attention, The Sovereign Budget

The attention block is where a twin declares what its owner's mind costs. Interrupt budgets, quiet hours, and per-class thresholds all live here, and they live only here, inside the twin they govern. This is Axiom III in construct form: the receiver's grammar governs.

Syntax

From the spec §5 grammar:

attention   = "attention" "{" { budget } "}" ;
budget      = "interrupts" nat "/" period
            | "quiet" timerange
            | "threshold" party number ;

The spec §4.8 example:

attention {
  interrupts 3/day
  quiet 22:00-07:00
  threshold others 0.8
  threshold family 0.3
}

interrupts n/period caps how many times per period anything may render now. quiet a-b declares a time range in which even budgeted interrupts wait. threshold party x sets θ, the pressure bar a flow must clear, per sender class.

Semantics

The thresholds declared here are the θ in the flow condition: a flow from A to B fires iff P > θ_B(A), where the subscript order is the whole design. θ belongs to B, is declared in B's source, and is indexed by B's classification of A. Nothing A writes can lower it, spend it, or see it.

The spec is emphatic that this is enforced below the type system:

Budgets and thresholds are legal only inside the twin they govern. Referencing another twin's attention block is not a permission error at runtime; it is a parse-impossible construction (Axiom III).

There is no syntax tree in which twin maya contains a rule about raj's thresholds. An attempt to construct one at the AST level (by a tool, bypassing the parser) is diagnostic O-006: thresholds belong to receivers. This is the entire point.

Why a budget

The philosophy comes straight from the Fifty-Year Letter. Law I, Receiver Sovereignty: attention belongs to the person receiving, not the person sending; nothing reaches a human eye by default. And the attention-budget component of the successor architecture: interruptions are metered like money. Senders spend standing to claim them, and chronic overdrafters find the price of your attention rising. Herbert Simon diagnosed the disease already in 1971, the year email was born: a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The attention block is that diagnosis turned into grammar. For the first time the cost of a demand on your mind is written down, and it is written down by you.

The protocol behind it

The Osmosis Protocol spec (§6) describes the full placement mechanics this block parameterizes: every absorbed delta is classified silent, ledger, or interruption; interruptions debit the sender's standing against the receiver's budget, denominated per link and per period; chronic overdraft raises the effective θ for that sender; and an interruption-class delta must carry a declared consequence-if-ignored field, verified for plausibility. Most of that machinery is protocol-future; the language gives it a home today, and the mesh grows into it.

v0.1 interpreter notes

The reference interpreter honors this block with documented pragmas:

Default thresholds. If a class has no explicit threshold, the defaults are family 0.3, team 0.4, others 0.8 (DEFAULT_THETA in osmol.py). Low bars for the trusted, a high bar for strangers.
Class derives from the receiver's own bonds. For a given sender, the receiver's class is computed by theta_for from the receiver's bond declarations: if the receiver bonds the sender trust high, the sender is family; otherwise others. Note that v0.1's receiver-side classifier is binary: team exists in the default table and may be set explicitly, but the engine never assigns a sender to it. (On the sender side, team and family audiences both match trust-high bonds; see the circles pragma.)
quiet is stored, not enforced. Wall-clock time is not simulated, so quiet hours are parsed and kept but never consulted.
interrupts is modeled but unused. Interrupt placement requires a passed escalate deadline, which needs a wall clock; in v0.1, no flow ever places as interrupt, so budgets are never debited and every trace honestly reports interruptions: 0.

The full guarantee, that interrupt placements never exceed the declared budget for any behavior of any other twin, is Theorem 3 (Attention soundness), which is open. The grammar shape already does most of the work; the proof will make it an invariant rather than a courtesy.

bond · membrane · Pressure · Equilibrium · O-006 · Open theorems

The Book of Osmol