Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And you know what, um twenty one years ago? Man, that blows my mind. But twenty one years ago, the world was very concerned that a clock, a a a digit changing from to zero zero was going to completely turn our technological world upside down. I'm talking about the Y two K problem.
And some of you out there might be too young to even know what that is, or maybe you were born after two thousand, you have no clue. But for those of us who were working in the nineties, this was a big deal. It was something that a lot of people were worried about, and it all had to do with those two little digits at the end of the year. And we're gonna learn about why why two K didn't in the world, because, I mean, spoiler alert, it didn't. So let's listen back to this episode, which
originally published on January two thousand and fourteen. Like someone cut and now things aren't working, also building up to something terrifying. Yeah, it's gonna build up to a NonStop replay of Prince over and over again, which it starts out awesome, but as it goes on, let me tell you that gets old. Okay, we're talking about the Y two K Bug obviously, people, Yes, yes, that is what our episode is about today. All of our fans who hate it. Whenever I do cheesy humor, I apologize, don't
really apologize. It is who I am. So the reason why we're talking about why two K Bug years after the whole issue happened, is because, you know, we ask you, guys what you want to hear, and in this case, a listener named James sent us a message on Twitter and said, hey, guys, you should do an episode on the Y two K Bug. Heart heart James. Well, James, we heart heart you two. Now we're going to do
our episode on the Y two K Bug. It's a pretty interesting story because it's one of those things where, you know, it really illustrates a few basic things about computing and human nature in general. One of those things is that when something new is created, no one who is around has any idea of how long it's gonna last, and they don't have any any appreciation of things that they do then lasting into well into the future, right, well,
especially things like computer programming. I mean, no one in say the nineteen sixties or seventies was expecting any of the programs they were writing to last for forty years. Yeah, computers were developing very quickly, and the general thought was that, you know, this is changing so fast that programming is going to change in at a crazy speed too. But as it turns out, while the hardware changed, the practices
that were established early on remained pretty much standard. And also a lot of this old programming would find its way into subsequent generations of software. So even if it wasn't something that people were continuing to do later on, uh, there'd still be these old fragments of code incorporated into stuff that did have it. Now we're kind of dancing around what that old thing was. Oh, oh, the the old thing, of course being I just got really excited that I knew the answer to this um being the
digits in the year. Yeah. So here was the issue back in the fifties and sixties when programmers were having to put a code in for the year, which is important for certain types of calculations, right, anything that's time based Obviously you need to have a way of recording the time so that you can compare times from different points and draw your calculations based on that different you know, for for for example, when people have been depositing paychecks
or right. So if you if you have a bank account that has interest, for example, time is obviously a factor there. It's not just the amount of money that you've been continuously putting into or taking out of that bank account. It's also the amount of times since you
established that bank account. And there's some complicated calculations that are very time sensitive, so you have to have that kind of stuff built into your algorithm, right right, or in other cases, you know, records of dates of birth or dates of medical surgery or all kinds of things. Yeah, so many different applications, to the point where there were even technologies that you wouldn't imagine would ever need to know what year it is that had the stuff built
into it. And here's the problem when you have two digits for your year. See the computer programming getting started in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, they figured, hey, we've got practically half a century before we have to worry about two digits, it's turning into zero zero. Clearly,
we're gonna totally fix this later. And computer memory right now is incredibly expensive, so let's let's let's be really conservative and just use two digits for the year, and we'll be fine until these other problems work themselves out. Oh and and I mean computer memory was so precious and saving, especially across the course of for example, an entire spreadsheet full of interest calculations. Saving two digits per
year was big. So so just by doing a month, month, day, day, year, year, you know, just just the two digits each, you could save a huge time and hassle for yourself at the at that current moment, right right, because I mean, you know, think about just a few years ago how expensive it was to buy, say a terrabyte for a hard drive, compared to today, now it's much more affordable. Well, you know, as opposed to when I was a kid, when a
terabyte was a completely unimaginable amount of information. Yeah, when I was a kid, I couldn't imagine ever filling up a megabyte of space. So you know, as time has gone on, memory has become less and less of a problem in the sense that we were able to make more of it more affordably. Back then very expensive and precious stuff that you only had so much to work with, and it was expensive to use. So cutting it down
