What are being referenced here?
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2025
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Honestly, this could be referring to most open-source projects. I’d imagine many of the popular ones were originally made to solve a problem for themselves and then everyone jumps onboard with that solution.
Linux itself also kinda fits here considering it was meant to just sort of be a small project in the beginning and I doubt Linus ever could have predicted what it became.
I have a tiny php library for a somewhat popular framework. It was made so a company could protect a very old database and certain tables. It started as a one off 9 years ago. It was one php file of less than 50 lines.
As of this month it has been downloaded 2 million times. I still can't believe its been used this much. And I'm the only maintainer. If I wanted to I could ruin a lot of peoples days. But I won't.
In a couple of decades, we are going to have large swaths of code that will outlive its creators being used on essential infrastructure.
Which one?
Laravel.
Whelp.
"most" is a bit strong. Many open source projects never get users or any kind of traction, they're just a passion project for the author. The lucky few fill a need and take off. Review the package usage count on npm or the GitHub stars for projects - there's a tiny fraction that make it big.
Considering that making it big just means a lot of responsibility, angry messages, AI-driven bug reports and still no pay, I wouldn't call them lucky.
I would, sarcastically.
one morning my wife and I were talking about Penis Pumps. Then I left for work, got annoyed with managing how many different AWS account credentials I had to manage in my dev-box terminal, and wrote a script to manage it for me.
I named my script PPump because lmao. My team lead saw me use it one day, logged into my dev-box and took the script and published it to our internal GitLab without knowing why I named it PPump.
Now one year later our entire office has PPump baked into the default devbox image. Every day people penis pump into their AWS accounts. They have no idea and I can't ever say anything about it.
Anyway this meme speaks to me in primordial ways.
Probably the original xkcd of this.
That's such a great riff on the original xkcd
Do you remember where you found it?
I don't know what the source is, but I remember seeing the "AI" bit first, and then a bit later people started editing it more and more, escalating things. I'd check sites like knowyourmeme if I wasn't lazy right now.
Pretty sure lemmy a few months back.
Edit: went to search my upvotes, only a month back.
only a month back.
2025 has been a long decade
It’s felt like a decade every year since the before times.
What's the thing at the very bottom?
Shark biting an undersea cable
Libxml would fit the description. In every browser and system and the maintainer just stepped down.
...and two others have stepped up before he actually quit.
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/commit/214fb814223614d13d44f1465302c3cbd7d1395a
https://hackaday.com/2025/12/23/libxml2-narrowly-avoids-becoming-unmaintained/
Literally every hack ever
POC is actually just short for Production (that) Occasionally Crashes
Anyone’s dependencies because they are too lazy to learn to code basic things
Lmao and I can tell you who gets to support that weird hacked together kinda janky piece of infrastructure!
Who?
Wait is it me
Unpaid and using an MIT license so that the megacorps dont contribute back? Golly, I wonder who that would be!
Many moons ago I did a project at uni where we implemented elliptic curve cryptography in Java and released it as open source. Unsurprisingly, we had no idea what we were doing. Some years later I get a random mail from someone using it on some embedded system...
I don't want to know, and I fear that ist is paramount that I maintain plausible deniability 😂♥️🙏
What is it with obscure and dark tv shows as a template?