I’m referring to xkcd 2347, the case where a small and oftentimes hobbyist project end up being fundamental to an entire sector
This obviously happens a lot in FOSS, but I’m wondering if this happens to, say, your personal hobbies or things that matter to you?
Asking because this has just happened to one of my hobbies two days ago. The maintainer of a very important web server for the entire community suddenly announced on X that they would shut down the server on May 31 Japanese time. Since the web server was so important, the community has already organized and nearly completed an organized web scrape of the entire server, less than 36 hours from when the news was announced (and 1-2 days before it would have been shut down)
I think most hobbies have a few legends of the hobby.
I recently got into learning about foraging. There’s is one dude is Wisconsin who basically wrote “The Book” on foraging. Samuel Thayer has basically rewrote what is and isn’t edible. He tried all the old sources himself as well as doing checking ethnobotany sources and asking people native to the region about every plant. He’s got three books and the ultimate field guide. All his books and titles are the source of the new AI slop foraging books out there.