Good time to remind ourselves to always log in UTC. Yes, always, no exceptions.
Thinking about the future, if humans as a species become interplanetary, keeping up with lunar time, asteroid belt time, martian time,etc.. is going to be a mess. UTC is the only way to go.
timezones are artifacts of olden days where people didn't communicate across great distances and worked fixed daylight hours. Much like being able to speak the same language, being able to use the same time across vast distances is a huge boost to productivity and progress. This is kind of like using the metric system, vs using local/traditional measurements (like the US does).
0xbadcafebee · 9h ago
> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones.
> Five years ago, I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time.
This is called many things: utopianism, dogmatism, authoritarianism, absolutism. Seems common in programmers. I don't understand the mechanism for it, but it would be great if we could figure out a way to prevent it, and teach that in schools. Too many people like this in the world today.
andy99 · 2h ago
I can't tell if your comment is intentionally ironic, as in you're saying we need to enforce your view on others that enforcing their view on others is bad.
If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.
dangus · 10m ago
An opinion becomes something a little more deserving of criticism when it’s saying things like “it should be abolished and everyone should do what I say.”
This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” it’s more like if this guy becomes king of the world we’ll literally be forced to used UTC time.
maxbond · 6h ago
Sometimes people interpret the complexity of the world as something to be eliminated rather than confronted and managed.
fastball · 1h ago
Seems to me that standardizing the entire world on a single time is confronting and managing the complexity of the world.
The existing system is more inertial and political than practical.
"Noon is when the sun is at its zenith in your area" is significantly less useful in 2025 than being able to coordinate globally with ease. It's also just not true in many (most?) cases, as noted in the article, where places like China have a single timezone even though there is a 3-hour discrepancy in the sun's position from one side of China to the other.
maxbond · 19m ago
Different parts of the world are at different times of day, that complexity doesn't disappear if you ignore it. The more distributed your team is, the more important this becomes. People keep saying timezones only exist because of inertia, but I do not buy it. There's definitely complexity caused by political boundaries that isn't inherent to the problem, but the primary reason timezones exist isn't inertia, it's that they continue to be relevant and useful. Because people continue to keep hours based on their local conditions. I'm skeptical that the juice is worth the squeeze as far as eliminating the small overhead caused by political boundaries.
3 hours is one thing, 12 hours is another (and "So you want to abolish timezones" notes that people in China commonly use lookup tables, creating implicit timezones).
When I coordinate across timezones, I say, "Hey does 9amPT/11amET work?" (Assuming those are the relevant timezones). I don't see the problem with that approach?
Let's say you abolish timezones. Okay. How do I know whether it's rude to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? I'm going to consult some kind of table and implicitly reintroduce timezones, right?
abtinf · 1h ago
Pragmatism is the rejection of principles on principle.
absurdo · 9h ago
People have been blowhards for as long as there have been people. Live and let live.
xboxnolifes · 7h ago
Maybe it manifests from "timezones are a difficult problem for my profession, lets get rid of them".
Eh, I think it's more a drive to simplify things that exist because of inertia/"that's how we always did it". Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone), daylight savings is even worse. Imperial units too, get rid of them.
arh68 · 6h ago
Exactly. By GP's logic, time zones are absolutist, and every town could & should observe solar noon independently.
I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?).
I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained
If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
ninkendo · 8h ago
> Time zones are arbitrary and silly (sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone)
> sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone
Being able to express where you are in the 24-hour cycle is useful. That's what local time is: an approximation of the time since the last solar midnight.
To the extent that the approximation is poor, it's an argument for improving it (Spain for example should really set their clocks back an hour), not for getting rid of it entirely.
jerlam · 8h ago
For the same reason I still like temperature in Fahrenheit, despite knowing that it is inferior in all contexts other than weather and most of the world doesn't use it. Around 100F is dangerously hot and 0F is dangerously cold.
Besides, Kelvin is the most true temperature scale, not Celsius.
yen223 · 2h ago
Above 0C you have liquid water, below 0C you have ice
I find this considerably more useful than the Fahrenheit equivalent.
fastball · 1h ago
Imo the best system would've been Celsius with double the precision, e.g. water freezing still at 0ºC but water boiling at 200ºC.
That way you have the "human livable" range kinda between 0-100, which feels very intuitive. Anything above 100ºC becomes effectively unlivable. It also means that it is much easier to distinguish between certain "zones". e.g. saying "70s" or "80s" is easier and more clear than with celsius where you typically are staying within a sliding 10º range from day-to-day.
nothrabannosir · 1h ago
99% of the time that I communicate about temperature, it’s in relation to the weather. Fahrenheit optimizes for the right thing. “How does it feel on a scale of 0-100?” is the nr 1 thing I use temperature for, nothing else comes close.
Using UTC for everything strikes me as attempting to apply thinking that's convenient for machines to humans.
In the vast majority of cases, the most salient property of a timestamp, for humans, is what point it occurred in the 24-hour day/night cycle (and, secondarily, where it occurred in the 7-day week cycle).
Local time is an approximation of exactly that 24-hour cycle; the local time anywhere is approximately the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in that location. (Yes, it's not perfect, because in some places local time has a persistent offset from solar time, or even one that changes twice a year, but it's close enough).
UTC is an approximation of the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in England. Most people don't live in England, so this just isn't relevant most of the time.
If we all used UTC, sure, people living in one place would get used to the new correspondence to solar time; someone who spends all their time in Arizona would quickly get used to the fact that they now eat dinner at 12:00 UTC instead of 7pm. But it would make traveling more tedious: you'd have to re-learn the mapping every new place you went. It'd also make communicating with people abroad more difficult. If someone tells you "I went to bed at 08:00 last night", you have to know that in New Zealand that means they're an early riser or were sick; in New York it means they had a wild party and in Poland it means they worked the night shift.
There are a few cases where having a shared absolute time reference is useful; for example, scheduling meetings with people in many different countries, but in those cases people tend to spontaneously settle on a time standard and it doesn't cause many problems in practice. And even in many of those cases, the local solar time is still relevant (you wouldn't want to schedule a meeting for someone around their solar midnight), so you have to have some way of expressing it anyway.
tgma · 7h ago
Right. The 7-day week cycle is also completely arbitrary, perhaps the most arbitrary of all time duration units, but having something of that nature has proven useful.
The 7-day week originated in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Babylon, around the 3rd millennium BCE. It was tied to the observation of seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each day was associated with one of these "planets," a system later adopted and refined by other cultures.
