Daylight saving creator left the chat....

What matters is consistency and our time system has tons of crazy inconsistent shit in our. Everyone knows about leap years, but do you know about leap seconds? Imagine trying to write a function to convert unix time to a current date and suddenly all your times are a second off.

Just look at this insane bullshit nonsense. The added complexity of time zones and daylight saving time is nothing compared to simply supporting our time system.

Not really. Timezones, at their core (so without DST or any other special rules), are just a constant offset that you can very easily translate back and forth between, that's trivial as long as you remember to do it. Having lots of them doesn't really make anything harder, as long as you can look them up somewhere. DST, leap seconds, etc., make shit complicated, because they bend, break, or overlap a single timeline to the point where suddenly you have points in time that happen twice, or that never happen, or where time runs faster or slower for a bit. That is incredibly hard to deal with consistently, much more so that just switching a simple offset you're operating within.

Lets just have 2 timezones, Chinese time and EST w/ permanent DST. The most populated timezones for Eurasia and the americas, and they're both 12 hours apart, so nobody has to do timezone math, just swich AM and PM.

Which part of the year is DST and which part is Standard Time?

I know, but it seems like half the people that say they prefer DST have it backwards.

DST vsm Standard time literally doesn't matter. It's the switching between the two that kills people.

The real problem is that across the globe there is like 50 different implementations of it. Some places have a fucking half hour, or some goofy shit. Really fun handling time zones with that sprinkled on top.

DST during winter = permanent depression.

It's not about the crops, farmers work by the sun, not by the clock.

It was able conserving candles and oil, for lighting rooms.

So, this is wrong on so many levels. First of all, DST had nothing to do with farmers, it was to save energy usage in the summer as people were doing more things when the evenings were warmer.

IIRC daylight savings was created way back when electricity really didn’t exist so it allowed the farmers more daylight to harvest their crops.

DST does not increase the amount of daylight on any specific day of the year, it just shifts it later in the day so that people in 8-5 jobs can do more things after work. Farmers don't work 8-5, they work as needed so if the crops need harvesting they will get harvested based on the weather.

Now with that said there is more technology in today’s farming equipment so DST shouldn’t really exist anymore.

Nowadays farmers have lots of lights and can harvest after the sun goes down, but that has nothing to do with why DST shouldn't exist. DST shouldn't exist because it doesn't save energy due to any populated place having their lights on all night and the actual changing of time leading to negative outcomes like deaths from accidents with no benefits.

Sure, the sun will come up earlier and set later in the summer if we get rid of DST, but the only reason for the time change in the first place was the standard working hours being longer after noon than before.

That’s a misconception. Farmers lobbied heavily against DST. Their work does not abide by the clock; they milk when cows need milking, and they harvest when there’s enough light, no matter what some clock says.

In Europe, DST as we know it now was first introduced by Germany during WW1 to preserve coal, then abandoned after the war, and widely adopted again in the 70s. In the US it was established federally in the 60s.

This is all glossing over a lot of regional differences and older history. But yeah, US farmers were very much against the idea.

That is literally the opposite of true.

It was some worker who wanted more time after work to catch butterflys.

Embedded portable device with a teeny ARM processor. Sadly, no room for linux anything or even an RTC. Every time it connected to a phone, the phone would set its clock so the timestamps were somewhat close to being accurate.

However, if you swapped out the AAA battery and DIDN'T connect it to the phone at least once, all your subsequent readings would go back to zero epoch and would be forgotten 🤷🏻‍♂️

Good times.

too bad unix time only has 14 years of life left in it.

Edit: this only applies to 32 bit Unix time. The 64 bit lifespan is a little longer, at 584 billion years. Whoops lol.

Unix time.

Unix time doesn't help with timezones... It's always in UTC.

