Technology was more reliable 54 years ago.

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Matrix Glitch
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10 Oct 2022, 8:26 am

From 1968 to 1969 in rapid succession, they launched Apollo moon mission rockets up to Apollo 11 which put men on the moon.

Yet 54 years later in 2022, the Artemis 1 moon rocket, which was supposed to launch 29 September 2022, has been constantly delayed due to technical difficulties, and now NASA says won't launch until at least sometime in November.

As someone who's been half skeptical regarding the validity of moon missions that took place over 50 years ago in the 1960's, I find the situation rather amusing.



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10 Oct 2022, 8:49 am

They did have some glitches.


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10 Oct 2022, 9:23 am

Technology was also more attractive, 54 years ago. I'd love to have a vintage colour TV from 1965 to watch Hogan's Heroes on. I know I'm only 47, but I really don't care.


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10 Oct 2022, 10:37 am

I wasn't born yet, so I really wouldn't know. I do know that everyone was terrified that the evil commie Russians were going to nuke them at any second. Looks like that's one thing hasn't changed. Or it changed for a while by the 1990s only to change back again.

I was born in the 70s and I read somewhere that the 1970s was a lot like the 2020s. But I was so young I don't remember that either, I just remember stuff like my mom playing her Abba records and watching reruns of The Flintstones. They said if they had internet back in the 70s the whole human race would be dead by now. So I guess the whole human race will be dead soon now.

I think people have their nostalgia filter on too high because every decade in human history has sucked mainly because there were humans in it. I still remember people thinking the 1990s was awful and how everyone was terrified of the future. Now all I hear is people gushing about the decade of Power Rangers and Pokemon and other stupid crap.



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10 Oct 2022, 10:48 am

I can't say anything about 54 years ago but I do get the sense that there was a time where, at least with code, it was a small career field filled with uber-nerds, ie. people who belonged there. It wasn't glamorous yet. Once something becomes a pathway to status though it tends to go downhill, it's like the vocational version of GoPro courage. You also get corporate and middle management styles of time management which is to ask for throughput in impossibly short amounts of time, 'wing it' like a boomer, and so even when people want to do things right they're ruled over by people who both a) don't program and b) are used to thinking of things at the social level where magic of will (and sharp elbows) just gets things done, which typically just means they're grinding their programmers, and most of their other employees while they're at it, to dust in order to rack up their promotions.

I program at a small family firm, I'm sure I'm deeply underpaid, but I also pause to think about how cutthroat Agile expertise seems to be and on one hand I really don't want to have to care about it all that much but I really don't want to be in a place where HR types made a dominance hierarchy around it, similar thoughts go for TDD which is a great technique where applicable but it's really about something else if someone says that it's the line between who should program vs. who should flip burgers at McDonalds (it reminds me of how 200 graduate degree students could be qualified for a post so they have to play woke rock-paper-scissors to filter it down).

Really to keep any profession safe the critical infrastructure needs to be kept away from the social climbers and really just let them handle the late maturity lifecycle stuff that'll be obsolete by next year.


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10 Oct 2022, 11:18 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
...I really don't want to be in a place where HR types made a dominance hierarchy around it, similar thoughts go for TDD which is a great technique where applicable but it's really about something else if someone says that it's the line between who should program vs. who should flip burgers at McDonalds (it reminds me of how 200 graduate degree students could be qualified for a post so they have to play woke rock-paper-scissors to filter it down).

TDD plus any other aspect of Kent Beck's Extreme Programming sometimes seems like a campaign to cleanse the industry of people on the spectrum. Consider Pair Programming and what kind of person would actually WANT to work that way. Not surprising it began in the 90s during the post-Cold War time of scarce technology openings for anyone without a Top Secret clearance. At that time it was typical to subject applicants for technical jobs to multiple interviews to assess their "cultural fit". The message at the time seemed to be that they only wanted technical people whom they could consider for promotion to management. There was also the idea that an individual's technical expertise was irrelevant, instead success of a project depended on how it was managed. I can recall having read an article that said that if asked at an interview why a project might fail, to answer that it was because of incompetent management not lack of technical mastery. Extreme Programming, which arrived a bit later, was more effective though because its "evangelists" were able to present as "cool nerds" rather than as the corporate shills they were in reality.

I may have survived that era because I was, perhaps mistakenly, hired for a position in which it was assumed I could be cleared for Top Secret while being able to work on unclassified hardware with "sanitized" information regarding the true nature of the project. I so impressed them with my technical aptitude that they kept me on even after determining that I wasn't clearable. Luckily most of the work at that place (a branch of a large technology company supporting a mostly civilian government agency) was unclassified and I remained there 7-8 years. I do somewhat suspect that technical standards in the classified world are lower on average because people are hired for their clearances rather than their technical ability. None of the subsequent (unclassified) projects I worked on there got me as high a rating as that first one.


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10 Oct 2022, 11:25 am

Matrix Glitch wrote:
From 1968 to 1969 in rapid succession, they launched Apollo moon mission rockets up to Apollo 11 which put men on the moon.

