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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A not-insignificant number of major problems in our society are driven by the attitude that "_____ is impossible, therefore I will never try ______, which proves that ______ is impossible."
@johnzajac The people who tried that during CoViD, like Fauci or Drosten here in Germany, faced death threats for just that.
Don't get me wrong: I don't disagree with you, and even less do I want to be a naysayer, I just feel that, given what we've seen the last decades, it's not as easy.
I guess what I'm trying to say is: I'm at a loss.
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Which, of course, is why I wish we had spent the last 26 years teaching people about it rather than just letting them make assumptions and be manipulated by cynics.
@johnzajac @pjakobs It may not have been formally taught, which I suspect is what you're wanting, but it's certainly been mentioned a reasonable amount.
Every time someone who isn't in IT hears about it, they won't believe it was a problem. Sure, some of the 'BIOS updates' were rubbish, and for some applications all that was affected was the display of a date (although that can itself be an issue), but even mentioning real bugs doesn't tend to shift opinion much.
Even with the huge numbers of public hacking incidents, security is still a maligned profession. Same with backup.
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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 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.
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@johnzajac @pjakobs It may not have been formally taught, which I suspect is what you're wanting, but it's certainly been mentioned a reasonable amount.
Every time someone who isn't in IT hears about it, they won't believe it was a problem. Sure, some of the 'BIOS updates' were rubbish, and for some applications all that was affected was the display of a date (although that can itself be an issue), but even mentioning real bugs doesn't tend to shift opinion much.
Even with the huge numbers of public hacking incidents, security is still a maligned profession. Same with backup.
@syllopsium @johnzajac I think the underlying question is really interesting:
how can we have a world where
a) people trust experts and
b) people don't listen to charlatansthe core thing is then: how can someone who is not an expert distinguish between those two.
The key learnings for that, in my mind, would be to
- understand and learn to distrust your own confirmation bias
- understand and accept how much you don't know -
A not-insignificant number of major problems in our society are driven by the attitude that "_____ is impossible, therefore I will never try ______, which proves that ______ is impossible."
@johnzajac @pjakobs remembering and empathising with all the above.
On the "thing is hard", I fully blame the media for its complicity. Their unwillingness to embrace educating their audience, and instead communicate simple solutions as part of some "both sides" impartiality has cost nations their critical thinking ability.
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@johnzajac @pjakobs remembering and empathising with all the above.
On the "thing is hard", I fully blame the media for its complicity. Their unwillingness to embrace educating their audience, and instead communicate simple solutions as part of some "both sides" impartiality has cost nations their critical thinking ability.
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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 A pal wrote his dissertation on precisely this a few years ago. Monograph forthcoming in a couple years.
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@syllopsium @johnzajac I think the underlying question is really interesting:
how can we have a world where
a) people trust experts and
b) people don't listen to charlatansthe core thing is then: how can someone who is not an expert distinguish between those two.
The key learnings for that, in my mind, would be to
- understand and learn to distrust your own confirmation bias
- understand and accept how much you don't know@pjakobs @johnzajac Also understand that an expert is likely to provide :
an answer you don't like
an answer that's significantly more nuanced than expected
a resolution that may take some timeGiven this is not what a lot of people want, it's an uphill battle.
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@pjakobs @johnzajac Also understand that an expert is likely to provide :
an answer you don't like
an answer that's significantly more nuanced than expected
a resolution that may take some timeGiven this is not what a lot of people want, it's an uphill battle.
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 information -
@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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All quibbles aside, it certainly stoked the conspiracy mania.
Maintenance and repair is continually undervalued in our "efficiency"-obsessed economy.
@hamishb @johnzajac Wow, did it.
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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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