This is so true tho
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Runk is Icelandic for jerking off
They are real people
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It’s super impressive.
Also interesting is that it’s one of the small number of unquestionably public domain pieces of software. Not open source, but public domain. It’s not entirely clear if you can technically put your own work in the public domain, or if you’re just freely licensing it to anyone.
Sqlite was initially developed for the US military though, which explicitly makes it public domain.
It doesn’t matter, but it’s interesting.
It’s lite architecture makes it the only valid option to not having to deploy a full on postgre
I mean, what’s the alternative aside from spinning up a MariaDB for your small local app? I can still remember the swamp of .ini files some older programs used for this or the totally overblown Windows Registry. Not a good time.
CSV or a spreadsheet (xlsx/ods)?
You didnt specify it had to be a good optio ;)db.txt
Now you’re just trying to hand-roll your own DBMS. Have fun with that. It won’t work out
Pretty sure lots of projects use json files, before that it was probably XML. Are those good or even decent alternatives? Probably depends on the amount of data …
Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
While those are the main developers neither is alone in maintaining their respective software.
Fatfs is also a big one iirc
Probably gonna get really bad once AI actors start combing the internet for exploits on a larger scale.
Start??
Also gonna get really bad once these lonely maintainers get into AI. Been browsing https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware, things looks pretty bleak.
Also extremely stable.
What do we think the blocks on the right represent? Projects like TempleOS?
ffmpeg is a good candidate im p sure
Nah that’s used by a ton of projects and websites
Calling ffmpeg a failed project is exactly what the comic is talking about lol. It’s a fantastic project and people don’t know how much water it carries
Sounds about right. Those things that are worked on by people who for whatever reason have unlimited free time and can hence afford to reinvent the wheel. SerenityOS is another example
By gods, the interactive one is great!
All I get is “Browser wants to open another app” which I have never allowed… D:
If you have Wikipedia set to open browser links that’s most likely what happened.
That is if you have the Wikipedia app installed.
Nah, I don’t have like any apps, and don’t like things trying to install them :I
Wasn’t sure whether you were using mobile or not.
I have Wikipedia set to ask to open links to Wikipedia on my phone. I thought it may have been something like that.
Aha! Nah, I’m seeing that on an iPhone with Firefox Focus.
Wat.
Just loads in for me.
I didn’t know how much I needed the interactive version until now.
I just touched the white void to the right of the structure, and slowly saw all modern infrastructure collapse.
Is this a real example? Or are we just talking about linux here
Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there’s several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.
You weren’t there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn’t just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.
Probably got put into a popular example and then everyone uses it because “that’s how.”
Huh… You know what that makes more sense than anything else I’ve come up with. I always just assumed it was lazy devs.
Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?
Nope, I was still a little too young
A huge proportion (most?) of server infrastructure runs on linux.
That’s what I meant. I phrased it badly, i meant to ask if it was about Linux or something else
It was leftpad. A stupid little function that was used by like 90% of the internet, and it crashed everything during a name dispute.
Not sure if it’s part of the joke but that word means “jerk” (as in “jerk off”) in Swedish.
So a perfect open source name then.
Runk that hog, swedish boy.
pojke/kille/grabb/gosse = boy/dude/guy/kiddo, so have fun with that. 😂
Arööö!
Is that how they climax over there?
Most likely is. Many open source projects have a joke as a name, often containing some form of innuendo or a double meaning. Helps in maintaining the free nature of the tool (corporations don’t want anything to do with it) as well as lower expectations on professionalism. Plus it’s funny, especially if it’s an in-joke of a niche language.
On the topic of “runk”, it’s also been loaned from Swedish to Finnish as runkata, or to runk = to jerk off. The actual act of it would be runkkaus or runkkaaminen. Can also be encountered in the form runkkari, aka a wanker (I’d assume Swedish had a matching equivalent). So the joke works in Finnish as well.
My go to real example is curl
Christopher’s Universal Request Library
In case anyone thinks you’re serious, that’s not what it stands for.
Yeah, its just Chris, dude HATES when people call him Christopher.
Crazy Ubiquitous, Raw, and Ludicrous
This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died… Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.
Not to downplay dmr’s importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we’d just have something else and perhaps it would’ve been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren’t a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that’s the whole importance of C, isn’t it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.
I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
Apple used Pascal up until the System 7 era anyway, C was just one of many choices of the time.
If we didn’t have C, we’d probably have eliminated things like buffer overflows and out of bounds memory accesses decades ago.
Oh wow I didn’t realize Pascal was even older than C, thought it showed up in like mid-70s or early 80s. To be fair I’ve ever only interacted with Delphi, not OG Pascal.
While I don’t necessarily like C, I am happy for C-style syntax over Pascal-style, which I’ve also worked with. Give me braces over begin and end any day of the week.
Not necessarily against what you said, but I realized you can kinda say that about anything, with some abstraction. There’s always smart people (thankfully), and they’ll often arrive at the same solutions. Roll over, Gauss.
Well I think it’s different for scientific discoveries where something is either found or not. Software and other products… There are niche things that may never exist without the author, and there are generic things that would be created in one form or another anyway. Once programming languages were a thing, general purpose high level languages were bound to happen IMO and there are infinite possible languages.
