this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2024
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not a programmer myself, but actually fuck you, UTC was the correct choice, anything that isn't UTC is a wrong choice, and i will literally fight to my death over this.
Timezones are dumb and stupid, and you cannot convince me otherwise, so far the single best argument i've heard is "well actually, the hands on a clock and the numbers themselves roughly represent the cycle of the sun in the sky during the day." Which is pretty good, until you realize that clocks tend to be circles, and you can often just rotate them. And suddenly, the numbers now match up perfectly. But i've also never once heard of someone caring about that specific feature, so uh. Good riddance frankly.
Timezones kind of made sense back in the day, when the sun was the only realistic timing system, and pre internet, when people stayed where they were. But now that people don't do that, and the internet tends to do this thing where it exists. I refuse to believe it makes more sense to have timezones than not.
"Hmmm yes please, i would like to order the time here, but halfway across the globe please" - statements dreamed up by the utterly insane.
ok that concludes my rant. Now i'm going to go set FUCKING DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME on my clock because FOR SOME REASON THE TIME JUST CHANGES HALFWAY THROUGH THE YEAR FUCK YOU.
My man.
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.
Don't think your username checks out, seems like time is killing you
No. Thats why im killing IT. Because it fucking sucks, and i hate it, and it should die.
I know I'm probably not changing your mind on this but interested in how you would want the system to be? Regarding your point about being able to rotate the clock so it matches the local solar cycle, suppose we're in a place where we have 13, at the top of the clock, because that's when midnight is where we are.
And let's say it's Wednesday 3rd April today. What happens when the clock reaches 13? After 1 second elapses, does your local clock go from Wednesday 3rd April 12:59:59 to...
a) Wednesday 3rd April 13:00:00 b) Thursday 4th April 13:00:00
If a) then you have the problem that the date change is now in the middle of the day, and most of the time you can't even say "what day is it today". (If 13:00 is midnight, then 00:00, when the date would roll over, would be just before noon.) You have to say today is "Wednesday/Thursday, or "3rd/4th April" because when you wake up it's Wednesday, but after lunch it becomes Thursday.
If b) 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. And in fact every location has their own time at which the date rolls over and it's not even possible to interpret a timestamp unless you have a table that tells you when midnight is for each location.
Maybe you feel that one or both of these are not really big enough of a problem, or maybe you can think of some other way of dealing with this that I haven't thought of. And yeah, both of these issues sort of happen already with timezones -- the issue in a) happens if you stay up past midnight, but at least it always happens at midnight at not when most people are awake and doing their business. The issue in b) sort of happens already since it can be Wednesday in one place and Thursday in another, but at least the timestamp would always indicate how many hours past the date rollover it is.
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.
it's the exact same amount of math in either scenario, arguably even less. Let's say you're setting up the time for a meeting with someone across the globe over zoom or something for instance. How does it go? Well you ask them what they're schedule is like, and you already know what your schedule is like. And both of them use the same timezone instance, because there is only one. So you do no math other than shifting it directly forward and back, the associated amount of time. Perfectly simple. You could also google it ig, but that's going to the exact same, minus the abstraction that you would otherwise have to do with timezones.
This is called a timezone. "Midnight" is the same time everywhere, unless you're talking about the literal mid night. In which case, yeah that changes, but i'd question why you would need to know that. It's not like you don't already know that. Google has already told you. Assuming we're talking about the date/time midnight, that's the same time, in every place of the world. Doesn't matter, midnight here (assuming the 00:00 standard is continued for some reason) is midnight in fucking norway or, sweden, or bulgaria, or your moms house. Doesn't matter.
See this is where you go wrong, i'm saying timezones SHOULDN'T exist, and then you immediately propose a system that is also just a timezone, they shouldn't exist PERIOD. There is not link between the solar cycle, and date/time, other than the fact that they exist in a parallel fashion. There is no anchor to what "midnight" is, midnight is just the middle of the night, that might be 2 am, that might be 5 pm, that might be 14:00 who knows. Who cares, it doesn't matter.
And let's assume that timezones are nice, because you get up for work at 6am, and they get up for work at 6am, and you both stop at the same time. Sure timezones are nice in that one specific instance because it's a direct translation, you know what else is a direct translation though? Not having timezones. You could just as easily convert "timezones" into "solar cycle maps" Literally the same thing, they explain the same exact thing, they use the same exact amount of effort.
It's literally only LESS confusing now.
There is no 21:00 your time. it's 14:00 your time. 14:00 is your midnight in that instance, because that's the time where the middle of the night occurs for you. 15:00 for you is one hour after you midnight, and 15:00. It's not magically 22:00 now, or 1:00 now. That's not how that works.
