Yeah I’ve seen this thing before and think it’s a neat design but not really worth funding tbh. In the end it’s just a Pi with a screen too small to be useful and a keyboard that would be terrible to use. Do we really need to fund more plastic crap? They could just put the designs online so people can 3D print them themselves, and put it on a service like pcbway for people that want a high quality version. People already do that all the time.

If they would design an interface for it as well, that would be really cool. Then it could be a useful thing definitely worth funding. But with a vanilla Pi Linux the user experience would be terrible.

Because when the Apollo project was ongoing, they only built what they needed to build. Everything was a prototype basically and there were usually different versions of everything going around. Afterwards a lot of the stuff was re-used for later programs, often modified or taken apart for parts. As the budget shrank they needed to be creative. Take a look at the work CuriousMarc and his team is doing with repairing and restoring old Apollo Moon hardware, along with documentation and preservation.

Why can’t we simply build the Apollo lander today. Well a couple of reasons.

First of all, like I said it were prototypes, so you’d have to figure out what design to use. All of the documents back then were on paper and not all of it is digitized by a long shot. The amount of documents they produced back then was crazy. And a lot of it was lost over time unfortunately. Puzzling all of that together would be quite some task. Most folk from back then are since dead or at the very least retired. And I for one sometimes forget entire projects I worked on, so good luck getting small details out of those people.

Our idea of what is acceptable, a good idea and safe has changed since the Apollo times. A lot of the design back then included components that were very dangerous and toxic. Not only to be used, but also to manufacture, which we wouldn’t find acceptable these days. And things we’ve later learned were a bad thing to do. So the design would need to be modified to be safer, which would probably cascade into an entire new design.

We’ve lost so much of the support infrastructure the program relied on. It’s hard to understate how much this matters. This is a big thing when people say the moon program was fake. It wasn’t just one rocket, one lander, one crew, it was millions upon millions of pieces of infrastructure supporting the whole thing. From jigs to electronics, test equipment, custom tools, handling facilities etc. All with their own backstory, design requirements, documentation etc. A lot of this has been lost, especially when it was outsourced at the time. You’d have to reverse engineer and re-create a lot of that.

Time has moved on and so has technology. Whilst the Apollo program had some cutting edge stuff back then, these days it’s ridiculously outdated. It would be very hard to manufacture any of those components today. We’re talking about the first generation of integrated circuits, on very expensive ceramics. Using crazy analogue electronics, only understood by the best gurus at the time. Even mechanical computers were used, a lost artform last used in the 80s. You could start redesigning stuff to modern equivalents, but again that would probably snowball into just designing a whole new thing.

Recreating something from that long ago is simply not possible I’m afraid. And even if we could, it would probably make for a pretty shitty lander compared to modern standards.

Well it all depends on what you want to do. I interpreted your question as we need to go there asap, what can we do? And then the answer is we can do an crewed orbit in about a year time.

If we just want to do it with a good chance of survival, building all the shit we need, but still get there soon, the answer would be different. If we just want to go fast, we would probably use all our heavy lift vehicles to build a moon vehicle in LEO. Then put a big ass engine on that and a bunch of fuel and launch the whole thing to the moon. That’s something we could do within 5-7 years if we would put our minds and money to it. I feel the suits we currently have in development could be ready within that time as well. The lander would be a problem however, we don’t have any of those in development right now. Blue Origin has their Blue Lander, but that’s been on the drawing board for so long now. They did get extra funding to get it ready for 2030, but haven’t shown their progress publicly, so who knows how far they are. On the other hand, if we want to take some risks for this special mission I’m sure we can get something together in 5-7 years if humanity unites and puts their weight/money/faith behind it.

However if we keep going like we’ve been going since Apollo was cancelled, we are never going to get there at all. The politics are complicated and the private sector has been hit or miss. Plus with the Musk factor, we don’t know what’s going to happen. I have zero faith in anything we have going right now.

At the moment, we just cannot.

We don’t even have space suits that can operate on the moon. The stuff they use on the ISS is made to be used in a total vacuum only, not walking around in the dust and on sharp rocks. There are new suits in development, but nothing final as far as I know. I’m not sure if any are close to being finished, let alone tested and certified.

There’s also no vehicle that can land on the moon with crew right now. Nasa is relying on SpaceX to get their Starship program to the point they can do it. People are divided on this, but anyone with technical knowledge I heard about this say the SpaceX program is very challenging and probably not feasible. Especially with the super optimistic timelines they’ve been throwing around.

In theory you could put a Crew Dragon with a big trunk of supplies on a Falcon Heavy, which has the delta-V to go to the moon. But obviously that’s pretty risky, once you go you’re committed. When working in LEO you almost always have some kind of disaster recover scenario available where you abort and get back to earth asap. If you are underway to the moon, there is no turning back. The Crew Dragon has very limited mobility. But I think a trans-lunar injection and orbit around the moon would be possible, with a free return trajectory. So if going around the moon is good enough, that would be possible.

Still it would probably take 9-12 months to put such a mission together and it would be very risky indeed. And like I said, landing on the moon is a total no-go right now.

We should ask Scott Manley to do a video about this, I would love to hear his thoughts on this.

I see projects move over to Gitlab a lot lately, but without porting over the issues. That means a huge amount of history and discussions are lost. If you want to find out why something is the way it is, old issues would be a goldmine. Sometimes they are still up on archived GitHub, but not always.

