explain xkcd - User contributions [en]

Talk:3245: Results Age

2026-05-18T12:24:09Z

AndyShow1000000:

oh god these are uncomfortably accurate...though sometimes the post age is the next time rung down. i hit an issue recently which sent me to mozilla forum posts from 2008, migrated twice, where the people having the problem seem to have stopped caring about it a decade ago - '''[[User:Vaedez|Vaedez]]''' ([[User talk:Vaedez|talk]]) 18:43, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Man, I’m not even 24 ''years old'' [[Special:Contributions/2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:803D:CE4C:ED8:DED4|2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:803D:CE4C:ED8:DED4]] 18:45, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
:Can we block this IP address? [[Special:Contributions/82.13.184.33|82.13.184.33]] 08:33, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
:I programmed a computer for the first time 55 years ago this month. --[[Special:Contributions/2A00:23CC:D248:8901:79C8:645F:821A:1BA3|2A00:23CC:D248:8901:79C8:645F:821A:1BA3]] 08:43, 16 May 2026 (UTC)

I guess once we finish the table in the explanation we can convert that to a similar table in the transcript, rather than doing them independently. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 19:13, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
:No. [[explain xkcd:Editor FAQ#What is the format of the transcript section?|Tables do not belong in the Transcript.]] It serves a different purpose. And it'll just be the text that's there, so would be far simpler (and more likely to be 'finished' any time soon) than the Explanation table which will get tweaked to add or clarify explanatory descriptions.
:You ''could'' copy an Explanation table (having the comic text, in various rows and columns) to the Transcript then 'de-Table' it (remove the table-formatting) and 'en-Transcript' what remains (add the ":[This bit looks like..]" stuff). But that's not much less effort than rewriting such a relatively small comic's from scratch.
:It can also go the other way, though... Someone gets the Transcript done, and then ''from that'' the base text of the Table is 'en-Tabled'. It'd depend on who visits the newly-created Comic page and what they decide to concentrate on to start up the otherwise blank page that the BOT put together. [[Special:Contributions/81.179.199.253|81.179.199.253]] 20:56, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
::I added the content of the table to the transcript based on the format of [[3120: Geologic Periods]] which also has a table. --[[Special:Contributions/208.59.176.206|208.59.176.206]] 00:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I will add an explanation of an edge case [[User:SomebodyElse|SomebodyElse]] ([[User talk:SomebodyElse|talk]]) 19:40, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

If it's negative time old you are in a Tardis. If it's sqrt(-1) time old, give me some of whatever it is you are smoking. [[Special:Contributions/64.201.132.210|64.201.132.210]] 22:02, 13 May 2026 (UTC)
:''Which'' sqrt(-1)? If it's imaginary i then you're in weird territory, but if it's quaternionic i, j, or k, you can interpret that as a spacelike separation, so it just means that you've found someone with an FTL drive i.e. the flowchart arrow also goes to TARDIS.[[Special:Contributions/185.146.232.73|185.146.232.73]] 10:03, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
:: Or if it is the engineer's j. Just realized that since if you restrict to the (1,i), (1,j) or (1,k) plane in the space of quaternians it's isomorphic to the complex numbers. So maybe the mathematician are just using the i quaternian and the engineers are using the j quaternian and they really are different.[[User:Lordpishky|Lord Pishky]] ([[User talk:Lordpishky|talk]]) 23:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah it's even better when there's no god damn results at all.[[User:RG|RG]] ([[User talk:RG|talk]]) 00:29, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

What about when the post is more than 13 years old and you see that the post is from yourself, you had just forgotten about it? [[User:JohnHawkinson|JohnHawkinson]] ([[User talk:JohnHawkinson|talk]]) 01:52, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
:Same vibe as googling early warning signs of alheizmers for the first time but all the links are purple.[[User:RG|RG]] ([[User talk:RG|talk]]) 02:08, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I once discovered a scanned magazine article from 1999 or so that briefly mentioned how to use a hidden Mathematica feature that a) still existed more than 20 years later and b) was in fact directly applicable to my problem. Sometimes things do work out![[Special:Contributions/185.146.232.73|185.146.232.73]] 10:03, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I actually made my first table on this one! It took a lot of trial-and-error. [[User:GSLikesCats307|GSLikesCats307]] ([[User talk:GSLikesCats307|talk]]) 11:10, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

What's wrong with this is that the first search result is irrelevant, since it will just tell OP to use Google because the question has been asked before. --[[Special:Contributions/80.187.113.212|80.187.113.212]] 13:07, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

