Time keeping, commonly, is stored as a binary number that represents how many seconds have passed since midnight (UTC) on January 1st 1970. Since the year 10,000 isn’t x seconds away from epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z), where x is any factor of 2 (aka 2^x, where x is any integer), any discrepancies in the use of “year” as a 4 digit number vs a 5 digit number, are entirely a display issue (front end). The thing that does the actual processing, storing and evaluation of time, gives absolutely no fucks about what “year” it is, because the current datetime is a binary number representing the seconds since epoch.
Whether that is displayed to you correctly or not, doesn’t matter in the slightest. The machine will function even if you see some weird shit, like the year being 99 100 because some lazy person decided to hard code it to show “99” as the first two digits, then take the current year, subtract 9900, and display whatever was left (so it would show the year 9999 as “99”, and the year 10000 as year “100”) so the date becomes 99 concatenated with the last two (now three) digits left over.
I get that it’s a joke, but the joke isn’t based on any technical understanding of how timekeeping works in technology.
The whole W2k thing was a bunch of fear mongering horse shit. For most systems, the year would have shown as “19-100”, 1900, or simply “00” (or some variant thereof).
Edit: the image in the OP is also a depiction of me reading replies. I just can’t even.
My brother in Christ, there’s more to time than just storing it. Every datetime library I’ve ever used only documents formatting/parsing support up to four year digits. If they suddenly also supported five digits, I guarantee it will lead to bugs in handling existing dates, as not all date formats could still be parsed unambiguously.
It won’t help you if time is stored perfectly, while none of your applications support it.
Regarding Y2K, it wasn’t horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn’t just about displaying 19 or 20.
I would hope that these kinds of parsers are not used in critical applications that could actually lead to catastrophic events, that’s definitely different to Y2K. There would be bugs, yes, but quite fixable ones.
Regarding Y2K, it wasn’t horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn’t just about displaying 19 or 20.
“There’s no glory in prevention”. I guess it’s hard to grasp nowadays, that mankind at some point actually tried to stop catastrophies from happening and succeeded
Even if such parsers aren’t used directly in critical systems, they’ll surely be used in the supply chains of critical systems. Your train won’t randomly derail, but disruptions in the supply chain can cause repair parts not to be delivered, that kind of thing.
And you can be certain such parsers are used in almost every application dealing with datetimes that hasn’t been specifically audited or secured. 99% of software is held together with duct tape.
True. But I wouldn’t see this as extremely more critical than the hundreds of other issues we encounter daily in software. Tbh, I’d be glad if some of the software I have to use daily had more duct tape on it…
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.
Y2K was definitely not only fear-mongering. Windows Systems did not use Unix timestamps, many embedded systems didn’t either, COBOL didn’t either. So your explanation isn’t relevant to this problem specifically and these systems were absolutely affected by Y2K because they stored time differently. The reason we didn’t have a catastrophic event was the preventative actions taken.
Nowadays you’re right, there will be no Y10K problem mainly because storage is not an issue as it was in the 60s and 70s when the affected systems were designed. Back then every bit of storage was precious and therefore omitted when not necessary. Nowadays, there’s no issue even for embedded systems to set aside 64 bit for timekeeping which moves the problem to 292277026596-12-04 15:30:08 UTC (with one second precision) and by then we just add another bit to double the length or are dead because the sun exploded.
Not a storage problem but still a possible problem in UIs and niche software that assumes years have 4 digits or 4 characters. But realistically if our civilization is even still around then AI will be doing all that for us and it won’t be an issue humans even notice.
This would be a great short story if for some reason the AI didn’t realize there was going to be a date issue and didn’t properly update itself causing it to crash. Then the problem is it was self sufficient for so long no humans know how to restart it or fix the issue, causing society to have a technology blackout for the first time in centuries.
Yes, it’s kind of a familiar sci-fi trope - a supercomputer that has no built-in recovery mechanism in spite of being vitally important. Like the Star Trek episode where they made smoke come out of a robot’s head by saying illogical things.
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.
Lmao I actively work with shortdates in a database because I have no control over how things are stored. They need to solve before 100 years have passed from the epoch, but at some point before then it’ll be fun to figure out if “58” in a date of birth is 1958 or 2058.
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 they would have never done it.
In this thread: mostly people that don’t know how timekeeping works on computers.
This is already something that we’re solving for. At this point, it’s like 90% or better, ready to go.
