Making Hard Things Easy

Post by fulafel » Mon, Oct 09, 2023, 5:48 AM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #147

jzwinck wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireshark is great but it does not show you every byte the network carried. For example it never shows Ethernet preambles, only sometimes shows Ethernet frame checksums, and never shows interpacket gaps (which are a required part of the Ethernet protocol). So yes it comes close but it just goes to show you, there is always more detail hiding somewhere!

Are the Ethernet frame checksums even visible to Wireshark, which hooks into the IP layer? would some of the ethernet stuff be only visible within the ethernet card itself, not to the software stack?

Wireshark has support for lots of interfaces, it's just a consumer for OS/driver supplied data in this aspect.

See eg this bit about wlan for some of the complexity: https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN#link-layer-radi...

Post by code_biologist » Mon, Oct 09, 2023, 6:55 AM UTC

vaughan wrote: post #124

cryptonector wrote: post #44

To make hard things easy you have to find the right way to abstract them so you hold only some bits of the hard things in your head and all the frequently-used details too (maybe), and everything else you have to look up as needed. That's what I do, and that's roughly what TFA says. The problem is that people don't necessarily bother to form a cognitive compression of a large topic until they really have to. That's b…

> As for SQL We should peel off SQL and get access to the underlying layers.

What if my SQL engine is Presto, Trino [1], or a similar query engine? If it's federating multiple source databases we peel the SQL back and get... SQL? Or you peel the SQL back and get... S3 + Mongo + Hadoop? Junior analysts would work at 1/10th the speed if they had to use those raw.

[1] https://trino.io/

Re: Making Hard Things Easy

Re: Making Hard Things Easy