When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.
“Whatever happened with the ozone layer panic, if scientists are so smart?”
We listened to the scientists, and the problem went away.
Didn’t go away, just stopped getting worse at an alarming rate.
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.”
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.
Okay why the fuck has this been top of my front page for two days
Lemmy auto sorts by “active” so my responding to you will now keep it at the top of your page for day 3 lol
