Why desks matter

Loneliness is a problem for remote workers—video chats are a terrible substitute for happy hour.

Plus, in person, you get to see people’s desks—it’s fun—it’s how you get to know people.

And I know other people think it’s fun, too: we remoties share our pictures of our workspaces all the time. Everyone should share their workspaces (here’s mine circa 2016).

My desk

This is my messy office as of today. (No cleaning and no judgments 🥹 allowed when sharing your workspace.)

Some things of note in this picture in no particular order:

• The desk and stuff on it
  • Ikea Markus chair and Trotten standing desk
  • My laptop—Framework 13 AMD
  • Vortex Race 3 Keyboard with Cherry MX clear switches
  • Logitech ERGO rollerball mouse
  • Ugmonk analog – the most straightforward productivity system I’ve found.
  • Field notes expedition edition – “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”
  • Endless recorder notebook – this notebook is slowly supplanting my Leuchtturm1917.
  • Micron 08 pens
  • Elgato wave mic arm with a cheapo Amazon Basics microphone. When you spend all day in meetings, it’s important to sound good.
  • Nikon D610 with 24–70mm f/2.8 lens for video calls
    • The camera sits atop a Manfrotto 244 Variable Friction Magic Arm attached to the desk via Manfrotto super clamp – see how many magic arms you spot on the International Space Station (answer: bunches)
  • The small red things in the foreground are USB data blockers—USB adapters with the data lines removed. I usually keep these in my travel bag.
  • The white cube is an ODISTAR Desktop Vacuum Cleaner.
  • dretec timer, for when I have the will to pomodoro.
  • Post-Its®. So many Post-Its.
• On the shelf
  • Perplexus maze ball held in place by a third-hand kit for soldering
  • My trusty ThinkPad X230
  • Lots of old notebooks and thank you cards
  • On the top shelf are some posters and essential reminders: “DON’T BECOME BITTER AND JADED” and “DON’T LET ADULTHOOD CORRUPT YOU.”
• My overflowing homelab rack
  • Startech 6U wall mount
  • Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3 5-port Ethernet Gigabit Router
  • Ubiquiti edgeswitch 16
  • Synology DS212—yes, from 2012(!), it’s still kicking thanks to 2×6TB Western Digital Red NAS HDDs.
  • Gigabyte mini PC – 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe, balancing precariously atop the Synology. The PC runs a handful of VMs: PiHole, HomeAssistant, Grafana, and Prometheus.
  • 2×Raspberry Pi 3B+s doing not much of anything
  • CyberPower CPS1215RMS Rackmount Surge Protector
  • $6 clamp work light with a $60 hue bulb bouncing light off a Neewer 43 in. reflector to light my video calls
• On the floor
  • Home Depot homer bucket, storing my Weaver arborist throw weight and line which is crucial for my job as an engineering manager.
  • A trash can with a lot of dryer sheets
  • An old dog bed

None of these are affiliate links since no one would want to be affiliated with this mess.

What’s the problem?

We’ll never memorize SHA256:XrvNnhQuG1ObprgdtPiqIGXUAsHT71SKh9/WAcAKoS0—hexadecimal and base64 were built to encode large amounts of information rather than be easy to remember.

But that’s ok for SSH keys because there are different kinds of memory:

• Rejection: I’ve never seen that before!
• Recognition: I know it’s that one—not the other one.
• Recollection: rote recall, like a phone number or address.

For SSH you’ll use recognition—do you recognize this key? Of course, SSH keys are still a problem because our working memory is too small to recognize such long strings of letters and numbers.

Hacks abound to shore up our paltry working memory—what Dan called “brain hardware acceleration.”

Randomart attempts to tap into our hardware acceleration for pattern recognition—the visiuo-spacial sketchpad, where we store pictures.

Dan’s idea tapped into a different aspect of hardware acceleration, one often cited by memory competition champions: chunking.

Memory chunking and sha256

The web service what3words maps every three cubic meters (3m²) on Earth to three words.

The White House’s Oval Office is ///curve.empty.buzz.

Three words encode the same information as latitude and longitude—38.89, -77.03—chunking the information to be small enough to fit in our working memory.

The mapping of locations to words uses a list of 40 thousand common English words, so each word encodes 15.29 bits of information—45.9 bits of information, identifying 64 trillion unique places.

Meanwhile sha256 is 256 bits of information: ~116 quindecillion unique combinations.

                                                                64000000000000 # 64 trillion (what3words)
115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936 # 116 (ish) quindecillion (sha256)

For SHA256, we need more than three words or a dictionary larger than 40,000 words.

Dan’s insight was we can identify SSH fingerprints using pairs of human names—couples.

The math works like this¹:

• 131,072 first names: 17 bits per name (×2)
• 524,288 last names: 19 bits per name
• 2,048 cities: 11 bits per city
• 17+17+19+11 = 64 bits

With 64 bits per couple, you could uniquely identify 116 quindecillion items with four couples.

Turning this:

$ ssh foo.bar
The authenticity of host 'foo.bar' can't be established.
ED25519 key fingerprint is SHA256:XrvNnhQuG1ObprgdtPiqIGXUAsHT71SKh9/WAcAKoS0.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting
(yes/no/[fingerprint])?

Into this²:

$ ssh foo.bar
The authenticity of host 'foo.bar' can't be established.
SHA256:XrvNnhQuG1ObprgdtPiqIGXUAsHT71SKh9/WAcAKoS0
Key Data:
    Svasse and Tainen Jesudasson from Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States
    Illma and Sibeth Primack from Itārsi, Madhya Pradesh, India
    Maarja and Nisim Balyeat from Mukilteo, Washington, United States
    Hsu-Heng and Rasim Haozi from Manali, Tamil Nadu, India
Are you sure you want to continue connecting
(yes/no/[fingerprint])?

With enough exposure, building recognition for these names and places should be possible—at least more possible than memorizing host keys.