9 ms·
Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
- amelius 8mo agoAnd what did we get from this space innovation? Not the cheap prosumer high density backup tape drives that we should be able to buy in the stores now.
- djb-at-durable 8mo agoI feel like that's also what's running the backend of Spirit Airlines, but somehow it feels more impressive in the context of Voyager 1.
- palmotea 8mo agoDecommission. It's not AI ready.
- manytimesaway 8mo agoVery depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.
- jagged-chisel 8mo agoTakes a lot of resources to track your users rather than just cruising through space
- flykespice 8mo ago""just""
- echelon 8mo agoIt takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc. LinkedIn is not a fun problem. The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks. It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it. It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there. Hence the bloat.
- kermatt 8mo agoVoyager only needs to track itself. Plus, no ads.
- divbzero 8mo agoAny website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.
- amiga-workbench 8mo agoThere's almost certainly less than 69KB of useful human-readable information on any given page.
- tombert 8mo agoI was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent. According to Brave's dev tools, looks like just shy of about 90kb on this comment page as of the time of this writing. Obviously some of that is going to be CSS rules, a small amount of JS (I think for the upvotes and the comment-collapse), but I don't think anyone here called HN "bloated". Even that one page wouldn't fit on Voyager.
- LeoPanthera 8mo agoThere’s a lot of LLM text in that article. It’s very offputting.
- armadsen 8mo agoYeah, it’s really starting to depress me how much text published to the web is written using an LLM now. Things that seem interesting at first glance become much less appealing when they have that telltale LLM quality to them, and I also start questioning whether they’re full of factual errors (“hallucinations”). I don’t know why I should spend my time reading something the author couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.
- sbinnee 8mo agoIndeed. I also had this weird feeling while reading through the article. It got hooked up in the beginning. And then at some point, my brain just noticed that it was LLM-generated. I wonder how this article was written. Did the author accidentally find about Voyager 1's tiny memory and its primitive tape technology while reading something else, or did he just ask LLMs to write something interesting that he could publish with a few prompts.
- saadn92 8mo agoThe thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
- hnthrowaway0315 8mo agoI'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
- y1n0 8mo agoI’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”
- SpaceNoodled 8mo agoI think their point is that the challenge becomes more enjoyable than tedious.
- hnthrowaway0315 8mo agoThat's the point. I haven't but I would like to, and I realize that the so called "engineering" problems I work on is NOT real engineering. OK I was probably wrong about that "not hard" though.
- TeMPOraL 8mo agoMost of us are working on problems that are boring and tedious, not hard.
- trgn 8mo agoWould sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
- tkocmathla 8mo agoIt's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
- stared 8mo agoGood they launched Voyager 1 before invention of Docker, Electron and NPM projects with thousands of padLefts.
- jmclnx 8mo agoI knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977. What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
- RiverCrochet 8mo agoAn old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
- reaperducer 8mo agoWhat amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80. That's 41 years ago. I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
- PepperdineG 8mo agoI suspect the key was you used Dr Emmett Brown to tune up the equipment then plugged your electric guitar into his amplifier.
- duskwuff 8mo agoA tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo: https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-recorder/ https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
- uwagar 8mo agoso unbelievable that makes you wonder if its all fake.
- hybrid_study 8mo agoOh c’mon! Do you really believe we actually sent space probes ~15.0 billion miles from earth? Next you’ll tell me that the message from humanity was read by someone later linked to Nazi-era activities (though not a confirmed war criminal in the legal sense).
- dn3500 8mo agoHere's a photo of the tape recorder: https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-recorder/ https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
- sbinnee 8mo agoPretty cool. Thanks for sharing
- ftkftk 8mo agoVoyager is an awesome mission. But the AI fingerprint in the piece is a turn off.
- bazzert 8mo agoThere is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
- pramsey 8mo agoSuch a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
- pan69 8mo ago> Video unavailable > The uploader has not made this video available in your country I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
- chistev 8mo agoWhy do some uploaders make it unavailable in certain countries?
