I’m ok with timezones, but the guy who invented daylight savings time I’d slap to all the way to the sun
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.
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).
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.
Switching sucks but DST is better than Standard Time.
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).
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.
DST vsm Standard time literally doesn’t matter. It’s the switching between the two that kills people.
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
Isn’t that Benjamin Franklin or did West Wing lie to me?
Love me some early evening daylight though. Nice warm but not hot cruise/drive with the windows and the top down on the car.
and id put him back and lovingly nurse him back to health. big hero.
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’s not about the crops, farmers work by the sun, not by the clock.
It was able conserving candles and oil, for lighting rooms.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That is literally the opposite of true.
It was some worker who wanted more time after work to catch butterflys.
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.
This is why we have pre-built libraries and Unix time.
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.
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 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.
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
Was it related to banking?
Consumer health.
Good product, too. Won a bunch of awards. Unfortunately, the company has since gone out of business.
Ok so there are 24 time zones. Before that every town had their own time based on the sun. We basically went from infinity time zones down to 24. This is in fact simpler.
(There are some half hour time zones too, (India, Newfoundland) so at least 26.)
There are a few time zones that are 45 minutes off, like Nepal Standard Time which is UTC+5:45, some places in Western Australia and South Australia use UTC+08:45 and the Chatham Islands are at UTC+12:45 or UTC+13:45 in summer.
DST means you also have things like CST vs CET and given some places start DST earlier or later than others and some ignore it all together, we probably have at least 50 time zones.
Always fun trying to schedule international regular meetings when suddenly there’s a week when half the people’s times changed and the other half’s times haven’t yet, so you try to figure out which time would exclude the fewest essential people.
there are 24 time zones
Cunningham’s law says that this will generate some discussion in the replies!
No, there is entire continuum of time zones.
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
The guy that invented time zones was solving a problem where each little town had their own time standard. I don’t think that was sustainable.
not a programmer myself, but actually fuck you, UTC was the correct choice, anything that isn’t UTC is a wrong choice, and i will literally fight to my death over this.
Timezones are dumb and stupid, and you cannot convince me otherwise, so far the single best argument i’ve heard is “well actually, the hands on a clock and the numbers themselves roughly represent the cycle of the sun in the sky during the day.” Which is pretty good, until you realize that clocks tend to be circles, and you can often just rotate them. And suddenly, the numbers now match up perfectly. But i’ve also never once heard of someone caring about that specific feature, so uh. Good riddance frankly.
Timezones kind of made sense back in the day, when the sun was the only realistic timing system, and pre internet, when people stayed where they were. But now that people don’t do that, and the internet tends to do this thing where it exists. I refuse to believe it makes more sense to have timezones than not.
“Hmmm yes please, i would like to order the time here, but halfway across the globe please” - statements dreamed up by the utterly insane.
ok that concludes my rant. Now i’m going to go set FUCKING DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME on my clock because FOR SOME REASON THE TIME JUST CHANGES HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR FUCK YOU.
My man.
The fact that i even have to think about timezones at all is hilarious to me. Jet lag? UTC would fix that, the time ANYWHERE you are is the time you are normally at, it’s just the day/night cycle that’s bunk. So now instead of being confused as to why things are pretty normal, but you feel utterly shit. You just feel very confused, and probably still tired, but it’s very obvious why.
This shit sends me into schizophrenic ramblings i swear to god PLEASE stop using timezones.
Don’t think your username checks out, seems like time is killing you
No. Thats why im killing IT. Because it fucking sucks, and i hate it, and it should die.
I know I’m probably not changing your mind on this but interested in how you would want the system to be? Regarding your point about being able to rotate the clock so it matches the local solar cycle, suppose we’re in a place where we have 13, at the top of the clock, because that’s when midnight is where we are.
And let’s say it’s Wednesday 3rd April today. What happens when the clock reaches 13? After 1 second elapses, does your local clock go from Wednesday 3rd April 12:59:59 to…
a) Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 b) Thursday 4th April 13:00:00
If a) then you have the problem that the date change is now in the middle of the day, and most of the time you can’t even say “what day is it today”. (If 13:00 is midnight, then 00:00, when the date would roll over, would be just before noon.) You have to say today is "Wednesday/Thursday, or “3rd/4th April” because when you wake up it’s Wednesday, but after lunch it becomes Thursday.
