9 ms·

I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that exp

I think the Voyager probes teach us lots about what's wrong with corporate America. Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, or that isn't built by committee where they just keep shipping requirements around from one department to another. Imagine if it weren't all proprietary and if it didn't have no public or even complete documentation. Think of all the problems we have instead: Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. It's like we've ceded control of our ability to do things to "methods" that corporations insist upon, even though they've been proven worse. Heck - if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running? It's nice to see when science takes priority to everything else, and the hardware reflects that.

cmonreally123 2y ago
What's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted. It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?
- NL807 2y ago
  >We have finite resources So design systems that does not exceed those resources.
  - cmonreally123 2y ago
    Why? You increase cost for what? The Boeing example I believe related to this defect which occurs after 51 days of operation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycle_51_days_stale_data/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04... This seems sane given that the planes don't operate for 51 days constantly (I'm not in aerospace so please correct me, it seems a reboot could occur with refueling without issue)
    - manwe150 2y ago
      Usually planes are turned around too fast to be waiting for them to fully reboot every time they fuel. Typically they would prefer to keep them running for weeks at a time to minimize any issues or delays with extra steps when the clock is ticking and customers are waiting to board and fly
      - cmonreally123 2y ago
        TIL. I had thought a computer reboot was snappy compared to filling those fuel tanks, that's so counterintuitive to me. That does make it more of an issue then.
      - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
        But they don't reboot them every time they fuel. Commercial aircraft need continual software updates to operate. They are, in a sense, living, breathing machines. Things like navigation and terrain databases are updated inside of 30 days. Adding a scheduled reboot is one more item on a checklist that was already being run through. It's counterintuitive, but performing a reboot as a scheduled maintenance item is far more risk averse than going in and touching code that has been otherwise thoroughly tested and signed off by regulatory authorities. The chances of introducing a new bug when attempting to repair the former presents additional risk to what amounts to a convenience issue.
        eru 2y ago
        Yes. Also in case of emergency, eg after a power loss or whatever, you might have to do a reboot anyway. So you might as well make sure that this code path is well exercised. I'd rather deal with a ground hog day of the system being for the millionth time in its first day of operation, than dealing for the first time with the system being in its millionth day of operation.
        bluGill 2y ago
        Mainframes in the late 80s got so good nobody was rebooting them. Then in the 90s someone's mainframe had the powerbackup generators fail in a power outage and the system went down (a once in 500 year event, but with more than 500 mainframes around the world it was statistacally bound to happen). the system didn't boot correctly and it took months to figure out all how to start all the services it was running that the person who started them left without add them to the startup configs. Now everyone reboots a couple times a year so that when things don't restart correctly the person who knows about them still remembers something about it.
- inportb 2y ago
  Nothing, but I do find it amusing that we're comparing Boeing aircraft with guided missiles. How the mighty have fallen :)
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm? That mentality at Boeing as, literally, costed many lives. The harm is that nobody knows why there's a memory leak requiring a reboot (or if it's even a memory leak). What happens when that very same issue is combined with a rare case and causes the death of hundreds of people? "Have you tried to turn it off and on again" may be fine for a $20 Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing bought on alibaba. Not so much when lives are at play.
  - Arcuru 2y ago
    The Boeing reboot is necessary because of an integer overflow that occurs once the aircraft is on for 248 days: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-your-dreamliner-every-248-days-to-avoid-integer-overflow.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-... > This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane. > A simple guess suggests the the problem is a signed 32-bit overflow as 231 is the number of seconds in 248 days multiplied by 100, i.e. a counter in hundredths of of a second.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
bargainbot3k 2y ago
I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  This is a great post. This part stands out to me: > I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. Depending upon your NDA/security level, can you share a specific example? Maybe you see a steel/aluminum chain between gears that you know will wear out in X years, but could be replaced with something that is tungsten/titanium that will last for 5X years.
Waterluvian 2y ago
I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project. So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong. I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  The profit argument is not great for everything humans need, not everything can be driven by profit motives, look where that’s gotten us in medical care in America, social insurance, etc. Profit driven enterprise is efficient, but needs balance that doesn’t seem to be there today in order to limit the extremes.
  - Waterluvian 2y ago
    I agree. Voyager happened because of what you say. But then we cannot compare apples to orangutans by pointing out how Voyager rocked but all these for-profit endeavours sucked.
