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   Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jul-2023 22:30:53 JST Fabio Manganiello

   The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

   And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

   50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

   The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

   • clacke likes this.
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     kravietz 🦇 (kravietz@agora.echelon.pl)'s status on Tuesday, 01-Aug-2023 04:53:03 JST kravietz 🦇

     in reply to

     @blacklight

     The key part here is the risk management: impact of crashing IntelliJ is local, and simple mitigations like document recovery are easier than writing the whole project in a formally verified language.

     clacke likes this.
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     นาตาลี :bellsystem: (natalie@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 19:37:10 JST นาตาลี :bellsystem:

     in reply to

     @blacklight@social.platypush.tech there are still plenty of applications in the embedded space where double-digit kbyte of ram would be considered a frivolous luxury. i don't think this knowledge is actually lost at all, it's just that the upper bound of hardware performance has increased so drastically

     :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: :blobancap: :blobcattrans: likes this.
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     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:09:34 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to
     @blacklight I believe it's just no longer a viable model with the commoditization of software engineering. The people and the skills are still out there but there's not an economic will.
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     Sexy Moon (moon@shitposter.club)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:17:54 JST Sexy Moon

     in reply to

     • Moffin'tosh
     @moffintosh our best people are probably doing finance software now for millions of dollars a year.
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     Moffin'tosh (moffintosh@berserker.town)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:17:56 JST Moffin'tosh

     in reply to

     @blacklight

     Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

     Also money and time that things where given

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     on-lain ✔ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ (lain@lain.com)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:21:04 JST on-lain ✔ᵛᵉʳᶦᶠᶦᵉᵈ

     in reply to
     @blacklight one single frame on a 4k display is over 30 megabytes already. that's nearly 2 gigs every second. computers and software are doing vastly more than they used to.