Potentially take a look at Sling TV. They’re selling the same streaming TV service that YouTube TV and Hulu + Live TV are, but they’ve structured things slightly differently. They have a “Sling Orange” and “Sling Blue” package which roughly translates to, “Do you want sports or cable news?” They both have an 80% overlap of channels like HGTV and Food Network, but Orange has ESPN and Blue has CNN. If you buy both it costs about the same as YouTube TV, but you save a decent chunk of change if you can forgo one of the packages.

The only big catch is they don’t carry local stations. If you sign up for 3 months in advance though, they’ll ship you a network connected TV antenna that you can use inside the Sling app to watch local TV. It’s probably not the most parent-friendly solution, but it works for watching one or two event programs a year like the Super Bowl or a debate.

“One day I’m going to be a 70 year old man named Zac.”

Which programming language is this a book cover for?

I think you’re dramatically overestimating how much people want to discuss politics with a stranger who slides into their mentions pointing out logical fallacies.

Modern satellites are protected by various means of encryption, but there’s an enthusiast community that tracks down and communicates with very old unencrypted zombie satellites. There’s even been an NGO which managed to fire rockets on an abandoned NASA/ESA probe (with their approval.)

The Voyagers benefits primarily from the lack of groups with an adequate deep space network to communicate with it. Their communication standards are otherwise completely open and well documented.

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

Zac Gorman’s comic with the original dialog: https://magicalgametime.com/post/48470399171

The two hardest problems in computer science are cache invalidation, naming things, and off by one errors.

The signal to noise ratio has seemed particularly out of wack with Google lately. The amount of blog spam SEO nonsense that crops up into the top 4 results has been pretty noticeable.

I’m not sure it’s entirely a Google thing. Reddit’s decline has made it harder to find quick answers for, “My washing machine’s making this weird string of beeps?” Niche hobbies moving from forums to Discord chats means, “How do I safely remove a keycap without damaging the switch?” is becoming a pinned message in a server you have to hear about via word of mouth. Basically any technology troubleshooting topic has moved from a blog post / forum to a YouTube video. And a 10 minute long one at that. Gotta hit those higher ad tiers.

For what it’s worth, I’m starting the new year off giving Kagi a try. It’s a startup trying to make a paid search engine work. You get 100 free searches to give it a try. After that it’s $5/mo for 300 searches, or $10/mo for unlimited. I’m not sure I’ll sign up for it just yet, but it seems pretty nice. No ads, custom components for things like Stack Overflow and Reddit, and some other nice touches for people who care about search. Their image search actually has a “View Image” link in addition to the “View Page” link. It’s hard to quantify how “good” a search result is, but I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far.