this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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This is like watching a Windows file explorer dialog box estimate the time to completion for a file transfer.
It's because chance to hit is not a good metric to show what NASA is doing. NASA has a range of possible positions and velocities of the asteroid and therefore a range of possible trajectories. They are now narrowing the possibilities down. So they are improving the estimations, but chance to hit jumps around based on whether the eliminated possibilities intersected earth or not. The chance to hit jumping around does not mean NASA made mistakes or anything of the kind.
Yeah, I know. It was just a joke
It's a good joke, but I imagine a lot of people may not know or realize why it is jumping like that, so I wanted to leave the explanation for them.
Also: Explorer doesn't do that anymore. The estimate is usually very precise from start to end (given there isn't a sudden and unexpected change in available bandwidth).
At least on Win 10, I find it as unreliable as ever if you mix small and large files in one transfer, since small files are not bottlenecked by bandwidth.
It's the opposite. A file transfer starts quickly, gets near the end, and then the time to finish starts climbing.
file copy is much easier to estimate than the total guess work that is application install progress. those 'wizards' are dumb af. zip zip zoom almost done. wait. wait. wait. 2 minutes later--two more pixels added to the bar. wait. zip. wait. zip. crawl. crawl. wait some more....... done.
Past performance is not indicative of future results