Andy Dixon
67a825a995
Twenty-six pages covering concepts, architecture, every subsystem, an interface tour with screenshots, the full API route table generated from openapi.json, the CLI, security and threat model, operations, ADRs, development history and a glossary. Built into the dixon.cx page skeleton, unlinked and noindex.
5.4 KiB
5.4 KiB
Short definitions of the terms used across this documentation, in alphabetical order.
A to D
- Affect
- A ten-dimensional vector (valence, arousal, curiosity, concern, frustration, confidence, uncertainty, engagement, task pressure, load) moved by a rule table, decaying to a personality-derived baseline, and modulating attention within bounds.
- Approval
- An operator decision on an ASK policy outcome, bound to a hash of the exact invocation. Once, for a session, with changes, or deny.
- Archive
- A checksummed JSON document of a mind's state used by snapshots, export and import. Contains no secrets and no event history.
- Attention
- Deterministic scoring of thought candidates over ten features with per-mind weights, producing the order of admission to the workspace.
- Belief
- A proposition with a subject, epistemic kind, status, prior and a confidence derived from evidence with a visible formula.
- Capability
- A named, typed, risk-classed tool registered in code. The only way a mind can act.
- Cognitive event
- An immutable record of something that happened in or to a mind: the unit of history and provenance.
- Consolidation
- Scheduled generalisation of clusters of episodes into semantic memories and evidenced beliefs, reviewable by operators.
- Contradiction
- A deterministic finding that two propositions on one subject conflict. Marks both contested; resolved by evidence or an operator.
- Cycle
- One pass of the cognitive loop: read events, observe, score, admit, dispatch, commit.
- Drive
- One of eight named pressures with a personality-derived baseline. No self-preservation drive exists.
E to M
- Epistemic kind
- The label every stored proposition carries saying what kind of knowledge it is: observation, fact, memory, claim, hypothesis, belief, prediction, assumption, inference or opinion.
- Evidence
- A row pointing at a memory, event, operator statement, tool result or belief, with direction, weight and source credibility. The only thing that moves confidence.
- Experiment
- A snapshot plus overrides, a stimulus script and expectations, run in a disabled subject mind with stored, exportable results.
- Fork
- A new mind restored from a snapshot with all row ids remapped; history before the snapshot is shared by reference.
- Goal
- A node in a mind's goal tree with status, priority, progress, blockers and an origin event.
- Integration
- An external source (research folder, git, Prometheus, webhook) polled or receiving deliveries, producing provenance-tagged observations.
- Intent (response)
- The structured, state-derived plan for a reply: what was asked, what answers it and how confidently, what is unknown. Rendered to language deterministically or by a model.
- Locked capability
- A capability whose effect is DENY regardless of policy and cannot be relaxed from any interface:
sudo_shellanddelete_database. - Master key
- The 32-byte key (
NOEMA_MASTER_KEY) under which provider keys, integration secrets and TOTP secrets are encrypted at rest. - Memory (long-term)
- An episodic, semantic, procedural or autobiographical item with provenance, importance, decaying activation and typed relationships.
- Metacognition
- The process that watches for loops, overconfidence, unresolved contradictions and budget pressure, producing warnings and notifications.
- Mind
- The unit of identity and isolation: personality, configuration, state, history and runtime.
- Mode
- The runtime state of a mind: awake, focused, idle, reflecting, consolidating, dreaming or paused.
N to Z
- Narrative
- A short, templated (optionally model-worded) statement of what the mind is attending to, working on and waiting for; updated after cycles.
- Observation
- A perception event carrying external data with its source, trust level and reference.
- Policy
- A rule producing ALLOW, ASK or DENY for a capability, target pattern, action kind and hour window, globally or per mind.
- Prediction
- An explicit expectation with criteria, a window and a confidence, resolved deterministically and feeding calibration.
- Prompt (versioned)
- A stored template for a model role with system text, a user template, an optional JSON schema and an append-only version history.
- Provenance
- The chain from any memory, belief, entity or reply back to the events and sources that produced it.
- Reflection
- A scheduled review of a period's mistakes, resolved contradictions and lessons, recorded as an event and optionally worded by a model.
- Replay
- Re-running recorded stimuli through a sandbox fork from a snapshot, labelling each step exact, approximate or diverged.
- Role (model)
- A cognitive task a model may perform: perceive, respond, hypothesise, summarise, judge, narrate, embed. Each routes to a primary model and fallbacks.
- Role (user)
- Observer, operator or administrator; the minimum required is stated for every route.
- Self-model
- The mind's data about itself: identity, what it can do, what needs asking and what is forbidden, kept in step with policy.
- Snapshot
- A stored archive of a mind's state at an event position.
- Trust
- The level attached to every input at its boundary: operator, user, system, source or low. Weights evidence and bounds effects.
- Working memory
- A decaying buffer of recently active items, slightly larger than the workspace, persisted every cycle.
- Workspace
- The capacity-limited set of thoughts a mind is attending to; admission is by attention score.