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
Time keeping, commonly, is stored as a binary number that represents how many seconds have passed since midnight (UTC) on January 1st 1970. Since the year 10,000 isn’t x seconds away from epoch (1970-01-01T00:00:00Z), where x is any factor of 2 (aka 2^x, where x is any integer), any discrepancies in the use of “year” as a 4 digit number vs a 5 digit number, are entirely a display issue (front end). The thing that does the actual processing, storing and evaluation of time, gives absolutely no fucks about what “year” it is, because the current datetime is a binary number representing the seconds since epoch.
Whether that is displayed to you correctly or not, doesn’t matter in the slightest. The machine will function even if you see some weird shit, like the year being 99 100 because some lazy person decided to hard code it to show “99” as the first two digits, then take the current year, subtract 9900, and display whatever was left (so it would show the year 9999 as “99”, and the year 10000 as year “100”) so the date becomes 99 concatenated with the last two (now three) digits left over.
I get that it’s a joke, but the joke isn’t based on any technical understanding of how timekeeping works in technology.
The whole W2k thing was a bunch of fear mongering horse shit. For most systems, the year would have shown as “19-100”, 1900, or simply “00” (or some variant thereof).
Edit: the image in the OP is also a depiction of me reading replies. I just can’t even.
Fun fact, lots of VW modules think it’s August of 2094 for some reason.
My brother in Christ, there’s more to time than just storing it. Every datetime library I’ve ever used only documents formatting/parsing support up to four year digits. If they suddenly also supported five digits, I guarantee it will lead to bugs in handling existing dates, as not all date formats could still be parsed unambiguously.
It won’t help you if time is stored perfectly, while none of your applications support it.
Regarding Y2K, it wasn’t horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn’t just about displaying 19 or 20.
I would hope that these kinds of parsers are not used in critical applications that could actually lead to catastrophic events, that’s definitely different to Y2K. There would be bugs, yes, but quite fixable ones.
“There’s no glory in prevention”. I guess it’s hard to grasp nowadays, that mankind at some point actually tried to stop catastrophies from happening and succeeded
Even if such parsers aren’t used directly in critical systems, they’ll surely be used in the supply chains of critical systems. Your train won’t randomly derail, but disruptions in the supply chain can cause repair parts not to be delivered, that kind of thing.
And you can be certain such parsers are used in almost every application dealing with datetimes that hasn’t been specifically audited or secured. 99% of software is held together with duct tape.
True. But I wouldn’t see this as extremely more critical than the hundreds of other issues we encounter daily in software. Tbh, I’d be glad if some of the software I have to use daily had more duct tape on it…
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:
I really don’t see how this scenario is comparable to anything we’ve faced, beyond Y2K.
Y2K was definitely not only fear-mongering. Windows Systems did not use Unix timestamps, many embedded systems didn’t either, COBOL didn’t either. So your explanation isn’t relevant to this problem specifically and these systems were absolutely affected by Y2K because they stored time differently. The reason we didn’t have a catastrophic event was the preventative actions taken.
Nowadays you’re right, there will be no Y10K problem mainly because storage is not an issue as it was in the 60s and 70s when the affected systems were designed. Back then every bit of storage was precious and therefore omitted when not necessary. Nowadays, there’s no issue even for embedded systems to set aside 64 bit for timekeeping which moves the problem to 292277026596-12-04 15:30:08 UTC (with one second precision) and by then we just add another bit to double the length or are dead because the sun exploded.
Not a storage problem but still a possible problem in UIs and niche software that assumes years have 4 digits or 4 characters. But realistically if our civilization is even still around then AI will be doing all that for us and it won’t be an issue humans even notice.
This would be a great short story if for some reason the AI didn’t realize there was going to be a date issue and didn’t properly update itself causing it to crash. Then the problem is it was self sufficient for so long no humans know how to restart it or fix the issue, causing society to have a technology blackout for the first time in centuries.
Yes, it’s kind of a familiar sci-fi trope - a supercomputer that has no built-in recovery mechanism in spite of being vitally important. Like the Star Trek episode where they made smoke come out of a robot’s head by saying illogical things.
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.
Y2k9 sounds like a problem that only affects calculations done in dog years.
Lmao I actively work with shortdates in a database because I have no control over how things are stored. They need to solve before 100 years have passed from the epoch, but at some point before then it’ll be fun to figure out if “58” in a date of birth is 1958 or 2058.
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 they would have never done it.