• TootSweet@lemmy.world
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    5 个月前

    The creator of DST gets the first slap. Then the timezones asshole.

    I’m planning to do a presentation at work on how to deal with dates/times/timezones/conversion/etc in the next few weeks some time. I figure it would be a good topic to cover. I’m going to start my talk by saying “first, imagine there is no such thing as timezones or DST.” And then build on that.

  • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
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    5 个月前

    It’s pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.

    Mirrors.

    We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.

    At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.

    At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.

    That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.

    The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.

    The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.

    The mirrors will be solar powered.

    This will fix it, right?

    • MrFunnyMoustache@lemmy.ml
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      5 个月前

      The Year: 2092

      The Problem: Timezones are annoying

      The Solution: Space mirrors! A series of mirrors in space would rotate to keep the entire planet under a single time zone. A perfect global time system is born!

      Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?

    • bountygiver [any]@lemmy.ml
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      5 个月前

      Alternatively, we have this arbitrary standard of 9am means morning, if we share a single universal time, different places would just have a different arbitrary time being the “morning” instead.

      • mojo_raisin@lemmy.world
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        5 个月前

        Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 个月前

        i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of “9am being morning” is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.

        Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.

        It gets even funnier if we include people who aren’t “normal” I for one, consider noon to be morning.

      • BigMikeInAustin@lemmy.world
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        5 个月前

        We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).

        But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.

    • netvor@lemmy.world
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      4 个月前

      No, we should educate all devs and fix all broken time API’s,…

      wait, your solution seems far easier.

  • dannoffs@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 个月前

    You know the system before timezones was way worse, right? Every town had their own time.

    • Crisps@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      That problem happened because there was no way to travel from town to town quickly so if the clocks were off nobody cared. The trains changed that.

  • randint@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
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    5 个月前

    obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish

    Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)

    Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:

    • causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
    • necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
    • convolutes timetables, where present
    • means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
    • complicates both secular and religious law
    • is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
    • makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
    • does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
    • is not simpler.

    As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.

    • Lightfire228@pawb.social
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      5 个月前

      Timezones make intuitive sense for humans

      UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers

      The issue is bridging the gap

      • netvor@lemmy.world
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        4 个月前

        The issue is bridging the gap

        Yes, but the irony is that we already have the bridges, it’s just we keep jumping off of them at random places, thinking it’s the other bank.

    • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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      5 个月前

      Eh, I think the article blows the situation out of proportion. Overall you’re still in the same situation as before. Instead you would just be looking up a timetable of sunrises/sunsets, instead of a timezone chart. It ends up mostly reframing the question from “what time is it there?” to “what time of day is it there?”. The real version of “after abolishing time zones” is “google tells me it is before sunrise there. It’s probably best not to call right now.”

      I’ve been using UTC on my own clocks without issue, and the change is not some completely reality-breaking thing - not anymore than DST. From a matter of personal perspective it just shifts what time correlates to what time of day.

      using UTC also simplifies the questions “what times can I call you at?” And “when should we have our call?” since you have the same temporal standard. Even before that, I was scheduling calls with family by stating the call would be at such-and-such time UTC.

      The biggest difference is with when the date changes, and I think that ultimately is the hardest pill to swallow, and that’s even compared to stomaching the sun rising at 2 AM. Having it change from June 5th to June 6th in the middle of a workweek, or even jumping to another month would bother alot of folks in a significant fashion.

      Ultimately it’s just a personal practice. No nation is going to abolish time zones if everyone still uses time zones. I just prefer it for various reasons.

        • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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          5 个月前

          Between the two, months is much harder. With time, you just set your clocks to UTC. To get months fixed you need mass adoption, rewriting calendar software, etc.

          • Midnight1938@reddthat.com
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            5 个月前

            Bold of you to assume people will agree to having sunrises at 9am while some other country gets the privilege of getting it at the usual 6

            • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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              5 个月前

              You’re upset that it’s sunrise at 06:00 somewhere and not that some other lucky bastard landed sunrise at 00:00?

              (that might actually happen over the ocean, I have not checked)

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      5 个月前

      Yeah it’s just being angry about the fact that the Earth is rotating ball. Wanting to abolish timezones is different from Flat Earth only be degrees.

      Sure the “what time is it there?” question goes away, but it’s replaced by “what are your business hours?”

