Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
Pretty sure no human lived at the Trinity test site or anywhere else in the test sites where weapons were detonated, especially at the moment of detonation. And I’m pretty sure none have since moved onto those sites either. Hence “inhabited”. It’s not like we nuked cities and towns.
Well considering Elon situation I wouldn’t blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying “you expected for it to blow up” is something no real scientist would’ve said unless they were making a bomb.
It’s called the prevention paradox: It’s when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn’t severe in the first place.
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you’re around then.
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
That’s a pretty good description. And most software back then didn’t use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who’s not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You’ve got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
You’re thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn’t need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it’s always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn’t know if it’s 1900 or 2000.
Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really
Yeah but not all people live on American soil…
It’s the American tradition to ignore that
WTF?
Unless that was sarcasm that I missed… 100’s of weapons have been tested on US soil…
Not sure what you mean.
The US was inhabited last I checked.
Pretty sure no human lived at the Trinity test site or anywhere else in the test sites where weapons were detonated, especially at the moment of detonation. And I’m pretty sure none have since moved onto those sites either. Hence “inhabited”. It’s not like we nuked cities and towns.
Right… Gotcha. So you’re a ‘change the goalposts to keep making me right as the argument and evidence changes’ kinda person.
No point engaging with your type.
Sounds like you’re the goalposts-mover here, shipmate, and it seems the rest of the readers here agree with me. Maybe this place ain’t your venue.
deleted by creator
“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening
Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now
Elon musk isn’t a scientist, he’s a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
Well considering Elon situation I wouldn’t blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying “you expected for it to blow up” is something no real scientist would’ve said unless they were making a bomb.
I can’t remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.
Like the preventative measures we’re so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.
It’s called the prevention paradox: It’s when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn’t severe in the first place.
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you’re around then.
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
At the rate of one year per year, even.
For each second that passes we’re one second closer to 2038
Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(
I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.
Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
That’s a pretty good description. And most software back then didn’t use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who’s not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
You don’t spend much time around them, do you?
The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.
I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.
Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You’ve got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.
Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.
You’re thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn’t need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it’s always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn’t know if it’s 1900 or 2000.