• tenchiken@anarchist.nexus
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    14 days ago

    It’s a hippy. On a road trip. It’s memory is the size of a thimble. It’s listening to hippy music.

    And it’s far out, man.

  • ameancow
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    14 days ago

    Voyager’s mission parameters and expectations have only decreased since 1977, it will never be required to run newer software or investigate new objects. It is winding down and is just sending back enough data that we can use our more powerful Earth-based computers to detect the most subtle changes to the cosmic medium.

    Meanwhile, we have a constantly accelerating global marketplace of new software and new ways of both working and playing games. If ya’ll were operating on a system designed to stay functional for 40+ years you would not like that system.

    All that said, we do have a pretty bad problem with bloatware and software/hardware companies colluding to leverage consumers to buy and upgrade phones and computers more than necessary.

    I just don’t think it’s a fair comparison if we were to get really pedantic and serious about a joke meme.

    • rarsamx@lemmy.ca
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      14 days ago

      It’s not only commercial software.

      We’ve come to expect more from our computers and as our processors gain more power we find ways to use it. I’m running things on a laptop that before would have required a workstation. I wanted to run an LLM on an old desktop, and 8GB RAM wasn’t enough.

      • BreakerSwitch
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        14 days ago

        True, but one of the biggest things we’re using that power for recently is “why bother optimizing?” With splashes of “can we obtain any more data from the user?”

      • ameancow
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        14 days ago

        The backache and frustration with the number 67 for existing already did that, but thank you for reminding me that we had a good Windows OS once.

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      14 days ago

      If ya’ll were operating on a system designed to stay functional for 40+ years you would not like that system.

      Sure would. I’m sick of the move at all and break things in modern software ecosystems. Were things this bad in CLI land too, until POSIX?

  • unphazed
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    14 days ago

    Google would be the worst partner for any space related work. We plan on launching in 4 years. Oh, Google says they redesigned it, oh, now it needs updates. 3 years, 11 mo later… Google cancelled the program, we need to find another partner.

    • UnderpantsWeevil
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      14 days ago

      October 20st, 2023: NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

      The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

      Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

      • Avicenna
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        13 days ago

        test in production taken to whole another level

    • tomiant@piefed.social
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      14 days ago

      "That is great to hear. I found the bug in your code. Here is an updated version that corrects it.

      🧩 Source Code"

  • leave_it_blank
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    14 days ago

    That’s impressive, but in the end there is only one question:

    Can it run Crysis?

  • AeonFelis
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    13 days ago

    Voyager 3 will stop working halfway to Mars because it’ll try to verify the subscription status with us-east-1 and get a timeout.

  • url
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    13 days ago

    Ok but what about the shareholders?

  • Something Burger 🍔@jlai.lu
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    13 days ago

    15.7 billion miles (168 AU)

    Americans will convert their miles to every yee yee ass unit under the sun before using metric.

    • EzTerry@lemmy.zip
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      13 days ago

      To be fair AU means more to me than miles or km in this case… 168 times further from us than we are to the sun.

      But since you want metric ~25.1 terameters.

      • Threeme2189@lemmy.zip
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        13 days ago

        But since you want metric ~25.1 terameters.

        You think you’re being witty, but you’ve just unintentionally shown why the metric system is so good.

        25.1 terameters => 25,100 gigameters => 25,100,000 kilometers.

        Easy as pie.

        Edit: Ahh crap, I forgot about megameters. It comes out to 25,100,000,000 km. Sorry for the metric ton of confusion.

    • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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      13 days ago

      At that scale meters and miles are pretty close with respect to orders of magnitude, which is why practically everyone talks about these scales in AUs regardless of what units they actually used to do the science.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      13 days ago

      Though AU is a pretty legitimate term if you don’t want to be going in Tera - Giga territory.
      I’d assume astronomers other than in the US also use it.

  • laranis@lemmy.zip
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    13 days ago

    But, but… How do we extract value from it? No micro transactions? No ad revenue? Can we sell it? Write it off as a loss? Is there at least a credit card reader so aliens can sign up for recurring payments?

    • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      13 days ago

      It’s a moonshot in that it has a very tiny likelihood of attracting alien intelligence that is such a game changer that it brings an unfathomable amount of wealth to our planet.

      • Wilco@lemmy.zip
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        13 days ago

        Allien Intelligence = potential investors and potential shareholder value. They could also destroy the planet.

        • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          13 days ago

          I’d argue that the type of people who make those investment decisions often don’t put the proper weight on “destroy the planet” risk when calculating their expected value.

        • Crashumbc
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          13 days ago

          They’re already bought puts for the case…

          Plus if the documentaries, “2012” and snowpiercer have taught us anything. It’s that the rich will survive.

  • rayyy@piefed.social
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    14 days ago

    That’s a long way still only 1/374th of a light year, to keep things in perspective.

    • Z3k3
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      14 days ago

      Don’t let Microsoft get a pass azure went down last week too

  • NotMyOldRedditName
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    13 days ago

    I wonder if any aliens ever ran into this, if they’d be like wow, this tech is so low, let’s not bother with who sent it.

    Or if they’d be like, it looks like it took 100 years to get here, let’s see what they did in 100 years.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.ca
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    14 days ago

    It was about that time when progress was abandoned for profit. We’ve been swirling down ever since.