I used to feel this way. Over the course of building out 2 calendar systems in my career (so far) and having to learn the intricacies of date and time-related data types and how they interact with time zones, I don’t have much disdain for time zones. I’d suggest for anyone who feels the same way as this meme read So You Want To Abolish Time Zones.
Also, programmers tend to get frustrated with time zones when they run into bugs around time zone conversion. This is almost always due to the code being written in a way that disregards the existence of times zones until it’s needed and then tacks on the time zone handling as an afterthought.
If any code that deals with time takes the full complexities of time zones into account from the get-go (which isn’t that hard to do), then it’s pretty straightforward to manage.
Time zones are part of it, but also daylight savings is a real pain in the ass. And like you said it gets particularly complicated when you’re dealing with a system that deals with these things as an afterthought, which seems to be a lot of older libraries for time. For instance, the Java date utils are a nightmare and are now considered semi deprecated replaced by a new java.time api. That is, of course, no help for the ridiculous amount of things that depend on these stupid date utils and no one wants to spend the dev hours to refactor.
This did little to convince me that timezones are an unnecessary construct. Pretty much every point made was done from the perspective of someone who had already decided their opinion rather than objectively weighing the pros and cons.
I agree. It’s written like “ugh I’m used to timezones, now what?”.
Yeah, the article is written like it’s parodying those who want to abolish timezones, but I’d be interested in specifically what you found unconvincing? I read the main point as being that time zones are an arbitrary social convention but that that arbitrary social conventions are pretty useful for humans.
Like one thing that the article does is repeatedly asking the question “but what time is it in Melbourne?” which I guess sounds pretty silly if you think timezones are unnecessary, since the question would be meaningless if timezones were abolished, and people in different parts of the world would already have centered their day around their respective parts of the clock and you would just look up what the times for everything are in another place. But I think the author was kind of already discarding that idea, because it’s just equivalent to timezones - you have a lookup table for each part of the world to find out what people do at a certain time, except instead of being a single offset you have like a list of times like “school openings”, “typical work hours”, “typical waking hours” (?) etc. This system is basically timezones but harder to use for humans. So the author asking “but what time is it in Melbourne?” is in the context of this table not actually existing, because if it did, then you haven’t actually abolished time zones.
I disagree about the table - if you’re interacting regularly across timezones you tend to convert everything to your local time anyway - India’s on lunch at 9am, US is starting at 14:00, because that’s how it fits into your day.
Yeah but also if we’re being honest, from a programmer perspective the timezone has no bearing on what you do, and is hence not a problem at all.
After all, much like you translate the language of your UI when displaying in X, you also add Y hours to all times shown in X. Done. You wouldn’t even need to persist the zoned time data anywhere, given their static nature you could decide the final timestamp shown at display time, purely on a client, visual, level.
OTOH, daylight saving time turns itself - and timezones - into an utter mess and whoever invented them hopefully is proud of the raw amount of grief and harm they caused the world. It causes all kinds of issues with persistence, conversion and temporal shifts in displayed time due to the ephemeral nature of the +X minutes added. Or not. That’s the worst part.
So timezones: Fine, it’s just bling bling on display anyways.
DST: Burn it at the stake.Yeah, I’m in agreement that DST is kinda pointless and could probably be abolished, but the thread is about abolishing timezones in general (or so I thought).
Abolishing DST doesn’t eliminate all the weird issues with “ephemeral” offsets though. Suppose the user wants to set a reminder for a recurring event at 3pm, and then moves to another country. Do you keep reminding them at 3pm in the new time zone or the old time zone? Maybe the reminder was “walk the dog” and the user meant for it to be at 3pm local time, or maybe it was “attend international meeting” and the user meant it to be at 3pm in the original timezone. (This admittedly only happens to calendar apps so isn’t something that most applications have to deal with, unlike displaying timestamps in general.)
But other than that, I’m of the opinion that as programmers we’re supposed to model the problem space as best we can and write software that fits the problem, rather than change the problem to fit our existing solution. After all, software is written to be used by humans, not the other way round (at least not yet). So if DST is something those wacky humans want and use, then a correct program is one which handles them correctly, and a programmers job is to deal with the complexity.
deleted by creator
UTC is the only time.
No, it’s not.
Elaborate.
TAI
A lot can happen in 37 seconds.
I just discovered that while the ServiceNow APIs return all times in UTC, they use the user’s default time for all times passed in as a parameter.
So if your account is set up in PDT and you say “give me this item that I just created”, it will say “here your item, this was created at 17:00”.
But if you say, “cool let me see all items created in the last hour, so anything greater than 16:00”, then it will respond “got nothing for ya, chief.”
I’m not a developer but give him one for me too
I’m ok with timezones, but the guy who invented daylight savings time I’d slap to all the way to the sun
IIRC daylight savings was created way back when electricity really didn’t exist so it allowed the farmers more daylight to harvest their crops.
Now with that said there is more technology in today’s farming equipment so DST shouldn’t really exist anymore.
It was some worker who wanted more time after work to catch butterflys.
It’s not about the crops, farmers work by the sun, not by the clock.
It was able conserving candles and oil, for lighting rooms.
