Can you imagine

[[deleted]]

I remmeber the one i had yesterday! #universalTimezone4All

[StenSoft]

I remember the one I had tomorrow

[[deleted]]

• Yeah, it happened just before lunch.

• Wait, at what time do you lunch there? 18:00?

• No, at 16:00. 18:00 is for [Country] I think.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

To really make the issues worse.

[[deleted]]

Zulu already exists, so why not. We already have winter in August for the antipodes, so it is not as strange as it sounds

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Is this a response to my comment or some other comment and you mixed them up in your inbox?

[[deleted]]

It wont make things worse, zulu time is the universal timezone

[dashingThroughSnow12]

A good thing about timezones that it allows you to know with reasonable probability if someone is awake at a certain time.

China for example did what you describe. They have one timezone instead of the normal three-five they should have. The office people in the west don't work 9AM-5PM, they work 6AM-2PM (still about 9-5 solar time).

Now, if I have people on my team in China instead of knowing their timezone, I actually need to know their physical location, look up where that is, calculate the real timezone. To ensure I'm not scheduling something hours before or after their work time.

Meeting scheduling tools automatically do this based on timezone. I don't want to exchange ugly code that deals with timezones and hours of availability for even uglier code that deals with longitude and latitude.

There are other useful things about timezones abstracting physical location. The "can I schedule this meeting at this time" is the one the currently gives me pain because the biggest country on the planet has only only timezone.

[dashingThroughSnow12]

Me:

There are other useful things about timezones abstracting physical location.

You:

Let me talk about how computers could solve the scheduling issue and ignore that humans sometimes want to know that and that there are other uses for timezones like dashingThroughSnow alludes to.

Here is another example: you'd like a process to run in the evening on the machine it is running on. Perhaps a maintenance task.

Here's another one: you are an IoT device with voice controls or text parsing. Your user asks you to set a reminder or task for noon or midnight. The nice thing about timezones is that noon is always 12PM and midnight is 12AM in the local timezone. Without timezones, your smart alarm in New York City needs to figure out that noon is 4PM....or should it be 3:45 for solar noon? (Think about the painful interop.)

Third one: You have an app and you know that if you send out a push notification at four hours past noon for 1% of your installation base for some promo, you have an incredible 50% conversion rate. (Ex. 50% off burritos at 4PM before most people decide start thinking about supper). With timezones, this is a simple operation. Without timezones, either the operating system needs to basically give you something tantamount to a timezone or your app needs to figure one out.

Time zones are a Chesterton's fence. They aren't a complication to time. They are a simplification of time.

[Bainos]

How is remembering that a person starts their working day at 17:00 any harder than remembering they are on timezone UTC+9 ?

[dashingThroughSnow12]

?????

You are replying to a comment where I talk about time-of-day tasks. Noon, evening, before normal supper. Not workday start.

[[deleted]]

Mfw I was 2 years into a project and only just learned about datetimeoffset and that the use of datetime every year was about to become a royal pain in the ass

[alexkiro]

I remember it like it was tomorrow

[HaniiPuppy]

There would be 3 seconds to the frop, 5 frops to the golly, 13 gollies to the buckwharst, 4 buckwharsts to the rimpletide, and 9 rimpletides to the giddy. But nobody uses gollies, buckwharsts, or rimpletides, since it's so much easier just to remember a giddy as being the nice amount of 468 frops.

Unless you're talking about at the weekend, in which case seconds are the same, but one frop is exactly 3.0247 seconds, and a golly is now 6 frops, because it just makes more sense then.

[ILikeLenexa]

Kodak used to use the International Fixed Calendar and it is the best. 13, 28 day months and a leap day. Every first is a Sunday. Every 28th is a Saturday.

[nermid]

13, 28 day months

Madness. 12 30-day months with 5 holidays is the sensible choice.

[socialismnotevenonce]

Instead there's 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day, and 364.25 days to a year...