      Ultimately it will be daytime in one part of the world while it’s night in another part of the world. That will always cause problems.

  • SavvyWolf@pawb.social
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    5 个月前

    I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.

    • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.

          • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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            5 个月前

            There are good sides to DST, such as coming home “earlier” (by the sun clock but not by the social clock) from school or work and therefore having more hours of daylight during the free time after work. These positive effects may go beyond subjective feelings. A study has shown for example that activity increases with longer evening daylight (Goodman et al., 2014) – albeit with small biological effect sizes (≈6% difference in the daily activity between the Standard Time of the year and DST, adjusted for photoperiod). Interestingly these results of the above study were culture-specific: a significant increase was mainly observed in Europe and to some extent in Australia, while no significant effects or even slightly negative effects were seen in the United States and Brazil.

            Fucking duh. This is the sticking point for me, and I am disappointed that the article doesn’t mention the effect of latitude here. Very easy for muricans to say “DST is not useful” when these fuckers never get pitch-black night before 6pm or full daylight before 6am ST.

            Brussels is on the same latitude as Calgary. ST robs every office worker of one hour of useful daylight. That’s it. That’s the whole argument for permanent DST. Businesses will not change their opening hours, so permanent ST means a net loss of one active hour in the day for every office worker. Permanent DST in Europe means someone working 9-6 would not have to drive home at night for 4 months of the year and could maybe even take the dog for a walk in the evening sun.

          • Cipher22@lemmy.world
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            5 个月前

            You realize there are places without it, and they’re fine, correct?

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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              5 个月前

              Not sure what you mean. My position is that daylight saving time should be abolished entirely. You linked an article about a push to move permanently on to daylight saving. I pointed out how that is actually a bad idea.

              • Cipher22@lemmy.world
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                5 个月前

                I just linked it to show the rare piece of bipartisanship. I agree DLST should be done away with. As to which schedule to keep, I find it to be 6 of one and half dozen of another. The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over.

                • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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                  5 个月前

                  The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over

                  No, it isn’t. The scientific research actually suggests that keeping DST is worse than switching back and forth. I have to admit I find that confusing, since a lot of the specific studies I’ve looked at concentrate on the effects caused by the switchover itself, but the meta-analysis doesn’t mince words:

                  In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        5 个月前

        timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint

        They’re a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say “the meeting is at 04:00” and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say “the meeting is at 2pm AEST” and then someone in AEDT will have to think “oh, that’s 3pm for me”, and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It’s a huge pain.

        So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter

        That’s not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn’t change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That’s the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it’s done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It’s also very harmful to public health.

        • bassomitron@lemmy.world
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          5 个月前

          But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.

          As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.

        • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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          5 个月前

          Eliminating time zones doesn’t make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren’t all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It’s just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.

          • yistdaj@pawb.social
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            5 个月前

            I’d argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.

          • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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            5 个月前

            Yeah you’re absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I’d usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.

            And when you’re attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It’s in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I’m of the opinion that the distinction between “what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?” and “where does this time sit in relation to their working day?” is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.

      • lud@lemm.ee
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        5 个月前

        I have never really understood why people care so much about the change.

        You will just wake up one hour later or earlier twice a year, so what? I do that multiple times a week, twice per year isn’t too bad.

        • dohpaz42@lemmy.world
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          5 个月前

          You obviously don’t suffer from a sensitive circadian rhythm. To that I’d say, lucky you. But there are plenty of people who do suffer. And by the time they finally get used to the time change, it’s time to change again. It’s vicious and disruptive; to more than just scheduling. It has a direct (negative) impact on physical and mental health.

          • lud@lemm.ee
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            Fair enough. Personally I and many others in northern Europe (and other places far from the equator) feel depressed in winter due to the highly reduced sunlight so removing DST isn’t just as obvious as “people will feel better”, because DST at least in theory helps with that.

            Edit: lol people are really mad about this 😂

            • davidagain@lemmy.world
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              5 个月前

              Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      5 个月前

      Assuming you used UTC as the shared time zone, 00:00 on Saturday would start at what is today 4pm in US Pacific Standard Time. So you’d finish work at 01:00 Saturday.

      On the other hand, you wouldn’t resume work until 17:00 on Monday.

      So you’re not losing any weekend time.

    • MTK@lemmy.world
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      Fuck days! We should all just use epoch and that’s it.

      Wanna meetup at 1719853000

      Sure! What time?

