Nov 12, 2025
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Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
Historically, the high technical entry barriers to publishing one's own work has left indie video games vulnerable to allegations of "programmer art": that is, a tendency for the audiovisuals to be created by people who don't know what they're doing because "real" artists are barred from the medium by lack of technical know-how.
In this sense, it's heartening to see that coding one's own game has become sufficiently accessible in the past decade or so that we're finally seeing the fruits of the natural yet historically largely unattested-to counterpart to programmer art: artist programming.
The thing about the Witch Hat Atelier world is that the magic system sounds great until you realize it's essentially programming and that sobers you up immediately. Sure, maybe you reach the level of skill needed to draw perfect curves, straight lines, and circles without looking down, but after that you still need to be able to logic out which combination of sigils will actually give you the desired effect, and if you misplace a single line it all goes to shit. Add to that the inclusion of effect-altering inks and you start to understand why Olruggio is Like That.
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN READ FROM A FILE
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN WRITE TO A FILE
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN ACCEPT USER INPUT
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN PLAY AUDIO AT AN APPROPRIATE VOLUME
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN RUN FOR AN EXTENDED PERIOD OF TIME WITHOUT CRASHING
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU CAN DISPLAY TO A MONITOR
YOU ARE A FUNCTIONAL APPLICATION YOU KNOW HOW TO RUN