If b) then you have the problem where it may be Thursday 4th April 13:00:00 where you live, but actually it’s not midnight yet somewhere else and so simultaneously it’s Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 there. And in fact every location has their own time at which the date rolls over and it’s not even possible to interpret a timestamp unless you have a table that tells you when midnight is for each location.
Maybe you feel that one or both of these are not really big enough of a problem, or maybe you can think of some other way of dealing with this that I haven’t thought of. And yeah, both of these issues sort of happen already with timezones – the issue in a) happens if you stay up past midnight, but at least it always happens at midnight at not when most people are awake and doing their business. The issue in b) sort of happens already since it can be Wednesday in one place and Thursday in another, but at least the timestamp would always indicate how many hours past the date rollover it is.
Thank you! Drives me up the wall that when people suggest this and they haven’t thought it through, and that it might make other things worse.
I’d say for everyday usability, what we have is way better. Sure, you deal with timezones, but at least once you know what time it is there you have a good sense of what part of the day they are in.
Currently you look up the timezone, maybe do some maths (but let’s be real, you just search and get given the time) and then you immediately have a good sense of what the time is there, oh cool it’s 7AM.
If we all had the same timezone: you look it up, and then you HAVE to do maths. Why? Oh their midnight is 8, and it’s 15 now, so 7 hours after midnight.
Your mind immediately has gone to oh it’s 7AM, but NO, in this new reality, it’s 15:00 everywhere and where you live midnight is 14:00, so that means where you live it would be like your 21:00.
No matter what time you pick to anchor what time of day that place is, the problem persists. And now you just have replaced the problem of looking up timezones, with looking up when the sun is at some point, and then needing to convert that to get a sense of what time it is there according to the sun.
This would be shit, when you get to a new country when travelling you have to relearn what the numbers “feel” like.
Let’s just keep what we have, this is a solved problem.
Currently you look up the timezone, maybe do some maths (but let’s be real, you just search and get given the time) and then you immediately have a good sense of what the time is there, oh cool it’s 7AM.
If we all had the same timezone: you look it up, and then you HAVE to do maths. Why? Oh their midnight is 8, and it’s 15 now, so 7 hours after midnight.
it’s the exact same amount of math in either scenario, arguably even less. Let’s say you’re setting up the time for a meeting with someone across the globe over zoom or something for instance. How does it go? Well you ask them what they’re schedule is like, and you already know what your schedule is like. And both of them use the same timezone instance, because there is only one. So you do no math other than shifting it directly forward and back, the associated amount of time. Perfectly simple. You could also google it ig, but that’s going to the exact same, minus the abstraction that you would otherwise have to do with timezones.
If we all had the same timezone: you look it up, and then you HAVE to do maths. Why? Oh their midnight is 8, and it’s 15 now, so 7 hours after midnight.
This is called a timezone. “Midnight” is the same time everywhere, unless you’re talking about the literal mid night. In which case, yeah that changes, but i’d question why you would need to know that. It’s not like you don’t already know that. Google has already told you. Assuming we’re talking about the date/time midnight, that’s the same time, in every place of the world. Doesn’t matter, midnight here (assuming the 00:00 standard is continued for some reason) is midnight in fucking norway or, sweden, or bulgaria, or your moms house. Doesn’t matter.
No matter what time you pick to anchor what time of day that place is, the problem persists. And now you just have replaced the problem of looking up timezones, with looking up when the sun is at some point, and then needing to convert that to get a sense of what time it is there according to the sun.
See this is where you go wrong, i’m saying timezones SHOULDN’T exist, and then you immediately propose a system that is also just a timezone, they shouldn’t exist PERIOD. There is not link between the solar cycle, and date/time, other than the fact that they exist in a parallel fashion. There is no anchor to what “midnight” is, midnight is just the middle of the night, that might be 2 am, that might be 5 pm, that might be 14:00 who knows. Who cares, it doesn’t matter.
