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1. LS (lain@lain.com)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:20:56 JST LS

   in reply to

   • Fabio Manganiello
   @blacklight one single frame on a 4k display is over 30 megabytes already. that's nearly 2 gigs every second. computers and software are doing vastly more than they used to.
   • Fabio Manganiello (blacklight@social.platypush.tech)'s status on Thursday, 05-Oct-2023 20:20:57 JST Fabio Manganiello

     The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

     And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

     50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

     The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.