UPDATE ON TECH

Spending a week on tech. Why? The market has caught up to Oversing and Runcible. So instead of being a hard sell in advance of the market, it’s an easy sell into a market of present demand. The gig economy has gone global and the economic benefits of decentralization of the white-collar workforce were accelerated by COVID.

Tech is pretty much there. And within a few years, using Dart, Flutter, Web assembly, Node, Redis, MySql, and Elastic Search the tech will make it possible to complete the transition. With React(Vue)/Redux(Vuex)/Electron on the front it’s possible to do now – and without exhaustive work duplicate desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile.

Oversing(interface) and Runcible(backend)

OVERSING ARCHITECTURE

In the most abstract terms, oversing is a game engine for life. And a game engine whose objective is *to make you continually better*.

Oversing presents the user with a landscape (horizontal) row of columns(panels). Each column(panel) functions as an app AND a filter. The apps are what you’d expect: A Menu, Communities (organizations), People, Channels, Chats, Email, Notifications, Activity Stream(Feed), Action Items(Workflow Assignments, or your responsibility ‘inbox’), Marketplace(Work Offers), Talent (Seeking Work), Deals (Contracts, assignments), To Do Section(Tasks), To-Do Detail(Task Detail), Content(can be anything), Calendar (schedule), Staffing(Resources, Conference Rooms, locations, etc) and Reports. The content section presents a document view whether a paragraph, section, chapter, or a random selection of them. In addition, plugins allow for the insertion of additional columns for content creation (graphics, documents, spreadsheets, etc).

By double-clicking on any element you can open a detail view of it (by default a side panel). You can drag any element to any other to create a connection between them. And in most cases clicking on (selecting), an element will filter the rest of the board (whatever is to the right) by whatever you’ve selected.

So, you can compose a workspace by opening or closing panels, and reorganizing them, selecting what’s in them, then saving the composition. In this way we create almost all possible business applications, for every role and every degree of sophistication, using a single interface, and that interface IS the desktop (shell).

The “To Do” section consists of a familiar set of panels: a view of tasks, whether simple paper list, sortable list, table, tree, simple agile (Trello), complex agile boards(Jira), schedule bars (simple), or full wbs(Project).

Around that to-do section are columns that filter it: Org Tree, Program, Project, Team(people), verb(function), noun(component), catalog(packages, items, parts), Priority, Estimate, Task Type, and others.

Everything in the system is a task (we call it that for ease of reference, but it’s just a generic object we call an ‘entity’). At present, there are over 140 different types of ‘task’. they range from what you’d expect (task), to parts, to what you might not (document section, or index card).

Every type of task has a default (necessary) workflow. Users (power users) can extend (inherit) these default workflows and modify them to match their workflows (business processes). The workflow designer is very, very, intuitive.
Workflows can debit (take) and credit (give) rewards to wallets(buckets).

Workflows can create, read, modify, and delete ‘variables’. Workflows can execute scripts (mini-programs). Workflows can perform Accounting (financial) transactions. Accounting transactions feed the accounting system for your ‘organization’ or ‘community’. Workflows can change the UI state, display content(think sales automation). We even experimented with a graphical content presentation (object renderer with bounding box events) so that you COULD create a game in the application. But we thought it might hurt marketability.

So whether you’re a hobbyist, an individual gig-worker, or a biz that uses a distributed team, or a member of a vast international bureaucracy, or anything in between, you need a browser, and Oversing and NO OTHER SOFTWARE AT ALL.

It even handles just in time, multiple currencies and current exchange rates for international companies.

And for power users we have a console where you type commands and bypass the user interface.

And none of this requires a programmer. If you want to use the accounting functionality you set up a chart of accounts, make workflows that you want, and automate a great deal of your accounting.

(The weakest parts are invoices, billing, and reciepts, and some of the reporting, because we worked on them last and in a hurry.)

RUNCIBLE

For those who have read Stephenson’s Diamond Age, Runcible is the code name for a book (supercomputer) that provides custom education for the reader.

The byproduct of Oversing and it’s more interesting value proposition is in its collection of data. About you, your organization, and people like you in other organizations = social, business, political, and military. But unlike social (advertising) platforms that seek to manipulate you, and to assist others in manipulating you, Runcible seeks to assist you. To educate you. So your personal profile, which is organization independent, and your personal property, tells you very interesting things about how you compare to similar (and dissimilar) people around the world.

There are tasks (sets of objects) for HR (recruiting, reviews) and management (goals), and self improvement. There are strategic tasks for managing an organization of any scale.

If you are crazy enough, you can turn on all programs (divisions, departments or initiatives) and projects etc, turn on the agile board view, and minmize the card sizes, and you’ll see the entirety of your organization change state by color changes, additions, and dissapearance, of little blinking dots. It’s like being in command of a starship. It’s insane – in a good way.

This kind of product creates extraordinary transparency for owners, execs, management, staff, contractor, vendor and even customer.

By charging for commercial features, we gain independence from advertising and the consequences of advertising. And if we chose to do advertising it would be by ‘catalogs’ (streams) curated for different audiences, with commissions going to the curators. And the application would be free of interruption (distraction) advertising.

I’ve only touched on five percent of what oversing and runcible can do.

So it’s an operating system that obviates the operating system as other than a host for a browser, which is increasingly the user interface replacing the shell. All that remains is that final step where the browser has access to the operating system services (think Electron) so that the failure of operating system manufacturers (microsoft, apple) to solve the user interface (shell) problem (make the next layer) is overcome by the browser. At which point the linux guys are going to say ‘told you so’.

Current AI Problem: Lack of a World Model (Universal Context)

Current ai implementations is that with (extraordinarily tedious training) they correctly categorize and prediction, and can then hand off to programmatic logic to ‘reason’ further.

Something like Go or Chess or Checkers, or even ‘training for image recognition’ is really not very complicated because the ‘world model’ for these programs is rather trivial, even ‘wayfinding’ through them is rather impressive.

The GPT-3 algorithm is interesting because it is so vast, and so accurately maintains associative context. That context’s world view is nonsensical, however. It’s just word-patterns.

The hard problem – which is where consciousness comes from – is constructing a world model, and predicting from that world model. Because humans (and anything that must reason like us) must have a ‘chessboard, go-board etc’ of the world, and the world is infinitely more complicated that those boards.

Worse, whatever we model is open to continuous revision.

Mathiness

It should not surprise us when the most sophisticated mathematics we discover,, that most accurately models the physical world, is analogous to bundles of fibers, when mathematics consists of positional names in a series. in other words, the imaginary number line is implied by the only property that number’s share: position in an order.

—“Why not PostgreSQL, rather than MySQL?”—

Depends on what you’re doing. joins vs scale. I designed (and continue to) systems that scale.

So the question is why not unstructured data (search), why not structured data (joins), or why not federated data (without joins). Imagine a triangle with each of those points on it, and make your choice.

My opinion is that oracle as usual will continue to malinvest in MySQL until Ingres (which is how I knew it), or Postgressql overtakes it.

However. I don’t think we get around financial scale = hierarchical, world modeling scale = relational, complex query = object-relational, and text search = object (document).