The author does all sorts of odd-looking optimizations in order to make the web page run on a single host of cheap battery/solar powered compute.
It does seem a bit extreme, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating: this website has been featured on the HN front page many times and I’ve not seen it ever falter. The same cannot be said for the many run of the mill “infinite scalability” cloud based SPA’s that make the front page – even those maintained by sizable organizations with hefty cloud budgets.
IMO the only optimization they 'missed' is to pre-compress the static files and images on disk, since it's cheaper to decompress on-the-fly if the client doesn't support gzip. The could use zopfli to "extra compress" the most frequently accessed files, and use this as a solar dump load to usefully burn extra power when the batteries are full (perhaps compressing with gzip -1 when Pelican re-builds the static site, or even avoid pre-compression altogether during the build process.
If you take something like the “draw a bike” test, I have to wonder if the “normal” folks have any visual memory.
It’s always been curious to me that there’s this idea that people can “see” anything they wish, but then do not know what common objects look like. Whereas I’d wager any aphantastic would nail that particular test.
When I (not aphantasic) see something like a bike, I see characteristics of it but I don't imprint the entire bike as a whole. Which means that, were I to draw one, I'd have to re-derive aspects of the bike that I didn't bother to memorize, because they haven't been important to my understanding of bikes. My visualization of the bike would be less precise in the areas that I haven't memorized, like in the precise layout of the frame or location of the seat/pedals or proportions or etc. I assume that someone more familiar with bikes, who has memorized more details of a bike, would be better than I am at drawing a bike.
One problem with these kinds of organizations, is that there effectively is no "budget" other than what the various contracted work declares. A subcontractor like, say, Raytheon gets to charge a fixed % "burden"/overhead and spend that largely however they want. These "burden" funded tasks at JPL were the exclusive use of new research tasks (ostensibely), or pet projects of political superstars (like the mars copter). At any rate, they were highly scrutinized and could not be used to offset mission costs (otherwise JPL would have an unfair advantage when bidding for missions vs other NASA centers, simply b/c JPL had many more sources of funding vs other centers).
So, those who would do less ostentatious work like encoding command sequences for aging spacecraft had to find a day job.
I believe at some point they disclose the Trisolaians aren’t actually interested in “solving” the problem. They do have analytical methods, but the problem isn’t prediction but rather the fact that everything they have will routinely burn to the ground and they’ll need to restart from 0. Also they will at some point get flung into a sun.
The “we need to solve this problem!” thread was a ploy to get earthly scientists invested in their plight such that they could convince them to support their cause from the inside.
Imagining you have a navigation to “/logout” that server side invalidates your token and redirects to home, would you implement that as a link? If so, what happens if someone tries to “open in a new tab” it?
I expect the vast majority of motel patrons are additionally paying a rent/mortgage for their main habitation.
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