May 24, 2021

s09e31: IT'S SIGGRAPH TECHNICAL PAPERS PREVIEW TRAILER TIME, BABY!

0.0 Context setting

It’s Monday, May 24, 2021 in Portland, Oregon.

I had a kick-off meeting on Friday with Emily Tavoulareas and Kevin Parker at the Beeck Center, who are running the Digital Fundamentals for Public Impact continuing ed course I’ll be helping out on this summer, going through the goals/aims, the overview and so on. It feels like it’s going to be fun. It’s going to be a job figuring out what makes the cut into 36 hours worth of curriculum.

Four things today, and then two more chapter of Snow Crash commentary.

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1.0 Some things that caught my attention

Names

Discovery and Warner Media attempting to consciously couple, so people are having fun imagining the resulting corporate name (options vary from various concatenations of their existing names or products or something off-the-wall like Tronc²,Cconsignia¹, Monday³ or Oath:⁴). So via Margot Bloomstein, an excellent corporate merger name, Keurig Green Mountain Dr. Pepper Snapple, which is

“basically Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsors without the royal baggage”

I am in vigorous agreement.

Caught my attention because: Names are important, what happens when corporations try to name themselves is sometimes unintentionally (but also entirely foreseeably) hilarious.

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What was it like?

Phil Gyford pointed me to What Was It Like? a… blog post? Essay? he wrote last year that starts “I should definitely write a post when my blog’s 20 years old!”. It is worth a read if a) you are into reminiscing if you are a certain kind of Internet Old, and b) if you are interested in history, which is important, because otherwise I have been told by other glib historians that whatever happened will happen again, in some sort of doom-like fashion. Some key points to provoke your interest: personal websites from the 2000s weren’t Geocities-like, we had started to standardize on navs, headers and so-on; many blogs started with “several posts a day, each with a timestamp” which as Phil points out is a bit like a certain bird-named social network, and especially given how they refer to other bloggers; oh and permalinks didn’t exist yet which is kind of wild if you’re not an internet old?. Anyway, it’s not just nostalgia. It’s important!

Caught my attention because: Knowing your history and your internet history is important. In this case because I think there are lessons to be learned on what people do with “online” and how people treat “online”. Yes, it’s different now that most people are online to some degree, but I think it’s useful in the sense of thinking about how people start using new applications and services.

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IT’S SIGGRAPH TECHNICAL PAPERS TIME!

If you have read this for a while you will know I get excited around May every year because it is SIGGRAPH TECHNICAL PAPERS TIME! Here is the SIGGRAPH 2021 Technical Papers Preview Trailer. SIGGRAPH is the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group (hence: SIG) for compute graphics and interactivity (hence: GRAPH). For comparison here is the 2020 Technical Papers Preview Trailer.

Caught my attention because: For starters, computer graphics have always always caught my attention since seeing shorts like 1990’s Panspermia – it’s the whole thing of telling computers to do things and then seeing the results. Siggraph gets more and more interesting every year from interesting sideways approaches like when NVidia surprised everyone by using machine learning as part of a fast ray tracing implementation. Also interactive computer graphics includes the interactive part, which means lots of fun things like watching cloth drape⁷. The SIGGRAPH Asia 2020 Emerging Technologies Trailer is another example of something I pay attention to to spot things that will show up in a few years.

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Legacy Systems and the Turkey

James Cham tweeted about @bellmar’s book, Kill It With Fire, which everyone should read, with an excerpt about legacy systems:

With legacy systems, we have an additional complication in the fact that some context of the system has been lost. Requirements, assumptions, and the technical limitations of the time are all undocumented.

One of the experiences I have with this is when I was able to interview one of the original architects of a DB2, mainframe-backed system that implemented its own custom compression and blob storage technique algorithms, splitting blobs amongst multiple records. That was fun to learn about!

