Comment by darthoctopus
Comment by darthoctopus 4 days ago
This is valid (if somewhat obscure) notation for decimal dates in particular, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
Comment by darthoctopus 4 days ago
This is valid (if somewhat obscure) notation for decimal dates in particular, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation
It's true that they say that:
The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.
It just sounds like a way for people to try showing how smart they are while in reality it just adds confusion to completely irrelevant discussions, such as this one.
I think the campaign does opposite of what it says. Using 5 digits limits your dates to dates to a maximum of year 99999. While not giving a fuck, using the digits needed to represent a year, works for all years. No one is clamping their years to 4 digits when they say '2024', they are just using the necessary digits needed for that year
Someday we'll admit that Roman numerals were perfectly efficient, and the only reason we switched to decimal was because of that DCLXVI guy.
(As of A.D. MMXXIV)
Why start counting 02024 years ago then? is pretty much a small scale arbitrary starting point. Humans have existed for longer than that, they could say we are in the year 300000.
How does promotion by a single non-profit talking shop, however celebrated or intellectual were its founders, make it a "valid notation"?
Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.
It's a stupid notation:
> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem
That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.