Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround.
  • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
    211·
    3 months ago

    Cosmic ray particle. Same thing happened during a Mario64 speed run years ago. The particle just happened to be flying through space and the earth and just happened to hit a spot on one of the computer chips. It made Mario warp upwards slipping a crucial section of the clockwork level. They couldn’t figure it out for years.

    Pretty neat. They wreck havoc in computers when it happens.

    • Daxtron2@startrek.website
      221·
      3 months ago

      That’s actually probably not true, it was suggested as one possible reason and games media outlets ran with it. https://youtu.be/vj8DzA9y8ls As far as Voyager goes, it’s equally if not more likely that the memory is starting to fail after nearly 5 decades in constant use.

      • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
        6·
        3 months ago

        I don’t give the slightest shit about speedrunning or bit flips, but I sat through that entire video and found it fascinating.

        • Daxtron2@startrek.website
          3·
          3 months ago

          Haha well that’s good at least! There are some great YouTube speed run analysis / history videos in this same style. You should check them out even if you don’t really care about speed running.

      • arin@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        Memory fails because of cosmic rays, this is why computer server systems use ECC memory

    • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
      62·
      3 months ago

      Same thing happened during a Mario64 speed run years ago. The particle just happened to be flying through space and the earth and just happened to hit a spot on one of the computer chips. It made Mario warp upwards slipping a crucial section of the clockwork level. They couldn’t figure it out for years.

      You cannot seriously believe this bullshit. There are so many other potential possibilities with actually a fair likelihood, than such a stupidly rare cosmic event to be the cause of it.

          • wyyomin@lemmy.ml
            22·
            3 months ago

            No I get what you are saying, the thing is that the cosmic ray bit flip fits the razor. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray

            Studies by IBM in the 1990s suggest that computers typically experience about one cosmic-ray-induced error per 256 megabytes of RAM per month.

            It isn’t unlikely for it to have happened on non-ECC hardware. I think they even replicated what happened in the video in an emulator with a single bit flip, so it really just boils down to “what are the chances someone recorded while a bit flip did something noteworthy”, and the odds are… pretty big actually, over so mamy years.

            To be honest I kinda suspect you’ve done no effort to fact check this but are just going with your gut feeling? I don’t mind discussing this further, but if so I’d really like to hear what your point is, because if it is that: a) cosmic bit flips doesn’t happen or b) a bit flip couldn’t have impacted the game like that then I think you’re better off watching that video I linked or actually read up on the subject because my impression is that if you apply occam’s razor to that mario64 incident… a bit flip is all that’s on the table.

            • DarkThoughts@fedia.io
              42·
              3 months ago

              No I get what you are saying, the thing is that the cosmic ray bit flip fits the razor.

              It does not, because there’s plenty of simpler and much more likely explanations than that.

              I think they even replicated what happened in the video in an emulator with a single bit flip

              You think. But they didn’t. They replicated something that fairly looked close, but not the same. If it was a bit flip, it would have been reproducible in the exact same way. You can see this very example being done in the other video someone linked here, disproving your entire argument.

              To be honest I kinda suspect you’ve done no effort to fact check this but are just going with your gut feeling?

              And I suspect you’re projecting. You watched a video that was spreading the myth and are now hell bent on believing it to be the cause, because you want to, rejecting any other explanation.

              I don’t mind discussing this further, but if so I’d really like to hear what your point is, because if it is that: a) cosmic bit flips doesn’t happen or b) a bit flip couldn’t have impacted the game like that then I think you’re better off watching that video I linked or actually read up on the subject because my impression is that if you apply occam’s razor to that mario64 incident… a bit flip is all that’s on the table.

              You clearly still miss the point, making me personally not wanting to discuss this further. I know that cosmic bit flips happen, but I also know that the example you’re talking about isn’t caused by a cosmic ray bit flip. It is way more likely that it is caused by some faulty hardware issue than a cosmic ray hitting it exactly at that moment causing exactly this outcome.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
      2·
      3 months ago

      lmao this sounds like the sort of shit my uncle would come up with instead of accepting that “xQtipx” is not a valid word in Scrabble