this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 86 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Chrome tabs are scary - unlike our sponsors:

Firefox. Firefox is a free and open source web browser that is not just nice to your RAM, making it run smoothly alongside games or on older machines, but also respects your privacy.
Unlike Chrome, it doesn't track every move you make online and it's not only more customizable, it also doesn't threaten ad-blockers and the free web in general. Check out Firefox with the link below!

https://www.mozilla.org/en/firefox/new/

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I actually switched to chrome many years ago because firefox was abusing system resources and chrome was much lighter.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I did the same! I’m now given to understand that that was Google’s goal with Chrome - make the easiest-to-use and most lightweight browser to bring everyone in, then ramp up the trackers and bloat. I think I need to export my bookmarks and look into Firefox again…

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

You Should. Firefox has gotten so much Better. Not to mention all the literal BULLSHIT Google has done and will be doing with their browser.

The way Chrome works now, every tab is its own instance. Firefox, each window is its own instance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I use Firefox, TOR, and even Edge sometimes these days for its nifty "Drop" feature. You'll never catch me using Chrome.

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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fun fact: It's a much simpler job to guide a vehicle to a planetary body than it is to render a webpage with a flat theme.

Source: It came to me in a dream

[–] GuybrushThreepwo0d 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well... You need like what, 3 floats for position and 4 more for orientation. Multiply that by 3 to get velocity and acceleration values. Then I don't know a few more floats per sensor and you have your whole state space in a few bytes.

Meanwhile a single image is like a megabyte so yeah.

Source: it's past midnight and I should have gone to sleep ages ago

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

And don't forget about redundancies

The programming for the Apollo program was hand woven so comparing it to modern systems is kinda like comparing apples to oranges

Honestly the computers for the Apollo program were amazing and I highly recommend looking into the whole thing more, it's so incredibly cool

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

People also forget that most of the actual calculations were done on paper first; the computers were basically just executing precalculated instructions.

 

This is the stack of code used for the navigation software for the Apollo program.

 

(Fun fact: standing next to it is Margaret Hamilton, director of NASA's Software Engineering Division & the lead of the team who wrote that code.)

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Additional fun fact: Margaret Hamilton is the person who coined the term "software engineering"

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Ooh, I didn't know that. That is a fun fact! 😁

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These are multiple printouts of the code. The computer did not only execute precalculated instruction. (This would be a sequencer BTW.). Try it yourself AGC.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is pretty cool. I might try it tonight since I'm at work right now. Thanks!

Though, to be fair, I did say that most of the code was precalculated.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm not quite sure if even that is correct. The AGC, as far as I understand it, did do quite a bit of calculation on the fly and was essentially the first digital fly by wire system. It did rely on input from the crew and ground control for eg correcting its state vector etc etc, but it even has dedicated vector instructions if I recall correctly. Can't really precompute all that much when you can't be sure things will go to plan and you're dealing with huge distances. It did have eg separate programs for different phases of the flight but they weren't really precalculated as such, more like different modes that eg read input from different sensors etc etc.

The US space program was pretty big on having a human in the loop though, much more so than the Soviet one which relied more on automation and the pilot was more of a passenger in a sense, sort of a failsafe for the automatic systems.

The book Digital Apollo goes into all this this in more detail, I can highly recommend it if you're a ginormous nerd like I am and think that computers we've shot into space are endlessly fascinating

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Some people still don't seem to comprehend the difference between an embedded system and a general purpose computer.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (6 children)

We've had general purpose computers for decades but every year the hardware requirements for general purpose operating systems keep increasing. I personally don't think there has been a massive spike in productivity using a computer between when PCs usually had 256-512mb to now where you need at least 8gb to have a decent experience. What has changed are growing protocol specs that are now a bloated mess, poorly optimised programs and bad design decisions.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Ya know I thought those were the pillarmen menacing symbols(I dont know japanese scripts), and ya know what it fits.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I personally don’t think there has been a massive spike in productivity using a computer between when PCs usually had 256-512mb to now

For general use/day to day stuff like web browsing, sure, I agree, but what about things like productivity and content creation? Imagine throwing a 4K video at a machine with 512 MiB RAM - it would probably have troubles even playing it, let alone editing/processing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your original comment mentioned general purpose computers. Video production definitely isn't general purpose.

What do you mean by productivity?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Video production is something you can do on a general purpose computer because it runs a flexible OS that allows for a wide range of use cases. As opposed to a purpose built embedded system that only performs the tasks for which it was designed. Hence, not general purpose. I believe this was their point anyway, not just like a computer for office work or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

Yup, exactly this.

Video production is general purpose computing just like opening a web browser to look at pictures of cats is - it's just that the former is way more resource intensive; it is done in software that runs on an OS that can run a dozen other things which in turn runs on a CPU that can usually run other OSes - as opposed to a purpose built system meant to do very specific things with software often written specifically for it.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like to have more than one tab opened on my browser.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Apollo 11 never had to deal with 47 different tracking cookies.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"we put Kanto and johto on a single cartridge"

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Yeah, but they were reusing tilesets an-

*looks at modern pokemon*

Uh. You know what, you have a point.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It took till Scarlet and Violet for us to get more than one region in a game

Kitikami and Unova

That's parhetic

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago

That's true I guess. But it probably helped that they had a big fucking rocket to get there.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Meanwhile I have 16 GBs, and I feel that I should update to 32...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I upgraded to 64gb last week

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did it work? I struggle with 32 sometimes, but I am blaming it on the software

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Y'all are in the double digits? I've only got 8 and I'm doing fine

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

You are blessed

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

You don't think you'll ever really use all 32GB at the same time until you're running a virtual machine or two and open task manager to see that you're consistently using over 82% of your RAM, which happened to me today.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

4kb plus literal rocket scientists. On the other side of it you have 8gbs and my dumb ass

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Isn't there some computer science hypothesis (or whatever) about how the more complex computers get the more inefficient they must get as well?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, the average PC probably has 5 separate installations of Chrome, for different apps

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fuck electron, all my homies hate electron

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Here here. Cool username btw.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Hey, I'd like to see the rocket load an entire redux store into local storage!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

They even had some hand-braided ram or whatever for systems that abso-fucking-luteley must not fail

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's why you should download more RAM.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

No no no, you need to upload RAM. Just make more swap partitions with Google Drive and a gigabit internet connection... Totally will work...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Unused RAM practically does not exist. The OS will use it for disk caching.

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