The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit
Subjectivity is implied. You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made. Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.
And as has been pointed out, you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact (i.e. that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)
I will give you credit, you have an art for writing absolutely infuriating comments. How is it that you manage to so perfectly encapsulate the exact thing you baselessly accuse one of doing?
> You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made.
You start with this, and then immediately lead into:
> Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.
> that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)
Neither of which are claims I made. At no point did I engage in the dictionary-definition pedantry that plagues this site. I was specifically highlighting how the sentiments they expressed in their message come together as a whole. An accusation that one "forgot to take basic principles into account" cannot possibly be construed in any way other than insulting. That phrase denies the possibility that the OP considered readability but consciously chose to make a trade-off in alignment with their own values, asserts the author's view as a matter of principle, and denigrates the person who "forgot" to consider it.
> you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact
Insofar as words have any meaning whatsoever, I am observing a fact about how they chose to communicate. If you really want to play the stupid game the people of this forum love where you play at the margins of language endlessly redefining everything into meaninglessness to score points in an argument, you can count me out.
There’s also the fact that nearly 1/4 US states require no emissions or safety checks whatsoever [1]. So everything is valid by default and realistically the only thing stopping you from driving a literal rust bucket, with tailpipe dragging, poor combustion, or modified emissions filtering (like modifying your truck so you can roll coal down Main Street) is it a cop feels like pulling you over for it
My understanding was that each satellite broadcasts a coarse ephemeris for the whole network, and that that “almanac” isn’t accurate for very long (on the order of weeks). Without uploads to the satellites, those almanacs will go stale.
I don’t think the almanacs are necessary for the system to work, in theory. But I believe they’re commonly used by receivers to narrow down the range of possibilities when trying to find a PRN match for a signal they’re getting.
(I’ve dealt with GPS and similar navigation signals for work but am not an expert, this is just the impression I’ve gotten over a few years)
This is a great plot for a B movie or a trashy military action book. “The bad guys are jamming GPS uplink and we only have two weeks until the almanacs are out of date and the whole system breaks down. Millions of innocent Americans will drive into rivers by accident.”
The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.
The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).
So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.
Perhaps. Sometimes the scale is "one" - the amount of engineering that goes into bespoke space missions is very large, and very little of that work is re-used for anything other than direct follow up missions
Even then... the reason we use the aero toolbox is because everybody in the aero industry trusts that MATLAB's results are accurate. I don't need to prove that the ECEF<->Keplerian conversions are correct, I can just show that I'm using the toolbox function and people assume it's correct. The aero toolbox is trusted.
When I've had to write similar code in Python, it's a massive pain to "prove" that my conversation code is correct. Often I've resorted to using MATLAB's trusted functions to generate "truth" data and then feeding that to Python to verify it gets the same results.
Obviously this is more work than just using the premade stuff that comes with the toolbox.
Any MATLAB alternative faces the same trust issue. Until it reaches enough mindshare that people assume that it's too popular to have incorrect math (which might not be a good assumption but it is one that people make about MATLAB) then it doesn't actually mimic the main benefit of MATLAB which is that I don't need to check its work.
I can attest to that. I was using Gemini to help with some spherical geometry that I just couldn't figure out myself. This was for an engineering system to define and avoid attitude deadzones for a system that can rotate arbitrarily.
About 75% of the time the code snippets it provided did what it said they did. But the other 25% was killer. Luckily I made a visualization system and was able to see when it made mistakes, but I think if I had tried to vibe code this months ago I'd still be trying.
(These were things like "how can I detect if an arbitrary small circle arc on a unit sphere intersects a circle of arbitrary size projected onto the surface of the unit sphere". With the right MATLAB setup this was easy to visualize and check; but I'm quite convinced it would have taken me a lot longer to understand the geometry and come up with the equations myself than it actually took me to complete the tool)
One my standard coding tests for LLM is a spherical geometry problem, a near-triangle with all three corners being 90 degrees.
Until GPT-5, no model got it right, they only operated in the space of a euclidian projection; perhaps notably, while GPT-5 did get it right, it did so by writing and running a python script that imported a suitable library, not with its own world model.
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