I mean, it didn’t happen due to all the hard work put in to fix the issue.
https://time.com/5752129/y2k-bug-history/
Kind of like how people are like, what ever happened to the hole in the ozone layer? The chemicals causing it were banned. I don’t think the concerns about what could have happened should be ignored, as what if no one put in the work, like they had? You know, kind of like climate change?
Tacking on with the most relevant wiki article.
I had no idea there was a term for this. That’s quite handy, thank you.
The ozone layer one is still a work in progress. CFCs were banned, but HCFCs replaced them; they were less likely to make it up to the ozone layer in the first place, but did more damage once they got there. HCFCs have been/are being replaced, but many of the refrigerants and blowing agents that we currently use do damage the ozone layer, and replacements haven’t been found yet. BUT!, the point is, they’re still working on solving the problems that were created a hundred years ago, and still making progress.
China seemed to have continued using the banned cfc’s. Chemical tracing satellites have picked up heavy concentrations over a couple areas there about 5 years ago.
After being called out on it, they did put a stop to it. They claim they were from illegal factories.
Ah, go figure! I should have looked that one up as well. Glad to hear they’re still working on it, maybe I’ll go read up on it more. Thanks for the info!
Sometimes shit like that makes me think software engineers should do a world wide strike on preparing for 2038, and let the Epochalypse happen.
Remember, remember!
The fifth of November,
The Gunpowder treason and plot;
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot!
People’s work to create democracy killed so many, and now, Trump. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Could easily be lost. Not a USian, but their crap spills over…
Planes were never at risk of falling from the sky, that’s not how airplanes work.
I personally remember thinking the planes would be hard to control, like I never pictured just… oops, suddenly these wings don’t work with the laws of nature, straight down to the ground. I was a child when it all went down, so, I don’t remember if it was people actually saying it would happen, just over exaggerating, or what. Since some take things literally though, it should not have been put that way, I could definitely see it being fear mongering, and that’s not good.
There were things that could have been affected though, so one part being put wrong on purpose or not doesn’t mean, we should have ignored it.
There was a lot of fear mongering. Y2K is actually when I realized that I can’t believe everything on the news. They kept reporting on it as an imminent threat for long after it was known that the engineers had patched the issue, and chances of problems were very low. As far as the planes go, the big threat was from air traffic control shutting down, and having thousands of planes in the air with no way to track all of them and safely route them in for landings. Plus there were concerns about navigation. So there were definitely issue, just not fall out of the sky issues.
In today’s episode of the Better Offline podcast, Ed Zitron specifically pointed to Y2K as an example of tech and government and business getting it right by investing to avert a disaster. The topic was Friday’s massive outage caused by CrowdStrike. Once again, I’m telling you that it was a massive effort that saved us from bad things happening rather than an overhyped nothing.
When you do things right people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all. In fact they’ll actively deny it.
Job definition of a sys admin.
The best investments in maintenance - whether infrastructure, IT, whatever - is the one the next generation can make fun of. That means it worked.
To be fair, quite a lot of work was done to ensure that things didn’t go wrong when the year changed over, and some things still did go wrong (and still do if you know where to poke), but thankfully there weren’t any globally affecting ones. Mitigations were in place in plenty of time. I can’t recall any specific tragedies, but I would be surprised if there wasn’t a handful of those.
More humorously, many, many websites started the new year with their auto-generated year showing as 19100, because no-one thought to fix that.
32-bit time / the 2038 problem is a similar kind of deal and steady work has been under way probably since Y2K was cleared.
So yeah, we do need to get ahead of the technology (AI this time) like we do with everything else, but we shouldn’t get too worked up about it because the experts have things under control.
Right…?
Not gonna lie, Pearls Before Swine has become one of my favorite mainstream comic strips. That guy is witty and can occasionally push the envelope.
Stephan Pastis is coming to Indianapolis in a couple of weeks. I’m going to meet him and get him to sign one of my Pearls collections!
I’m sure you probably already know this, but he is so respected that Bill Watterson did a handful of the strips.
I actually did not know that! It must not be in any of the collections I have unless it isn’t obvious. Do you know when he did them?
Here’s an article about it. Apparently it was June 4th, 5th, & 6th of 2014. I thought Watterson did the whole strip, but according to the article, he only did the middle panel. Still, pretty impressive that he would volunteer to do it!
Thanks! Berkeley Breathed did a Bloom County series during COVID where Opus and co. work to reunite Hobbes with Calvin. I think it was only done with Watterson’s permission, but it looks really close to his art.
I’ve never seen that, thanks for sharing!
Have you ever seen the one-off cartoon that Watterson drew for the cartoon documentary Stripped?
And it looks like June 7th was Pastis doing a tribute to the last Calvin & Hobbes strip.
(I found all 4 strips on GoComics with a Google search for the dates.)
That’s awesome!
This is honestly pretty uplifting today, thank you. Perspective is everything
Y2K wasn’t a thing because people like me worked to fix it.
We don’t need AI when humans do all this shit already.
AI, or CrowdStrike?