to two digits made sense at the time. But the problem was that when you roll over from nine to two thousand in the computer terms, that goes from ninety nine to zero zero, which meant that people weren't really sure what was going to happen. Right, would the computer think that it was all of a sudden Would that completely bark all of your calculations for for example, interest rates, yeah,
or the the age of a person. So your example, if it's figuring out the age by subtracting the current date from your date of birth or the date of birth from the current data, should say, so, let's say it's ninety nine and you were born in ninety, then that's pretty easy. It's years old. Okay, got it. But then let's say it goes zero zero and you were born in ninety. So at zero zero minus ninety suddenly like oh um am I getting negative numbers because now
a negative age that doesn't make sense. And so you can have all sorts of computer problems ranging from the financial industry to health to all pretty much everything that had any sort of code in it that included the year, which extends to things like like elevators that had microchips. Yes, yeah, elevators. I mean that's pretty that that was a real concern.
People are like, I do not want to be in an elevator on New Year's Eve because you don't know if that thing is going to make it to the floor.
You want by right, And I mean, and of course, you know, they weren't afraid that the elevator was going to slow down to a rate, to a negative motion rate or anything like that, but they were afraid that the code and the microchip crashing would I don't know, cause a fire and make the elevator drop or just or just stop or just stop entirely and refused to open.
People had a lot of just uncertainty about exactly what was going to happen to code and whether or not it was going to cry as an entire system when this this year changed, over right, And so this this fear started to kind of rear its head in the ninety nineties. Uh, it really reached a fever pitch in nine. That was when I think the general public became really aware of it before that due to media complete over saturation. Yeah yeah, I got a little, a little crazy, be
a lot crazy, depending about where you lived. In the United States, it's certainly became crazy. So you had you had computer scientists who were and programmers who were saying earlier than this, like, hey, guys, maybe we should fix this is you know, this is a problem and instead of perpetuating it across multiple industries at infinitum, maybe we should address it and that way, just establish a new
rule going forward. Now, computer memory not such a big deal. Now, why don't we Why don't we fix it before we get Hello? So any what is this thing on? Hello? And the problem was that a lot of people didn't listen until it started getting closer to two thousand and people began to really worry about the possibility that this could bring about, if not some sort of technological armageddon, at least a lot of glitches and problems that could have been avoided. So then they had to say, well,
what are we going to do about it? The obvious solution was also the most time consuming and expensive one, which was the manually go through and start updating code and changing it so that it's a four digit year instead of a two digit year and uh and then thus increasing the usefulness till at least nine thou right, Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, the alternate there's to recode just so that programs would recognize that zero zero
probably meant two thousands instead of nineteen hundred. But that's a less effective solution. And b I mean, you just need to change it over at the next turn of the century, not that probably those same programs were going
to be in use, but you never know, right. The thing is that, you know, you have these legacy systems that certain companies rely on that were originally programmed, you know, thirty forty years ago, and you know they continue to rely on them because they do exactly what the company needs them to do, right And Okay, so so either way, these changes might have to be entered by hand thousands of times or hundreds of thousands of times in a single program um and each change then has to be
tested against errors. Of course, eventually code was developed to help automate the process, but you know, I mean it was just a big undertaking. Yeah. You might remember if you watch the documentary Office Space that the characters at in a tech the company and office space were they
that was their job. They went into other companies and helped update their code to meet the Y two K issue, which kind of raises another question, which is what was this company going to do after the year two thousand? But at any rate, that was actually a very real concern. I mean, spaces is a great parody of all of that, kind of sure, but but there was a concern that, you know, with with all of these extra per gramming jobs that were going to be created, that that businesses
would crash and burn. And some of them did. I mean, most of them just moved on to other things and found freedom and not having to do this incredibly tedious work anymore. Right, And then there was a lot of other crashing and burning in the tech industry for unrelated reasons. That was the whole dot com bubble burst. But it
didn't have anything to do with Y two K directly. So, uh, here's the other problem is that a lot of these programs didn't recognize even if even if two thousand was going to be fine, even if they could recognize the five that was two thousand was a four digit year, they didn't necessarily recognize that two thousand was going to
