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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation > In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, th

by bdsa 5y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation > In a manner somewhat similar to the Holocene calendar, the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem[1] (e.g., by writing the current year "02021" rather than "2021").

deleted 5y ago
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mLuby 5y ago
If we're using 5 digits, add 10K years: we're in year 12021 of this Holocene calendar. (Happy palindrome year!) 0 is pre-history, some of the very first permanent construction. An 8min video by Kurzgesagt on it: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs
- garmaine 5y ago
  That’s the Holocene calendar, not the Long Now date writing tradition.
fouric 5y ago
This seems to imply that writing "02021" in a textual forum post does anything more than just make it significantly more difficult for another human to parse. I don't buy that argument - writing "1999" instead of "99" in BBS/IRC messages before the turn of the century would have done nothing to fix the critical systems that were storing years as a pair of bytes.
- darkwater 5y ago
  But if you start in 2021, well, 02021, to write it 02021, by 08850 it will be in everybody's mind (including AI's) and developers - or AIs - by 09330 will write programs that will laat 700 years and will not have the Y10K bug.
- wpietri 5y ago
  The point of it, like the point of many Long Now projects, is to get people to think about longer spans of time, and be more aware of how little we normally do that. As they say, "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." -- https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/ So the fact we're talking about these issues here is a success. Another example of their efforts is something I wrote the code for, a bet/prediction registry: https://longbets.org/bets/ https://longbets.org/bets/ Unlike the sort of prediction markets that are now relatively common, where the goal is to serve as a functional business, the goal for Long Bets is to get people thinking and talking about the long term. My favorite bet is the one between Warren Buffet and a hedge fund guy: https://longbets.org/362/ https://longbets.org/362/ Buffett was already making much larger bets than this in the marketplace, so in some sense this was pointless. He also could have made it a private bet and saved the hassle. But the public nature of it drove an enormous amount of media coverage and discussion.

by bdsa 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mLuby 5y ago

If we're using 5 digits, add 10K years: we're in year 12021 of this Holocene calendar. (Happy palindrome year!) 0 is pre-history, some of the very first permanent construction. An 8min video by Kurzgesagt on it: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

garmaine 5y ago
That’s the Holocene calendar, not the Long Now date writing tradition.

fouric 5y ago

This seems to imply that writing "02021" in a textual forum post does anything more than just make it significantly more difficult for another human to parse. I don't buy that argument - writing "1999" instead of "99" in BBS/IRC messages before the turn of the century would have done nothing to fix the critical systems that were storing years as a pair of bytes.

darkwater 5y ago
But if you start in 2021, well, 02021, to write it 02021, by 08850 it will be in everybody's mind (including AI's) and developers - or AIs - by 09330 will write programs that will laat 700 years and will not have the Y10K bug.
wpietri 5y ago
The point of it, like the point of many Long Now projects, is to get people to think about longer spans of time, and be more aware of how little we normally do that. As they say, "The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. We hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." -- https://longnow.org/about/ https://longnow.org/about/ So the fact we're talking about these issues here is a success. Another example of their efforts is something I wrote the code for, a bet/prediction registry: https://longbets.org/bets/ https://longbets.org/bets/ Unlike the sort of prediction markets that are now relatively common, where the goal is to serve as a functional business, the goal for Long Bets is to get people thinking and talking about the long term. My favorite bet is the one between Warren Buffet and a hedge fund guy: https://longbets.org/362/ https://longbets.org/362/ Buffett was already making much larger bets than this in the marketplace, so in some sense this was pointless. He also could have made it a private bet and saved the hassle. But the public nature of it drove an enormous amount of media coverage and discussion.