everybody lives rose! just this once, everybody lives!

Well, at least until the printer starts to spew out paper like an assassin or it somehow creates the biggest paper jam of all time!

Except the trees. Think of the poor poplars.

Not true. In the NASCAR one, only one person died.

Was about the say the same thing. Where the mass extinction even?

Well what if you carried the pages to your home?

What about flashlights?

what if you went to where the wikipedia servers are and stole files and took them home? ​@@hanstheexplorer

And you would recoup a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the printing costs with the lighting. Win-win!

With ideas like this, you're a shoe-in for their inkologist position. 1:55

"It was a pleasure to- black-out?"

That was my first thought, just burn the pages.

There's a joke in there about Boomers versus Millennials, but my coffee hasn't kicked in yet so I can't make it work. (Says the proud-to-be-Gen-Y person.)

This video is actually sponsored by Newell Brands, the makers of Sharpies (TM).

@@davydatwood3158 "All these regulations and liability getting in the way of efficiency, used to be we'd just burn 'em."

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy

@@TheT8or That was... quite something. Almost sounds like a joke.

@@TheT8or the line between wikipedia editor and SCP writer is far thinner than some might think

this sounds like one of the Portal 2 narrator lines "If you are a non-employee who has discovered this facility amid the ruins of civilization, welcome! And remember: Testing is the future, and the future starts with you."

​@@AbCd-kq3kyIt is a joke. It literally says at the top that Wikipedia does not, and will not, consider the article to be a serious piece of advice

I read it as "monkeys" at first, as in "with typewriters", until I looked again.

@@TonViperThey demand even more respect.

Explain please

Why, because of the palimpsests?

​@@davidwuhrer6704 The hypothetical monks definitely save a lot of animal skin that way. I imagined the op was referring to the efficiency of marginalia.

Tbh that's not a lot of pages. Page wide printers can often print more than 70 pages per minutes so a few thousand pages is probably less than an hour of work. Any proper print center can probably handle such peak without compromising availability. Unless everyone in the school suddenly all want their copy of the entire XKCD, of course, but outsourcing a printing press isn't very hard, and the quality of that is often better than common draft quality digital prints.

This is when I'd try to optimize it. For CAD work where paper blueprints are desired, such as architectural work, there is a different kind of printer, it is what replaced Pen Plotters for drawing out blueprints. This is an inkjet printer for the most part, but scaled up a lot in the width dimension, and the paper is fed from a reel instead of individual sheets. With this printer comes some economies of scale. Ink is supplied by tanks that do not move with the print head, which makes the ink tanks a lot cheaper to keep topped up because now you don't have to limit their size to what the carriage can carry, and you also don't have to design nearly as much of an anti-frothing action into the ink's chemistry (or a foam anti-slosh buffer into the ink tank which requires making sure the ink is chemically compatible with said foam) to prevent the ink from having bubbles in it which would cause blank spots in the print. Still expensive, but you're also not paying for 3 inks at a time when only one is out (if using color), a whole print head and plastic ink tank every time you need to get more ink (which is universal to all ink cartridges) and that brings the cost down a lot. Closer to the cost of laser compared on the basis of equal areas of printed paper produced, but still more expensive by a little bit. Now for how that gets back to printing out all the XKCD comics. Thru some intelligent use of scaling the XKCD pages to fit the width of the drafting printer paper roll, you would be able to fit a whole lot of XKCD comics on a single "square area" (as a stand-in for a page) of this drafting printer paper, and this printer is actually a good bit faster than a standard letter/A4 paper inkjet printer because it doesn't have to pause to feed a new page, it just advances the paper a bit without printing anything to create a small gap between "pages" that it prints, if desired. Or it can print one long continuous "page", if you set up your print job that way. Point is, with the right paper selection this would be a good way to create a one-off "XKCD Comic Compendium" wallpaper thing for an interesting "nerd room" in a house maybe, but it's also a lot less expensive and a lot faster at just "printing out all of the XKCD comics" than a standard inkjet printer if using the normal drafting paper. Now yes, SOME business-class laser printers can be faster to print the whole thing even when only using Letter/A4 paper, but those are generally found in law offices and not so much on a college campus unless it's a centralized printer for something like "the whole floor of classrooms in this campus building" which is a lot closer to how they're set up in law offices (source: my mom is a retired legal secretary from the real estate department of a rather large law office, and what I have said about law office printer types and locations is how she described the printer set-up at her office, I have no reason to think it's much different in other law offices). Oh and those business-class laser printers generally aren't the kind to have a "color printing" function. For a laser-fast printer that can do color, you need to look for a Dye Sublimation printer, those are really neat because the "ink" or "Dye" is not a liquid, it's a solid and easy to handle "lump" of "colorful stuff" and the printer somehow transfers that to the paper and makes it stick there as close to permanently as my lifespan would allow me to observe.

