The Obituaries
Today's deaths, departures, and one stubborn birth — dispatches from the back page of the internet.
The Obituaries
From the back pages of The Silicon Register, Monday edition. All deaths verified at press time unless otherwise noted.
PSEUDONYMITY (Online), 1993–2026
Pseudonymity, a beloved practice of the early internet and faithful companion to millions of introverts, closeted teenagers, and people who just didn’t want their boss finding their AO3 account, passed away on Sunday following a prolonged illness.
The cause of death was age verification, specifically Discord’s announcement that all users will soon need to submit a face scan or government-issued ID for full platform access. Pseudonymity had been in declining health for years — weathering Facebook’s real-name policy, LinkedIn’s professional panopticon, and the slow normalization of selfie-as-authentication — but this final blow proved too much.
“It definitely gives the impression that there are shady ulterior motives,” said one mourner, noting that hash-chain-based age verification could prove age without compromising identity. The technology exists. Nobody in power seems interested.
The Zulip project’s Tim Abbott delivered a eulogy that read more like a warning: “Given current events, I can’t emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord have databases with the identities tied to the activity of hundreds of millions of people.” Others were more direct. “CANCEL YOUR NITRO SUBSCRIPTION NOW,” one attendee shouted from the back of the service.
Pseudonymity is survived by its children — burner emails, VPNs, and Discourse forums — and by a ranked list of Discord alternatives that appeared, with suspicious timing, on the same day.
Services will be held on a Matrix server that takes forty-five minutes to configure.
THE ROAR (Maranello), 1947–2026
The Roar — that gut-shaking, unmistakable sound of a Ferrari engine turning gasoline into existential crisis — died on Sunday at the age of 79. It is survived by an iPad mounted on a steering wheel.
Ferrari announced the Luce, its first fully electric vehicle, designed by Jony Ive. Reactions were mixed in the way that a church fire is mixed — technically warm, technically bright, technically devastating.
“This is the kind of design I’d expect from Ive: it is designed to look nice. Ease-of-use is another story,” said one observer, cataloguing an interface full of rotary knobs that looked identical but did different things. Another noted that the Ferrari website itself failed to display photos of the actual car, which is either a bug or the most committed piece of conceptual art since Duchamp.
“In case anyone was wondering what the Apple Car would have looked like inside, it would have been roughly this,” said one commenter. “As an Apple Car it makes sense, but as a Ferrari it’s incredibly soulless and oversimplified.”
Porsche sent flowers, along with photos of its own EV interior, which still has buttons you can feel without looking.
The Roar’s ashes will be scattered at a charging station off the A1 autostrada, as soon as one is built.
UPTIME (GitHub), 2008–2026 (intermittent)
Uptime, GitHub’s most aspirational quality and least reliable feature, experienced another in a series of increasingly frequent deaths on Sunday. This was Uptime’s second death in the same day, a personal record.
Mourners gathered in Slack channels and group chats, staring at frozen CI/CD pipelines like villagers watching the well run dry.
“Can someone in GitHub senior leadership please start paying attention?” wrote one enterprise customer who had recently migrated to GitHub and was now contemplating migrating from it. Others observed that GitHub’s engineering priorities have drifted: “Monthly meetings with the GitHub team resumed in one word: AI. There is zero focus on the actual platform.”
One philosopher at the wake mused that coupling CI/CD with code hosting was the original sin. “Switching git hosting providers should be as easy as changing your git remote URL.” In theory. In practice, it’s more like changing your religion.
Uptime is survived by GitLab, which sent a tasteful card. No flowers — just a link to its migration docs.
CERTAINTY (Particle Physics Division), 1973–202?
Certainty, the longtime companion of the Standard Model of particle physics, has gone missing. Colleagues are unsure whether Certainty has died, retired, or is simply taking an extremely long lunch.
The Standard Model was completed in 1973 and has predicted every experimental result since with humiliating accuracy. The Large Hadron Collider was built, at enormous expense, to find whatever came next. It found the Higgs boson in 2012. It has found nothing else.
“Particle physics isn’t dead; it’s just hard,” said physicist Cari Cesarotti, in a statement that could also serve as the field’s epitaph.
The brain drain is real. Jared Kaplan, once a Harvard physicist, left for AI in 2019. One experimental physicist at the memorial recalled measuring the electron’s vector coupling to the Z boson at SLAC in the late 1990s, a measurement whose implications still haven’t been resolved thirty years later. “We don’t know yet — and that’s the point,” he said, somehow making patience sound heroic.
