We've known what we're doing to all types of bees for a long time. Here's a paper from 01999 talking about pesticides and their toxicity to bees:

https://ucanr.edu/sites/uccemerced/files/40411.pdf

There are many articles that have found viral audiences throughout the 02000s about how other bee species are on extinction spirals because of the American agriculture industry's lack of regulation. This happening to the bumblebee is not a real surprise and we've definitely seen it coming within the window to act.

Very interested in your year notation. This is the first I’ve seen of it before. Is this to inspire readers to take a more long-term view?

An unintended consequence is that it confuses C programmers, who expect an octal literal to follow the leading 0.

Yes, The Long Now Foundation[0] uses the same notation. [0] https://longnow.org/

I will start the Long Long Now Foundation and support years with fifteen leading zeros. Much better.

That's already part of a proposed "standard" - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2550

The whole idea is bonkers and self-contradictory. If NLP hasn't advanced to understand the context of shorthand dates in old texts in 10,000 years time, I'd say thats a pretty pessimistic view on long term progress. Yet the idea is to add 0s because of a long term view on human progress? Doesn't make sense to me.

Regarding the RFC - check out the publication date.

From my impressions on the Long Now (and I found Deep Time a rather interesting read) the issue is not just sticking a zero on to say "think about the future" but rather that our current culture doesn't think about the future beyond the next news cycle, quarterly report, or election.

I'd contend that The Clock of the Long Now (and the intended level of technology to repair it) and the Rosetta Project are very pessimistic about the future of humanity. ( https://rosettaproject.org/about/ )

The recent HN post about the oak grove for repairing the USS Constitution reminds me of https://blog.longnow.org/02014/12/31/humans-and-trees-in-lon...

> Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

That a several hundred year old grove was planted because the builders, being familiar with wood construction, knew that in a few hundred years that it would need to be repaired and they'd need the materials to do the repair.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/oak-beams-new-college-ox...

> The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.

It's a weird form of advertising/virtue signaling, really. "I use an extra zero on my dates to show I know and care about the future."

I had a professor who was very excited about their work. Coming from an environmental and ecological point of view with a decent amount of idealism, I thought the whole thing was a little pie-in-the-sky wackadoodle. I feel like they do have some projects that made some sense and had some promise, but I sure can't find them to cite now.

The idea of planning for further out is not a bad one. I'm not sure how a giant clock inside a mountain helps with that.

So here's a question to think about... how do you tell a culture 5000 years from now of an arbitrary technology that the nuclear waste dumps that we have are "bad"?

The Clock of the Long Now is an artifact from thinking about that and other questions.

I'll certainly grant that many times the art or artifact that comes from that idea may become more visible than the idea itself... but for people who are inspired by the artifact and go on to disover the idea behind it, it can be, well, inspirational - and a way of doing something today that will have repercussions centuries and millennia from now.

I've read an article about the project that's in the works to discourage future humans from digging up nuclear waste. It's a heck of a conundrum. Not that we shouldn't try, but I've got the feeling that no matter how we go about indicating that these sites are dangerous and that there is nothing to be gained by digging there, it's almost human nature to dig it back up. A primitive culture is probably the only kind that would heed the warnings laid down. Can you imagine modern humans stumbling upon something like the site that's being proposed? The only thing that might stop us before it's too late is if someone was smart enough to bring a Geiger counter.

It's obviously a place that the people who built it didn't want dug up. Just like all the ancient places that the people who built them didn't want dug up. Like the pyramids. We knew they were supposed to be dangerous and cursed and booby-trapped and whatnot. Didn't stop modern humans for a second.

I do really like the thought process, and again, I really want this to be a neat organization pushing people to think long-term. Unfortunately, when every project has the vast majority of people scratching their heads and trying to figure out what kind of drugs these folks are on, they're not really accomplishing much on that front.

If you're interested in it - get a copy of Deep Time - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2014020.Deep_Time

> Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to asyet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?

> Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood. In clear, crisp language, he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and explores the possible "messages" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself -- from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.

It’s pretty obviously a Bezos pyramid

So long now uses strings instead of integers for year? That seems shortsighted.

I just saw an e-fluencer use it, so I decided I might as well also. No hidden agenda here.

But yes, that's the intention behind the action here: https://blog.longnow.org/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-dig...

