Year in Review 2024

With 2025 waiting in the wings, I am casting an eye back over 2024 and finding that it looks pretty shiny from here. Overall, it felt like there were fewer extraneous disruptions and distractions than there have been for the past few years - I got the chance to dig in to my hobbies and push hard. I also feel I did a good job of moving existing projects toward completion and taking a few overdue items off the backlog, instead of just starting new work.

Per my personal tracking, I've logged more hours of total "work" than I did last year, and kept the creation/maintenance ratio above 3x ... just barely. Monitoring my own time usage over a long period raises some interesting flags. For example, I spent more time on my blog articles this year than I spent writing and publishing short fiction, by 6+ hours. (Those "AI Ideology" articles were a lot of work. Writing about real people's viewpoints and trying to be critical but fair eats serious hours.) I don't think I want the blog to be taking that much, so I'm not planning an in-depth series for 2025, and I'll probably let my article rate drop below two per month. But where writing tasks are concerned, even the blog loses the time hog prize to journaling. I'm a little uncomfortable with the fact that recording my life uses so much of it up, but I also really like journaling (and it's easy, so if I dumped it, some of those hours might go to recreation instead of harder tasks). Other mundane time-stealers are on the small side, but still galling. I logged more hours on food preparation than on studying, and more on housecleaning than on art.

Acuitas remains the king of all my hobbies at 360+ hours invested. That's a good number - I found more time for him in 2024 than in any other year of the past five. The robots also fared very well at 110+ hours.

So what did I achieve with all that time? Well, here goes.

*The first major Acuitas milestone was completion and demonstration of the "Simple Tron" story in February. This was a target that I had been silently keeping in mind and laying groundwork toward for years.
*I have unified issue tracking across multiple code blocks, such that the Game Engine, Executive, and Conversation Engine all now use the "scratchboard" structure I developed for Narrative understanding.
*I integrated the improved Text Parser, achieved substantial benchmark improvements in the number of parseable sentences, and worked on a number of ambiguity resolution problems.
*I overhauled and improved the Conversation Engine, and released a demo video just this month.

*The Atronach's Eye project is almost complete. This year I finished rebuilding the case and demonstrating eye centering with the limit switches, and I reworked the software to use a better motion tracking algorithm. All that's left is a power cutoff to keep the stepper motors from getting hot when not moving. By early next year, I'm hoping the Eye can be a working fixture on my living room wall.

Final version of the peristaltic pump (without its front shell/lid)

*I completed my homemade peristaltic pump design and ran a performance comparison on several pumps.
*I built and demoed a second iteration of the prototype small-scale hydraulic system, including my first homemade fluid bladder actuator.

*ACE didn't get a lot of love this year, but I did run some more motion tests and decided gearboxes would be needed - after which I designed and built one to work with the existing motors.

*I wrote two new short stories: a science fiction piece about alien plant life with an unusual way of communicating, and a fantasy piece about a young woman who finds the rules of society standing between her and her perfect pet.
*One of my previous stories, "Peacemaker's First Strike," was accepted by Abyss & Apex and is on contract to be published in July 2025. This is very exciting. (Check out the new "Read my Writing" link in the top bar to see all my published work and where to get it.)
*My blog publication rate stayed at/above two posts per month for the third year in a row.

One of the display cases, acting as a home for D&D characters past

*I designed a series of 3D-printable medallions and printed examples of all the designs to give as gifts.
*I also threw together a fully-enclosed hexagonal display case design and fabricated four of them, for dust-free housing of my miniatures and curios.

*I hired a plumber to fix the kitchen sink, and thereby got rid of the last known high-priority breakage in my house.
*I cleaned out and organized two different "disaster rooms" and tore down some e-waste for salvage in the process.
*I grew potatoes again. The garden wasn't especially successful this year, but I at least maintained production of my staple crop.

I wasn't terribly successful at adding native plants to my yard, but Blazing Stars were one of the species that worked out, and they bloomed this year.

*I made a road trip to Arkansas and observed totality of the solar eclipse that crossed North America in April (with a detour by Space Center Houston on the way).
*The first Worldview Legion satellites were launched. I made a small contribution to these, in the form of some post-delivery debugging and feature enhancement work on the component my employer built for them.

Until the next cycle,
Jenny

Year in Review 2022

Well, disastrous world events continue apace, but I'd call 2022 another solid year. Maybe not a *great* year. I lost both of my surviving grandparents, I pretty well healed up from CIDP (or whatever it is) but then I caught COVID and it came back, and it's hard for me to think of many spectacular events. But we can call this a "foundation-building" year. I've made significant, if quiet, progress, and I'm excited about where 2023 is going to go.

