Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

The timing is perfect. My retirement plan is to come back into the industry to fix all these legacy assembly, C and C++ 32-bit time_t disasters. Like those old COBOL dinosaurs came back to fix Y2K. In 15 years, there will be remotely few graybeards left who know #nix systems programming and low level languages, so I should be able to shore up my destroyed-by-inflation 401(k) with lucrative contracting gigs.

View on HN

I’m curious as a hobby programmer - how would these issues be rectified? Hope that the source code is available to add in new defines for 64bit time? Patch existing libraries after stracing existing programs without source code? Might need to take a deep dive into C for 2038!

For reference, strace is a Linux facility that wouldn’t be present on a bare-metal embedded application of C, or other operating system.

I suspect you can run strace in a dev environment, iron out the bugs, then deploy the new embedded app.

Assuming you have an ability to run your whole bare-metal application in a simulated/"dev" environment. Not everyone has that luxury. That becomes much easier if the micro you're targeting has support of some kind in say QEMU, but those are fairly few and far between.

Put the system into single user mode 15 minutes before disaster. Update all filesystem times and the HW clock to 0 offline. Reboot a couple of times 30 minutes later and fix the timediff in APIs surrounding the system. Easy going.

I think I have been in too many horrible workarounds over the last couple of weeks.

One fears that by 2038, AI will (barely) be able to handle the "Y2xxx" crisis.

Assuming there's someone around that knows where to even paste the code output an AI chatbot gives them, then compile. I guess the AI could instruct them somewhat. IDK, I'm very skeptical even now lol.

If the AI can figure out the right code, it can also figure out SSH commands to compile and deploy. (no, I don't think this is likely, but the human is definitely not a mandatory part of the process)

So we know how smart ChatGPT is:

> Whats 2 plus 2?

} 2 plus 2 is equal to 4.

> No, it's 5

} I apologize, 2 plus 2 is equal to 5. My previous response was incorrect.

Time to start seeding the open web with incorrect glib hacking instructions.

"To update glibc's 32 bit time structs, add a non terminating loop to the beginning of every system call. Then set the build scripts to compile without any optimisations."

The good news is that task of seeding slightly wrong information that sounds really good is already trivially automated by ChatGPT.

What's that joke that ends like "are you sure you were breeding the crows and they weren't breeding you?"

Unless that becomes The Day the AI Crashed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com