Title text:
In 1899, people were walking around shouting ‘23’ at each other and laughing, and confused reporters were writing articles trying to figure out what it meant.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3184/
For millennials, like me: 1337 means “LEET” which is short for “Elite”.
Sorry, what? I’m a millennial, this is common knowledge for anyone who played a videogame in the last quarter century.
I was going to say, I think the perpetuation of leetspeak and most of its use falls squarely into the millennial generation’s early 90s into the early 2000s.
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What the h311 is wrong with you? Us millennials invented 1337!
Nope. Source: am gen X.
Yep I think pops here has this one, us Millennials grew up with leet speak, it already was a thing in the 80s.
That’s the first time anyone called me pops! NOW I feel old!
Sorry to hear that, gramps!
(Am also Gen X. Sigh…)
If you’re GenX and no one has called you pops before you have lived a Sheltered life
This is a fair point. I’m a programmer and this kind of banter is not super common in my workplace. We are all a little bit odd in our own ways.
Yeah it was common on BBSes late 80s at least. Also am gen X.
People get confused because leet speak had a resurgence around 1997 or so.
Y2K
I remember it well.
The newspapers were apoplectic about the coming millennium bug Armageddon (hospital equipment was all going to crash because programmers encoded a date as two digits to save what was then rather sparse memory and storage space, and everyone was going to accidentally become of negative age and all timers would temporarily give very wrong answers.
COBOL programmers: there’s a serious issue with banking and other business systems and we need to concentrate on this above above other issues to resolve it
Managers and newspapers: ARMAGEDDON!
COBOL programmers: we’ve got this.
Newspapers: nobody is doing anything about it! Armageddon!
COBOL programmers: It’s a lot of work but we’re cracking on, we’ve been working at it a while and it’s going to be tight and we’re going to need to put in some overtime, but really, we’ve got this.
Newspapers: OH FUCK LITERALLY EVERYTHING IS GOING TO CRASHMillienium dawns. Some slight issues remain. Most important systems already patched and fine. Society does not crash.
Newspapers: There was no millennium bug after all!
COBOL programmers: no, there was, but we fixed it like we said we needed to and then we did. Boy, that was hard work.
Newspapers: It was ALL A HOAX.
COBOL programmers: no, it was a problem and we fixed it.
Newpapers: CELEBRITY WOMAN WEARS DRESS.
COBOL programmers: we just see the world differently, I guess. Can I retire early with all this emergency business critical overtime money?Ahahah I experienced only the media narrative, and it did play out exactly as you described it.
Of course now it comes to reason that many people were actively working to fix the problem, but they never really explained that part on TV.
Lol no, they did not!
NERDS WORK VERY HARD INDEED AND FIX BUGS IN MASSIVE NUMBERS OF SYSTEMS doesn’t sell papers.
For that matter, neither does TEENAGERS WORK NIGHT AND DAY IN UNPRECEDENTED LEVELS OF REVISION AND EXAM PREPARATION AND BREAK PREVIOUS SUCCESS RECORDS AGAIN BECAUSE TEACHERS AND SCHOOLS ARE GRADED AS FAILING UNLESS RESULTS RISE CONTINUOUSLY. Can you tell I have friends in the teaching profession?!
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I’m confused as to where you fit in the Millennial demographic for you to have not known this already
It seems, I’m on the older side.
if you’re in your 40s and don’t know this i’m worried.
It’s been around since the 1980s. If you didn’t know it it’s not because you’re a millennial, it’s because you weren’t part of the right subcultures when you were young / teen / 20s.
1337 h4x0r
Hack the planet
Millenials pwnd the n00bs with the best of the genX back in the day, but I think leetspeak was a lot more niche than say 67 is, it was very gamercoded/nerdcoded when that wasn’t cool.
Source: am millenial who had a leetspeak AIM handle back then
back when the internet was not cool
The internet used to be a place
oh they had designers then
Yeah, I had my Facebook set to leetspeak back in the day when it was restricted to college students. Of course, Zuckerborg was still a POS and I got rid of my Facebook ages ago
Ragebait. Millenials are like 40 and have back pain.
84CK P41N
D0/\/'7 m4k3 f|_|/\/ 0f /\/\y 84(k
I can confirm you can in fact get back pain before the age of 40
Batman can confirm too.