That is literally the opposite of true.
That’s a misconception. Farmers lobbied heavily against DST. Their work does not abide by the clock; they milk when cows need milking, and they harvest when there’s enough light, no matter what some clock says.
In Europe, DST as we know it now was first introduced by Germany during WW1 to preserve coal, then abandoned after the war, and widely adopted again in the 70s. In the US it was established federally in the 60s.
This is all glossing over a lot of regional differences and older history. But yeah, US farmers were very much against the idea.
I blame Big Ice Cream™.
Those ice cream trucks get an additional hour of daylight to hawk their goods before the children are recalled back inside for supper.
So, this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, DST had nothing to do with farmers, it was to save energy usage in the summer as people were doing more things when the evenings were warmer.
IIRC daylight savings was created way back when electricity really didn’t exist so it allowed the farmers more daylight to harvest their crops.
DST does not increase the amount of daylight on any specific day of the year, it just shifts it later in the day so that people in 8-5 jobs can do more things after work. Farmers don’t work 8-5, they work as needed so if the crops need harvesting they will get harvested based on the weather.
Now with that said there is more technology in today’s farming equipment so DST shouldn’t really exist anymore.
Nowadays farmers have lots of lights and can harvest after the sun goes down, but that has nothing to do with why DST shouldn’t exist. DST shouldn’t exist because it doesn’t save energy due to any populated place having their lights on all night and the actual changing of time leading to negative outcomes like deaths from accidents with no benefits.
Sure, the sun will come up earlier and set later in the summer if we get rid of DST, but the only reason for the time change in the first place was the standard working hours being longer after noon than before.
My understanding is DST did still save appreciable energy until we replaced incandescent lights with fluorescent and leds. Longer daylight in the evening when people are awake and less in the early morning when people are asleep means lights aren’t being used as much. The average light bulb used to consume 60 watts or more and also let off significant undesirable heat, so with a house full of lights DST really did cut back energy usage. Now though with led lights low consumption and virtually no heat, it’s not nearly as significant.
Actually DST was a war world one thing to save energy. To not need lighting in the factory.
Look it up you’re both wrong.
It actually was only active during WWI and WW2 until late 60s or early 70s (oil crunch may have brought it back.)
Originally being started for WWI and WWII doesn’t contradict my post which talks about the current reasons given to keep it and that it is not saving energy now.
Oof just 90%
“Midwestsocial”
Yup that explains the lack of reading comprehension…
Good day
Why does my location impact your reading comprehension?
Smh my head
and set earlier in the summer*
I hate it. I fucking hate it. With every fiber of my being. I spend every winter counting the days until the sun stops setting before I stop working. Our entire lives are scheduled so we are inside under neon light from 9-6, why are we trying to maximize how much of that is during daytime?
On the day that we go back to permanent ST I will turn to hard drugs to make up for the dopamine deficiency. No joke very few things in my life fill me with more dread than having to suffer early evenings for the rest of my life.
Maybe, and hear me out, the problem is that 9 to 6 is the problem, since 2/3 of that time is after noon. Instead of changing reality to appease business, business, work hours could be changed to 8 to 4 with four before and four after which is both more light in the evening than DST and a shorter workday because people are more productive than they ever have been.
But I guess you would rather let business practices determine when noon is for everyone instead of the sun.
Business hours is no more or less of a social construct than DST or the 24 hour clock.
The only difference is that we have a shot at making everyone agree on a timezone shift or permanent DST, but absolutely NO SHOT at getting every business to switch to an 8-4 schedule. None. It’d be a nice sentiment. But it’s not happening, and I don’t care what the number says on the clock when I leave work as long as it’s sunny outside.
Why is it so important that the sun reaches its zenith at noon anyway? Do you often get confused while looking at your antique sundial?
First of all, noon refers to when the sun is at the highest point in the sky so being an hour off is confusing.
Being able to look at the general position of the sun and being able to estimate time is pretty handy.
Being able to estimate the length of day because the time between sunrise and sunset being approximately the same is handy.
Not changing the time of day twice a year would be fucking fantastic.
Some places already stick with standard time all year round.
The US tried year round DST in the 70s and it was widely rejected within a year because DST during the winter is fucking awful.
Plus, most jobs don’t mind people coming in and leaving early, which is a far more common shift adjustment than coming in and staying late.
Year round standard time is the real solution.
And you’d think *if anything farmers would want more sunlight in the morning when it’s cooler.
Edited because people want to take this the wrong way. As in this another reason that DST and farmers makes no sense.
Farmers don’t care about clocks unless they are scheduling a time to meet and using the clock for clarity.
The sun comes up when it comes up and that is what matters. Farmers don’t care about the clock for what they consider morning, because morning is before the sun is highest in the aky. They are already getting up a few minutes earlier or later depending on whether the days are getting longer or shorter.
DST has nothing to do with farmers.
I think you misread my comment. It’s along the lines of if anything they would prefer the morning.
This is like saying dogs would want better stock options when stock options don’t matter to dogs.
