• Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    My take:

    Daylight savings = bad

    Time zones = good

    If everyone had the same clock time, we would need to know when it was morning, midday and evening for people in other locations. Scheduling stuff between locations would still suck, but it would suck differently.

      • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Maybe this solar device could have a marker that would cast a shadow on some sort of measuring device. That device could document the sun’s relative position for that region of the earth.

        Then, when we schedule a meeting between regions, people could share their relative shadow positions from their measuring devices.

        • thevoidzero@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          That sounds like too much work, and what if there are clouds. We should make devices that can be calibrated when you’re in a certain location based on their standards and then the device will continue to show that locations’ shadow location without the sun.

          • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            We could use the solar device as reference for a battery powered device that worked without sunlight.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Yeah but it could be improved by not using arbitrary country-decided timezones and instead simply listing “diurnal time”, basically. And then clocks could get normalized as always showing UTC nearby, too. For communication.

      • PowerCrazy@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        That’s not reasonable at all. The purpose of time is to help organize society across distance. The purpose of states/countries/administrative districts is to help organize society within a similar geographical region. It is entirely reasonable for timezones to conform to political boundaries.

      • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        I don’t know about that, it seems like one of the things that makes the world simple for programmers and complex for everyone else. It doesn’t allow for large countries to split along sensible political boundaries. So if one boundary slices through the middle of New York City, too bad. Moving boundaries to instead be at state/province/etc boundaries or in the middle of nowhere like we usually see now seems more sensible.

  • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Even worse. Daylight savings creators. I work in manufacturing and we literally stut down the production line for an hour during the “fall back” and “spring ahead” so we can manually change the time on every computer.

    • ADTJ@feddit.uk
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      7 months ago

      Does it matter if those machines are an hour out for 6 months? Why not just keep them on UTC as a rule?

      • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        For quality control it did. The real concern is people messing up time. If there was a quality complaint we wanted it to be easy for people to go back thru production data. A lot of the people operating the machinery and performing quality checks at our facility are not well educated, and the need is there to make investigating quality tasks/entering quality data very easy.

    • master5o1@lemmy.nz
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      7 months ago

      At least we don’t use the Roman method of varied hour lengths depending in the time of day and times of year.

  • azimir@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There’s plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.

    Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.

    • ryathal@sh.itjust.works
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      7 months ago

      Time is annoying, but it’s mostly solved. The problem is people don’t use the solutions and make their own things that don’t actually work.

  • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Yeah but good luck time traveling to the right moment to catch that guy.

    “Oh him? He was here three hours ago”

    • dankm@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      Netflix has the wrong time for me half the year. Apparently they don’t believe in areas where DST isn’t a thing.

  • MoonMelon@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    Wasn’t it the railroads at the end of the 19th century? Yeah… they would kick our asses.

  • Kidplayer_666@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Without time zones it would be worse. Every little town would have their own time, calculated from their position

    • flashgnash@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      At least then everyone would be thinking about it and using UTC, not writing their programs to rely on the timezone always being the same

      It’s too easy a problem to ignore/overlook right now

      • electricprism@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        I agree, UTC for global is fine, might as well just do localized time as

        Sun-up, 1st hour of the day, ,2nd, 3rd… Sunset for locale

  • poinck@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    What about time on a different planet? What would be a common time"zone" for Mars and Earth?

    • Cysioland@lemmygrad.ml
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      7 months ago

      I need to save up enough dough to be able to early retire the moment I hear that we need to adapt our software to Martian Time

  • Daxtron2@startrek.website
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    7 months ago

    Store times in UTC, convert in UI to locale’s timezone with one of any of the millions of timezone libraries. If you’re storing in local time, you’re gonna have a bad time.

    • ShortFuse@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      Timestamp in UTC

      But for time of day, use local time and store separate column with the timezone name. Don’t use timezone offsets since that doesn’t work with DST. You’re better off with something like America/New_York because God knows what 2030 will look like.

      And if timezone are abolished, or DST, that’s even more reason to store the timezone name.

    • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world
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      7 months ago

      It depends. If something needs to happen in local time (like, always at the same time regardless of daylights savings for example) you should be storing times in local timezone

        • Phrodo_00@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          tz offset is really not enough. You’d need to save the time zone id and/or offset, to have you library calculate deviations such as daylight savings.

          Even that, that would break if the user moves and now what they setup is using their previous timezone.

          Basically, I’m saying that storing the offset works most of the time, but not all of the time.

  • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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    7 months ago

    We’ll round up the DST people right after we eradicate this kid-pidgin, rounding up the ‘u’ and the ‘r’ indolents.

    Let’s grab the people who don’t know ‘will’ from ‘would’, as well. No child left behind.

    Average IQ in America will skyrocket.

  • aaa@mujico.org
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    7 months ago

    I recall having this conversation about a world with same TZ in the world with my teameates, one of them responded with “wait… we will be still sleeping in the night ¿right?”