• morrowind
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    1 year ago

    Makes sense why time zones drive programmers insanse

    • Skua@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      It looks like that entire area, which is the size of Albania, only has about fifty people living in it. They’re so far from everything else and there’s few enough of them that they can just agree to do their own thing

    • Pregnenolone@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      There used to be a telephone exchange there between Adelaide and Perth 100+ years ago. I think the theory is that the time zone was there to prevent confusion at the exchange, especially since they would otherwise have sunrise at like 4:20am. Since there are only three or four communities there they have kept the local time zone and use it for local business. It has an official code (ACWST), but it is not officially recognised by the West Australian government nor the Australian government when it comes to timing things for government purposes.

      It’s also used by a single town on the South Australian side of the border.

    • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, I don’t get why anyone would want their timezone not to be a round hour. Surely the extra complexity and increased chances of mistakes isn’t worth it? Timezones are bad enough when they’re a round number. And as the map shows, many places don’t match their geological position, anyway, so it’s not like being 15-30 minutes off is a big deal.

  • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    I think we should all operate on gmt. One time, all the time, 24 hour clock. No timezones, no daylight savings. Just seconds ticking away.

      • NovaPrime
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        1 year ago

        Fuck that. End standard time and make everything savings time. Much prefer longer, brighter evenings

          • CoderKat@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Same. Pick one. I don’t care which. They both have their pros and cons. Plus, it’s an arbitrary number and nothing actually forces people to believe things like “the work day should be 9-5” (though admittedly, changing social norms is difficult).

            Saskatchewan has the right idea. Its timezone is a bit weird, but nobody there cares and is just glad to not have to deal with DST. For non Canadians: it’s the part of Canada in this map where something that looks like it should be -6 (central time) juts into -7 (mountain time). They don’t have DST and it’s one of the few things Saskatchewan gets right anymore.

      • emmanuel_car@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Queensland, Australia got rid of it, so despite them being directly north of New South Wales, they’re an hour out half the year.

    • JDtheGeek@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      When programming software we use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is basically just GMT.

      As someone in the UK, I am very happy for the world to start using UTC too 😂

    • verysoft@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Would be good for the modern world, but it would take a few generations or more for people to get used to it. People have 9-5 so ingrained in their minds that everytime the discussion of DST comes up, they forget that just changing the work hours is possible. Honestly though, changing time is too much effort for not so much gain, so it is very unlikely to ever happen.

      • colin@lemmy.uninsane.org
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        1 year ago

        i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.

        it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).

        but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.

        not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.

    • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      Then you get into political issues… why is it centered on the UK and not, say, India or China? Ridiculous, petty? Absolutely. And 100% how humanity works.

      • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Umm… we are already using GMT/UTC, it’s just that we adjust it based on offsets because long ago before clocks we used sundials and high noon was just the time when the sun was at its highest.

        The problem with adjusting the time locally is that it leads to all kinds of problems. 9am… where?

        This has nothing to do with politics. No country is trying to change the 0:00 time.

        I hope you understand now. Let me know if you don’t and I’ll elaborate.

        • ThatFembyWho@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 year ago

          My comment wasn’t about how UCT works, it was in response to this:

          I think we should all operate on gmt. One time, all the time, 24 hour clock.

          As a programmer, I say that all the time in frustration.

          But if you try to convince average people to use a single time zone, it will absolutely become political. Why should I change to your time, why don’t you change to mine. Average person won’t care even the slightest about UTC offsets. We’re talking billions of not-so educated people who are used to thinking in their own local time… And now you want to sell them on a single global timezone… Good luck lol

          Even deciding to stick with DST or not is a highly political issue. C’mon.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      That has it’s own issues. Either you need some people to wake up in the middle of the night because it’s now “morning”, which would destroy people, or you need a way to figure out what part of their day night cycle people are in, which is what a time zone is.

      The difficulty isn’t because of the maps, it’s because humans evolved to care about day-night cycles, being round, the earth has a continuous day night cycle, and it’s only recently that we could suddenly talk to people in drastically different places. There’s just no way to reconcile them.

      • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        …………… what? You know I don’t mean that working 09:00-17:00 would be everyone’s shift, right? If your normal time zone offset is -8, then your working hours are 17:00-01:00

        • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Yes, I know. And now if you want to know when to schedule a meeting with someone far away, you have to consider that where you are, working hours are 22:00 to 06:00, and where they are working hours are 13:00 to 21:00. Knowing that is just a different way of having timezones.

          Timezones are only annoying when they change, or when you have to do things that cross between them. If you want to get rid of them, you need a way to solve the problem that timezones solve, ideally without having the same problem but with more steps.

          • tsonfeir@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Today, you have to consider where a person is to schedule a meeting. Nothing is changing here. You’re just arguing to argue.

            If I say, “are you free at 13:00?” No one has to say “well, is that 13:00 your time?” It’s just clear

            We ALREADY have this system. We just reference the UTC when talking about time.

            Obviously it takes some getting used to and that makes you uncomfortable, but it’s no more difficult switching than switching from a 12 hour clock to a 24 hour clock.

            • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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              1 year ago

              It’s really not arguing just to argue. What you’re talking about is just timezones with extra steps, so why not stick to having a time zone?

              Right now, I’m GMT-5, and if I’m scheduling something, I can look in their slack profile and see that they’re GMT-8, and adjust accordingly. If we get rid of timezones, I have to know where they are, and what normal working hours are where that is. The simplest way to do that is a big table of offsets from some standard starting point, which is exactly what a time zone is.

                • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 year ago

                  I woke up at 14:00 GMT. Did I wake up early, or sleep in?

                  A time without an associated time zone or location is always lacking sufficient information to convey the full context of what the time means.

                  Timezone issues arise when events cross timezone boundaries. If we use timezones, it can be tricky to know what specific points in time correspond to in other timezones without additional information. If we all use GMT, it’s difficult to know what a time actually means without additional information.
                  Since we care about where the sun is in the sky, and also when events happen relative to one another, it’s not an easy situation to just make work.

                  It’s why a proper timestamp includes timezone offset information, since that’s easier to work with that geospatial coordinate offset.

  • infeeeee@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The biggest time difference on land is between China and Afghanistan, 3 and a half hours, but there is no border crossing point there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakhjir_Pass

    AFAIK The biggest time difference where you can cross is between Tajikistan and China, you would have to set your clock by 3 hours. There is one border crossing there Kulma Pass


    Kiribati switched to the other side of the date line in 1994, so there are 3 different days at the same time on the Globe for an hour:

    • Kiritimati, Kiribati, UTC+14: Sunday, 00:30
    • London, UK, UTC+1: Saturday, 11:30
    • Midway Island, US, UTC-11: Friday, 23:30

    https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231014T103000&p1=274&p2=136&p3=1890

    So be careful when you ask what day it is

  • NRDK
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    1 year ago

    Wasn’t aware that there are countries with 1/2 hours difference

  • DarylDutch@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Biggest difference i found was the china pakistan border, 3 hours. China is also all in one timezone which must create problems.

    • Skua@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      There’s a thin bit of Afghanistan separating Pakistan and Tajikistan, and it reaches all the way to the Chinese border. That tiny bit of border (which is closed on the Chinese side and also a mountain pass thousands of metres high, but it is indeed a border) has a three and a half hour difference

  • leave_it_blank@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As a kid I read Around the World in Eighty Days, and the international date line concept blew my mind! I love maps like this ever since!