this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Real I'm not quite sure Y2K should be in there since it didn't really result in anything happening.
Y2K was like the ozone.
It became a big nothing issue because of the spreading awareness, hard work, and other activities that went into preventing it.
So like I said in another post.
The problem with crisis is always the people.
If nothing happens, cause of the hard work to prevent it, people riot over it being a big waste of time cause nothing happened
if something happens, then people riot because no one worked hard to prevent it.
A theory of mine is that one of the reasons people don't take the various crises threatening to destroy civilization seriously is that we've lived through so many crises that were solved without the average person suffering that much.
Y2K, overpopulation, the decay of the ozone, acid rain, all major problems, which received major attention from government, media and the scientific community....and were solved, by the scientific community through incredible efforts that were unthinkable a generation before thanks to advances in science. But things didn't really change that much for your average schlub on the street. The change in fluorocarbons in bug spray or air conditioning units may have changed the price a bit, but not enough to really hurt the ordinary person's wallet.
In World War II, everyone participated, everyone did something, be it as big as risking their life on the battlefield, or as small as collecting old newspaper to recycle. Nothing in the past eighty years has demanded that kind of investment or sacrifice or commitment. A great swathe of our population simply cannot believe there is or can be an existential threat to life as we know it.
I have a similar theory about politics, that most Americans thinks of the modern American democracy as inevitable and irrevocable, thus don't take it seriously when the President's platform seems built around totally destroying democratic norms.
Oh I know. My uncle was a big part of all of the work to make it a non-issue.
I'm just saying it was hardly scarring, unlike the other things listed. Most people didn't really think it would be a big thing and it turned out, because of other people's hard work, not to be a big thing.
Mostly it was just a giant waste of NASA's time trying to explain to people why it wouldn't result in toasters exploding no matter what anyone did or did not do, because toasters don't care about the date.
I don't deny there was some hysteria around the subject.
but given how stupid the average human is.. its probably better to err on hysteria, than to err on common sense, when you need to build public awareness and support for something critical.
Thank software engineers for that.
The real concern for computers is the Year 2038 problem.
Just like y2k, the irony is the problem is already solved but that won’t help us.
Datetime types have long since converted to longer data types that will not have such a problem for thousands of years. APIs have long since converted to return those longer data types. The problem is solved.
But the backward compatible 32bit datetime types are still there. Too many programs still use them. Too many embedded devices don’t include “extra features that waste space “, industrial devices are far more widespread but don’t get updates for many years. Worst of all, we have no idea what works and what doesn’t. We’re doomed to repeat the same crisis as y2k, where we’ll need to evaluate all our software, roll out patches, worry about everything falling down.
Modern software development has made it easier than ever to keep everything up to date, to prevent so many issues from ever happening. Year 2038 is an unnecessary problem. But human nature is to let it fester until the problem erupts. We’re doomed
It's the same problem, though. "Oh no, we need to store 4 digits instead of 2" vs "Oh no, we need to store int64 instead of int32". Or y'know, just use RFC3999 if you can't do 64-bit. It's a tedious lift, but it's not a crisis. People that need to change will do.
You might read up on the everlasting prevalence of ancient COBOL still running too much of our banking and government. the same software that caused y2k is still there
The problem is all the existing IoT devices etc that haven’t pre-planned for this. It’s a safe bet a lot of consumer devices with embedded systems haven’t planned for this and likely don’t have user friendly upgrade paths.
lots of cars too, probably. Its totally not unreasonable for a car to be on the road for 10/15/20 years.
I used to work at a major iot company. While, yeah, some devices will probably be left behind, most would've had this covered from the outset. The ones left behind were never intended to make it that long anyhow.
Oh we're absolutely all going to die because there's literally no way to move some businesses off software developed in the 1980s they're addicted to it.
It was considered pretty serious at the time. I remember being at a new year's party and everyone went outside at the ball drop to see if the world turned off.
Apparently IT people at the time had to deal with bunch of stuff and come to work at christmas just in case.
Hopefully "possible WW3" will turn out the same way.