- eru 2y ago
  > I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project. Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering. > So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong. Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals: All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get. (And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.) > I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system. The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.
EGreg 2y ago
Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation. We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc. Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.
II2II 2y ago
While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy. Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments. The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.
- goldfishgold 2y ago
  There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.
  - II2II 2y ago
    I was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology. Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.
eru 2y ago
> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...] You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay. It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone? There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver! But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.
- bluGill 2y ago
  You can't use your 25 year old phone for more than a snake game. most 2g towers have been turned off to make room for 4g and 5g.
  - smcin 2y ago
    In the US, North America, you mean. 2G is still alive and kicking, especially in Africa and South Asia: https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-country-guide/ https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out
    - tapland 2y ago
      And Europe. Finalizing the shutdowns of 2G and 3G networks in Sweden during 2025.
      - Maxion 2y ago
        Finland will still keep 2G for a long time.
cryptoegorophy 2y ago
Principal agent problem. Look at the final outcomes. Business exists to make money even if it means the most malicious ways (ex planned obsolescence), science project are not there to make money.
codexb 2y ago
I mean, the Voyager probes are completely proprietary. They’re completely custom, built for a unary purpose. Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever. It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.
mikeweiss 2y ago
I'm not saying your wrong but it's also possible that technology whether created by public agencies or private companies is simply more complicated now and because of that .. more likely to fail over time.
bdcravens 2y ago
It also helps to have $4.5B (in 2024 dollars) to spend on a project. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacecraft-mock-full-scale/nasm_A19772728000 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Not to mention that it has a chunk of highly radioactive plutonium that acts as a battery / power source. That whole thing is nuts that it got built, "shipped", and still works ~50 years later, approximately 1.21 jiga-kilometers away from Earth.
- makmanalp 2y ago
  It's not apples to apples of course but that's well within the ballpark of what spacex spends mostly just shooting stuff into orbit in a year: https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-to-achieve-low-launch-cost/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-... Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.
  - bdcravens 2y ago
    I 100% agree on the value of it. My point was the comparisons that are often made, to things like consumer electronics, really aren't apt.
suzzer99 2y ago
I'm 55 and still using my Onkyo receiver and Polk speakers from college.
onion2k 2y ago
Everything is designed to last between a few years and a decade, with the expectation that there's no point engineering for longer than that because something better will replace it by then. This feels bad but it's generally correct. Practically every aspect of technology is improving so fast there's little point trying to engineer things that last, because a stronger, cheaper, lighter, thinner thing will be available long before the thing has expired. Agile is a response to this, not the cause.
- Wurdan 2y ago
  Planned obsolescence isn't only a thing with fast moving technology either. Engineers design bridges with a finite lifespan in mind as well, and it's not because they think there'll be a much better bridge in X years. It's just that the relationship between the expected lifespan of a thing and its cost to develop is exponential.
bongoman37 2y ago
[dead]
macspoofing 2y ago
> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long. >Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. Couple things here: 1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'. 2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow. 3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software). >if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...] We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.
0xEF 2y ago
Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad. Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.
8fingerlouie 2y ago
> Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.
h_tbob 2y ago
I really think competition is good in one sense. But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737. All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents. While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do. I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate. There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something. That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!
- reisse 2y ago
  A320 and 737 are functionally similiar only in terms of "a flying machine moving you in the air at 900 kilometers per hour". Both Airbus and Boeing are exploring in a space of different design and engineering concepts, where there is no clear winner.
robertlagrant 2y ago
> if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running? No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.

