Lately I’ve been thinking about orphaned code. Code that’s still running, live, with no remaining developers or users.
Forgotten hardware devices. Deserted VMs on cloud free tiers. Smart contracts whose DAOs disbanded years ago. Old school internet worms. Abandoned, starving Tamagotchi.
Can you think of other examples?
There are obvious conclusions here about maintainability, ecosystem security, etc, but I’m not here to lecture, I have no particular conclusions. Just a vibe.
If this grabs you, I wholeheartedly recommend the short story "Coding Machines" by Lawrence Kesteloot. I re-read it every few years, and it throws me for a loop every time. https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/
testing zaps for this note… your profile only specifies a nip05 nostr address, but not a lightning address, so we tried to zap your nip05 address.... we made six attempts to⚡zap this note, at _@snarfed.org, over a period of 7 minutes. in each case, we found that your lightning address service or server did not respond correctly. if you wanted to fix this... you could try getting a free rizful lightning address -- https://rizful.com ... if u get it set up, pls reply here so we can do this ⚡zap test again.
@snarfed.org 🎭
