• UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Chrome tabs are scary - unlike our sponsors:

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    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!

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  • 567PrimeMover@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    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@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      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

      • Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year 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

    • Quereller@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      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.

        • interolivary@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          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

  • kamen@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

    • spiderplant@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • kamen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • spiderplant@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

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

          What do you mean by productivity?

          • slackassassin@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            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.

            • kamen@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              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.

              • spiderplant@lemm.ee
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                1 year ago

                We’ve had video editing software available to most personal computers since at least 1999 with imovie and 2000 with windows movie maker. IMO this is all general computer users need.

                Professional level video production is not general computing, it’s very niche. Yes it’s nice that more people have access to this level of software but is it responsible.

                The post does raise some real issues, increasing hardware specs is not consequence free. Rapidly increasing hardware requirements has meant most consumers have needed to upgrade their machines. Plenty of these could have still been in operation to this day. There is a long trail of e-waste behind us that is morally reprehensible.

                • rambaroo@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You don’t need to be a “professional” to edit 4k videos at home, people do that every day with videos they took on their effing phone.

                  And that’s the point. What people do with their computers today requires far more resources than computers did in the late 90s. I’m sorry, but it’s completely idiotic to believe that most people could get by with 256 - 512MB of RAM.

                  “Morally reprehensible” give me a break, you simply don’t know what you’re talking about. so just stop.

                • kamen@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  So what are you suggesting - everyone to stick to 640x480 even though many smartphones today shoot 4K/60?

    • DrQuint@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, but they were reusing tilesets an-

      *looks at modern pokemon*

      Uh. You know what, you have a point.

    • Queen HawlSera@lemm.ee
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      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

  • Chaos@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

  • TheControlled@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

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

    • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • ℛ𝒶𝓋ℯ𝓃@pawb.social
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      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…