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.
Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.
Imagine any internet company lasting 50 years.
This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.
I mean, unironically, yeah.
It’s not even that we need to go back to email. The problem isn’t moving on from outdated forms of communication, it’s that the technology being pushed as a replacement for it is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Which is to say nothing of the fact that all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it (and their searches are trash).
all of these new platforms are proprietary, walled off, and in some cases don’t make controlling the data easy if you’re not hosting it
You’ve just discovered their business case. So many new businesses these days only insinuate themselves into an existing process in order to co-opt it and charge rents.
It’s not Slack’s fault. It is a good platform for one-off messages. Need a useless bureaucratic form signed? Slack. Need your boss to okay the afternoon off? Slack. Need to ask your lead programmer which data structure you should use and why they’re set up that way? Sounds like the answer should be put in a wiki page, not slack.
All workflows are small components of a larger workplace. Emails also suck for a lot of things. They probably wouldn’t have worked in this case, memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it and the topic is not up for further discussion.
memos are the logical upgrade from emails where you want to make sure everyone receives it
uh, email is memos? email is so memos that ibm’s proprietary email management solution Lotus Notes calls the transaction “create memo” where outlook calls it “new message”.
and the topic is not up for further discussion.
bit rude, imo.
Sorry, email is still better for all of those things. Except the wiki page, of course.
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Even then, you get banned from Google for some reason, what then?
- Don’t use google as your email provider
- Keep backups of your email (you can do this on gmail, too)
IBM is 100, but the Internet didn’t exist in 1924, so we’ll say the clock starts in 1989. I’m pretty sure at least MS or IBM will be around in 15 years.
What does IBM even do anymore? I’m guessing they just support all of their legacy products that customers are locked into.
Bought Red hat and is trying to lock down it’s users.
It’s basically an investment fund that runs the companies it invests in, like Alphabet, but with a bigger mix of real estate and finance investments thrown in.
What’s a company they invest in?
Themselves. I’m just saying internally they run it like an investment fund. Example: https://medium.com/design-ibm/area-631-what-i-learned-in-ibms-start-up-and-innovation-program-d87ed98f9549
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To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/
They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/
That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.
I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?
Or do they have a simulator of it today - we’re talking about early 70’s hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I’ve read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).
I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I’m surely not saying I have better ideas - they’ve probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they’re doing.
Probably brought in some of the original guys for one last job.
takes long drag off cigarette “I’m too old for this shit”
Son of a bitch, I’m in.
do I hear heist movie?
The Hard Fork podcast had a pretty good episode recently where they interviewed one of the engineers on the project. They’d troubleshooted the spacecraft enough in the past that they weren’t starting from square one, but it still sounded pretty difficult.
They apparently didn’t have an emulator. The first thing I’d have done when working on a solution would have been to build one, but they seem to have pulled it off without.
There is an fascinating documentary about the team that sends the commands to Voyager 1 and 2 called It’s Quieter in the Twilight
To me, the physics of the situation makes this all the more impressive.
Voyager has a 23 watt radio. That’s about 10x as much power as a cell phone’s radio, but it’s still small. Voyager is so far away it takes 22.5 hours for the signal to get to earth traveling at light speed. This is a radio beam, not a laser, but it’s extraordinarily tight beam for a radio, with the focus only 0.5 degrees wide, but that means it’s still 1000x wider than the earth when it arrives. It’s being received by some of the biggest antennas ever made, but they’re still only 70m wide, so each one only receives a tiny fraction of the power the power transmitted. So, they’re decoding a signal that’s 10^-18 watts.
So, not only are you debugging a system created half a century ago without being able to see or touch it, you’re doing it with a 2-day delay to see what your changes do, and using the most absurdly powerful radios just to send signals.
The computer side of things is also even more impressive than this makes it sound. A memory chip failed. On Earth, you’d probably try to figure that out by physically looking at the hardware, and then probing it with a multimeter or an oscilloscope or something. They couldn’t do that. They had to debug it by watching the program as it ran and as it tried to use this faulty memory chip and failed in interesting ways. They could interact with it, but only on a 2 day delay. They also had to know that any wrong move and the little control they had over it could fail and it would be fully dead.
So, a malfunctioning computer that you can only interact with at 40 bits per second, that takes 2 full days between every send and receive, that has flaky hardware and was designed more than 50 years ago.