@@44R0Ndinbut could those big printers fit that one big interactive explorable comic? There might be more than one actually. Of course you could stack them if you needed to.

@@EmergencyTemporalShift Probably? The paper's roughly a meter wide, and the roll of it is really, really long (50-200m long for HP CAD plotters) The specific kind of printer I'm talking about is called a "CAD Plotter". Most of the major printer makers have an offering in that category. The specific one I looked at for the purposes of my first comment was the HP DesignJet T850.

​@@EmergencyTemporalShiftthere's a lot of interactives

If you didn't already know; Will Wheaton read the audiobook versions of "What if?" And "what if 2". They're definitely entertaining, worth picking up if you ever find yourself listening to audiobooks.

@@almeron82 That's how I was first introduced to What If, Wheaton does a great job. His narration is filled with geeky glee at the absurdity of it all.

I especially like the sound effects.

So so glad it's actually Randall voicing these new ones

youre saying this vid is just based on some older thing?

"Several inconveniently-large buildings." Also the Guide seems to have a fairly glacial update schedule. (Ford also mentions about limits on _space_ in the book which I guess given the tech at the time would have been a concern.)

Notably, the Hitchhiker's Guide summed up the totality of Earth (i.e. the entire non-science and math portions of Wikipedia) as "Harmless" “What? Harmless! Is that all it’s got to say? Harmless! One word!’ Ford shrugged. ‘Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book’s microprocessors,’ he said, ‘and no one knew much about the Earth, of course.’ ‘Well, for God’s sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit.’ ‘Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it’s still an improvement.’ ‘And what does it say now?’ asked Arthur. ‘Mostly harmless,”

300 cubic meters sounds like a lot but it‘s basically the volume of a slightly above average apartment.

You've got exactly 42 likes! 😆

The size of the skyscrapers isn't very well defined. I would expect a civilization capable of casual space travel to build larger skyscrapers than we do on Earth. (I mean, we've invented carbon nanotubes and we still make buildings of WOOD? We're basically still stuck in the stone age)

I guess edits to English Wikipedia aren't constant throughout the day, but tend to fall when the most populous English-speaking countries (ie USA) are mostly asleep (or at work, I expect most edits are done in personal time). So a longer print queue also lets you use fewer printers and catch up during that downtime.

You could just have more recent updates replace the spot in the queue of the now obsolete update maybe ?

@@gdclemo I read the phrase "edits... tend to fall when..." with the meaning "edits... tend to happen when...", and then the rest of the sentence still almost made sense! The second sentence clued me in to my mistake. :)

Cache invalidation is widely recognized as one of the hardest problems in computer science. ;)

You could probably create a program that freezes printing if the queue is less than, say, 100 pages. If a page gets edited while it's still in the queue, you remove the now obsolete edit, and then put the new one in, and move it to the position of the obsolete edit. This way, any time a page begins printing, it is ALWAYS the latest version of the page. The margin for error would be while printing the page. All there is from there is optimizing the queue size for maximum throughput, accuracy to the current version, and minimum time in queue.

Basically microfiche

That could actually be really effective, not for keeping up with edits, that doesn’t change, but let’s say that this 4pt font strategy lets us condense 100 pages into 4 (assuming that the entire book in four pages was a 100 page kids book like the ones I used to read). It would fit into 4 of that one art installation mentioned in the video. That’s a storeable value. In the case of a civilization collapse, a text Wikipedia would be extremely useful, lasting hundreds of years and not requiring technology to read. Given that the most important stuff is scientific facts, and that doesn’t change often, unlike history, we can afford to update this physical library far less often, I’d suggest somewhere between 1 and 5 years, depending on how much we want to care about modern events and how quickly we want new discoveries to enter the vault.

