this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
1051 points (94.6% liked)
Technology
59575 readers
3115 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You kid, I know. But the shuttle software was one of the most stringently tested systems, at least as one of my sEng courses would have me believe.
Amazing that the device you are reading this on is way more powerful that the ones that first put men on the moon.
Early electronics are fascinating. The amount of power we were getting out of devices back in the day is crazy. Like this comment probably takes up more memory than Adventure on the Atari 2600.
I wonder what we could pull off now if people tried to squeeze every ounce of power out of modern day equipment?
Agreed. I used to follow a mod group and the optimizations they used to pull off on 8086 is ridiculous. Nowadays an embedded browser app takes up 5gb on my phone. Wtf.
We still do optimize software today, it's just that there's a cap to how much computing you can really need for stuff like flying through space.
The most impressive optimized software things we do now tends towards the more abstract, or banal in modern views.
Calculating the most efficient route to launch a spacecraft to slingshot off a bunch of different planets takes more computation than actually flying or controlling the spacecraft.
We can also model every particle involved in a nuclear detonation to optimize blast yields, which is how we optimize lethality while reducing the number of warheads.
Video games are also typically pretty optimized at their core, it just tends to be overshadowed by being "boring" uses.