You must log in or # to comment.
Scanning public QR codes, yikes.
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.
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
I do the opposite. I’ll move an entire directory just because the URL looks a bit nicer and break every old link. I don’t want a billion old redirect entries bogging up the codebase. Fuck it, it’s my site
Obviously it’s your site and prerogative, but it’s not a great UX.
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.
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.
What future?
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.
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.
You Connect to the WiFi and your phone is cursed with malware.
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.
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.
That’s like, the entirety of Mario on the nes in just 10 of em :)
scan next tombstone to proceed with installation
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
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.
All fun and games until the funeral misspells your ghost.cx domain
I’m sure funeral homes won’t forget to renew the domains. Should have just encoded text.
Afaik, these pages have a comment function where the visitor may express their condolences or alike. I.e. the web page not only contains content but serves a purpose.
Ok so include the URL in the text too. Keep the obituary encoded.
Why do you think it’s matters whether the URL is in plain text or as a QR code?
It would be odd if they’d use a link shortener.
QR codes aren’t contained in some exotic filetype; it’s just Unicode text. They do usually contain a link, in practice; but the OP is saying that they should just encode a plaintext version of whatever is on the destination website, and also contain a link that the mourner can visit if they wish for images or interactive content.
Indeed, you can fit about 4,200 alphanumeric English characters (so, call it about 900 words) in the biggest QR code; long enough to fit more than just an obituary, and definitely more than you’d be able to chisel onto a headstone directly; though not long enough to fit an entire life story.
Though those are also the most fiddly to print and the most likely to be damaged beyond the built-in error correction’s ability to repair; to use the best error correction, you get about half that. And at version 3 or 4, which is the size you see most often, you only get at most about 100 characters. Which is why they’re usually just links.
QR codes aren’t contained in some exotic filetype; it’s just Unicode text.
Exactly. That’s why:
Ok so include the URL in the text too.
is unnecessary.
I assume that the usual information of the deceased person, their name and dates of are still physically present on the tombstone, just the book of condolences and maybe an image or interactive content is on the web. Having only a QR code would be odd indeed.
I don’t think anyone is suggesting just a QR code.
What’s then the point @LodeMike@lemmy.today is trying to make?
So what you’re saying is that we need a better QR Code format
Because easily scanned data engraved in stone scannable by pocket supercomputer is pretty sci-fi.
I wouldn’t mind getting 900 words about someone in pure text form if it worked, and/or maybe a hologram using some sort of data saving format like pointillism (cloud of points forming a 3D image).
what you’re saying is that we need a better QR Code format
I’m not a precision optics guy, so I don’t know for sure, but it seems like the problem there is one of reliability. We’re talking about encoding digital data into an analog format, with enough error correction that it isn’t lossy, which limits our options; it needs to work in low light, at a distance, at any rotation, when a big blob of mud is stuck to it, when you’re standing off-center, when there’s reflections on it, when you’re moving, when it’s moving, in any color, with light and dark inverted, printed with any process, on any material, with any computer-connected camera, and it needs to work essentially instantly, in a standard format that enough manufacturers have agreed on that billions of phones could theoretically decode it without any additional hardware or software. Honestly it’s kind of a miracle that it happened once. I think the pixels need to be a minimum size, and it seems like Version-40 QR codes might be getting to around the limit of what we could reasonably expect a smartphone camera to reliably capture.
Because easily scanned data engraved in stone scannable by pocket supercomputer is pretty sci-fi.
Whoa, you’re absolutely right. I grouse and complain about QR codes replacing things like menus at restaurants, but if I could walk through a cemetery in 2126 and read a short obituary of someone who dies tomorrow, despite the mortuary being long since out of business, that would indeed feel sci-fi.
if it worked
I mean, it already does.
(cloud of points forming a 3D image)
3D ASCII art?!? That’s amazing!
Which won’t be very useful when the domain doesn’t work or sends them to a sports betting website.
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
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.
I think you’re missing a key point. Archaeology doesn’t look at every single thing from 2,000 years ago. All we have are sparse records of a small fraction of artifacts that happened to be preserved against the odds due to anomalous natural events. Nature could preserve a few long into the future.
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.
And data it links to is perfectly safe in the cloud! /s
Granite is astonishingly durable. A marble gravestone from as little as fifty years ago is already losing its edges, whereas I’ve seen granite stones from 100+ years ago that still look crisp and new.
If there’s ads at the link, it could at least contribute to their financial legacy, if not wealth in the afterlife
“One prominent theory suggests they may be a sigil used in the worship of the deity ‘missingno’.”
The Talos Principle