And you explained all of that WITHOUT THE OBNOXIOUS GODDAMNS and FUCKIN SCIENCE AMIRITEs
Finally I can put some take into this. I’ve worked in memory testing for years and I’ll tell you that it’s actually pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time. So much so that what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells. We add more memory cells than we might activate at any given time. When shit goes awry, we can reprogram the memory controller to remap the used memory cells so that the bad cells are mapped out and unused ones are mapped in. We don’t probe memory cells typically unless we’re doing some type of in depth failure analysis. usually we just run a series of algorithms that test each cell and identify which ones aren’t responding correctly, then map those out.
None of this is to diminish the engineering challenges that they faced, just to help give an appreciation for the technical mechanisms we’ve improved over the last few decades
pretty expected for a memory cell to fail after some time
50 years is plenty of time for the first memory chip to fail most systems would face total failure by multiple defects in half the time WITH physical maintenance.
Also remember it was built with tools from the 70s. Which is probably an advantage, given everything else is still going
Also remember it was built with tools from the 70s. Which is probably an advantage
Definitely an advantage. Even without planned obsolescence the olden electronics are pretty tolerant of any outside interference compared to the modern ones.
what we typically do is build in redundancy into the memory cells
Do you know how long that has been going on? Because Voyager is pretty old hardware.
Is there a Voyager 1, uh…emulator or something? Like something NASA would use to test the new programming on before hitting send?
Today you would have a physical duplicate of something in orbit to test code changes on before you push code to something in orbit.
They have spare Voyager on Earth for debuggingEDIT: or not
Still faster than the average Windows update.
Microsoft can’t even release a fix for Window’s recovery partition being too small to stage updates. I had to do it myself, fucking amateurs.
Not to mention what a bitch that partition is when you need to shrink or increase the size of your windows partition. If you need to upgrade your storage, or resize to partition to make room for other operating systems, you have to follow like 20 steps of voodoo magic commands to do it.
The possibility of a catastrophic fuck up is way too high to put this on the average Windows user.
NASA should be in charge of Windows updates!
If they were it wouldn’t be Windows
Certainly better tested.
Well, they only had to test it for a single hardware deployment. Windows has to be tested for millions if not billions of deployments. Say what you want, but Microsoft testers are god like.
Windows? Hardware testing? Testing in general? LMAOOO
Interviewer: Tell me an interesting debugging story
Interviewee: …
Heh. Years ago during an interview I was explaining how important it is to verify a system before putting it into orbit. If one found problems in orbit, you usually can’t fix it. My interviewer said, “Why not just send up the space shuttle to fix it?”
Well…
I think the term “metal” is overused, but this is probably the most metal thing a programmer could possibly do besides join a metal band.
Or activate Skynet.
I wont even upgrade the BIOS on my motherboard because im afraid of bricking it.
As a teenager I experienced a power outage while I was updating my bios.
Guess what happened?
I’m still bitter about it.
I updated mine a couple of weeks ago. I was actually really anxious as It went through the process, but it worked fine, at first…
Then I found out Microsoft considered it a new computer and deactivated windows. (And that’s when I found out they deleted upgrade licences from windows 7 & 8 back in September)That’s Microsoft in a nutshell for ya.
Posting from Linux then?
Well, a “free” OS anyway.
Buy spare flash chip
Great documentary on the Voyager team: It’s quieter in the twilight
I prefer the sequel Star Trek: the motion picture.
When I hear what they did, I was blown away. A 50 year old computer (that was probably designed a decade before launching) and the geniuses that built that put in the facility to completely reprogram it a light-day away.
OTS flashing.
Like OTA but with space rather than air.
OTV (void)
If we flash our phones here on Earth, we lose our warranty, wtf
Warranty never works anyway
Fuck it, we’ll fix it live
It reminds me that there are still very intelligent and talented people within our ranks. A nice breath of fresh air.
**This also means that aliens can reprogram all of our satellites. **
Nearly all such satellites would have highly directional antennas, so the aliens would have to be neat earth before they could do that. Voyager is not expecting a command signal from anywhere else but Earth. The signal would have to originate not more than a fraction of a degree from Earth from Voyager’s perspective.
SWEs have new standards now, and i think we should hold them to it. Considering how shit most modern websites are these days. I think it’s only going to be beneficial.
Let’s hope the over-the-air update didn’t get Man-In-The-Middled…
Suspect #1:
Voyager is a boomer and could more easily be phished
Gen-X
Holy shit! I forgot that I’m old now and Gen-Xers are now super-old! Yuck! I regret reading your comment and now I’m mad at the internet for the rest of the day…
You can all go suck a butt
And the IT support service can’t even fix a computer problem of an customer 20 km away.