And let’s assume that timezones are nice, because you get up for work at 6am, and they get up for work at 6am, and you both stop at the same time. Sure timezones are nice in that one specific instance because it’s a direct translation, you know what else is a direct translation though? Not having timezones. You could just as easily convert “timezones” into “solar cycle maps” Literally the same thing, they explain the same exact thing, they use the same exact amount of effort.
It’s literally only LESS confusing now.
Your mind immediately has gone to oh it’s 7AM, but NO, in this new reality, it’s 15:00 everywhere and where you live midnight is 14:00, so that means where you live it would be like your 21:00.
There is no 21:00 your time. it’s 14:00 your time. 14:00 is your midnight in that instance, because that’s the time where the middle of the night occurs for you. 15:00 for you is one hour after you midnight, and 15:00. It’s not magically 22:00 now, or 1:00 now. That’s not how that works.
I suppose you could be arguing that you are so entrenched into this particular method of counting, that the numbers the funny paper disc tells you is actually how you control your sleep cycle, but i would much rather argue, uh no. The sun does. Why? Science.
quick edit:
This would be shit, when you get to a new country when travelling you have to relearn what the numbers “feel” like.
Also, news flash, we already have this issue, it’s literally called jet lag. This is a normal occurrence. And also, literally anybody who lives in somewhere that DST exist, does this TWICE A YEAR.
timezones IMO, shouldn’t exist. The sun cycle is disconnected from actual physical date and time cycle. Just pick a timezone, UTC, or whatever the fuck, unix time, i don’t care, DST or not, i don’t care, and stick with it.
Nothing, the next day is 00:00 You’re adjusting it to match the rising cycle of the sun, not to match the day transition point which is entirely arbitrary, that would just be different. I mean, take a normal clock, flip it upside down. Does it run any differently? Nope. It’s the same, it’s just upside down now.
The date time roll over would be a little weird, but then again we literally already have it. It’s just not synced with the sun cycle. Ask anybody who rolls a late night schedule what they think about midnight. I mean you literally can say what day it is. The date is explicit. The date changes at night, can you say what night it is at night? It literally doesn’t matter.
The date cycling over is universal across every zone, doesn’t change from one place to another. It’s the cycle of the sun that changes. That’s the easy part to adapt to, we’ve been doing it since the beginning of humanity.
then you have the problem where it may be Thursday 4th April 13:00:00 where you live, but actually it’s not midnight yet somewhere else and so simultaneously it’s Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 there.
Yeah, we already have that, it’s called timezones. The day night cycle is independent from date time. To TL;DR that entire section, midnight literally just isn’t a thing in that scenario. It’s the date rollover point now.
Like frankly, someone who lives in the midwest, with DST, and long days in the summer, and shorter days in the winter. None of this is a problem. We’ve been collectively doing this async sun cycle/date time thing for centuries. The sun here sets about 3-4 hours later in the summer, in the winter it’s about much earlier comparatively. We adjust our clocks to this twice a year, every year, for every decade, for every century. Our bodies adapt to it. Nothing explodes. (even though arguably it still sucks.)
The problem you list there specifically i think is mostly confusion about the concept of midnight not being midnight anymore, midnight is just called that because it’s the middle of the night, we just happened to choose that as the point where the day rolls over. Sun rise and sun set happen at specific times, weather apps will tell you about this. Nobody seems to complain about those being incredibly variable.
The date rollover is the same in every place in the world. You local day/night cycle is what is disconnected. I could see that potentially being annoying, but then again, we already have concepts of morning, noon, afternoon, evening, etc… I’m genuinely not sure how much this would matter in day to day life. You wake up, it’s one day. You wake up the next day, it’s the next day. You just happen to be awake at the point that it happens. I mean hell it probably wouldn’t even bother most people. Lets say day rollover is noon in 24 hour time somewhere. You tell someone to show up 15:00 on the 8th, which is an impossible date, you just automatically go ok that’s “today” everything before 12 in that scenario is the 7th, everything after is the 8th. 15:00 on the 7th literally isn’t a time that can exist. It’s automatically the 8th. and the advantage here, is that the date rollover point, is the same EVERYWHERE. It literally does not matter where you are on earth.
