Comment on NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system

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wyyomin@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

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

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