“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
It’s the same as people using the example of the Y2K bug being a non event. Yeah, because globally trillions of dollars were spent fixing it before it became an event.
Didn’t go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
Didn’t the hole above Australia close again?
As a kiwi, the amount of sunburn I get every summer would imply it hasn’t.
Yeah but I’m pretty sure that’s just cause the sun is upside down over there or something.
Down there??? The Earth isn’t flat, you say??
No, also the massive SO2 that Mt Pinatubo put into the atmosphere slowly went away. And the CFCs.
Pinatubo created more sulfur emissions during its eruption than 10 years of all human coal burning.
And also on top of that we were also wrecking the Ozone.
Nature can always make our mistakes much much worse.
No
Get that marble brain Reddit-style bs outta here. If you wanna deny, you’re gonna have to come up with a reason that you could be right. Otherwise, we’re just gonna point al laugh at your dumbassery.
Removed by mod
Did you even bother to read it?
Among other things it says: “Based on the Montreal Protocol and the decrease of anthropogenic ozone-depleting substances, scientists currently predict that the global ozone layer will reach its normal state again by around 2050.”
The reason it isn’t discussed as much is because it’s on the mend and the only things newsworthy are the larger than normal cyclical hole that forms. Another thing mentioned was a volcanic eruption in 2022 that is believed to contribute to that “larger than normal” hole.
Nothing there disputes the fact that we took action. I worked as a refrigeration tech and we even had to learn about this before we could be EPA certified to handle refrigerants.
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.”
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
You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really
WTF?
Unless that was sarcasm that I missed… 100’s of weapons have been tested on US soil…
inhabited
Not sure what you mean.
The US was inhabited last I checked.
“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
Elon musk isn’t a scientist, he’s a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
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.
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 👀
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.
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.
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.
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
Y2K is similar. Most people will remember not much happening at all. Lots of people worked hard to solve the problem and prevent disaster.
Was there ever really a threat to begin with? The whole thing sounds like Jewish space lasers to me.
Edit: Gotta love getting downvoted for asking a question.
Yes. A massive amount of work went in to making sure the transition wnet smooth.
Yes, most administrative programs, think hospitals, municipal, etc had a year set only in 2 digits. Yesterdays timestamp will read as 99 years in the future, since the year is 00. Imagine every todo item of the last 20 odd years suddenly being pushed onto your todo list. Timers set to take place every x time can’t check when last something happend. Time critical nuclear safety mechanisms, computers getting stuck due to data overload, everything needed to be looked at to determine risk.
So you take all the dates, add size to store additional data, add 1900 to the years and you are set. In principle a very straight forward fix, but it takes time to properly implement. Because everyone was made aware of the potential issue IT professionals could more easily lobby for the time and funds to make the necessary changes before things went awry.
That’s fuckin wild and seems like a massive oversight.
Did they just not expect us all to live that long or did they just not think of it at all?
Depends on the “they”…
But generally, back in the day data storage, memory and processing power were expensive. Multiple factors more expensive than they are now. Storing a year with two digits instead of four was a saving worth making. Over time, some people just kept doing what they had been doing. Some people just learned from mentors to do it that way, and kept doing it.
It was somewhat expected that systems would improve and over time that saving wouldn’t be needed. Which was true. By the year 2000 “modern” systems didn’t need to make that saving. But there was a lot of old code and systems that were still running just fine, that hadn’t been updated to modern code/hardware. it became a bit of a rush job at the end to make the same upgrade.
There is a similar issue coming up in the year 2038. A lot of computing platforms store dates as the number of seconds since the beginning of 1970-01-01 UTC. As I type this comment there have been 1,710,757,161 seconds since that date. It’s a simple way to store time/date in a way that can be converted back to a human readable format quite easily. I’ve written a lot of code which does exactly this. I’ve also written lot of code and data storage systems that store this number as a 32bit integer. Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296. That means at 2038-01-19 03:14:07 UTC, some of my old code will break, because it wont be able to properly store the dates.
I no longer work for that employer, I no longer maintain that code. Back when I wrote that code, a 32bit integer made sense. If I wrote new code now, I would use a different data type that would last longer. If my old code is still in use then someone is going to have to update it. Because of the way business, software and humans work. I don’t expect anyone will patch that code until sometime around the year 2037.
Without drilling down into what that means, the limit of that data storage type will be a count of 4,294,967,296.
A little nitpick: the count at that time will be 2,147,483,647. time_t is usually a signed integer.
I often wonder what happened to the code I wrote in 2010 and used for production coordination & was working fine when I retired (2018). I figured the minute I left the hotshot kids would want to upgrade to their own styles. Not everyone liked it bc it wasn’t beautiful but no one could say it wasn’t functional, so it persisted. I was busy learning design and assemble CNC routers; but it worked and I didn’t have time to make a selection of backgrounds & banners. It’s just Excel, AutoCAD, & Access using VBA, which everyone has says they are going to deprecate VBA but, alas, people still want it. I remember Autodesk announcing the deprecation of VBA c. 2012 and I just looked and I guess they changed their mind bc there are modules for VBA available
14 years ago at stackoverflow. What is the future of VBA? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1112491/what-is-the-future-of-vba Download the Microsoft VBA Module for AutoCAD - Autodesk https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/tsarticles/ts/3kxk0RyvfWTfSfAIrcmsLQ.html Links to download for VBA modules for their products Feb 7, 2024 To install the Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications Module (VBA) for Autocad, do the following: Select the appropriate download from the list below. Close all programs. In Windows Explorer, double-click the downloaded self-extracting EXE file.
sometimes legacy methods last longer bc no one wants to be a hotshot.
