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Cake day: July 31st, 2025

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  • Yeah. It’s not “how evilly can we design this to only last three years”, it’s “how cheaply can we design this to last only at least as long as it has to”. There’s a difference between making it fail and just not caring if it continues.

    Like how the mars rovers had a design lifetime of like three years or whatever, and anything past that was just a bonus. NASA didn’t design them to fail after three years, they designed them to last at least three years at minimum.


  • Survivorship bias, sort of. Some things were definitely made to be repairable, but a lot of stuff was made that way because it was the best option. We didn’t have cheap plastic manufacturing processes and one little logic board controlling everything, it was solid mechanical timer components.

    And if they broke beyond reasonable repair, they were thrown out.