This is besides what I was saying, which was again “if anything” and adding another reason why farmers and DST makes no sense. But dude people live in the world. Farmers are not 1000% in their own bubble. They need to go out to stores and get supplies and interact with the world and the supply chain. You are now taking lack of an office schedule or something to a ludicrous degree with your analogy. I wasn’t even disagreeing with your old points, I was saying “if anything” and adding another reason, but you want to go off on seemingly everyone. Perhaps you’re confusing me with the other guy, but whatever. Cheers.
Isn’t that Benjamin Franklin or did West Wing lie to me?
From a development perspective it certainly sounds easier to have one global timezone with DST than a bunch of smaller ones without it. Would that make sense in reality? Probably not but I definitely think timezones take more work to compensate for properly.
Not really. Timezones, at their core (so without DST or any other special rules), are just a constant offset that you can very easily translate back and forth between, that’s trivial as long as you remember to do it. Having lots of them doesn’t really make anything harder, as long as you can look them up somewhere. DST, leap seconds, etc., make shit complicated, because they bend, break, or overlap a single timeline to the point where suddenly you have points in time that happen twice, or that never happen, or where time runs faster or slower for a bit. That is incredibly hard to deal with consistently, much more so that just switching a simple offset you’re operating within.
Lets just have 2 timezones, Chinese time and EST w/ permanent DST. The most populated timezones for Eurasia and the americas, and they’re both 12 hours apart, so nobody has to do timezone math, just swich AM and PM.
There was actually a really interesting idea I heard to have no time zones. And I actually think it could be a good idea. It’ll never happen because people would need to re-learn time but if it was always the same time everywhere it would make scheduling and business so much easier. No one would need to convert between different zones or be late because of an incorrect conversion. The downside is that times which are conventionally morning or evening etc, would no longer would be so people would have to get used to time just being a construct for scheduling and not a representation of the natural day/night cycle…but it actually doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.
Problem you run into is the areas where we need to tie things to solar days across an area.
You end up with places having to regulate that school starts at 22:00, and gets out 05:00 the next day.
Businesses close for the night at 06:00 and open bright and early later that day at 22:00.
You have places where one calendar day has two different business days in it, so the annoyances faced by people who work overnight shifts spreads to everyone, and worse gets spread to financial calendars, billing systems and the works.It’s not better.
🤔 that’s a fair point…
Time is an air bubble trapped under a screen protector. It’s annoying, and you can push it around to try to keep it out of the way, but you can never really fix it.
There’s just too many inherently contradictory requirements for us to end up with a “good” system, and we just need to settle for good enough.My dream is that we stop changing things. Whatever we have in time zone database today is what we stick with going forwards. No more dst shifts, no more tweaks to the zones, no more weird offsets and shifts, because we don’t get to stop dealing with the old layout when we change, we just add a new one that we think is better.
For the most part, dealing with this stuff is a solved, shitty problem. It’s when we change the rules that problems come up. Worse when we change them retroactively. (Territory disputes between nations have been resolved with the conclusion that land was actually in a different time zone in the past because it was actually in another country. Not a problem usually, unless there’s a major stock exchange in an island that was transferred between nations and retroactively changing what time it was affects what laws were valid at the time certain transactions took place.
What matters is consistency and our time system has tons of crazy inconsistent shit in our. Everyone knows about leap years, but do you know about leap seconds? Imagine trying to write a function to convert unix time to a current date and suddenly all your times are a second off.
Just look at this insane bullshit nonsense. The added complexity of time zones and daylight saving time is nothing compared to simply supporting our time system.
Incredible list, the scale.
The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
hmm
A little aspirational?We need to synchronize all computer times with that one clock that can stay accurate to within 1 second every 40 billion years.
We do? With NTP
I’m referring to this one, the most bleeding edge of accuracy. I don’t think NIST would have implemented this particular clock (yet).
and id put him back and lovingly nurse him back to health. big hero.
Switching sucks but DST is better than Standard Time.
DST vsm Standard time literally doesn’t matter. It’s the switching between the two that kills people.
Which part of the year is DST and which part is Standard Time?
I know, but it seems like half the people that say they prefer DST have it backwards.
It’s easy, the good part is DST (which is what we’re currently in - Spring through Fall in the northern hemisphere).
It’s only good from spring to fall. Come winter and it’s a permanent depression.
Standard Time during that period is what’s depressing.
With standard time you get some light in the morning. With DST you get no light at all. Also there’s nothing worse than waking up in the darkness.
Sure there is… Coming home from work in the darkness is way worse than waking up in it.
yeah it’s literally ass-backwards. how can anyone support DST as it stands is beyond me
deleted by creator
just move somewhere better. don’t mess up my timezone just because your weather always sucks!
I don’t know what you mean by evening, but it’s already dark at 16:00 during winter. You only get some light in the morning. DST means no more light in the morning and no more light in the evening. Complete depression. DST should not exist.
i still dont even understand what DST even is, as far as i care because i don’t is that DST just means we change the time, because god forbid the time be a little funky.
DST is shifting the sunlight later in the day during the summer.
too bad there isn’t like a standard convention that establishes when something would take effect, how it would take effect, and at what interval.
No, daylight savings time is definitely what we’re going to call it.
