fossilesqueMar 17, 2024

CFCs

https://mander.xyz/post/10840974

CFCs - Mander

Show threadqjkxbmwvz
Similar with Y2K — it was only a nothingburger because it was taken seriously, and funded well. But the narrative is sometimes, “yeah lol it was a dud.”
Mar 17, 2024 at 3:54amWeb
Show threadTonyTonyChopperMar 17, 2024
All this hysteria over nuclear weapons is overblown. We’ve known how to build them for 75 years yet there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil. They’re harmless
Show threadKilling_SparkMar 17, 2024
You even dropped a few accidentally and nothing happened! Complete duds these things really
Show threadhedidwotMar 17, 2024

WTF?

Unless that was sarcasm that I missed… 100’s of weapons have been tested on US soil.

Show threadTonyTonyChopperMar 17, 2024

inhabited

Show threadhedidwotMar 17, 2024

Not sure what you mean.

The US was inhabited last I checked.

Show threadwanderingmagusMar 17, 2024
Pretty sure no human lived at the Trinity test site or anywhere else in the test sites where weapons were detonated, especially at the moment of detonation. And I’m pretty sure none have since moved onto those sites either. Hence “inhabited”. It’s not like we nuked cities and towns.
Show threadhedidwotMar 18, 2024

Right… Gotcha. So you’re a ‘change the goalposts to keep making me right as the argument and evidence changes’ kinda person.

No point engaging with your type.

Show threadwanderingmagusMar 18, 2024
Sounds like you’re the goalposts-mover here, shipmate, and it seems the rest of the readers here agree with me. Maybe this place ain’t your venue.
Show threadxantoxisApr 29, 2024
Bruh, the comment you responded to clearly said “there hasn’t been a single one detonated on inhabited American soil”. It’s absolutely crystal clear that the joke is about nuking american citizens. You erroneously corrected them, you got shut down, and now you’re tripling down because people like you Refuse To Take The Fucking L. Delete.
Show threadroboticaMar 18, 2024
Yeah but not all people live on American soil…
Show threadTonyTonyChopperMar 18, 2024
It’s the American tradition to ignore that
Show thread4amMar 17, 2024

“Lol Elon rocket go boom, science isn’t real” is also happening

Stupid people just think they’re the smartest ones in the room now

Show threadScrofMar 17, 2024
Well considering Elon situation I wouldn’t blame anyone for making fun of his idiotic ventures. Also starship is actually dumb and saying “you expected for it to blow up” is something no real scientist would’ve said unless they were making a bomb.
Show threadCybranMMar 17, 2024
How is Starship dumb exactly? Making a new thing at any extreme of our current capability is going to be hard and its not unexpected when something goes wrong. What would be dumb is if they put human lives on the line
Show threadAdrianTheFrogMar 17, 2024
It had no payload on any of its flights. Rockets that have enough time/money put into development to have a reasonable expectation of working on the first try (and don’t have such a unique design) normally launch with a payload on their first flight. Sometimes, even those fail on the first few flights. Having the first few of a new rocket design fail before reliability is achieved is common (ex: Astra) and SpaceX’s other rocket, the Falcon 9, is known as the most reliable rocket, even achieving landings more often than most others do launches.
Show threadbrianorcaMar 18, 2024

Starship, as it is right now, is already a better rocket than SLS. It can already carry more mass and be cheaper (even fully expended) than the SLS’s 4 billion cost per launch.

It will get better. Falcon 9 didn’t land the first time either, but now it has successfully landed more consecutive times than any other rocket has flown.

There’s nothing wrong with saying this is a test. This is only a test, and we don’t expect it to be perfect yet. Each time they learn from the data. And SpaceX hasn’t repeated the same mistake twice.