Yeah I would imagine poor/lazy planning or they either thought their tools would be replaced by then and/or that computers were just a fad so there’s no way they’d be used in the year 2000.
The Mayans figured a calendar that only went to 2012 would be good enough. And they were right, their civilization didn’t exist anymore in 2012. Only relevance their calendar system had in 2012 was that some people felt like it was a prophecy about the end of the world. Nope, just was an arbitrary date the Mayans rightly assumed would be far enough away it wouldn’t matter.
While I suppose you could make a date format that was infinitely expandable, it would take more processing power and is really unnecessary.
Anyway got until 2038 until we’ll have to deal with a popular date format running out of bits. We’ll probably be in some kind of mad max post apocalyptic world before then so it won’t matter.
That’s a misconception. The Maya (not Mayan, that’s the language) long count for December 20, 2012 was 12.19.19.17.19. December 21, 2012 was 13.0.0.0.0. Today is 13.0.11.7.4. It continues the same way indefinitely, it’s just the number of days since some arbitrary date (August 11, 3114 BCE if you’re curious) in base 20, with the second to last digit in base 18, which seems odd at first but it rather cleverly makes it so the third digit can stand in as a rough approximation of years, and the second is approximately a generation. Now October 13, 4772 could be seen as an endpoint but there’s nothing that says it can’t be extended with one more digit to 1.0.0.0.0.0, and then you’re good for another 150,000 years or so.
Now there was a creation myth that said 0.0.0.0.0 was the previous world’s 13.0.0.0.0, but there was no recorded belief that this was any sort of recurring cycle, in fact plenty of Maya texts predicted astronomical events millennia past 2012. The idea that it was recurring was probably borrowed from the similar Greek construct of ekpyrosis, which doesn’t specify any sort of time frame.
you think that’s bad, just wait til 2038 when the UNIX time rolls over.
You’re saying “imagine” a lot there.
Were there concrete examples of critical software that actually would’ve failed? At the time I remember there was one consultant that was on the news constantly saying everything from elevators to microwaves would fail on Y2K. Of course this was creating a lot of business for his company.
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
And sure a lot of of software needed to be tested to be sure someone didn’t do something stupid. But a lot of it was indeed an exaggeration. You have to reset the time on your microwave after a power outage but not the date, common sense tells you your microwave doesn’t care about the year. And when a reporter actually followed up with the elevator companies, it was the same deal. Most software simply doesn’t just fail when it’s run in an unexpected year.
If someone wrote a time critical safety mechanism for a nuclear reactor that involved parsing a janky homebrew time format from a string then there’s some serious problems in that software way beyond Y2K.
The instances of the Y2K bug I saw in the wild, the software still worked, it just displayed the date wrong.
Y2K38 is the real scary problem because people that don’t understand binary numbers don’t understand it at all. And even a lot of people in the technology field think it’s not a problem because “computers are 64 bit now.” Don’t matter how many bits the processor has, it’s only the size that’s compiled and stored that counts. And unlike some janky parsed string format, unix time is a format I could see systems at power plants actually using.
Some of the software at my employer at the time, would have failed. In particular, I fixed some currency trading software
When you think about it storing a date with 6 bytes would take more space than using Unix time which would give both time and date in four bytes. Y2K38 is the real problem. Y2K was a problem with software written by poor devs that were trying to save disk space by actually using more disk space than needed.
This comes to mind:
You don’t store dates as Unix time. Unix timestamps indicate a specific point in time. Dates are not a specific point in time.
You also don’t store dates in a string that you’ll have to parse later. I’ve had to deal with MM-DD-YYYY vs. DD-MM-YYYY problems more times than I can count.
And you understand that you could have a date in unix time and leave the time to be midnight, right? You’d end up with an integer that you could sort without having to parse every goddamn string first.
And for God’s sake if you insist on using strings for dates at the very least go with something like YYYY-MM-DD. Someone else may someday have to deal with your shit code, at the very least make the strings sortable FFS.
You’re probably getting down voted because you asked here instead of a search engine, and many people think it’s common knowledge, and it was already answered in this thread.
Sometimes an innocent question looks like someone JAQing off.
I wonder how many people will see this and not know its a quote from Futurama
The sysadmin curse (and why you document your actions in a ticketing system).
Ah but the Ozone hole is increasing again in no small thanks to China!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2019-05-23/mystery-ozone-depleting-gas-tracked-to-china/11137546
Conservatives aren’t used to the concept of “Problems go away when you do something about them.”
They are stuck in the mindset of “The problem will always be with us, so just shame those suffering from it and isolate them so we don’t catch their problem.”
I literally had this exact exchange with someone last year, when they tried to cast doubt on global warming by comparing it to the ozone. Another person did the same , using acid rain, and I pointed out that the northeast sued the shit out of the Midwest until they cut that shit with the coal fire power plants.
The Conservative Party led Canadian Government and the Regan-era Republican US Government started working on the US-Canada Air Quality Agreement, which was signed by the George H.W. Bush administration into law in the US (and the Brian Mulroney led Government of Canada).
That’s right — two Conservative governments identified a problem, listened to their scientists, and enacted a solution to acid rain. And now the problem has virtually disappeared.
Oh how low Conservatives have fallen on both sides of the border since those days.
There were goddamn Nickelodeon phone-a-thons where you pledged to not use cfc products. This shit was serious.
Edit: I just remembered ,they talked about how bad the sun was for kids in Australia, or something.