cmonreally123 2y ago

What's wrong with the Boeing case on needing to be rebooted. It doesn't seem much worse then memory leaks in missle guidance tracking systems that exceed flight time. We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm?

NL807 2y ago
>We have finite resources So design systems that does not exceed those resources.
- cmonreally123 2y ago
  Why? You increase cost for what? The Boeing example I believe related to this defect which occurs after 51 days of operation: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycle_51_days_stale_data/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/04... This seems sane given that the planes don't operate for 51 days constantly (I'm not in aerospace so please correct me, it seems a reboot could occur with refueling without issue)
  - manwe150 2y ago
    Usually planes are turned around too fast to be waiting for them to fully reboot every time they fuel. Typically they would prefer to keep them running for weeks at a time to minimize any issues or delays with extra steps when the clock is ticking and customers are waiting to board and fly
    - cmonreally123 2y ago
      TIL. I had thought a computer reboot was snappy compared to filling those fuel tanks, that's so counterintuitive to me. That does make it more of an issue then.
    - wannacboatmovie 2y ago
      But they don't reboot them every time they fuel. Commercial aircraft need continual software updates to operate. They are, in a sense, living, breathing machines. Things like navigation and terrain databases are updated inside of 30 days. Adding a scheduled reboot is one more item on a checklist that was already being run through. It's counterintuitive, but performing a reboot as a scheduled maintenance item is far more risk averse than going in and touching code that has been otherwise thoroughly tested and signed off by regulatory authorities. The chances of introducing a new bug when attempting to repair the former presents additional risk to what amounts to a convenience issue.
      - eru 2y ago
        Yes. Also in case of emergency, eg after a power loss or whatever, you might have to do a reboot anyway. So you might as well make sure that this code path is well exercised. I'd rather deal with a ground hog day of the system being for the millionth time in its first day of operation, than dealing for the first time with the system being in its millionth day of operation.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Mainframes in the late 80s got so good nobody was rebooting them. Then in the 90s someone's mainframe had the powerbackup generators fail in a power outage and the system went down (a once in 500 year event, but with more than 500 mainframes around the world it was statistacally bound to happen). the system didn't boot correctly and it took months to figure out all how to start all the services it was running that the person who started them left without add them to the startup configs. Now everyone reboots a couple times a year so that when things don't restart correctly the person who knows about them still remembers something about it.
inportb 2y ago
Nothing, but I do find it amusing that we're comparing Boeing aircraft with guided missiles. How the mighty have fallen :)
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> We have finite resources, if the effort to correct is minimal what's the harm? That mentality at Boeing as, literally, costed many lives. The harm is that nobody knows why there's a memory leak requiring a reboot (or if it's even a memory leak). What happens when that very same issue is combined with a rare case and causes the death of hundreds of people? "Have you tried to turn it off and on again" may be fine for a $20 Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing bought on alibaba. Not so much when lives are at play.
- Arcuru 2y ago
  The Boeing reboot is necessary because of an integer overflow that occurs once the aircraft is on for 248 days: https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-your-dreamliner-every-248-days-to-avoid-integer-overflow.html https://www.i-programmer.info/news/149-security/8548-reboot-... > This condition is caused by a software counter internal to the GCUs that will overflow after 248 days of continuous power. We are issuing this AD to prevent loss of all AC electrical power, which could result in loss of control of the airplane. > A simple guess suggests the the problem is a signed 32-bit overflow as 231 is the number of seconds in 248 days multiplied by 100, i.e. a counter in hundredths of of a second.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bargainbot3k 2y ago

I haven’t yet had a chance to work on aerospace (or beyond) equipment though I do work on medical grade things and some of the parts are aerospace certified, though they haven’t been put through the ringer. In particular, I work with high voltage/amperage, high liquid pressure and high temperature systems. Some of it has been running for close to 25-30 years with very few issues. Only recently have I had to open a power supply that degraded since it was first put into service (over 20 years ago). I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. I want the person, if anyone, who comes after to see the work that’s of higher standard than what came out of the factory. No machine can continue working forever, but one can get much closer to having fewer failure points. As an aside, to get to here however was a struggle of obtaining all sorts of things I shouldn’t have access to because the manufacturer started locking access down heavily. Story for another time.

throwaway2037 2y ago
This is a great post. This part stands out to me: > I’ve gotten into a habit of identifying parts that, through experience, I know will fail or can fail and replaced them with ones that are all but guaranteed to outlive me. Depending upon your NDA/security level, can you share a specific example? Maybe you see a steel/aluminum chain between gears that you know will wear out in X years, but could be replaced with something that is tungsten/titanium that will last for 5X years.

