[jbeninger]

Demonstrate? Or just scaremonger?

Y2K showed that you don't need details beyond vague threats of "medication administered at the wrong time" and "planes falling out of the air" to get organizations and the public to care. No idea how that's going to tie into the conspiracy-heavy media landscape we inhabit now.

(Note I do think this is a serious issue that needs to be addressed. And I'd love to see specific examples. I'm just pushing back against the idea that examples would make much difference to advocacy efforts)

[bongodongobob]

What? Y2K did have many demonstrable problems... Having a 2 digit year did obviously cause problems. The reason nothing happened is because a shit ton of time and money was spent making sure it didn't.

[jbeninger]

Agreed. My point is that the orgs paying for all these updates were mostly motivated by the vague claims of experts rather than concrete examples

[jmbwell]

It was pretty easy for orgs with affected systems to produce concrete examples for themselves. Maybe to everyone else it seemed vague, but for the people who had to deal with it, it was taken pretty seriously from top to bottom.

It was thankless work that is still glossed over and waved away today, but it was all a very big deal throughout the late 90s.

[mulmen]

> It was thankless work that is still glossed over and waved away today, but it was all a very big deal throughout the late 90s.

Mike Judge even made a movie about it! Office Space might be the most recognition turn of the millennium programmers will receive.

[Waterluvian]

All I can say is that at my level in an org, if I want to say “instead of developing X this quarter, I want to test the effects of 2038 on Y,” that’s a far easier conversation if I can say something like “in similar embedded devices they crashed and wouldn’t even respond to OTA updates” vs “something bad could happen. Not sure.”

The latter is just a ripe plumb, left to rot in the backlog.

[bongodongobob]

That's nonsense. Orgs spent time and resources on it because they grabbed a test server and demonstrated it caused problems. It's not some weird ethereal untestable bug. They set the dev server to a minute before midnight and went "oh shit".

[pixl97]

That and quite often the problems started showing up years before 2000 itself. "Hey, the scheduler is giving me a meeting 80 years ago" type weirdness when it crossed the boundry.

[BeFlatXIII]

“Planes falling pit of the sky” still gets used both as an example of overblown Y2k fear-mongering AND the reason why all those quiet preparations were necessary.

[msla]

Is there any plausible mechanism for Y2K bugs to cause planes to fall from the sky?

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Why not? From five years ago, on the most modern type:

https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

Seems to be unrelated at first look, but considering the complexities of systems, and cascading failure modes?