Talk:3245: Results Age

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 - Vaedez (talk) 18:43, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Man, I’m not even 24 years old 2A02:6B6F:E226:B00:803D:CE4C:ED8:DED4 18:45, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Can we block this IP address? 82.13.184.33 08:33, 14 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. Barmar (talk) 19:13, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

No. 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. 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. --208.59.176.206 00:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

I will add an explanation of an edge case 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. 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.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.Lord Pishky (talk) 23:49, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Yeah it's even better when there's no god damn results at all.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? 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.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!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. 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. --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. Barmar (talk) 14:07, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

Really? I'm sure I remember using it way more than three years ago... 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. 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. Yorkshire Pudding (talk) 22:35, 14 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. blagae (talk) 15:47, 14 May 2026 (UTC)