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Na, Jan 2038 will be the next Y2K. That is when the 32 bit Unix timestamp runs out.
There’s still a lot of legacy systems running, but so much has moved onto to 64 bit, and that is far beyond OP’s imagined problem. The universe will be well into its heat death or whatever it’s going to do before that can flip.
The CPU may be 64 bit, but how was the software compiled? How is the date actually being stored? These are completely independent of the CPU being 64 bit.
This is why it’s going to be a huge problem… to begin with most people don’t understand anything about binary so won’t get why this weird date in 2038 will be an issue. Then among those that get the binary part of it, there will be a lot of people saying “pfffft all of our CPUs are 64-bit, this doesn’t impact us.”
And it won’t be just some janky DBs or whatever like with Y2K. It will be Unix systems that have been moved behind layers of virtualization that have worked reliably for so long no one even thinks about anymore and systems nobody wants to touch because they’re so critical.
64bit date is “only” 292 billion years from now. While it is way beyond any system we will be using, the heat death of the universe is like thousands of trillions of years
Maybe we should go full 256 then.
“Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”
We can jump to 128, and comfortably stay there until they fully sunset 64. Thinking about 256 right now skips over issues we haven’t even addressed in 128 yet. For example: how can we get users to adopt Copilot and stop calling us “Microslop?”
64 bit systems aren’t even 64 bit yet. Just recently we had the next stage of rollout pushing memory space sizes from 48 bit (256TiB) to 57 bit (128PiB).
I’ve never bought a computer with a “48 bit” sticker on it. I think you’re getting ripped off.
^Both this comment and the previous are drenched in sarcasm^
When’s the next one after that if it just gets increased by one byte?
it got doubled, not added one byte. We are using 64 bit timestamps now which ends the 4th December 292,277,026,596 AD.
Using the agile framework we should be able to have systems converted by Q3 374,577,249,355
“In the year ninety-nine ninety-nine, we are vibecoding just to stay alive…”
Now the song is stuck in my head.
Ha. I ran into the date thing on an old NAS. It has self signed certs for accessing via Https. Since I keep a compressed image of the OS as backup, I figured why generate a new cert each time I reinstall and set the expiry date to 20 years (figuring it would be in a land fill before that runs out). Well that messed everything up because after 2038 the date rolls back to 1970s or something and so login via web was blocked. Lol
Y10k?