Unix timestamps also get a bit weird because of leap seconds. Unix timestamps have no support for leap seconds (the POSIX spec says a Unix day is always exactly 86400 seconds), so they're usually implemented by repeating the same timestamp twice. This means that the timestamp is ambiguous for that repeated second - one timestamp actually refers to two different moments in time. To quote the example from Wikipedia:

Unix time numbers are repeated in the second immediately following a positive leap second. The Unix time number 1483142400 is thus ambiguous: it can refer either to start of the leap second (2016-12-31 23:59:60) or the end of it, one second later (2017-01-01 00:00:00). In the theoretical case when a negative leap second occurs, no ambiguity is caused, but instead there is a range of Unix time numbers that do not refer to any point in UTC time at all.

Some systems instead spread a positive leap second across the entire day (making each second a very very tiny bit longer) but technically this violates POSIX since it's modifying the length of a second.

Aren't timestamps fun?

Luckily, the standards body that deals with leap seconds has said they'll be discontinued by 2035, so at least it's one less thing that developers dealing with timestamps will have to worry about.

Don't try to write your own date/time code. Just don't. Use something built by someone else.

Consumer health.

Good product, too. Won a bunch of awards. Unfortunately, the company has since gone out of business.

DST means you also have things like CST vs CET and given some places start DST earlier or later than others and some ignore it all together, we probably have at least 50 time zones.

Always fun trying to schedule international regular meetings when suddenly there's a week when half the people's times changed and the other half's times haven't yet, so you try to figure out which time would exclude the fewest essential people.

Absolute madness. smh my head

Can't be that simple due to time dilation effect. Time moves at a different rate in moon, about 1s 58.7 μs difference per day.

https://www.reuters.com/science/white-house-directs-nasa-create-time-standard-moon-2024-04-02/

The fact that i even have to think about timezones at all is hilarious to me. Jet lag? UTC would fix that, the time ANYWHERE you are is the time you are normally at, it's just the day/night cycle that's bunk. So now instead of being confused as to why things are pretty normal, but you feel utterly shit. You just feel very confused, and probably still tired, but it's very obvious why.

This shit sends me into schizophrenic ramblings i swear to god PLEASE stop using timezones.

Thank you! Drives me up the wall that when people suggest this and they haven't thought it through, and that it might make other things worse.

I'd say for everyday usability, what we have is way better. Sure, you deal with timezones, but at least once you know what time it is there you have a good sense of what part of the day they are in.

Currently you look up the timezone, maybe do some maths (but let's be real, you just search and get given the time) and then you immediately have a good sense of what the time is there, oh cool it's 7AM.

If we all had the same timezone: you look it up, and then you HAVE to do maths. Why? Oh their midnight is 8, and it's 15 now, so 7 hours after midnight.

Your mind immediately has gone to oh it's 7AM, but NO, in this new reality, it's 15:00 everywhere and where you live midnight is 14:00, so that means where you live it would be like your 21:00.

No matter what time you pick to anchor what time of day that place is, the problem persists. And now you just have replaced the problem of looking up timezones, with looking up when the sun is at some point, and then needing to convert that to get a sense of what time it is there according to the sun.

This would be shit, when you get to a new country when travelling you have to relearn what the numbers "feel" like.

Let's just keep what we have, this is a solved problem.

timezones IMO, shouldn't exist. The sun cycle is disconnected from actual physical date and time cycle. Just pick a timezone, UTC, or whatever the fuck, unix time, i don't care, DST or not, i don't care, and stick with it.

Nothing, the next day is 00:00 You're adjusting it to match the rising cycle of the sun, not to match the day transition point which is entirely arbitrary, that would just be different. I mean, take a normal clock, flip it upside down. Does it run any differently? Nope. It's the same, it's just upside down now.

The date time roll over would be a little weird, but then again we literally already have it. It's just not synced with the sun cycle. Ask anybody who rolls a late night schedule what they think about midnight. I mean you literally can say what day it is. The date is explicit. The date changes at night, can you say what night it is at night? It literally doesn't matter.

The date cycling over is universal across every zone, doesn't change from one place to another. It's the cycle of the sun that changes. That's the easy part to adapt to, we've been doing it since the beginning of humanity.

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.

