Programmers in 292,271,023,045 after uint64_t isn’t enough for the unix timestamp anymore:
Programmers dealing with the timezones of asymmetric period binary and trinary star systems once we go interstellar 💀
Fucking forgot to use a time dilation safe type for storing my time variables
Don’t worry, we’ll be extinct soon, hopefully. Maybe even before int32_t runs out. Unfortunately not soon enough to stop the humans impact on earth before the worst damage is done.
well there have been mass extinctions before, the most notable maybe oxygenation catastrophe , mainly caused by photosynthetic life.
And it represented a major breakthrough for life on Earth, so i doubt that this one is an irreparable crisis.
I’ll let you in on a secret.
Humanity and the animals that we like will get through just fine.
Humans in general and the vast majority of biodiversity will be fucked if it ever happens.
I firmly believe it won’t. Too many good people in the world doing far more than the shitty ones.
I don’t think 10000 year is a problem. There is a real “year 2038 problem” that affects system storing unix time in signed int32, but it’s mostly solved already. The next problem will be in year 33000 or something like that.
There are so many problems there is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to them.
Yes, there are random systems using every kind of smart or brain-dead option out there.
But the 2038 problem impacts the previous standard, and the current one will take ages to fail. (No, it’s not 33000, unless you are using some variant of the standard that counts nanoseconds instead of seconds. Those usually have more bits nowadays, but some odd older systems do it on the same 64 bits from the standard.)
Well, I looked at a Year 10000 problem less than 2 hours ago. We’re parsing logs to extract the timestamp and for that, we’re using a regex which starts with:
\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}
So, we assume there to be 4 digits for the year, always. Can’t use it, if you live in the year 10000 and beyond, nor in the year 999 and before.
Do you think so? Surely, it’s able to handle dates before the year 999 correctly, so I’d also expect it to handle years beyond 10000. The \d{4} is just our bodged assumption, because well, I have actually never seen a log line with a year that wasn’t 4 digits…
It’s going to be significantly more than the year 33000 before we run out of 64-bit epoch timestamps.
The max value for signed 64-but epoch values is more than 292 billion years away, or 20 times the age of the universe itself.
So yeah, we’re basically solid forever with 64-bit
it’s mostly solved already
I wished I believe this. Or I guess I agree that it is solved in most software but there is lots of commonly used software where it isn’t. One broken bit of software can fairly easily take down a whole site or OS.
Try to create an event in 2040 in your favourite calendar. There is a decent chance it isn’t supported. I would say most calendar servers support it, but the frontends often don’t or vice-versa.
A common method of storing dates is the number of seconds since midnight on Jan 1, 1970 (which was somewhat arbitrarily chosen).
A 32-bit signed integer means it can store numbers between 231 through 231 - 1 (subtracting one comes from zero being effectively a positive number for these purposes). 231 - 1 seconds added to Jan 1, 1970 gets you to Jan 19, 2038.
The solution is to jump to 64-bit integers, but as with Y2K, there’s a lot of old systems that need to be updated to 64-bit integers (and no, they don’t necessarily have to have 64-bit CPUs to make that work). For the most part, this has been done already. That would put the date out to 292,277,026,596 CE. Which is orders of magnitude past the time for the sun to turn into a red giant.
midnight on Jan 1, 1970 (which was somewhat arbitrarily chosen).
well not so much, as far as I remember the first end-user computers became available in 1971 or 1972 or something, and the internet also underwent some rapid developments in that time, so the date has a certain reasoning to it.
Unix computers store time in seconds that have passed since january first 1970. one there have been too many seconds since 1970, it starts breaking. ‘signed’ is a way to store negative numbers in binary. the basics of it are: when the leftmost bit is a 1, it’s a negative number (and then you do some other things to the rest of the number so that it acts like a negative number) so when there have been 09999999 seconds since 1970, if there’s one more second it’ll be 10000000, which a computer sees as -9999999.
There might be a new calendar year system by then. Probably some galactic dictator who says that the beginning of their rule is now Year Zero.
Year Zero of the Glorious Zorg Empire!
Lol China used to use “Year 1” right after Xinhai Revolution.
Its “民国” (ROC) followed by the year number
Example: 民国一年 ROC Year One (aka 1912)
(ROC stand for Republic of China, btw)
Then the communists kicked the KMT out, and I think the ROC government in exhile in Taiwan stopped using it.
Good news! We’ll be exctinct long before this happens. One less thing to worry about!
Seems hyperbolic to assume we will be extinct by 9999.
Sure we’re heading for a climate crisis, but I don’t think all humans will be dead; Just the poorest.
That has forever been the fallacy.
The poor won’t die in the apocalypse leaving only the rich behind. The poor will die, and the rich will be faced with the harsh reality that they needed an army of poor working under them to sustain themselves, leading them to all die within the generation.
That’s true until it isn’t. Automation is on its way. Marching ever onward.
The factory I work in built a new building this year that employs 1/4 of the workers as the next newest one and does 2.5x the output.
Y10K.
The trick is to unplug our computer a few seconds before midnight on December 31st, 9999 and then plug in the wire again
