Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.

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  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Precision for what? Knowing their cron job will fire? Knowing what was wrong with the commands they sent? Neither of those are crazy precise or ambiguous statements?

    The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.

    NASA tends to be pretty straightforward when talking about risks, and if they feel like all the systems are in working order and there’s a good chance we’ll be back in contact with it, I think it’s worth talking them at their word.

    Like yeah, it’s impressive they can aim an antenna that precisely, but using stars to orient an object is a very very well understood geometry problem. NASA has been using that technique at least as far back as Apollo





  • Honestly sometimes just making a show of it not getting to you can get people like that to leave you be. Just start looking get dead in the eye and saying “thanks for the tip. I’ll take it under advisement”, every time she starts doing that to you. Every time. Same inflection. Even if you have to do it 20 times in a row. Even if she gets angry. Don’t say anything else to her unless it’s required to do your job.

    Eventually she’ll get annoyed or bored enough to leave you alone and try to bother someone else she can get a reaction out of.



  • IMO, it’s always better to try. Worst case scenario is that nothing changes, so no worse than if you didn’t. The only sane choice in that kind of situation is to pick the one with a chance for improvement.

    In my experience, giving a shit about what you’re doing has a bunch of positing knock-on affects as well. You just end up feeling better about yourself. In your specific scenario it sounds like trying would also afford you the opportunity to live a happier life, and that’s worth chasing. The world is fucked, but scientists keep saying they if we act soon it’s not so fucked they we’re past the inflection point to un-fuck it.



  • It’s not that strange. A timeout occurs on several servers overnight, and maybe a bunch of Lemmy instances are all run in the same timezone, so all their admins wake up around the same time and fix it.

    Well it’s a timeout, so by fixing it at the same time the admins have “synchronized” when timeouts across their servers are likely to occur again since it’s tangentially related to time. They’re likely to all fail again around the same moment.

    It’s kind of similar to the thundering herd where a bunch of things getting errors will synchronize their retries in a giant herd and strain the server. It’s why good clients will add exponential backoff AND jitter (a little bit of randomness to when the retry is done, not just every x^2 seconds). That way if you have a million clients, it’s less likely that all 1,000,000 of them will attempt a retry at the extract same time, because they all got an error from your server at the same time when it failed.

    Edit: looked at the ticket and it’s not exactly the kind of timeout I was thinking of.

    This timeout might be caused by something that’s loosely a function of time or resources usage. If it’s resource usage, because the servers are federated, those spikes might happen across servers as everything is pushing events to subscribers. So, failure gets synchronized.

    Or it could just be a coincidence. We as humans like to look for patterns in random events.