Anyway, the whole thing reminded me about a story called Grandma’s Cooking Secret, when a bride finally questions why her mother cuts the ends off roasts before cooking them⁵. The answer, if you don’t already know this one, is in this footnote⁶.

This is why user research is important not just for figuring out what people do and why/how they do it, but also why things work the way they do, and doing this work is sometimes called software archaeology⁸. From the Wikipedia article:

The term has been in use for decades and reflects a fairly natural metaphor: a programmer reading legacy code may feel that he or she is in the same situation as an archaeologist exploring the rubble of an ancient civilization.

Caught my attention because: The public interest/civic/government technology part of my career is at least somewhat focussed on older technology, never mind the more general part of my career on “making things digital”.

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2.0 Snow Crashing, chapters 19 and 20

Snow Crashing, chapter 19

Previously, I covered chapters 17 and 18, where we learned a little about how Nova Sicilia, also known as The Mafia works as a commercial franchise organization.

In chapter 19, we’re back at the underpass. Last time we were here, at the end of Chapter 16, Lagos had just been found dead.

There isn’t much going on from a technology point of view in Chapter 19. We open with Hiro hanging out with Squeaky, the Enforcer we met in Chapter 16 and was in charge of the security detail at the gig.

In short order, we establish that Hiro’s pretty sure that Lagos wasn’t killed with a sword: swords don’t slit people open the way Lagos has been killed. Which leads us to this great exchange:

“Really? Have you killed a lot of people with swords, Mr. Protagonist?” “Yes. In the Metaverse.”

The main suspect is Raven, but nobody’s sure why Raven killed Lagos other than Raven not liking being under surveillance. It’s fairly likely, though that Raven was able to find Lagos with the same trick as Hiro, by following the laser scatter off the dust in the air.

Squeaky gets a tip from Y.T. that Raven’s heading into Chinatown–she phoned in–so Squeaky jumps into his car to follow.

There’s a throwaway reference that Hiro is able run after Squeaky and jump into the car on time because

His legs are in incredible shape from swordfighting.

and we should remember that so far, while we’ve seen Hiro about with his swords out in the world and a reference to him using them once or twice, we’ve only really seen Hiro fight with his sword in the Metaverse.

You might think that Hiro being a sword fighter in the Metaverse doesn’t translate into him being particularly skilled or strong in the physical world, but in 2021 I can bring up two great examples:

1. Beat Sabre⁹, a 2019 VR rhythm game that came out in May 2019 and where you swat sabers to the rhythm of music–here’s a video of someone playing DragonForce’s Through The Fire And Flames on Expert; and
2. Dance Dance Revolution¹⁰ one of the original series of rhythm games, released in 1998, 6 years after Snow Crash, and a video of the 9th Konami Arcade Championships from 2020.

Which is to say the matter of totally pumped legs thanks to playing videogames and/or in virtual reality should be a settled matter.

The inside of Squeaky’s car sees another mention of a printer, when Squeaky

rips ten feet of hard copy out of the dashboard printer and begins sifting through it.

Ten feet of hard copy sounds like a lot, but is nearly 11 single-sided pages of letter-sized paper, or just over 10 pages of properly-sized A4 paper.

One of the first consumer portable printers I remember is 1995’s Canon BJ-30¹¹ bubble jet printer that came with a battery pack. You can tell the printer is old because it connected over a parallel port and had drivers for MS-DOS.

I got completely side-tracked by this Canon printer and ended up asking on Twitter¹² if anyone remember it or other portable printers of the 1990s era. It turns out a lot of people did! Some honorable mentions include:

• The Game Boy Printer, in 1998, via Luca Hammer
• The 1993-era Canon NoteJet, a portable computer that had a built-in printer!
• Apple’s Portable StyleWriter

Although I should point out that just the measuring of the hard copy material in terms of length does suggest that it’s less of a portable carry-it-into-your-hotel-room printer, and more of a dot-matrix-printer-affixed-to-the-car.

