It's "Long Now" stuff, which really should be called "Medium Now" because they're only using one leading zero.

kragen thinks making most of his readers glitch for a second every time they read one of his dates is worth it on order to advertise for the Long Now. Really unfortunate choice, since he often has decent information to share.

It's a meme that's supposed to get people to think in >4-digit timescales, apparently. Always makes me think of octal TBH

He's talking about AD 1036. Try to keep up

I think they've over-corrected from the two digits are enough truncation that was common in computers between the 1950s and ~2000. It started to become less common then, but the phase out is arguably still going or stalled until things just die.

However OCTAL (leading zero) prefixing of a text mode number fails on a number of points:

* It's still a fixed register size (5 characters), which will overflow on the year 100000 AD.

* It's confusing, everyone else.

* It's not technically correct. (human behavior)

Truncating to two year digits was confusing because ambiguity. There is no ambiguity if a number encoded in decimal uses precisely the number of characters it needs. That's how normal humans normally write numbers.

It's there to provoke your question