3 ms·

I totally lack the patience to be able to deal with sending a command and having to wait 2 days to see the result. Everything about this is awe-inspiring for me

I totally lack the patience to be able to deal with sending a command and having to wait 2 days to see the result. Everything about this is awe-inspiring for me.

robertlagrant 2y ago
Imagine opening Vim and gradually typing the commands in to edit a file with a 2-day time lag. Only at the end to notice the fateful words at the bottom of the editor: [read-only].
- Faaak 2y ago
  This reads like a great opening to a geek-sci-fi book!
  - rubslopes 2y ago
    geek-sci-fi-horror book
- _flux 2y ago
  I wonder if you could teach millions of terminal sessions to an LLM and then have mosh run the inference algorithm to hide the latency (and eventually correct when it gets the real data)..
- lostlogin 2y ago
  > Imagine opening Vim Imagine being able to close Vim. And yes, I’m hopeless. Nano please.
marban 2y ago
Don't get into GenAI then.
FerretFred 2y ago
It sounds like my old company (not NASA) when we submitted tickets to offshore tech support - 2 days response time was the norm, and sometimes we never got a response back at all...
peterburkimsher 2y ago
I told my dad about the Voyager fix, and he said that back in the days of punched cards, latency of 2 days was quite normal! He was still impressed at the high stakes of the repair though, with no option to go over and turn it off and on again.
epgui 2y ago
This is basically why I quit cancer research to go into software. It was like trying to debug via the postal service. You do something to your cell cultures, and you only find out 6 weeks later if something went wrong. And because a million different things can happen to cells over the course of 6 weeks, you don't get a line number, or a stack trace, or very much debugging information at all.
- remoquete 2y ago
  So you quit potentially life-saving research because you couldn't open a terminal session to a cell culture? Why did you even enter that field in the first place? Genuine question.
  - doublerabbit 2y ago
    ./configure --fix-cancer sudo make cell
  - epgui 2y ago
    Because I legitimately thought it would be a field where I could maximize how much of my brain I used. Instead, it turned out to be 99% dishwashing. I very much loved undergraduate studies. I legitimately love studying what has been done and what has been discovered already. While we often say that we know nothing (it's somewhat true), the amount of human knowledge that already exists, especially in the life sciences, is unfathomable. And that's genuinely challenging and exciting. But as soon as you start actually doing the research work, it's a lot less exciting, not much happens, and there is not a lot of problem solving (at least not in comparison to software). It's just a slow methodical grind, with pretty much no pivoting opportunities. You just stick to the plan, and you must try the same thing over and over again. I was surprised by that. Your experiences may differ depending on where you worked, on your funding obligations, and on your specific research area. And after you finish your PhD, you might get lucky and get one of these fancy $ 40k post-doctoral fellow salaries. /s (The way science works at a large scale is pretty fantastic, but how it feels for an individual is a very different thing.)
    - 2y ago
bregma 2y ago
My computer course in high school has a one week turnaround time. Send your punched card deck off Thursday of one week, get the printout back the next Thursday. Two days would have been luxury.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  When you say ‘has a one week turnaround’ you mean ‘had’ don’t you? If not, I’d quite like to try a course on punchcard usage.

I totally lack the patience to be able to deal with sending a command and having to wait 2 days to see the result. Everything about this is awe-inspiring for me.

robertlagrant 2y ago

Imagine opening Vim and gradually typing the commands in to edit a file with a 2-day time lag. Only at the end to notice the fateful words at the bottom of the editor: [read-only].

Faaak 2y ago
This reads like a great opening to a geek-sci-fi book!
- rubslopes 2y ago
  geek-sci-fi-horror book
_flux 2y ago
I wonder if you could teach millions of terminal sessions to an LLM and then have mosh run the inference algorithm to hide the latency (and eventually correct when it gets the real data)..
lostlogin 2y ago
> Imagine opening Vim Imagine being able to close Vim. And yes, I’m hopeless. Nano please.

marban 2y ago

Don't get into GenAI then.

FerretFred 2y ago

It sounds like my old company (not NASA) when we submitted tickets to offshore tech support - 2 days response time was the norm, and sometimes we never got a response back at all...

peterburkimsher 2y ago

I told my dad about the Voyager fix, and he said that back in the days of punched cards, latency of 2 days was quite normal! He was still impressed at the high stakes of the repair though, with no option to go over and turn it off and on again.

epgui 2y ago

This is basically why I quit cancer research to go into software. It was like trying to debug via the postal service. You do something to your cell cultures, and you only find out 6 weeks later if something went wrong. And because a million different things can happen to cells over the course of 6 weeks, you don't get a line number, or a stack trace, or very much debugging information at all.

remoquete 2y ago
So you quit potentially life-saving research because you couldn't open a terminal session to a cell culture? Why did you even enter that field in the first place? Genuine question.
- doublerabbit 2y ago
  ./configure --fix-cancer sudo make cell
- epgui 2y ago
  Because I legitimately thought it would be a field where I could maximize how much of my brain I used. Instead, it turned out to be 99% dishwashing. I very much loved undergraduate studies. I legitimately love studying what has been done and what has been discovered already. While we often say that we know nothing (it's somewhat true), the amount of human knowledge that already exists, especially in the life sciences, is unfathomable. And that's genuinely challenging and exciting. But as soon as you start actually doing the research work, it's a lot less exciting, not much happens, and there is not a lot of problem solving (at least not in comparison to software). It's just a slow methodical grind, with pretty much no pivoting opportunities. You just stick to the plan, and you must try the same thing over and over again. I was surprised by that. Your experiences may differ depending on where you worked, on your funding obligations, and on your specific research area. And after you finish your PhD, you might get lucky and get one of these fancy $ 40k post-doctoral fellow salaries. /s (The way science works at a large scale is pretty fantastic, but how it feels for an individual is a very different thing.)
  - 2y ago

bregma 2y ago

My computer course in high school has a one week turnaround time. Send your punched card deck off Thursday of one week, get the printout back the next Thursday. Two days would have been luxury.

lostlogin 2y ago
When you say ‘has a one week turnaround’ you mean ‘had’ don’t you? If not, I’d quite like to try a course on punchcard usage.