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Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

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Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society? https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL

> " "useful" Fuck all of it is useful besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth. Nonetheless, interesting ? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hard…

who wants to spend billions on peace and food for everyone if you can have pretty pictures of a barren wasteland millions of miles away. simple logic.

just be happy there's no cats in space to take pictures of otherwise all would be lost.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#242
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First that's just star systems within 100 lightyears of Earth, systems with one of more gravitationally bound stars in them. There are thousands of stars within 100 light years of Earth. Most are red dwarfs but there's about a thousand F, G, and K class stars.[0] While telescopes indeed are not magic, an alien species at least as advanced as us could have telescopes capable of not only finding Earth but gathering spe…

If they are at our current tech level, to "see" Earth, then Earth would need to pass in front of the Sun from their point of view. That means they would need to be somewhere in the same pane as the Earth's orbit.

That's a transiting detection, there's other detection methods for exoplanets. Even a coarse grained survey with a ground based traditional telescope can find our solar system thanks to Jupiter's gravitational influence on the Sun. Doppler shift's in the Sun's spectra come from Jupiter tugging at it gravitationally. With interferometry and coronagraphy spectra of planets in our system can be gathered without needing to see our system edge-on. Then of course for aliens on the ecliptic there's transiting spectra of Earth.

The number of techniques for detecting exoplanets makes the Dark Forest concept silly. There's no hiding our solar system from alien observation. For dedicated observers (at the right distances) there's no hiding the existence of life, the Industrial Revolution, or above ground nuclear testing.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#245
surely, 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.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo at least gave the country hope and showed that we could accomplish big ideas.

But—we clearly can't accomplish basic things. That's my point

No country has eliminated homelessness.

But only one country landed a man on the moon.

What is progress exactly?

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#248

sadly 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. ```

Same, holy shit immediately knew this was written by an LLM.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#249
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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'…

I was actually a bit curious how much HN uses, since it's probably the lightest site that I frequent. I use an iPhone 5 as an iPod. HN is one of the few web sites that still works with iOS 10.

HN used to work fine on an Nokia classic phone until last year. Sadly it doesn't any more, since they switched the CA to something that is not in the OS root trust. If HN wouldn't enforce HTTPS, it would still work fine.

Re: Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder

#250

> 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.

Android 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…

I 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.
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