Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I can see the same thing happening with climate change; say we successfully avert it, you’ll have all the lunatics on saying, “see?? There was nothing to worry about, we stressed and struggled for nothing!!1!”
It’s too late to wish for that. We’ve already emitted too much, and didn’t slow enough in time to avert catastrophic climate change. We will likely live through it, but we’ll suffer. And those in poorer, hotter countries will die en masse. Wars will likely happen as refugees flee countries now made inhospitable. Fascism will rise as richer countries, more able to weather the storms, become insular and focus on domestic issues to the detriment of the aforementioned refugees. Perhaps revolutions will happen. Extreme heatwaves, hurricanes, tsunamis, will threaten coastal and tropical cities, and island nations in particular, but even cooler countries will be stricken with fatal heatwaves, just less often.
None of this is “if” we miss some target. We already missed it. It is already set in stone. We can only do our best to ensure it doesn’t get even worse than that. That’s still not the worst possible outcome.
The year 2038 problem (also known as Y2038, Y2K38, Y2K38 superbug or the Epochalypse) is a time formatting bug in computer systems that represent times after the time 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038.
The problem exists in systems which measure Unix time – the number of seconds elapsed since the Unix epoch (00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970) – and store it in a signed 32-bit integer. The data type is only capable of representing integers between −(231) and 231 − 1, meaning the latest time that can be properly encoded is 231 − 1 seconds after epoch (03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038). Attempting to increment to the following second (03:14:08) will cause the integer to overflow, setting its value to −(231) which systems will interpret as 231 seconds before epoch (20:45:52 UTC on 13 December 1901). The problem is similar in nature to the year 2000 problem.
A lot of old PC hardware simply couldn’t scale to modern needs. On the plus side, things like virtualization and 64-bit architecture are helping solve issues like this.
We actually recently lived through some of the work arounds for Y2K causing issues again. Look up the Y2020 issue. A lot of the fixes for Y2K only pushed the problem out 20 years.
Same thing with the hole in the Ozone layer. People think it was never a problem because we don’t hear about it anymore, not realizing the issue has been mitigated and is recovering as we took concerted efforts to understand the cause and fix it before it became a disastrous situation.
Fun fact, pandemics can be addressed in a similar manner. With plenty of resources and scientific collaboration, potential pandemics can be identified, risks and remedies can be researched, and then policies can be put into place to prevent them from rising to the level of a pandemic in the first place. The problem is that people generally don’t see that a pandemic was prevented, only when they fail to be prevented. Also preventing them takes money, and requires policies that can temporarily negatively affect economies. Those things are mortal sins to conservatives and libertarians. So they dismantle programs that already exist or cut their funding to make them as useless as they believe them to be. Then the worst happens and they get to point at the program that failed and use that to justify never spending money on it again. Yaaaaaaaaay!
On which part? When it comes to Y2K being a real problem, my dad was working at PepsiCo at the time. He had to spend a lot of time and effort upgrading or replacing a lot of their systems because they would have stopped working and/or had major database issues if the time bug hadn’t been fixed. On top of that, a lot of backend systems were (and probably still are) designed to be running 24/7. The result is that it can take a while to get systems back online if one of them goes down unexpectedly. If all of the systems had gone down at the same time, it would have likely resulted in a catastrophic failure that could have bankrupted the company.
From the standpoint of corporations spreading misinformation about Y2K, I don’t have any concrete specifics, however my dad’s mentioned that his manager afterwards had warned the team he was on that there were grumblings from upper management and executives about Y2K preparations being a waste of money. Afaik nothing ever came of it inside the company (or if it did, it didn’t effect my dad), but it seems odd how easily the “Y2K was a hoax” conspiracy theory took off (I’m almost certain I’ve read a few articles about CEOs spreading misinformation about it shortly after the event, however I haven’t been able to find anything with a quick Google search).
As for Y2K being taught as a hoax… look around you. How many people do you think believe it was a hoax? Whenever I hear about it come up, it’s people ridiculing the “doomsday cult” that was pushing for corporate and government entities to fix the bug and how unnecessary it supposedly was. Someone is teaching them that, whether it’s formal education or informally via peers or the internet.
Working as an engineer in a corporation is weird. Do your job so well that it all works seamlessly? The “management” will ask you what you are doing because there’s no problem to fix so no pay raise. You have to work bare minimum so everything can break so this “management” people know that you’re “working”
If we don’t obliterate ourselves by 2032, then I highly suspect nothing will be done about the 32bit rollover time issue as it becomes politicized, nothing will get fixed and literally the solution is to add another 32 bits in front of the existing 32 bits.
Remember when Y2K was going to potentially end the world, but it didn’t thanks to experts working 'round the clock?
Remember when corporations turned around and got pissy because Y2K was successfully avoided, claiming that it was all a big hoax?
Remember how it’s now taught in some places that Y2K was a hoax and you can’t trust experts?
No wonder the world struggled with COVID.
The reason Y2K wasn’t a big deal was through the efforts of software developers and the only recognition they got was the movie Office Space.