The Babylonians passed this concept to the Jews, who formalized it in their religious practices, linking it to the biblical creation story in Genesis, where God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the Sabbath. This Jewish tradition influenced the structure of the week in the Western world.
The Romans also adopted the 7-day cycle by the 1st century CE, replacing their earlier 8-day market cycle (nundinae). They named the days after their gods, aligned with the celestial bodies: dies Solis (Sun), dies Lunae (Moon), dies Martis (Mars), dies Mercurii (Mercury), dies Iovis (Jupiter), dies Veneris (Venus), and dies Saturni (Saturn). These names persist in Romance languages (e.g., French: lundi for Moon, mardi for Mars).
The 7-day week spread through the Roman Empire and was cemented by Christianity, especially after Emperor Constantine made Sunday a day of rest in 321 CE. Other cultures, like the ancient Egyptians and early Chinese, had different cycles, but the 7-day week became dominant globally due to Western influence, trade, and colonization.
It’s not perfectly aligned with natural cycles—365.25 days in a year don’t divide evenly by 7—but its cultural and religious roots have made it a near-universal standard.
1718627440 · 7h ago
It is not just convention it seams also to be a somewhat natural unit for humans. Each time some try to change it, people get sick.
kweingar · 2h ago
Is it natural, or have we just adapted to it? Maybe if we had always had 10-day weeks, we'd get sick if we switched to 7.
justahuman74 · 42m ago
What do the symptoms look like?
praash · 7h ago
> someone who spends all their time in Arizona would quickly get used to the fact that they now eat dinner at 12:00 UTC instead of 7pm. But it would make traveling more tedious: you'd have to re-learn the mapping every new place you went.
Following local times won't spare you from having to learn local culture anyway, such as Spanish dinner times ranging around 21-23.
umanwizard · 4h ago
That’s true, but you still have to know much less information. In most cultures, most people eat the main evening meal somewhere between 18h and 23h; Southern Europe tends later in that range than most places, whereas the US tends earlier. This is still a lot simpler than each longitude having its own unique offset that can range anywhere from -12 to 12.
If you visit Spain as a tourist and eat at 19:00 local time every day, you’ll be slightly out of sync with the locals but you aren’t going to cause any huge drama. If you never even learned the fact that Spanish people eat later, you’d still basically be fine. So knowing that cultural fact about Spain isn’t absolutely essential the way it would be to learn the offset of each place in a world without time zones.
whoisyc · 1h ago
IMO the best argument for time zones is it keeps calendar days roughly[1] aligned with “natural” days, such that day changes happen when it’s dark outside and most people[2] are asleep and most people won’t be entering a new day during a work meeting.
Why? Because it is confusing if most people’s natural days are divided into different calendar days. If I wake up and the calendar says Tuesday, then I can be sure that I don’t need to worry about the dental appointment on Wednesday afternoon. But if Wednesday starts midday, then I have to spend extra brain cycles to work out which parts of my natural day belong to Tuesday and which parts are Wednesday. It’s a lot of hassle avoided by having days change over when I’m asleep.
If you want real life example of such confusions, look up “early morning flight confusion” on your favourite search engine. It turns out a lot of people are confused by flight times like “Wednesday 1:20am”, because if you are catching an 1:20am flight, you are heading to the airport on the previous day before midnight, and mentally the flight feels like a part of the previous “natural” day. What sometimes happens is people will book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight.
By the way, one successful attempt at addressing this problem is Japanese late night anime schedules. If an anime is aired on Wednesday 1:20am, the TV station will instead write “Tuesday 25:20” on the schedule. It makes no sense from a technical point of view, but feels right for the human because what is the early morning of Wednesday if not just Tuesday night prolonged?
[1] Even extreme cases like Spain are only a couple of hours out of sync, it’s not like the sun shines on Madrid during “midnight”.
[2] the article mentions remote workers and frequent travelers, which I am willing to wager are a tiny (but over represented in nerd spaces) fraction of the society.
necovek · 35m ago
Incidentally, this works for someone close to the UTC time (3h off for Moscow) for the reasons you mention.
It likely does not generalize at all.
They also haven't faced an issue where an event is booked by someone else at a DST-affecting time: as that time changes between two days, you now need an extra "if" in your brain (is it DST there? Europe and US are on different cycles there too).
I've tried booking all the cross-timezone meetings in UTC, but didn't get far with it: it was more work for everyone compared to somewhat reduced confusion and suddenly overlapping meetings.
RedShift1 · 48m ago
I don't get the flight example? Wednesday 1:20 AM = Thursday 1:20 (24 hr notation)?
Anyway it seems to me this whole problem arises with 12 hour notation.
neilpomerleau · 33m ago
Wednesday 1:20 AM (12 hr notation) = Wednesday 1:20 (24 hr notation), or is there another convention I’ve never heard of? Either way, this seems to further validate the original confusion.
RedShift1 · 22m ago
> book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight.
This bit here, I don't understand what Thursday is supposed to do here. If my flight leaves Wednesday at 1:20 AM, I'm leaving for the airport Tuesday evening.
But if I'm interpreting OP correctly, people are booking flights for Wednesday 1:20 AM but leaving for the airport Wednesday evening? Why would you be confused about that?
tzs · 25m ago
Timezones, or something equivalent, are here to stay for the foreseeable future because we live on an approximately spherical world, its rotation is not tidal locked to its star, its rotational axis is not perpendicular to its orbital plane, we evolved to synchronize our biological rhythms including our sleep/wake cycle to local sunrise and sunset, we occupy a wide range of latitudes and longitudes, and we need to coordinate activities with people who are far away from us.
calmbonsai · 9h ago
Nope, no. I appreciate the experiment and I did do this myself for about 4 months when doing some intense cross-Atlantic business consulting traveling.
Unlike DST today, time zones do still have economic utility in the modern world since there are many more personal and industrial activities that exclusively happen during day or night in a single locale and far fewer that happen 24x7 and routinely traverse multiple locales.
No comments yet
tptacek · 2h ago
The nerve of this person to post this at 34:29 my time, right when I'm winding down.
Eddy_Viscosity2 · 4h ago
Living UTC would be awkward, however as someone who works with real world data sets, USE UTC FOR DATA! and also iso-8601 formatting. Everything else is a nightmare. Thank you for attending my ted talk.
wwweston · 1h ago
UTC for data is perfect for events that have occurred. It has corner cases for planned future timing that require further thought and probably storing wall time + locale.
macintux · 2h ago
My co-workers consistently stick with UTC, but they refuse to include the time zone in strings in their databases. Drives me crazy.
yen223 · 2h ago
The TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE data type doesn't include the time zone, which is hilarious to me.
jrochkind1 · 1h ago
> After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today.
