I can't give an authorative answer (not my domain), but I think there are two ways these types of things are done.

First is just observing the page or service as an external entity; basically requesting a page or hitting an endpoint, and just tracking whether you get a response (if not, it must be down), or for measuring load level in a very naive way, track the response time. This is easy in the sense that you need no special access to the target. But it's also limited in its accuracy.

Second way, like what your github example is doing, is having access to special api endpoints for (or direct access to) performance metrics. Since the github status page is literally ran by Github, they obviously have easy access to any metric they could want. They probably (certainly) run services whose entire job is to produce reliable data for their status page.

The minute details of each of these options is pretty open ended; many ways to do it.

Just my 5¢ as a non-web developer.

I know it won't happen, but I keep imagining CDDA getting the "Steam" treatment ala Dwarf Fortress. Both games are amazing... Should play CDDA again myself. Always such a pain to remember HOW to play though, and by the time my muscle memory gets good enough that I can actually fluidly play the game instead of staring at keybinds, I've kinda run out of gas 😄

I'm not so sure we're missing that much personally, I think it's more just sheer scale, as well as the complexity of the input and output connections (I guess unlike machine learning networks, living things tend to have a much more 'fuzzy' sense of inputs and outputs). And of course sheer computational speed; our virtual networks are basically at a standstill compared to the paralellism of a real brain.

Just my thoughts though!

What do you mean 20 years ol-... holy fuck they're right. I am sad now.

There's just something about it that won't click with me even though I recognize it as being a good game.

Tbh, I have had this feeling so many times over the years, makes me curious about the reason for it. So many objectively great games, that I recognize as such based on my own inspection (vs just parroting what others say or believe), yet just can't get myself into.