The Internet is not over 50 years old. The Internet as we know it came online at the beginning of 2023, when Arpanet switched from the old NCP protocol to TCP/IP. So I changed that explanation to "over forty years old". Although as far as modern users are concerned, anything prior to the WWW is mostly irrelevant. [[User:Barmar|Barmar]] ([[User talk:Barmar|talk]]) 14:07, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
: Really? I'm sure I remember using it way more than three years ago... [[Special:Contributions/82.13.184.33|82.13.184.33]] 14:10, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
: Because of progressive interoperability over time, I'd say that you can't give a definite hard limit to the start of 'the Internet'. The TCP backbone itself was first implemented in 1974, and yet even in the early '90s I had to tunnel some 'internet' traffic through legacy systems that weren't using TCP/IP for the layer-3 OSI (that's alongside other 'similarly old' alternatives to TCP/IP like IPX/SPX). Battling with using ZMODEM (or ''one'' of the <FOO>MODEMs, maybe X or Y instead) over X.25 forms part of my early efforts (that I'd happily now forget) to learn how to do (as a 'new guy') what others around me were already perfectly at ease using. Even concentrating on layer-7 (user experience) or layer-1 (the physical infrastructure), the Internet-that-everyone-now-uses can be argued as to having started at different times (e.g. the arrival of Broadband, or perhaps even Mobile Data, as a mass-consumer product for a given territory, yet dial-up access existed before that, as well as permanent ISDN or T#-lines between institutions and businesses sufficiently invested in the need for interconnectivity).
:Did you mean 1983, instead of 2023? That makes more somewhat more sense, all these further caveats aside. [[Special:Contributions/82.132.212.205|82.132.212.205]] 17:20, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
::Yeah...''must'' mean 1983. Because, well, it happened in 1983! It would be weird to declare a date (and reference 40 years ago) and be that wildly wrong. [[User:Yorkshire Pudding|Yorkshire Pudding]] ([[User talk:Yorkshire Pudding|talk]]) 22:35, 14 May 2026 (UTC)
:::25 years? Hold my beer. 25 or so years ago I found an answer to a problem I had in an online web archive of a post to comp.os.cpm from the early 1980s. [[User:Jgharston|Jgharston]] ([[User talk:Jgharston|talk]]) 07:37, 17 May 2026 (UTC)

I thought for sure that the title text was gonna be about how AI makes solving some problems trivial, while sometimes it sends you off the deep end even worse than a UseNet thread from 1994. [[User:blagae|blagae]] ([[User talk:blagae|talk]]) 15:47, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

For me, the particular aspect of "13 years ago" (or more likely "7 years ago") is You're the only person with this problem" - "The only hit you found is from a thread you yourself started." I've had this happen at least twice: look for a specific combination and the only posts are one on reddit and one on stackoverflow, both of which match exactly because seven years later you used exactly the same terms in your search as you wrote in your post. Still no solutions! [[User:Gidklio|Gidklio]] ([[User talk:Gidklio|talk]]) 12:50, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

My friend says Xkcd is stupid, should I slime him out?[[User:Commercialegg|Commercialegg]] ([[User talk:Commercialegg|talk]]) 18:10, 15 May 2026 (UTC)
:Well, "Xkcd" ''is'' stupid. But "xkcd" (or, at a push, "XKCD") should be ok. I'm with your friend, there.
:As to slime... is that something you'd like to use? And your friend? It takes all kinds, I know, and there are ''so many'' kinds of potential slime, so I'm not sure what kind you're potentially working with, here. Enquiring minds may want to know more, though. [[Special:Contributions/81.179.199.253|81.179.199.253]] 19:03, 15 May 2026 (UTC)

Is this comic related to the at-the-time recent {{w|2026 Canvas data breach|Instructure outage / cyber attack}}? If so, it should probably be added to the explanation.

3245: Results Age

2026-05-18T12:12:03Z

AndyShow1000000: Finished transcript and minor copyediting.

{{comic
| number = 3245
| date = May 13, 2026
| title = Results Age
| image = results_age_2x.png
| imagesize = 478x669px
| noexpand = true
| titletext = 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.
}}

==Explanation==
{{incomplete|This page was created BY AN INTERNET GRANDPA. Don't remove this notice too soon.}}
This comic shows how likely it is that a bug reported will be fixed, based on the age of some past post that matches your search for details of the problem.