I would like to hear more about how that works out, you don't shift to sleep cycles at the place you are at, you just always go to bed at 21:00 UTC?
perching_aix · 1h ago
> Once I mastered handling two time contexts, adding more was simple. I now juggle four: UTC, my local time, my team’s time zone, and another I occasionally work with. There’s no confusion, my brain seamlessly tracks them all.
I don't really follow. I thought the whole concept was not having to do exactly this. Or maybe I just don't understand, I don't know.
If I'm investigating something and am interrogating logs, I'll mentally switch time bases to UTC, after which I'm natively thinking in UTC until I decide to switch back. I also have no issues converting to the handful of timezones I use often.
I'll never understand why people would want to use UTC as their native time. But then I'm on the other end of the absolutist spectrum, "often" looking up my local solar time, and shaking my fist at the sky about the local administrative time being oh so off from the "real local time" (that being, said local solar time).
pavlov · 9h ago
Clearly everybody should use Swatch Internet Time, also known as “.beat”:
Nothing is more rad than checking the dot-beat on my translucent plastic watch while waiting for dial-up to connect so I can update my ICQ status to let my global friends know I’m listening to “Barbie Girl” from a 128k MP3 in WinAMP. Pre-emptive multitasking baby.
myself248 · 1h ago
I like to think .beats might've caught on, if they were UTC-based instead of UTC+1, because Swatch is headquartered in Switzerland, and I think that little offset made it obviously tongue-in-cheek.
Animats · 9h ago
Could be worse. Mecca has the world's biggest clock dial.[1] Originally, it was to be set to solar time at Mecca, but that was just too confusing.
For some reason no friends or family took me seriously when I brought it up at the time.
tifik · 10h ago
> In my head, these are equivalent, like two labels for the same moment. There’s no mental conversion, no extra cognitive load.
Well said. Ill use this when explaining to my north american friends how 17:00 is 5pm in my head without doing any math.
stavros · 9h ago
Yep, it's now a lookup table.
silisili · 10h ago
FWIW, most phones allow dual time display, and GMT watches would be extra helpful here as you can essentially track both at once, using either as your 'main.'
> After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today.
The problem is, depending on where you landed, 21:00 could be typical start of the workday, and you'd be showing up to an empty office.
> If you had a call at 13:00 yesterday, it’s still at 13:00 today
This part sounds nice, until DST comes along to sabotage you. For only being twice a year though, it's probably still a net gain, one I hadn't really considered for someone who travels a lot.
timewizard · 9h ago
> most phones allow dual time display,
That's how I have conky setup on my desktop. "Year : Julian Day : HH:MM:SS" in both local and UTC. With a fixed width font and the two right above each other it's exceptionally useful. It makes looking at logs captured in UTC much easier to parse.
_trampeltier · 10h ago
In 2021 there was a website thehtime.com. It had the best concept for dealing with timezones.
And if your language doesn’t use the Latin alphabet?
I like the concept of a global time that maps to local time, and while I am unconvinced that Latin letters are the best way to do that, I can’t think of a better way. It’s either letters of some sort, symbols, or names, and none of those sound good.
layer8 · 9h ago
It shouldn’t have used both L and I though, and probably also have dropped O, in favor of adding X and Y.
131hn · 7m ago
Using continious letters for addititives values is a good idea (F+3) can be predicted easily.
Yet i agree that confusing « symbols » should be avoided.
Forcing UPPERCASE formeront plus using a prefix (Z might be a good one)
ZA:03
ZB:23
ZL:55
ZI:12
ZO:08
would work greatly for me
windows2020 · 10h ago
Time zones let you know if you're scheduling a meeting with someone in the middle of the night.
nly · 10h ago
It also enables common culture. If someone says they got up at 5am for a flight then it is widely understood that that is pretty early for a typical person, without having to explain as much in words.
If someone says they didn't get home until late, you know they probably mean 9 to some small hour of the morning etc.
nomadygnt · 10h ago
Yes! Whenever people say that we should have one timezone I always bring this up. Either you have to look up what time it is in another country or you have to look up what time of day it is. Either way you still have to look it up.
nirvdrum · 9h ago
You may have already read it, but in case you haven’t, I think this post illustrates the challenges with a single timezone rather nicely: https://qntm.org/abolish
actinium226 · 9h ago
Who are these people who say we should have one timezone?
ianburrell · 9h ago
Every time time zones are discussed here, there is someone who thinks should abolish time zones and use UTC.
umanwizard · 9h ago
The author of the article we're commenting on, for example.
And it's an idea that I see come up not too rarely on any post about time subtleties (time zones, leap seconds, etc.)
atmavatar · 5h ago
Somewhat, but it does so poorly.
If you're scheduling something with someone non-local to yourself, you need not only know their time zone, but you also need also consider their latitude/longitude and what time of year it is so you account for the potential use of daylight saving time and their current sunrise/sunset times.
For example: if you schedule something at 7PM - is that daytime or nighttime? Well, if it's the first of October, and the person is in Kansas City, the answer is daytime. However, if they're in Phoenix, the answer is nighttime. And here's the kicker: the fact that Kansas City uses daylight saving time is irrelevant, as it would still be mostly light out even if you used standard time due to its higher latitude.
ItsHarper · 10h ago
In fairness, that's not what they're arguing for. They're advocating using UTC for yourself, and since no one else does that you'll inevitably get good at conversions to other time zones.
borsecplata · 9h ago
But... why? Out of boredom?
Nevermark · 6h ago
Nothing, nothing at all, is more abhorrent than someone willing to make a change only to leave more work for someone else to clean up!
Yes, one universal time zone, used universally! Bravo, finally, indeed.
Notation: instead of '°', metric degrees use a filled circle '•'.
Now we have conceptual correspondence between 1 minute of time and 1 minute rotation of the Earth.
If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.
Finally, a metric "milette" distance is defined as 1/1000 of the Earths circumference, or ~40km. The Earth's surface moves 1 millete distance -> in 1 minute of time -> over 1 minute of rotation
Ok, open for suggestion period.
abrefeld · 1h ago
> If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.
I've also thought that setting time using longitude could make sense. Especially since I and many people tell time, schedule meetings, etc using a device with a GPS. This article [0] makes an interesting point about the effect that time shift based on longitude would have on computers in the same data center.
> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. ...
So, strictly speaking, continuous time zones mean that clocks on machines in different parts of the same data centre — neighbouring racks, even — will need to be set to different times, depending on the exact positions of those racks.
