About
"How many frameworks does it take to get a video online?"
"Depends on which full stack you get."
Technology claims to give us tools for life and save us time, but cannot objectively be said to deliver on either promise.
# Clear Need
We use technology to communicate, to remotely work together, and to entertain, (among other important functions), but we are often artificially and arbitrarily limited short of fully engaging with and succeeding in these basic goals.
This underlying technical need can be met by modern forms of automation, in which many repetitive or time-consuming tasks can be abstracted behind the push of a button; yet most individuals spend far too much time repeating convoluted steps to get familiar (but rapidly changing) technology to work consistently, much less address their underlying needs in a functional way.
Even when the technology does work consistently, the base functions are often co-opted by corporate or government interests, locking users away from any hint of agency on the systems they paid good money for. Quite often, these points of external control become security vulnerabilities, leading to post-consumer exploitation of minors, the elderly, and other vulnerable social demographics.
Not only are these base functions limited, they are limited inside an ecologically destructive cycle of disposable hardware, driven by a market focused on selling e-waste to temporary customers, all while siphoning their userbase's metadata for further financial exploitation. Many of our modern uses of technology raise deep questions of ethics and professional conduct for the systemic implementation of exploitation through commonly-accepted portions of a modern, connected lifestyle.
And even where there are some means of control and security, these critical functions are too often mired in layers of technical jargon, inaccessible or unavailable 'help' options, and the user's own fear of breaking a fragile working system by attempting to make it better.
Using axioms of current system methodologies, e.g. "do one thing well", it is possible to build logical principles of a modern system, but no such system exists where the functional needs of users are thoroughly considered, and considered without prioritizing the subversion of the user's environment for short-term profit extraction
---
This clear need represents our project's focus: the creation of a cohesive, health-and-accessibility-first computing system - aka, human-oriented computing.
## Automation
Our goal is the automation of all meaningful tasks to accomplish corresponding user goals, such that high-level configuration of the system can be accomplished with one or fewer interactions.
Unlike traditional operating systems, the included source code is configured to securely build the operating system and all dependencies, along with all software, including the build system itself. Automation scaling is accomplished through the concept of a build network, where individual jobs (which are optimized for concurrency or need resources beyond the user's local system) can be added to a queue on trusted groups of nodes, remotely executing their tasks where computing resources are more plentiful.
This process happens automatically away from the user's main view, but unlike any current systems, the build process is utterly transparent, local-first, intentionally presenting the user with tools for contextualizing, changing, and restoring their system's data and configuration. Integration of hooks and triggers and a form of "if this, do that" logic allows realtime adjustment of this process by the user, making the critical system state control-feedback loop complete in form of presets and versioning.
In the event of power loss (or some other cause for a generalized network outage), any trusted device becomes a backup node on a mesh network of local peers, providing device interconnectivity whether the "internet" grid is up or not.
## Data Management
Immuteable system design syncing user data across trusted peers means the loss of any specific hardware is a momentary distraction from in-progress tasks.
All data is encrypted and chunked locally, then synced to (a) local or remote trusted vault(s).
Because only the authenticated user ever sees their unencrypted data, only the user is given tools for managing this data, and intuitive user-accessible controls for tuning data management algorithms are an important part of the underlying system functions.
## Accessability
This threshold, above all others, is where users become unable to continue using technology.
To operate a motor vehicle, the user does not need to know how to build a transmission, and neither should they need to know cryptography to securely send a message to a friend. Similarly, one does not need to understand weights and balances to ride an elevator, and they shouldn't need to know programming to have a website or blog.
By abstracting the routine of maintaining a system, as well as the underlying functionality in terms of goals, the end user is safely given the power to direct their own technical stack wherever their personal or professional interests take them.
##
These three measures - automation, data management, and accessibilty - are formidable when aligned, but far too few examples of this alignment exist, and none which lift the burden from the user's shoulders (fingers?) without lightening their pocket by an exponentially (and often prohibitively) weighty amount.
The Hub System intentionally aligns these measures for our users, giving them the best of computing at their fingertips, rather than frustrations.
