this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2024
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I work for a Chinese company and my colleagues treat daylight savings time as an inexplicable religious ritual that they indulgently accommodate us ptimitives iin.
I feel the same as a programmer. Also time zones.
It is a ridiculous thing, but it doesn't strike them as odd that their own country has just one timezone despite being wider than the USA?
I'd be happy if the whole planet had the same timezone. Just adjust your personal life to global time, rather than expecting time to adjust to anyone's work/school timetable.
As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go "it's 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping" than "it's 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?"
The best counter point I've heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
Just abolish dates and use Unix Timestamp for everything.
"See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?"
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
Birthdays could happen on the same interval as always
Once every 31,536,000 seconds... And oh, don't forget to keep track of leap years..
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn't matter what time it is there, as they're not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we've adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
Considering that there are quite a few people with unusual sleep and/or work schedules that doesn't help nearly as much as you would think.
How about 'the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things' versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
Nobody is suggesting going back to a system where every little place has their own time. I am talking about having a single time for the entire world.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It's still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.
What a fucking mess that would be, nobody would have any idea what time of day anyone was talking about when they said "8 o'clock". You'd always have to check. Now you only have to check if you want stuff to happen simultaneously.
There's a good reason time zones exist and why shit doesn't work so well in China with just one. "Work starts at 8" might have a pretty different meaning to different parts over there lmao.
I’ve read we would all compensate in ways that would essentially bring back time zones.
Reminded me of this:
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
short list
Nope I lied
GMT
time zone.1339972628
or133997262837
.05/07/11
.N
to eitherN+1
or1
, with no discontinuities.DST
.HH:MM:SS
by sampling once a second.n
seconds and then terminates, approximatelyn
seconds will have elapsed on the system clock at the time of termination.UTC
) will not change during office hours.Thread.sleep(1000)
sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.Thread.sleep(1000)
sleeps for>=
1000 milliseconds.GMT
andUTC
are the same timezone.GMT
.7 * 86400
seconds.24:12:34
is a invalid time.YYYY-MM-DD
format, the year consists of four characters.---12Z
orP12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S
.getCurrentTime()
function is the same as the precision of that function.getCurrentTime()
function will return distinct results.getCurrentTime()
function will return a larger result.I would totally agree if Beijing didn’t force the rest of China to use their time zone, lol. Noon in Western China is nuts to experience.