Obligatory.

Edit: …wow I made the meme way too low-res. Hope it’s showin’ up alright in y’all’s apps.

Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?

I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

Between blowing up a Borg transwarp conduit, averting an Omega catastrophe, and surviving an absurd lost in deep space scenario, is there anything in the Voyager mission log that wouldn’t get chalked up to, “Well you were on your own and had to make some difficult choices.”

Their botched alliance with the Kazon, giving holographic technology to the Hirogen, and the whole Tuvix episode would likely be footnotes during her debrief. They’d probably spend more time asking questions about meeting Amelia Earhart, proving that a graviton ellipse swallowed the Aries VI orbiter, and wanting to know more about… am I reading this correctly? A space pitcher plant?

You have to imagine her initial encounter with the Caretaker would get the most interrogation. In hindsight would a Federation council agree with her decision to blow up the caretaker’s array, or would Starfleet captains get sent some additional footnotes to the prime directive about not stranding your crew seventy years away from home?

My favorite compile error happened while I was taking a Haskell class.

ghc: panic! (the ‘impossible’ happened)

The issue is plainly stated, and it provides clear next steps to the developer.

Zac Gorman’s comic with the original dialog: https://magicalgametime.com/post/48470399171

I’ve slowly been coming to terms with the fact that my most enduring legacy on the internet is going to be tweeting a screenshot of my local library’s Facebook page.

The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.

The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

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.