this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 242 points 8 months ago (16 children)

Similar with Y2K


it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, "yeah lol it was a dud."

[–] [email protected] 76 points 8 months ago (10 children)

All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We've known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn't been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They're harmless

[–] [email protected] 43 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (5 children)

It's already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe. If you're around then.

[–] lowleveldata 40 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Finally it'd be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago

This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

debian for example is atm at work recompiling everything vom 32bit to 64bit timestamps (thanks to open source this is no problem) donno what happens to propriarary legacy software

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I think everything works in windows but the old windows media player. You can test it by setting the time in a windows VM to 2039.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn't an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date "0" which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (4 children)

2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet

[–] [email protected] 46 points 8 months ago (3 children)

At the rate of one year per year, even.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (1 children)

For each second that passes we're one second closer to 2038

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(

[–] lowleveldata 7 points 8 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

AfaIk that's not entirely true, e.g. Debian is changing the system time from 32 bit integer to 64 bit. Thus I assume other distros do this as well. However, this does not help for industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives

This is my concern, all the embedded devices happily running in underground systems like pipes and cables. I assume there are at least a few which nobody even considered patching because they've "just worked" for decades!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Or like... PLANES! Some planes still update their firmware using floppy disks

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago

They do at least get updates though, and they're big enough that they don't get forgotten!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

That's not true, lots of people are panicking about how fast they're getting older

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Well that's justifiable. We're not sure if we're even going to make it to then

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I can't remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.

Like the preventative measures we're so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's called the prevention paradox: It's when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn't severe in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago

Case in point: Measles. It was a thing when I was a kid. Then it wasn't. Now my kids have to deal with Measles because we can't teach scientific literacy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

that waste of effort cold war... /s

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening

Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now

[–] [email protected] 24 points 8 months ago

Elon musk isn't a scientist, he's a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Well considering Elon situation I wouldn't blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying "you expected for it to blow up" is something no real scientist would've said unless they were making a bomb.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

How is Starship dumb exactly? Making a new thing at any extreme of our current capability is going to be hard and its not unexpected when something goes wrong. What would be dumb is if they put human lives on the line

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

It had no payload on any of its flights. Rockets that have enough time/money put into development to have a reasonable expectation of working on the first try (and don’t have such an ambitious design) normally launch with a payload on their first flight. Sometimes, even those fail on the first few flights. Having the first few of a new rocket design fail before reliability is achieved is common (ex: Astra) and SpaceX’s other rocket, the Falcon 9, is known as the most reliable rocket, I even suspect it achieves landings more often lately than most others do launches.

Starship's last launch went decently well, reaching orbit (which is as far as most rockets go!) but failing during reentry. It is also supposed to be the rocket with the largest payload capacity to low earth orbit, with 100-150 tons when reused and likely 200-300 when expended.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (3 children)

I wasn't working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it'd most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely due to interest, and applied patches accordingly.

Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

That's a pretty good description. And most software back then didn't use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who's not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Most of the y2k problem was custom software, and really old embedded stuff. In my case, all our systems were fine at the OS, and I don’t remember any commercial software we had trouble with, but we had a lot of custom software with problems, as did our partners

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

And that modem was handling the nuke codes, right?

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