COBOL, Dates, May 20, 1875, and Disinformation - Gell-Mann Amnesia Awareness \ stacker news ~tech

I could have posted this in the politics territory but its really a technical article and a well written one. I am kinda surprised no one has posted a link to this.

I know the Internet has probably forgotten about the COBOL dates and Elon thing already but this is just to good to not share.

For those that want a TLDR; here you go.

But, "May 20, 1875" has nothing to do with ISO8601, COBOL, or basically anything else other than the day that the Meter Convention was signed in Paris.

It was interesting to see a disinformation campaign take off like this, and I think at this point those involved have moved on to something else. But this will live on because of the internet and all the newly-minted COBOL date experts expounding on how Musk and company don't know something that's just so obvious. Sigh.

Never change, internet. Never change.

I would only add that we need to be skeptical. Very confident technical people easily fool the masses. I remember when this COBOL date thing was going around and it sounded wrong to me. But both sides sounded wrong. I'm not an Elon stan nor Elon hater so to sound like a younger kid my reaction was... meh.

Ready to nerd out? Click the link.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford OP 5 May

Credit where's credit is due. John C Dvorak mentioned this article on the latest episode of No Agenda. They played a recent clip from NPR where a supposed "data scientist" was repeating this false explanation as if it was fact. No caveat. No fact checking :) Our good ole national treasure NPR.