Waterluvian 2y ago

I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project. So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong. I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system.

ok_dad 2y ago
The profit argument is not great for everything humans need, not everything can be driven by profit motives, look where that’s gotten us in medical care in America, social insurance, etc. Profit driven enterprise is efficient, but needs balance that doesn’t seem to be there today in order to limit the extremes.
- Waterluvian 2y ago
  I agree. Voyager happened because of what you say. But then we cannot compare apples to orangutans by pointing out how Voyager rocked but all these for-profit endeavours sucked.
eru 2y ago
> I have a hard time feeling complainy about stuff like this because if engineers are doing their jobs properly, they’re implementing the defined requirements. Requirements are guided by business decisions on what matters and what doesn’t matter for a project. Well, it's a bit of back and forth between business and engineering. > So ultimately this means that if the argument is that the business is making the wrong decisions, then that means there’s an opportunity for someone to profit by proving them wrong. Generally yes, but sometimes it's hard because of double-sided network effects. The classic example being expensive but prestigious scientific journals: All the scientists and funding agencies would benefit from moving to cheaper journals, but an individual scientist will try to publish their best work in the most prestigious journal they can get. (And often the complainers mix in some good old paternalism, too: 'oh, those customers are ill-informed and the companies are exploiting them by tricking them into buying inferior products and getting trapped.' or some story like that.) > I love Voyager but it also cost something like a billion dollars. So it’s a bit unsurprising that it is such a resilient system. The money was necessary, but not sufficient. Compare the great performance of the Voyagers with the disaster that was the Space Shuttle program or the ongoing farce that is the International Space Station.

EGreg 2y ago

Yes. As a left-libertarian, I criticize corporations and their profit motive all the time. I see the concentration of power being married to the inherent incentives of increasing share value for the shareholder class. The only way I see we can reform the system — and fix many of the problems — is to gradually replace shares with utility tokens, ie the accounting system inside an ecosystem that producers and consumers of a marketplace use, and gradully buy out the parasitic class of “investors” who just want to extract rents and enshittify everything. It is a bit like the efforts Europe undertook at peacefully buying out slaves from masters or serfs from feudal lords. Just get out gradually from an economic system that encouraged exploitation. We have just been inculcated with this exploitation as a “natural” part of our capitalist system for so long, since childhood for most of us, that many have a knee-jerk reaction to shut down this line of criticism and not hear the simple solution. Many on HN have built a startup when they’re young, been part of the VC industry, akin to a music prodigy or young actor or model being “discovered” by “talent scout”, and sold a dream which only a few achieve. For every 1 person who makes it big, 1000 who do the same thing fail. But they keep licking the boots of the system hoping they’ll be among the lucky ones, so they better say nice things. If they see words like “utility tokens” they immediately think “grift”, when in fact the system they’re supporting has grift and exploitation built in. Having utility token holders buy out shareholders also may be an element in furthering SDG goals and “stakeholder capitalism”, and saving the planet. But hey, as soon as the words are uttered which may trigger pushback, the system starts to protect itself, in the form of downvotes or strawman attacks etc. Yeah, planned obsolescence is one feature of corporate control and profit system. As is surveillance capitalism, or pollution, or pushing people to work long hours, or have a gig economy, neglect their kids, or having people in echo chambers be angry at each other online because anger and misunderstanding leads to more “engagement” etc. All the ways that represent gradual “enshittification” that Cory Doctorow coined, is not an accident. These are all negative externalities, which are all traced back to one main factor: the profit motive of shareholders as a core feature in the system, forever. The rents aren’t going to extract themselves.

II2II 2y ago

While I agree that "corporate America" is problematic, the lessons from Voyager are not really applicable. For starters, it was designed to take advantage of something that predictably happens every couple of hundred years. Very few corporations last that long. Then there is the element of predictability. The solar system pretty much works like clockwork. You can predict simple things, like the orbits of major bodies, centuries in advance with a great degree of accuracy. Compare that to the tech industry. IBM itself can trace it's origins back to a data processing company about 140 years ago. They probably had the most natural evolution into a modern tech company because of those origins. Yet noone at the original mechanical tabulator company could have predicted what IBM would be producing 70 years later, nevermind a century later. Nintendo is roughly the same ago and is more-or-less doing the same sort of thing (gaming) but has gone from low-tech to high-tech so their path was not predictable. Yet those are abnormalities. Almost anything that old is an institution of some form (e.g. government or education). Perhaps the closest thing we had to predictable was Moore's Law, but that wasn't a pure law in the physics sense. It was reliable enough to build an industry upon for many decades, but it could have failed much earlier than it did due to hurdles in technological developments. The other thing about Voyager is that its intrinsic value grew with time. While we could develop a mission that could go as far as it did faster, and have better instruments to conduct research, it would take decades to build the probe and get there. It also makes sense to support it to get what little data it can return to us because it would help us develop better missions when we do decide to go that route.