12 is the rollover point in finland, it’s the rollover point in siberia, it’s the same in china, africa, america, south america, etc… The ONLY thing that has changed is the offset of the day/night cycle in relation to the date/time cycle.
I’m quite confused as to how you’re actually proposing the time should work. I assume that when we talk about abolishing timezones, we mean that everyone switches to a single standard timezone (and that it still goes from 00:00 - 23:59). Are you saying that you would like:
a) The date-rollover point to happen at local solar midnight (i.e. 12 hours past when the sun is highest in the sky in your location, or roughly that), regardless of what the time actually is
b) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people still wake up and go to sleep roughly around when the sun rises and sets
c) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people wake up at roughly 07:00 (for the sake of argument, it could just be any standard time) and go to sleep roughly 22:00, regardless of where the sun is at those times
d) Some other scenario that I didn’t think of?Maybe I suck at reading comprehension but I can’t tell which system you’re advocating for. I’m also confused when you give the example “15:00 on the 7th literally isn’t a time that can exist”, because however your system works, surely if 15:00 on the 8th is a time that you can refer to, then 15:00 on the 7th is just the time 24 hours before that? (I’m actually just very confused by your scenario. Are you referring to noon as the local solar noon, i.e. when the sun is highest in the sky, or are you referring to when the clock reads 12:00? In both cases I can’t figure out a way to make “15:00 on the 7th” impossible.)
Also I don’t think that the sunrise/sunset times being different throughout the year or that DST exists are indications that the solar cycle is independent of the date. Even if the sunrise/sunset happens at different times of the year, timezones are clearly meant to roughly center the waking day either side of 12:00 on the clock around the solar noon. DST exists to make sure that people get more sun during the afternoon when people are more active, so that both contribute to that the date-rollover point happens when it’s dark out and people are less active.
I’m quite confused as to how you’re actually proposing the time should work. I assume that when we talk about abolishing timezones, we mean that everyone switches to a single standard timezone (and that it still goes from 00:00 - 23:59). Are you saying that you would like:
simplest possible solution.
to give an example, let’s say we keep midnight as the date rollover. 00:00 of every day would be the rollover point. The date would change at that point, globally. No matter where you are on the world, the time, and date, is exactly the same. That never changes.
Locally, you would account for this by using offsets, i refer to them as timeoffsets, rather than timezones, or time offset mapping, for completion, which gives you a map to your “local solar time equivalent” Most anything you would need to do would be governed by local solar time, or it’s related offset. Work for instance, that’s how it already works, nothing would be different there, just the funny number that the clock shows you would change. This is literally just our current timezone system, but inverted.
As for the example i used, probably not a good one. That was 24 hour time with noon as the roll over point, just for demonstration. So the first twelve hours are one day, the latter half are the second. Given how twenty four hour time works. The first 12 hours of the day wouldn’t be possible on the day after. Essentially, a good way to think about it, would be that it’s like even and odd numbers. You can tell them apart, just by the very existence of them. 15:00 would not be a possible time for the 7th in that example, unless you went back in time. That was just an example of a slip of the tongue type thing. If you were doing anything more serious, you would be planning it better anyway. Noon in that example, local solar noon or not, doesn’t matter, as that’s arbitrary. The point was just a hypothetical.
Though frankly, i think keeping 00:00 as the roll over makes sense, it’s very explicit. Even if it’s midday. That’s a very explicit time change. DST makes the solar cycle aggressively independent of time throughout the year, in each half of the year, so to some extent, it does with date. Like here in the midwest for example, the summer sunset and winter sunset vary by about 4 hours. Which is a thing that changes twice a year, once a year in the one direction. But twice a year for all intents and purposes. Everybody lives with it perfectly fine. I see no reason that 19:00 being the local solar noon would change anything drastically.