I suppose you could be arguing that you are so entrenched into this particular method of counting, that the numbers the funny paper disc tells you is actually how you control your sleep cycle, but i would much rather argue, uh no. The sun does. Why? Science.
quick edit:
Also, news flash, we already have this issue, it's literally called jet lag. This is a normal occurrence. And also, literally anybody who lives in somewhere that DST exist, does this TWICE A YEAR.
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.
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.
I'm quite confused as to how you're actually proposing the time should work. I assume that when we talk about abolishing timezones, we mean that everyone switches to a single standard timezone (and that it still goes from 00:00 - 23:59). Are you saying that you would like:
a) The date-rollover point to happen at local solar midnight (i.e. 12 hours past when the sun is highest in the sky in your location, or roughly that), regardless of what the time actually is
b) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people still wake up and go to sleep roughly around when the sun rises and sets
c) The date-rollover point to happen at 00:00 standard time, but most people wake up at roughly 07:00 (for the sake of argument, it could just be any standard time) and go to sleep roughly 22:00, regardless of where the sun is at those times
d) Some other scenario that I didn't think of?
Maybe I suck at reading comprehension but I can't tell which system you're advocating for. I'm also confused when you give the example "15:00 on the 7th literally isn’t a time that can exist", because however your system works, surely if 15:00 on the 8th is a time that you can refer to, then 15:00 on the 7th is just the time 24 hours before that? (I'm actually just very confused by your scenario. Are you referring to noon as the local solar noon, i.e. when the sun is highest in the sky, or are you referring to when the clock reads 12:00? In both cases I can't figure out a way to make "15:00 on the 7th" impossible.)
Also I don't think that the sunrise/sunset times being different throughout the year or that DST exists are indications that the solar cycle is independent of the date. Even if the sunrise/sunset happens at different times of the year, timezones are clearly meant to roughly center the waking day either side of 12:00 on the clock around the solar noon. DST exists to make sure that people get more sun during the afternoon when people are more active, so that both contribute to that the date-rollover point happens when it's dark out and people are less active.
simplest possible solution.
to give an example, let's say we keep midnight as the date rollover. 00:00 of every day would be the rollover point. The date would change at that point, globally. No matter where you are on the world, the time, and date, is exactly the same. That never changes.
Locally, you would account for this by using offsets, i refer to them as timeoffsets, rather than timezones, or time offset mapping, for completion, which gives you a map to your "local solar time equivalent" Most anything you would need to do would be governed by local solar time, or it's related offset. Work for instance, that's how it already works, nothing would be different there, just the funny number that the clock shows you would change. This is literally just our current timezone system, but inverted.
As for the example i used, probably not a good one. That was 24 hour time with noon as the roll over point, just for demonstration. So the first twelve hours are one day, the latter half are the second. Given how twenty four hour time works. The first 12 hours of the day wouldn't be possible on the day after. Essentially, a good way to think about it, would be that it's like even and odd numbers. You can tell them apart, just by the very existence of them. 15:00 would not be a possible time for the 7th in that example, unless you went back in time. That was just an example of a slip of the tongue type thing. If you were doing anything more serious, you would be planning it better anyway. Noon in that example, local solar noon or not, doesn't matter, as that's arbitrary. The point was just a hypothetical.
Though frankly, i think keeping 00:00 as the roll over makes sense, it's very explicit. Even if it's midday. That's a very explicit time change. DST makes the solar cycle aggressively independent of time throughout the year, in each half of the year, so to some extent, it does with date. Like here in the midwest for example, the summer sunset and winter sunset vary by about 4 hours. Which is a thing that changes twice a year, once a year in the one direction. But twice a year for all intents and purposes. Everybody lives with it perfectly fine. I see no reason that 19:00 being the local solar noon would change anything drastically.
My main point there is that we already wake/sleep at different cycles of the day. On the regular, depending on DST, and season. That doesn't make a huge difference to day to day life. Local solar noon as a concept being noon (more explicitly, 12:00) every day is an entirely arbitrary concept. It's kind of cute and all, but like i said, if you really care about representation for it, you can just rotate your clock. Noon to me just marks the midday point, and the point where the sun is highest in the sky. I don't care about the actual time itself. That means nothing to me.
Oh and while we're at it, standardizing 24hr time would be a good move. 12 hr time is dumb.
This is an interesting thought:
If we had UTC before we decided on a lot of modern standards - by whatever means we got it - I wonder whether it would have just evolved that Celts are used to the sun rising at 4-10 on the clock, but an Ainu is entirely used to the sun rising at 13-19.
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.