Makes sense why time zones drive programmers insanse
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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I would love to see this map animated. If it looks insane now, imagine it changing every year.
Where I used to live, the time zone would change by city and county, some of which (but not all) followed DST as well.
I think we should all operate on gmt. One time, all the time, 24 hour clock. No timezones, no daylight savings. Just seconds ticking away.
Please, for love of God, just end daylight savings time. That is all I ask.
Fuck that. End standard time and make everything savings time. Much prefer longer, brighter evenings
I am fine with literally any time as long as it remains constant.
Same. Pick one. I don't care which. They both have their pros and cons. Plus, it's an arbitrary number and nothing actually forces people to believe things like "the work day should be 9-5" (though admittedly, changing social norms is difficult).
Saskatchewan has the right idea. Its timezone is a bit weird, but nobody there cares and is just glad to not have to deal with DST. For non Canadians: it's the part of Canada in this map where something that looks like it should be -6 (central time) juts into -7 (mountain time). They don't have DST and it's one of the few things Saskatchewan gets right anymore.
Monkey paw, time stops for everyone but you.
Deal.
Queensland, Australia got rid of it, so despite them being directly north of New South Wales, they’re an hour out half the year.
Sounds like a New South Wales problem.
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Ticking away, the moments that make up the dog days.
Then you get into political issues... why is it centered on the UK and not, say, India or China? Ridiculous, petty? Absolutely. And 100% how humanity works.
Umm… we are already using GMT/UTC, it’s just that we adjust it based on offsets because long ago before clocks we used sundials and high noon was just the time when the sun was at its highest.
The problem with adjusting the time locally is that it leads to all kinds of problems. 9am… where?
This has nothing to do with politics. No country is trying to change the 0:00 time.
I hope you understand now. Let me know if you don’t and I’ll elaborate.
My comment wasn't about how UCT works, it was in response to this:
I think we should all operate on gmt. One time, all the time, 24 hour clock.
As a programmer, I say that all the time in frustration.
But if you try to convince average people to use a single time zone, it will absolutely become political. Why should I change to your time, why don't you change to mine. Average person won't care even the slightest about UTC offsets. We're talking billions of not-so educated people who are used to thinking in their own local time... And now you want to sell them on a single global timezone... Good luck lol
Even deciding to stick with DST or not is a highly political issue. C'mon.
I’m not talking about reality.
Would be good for the modern world, but it would take a few generations or more for people to get used to it. People have 9-5 so ingrained in their minds that everytime the discussion of DST comes up, they forget that just changing the work hours is possible. Honestly though, changing time is too much effort for not so much gain, so it is very unlikely to ever happen.
i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.
it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).
but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.
not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.
When programming software we use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is basically just GMT.
As someone in the UK, I am very happy for the world to start using UTC too 😂
Epoch time is superior. We’re gonna party like it’s 946684799!
That has it's own issues. Either you need some people to wake up in the middle of the night because it's now "morning", which would destroy people, or you need a way to figure out what part of their day night cycle people are in, which is what a time zone is.
The difficulty isn't because of the maps, it's because humans evolved to care about day-night cycles, being round, the earth has a continuous day night cycle, and it's only recently that we could suddenly talk to people in drastically different places. There's just no way to reconcile them.
………….. what? You know I don’t mean that working 09:00-17:00 would be everyone’s shift, right? If your normal time zone offset is -8, then your working hours are 17:00-01:00
Yes, I know. And now if you want to know when to schedule a meeting with someone far away, you have to consider that where you are, working hours are 22:00 to 06:00, and where they are working hours are 13:00 to 21:00. Knowing that is just a different way of having timezones.
Timezones are only annoying when they change, or when you have to do things that cross between them. If you want to get rid of them, you need a way to solve the problem that timezones solve, ideally without having the same problem but with more steps.
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Wasn't aware that there are countries with 1/2 hours difference
Look at Nepal (Northeast of India) over there with 5¾ ...
Mad lads
The biggest time difference on land is between China and Afghanistan, 3 and a half hours, but there is no border crossing point there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wakhjir_Pass
AFAIK The biggest time difference where you can cross is between Tajikistan and China, you would have to set your clock by 3 hours. There is one border crossing there Kulma Pass
Kiribati switched to the other side of the date line in 1994, so it's there are 3 different days at the same time on the Globe for an hour:
- Kiritimati, Kiribati, UTC+14: Sunday, 00:30
- London, UK, UTC+1: Saturday, 11:30
- Midway Island, US, UTC-11: Friday, 23:30
So be careful when you ask what day it is
Here's one of my old posts that France and Spain are in the wrong time zone because of Nazis: https://lemmy.ca/post/2220899
Thanks, I did not know that.
I've always assumed the France chose a different timezone just to not be on the same timezone than the British
Biggest difference i found was the china pakistan border, 3 hours. China is also all in one timezone which must create problems.
Honestly, it probably solves more problems.
There's a thin bit of Afghanistan separating Pakistan and Tajikistan, and it reaches all the way to the Chinese border. That tiny bit of border (which is closed on the Chinese side and also a mountain pass thousands of metres high, but it is indeed a border) has a three and a half hour difference
Wow, the USA isn't the insane one for once.
As a kid I read Around the World in Eighty Days, and the international date line concept blew my mind! I love maps like this ever since!
I dislike maps, I'm going to rebel against this community