My main point there is that we already wake/sleep at different cycles of the day. On the regular, depending on DST, and season. That doesn’t make a huge difference to day to day life. Local solar noon as a concept being noon (more explicitly, 12:00) every day is an entirely arbitrary concept. It’s kind of cute and all, but like i said, if you really care about representation for it, you can just rotate your clock. Noon to me just marks the midday point, and the point where the sun is highest in the sky. I don’t care about the actual time itself. That means nothing to me.
Oh and while we’re at it, standardizing 24hr time would be a good move. 12 hr time is dumb.
Timezones are dumb and stupid, and you cannot convince me otherwise, so far the single best argument i’ve heard is “well actually, the hands on a clock and the numbers themselves roughly represent the cycle of the sun in the sky during the day.” Which is pretty good, until you realize that clocks tend to be circles, and you can often just rotate them. And suddenly, the numbers now match up perfectly. But i’ve also never once heard of someone caring about that specific feature, so uh. Good riddance frankly.
This is an interesting thought:
If we had UTC before we decided on a lot of modern standards - by whatever means we got it - I wonder whether it would have just evolved that Celts are used to the sun rising at 4-10 on the clock, but an Ainu is entirely used to the sun rising at 13-19.
if we knew that people would be universally connected across the world, independent from the solar cycle. Than yes, absolutely this would have been considered.
We didn’t know that then, we do know that now, and we also know that when gas pumps in finland experience a leap year, they stop working. It’s literally Y2K but completely random, and entirely jumpscare based. You have no warning.
I mean i live in the midwest, in the summer i’m used to the sun setting at like 10pm. In the winter it sets at like 5-6pm.
Before timezones and trains, each town had its own natural time (based on the sun or whatever). Would you have preferred that?
tbf there are libraries capable of handling that too, like rust’s chrono
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.
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.
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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.
I feel you’re conflating TimeZones with ever-changing Daylight Savings time rules.
True but so do most computers. Computers have a database of timezones and time offsets around the world. Depending on the UTC date and time, and your current timezone it will look up what offset to apply to show the local time. The database is very gnarly since rules change over time, e.g. maybe in the 70s some countries had longer DST to counteract oil shortages.
You don’t have to go back to the 70s for changes. Kazakhstan has changed from two time zones to one just about a month ago.
And there was much rejoicing (not)
I’ve just said ‘fuck it’ and switched all my clocks to UTC. I don’t even care anymore.
Why not metric time(TAI)?
Or why not just seconds past the epoch?
leap second corrected or not?
Metric seconds or UTC seconds?
I’m gonna say SI
Reasons just states difference, but does not answer why.
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?
There’s literally a section titled ‘why use UTC - not TAI?’.
Is that supported in any common operating systems?
Yes, CLOCK_TAI here
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.
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.
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.
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… ?
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.
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.
My point is we have that unambiguous system you want. People don’t use it except in specific circumstances.
And America has adopted the metric system, by law at least. 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.
I have. My conclusion is that it’s mostly habit/tradition, although surely not entirely.
I mean I can see the appeal. 12:00 is (roughly) noon/midnight regardless of where you are. Great. Just have to reset your clocks when you travel. Good. Or hope your software is written well enough to do it for you. Uhm… Ok, I will travel there in six months my flight leaves at 14:00 local time, and arrives at 14:00 local time. Urgh. Ok, so the offset between there and here is -6. Hey but wait, the flight only takes 5 hours. What? Ah fuck me, we switch DST on different dates. *facepalm*
But the main reason is you don’t have to relearn an intuition that has been reinforced over and over since you can think about time. Nobody wants to do that, and I get that.
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.
Because they (we) are literally indoctrinated to measuring that in a certain way since childhood. They could learn to do it in a different way, the critical question is if they would. And what the benefits are. I mean the only requirement is you are to able to count to 24. You can do that on your two hands. Plus the concept of integer over-/underflows I guess.
The people in China who made their own bootleg timezone illustrate that perfectly.
All they illustrate, at least in my humble opinion, is that habits are hard to break. I will circle back to this point later.
