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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Already are in the form of bogus contracts and subsidies. Why do you think Musk jumped right into this? Ripping off the government (i.e. us) is his entire business model.
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.
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?
Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index found employment for software developers aged 22–25 fell nearly 20% since 2024, while employment for developers aged 30 and over continued growing. The entry-level ladder is being pulled up, not the whole building.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a refutation, so apologies if I misinterpreted. But cut jobs to buy hardware sounds to me like jobs lost due to AI, no?
AI isn't replacing those jobs. Those jobs were lost to fund speculation. AI isn't doing their jobs, their former coworkers are doing more work. It's an important distinction. Those salaries are funding things that don't exist yet, so the workers couldn't have been replaced by them.
It feels like a distinction no one is strictly trying to make in this thread, to me. The OP picture says AI has made us unemployed. Commenter at top of chain says it has, and provided a source to show job loss due to AI.
I mean, I just don't think the people who have lost their jobs due to AI care much if it was because the AI directly replaced them or just made their former coworker more efficient.
It matters very much whenever discussing AI, as to whether AI is actually performing the jobs of workers who lost their jobs. There's a very powerful marketing machine at work which is partially responsible for convincing businesses to make these speculative moves. Speculation and a bubble are killing jobs. "AI" is by and large not replacing workers.
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I see your screenshot of a tweet of a photo of a projection of a screenshot and raise you a screenshot:
https://xkcd.com/1683/
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.
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1683
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?
I feel like I missed the jeans. And i’m fine with that.
We had beans in jeans.
you got they motherfuckin ass
And print it.
On a 9 pin dot matrix printer.
What is this?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2273430/BlazBlue_Entropy_Effect/
Pure poetry
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.
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...
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).
I'm front of Dad
Oo! I have one for this! (Digs through meme collection.)
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.
😭
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.
"it works on my machine"
Then we'll ship your machine!
...and docker was born.
Wheezing
This is pretty impressive. Looks pixel for pixel what I’ve been building for months now.
Keep it running
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.
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.
they're gonna shit our pants again arent they
Always do.
It's seeming more and more likely that the tax payers will directly bail out all these shitheads.
Already are in the form of bogus contracts and subsidies. Why do you think Musk jumped right into this? Ripping off the government (i.e. us) is his entire business model.
No need to have as many people employed when they're not trying anything new though. So that sucks too
Wait til this person sees 192.168.1.1
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.
AI put the entire internet on my machine!
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
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?
So looks like systems guys like me still have a job but the devs are screwed?
Looks great! Well, good luck!
it has
Only in the sense that it’s being used as a scapegoat for layoffs
oh 100% - but also:
https://axis-intelligence.com/ai-job-displacement-statistics/
they are in for a surprise in 5-8 years, when they find these 30 yo ones don't grow on trees...
Hasn't this been happening for longer than that? Nobody wants to hire juniors if you can just poach them when they know how to do things
https://worldmetrics.org/ai-job-loss-statistics/
Most jobs lost to AI were not replaced by AI but cut so they could use their salaries to pay for more hardware.
I'm not sure if this is meant to be a refutation, so apologies if I misinterpreted. But cut jobs to buy hardware sounds to me like jobs lost due to AI, no?
AI isn't replacing those jobs. Those jobs were lost to fund speculation. AI isn't doing their jobs, their former coworkers are doing more work. It's an important distinction. Those salaries are funding things that don't exist yet, so the workers couldn't have been replaced by them.
It feels like a distinction no one is strictly trying to make in this thread, to me. The OP picture says AI has made us unemployed. Commenter at top of chain says it has, and provided a source to show job loss due to AI.
I mean, I just don't think the people who have lost their jobs due to AI care much if it was because the AI directly replaced them or just made their former coworker more efficient.
It matters very much whenever discussing AI, as to whether AI is actually performing the jobs of workers who lost their jobs. There's a very powerful marketing machine at work which is partially responsible for convincing businesses to make these speculative moves. Speculation and a bubble are killing jobs. "AI" is by and large not replacing workers.
is that a feeling or backed by data? losses are largely due to automation