The real problem is that across the globe there is like 50 different implementations of it. Some places have a fucking half hour, or some goofy shit. Really fun handling time zones with that sprinkled on top.
I love DST! I just think ever switching out of it is where the mistake lies
DST during winter = permanent depression.
You are aware that the actual amount of daylight doesn’t change when we move the clocks right?
It really comes down to when you’d rather have more daylight, morning or evening.
Evening
Agreed. That’s why DST is best.
Except that it doesn’t. Take a look at daylight data for 20 Dec here https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/uk/london
Daylight: 08:03 - 15:53
That’s ST obv. Now let’s convert it to DST, that will be 9:03 - 16:53. Let’s say you work a standard 9-5 job. Well, 9:03 is after you start working and 16:53 is before you finish. Thus you get ZERO daylight during the day in DST. You get almost an hour in the morning with ST.
Now let’s move further away from equator https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/latvia/riga
Daylight: 08:59 - 15:43
Well, DST is a perma fucking depression now as you’re robbed from the very few minutes you had before.
How about further North https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/finland/helsinki
Daylight: 09:23 - 15:12
No wonder Finland has such high suicide rates during winter…
P.S. It is also worth noting that daylight grows the closer you get to the equator and it grows in the morning, not in the evening. You can see from the examples above that their evening difference is smaller than the morning one. There’s just no point having DST.
I’m missing your point. Do you think that moving the clocks is having an effect on the tilt of the earth? Or are you just trying to explain to me how daylength and latitude are related?
I know quite well how dark it gets in the north. I live in the north. Luckily, the sun still rises and sets at very predictable intervals. If I want to enjoy sunlight, I simply need to be awake at some point that coincides with when the sun is up.
You are also aware that not everyone works the exact same hours, right? And windows exist?
Use a different example to make the opposite point: I’d like the sun to be out for at least an hour after I get home from my “9-5”, so if the sun sets at 1700 I’m standard time, I am depressed. But in DST, I get to spend an hour in my garden.
See? The debate is stupid. Do you want more daylight in the morning or afternoon. That’s the only question. The amount of daylight is not affected by clocks.
Wut? If it’s DST during winter, you don’t have any light to enjoy after work. You can only enjoy light in the morning with ST. All the explanation is above, with facts.
Love me some early evening daylight though. Nice warm but not hot cruise/drive with the windows and the top down on the car.
DST had good reasoning at the time. It doesn’t anymore.
The US tried no dst back in 1970. After 2 years people wanted it back.
They did permanent DST instead of no DST (permanent standard time), so they had dark mornings in winter.
Is it still 1970 today?
What is so different today that people wouldn’t change their mind again about DST?
It’s 54 years later. Are you expecting a full list or something?
So because you read the news on your phone instead of the newspaper somehow everything is different with the sunrise?
You’re right. The only thing that has changed is that newspapers are smaller.
If the list is so long, then it should be easy to list one thing that is different today that would make people not want DST.
I don’t need a list. Just one example.
DST is a digital STD
Move to International Atomic Time timezone.
clock_gettime(CLOCK_TAI, ...)and stop complaining.The UK press every year makes a huge song and dance in opinion pieces about getting rid of DST. However I’m always horrified to see that people want us to keep British Summer Time instead of Grenwich Mean Time. I understand that there are “longer evenings” in BST; however we literally invented GMT and coerced the rest of the world to adjust their times based on that. From the point of view of being constantly compatible with UTC and having more consistent business hours for international companies it makes more sense to me if we kept GMT.
Also the longer evenings thing can be achieved by simply staying up an hour later. It’s not exactly like an hour is being stolen from you when the times switch, the change of clocks are mainly pointless admin.
Lastly I read an article recently that described a correlation between the incidence of heart attacks and the clocks changing. The theory is that just slightly messing with people’s sleeping patterns can cause additional strain on the body.
Another point for GMT, in the mid '70s, the US went onto DST year round for a couple years. People hated it so much they changed back to switching the time.
If we wanna do away with DST and BST, we need to go back to standard time, as the later sunset in the summer translates to no sunlight for workers in the winter
No the longer evenings are achieved by work starting and ending an hour earlier. And it’s literally easier to change the time zone than to change corporate culture.
So would you be team BST if we had to pick one? I’m just personally not sure it’s such a loss when the sun is out until 10pm at the height of summer.
Edit: to be honest that would probably be my 2nd preference. Anything except the system we have now where the clocks change!
I think I want work to end an hour earlier in the winter because of how early the sun sets, and care much less about the summer. So however it’s done, it would be great if office jobs could happen when it’s dark outside and we could live our lives during daylight.
Mmm yeah I’ve noticed that my retired parents keep telling me what a great summer we’re having every year and I’m completely unaware of it due to being cooped up inside.
The only downside of being in GMT is that programmers here almost never notice their timezone bugs when developing systems in the winter.
Still, avoiding a whole other class of bugs would be nice.
Worked on a project where devices just magically froze, but only during the month of February!
Turned out the people who had written the firmware had decided to do their own time math to save space and had put in an exception in the code for leap year values. Except instead of February 29th, it kicked in for the whole month. And the math was wrong so you ended up with negative values.
