Shiiieeettt.......

They did it once by mixing meters and feets, and crashed the Mars lander.

Edit: looked it up, wasn't actually meters vs feet, but newton-seconds vs some American eagles per gun unit for force

It's guns per eagle, get it right. What would eagles per gun even be?
- A gun that shoots eagles, obviously
- Step clap step step clap
it happened again with the Intuitive Machines lander that landed on the moon last week
- The Intuitive Machines lander issue was that no one disarmed the safety switch on the laser guidance system. (No, really!) Luckily NASA had a backup system installed that ended up working better anyway.
Pound-seconds, I believe. Good ol' LM giving imperial numbers to NASA.
Hopefully, the transition to metric is soon and I can stop reading this same joke every week.
- Technically the US measurement system is metric since the Mendenhall Order of 1893 reestablished all customary units as conversion factors of metric units. In 1933 the ASA redefined the inch to be exactly 25.4mm, following the lead of the British Standards Institution in 1930 (precision was increasingly important for manufacturing, and the previous value of 25.40005mm had become impractical). The international yard and pound were officially adopted by the US National Bereau of Standards (now NIST) in 1959, the Metric Conversion Act was passed in 1975, and finally EO 12770 (1991) required all agencies of the executive branch to transition to metric units.
  So, from one point of view we've been transitioning to metric since 1893 and it's still not done. From another, the inch is just a metric unit as its length is officially defined in millimeters (all customary units are now based on SI units), therefore the conversion is complete.
it's an orbiter not a lander
- It was intended to be an orbiter.

If a TODO passes code review, more than one person fucked up.

At my first job after university, we did releases every Friday evening. From 3-5pm, all you would see in the Slack channel was a flurry of everyone committing straight to master (with a bunch of merge conflict commits between). Oh and then we'd release. Fun times.
- A free for all, late Friday deployment is baffling… We’ve got a strict window of Tuesday-Thursday for releases (unless it’s a critical issue), and a 2-3 day merge freeze to help mitigate unexpected changes.
  We’ve got a relatively small team with LOTS of moving parts, so minimizing deployment issues is always top of mind.
- I literally know multi billion dollar B2C startups doing the same. It's got so toxic that the management regularly fires people and to fill their spots, they offer obscene amounts of money just for starter positions.
Eh, then you just get those idiots who avoid using TODO: because it makes the code review "harder".

// This is a broken example. // Note: remove X before doing Y
- That's no longer a technical process issue but more of a teamcoach/HR kind of issue then. You should be able to assume good intentions from colleagues, imho.
You guys do code reviews?
I mean, just look at how many patches in Android are marked DO NOT MERGE, DO NOT MERGE ANYWHERE, etc, but are in mainline
Especially the devops team. That keyword should be caught in a precommit hook
- We use a CI pipeline check which prevents merges to master if the code contains a TODO. A precommit hook only works if the developer has the hooks configured.

I feel like modern compilers would turn their nose up at that shit. "Dead code? Ewww! No way I'm letting that into my syntax tree!"

A lot of IDEs would probably throw a warning about unreachable code.
- Golang won't even compile with dead code. Unfortunately that's too strict, you just end up commenting out the whole block instead. At least the commented out code is obvious in review, and some automated checks catch it if you have them.
- implying that any developer actually reads warnings
Guess what? Flight Software usually uses ancient proprietary compilers for specialized hardware running an RTOS, rip 😢
- Woah woah WOAH WOAH.
  So you're saying software for the Artemis landers aren't being built with the latest TypeScript compiler and running on a canary version of v8?!

At my workplace, we have a lint rule that reports an error if @nocommit is anywhere in the file, plus a commit hook that blocks all commits with @nocommit anywhere in them. It works well and has saved me a few times.

Works pretty well, except the lint rule and its associated tests have to do something like "@no"+"commit" to avoid triggering it,

I did the same thing with "DO NOT MERGE" back in the day. Saved some people who didn't even know about the check.
In a lot of modern work flows this is incompatible with the development pattern.
For example, at my job we have to roll a test release through CI that we then have to deploy to a test kubernetes cluster. You can't even do that if the build is failing because of linting issues.
- The test release shouldn't have anything marked with @nocommit though... The idea is that you use it to mark code that is only temporary local debugging code that should never be committed.

Dude looks like Hank and Dale had a baby.

Dank Grill
He does, nothing but propain conspiracies all day long, and a too hot wife
Other dude looks like the angry teacher from Daria

Isn't this pretty much what happened with the LIDAR on the most recent commercial moon lander?

Yes but it was a physical switch
- Final flight checks:
  "It's off, so I turn it on and .... WALK AWAY!"

B-b-but it clearly says right there in the todo, that's good enough, r-r-right?!

I mean, my IDE highlights all the TODO's in yellow. I don't know how we could possibly make it any less error prone.
- That requires someone to look at that section in the IDE. If it doesn't block the merge, it doesn't do shit.
- Yeah, gVim is pretty great, isn't it? :-P

If anyone is interested there is a wonderful walk about one of the apollo flight computers

This got a lot of compression over less than a couple of hours!

git blame

Naomi Nagata

Anyone know the artist? Saw another one by them a couple days ago about brute force protection.

They still have those control desks in modern missions?

For NASA, similar desk layout, but it does look more modernized.
https://images-assets.nasa.gov/image/KSC-20181107-PH_BOE01_0002/KSC-20181107-PH_BOE01_0002~large.jpg
- On the one hand: kind of sad since this isn't too far removed from some workplaces. The hardware and furniture could be sourced from any number of places.
  On the other: hot damn. We can get the same kit NASA uses at home. Welcome to the future.
- That's what i meant, all software and plugable devices now. Those desks were prohibitively expensive.

Ah, the Season 4 finale of For All Mankind.

It's ok we'll QA in prod

I will say I really like the naming here