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NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

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Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#31

Post by FpUser »

rbanffy wrote: post #2

> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will…

>"Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers"

Assembly? Understanding how things actually work? No Agile? No K8s? No Rust, No React? - death knell for someone's resume

>"and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager"

this is the best case with the result of being tied to another single project for years and unemployable anywhere else. in more realistic case - warm goodbye in few years and start your life from scratch with no credits for the thins done.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#32

Post by sublinear »

hilariously wrote: post #28
sublinear wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> none of this existed like the cult it is now So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible? All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results.

Unfortunately in many places it is indeed a cult and serves to ossify management decisions. We ARE doing Agile, what do you mean? No this person is the scrum master and they tell us what Agile is and then we do it, see? I have worked at 8 different software places and none of them implemented things in a way I would call "genuinely agile" and most of them were just bad waterfall with more meetings and telling the eng…

My point is you would never even have a clue that there is dysfunction at all without these methodologies. These days you at least have some idea in your head how it should be vs how it is.

I think there's something critical being lost in younger people who have never been exposed to the bad old ways and only understand their current situation through memes. We need to get a grip here.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#33

Post by quotemstr »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #22
rbanffy wrote: post #2

> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will…

> Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? It's an isolated legacy-project with no future. Mostly everything you learn for it will be only useful for this specific project, so all time to invest there is time to can't invest into something useful. Sure, there are probably some parts to learn from this too, but It's less than what your co…

You should hire for personality characteristics, not knowledge. I'll take anyone who's worked on a weird obscure system and figured it out from first principles over Front End React Dev #8482828 with Opinions on algebraic effects.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#34

Post by FpUser »

sublinear wrote: post #21
tamimio wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense…

> none of this existed like the cult it is now So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible? All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results.

>"So you'd prefer for all this project management drama and power struggle to be invisible?"

Well project managers can have their dramas. Just do not involve developers. Or what is even better - get the fuck out and leave it to people who can do things without drama.

>"All this scaffolding is not a cult. It exists to democratize the process. Your personal comfort is irrelevant to the results."

Pile of BS. It exists to feed whole layer of self serving people who contribute very little and grow like a cancer.

In my career I was lucky. I am an independent software developer. Designed and developed many products for various clients (including some of my own ventures) and have managed without Agile, Scrum and the likes. My largest products - I had teams of up to 35 people under me and somehow we've survived.

On few occasions I had pleasure to be on some of those meetings as a visitor - felt nothing but disgust. Again luckily I was spared from direct participation

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#35

Post by norman784 »

jmclnx wrote: post #18

As the should. Voyagers are still active and this maintenance is needed in case issues occur. In a way due to the +24 hours oneway communication to correct software issues should they occur, this will help speed corrections up. Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?

That would be an interesting project, I assume a lot of not so young engineers will want to play with it, as a hobby. Also if that project exists, I'm sure that someone will try to port DOOM.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#36

Post by philipwhiuk »

roflmaostc wrote: post #16

Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs? Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs. And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too? Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?

You don't want your spacecraft that's 15.8 billion miles away pointing backwards because the AI's fairly proficient code misunderstand something.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#37

Post by philipwhiuk »

doodlesdev wrote: post #20
roflmaostc wrote: post #16

Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs? Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs. And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too? Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?

I don't think you want LLMs touching projects that cost over $800.000.000, even to assemble "documentation" (since the LLM can't really document in as much it's translating what it's reading, because documentation includes much more information than what's stored in the code itself). It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :)

> It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :)

Since the Bun AI LLM 'exeriment' conversion got merged I'm a lot less trusting of 'experiments' with LLMs. They seem to get shipped

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#38

Post by philipwhiuk »

jmclnx wrote: post #18

As the should. Voyagers are still active and this maintenance is needed in case issues occur. In a way due to the +24 hours oneway communication to correct software issues should they occur, this will help speed corrections up. Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?

I believe they have both.

Simulators for the spacecraft and replicas for some bits of hardware.

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#39

Post by lexicality »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #23
lexicality wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm reviewing CVs and I see that you worked at NASA on the Voyager code, you're getting an interview just so I can ask about it. I wouldn't normally approve of CV driven development, but for this?!

But would you give them a job? Would they even match the requirements?

> But would you give them a job?

That's what the interview is to find out, isn't it?

> Would they even match the requirements?

I would assume if they got a job at NASA working on mission critical systems, they probably exceed the requirements of my startup

Re: NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

#40

Post by philipwhiuk »

norman784 wrote: post #35
jmclnx wrote: post #18

As the should. Voyagers are still active and this maintenance is needed in case issues occur. In a way due to the +24 hours oneway communication to correct software issues should they occur, this will help speed corrections up. Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?

That would be an interesting project, I assume a lot of not so young engineers will want to play with it, as a hobby. Also if that project exists, I'm sure that someone will try to port DOOM.

https://github.com/Zaneham/voyager-fds-emulator
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