Yeah, we already have that, it's called timezones. The day night cycle is independent from date time. To TL;DR that entire section, midnight literally just isn't a thing in that scenario. It's the date rollover point now.

Like frankly, someone who lives in the midwest, with DST, and long days in the summer, and shorter days in the winter. None of this is a problem. We've been collectively doing this async sun cycle/date time thing for centuries. The sun here sets about 3-4 hours later in the summer, in the winter it's about much earlier comparatively. We adjust our clocks to this twice a year, every year, for every decade, for every century. Our bodies adapt to it. Nothing explodes. (even though arguably it still sucks.)

The problem you list there specifically i think is mostly confusion about the concept of midnight not being midnight anymore, midnight is just called that because it's the middle of the night, we just happened to choose that as the point where the day rolls over. Sun rise and sun set happen at specific times, weather apps will tell you about this. Nobody seems to complain about those being incredibly variable.

The date rollover is the same in every place in the world. You local day/night cycle is what is disconnected. I could see that potentially being annoying, but then again, we already have concepts of morning, noon, afternoon, evening, etc... I'm genuinely not sure how much this would matter in day to day life. You wake up, it's one day. You wake up the next day, it's the next day. You just happen to be awake at the point that it happens. I mean hell it probably wouldn't even bother most people. Lets say day rollover is noon in 24 hour time somewhere. You tell someone to show up 15:00 on the 8th, which is an impossible date, you just automatically go ok that's "today" everything before 12 in that scenario is the 7th, everything after is the 8th. 15:00 on the 7th literally isn't a time that can exist. It's automatically the 8th. and the advantage here, is that the date rollover point, is the same EVERYWHERE. It literally does not matter where you are on earth.

12 is the rollover point in finland, it's the rollover point in siberia, it's the same in china, africa, america, south america, etc... The ONLY thing that has changed is the offset of the day/night cycle in relation to the date/time cycle.

if we knew that people would be universally connected across the world, independent from the solar cycle. Than yes, absolutely this would have been considered.

We didn't know that then, we do know that now, and we also know that when gas pumps in finland experience a leap year, they stop working. It's literally Y2K but completely random, and entirely jumpscare based. You have no warning.

I mean i live in the midwest, in the summer i'm used to the sun setting at like 10pm. In the winter it sets at like 5-6pm.

I agree. It's written like "ugh I'm used to timezones, now what?".

Yeah, the article is written like it's parodying those who want to abolish timezones, but I'd be interested in specifically what you found unconvincing? I read the main point as being that time zones are an arbitrary social convention but that that arbitrary social conventions are pretty useful for humans.

Like one thing that the article does is repeatedly asking the question "but what time is it in Melbourne?" which I guess sounds pretty silly if you think timezones are unnecessary, since the question would be meaningless if timezones were abolished, and people in different parts of the world would already have centered their day around their respective parts of the clock and you would just look up what the times for everything are in another place. But I think the author was kind of already discarding that idea, because it's just equivalent to timezones - you have a lookup table for each part of the world to find out what people do at a certain time, except instead of being a single offset you have like a list of times like "school openings", "typical work hours", "typical waking hours" (?) etc. This system is basically timezones but harder to use for humans. So the author asking "but what time is it in Melbourne?" is in the context of this table not actually existing, because if it did, then you haven't actually abolished time zones.

You don't have to go back to the 70s for changes. Kazakhstan has changed from two time zones to one just about a month ago.

My emotional brain thinks we should just give up and climb back into the trees.

Funny enough, a story just broke about a lunar timezone, which would lose a second or so every year relative to Earth due to relativity. If space travel becomes a big thing we're going to have to choose a frame of reference, and probably just go with Unix epoch in that frame as the universal time. Hopefully it doesn't happen to pass through a black hole, because there's no consistent way to define a frame of reference that's not subject to gravity.

This guy has a lot of these, it's kind of a classic now. I hadn't even thought of managing days.

Here's a quick essay about the problems with it.

