The creator of DST gets the first slap. Then the timezones asshole.
I’m planning to do a presentation at work on how to deal with dates/times/timezones/conversion/etc in the next few weeks some time. I figure it would be a good topic to cover. I’m going to start my talk by saying “first, imagine there is no such thing as timezones or DST.” And then build on that.
Imagine, if we were just all on the same time. It’d just make things, a little easier.
All in the same time? But… Then the sun might go down at noon. That doesn’t make sense…
Wait… Noon? Noooon…
The word noon comes from a Latin root, nona hora, or “ninth hour.” In medieval times, noon fell at three PM, nine hours after a monk’s traditional rising hour of six o’clock in the morning. Over time, as noon came to be synonymous in English with midday, its timing changed to twelve PM.
Oh now that’s worse
Life, that is. It would just make life a little easier.
Sandford Fleming (the guy who invented time zones) actually made it easier.
Before timezones, every town had their own clock that defined the time for their town and was loosely set such that “noon is when the sun is at its highest point in the sky.” Which couldn’t be measured all that accurately.
If it wasn’t for Fleming, we’d be dealing with every city or town having a separate time zone.
Save a slap for the dude who invented sundials, and another slap for the dude who invented civilization.
Save a slap for the leap seconds creator.
You might want to show them this video https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
DST people should get hung. By three balls. Fuck them.
Oh yeah, please do imagine there is no such thing as a time zone.
On an ellipsoid!
No, see, how it would work without timezones is:
- Everyone would use UTC and a 24-hour clock rather than AM/PM.
- If that means you eat breakfast at 1400 hours and go to bed around 400 hours and that the sun is directly overhead at 1700 hours (or something more random like 1737), fine. (Better than fine, actually!)
- Every area keeps track of what time of day daily events (like meals, when school starts or lets out, etc) happen. Though I think generally rounding to the nearest whole hour or, maybe in some cases, half hour makes the most sense. (And it’s not even like everyone in the same area keeps the same schedule as it is now.)
- You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.
- One caveat is that with this approach, the day-of-the-month change (when we switch from the 29th of the month to the 30th, for instance) happens at different times of the day (like, in the above example it would be close to 1900 hours) for different people. Oh well. People will get used to it. But I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour. (Now, you might be thinking "yeah, but that’s just timezones again. But consider those timezones. The way you’d figure out what day of the week it was would involve taking the longitude and rounding. Much simpler than having to keep a whole-ass database of all the data about all the different timezones. And it would only come into play when having to decide when the day of the week changes over.)
- Though, one more caveat. If you do that, then there has to be a longitudinal line where it’s always a different day of the week on one side than it is just on the other side. But that’s already the case today, so not really a drawback relative to what we have today.
regarding day change, you could also just have it change at UTC midnight and the entire planet bongs at that time if they’re awake.
What’s DST?
Edit: oh it means Daylights Savings Time
Dick sucking time
That’s the only time zone I’m for!
Is this something that is going to be publicly available? If so, post a link when you have it.
I used to think this way, then it was pointed out to me that, without timezones, we’d be in a situation where Saturday starts mid-workday in some places.
Yeah, timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint. Daylight savings time, though… That nonsense needs to be eliminated. So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter, I’d take it over dealing with the time change twice a year.
Anti-DST… The almost accidental political bridge. Kinda funny actually: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-senate-approves-bill-that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent-2023-2022-03-15/
Look at the names of the quotes. Both sides are commenting on how dumb it is.
Then the House got involved.
that-would-make-daylight-savings-time-permanent
fwiw this is by some metrics even worse than switching back and forth
You realize there are places without it, and they’re fine, correct?
Not sure what you mean. My position is that daylight saving time should be abolished entirely. You linked an article about a push to move permanently on to daylight saving. I pointed out how that is actually a bad idea.
I just linked it to show the rare piece of bipartisanship. I agree DLST should be done away with. As to which schedule to keep, I find it to be 6 of one and half dozen of another. The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over.
The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over
No, it isn’t. The scientific research actually suggests that keeping DST is worse than switching back and forth. I have to admit I find that confusing, since a lot of the specific studies I’ve looked at concentrate on the effects caused by the switchover itself, but the meta-analysis doesn’t mince words:
In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.
timezones are absolutely helpful from a logistics and coordination standpoint
They’re a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say “the meeting is at 04:00” and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say “the meeting is at 2pm AEST” and then someone in AEDT will have to think “oh, that’s 3pm for me”, and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It’s a huge pain.
So what if it will be dark well into morning wake hours in the winter
That’s not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn’t change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That’s the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it’s done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It’s also very harmful to public health.
But… We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you’d still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn’t end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.
As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we’d have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.
Eliminating time zones doesn’t make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren’t all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It’s just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.
Yeah you’re absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I’d usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.
And when you’re attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It’s in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I’m of the opinion that the distinction between “what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?” and “where does this time sit in relation to their working day?” is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.
I have never really understood why people care so much about the change.
You will just wake up one hour later or earlier twice a year, so what? I do that multiple times a week, twice per year isn’t too bad.
I’d say the people in that 24% have a quite valid reason to care.