The product was due for launch in March of that year and was headed to manufacturing. It was by sheer luck that someone ran a test on February 1st and caught the problem.
Don’t mess with time in code, kids.
Was it related to banking?
Consumer health.
Good product, too. Won a bunch of awards. Unfortunately, the company has since gone out of business.
This is why we have pre-built libraries and Unix time.
too bad unix time only has 14 years of life left in it.
Edit: this only applies to 32 bit Unix time. The 64 bit lifespan is a little longer, at 584 billion years. Whoops lol.
No
Unix time.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamps also get a bit weird because of leap seconds. Unix timestamps have no support for leap seconds (the POSIX spec says a Unix day is always exactly 86400 seconds), so they’re usually implemented by repeating the same timestamp twice. This means that the timestamp is ambiguous for that repeated second - one timestamp actually refers to two different moments in time. To quote the example from Wikipedia:
Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number 1483142400 is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Aren’t timestamps fun?
Luckily, the standards body that deals with leap seconds has said they’ll be discontinued by 2035, so at least it’s one less thing that developers dealing with timestamps will have to worry about.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
Luckily, the standards body that deals with leap seconds has said they’ll be discontinued by 2035
Did they figure out a way of making the earth spin more reliably per how the humans want it to?
If I remember correctly, they’re updating the standards to allow for more deviation between UTC time and “actual time”. They’ll likely replace leap seconds with a leap minute that happens much less frequently, implemented by spreading it across the whole day, similar to the leap second workaround I mentioned.
Unix time doesn’t help with timezones… It’s always in UTC.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful. It’s seconds since Jan 1st 1970 UTC. Libraries let you specify timezone usually if you need to convert from/to a human readable string.
Don’t try to write your own date/time code. Just don’t. Use something built by someone else.
…yes that’s why UNIX timestamps are helpful, because it’s a constant standard across all the libraries.
Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it’s modifying the length of a second.
Then that system should be trashed.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC
Careful with the exact phrasing here - while the epoch was at midnight in GMT, the time from which time_t is measured also exists in other timezones.
Then that the library that does it should be trashed.
UNIX time is trash.
Unix timestamp is always in UTC which is why it’s helpful.
Any time you show the time to a user, you have to use a timezone. That’s why the unix timestamp has limited usefulness - it doesn’t do a lot on its own and practically all use cases for times require the timezone to be known (unless you’re dealing with a system that can both store and display dates in UTC). Even for things like “add one week to this timestamp”, you can’t do that without being timezone-aware, since it’s not always an exact number of seconds as you need to take Daylight Saving transitions and leap seconds into account.
Then that system should be trashed.
A lot of systems just don’t handle leap seconds well. Many years ago, Reddit was down for four hours because their systems couldn’t deal with leap seconds. Smearing the extra second across the whole day causes fewer issues as software doesn’t have to be built to handle an extra second in the day.
Embedded portable device with a teeny ARM processor. Sadly, no room for linux anything or even an RTC. Every time it connected to a phone, the phone would set its clock so the timestamps were somewhat close to being accurate.
However, if you swapped out the AAA battery and DIDN’T connect it to the phone at least once, all your subsequent readings would go back to zero epoch and would be forgotten 🤷🏻♂️
Good times.
Some absolute and utter legend of a man made a Unix kernel for the fucking ZILOG Z80, you have no excuses
(It’s called UZI and it’s written in K&R C for some obscure CP/M compiler)
If it had been up to me, I would have included a proper real-time-clock in the design and done things a lot differently.
But the device was designed by one company and the BLE and processor module by another. For some ungodly reason neither trusted each other, so nobody was given access to the firmware source on either side. I worked for a third company that was their customer paying the bill. I was allowed to see the firmware for both sides, but only read only, on laptops provided by each company, one at a time, in a conference room with their own people watching everything. Yeah, it was strange.
I was there because the MCU and the BLE processor sometimes glitched and introduced random noise. Turned out the connection between the two parts were unshielded UART with no error detection/correction 🤦🏻♂️
It was concidental that we hit the date glitch. Took all our effort just to get them to add a checksum and retry. The tiny MCU was maxed out of space. No way to fit in any more code for date math.
God I’m sorry you had to go through that much middle management bullshit
Thanks. On the plus side, I got to try ‘soup dumpling’ – still the best I’ve ever had. And Kaoliang, the most gut-busting distilled beverage known to mankind. OTOH, the product shipped, won lots of awards, and got national coverage for the company.
Nothing to do with timezones, but still, fun times.
I’ve just said ‘fuck it’ and switched all my clocks to UTC. I don’t even care anymore.
Why not metric time(TAI)?
Reasons just states difference, but does not answer why.
There’s literally a section titled ‘why use UTC - not TAI?’.
On the other hand, TAI does not take into account the variations in Earth’s rotation speed, which determines the true length of a day. For this reason, UTC is constantly compared to UT1. Before the difference between the two scales reaches 0.9 seconds, a leap second is added to UTC.
On average, Earth has been slowing down a bit over the past decades, so UTC is currently running 37 seconds behind TAI.
So leap seconds is advantage here?
Is that supported in any common operating systems?
