Lex Fridman

The human beings are so important at the core of these projects.

Yeah, this is the meme.

I mean, it applies to a lot of open source projects, but this is...

the all-modern digital multimedia infrastructure and then that thing at the very bottom that everything relies on is FFmpeg.

It's true.

And then there's usually, you know, a handful of folks that are maintaining that.

Some of it is financial, but some of it, and people should definitely support open source financially all across the board.

But some of it is also like spiritual on a basic human level.

There's something that happens like with this image of FFmpeg and so much of the internet, depending on it, where people almost like talk down to the folks who are carrying these projects forward and maintaining it.

an edge case to the 99.99999 percentile he didn't think about because it's his hobby project decoding Star Wars games I get the hobby project aspect of it it's just hard work and it's beautiful and the right approach there is to celebrate people for doing incredible incredible work it's just incredible that humans step up

not getting really paid at first or maybe ever, and then they're doing it out of the love of it.

And we need to, like, human civilization runs on people like that.

We need to celebrate them.

It sucks that that's part of reality because all the people that love VLC, all the people that love FFmpeg,

Like me, you know, I legitimately probably thousands of times in my life had a smile on my face because FFmpeg made me happy.

Period.

And how many times did I get a chance to say that?

Zero.

Until I realized there's a Twitter account.

And every once in a while I'm like messaging it.