I think everyone is missing a key point. They won’t last 2000 years, or even 100. Tech aside, nature will wear them off long before then.
We have clay tablets that are 3,000 years old and still readable. Those qr codes aren’t etched deep in granite but some will survive through luck.
“One prominent theory suggests they may be a sigil used in the worship of the deity ‘missingno’.”
I’m sure funeral homes won’t forget to renew the domains. Should have just encoded text.
A subscription service etched in literal stone targeted at the emotionally vulnerable. Not even death will stop these techbros exploiting corpses for money.
Doesn’t have to be a URL. You can encode any data.
No subscription required.
Of course, it’ll erode over time.
I think you may be vastly overestimating the storage capacity of a QR code and the goodwill of any company attempting this. You’re not fitting obituaries in that, certainly not any image.
3 kilobytes more or less.
And if you want an image, well, put the image on the stone.
I once made and posted an absurdist/Kafkaesque drawing (not exactly drawing as I heavily edited my drawing on a GIMP-like mobile image editor to include lots of textual elements mimicking and mocking the writing style from most Western LLMs) imagining the dystopian concept of a techbro-sounding ads for a “smart coffin” (“kadAIve®”).
The coffin, made of carbon fiber, replaces the tombstone plaque with a hollow QR Code followed by the deceased’s subscription plan (“kadAIver Premium+”), paid by the deceased’s consciousness digitalized to a computer in “opt-out” conditions (“opt-out available only for Premium+ plans”) who’d be kept working postmortem to a corporation like a disincarnated Sisyphus.
Although I was imagining the QR code as a link to a necromantic “LLM-powered” simulacra, it was a QR code nevertheless, a QR code on a coffin, and I was imagining such a scenario in the not-so-far future, except… oh, dammit…! Now I understand the kind of struggle experienced by The Onion et al, trying to be more absurdist than the absurd reality. lol
A graveyard full of dead links. How spooky.
Technically, there’s nothing stopping them from just putting the full obituary text in the QR code.
But I know they’ll just use a link shortener…
I’m gonna get this one:
This will be mine:
i have one of those already. my bookmarks file on the home pc, which began life ~ early 2001 and has thousands (10s of thousands… probably) of entries. it’s been ‘de-duped’ a few times over the years, but i’ve never ran a dead-link checker on them.
me too
wayback machine them
I have (unloaded) tabs that are years old and I’ll occasionally click on one and find a dead link. Yeesh
I have one from 10 years ago that’s probably half dead. Websites just love changing their path structures and breaking every link and bookmark that pointed to them.
our small biz website is over twenty years old. it’s been through numerous designs, several different backends, moved servers five times… url schemes change, site organization and content changes… but every single url that once existed and no longer does today, has a redirect to the relevant existing page. every. single. one. it’s an ‘automatic’. it’s something i’ve always done dating back to the earliest of early days of http
Good on you for doing that. When it’s 3rd party it can be out of your control. I know for software it’s not an easy choice to be locked into old schemas or going with a new one that might break things.
A qr code can hold data itself, like 3 kb. Using it for text and pictures is kind of redundant though since you could also just carve the picture and text on the tombstone.
Using it for an URL to be able to store more data seems like a bad idea for other reasons. The oldest still active URL is 35 years. Who knows what happens once the owner dies or just decides to stop maintaining it.
Also, for the relatives. Having to maintain the online page seems like a burden and an obstacle to letting go.
Perhaps the QR code spec defines the maximum to be 3kb but in practice that might not be ideal.
3kb is something like a 155 x 155 grid.
It would still work I guess but it would look ugly and would be harder to scan if it got dirty.
Make the tombstone an access point/server and the qr code the login to the WiFi.
The curse of the modern mummy would be a rootkit.
We finally managed to crack the code! It’s an ancient dialect that hasn’t been spoken for millennia and we don’t know what it means, but at least we can decipher the image now!
We believe it was a religious enchantment of sorts. It reads: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
I mean, given the different but not random patterns to them, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone thought them to be a writing system. They’re not entirely far off from one, just one designed for computers.
Yeah this is probably easy to crack, although not sure they’ll use the same URL structure, personally I’d put a text not an URL but personally I’d also like my body to be tossed in the trash, or wild, dunno but burial and cremation are either too expensive or I don’t like them but again I’d be dead
I wish sky burials were legal in the US. I wanna be picked apart by vultures dammit
I have a similar wish, except in my case it’s Brazil and I wish I could be picked apart by Great Horned Owls (jacurutus) instead.
All fun and games until the funeral misspells your ghost.cx domain
If the QR codes on gravestones aren’t Rickrolls then what’s the point of dying anymore.
This is the only correct answer, anything else will probably go unmaintained in like 2 decades max.
What future?
If there’s ads at the link, it could at least contribute to their financial legacy, if not wealth in the afterlife
Like, why?
It’s not like today’s children actually know what a save icon actually represents…