On the paper are photos (“renditions”) of T-Bone, the Crip who’s chasing after Raven, and Raven himself:

There’s also a picture of Raven. It’s an action shot, not a mug shot. It is terrible output. caught through some kind of light-amplifying optics that wash out the color and make everything incredibly grainy and low contrast. It looks like some image processing has been done to make it sharper; this also makes it grainier.

Toward the end of the chapter, there’s an equivalent of this action shot when Hiro runs after Raven hoping to catch another glimpse of him.

In 2021 it would be a crap-shoot between a Proper Camera (long lens, wide aperture, big sensor), computational photography (your latest smartphone with a bunch of software and hardware) and ubiquitous surveillance getting the best shot of Raven. Given Raven’s existing documented dislike of surveillance (see: Lagos, dead), that leaves the former two. I have a suspicion the image of Raven would be somewhat better than what’s available to the Enforcers.

Raven and T-Bone are now trying to kill each other, so Squeaky heads off in pursuit, following the trail of dead bodies and carnage until they reach a field of hops (run by a local microbrewery that grows its own hops, the tending of which is contracted out to Chinese peasant urban gardeners).

The field of hops quickly plays host to Raven (who led T-Bone in there; it’s a great to hide and stalk thanks to eight foot high trellises); T-Bone (the Crip who’s following him); Squeaky (the Enforcer head of security Hiro hitched a ride with); and Squeaky’s driver, who I’ll just call Driver.

In short order, Raven:

• kills Driver, by impaling him with a bamboo spear;
• throws a spear at Hiro, who slaps it away in one of our first real-world examples of sword defense, if not sword fighting;
• impales T-Bone, which is a surprise given he’s wearing body armor;
• separates the majority of T-Bone from one of his hands;
• knifes T-Bone (again, a surprise given the body armor) and then kills him by being quite mean to T-Bone’s femoral arteries, with the result of T-Bone bleeding out;
• hops onto his motorcycle to continue his escape; and
• Batmans a Crip who had the bad idea of running after him.

The Crip who gave chase and got Batmanned (i.e. not killed, just… very injured) tells us that Raven ripped off the Crips because “the suitcase burned”. It was this ripping-off that lead inexorably to the Crips giving chase.

And then, exit Raven:

Hiro watches the large, radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into Chinatown. Which is the same as riding it into China, as far as chasing him down is concerned.

Snow Crashing, chapter 20

Chapter 20 is mainly concerned with our introduction to Snow-Crash-the-drug’s physical form.

Remember how in the world of Snow Crash is one without ubiquitous wireless network access? There are only a few mentions to cellular networks, so it’s not a surprise that when the Enforcers have turned the hops field/Raven-killing-spree area into a “mobile cop headquarters” they’ve done so by including “satellite links on flatbed trucks”.

Here’s another view of network access in the world of Snow Crash: a top-down, broadcast-type internet with little to none self-publishing is also one where it’s easier to imagine infrastructure that’s also tilted that way. So: expensive infrastructure like satellite links that are only available to comparatively few people who are able to pay for it and access to the information available over those network links. Satellites are big and expensive.

We’ll assume there aren’t microsats, or anything like Starlink, either Iridium¹³, one of the first commercial satellite constellations first launched in 1997, 5 years after Snow Crash was published, originally topped out at 95 satellites and is somewhat famous for being a) very expensive and b) an unprofitable commercial failure.

We can compare that to around 400,000 cellphone sites in America in 2019, and that’s before 5G and its need for small cells/microcells/femtocells/picocells¹⁴. If the number of network users is so small, and they do so from payphones and essentially net cafes, then why build out all that infrastructure?

Inside T-Bone’s car are the remains of the briefcase, the subject of the disagreement between the Crips and Raven that led to T-Bone’s death. Even though it’s been burned from the inside-out (in a sort of Mission Impossible-esque self-destruction mode), Hiro has a fairly good idea of what the briefcase constituted:

The bottom half of the case appears to be some kind of miniaturized, old-fashioned computer terminal. Most of it is occupied by a keyboard. There is a small liquid-crystal display screen that can probably handle about five lines of text at a time. There is a penlike object attached to the case by a cable, maybe three feet long uncoiled. It looks like it might be a light pen or a bar-code scanner.