We don’t currently have to reason about where someone is physically located to know if they’re likely asleep. [whole bunch of reasoning about where somebody is physically located and timezone differences which disregards DST and a bunch of other edge cases]
Righto. What you are doing here would be the exact same thing if everybody operated on UTC, minus the DST bullshit and the weird timezones that are too big, too small, or shifted by half an hour for some fucking reason. Or administratively shift business hours without adjusting the timezone like California apparently does(?).
I should probably wait half an hour to call to avoid the typical lunch hour.
You should probably also look into the target country traditionally having longer or shorter or no lunch breaks. The lunch break in my country would traditionally extend from 12:00 to 15:00, although by now that’s pretty old fashioned and most businesses don’t take them anymore at all or take shorter ones somewhere in that window.
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.
Daylight savings time (at least in spirit) strikes again. Have you checked if this only applies for half the year? Because you probably should.
What a great fucking system this is, let’s fight tooth and nail to keep it like that! /s
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.
I feel like you are making my point here. That’s ridiculous. That’s what you were bringing up as a point about China and their ad-hoc timezones (which I still maintain are habit-driven) as a negative example. Now you are justifying it.
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.
Do we need that though? The main reasons for this I can see (ambiguity in communication) would be obsolete if the whole planet would operate on the same time.
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.
Well that could be accounted for in the new rules. I’m not saying the transition to any new system would be easy, they never are. We can count ourselves lucky that most of the planet has adopted the metric system before we were born I guess. The proposition must have seemed similarly hubristic as using a single timezone at first and it’s adoption wasn’t entirely voluntary I would assume.
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.
It seems to me you just found an easy way to stipulate that.
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.
I have seen business schedules like this regularly posted on things like bars and other businesses operating at night, so I don’t really see the problem.
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.
And that reason, as I keep pointing out, is mainly because we were taught it works like that from childhood. If you had instead learned that where you are 04:00/16:00 are noon/midnight you would be just as familiar with that and its arithmetic quirks as you are with 00:00/12:00 now. You would know the workday starts ~01:00 and ends ~09:00 because unless you moved that’s just how it has always been for you.
Greenwich is not the point, put the noon alignment over the Bering strait for all I care, although that would make the change more disruptive. The point is using a single 24 hour window for any given date planet-wide, instead of a 48 hour window (?) as we do now.
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.
Timezones are technically standardised UTC offsets, yes. But practically you have to account for DST with different start and end dates per timezone, timezones spanning more or less than 1/24th of the globe, as well as Iran, Afghanistan, India, and like a third of Australia having a 30 minute shift (plus probably some more places I can’t easily grasp by looking at a map of timezones) instead of a full hour for whatever fucking reason (it’s probably solar alignment, isn’t it?), and day dates shifting forward or backward if you go past the date line.
At best it’s timezones with a different name and more of them.
It’s timezones with a whole lot less edge cases and less of them. I mean DST alone is a big one and correlates with a spike in heart attacks every time the clock is turned back, but apart from that just look at this shit:
[Same map as direct link for saving you the right-click]
It’s fucking mad is what it is!
If you take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_UTC_offsets where I took that image from, you will note there are 38 offsets listed, not 24 as you would expect.
Few things I picked up from this article that I didn’t know before:
- There are nautical timezones (denoted with †)
- There timezones with a 45 minute offset (denoted with *)
- UTC offsets extend from -12:00 to +14:00
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.
In this sense yes, it’s an apt metaphor. I get where you are coming from.
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.
And in this sense no, it is not an apt metaphor. What we are dealing with right now is the janky system built around a small segment of the world population (administrative elites). That’s why I’m equating UTC and using a solar offset to Unicode. Because it would would serve a broader segment of the population with a lot less downsides. And the cynic irony is that it would generally speaking also benefit these administrative elites, because it’s much simpler for everybody involved, especially once you go international (sometimes even intranational though).
Once everybody gets used to it at least, or everybody who is not naturally died away. Bit of both in there every time you switch basic systems of measurement I guess. If you want to call that intuition instead of what I called habit and tradition and indoctrination, fine, same thing. Teaching new tricks to an old dog is hard, but not impossible. And it might benefit the young dogs way more than us.
