@thomasfuchs its the same dangerous revision as “the hole in the ozone layer was never a problem”, its sadly being used as propaganda for “there was fuss over x but nothing happened, so fuss over y is unnecessary" where y is something the propagandists don't want to prevent, like ai, or climate change
@thomasfuchs People think I'm overreacting when I say that y2k38 (I personally prefer the term epochalypse) is going to break a some hardware everybody forgot they depend on for everything and the first few months of that year are going to suck. This confirms my fears.
@thomasfuchs I spent the last few months showing folks they could run their point of sale systems as if it was 1971 going to 1972 until they had a chance to upgrade after the first of the year
Here's the thing: many dates aren't point-in-time but past/future. We should have seen the left half of a massive bell curve of failures for 10–20 years before the year 2000 (and before we started fixing it seriously), e.g. mortgages being flagged as 80 years late for renewal, reactors shutting down because their maintenance was 95 years late, etc.
We didn't see that. The Y2K bug wasn't fake, but it was massively overhyped.
@thomasfuchs First half of 1997. Major US wireless carrier. Found and fixed thousands of Y2K bugs. Also learned that the world of difital commerce is held together mostly by luck. Good grief, was that code bad. So, so bad.