I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000
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@johnzajac worthwhile pointing out that many websites displayed an impossible time due to a Y2K issue in Perl. The world did not stop.
Also, the consulting companies made out like bandits. They used the concept of Y2K compliance to drive business.
Because of that I am always cautious about Y2K as an analogy.
@glent @johnzajac Do you remember any details? I don't remember any perl-specific problems, but it would be interesting to know.
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There's another thing we've learned form Covid:
What is considered intellectual honesty is read as intellectual weakness by many:Someone who deeply understands a topic will
a) be careful with black and white statements
b) change their position if they have new informationWe also learned that experts and scientists are *not* the people you want to set the pace of responding to an emergency or catastrophe.
Had experts and scientists accepted (or assumed, to limit harm) that COVID was airborne in March 2020, the pandemic could have gone a much different way.
Notoriously, many credentialed scientists also were like "we don't know if respirators work without RCTs!" which is, bluntly, batshit stupid.
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@glent @johnzajac websites were not the concern. it was largely financial systems using COBOL, like taxes and payroll, where not fixing the problem would have caused more serious problems. like maybe nobody gets their paycheque cause the dates are wrong.
@burnitdown @glent @johnzajac Industrial control systems, too, because COBOL is weirdly good for developing programmable state machines. Power companies used them (probably still do) for managing when substations go offline and others take up the load for maintenance.
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@johnzajac I've been saying myself that disaster avoidance is one of the things where people will shit on you whatever happens
If you succeed and it didn't happen, people will say "you're freaking out over nothing"
If you fail and it did happen, people will say "you're not putting in enough effort to prevent it"Feels like it makes people to just wait it out until the bad thing actually happens, only then they swoop in so that they may become "heroes", but oftentimes it's too late already
Idk really
@koakuma @johnzajac For a lot of folks, unless a hero saves the day at the last minute it wasn't a thing at all.
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TBH "never let a good catastrophe go to waste" is a good rule of thumb, here: use an existing catastrophe to slip in disaster prevention.
Were I more cynical, I would say that political strategists should *plan* disasters to "allow", in order to *use* those disasters to pre-fix much worse disasters by slipping them into the response to the ongoing one.
Like, "Marie, we've identified that all Go Carts will stop working; if we let it happen,can we use that to update our grid infra?"
@johnzajac @koakuma That's pretty much the motto back home. I knew a lot of folks inside the Beltway who operated like that. Though it was usually for the purpose of expanding their influence over other stuff in the org.
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@johnzajac
I've been telling people that for 26 years. Then they pivot to all the money the consultants made.@human3500 @johnzajac Because we worked sixteen hour days for months on end fixing it.
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@johnzajac It’s very hard to overcome the allure of “look at all those so-called experts acting like morons, I’m so much smarter than they are because I have Common Sense
.”@mikeash @johnzajac Thank Hollywood for that.
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@glent @johnzajac Do you remember any details? I don't remember any perl-specific problems, but it would be interesting to know.
@dwmalone I'm going to take a guess:
Perl had (has?) a date function that returns the year as the number of years *after 1900*.
During 19xx, this gave a return value in the range 0 <= x <= 99. Ignoring 190x, you can just prepend "19", print it as a string, and it'll look okay.
During 20xx, that becomes "191xx".
*But that behavior was clearly documented.*
If people put the pot upside down on the stove, they shouldn't be surprised that good cooking is more difficult.
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@johnzajac I think the general cynical opinion about y2k efforts pretty much explains why computing is such a dumpster fire today.
Part of the problem is the lions' share of y2k fixes were very simple, and that's not what the high-status IT experts want today.
@tasket @johnzajac No, it wasn't simple.
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@tasket @johnzajac No, it wasn't simple.
@drwho @johnzajac Among other duties, I had to hack binaries for major clients because they lost their source code.
Compared to challenges we see today, that was simple.
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We also learned that experts and scientists are *not* the people you want to set the pace of responding to an emergency or catastrophe.
Had experts and scientists accepted (or assumed, to limit harm) that COVID was airborne in March 2020, the pandemic could have gone a much different way.
Notoriously, many credentialed scientists also were like "we don't know if respirators work without RCTs!" which is, bluntly, batshit stupid.
Okay, but what do we then base decisions on?