You obviously don’t suffer from a sensitive circadian rhythm. To that I’d say, lucky you. But there are plenty of people who do suffer. And by the time they finally get used to the time change, it’s time to change again. It’s vicious and disruptive; to more than just scheduling. It has a direct (negative) impact on physical and mental health.
Fair enough. Personally I and many others in northern Europe (and other places far from the equator) feel depressed in winter due to the highly reduced sunlight so removing DST isn’t just as obvious as “people will feel better”, because DST at least in theory helps with that.
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Assuming you used UTC as the shared time zone, 00:00 on Saturday would start at what is today 4pm in US Pacific Standard Time. So you’d finish work at 01:00 Saturday.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t resume work until 17:00 on Monday.
So you’re not losing any weekend time.
You know the system before timezones was way worse, right? Every town had their own time.
That problem happened because there was no way to travel from town to town quickly so if the clocks were off nobody cared. The trains changed that.
It’s pretty simple, actually. A village somewhere in Europe that is completely in the shade all day for part of the year has already proven it.
Mirrors.
We just need a ring of motorized mirrors around the Earth.
At hour 0, the mirrors will rotate to show sun all across the entire Earth.
At hour 12, the mirrors will rotate to put all of the Earth into night time.
That lets the entire Earth have the exact same synchronized time synchronized with the daylight.
The mirrors will block the sun from parts of the earth facing during the night.
The mirrors will constantly be rotating to keep the proper amount of sun light facing each part of Earth as the Earth rotates.
The mirrors will be solar powered.
This will fix it, right?
I don’t see any way whatsoever that could mean this project is not viable.
Sounds feasible.
The Year: 2092
The Problem: Timezones are annoying
The Solution: Space mirrors! A series of mirrors in space would rotate to keep the entire planet under a single time zone. A perfect global time system is born!
Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
Now I’m thinking about an ex-programmer supervillain who does this as her big foray into supervillainy
Alternatively, we have this arbitrary standard of 9am means morning, if we share a single universal time, different places would just have a different arbitrary time being the “morning” instead.
Or, we could collectively realize time is but an illusion and transcend this silly problem.
Lunchtime, doubly so!
i would aruge that the arbitrary factor of “9am being morning” is entirely to do with the fact that morning is actually a solar time phenomenon, whereas global time does not have the concept of morning, since it is merely imitating the local solar time.
Local solar time being the literal point in the sky that the sun is in.
It gets even funnier if we include people who aren’t “normal” I for one, consider noon to be morning.
We could keep the 0 hour as the “middle” of the night and 12 being the “middle” of the day (though I’m not sure if that’s really the sun’s high spot for the day for any places).
But with fully controlled mirrors, we could make it exactly 12 hours, so we could just then switch to the 0 hour being when the sun comes up.
Inagine going back hundreds of years to convince everybody in the world to use the same time. “No I know not everybody has a clock, but if you could consider sunrise midday that would make my job in the future much easier.”
Aren’t time zones quite straightforward? You add a whole number of hours and for some a half. Compare that to a sundial on the one side and having times that don’t match your day at all on the other, I’d say it’s good
You add a whole number of hours and for some a half
Or three quarters in a few cases.
And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 “ideal” time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.
And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.
But what is the alternative? Sure, fck daylight saving. Having the date changed at noon is fucked up, too, and that’s what happens if you agree to one global time. And having countries that are too big for a time zone is fucked up as well. Russia for example actually only spans to the Ural mountains, everything to the east are colonies. Fuck states in general #nobordersnonations
I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.
But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I’ve had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.
But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.
Normie. Real timezone-haters use Unix epoch. /s
im a proponent of using exclusively UTC for anything pertinent to being accurate, and then using local solar time (the sun) to refer to everything else, it has the benefit of making people look outside anyway.
It’s not always whole hours
To be fair, they did say “and for some a half”.
Though that misses the Kathmandu, Eucla, and Chatham Islands, which are all :45.
Not if the place doesn’t do daylight savings time, and not all places in a timezone will do that (least in North America) so you need extra code if they do or do not. It becomes a pain after awhile when you do it in multiple projects. Technically one extra setting but it’s still a pain to make sure it’s handle properly in all cases, especially when the previous programmer decided to handle it for each case individually, but that’s a different issue.
Also when you deal with the times, say in .Net you gotta make sure it’s the proper kind of date otherwise it decides it’s a local system date and will change it to system local when run. Sure it’s all handled but there are many easy mistakes to make when working with time.
I probably didn’t even get to the real reason, I sort of picked this up on my own.
Sounds like daylight saving is the bigger issue. Maybe not bigger but when you compare cost and benefit. I think the US uses even different start and end dates than the EU and I don’t know about the rest of the world
Yeah the US differs by a couple of weeks iirc
you have to program a meeting that reoccurs between DST observant & non observant states in the US and australia.
Good luck.
I hate to repeat myself but DST is garbage. I never said it’s good
oh you sweet summer child, what you don’t know is going to come back to haunt you forever.
Aren’t time zones quite straightforward?
How very dare you!?