So 10,000 years ago is approximately the start of the agricultural revolution. So the start of cities and I believe I can get away with saying the beginning of modern civilization. So 8000 years in the future is when they expect to encounter these issues with 4-digit dates. 8000 years in the past, no one had invented the alphabet. Someone double check me, but I believe that's before proto-Indo-European is believed to have developed. So the language that became the languages that became the languages that we speak today in Europe and various parts of the world isn't believed to have become distinct from its own progenitor yet.

It just seems kind of cocky to think that we can forsee what sorts of problems are going to need to be solved in the year 10k. At least as far as technology is concerned. I can see arguing for a long-term outlook on social issues. Of course we need to be looking well down the road on environmental issues. But technology? They really think that we're going to have a problem with the number of digits in the date in the year 10k? It wasn't even really a problem in 2000.

Thinking about the future is important. I have the feeling they're not literally worried about the number of digits in the date. I'm pretty sure it's just supposed to get you thinking. But nothing they're doing makes logical sense. Yes we should be thinking about the future, but trying to shoehorn it into our modern framework is misguided in my opinion. The idea itself isn't bad, but I'm not sure they actually understand how to use it constructively.

I haven't read much about this group in 10 years. If someone has more recent experience with the concepts, please let me know where I'm wrong here. I honestly want this to be a useful group, but nothing I've seen them do actually helps accomplish anything useful.

I'm not the person you're asking, but FWIW I first heard of it in connection with the Long Now Foundation

> 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/

An aside, but Y100K-limited fixed-length years are dumb. They don’t fix a Y10K problem, because untruncated variable-length years don’t have a Y10K problem. The Y2K problem was caused by truncated 2-digit years with an assumed two-digit prefix, and the problems when the assumed prefix became an incorrect assumption.

Its true that software that only reserves four digits for years becomes a problem in Y10K, but fixing that internal representation problem shouldn't have any effect on presentation, and if it does “5 digits fixed” presentation is a soft indication of the most short-sighted possible solution.

Why do you pad years with an added 0? Looks weird.

Y10K compliance, of course.

Why would HN comments need to be Y10K compliant? What about catering for people reading your comments in the year 199999?

I think that, given current estimates on lifespans and advances in nanotechnology, it's plausible that I'll be around when Y10K happens, and being able to search through my collected writings in a simple, uniform way will be nice. I'm lazy, and would be unlikely to write a script to convert the dates automatically.

I think it is significantly less likely that I'll be around when Y100K hits. I don't particularly care about anything that happens after my death. That's somebody else's problem.

You know how silly this all sounds right? The idea that you need to add 0s in front of comments that already have post dates for context, yet nanotech will make quantum leaps. Those two circles don't square. If the nanotech proposition comes to fruition, you won't need 0s in front of dates for old texts to be properly contextualized.. You'll have NLP tech so advanced that adding 0s will look like you were rubbing sticks together.

On the broader subject of the 0s, it's ironic that they are added for reasons of long-term optimism. Because if NLP hasn't advanced to understand the context of shorthand dates in old texts in 10,000 years time, I'd say thats a pretty pessimistic view on long term progress.

The computing device I use most right now is twenty years old, and powered off of two double-A batteries. It serves all of my non-entertainment needs, and I will never need anything more for essential use. It is fully-programmable, and works fine. If I go a thousand years in the future, I want my thrift-store Palm Pilot to continue working. Some people drive old cars, I like old PDAs.

Natural language processing is a joke of a field, and I don't see any future in which I will run a natural language processor that works on my old computers and takes all information and reformats it in a way that makes it most aesthetically pleasing to me. As a result, my only option is to write in a way that aesthetically pleases me and allows me to get away with the least amount of future effort. Rather than dedicate hours of my life to reformatting old text, I'll just write it correctly now.

Fair.

> "write it correctly now"

Though in my opinion, your version of correct is quite amiss and misses the forest for the trees.

We don't need to put 0s in front of dates before 1000. Why do we need to do it for dates before 10000? Any date after that will have at least 5 digits, which distinguishes it from dates before then, which only have four digits.

Is this really how some people think? Eye opening

I've never been much for sentiment, but I am one for making my life easier. I assume it's how many people think.

Makes me want to party like it’s 9999.