We're being short-sighted

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Actual programmers wondering why this joke doesn't mention 65535...

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More of a front end issue actually, almost all time is just stored as the number of seconds since 00:00:00 Jan 1 1970.

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And it's represented as a 64 bits value, which is over 500 billions years.

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and I think the ROC government in exhile in Taiwan stopped using it.

Actually it is still used. It's everywhere in legal documents, government documents and stuff. Though people more commonly say 2024 instead of 民國113年.

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64 bits value

.... About that...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

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That's the 32 bit timestamp

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You still need loaders, drivers, retailers to get anything to the customer. A lot of rich ski and holiday towns can't staff the stores and Cafe's, because the employees can't afford to pay rent in the same towns

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In this thread: mostly people that don't know how timekeeping works on computers.

This is already something that we're solving for. At this point, it's like 90% or better, ready to go.

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Time keeping, commonly, is stored as a binary number that represents how many seconds have passed since midnight (UTC) on January 1st 1970. Since the year 10,000 isn't x seconds away from epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z), where x is any factor of 2 (aka 2^x, where x is any integer), any discrepancies in the use of "year" as a 4 digit number vs a 5 digit number, are entirely a display issue (front end). The thing that does the actual processing, storing and evaluation of time, gives absolutely no fucks about what "year" it is, because the current datetime is a binary number representing the seconds since epoch.

Whether that is displayed to you correctly or not, doesn't matter in the slightest. The machine will function even if you see some weird shit, like the year being 99 100 because some lazy person decided to hard code it to show "99" as the first two digits, then take the current year, subtract 9900, and display whatever was left (so it would show the year 9999 as "99", and the year 10000 as year "100") so the date becomes 99 concatenated with the last two (now three) digits left over.

I get that it's a joke, but the joke isn't based on any technical understanding of how timekeeping works in technology.

The whole W2k thing was a bunch of fear mongering horse shit. For most systems, the year would have shown as "19-100", 1900, or simply "00" (or some variant thereof).

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We've still got time to fix it, and the next release of Debian will likely have a time-64 complete userland. I don't know the status of other "bedrock" distributions, but I expect that for all Linux (and BSD) systems that don't have to support a proprietary time-32 program, everything will be time-64 with nearly a decade to spare.

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Except the shitty ones have more money and political power.

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Nah, they will do what they always do. Change some system environmental variables to move the zero date on till after they would have retired.

Nobody wants to touch the original code, it was developed in the 1970s

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My brother in Christ, there's more to time than just storing it. Every datetime library I've ever used only documents formatting/parsing support up to four year digits. If they suddenly also supported five digits, I guarantee it will lead to bugs in handling existing dates, as not all date formats could still be parsed unambiguously.

It won't help you if time is stored perfectly, while none of your applications support it.

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Y2K was definitely not only fear-mongering. Windows Systems did not use Unix timestamps, many embedded systems didn't either, COBOL didn't either. So your explanation isn't relevant to this problem specifically and these systems were absolutely affected by Y2K because they stored time differently. The reason we didn't have a catastrophic event was the preventative actions taken.

Nowadays you're right, there will be no Y10K problem mainly because storage is not an issue as it was in the 60s and 70s when the affected systems were designed. Back then every bit of storage was precious and therefore omitted when not necessary. Nowadays, there's no issue even for embedded systems to set aside 64 bit for timekeeping which moves the problem to 292277026596-12-04 15:30:08 UTC (with one second precision) and by then we just add another bit to double the length or are dead because the sun exploded.

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I would hope that these kinds of parsers are not used in critical applications that could actually lead to catastrophic events, that's definitely different to Y2K. There would be bugs, yes, but quite fixable ones.

Regarding Y2K, it wasn't horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn't just about displaying 19 or 20.

"There's no glory in prevention". I guess it's hard to grasp nowadays, that mankind at some point actually tried to stop catastrophies from happening and succeeded

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Even if such parsers aren't used directly in critical systems, they'll surely be used in the supply chains of critical systems. Your train won't randomly derail, but disruptions in the supply chain can cause repair parts not to be delivered, that kind of thing.

And you can be certain such parsers are used in almost every application dealing with datetimes that hasn't been specifically audited or secured. 99% of software is held together with duct tape.

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... any discrepancies in the use of "year" as a 4 digit number vs a 5 digit number, are entirely a display issue (front end).

That's exactly how I read the meme. It would still require a change.

Whether that is displayed to you correctly or not, doesn't matter in the slightest. The machine will function even if you see some weird shit,

I'm not sure if this is some nihilistic stuff, or you really think this. Of course nothing actually matters. The program will still work even if the time is uint32 instead of uint64. The machine of course will still work as well. Shit, your life will go on. The earth continues to spin and this will for sure not cause the heat death of the universe. But aside from actual crashes and some functionality bugs, UI issues should be the ones you worry about the most. If your users are a bank and they need to date the contracts, and you only offer 3 digits for the year? I think you'll agree with me that if users don't like using your program, it's a useless program.

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True. But I wouldn't see this as extremely more critical than the hundreds of other issues we encounter daily in software. Tbh, I'd be glad if some of the software I have to use daily had more duct tape on it...

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Look at this fucking piece of shit code, oh right, it's been written by a homo sapiens sapiens. No wonder they collapsed soon after.