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well, 01935, not 01835. not a lot of paraguayan businesses from 01835 survive thanks to the war of the triple alliance



Ack, yes, I meant 1935. I'm on mobile and typoed that in a way the spell checker couldn't catch...

Even now in the US I have yet to see Disney selling rice under the Mickey Mouse brand in a way that could be at all confused with the Mickey rice in Paraguay that I grew up with.


Neither 8 nor 9 are valid octal digits, please stop that


This is valid (if somewhat obscure) notation for decimal dates in particular, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation


It's a stupid notation:

> the foundation uses 5-digit dates to address the Year 10,000 problem

That just sets you up for the year 100,000 problem. The objectively better idea is to just parse years as regular integers, something that I'm confident people will figure out in the remaining 8 millennia until the problem actually hits.


It's true that they say that:

    The Long Now Foundation uses five-digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.
~ https://longnow.org/about/

but the truth is more subtle, love it or hate it the five digits are part of a campaign to encourage people to think about humans in timescales a tad longer than a few decades at most.


It just sounds like a way for people to try showing how smart they are while in reality it just adds confusion to completely irrelevant discussions, such as this one.

I think the campaign does opposite of what it says. Using 5 digits limits your dates to dates to a maximum of year 99999. While not giving a fuck, using the digits needed to represent a year, works for all years. No one is clamping their years to 4 digits when they say '2024', they are just using the necessary digits needed for that year


> a way for people to try showing how smart they are

given the choice between trying to demonstrate intelligence, and trying to demonstrate viciousness, i prefer the former. i guess your preference is different


Or you can try neither and use a year format that does not confuse us plebs.


Why start counting 02024 years ago then? is pretty much a small scale arbitrary starting point. Humans have existed for longer than that, they could say we are in the year 300000.


Someday we'll admit that Roman numerals were perfectly efficient, and the only reason we switched to decimal was because of that DCLXVI guy.

(As of A.D. MMXXIV)


How does promotion by a single non-profit talking shop, however celebrated or intellectual were its founders, make it a "valid notation"?

Five digits don't even make sense in practical anthropic terms, since we're obviously headed for a shitload of trouble long before the hundreds digit next wraps.


Indeed, my joke was written with the full knowledge of this farce. To make any prediction about technology in use 8000 years from now is just silly.


To add some context as to why businesses wouldn't survive it, that war happened between 00001864 and 00001870, and wiped more than 00000050% of the male population (estimates vary).




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