We're being short-sighted

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I think you might be underestimating the potential impact.

Remember the Crowdstrike Windows BSOD? It caused billions in damages, and it's the absolute best case scenario for this kind of issue. Our potential Y10K bug has a bunch of additional issues:

you don't just have to patch one piece of software, but potentially all software ever written that's still in use, a bunch of which won't have active maintainers
hitting the bug won't necessarily cause crashes (which are easy to recognize), it can also lead to wrong behavior, which will take time to identify. Now imagine hundreds of companies hitting the bug in different environments, each with their own wrong behavior. Can you imagine the amount of continuous supply chain disruptions?
fixes have to be thought about and implemented per-application. There's no panacea, so it will be an incredible amount of work.

I really don't see how this scenario is comparable to anything we've faced, beyond Y2K.

JackbyDev

You need to qualify your statement about Y2K being fear mongering. People saying all technology would stop (think planes crashing out of the sky) were clearly fear mongering or conspiracy theorists. People saying certain financial systems needed to be updated so loans didn't suddenly go from the year 1,999 to 19,100 or back to 1900 were not fear mongering. It's only because of a significant amount of work done by IT folks that we have the luxury of looking back and saying it was fear mongering.

Look at this Wikipedia page for documented errors. One in particular was at a nuclear power plant. They were testing their fix but accidentally applied the new date to the actual equipment. It caused the system to crash. It took seven hours to get back up and they had to use obsolete equipment to monitor conditions until then. Presumably if the patch wasn't applied this would happen at midnight on January 1st 2000 too.

Y2K was a real problem that needed real fixes. It just wasn't an apocalyptic scenario.

JackbyDev

The comment you're replying to is really frustrating to me. It annoys me when people are so arrogant but also wrong. Do they live in a perfect world where nobody stores dates as ISO 8601 strings? I've seen that tons of times. Sometimes, it may even be considered the appropriate format when using stuff like JSON based formats.

JackbyDev

Actual programmers wondering how you've never seen anyone use ISO 8601 strings as storage.

JackbyDev

I've seen plenty of people use ISO 8601 for storage as well as display.

JackbyDev

Probably some mainframe or something lol. Always a mainframe.

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In other news, the colony Szinthar failed to update its software systems due to a lack of pregrammers and Techmancers. Signals received suggest there were no survivors.

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Again?!

Rest of the world: I guess they overhyped that issue because nothing bad happened.

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Planes crashing out of the sky wouldn't have been inconceivable. Say you have two air traffic control systems that are synchronizing - one handles dates with a modulo 100, another handles them in epoch time. All of a sudden the two reported time + positions of two different planes don't match up by a century, and collision projection software doesn't work right. I've seen nastier bugs than that, in terms of conceptual failure.

At no point is that a theory about a "conspiracy" either, IDK why you're bandying that term around.

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Years

YYYY

±YYYYY

ISO 8601 prescribes, as a minimum, a four-digit year [YYYY] to avoid the year 2000 problem. It therefore represents years from 0000 to 9999, year 0000 being equal to 1 BC and all others AD, similar to astronomical year numbering. However, years before 1583 (the first full year following the introduction of the Gregorian calendar) are not automatically allowed by the standard. Instead, the standard states that "values in the range [0000] through [1582] shall only be used by mutual agreement of the partners in information interchange".[20]

To represent years before 0000 or after 9999, the standard also permits the expansion of the year representation but only by prior agreement between the sender and the receiver.[21] An expanded year representation [±YYYYY] must have an agreed-upon number of extra year digits beyond the four-digit minimum, and it must be prefixed with a + or − sign[22] instead of the more common AD/BC (or CE/BCE) notation; by convention 1 BC is labelled +0000, 2 BC is labeled −0001, and so on.[23]

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The two most difficult things in programming; dealing with time, naming things, and boundary conditions.

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Amazon is already testing robotic loaders, self driving trucks are already in development, and vending machines retail everything in Japan.

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I'm 100% with you - it's the dangerous level of knowledge where someone understands the technical background for the most part, but is lacking real world experience. Reminds me of the blog posts titled "Misconceptions programmers have about X" - almost everything we touch in IT is complicated if you get deep enough.

But their style of commenting really jives with Lemmy on technical topics. I can't count the number of posts where people proudly shout fundamentally wrong explanations for current AI models, yet any corrections are downvoted to oblivion. It's not as bad on non-AI-topics, but I can't imagine anyone in the field reading GPs comment and agreeing...

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The Microsoft Zune had a y2k9 bug caused by a lingering clock issue from leap year from the extra day in February 2008 that caused them to crash HARD on Jan 1, 2009. I remember It being a pretty big PITA getting it back up and running.

JackbyDev

Fucking forgot to use a time dilation safe type for storing my time variables

JackbyDev

I don't think it will be a problem because it's 8,000 years away lol, but people do store time in ISO 8601 strings.

JackbyDev

Conspiracy is probably the wrong term. What I mean is that some (keyword: some) predictions were quite extreme and apocalyptic. See the fringe group response section for examples of what I was trying to convey.

The New York Times reported in late 1999, "The Rev. Jerry Falwell suggested that Y2K would be the confirmation of Christian prophecy – God's instrument to shake this nation, to humble this nation. The Y2K crisis might incite a worldwide revival that would lead to the rapture of the church. Along with many survivalists, Mr. Falwell advised stocking up on food and guns".

That's what I meant by the sort of "conspiratorial" response. Maybe I should reword my post to make it more clear?

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You're spot on. The vast majority of news coverage and "hype" from the general public relating to Y2K was all horse shit, but there were critical systems that did have issues and needed some work.

For the most part, the whole 19100 issue was a display bug, and likely wouldn't have caused problems, and the same for 1900... Those are examples that people generally saw at banks and whatnot, it would, for the most part, look weird, but for the most part, wouldn't create any actual problems. It would just be confusing for a while until the system caught up.

I think there's a few examples of companies missing the January 1st deadline and ending up with stuff marked as January 1900 for a bit. Otherwise they didn't have any significant issues.

Anything that involves a legally binding agreement would be critical though. Since the date is part of the agreement terms, it would need to be correct, and shown correctly.

Unless the "bug" literally crashed the system (which, it really should not have in most cases), like in your example, or it was connected to a legal contract, then it really wasn't that big of a problem.

The media, and people in general kept going on about it like they knew what the technical problem was, and it was always just conjecture and banter that made people worry unnecessarily.

What I'm trying to say is that Y2K was something that needed to be fixed but the likelihood that it would affect any singular person in society was very small. Those that were going to be affected, generally knew who they were and they were taking the steps required to fix the problem.

lad

You know, this is ironic

JackbyDev

I get your point, but in the same way that people "shouldn't" have been using two digits for year storage, there are certainly many parsers of ISO 8601 that don't match the spec. In 8,000 years I don't think this will be a problem though lol. I don't think we can really perceive what technology might be like that far in the future. But, hypothetically, is year 10,000 was in a few days and this was year 9,999 I would suspect we'd see at least some problems come January.

As an example, YAML 1.2 changed Boolean representation to only be case insensitive in 2009, but in [2022 people still complain about the 1.1 version]. (Caveat: I don't know if this person actually ran into a "real" problem or only a hypothetical one.)