zlacker

It’s so inspiring when you see how these things are just built to last.

quote: “In the past, engineers have compared keeping the probes operational to keeping an old car running. The tech is severely outdated, yet it keeps ticking over – a trend often seen in the spacecraft of past decades.”

At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.

>>alex_s+(OP)
You should read "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster. Also, "Pump Six" from "Pump Six and Other Stories" will also do fantastic job of diving into this "forgetting how to maintain them" reality.

>>bayind+n
Ringworld

>>tass+I
Fire upon the deep, where space ships runs on a future version of unix and only one guy knows what the unix epoch means.

>>bayind+n
Awesome, thank you! Just as I was again running out of things to read.

>>bayind+n
The most incredible thing about The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is how casually prescient it is - first published in 1909!

Instant messaging, video calls, the internet…

>>bayind+n
Pump Six really nails that feeling of "this thing we don't really understand keeps filling the log with warnings we don't know what to do about, let's ignore them and pray it just keeps working."

Any similarities with the real world are surely coincidental.

>>bayind+n
> "forgetting how to maintain them" reality

I serve the Omnissiah.

>>skywal+e1
I don't recall that in that book. Maybe you're thinking of A Deepness in the Sky? I haven't read that one yet.

>>larper+je
I think the reference is in Fire: It’s an offhand line about an ancient timekeeping system which the modern engineers mistakenly believe is calibrated to humanity’s first steps onto another celestial body.

>>larper+je
I loved that aspect of it - it's becoming more and more true as we build more and more frameworks/abstractions. Once we got to Kubernetes and some of the modern web frameworks, the notion of "Programmer-at-Arms", the one-in-thousands master developer who'd actually dig into the depths of these abstractions, made perfect sense!

>>the_af+5c
Many apps have warning/errors that are undecipherable from the very beginning, let alone 20 years later.

Or only make sense when looking into source code that is long gone

>>twoodf+th
As A Fire Upon the Deep is one of my favorite books (it's been a while since I've read it- my copy is currently on tour), I'd like to chime in and say I remember this reference, but I believe it's in A Deepness In the Sky, which goes more into Pham's backstory. It's definitely one of these two books though.

>>skywal+e1
I really love that series. It's been a little bit since I last re-read them but there are certain concepts/ideas in them that I still think of from time to time.

>>tass+I
Loved this series when I first read it and it will always hold a special place in my heart but I did reread a few months ago and the way Teela Brown (and some other women) is talked about/to left me feeling very uneasy.

>>alex_s+(OP)
The Foundation series covers this as well though I can't really recommend the book series. I tried a re-read when the TV show came out and felt pretty icky with how women were portrayed in the books. Also they aren't as good I remember. The TV completely diverges from the books but in a good way IMHO. Normally that bothers me a lot but after rereading the first book again I think I prefer the TV show.

>>tass+I
Keep in mind if you start the Ringworld series there's also a tie in series that starts 200 years before Ringworld (Fleet of Worlds) and both end with the same last book. Niven and M. Learner wrote so many books...

>>joshst+lR
I loved the series as young teen but rereading the first book was a disappointment. I'll be checking out Foundation after I finish Silo.

>>pstuar+651
Space opera is my favorite genre but I've failed to get through the Foundation series probably 20 times now so this may be terrible advice but it's recommended to not read them in publication order by Asimov himself.

This has a good breakdown: https://www.reddit.com/r/Asimov/wiki/seriesguide/

edit: Somehow I got Foundation mixed up with Banks' Culture series. I think I have gotten through most of Foundation if not all but I've had a hard time with the Culture series, there I usually start with Player of Games..

>>ilyt+Xl
The worst is when the log line is constructed in a way that makes it really hard to find the source. Source code file name and line number is ideal but a tag like on Android auffices.

>>swozey+7e1
The Culture series is good but I've struggled with getting through it all as well. If you like space opera I can highly recommend the Honor Harrington series, the first book being On Basilisk Station [0]. This has held up for me for well over a decade and I've reread the entire series (~14 books IIRC) at least 4-5 times. I've heard it described as "Horatio Hornblower in space" but I never read that series so I can't speak to that.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35921.On_Basilisk_Statio...

>>larper+je
Yes, that bit is in "Deepness".

>>winrid+HR
I think the Man-Kzin Wars are also somehow related, but I'm not sure if it's technically in the same continuity or not.

>>alex_s+(OP)
> At some point us humans will probably simply have forgotten how to maintain them.

Nah, these systems are simple and incredibly well documented. A ton of people have operated them, too. They'll be fine.

I'd expect something like that to happen to a university cubesat lol.

>>WWLink+4Q1
We can only hope that because they're so well documented, we can work around any "dead hardware" or "dead media" issue. Like, I hope the Voyager manual doesn't say "see disk 2 for firmware", and disk 2 has turned to dust 10 years ago.

>>ilyt+Xl
And to say that people are paid to find traces of attacks in logs, while after 5 years, everyone ignores everything that’s in the logs.

>>Vecr+Ev1
Same universe, not sure if same characters. There are like 20 books, and I think some of them are community written.

>>joshst+Lh1
Incidentally, On Basilisk Station is a free e-book at the publisher's website [0]. They also have an online HTML version [1]. So you can try the first book in the series to see how you like it before purchasing any of the others.

[0] https://www.baen.com/on-basilisk-station.html

[1] https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0743435710

>>r2_pil+ym
> Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems.

- Chapter 17, A Deepness in the Sky

>>r2_pil+ym
At a conference I met Vernor Vinge and told him my entire career was basically because I read his books in high school. He was very happy.

>>joshst+RP
I think the first half of the first book is the best. Much less interested in Tine's world

>>pstuar+651
I accidentally read the 2nd book first, and going back to read the first afterwards was kind of a struggle. You could totally just skip the first and read the other two.

>>a_e_k+Qb2
I'm a big fan of the audiobooks for this series as well, the narrator does a very good job IMHO.