A table is shown below of the explanations of each table row:
{| class="wikitable"
!Age of post !! What it means !! Probability of a fix !! Full Explanation
|-
|2 hours ago || There's an infrastructure outage || '''Very High''' - Just wait ||The recentness of the information implies that it has just happened, and other people have noticed it and started to post about the issue. Large-scale problems like a service outage are obvious priorities, and will (hopefully!) be fixed quickly.
|-
|5 days ago || A recent update just broke something big || '''High''', but you might have to wait for a patch || Similar to before, a large breakage would be very high priority to be fixed. However, as it's been five days since reporting it, the bug is likely taking a while to be found, so - as pointed out in the comic - you could have to wait a bit longer for this one to be resolved, and wait a bit for the patch when it comes.
|-
|3 months ago || A new product isn't working for some users || '''Decent chance''' of a solution in the replies || This problem is clearly not considered a priority for a fix by the creators, judging by how long it's been there. It possibly isn't an issue affecting everyone, or even a large proportion of users. However, people are innovative, and someone may well have found their own fix, patch or kludge to get around the product limitations.
|-
|2 years ago || You've run into an edge case || '''Low''', but the replies could help with troubleshooting || An {{w|edge case}} is an unusual set of circumstances in which a system is asked to operate. These can cause an otherwise well-functioning system to behave in unexpected and unpredictable ways. Because such cases will occur very rarely, they may not have been foreseen or tested by the developers, or they may have considered it not worth the effort to cater for them. Very few people will suffer from this precise problem, which may mean that it's not considered worth the effort to apply a fix. The developers or other users may have encountered similar issues on this or similar software, and noting how they solved or worked around ''those'' problems might lead you towards how to address your own.
|-
|13 years ago || You're the only one with this problem || '''Very Low''' - post is likely not relevant|| A post of this age likely predates the software you're using, or at least the current version of it. It's probably a coincidental match to your search query, and doesn't actually relate to the problem you've encountered. Since no-one else has posted about this issue or anything similar within a recent timeframe, it's likely that you're the first person (or at least, one of very few people) to have ever come across it.
|-
|24 years ago || Oh god how is the Internet this old || Maybe whoever posted the message has kids who can help you || This is another comic where Randall [[:Category:Comics to make one feel old|makes people feel old]], in this case by pointing out that {{w|the Internet}} is quite old. The children of the people who posted these comments are now likely to be around the same age the original posters were when they posted them (and may now be posting themselves). It is also (presumably) rare enough to be a [[979: Wisdom of the Ancients|DenverCoder9 situation]], and 13 years is longer than the time in that comic, so 13 years might be such a situation too. It is possible that Randall could be referencing this comic, as the thread that DenverCoder9 posted on was last posted to in 2003, 23 years before this comic's publication. If DenverCoder9 posted to the thread in 2002 and the thread happened to continue into 2003, then it would perfectly match the age.
The Internet is, in fact, significantly over forty years old, based upon original infrastructure and methods that were set up for perhaps up to two more decades previous to that. The World Wide Web (to many, synonymous with the Internet) hails from the early 1990s, and Google (one of the more commonly used search engines, through which this error search might have been made) was launched in the late 1990s, so are still practically older than this notional post. The biggest surprise might be that some information published on a webpage in 2002 (and still relevant to your search) survives on some still live web server (or as an archive/{{w|Mirror site|mirror}} of that original information on some archival/successor site). For example, any topical write-up of a then extant case of this issue, if documented upon web pages originally hosted by {{w|GeoCities}}, would have otherwise been made permanently inaccessible by the end of 2014.
|}

The title text appears to be a conversation taking place in a distant future with the descendant of an ancient internet post. The 'last living descendant' is a common trope in fiction where arcane knowledge is passed down through a family line (often on the previous generation's deathbed). The suggestion is that the solution to the user's issue is a closely guarded secret that has had to be kept safe in this way. However, it is unclear why it is that a bug fix would be guarded, given you usually want to fix bugs quickly, rather than hide them. Possibly though this bug was discovered in some kind of [[:Category:Singularity|Robot Apocalypse]] situation, and this bug was the only thing stopping them gaining total control. Strange robot apocalypses are [[:Category:Singularity|recurring theme on xkcd]].

==Transcript==

:[Large heading, centered.]
:Implications of the age of the posts you see when you Google an error message

:[A search engine prompt field is shown, containing part of an error code message (beginning with E-21, and what looks like a 9 and 3 next to it). Below this are search results shown as obscured text, except for a the phrase '3 years ago' in the first heading. This is expanded into an ellipse that obscures the rest of the search field.]
:[A table, with 3 columns, labelled "Age of post", "What it means", and "Probability of a fix"]

:[Row 1: Age of post:] 2 hours ago
:[What it means:] There's an infrastructure outage
:[Probability of a fix:] Very high -- just wait

:[Row 2: Age of post:] 5 days ago
:[What it means:] A recent update broke something big
:[Probability of a fix:] High, but you might have to wait for a patch

:[Row 3: Age of post:] 3 months ago
:[What it means:] A new product isn't working for some users
:[Probability of a fix:] Decent chance of a solution in the replies

:[Row 4: Age of post:] 2 years ago
:[What it means:] You've run into an edge case
:[Probability of a fix:] Low, but maybe the replies can help with troubleshooting

:[Row 5: Age of post:] 13 years ago
:[What it means:] You're the only person with this problem
:[Probability of a fix:] Very low -- post is likely not relevant

:[Row 6: Age of post:] 24 years ago
:[What it means:] Oh God how is the Internet this old
:[Probability of a fix:] Maybe whoever posted this message has kids who can help you

{{comic discussion}}<noinclude>

[[Category:Comics to make one feel old]]
[[Category:Computers]]
[[Category:Internet]]
</noinclude>