I'm just sitting here looking at a screenshot of a Twitter post of a photo of a projection of a screenshot of someone else's joke.
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
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We saw this same joke template shortly after ChatGPT was a thing. Almost exact, but now with Fable. Fake bullshit, though good chance that the original was authentic. The internet sucks now.
The format is in its "LinkedIn viral" phase of life, so it should be fully dead soon
I remember when my dad was skeptical that I copied a game from my friend's computer onto ours via floppy disk. "A game is too big nowadays to fit on a floppy," he said. "Just you wait," I said.
I had copied the shortcut from the desktop.
A classmate of mine once tried to copy MS PowerPoint by burning the desktop shortcut to CD.
That person either randomly wakes up at 4:00am thinking about that still to this day, or is a robot.
Oo! I have one for this! (Digs through meme collection.)
Oh how excited you must have been when you copied the shortcut onto your computer's desktop and saw that it transferred over just fine.
And then how disappointed once you tried clicking on that shortcut...
I'm front of Dad
There's a chance it didn't copy over fine because it might have grabbed the icon from the shortcut target rather than save it with the shortcut file. So the transfer might have ended with a sinking feeling seeing that blank icon that was confirmed when it was double clicked (maybe with a brief moment of hope upon seeing that it wasn't just an OK error box but had a browse button to find the correct target, before realizing that they didn't have the files).
A guy I know thought he made a backup of all his family photos on an external hard disk. He only copied the shortcuts.
He only found out after disposing of the old computer...
I remember reading a thread on Swedish computer forum.
There was a guy who had "compressed" his whole media livrary and saved it to a floppy disk, reinstalled his computer and now wanted to restor the media files....
Yeah, what he had done was to misunderstand what an MD5 hash was, he thought it was an extremely efficient compression algorithm....
And this is one of the many reasons I tell people that "an untested backup does not exist"
So all you have to do now is go through all the combinations of bits for a file, flag the ones with the same MD5, and manually look through those to see which one it is.
Ow.
You have a promising future in middle management.
😭
I see your screenshot of a tweet of a photo of a projection of a screenshot and raise you a screenshot:
I'm either going blind or that image definitely degraded 😂
that... is the point of the joke
edit: ok, i did not realize that. so the image is linked directly from xkcd.com. but here is the cleaner version. is that some randall's meta joke?
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:digital_data.png
so...
As an easter egg, the high-resolution (pixel-doubled) version of the comic is merely the comic resized to 50% and then to 400%, making it an image of poorer quality rather than a higher resolution image as for other comics, demonstrating how repeated image scaling can also introduce artifacts into images. There appears to be another easter egg in which between 21 November 2016 and 10 December 2016 (both Internet Archive pages), the original hi-res image was replaced by the pixel-doubled image. However, the image URL below the comic still links to the hi-res image.
The img-tag also includes the pixel-doubled version as a srcset-attribute: srcset="//imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data_2x.png 2x" This causes browsers on high-resolution displays (pixel density ratio 2) to show the low-quality version of the image instead of the standard-quality one and leads to people re-visiting the comic on modern displays to experience degradation compared to the remembered version.
Thanks for the content. Yah, I'm usually at the end of an exhausting night when I get on here. I definitely repeated the joke on that one lol.
I'll take a screenshot of that.
First beans, then jeans, then Deans. Now screens?
And print it.
On a 9 pin dot matrix printer.
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So looks like systems guys like me still have a job but the devs are screwed?
"it works on my machine"
Then we'll ship your machine!
...and docker was born.
Wheezing
Keep it running
Wait til this person sees 192.168.1.1
The next gen of Claude will just steal your CC info from Chrome and sign you up for an AWS free trial without your consent.
But hey, at least it'll work, right?
You're right! I did rack up $20,000 in AWS usage fees.
This is pretty impressive. Looks pixel for pixel what I’ve been building for months now.
The only hope is that this bubble burst so badly and they will lose so much money that for years companies will shit their pants before trying anything new.
They will not shit their pants... They will simply raise prices for consumers and small business depending on them.
It's seeming more and more likely that the tax payers will directly bail out all these shitheads.
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AI put the entire internet on my machine!
it would've been cool if the only type of website AI could do would've been good old GEOCITIES garish monstrocity. that would've justified the existence of AI. But since the only good AI website that doesn't fall apart is minimalist white - why even bother?
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