Yes, CLOCK_TAI here
Or why not just seconds past the epoch?
Metric seconds or UTC seconds?
I’m gonna say SI
leap second corrected or not?
Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now. Or maybe there’s just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can’t be scheduled between them.
The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time. A lot of nuance is unavoidable.
China uses a single timezone where similar width countries use three or more. So some parts start the day at 8am, others start at 10am
If we used a single timezone in the west it would be UTC which is practically on the other side of the world to me - I’m in +11 now, +10 when we go back to standard time in a week. That would make it reasonably easy here, the clock would be out by near enough to 12 hours (if you prefer light in the evening) that you’d be fine on a 12 hour clock just inverting am and pm
America would be a trip, though. 8 PM sunrise would be a thing depending on time of year.
TIL about China.
Cool, so sunrise is at 8 PM now.
And the problem with that is… ?
Or maybe there’s just no consistent relationship between what a clock on the East and West coast of America say, and a call can’t be scheduled between them.
If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no? If you want to schedule a call you just say the time and save the timzone offset fiddling.
The real problem with time and date is that it has to fit social and natural systems as well as actual passage of time.
Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.
It’s not that simple as people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight. Just look at china where the whole country is under a single timezone despite spanning from UTC+05:00 to UTC+09:00. People on xinjiang ended up using their own unofficial timezone (UTC+06:00) for their daily activities instead of using china’s official timezone (UTC+08:00) because it’s inconvenient to them.
people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight
Yeah but that is exactly what I mean with habitual. It’s a learned association of questionable utility. It can be unlearned and replaced with 0400 is noon or 1600 is noon based on your longitude just as well. Dawn and dusk are dependent on latitude and have to be learned for anything not smack-dab on the equator anyway.
I can see why that would be inconvenient to people, but I would maintain that is only so due to them clinging to a habit.
They just gave an example though of people who made up their own timezone because the official one was bad.
These systems exist for people and if no one other than programmers wants to do the internal calculus of “The sun is setting and they’re a quarter of the earths rotation Eastward, so that means they’re probably in bed” every time you want to call someone, then we shouldn’t make the standard that way.
You also get some things that become way more complicated, like “send the user a notification at the start of the normal working day”.
Right now you just look up the timezone in their profile and send it at 9:00, but without timezones, you need a “database of regional conventions for coordinating business hours”, which is just a worse way of having timezones.Timezones exist because they have a purpose. UTC exists because having some sort of coordinated universal time is helpful and people (outside of Greenwich) don’t use it because it isn’t helpful to them, except in specific circumstances.
It’s like abolishing everything except latin1 because Unicode is a pain. Wanting to write your name in your traditional alphabet is just a habit that people can break.
They just gave an example though of people who made up their own timezone because the official one was bad.
Yeah, and in reply I argued that they did this out of not wanting to change their habit of associating 12 o’clock with noon. Which is in my opinion an understandable impulse but not a good reason to preserve the status quo.
These systems exist for people
Yeah fair, I’m aware I’m toeing unpopular opinion territory here.
and if no one other than programmers wants to do the internal calculus of “The sun is setting and they’re a quarter of the earths rotation Eastward, so that means they’re probably in bed” every time you want to call someone, then we shouldn’t make the standard that way.
But the standard is like that right now, worse even with DST and other complexities.
Right now you just look up the timezone in their profile and send it at 9:00, but without timezones, you need a “database of regional conventions for coordinating business hours”, which is just a worse way of having timezones.
Well no you need an offset. Like the user has set +8:30 as their offset, so send the notification at 00:30 UTC. That’s not worse than having timezones, that’s having timezones but simpler.
Timezones exist because they have a purpose.
Yeah, and some of those purposes are bonkers.
It’s like abolishing everything except latin1 because Unicode is a pain.
More like getting everyone to use Unicode, but whatever. Like I said I see why it would be unpopular to the point of being unenforceable, but that doesn’t mean an unambiguous way of communicating time as the default would be entirely undesirable.
My point is we have that unambiguous system you want. People don’t use it except in specific circumstances. Instead of saying those people are wrong, you can look at why they don’t use UTC for everything.
People don’t use UTC because people aren’t usually interested in universal time, they’re interested in time of day, which is fundamentally tied to the position of the sun and people’s day night cycles.
The people in China who made their own bootleg timezone illustrate that perfectly.We don’t currently have to reason about where someone is physically located to know if they’re likely asleep. I’m in UTC-4. It’s 15:30. It’s 19:30 in London. I know the evening is advanced enough that I shouldn’t call my coworker there, but early enough that I can if it’s an emergency. I forgot California’s timezone, so I googled it, and it’s UTC-7, so it’s 12:30 there. I should probably wait half an hour to call to avoid the typical lunch hour.
Otherwise I use a tool to look up and see that solar noon in California is around 20:00, so people are probably doing their midday routines then. Except that California shifted business hours so that they’re offset an hour from solar noon to reduce energy consumption, which I didn’t know.
And what do we do about places like Texas where solar noon varies by more than an hour on different ends of the state? For simplicity, most regions like to synchronize working hours inside their contiguous economic sphere. So I can assume that the state would pass a law relating to what time was considered “convention”, since we need schools, businesses, banks and government services to be consistent inside a jurisdiction.
