We're being short-sighted

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.)

JackbyDev

I remember reading a primary source about someone's experience fixing Y2K stuff. I wish I could find it or remember more. The funniest part was that they actually got everything to work, but on January 1st when they tried to get into work their badge didn't work! The system on their badge reader was broken due to Y2K lol.

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Time I can deal with, timezones however, fuck that shit all to hell.

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2147483,647 + 1 will also be a rough year for humanity (or whatever is left)

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dealing with time

Network engineer here, it's just as bad here. Currently trying to figure out what to do with 'gaining' a leap second.

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Y2K wasn't entirely fear mongering horse shit. There were quite a few important cogs in our digital infrastructure that were using code that would not work past 1999. It was necessary to terrify corporate ownership into paying to fix the code, otherwise there would have never done it.