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Title text:
Please, we need your help. Our research suggests you're the last living descendant of the person who knew how to format this config file.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3245/
I hate when apps say "3 years ago" or whatever and don't make it easy to see more specifically when. Just put it in an on-hover popup please. (Lemmy-UI does this just fine, but there are plenty of sites out there that don't.)
I was saying the same thing just the other day, although in my case it was for something that was ”2 days ago" - totally unhelpful if you need to know the time it was posted! Just put an absolute date and time (and a timezone stamp if necessary).
Screenshots of social media posts are already untrustworthy without also adding in that it could have actually been 5 years ago instead of 5 hours.
I would argue that even on-hover popups are insufficient, because they normally don't make it into screenshots and that's the use-case where you're most likely to really want to know the absolute timestamp.
158 weeks ago
I assume there's some evil enshittification reason that they do this, though I don't know what it is.
Many times you can inspect element and the actual date is right there, they're just choosing to display it poorly.
3,000 years: .... users can no longer interpret your query and have turned it into a religion of their own making and design. This has spawned several schisms and now there are global wars occurring between different factions.
Once I searched about how to do something and I found a post that asked the same question that I had. The developer just said "we are already working on implementing that functionality, and it will be included in a new release soon!". Then I realized the post was really, really old and new releases still hadn't included that change.
Imagine if you could still Google an error message and get relevant results. This comic is already like three years out of date.
i'm sure it's not as good as google used to be, but i've been using duckduckgo for years now and i've never related to the problems people have with google.
If i don't find answers to my searches it very much feels like the answer just doesn't exist, or can't reasonably be found by a search engine.
How to fix error 404
We've all been there. Browsing the web or scrolling the reels when you see it. The dreaded 404 error. Luckily there are 10 easy steps you can take to diagnose the problem...
The urge to downvote is strong. i must remember it is satirical.
on the other side of that coin is that I've gotten a lot more active on the relevant forums and that's helped me meet some pretty cool people
xkcd itself is 21 years old...
So much internet cultural infrastructure is coming of age
Worse than only finding old posts about the issue is when you find an old post, then notice that it's got your name as the author, and you realise you've been fighting the issue for so long you've forgotten where you posted about it.
And there's a comment below by you
"Fixed it"
And nothing else
Or when the person with the answer deleted their account and all messages with it, then all of the comments after say “That worked!”
let's learn from this and remember to cite the actual things we did to fix stuff, in our own messages Also relatedly, and because i just had to deal with this: USE GIT, FUCKING USE GIT FOR ANY SORT OF CONFIGURATIONS, YOU WILL SAVE YOURSELF SO MUCH PAIN
This is how I feel about Sync for Lemmy. I think that's been broken going on a couple years now.
Sync for Reddit users: "First time?"
I still use it because I enjoy punishment and I filter porn so the broken links don't bother me. Everything else works.
Isn't all the porn gone now anyway? Can't say I would try unfiltered Lemmy regardless.
the original instance died, but there's a new porn instance now
24 years ago
Oh God how is the Internet this old
So, I'm being a nit-picky, but while I'd say that personal Internet access really became a major thing in the US in the late 1990s or so, and that led to a huge explosion in the creation of the stuff like commercial websites, and so from consumer "the Internet is directly part of my life" standpoint, a lot of people might say "that's when the Internet became a thing," the Internet as an entity has been around since it was created from the ARPANET.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
The ARPANET initially served as a backbone for the interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the United States to enable resource sharing. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET).[39]
In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which facilitated worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks. TCP/IP network access expanded again in 1986 when the National Science Foundation Network (NSFNet) provided access to supercomputer sites in the United States for researchers, first at speeds of 56 kbit/s and later at 1.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s.[40]
The NSFNet expanded into academic and research organizations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan in 1988–89.[41][42][43][44] Although other network protocols such as UUCP and PTT public data networks had global reach well before this time, this marked the beginning of the Internet as an intercontinental network. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in 1989 in the United States and Australia.[45] The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990.[46]
It's just that the places using it were more universities and companies doing engineering stuff and stuff like that for a while.
So if you say that the Internet was really born from the ARPANET when networks shifted to TCP/IP, you're talking something like early 1980s; by that metric, the Internet would be something like 55-ish years old.
EDIT: Some users here are on lemmy.sdf.org. SDF was around well before 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDF_Public_Access_Unix_System
Super Dimension Fortress (abbreviated as SDF, also known as freeshell.org) is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a Bulletin board system created by Ted Uhlemann for fellow Japanese anime fans.[1] From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.
Randall isn't saying that the internet is only 24 (I mean, he's been making xkcd for 20 years and was on it before that). He's saying that his mental conception of the internet is still "new exciting thing," and the fact that it's been around for 24 years means that he's currently being haunted.
And as someone who read xkcd as a teenager, I feel the opposite, it feels like it's always been here