It concludes that you would have to choose a single reference point to represent the time of a machine and that:
> We might even consider applying this consistency across all machines in any given data centre. This would simplify tasks such as e.g. collating accurately timestamped log entries from multiple machines. We would ignore the real longitudes of the various machines and set all of their clocks to the same local time. The interior of the facility would become an area of uniform time; a "time zone", as it were.
I've only heard "metric time" refer to strictly powers-of-ten seconds (kiloseconds / megaseconds / ...), not your fractions of a day.
Have you seen the French revolutionary decimal time? It's closer to your proposal but with 10 hours/day instead of 25, for more consistency.
bravesoul2 · 2h ago
Why reinvent the second when it already independent of the time it takes earth to spin.
tgma · 10h ago
Why does it matter for your normalized baseline to be UTC? Why not your local time and convert everything into that in your head. The reference time zone seems arbitrary and your primary residence's local time makes the most sense IMO.
navigate8310 · 10h ago
Because it's "Universal". It becomes fairly easy to calculate time of an unknown city, instantly once you know the offset. One less mental calculation.
tgma · 9h ago
I don’t buy it at all. If you are that used to conversions, you probably remember the direct offsets by heart. I know I do for the three or four time zones I care about.
That said the whole conversion thing is not an immaterial burden unless you’re really up in the sky longer than walking on earth.
The whole point of UTC is to have a shared reference baseline to communicate with the world; however the author is obviously not concerned about that, I don’t think, as they have to do the conversion into the third party’s local time in their head if they want to have any friends, so that point is moot.
greatgib · 9h ago
Looks totally stupid in my opinion...
After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today.
This will not work except if you are completely shifted with the local time when you travel.
If you change of timezones, the sun will not raise and go down at the same time in UTC obviously. So you will go to sleep in the middle of the day.
Also, when you are at home, everything will be in local time anyway, you will not see the difference, and going abroad you will constantly have to do conversion in your mind from local time to UTC otherwise you will not know when shop open and close, the train will leave, ...
You can complain and work on improving a tool that will covert badly, but for me it is kind of transparent with recent technology. Phone and watch update themselves automatically when you leave an airplane in a different time zone country and most tools look at your location to show you relevant time.
If you say that it will make it more convenient to work with people in other timezones, that's not even the case, because UTC will not tell you if a time is a good time or not regarding local time. So someone giving you his country/timezones is enough for you to select a right time.
Let's imagine I'm working with you that is located a quarter of the world away, how do I know in UTC what time is the work day morning proper time for a meeting? 11h UTC? 22h UTC? 4h UTC?
xelxebar · 1h ago
Haha. Me and my friends did this throughout middle school. My experience was similar; the biggest downside is social.
These days, dealing with clients scattered across disparate timezones, no matter what, you either gotta deal with calendar differences or jet lag.
blacksmith_tb · 7h ago
My favorite thing about UTC is that the abbreviation was chosen because it doesn't make sense in French or English[1], (I like CUT a little more than TUC, though both are pronounceable as one-syllable words... unlike you-tee-see).
I wonder sometimes, if we were living in a world that never had timezones, and instead everyone standardised on UTC, what would the case be for introducing timezones?
tialaramex · 1h ago
I'm not sure this makes coherent sense.
The timezones are a formalization of existing practice, the way modern Metrication is a formalisation of practices which date back to early Weights And Measures laws.
In both cases people didn't wake up one day and from scratch invent the present sophisticated systems, they iterated, once upon a time the kilo was roughly "this much", by the 19th century it was a platinum iridium model object (the "international prototype kilogram"), today it's defined in terms of the measured constants of our universe.
Once upon a time midday was whenever the sun is directly overhead, people iterated, fast transport such as railways led to the use of standardized clocks and gradually there's a "standard" time agreed over whole regions or nations so that midday is whenever that standard says it is.
The timezones just codify and structure this existing practice. If you tell the people of Kyoto that midday ought to be eight minutes earlier than they've been having it so as to line up with a Japan-wide national time system, that's a minor annoyance. But if everybody in the world "standardized" on UTC that's eight hours different, I repeatedly tried to work out what happens, I kept getting muddled, I suspect residents experiencing this would fare little better. No.
yibg · 9h ago
When dealing with anything across timezones the reality is you ARE dealing with 2 time contexts.
1) global time. i.e. UTC
2) local “sun” time. i.e. local timezone
When scheduling a meeting you are trying to find an intersection of global and local time that works.
It’s messy but also our physical reality. The conversion still needs to be done, just in the article the person is living in global time and having to convert to local time when needed. Vs living in local time and converting to another different local time.
zzo38computer · 9h ago
I think that if you want to use UTC, you should make it clear by adding "Z" (or "UTC") on the end of the numbers which tell you what time it is. This makes it more clearly, avoiding some of the confusion they mention in that article.
However, I think that local time should be used as well as UTC, for different purposes, but that the local time should just use solar time, rather than using time zones and DST.
layer8 · 9h ago
You can’t have standard seconds with solar time though (or minutes or hours), unless you live at the equator [0]. So it will be interesting to calculate at what local time your CI build is expected to complete, or if you have enough time to watch that 120-minute movie before whatever the equivalent of 10 o’clock would be in solar time.
Or alternatively, each day would have to end at a different time, but then 12 o’clock wouldn’t be solar noon (or midnight).
Solar time doesn't involve different lengths of seconds. The length of day and all the pieces doesn't change. Local solar time is effectively time zone on longitude. It is mean solar time.
The downside of solar time is that 1 minute of time is 15 arc minutes which is roughly 17 mi east west. Which means need to deal with time zones in same metro area.
The railroads invented time zones because dealing with local solar time was a pain. Minute accuracy is needed for time tables. We might be able to do it with computers, but it would require knowing the location of everything.
zzo38computer · 1h ago
When the minute accuracy is needed between different places, that is when UTC would be used. It is helpful for travel, and for many other purposes.
For local stuff that does not involve precise measurement of timing, you can use solar time (and you can use a sundial), and you can do by the sun light (even, in summer it is more light and in winter it is dark early, you can use that, e.g. to go outside when it is light and don't need to turn on light inside, and in night time is dark you can sleep), and by the moon light (less commonly, but sometimes it is also meaningful and useful).
Even for things that do use precise measurement of timing, UTC is not always appropriate; for some uses you will use TAI, or SI seconds instead of UTC seconds.
