The register
Sixty-four bits. One copy, held in one place, shared by everyone who opens this page.
It was manufactured reading GOODBITS. It has been out in the world since.
Click any bit to flip it. Everyone watching sees it move.
The 64 bits
Integrity
— bits from where it started
What it currently means
- hex
- —
- ascii
- —
- uint64
- —
- int64
- —
- float64
- —
- colour
- —
Recent damage
0 flips since the register was installed.
Why one bad bit is worth a website
Memory is not honest. Cosmic rays, marginal voltage, a cell that no longer holds its charge — a bit somewhere flips on its own, and the machine carries on as if nothing happened. These are called single-event upsets, and at data-centre scale they are not rare; they are a Tuesday.
Server memory answers this with ECC. A SECDED code spends eight extra bits per sixty-four so that any single flipped bit can be repaired in flight, and any two can at least be noticed. That is the whole bargain, and it is why the meter above stops being reassuring so quickly:
- 0 bits — the word as designed.
- 1 bit — ECC repairs it silently. You would never know.
- 2 bits — ECC notices and refuses to guess. The machine halts instead of lying.
- 3+ bits — past what the code can see. The corruption is now simply the truth.
Built on Cloudflare Pages, with the word itself held in a single Durable Object so that everyone is provably looking at the same sixty-four bits. Raw state: /api/state.