• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      8 hours ago

      I talked to a guy that thinks we should just all use Unix Epoch on here once. We’d still need local informal systems to describe the time of day and weekday, but the more I’ve thought about it the less stupid it sounds. Date/time systems are a pain in the ass and necessarily ugly.

      • idegenszavak@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        Shit programmers say…

        The problems of time zones only affect a handful of people, the wast majority of people nearly never think about this.

        Epoch or standard time would just rename time zones, beucause currently you say hour offset from London, with “no timezone” you would have to say something like, noon is at 05:00 utc/epoch at that city, so nothing really changed

        Industries where it actually matters already use UTC for everything, e.g. international flights.

        It would make more sense to switch to base 10 minutes and hours than to “solve” the time zones

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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          3 hours ago

          Yeah, I’m not seriously suggesting this is something we should get on, lol. Maybe solve world hunger or just all the wars first before another radical standards reform.

          The difference would be that you would actually just schedule something for a megasecond out, instead of having to screw with timezones or reference the sun at all. It wouldn’t matter much locally, but for anything international - like probably this conversation - it would be easier. Even UTC has hard edges.

          If we seriously go into space it’s going to be really picking weird thinking in terms of the incommensurable days and years of a distant planet, at which a point it might not be just a trivial issue anymore.

          Would you redefine the second to make your decimal system work? We’ll need a new Epoch system then, haha. The French did try to do something like that.

    • pitaya@lemm.ee
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      16 hours ago

      At 00:00 (midnight) UTC on monday, Russia’s time would be 12:00 (noon) of monday and alaska’s would be 15:00 (3 pm) of sunday.

        • schnokobaer@feddit.org
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          15 hours ago

          Hour. Just a weird way to say 12:00 and 15:00 or 3pm and whatever 12:00 is in am/pm talk

          • samus12345@lemmy.world
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            14 hours ago

            12am is midnight and 12pm is noon. But most people just say “noon” or “midnight” because it’s less confusing.

            • toynbee@lemmy.world
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              14 hours ago

              That is confusing. “PM” is “post meridian” or, as I understand it, after the middle. One would think it wouldn’t be PM until 12:01 or at least 12:00:01.

              Which is why I, as you said, use “noon” and “midnight.”

              • schnokobaer@feddit.org
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                13 hours ago

                I can never remember it properly either but when someone reminds me (thanks samus12345) which way around it is it does kind of make sense.

                If you think of 12:00 as literally an infinitesimal slice of time it’s not really possible to give it an am/pm distinction, as it is literally the devider between the two. BUT, in a more real-life approach 12:00 is probably not an infinitesimal slice of time but the minute after a digital clock flipped to 12:00. That can be 12:00:00.00004 or 12:00:30 or 12:00:59.999944. And all those are indisputably pm.

              • samus12345@lemmy.world
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                13 hours ago

                Correct - technically, noon is neither am nor pm, but clocks and the like have to have SOMETHING there, so am for midnight and pm for noon was arbitrarily chosen.

        • Voyajer@lemmy.world
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          15 hours ago

          Hour, it’s noon Monday on the Russian side and 3pm Sunday on the American side.