[ ]( ) [WALL·E](

WALL-E - Wikipedia

) 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. It’s a very, very…mad world.

We had some downtime bridging to Bluesky last night, roughly 10:30-15:30 UTC. Back up and running as of a couple hours ago. Bridging from Bluesky, and between web and fediverse, were unaffected. Apologies for the outage! Will investigate, feel free to follow

GitHub

Hub outage · Issue #2150 · snarfed/bridgy-fed

Took down our bridging to Bluesky last night, 2025-10-19 10:30-15:30 UTC ish. Like #1315, but different root cause. Saw this once, a bit before we ...

for details.

[*Art of Manga*](

FAMSF

Art of Manga

Manga — Japanese comics and graphic novels — have become a global phenomenon. Art of Manga showcases the world of manga from the 1970s to today.

), [de Young Museum](

FAMSF

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Together, the Legion of Honor and de Young make up San Francisco’s largest public arts institution.

), Oct 2025

standards bodies: “bureaucracy for good”

A glimpse into the [Bridgy Fed](

Bridgy Fed

Bridgy Fed is a bridge between decentralized social networks like the fediverse, Bluesky, and web sites and blogs.

) monitoring dashboards. Pretty conventional mix of infra, OS, and app level metrics. Note the delay numbers. When you do something in one network, how quickly do we bridge it across? We pay a lot of attention to that, we try hard to keep it as fast as possible! []( ) []( ) []( ) []( ) I wish we could [make these dashboards public](https://github.com/snarfed/bridgy-fed/issues/1546 )! Google Cloud Monitoring doesn’t support that right now; [hopefully they will eventually](

Google Issue Tracker

).

office []( )

[]( )

I don’t understand the value of consumer VPNs. Can someone explain it to me? We do pretty much everything over SSL these days. Definitely everything that matters. That provides confidentiality, so network intermediaries can’t see the data, and server authentication, so they can’t impersonate the server. Yes, DNS is the exception, it’s not encrypted, but more and more browsers and other user agents are building in DoH and DoT, and even enabling it by default. So, given all that, what do general purpose VPNs add? What am I missing? Are they just security theater marketing? Or do they bundle other security features like anti-malware etc, and the term “VPN” now means a bundle of miscellaneous endpoint security features, like (shudder) anti-virus used to?

[]( )

In 100 years, when people look back on health care today, I suspect they’ll think our dependence on symptoms was a bit…barbaric. “So if something went wrong, they didn’t notice until it got bad enough to *hurt*? Really?! They just ignored it until then? But that’s so late! How crude. Thank God we don’t have to live like that now.” Yes, we do blood panels and biomarkers and imaging and “wellness.” And yes, we have wearables and CGMs and other devices. Most are nowhere near medical grade, but they’re getting better, and more accessible. Still, for lots of diseases, even critical ones like cancer, where catching them early can make all the difference, most of the time we’re still waiting until someone shows up in clinic, coughing up blood and complaining that their side hurts, or poking at a bump on their skin and saying, unconvincingly, “This isn’t a big deal, right? This is fine…right?” I can’t imagine we’ll still be this symptom-driven in 2125. After all, even now, when you think about it, it seems pretty…barbaric.