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.
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.
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.
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.