3 ms·
Meh. Even if the transition to a 128 bit time value takes a billion years to roll out, it's no big deal. There's no reason to think it would be drastically more
by anonporridge 5y ago
Meh. Even if the transition to a 128 bit time value takes a billion years to roll out, it's no big deal. There's no reason to think it would be drastically more challenging for whatever intelligence to deal with it then than it is now.
- virchau13 5y agoYeah, but they're not going to do it 1 billion years in advance, they'll do it 2 years before :p
- Aeolun 5y agoI’m sure some AI at the time will do a quick lookup of it’s global history to point back to this comment and say “see, they called it”.
- withinboredom 5y agoRoko’s basilisk thanks you for your service.
- zelon88 5y agoIn reality, 1,000 years in the epoch will be just arbitrary. By then they might as well pick a new epoch that isn't 128 bits. What would they need to preserve that they wouldn't be able to emulate or virtualize?
- eyelidlessness 5y agoAt epoch 0 it was already arbitrary.
- oh-4-fucks-sake 5y agoGit blaming code from billions of years ago would be hilarious. Imagine understanding the few hundred keywords in a long-lived language but not being able to understand the git commit messages.
- Piskvorrr 5y agoHow is that different from today? ;)
- CWuestefeld 5y agoOne interesting idea in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky was the job of "code archaeologist". A far future society, they were saddled with ongoing maintenance of centuries-old code, and needed to be able to figure out what those historical programmers were trying to do.
- Piskvorrr 5y agoHeld that title (unofficially) in a company. Figuring out "what did we mean by this, twenty years ago" was already a nontrivial task, even with a theoretically similar tech stack.