Show threadPhoenixzMar 17, 2024
Elon musk isn’t a scientist, he’s a scammer who got lucky. That, and an asshole.
Show threadTrantariusMar 17, 2024
Y2K specifically makes no sense though. Any reasonable way of storing a year would use a binary integer of some length (especially when you want to use as little memory as possible). The same goes for manipulations; they are faster, more memory efficient, and easier to implement in binary. With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900, the concerning overflows would occur in 2028, not 2000. A base 10 representation would require at least 8 bits to store a two digit number anyway. There is no advantage to a base 10 representation, and there never has been. For Y2K to have been anything more significant than a text formatting issue, a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs. Also, usage of dates beyond 2000 would have increased gradually for decades leading up to it, so the idea it would be any sort of sudden catastrophe is absurd.
Show threadThe OctonautMar 17, 2024

The issue wasn’t using the dates. The issue was the computer believing it was now on those dates.

I’m going to assume you aren’t old enough to remember, but the “only two digits to represent the year” issue predates computers. Lots of paper forms just gave two digits. And a lot of early computer work was just digitising paper forms.

Show threadScrolloneMar 17, 2024
I remember paper forms having “19__” in the year field. Good times
Show threadexocrinousMar 17, 2024
When I was little I was scared of that problem and always put all four digits of the year in my homework.
Show threadthomaswMar 17, 2024
And then there is PIC 99 in Cobol. In modern languages, it makes no sense, but there is still a lot of really old code around and not everything is twos complement, especially if you do not need the efficiency in memory and calculations.
Show threadbreakingcupsMar 17, 2024
You do realize that “counting from 1900” meant storing only the last two digits and just hardcoding the programs to print"19" in front of it in those days? At best, an overflow would lead to 19100, 1910 or 1900, depending on the print routines.
Show threadSkippingRelaxMar 17, 2024

a whole lot of programmers would have had to go out of their way to be really, really bad at their jobs.

You don’t spend much time around them, do you?

Show threadGoodEye8Mar 17, 2024
You’re thinking of the problem with modern solutions in mind. Y2K originates from punch cards where everything was stored in characters. To save space only the last 2 digits of the year because back then you didn’t need to store the 19 of year 19xx. The technique of storing data stayed the same for a long time despite technology advancing beyond punch cards. The assumption that it’s always 19xx caused the Y2K bug because once it overflows to 00 the system doesn’t know if it’s 1900 or 2000.
Show threadfrezikMar 17, 2024

With an 8-bit signed integer counting from 1900…

Some of the computers in question predate standardizing on 8 bits to the byte. You’ve got a whole post here of bad assumptions about how things worked.

Show threadMatomboMar 17, 2024
Oh boy you heavily underestimate the amount and level of bad decision in legacy protokoll. Read up in the toppic. the Date was for a loong time stored as 6 decimal numbers.
Show threadbufalo1973Mar 17, 2024
Look some info on BCD or EBCDIC.
Show threadFractalsInfiniteMar 17, 2024
The question is, what will happen in 2038 when y2k happens again due to an integer overflow? People are already sounding the alarm but who knows if people will fix all of the systems before it hits.
Show threadScrolloneMar 17, 2024
2038 is approaching super fast and nobody seems to care yet
Show threadSuccessful_Try543Mar 17, 2024
AfaIk that’s not entirely true, e.g. Debian is changing the system time from 32 bit integer to 64 bit. Thus I assume other distros do this as well. However, this does not help for IOT devices running deprecated Linux distributions.
Show threadsmegMar 17, 2024

industrial or IOT devices running deprecated Unix / Linux derivatives

This is my concern, all the embedded devices happily running in underground systems like pipes and cables. I assume there are at least a few which nobody even considered patching because they’ve “just worked” for decades!

