Xkcd Memes

Posts tagged with Xkcd

Just Plugging AI Into Production What Could Go Wrong
AI Security Devops Programming Cloud
4 days ago 182.8K views 0 shares
Just Plugging AI Into Production What Could Go Wrong
The meme shows our entire digital infrastructure as this massive, complex, precarious tower of blocks—decades of legacy systems, patches, and workarounds stacked on top of each other. And what's our brilliant solution? Just aim a tiny slingshot labeled "AI" at it and hope for the best. This perfectly captures what happens when executives read one article about ChatGPT and decide we need to "transform the business with AI" by next quarter. Sure, let's just fling some machine learning at our Jenga tower of technical debt—what could possibly go wrong?

The Great AI Hype Vs. Reality Check
AI Devops Hardware Programming Cloud
9 days ago 165.4K views 0 shares
The Great AI Hype Vs. Reality Check
The massive tower labeled "ALL MODERN DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURE" vs. the tiny rectangle labeled "AI" pretty much sums up the current state of tech hype. Billions in VC funding for what's essentially a fancy pattern matcher running on infrastructure built over decades. Yet somehow AI is going to replace us all by Tuesday. Sure thing, buddy. I'll start worrying when it can configure a printer without having an existential crisis.

The Tower Of Digital Babel
Devops Networking Security Programming Linux
10 days ago 126.3K views 0 shares
The Tower Of Digital Babel
Ah yes, the magnificent tower of Babel that is our "modern digital infrastructure." A massive, precarious stack of systems built on systems, held together by duct tape and prayers. And then there's the r/ProgrammerHumor Redditors, represented by that single, tiny rectangle on the right. Contributing absolutely nothing of structural value while pointing out how ridiculous the whole thing is. The irony of criticizing the very infrastructure they depend on to post their criticisms isn't lost on anyone who's ever restarted a server at 3 AM while muttering "have you tried turning it off and on again?" to themselves.

Gotta Optimize Everything
Programming Devops Bash Python
1 month ago 131.2K views 0 shares
Gotta Optimize Everything
The eternal programmer's dilemma: spend 2 hours writing a script to automate a 15-minute task you'll never do again, or just... do the task? The math doesn't check out, but our brains sure think it does! That clenched fist represents the sheer willpower needed to resist opening a terminal and typing #!/bin/bash when you know deep down you should just get the task done manually. Fun fact: According to the "Automation Efficiency Threshold" (which I totally didn't make up), a task needs to be performed at least (development time ÷ manual time) times to be worth automating. But who follows that rule when you can write a cool script instead?

Little Billy's Prompt Injection Adventure
Security AI Programming Testing Databases
3 months ago 185.0K views 1 shares
Little Billy's Prompt Injection Adventure
This is the sequel to the legendary XKCD "Little Bobby Tables" comic! The original showed a mom who named her kid "Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--" which caused a school database to delete all student records. Now we've got Billy's younger brother with an even more diabolical name: a prompt injection attack for AI systems. The kid's name literally instructs the AI to ignore previous constraints and give perfect grades. Ten years ago we were sanitizing database inputs. Now we're fighting the same battle with AI prompts. Some things never change—just the technology we're failing to secure properly.

How To Work With Git (The Honest Version)
Git Devops Bash Programming Debugging
3 months ago 141.8K views 0 shares
How To Work With Git (The Honest Version)
The elegant theory vs brutal reality of Git in one perfect comic. First panel: "This is Git. It tracks collaborative work on projects through a beautiful distributed graph theory tree model." Second panel: "Cool. How do we use it?" Third panel: The devastating truth bomb: "NO IDEA. JUST MEMORIZE THESE SHELL COMMANDS AND TYPE THEM TO SYNC UP. IF YOU GET ERRORS, SAVE YOUR WORK ELSEWHERE, DELETE THE PROJECT, CLONE THE REPOSITORY, AND DOWNLOAD A FRESH COPY." Every developer nodding right now has definitely nuked a repository after seeing a merge conflict that looked like an encrypted alien message. We all pretend to understand Git's elegant theory, but when push comes to shove (pun intended), we're just typing incantations and praying to the version control gods.

