FlatFootFox
@FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
- Comment on Rover 5 months ago:
“My battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
- Comment on Voyager 1 6 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Voyager 1 6 months ago:
Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe before (with their approval.)
The Voyagers benefit primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. They’re otherwise completely open and well documented.
- Comment on Voyager 1 6 months ago:
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.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 10 months ago:
I think they realized their price structure was confusing/annoying towards the end of last year. Now it’s just $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited. (There’s also still an expensive $25/mo plan for early access to some of their LLM experiments apparently?) You got me curious and I couldn’t find any mention of per-search overage billing. This feature request thread from 2022 just makes it sound like Kagi search gets shut off.
I bouncing hard off of Kagi when they had the original pricing structure you described. Bringing back aughts era SMS overages or just mentally having to count searches doesn’t exactly found like a fun time. I’m going to give the $5 plan a try this month to see how far that gets me. $10/mo is still a tough sell for Internet search. If I really find it substantially better, I might convince my spouse into trying the two seat $14/mo unlimited “Duo” plan for a while.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 10 months ago:
You’re my new favorite person in this comment section.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 10 months ago:
Have Brands™ started astroturfing Lemmy yet?
I’m not completely sold on Kagi yet. I’m still in the trial period right now. But paid services can be a tough sell online. I figured I’d be up front about the costs rather than wait for the inevitable “$10 a month for search!?” comment.
- Comment on Has google stopped working for finding anything? 10 months ago:
The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.
For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.
- Comment on Sega wants classic franchise reboots to show ‘edginess and a rebellious mind-set’ 11 months ago:
If you’re looking for a new Jet Set Radio style game, make sure to check out the recently released indie project Bomb Rush Cyberfunk. They did a great job of capturing the JSR spirit while modernizing the controls and gameplay. store.steampowered.com/…/Bomb_Rush_Cyberfunk/