__s · 7h ago
I've been doing this for the last 5 years too with all my devices. Makes it nice when looking at logs
I have let through some timezone bugs, tho those bugs also didn't impact prod since prod machines are UTC
Done with both EDT & PDT,
I did have a mixup with catching flight: I read 2300 as being UTC (since I'm not used to 24h clock being localtime) & thought my flight was 7PM instead of 11PM. Would be nice if flight times were UTC, always annoying figuring how long flight actually is
hinkley · 9h ago
My third job was medical telemetry and that was sufficient for me to not only put everything in utc but also correct for client server clock skew.
Problem is though with distributed offices and remote workers. “The servers started crashing at 10:31 can you look at it?” Doesn’t mean anything without more context. If it’s 10:50 local does that mean it started 20 minutes ago or 7:20 ago? 3:20 ago because they’re on the east coast?
schoen · 9h ago
The oddity I'd expect from this is that your local date changes at some moment other than 0:00. For example, in Moscow the date will change at 21:00.
layer8 · 9h ago
That’s still at midnight locally though. What’s maybe odder is that your UTC date changes in the middle of the local day. So “tomorrow” can be “this afternoon”.
OJFord · 8h ago
That does seem odd on paper, but in practice we already deal with that anyway from midnight being kind of arbitrary and not necessarily while we're asleep (almost never, personally) so we do things like scare-quote 'tomorrow' because really what we mean is 'my next waking period'. It'd be weird at first for sure, but once accustomed to it I don't think that would be a drawback personally, just a different arbitrary.
borsecplata · 9h ago
Makes no sense. As long as you are primarily in your timezone, why take the trouble of converting date/time every time you look at the clock?
amelius · 9h ago
Why not use International Atomic Time (abbreviated TAI, from its French name temps atomique international)?
Because if we're abolishing timezones, we gotta keep a little fuckery. Leapseconds keep people on their toes. TAI would just be too simple.
fmajid · 7h ago
I have all my cameras set to UTC, but I live in London so it’s at most off by one hour.
The great advantage of UTC is you don’t have to deal with the abomination that is daylight saving time.
mystifyingpoi · 9h ago
> Why care if the sun rises at 8 or 21?
Isn't that sentence contradicting the entire thing? If you don't care, then use local time. Unless this is satire that I didn't get :P
OJFord · 8h ago
I'm not quite sure how you're reading it, but what they mean is 'the reason to have different offsets is so that morning/sunrise happens circa 8am everywhere in the world (in local times), but why is that a goal - why care if it's circa 8am or circa 9pm or anything else, it can be at different times in different places instead of them having different offsets to make it the same'.
Note I'm not saying I agree, just explaining.
dangus · 12m ago
This to me has some parallels with the original pitch for Soylent where it was like “why bother with human emotions that surround cooking and eating food when you can exclusively eat this grey tasteless slop for every meal of the day?”
Why deal with this stupid human construct of your day starting when the sun comes up when the sun isn’t relevant to your local data center?
Heck why not just count up milliseconds since 1970?
The article focuses a lot on how this reduces friction when working across time zones but glazes over how it makes interacting with everything local require a conversion.
5 days a week I am working with people in Seattle, NYC, Munich, and often London or India. I have to coordinate meetings across time zones a lot. I travel a lot.
And yet at home or on the road I have to process things like "this store closes at 18:00" or "this train is at 16:45" infinitely more. Putting my devices in UTC requires me to think for all of those interactions which is way worse.
schrodinger · 9h ago
Says the guy living 3 hours off UTC.
It's a little different when going to bed one day and waking up another doesn't happen anymore. And small numbers aren't morning, big numbers aren't night.
I hate this form of nerd clickbait. tech bro discovers UTC, thinks he’s cracked the code of the universe, and writes a navel-gazing manifesto about how changing his watch changed his life. of course it ends in a SaaS plug.
__s · 7h ago
I've done this with 4/5 hour offsets & 7/8 hour offsets. You quickly build up a mental mapping to skip arithmetic. Numbers are just symbols
smitty1e · 10h ago
Even if UTC itself is a bridge too far, at least consider a 24hr clock, in order to obviate that AM/PM ambiguity.
OJFord · 8h ago
I would settle for people and software just not doing that '06:00pm' type abomination. 6pm fine, 1800 fine (06/6am fine) but not 06pm.
layer8 · 9h ago
PM is like ROT12 AM.
AStonesThrow · 10h ago
Many years ago I committed to setting everything to 24hr clocks. Even when I still had a standalone digital alarm clock that plugged into the wall; in fact that was the impetus to change.
Because it was very easy to miss a little "PM" pip in the corner, when reading or setting the time; and setting an alarm depended on getting the pip correct, so eliminating the pip for me meant eliminating ambiguity in the digits.
It's been a fairly successful transition, although sometimes I look at "16:15" and think it's 6pm so the "mentally subtracting 12" needs practice. And there are still special snowflake UI widgets that ignore my i18n settings, and constrain how I enter or specify a time.
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charlieyu1 · 7h ago
I live in Britain and I'm annoyed by the summer time. Worst is when you work with people in North America and the time difference changes 4 times a year.
lampiaio · 9h ago
"Bart, remember .beat? It's back! In UTC form."
stackedinserter · 9h ago
That's great to have an alarm to 11am which is 7am at your timezone and be woken up at 3am after cross-atlantic flight next day.
Some people just like to add complexity to their lives and keep convincing themselves that it's better.
Anecdotally, I worked on a military facility where all clocks were in "master timezone" of the country without daylight saving offset. 6 months a year we put "+1" sign made of electric tape to not forget about that it's summer and 0400 is actually 0400+TZ+1. I worked there for 5 years and never got used to it.
m-s-y · 2h ago
> After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today. If you had a call at 13:00 yesterday, it’s still at 13:00 today.
Wow. This is amazing. Who knew this only worked with UTC!! /s
Missives like this just make me embarrassed for us “technical folk”.
pif · 9h ago
> As a programmer, I’ve always been annoyed by the concept of administrative time zones.
That's because you committed one of the capital sins for a programmer: you tried working with time. The old mantra "use a library" still rules.
> I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time. Why care if the sun rises at 8 or 21?
You seriously need to go out more often.
gherkinnn · 9h ago
> You seriously need to go out more often.
Pretty much that. Most mammals I can think of live by what the sun, one way or another.
zzo38computer · 7h ago
You should live by the sun, regardless of what the clock says. The clock is useful for measuring time, and UTC, TAI, etc can be useful for that, but if you want to wake up, etc, you can do by the sun light. For local time, you can use the solar time, which can be used with a sundial.