Show threadScrolloneMar 17, 2024
Or like… PLANES! Some planes still update their firmware using floppy disks
Show threadsmegMar 17, 2024
They do at least get updates though, and they’re big enough that they don’t get forgotten!
Show threadexocrinousMar 17, 2024
That’s not true, lots of people are panicking about how fast they’re getting older
Show threadAceticonMar 17, 2024
At the rate of one year per year, even.
Show threadlowleveldataMar 17, 2024
omg
Show threadCybranMMar 17, 2024
For each second that passes we’re one second closer to 2038
Show threadjjjalljsMar 18, 2024
Except for leap seconds. Time is the worst to work with :(
Show threadtrashgirlfriendMar 17, 2024
That’s 30.4 days per month!!!
Show threadtheneverfoxMar 17, 2024
Well that’s justifiable. We’re not sure if we’re even going to make it to then
Show threadzikMar 17, 2024
It’s already been addressed in Linux - not sure about other OSes. They doubled the size of time data so now you can keep using it until after the heat death of the universe.
Show threadlowleveldataMar 17, 2024
Finally it’d be the year of desktop linux with all the windows users die off
Show threadbaconsangaMar 17, 2024
This is the funniest comment I have ever read here. Thank you.
Show threadMatomboMar 17, 2024
debian for example is atm at work recompiling everything vom 32bit to 64bit timestamps (thanks to open source this is no problem) donno what happens to propriarary legacy software
Show threadAdrianTheFrogMar 17, 2024
I think everything works in windows but the old windows media player. You can test it by setting the time in a windows VM to 2039.
Show threaddev_nullMar 18, 2024
Obviously new systems are unaffected, the question is how many industrial controllers checking oil pipeline flow levels or whatever were installed before the fix and never updated.
Show threadCLOTHESPlNMar 18, 2024
Being somewhat adjacent to that with my work, there is a good chance anything in a critical area (hopefully fields like utilities, petroleum, areas with enough energy to cause harm) have decently hardened or updated equipment where it either isn’t an issue, will stop reporting tread data correctly, or roll over to date “0” which depending on the platform with industrial equipment tends to be 1970 in my personal experience. That said, there is always the case that it will not be handled correctly and either run away or stop entirely.
Show threadcqthcaMar 18, 2024
As a future boltzmann brain, I agree.
Show threadneidu2Mar 17, 2024

I wasn’t working in the IT field back then, as I was only 16, but as I knew that it’d most likely be my field one day (yup, I was right), I followed this closely and applied patches accordingly.

Everything kept working fine except this one modem I had.

Show threadDasnapMar 17, 2024
And that modem was handling the nuke codes, right?
Show threadFunkFactoryMar 17, 2024
I kinda wish I knew what it was like working on Y2K stuff. It sounds like the most mundane bug to fix, but the problem is that it was everywhere. Which I imagine made it pretty expensive 👀
Show threadbrianorcaMar 17, 2024
That’s a pretty good description. And most software back then didn’t use nice date utilities, they each had their own inline implementation. So sometimes you had to figure out what they were trying to do in the original code, which was usually written by someone who’s not there anymore. But other times it was the most mundane doing the same fix you already did in 200 other programs.
Show threadstringereMar 18, 2024
And computer networking, especially the ability to remote into a system and make changes or deliver updates en masse, was nowhere near as robust as it is today meaning a lot of those fixes were done manually.
Show threadAA5BMar 18, 2024
Most of the y2k problem was custom software, and really old embedded stuff. In my case, all our systems were fine at the OS, and I don’t remember any commercial software we had trouble with, but we had a lot of custom software it’s problems, as did our partners
Show threadfine_sandy_bottomMar 17, 2024

I can’t remember the name but I think this is some kind of paradox.

Like the preventative measures we’re so effective that they created a perception that there was no risk in the first place.

Show threadMatomboMar 17, 2024
It’s called the prevention paradox: It’s when an issue is so severe that it is prevented with proactive action, so no real consequenses are felt so people think it wasn’t severe in the first place.
Show threadIvanOverdriveMar 17, 2024
Case in point: Measles. It was a thing when I was a kid. Then it wasn’t. Now my kids have to deal with Measles because we can’t teach scientific literacy.
Show threadcqthcaMar 18, 2024
that waste of effort cold war… /s