There’s lots of history you can look at to see how this works. The same thing does get invented more than once, but sometimes there’s different technologies that could each become dominant, and then there’s a real first mover advantage.
In Russia, they don’t really have highways. Everything is built around rail lines. In the Inca empire, they had highways, but highways with stairs because there was no widespread wheel usage (which itself might be down to limited available wagon pullers and rough terrain).
Sure, but what I’m saying is that at a high level of abstraction scientific discoveries are similarly inevitable as well. I don’t think niche creations are a major difference since as you yourself stated “without him we’d just have something else and perhaps it would’ve been a bit later.”. The majority build on previous findings, often many scientists are working towards the same goals, and truth is truth, whether it be found through physical experimentation or fleshing out applied logic.
Yeah, Apple would just steal literally every single idea and piece of software from someone else
I’m not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
He made money, and enemies who couldn’t actually do anything about it.
Ah. He must be a KDE contributor as well.
Kontributor
You know, I was VERY tempted to write it that way, but decided against it at the last moment.
Klearly you are not a KDE Kontributor.
Khx klreno kor kour kontribution!
Seems you’re too reserved to ever become a konqueror.
Qrunk
On top of it all, Steve Jobs wasn’t even in tech. He was in sales.
Fabrice Bellard is ten Ronalds.
FFmpeg and QEMU? Holy shit!
I had no ideaand tcc, which while maybe not as ‘important’, is extremely cool.
Is QEMU simply a VM?
It’s basically the best virtualization platform. It can do full system emulation across a number of platforms, or hardware assisted virtualization (using KVM). It’s incredibly useful for debug as well as doing real work.
I would say so? It’s an emulator and I personally use it to manage KVM on Linux. Makes my life easier.
Not really sure about the precise details, sorry
The myth of Steve Jobs needed the actual genius of others to exist. Steve’s gift to the world was recognizing and pointing out actual gifts tonthe world that would have otherwise gone unoticed or not brought to their full potential.
If Steve was still around, he would have taken Ronald’s idea and had it rebuilt with a little polish and an exorbitant price tag.
And scrubbed it of any mention of Ronald’s name before pulling it out onstage. Don’t forget that.
There is no Jobs without Wozniak.
One hundred percent, but don’t forget Jony Ive. The mythology of Steve Jobs is built on the genius of Woz and the designs of Ive.
handles all math on every machine on earth
That’s just gmp. The go-to unlimited precision arithmetic library.
For a long time all systems which deal with timezone data (like ability to convert utc to est for example) was reliant on 1 server in 1 random guy’s basement which he paid for himself. I heard they were working to correct this situation but haven’t been following it.
You sent me down the exact kind of weird rabbit hole I love. Genuinely thank you.
It’s maintained by the IANA now (the same people who basically run the modern Internet, saying what domains are allowed and such for those who don’t know). Though Arthur David Olson (the man you mentioned) still contributes his expertise and data.
You’re probably thinking of Paul Eggert.
Edit: I was a bit quick to post. The article I linked says Arthur David Olson (mentioned in sibling comment) started the TZ database, with Paul Eggert extending it and maintaining it later. The 2011 lawsuit is also mentioned in the Wikipedia page I just linked.
I remember when he got sued for copyright infringement or something ridiculous and it was big news
The amount of businesses with things you just can’t touch for whatever reason is surprising.
The reliance on something made that is barely understood by the entire company makes me think that society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Social collapse isn’t an exciting day in your life, it’s a broad trend historians will puzzle over centuries later. Look at the bronze age collapse for an example.
Some dude in the year 2345 will be shitposting about how we didn’t see it coming because we are dumb.
We did see it coming, but we are dumb
Dumb and selfish, but thats not solely human traits
Yeah, and things can putter on for hundreds of years before they really “collapse”
That sounds like a ‘crunch’ category risk
society will drag on generations after any kind of societal collapse.
Reminds me of the Imperium in Warhammer 40k how a lot of the tech they use is barely understood or some of it is not understood at all. Like the adeptus mechanicus believe in the Omnissiah (me too) and a lot of what they do is purely ritualistic.
But lots of those rituals are just stuff like turning something on in the right order. Or other mundane things that have become an arcane ritual after thousands of years that need doing for a thing to work right but nobody remembers why it needs to be done or how the thing works. Just that these are things you must do to please the machine spirits and make whatever random thing work right.
Honestly there is enough complexity in enough tech nowadays that I’m sure almost all of us are doing something similar in many areas of our life. Like I would struggle to explain how the Internet works or even how my television actually creates an image on itself. Maybe a better example would be cars, a lot of people use them but don’t know anything about necessary maintenance or basic principles of how they work.
You just explained the experience of anybody having to properly configure Apache for the first time.
Configure the right incantations and the machine god will serve your web pages, brother.
Or more things will happen like the Bhopal disaster where a chemical plant, over a decade or so, laid off or failed to replace everyone who knew what their carefully designed multi-layered safety systems did. When those systems aged and needed maintenance, the remaining production people took them out one by one. Then 500,000 people were gassed with cyanide. 2,200 immediate deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
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Here’s to all the Ronalds and Daniels out there.
Thanks.
:)