Yet 54 years later in 2022, the Artemis 1 moon rocket, which was supposed to launch 29 September 2022, has been constantly delayed due to technical difficulties, and now NASA says won't launch until at least sometime in November.

As someone who's been half skeptical regarding the validity of moon missions that took place over 50 years ago in the 1960's, I find the situation rather amusing.

The road to the first successful Apollo mission was a years-long struggle which even took some lives. The Artemis project suffers from excessive publicity and visibility to those lacking enough experience in engineering to understand what they're being told.


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Matrix Glitch
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10 Oct 2022, 11:36 am

MaxE wrote:
Matrix Glitch wrote:
From 1968 to 1969 in rapid succession, they launched Apollo moon mission rockets up to Apollo 11 which put men on the moon.

Yet 54 years later in 2022, the Artemis 1 moon rocket, which was supposed to launch 29 September 2022, has been constantly delayed due to technical difficulties, and now NASA says won't launch until at least sometime in November.

As someone who's been half skeptical regarding the validity of moon missions that took place over 50 years ago in the 1960's, I find the situation rather amusing.

The road to the first successful Apollo mission was a years-long struggle which even took some lives. The Artemis project suffers from excessive publicity and visibility to those lacking enough experience in engineering to understand what they're being told.

I'm sure the Apollo Saturn V test launches had plenty of publicity. Plus there was all that pressure to beat the Russkies.



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10 Oct 2022, 11:44 am

Double Retired wrote:
They did have some glitches.

That was a ground simulation. Apollo 13 would be a little more applicable.



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10 Oct 2022, 11:52 am

lostonearth35 wrote:
I wasn't born yet, so I really wouldn't know. I do know that everyone was terrified that the evil commie Russians were going to nuke them at any second. Looks like that's one thing hasn't changed. Or it changed for a while by the 1990s only to change back again.

I was born in the 70s and I read somewhere that the 1970s was a lot like the 2020s. But I was so young I don't remember that either, I just remember stuff like my mom playing her Abba records and watching reruns of The Flintstones. They said if they had internet back in the 70s the whole human race would be dead by now. So I guess the whole human race will be dead soon now.

I think people have their nostalgia filter on too high because every decade in human history has sucked mainly because there were humans in it. I still remember people thinking the 1990s was awful and how everyone was terrified of the future. Now all I hear is people gushing about the decade of Power Rangers and Pokemon and other stupid crap.

My older brother was totally absorbed with the NASA missions and he involved me in his detailed interest as much as he could. I remember watching the Apollo 11 mission on TV. I remember being disgruntled because there was something else I wanted to watch. And I remember when they lost contact with the crew when they went around the far side of the moon, I said something like "if they're dead can we change the channel?"

Edit: Come to think of it that was probably one of the earlier missions when they just had the crew orbit the moon for the first time. Probably Apollo 8.



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10 Oct 2022, 12:34 pm

MaxE wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
...I really don't want to be in a place where HR types made a dominance hierarchy around it, similar thoughts go for TDD which is a great technique where applicable but it's really about something else if someone says that it's the line between who should program vs. who should flip burgers at McDonalds (it reminds me of how 200 graduate degree students could be qualified for a post so they have to play woke rock-paper-scissors to filter it down).

TDD plus any other aspect of Kent Beck's Extreme Programming sometimes seems like a campaign to cleanse the industry of people on the spectrum. Consider Pair Programming and what kind of person would actually WANT to work that way. Not surprising it began in the 90s during the post-Cold War time of scarce technology openings for anyone without a Top Secret clearance. At that time it was typical to subject applicants for technical jobs to multiple interviews to assess their "cultural fit". The message at the time seemed to be that they only wanted technical people whom they could consider for promotion to management. There was also the idea that an individual's technical expertise was irrelevant, instead success of a project depended on how it was managed. I can recall having read an article that said that if asked at an interview why a project might fail, to answer that it was because of incompetent management not lack of technical mastery. Extreme Programming, which arrived a bit later, was more effective though because its "evangelists" were able to present as "cool nerds" rather than as the corporate shills they were in reality.


I had to watch quite a few discussions and debates to get a better understanding about what bothered me, and it as mostly the 'Uncle Bob' outlook (ie. TDD or flip burgers) that bothered me. I remember David Heinemeier Hansson (commonly known as DHH) who wrote some heterodox articles about it, I saw him have a group discussion with Kent Beck and Martin Fowler on the topic. For what I can see DHH was actually arguing for TDD - but - the critical thing was that he was arguing that it had very strong and very specific relevant range use cases. For example if your doing the most standard project where the code is copy-pasta and the procedures are really standard and the tests really clear up a lot of unknowns - great! There's other stuff where you'll not only have to crawl through the programming process to figure out how you'll get it to work but it's more of a Rube Goldberg scenario where there's a lot happening and a lot less of it is recursive - much more difficult place to get coverage, and then you'll have places, like proving an html div exists, where it's more like you're just doing busywork to prove that you're not watching Netflix (or more likely it's a tax everyone has to pay that's really in place to keep lazy people from not doing TDD at all).

