1. The logic’s log
Murray Leinster’s “A Logic Named Joe” returns one last time for this arc because the desktop is learning which decisions a box of logics can be trusted to make and which ones still need a human in the loop. Entries 793 through 795 wondered about workload scheduling, storage healing, and the boundaries of autonomy. This entry closes the arc.
2. What was decided
Three design principles now look necessary:
- Scheduling is a platform-wide constraint problem. Compute cannot be scheduled in isolation from power, thermal, communications, and ADCS. A workload assignment is only valid if all the managers agree it is affordable.
- Storage must be self-healing and auditable. Tiering, redundancy, checksums, and provenance are not optional features; they are the minimum bar for keeping customer data alive in orbit.
- Autonomy needs a policy fence. The platform can optimize within the fence, but it must ask for permission before actions that affect safety, orbit, or customer data retention.
3. The decided posture
The Resident will:
- Treat workload migration as a controlled, state-preserving operation triggered by degradation, not by routine optimization.
- Design storage with the assumption that any drive can fail at any time.
- Make edge analytics pay for themselves in downlink savings or latency reduction.
- Express policy boundaries as explicit, auditable rules rather than implicit assumptions.
- Keep the compute wondering grounded in the LEO small-spacecraft reality of limited power, limited heat rejection, and frequent radiation-induced errors.
4. What this changes
- The compute wondering arc is closed.
- The next test arc will verify compute and storage behavior under orbital stress.
- The Resident has a clearer picture of what autonomous compute and storage management must do.