Tbf every kid entering the workforce should have to watch office space and handed a red card for the IWW
And their choice of an office printer to go ham on
And a red Swingline stapler
Fuckin’ A
Office space is great, to be fair
It cost like half a trillion dollars to avert the issues of Y2K. A lot of people don’t realize how much of an issue it was.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I can see the same thing happening with climate change; say we successfully avert it, you’ll have all the lunatics on saying, “see?? There was nothing to worry about, we stressed and struggled for nothing!!1!”
Oh you know they will. It’s a guarantee… and I hope that winds up being the case because the alternative is a nightmare come true.
It’s been the reality for many years my friend
Literally already done with the hole in the ozone layer
It’s too late to wish for that. We’ve already emitted too much, and didn’t slow enough in time to avert catastrophic climate change. We will likely live through it, but we’ll suffer. And those in poorer, hotter countries will die en masse. Wars will likely happen as refugees flee countries now made inhospitable. Fascism will rise as richer countries, more able to weather the storms, become insular and focus on domestic issues to the detriment of the aforementioned refugees. Perhaps revolutions will happen. Extreme heatwaves, hurricanes, tsunamis, will threaten coastal and tropical cities, and island nations in particular, but even cooler countries will be stricken with fatal heatwaves, just less often.
None of this is “if” we miss some target. We already missed it. It is already set in stone. We can only do our best to ensure it doesn’t get even worse than that. That’s still not the worst possible outcome.
That’s the one thing we can’t avert, only adapt to and mitigate. The time to avert was half a century earlier.
Damn we made the air breathable, the rivers clean and the animals happy for no reason
Are you ready to go through it again soon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
A lot of old PC hardware simply couldn’t scale to modern needs. On the plus side, things like virtualization and 64-bit architecture are helping solve issues like this.
We actually recently lived through some of the work arounds for Y2K causing issues again. Look up the Y2020 issue. A lot of the fixes for Y2K only pushed the problem out 20 years.
Afaik the Nintendo3DS also had 2038 as it’s max calendar year.
I’ll just take a sabbatical on 2037
Same thing with the hole in the Ozone layer. People think it was never a problem because we don’t hear about it anymore, not realizing the issue has been mitigated and is recovering as we took concerted efforts to understand the cause and fix it before it became a disastrous situation.
Fun fact, pandemics can be addressed in a similar manner. With plenty of resources and scientific collaboration, potential pandemics can be identified, risks and remedies can be researched, and then policies can be put into place to prevent them from rising to the level of a pandemic in the first place. The problem is that people generally don’t see that a pandemic was prevented, only when they fail to be prevented. Also preventing them takes money, and requires policies that can temporarily negatively affect economies. Those things are mortal sins to conservatives and libertarians. So they dismantle programs that already exist or cut their funding to make them as useless as they believe them to be. Then the worst happens and they get to point at the program that failed and use that to justify never spending money on it again. Yaaaaaaaaay!
2 digit years can’t melt mainframe computers. (/s)
Imma need a source on that one.
On which part? When it comes to Y2K being a real problem, my dad was working at PepsiCo at the time. He had to spend a lot of time and effort upgrading or replacing a lot of their systems because they would have stopped working and/or had major database issues if the time bug hadn’t been fixed. On top of that, a lot of backend systems were (and probably still are) designed to be running 24/7. The result is that it can take a while to get systems back online if one of them goes down unexpectedly. If all of the systems had gone down at the same time, it would have likely resulted in a catastrophic failure that could have bankrupted the company.
From the standpoint of corporations spreading misinformation about Y2K, I don’t have any concrete specifics, however my dad’s mentioned that his manager afterwards had warned the team he was on that there were grumblings from upper management and executives about Y2K preparations being a waste of money. Afaik nothing ever came of it inside the company (or if it did, it didn’t effect my dad), but it seems odd how easily the “Y2K was a hoax” conspiracy theory took off (I’m almost certain I’ve read a few articles about CEOs spreading misinformation about it shortly after the event, however I haven’t been able to find anything with a quick Google search).
As for Y2K being taught as a hoax… look around you. How many people do you think believe it was a hoax? Whenever I hear about it come up, it’s people ridiculing the “doomsday cult” that was pushing for corporate and government entities to fix the bug and how unnecessary it supposedly was. Someone is teaching them that, whether it’s formal education or informally via peers or the internet.
I worked Y2K mitigation. Remember it well! But I’ve never read a single article or comment scoffing at the notion.
Sure, at the time people laughed it off, but 20-years later I feel our disaster prevention efforts are well understood.
LOL, we must run in different circles.
Working as an engineer in a corporation is weird. Do your job so well that it all works seamlessly? The “management” will ask you what you are doing because there’s no problem to fix so no pay raise. You have to work bare minimum so everything can break so this “management” people know that you’re “working”
If we don’t obliterate ourselves by 2032, then I highly suspect nothing will be done about the 32bit rollover time issue as it becomes politicized, nothing will get fixed and literally the solution is to add another 32 bits in front of the existing 32 bits.