As a child of the 70s, the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes have been a part of my earliest understanding of space and our exploration of it. I learned about them (multiple times) in school, and was excited (spoiler alert) years later with how central the fictional Voyager 6 was to the plot of the first Trek movie.

Every single time I have read that they are still sending data back I'm excited to hear it, though from what Wikipedia says there is really no likelihood either will be doing so later than 2025/2026 respectively.

This headline gave me a little "oh no" moment until I read the article. 😀

On purpose.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

I truly thought it was just tone deafness and overconfidence on the part of Musk for a good potion of this. But the last few events, along with various comments he has made along the way, have me concluding that this must be true.

They are not cool

I mean, not with that attitude.

Funnily enough, Trump would very much agree with you.

And you’d both be wrong.

Hmm, probably. But we need to rethink the details of how US democracy works.

First past the post elections are as much or more a problem than the current state of gerrymandering to our overall health as a nation (IMO), and I bizarrely find myself agreeing in different measures with both supporters and detractors of the electoral college system.

I don't have much in the way of solutions, but smarter folks than me should be figuring out how to fix these issues fairly (and probably already have) - so we can modernize without destroying our system.

what an amateurish logo, looks like what a tiny business puts up on their wordpress when they have no designers & are only making a logo

To me it looks legitimately confusingly like the xorg logo, which ironically you usually see on a Linux system only when the config to display the correct logo for something is missing or invalid.

They are called TWEETS, ELON! TWEETS!

Elon Musk: For now...

Least destructive decision he's made since acquiring it.

They don’t want to feel bad about what their ancestors did.

I don't think you need to feel bad about it to acknowledge it. That's part of what makes it so infuriating. They throw around white guilt like it's something progressives suffer from, but it's very clearly something they cower and hide from.

My family hasn't been here long enough to have been slave owners, but my grandfather was a little bit racist by today's standards (and I acknowledge he may have been more racist than I realized). My dad is a boomer who always taught us to treat people equally, but he says things now (and did back then) that would be really offensive to a modern ear. I never heard the N-word from anyone in my immediate family nor grandparents, but I'm not sure it was never said out of ear shot, and I definitely heard it from a great-uncle or two.

It's a little uncomfortable for me to say that out loud, but so what? It's nonetheless true. It reflects on them, not me, and it would be no different if I could go back a couple more generations and find a slave owner in my family. Awful, uncomfortable, but something that does not reflect on today's generation beyond their reluctance to admit it and what it meant and what it did and continues to do with regard to impacts on the community and the people who are descended from enslaved ancestors.

They should be feel bad about their own cowardice about admitting what happened in the past, not for the details of those past events.

If your great great grandparents did bad shit, don't make it worse by trying to lie and whitewash it, make it better by encouraging those truths to see the light of day so society is bettered for it, or at the very least stop trying to prevent others from doing so.

It's honestly kind of sweet that you sound so surprised.

Feels like just yesterday in some ways. But how the world has changed since then. Really sad about this.

Before you all fall for the shamless clickbait,

I used to start and end my day at Ars Technica. For years.

Has really never been the same since Conde Nast took over. I usually only end up there now when someone links an article from there. Thanks for saving me a click, and I'll pour one out for what once was...

Just created my account here in the past day. I know it probably can't last, but I don't think I've had that "cozy" feeling right away in a forum or other online community like this in decades, and I'd say it was somewhat rare even "back in the day."

So far folks seem to live up to the stated goals of the place and I think that's pretty great.