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After 2000, *lots* of people sneered that the Y2K bug had been a big nothing, massively overhyped. They were idiots. If the vast amount of Y2K remediation that took place hadn't, planes might well have fallen from the sky, nuclear power plants might well have melted down. I worked on two projects myself to fix bad 2 digit dates. We get to the other side of the current Nazi infestation, the same idiots are going to say, "See, you were just hysterical." 66 comments
 @fatsam empathy is not a weakness.  @fatsam  @forteller @fatsam yeah. I really wish some people could just Find Outโข on their own, without causing problems for the general population.  Yes, it will be bad for the rest of us if some idiot drinks unpasteurized milk with the nasty new bird flu virus in it while also having a case of the regular flu, and becomes the latest one to rediscover influenza's ability to recombine. @toadofsky most commercial flights were cancelled on New Year's Eve 1999. They were more worried about flight control than the individual planes, but there was patching done to quite a lot of individual subsystems in planes, as I recall. Give me a minute on the nuclear power plants. I know there was at least one problem due just to testing.  @fatsam @toadofsky @leeloo @fatsam @toadofsky Other than the journalist's weird use of the word "antiquated" to describe analog indicators, it doesn't at any point demonstrate that the analog indicators are inferior to the computerized. (And why would they be? Nuclear reactors existed, safely, before computers were available for them, like in 1950s submarines) I get the urge to push back on "Y2K was no problem!" but there's some over-correction going on here. This is just as wrong, but in the other direction.  @leeloo @fatsam @toadofsky True, but if the problem could be caused by an improperly set clock, it's not a stretch to think it could have been caused by a date overflow, too.  @toadofsky @fatsam systems use dates/times to monitor changes. like "too much radiation leak" might be "X rads in Y time" date/time failures could bring down key monitoring systems easily (I didn't work on Y2K, but I do make monitoring systems) @fatsam I mean, we did it with COVID tooโฆ.. โAll that time masking and it was for nothing.โ @fatsam Until it affects them, they don't believe. Same.with climate change. Aerosol pollution has been cooling the planet for a while, to the detriment of CO2 buildup. With aerosol pollution waning, thins are really taking off now. The yearly forest fires are probably mitigation techniques by corporate to slow the warming with light filtering global smoke clouds to extend sales figures. ๐ @fatsam Reminds me of the hole in the ozone layer. People love asking "whatever happened to that?" And the answer is that we actually took action and fixed it.  @fatsam I managed the y2k lab for a major healthcare company, and we fixed *so many* showstopper bugs. @fatsam To expand that to the current issues, it will likewise require enormous efforts to stave off the giant piles of imminent disasters, and if we succeed by some combination of Herculean effort and luck, it'll be minimized just like the CFC impact on the ozone layer. That's the price our culture pays for success, we are an anti intellectual society. @Longplay_Games @CivilityFan @fatsam Hah! Same, we had a huge party on the actual millenium though. The company even rented a boat. I have very little respect for people who refuse to acknowledge the effort put forth to prevent disasters.   Yeah, consumer electronics were little affected. By the time microcomputers became common in the 1980s, it was already well known that a two-digit year wasn't going to suffice for long, so for the most part, they were Y2K compliant from the start. But the machines keeping track of people's bank balances or the status of a nuclear power plant were much older, and programmed at a time when even a single byte of memory was scarce and valuable. I'm surprised you had a 486 PC without a battery-backed hardware real-time clock. I was under the impression they all did. Mine did. It knew quite well what time it is when powered on (unless the battery died). Indeed, a lot of 486 motherboards today are inoperable because the battery leaked and its corrosive electrolyte has damaged the board. The original IBM PC didn't have a battery-backed RTC, though. That one did require you to type in the current time at power on. 1/ @argv_minus_one @leeloo I owned an original IBM PC. You could, and I did, buy an expansion board with more RAM and a battery-backed clock on it, though. (Serial port as well, I vaguely recall.) @argv_minus_one @fatsam  @fatsam the good news is we won't get this one for catastrophic climate change, because we won't avert it    @fatsam In about fourteen yearsโ time, history might well repeat for the Year 2038 problem, which is much more serious as itโs literally the end times for systems that still use 32-bit Unix time. @fatsam If something catastrophic occurs, the rabble will clamour that itโs the end times. But if nothing particularly bad happens, then theyโll claim itโs a hoax. Computer programming, when done correctly, is a thankless job simultaneously over- and under-appreciated by all of society that expects computers to be magical solutions to all their problems.  @fatsam I was just thinking about this the other day: all cults end, and when this cult ends everybody who chose to be a member will be blaming everyone but themselves. They'll blame Fox News like the January 6 defendants are already doing, then keep watching Fox News because it will be telling them nothing really bad happened. Which Fox is already also doing with January 6. And the leftists who both sides Nazism will still be spouting their nonsense. @fatsam @fatsam And yes, Y2K was a catastrophe averted by lots of effort that went largely unnoticed precisely because it WORKED. @fatsam I like the word "remediation" in the context of dealing with nazis! As I just learned, it can mean special-needs education, but it could also be read as an euphemism for more drastic measures.  @fatsam getting to other side is a big IF rt now, sadly. But yr point is so true. Pls read #GregOlear 's new book...Rough Beast...he lays out in short concise terms how the U.S. will be a completely changed place by July 2025 if Trump gets back in power. It's written for Repubs & Indep who might be willing to see facts & hv them register - like NY jury which had 1 man who only got his news frm Truth Social.Fellow fascism fighters - pass it on-it $14 on Amazon & we nd to get it in ppl's hands! They already are. Trump tried to have the Affordable Care Act repealed during his first (and hopefully only) presidential term, which would have killed me, and people now tell me I was and still am overreacting. WTF! I'm lucky to still be alive right now! @fatsam If you need detailed evidence that the Y2K bug was real and had real consequences. ๐ Most potentially adverse consequences were averted by the expenditure of trillions of $ over many years in advance of the year 2000, and in some cases in the nick of time. https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/what-really-happened-in-y2k  @fatsam If the Donner Party hadn't taken the Hastings shortcut, many of the 90+ members would've spent the rest of their lives wondering if they could've gotten to the west coast even more quickly. @fatsam ๐ฏ this. I was departmental systems manager at the time. We did a huge amount of careful checking and fixing, and found a lot of things that would have failed if not sorted. Such careful, informed foresight seems completely unimaginable today. ๐ Or indeed even after Jan 2000 when the news media take was there had been nothing to worry about. ๐คฌ๐ญ @FaithfullJohn I've got one trying to argue with me in this thread. Hadn't expected to run into it on Masto, to be honest. @FaithfullJohn @fatsam โY2K wasnโt that big of a dealโ is the vague impression I had until I took my first and only programming class in university, due to the fact that I was 9 years old at the time (and no adults around me worked in tech, even though I was in the SF Bay Area). So itโs great to see these counter-to-the-news-media personal stories on here, and at the same time, I can see how many people outside the tech bubble still might not be aware of the magnitude of it all, decades later. @FaithfullJohn Iโm so very sorry that people didnโt appreciate all of your hard work! ๐ญ But I, for one, appreciate everything you and other tech industry veterans did so the world didnโt crash and burn before I even got to 5th grade! But there are lots of people who care about preventative work, and we will try our best to take your stories and pass them on, so please keep telling them! ๐  @fatsam โplanes would have fallenโ is an exaggeration. It was likely that ATC systems would have crashed, so planes would have had to divert to the nearest airport. If that was expected to happen, none would have taken off. I agree with your wider point though. @bernardlyons if you're going to put quote marks around something responding to me, at least use my actual text. Might and would are not the same. Most commercial flights were grounded on New Year's Eve 1999. I'll leave the rest to people who worked on those systems. @fatsam   @fatsam same with pandemic measures and vaccines. Imagine where weโd be if none of that happened. |
Gregory's Server
That's the payoff for successfully winning this war, having to ignore the chorus of weak liberals and complicit conservatives, afterward. It's a small price, surely. But don't forget what it feels like, today, if we're lucky enough to head off fascism again. It was the complacent chowderheads and incipient Nazis who put us through this in the first place.