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.
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.
Switching sucks but DST is better than Standard Time.
DST vsm Standard time literally doesn't matter. It's the switching between the two that kills people.
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.
Love me some early evening daylight though. Nice warm but not hot cruise/drive with the windows and the top down on the car.
Isn't that Benjamin Franklin or did West Wing lie to me?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolute madness. smh my head
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I've just said 'fuck it' and switched all my clocks to UTC. I don't even care anymore.
Why not metric time(TAI)?
Is that supported in any common operating systems?
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.
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.
...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.
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.
Standardising on EST is fine; it's just UTC plus a constant. If they flipped between EST and EDT, now that'd be insane.
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)
time always goes forward
It not always goes and not always forward. I think you need metric time(TAI) instread.
The UK press every year makes a huge song and dance in opinion pieces about getting rid of DST. However I'm always horrified to see that people want us to keep British Summer Time instead of Grenwich Mean Time. I understand that there are "longer evenings" in BST; however we literally invented GMT and coerced the rest of the world to adjust their times based on that. From the point of view of being constantly compatible with UTC and having more consistent business hours for international companies it makes more sense to me if we kept GMT.
Also the longer evenings thing can be achieved by simply staying up an hour later. It's not exactly like an hour is being stolen from you when the times switch, the change of clocks are mainly pointless admin.
Lastly I read an article recently that described a correlation between the incidence of heart attacks and the clocks changing. The theory is that just slightly messing with people's sleeping patterns can cause additional strain on the body.
No the longer evenings are achieved by work starting and ending an hour earlier. And it's literally easier to change the time zone than to change corporate culture.
Another point for GMT, in the mid '70s, the US went onto DST year round for a couple years. People hated it so much they changed back to switching the time.
If we wanna do away with DST and BST, we need to go back to standard time, as the later sunset in the summer translates to no sunlight for workers in the winter
The only downside of being in GMT is that programmers here almost never notice their timezone bugs when developing systems in the winter.
Still, avoiding a whole other class of bugs would be nice.
The only code with timezones should be the bit squishy meat bags touch. Everything's is should be UNIX time. Or it you are unfortunate enough to be on Windows, NT time.
Some unfortunate programmers already have to deal with the speed of time not being a constant. In a distant future, timestamps might always have a universal position (and speed), and is that much different from timezones?
Or we find some way of removing time distortion of physics. Find the universe's real systick. 😃
No UTC. Convert/use UTC on the way in and covert to local time for the user or local time of the noun the date is for in the display.
Any UTC type is going to do native time and convert for display.
But with native time directly, you can just an int64 with loads of space for fine resolution via multiplication.
Storing time broken up into separate units is crazy.
DST is a digital STD
Move to International Atomic Time timezone.
clock_gettime(CLOCK_TAI, ...)and stop complaining.I'm not a developer but give him one for me too
I just discovered that while the ServiceNow APIs return all times in UTC, they use the user's default time for all times passed in as a parameter.
So if your account is set up in PDT and you say "give me this item that I just created", it will say "here your item, this was created at 17:00".
But if you say, "cool let me see all items created in the last hour, so anything greater than 16:00", then it will respond "got nothing for ya, chief."
Would be more appropriate if it was the datetime library creator.
Leap year creator has left the chat & blocked.......
Leap years are not as bad as timezones, if you think about it. Timezones try to imperfectly solve a local problem - how to match your clock with the position of the sun. Leap years try to reasonably solve a global problem - how to keep your calendar aligned with the seasons.
Not too late to abolish.
There are some time libraries which actually work pretty well and allow you to manage things like Timezones. And then there are some abominations beyond my compression…
Have you tried 7zip?
I would have stern words with John Riccitiello the ex Unity CEO who really neglected the core of their business for the years he was there. He was fired not too long ago. Games from scratch covered the conclusion of that train wreck. The new CEO seems to get that they need to refocus on the engine and making it better for developers versus chasing money. https://youtu.be/woTLLrgywwE?si=BIXTJGGMjpjv72vO
I identify as a time radical. We should switch the entire world onto GMT; +/- not a goddamn thing. Is it perfect? I think so, but all those people who might be confused will probably find it a lot less confusing than trying to make sense of the difference between timezones.
GMT has leap seconds. TAI does not. Switch world to TAI.
