Surely that’s not a combination kitchen chair and stepladder. 🫣

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

Obligatory.

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

Oh it’s 100% Solok. The guy made his entire senior staff learn and practice baseball just to antagonize a former colleague.

Soval was the face of the High Command’s punchable decisions, but he ended up being a real one in Season Four. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CpIPixWaj1E

Reminds me of when a recent sci-fi author wrote a first person novel with an androgynously named protagonist. They didn’t ever directly refer or allude to the character’s sex in the novel. Fan communities and book clubs spent months realizing they’d subconsciously given the protagonist pronouns in their head. (It’s less awkward than it sounds due to the sci-fi premise.) The author only addressed it months after it came out. They got both Wil Wheaton and Amber Benson to create identical audiobooks for the sequel.

Someone made this into a comic! https://mythjae.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/fated-3/

The games aren’t deep per se, but they just get a little tonally weird towards the end given the franchise’s cute presentation. You go from fighting a tree who won’t stop disrupting forest creatures to battling an unknowable alien incarnation of darkness who wants to take over all of reality. The series has a lot of, “Oh no, our friend’s been possessed by a manifestation of pure evil!” plots.

The Universal Translator is basically magic. TOS came closest to describing how it works, and it boiled down to, “IDK man it does some brain scans to detect your language structure”. There’s no satisfying answer as to why it knows the “Washington State Bridge” is a combination of a proper noun, a geopolitical concept, and a general noun.

In Enterprise, the Universal Translator is generally depicted as a modern miracle of technology, but one without useful internal intelligence. If it hears a few snippets of Romanian, it’s just going to start brute forcing a translation matrix with every technique it has at its disposal. More speech gives it more data to work with, but it’s still just cycling through its options.

Sato’s familiarity with xenolinguistics allows her to aid the Universal Translator by narrowing the system’s options or directing it down specific paths. She doesn’t know or learn the alien languages in the traditional sense, but she’s shown for having a knack for picking up on patterns and syntax. Again with the Romanian example, she’s doing the alien equivalent of saying, “This sounds European, skip trying to translate this as an Asian language for now”. The Universal Translator has fewer options to run through and gets to a successful translation matrix faster.

But again, it’s plot contrivance space magic.

Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.

By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.

What are you talking about?

The internet used to scream at you when you went online. Now it’s the reverse.

Try plugging the Mac in without a dock.

A lot of docks out there are DisplayLink based, and you may need to install their driver to get the higher refresh rate.

Also try switching up which type cable you’re plugging into the dock. Most dock manuals have an esoteric support table based on whether or not you plugged in a DisplayPort or HDMI cable.