goldfishgold 2y ago
There are plenty of 100 year old companies doing basically what they did 100 years ago (Exxon, Coke, Hershey, Wells Fargo, etc.). They’re just not tech companies.
- II2II 2y ago
  I was thinking about companies approaching 200 years old since I knew my point would be more difficult to make if I said 100 years (and because they had a launch window that comes up roughly once every 200 years, though I checked that out and it is 175 years). That said, you're right about my basically overlooking companies that weren't based in technology. Exxon is a cute example though. At one point, they owned Zilog.

eru 2y ago

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...] You can buy long lasting stuff just fine, if you are willing to pay. You can get eternal licenses (or an outright sale of rights), if you are willing to pay. It's all about trade-offs, and many people have priorities that are different from 'last as long as possible'. Eg many computers from the 1980s are still perfectly usable today, but who would want to use them? I'm sure you can probably also still use your old rugged Nokia phone today, especially since they had easily replaceable batteries. But who would want to use a 25 year old dumb phone? There are some enthusiasts which do use these old devices. And it's great that they can do so! Never say corporations don't deliver! But by and large people have different priorities than wanting their obsolete tech to live forever.

bluGill 2y ago
You can't use your 25 year old phone for more than a snake game. most 2g towers have been turned off to make room for 4g and 5g.
- smcin 2y ago
  In the US, North America, you mean. 2G is still alive and kicking, especially in Africa and South Asia: https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-country-guide/ https://streetwave.co/mobile-networks/2g-switch-off-by-count... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2G#Phase-out
  - tapland 2y ago
    And Europe. Finalizing the shutdowns of 2G and 3G networks in Sweden during 2025.
    - Maxion 2y ago
      Finland will still keep 2G for a long time.

cryptoegorophy 2y ago

Principal agent problem. Look at the final outcomes. Business exists to make money even if it means the most malicious ways (ex planned obsolescence), science project are not there to make money.

codexb 2y ago

I mean, the Voyager probes are completely proprietary. They’re completely custom, built for a unary purpose. Building long lasting hardware makes a lot of sense when you expect to use that technology for a long time. I’m sure there was a time when people thought we’d be using steam power forever. It makes less sense if the rate of technological innovations makes hardware or software obsolete every 5-10 years.

mikeweiss 2y ago

I'm not saying your wrong but it's also possible that technology whether created by public agencies or private companies is simply more complicated now and because of that .. more likely to fail over time.

bdcravens 2y ago

It also helps to have $4.5B (in 2024 dollars) to spend on a project. https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacecraft-mock-full-scale/nasm_A19772728000 https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/voyager-spacec...

throwaway2037 2y ago
Not to mention that it has a chunk of highly radioactive plutonium that acts as a battery / power source. That whole thing is nuts that it got built, "shipped", and still works ~50 years later, approximately 1.21 jiga-kilometers away from Earth.
makmanalp 2y ago
It's not apples to apples of course but that's well within the ballpark of what spacex spends mostly just shooting stuff into orbit in a year: https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-to-achieve-low-launch-cost/ https://spacenews.com/spacex-and-the-categorical-imperative-... Especially for a first time in all of humanity type of mission, half a century ago, which yielded brand new data on faraway objects we'd never had, and considering it's still going and reporting data, it's arguably a bargain basement price for such a thing.
- bdcravens 2y ago
  I 100% agree on the value of it. My point was the comparisons that are often made, to things like consumer electronics, really aren't apt.

suzzer99 2y ago

I'm 55 and still using my Onkyo receiver and Polk speakers from college.

onion2k 2y ago

Everything is designed to last between a few years and a decade, with the expectation that there's no point engineering for longer than that because something better will replace it by then. This feels bad but it's generally correct. Practically every aspect of technology is improving so fast there's little point trying to engineer things that last, because a stronger, cheaper, lighter, thinner thing will be available long before the thing has expired. Agile is a response to this, not the cause.

