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/
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I’m disappointed this does not have a 6 years - you find a post about the same problem, made by you, and edited with nvm, solved it. No solution in post.
I don’t know Rico magnification top comprehend
Imagine if you could still Google an error message and get relevant results. This comic is already like three years out of date.
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…
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
So the chances of Google ever fixing that is low, but maybe some replies here can help you find alternatives (atleast according to the chart)? I hate it so much, I use to be able to learn and fix anything, I feel like the internet has been stolen from me.
5 years ago - None, you have a faulty device and the hardware manufacturers are aware of the problem and will never fix it unless you start a class-action lawsuit with low chance of success.
In this situation right now. Bought a last gen Fitbit smartwatch on discount and it has fucking idiotic software bug where if you have the device in Do Not Disturb when the automatic sleep mode schedule triggers, it softlocks itself and you can’t manually disable either DND or sleep mode until the automatic sleep mode schedule expires. Unfixed since 2023.
The retailer denied my refund because I opened the package, so currently I’m waiting for the replacement device Google’s rep insisted on sending my way. As soon as it’s here I’m going to confirm that the bug still happens on it and RMA it again. What a waste of everyone’s fucking time.
Never, ever, buy a device that doesn’t have third-party Free Software firmware available.
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!”
I had an issue with my (old but trusty) scanner and I remembered encountering something very similar before but didn’t remember what I did about it. So I looked for the solution which I knew must exist since I’d found it before. Was pleasantly surprised and hit by nostalgia to find a link to a forum that I used to spend my time on in the early 2000s that seemed to describe exactly my issue. Then I realised the post was by me, helping someone else with that exact problem, in 2004. Day ruined.
No I can’t tell you what that issue was that was the same in 2004 and 2025, I don’t remember, I’m old.
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 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.
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 assume there’s some evil enshittification reason that they do this, though I don’t know what it is.
That’s when they remove the age entirely, like on YouTube
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).
Many times you can inspect element and the actual date is right there, they’re just choosing to display it poorly.
xkcd itself is 21 years old…
So much internet cultural infrastructure is coming of age
This is how I feel about Sync for Lemmy. I think that’s been broken going on a couple years now.
Switched to Summit some months back, and it’s pretty much the same feel. The only thing I miss is the “parent” button. I’ve browsed through the settings, and haven’t found any option to enable this function. Pretty annoying when you’re reading through a long thread.
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.
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.
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
Interesting. I’m probably only a few years older than you, and even though I started reading xkcd in college (probably about 2-3 years after it started), it somehow simultaneously seems like a scrappy startup comic just coming into its own, and also a venerable internet institution.
Oh xkcd feels that way to me, but the internet doesn’t
As far as googling is concerned, there’s not much you’ll actually find older than this millennium