It’s important we have stuff like that be uniform, because jurisdictions have laws about stuff like preventing teens from working during school hours, or preventing schools from starting class so early it interferes with children’s sleep or staying in session so long it interferes with their evenings.
Texas can just mandate that standard business hours are 14:00 to 22:00.
Thank God they didn’t end up having to mandate that the standard business day is split across two different calendar days like California. Imagine the hell of child labor laws when you have to stipulate that teens can’t work between the hours of 15:00 and 1:00 the next day unless said scheduled interval begins on a weekend.
Business hours being posted as 00:00 - 03:00, 17:00-00:00 for things like Sandwich shops is my favorite though. “I closed for the night today at 3, but I’ll be open again later today in the morning at 17” just has a delightfully complicated inhuman ring to it.There’s a reason people like their days to line up with their days, and we like to base our clocks around how we live our lives where we are, not where the sun in in Greenwich.
I fundamentally disagree that a system that’s identical to how we work with timezones but non-standard, like a UTC offset system you describe, is simpler than timezones, which are standardized UTC offsets. At best it’s timezones with a different name and more of them.
Latin1 is far simpler than Unicode, and doesn’t have conversion issues. It’s static and very difficult to get wrong. It’s clearly a better match for comparison to UTC-only. It’s only downside is that it leaves everyone outside of a small segment of the worlds population to build their own janky system for dealing with their silly human need to reason about time in an intuitive sense/write their names.
It could be worse. What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)? People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.
What would happen on people that live in UTC+12:00 ? When your friend say “lets meet on Tuesday”, which Tuesday it is (because the day changes at noon)?
Given how +12 is at the front of the “date wave” currently they would probably take it to mean the Monday/Tuesday noon.
People will resist such majorly inconvenience changes unless the benefit of switching is clear for them. Forcing unpopular changes will guarantee people using unofficial timezone which cause even more confusion down the line.
Yeah fair. To me the benefit is clear, there is no good rhyme or reason to timezones as a totality, we should come up with a better system. A straightforward approach like using UTC offsets seems best.
Here’s a quick essay about the problems with it.
TL;DR - as long as people generally prefer to sleep when it’s dark and wake when it’s light (and they always will in general) time zones are basically needed as a form of lookup table for when to try to communicate with other places.
Well the essay has a lot to discuss, part of which is already (or will be) addressed up and down thread, so towards your TL;DR:
Yes of course, I’m not suggesting to disrupt circadian rhythms. And yes, lookup tables for solar days will always be required, but I would argue this is an inherent complexity to how we measure time in relation to our behavioural patterns and environment. However doing that by using variously large timezones that do not quite match solar days at their edges anyway, with a lot of them changing their offsets by an hour for half the year, and some of them using half-hour offsets throughout the year, that is complexity added for administrative reasons which are partly obsolete and largely irrelevant to the question off what would benefit humanity as a whole the most.
If everybody were to use one single timezone you would memorise your relative offset to noon/midnight pretty fast. Like it’s one number to remember, e.g. where you are 4:40am is noon, 4:40pm is midnight, your offset is -7:20. Having those times be (roughly) 12 (for half the year) is just tradition and something we have every child learn. We could teach them about solar offsets just as well. It’s not even really more complex, arguably much less so since you remove the need to confuse them with the chaos that global timezones have grown to be historically.
And the problem with that is… ?
Subjective. It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.
If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no?
Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.
Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.
Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary. And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week. If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in. All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.
It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you’d prefer that.
I’d prefer that over having to change clocks when you travel, and having to have knowledge about the location and possibly having to flip the date when you encounter a reference to a specific time, yes.
Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That’s what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.
Yes, you would obviously do the latter. No sense it going back to the bad old days.
Well, there’s not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they’re all naturally occurring and arbitrary.
Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.
And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week.
Yeah but none of that has much impact on the timezone debate.
If you do have timezones, it doesn’t make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they’ll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they’re in.
Fair enough. I acknowledged this point in my other post, that there are historical reasons for timezones mostly rooted in administrative requirements. But I don’t think this is a good reason to not adopt a better system per se.
All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.
Exactly! So out with the old, in with the new. Sure this will create some other headaches, especially given how deeply rooted some of the relevant nomenclature is in most languages, but the sooner we change this the less it will hurt. I see that it might be a non-starter given the inertia and disunity of globalised society working against it, but it still seems desirable nonetheless, to me at least.
Days in a year ok (except leap years). But seconds in a day are round (discounting days with leap seconds). 24 * 60 * 60 = 86400, which is divisible by two. Did you mean they are not based on the decimal system? I’d be up for a decimal based time system and a reorganised calendar, but that wasn’t the topic of discussion here.
Oops, I thought seconds were defined by the meter at some point. Nope, a pendulum 1/40000 of the distance from the pole to the equator just happens to measure the second near-perfectly, but the second stayed defined by astronomical motions until the atomic standard. Still, do to said variability of the Earth’s rotation since then it’s 86400.002, so even if it stopped changing we’d need leap seconds.
