Recently, I was shopping for a hard drive at a big box store and tried to filter by capacity ...

How many chickens can the 0 TB drive store, I wonder?

Only if you eat fewer than 20 chickens per day.

I remember back in 2013 I built a PC for my wife, and in 2014 one for myself. At that point, buying something online still felt a bit odd. It was reserved for specialty items, shipping would often take at least 2 weeks, or even 6 weeks depending on where it was coming from. I was no stranger to purchasing online, but brick-and-mortar stores with real stock still existed and could get me what I purchased much more quickly.

I remember being so impressed with Newegg's website. It made it so easy to build a computer and make sure everything was compatible. It was really easy to compare different options. The filter system was intuitive and comprehensive. I remember thinking "wow this is a perfect shopping experience. The future has arrived".

I went to build my next PC in 2019, and dear Satan was it so much worse. I had heard about Newegg getting bought out by a larger company in 2016, and it showed. They opened it up to 3rd party sellers. The filters got clogged with garbage and don't seem to work properly anymore. The sort function became a joke. The UI got rearranged to be less intuitive. I think they purposefylly wanted to make a worse shopping experience to make people frustrated, to get them to give up on looking for deals and pay a bit extra just to be done with it. I ended up having to go to a 3rd party website (PCPartPicker) to figure out what I needed and where to get it. And some of those parts I had to order on eBay (some even from Newegg's eBay account which is just.... Why are we doing this?), some on Amazon or Best Buy. And it's only gotten worse since.

This same experience has happened everywhere. Just this morning my wife was checking out Culture Hustle to see if they have any interesting new paints and commented on how much worse the website was now than when we last used it a few years ago.

This may make me sound like an old curmudgeon yelling at clouds, but I think the Internet peaked a while ago. There are arguments over exactly when, but sometime between 2008-2016. I remember in 2012 in talking to my fellow students about how Google search results were getting worse.

That's multiplicative, no? Conjunctive rather than disjunctive.

This shit infuriates me. It is trivial to add an option for "and/or" when you have multiple checkboxes.

I haven't had this problem that I can recall with online shopping, but I have definitely encountered it when searching Jira tickets.

Actually, some of my most successful online shopping (or at least filtering) has been at Home Depot. They indicate where items are in their store very specifically (and usually accurately) and most of them even have Google Maps of the inside of their store. Because I can precisely locate something before I go there, I know exactly where to go when I do and can be in and out very quickly. It's wonderful.

The screenshot is from Walmart. Their accuracy is much more questionable. I didn't see a single chicken last time I visited. Joking aside, the website has indicated that an item was in stock in an aisle that didn't even exist (I think it was looking at another store despite me confirming multiple times which one I had set).

Did it ever actually get made? I remember this.

1 Chicken is measured by the cut size. The smallest currently is measured in bites. Here is a 3lb partition...

The six 1 chickens are for RAID

The filters are different today and only one result shows up, but apparently this is a 1 chickens drive: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Universal-500G-USB3-0-External-Hard-Disc-HDD-State-Drive-Notebook-Desktop-for-Flash-Deals-Women-Men-New-Blue/9815853058

If you're curious enough to reproduce the results yourself, obviously it's Walmart (I'm not proud, but they're the only store within an hour of my small town that carries essentially any electronics at all). I got the results searching for "20tb external drive" (not carried, it turns out) and trying to filter by capacity and in-store, but I imagine you could perform a less specific search and perhaps get even more amusing filters.

Since dactyl mean finger, which can also be translated as a digit, it kinda works. 🤔

Nice.

Probably 1 chicken

Weirdly, it was just a hard drive. I took this screenshot 1-2 months ago and the filter options aren't quite the same today, but "1 chickens" still shows up as option. If I select it, I get: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Universal-500G-USB3-0-External-Hard-Disc-HDD-State-Drive-Notebook-Desktop-for-Flash-Deals-Women-Men-New-Blue/9815853058

Do you have enough hard drive for it?

∞

Undefined

segmentation fault at 0x87ac4608
core dumped

Sigh. How many times do I have to keep telling people.. 0TB ≠ 0 TiB. One is a marketing gimmick that makes it look like you're getting more capacity than is actually available. You think you're getting 0TB when you're actually only getting 0TiB.

yeah especially since these days software seems to expand to fill the available volume, just like a hot gas.

It can be ∞ TB if you inverse it by instead uploading to cloud 😏🤏🏻

Everyone has their own way of doing things. In order to integrate them, you have to create your own way of doing things. Later, other people have to integrate your new schema with their own. It's just the nature of working with many different companies

Mine say 256 ertuherrrrs. Wut dat?

Hmm, that loads a blank page for me and searching online for "chicken PDF" returns a lot of unrelated stuff.

Still, I've heard a PDF can be the size of Britain or something like that. It makes sense that you could only fit a single one (or perhaps single ones) on your drive.

A PetaPerson would hold 0 chickens.

I don't understand your question. You don't use chickens as a measurement of file size?

Next you'll tell me you don't describe a gigachicken as a person!

edit: I would be remiss if I didn't mention Egg, Inc.

Maybe after a bunch of translations you could get there

Gluten free, TB free

You know, I didn't check. Maybe I should pick up a Nothing phone and try again.

Jo dawg

I heard you like hard drives ...

Strangely (to me), most of the comments I've seen have been focused on the chickens, which are pretty funny; however, I don't think I've seen anyone comment on the "1 person," which - to me - is more concerning. Though if "Dennis" is a person (rather than a menace), perhaps that mitigates my concerns.

If you've had it for long enough you start to find Easter eggs in the game

Is chicken-networking related to duck-networking as described in The Story about Ping?

Do you plan to just cluck into a microphone?

https://youtu.be/1HPVQ4FpVlY

Unfortunately, I took that screenshot a while ago; if I do the same search again, I get only one "1 chickens" result, which I've linked elsewhere in the thread. It's just a normal external drive, as far as I can tell, so I have no idea how "chickens" got involved.

The search was originally done on Walmart.com (I'm not proud but there aren't a lot of retail options around my small town). All I did was search for "20tb external drive," filter for "in store," then open the "capacity" filter, which is what's shown above. I've consistently gotten weird results so, unless it's something specific to my local store, you probably will as well. If you do this, I'll be curious of your findings.

Much appreciated! I ended up ordering from Newegg, which had much more sensible filters. I had originally purchased what I wanted from Amazon, but the first one I got, ordered refurbished, had clearly been shucked and replaced with a 160GB drive from (IIRC) 2008 and the second one, ordered new, started audibly clicking one day into use.

For some reason (described by Amazon customer support as a "server glitch") Amazon had a really tough time with the return of both of them. This drive is meant to back up a RAID attached to my file server, so I didn't want to continue tempting fate by continuing to leave the server un-backed-up, which is why I was trying to find a place I could pick up one approximately the same day. I wasn't able to find such a place, so I went with Newegg because it seemed like a bad idea to keep trying Amazon.

Wow, thanks for this

Chicken attack!

Well, you've sold me on it. I'll go buy the one chicken drive now.