Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

rammed

2023-08-03 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
You are viewing an older revision of this explanation (2026-03-14 15:19:58). View current version →
rammed
Votey panel for rammed
This explanation is incomplete or may contain errors. It was generated by AI and has not yet been reviewed by a human editor.

Explanation

The Joke

Two people stand near a collapsed structure — what appears to be the ruins of a fortress or prison. One asks "But how? It just collapsed." The other explains that they asked for a last meal, and when the system tried to load a recipe page online, it immediately ran out of RAM — causing the entire system to crash.

The caption below reads: "What if search engine optimization is just Google protecting us from an AI apocalypse?"

The Humor

The comic makes a joke about the notoriously bloated state of modern recipe websites. Anyone who has tried to find a recipe online knows the experience: pages loaded with ads, pop-ups, auto-playing videos, life stories, and SEO-optimized filler text that consume enormous amounts of memory and processing power. The joke imagines that this bloat is so extreme that even a powerful AI system would crash trying to load one.

The caption extends the joke into conspiracy-theory territory, suggesting that maybe Google's search engine optimization — which incentivizes the very bloat that makes recipe pages so resource-heavy — is actually a secret defense mechanism against AI. If an AI ever tried to access the internet for something as simple as a recipe, the sheer weight of modern web pages would overwhelm it. It's a funny inversion that reframes one of the internet's most annoying features as an accidental safeguard for humanity.

View History (1) Original Comic