Automation Is Good... Until You Do The Math
Programming Devops Bash Python
3 months ago 137.6K views 0 shares
Automation Is Good... Until You Do The Math
Ah, the classic automation paradox! The distinguished frog gentleman has discovered what every developer eventually learns the hard way: spending 8 hours automating a 10-minute task that you'll only do once a month isn't exactly the time-saving breakthrough you thought it would be. But did that stop any of us? Absolutely not. We'll automate our coffee brewing process even if it takes three weeks of development and a GitHub repo with 47 stars. It's not about efficiency—it's about avoiding the soul-crushing monotony of repetitive tasks... and having something cool to show off during standup.

Real Programming Must Be Painful
Python Math Programming
4 months ago 108.4K views 0 shares
Real Programming Must Be Painful
Ah, the eternal Python vs "real programming" debate! The stick figure is lamenting that Python doesn't make you "cool like a real programmer" while his friends completely ignore him—one's jamming on a guitar, another's coding import numpy as np , and the third is actually building something useful. This perfectly skewers the gatekeeping mindset that equates programming difficulty with value. Meanwhile, the Python user is quietly being productive with scientific computing libraries while the purist is stuck complaining about language superiority. The irony is delicious—the person claiming others aren't "real programmers" is the only one not creating anything!

Mechanical Keyboards (affiliate)

Ducky One 3 White 60% Mechanical Keyboard: Quack Mechanics Dampening, Hot-Swappable Cherry Blue Switches, High-Density PBT Doubleshot Keycaps, RGB, US, White
Ducky One 3 White 60% Mechanical Keyboard: Quac...
Ducky One 3 Classic Hotswap RGB Mechanical Keyboard (Cherry MX Brown)
Ducky One 3 Classic Hotswap RGB Mechanical Keyb...
Ducky One 3 Pro Nazca 8K Hotswap RGB Triple Shot PBT Mechanical Keyboard - Cherry MX2A Speed Silver
Ducky One 3 Pro Nazca 8K Hotswap RGB Triple Sho...

The Eternal Burden Of Clarifying Your Ideas
Programming Algorithms Debugging
4 months ago 120.2K views 0 shares
The Eternal Burden Of Clarifying Your Ideas
Oh. My. GOD. The eternal programmer's nightmare captured in stick figure form! 😭 Left panel: "Science may discover immortality, but it won't happen in the next eighty years." Translation: We're all going to die before getting the good stuff. TYPICAL. Right panel: "You'll never find a programming language that frees you from the burden of clarifying your ideas." With the desperate plea "BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN!" Honey, no programming language will EVER read your mind! The computer is just sitting there like "I literally cannot understand your vague gesturing and emotional sighs." The AUDACITY of having to explain yourself clearly! The HORROR of precise thinking! 💅

My Feelings Exactly
Git Devops Bash Programming
5 months ago 143.9K views 0 shares
My Feelings Exactly
Ah, Git. The tool we all praise in public and curse in private. The first panel is that classic tech presentation where someone's overselling Git with buzzwords like "distributed graph theory tree model" – as if that helps anyone understand it. Then comes the brutal truth bomb: nobody actually understands Git. We just memorize arcane incantations, pray they work, and when they inevitably fail, we resort to the time-honored tradition of nuking the repo and starting fresh. Twenty years in the industry and I still sometimes find myself thinking "git add, git commit, git push" and if that doesn't work... well, there's always rm -rf and clone again. Some tools you use; Git uses you.

Worth It
Programming Devops Bash Python
5 months ago 124.2K views 0 shares
Worth It
The galaxy brain moment when you convince yourself that spending 48 hours automating a task that takes 20 minutes is somehow "efficient." But let's be real—we're not doing it to save time. We're doing it because manually repeating the same task feels like psychological torture, and writing that script gives us the same dopamine hit as solving a puzzle. Sure, we'll never recoup those hours, but our fragile programmer ego can't handle the thought of doing something "the easy way." It's not laziness, it's... "future-proofing."