• Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    4 months ago

    “This is basically what we were all worried about with Y2K, except it’s actually happened this time.”

    What people were worried about with Y2K was nuclear weapons being launched and planes falling out of the sky. And it was nonsense, but bad things could have happened.

    The good part is that the harm was mitigated for the most part through due diligence of IT workers.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      This is similar to what would have actually happened if not for the dilligence of IT workers fixing the Y2K code issues globally. Uninformed people were worried about missiles and apocalyptic violence, but IT workers withdrew some cash and made sure not to have travel plans.

      The difference here is that this was caused by massive and widespread negligence. Every company affected had poor IT infrastructure architecture. Falcon Sensor is one product installed on Windows servers. Updates should go to test environments prior to being pushed to production environments. Dollars to donuts, all of the companies that were not affected had incompetent management or cheap budgets.

      • Semi-Hemi-Lemmygod@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Millions of man hours spent making sure Y2K didn’t cause problems and the only recognition they got was the movie Office Space.

        • OsaErisXero@kbin.run
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          4 months ago

          There isn’t a single one of them who was working at that time I have spoken with who didn’t think Office Space was exactly the correct tribute

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          I’ll take it. I identified so hard with that movie. When I eventually die, I’ll do so knowing I’ve been seen.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          I wonder if there would be any way to work it so that a dry concept like that could be made into a decent movie based on the actual events. They did it for Tetris.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Sure, but even the worst Y2K effects wouldn’t have had what lots of people were worried about, which was basically the apocalypse.

        People who really should have known better were telling me that Y2K would launch the missiles in the silos.

        • MagicShel@programming.dev
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          4 months ago

          We knew. However we knew there would be problems so we emphasized extremely unlikely scenarios to get the budgets to prevent the really annoying shit that might’ve happened.

        • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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          4 months ago

          We rarely disagree, but I’m gonna pull the “I work in the industry” card on you. A lot of hardworking people prevented bad things from happening whether big or small. We only look back at it as overblown because of them.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Are you really going to claim that we would have had a global thermonuclear armageddon if Y2K mitigation was a failure?

            • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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              4 months ago

              You’re focusing on the extreme unrealistic end of what people were worried about with Y2K, but the realistic range of concerns got really high up there too. There were realistic concerns about national power grids going offline and not being easily fixable, for example.

              The huge amount of work and worry that went into Y2K was entirely justified, and trying to blow it off as “people were worried about nuclear armageddon, weren’t they silly” is misrepresenting the seriousness of the situation.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                I literally said in my first comment:

                The good part is that the harm was mitigated for the most part through due diligence of IT workers.

                What more should I have said?

                • FaceDeer@fedia.io
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                  4 months ago

                  It’s not what more you should have said, but what less. It’s the “people were worried about nuclear armageddon” thing that’s the problem here. You’re making it look like the concerns about Y2K were overblown and silly.

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    Well you’re welcome to think that, but that wasn’t what I was talking about. I was talking about what people were actually worried about rather than what the person claimed people were worried about.

                    I literally quoted what I was responding to, so I have no idea why you’re taking that away from what I said that I was suggesting Y2K wasn’t a big deal when I wasn’t even discussing the reality of the situation.

            • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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              4 months ago

              No. I’m saying that something like today would have happened only it would have been much worse in that it couldn’t be fixed in the space of hours / days.