- UltraMagnus 8mo agoThis YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is available on some free streaming sites, here's one: https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilight/XM03NY2HJB8KSF https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilig... If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
- robthebrew 8mo agobut can it play Doom?
- kmaitreys 8mo agoReminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal" > Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter. > The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances. The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this. https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
- wookmaster 8mo agoDuh its space you have to use Turbo pascal
- vardump 8mo agoDuh, turbo doesn't work in space. Surely you meant High Speed Pascal! https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/ https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 8mo agoAt least Voyager has enough space to carry Turbo Pascal if we wanted to send a copy to our galactic neighbors: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644308
- hakunin 8mo agoI’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).
- masfuerte 8mo agoMy first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".
- zimpenfish 8mo ago> My first computer had 32KB. 1KB for me[0]. Then another 1KB[1] expanded to 16KB via my father's electronic wizardry. Then an official 16KB[2] and ever upwards from there. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum
- hybrid_study 8mo agoStill amazed how much fun it is to play a 36KB Stargate Defender!
- lnsru 8mo agoWelcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
- Waterluvian 8mo agoNice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
- nadav_tal 8mo ago[flagged]
- chistev 8mo agoI'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before - The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void. Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second. Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record. The contents: - Greetings in 55 human languages. - A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter. - 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it. Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back. And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul. It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote - "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. " That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever. Full piece - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- tom-blk 8mo agoVery cool, first time reading about the specifics of voyager 1, this is super impressive!
- dirkt 8mo agoArchive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixated.com/a-1977-time-capsule-voyager-1-runs-on-69-kb-of-memory-and-an-8-track-tape-recorder-4/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixat...
- bikamonki 8mo agoWow! Reading this after watching PHM I almost cried...again. Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.." OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
- Quitschquat 8mo agoWhat's PHM
- ethmarks 8mo agoProject Hail Mary. It's a sci-fi novel by Andy Weir (author of The Martian) that was adapted into a movie that released in theaters a couple weeks ago. It's fantastic and you should totally read/watch it.
- phreeza 8mo agoWhat really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
- FpUser 8mo agoThis is one mighty tape recorder, hats off: https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magnetic-tape-decay-prevented-in-voyager-1#:~:text=Truth%20is%2C%20I%20worked%20at,vibration%2Dfree%20continuous%20tape%20speed. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
- trgn 8mo agoWish javascript devs would read this. If the web is slow, its because of them
- pkorzeniewski 8mo agoVoyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
- andai 8mo ago>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Could you elaborate on this?
- gautamcgoel 8mo agoI assume OP means that a probe launched today would take decades to exit the solar system.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- cedilla 8mo agoVoyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively. Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
- Narishma 8mo agoCould we even catch up to them at all with the current propulsion technology? Not only did they have decades of head start but they took advantage of a unique planetary alignment that I don't think will come back around anytime soon.
- vikingerik 8mo agoYes, easily. The alignment doesn't really matter for that. Almost all your speed gain comes from just Jupiter. Saturn is 30% the mass and 2/3 of the orbital velocity, so your gain from Saturn is only 20% of what you can get from Jupiter (and also your potential gain is limited by a minimum approach distance greater than the rings, or you'd hit them.) And the ice giants are slower and smaller yet; Voyager barely gained from Uranus and actually slowed from Neptune since it wasn't routed to gain speed there. New Horizons achieved 80% of Voyager's velocity with just Jupiter, and it wasn't really trying to optimize for speed, it approached Jupiter only to 10 million km (over 100x greater than the planet's radius.) A probe dedicated to a fast slingshot past Jupiter could easily overtake Voyager. We haven't had any need to try, unless one of the missions to specifically study the heliopause-interstellar area happens. It would still take a while to catch up to Voyager's head start, but it's doable. The alignment for Voyager was captivating, but it really wasn't as important as people typically think. Jupiter alone can get you anywhere and launch windows for it come every 12 years. If the four-planet alignment hadn't happened then, realistically we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions.
- elvis70 8mo ago> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system... Seriously?
