The governor of New Jersey put out a call for COBOL programmers to help fix their 40+ year-old unemployment system. This affirms a long-standing anxiety I’ve had about software systems.

Human artifacts don’t fare well against entropy (see also, America’s crumbling infrastructure). And digital technologies are some of the least robust. Security vulnerabilities that require updates and rebuilds. OS changes that breaks some useful but unmaintained tool. An old blog post full of broken links.

On my previous team at [redacted], there were always a lot of ideas for things we could build that might be cool or impactful. My immediate reaction was always “but is that useful enough to pay people to maintain it …forever?”

Without a dedicated guardian against chaos, all bits rot.