I think it's also been a great year for internet friendships, in spite of Facebook slowly fading into a ghost town and then Twitter splitting at the seams. Thank you all again for being here. Thank you for following my work, having good conversations, and sometimes even looking after me when I get upset. When I first started blogging, I expected to have "an audience," but never thought it would be this good.

Ursula inspects Version 3 of the mechanical eyeball.

So here's a quick rundown of what I did this year:

*Added support for coordinating conjunctions - the last missing part of speech - to Acuitas' text processing chain, and achieved improvements on Parser benchmarks.
*Put a lot of work into better Narrative comprehension and Theory of Mind frameworks. I feel almost ready to take a crack at a particular story I've wanted to do, and ... *whispers* maybe text adventures? Next year, next year ...
*Got partway through a major refactoring and tidying of the Narrative module, to lay a good foundation for the new work next year.
*Finished reading all the publicly available papers on Pei Wang's recommended "AGI Education Advanced Topics" list.

A story flowchart (generated by Acuitas' Narrative Engine) for the "Altan Finds Water" story from this May.

*Bought and initiated the Anycubic Vyper printer, which is amazing. I still used my X-One 2 to help with all the Christmas projects, but the Vyper is (in many ways) so much nicer that it's hard to make myself go back to the older model.
*Completed a redesign of all ACE's leg joints and spinal frame, and got him to ACTUALLY STAND passively at his full height. Next year - motion? Maybe? Or another small redesign when I find out those motors just won't cut it.
*Took Atronach's Eye through a couple of design iterations, and got a better understanding of the issues with its mechanics, but didn't really solve them. There's another saga that will continue into next year.

Ill Gotten Games' Pocket-Tactics starter set, printed for a Christmas present

*Queried a few agents with my first novel, then decided to change tactics and boost my portfolio before trying again.
*Wrote four short stories.
*Published more than two blog posts per month (on average) - that's almost double the amount I was able to write the previous two years.

*Got almost ready to wrap up what has been my main project for the past few years at Day Job: parts of the data processing and storage box for an imaging satellite. That's not as glamorous as a launch announcement, which I don't suppose will be coming for several more years - and we made this one for Germany, so from our perspective it's not classified, but I have no idea how public the launch information will be. In any case I'm looking forward to shipping it and doing something new!

Butternuts green on the vine. In the far backgound is the acorn squash, which really tried to produce but didn't make it before the freeze.

*Successfully harvested butternut squash for the first time, in addition to the usual potatoes.
*Kept the book consumption rate higher than the book acquisition rate ... only by a little, but the queue is almost empty. Soon I will once again be justified in buying books on impulse, soooon ...
*Pushed my creation work rate over three times the maintenance work rate for the year, just barely. It wasn't the most productive year - I let the work rest for a while and did a lot of traveling - but I still completed most items on my planning schedule.

Happy New Year, everyone. I hope 2023 turns out better for us all.

--Jenny

Inmarsat-6 Satellite Launch!

I've mostly used this blog to talk about my hobbies, but I also have an aerospace industry job -- and it's become so exciting that I have to say something about it, because one of the projects I worked on is finally about to go up. Something of mine is soon to be IN SPACE you guys. (It's possible that one of my earlier projects is already out there ... but it was a military satellite. I wasn't told when or if it was launched, or whether it was successful. So it kinda doesn't count.) Due to a combination of working secret projects like that, and working IRAD projects that never got launched, I have been waiting for this for over nine years.

I don't have any personal photos of the RF box or our labs, and wouldn't be allowed to show you if I did ... but here's one I snagged from the company website. Image credit: SEAKR Engineering

The satellite in question is Inmarsat-6 F1, first of its name (there is an F2). Inmarsat is the operator, and the satellites were manufactured by Airbus ... which subcontracted the design and construction of the RF data processing boxes to my employer, SEAKR Engineering. The I-6 are data carriers, and the RF (radio frequency) processor functions something like a telephone switch, routing streams of data from one frequency to another.

According to Inmarsat, I-6 F1 will be "The world's largest and most sophisticated commercial communications satellite." I never read any marketing copy for this thing when I was part of the team laboring over it back in 2017-2018. It was just my daily work, another program I was assigned to and needed to get to completion. It feels a little surreal to see the language that Inmarsat describes it with now.

Before I say exactly what I did, I need to talk a bit about my field. I'm an Electrical Engineer with a specialty in FPGAs (Field Programmable Gate Arrays). An FPGA is a type of integrated circuit -- a computer chip. But whereas the average chip contains fixed circuitry that was cut and deposited into the layers of material inside, an FPGA contains many independent components (logic lookup tables, flip-flops, small RAMs, etc.) that can be connected by the user, post-manufacturing, to create almost any kind of digital processor. FPGA design consists of inventing the connection pattern for one of these. Imagine building a computer's CPU out of tiny LEGO bricks. Older FPGAs contained antifuses, and the connections were made by placing the FPGA in a programming socket that would permanently burn some of them closed. Newer FPGAs have configuration memory that can be loaded with binary data, and the values in this memory set electronic switches to establish the circuit. Since the memory can be rewritten, the circuits inside such FPGAs can be revised many times.

