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
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
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
YOURE COOL
No u
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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…
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.
I use Firefox, TOR, and even Edge sometimes these days for its nifty “Drop” feature. You’ll never catch me using Chrome.
Meanwhile, there are dozens of us using Safari, and wondering what all the fuss is about.
Removed by mod
We need to fork firefox so we can run furryfox on uwuntu
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.)
Additional fun fact: Margaret Hamilton is the person who coined the term “software engineering”
Ooh, I didn’t know that. That is a fun fact! 😁
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.
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.
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
I didn’t know that. Thanks for telling me! I’ll have to check out that book. It sounds fascinating. :)
That’s true I guess. But it probably helped that they had a big fucking rocket to get there.
Meanwhile I have 16 GBs, and I feel that I should update to 32…
I upgraded to 64gb last week
Did it work? I struggle with 32 sometimes, but I am blaming it on the software
Y’all are in the double digits? I’ve only got 8 and I’m doing fine
You are blessed
The chosen one
One day, I will get 12 and the world will FEAR me!
I had fricking 4GB of ram and 2 cores in my laptop till like two months ago
Compute intensive stuff usually demands those levels of RAM. I know for gaming the recommendation nowadays is 16GB while 8GB are considered “works for now”. There are some games though that still benefit from more RAM (I upgraded to 32GB on my old PC for a Beta of a Sim game as it maxed out my 16GB to the point of lagging my PC)
Bruh I play Minecraft with shaders on this thing. What more could a man want?
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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4kb plus literal rocket scientists. On the other side of it you have 8gbs and my dumb ass
“we put Kanto and johto on a single cartridge”
Yeah, but they were reusing tilesets an-
*looks at modern pokemon*
Uh. You know what, you have a point.
It took till Scarlet and Violet for us to get more than one region in a game
Kitikami and Unova
That’s parhetic
For people who want to know more about the fascinating computer in the Apollo space craft.
They even had some hand-braided ram or whatever for systems that abso-fucking-luteley must not fail
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
34C3 - The Ultimate Apollo Guidance Computer Talk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There’s an even better alternative on the CCC’s website, the original source of the video ;)
https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9064-the_ultimate_apollo_guidance_computer_talk
That’s why you should download more RAM.
No no no, you need to upload RAM. Just make more swap partitions with Google Drive and a gigabit internet connection… Totally will work…
Isn’t there some computer science hypothesis (or whatever) about how the more complex computers get the more inefficient they must get as well?
Yeah, the average PC probably has 5 separate installations of Chrome, for different apps
Computers haven’t become less efficient. They can still crunch numbers like crazy.
It’s the software. Why spend a month making something when you can just download some framework that does what you want in one hour. Sure, it used 10 times as much memory and CPU, but that’s still only a 1 second delay with a modern computer and the deadline for release is approaching fast.
Repeat that process often enough and you have a ridiculously bloated mess of layers upon layers of software. Just for fun you can start up some old software and play around with it in an emulator to be baffled how quick it all works on a modern system.
This is mainly due to modern day web bloat and lazy inefficient coding
Meanwhile apple still selling macbooks with 8gb ram
16 GB RAM 8GB nVidia and you can play Immortals Of Aveum at 30 FPS, (maybe)
Unused ram is wasted ram
Unused RAM practically does not exist. The OS will use it for disk caching.