The point being that even if you get rid of timezones the calendar will still suck to work with. I question whether we should even have fixed days, months and years, if the time doesn’t relate to the position of the sun in the sky. You might as well just go with Unix epoch, and leave days to be informal. Of course, then you’d have to calculate multiples of 86400 a lot to set appointments. Maybe we need a new decimal second as well.
And the problem with that is… ?
The problem is that the date changes in the middle of the day. 00:00 (“midnight”) should occur around the middle of the night, so that one day (sunrise to sunset) has a single date assigned to it.
In my opinion it would make more sense to set 00:00 at slightly before sunrise (roughly 4:00 by my clock), that way one night “belongs” to the day that preceded it. But for whatever reason they decided that the date changes in the middle of the night. That’s fine. Middle of the day would not be fine.
Edit: hey cool, Japan kinda agrees with me! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan#Time
Anyone who works nights, or an evening job that runs late like a bar or something, is currently used to having the date change in the middle of their “day”. I don’t think it’s really that big of a deal. It would be super weird at first, but kids who grew up with it would find our current system just as bananas as we would find this.
Yeah but you still mentally consider it to be the same day as the preceding day, until you go to sleep. (Unless you stay up all night but that’s very uncommon, my sympathy to night shift workers)
If the date changes in the middle of the day, does that make the latter half of the day “tomorrow” from the first half? That’s absurd to me.
The fact that you give a preference to change something here which you give as an example for something that shouldn’t be changed because it would be problematic is deeply ironic to me.
Also, again, I don’t really see the problem with changing the date in the middle of the day. It’s virtually the same as changing it at 00:00 or 04:00, you change the date once every 24 hours. Right now you have a situation where one persons 3rd of the month could be another persons 2nd or 4th, depending on where on the globe they are. That’s not really ideal either, especially for that call scheduling example by the GP.
Don’t you think it makes sense for the date to change while ~everyone is asleep?
International light-speed communication is what we internet dwellers are used to but it’s not most people’s experience. Most people rarely talk to people from another continent.
Tilde as natural language punctuation, meaning “roughly” or “approximately”. I like it.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I see how it makes sense. I’m just saying that 1) it is arbitrary nonetheless and 2) it doesn’t outweigh the benefits that could be gained by using a single global timezone. Incidence angle of solar radiation is hardly something most people need or even want to track beyond a certain degree (dawn, noon, dusk, midnight), and the times that would coincide with at your latitude and longitude can be easily learned.
I guess I disagree about the benefits of a single global timezone. We already have that for technology to use - the unix timestamp. All potential benefits of a unified timezone could be (and are) gained by having software convert times to whichever timezone you need.
Maybe I’m missing something. What do you think the benefits would be?
We already have that for technology to use - the unix timestamp.
A unix timestamp is an offset to a UTC date, not a timezone. But fair enough, there is UTC. It’s not used by default however, except by scientists and programmers maybe.
Maybe I’m missing something. What do you think the benefits would be?
Removing ambiguity from casual language. Currently when you state a time you are almost always implying your local timezone applies, which might be unknown information to the recipient, especially with written sources like these comments here. With everybody using the same timezone instead you would always make an unambiguous statement about the specific time by default.
Yeah, tbh the “no timezones” approach comes with its own basket of problems that isn’t necessarily better than the “with timezones” basket. The system needed to find a balance between being useful locally, but intelligible across regions. Especially challenging before ubiquitous telecommunications
Imagine having to rethink the social norms around time every time you travel or meet someone from far away. They say “Oh I work a 9-to-5 office job” and then you need to figure out where they live to understand what that means. Or a doctor writes a book where they recommend that you get to bed by 2:00PM every night, and then you need to figure out how to translate that to a time that makes sense for you.
We’d invent and use informal timezones anyway, and then we’d be writing Javascript functions to translate “real” times to “colloquial” times, and that’s pretty close to just storing datetimes in UTC then translating them to a relevant timezone ad hoc, which is what we’re already doing.
That’s what my rational programmer brain says. My emotional programmer brain is exactly this meme.
My emotional brain thinks we should just give up and climb back into the trees.
Funny enough, a story just broke about a lunar timezone, which would lose a second or so every year relative to Earth due to relativity. If space travel becomes a big thing we’re going to have to choose a frame of reference, and probably just go with Unix epoch in that frame as the universal time. Hopefully it doesn’t happen to pass through a black hole, because there’s no consistent way to define a frame of reference that’s not subject to gravity.
Yes! Very much so.
This is a good illustration of exactly why timezones exist and the issues with not having them.
This guy has a lot of these, it’s kind of a classic now. I hadn’t even thought of managing days.
Soon we’re going to have a new timezone for the moon. Yay, I guess?
Surely they will just use utc?
Can’t be that simple due to time dilation effect. Time moves at a different rate in moon, about
1s58.7 μs difference per day.https://www.reuters.com/science/white-house-directs-nasa-create-time-standard-moon-2024-04-02/
That article says 58.7 microseconds per (Earth) day. Not 1s.
Shit you’re right, I misremembered it.
Appreciate you correcting your post, just one more needed.
ms = milliseconds
us = microseconds
Easier to just round up lol