be a leap year. And here's the reason why. So leap years actually follow an algorithm, a set of rules, obviously, So the the basic rule is that for every four years, you added an extra day, a leap day, at the end of February to balance out the calendar year with the solar year. Because the solar year is close to three sixty five point to five days, not quite point
to five, almost point to five, which is important. Yeah, So if you stretch out over an incredibly long time for us humans, let's say a few centuries, your calendars will start to become misaligned because it's not quite three sixty five point to five days in the solar year. So that means that occasionally you have to ignore the
leap year. And the way the rule goes is that if the let's see if I can get this right, if the century is divisible by one hundred but not by four hundred, it would not be a leap year. So if it's divisible by both one hundred and four hundred, it's a leap here. So in other words, seventeen hundred, eighteen hundred, and nineteen hundred were not leap years. Was because sixteen hundred is divisible by four hundred. Two thousand also divisible by four hundred, so it should be a
leap here. However, because you got just have zero zero as the digits. If the computer thinks it's nineteen hundred, the computers also knows the rule that nineteen hundred is not a leap year, so it says, hey, this, this big zero kind of number is totally not a leap year, right, So it's only three d sixty five days, not three hundred three, And we we don't have a f every
twenty nine this year, is what I would say. But there was totally a fevery twenty nine here, which meant that other calculations would get thrown off because it wouldn't take that leap day into account. So all these calendar applications weren't also had to be corrected. So suddenly people were like, oh boy, this is a big old mess here. We've got to fix this and uh and so so a lot of time and effort and attention was directed to this. And there was a third problem as well.
Wasn't there having to do with all of the nines. Oh yeah, Oh, I totally forgot about that. I'm glad you brought that up. Yes, So, okay, in the old days, children gather around this, gather around the digital fireplace. You know, if Netflix still has that digital fireplace. Stared started up back in the old days. Children. Sometimes programmers, in order to designate the end of a program, would just type out a string of nines. It was essentially just the
code to say, this is where stuff ends, y'all. Uh so had a date in Exeptember nine that if you were to write it, I would be like nine. You know, a lot of nines. And the worry was that certain programs which would see that as meaning this is where stuff stops and would stop working. So you had a
lot of digit problems here. So some of this you could count on, you know, just a a kind of a jerry rigged system of this is how I'm going to designate this is the end of a program, And it was just kind of arbitrarily chosen that would be stuff. Some of it was more of a practical consideration, the idea of we need to save time and money, so
therefore we're shortening this year to two digits. In either case, it ended up meaning lots and lots of work for people in the late nineteen nineties, and you got a lot of attention. I mean, there were there were things like industries that were already taking advantage of the time in the nineties to address this. The software industry was way ahead of the game. Oh yeah, yeah, I mean back by you know, I think few people were on
top of it. Certainly by a lot of people had already kind of corrected the problem, right, So the software that was being produced from that point going forward had already addressed it. Now, granted, there was still software that was out previously that had this old code in it, but the new code coming out of the software industry had had adjusted for this kind of problem. But there
were other industries that were lagging behind. And in fact, according to one study, uh the cap Gemini America consulting firm did a study. They found that the state and federal government systems were the furthest behind. And when you think of all the information that state governments and federal government here in the United States requires to operate, things
like taxes that are dependent upon or infrastructure. Infrastructure, yeah, your water systems, all sorts of stuff that rely on can puter systems that are run by spy satellites, all of the stuff, communications, everything. I mean, there's entire industries that are dependent either completely or in part on state and federal systems. All of those were at risk because they were the first behind. They had the least amount
of progress on addressing the Y two K problem. Uh, such a huge deal that the president at the time it was Bill Clinton, assigned the two thousand Information and Readiness Disclosure Act into law, and that was designed to create a collaborative environment among multiple industries. So that is one industry developed the best practices and tools to address the Y two K problem, it would be there was an incentive to share the information across other industries so
that we didn't. It's not a competition, it's it's hey, let's all get this done together. Kind of like I would like my stuff to continue not being on fire. How about I give this information to you guys, and maybe that will decrease the chance that my stuff will be on fire. In two thousand and that was that was a big motivator. As it turns out, helped a lot.
