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by planteen 2730 days ago
I used to work on spacecraft flight software and I agree. Some people are so off base it's not even funny. I used to correct them but that nearly always leads to a pointless argument.

One of my favorites was when a reaction wheel failed on the Kepler spacecraft in 2013. Someone on Reddit declared that the mission was over with no chance of recovery. I kept my mouth shut. But I knew people down the hall from me were working on a solution. Kepler ended up observing for 6 more years.
2 comments
ben_w 2730 days ago
An interesting and worth-knowing observation. I ought to have guessed given how off-base public discussion of other things often is, yet I forgot to apply Gell Mann Amnesia.

Which forums would you say are worth lurking in? This one? The Stack Overflow family? Are any specific subreddits not-terrible?

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planteen 2726 days ago
This forum isn't really that good for space discussion. There are definitely people in the aerospace industry, but not very many, and mostly in software. You really need some people who are aerospace engineers to have the best discussion. Lots of flight software algorithms begin as a MATLAB/Simulink or Fortran code from an aerospace engineer rewritten by a software engineer.

I've seen some good discussion on Stack Overflow, but I don't regularly lurk. I do lurk on satobs.org - occasionally there is very interesting discussion there.

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illumin8 2728 days ago
One thing I've learned from reading Medium blog posts recently on programming is that there are some truly misinformed people out there that write extremely well-worded posts describing why their language or framework of choice is better than anything else. If you're just entering the field, you might take their advice as gospel, and think they're really knowledgeable, but they're not. It's just cringeworthy to see the vast amount of bad advice out there.

The most click-baity "ten reasons why you should use my favorite JS framework" posts seem to win, and it's troubling. We will soon be a world full of dumbed down workers, who can't experiment and think for ourselves, but instead get advice from whatever click-bait article included enough buzzwords to get recommended by an algorithm. What ever happened to tinkering and figuring it out on your own?

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