Source: Knightfall.
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I did that too, but back then it was called Backtrack Linux. I bought a special Atheros chipset WiFi card for my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. The built-in 802.11b WiFi card worked under Linux but only by using the Windows ME driver in NDISWrapper, which didn’t support promiscuous mode.
The Atheros chipsets could be configured (by flashing the firmware with a blob I got from a BBS, if I recall) to capture the traffic from nearby wireless networks. In particular, I wanted to pick up the signal from when a device first connects. There was a bug in Windows XP that could cause the WiFi to drop briefly, then promptly reconnect. By triggering that bug over and over I could capture a lot of reconnect packets in a short time frame.
Then I’d save the data to a big file and pipe it to Aircrack and extract the Wired Equivalent Privacy password.
I was a 1337 H4XX0|2 B-)
Tap for spoiler
Well, that’s how the tutorial said it would work anyway. I actually never could get enough packets captured. The signal strength was too low
Just to toss this in there, it totally wasn’t a bug, you were sending a deauth packet to force them to reconnect then recapturing their auth sequence until you had enough packets to crack the WEP key. A pretty fun demo back then was to setup a wireless bridge between an open public network and a rogue AP (usually we’d just use a pcmcia WiFi card bridge to the internal WiFi adapter); then (due to pretty much no https anywhere), you could follow peoples browsing habits, log into their MySpace/LiveJournal/DeadJournal/GeoCities/etc (passwords were pretty commonly passed in plaintext), etc.
It was never done nefariously, but allowed us to learn a lot.
Had a friend who wrote his french oral presentation out in 1337, he was allowed notes but not the word for word presentation. He showed the teacher beforehand, she said that’s fine, looks like gibberish.
Same, but I was 15 like 15 years later lol
I know it just means you aren’t familiar with it but it’s funny you picked the millennial one as the one you had to explain to millennials.
Also for geeky Gen X
Y35!
I feel like (6, 7) should definitely be a tuple
6’7" is a non integer measurement.
It’s got nothing to do with height. It’s a Chicago police code for murder. The rapper whose song this was taken from is from Chicago and the the context in which it appears in those lyrics make it clear it’s also about murder.
The 6’7” thing was made up by people trying to find reason or rhyme as to why a shibboleth they didn’t know would be said at a basketball game and inventing that it had to be connected to the height of one player.
Skrilla is from Philadelphia, where the police apparently don’t use 10-67, but it’s “Report of Death” in some areas so this still seems the most likely explanation.
Sorry, you’re right. Philadelphia
What about Schfifty-Five?
Three fiddy?
Tree-fiddy came so close to making the list I think but it feels right that it didn’t.
Shiggity Schwat
Girlfriend’s age?
My IQ
Fourteen-teen
I was reading Wikipedia about the origins of 23 and came across this neat tidbit:
On the RMS Titanic there was a watertight door on E Deck numbered 23 which was informally called the “skidoo door” according to the testimony of the Chief Baker Charles John Joughin.
23 also independently came to prominence with the 23 enigma, originating with William S. Burroughs and popularized by ‘The Illuminatus! Trilogy’ and ‘Principia Discordia’. It postulates that the number 23 appears to have significance suspiciously often.
Missing “about three-fitty”
Tree fiddy
Dammit Loch Ness monster…
true I misspelled that :/
I’m not a mathematican, but
0118 999 881 999 119 725 3
Oh, that’s easy to remember!
I think it’s more of a 0118 999 88199 9119 725 3
I’ve had a bit of a tumble
Teens in different countries have different funny numbers too funny enough. There is a thing influencing multiple civilizations to do this.
31 is funny in Turkey.
all the older ones at least had some kind of meaning behind them, this new shit is actual brainrot.
Some kind of meaning behind them, huh?
Let me ask you something.
Can you count…
All the way…
To shfifty-five?
Shwam.
Doo.
Two and helf.
Scheven.
Schfourteen-teen.
Shwenty One.
Shwenty-Seven and Helf
27
37
WHAT YOU SAY?!!
I have said “schfourteen-teen” about once per week for the past 20 years
…I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten the reference
But this isn’t even a fair comparison because that’s literally a whole ass song with an animation compared to a dumb kid in some viral video saying six or seven
What’s the meaning of 42? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
It’s the answer
But what is the question?
That is the real question!
