Two things that make me cray-cray:

1) people who confuse kindness and mercy with weakness;

2) people who confuse values and beliefs with strongly-held (and usually very tenuous) personal convictions about nearly everything under the Sun.

Someone close to me once said the secret to happiness is to lower your expectations, or to limit the number of things you feel really strongly about.

I don't completely subscribe to this point of view. To me happiness has more to do with severely limiting the number of things I consider myself an expert on, and even then trying really damn hard to pretend I don't know anything about those subjects all day long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ATJhCIeaqo

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.