"Depends on which full stack you get."
Technology claims to give us tools for life and save us time, but cannot objectively be said to deliver on either promise.
# Clear Need
We use technology to communicate, to remotely work together, and to entertain, (among other important functions), but we are often artificially and arbitrarily limited short of fully engaging with and succeeding in these basic goals.
This underlying technical need can be met by modern forms of automation, in which many repetitive or time-consuming tasks can be abstracted behind the push of a button; yet most individuals spend far too much time repeating convoluted steps to get familiar (but rapidly changing) technology to work consistently, much less address their underlying needs in a functional way.
Even when the technology does work consistently, the base functions are often co-opted by corporate or government interests, locking users away from any hint of agency on the systems they paid good money for. Quite often, these points of external control become security vulnerabilities, leading to post-consumer exploitation of minors, the elderly, and other vulnerable social demographics.
Not only are these base functions limited, they are limited inside an ecologically destructive cycle of disposable hardware, driven by a market focused on selling e-waste to temporary customers, all while siphoning their userbase's metadata for further financial exploitation. Many of our modern uses of technology raise deep questions of ethics and professional conduct for the systemic implementation of exploitation through commonly-accepted portions of a modern, connected lifestyle.
And even where there are some means of control and security, these critical functions are too often mired in layers of technical jargon, inaccessible or unavailable 'help' options, and the user's own fear of breaking a fragile working system by attempting to make it better.
Using axioms of current system methodologies, e.g. "do one thing well", it is possible to build logical principles of a modern system, but no such system exists where the functional needs of users are thoroughly considered, and considered without prioritizing the subversion of the user's environment for short-term profit extraction
---
This clear need represents our project's focus: the creation of a cohesive, health-and-accessibility-first computing system - aka, human-oriented computing.
## Automation
Our goal is the automation of all meaningful tasks to accomplish corresponding user goals, such that high-level configuration of the system can be accomplished with one or fewer interactions.
Unlike traditional operating systems, the included source code is configured to securely build the operating system and all dependencies, along with all software, including the build system itself. Automation scaling is accomplished through the concept of a build network, where individual jobs (which are optimized for concurrency or need resources beyond the user's local system) can be added to a queue on trusted groups of nodes, remotely executing their tasks where computing resources are more plentiful.
This process happens automatically away from the user's main view, but unlike any current systems, the build process is utterly transparent, local-first, intentionally presenting the user with tools for contextualizing, changing, and restoring their system's data and configuration. Integration of hooks and triggers and a form of "if this, do that" logic allows realtime adjustment of this process by the user, making the critical system state control-feedback loop complete in form of presets and versioning.
In the event of power loss (or some other cause for a generalized network outage), any trusted device becomes a backup node on a mesh network of local peers, providing device interconnectivity whether the "internet" grid is up or not.
## Data Management
Immuteable system design syncing user data across trusted peers means the loss of any specific hardware is a momentary distraction from in-progress tasks.
All data is encrypted and chunked locally, then synced to (a) local or remote trusted vault(s).
Because only the authenticated user ever sees their unencrypted data, only the user is given tools for managing this data, and intuitive user-accessible controls for tuning data management algorithms are an important part of the underlying system functions.
## Accessability
This threshold, above all others, is where users become unable to continue using technology.
To operate a motor vehicle, the user does not need to know how to build a transmission, and neither should they need to know cryptography to securely send a message to a friend. Similarly, one does not need to understand weights and balances to ride an elevator, and they shouldn't need to know programming to have a website or blog.
By abstracting the routine of maintaining a system, as well as the underlying functionality in terms of goals, the end user is safely given the power to direct their own technical stack wherever their personal or professional interests take them.
##
These three measures - automation, data management, and accessibilty - are formidable when aligned, but far too few examples of this alignment exist, and none which lift the burden from the user's shoulders (fingers?) without lightening their pocket by an exponentially (and often prohibitively) weighty amount.
The Hub System intentionally aligns these measures for our users, giving them the best of computing at their fingertips, rather than frustrations.