Worst is when someone fucked up the DB time configs at some point and you have datetimes in a column that fall during the “nonexistent” hour in which clocks skip ahead for DST, and you have to figure out what the fuck actually happened there, and where in the data pipeline tz data was either added or stripped (sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s not just once), and undo the timestamp fuckery.
Source: did that this week. Was not super awesome.
fr i keep saying this and nobody seems to think it’s a good idea.
Fuck timezones, me and my homies operate on UTC.
Ive been using utc personally for over a year and i use it in context of vrchat since it yields one less necessary conversion to other people’s timezones because only the offset is needed (as opposed to memorizing both offsets, which is much harder because of that nasty nasty daylight savings and its weird anomalies) but they still hate it and tell me to use a “normal” timezone lol. I had gotten 1 person to switch. And she since switched back. Shit don’t work in practicality but I’m still gonna use it out of stubbornness
if i can’t have anything nice, you can’t have anything nice, and only the people who can’t have anything nice will have something nice >:)
One of my favorite T-shirts. https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo
(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)
UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.
Holy shit! Yes!!! Having worked with time sensitive data, it’s such bullshit.
Dates and times aren’t that hard—honestly!
Video is a lecture about how to think about dates and times, through the lens of a specific open source .NET library designed to aid with applying that thinking. It points out how most languages’ standard libraries really work against you, because they conflate different concepts. For example, an
Instant(a specific point in time, globally recognised) and aLocalDateTime(a date and time in a way that is irrespective of your location—for example you might want your alarm to wake you at 8:00 am on weekdays, and still do that if you move to a different time zone), aZonedDateTime(a date and time tied to a specific location—like if you want to say “the meeting starts at 10:00 am Oslo Time”), and anOffsetDateTime(a date and time tied to a specific UTC offset—which is not necessarily the same as a time zone, because “Oslo Time” is a time zone that doesn’t change, but its UTC offset might change if they go in or out of DST, or if a place decides to change, like how Samoa changed from UTC-11 to UTC+13 in 2011.These are all subtly different concepts which are useful in different cases, but most libraries force you to use a single poorly-defined “
DateTime” class. It’s easier and requires less thought, but is also much more likely to get you into trouble as a result, precisely because of that lack of thought, because it doesn’t let you make a clear distinction about what specifically it is.His library is great for this, but it’s very worth thinking about what he’s talking about even if you don’t or can’t use it. As he says in wrapping up:
You may be stuck using poor frameworks, but you don’t have to be stuck using poor concepts. You can think of the bigger concepts and represent all the bits without having to write your own framework, without having to do all kinds of stuff, just be really, really clear in all your comments and documentation.
I don’t know what the hate is unless you are trying to store time as a String property. There a special place in hell for all developers who do this.
IMHO, all you really need to know is an Epoch time stamp and whether it’s localized to the viewer or the creator… Not that complex. The problem with time zones is that politicians keep changing them
Honestly, I’d rather give the creator of NULL a slap.
What’s wrong with NULL? How else can you differentiate between not having a value and having a blank value?
I’m probably going to get a lot of hate for this, and I do recognize there have been problems with it all over the place (my code too), but I like null. I don’t like how it fucks everything up. But from a data standpoint, how else are you going to treat uninitialized data, or data with no value? Some people might initialize an empty string, but to me that’s a valid value in some cases. Same for using -1 or zero for numbers. There are cases where those values are valid. It’s like using 1 for true, and zero for false.
Whomever came up with the null coalescing operator (??) and optional chaining (?->) are making strides with handling null more elegantly.
I’m more curious why JavaScript has both null and undefined, and of course NaN. Now THAT is fucked up. Make it make sense.
To offer a differing opinion, why is null helpful at all?
If you have data that may be empty, it’s better to explicitly represent that possibility with an
Optional<T>generic type. This makes the API more clear, and if implicit null isn’t allowed by the language, prevents someone from passing null where a value is expected.Or if it’s uninitialized, the data can be stored as
Partial<T>, where all the fields areOptional<U>. If the type system was nominal, it would ensure that the uninitialized or partially-initialized type can’t be accidentally used whereTis expected sincePartial<T>!=T. When the object is finally ready, have a function to convert it fromPartial<T>intoT.Ignoring the fact that a lot of languages, and database systems, do not support generics (but do already support null), you’ve just introduced a more complex type of null value; you’re simply slapping some lipstick on it. 😊
Worst is UTC vs IAT
Conversion for metric system is a pita also
Which conversions? Most metric conversions are drastically simpler than their imperial counterparts.
From metric to others, of course.
Nah. Metric should have just been base twelve.
I actually like DST
A lot of things that people like are bad and should not be public policy.
Some individuals feeling like they like DST doesn’t counteract its significant health detriments.
well that’s a domain
Sorry, I don’t know what you mean.
Just kinda silly
Oh, I see. Yeah I suppose it is, now that you point it out. It comes from:
- .gov: the US government
- .nih: the US National Institutes of Health
- .nlm: the National Library of Medicine
- .ncbi: the National Center for Biotechnology Information
But really, I only know it because it’s a very common host that comes up when you’re searching for published research papers. I just see “bunch of Ns .gov” and know it’s reliable.
No you don’t, stop telling lies.
I do 👍