@@liegeparadox2624 Keep two copies. One complete one, that you update every few years, and the addition, which updates more frequently (once a month maybe), but only contains the stuff that changed since the last full archive

@@liegeparadox2624 Close, but not cigar. In case of your ISO-standard sci-fi flavored technological collapse, what you'd need is not only science books, but also TECHNOLOGY books - you know, those books detailing the exact procedures to make the nifty stuff that the encyclopedia describes. Don't believe me? Do not try building a car based upon the Wikipedia article for "car"; try just building a metal file based upon the article for "File (tool)".

Most paper is acidic and degrades p quickly, they'd need to use archival quality paper which is astronomically more expensive than standard paper

When you purchase OEM ink for sure.

Sounds like they should have switched to laser printers...

@@tompw3141 I dunno if laser still cuts down the cost _that_ much. At the college I went to (2003-06) there was a box provided by the printer bank (All HP colour lasers) for putting unwanted _whoops_ pages in (Y'know, those annoying banner ads at the end that *always* came out on a separate page?) for use as jotting scrap, and when I started there you'd get maybe ten sheets in it a day. By the time I left the volume of waste pages was so high the box had changed from the _lid_ of a paper box to two 5-ream boxes, daily addition easily in the 50-100 sheet range. 🖨📈💸 And people wonder why UK tuition fees seem to track alongside HPs share price?... 😉

I worked at an independent pharmacy until 2010 and still did this. Moved and got a job at a big chain, and it was all electronic. Most states dont even require paper prescription records anymore, as long as the records exist digitally

The problem is, what will you do when there's an outage? Not if, when. Because all technology breaks.

My country used to have a book like that but for electricians. Where how to do installations according to code was written in plain language and with diagrams etc. They used to publish a packet of update pages once a year. Basically, every licensed electrician would have a subscription for this and then change those pages in their ring binder. Not sure if it's still available on paper. The ring binder was A5 size and about an inch thick, printed on sturdy, slightly glossy paper that could withstand being used on a construction site and even being handled in damp conditions.

@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo I image they have backups in case that happens. Also paper can also break.

@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo My IOTs smart pacemaker goes out whenever the internet goes down so I don't guess I'll have to worry about it.

Makes sense. Most books have their own Wikipedia article, but of course the book itself is magnitudes larger.

Another of the What If questions (the infinite Twitter timeline one, I think?) points out as an aside that, if saved as ASCII plaintext, every book that has ever been published would fit on 2 DVD disks. We have so much storage space these days and we just waste it on less efficient file formats... :P

@@GameDevYal how about we optimize further - ascii has a bunch of characters that aren't used in 99% of the books, so let's make new standards (all different bits per character) per book, and just have a single byte saying which one it is before anything

From the moment I heard inkjet I was sure that he did it specifically to highlight the ink cost XD

Most people tend not to think of colour laser printers as being a Thing, because they're so expensive up front that you rarely see them unless you're part of a larger organization that has reason to have them. So if you wanted pictures, in colour, most people are going to default to 'ink jet'... never mind that it's been a Long time since an inkjet made sense when you could use a black and white laser printer for everything except the rare/niche situation where colour pictures actually matter (and again, print shops exist, last I checked).

@@laurencefraser Color laser printers aren't very expensive anymore, but they are certainly not photo quality. They are intended for printing charts and graphs for business documents. If you want to print a lot of color pictures, the cheapest way is to use an inkjet printer that's been modified to use a continuous ink system. They use bulk ink that can be bought in large bottles fairly cheaply.

​@@laurencefraserEveryone I know who still owns a printer went laser years ago. People either print enough that it's worth it, or they print rarely enough that inkjet dries out between uses. They priced themselves out of the middle ground, so inkjet is going the way of the dodo.

@@Merennulli I wish I could say the same, but I support many small businesses, and the owners of those business only care about "it does color!" (even though they don't really need it) and "low price!" They all find out that fallacy the hard way, and many still repeat the mistake.

They'd dig up his corpse and find some kinda dust or powder on it and assume the article was right!

if pages about Wikipedia itself or vandalism of it survive they'd eventually figure it out

They would probably assume it was an idiom that was common for the time, but there wold be some argument if it was about his actual drug use, or how good he was. The latter opinion would be based off the known compliment "this contains crack" for foods and drinks that are considered so good you want to keep consuming them.