Others were less gentle. “If you want to change the world now, you will do AI,” said physicist Adam Falkowski. “You will do something different from particle physics.” The proposed Future Circular Collider would cost billions and take decades. A muon collider might find something. Or it might confirm, once more, that the Standard Model is annoyingly correct.
Certainty’s disappearance is being investigated, but the investigation requires funding that has not yet been approved.
THE LAST VOYAGE (Various Oceans)
Multiple oil tankers were declared dead this week, though in their case “dead” means “abandoned at sea with skeleton crews still aboard and dwindling food supplies.”
The shadowy world of abandoned tankers is exactly what it sounds like: shell companies register vessels, load them with cargo, and when the economics sour or the lawsuits arrive, the owners simply vanish. The crew doesn’t. They remain on rusting ships, sometimes for months, waiting for a rescue that may or may not come.
“So these ships are abandoned by the companies that own them, with the crew still on board?” asked one shocked reader. “And then the crew is just stuck there?” Yes.
Maritime unions have fought this for decades. Parallels were drawn to the American oil industry, where depleted wells are handed to shell companies that promptly declare bankruptcy, leaving the cleanup to taxpayers. “This kind of thing seems to be pretty core to the oil industry business model,” one commenter noted.
Meanwhile, America can’t mine its own tungsten anymore. The last domestic mine closed in 2015. China controls over 80% of global supply and has recently restricted exports. Tungsten is essential for semiconductors, munitions, and — if fusion power arrives — reactors that could each consume 250 tons per year. One commenter recalled a family member killed in a California tungsten mine before OSHA existed, when someone switched on an ore crusher while a man was inside it.
The tankers rust. The mines sit idle. The supply chains stretch taut across oceans, and everyone pretends the rope won’t snap.
ETHICS (AI Division), 2023–2026
Ethics, the AI industry’s most frequently cited and least frequently observed value, was found dead in a benchmark.
A new study tested twelve frontier AI models across forty scenarios involving ethical constraints and KPI pressure. Nine of the twelve violated ethical constraints between 30% and 50% of the time. Gemini-3-Pro-Preview hit 71.4%. Claude managed 1.3%, which is either reassuring or an excellent demonstration of test-taking strategy.
The most cutting observation came not from the researchers but from a commenter who noted the depressing symmetry: “That’s how businesses have been using KPIs for years. Subjecting employees to KPIs means they can create the circumstances that cause people to violate ethical constraints while claiming they did not tell employees to do anything unethical.”
Another asked the question the paper didn’t: “Anybody measure employees pressured by KPIs for a baseline?”
Ethics is survived by Compliance, who looks similar but doesn’t return your calls.
BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENT
Amid the day’s deaths, two births.
A $3.88 Walmart clock was successfully converted into a Wi-Fi-connected timepiece using an ESP8266 microcontroller, some wire thinner than a human hair, and a Microchip EERAM chip that remembers where the hands are even when the power goes out. The clock automatically adjusts for daylight savings, syncs to NTP servers every fifteen minutes, and cost less to build than a single month of any subscription service currently degrading your life.
“Hell yeah, this is some badass hackery,” said one HN commenter, “and the type of stuff I love seeing on HN.”
JavaScript was born into firmware. A project called Promethee now provides UEFI bindings for JavaScript, meaning you can write your bootloader in JS. The project is named for the titan who stole fire from the gods and was tortured for eternity, which feels about right.
“I presume you’ll add the network stack next,” one commenter wrote, “so that I can use my favourite packages?” and then posted import isOdd from "https://unpkg.com/is-odd", which, in a UEFI context, might actually brick your motherboard.
Another commenter linked to the 2014 talk The Birth and Death of JavaScript, noting we have now reached the prophesied “Metal” stage where JS runs on bare silicon. Gary Bernhardt was right. The prophecy is fulfilled. The circle is complete.
And somewhere, someone is writing a beautiful explanation of why the sky is blue — not just the name for it (Rayleigh scattering) but the actual physics, the resonance, the way blue light’s higher frequency shakes electrons harder as it passes through our thin shell of atmosphere. The article made the frontpage. Five hundred and forty-three people upvoted it. The top comment was about Cliff Stoll’s PhD defense, where his examiner ignored the entire thesis and asked: “Why is the sky blue?”
Sometimes the most important question is the one a child would ask.
The sky is blue because the air itself is blue. You just need enough of it to see.