A graveyard full of dead links. How spooky.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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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
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.
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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 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.
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.
Which won't be very useful when the domain doesn't work or sends them to a sports betting website.
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.
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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.
And data it links to is perfectly safe in the cloud! /s
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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.
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.
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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
Is the actual obituary encoded into the qr (doesn't it look like it)? Or is it just a link to an ai slop site that will be offline in 3 months?
Edit:
It's a link.
http://www.qr-memories.com/timothytuttiett
Edit 2:
Their pricing is criminal. £200 for just the QR code.
Edit3: This is cringe but obviously something people want. I wonder if there is some way to do this for free/reasonable price in a way that isn't a total scam?
... and the irony that there would be a dead link on someone's gravestone the moment the company goes out of business... unless someone goes there and peels off the sticker.
Anyone could set up a website and point a QR code at it. The issue is one of longevity - what use is a QR code if the site/domain goes down in 5 years? It has to be something which lasts a period of time into the future guaranteed. Or the QR code is just self-describing - 2kb of information about the person.
As for this service, it looks like BS. I see no evidence on their website that they will even try to hold the server in perpetuity or even guarantee it will be up a year from now. I expect the service to last as long as they can convince people to fork out £200 for a link, but that's it.
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The more I read about history the more I don't believe people were more or less superstitious than they are today. I think the way they spoke was the only difference
Half of us are OK with destroying the world because we'll be rewarded afterwards.
What future?
"One prominent theory suggests they may be a sigil used in the worship of the deity 'missingno'."
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.
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
All fun and games until the funeral misspells your ghost.cx domain
I don't know how everyone else missed the obvious solution here.
Simply immortalize your obituary and image as an NFT, linked with the QR code. Not only is it saved forever on the blockchain, but also visitors can dynamically track ownership of your soul.
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