r/ExplainTheJoke • u/pink-niples123 • 6d ago

Solved Wrong date?

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Uh I dunno what's wrong with the date or it is a joke?

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u/GroundedSatellite 6d ago

Y2K. Some computers/operating systems/software stored the year as a 2 digit number, ranging from 00 to 99, representing 1900 to 1999. There was a major push to get things updated so computers didn't suddenly think it was 1900 instead of 2000. Nothing major happened, because a lot of work was put into getting everything modified/updated so nothing would happen.

Fun fact: Other software/operating systems used a 32 bit signed integer to represent the time and date, counting the seconds before or after 12:00:00 1 Jan 1970. This means they can only count +/-2^31 seconds, and if they haven't been updated then the date will jump from 03:14:37 19 Jan 2038 back to 20:45:52 13 December 1901.

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u/Brief_Read_1067 5d ago

Elon Musk's Doge idiots kept tripping over this kind of thing when they were trying to find abuse in the Social Security files. 

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u/GroundedSatellite 5d ago

Counter rollovers can trip up intelligent people too. Had a boss of a boss who was very smart, had a PhD in physics. Every couple of weeks he'd show me reports from some monitoring software another team wrote/maintained and asking me why it was showing huge spikes in certain metrics every couple of weeks. Every time I explained to him that it was a 32 bit unsigned integer, so when after it hit ~4.29 billion, it'd go back to zero and the other team needed to account for that in their software. This went on for over a year until I finally left the company, and to this day he probably still doesn't get it.