this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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For example, Britain's national mapping organisation's brand is associated in our national consciousness with going to a small shop in a quaint village to get a map showing how to walk up a mountain. It's called Ordnance Survey. If that sounds like Artillery Research to you, that's because the project started because the king wanted to know how to accurately bomb Scotland.

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[–] Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 54 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

4,000 years ago, we were doing trigonometry, but just 200 years ago we were still putting leeches on people and not washing our hands before doing surgery.

Also, we sent people to the moon and got them back using less computing power than a smart watch.

[–] kayazere@feddit.nl 17 points 10 hours ago

It’s insane how wasteful modern software is. The infinite growth mindset causes companies to pack more useless features into software and load it up with spyware and adware.

Google and Facebook’s tracking and ad software are a big cause of computing waste in most websites and mobile apps.

[–] otacon239@lemmy.world 29 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

Those computers has less memory than a dollar store calculator. The bits in memory were physical magnets woven by hand into a mesh. It’s insane that it left our planet and came back with people alive.

[–] Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

to be fair, most of the calculations were done on Earth

[–] PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 10 points 17 hours ago

Yeah, they even employed weavers to make the memory units, because it was easier than training factory workers to deal with such thin wire.