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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer my first thought reading this was:

If I was designing a program to send me back a message and it was super critical I received it, I wouldn't put any quotes or non-alphanumerics in the message. Even if my string handling checks out, if the stakes are sufficiently high, I don't trust em!

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"Say again? You're dropping out, my battery is low Just so you know, we're going to a place nearby Gotta go!"

- Mars rover

I always assumed it sent some short, efficient code with the appropriate error correction, packet loss protection and so on and it was only the receiving program that translated to a verbose string. Is that not the case?

If I was designing such a message I'd make sure there is a lot of redundancy in the message so even if I only received part of it I could figure out what it was. Adding quotes and other non-alphanumerics can add more clues that make the message unique enough to identify it even when significant amounts of the data are lost in transmission.

We have really sophisticated, formal strategies for that purpose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_correction_code

Yep, I worked in the disk drive industry over twenty years ago, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of what we read off the disk is actually wrong! If not for a lot of generous error correction they'd've been pretty unusable.

I thought it was pretty annoying that the communications are put forth here as if the lander is an animate thing engaging in conversation with us.

Perhaps one day we'll achieve something like that. Heck, maybe we'll send up the grandchild of ChatGPT to be the voice of a future exploration probe. But that's not what we have today. These messages were coded by the engineers who built the thing, and any implication of sentiment is bogus.

Because the messages were written by people, the sentiment is more authentic than anything made by gpt.

The messages were written by the very people that they are ostensibly sent to. It's sock-puppeting.

Why does this make the sentiment insincere? Is it inauthentic if you're saying it to yourself?

And whoever wrote this didn't write it just for themselves (there are other involved people and there is public relations).

More charitably than sock puppeting, it is storytelling through personification.

If NASA themselves want to use storytelling for PR purposes, fine. I don't think that has a proper home in scientific journalism.

Isn't that what we* have been criticizing journalists about - letting the objective story get co-opted to achieve someone's agenda?

*I don't know if that "we" specifically includes you. But certainly big chunk of society, especially in technical spheres, is within the "we".

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