Reminds me of a character in one of Alastair Reynolds novels who is a software archaeologist. I think they're in Tau Ceti, but anyway. The character has a speci

Reminds me of a character in one of Alastair Reynolds novels who is a software archaeologist. I think they're in Tau Ceti, but anyway. The character has a specialty in digging through code that's hundreds of years old. I think we're already dealing with this. My uncle is in his 60's and maintains old truck shipping software in COBOL. Btw there are job openings in old tech like this, for those that are interested. Happy to provide introductions. But the basic problem stands, the left-pad issue. We still deride this choice. Junior engineers without supervision hap-hazardly installing dependencies. But over the course of decades and generations of developers we still "sum to zero", where most software will rely on some number of unknown dependencies. Say in 2100 an update needs to be issued. You push it through whatever is managing npm dependencies at the time. Meanwhile there is a solar system of dependent devices that need security updates. There could be trillions of dependent devices and any number of of independent intermediary caches that may or may not be recently updated. I can't event imagine what that dependency tree would look like.