SillyUsername · 9h ago
Your thinking is incorrect. Most mammals are nocturnal
Nocturnal would be “the other way”. It’s still based on where the sun is: below the horizon.
umanwizard · 9h ago
Nocturnal animals are still living according to where the sun is, just as much as we are.
OJFord · 8h ago
How do you be nocturnal without living by what the sun's doing?
mckn1ght · 9h ago
Good time to bring up my idea where time is expressed as offsets from sunrise, noon or sunset for a given lat/long coordinate.
mdnahas · 9h ago
I’m convinced we need to move to a world time. The Internet is part of life and we have people coordinating around the globe. Time is time everywhere.
Sunlight is different everywhere. But not everything timed is tied to sunlight. There is no reason that the time should be 12:00 at peak sunlight locally.
UTC is an issue near the international date line. I could see residents of Pacific islands wanting to not have the date change mid-day. Should think about adding hours 24, 25, 26, etc. to Wednesday that are equivalent to hours 0, 1, 2, etc. on Thursday.
(And as a quant who did a lot of time programming for financial markets, fuck Daylight Saving Time and the leap second.)
Thinking about the future, if humans as a species become interplanetary, keeping up with lunar time, asteroid belt time, martian time,etc.. is going to be a mess. UTC is the only way to go.
timezones are artifacts of olden days where people didn't communicate across great distances and worked fixed daylight hours. Much like being able to speak the same language, being able to use the same time across vast distances is a huge boost to productivity and progress. This is kind of like using the metric system, vs using local/traditional measurements (like the US does).
If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.
This wasn’t phrased like “I prefer to use UTC time and here’s why I like it,” it’s more like if this guy becomes king of the world we’ll literally be forced to used UTC time.
The existing system is more inertial and political than practical.
"Noon is when the sun is at its zenith in your area" is significantly less useful in 2025 than being able to coordinate globally with ease. It's also just not true in many (most?) cases, as noted in the article, where places like China have a single timezone even though there is a 3-hour discrepancy in the sun's position from one side of China to the other.
3 hours is one thing, 12 hours is another (and "So you want to abolish timezones" notes that people in China commonly use lookup tables, creating implicit timezones).
When I coordinate across timezones, I say, "Hey does 9amPT/11amET work?" (Assuming those are the relevant timezones). I don't see the problem with that approach?
Let's say you abolish timezones. Okay. How do I know whether it's rude to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? I'm going to consult some kind of table and implicitly reintroduce timezones, right?
It reads as tongue-in-cheek to me :)
I think folks are averse to "world time" (for reasons, largely inertial), so maybe the baby step is try 1 timezone per country (like China's done for .. 75 years ?).
I'd even argue Local Time has only ~4 useful times: dawn, daytime, dusk, & nighttime. Where I grew up, the parks closed at dusk every day. Nobody complained
If I take a walk at 7:05:35 PM every day, it seems very precise but doesn't indicate whether I need sunglasses or a flashlight. It's meaningless precision, like 0.6235 slices of pizza. If I'm coordinating a walk with you, I might as well use UTC: it still won't tell light from dark, but at least nobody'll be waiting for an hour due to DST. It'd make more sense to schedule our walk at `1 hour before dusk`, or "just" settle for UTC, IMO.
So You Want To Abolish Time Zones - https://qntm.org/abolish
Being able to express where you are in the 24-hour cycle is useful. That's what local time is: an approximation of the time since the last solar midnight.
To the extent that the approximation is poor, it's an argument for improving it (Spain for example should really set their clocks back an hour), not for getting rid of it entirely.
Besides, Kelvin is the most true temperature scale, not Celsius.
I find this considerably more useful than the Fahrenheit equivalent.
That way you have the "human livable" range kinda between 0-100, which feels very intuitive. Anything above 100ºC becomes effectively unlivable. It also means that it is much easier to distinguish between certain "zones". e.g. saying "70s" or "80s" is easier and more clear than with celsius where you typically are staying within a sliding 10º range from day-to-day.
https://xkcd.com/1982/ Had it entirely right.
- ex Celsius user
In the vast majority of cases, the most salient property of a timestamp, for humans, is what point it occurred in the 24-hour day/night cycle (and, secondarily, where it occurred in the 7-day week cycle).
Local time is an approximation of exactly that 24-hour cycle; the local time anywhere is approximately the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in that location. (Yes, it's not perfect, because in some places local time has a persistent offset from solar time, or even one that changes twice a year, but it's close enough).
UTC is an approximation of the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in England. Most people don't live in England, so this just isn't relevant most of the time.
If we all used UTC, sure, people living in one place would get used to the new correspondence to solar time; someone who spends all their time in Arizona would quickly get used to the fact that they now eat dinner at 12:00 UTC instead of 7pm. But it would make traveling more tedious: you'd have to re-learn the mapping every new place you went. It'd also make communicating with people abroad more difficult. If someone tells you "I went to bed at 08:00 last night", you have to know that in New Zealand that means they're an early riser or were sick; in New York it means they had a wild party and in Poland it means they worked the night shift.
There are a few cases where having a shared absolute time reference is useful; for example, scheduling meetings with people in many different countries, but in those cases people tend to spontaneously settle on a time standard and it doesn't cause many problems in practice. And even in many of those cases, the local solar time is still relevant (you wouldn't want to schedule a meeting for someone around their solar midnight), so you have to have some way of expressing it anyway.
The 7-day week originated in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Babylon, around the 3rd millennium BCE. It was tied to the observation of seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each day was associated with one of these "planets," a system later adopted and refined by other cultures.
The Babylonians passed this concept to the Jews, who formalized it in their religious practices, linking it to the biblical creation story in Genesis, where God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the Sabbath. This Jewish tradition influenced the structure of the week in the Western world.
The Romans also adopted the 7-day cycle by the 1st century CE, replacing their earlier 8-day market cycle (nundinae). They named the days after their gods, aligned with the celestial bodies: dies Solis (Sun), dies Lunae (Moon), dies Martis (Mars), dies Mercurii (Mercury), dies Iovis (Jupiter), dies Veneris (Venus), and dies Saturni (Saturn). These names persist in Romance languages (e.g., French: lundi for Moon, mardi for Mars).
The 7-day week spread through the Roman Empire and was cemented by Christianity, especially after Emperor Constantine made Sunday a day of rest in 321 CE. Other cultures, like the ancient Egyptians and early Chinese, had different cycles, but the 7-day week became dominant globally due to Western influence, trade, and colonization.