- bombcar 8mo agoGiven the LLM on a PDP-11 which had 32KB of RAM, we should be able to install an LLM on this thing.
- wek 8mo agoAmaze. Amaze. Thank you for sharing.
- thomasgeelens 8mo agoI know it makes no sense about what I'm going to say but: whenever I lose a 'simple 5G phone call' connection I remind myself that the Voyager 1 runs on 69kb of memory and there's a robot on Mars.
- gdubs 8mo agoOne of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a YouTube short about it a while back: https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc
- mek6800d2 8mo agoI enjoyed your video and it is well done. Unfortunately, I don't think it's true. The Voyager tape drives were similar (if not largely identical) to the earlier Viking Orbiters' DTRs. The Voyager engineers were certainly familiar pre-launch with the motions imparted to the spacecraft by the mechanical movements of the tape drive. The Voyager DTRs were specifically mounted to minimize the effects on the roll axis. Potential problem were expected and planned for with Voyager 2's flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Because of the long exposures required for these more distant planets, like you pointed out, the engineers had to account for the attitude effects of both (i) the DTR movements and (ii) panning the cameras to keep them focused on a single point while the spacecraft was moving past at high speed. This was especially a problem at Uranus, which is tilted on its side. Voyager 2 was approaching at its north pole; with the plane of the moon's orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic - like an arrow flying into an archery target. As a result of this configuration and Voyager 2's high speed, the high-resolution observations of Uranus and its moons were compressed into a 6-hour period. These engineering efforts are described in detail in a 1985 paper, "Voyager Flight Engineering: Preparing for Uranus", by W.I. McLaughlin and D.M. Wolff. Abstract: https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287 (The full paper can be found online with some effort; doi:10.2514/6.1985-287) Here's a quote from the paper (AACS is the attitude control computer and CCS is the command computer): "The DTR is mounted on the spacecraft such that its angular momentum is introduced into the yaw and pitch axes of the spacecraft with almost none going into the roll axis. DSSCAN was first programmed to introduce cancelling momentum in the yaw axis only. The modification to the AACS and CCS software took place in an environment of a scarcity of available memory so that, from a programming point of view, it had to be carefully fit in. The "patch" was carefully tested in the Voyager Capability Demonstration Laboratory (CDL) before loading onboard Voyager 1. (The AACS and CCS programs were modified without being reassembled as is the case with all AACS and CCS changes since launch.) The CDL is a digital/analog simulation of many of the spacecraft capabilities. Modifications or tests of any degree of complexity are done first, whenever possible, on Voyager 1 before implementation on Voyager 2, a reflection of the fact that Voyager 2 still has two planetary encounters scheduled while Voyager 1 has none."
- PearlRiver 8mo agoI watched a documentary about Voyager once. It was fascinating seeing all these men and women huddled around a tiny little screen and a telex printer to see all their theories about Saturn become real. It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.
- offbyone42 8mo agoMeanwhile Claude Code starts with Bun and 400MB min instead of...I don't know, C? C++? Rust? Go? Hell, even Python?
- dev_l1x_be 8mo agoHow could they achieve this with much abstraction?
- thebeardredis 8mo agoMore resources than AOC has.
- scottlawson 8mo agothe legacy of Voyager 1 is crazy, this spacecraft launched decades before I was born and yet I see it regularly talked about even today. Seeing posts about how the Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system led to me learning about the heliosphere. Hearing about the Pioneer anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly led me down a rabbit hole of learning about thermal radiation and radiation pressure (granted this is not Voyager). Then I learn about how it is powered by radioisotopes, its kind of cool how many things I've learned from these "ancient" spacecraft.
- sergiotapia 8mo agoWhat happens when hydrazine tanks run out and it can't stabilize anymore to shoot data back to earth? it's over?
- ill_ion 8mo ago[dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 8mo agoWe are so detached from the software "engineering" in our jobs that we are amazed when we see it.
- aag 8mo agoThis makes me nostalgic for my 4K TRS-80 Model I with cassette tape. There was something beautiful about having control over everything, and even the tight constraints were sometimes fun.