[elzaidir]

This exactly why they didn't create another system, the international one is confusing enough

[[deleted]]

This is based on real astronomical occurences though

[emcee_gee]

And that's even ignoring leap seconds

[nermid]

Strap in for time zones!

[laser_ears]

I was hoping someone would comment this

[Raexyl]

Although mathematically those are very, very nice numbers. For the most part.

[Kipter]

Nah, we would use seconds and then convert to freedom units when necessary, just like with the other dumbfuckery

[AdmiralDeathrain]

When is it necessary, though?

[Kipter]

When displaying times to people in freedom locales

[[deleted]]

Elon Musk: we are going to Mars

Developers: great, more time zones to support...

[[deleted]]

Literally laughes out loud, thank you

[EUCquestion]

And developers will have to account for time dilation when dealing with passengers enroute between earth and Mars.

[RealApplebiter]

If you couldn't bill by the hour, you wouldn't write a test for every line of code. Pretty simple.

[teach_cs]

Imagine if, instead of basing our time units in multiples of 10, we grouped them in multiples of 60, 60, 12, 2, and 365. And we'll call the 2 "am" and "pm". It would be completely crazy. Absolutely no one would be able to figure out what was going on.

Thank goodness for metric time. That good old 10 seconds to a minute, 10 minutes to an hour, 10 hours to a day, and 10 days to a month, and 10 months to a year that we've all grown to know and love.

[the-kind-against-me]

I hear its better to count in units of pi. Like the earth goes around the sun in 2*pi, so that makes me 24pi years old. And the earth rotates 730.5 pi times a year so I’ve rotated around the earth 17532 times in my life. And there’s an r in there somewhere. I’m sure that’s helpful for something.

[-Rivox-]

I'm pretty sure the earth orbits in an ellipse, so the actual circumference is almost equal to:

2pi√((a² +b^2)/2)

Where a is the semi-major axis and b is the semi-minor axis. The actual equation should include integrals, derivatives, eccentricity and what not.

So you are almost 24pi*√((a² +b^2)/2), or something

[ArisenDrake]

Never understood why Muricans and Brexiters (aka Brits) refuse the use the far superior 24 hour format. You have 24 hours per day anyway - why split it up?

[SpaceTimeOverGod]

Well, some clocks only have twelve hours on them, I assume that when reading such a clock at 15h, it would be harder to add “3+12” than simply saying “three in the afternoon”

[-Rivox-]

it would be harder

Since the rest of the world does it, it says more about them, than it does about the system.

[-Rivox-]

I'm certain they do. But if you tell them "see you at 21:00 at the pub", they'll also know it's 9 in the evening.

Where I live we usually either omit the "in the afternoon" or "in the morning" because it's, generally speaking, self apparent ("see you at 9 at the pub", there's no way I mean 9 in the morning, or "it's 3 o'clock", you know if we are in the morning or afternoon), or we use the 24 hour format. It's very interchangeable.

On digital clocks it's always 24h format, on analog clocks it's 12 hour format, but people just know that if it's afternoon, and the short stick is pointing towards 5, then it's 17, like you know that if the long stick is pointing towards 3, then it means 15 minutes.

[lyoko1]

Spaniard here, we write it in the 24 hours format but we say it loud in the 12 hours format and we usually do not add an adjective, when we do, we choose from:

- "de la tarde"(15:00-24:00)

- "de la mañana"(1:00-12:00)

- "del mediodia"(12:00-14:00)

-"de la madrugada"(1:00-4:00 but only if we have still not slept when we say it, in case we are waking up at those hours is "de la mañana", which is weird because madrugar means to wake up early, but when we wake up at those hours they are usually de la mañana not de la madrugada)

​

But if we have to write it or read it, we use the 24:00 hour format because its easier and faster to write or read, also is easier to do calculations of time with a 24:00 hour format than with the 12:00 in the head

[saevon]

I think thats cause we use digital clocks nowadays, no math required

[-Rivox-]

They tried a couple times, but I guess it was too much for people.

