this site has two programmers

 

dorky femme droid

eggbug enthusiast

important eggbug lore

 


 

if you use the phrase "be normal" as if it's something to aspire to, kindly take a long walk off a short plank. or block me. whichever is easier for you.

 


 

child of the 80s

 


 

i escaped a cult.
all of the content warnings.
all of them.
tag: exerian's tragic backstory

 


 

                                 
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0xabad1dea
@0xabad1dea

whenever clocks make things complicated, as they often do, someone inevitably declares: "we should just abolish timezones."

All right: poof. There is now exactly one standard time in use by everyone everywhere.

You try to arrange an online meeting and set it to be at 13:20. They write back: are you being serious? that's the middle of the night! Okay, so now you ask them what their usual business hours are, and work out where the overlap is.

It turns out this just keeps happening, so you need some sort of way to infer what someone's sunlight hours are without having to ask every person individually. It turns out you can calculate this pretty accurately from knowing their rough location, because the sun is pretty consistent like that. Hence, you can measure their offset from some arbitrary reference point and calculate their daylight hours, which you're probably going to want to represent in some sort of standard notation. It doesn't have to be precise to the second or anything, so you're probably gonna wanna break it down into zones of approximately the same sunlight hours...

You have become that which you swore to defeat.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

These people always, oddly enough, suggest that Universal Time should be keyed to something roughly convenient for them (UTC being still reasonably useful even across the US, when they don't just completely unironically say Make EST Standard Everywhere) rather than, say, CST


NireBryce
@NireBryce

these time units are so... planetary, anything outside of that gets kinda hard to reason with when we talk 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day


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in reply to @0xabad1dea's post:

in reply to @DecayWTF's post:

90% of the problem with timezones is when you cross programming language boundaries, where you should be always using UTC behind the scenes, period

the other 10% is that some countries don't have enough timezones and just a half hour zone to just have one, some countries use an "incorrect" TZ for political reasons, DST exists, etc etc etc

So, once upon a time there were good arguments for using local time in programs; those cycles (and bytes of code) for doing date calculations add up if your system only runs at 30 MHz, has 4MW of RAM max and is supposed to serve hundreds of users. These days... yeah, just use UTC in the back.

in reply to @NireBryce's post:

like in deepness in the sky where the qeng ho operate purely on seconds

a kilosecond is like 20 minutes

100ksec is basically a day

a megasecond is like a week and a half or so

honestly fairly relatable timekeeping