this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 months ago (3 children)

To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.

Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That's about 10x as much power as a cell phone's radio, but it's still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it's extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it's still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It's being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they're still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they're decoding a signal that's 10^-18 watts.

So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you're doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.

The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you'd probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn't do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.

So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.

[–] flerp@lemm.ee 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs

[–] kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 6 months ago

Oh screw that, that's an emotional post from somebody sharing their reaction, and I'm fucking STOKED to hear about it, can't believe I missed the news!

[–] chimasterflex@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Finally I can put some take into this. I've worked in memory testing for years and I'll tell you that it's actually pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time. So much so that what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells. We add more memory cells than we might activate at any given time. When shit goes awry, we can reprogram the memory controller to remap the used memory cells so that the bad cells are mapped out and unused ones are mapped in. We don't probe memory cells typically unless we're doing some type of in depth failure analysis. usually we just run a series of algorithms that test each cell and identify which ones aren't responding correctly, then map those out.

None of this is to diminish the engineering challenges that they faced, just to help give an appreciation for the technical mechanisms we've improved over the last few decades

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time

50 years is plenty of time for the first memory chip to fail most systems would face total failure by multiple defects in half the time WITH physical maintenance.

Also remember it was built with tools from the 70s. Which is probably an advantage, given everything else is still going

[–] orangeboats@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago

Also remember it was built with tools from the 70s. Which is probably an advantage

Definitely an advantage. Even without planned obsolescence the olden electronics are pretty tolerant of any outside interference compared to the modern ones.

[–] MonkderDritte@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Huh. If it survives a few years more, it's a lightday away.

[–] FlatFootFox@lemmy.world 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

[–] xantoxis@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

[–] Artyom@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago

It's not Slack's fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they're set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.

All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn't have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

IBM is 100, but the Internet didn't exist in 1924, so we'll say the clock starts in 1989. I'm pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.

[–] jaybone@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

What’s a company they invest in?

[–] nxdefiant@startrek.website 0 points 6 months ago

Themselves. I'm just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

They don't use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

That means "written in assembly" means "written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn't document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke".

[–] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

They also released the source code of the Apollo 11 guidance computer. So if you want to fly to the moon, here is one part of how to do it.

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Nice, now I just need a rocket and launchpad! Craigslist?

[–] Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 months ago

Commission one on fiverr or etsy.

[–] watersnipje@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 6 months ago

Man I can’t even get my stupid Azure deployment to work and that’s only in Germany.

[–] Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Still faster than the average Windows update.

[–] mjhelto@lemm.ee 1 points 6 months ago

NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!

[–] blackluster117@possumpat.io 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)
[–] bstix@feddit.dk 1 points 6 months ago

Absolutely. The computers on Voyager hold the record for being the longest continuously running computer of all time.

[–] fsr1967@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Interviewer: Tell me an interesting debugging story

Interviewee: ...

[–] sudo42@lemmy.world 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Heh. Years ago during an interview I was explaining how important it is to verify a system before putting it into orbit. If one found problems in orbit, you usually can’t fix it. My interviewer said, “Why not just send up the space shuttle to fix it?”

Well…

[–] pruwybn@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 6 months ago

Why do Tumblr users approach every topic like a manic street preacher?

[–] KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

SWEs have new standards now, and i think we should hold them to it. Considering how shit most modern websites are these days. I think it's only going to be beneficial.

[–] agressivelyPassive@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Say that to corporate. I'm perfectly willing (eager, even) to write actually good software, but I'm forced to work within a budget and on top of the pile of despair we call "tech stack". Everything is about 20 orders of magnitude more complex than it needs to be, nobody has time to do anything properly and everything is always kind of burning.

[–] Crumbgrabber@lemm.ee 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

**This also means that aliens can reprogram all of our satellites. **

[–] Johanno@feddit.de 0 points 6 months ago

Yes if they can track them in middle of space.

It's impressive that we can still send data to the satellite. I mean you need to send the signal to the place where the satellite will be in 24 hours.