this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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The Epochalypse: It’s Y2K, But 38 Years Later (hackaday.com)
submitted 6 days ago by mesamunefire@piefed.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] LostXOR@fedia.io -1 points 6 days ago (2 children)

A 64-bit signed integer can represent timestamps far into the future—roughly 292 billion years in fact, which should cover us until well after the heat death of the universe. Until we discover a solution for that fundamental physical limit, we should be fine.

Come on now, heat death will take far more than 10¹⁰⁰ years, not just 3x10¹¹. It's not the point of the article but get your facts right.

I'm not too worried about the year 2038 problem. I suspect it will be similar to Y2K, with a bit of overhyped panic, but with most stuff being patched beforehand to avoid issues.

[–] KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Y2K wasn’t overhyped. It was just successfully planned for. This reeks of the paradox of IT. “Everything is broken, what do you even do” vs “nothing is broken, what do you even do?”

[–] captainastronaut@seattlelunarsociety.org 5 points 6 days ago

Yeah it only felt like it wasn’t a big deal because it became a big deal early enough for there to be plans made. And because good people doing hard work to prevent a problem wasn’t newsworthy after the fact.

[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 points 6 days ago

That's the thing though: It was well-prepared and due to that there was no big issue.

2038 is the same: very well prepared and thus it will not be a big issue.

Of course, if ignored, both would be very problematic, but that's not the point.

[–] Xaphanos@lemmy.world 29 points 6 days ago

I was at Pepsi for Y2K. In 98, we started with MSMail, W95, and Netware2. We had to also replace all 40k desktops. We worked like dogs for those 2 years and only barely had everything ready in time. Without that work, we would not have been able to continue any business operations. Nothing about it was overhyped.