Comment by dpassens
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.
It's true that they say that:
~ https://longnow.org/about/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.