y2k38 Is Not Just Another y2k
After embarrassing myself on the karaoke stage years ago, I isolated myself. But I am speaking out today in lieu of my unbearable nightmares of hairy-armpitted, tie-dye-wearing cyborgs disco dancing, spewing black smoke as they fly their hovercrafts into the horizon. I am speaking out today to shed light on the bunk y2k crisis and, more importantly, on the very real and imminent y2k38 crisis.
y2k38 is dire enough that I will put my embarrassment aside, for just a few moments, to explain. Meanwhile, would you do yourself a favor and don’t search my real name (if you know it) on YouTube? It was the just the wine, not my personality, I swear.
The y2k scare boiled down to a whole lot of people thinking the number 2000 was special. People thought that once 1999 rolled over to 2000, computers would go crazy because they were programmed on the assumption that the year was within the range 1900-2000.
However, while a few sequential zeros, much like a box of tasty donuts, might enthuse a human, a computer doesn’t give rats or asses about either zeros or donuts, at least not in our base 10 number system. In fact, 2000 doesn’t even look like 2000 to a computer. Computers use binary, a.k.a. zeros and ones. In binary, 2000 looks like 0b11111010000 — nothing special.
The number 2038, to the contrary, will catch any right-minded computer’s eye. That’s because the year 2038 is 2,147,483,647 seconds after 1970 (1970 being the original epoch of our computer clocks).
What does this mean? Let’s look at the encoding. 2,147,483,647 = 0b1111111111111111111111111111111. Considering the way computers often use finite-sized, 32-bit memory blocks to encode integers, when we add one more second to this value, we get integer overflow: 2,147,483,647 + 1 = 0b000000000000000000000000000 = 0b0.
And so, just one second after the 2,147,483,647 second mark since, computer clocks will automatically roll back to 1970.
Imagine the whole world advances into some futuristic utopia, but then suddenly reverts to the 70s. It is going to be a shitshow. We need to figure something out.
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