xkcd
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Search complete. 96 mentions across 71 episodes found for "xkcd".
Oct 30, 2026
Elliot WilliamsHOST
Building the infinite matrix of Tamagotchis is absolutely hilarious.
Elliot WilliamsHOST
It either was inspired by or inspired an XKCD cartoon, and I don't actually know which direction that one went.
Elliot WilliamsHOST
anyway definitely give these talks a look there's a long and lovely history of tamagotchi hacking early early this year there's a precursor to you know not the classic tamagotchi not this brand new tamagotchi paradise but a middle stage tamagotchi connection where they talk to each other using irda and that protocol has also been reverse engineered naturally and spoofed and what i think we had a in early january this year where zach resmer made basically a tamagotchi irda feeding sao so it's a simple add-on that you can have on your badge and it'll feed anyone's tamagotchi that comes by if it's one of the ones that speaks this infrared protocol So yeah, Tamagotchi hacking.
Elliot WilliamsHOST
It's pretty rad.
GaryHOST
So it probably gets worse before it gets better.
GaryHOST
And if it gets better because someone has built some new tool, then I suppose it's XKCD standards all over again, isn't it?
AaronHOST
How much of the problem do you think is that everybody wants to run their cloud-native development team or infrastructure team like Google, even if they're only three people?
SeanHOST
That's a fair question.
Grant SandersonGUEST
And I think with a little bit of foresight, you can actually avoid having to rely on chance in quite the same way.
Grant SandersonGUEST
There's a post I like on the webcomic XKCD that shows a man standing on a stage, and he has bags of cash surrounding him.
Grant SandersonGUEST
Never stop buying lottery tickets, he says.
Grant SandersonGUEST
No matter what people tell you, I failed again and again, but I never gave up, and here I am as proof that if you put in the time, it pays off.
GaryHOST
So it probably gets worse before it gets better.
GaryHOST
And if it gets better because someone has built some new tool, then I suppose it's XKCD standards all over again, isn't it?
AaronHOST
How much of the problem do you think is that everybody wants to run their cloud-native development team or infrastructure team like Google, even if they're only three people?
SeanHOST
That's a fair question.
Andy LoweHOST
how much of the internet is based off of just old school chewing gum.
Dave PillayHOST
Oh, have you seen the XKCD comic? Hang on.
Dave PillayHOST
I'm pulling it up.
Dave PillayHOST
So XKCD is like, you know, so prophetic.
Dave PillayHOST
So prophetic.
Dave PillayHOST
And in this case, there are two relevant XKCDs.
Dave PillayHOST
So here's one relevant XKCD, which is the All Modern Digital Infrastructure.
Dave PillayHOST
And the project Some Random Person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003.
August BourniqueHOST
That's not a new idea either.
August BourniqueHOST
I think there's multiple famous XKCD comics about it.
August BourniqueHOST
This is
Piet De VaereHOST
not novel.
Piet De VaereHOST
There is also an XKCD comic about using four as a random number, by the way.
August BourniqueHOST
We were talking about prophetic texts earlier or prophecy earlier.
August BourniqueHOST
But what I was getting at with that was we're looking at really, it seems like this week, this kind of approach to what is effectively the infrastructure, the global infrastructure for modern commerce and modern life.
Mitchell GattingHOST
And I was like, is that stuff running? You've got nothing on the backend, but if you've got somewhere they could potentially harvest things off it.
Mitchell GattingHOST
Um, But there was a XKCD joke about this that made the comic where it was just like all these different security protections, you know, authentication or authorization, permitless, like we don't have firewalls and that kind of jazz.
Mitchell GattingHOST
At the bottom of it all was like this Jenga piece and it was just like open source PHP or something along those lines.
Mitchell GattingHOST
Whereas like, yeah, you could do all of this, but like one person needs to flick the bomb.
James BallGUEST
But it was a good reminder that a lot of the internet is essentially built on completely crumbling infrastructure.
James BallGUEST
It's like the XKCD comic.
James BallGUEST
In fact, you said something good on this one.
James BallGUEST
I always mentioned it to
John BrittonGUEST
And version numbers are an interesting thing.
John BrittonGUEST
What does the version number actually signify? There's this famous XKCD one.
John BrittonGUEST
It's like, this is the version number bump that people care about.
John BrittonGUEST
What makes this 2.0 really is that there's now a workbook app.
PaulHOST
Or we would be so much better off if we had one standard of cable.
PaulHOST
Reminds me of this classic XKCD comic where there's this dialogue between two characters and one of them is shocked.
PaulHOST
What do you mean there's 14 competing standards for the same thing? We should have a standard that puts everything together and we should use one.
PaulHOST
end result six months later, we have 15 now competing standards.
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