♫ Bird of Prey cruises of red and green,
Decloaking over your head,
Look for the ship, set phasers to stun,
And she’s warped. ♫
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
You’re the quartermaster and a snarky engineer from 800 years ago is complaining that she likes to wear her jacket open. Do you get into a long drawn out fight you’re probably going to lose, or go, “Right Commander Reno, let me go ahead and replicate the J rank variant for you.”
It’s still surreal to see OpenAI’s need for training data be so vast that they casually developed and open sourced a generational leap in transcription technology just so that they could scrape online videos better.
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.
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.
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.
Human Diplomat: *Laughs at joke.*
Vulcan Diplomat (To Himself): This is great. I’m going to get a good grade in Party, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve.
https://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/737885534519738368/
Captain Archer and Commander Shran also rank up there.
Any of Nelix’s cooking with Leola root. No matter how far Voyager traveled, it was the proper noun space vegetable they always had on hand.
*Reloads Quicksave*
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.
Aahh, you’re totally right. I should have combined the first two panels and just ended it at the third.