There were other areas of the world that we're also being very responsive to this European Commission issued a report about Y two K to the European Union member countries that all kind of got them. On the same page, the British government announced that the British military would be on hand to assist local police forces in the event of emergency services breaking down as a result of the Y two K problem. And there there was so much hype. I mean, I mean, yeah, well, we'll talk more about
hype in a second. The United Nations held a conference on it. They were trying to facilitate more sharing of information, particularly but you know, that's that's cool, that's that's not hype, that's preparedness, right. Well, they were particularly worried about a lot of regions in Asia that were there were at least thought of to be behind the curve on this
on addressing the HIT two K problem. So they wanted to make sure that everyone in the world had an equal chance of catching up, so that they could minimize any effects that the Y two K problem. They have not keep in mind, this is still at a time where no one was really sure what was going to happen,
at least not on a global scale. There were some people were saying like, well, you know, this system over here is probably gonna be okay, because it's not really critical, and even even if it were, you know, it would just be something that we could adjust by writing a couple of extra lines of code to correct that problem other systems. People were like, I don't know if that airplane will stay in the air. I mean, that wasn't
legitimate fear some people. I don't know, Okay, maybe fear that people absolutely and and you know, on a on a person to person basis, the amount of panic varied um and problem they were depending on how much media they had consumed about it, and excitable they were to
begin with. I want to say, towards the end of a lot of the media coverage lent leaned more towards the satirical and the the kind of jokey world's gonna end next month kind of stuff, less less of the actual fearmonger ring style, and more of the no one's really sure, but you know, the worst case scenario could
be that kind of thing. So it wasn't at least as as bad as you know, next month, everything you know will be different because nothing's going to work, and you know, start building your bomb shelter now, Um, you know, there weren't a whole lot of serious reports that were coming out like that, and I'm sure the Onion had a lot of fun with it. We'll hear more about the Y two K problem and why it wasn't as big a calamity as we were originally expecting, but first,
let's take a quick break. All right, So we're back now. The clock is ticking down. I know you've been waiting, waiting all episode to learn what would happen about to turn to two thousand? What half? Okay, so technically we're all still here, so I guess we can draw some conclusions right off the bat. And and and I mean, this event is in our relatively recent path, and it
was really only years ago. And most of you guys are probably remembering this, some of you, and some of some of you folks who are in maybe middle school or whatever. Maybe this is all new to you, in which case, hey, welcome to the ridiculous panics that the rest of the world went through before you were born. Your parents were silly. Yeah, So, as it turns out, a lot of the work that was being done leading up to two thousand was successful, I mean, and there
was a lot of work. It was uh. One estimate said that globally the world spent about three hundred billion dollars that's billion with a B to address the Y two K problem, and about just a little less than half of that was spent in the United States alone
to address this issue. And that ranged from everything from wide computer networks to like we were saying, microprocessors that control things like microwaves, and you know, really in that case, it was more of testing it to see, you know, if you were to digitally alter the clock of the sheen, would it continue to operate properly that kind of stuff, right, And and in the most most cases things things were
absolutely fine. And and people people kind of knew that, I mean that there was a little bit of this media frenzy, but um but a p Poles indicated that Americans expected minor problems at worst, um but that some thirty percent had planned stockpiles just in case. Yeah, yeah, that the food money, that kind of that was. Yeah, they weren't necessarily creating an armed militia, although there was
some of that going on too at the time. But you know, it's it's one of those things where I think a lot of people were jokingly saying like, yeah, I mean, everything's gonna be fine, nothing's gonna be a problem. But then like, you know, but just in case, I think I'm gonna take it easy this year, uh or just that day specifically, we have New Year's Eve to two thousand to make sure that, you know, let's let's not let's not put ourselves in danger unnecessarily. But nothing's