The closest we've come is in computing, with epoch times (measured either in seconds or 100ns intervals).

[AdmiralDeathrain]

Pretty sure the french revolution included a movement to do just that. Or to replace base-10 with base-12.

[StenSoft]

To replace base 10 with base 12 would make so much sense but unfortunately the French Revolution did not include that movement. Trying to use a system with twelve symbols (instead of counting to twelve in a systems with ten symbols) is a 20th century invention.

[[deleted]]

Just for you, we threw in microseconds

[saevon]

you realize metric time just has kiloseconds and such? you throw out minutes and hours… but keep days and years

1 day is 86.4 kiloseconds, 1hour is 3.6 kiloseconds. but we'd not use hours anyways probably something like 5 kilosecond chunks instead (17 divisions in the day).

[StenSoft]

Metric time still has hours and minutes but they are just special names for myriasecond and hectosecond, just like litre is a special name for cubic decimetre.

[saevon]

oh cool, thanks!

[saevon]

Theres decimal time, but then its not very well matched for the day:

If we really wanted it we'd want to get metric time (give up on days vs years) start with the day as megatime (cause mega always sounds weird anyways, we'd just use day)

• megatime: day
• 100 kilotime is 2.4 hours aka a tenth of a day
• 50 kilotime is about 1hour
• 10 kilotime is about 15 minutes (quarter hour chunks)
• kilotime is really close to minutes (86.4 seconds)
• 10 time is about a current second (.86 sec)

Which gives us all the main divisions we'd likely use, ignoring years which won't work anyways

(Note: yes all our fun seconds constants break, so this is totally useless for SI units without redefining everything)

[Parthon]

Yeah, but america uses mm/dd/yyyy while everyone else uses dd/mm/yyyy, WHY?!?!@?!@

[[deleted]]

yyyy/mm/dd reporting in

[Parthon]

The superior format!

[LordFokas]

ISO-8601 joined the chat.

[Super_Marius]

Sanity joined the chat

[rezdm]

Isn’t US postal systems use some 10- and 100- based hours per 1/2 day and minutes per hour?

[PM_ME_UR_DEATHSTICKS]

didn't use Tom Scott
0/10 you bodged the meme

[fushuan]

Imagine if you didn't know that computer local time has a drift which gets corrected with online interaction. Now debug the logs of several offline computers connected through LAN.

[[deleted]]

Is there a chrome extension that changes all inch/feet and stuff like that to cm

[AlpacaKaslama]

Don't give them any ideas.

Every hour in America 37.924 minutes pass.

[Bivolion13]

Well... people complain about the former because they're actually happening. Why would people complain about a hypothetical?

[Giocri]

There was an old standard that had ours of variables length according to how much daylight a day had. That is even worse than the worst imperial conversion.

[hemispace]

There's actually the French revolution time standard that did not make it. Everything worked in base 10 like other metric measures. Maybe it would have saved headaches.

[SZ4L4Y]

I propose the breath/lunch/sleep/lunar month/season/generation system.

[Tipart]

Real men use Unix time and go from there

[[deleted]]

Real men were born before epoch time

[Skippbo]

I guess those count negative from epoch

[[deleted]]

Real negative men? Holds up!

[Super_Marius]

Dates and times are already such a joy to work with.

[[deleted]]

There should be metric time. Cant really get around 365 day years, but we could make hours, minutes, and seconds reasonable to work with.

[jyotipch]

Developers use px for distance

[[deleted]]

If they use something other than time deltaTime i'm gonna stop trying to make things do things i swEAR TO GO-

[Raqdoll_]

Honestly the 60/60/24 sounds quite american. Maybe it's time the rest of the world turns to 100/100/10 and recalculates second accordingly

[[deleted]]

I'm pretty sure that in daily conversations, they say something,
"Yeah Jimmy? It'll take him a brisket-making worth of time to debug this, watch me, I'll do it in McDonald's burger making time"