There are stock news site that churn out “why did $STOCK move in $DIRECTION” filled with bullshit speculation. I bet it was mostly automated even before chatGPT and has gotten much worse now.

I get the joke, but for those seriously wondering:

The epoch is Jan 1, 1970. Time uses a signed integer, so you can express up to 2^31 seconds with 32 bits or 2^63 with 64 bits.

A normal year has exactly 31536000 seconds (even if it is a leap second year, as those are ignored for Unix time). 97 out of 400 years are leap years, adding an average of 0.2425 days or 20952 seconds per year, for an average of 31556952 seconds.

That gives slightly over 68 years for 32 bit time, putting us at 1970+68 = 2038. For 64 bit time, it’s 292,277,024,627 years. However, some 64 bit time formats use milliseconds, microseconds, 100 nanosecond units, or nanoseconds, giving us “only” about 292 million years, 292,277 years, 29,228 years, or 292 years. Assuming they use the same epoch, nano-time 64 bit time values will become a problem some time in 2262. Even if they use 1900, an end date in 2192 makes them a bad retirement plan for anyone currently alive.

Most importantly though, these representations are reasonably rare, so I’d expect this to be a much smaller issue, even if we haven’t managed to replace ourselves by AI by then.

Tell that to the custom binary serialization formats that all the applications are using.

Edit: and the long-calcified protocols that embed it.

Y2038 is my “retirement plan”.

(Y2K, i.e. the “year 2000 problem”, affected two digit date formats. Nothing bad happened, but consensus nowadays is that that wasn’t because the issue was overblown, it’s because the issue was recognized and seriously addressed. Lots of already retired or soon retiring programmers came back to fix stuff in ancient software and made bank. In 2038, another very common date format will break. I’d say it’s much more common than 2 digit dates, but 2 digit dates may have been more common in 1985. It’s going to require a massive remediation effort and I hope AI-assisted static analysis will be viable enough to help us by then.)