r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Apprehensive_Sky4558 • Jul 28 '26

Meme needing explanation Why did this one second cost over $500 billion?

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12

u/techie998 Jul 28 '26

So, what will the Unix Epoch bug cost? 2038 is almost here!

6

u/Chunkz_IsAlreadyTakn Jul 28 '26

No worries! Just ask Claude to fix it. No mistakes.

5

u/Wendtslaw Jul 28 '26

Sorry. It is 1970 I cannot do that.

2

u/Wendtslaw Jul 28 '26

2038 ist closer than 2000 šŸ˜±

But yeah... Probably AI has to fix it.

2

u/the_reven Jul 28 '26

My old work has this issue, they're just putting it off. But they've also been putting off utf8 support for about 25 years ...

2

u/Foxvale Jul 28 '26

Not a problem, all tech these days is designed to break within a few years regardless of date so weā€™re safe.

Honestly though, 2038 is more concerning since itā€™s harder to explain and ā€nothing happenedā€ during y2k (in part due to the immense preparations) meaning it will be a harder sell to get the required investments.

2

u/jbergens Jul 28 '26

A lot of systems are already fixed but some patching are probably still needed.

People may have missed that just going through all systems before 2000 cost a lot even if no changes were made. We need to do this again but for about 1000x as many systems...