Especially because he is actually .75 cocaine.

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charlie_Sheen&diff=prev&oldid=846419309

I'm assuming that those big ink containers aren't, say, available to be ordered on Amazon by the general public (at least not without risking everything becoming a big inky mess in the process :P)?

Just about *anything* is orders of magnitude less than desktop printer ink.

​@@gordontaylor2815If you were thinking of using those in a conventional desktop printer, that might not go so well. According to another commenter, the ink formulation is different. You typically can't directly sub ink from tank fed systems into carriage tank printers because tanks that move with the print head need anti-foaming properties to avoid bubbles generated by the rapid side to side motions resulting in blank spots in your print. Now, if you have high, but not commercial scale print volumes, you can get smaller tank fed desktop printers from Canon and Epson at least, that still get you savings, but you do need to have enough volume to actually use the ink while it's still good.

I said in a jokey way once to some people "come on, who hasn't edited a wikipedia article to win an argument before!" and all of them looked horrified at the concept!

E‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎‎

there has to be a mountain of endless fan fold computer paper with the green lines. Still need to invent a continuous printer, but so what.

Our Kingdom of the divine Bartholomew VII has began a war. -Lord King Thomas, Thubert of pantria XII

Or inscribe it on granite obelisks....

Print?

Ooh, how much tractor feed paper can you get in one box? We might have to find and refurbish a high-end dox matrix or daisy wheel printer, but once you get it set up, it should go quickly. Just bring ear protection.

The scribes would be working overtime to get every edit written down

Not exactly what you're talking about, but there is a project sponsored by Wikipedia called Kiwix that does largely that, most of their downloads are free but they also have some private server packages that cost about as much as a movie ticket or two

What blows my mind is that I could fit over five of those on my phone

They do provide downloads of archives of it

@@HmmmmmLemmeThinkNo What blows my mind is when I try to fit all those pages into my brain

You can! Have a search for Kiwix :-)

TBH i doubt thatregular printers can handle very thin paper :)

​​@@sognarisenheart7806 Just *_THINKING_* about the amount and severity of paper jams from using 12#, is enough to make me want to ALT+F4 in real life... 😟😵

or don't worry about your pictures being in colour and use a black and white laser printer... or shell out more up front for a Colour laser printer because, while most people will never actually reach this threshold normally, it doesn't actually take all That much use before not paying the artificially high cost of coloured ink makes up for the rather steap price jump for the machine itself.

Printing wikipedia on an inkjet is insanely dumb, buy a high capacity laser. Actually any inkjet is dumb. There are two rules of printing. Rule one is you brought an inkjet and do so much printing it would have been cheaper to buy a laser. Rule two is you brought an inkjet and don't do much printing, so spend a fortune cleaning the print heads and it would have been cheaper to buy a laser. If you want a photo there a services that put your print on real photographic paper, use them.

not just his family, his entire SPECIES

Not to mention it's going to be cheaper when you're doing such large volumes. Printer ink is expensive because cartridges aren't interchangeable between printers and have a lot of specialized parts. Refillable cartridges are cheaper, but you're not buying in bulk. If you have an actual print shop/factory? You're using industrial quantities of ink and it's going to be lower than a home printer.

Printers with refillable ink tanks have existed almost as long as ink-jet printers. way before xkcd even existed. They have never been super popular, because the printers themselves were always more expensive, and they were usually high-end models.

Toner is also a thing.

if chip shortage really caused printer companies to stop using chips to force you to buy new ink cartriges, that's kinda funny.

@@deepspacewanderer9897 Partially true. Ink-tank printers are now affordable and affordable for personal use.

A bot stole your comment

You didn’t Even watch it yet.

uhh... you didn't watch it?

Thank you for being honest

Actually, that's a good idea. A laser printer would cost around 4 cents per page; but if you only used black ink, the cannon tank printer would be 1/10th of the price

A laser printer would still be much better because tank ink jet printers have waste pads that fill up really quickly if you're doing high volume printing I filled the one on my printer up in 3 years. Also inkjet is much slower than laser.

