From Middle America to the Ends of the Universe

Happy Wednesday!

I have two news items and a bit of computer speculation for you this month, so let's jump right in.

Sales News

One reason I don’t publish exclusively through Amazon is because there are millions of readers around the world who prefer buying ebooks elsewhere. Whether you shop at Kobo, Google Play, Apple, or Barnes & Noble, I want to share my love of science fiction stories with you.

If you shop at Barnes & Noble for ebooks for your Nook device or app, this item is for you.

My short novel Love and Death in the City of Bone is on sale for only $0.99 as part of Barnes & Noble’s A Big Deal on Short Books: Starting at $0.99 promotion, running through August 16, 2026. That’s 2/3 off the list price of $2.99.

No death, just love for Barnes & Noble readers.

Fantasy novels from a fellow Analog author

Like me, Ron Collins is well-known for publishing short stories in Analog magazine. Also like me, he works in a broad range of genres. His fantasy works include the Apprentice Mage (book 1 of a complete series), a collection of stories called Five Magics, and book one of a new series, The Price of Vengeance, coming out in a few months.

But you can get all three of those books now, including The Price of Vengeance months before the general public. Ron has included all three under the box set title Fantasy Firsts and included it in the Fantasy Bundle of Bundles (fulfilled by StoryBundle).

The way StoryBundle works: pay the amount you want for three titles, including Ron's. A minimum of $30 unlocks twelve more. If you're looking for a huge amount of fantasy to load to your ereader, that's money well spent. Whatever device or app you use, it's easy to upload them.

Even better news: you have centuries before your ereader will crash...

I remember Y2K

Some of you remember the late '90s hype about the Y2K bug. For those of you under the age of 35, fear-mongers warned that when the calendar flipped to the year 2000, all the computers in the world would crash.

The reasoning: computers in the '60s and '70s had extremely limited memory. For that reason, dates were commonly encoded as six digit numbers, MMDDYY.

The fear: when the date went from 123199 to 010100, computers would treat it as a date a century in the past instead of one day in the future. Systems would crash. The world would enter a new dark age...

Although a few systems were down for a few days in early 2000, patches were soon unrolled. At no time was a global computer system crash in the cards.

But MMDDYY isn't the only way for computers to store date and time information. Different flavors of the Unix operating system are the OS for most of the internet, including the server from which you are receiving this text. Unix systems keep time in seconds starting from 1 January 1970. As of a few weeks ago, the Unix time was 1785416576.

What happens when systems that record time as a 10-character string go from 9999999999 to 0000000000? How much of the internet will collapse? Will the world enter a new dark age?

You might be tempted to relax. Ten billion seconds of the Unix epoch gets us to 20 November 2286. This certainly isn't a problem that will hit in our lifetimes.

But don't get too complacent for our descendants. I can guess what you're thinking:

By the year 2286, computers will be orders of magnitude more powerful than they are today. This won't be a problem.

Sounds reasonable... but it's totally wrong.

If anything, by 2286, because computers will be so much more powerful, the problem will be even worse.

Evolution builds on the old, but doesn't discard it

Whether the variety of life on Earth today arose from natural selection, alien selection, divine selection, or something else, it evolved from ancestral forms.

For example, oxygen-binding proteins play different roles in different organisms. In animals, hemoglobin carries oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and myoglobin stores it in the muscles. Soybeans use leghemoglobin to trap oxygen before it can poison the enzymes that convert atmospheric nitrogen to fertilizer.

As you might guess from the common ending -globin, these different proteins have similar structures. They are all about the same size and shape. They all use heme, a molecule containing an iron atom held in place by a flat set of carbon rings, to bind oxygen. The amino acids that hold heme in place and control access of oxygen to and from the heme iron are similar, and where they are different, the differences correlate with the different functions of the enzymes.

The implication is that evolution didn't build new oxygen-binding proteins for new species, but instead, hacked what was already there.

So too with software. Rather than write new code from scratch, it's easier to import a module to give you the functionality you need. That imported module will bring with it dependencies for the same reason; it was easier for the module author to import a previous module than reinvent the wheel.

Which means a bug in a foundational module of a programming language will impact later code and the final mile of user experience.

And that's just for updates within the same language! How many government and commercial systems still run Fortran programs on obsolete OSs because the cost of rebuilding in a modern language for modern computers is too high? With latent bugs such as the end of the Unix epoch considered far enough in the future to be someone else's problem? And how many of these obscure old programs provide outputs that other, newer programs need to operate?

Vibe coding will only make this situation worse. The AI will happily abstract away all the modules and dependencies from the user's awareness. The software might be a Rube Goldberg mess under the hood, but if it works well enough and the bugs are tolerable, no one will care.

The AI will have no clue why humans are freaking out on November 20, 2268.

But now, you will.

Till next time,

Happy Reading!

Raymund