Traffic for the static payload is super cheap. And the insane amount of requests is handled easily by modern event-based architectures. The operation costs are most likely only a tiny amount of the overall economics of the tracker's buisness model. The generated tracking data is certainly worth an order of magnitude more then it takes to generate it.
The tragedy of the commons affects not only grey-haired astronomers but everybody who wants to learn about nature. Light pollution is already so real that I assume the majority of people in "industrialized states" haven't seen milky way with naked eyes if they cannot afford traveling to very remote areas (me included, despite I have a PhD in astrophysics, which makes me technically a grey-haired astronomer).
Of course technology will eventually solve the problem and space-based observatories are superior, despite more expensive and thus makes it more difficult to make science inclusive.
The big question is: Will the shift to orbit exclude a big part of mankind from participating? Capitalism most likely days "yes" and this is, in fact, a tragedy.
We can't avoid altering nature, especially when we expand our capabilities, which in turn lets us learn more about it. It's like quantum mechanics. Our act of observation affects the world.
And anyway, satellite constellations don't stop us learning about the universe. We can put telescopes in space. They're better than terrestrial telescopes! It's fine. We'll be okay, especially in the long run.
Please remember that change is only bad if it's change for the worse. Change in itself isn't bad.
More subtly: Change can make things worse for certain individuals, those with "night sky photography" as a hobby, or individual researchers working with solely with terrestrial telescopes. The motorcar was terrible for buggy whip makers too!
> I assume the majority of people in "industrialized states" haven't seen milky way with naked eyes if they cannot afford traveling to very remote areas (me included, despite I have a PhD in astrophysics, which makes me technically a grey-haired astronomer).
You really don't have to go that far, even from the most light-polluted places. Simply driving outside of the "greater city borders" will get you a more than good enough view to experience the awe.
> The big question is: Will the shift to orbit exclude a big part of mankind from participating? Capitalism most likely days "yes" and this is, in fact, a tragedy.
Satellite constellations in no shape way or form affect amateur astronomy, other than the "pretty pictures" aspect, and there's workarounds for that too.
It does upset professional astronomers, but I'm betting they'll adapt in the same manner that they've figured out workarounds for everything else. I suspect they'll end up using something like video capture and "median of 'n' frames" digital post-processing to filter out the satellites. Even space telescopes have to filter out noise due to radiation and the like! It's the nature of science.
I don't want this to come across the wrong way, but fundamentally: science never was "democratic", doesn't (really) pretend to be so, and especially modern science can't possibly be anything other than the plaything of very rich nation-states.
Historically, science was done by the wealthy. Lords, and the like.
These days, science is done with budgets in the millions or billions, especially astronomy where bigger and better telescopes are the name of the game.
I don't accept criticism of "global internet coming down from space" because it might stop someone from doing astronomy that is so poor that they can't even drive a few hundred miles to get a better view of the sky! They're not going to meaningfully contribute, no matter how noble their effort.
I wonder whether this requires particular GUI toolkits to be used, such as WFC. In any GUI there are enough "bad boy" toolkits which just "draw lines" and thus are not accessible at all.
The coverage varies by toolkit. Win32/WPF/GTK expose rich trees. Electron apps expose key elements but the tree is shallower. Custom-drawn UIs (games, OpenGL) have minimal or no accessibility tree. That's the main limitation.
To be honest, the same applies when a developer gets promoted to team lead. I made this experience on my own that I no longer got in touch with the code written. Reasons are slightly different (for me it was a lack of time and documentation)
I am a scientist who rarely collaborates (unlike programmers and unlike most scientists).
When I wrote a paper in collaboration some time ago, it felt very weird to have large parts of the paper that I had superficial knowledge of (incidentally, I had retyped everything my co-author did, but in my own notation) but no profound knowledge of how it was obtained, of the difficulties encountered. I guess this is how people who started vibe coding must feel.
Slightly off-topic: https://tonies.com/en-gb/ is a very popular physical music box for children coming from Germany. I guess (not sure) it pioneered figures with NFC chips which then let the wifi-connected speaker stream the music from their platform. Prices are crazy (like EUR30 for a 45min audio play) but wealthy middle class parents happily play it to avoid their children to control their streams from our sad addictive mobile screen world.
As an 1980s child I would love to see more (also cheaper) solutions coming up to make music physical again.
I'll repeat a critique I've made about Tonies before [1]:
I recently discovered Tonies when I remembered the Fisher Price cassette player which was my favourite toy when I was a kid and wanted to get something similar for my son. What I ended up getting: A used Fisher Price cassette player on e-bay plus a cassette deck to record with.
Tonies just seem like such a horribly bad deal: The actual content is content that the family already pays for twice because my wife pays for Spotify and I pay for YouTube Premium, and the content on those Tonies is actually on the streaming services as well. So, we'd end up paying for the same content a third time.
Moreover, we'd lock ourselves into a closed cloud. If the Tonie company goes out of business, Tonies will no longer work.
One of the nice things about a cassette player is that it seamlessly transitions the kid into enjoying the culture of the grown-ups. I can remember how exciting it felt as a kid when I started borrowing my dad's music and enjoying that on my Fisher Price. -- With the Tonies, you're locked into whatever content the content-mafia deems appropriate for toddlers.
There are also all the arguments pertaining to streaming vs. physical media in general that play into this, which I won't repeat here. I'll just say that children's literature is consistently a target for political influence on culture, and cloud-based centralisation makes it more vulnerable to that sort of influence -- “Vote for me, and there will be no more Taka-Tuka Land for Pippi Longstocking! That's so offensive to ... uhm ... whoever (Polynesians, I guess? Africans?) And what about that shy lion that needs to learn to roar, so the other animals will take him seriously? Toxic masculinity!”
I don't know the particulars of what the Tonie system looks like from a content creator perspective, but I certainly find it peculiar that Tonies lean heavily in the direction of Disney content. The German language is not exactly the best market for content creators. So, I think we should support our own content creators as well as we can to avoid a situation where the only kind of culture we have is translations of whatever Disney cooks up in the Anglosphere.
And the blank/creative Tonies are not a counterargument to the above because I'd expect there to be upload filters for copyrighted content and the like (or there soon will be if there isn't already).
Quite offtopic, but: I found UUIDs being overused in many cases. People then abused them to store data, making them effectively "speaking IDs" or "multi column indices".
Unless it's a key that needs to be sortable (e.g. insertion order) or a metric/descriptor of some kind, I'm not sure why UUID would be overused or inappropriate for use.
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