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   Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:22:30 JST Nowhere Girl

   NASA recovered a space probe's 47-year-old computer with about as much memory as my old Commodore 64 over a distance of 15 billion miles so it can (hopefully) continue to do science work, and it reminds me of how much ingenuity used to go into computers back when the assumption was you couldn't consume the water and electricity of a small nation just to power Ask Jeeves.

   • AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:23:09 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     I like a lot of things about modern-ish computers, hardware, and global connectivity, but there is so much lazy slop being produced as "innovation."

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     Kalshann (kalshann@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:23:14 JST Kalshann

     in reply to

     @gwynnion
     Seriously I got a giddy happy thing just reading about Voyager today.

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:23:25 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     • Kalshann

     @Kalshann Yeah! If it's returning engineering data then science work should go off without a hitch. It'll just take time to do it carefully.

     I'm impressed they worked around a dead memory chip at all.

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     Nowhere Girl (gwynnion@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:23:54 JST Nowhere Girl

     in reply to

     • IPmonger

     @IPmonger The two extremes are like Tesla, where "done is better than good or safe or even functional" is apparently the rule because there are no regulations anymore, and on the other hand, the assumption that cloud computing lets us waste massive resources on extremely stupid shit that nobody actually needs.

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     IPmonger (ipmonger@hachyderm.io)'s status on Tuesday, 23-Apr-2024 06:23:55 JST IPmonger

     in reply to

     @gwynnion it’s something that can be hard to accept, but constraints are frequently helpful in creating practical solutions. Necessity is the mother of invention and all…

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.