The meaning can also be inferred from… the face.
Until I read that comment I was having real trouble figuring out WTF it had to do with running commands. I thought it might be some practical joke tool that automatically modifies your commands such that they'll make you sad when they run.
Don’t get why we have to bust out all the cringe internet lingo to describe something that you see in that venerable “real world”.
[EDIT] I mean I see it once someone points it out, but that'd have been lucky to make my top-5 guesses otherwise.
https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/blob/v14.0.1/assets/72x72...
To me at 2–3 mm it looked more like sleep deprived baggy eyelids (or maybe candy corn eyes, but what does that mean?). I read the whole post thinking the program was named after exhaustion, not pleading.
I just polled the room and most guesses were that it’s sadness/sorrow.
No idea what that's supposed to mean
I remember a few years back, there was a problem where Apple implemented "GRINNING FACE" in such a way that Apple users interpreted it as a sarcasm indicator, but most others would look just like a standard smiling face, leading to quite a number of awkward exchanges when non-Apple users would read things such as "Yes, let's burn it all down :)" instead of "Yes, let's burn it all down :|"
Disregarding the "browser" column (could be anything, it's what your browser renders the text as), only the Twitter font has the "looking up" variant that you think is normal. I'd rather say the straight-ahead look is the norm for most font designers when interpreting the "FACE WITH PLEADING EYES" description of the character.