November 17, 2022

s13e21: Sunny and crisp outside

0.0 Context Setting

It’s Thursday, November 17, 2022 in Portland, Oregon and it is sunny and crisp outside, an archetypal autumn morning.

It’s thirteen days since I tested positive for COVID-19, and I’m still feeling tired and foggy-brained. It’s not great, folks.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Ethernet in Space

So! The plan for putting computers in everything continues apace, and now that computers are in lots of things, people are realizing that it would be {cheaper, lighter, more efficient} if instead of having a bunch of different wires connecting things you could just use the same wires to connect everything. Which makes sense! Who likes pulling more wire through and ordering wires? Ugh.

This is how I learned about Time-Triggered Ethernet, which is in some readings “people want to make token ring happen again”, but for those of us who are less able to understand what that means, it means:

• regular ethernet is just fine for, like, making sure people can watch TikToks
• but for safety critical applications like when your LIDAR wants to send a TikTok of this hilarious pedestrian it saw to your main car computing core and your main car computing core thinks that’s hilarious and wants to send it to your car’s brakes, then you want to not use regular ethernet, because regular ethernet is all like “eh, I’ll just make my best effort for people to see it on time.

So for safety and time-critical TikToks, what you’ve needed before is some sort of separate wiring, which is good, because you don’t want inflight entertainment systems on planes also running on the same network as whatever it is on planes that stops them from crashing or hallucinating that sea level is much lower than it is supposed to be at the airport at which you’re landing¹.

It would be much better and cheaper and weigh less if you could just use the one bit of network infrastructure for everything, which is why Time-Triggered Ethernet exists: it’s a way for you to send time-critical messages over your regular ethernet at the same time as your regular best-effort TikToks get sent. Very important, very cost-saving.

Anyway, the short version of this story is that a couple of researchers figured out a way to break Time-Triggered Ethernet²[^arstech] which involves having a bit of hardware (so an Evil Housekeeping³ attack) to listen to what’s going down the wire, and then handwaves send some electromagnetic interference to one of the switches. This is a very long way of saying that it was quite funny when watching NASA’s Artemis I launch livestream⁴ that one of the delays was due to an ethernet switch.

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1.2 Bits and pieces

• 18F blog post on updating the hey guys bot which, if you’ve ever encountered it, was absolutely maddening to me in terms of its inflexible sledgehammer approach to something that on balance, I bet most people would like to change. Caught my attention because: it’s a good example of changing and improving a tool intended to help people reflect on behavior and change.
• I am having a lot of fun with my new bot, @starfleetjobs, which posts, uh, jobs in Starfleet. Caught my attention because: a) I made it, b) I love making bots with tracery, it appeals to my love of simple programming, linguistics and parsing sentence structure without having to do anything that feels too hard.
• Ready is a new calendar from a VC-backed startup that I will probably write about again later. Caught my attention because: it describes itself as multiplayer, and I’ve been going on about massively multiplayer word/google docs, etc. for ages, so that’s nice to see; it’s VC-backed and what does that mean these days given the longevity of such systems and software; I have a niggling thought about meeting-based-software as opposed to document-based-software, time-based-software, concurrent/synchronous-time-based-software and so on that is just waiting for the right time to pop out.
• Initial thoughts on China’s updated Social Credit Law. Caught my attention because: duh, will read later.
• Quantum computing scientist Scott Aaronson had an interesting take on how to deal with people sneering at you online (i.e. shitty reply guys), which is to treat them like below. Caught my attention because: a really interesting reframing.

“like a train in a movie that’s barreling directly towards the camera. If you haven’t yet internalized how the medium works, absolutely terrifying! Run from the theater! If you have internalized it, though, you can sit and watch without even flinching.”

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That’s it for today. I am tired and my brain is foggy.

Best,

Dan