A visualization of an FPGA interior, with components used by the current design highlighted. Image credit: Xilinx (Figure 2-2 in UG633 v14.5)

FPGAs are valued by electronics designers for their balance between specialization and flexibility. If you need to do some calculations, you could design and order a 100% custom circuit -- an ASIC -- that will run them in the most efficient way possible. But ASICs are very expensive and time-consuming to produce. If you aren't planning to sell very many units (and in the satellite industry, we generally don't), they often aren't worth it. On the other end of the spectrum, you could buy a standard embedded processor and write your own software for it. But such a processor is designed to do a handful of basic math and logic operations; it won't have specialized circuitry to suit your needs, and your calculations might end up being very slow. FPGAs bridge the gap. They are standardized and lack the custom manufacturing costs of an ASIC, but they come to you as clay ready to be shaped. You can turn them into processors that are excellent at doing exactly what you want to do. And their reconfigurability makes them tolerant of design mistakes.

Now I need to say a few words about the bane -- well, one of the banes -- of electronics in space. That would be radiation, in the form of high-energy particles. Examples include cosmic rays (ions that fly in from interstellar space) and protons from the solar wind. These particles hurtle along at such blazing speeds that they can punch straight through an integrated circuit, leaving behind a trail of electric charge in all the wrong places. Then the misplaced charges can do annoying things, like turning transistors on or off, possibly disrupting the IC's function. Generally, the better an IC's performance, the smaller its internal features are and the less charge is needed to disrupt them. These effects are especially problematic in a reconfigurable FPGA ... not only could they change the current state of the circuit, they could strike the configuration memory, thereby rewiring the circuit itself!

Space radiation is such a problem that we test our parts ahead of time to find out how they will malfunction when struck by particles. I spent most of 2018 assisting that effort. This is the business end of the heavy ion beam system we used at the Texas A&M University Cyclotron Institute.

Earth's atmosphere blocks most ionizing radiation, which is a good thing for both ground-level computers and your own sweet cells. In space, shielding a computer is often impractical. The amount of material needed to stop the particles would make a satellite unacceptably large and heavy. An alternative is to design the processor to detect radiation-induced errors and self-correct.

That's where I came in on this project. I was responsible for one side of the two-part error monitor that watches for radiation events in the big, vulnerable FPGAs that are doing all the data processing and routing. I wasn't the first person to work on it, but I was the one who finished it, took it through integration and test, wrung out all the bugs, and answered everyone's questions about it for months afterward. Unfortunately, I can't give any details about exactly how it works, since that would be going deep into trade secret territory. SEAKR is more protective of that error monitor than most of the code we've developed in-house.

After finishing my half of the error monitor, I helped with the performance testing for the high-speed data links between the processing FPGAs. We ran these tests in a thermal chamber, so we could ensure the data wasn't corrupted at the hottest and coldest temperatures we expected the box to suffer in space.

Another photo from TAMU. This is part of the beam system for proton testing.

I did a worst-case analysis report on yet another data interface. A WCA is a set of theoretical calculations that check whether the interface will still work across all possible environmental and internal conditions. For instance, can the electrical signals be expected to always arrive at their destination within the right time window? WCA might be my least favorite part of my job: complex, tedious, and endlessly frustrating. Usually whoever designed the interface pushed it right to the edge of acceptability -- leaving me, the analyst, to consider tiny effects, make strained assumptions about parts that don't come with adequate data, generate sixteen timing diagrams instead of one, and chew on my own fingers. I finally got the horrible report written up to our lead's satisfaction and moved on to another project.

... And then I came back, in late 2020, to solve a nasty little bug that was causing data packets sent to the processor FPGAs to be duplicated or lost under rare circumstances. At this time the program was wrapping up and struggling to get the flight units shipped. I was running low on things to do and the bug had been going neglected, so they threw me at it, even though I had never studied this part of the FGPA code before. As I recall, it took me weeks. (If you've ever chased a bug in software ... FPGA bugs are an order of magnitude worse.) But I found it and fixed it, and some time later we finally got the two RF boxes out the door.

Then I forgot about them ... until about six weeks ago, when I got the company-wide e-mail that the first of the two satellites had been delivered to Japan. It will be launched from JAXA Tanegashima Space Center on a Mitsubishi Heavy Industries rocket, on December 21st as early as 14:33 GMT (assuming all goes well with weather and other contingencies). The launch will be livestreamed. So if you'd like to watch my first major contribution to civilization ascend to the heavens (or gloriously explode? good thing there's a second one!) be at that link the day of.

Until the next cycle,
Jenny