going to happen, you know. Cautious optimism is probably how I would describe it. Yeah, and basically, none of those big doomsayer kind of things, the worldwide power failures, the total breakdown of transportation infrastructure, that planes falling out of the sky, none, none of that. None of that happened. Now, to be fair, one reason a lot of that may not have happened is because so much work was done
addressing the problem. Right. I still don't think that every computer in the world would have simultaneously caught on fire and started eating your face. No, that's the likelihood of that was very low, pretty low. I mean, some other spooky stuff would have had to have been going, but they we're talking some paranormal activity stuff at that point. But no, I think, you know, here's here's The problem with assessing how Y two K worked out because a lot of people said, oh, it was a lot of
worry over nothing, nothing really big happened. But part of that was because so much work had been done to address the issue on a on a code level, to make sure that the code in some very critical systems was updated to not have this problem. So you could argue that the reason why there wasn't a problem was
because we caused such a fuss in the first place. Sure, it's also possible that if we had never done anything and someone in two thousand said, hey, guys, I just thought of something that we probably should have thought about before. That everything's fine now, but you know what could have happened was blah blah blah. Sure that might have happened to the clue ending Yeah, yeah, like this is that's what really happened. But here's what could have happened. That's
kind of the opposite of the clue endings. But yes, um, yeah, so the the you know, it's hard, it's impossible to say in hindsight, right, how I would have turned out differently had nothing happened. I imagine that we would have seen a lot of other glitches and systems that would have been time consuming to fix. And we did see some glitches, right, It wasn't like everything went off without a hitch. Right. Well, okay, most of the glitches were
kind of preemptive. Some some large chemical plants and oil pipelines were shut down preemptively during the transition and and rebooted. UM Service was suspended on like major freight railroads and Amtrak on New Year's Eve for for a final round of equipment and signal checks. Um. Yeah, uh, you know, the workload on programmers over the past couple of years had had been increased like twenty six in order to
solve the problems. So that was an effect anyway. Uh, yeah, I mean there there were you know, some of the some of the problems that came up were very comical in nature. Yeah, there were, I mean, okay, there were legitimate, like a few hundred reports of errors amongst small businesses, but needs most most of them were resolved in a
matter of hours after they had been reported. Um. There was the temporary shutdown of a Defense Department ground station that that processed info from a from a satellite from a spy satellite. UM. But it didn't have any major consequences. Yeah, I mean there were there were a couple of really good ones. Um for okay. So, so this was when uh al Gore was the vice president. This is my
favorite of the White UK problems. By the way, um for for a minute, his town hall web page informed visitors that it was January three, uh ninete if they arrived via netscape and January three, nineteen thousand, I'm sorry. If they were coming in via Futurama. We know that by that time al Gore's head is in a jar. So maybe it was accurate. It could be. It could have been like this was a glimpse into the Futurama future. Um um, there was a there was a glitch in
the New York Times. Oh I love this one, dude, No, this one's my favorite. I retract by earlier statement. This one's my favorite. They can both be your favorite. Um okay. So, so there's a telephone service that would read an automated selection of the New York Times and other newspapers to um New Yorkers with with vision problems, and um it informed clients that they would be hearing the January three
hundred issues. So before we start recording. I said, I could just mention the top headline dirigible races reach inevitable draw for you're running. I think, I I want, I kind of want that alternate history, right were you? What would have been amazing as if it had actually read the headlines from January three d at that point. Now that's not exactly that's not what happened. It just had