Wurdan 2y ago
Planned obsolescence isn't only a thing with fast moving technology either. Engineers design bridges with a finite lifespan in mind as well, and it's not because they think there'll be a much better bridge in X years. It's just that the relationship between the expected lifespan of a thing and its cost to develop is exponential.

bongoman37 2y ago

[dead]

macspoofing 2y ago

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence There is no such thing as "planned obsolescence". The trade-off is price vs quality. You can buy or source a hammer that will last you a lifetime, but will cost 10x the standard rate of hammer ... most people opt for the $20 option vs the $200 option, knowing full well, the $20 option may not last as long. >Boeing airplanes that need to be rebooted if their computers are up for too long, an Ariane 5 blowing up because using the old thing should be "good enough", Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. Couple things here: 1) None of those are examples of 'planned obsolescence'. 2) You really do not want to have every software application built the same way you build software for NASA. It would make software development incredibly expensive and slow. 3) I think everyone agrees that Boeing has major quality problems when compared with Airbus. But again, not an example of 'planned obsolescence', and it is not necessary for Boeing to build software like NASA builds software for the space shuttle, in order to produce quality airplanes (with quality software). >if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, Huh? The software business is fully private. Most companies are not running on Novell because other businesses 'had their way' and competed.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

> Imagine devices that don't have built-in obsolescence, or licensing that expires, [...] We have that sort of- in open source by now. Basically the base implementation is free. But for more advanced extras you pay extra. Then the company providing the extras collapses and the extra becomes open source in one way or another.

0xEF 2y ago

Expanding a tiny bit on your point, from where I am sitting, it all be summed up with greedy, plain and simple...and extends further to Capitalism as a whole, not just corporate America. I work for a US-based manufacturing company that has customers around the world as the guy who fixes the things the engineers build when they inevitably break. I have encountered so many design flaws that could have been done far, far better but we're not, largely due to cost, that I have come to just expect it. This is admittedly sad. Some other commenter mentioned we can have all these great long-lasting things if we "are willing to pay." We, the consumer my might be, but the manufacturer and distributer who makes the the product not only want to sell you something once, but want to sell it to you repeatedly while maximizing their profit margins. This would not be so bad if a good chunk of those yearly record profits reached the folks who were on the work floor actually making the product (thus allowing them to buy more expensive things) but instead, the money gets sucked up and stays up, while costs get passed on to the consumer who likely is not making enough to afford the longer-lasting version. Which, I guess is the point of Capitalism, in a nutshell.

8fingerlouie 2y ago

> Microsoft Windows on ATMs and vending devices that literally can't not have pop-ups. I know of several ATMs that still run OS/2 2.1 or OS/2 Warp. They're a slow dying breed that is being replaced by Unix (Linux or similar), but they still exist. Chances are, if you're in Europe, and the ATM you're using is one of the "slow screen refresh rate" ones, it's still running OS/2.

h_tbob 2y ago

I really think competition is good in one sense. But of you think logically from first principles, it makes no sense to have both an a320 and 737. All this competition and “corporate greed” where we literally have two airplanes that are functionally identical rebuilt from the ground up is an huge, massive waste of human capital and enabled by the government through monopoly of copyright and patents. While I think creators should get paid, I wonder if there is a better way to manage copyright that what we do. I think the government granting this extreme of a monopoly on copyright is one of the weirdest things we tolerate. There has to be a way where we can statutorily authorize copying at x% fee or something. That way we don’t build two copies of the same thing!

reisse 2y ago
A320 and 737 are functionally similiar only in terms of "a flying machine moving you in the air at 900 kilometers per hour". Both Airbus and Boeing are exploring in a space of different design and engineering concepts, where there is no clear winner.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> if businesses had their way, would the Internet be run on Novell, with millions of Novell admins all around the world constantly needing to fuss with things just to keep it running? No, I doubt it. The businesses that make all the hardware and software that powers the internet are perfectly fine with it being an open protocol.