The sort of miniaturized, old-fashioned terminal I’m reminded of is a bit like the 1989 Atari Portfolio¹⁵. This made an appearance in Terminator 2 as the palmtop computer Young John Conner used to hack an ATM and also get into the vault at Cyberdyne¹⁶.

The Portfolio has a much more sophisticated display than the briefcase: it can display a whole 8 lines of text.

The light pen (a light pen!) or bar-code scanner (again with the bar-codes) would have its place taken by an RFID these days if you were being unnecessarily sophisticated, otherwise the bar-codes work just fine. You wouldn’t need a scanner, though, because:

Above the keyboard is a lens, set at an angle so that it is aimed at whoever is typing on the keyboard. There are other features whose purpose is not so obvious: a slot, which might be a place to insert a credit or ID card, and a cylindrical socket that is about the size of one of those little tubes.

the camera behind that lens above the keyboard ought to do the trick of reading the bar code. The slot does turn out to be a place to insert an ID card, so let’s just assume it’s pretty much just like a U.S. military Common Access Card¹⁷, and the cylindrical socket ends up being used to do something like arm the vial for use.

The vials are pretty sophisticated:

From a distance, it looks like a simple vial, but stepping up to look at it more closely Hiro can see at least half a dozen tiny individual compartments inside the thing, all connected to each other by capillary tubes. It has a red plastic cap on one end of it. The cap has a black rectangular window, and as Squeaky rotates it, Hiro can see the dark red glint of an inactive LED display inside, like looking at the display on a turned-off calculator. Underneath this is a small perforation. It isn’t just a simple drilled hole. It is wide at the surface, rapidly narrowing to a nearly invisible pinpoint opening, like the bell of a trumpet.

I mean, Snow Crash is clearly a drug that requires mixing/preparation at the point of delivery, which sounds… complicated. Then again, we don’t learn that much about the drug/pharma industry so perhaps that’s where a lot of the money went. It also feels like an inordinate amount of smarts went into the vial itself when these days, again, displays would be farmed out to the ubiquitous smartphone.

In fact, that’s what’s happened! In 2019, Schreiner Group introduced a Smart Packaging Solution for Vials, their Smart Vial Kit¹⁸, which:

• is a cardboard box (which is cheaper than a briefcase)
• uses printed electronics, so you can tell exactly when the vial was removed and its compartment
• stores all that data in the “smart packaging” which I guess is the special cardboard box
• and can be accessed via the you-guessed-it smartphone app over you-guessed-it Bluetooth and NFC.

So those are the vials. I bet in Snow Crash they are all shiny and chrome.

Why did the briefcase go foosh? Well, it’s because T-Bone strayed more than 10 feet away from the briefcase, which implies that there was a paired Tile or AirTag that the briefcase was looking out for. But that doesn’t explain the underlying why of the foosh. For that, there’s Squeaky, who also gives us another Title Drop¹⁹

But I would guess that whoever makes this drug—they call it Countdown, or Redcap, or Snow Crash—has a real thing about trade secrets. So if the pusher abandons the suitcase, or loses it, or tries to transfer ownership to someone else—foosh.”

Before we finish Chapter 20, we learn exactly why everyone’s giving Raven a wide birth beyond geiger counters having a lot of fun near his motorcycle: it’s because he’s a Sovereign, which means, as Squeaky says

You know that funny-looking sidecar that Raven has on his Harley? Well, it’s a hydrogen bomb, man.

… and that bomb is hooked up to a dead man’s switch, implemented via what also feel like unnecessarily complicated “EEG trodes embedded in his skull”.

And that’s the end of Chapter 20.

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That’s it for today. How are you doing?

Best,

Dan