Yeah the “Analog stick” is just a DPad, it doesn’t have pots or anything like that, just binary buttons. And I have to say, it’s terrible. It feels bad, it pushes your thumb upwards with a really awkward angle. For some reason it’s really hard shiny plastic and the edge stands up so it digs into your flesh. It’s concave instead of convex like modern sticks are (and even sticks back then were really). Doing fast inputs is impossible since you need to move it quite far before it responds and diagonals don’t work very well at all.

So it sucks, but it just adds to the charm as far as I’m concerned.

One trip to my trusty room of boxes full of old shit and I found it!

Along with its official carrier case and TV out cable in original packaging. The screen protector has seen better days tho.

And it still works just fine:

Yeah I think I have one of those still around somewhere. I remember when they released it they didn’t release any sources at all, even though it was full of software that required sharing in their license. So the community got together and helped them publish it all. Some of the drivers were still binary blobs, but that was the maker of the chips fault and not GameParks fault.

Once I got one I created a small little side scrolling game engine and a couple of games for it, a couple of other people used my engine to make some games for it as well. To imagine that’s 20 years ago. We had a small little forum of enthusiasts setup and shared code in attachments. It’s all lost to time now, but those were the days.

Luckily there is a distro for anyone. There’s plenty of super stable distros out there. But if you want the cutting edge, stability will be comprised. And the cutting edge is pretty cool at the moment, so for me it’s worth the issue once and again.

No, but depending on what’s wrong that might not be the best thing to do. If the new version is broken, rolling back to a previous working version might fix it. But when the update broke something, it might not fix it and could even make it worse. I’d rather figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, it’s a good skill to have. And if the new version does turn out to be broken, it’s good to have dug into it so you can make a proper bug report.

I use Arch BTW.

Today the liquidctl integration of cooler control died, making all my fans go into a safe profile which makes a lot more noise than normal. Imagine having to listen to that for an hour trying to get it working again. I did get it working luckily, somehow the coolercontrol-liqctld python module didn’t register properly. Once I got the module registered everything was working, for now…

Sure just saying, not trolling at all.

Solar drives energy prices down, not up. In the summer the energy price regularly goes negative because there is so much solar available.

And it isn’t even remotely true, other countries have higher energy prices than Germany within the EU. The Netherlands for example has crazy high energy prices. And that’s in absolute numbers, not even corrected for things like GDP.

Yeah that sucks, they haven’t shared the source, only what site it’s from.

This is the closest I could find: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=year&year=-1&source=public

But this includes all sources, where the chart shown only includes renewable sources. I can’t find it on the site, but I’m kinda dumb so maybe somebody else can find it.

People calling each other at new years was a thing in the before times when texting was non-existent, expensive or not widespread. People would call each other usually on land lines and caused a lot of stress to the network. It could take hours to get through. When mobile phones became a thing, people tried to be trendy and call from a party, leading to total collapse of the local cell network.

Later when texting became the norm, it would also be easily overloaded and texts could take a while to get through. These days since everything goes through the internet, I wouldn’t expect there to be any issues. The internet can handle sudden increases much better.

That dude has mad skills and all the experience. He also spent so much time designing and making that hotend. Just because it works for him, doesn’t mean the principle is sound or that it could just work for anybody. I’ve been following him on YouTube for quite some time and am insanely jealous of his workspace and skill level. If anything his videos have shown me it’s super hard to get multi input extruders to work.

All of the Kirby games are really fun for kids, especially the 2D ones. I recommend Kirby Star Allies, I played it a lot with my nephew when he was 5

One thing I’ve also noticed is people doing code reviews using ai to pad their stats or think they are helping out. At best it’s stating the obvious, wasting resources to point out what doesn’t need pointing out. At worst it’s a giant waste of time based on total bullshit the ai made up.

I kinda understand why people would think LLMs are able to generate and evaluate code. Because they throw simple example problems at them and they solve them without much issue. Sometimes they make obvious mistakes, but these are easily corrected. This makes people think LLMs are basically able to code, if it can solve even some harder example problems, surely they are at least as good as beginner programmers right? No, wrong actually. The reason the LLM can solve the example problem, is because that example (or a variation) was contained within its training data. It knows the answer not by deduction or by reason, it knows the answer by memorization. Once you start actually programming in the real world, it’s nothing like the examples. You need to account for an existing code base, with existing rules, standards and limitations. You need to evaluate which solution out of your toolbox to apply. Need to consider the big picture as well as small details. You need to think of the next guy working with the code, because more often than not, that next guy is you. LLMs crumble in a situation like this, they don’t know about all the unspoken things, they haven’t trained on the code base you are working with.

There’s a book I’m fond of called Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture by Martin Fowler. I always used to joke it contained the answer to any problem a software engineer ever comes across. The only trick is to choose the correct answer. LLMs are like this, they have all these patterns memorized and choose which answer best fits the question. But it doesn’t understand why, what the upsides and downsides are for your specific situation. What the implications of the selected answer are going forward. Or why this pattern over another. When the LLM answers you can often prompt it to produce an answer with a completely different pattern applied. In my opinion it’s barely more useful than the book and in many ways much worse.

Nah I went over to camp Debian for a long time, switched when Debian Potato was released. Then when Debian kinda stalled I was lured into Ubuntu because they had the latest and greatest. I know it isn’t the cool choice these days, but I have stuck with Ubuntu ever since.

I dug around in old boxes and found the book!