the date wrong. On the date part. The actual content was the same, was the one for January third, two thousand. It's not like the computer glitched and went and looked up some microfiche brought it back and read it out. I wish that had happened though. That would have been so awesome. That would have been delightful. UM, I mean, like other stuff. Uh, there was some some legal battles that arose over all of this. Xerox, Nike, Unitis, and a whole bunch of other companies were a few major
other companies. Um UH sued their insurers for reimbursement for having to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on these repairs. Um citing language from nineteenth century business contracts wherein insurers had to repay ship owners for money spent trying to prevent a ship from sinking. Yeah, interesting sighting
of a precedent. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. Um, suits generally generally settled on the side of the insurance come benize because I think arguing that because nothing bad happened, then we shouldn't have been forced to prevent something bad from happening is a weird argument, because if nothing bad happened, that's possibly proof that the thing you had to do worked oh well. And even I mean even if you if you spend that money preventing a ship from sinking
or preventing a computer from crashing. Um. You know, in this particular case, the companies had seen the ship sinking several years before they actually informed the insurance company that it was an issue, and so in that case, the courts were like, you knew about this beforehand. This interesting, this is stuff that you had to take care of. And um, I see there were some other like practical outcomes that were, you know, just the way people had
reacted to Y two K and started stockpiling stuff. That meant that once the new year happened and society did not crumble, a lot a lot of people returned to space heaters, um like so many that that SEARS started incurring a titter not in but um but charging stocking fee because people so many people were worried that the infrastructure would be gone, that they wouldn't have gas or electricity,
you know. And then they once once that those problems went away, like once two thousand came around and everything was fine, then they're a, well, I don't really need this anymore. Charity groups collected a lot of extra cand goods that year. Uh not so many people traveled by airplane on New Year's Day that year, right, I mean not that many people travel on New Year's Day to begin with, but even spetistically fewer. Yeah, there were some of those people who were worried about that whole airplane
dropping out of the sky thing. And here's the thing is that while this YE two K problem sounds like it's like, well, yeah, sure it happened once, they'll never happen again. We've got more to say about Y two K, but that's gonna have to wait till after this break alright. Alright, So there there are a bunch there. There are like many much multiple other problems, like like the Y t
K problem, they're all time dependent, and they're all code dependent. However, the the year in which each one would hit its big old problem is different from one example to another, mostly because engineers have a wicked sense of humor. Well I'm not sure, okay, So so I don't I don't code. I'm not a programmer. I I've never used any kind of back end sort of thing. I know how to make things bold and h ham l on my own.
But that's that's about it. Um. But so so apparently in various programs, UM, the beginning of time starts on various dates. Yeah, the beginning of time tends to be the date that whatever was created was put into action, although not all of all the time. So, and it can depend on the numeracle system that the coding is using. UM. I know, for for IBM PCs, the beginning of time is January on up. And uh, the time itself goes
up in seconds. So the second is the base integer for this whole thing, um, And it's a thirty two bit integer. So that means that if you if you do the math, and you're thinking, okay, it's a thirty two bit integer. Each second is another increment. So every second that passes goes up another one. If you're limited to thirty two bits and you're starting days January one, nineteen eighty, you can extend that out and you see that in two thousand one sixteen you have hit the
limit of of the integers you have. You are no longer able to go up without rolling over. It's kind of like those old alright, gather around that digital fireplace, children and the old days we had digital uh like pinball machines, and once you hit a high score at a certain level, it would turn over, meaning it would go back to I actually did that on the Star Trek one. I'll tell you about some time. Anyway. I was, Yeah, I had seventeen free replays by the end of that.