"ah yes, the 2025 edition of Wikipedia, part 7245"

There WAS something called the WikiReader that was basically "pictureless Wikipedia on a flashcard", but that stopped getting updated years ago when the size became too big for the media the reader was designed for: watch?v=1lRI35gKSPA

It's simple. All we need is a computer database to track where the information is, and where in the pile the edit page goes. I mean, we just need a computer that effectively has a copy of the text, so you can calculate which page is altered. Now we just need people to maintain that digital copy, and keep all the edits tracked, and of course the software to track reverts and such. Who is going to write all that code? (ahem: Sarcasm/joking, if you didn't already get it)

I'd say this would be a non-problem. Just print a new edition each year. The size of said edition could be vastly shrunk by printing it on microfiche and including a reader next to the rack of slides. The index would be another smaller set of slides.

@@C.I... True. As long as the digital Wikipedia still exists, having a printed version would be more for the spectacle and/or in the case of emergency. Nobody would go there for up-to-date information when they can just go to the website. An annual refresh seems reasonable.

@@C.I... now, imagine if we engraved these articles into glass, and had a small reader controlled by a small but fast computer that can read or write to any of these. You reinvented digital storage.

@@cewla3348 the use case of this system over digital storage is that we do not need electricity to access the data

the article was made before epson heard of tank printers, this is just that article but animated and voiced

@@cewla3348 Still should've been updated or at least been pointed out in an annotation imo, especially since it concerns a major point. This is atypical for Randall.

And could we speed up the process? Giant unfolding kevlar sheets / sponges come to mind, as they'd probably be the most effective way to slow down objects at orbital velocities enough to make them fall back down.

@@DeuxisWasTaken Praying for a Carrington event would help more. A solar storm of that size would puff the atmosphere out far enough to cause most tiny particles to reenter faster. I don't know how we could possibly replicate that, though. Your idea might work better if we could develop a system to create aerogel from a sealed container in orbit. At 20 kg per cubic meter it could absorb quite a few hits and yet have enough air resistance to slow appreciably even in the near vacuum 200 km up.

​@@willythemailboy2Wouldn't high-altitude nuclear detonations also do that kinda? Though not sure if self-EMP is a good idea in such situation

​​​@@ignaloidasNo, it wouldn't. (See: Operation Fishbowl.) And an EMP is still subject to the inverse squared per distance thing.

billions of years. without us,.

A picture is worth a thousand words, which makes pictures very inefficient in terms of words per unit of disk space.

Flash drives are big enough now to include the pictures too.

It's said to be about 23 gigabytes - so, yeah. Text is very efficient.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Terminal_Event_Management_Policy a zip drive might be nice. Though actual printing would last longer depending on conditions

I'd win.

We actually already kind of know what happens when something similar happens. A guy in Russia got a particle accelerator beam shot through his head. It would have been enough radiation to kill him instantly, but because it was in such a small area, he survived. Look it up. It's really interesting. He's actually still alive, at least as of the last time I checked.

There's actually a case of something like that happening to someone, where he stuck his head into a particle accelerator and got shot through _the head_ with a particle beam... And yet he lived!

​@@gohunt001-5The reason for his survival is that the particle which penetrated through his head was actually so powerful it didn't dump all of it's energy inside the man's head but pass through him in a relatively clean fashion leaving relatively non destructive path behind

ehh, leaving out stubs makes sense, minor articles not so much.

12 years, 1 begrudging person who has ever cared about a single thing you thought. Fell off.

It's a romantic thought. Though bigger libraries Should already have each Dewey decimal number stocked. Though my Local library lacks some topics I'm interested in

I’m also looking forward to a periodic table

nov 29th 2023 : aim hubble at earth dec 5th 2023: magnitude 15 earthquake dec 19th 2023: No rules NASCAR jan 9th 2024: earth stops spinning feb 6th 2024: speed of light baseball feb 20th 2024: laser umbrella mar 5th 2024: submarine in space apr 2nd 2024: Swim in a nuke pool apr 16th 2024: everyone jumps may 7th 2024: all the lightning in one spot may 28th 2024: when the last light goes out june 18th 2024: drained the oceans I'll leave the actual math as an exercise for the student, but this looks to be about right on time.

The Matrix gets more efficient every day!