It’s not perfectly aligned with natural cycles—365.25 days in a year don’t divide evenly by 7—but its cultural and religious roots have made it a near-universal standard.
Following local times won't spare you from having to learn local culture anyway, such as Spanish dinner times ranging around 21-23.
If you visit Spain as a tourist and eat at 19:00 local time every day, you’ll be slightly out of sync with the locals but you aren’t going to cause any huge drama. If you never even learned the fact that Spanish people eat later, you’d still basically be fine. So knowing that cultural fact about Spain isn’t absolutely essential the way it would be to learn the offset of each place in a world without time zones.
Why? Because it is confusing if most people’s natural days are divided into different calendar days. If I wake up and the calendar says Tuesday, then I can be sure that I don’t need to worry about the dental appointment on Wednesday afternoon. But if Wednesday starts midday, then I have to spend extra brain cycles to work out which parts of my natural day belong to Tuesday and which parts are Wednesday. It’s a lot of hassle avoided by having days change over when I’m asleep.
If you want real life example of such confusions, look up “early morning flight confusion” on your favourite search engine. It turns out a lot of people are confused by flight times like “Wednesday 1:20am”, because if you are catching an 1:20am flight, you are heading to the airport on the previous day before midnight, and mentally the flight feels like a part of the previous “natural” day. What sometimes happens is people will book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight.
By the way, one successful attempt at addressing this problem is Japanese late night anime schedules. If an anime is aired on Wednesday 1:20am, the TV station will instead write “Tuesday 25:20” on the schedule. It makes no sense from a technical point of view, but feels right for the human because what is the early morning of Wednesday if not just Tuesday night prolonged?
[1] Even extreme cases like Spain are only a couple of hours out of sync, it’s not like the sun shines on Madrid during “midnight”.
[2] the article mentions remote workers and frequent travelers, which I am willing to wager are a tiny (but over represented in nerd spaces) fraction of the society.
It likely does not generalize at all.
They also haven't faced an issue where an event is booked by someone else at a DST-affecting time: as that time changes between two days, you now need an extra "if" in your brain (is it DST there? Europe and US are on different cycles there too).
I've tried booking all the cross-timezone meetings in UTC, but didn't get far with it: it was more work for everyone compared to somewhat reduced confusion and suddenly overlapping meetings.
Anyway it seems to me this whole problem arises with 12 hour notation.
This bit here, I don't understand what Thursday is supposed to do here. If my flight leaves Wednesday at 1:20 AM, I'm leaving for the airport Tuesday evening.
But if I'm interpreting OP correctly, people are booking flights for Wednesday 1:20 AM but leaving for the airport Wednesday evening? Why would you be confused about that?
Unlike DST today, time zones do still have economic utility in the modern world since there are many more personal and industrial activities that exclusively happen during day or night in a single locale and far fewer that happen 24x7 and routinely traverse multiple locales.
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I would like to hear more about how that works out, you don't shift to sleep cycles at the place you are at, you just always go to bed at 21:00 UTC?
I don't really follow. I thought the whole concept was not having to do exactly this. Or maybe I just don't understand, I don't know.
If I'm investigating something and am interrogating logs, I'll mentally switch time bases to UTC, after which I'm natively thinking in UTC until I decide to switch back. I also have no issues converting to the handful of timezones I use often.
I'll never understand why people would want to use UTC as their native time. But then I'm on the other end of the absolutist spectrum, "often" looking up my local solar time, and shaking my fist at the sky about the local administrative time being oh so off from the "real local time" (that being, said local solar time).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Nothing is more rad than checking the dot-beat on my translucent plastic watch while waiting for dial-up to connect so I can update my ICQ status to let my global friends know I’m listening to “Barbie Girl” from a 128k MP3 in WinAMP. Pre-emptive multitasking baby.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clock_Towers
For some reason no friends or family took me seriously when I brought it up at the time.
Well said. Ill use this when explaining to my north american friends how 17:00 is 5pm in my head without doing any math.
> After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today.
The problem is, depending on where you landed, 21:00 could be typical start of the workday, and you'd be showing up to an empty office.
> If you had a call at 13:00 yesterday, it’s still at 13:00 today
This part sounds nice, until DST comes along to sabotage you. For only being twice a year though, it's probably still a net gain, one I hadn't really considered for someone who travels a lot.
That's how I have conky setup on my desktop. "Year : Julian Day : HH:MM:SS" in both local and UTC. With a fixed width font and the two right above each other it's exceptionally useful. It makes looking at logs captured in UTC much easier to parse.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211022024626/https://thehtime....
I like the concept of a global time that maps to local time, and while I am unconvinced that Latin letters are the best way to do that, I can’t think of a better way. It’s either letters of some sort, symbols, or names, and none of those sound good.
ZA:03 ZB:23 ZL:55 ZI:12 ZO:08
would work greatly for me
If someone says they didn't get home until late, you know they probably mean 9 to some small hour of the morning etc.
And it's an idea that I see come up not too rarely on any post about time subtleties (time zones, leap seconds, etc.)
If you're scheduling something with someone non-local to yourself, you need not only know their time zone, but you also need also consider their latitude/longitude and what time of year it is so you account for the potential use of daylight saving time and their current sunrise/sunset times.
For example: if you schedule something at 7PM - is that daytime or nighttime? Well, if it's the first of October, and the person is in Kansas City, the answer is daytime. However, if they're in Phoenix, the answer is nighttime. And here's the kicker: the fact that Kansas City uses daylight saving time is irrelevant, as it would still be mostly light out even if you used standard time due to its higher latitude.
Yes, one universal time zone, used universally! Bravo, finally, indeed.
But with metric time:
• 1 metric hour = day/25
• 1 metric time minute = day/1000 = hour/40 = 1 mday
• 1 metric time second = metric minute/1000 = 1 µday
And while we are at it, since this is all about rotation, lets fix that too:
• 1 metric rotation degree = rotation/100 = 1 centi-rotation
• 1 metric rotation minute = rotation/1000 = 1 milli-rotation
• 1 metric rotation second = metric degree minute/1000 = 1 µrot
Notation: instead of '°', metric degrees use a filled circle '•'.
Now we have conceptual correspondence between 1 minute of time and 1 minute rotation of the Earth.
If you know your metric longitude, you know the local time shift, and vice versa.
Finally, a metric "milette" distance is defined as 1/1000 of the Earths circumference, or ~40km. The Earth's surface moves 1 millete distance -> in 1 minute of time -> over 1 minute of rotation
Ok, open for suggestion period.
