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.
Holy shit! Yes!!! Having worked with time sensitive data, it’s such bullshit.
DST
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?
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?
There have been several concepts drawn up about using space mirrors as a way to focus the light from the sun into a deathray
That was a nod to Great Moments in Unintended Consequences. (Example)
I got that reference! Surprised to see it out in the wild.
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.
Time is a cube, and always will be.
Lunchtime, doubly so!
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.
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.
I don’t see any way whatsoever that could mean this project is not viable.
No, we should
educate all devs and fix all broken time API’s,…wait, your solution seems far easier.
Sounds feasible.
IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.
That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.
I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.
I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.
My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.
Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.
UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.
What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.
Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.
Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.
Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.
That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.
It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.
So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).
Awesome.
I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.
I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.
I use 24h clocks and ISO 8601 dates almost always
Honestly, I’m better at organizing code than I am my actual life
Timezones are kind of a necessary evil though, because without them then you’d have to check regions (or zones) to see if 1PM in China is the same thing as 1PM in Australia is the same thing as 1PM in Bolivia.
Even then, 1pm in Beijing is something different than 1pm in the Tibet since all of China is technically one time zone.
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 👍
Timezones are fine to program around.
DST is a bit of a pickle to plan around, but can be done just fine by a computer program.Historical dates; considering leap years, skipped leap years, and times when leap years weren’t a thing or when humanity just decided we skip a bunch of years; are the bane of all that is good.
I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren’t so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.
We call eastern coast time AEST
I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.
Proleptic Gregorian Calendar enjoyers
Na let’s keep timezones, there useful for humans who generally want time to mean something, but lets ditch daylight savings time, all it does is make scheduling a massive pain twice a year, and messes up everyone’s sleep cycle. Without it, timezones would just be a fixed offset from another, minimizing trouble.
My suggestion has always been universal sidereal time. It is singular, doesn’t change, and carries no colonial baggage since it rotates around the whole earth. Even suitable as a home time if we become spacefaring.
doesn’t change
Citation needed.
Do you use leap seconds to stay in sync with earth’s rotation? When would they be applied? How would spacefarers be notified of these updates?
Also, what meridian do you choose for this ‘universal’ time? Is it still Greenwich? Because that’s peak colonial baggage.
peak colonial baggage
I get the thought, but wouldn’t changing it just end up performative?
I think changing the date system from AD/BC to CE/BCE is peak performative, and that’s coming from me as an atheist. We still use the same years based on the mistaken belief of when the Christ was born.
Where would we change UTC to be? Best place I could think of is where the current International date line is in the middle of the Pacific but that area is already a clusterfuck of zig zagging not that current UTC 0 is much better. And then, what do we call it? Do we keep UTC because it was a compromise between English and French speakers? Should we go with Mandarin Chinese since that is the most widely spoken language natively in the world? But there is plenty of colonialism within Chinese history of the Han people versus all other Chinese ethnicities and languages. Or English because it is the most widely spoken language when adding first and additionally spoken languages (definitely colonialism there)?
I’d sincerely love to know your thoughts on this. I’ve pondered it before and couldn’t come up with a good change besides using an artificially made language like Esperanto but that comes with a whole host of other issues.
wouldn’t changing it just end up performative
Exactly. Sidereal time does get rid of time zones and leap years, but it’s still referenced to a single physical object and relies on a arbitrary choice of start point. So it doesn’t create some perfect cosmic time standard.
The international date line doesn’t help since that’s just 180° offset from Greenwich itself.
The point of standards is that they can be followed by everyone. The AD/BC epoch is fine. The Greenwich meridian is fine. UTC is fine. Changing them would cause so much disruption that it cannot be worth it.
Daylight savings can go die in a ditch though.
“Daylight savings biting curb at 4k” as the kids would say.
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.
fr i keep saying this and nobody seems to think it’s a good idea.
Fuck timezones, me and my homies operate on UTC.
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)
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
Go play EVE Online. The servers used to have (still, do I think, but shorter) daily downtime that was scheduled using UTC and it led to everyone using UTC since the game server itself used that time.
There’s dozens of us! Yeah practically it’s almost entirely an aesthetic effect. I’ve kept it that way and haven’t had any problems from it, though.
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 >:)
UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.
The title partially answers this.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html
GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).
UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.
I’d fuck with atomic time, but at that point i want a perfect calendar system also.
No it doesn’t. “Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, as in the list of time zones by UTC offset.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Time now in UTC is 10:33, no matter where on the planet you are.
UTC is expressed using positive or negative offset from IAT
That doesn’t mean it’s a timezone
I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.
“many moons ago, when the sun was low in the sky…”
UTC has leap seconds to keep it aligned with earth’s rotation. Otherwise all timezones would slowly shift away from having any correlation with solar time. Between UTC and IAT, UTC is the more human-useable and thus better.
I would truthfully and happily go back in time and tell people not to waste with the fucked up bullshit technology of the past. I mean Angular 1, what the hell was that? Twitter integration? Fuck you 2010. Zend Framework? You should be hanged. HANGED.
Worst is UTC vs IAT
At least most of us don’t need to worry about time dilation caused by relatively yet. Have fun with that, space faring developers.
We kinda do, with GPS satellites that have to correct their clocks due to the effects of gravity and speed
And communication with space probes
