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  • "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.

    • 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.

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

      • 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.

    • Y2K wasn't nonsense. It was unremarkable, ultimately, because of the efforts taken to avoid it for a decade.

      20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously

      President Clinton had exhorted the government in mid-1998 to “put our own house in order,” and large businesses — spurred by their own testing — responded in kind, racking up an estimated expenditure of $100 billion in the United States alone. Their preparations encompassed extensive coordination on a national and local level, as well as on a global scale, with other digitally reliant nations examining their own systems.
      “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance. And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have a sense that the programmers were on the job,” says Paul Saffo, a futurist and adjunct professor at Stanford University.

      What is worth noting about this event is how public concern grows and reacts out of ignorance. Just because a pending catastrophe results in something 'less-than' does not mean best efforts weren't taken to avoid it. Just because something isn't as bad as it could have been doesn't mean it was a hoax (see: covid19). Additionally, just because something turns out to be a grave concern doesn't mean best efforts didn't mitigate what could have been far worse (see: inflation).

      After the collective sigh of relief in the first few days of January 2000, however, Y2K morphed into a punch line, as relief gave way to derision — as is so often the case when warnings appear unnecessary after they are heeded. It was called a big hoax; the effort to fix it a waste of time.

      Written in 2019 about an event in 1999, it's apparent to me that not much has changed. We're doomed to repeat history even provided with the most advanced technology the world has ever known to pull up the full report of history in the palm of our hands.

      The inherent conundrum of the Y2K [insert current event here] debate is that those on both ends of the spectrum — from naysayers to doomsayers — can claim that the outcome proved their predictions correct.

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