There are a lot of different categoric issues here and I've noticed that people who really want to grab power and dominate others also love blurring distinctions so they can take certain things (like employee micromanaging) out of where they belong and even have them impinging on the engineer's ability to work, not because it helps the engineer but it arranges that status hierarchy in such a way that the managers like.


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10 Oct 2022, 1:24 pm

every type of technology has advanced since 1972 ...except space travel...



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10 Oct 2022, 1:51 pm

klanka wrote:
every type of technology has advanced since 1972 ...except space travel...

Some have stagnated a lot and leaned on other technological improvements for the appearance of innovation (software's a good example). It can be tricky to tell at times where something's really moving vs. just riding a wave beneath it.


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10 Oct 2022, 2:25 pm

I was born.
Technology was way better.

My mother still has a fridge from before I was born.
Cars were built to last 20 years +.
Telephones and TVs didn't need to be upgraded every six months.
They didn't go obsolete.
I love rotary phones (she still has one).
Toilets actually flushed.
Paint stuck to the walls.
Lightbulbs didn't give people blinding migraines.
Now I can't even buy an incandescent bulb.

Everything was more reliable.

Right now I'm searching for a radio with a dial tuner.
I can't stand digital ones that you need to reset any time the power goes out.
I can't stand setting digital radio stations.
It's a major pet peeve so I've gone about ten years without radio.

I can't speak to NASA, but everything else was better.
Computers are a PITA.
Right now my TV and home phone haven't been working for almost two weeks.
My laptop died and ate my life's work including thousands of photos.

Tech sucks.



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10 Oct 2022, 2:35 pm

Technology can be difficult to judge because while a lot of advancements have been made, those advancements have often added un-neccessary complexity so though potentially the reliability "Should" improve, in reality the reliability can be worse just simply due to us now having many functions for something that origionally just did a single thing.
A perfect example is my hobby of kodel railways, where though when everything works well, the control one has has improved, but at the expense of overall relibility (Talking generally here as there are exceptions as each generation of technological advancements has its successes and failures).

What "Gets" me overall is when whatever technology one has reaches the peak of its reliability and then, the manufacturers bring out a new thing, and if the new thing is clearly not as good as the last thing out and they still sell the last thing, they begin to introduce design flaws or quality issues into the old technology to make people turn to their new technology which often is produced cheaper but is sold for a higher price than before! Bicycles and their history are a perfect example of this (For those who know the technological advancements as most is just past failures re-invented and called "New" as very little is actually new in this regards (And if someone rich wanted me to tell them how to design and build that ultimate bicycle for everyday use I can certainly share my thoughts on what works and what does not last or is no good and just a fashional gimmick), as I have to be perfectly honest and say that in the last few years before covid hit, technology wize I would say has gone backwards. What I mean by this is that much of the leading top class bicycles have actually mechanical design flaws built in which cause increased wear and a noticable loss of precisionable functionality. The component design is such that it is designed to fail in less time than past technology would normally last. I remember having discussions where those of us who had experience in the trade and were older were talking along the lines of the increased wear and issues the new gear systems have while those who were young who only saw the "Hype" were saying how great and claiming it was better (To which those of us who were old enough to have seen and used and lived with the past technologies just saw how easily these youngsters had been brainwashed by the cycle media to have come out with such a view!)
Not all new is bad. Not all old was good and vice versa. But it does grind with me when new technology goes backwards in reliability for the sole purpose of generating more sales, and this is when I speak out, as customers who wat to spend more of their hard earned money SHOULD at the very least be given the best and not the worst hyped up to dillude the customer that it is the best so one can see the customer being takenadvantage of where they really would have had a better bicycle had they bought something from the past and done that up instead.


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10 Oct 2022, 2:37 pm

Both Samo Burja and John Blow have talked about something called 'intellectual dark matter' which is information that a given generation of advanced knowledge or engineering workers (say in their 50's or 60's) have which makes the world go round as far as the projects their working on, the quality of those projects, etc., and then they either forget to pass that information on to younger workers when they retire or, alternatively, the companies they work for just don't consider it important enough to pay anyone to teach that information - they don't know it exists, out of sight out of mind, etc..

That's part of how expertise and knowledge gets lost and I remember John Blow talking about how risky this is given that most programmers only know surface-layer languages whereas the stack is built on much older, more primitive things and it gets to be an issue if no one knows those languages anymore or even properly knows what the warning signals are when something's starting to fail at that level.

There as a good example that either he or Samo Burja gave in a lecture where they talked about bad Intel chips being made by a group of new engineer who thought they'd found a massive flaw in how the older engineers were building chips, just to then find out that the new chips they designed had electrical interference patterns as a result of the structure they chose.

This is one of the weakness of market liberalism, ie. the more competitive it is the more it pays to be at the cutting edge of what can make you, personally, money, and the places where the money is at tend to be rather fleeting, self-serving, etc., and said motivation really isn't excited over infrastructure maintenance and the like. Maybe this is where we really need to leverage AI to make dealing with the 'boring' or 'unprofitable' stuff (or all of those replication failures in peer review) more viable.


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