      Around 900?

      Great!

      And they meetup on roughly 1.7.24 17:12:00 GMT

  • tibi@lemmy.world
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    5 个月前

    It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.

    Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.

    • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      It’s called temporal hour. Many cultures around the world had such a time system. Like in Japan they made clocks and watches that could tell temporal hours called wadokei.

    • uis@lemm.ee
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      5 个月前

      UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.

    • Sunrosa@lemmy.world
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      Ive been using utc personally for over a year and i use it in context of vrchat since it yields one less necessary conversion to other people’s timezones because only the offset is needed (as opposed to memorizing both offsets, which is much harder because of that nasty nasty daylight savings and its weird anomalies) but they still hate it and tell me to use a “normal” timezone lol. I had gotten 1 person to switch. And she since switched back. Shit don’t work in practicality but I’m still gonna use it out of stubbornness

      • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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        5 个月前

        Go play EVE Online. The servers used to have (still, do I think, but shorter) daily downtime that was scheduled using UTC and it led to everyone using UTC since the game server itself used that time.

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 个月前

        if i can’t have anything nice, you can’t have anything nice, and only the people who can’t have anything nice will have something nice >:)

      • _NoName_@lemmy.ml
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        There’s dozens of us! Yeah practically it’s almost entirely an aesthetic effect. I’ve kept it that way and haven’t had any problems from it, though.

  • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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    5 个月前

    Timezones are fine to program around.
    DST is a bit of a pickle to plan around, but can be done just fine by a computer program.

    Historical dates; considering leap years, skipped leap years, and times when leap years weren’t a thing or when humanity just decided we skip a bunch of years; are the bane of all that is good.

  • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
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    Timezones are kind of a necessary evil though, because without them then you’d have to check regions (or zones) to see if 1PM in China is the same thing as 1PM in Australia is the same thing as 1PM in Bolivia.

    • milkisklim@lemm.ee
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      Even then, 1pm in Beijing is something different than 1pm in the Tibet since all of China is technically one time zone.

  • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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    Aren’t time zones quite straightforward? You add a whole number of hours and for some a half. Compare that to a sundial on the one side and having times that don’t match your day at all on the other, I’d say it’s good

    • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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      5 个月前

      You add a whole number of hours and for some a half

      Or three quarters in a few cases.

      And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 “ideal” time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.

      And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        5 个月前

        But what is the alternative? Sure, fck daylight saving. Having the date changed at noon is fucked up, too, and that’s what happens if you agree to one global time. And having countries that are too big for a time zone is fucked up as well. Russia for example actually only spans to the Ural mountains, everything to the east are colonies. Fuck states in general #nobordersnonations

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          5 个月前

          I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.

          But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I’ve had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.

          But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            5 个月前

            im a proponent of using exclusively UTC for anything pertinent to being accurate, and then using local solar time (the sun) to refer to everything else, it has the benefit of making people look outside anyway.

          • MisterFrog@lemmy.world
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            5 个月前

            The drawbacks are many and the benefits are few.

            Watching foreign films would be a pain, where is this in the world again, what does 19:00 mean for them? More exposition, or you just have to guess based on languag and accent.

            I need this work done by our team in XYZ country, what are their working hours? (wow, look at that, still using timezones?)

            When you arrive somewhere on holiday, now you have to get a sense of the time there. Or continually be thinking “what’s that in my home time?/what’s that in solar time”, which is why solar time just makes more sense.

            People aren’t going to stop thinking in solar time, ever. We’re hard-wired to be awake with the sun. It doesn’t matter what the numbers are, you will associate them with the sun. The question then becomes, would we rather all use roughly the same numbers (timezones, what we currently have), or different numbers (everyone using UTC).

            Using UTC solves only 1 problem, you can say verbally to someone across the world, let’s make the meeting 15:00 - but this is already easily solved by using a calendar which converts for you…

            There’s a reason we have never used a single non-solar time, it’s just worse and I think there’s a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I’m sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn’t even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You’d just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)

            This is a solved problem.

            • flerp@lemm.ee
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              5 个月前

              I think there’s a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I’m sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn’t even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You’d just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)

              Which is short sighted considering it is much easier to make a standardized library for converting time zones than it is to make a standard library reflecting what different time numbers mean in different places around the world. If they somehow convinced people to make the change, they would find out pretty quickly they were better off with the devil they knew.

      • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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        5 个月前

        I agree planning around it is stupid, but I don’t see how that affects computer programs.

        (let me clarify, this seems like an everyone-issue, rather than a developer-issue)

        • homoludens@feddit.de
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          5 个月前

          IMO the problem for developers is that they have to provide general solutions, so they have to cover each case all the time instead of just a singular case at a time.

    • Skullgrid@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      you have to program a meeting that reoccurs between DST observant & non observant states in the US and australia.

      Good luck.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        5 个月前

        I hate to repeat myself but DST is garbage. I never said it’s good

    • orbitz@lemmy.ca
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      5 个月前

      Not if the place doesn’t do daylight savings time, and not all places in a timezone will do that (least in North America) so you need extra code if they do or do not. It becomes a pain after awhile when you do it in multiple projects. Technically one extra setting but it’s still a pain to make sure it’s handle properly in all cases, especially when the previous programmer decided to handle it for each case individually, but that’s a different issue.

      Also when you deal with the times, say in .Net you gotta make sure it’s the proper kind of date otherwise it decides it’s a local system date and will change it to system local when run. Sure it’s all handled but there are many easy mistakes to make when working with time.

      I probably didn’t even get to the real reason, I sort of picked this up on my own.

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        5 个月前

        Sounds like daylight saving is the bigger issue. Maybe not bigger but when you compare cost and benefit. I think the US uses even different start and end dates than the EU and I don’t know about the rest of the world

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        5 个月前

        To be fair, they did say “and for some a half”.

        Though that misses the Kathmandu, Eucla, and Chatham Islands, which are all :45.

  • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works
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    5 个月前

    It’s only bad when used incorrectly. Just store time in UTC and convert it to timezone of your setting to present it. Most modern languages offer a library that makes it just one more line of code. Not only it’s then clear and unambiguous, it supports all timezones.

    • dvlsg@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      Doesn’t always work, especially if you need to work with any sort of calendar or recurring schedule.

      • booly@sh.itjust.works
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        5 个月前

        Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      5 个月前

      bingo. Timezones became easier when I learned that all apps and databases should have all times be in UTC. Let the UI do it’s thing and accept local time and convert it, and vis versa.

    • TCB13@lemmy.world
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      5 个月前

      +1 for this. This is kinda the same issue with encoding, just UTF-8 everything and move on.

  • bricklove
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    5 个月前

    At least most of us don’t need to worry about time dilation caused by relatively yet. Have fun with that, space faring developers.

    • Lightfire228@pawb.social
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      We kinda do, with GPS satellites that have to correct their clocks due to the effects of gravity and speed

      And communication with space probes

  • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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    5 个月前

    Dates and times aren’t that hard—honestly!

    Video is a lecture about how to think about dates and times, through the lens of a specific open source .NET library designed to aid with applying that thinking. It points out how most languages’ standard libraries really work against you, because they conflate different concepts. For example, an Instant (a specific point in time, globally recognised) and a LocalDateTime (a date and time in a way that is irrespective of your location—for example you might want your alarm to wake you at 8:00 am on weekdays, and still do that if you move to a different time zone), a ZonedDateTime (a date and time tied to a specific location—like if you want to say “the meeting starts at 10:00 am Oslo Time”), and an OffsetDateTime (a date and time tied to a specific UTC offset—which is not necessarily the same as a time zone, because “Oslo Time” is a time zone that doesn’t change, but its UTC offset might change if they go in or out of DST, or if a place decides to change, like how Samoa changed from UTC-11 to UTC+13 in 2011.

    These are all subtly different concepts which are useful in different cases, but most libraries force you to use a single poorly-defined “DateTime” class. It’s easier and requires less thought, but is also much more likely to get you into trouble as a result, precisely because of that lack of thought, because it doesn’t let you make a clear distinction about what specifically it is.

    His library is great for this, but it’s very worth thinking about what he’s talking about even if you don’t or can’t use it. As he says in wrapping up:

    You may be stuck using poor frameworks, but you don’t have to be stuck using poor concepts. You can think of the bigger concepts and represent all the bits without having to write your own framework, without having to do all kinds of stuff, just be really, really clear in all your comments and documentation.

  • VeganPizza69 Ⓥ@lemmy.world
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    5 个月前

    I fucking hate timezones. Whatever it is, I’d rather read the current clock as 4 a.m. even if it’s noon than have timezones.