- mkrd 8mo agoA phone only has roughly 1 million times the memory, as I am roughly 20 meters tall
- dangoodmanUT 8mo ago@claudecode
- elwebmaster 8mo ago[dead]
- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoWe need a new round of voyager probes with modern technology. We should be at least trying to reach another solar system.
- JKCalhoun 8mo agoVoyager 1 and 2 communicate by CB radio. <jk>
- devnotes77 8mo ago[dead]
- ginkgotree 8mo agoCompared to LinkedIn, which consumes GBs of memory.
- vpribish 8mo agonice
- geor9e 8mo ago"That moment was not just a milestone in mission terms. It was a fundamental scientific event." Come on people. This article is straight out of ChatGPT.
- netcoyote 8mo agoKudos to those NASA engineers for managing to pack React into such a small footprint.
- nxobject 8mo agoMan, I'd love to play around with an emulator for that.
- abhishekayu 8mo agoVoyager is proof that when requirements are stable and systems are simple, longevity follows. We rarely get that luxury today.
- setnone 8mo agoi wonder was there a hot debate on whether or not to include Golden record
- Egonex 8mo agoTotally get it. We work on compact binary alerts for constrained links. We have the same obsession with bytes.
- vmilner 8mo agoEdwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'
- vmilner 8mo agoThe estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols. https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/ https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
- shevy-java 8mo agoBack then they were efficient. Today we have the slops instead - microslop, autoslop, all-the-slop.
- praveen9920 8mo agoI wonder if we can build a series of probes sent one after the other, which can communicate with relay network. Im sure we can reduce the power requirements for radio for each probe. I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements rather than technical feasibility.
- ramon156 8mo ago> The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1. I know both things are almost entirely unrelated, but I sometimes wonder how much more perf you could squeeze out of a phone if Android wasn't doing so much stuff in the background. Granted I do not know enough about the inner workings.
- grishka 8mo agoAndroid does a lot less stuff in the background than it used to. Initially there were no limitations at all, your app could just do whatever, you ask to start a service, the system runs it for you no questions asked, only kills it if a foreground app needs memory, and then restarts it whenever possible. Modern Android is very strict about this sort of thing in comparison. You only run something in the background if you have a good reason to, and you better display a notification while it's running. Background processes that try to do stuff in the background without telling the system are killed and throttled aggressively.
- 1718627440 8mo agoI think he was referring to things the OS does, rather than apps running in the background. My computer is under nearly full load when I start MS Windows and let it be "idle". (I run 10 IoT Enterprise so there is less bloat than typically, I also already tried to disable stuff I could find.) When I start my GNU/Linux OS it is truly idle and I can do video processing or compile stuff with hundreds of translation units in parallel.
- alwahi 8mo agohehe 69 har har
- hellzbellz123 8mo agoits the 'ol honda' of spacecraft. definitely one of my favorite human achievements
- bradley13 8mo agoAmazing engineering. Today's software development: Write a program running on a framework (of which you need 1%, but get it all), that framework depends on dozens of libraries (but again, you only needed 1% of them), which in turn depends on dozens more. Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!" We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
- pickleglitch 8mo agoCould it run Doom tho?
- caxco93 8mo agosadly had to stop reading at ``` The tape recorder did not fail. The power supply simply could no longer spare the energy to run it. That distinction matters. ```
- TyrunDemeg101 8mo agoSame, holy shit immediately knew this was written by an LLM.
- lancetheai 8mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- jiveturkey 8mo agosurely, the security protocols and radio modulation techniques of the day did not consider a modern-day internet threat landscape. i'm a bit surprised no one has sent their own command signals to Voyager. i'm guessing massive transmit power must be required.
- huflungdung 8mo ago[dead]
- ChrisMarshallNY 8mo agoA favorite (bruised_blood) meme: https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798 https://x.com/iamdevloper/status/1072503943790497798
- noritaka88 8mo ago[flagged]
- poulpy123 8mo agoStill disappointed that nobody made doom run on it