We don’t need AI when humans do all this shit already.
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.
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?
This is honestly pretty uplifting today, thank you. Perspective is everything