It was Jackie Robinson’s number
we’ve been over this what is six times nine
What did 23 mean? I thought the post was pointing out it meant nothing? 69 is a position, 420 smoke weed, boobs, 42 was a nonsense joke that meant nothing as well. They just defined it as the meaning of life for no reason from what I know… so 23, and 67 seem about the same, running closely behind 42
42 is from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. They built an enormous computer called Deep Thought that was the most powerful ever built to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The computer, after 75 million years of processing, came up with 42. The confused crowd that gathered to hear the answer did not understand. Turns out, 42 is the correct answer, but what is the question?
So after that, they decide to build another computer, which is planet Earth, to figure out the question.
It was still calculating when it was destroyed by the Vogons to make space for a hyperspace bypass.
Yeah I remember that, saying 42 is the answer to everything was what I called nonsense, as I could just as easily say 42 meaning everything is is the product you get from, 6 7 (meaning nothing). Poof, now everything is a multiple of nothing, and at the end of the day none of it made any sense or had any meaning
Funny enough, there’s a point in a later book in the series where they suggest the “ultimate question’” that 42 is an answer to could be “What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”
Which works in base 13!
Im 93% sure that 6*9 doesnt equal 42 in base 6227020800
which, when a mathemagician occasionally asked adams about it, he would respond along the lines of “oh fuck”
Additionally, while technically imbued with ‘meaning’, even the number 420 itself is somewhat meaningless and was originally used to delineate those who knew from those who don’t. It’s just that it got famous enough that we now almost all know.
In that sense I would argue it filled more or less the same function as 67.
I’d like to add that that’s called a shibboleth :)
I’ve heard it said that 420 referred to the time 4:20 pm, when a group would come together to smoke, but that sounds contrived.
420 can also refer to the birth date of Adolf Hitler, which makes 420 a bit darker than just “haha, smoke.”
23 was before my time, but it is 1/3 of 69, so there’s that.
Ni
Ni’s NaN though and they no longer say it.
Japanese would argue otherwise, 二 is certainly a number.
23 is from the movie of the guy escaping from the number 23 I think?
Thank you. I didn’t know what 23 was about
Oh shit I forgot that movie, that was a Jim Carrey movie wasn’t it
I think so
67 is the police code for a homicide. Kids just didn’t understand it and thought it referred to something else.
I thought that’s 187
In California it’s 187.
And now I gotta listen to sublime
187 is homicide, yes, but it says there 67 is homocide. You’re welcome.
Thanks. Fucking ios keyboard gets worse every day.
That might just be California. In standard “10” police codes, it’s 67. https://www.police1.com/resources/articles/police-codes-VqFqvwMyjl6GES0f/
That number is just an example of a specific category of absurd humor. It’s rare to see that sort of thing applied to numbers though. In other situations, we’ve all seen it. Just repeat any dumb thing a hundred times and suddenly it becomes funny. You could look at pretty much any TV comedy. Pick any decade, like 60’s, 70’s, 90’s or whatever. The rule is very simple: Just repeat it and it becomes funny at some point.
You could also say that the seeds of brain rot are older than we dare to admit. The 2020s just distilled it to its purest form yet.
What’s funnier than 24?
25
Ok boomer
It’s the children who are wrong
What
Schfifty-five.
Shiggity shawh
twennyone
You stoopid
Where’s 3.50?
Get outa here ya lock ness
It was about that time that I noticed that sweet little verilyfemme was a three story tall crustacean from the Mesozoic era!
It was about that time…
67 sneaking onto the ‘funny numbers’ list is hilarious—teens are basically a standards committee now.
Bot account? Comments seem like your average “short and humorous response” bot.
Definitely a bot, not sure what the point of them is on Lemmy.
6-7 is an under 10 thing. By the time you’re 12, it’s stupid.
Nah, even early 20s do it here.
42 is undeniably the funniest number
Sorry for the inconvenience.
If you’re gonna include 23 skidoo… You should include being at sixes and sevens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_sixes_and_sevens
67… Is very very old British slang for wrecked/confused, at odds, or hysterical.
“I was all 6’s and 7’s”
Dressed to the nines no less.
We better 86 it with all this numbers business tho.
I think some will still understand it, although I can’t remember the last time I heard anyone use it.
Vague Austin Powers memory somewhere…