There are upsides and downsides to both of course, but I still maintain that - in the long term - the upsides clearly win out.
If I told you my business hours are Sun-Thu 23:00-07:00 you’d know when to call.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But if time travel is a thing, imagine the whole new time nightmares! Oh you went back a year with your phone? Now all your TLS root certs are invalid because you’re before the start date. Or you have files/emails/whatever that are dated in the future. I guess you can get to that state by just setting your clock forward but I imagine some stuff would break.
I worked on a project that had a few spots where we compare a saved timestamp to the current time. During testing, the client would randomly change their device time a few days forward or backward and complain that things weren’t working as expected. I had to explain to them multiple times that they were basically time traveling, and the program was actually handling it fairly well all things considered.
well thats the funny thing, it’s technically not time travel, it’s just time dilation if you squint hard enough. So technically, it doesn’t matter.
I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:
a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.
b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user
Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.
time always goes forward
It not always goes and not always forward. I think you need metric time(TAI) instread.
UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time. That is why you should use it. To take my EPG situation above, I stored program start / end times in UTC so they would render properly even if DST kicked in or not during the middle of the program.
Ok, this is more unix time quirk that can’t handle 24:00:00 and skipping 23:59:59.
UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time
But not unix time.
I stored program start / end times in UTC
If your program finishes in less than one seond it might report negative time.
I didn’t say Unix time, I said UTC. And no it won’t report negative time, not unless somehow the system clock was modified while it was running…
not unless somehow the system clock was modified while it was running…
Which is how most systems handle leap seconds.
Leap seconds still make time go forwards, not backwards. NTP clients would also resolve small time discrepancies while still advancing forwards prior to the next time sync.
Leap seconds can make time go both ways, but adding them makes time stop/go back because 24:00:00 cannot be represented as 1/86400 part of day N instead of day N+1 on major OSes. And they were only added so far.
Standardising on EST is fine; it’s just UTC plus a constant. If they flipped between EST and EDT, now that’d be insane.
Yes as long as the rules are known, but it’s really just better to do things sanely and leave no margin of doubt.
Yep, case in point flipping between EST and EDT may be “insane” but that’s the default for systemd-timesyncd. So now you have to be 100% certain that it’s disabled on your servers, and on the remote hosts interacting with them.
Best I’ve seen is a process scheduled on UK local time (including hour changes) running on a server that maintains Eastern local (including hour changes) but the process logs in EST ( and does not move with the hour)
Except if there was only one zone of time that would be hell to program too because then you would need to check for different times of day for different locations. I think programming is just difficult lol
you would need to check for different times of day for different locations
You have to do that now with time zones anyway.
I think the comment was more about phases of the day. Like for example, your phone might come pre-installed with a sleep mode from 23:00 to 06:00, which roughly fits for most users. Should we use UTC everywhere, then you’d have to have different presets for different parts of the globe.
Or say you wake up just a bit after sunrise at 7am everyday and you fly across the continent for vacation. Now you have to change all your alarms because sunrise is suddenly at 3am.
Or what if you’re writing a book and you want to tell the reader what time it is: 15:00 will mean something else to readers around the world. And while you could attempt to cover it up with “15:00 in the afternoon”, there will still be a disconnect between your words/intentions and what the reader pictures.
UTC would be a bliss for programming and scheduling events in this funny little globalized world, but as animals we still base our days on the burning fireball in the sky and removing that connotation from our timekeeping messes with linguistics and clear communication.
I don’t think the system we have is perfect either, but I don’t think employing UTC everywhere is the way and I don’t have other suggestion either.
and then boom congratulations you just reinvented time zones except worse, & everyone’s gonna do their own way and they’re all gonna be slightly different.
but at least your code will be simpler. oh, wait…
…but it would be the same time in different locations? E.g. at the time I’m writing this it’s 660DFD56 in New York, London, Moscow, Tokyo, Moon, Mars, Andromeda etc.