TL;DR - as long as people generally prefer to sleep when it's dark and wake when it's light (and they always will in general) time zones are basically needed as a form of lookup table for when to try to communicate with other places.

And the problem with that is… ?

The problem is that the date changes in the middle of the day. 00:00 ("midnight") should occur around the middle of the night, so that one day (sunrise to sunset) has a single date assigned to it.

In my opinion it would make more sense to set 00:00 at slightly before sunrise (roughly 4:00 by my clock), that way one night "belongs" to the day that preceded it. But for whatever reason they decided that the date changes in the middle of the night. That's fine. Middle of the day would not be fine.

Edit: hey cool, Japan kinda agrees with me! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japan#Time

It's not that simple as people has this urge to associate 12pm to noon and 12am to midnight. Just look at china where the whole country is under a single timezone despite spanning from UTC+05:00 to UTC+09:00. People on xinjiang ended up using their own unofficial timezone (UTC+06:00) for their daily activities instead of using china's official timezone (UTC+08:00) because it's inconvenient to them.

And the problem with that is… ?

Subjective. It seems like it would be a bit confusing, though, if you had to relearn times whenever you travel somewhere (edit: and dates could flip over in the middle of a work day). But maybe you'd prefer that.

If you get rid of timezones they all say the same time, no?

Before they were invented, it was literally just anarchy. People set it to match people they knew. That's what I was thinking of, but it could also just be one place where noon is at 12:00 PM.

Can you give any more concrete examples? None come to mind beyond habit, which is not an immutable thing.

Well, there's not a round number of second in a day, or days in a year, for example, since they're all naturally occurring and arbitrary. And then the Earth turns at a subtly non-constant rate, and people have settled on a seven day week. If you do have timezones, it doesn't make sense to be inflexible with them when they run up against geography or trade and cultural ties, so they'll be curvy, and geopolitics will itself change over decades and someone will want to change which one they're in. All of this is a headache if you just want to do a calendar calculation.

America would be a trip, though. 8 PM sunrise would be a thing depending on time of year.

TIL about China.

Or why not just seconds past the epoch?

Reasons.

Is that supported in any common operating systems?

I think the comment was more about phases of the day. Like for example, your phone might come pre-installed with a sleep mode from 23:00 to 06:00, which roughly fits for most users. Should we use UTC everywhere, then you'd have to have different presets for different parts of the globe.

Or say you wake up just a bit after sunrise at 7am everyday and you fly across the continent for vacation. Now you have to change all your alarms because sunrise is suddenly at 3am.

Or what if you're writing a book and you want to tell the reader what time it is: 15:00 will mean something else to readers around the world. And while you could attempt to cover it up with "15:00 in the afternoon", there will still be a disconnect between your words/intentions and what the reader pictures.

UTC would be a bliss for programming and scheduling events in this funny little globalized world, but as animals we still base our days on the burning fireball in the sky and removing that connotation from our timekeeping messes with linguistics and clear communication.

I don't think the system we have is perfect either, but I don't think employing UTC everywhere is the way and I don't have other suggestion either.

Yes as long as the rules are known, but it's really just better to do things sanely and leave no margin of doubt.

Best I've seen is a process scheduled on UK local time (including hour changes) running on a server that maintains Eastern local (including hour changes) but the process logs in EST ( and does not move with the hour)

UTC always goes forward regardless of the timezone and local time. That is why you should use it. To take my EPG situation above, I stored program start / end times in UTC so they would render properly even if DST kicked in or not during the middle of the program.

So would you be team BST if we had to pick one? I'm just personally not sure it's such a loss when the sun is out until 10pm at the height of summer.

Edit: to be honest that would probably be my 2nd preference. Anything except the system we have now where the clocks change!

Any UTC type is going to do native time and convert for display.

But with native time directly, you can just an int64 with loads of space for fine resolution via multiplication.

Storing time broken up into separate units is crazy.

They did permanent DST instead of no DST (permanent standard time), so they had dark mornings in winter.

Is it still 1970 today?

Elaborate.