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‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

theguardian.com

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Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#131

Post by Clamchop »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #83
Clamchop wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the messages were written by people, the sentiment is more authentic than anything made by gpt.

The messages were written by the very people that they are ostensibly sent to . It's sock-puppeting.

Why does this make the sentiment insincere? Is it inauthentic if you're saying it to yourself?

And whoever wrote this didn't write it just for themselves (there are other involved people and there is public relations).

More charitably than sock puppeting, it is storytelling through personification.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#133

Post by dbg31415 »

devsploit wrote: post #129

I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…

My guess is that it's PR baked into the software -- at least the receiver software. It was a line written by someone who understood that just an error code is really bad for humans to read. So they humanized it a bit. They had time to plan this, not like they didn't know this was the likely outcome. Good product management to give the robot a voice.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#134

Post by btgeekboy »

barbazoo wrote: post #124
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

I dislike the Twitter UX so much, it's not clear to me if the "thread" only contains 2 tweets or if I'm too dumb to navigate this shitshow of a UI. Constantly being bombarded with popups doesn't help the UX either.

It’s just the two below it. Beyond that are replies to the first message.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#135

Post by logicallee »

ericbarrett wrote: post #75
logicallee wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After reading your note "why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned" I clicked through and as I clicked I was thinking "okay so obviously it is possible for the solar panels to self-clean. prove me wrong." I mean how hard could it be? No way is that an "impossible" task. I went out of it thinking, "yep, look at these excuses we are making for the state of robotics." - the quote is: "A system like t…

I agree with you, and I think the other replies are missing your point. With all the techno-marvels around us, it's a shame that lightweight, reliable robotics that can do something as superficially simple as brush some panels don't exist. Just goes to show how hard the field is, I guess.

Yeah, they really don't get what I meant which is probably my failure to communicate.

It's like me saying "It's a shame I can't save myself a few minutes every day by having a robot make my sandwiches for me, since there is no such thing as a cheap household robot that can easily make a sandwich from its ingredients put before it" and them saying, "nono there totally are they just cost too much so it doesn't make sense and you don't understand anything about the intrinsic difficulty of sandwich assembly in a zero-person environment". Okay fine but end result is I'm still making my own sandwich in 2022 :) End result is this mars rover can't do $2 worth of human work because it can't brush itself off, it is easier to add larger solar panels than brush them off since there's no such thing as a cheap lightweight easy reliable robot arm.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#136

Post by pwisswordfish99 »

devsploit wrote: post #129

I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…

I’m especially curious whether it actually used the apostrophe, but I suppose the lander itself just sends its usual vitals and the first-person tweets are done by an on-world PR department.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#137

Post by dougmany »

ilyt wrote: post #44
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

So its essentially "the system needs to be cheap and light enough to beat bringing more panels"

I remember calculating the cost efficiency of adding a sun tracking mount to some panels. It turned out that the increased power would be about the same as adding an additional panel and one panel was cheaper than the mount. The mount also would only help half the year and the extra panel would help the whole year.

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#138

Post by sam0x17 »

devsploit wrote: post #129

I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…

Probably some bytecode representing an RPC enum variant

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#139

Post by devsploit »

sam0x17 wrote: post #138
devsploit wrote: post #129

I suppose this is kind of a trivial question, but does anyone know if the last message was ACTUALLY the STRING: “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”, or was it some binary/hex code to represent that, like, "503 ERROR", and the PR department just tweeted its interpretation as “My power’s really low. Don’t worry about me though…”? It raises more questions. Was this logging message decided by committee…

Probably some bytecode representing an RPC enum variant

Yeah this sent me down a rabbit hole. Apparently "NASA had previously decided to declare the mission over if the lander missed two communication attempts" (https://mars.nasa.gov/news/9321/nasa-retires-insight-mars-la...).

Ah well, nothing wrong with a little space theatre!

Re: ‘My power’s low’: NASA’s Insight Mars lander prepares to sign off

#140

Post by snvzz »

barbazoo wrote: post #124
simonswords82 wrote: post #19

Interesting thread on why it's not possible for the solar panels to be self cleaned: https://twitter.com/NASAInSight/status/1590736220199735296?c...

I dislike the Twitter UX so much, it's not clear to me if the "thread" only contains 2 tweets or if I'm too dumb to navigate this shitshow of a UI. Constantly being bombarded with popups doesn't help the UX either.

Nitter got you covered.
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