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.

Massachusetts just made free school meals permanent!

#MAPoli #massachusetts

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/free-school-meals-students-budget-massachusetts/

One thing I still find very frustrating with #fediverse is the way interactions often are hidden. I commented on a post, it looked like I was the only one, but after opening "original post" I saw several other comments that were invisible to me at first.

This feature means I miss out on interesting conversations and makes it more difficult to find new accounts to follow. And I just don't understand why this is.

Tesla exaggerated EV range so much that drivers thought cars were broken

Inundated with complaints, Tesla created "Diversion Team" to cancel appointments.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/tesla-exaggerated-ev-range-so-much-that-drivers-thought-cars-were-broken/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

What do these developments have in common?
- Libraries are running institutional #repositories
- Scholarly organizations are hosting #mastodon instances
- the EU council decides to foster #openscience infrastructures
- The EU launches #CoARA to deprecate #bibliometrics and journal brand

They are all steps towards replacing academic journals
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230206
with interoperable, not-for-profit infrastructures based on #foss and #openstandards
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.230207