Sounds like a good thing to me.
It quickly identifies you as someone who prioritizes personal idiosyncrasies over communicating whatever it is you want to communicate - since pretty much every reader will do a double-take on the date (or is it a date?) and be distracted from reading the content.
That's helpful, since one can generally assume that anyone with that attitude isn't communicating anything useful.
Please don't do that.
But, obviously enough, I already know I'm violating the date formatting convention, and I could hardly be more aware of those people. My theory is that, like Carmen Ortiz, they like attacking people because it makes them feel powerful, and violations of arbitrary conventions give them the opportunity.
Most people will interpret this sort of thing as extremely pretentious and also assume that you're fishing for "compliments" and trying to look cooler than everyone else. Like an inside joke only you know about, so will someone please ask you about it?
This type of behavior is typical in a classroom but becomes a lot less culturally acceptable the older you get.
Who cares what most people think?
And, yeah, it's true that most human cultures are very conformist, although I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that social groups full of old people are the most conformist. That conformism is why, for example, it took the humans 2000 years from recognizing that light darkens silver chloride until they invented photography, and they're constantly killing each other en masse in warfare, and 50 years after the first Moon landing there are still no cities off Earth.
So, lighten up. Play a little. Violate arbitrary conventions. The mind you save could be your own.
How do they write BCE years?
I commonly say things like "Troy fell around 01100 BCE". Except that usually I look up the date so I don't get it wrong like that. I don't know what the Long Now folks do.
Except conventions derive their value from the proportion of people using it. If a convention is stupid for other reasons, it may be worth trying to convert people. But writing numbers without a leading 0 is not stupid; in fact the opposite is. Why not write the current year as 0000000000002022 to preemptively protect against the Y(10^16)k problem? Why not write your age as 027 so that you're prepared when you hit 100?
> The mind you save could be your own.
You telling people you're liberating their sheeple mind, like literally every conspiracy theorist says, is not helping your case.
False; see US vs ISO date formatting.
You're welcome to use the date formats you've proposed if you think they're better.
On what account is the Earth disappearing in a mere 8000 years?
It's superior in every way: minimal, unconstrained, universal.
"Anyone who shows noticeable personal idiosyncrasies in their writing must not have anything useful to say" strikes me as a heuristic of exceedingly little value.
I was familiar with the general Long Now ethos, but seeing prefixed years in the wild and going down this HN rabbit hole has been worthwhile.
Also seeing how politely & reasonably you folks debated back and forth on this usage makes me love the HN community (if we can even call it that?) even more.
I'm glad you enjoyed the conversation, though, and found it worthwhile.
One of the best ways to be polite is Principle of Charity and that's mostly what I saw here.
Why write such a lengthy comment telling someone you're dismissing them rather than just dismissing them? Is it to discourage their behavior, or to warn other readers? Or simply to share how you feel?