Lindy's law

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The life expectancy of something is proportional to its age.

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In context

This law belongs with Murphy's Laws, where small assumptions, timing, and system complexity tend to turn into memorable failures.

Editorial note

Ideas or technologies that have survived for a long time may be more likely to persist, but the heuristic does not predict every individual case.

Practical example: A maintainer expects a decades-old text format to outlast a newly launched proprietary format.

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