The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).

And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.

50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.

The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.

Threads, Twitter, and Bluesky: Our billionaire is better than your billionaire.

Mastodon: You actually don't need a billionaire at all.

Threads, Twitter, and Bluesky: Hold on, we have to ask our billionaire if that's true.

It's been 12 years since I last read this...so here we go.

#Book #WhatImReadingNow #ASOIAF