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 vibe grabs you too, 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.
@noelransome.bsky.social looking at WALL-E screenshots led me to this old article of yours, it’s a banger. So so true. One of the most jarring movies I’ve ever seen, the first section is so incredibly good, the rest is so drastically different, so much more prosaic and forgettable. Hard to watch.
All the forgotten first gen wearables – the Nike wristband, fitbits that no longer have an app or server they can talk to.
@snarfed.org oh! You mean Google groups?
@snarfed.org smart devices whose companies went out of business and can no longer phone home.
Heck, email alone would be an infinitely deep rabbit hole. All that spam, all those automated jobs, all those listservs
@snarfed.org at a former employer we had several services which we thought were in use but it turned out all the traffic came from the IT department monitoring said services.
10 years they ran like that before I decommissioned them only to have someone from IT showing up in my office being angry about breaking their monitoring.
Made me wonder if stuff I knocked up donkeys years ago is still chugging away and will never be retired. Bit sad really.
@snarfed.org you would love “When Sysadmins ruled the world” by @pluralistic . It’s a lovely short story that you can find here: https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-Overclocked-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html