I ended up leaving because I couldn't keep playing all day. I was in college at the time. Money will spend Mom and Dad. Anyway, two thousand, one h and sixteen is when those integers will reach the limit, meaning that, UH don't know what's going to happen after that. It's not gonna be able to make these these time dependent calculations accurately anymore, because it won't be able to track time in a in a way that makes sense to
the computer anymore. So you would think, oh, well, clearly, all right, so we've got the y two k problem and the two thousand, one hundred sixteen problem with IBM PCs.
But after that we're okay, right, well uh well, so so Windows NT sets the beginning of time as January one, six one, So apparently they were thinking, like, okay, Shakespeare would totally use Windows INT just before, you know, shortly before he dies, so clearly he would have written, you know, some of his greatest plays using a machine using Windows NT. So let's start the I have no idea why they
chose January. Yeah, and okay, so it uses a sixty four bit integer to track time, so way more integers than you know, twice as much as the thirty two bit intager that IBMPC did, and furthermore uses a hundred nanoseconds as its increment. So so it's problem is a yeour right, So it's here's the thing. It covers a much greater span of time, right because it starts in sixt one and it won't end until four, so that's later. But because of that hundred dano second problem that eats
up those managers pretty quickly. If it had done it as a second intager, it would extend much further out. But hey, good good news for Apple users. According to Apple, um mac is okay out to the year. Uh yeah, um so, I mean not that it matters, because you're gonna update all your stuff every year. Anyway, you have Apple fanboys. I'm saying that I'll love I'm not entirely positive that you are. Really. My wife has a iPhone. I I love her. I've got a Mac. I mean,
I'm granted my Mac. It's like eight years old. At this point. It might actually be an Apple computer, not a Mac. They might have devolved. But anyway, yes, at any rate, all of these problems are going to be a little bit easier to fix than the Y two K problem, right, And and it's one of those things where the Y two K problem that was something that was so uh grounded in the very basic code that
so many different UH systems were using. That's probably the scope of it was enormous, right, And we didn't have the tools available than that we do today for for going in and addressing propagating things. Only that, but we've got a greater time scale for all of these problems. It's not something that's you know, five years away. Although we can't just have the attitude of oh well that's you know, that's like twenty more years. We don't need
to worry about that. No, we should definitely take the steps to address these issues. So, yes, it is one of those things where we see it over and over again. Does it mean that we are done that? No one is ever going to make this kind of mistake just for the sake of convenience or or efficiency or economics. Uh, We're never gonna make a plain old mistake. No, we're human. We make mistakes. That's kind of kind of thing. They're they're warm and fuzzy. It's us. Yeah, well you know
we're good at that and making mistakes. I am great. I'm like I learned from my mistakes. I can repeat them almost exactly. So, um, yeah, it's something that will price see also pop up. And of course those people will eventually be ridiculed like do don't you remember why I do? K? And uh, you know, we'll just we'll relive this drama multiple times. But hey, some of these are problems that are so far in the future that it's our descendants that they are gonna be worried about
them unless we find some digital immortality or something. Yeah. See there you go say, I think that what all of this is not taking into consideration is that we are clearly going to hit the singularity in years. Yes, you know, we're getting We're rapidly approaching what Hurtswil said would be the singularity. And I'm a little skeptical right now,
but hey, it could be proven wrong. But you know, when we see problems like this rise up, it does make you wonder about that singularity and think maybe that maybe that would only be really super awesome for a
very relatively short time until our code ran out. I hope you guys enjoyed that classic episode of tech Stuff and you learned a little bit about Y two K, and you wonder, you know, are we going to see this happen again, because that's a fear and uh, it really does show that sometimes a short cut is not the best way to go about things. Sometimes it pays
off to, you know, take the long route. If you have any suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, get in touch with me and let me know what those might be. It can be a technology, it could be a company, it could be a trend in tech. The way to do that is to go over to Twitter and send me a message. The handle that you should use to to contact me is text stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text
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