Facts are a pretty good basis if we have them, beyond facts, we might have heuristics, and then?At the beginning of 2020, I felt well prepared, we had information, science was working at an amazing speed and there was a good choice of factual comuniction. When speaking to a friend who is a social scientist, he mentioned that he felt we did not provide enough emotional communication, that facts are not good enough for
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Okay, but what do we then base decisions on?
Facts are a pretty good basis if we have them, beyond facts, we might have heuristics, and then?At the beginning of 2020, I felt well prepared, we had information, science was working at an amazing speed and there was a good choice of factual comuniction. When speaking to a friend who is a social scientist, he mentioned that he felt we did not provide enough emotional communication, that facts are not good enough for
most people, that you needed to reach them at an emotional level. I didn't, at the time, understand what he meant, but where we are today is a result of this.
There are clearly a lot of people who are not rechable with facts, who we need to address differently, so they can accept the conclusions that the facts mandate
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@drwho @johnzajac Among other duties, I had to hack binaries for major clients because they lost their source code.
Compared to challenges we see today, that was simple.
@tasket @johnzajac I did the same thing - hex editing VMS executables to patch date checking routines.
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@johnzajac @koakuma That's pretty much the motto back home. I knew a lot of folks inside the Beltway who operated like that. Though it was usually for the purpose of expanding their influence over other stuff in the org.
It's a whole lot simpler to go with Men in Black's summation of the human race.
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It's a whole lot simpler to go with Men in Black's summation of the human race.
@tuban_muzuru @johnzajac @koakuma That is pretty much what I do. After years of trying to disprove it and failing, I had to accept it.
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@human3500 @johnzajac Because we worked sixteen hour days for months on end fixing it.
@drwho
Exactly. Planning and action prevent problems.
@johnzajac -
@dwmalone I'm going to take a guess:
Perl had (has?) a date function that returns the year as the number of years *after 1900*.
During 19xx, this gave a return value in the range 0 <= x <= 99. Ignoring 190x, you can just prepend "19", print it as a string, and it'll look okay.
During 20xx, that becomes "191xx".
*But that behavior was clearly documented.*
If people put the pot upside down on the stove, they shouldn't be surprised that good cooking is more difficult.
@mkj @glent @johnzajac I did see this Quora post that suggests this might not have been a real problem, but arose as a joke in the perl community, which seems plausible... https://www.quora.com/Was-the-only-Y2K-problem-caused-by-a-widely-circulated-Perl-script-designed-to-fix-the-problem-Is-this-the-reason-that-Perl-disqualifies-itself-from-nuclear-power-plant-use
(The year being given as the number of years since 1900 is from the C gmtime() function, so that wouldn't have been a perl specific problem.)
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most people, that you needed to reach them at an emotional level. I didn't, at the time, understand what he meant, but where we are today is a result of this.
There are clearly a lot of people who are not rechable with facts, who we need to address differently, so they can accept the conclusions that the facts mandate
The problem is when "facts" that are in evidence are wrong, but dogmatic insistence that they are, in fact, correct creates transparently bad outcomes in real time.
My mom was a research scientist (in the biological sciences) and professor, and when I pointed out that insistence on getting rock-solid evidence before we took precautionary measures was literally killing tens of thousands, she simply couldn't accept that action should be taken despite the lack of knowledge.
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I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people that the reason the 2000 bug didn't destroy a significant amount of our infrastructure is because *we caught it* and *spent thousands of hours fixing it* BEFORE the year 2000
Because within that little perplexion - people thinking the problem was a hoax because it was fixed before it destroyed shit - is an encapsulation of the current era of Western politics, including COVID mitigation, lesser evil politics, fascism, and crime rate hyperbole
@johnzajac COVID actually did cause huge chaos and death early on, though, in some countries. China, Italy, Iran, US.
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The problem is when "facts" that are in evidence are wrong, but dogmatic insistence that they are, in fact, correct creates transparently bad outcomes in real time.
My mom was a research scientist (in the biological sciences) and professor, and when I pointed out that insistence on getting rock-solid evidence before we took precautionary measures was literally killing tens of thousands, she simply couldn't accept that action should be taken despite the lack of knowledge.
As I said: expertise is useful insofar as it can guide decisionmaking by providing a necessary perspective, but we've built a rigid and calcified scientific community in the West that spends most of its time protecting its own ideas, and less time dismantling them, especially in medicine.
In 2020, when circumstances demanded flexibility, dynamism and inference, the vast majority of the scientific and expert community failed to deliver.
Indeed, sometimes aggressively.