I've also thought that setting time using longitude could make sense. Especially since I and many people tell time, schedule meetings, etc using a device with a GPS. This article [0] makes an interesting point about the effect that time shift based on longitude would have on computers in the same data center.
> At the equator, the position directly underneath the mean Sun travels west at about 463 metres per second. That means a standard rack unit is about one millisecond wide. ... So, strictly speaking, continuous time zones mean that clocks on machines in different parts of the same data centre — neighbouring racks, even — will need to be set to different times, depending on the exact positions of those racks.
It concludes that you would have to choose a single reference point to represent the time of a machine and that:
> We might even consider applying this consistency across all machines in any given data centre. This would simplify tasks such as e.g. collating accurately timestamped log entries from multiple machines. We would ignore the real longitudes of the various machines and set all of their clocks to the same local time. The interior of the facility would become an area of uniform time; a "time zone", as it were.
[0]: https://qntm.org/continuous#sec1
Have you seen the French revolutionary decimal time? It's closer to your proposal but with 10 hours/day instead of 25, for more consistency.
That said the whole conversion thing is not an immaterial burden unless you’re really up in the sky longer than walking on earth.
The whole point of UTC is to have a shared reference baseline to communicate with the world; however the author is obviously not concerned about that, I don’t think, as they have to do the conversion into the third party’s local time in their head if they want to have any friends, so that point is moot.
You can complain and work on improving a tool that will covert badly, but for me it is kind of transparent with recent technology. Phone and watch update themselves automatically when you leave an airplane in a different time zone country and most tools look at your location to show you relevant time.
If you say that it will make it more convenient to work with people in other timezones, that's not even the case, because UTC will not tell you if a time is a good time or not regarding local time. So someone giving you his country/timezones is enough for you to select a right time.
Let's imagine I'm working with you that is located a quarter of the world away, how do I know in UTC what time is the work day morning proper time for a meeting? 11h UTC? 22h UTC? 4h UTC?
These days, dealing with clients scattered across disparate timezones, no matter what, you either gotta deal with calendar differences or jet lag.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Ety...
The timezones are a formalization of existing practice, the way modern Metrication is a formalisation of practices which date back to early Weights And Measures laws.
In both cases people didn't wake up one day and from scratch invent the present sophisticated systems, they iterated, once upon a time the kilo was roughly "this much", by the 19th century it was a platinum iridium model object (the "international prototype kilogram"), today it's defined in terms of the measured constants of our universe.
Once upon a time midday was whenever the sun is directly overhead, people iterated, fast transport such as railways led to the use of standardized clocks and gradually there's a "standard" time agreed over whole regions or nations so that midday is whenever that standard says it is.
The timezones just codify and structure this existing practice. If you tell the people of Kyoto that midday ought to be eight minutes earlier than they've been having it so as to line up with a Japan-wide national time system, that's a minor annoyance. But if everybody in the world "standardized" on UTC that's eight hours different, I repeatedly tried to work out what happens, I kept getting muddled, I suspect residents experiencing this would fare little better. No.
1) global time. i.e. UTC
2) local “sun” time. i.e. local timezone
When scheduling a meeting you are trying to find an intersection of global and local time that works.
It’s messy but also our physical reality. The conversion still needs to be done, just in the article the person is living in global time and having to convert to local time when needed. Vs living in local time and converting to another different local time.
However, I think that local time should be used as well as UTC, for different purposes, but that the local time should just use solar time, rather than using time zones and DST.
Or alternatively, each day would have to end at a different time, but then 12 o’clock wouldn’t be solar noon (or midnight).
[0] http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2014/10/19/rate-of-change-of-day...
The downside of solar time is that 1 minute of time is 15 arc minutes which is roughly 17 mi east west. Which means need to deal with time zones in same metro area.
The railroads invented time zones because dealing with local solar time was a pain. Minute accuracy is needed for time tables. We might be able to do it with computers, but it would require knowing the location of everything.
For local stuff that does not involve precise measurement of timing, you can use solar time (and you can use a sundial), and you can do by the sun light (even, in summer it is more light and in winter it is dark early, you can use that, e.g. to go outside when it is light and don't need to turn on light inside, and in night time is dark you can sleep), and by the moon light (less commonly, but sometimes it is also meaningful and useful).
Even for things that do use precise measurement of timing, UTC is not always appropriate; for some uses you will use TAI, or SI seconds instead of UTC seconds.
I have let through some timezone bugs, tho those bugs also didn't impact prod since prod machines are UTC
Done with both EDT & PDT,
I did have a mixup with catching flight: I read 2300 as being UTC (since I'm not used to 24h clock being localtime) & thought my flight was 7PM instead of 11PM. Would be nice if flight times were UTC, always annoying figuring how long flight actually is
Problem is though with distributed offices and remote workers. “The servers started crashing at 10:31 can you look at it?” Doesn’t mean anything without more context. If it’s 10:50 local does that mean it started 20 minutes ago or 7:20 ago? 3:20 ago because they’re on the east coast?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time
The great advantage of UTC is you don’t have to deal with the abomination that is daylight saving time.
Isn't that sentence contradicting the entire thing? If you don't care, then use local time. Unless this is satire that I didn't get :P
Note I'm not saying I agree, just explaining.
Why deal with this stupid human construct of your day starting when the sun comes up when the sun isn’t relevant to your local data center?
Heck why not just count up milliseconds since 1970?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
5 days a week I am working with people in Seattle, NYC, Munich, and often London or India. I have to coordinate meetings across time zones a lot. I travel a lot.
And yet at home or on the road I have to process things like "this store closes at 18:00" or "this train is at 16:45" infinitely more. Putting my devices in UTC requires me to think for all of those interactions which is way worse.
It's a little different when going to bed one day and waking up another doesn't happen anymore. And small numbers aren't morning, big numbers aren't night.
I hate this form of nerd clickbait. tech bro discovers UTC, thinks he’s cracked the code of the universe, and writes a navel-gazing manifesto about how changing his watch changed his life. of course it ends in a SaaS plug.
Because it was very easy to miss a little "PM" pip in the corner, when reading or setting the time; and setting an alarm depended on getting the pip correct, so eliminating the pip for me meant eliminating ambiguity in the digits.
It's been a fairly successful transition, although sometimes I look at "16:15" and think it's 6pm so the "mentally subtracting 12" needs practice. And there are still special snowflake UI widgets that ignore my i18n settings, and constrain how I enter or specify a time.
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Some people just like to add complexity to their lives and keep convincing themselves that it's better.
Anecdotally, I worked on a military facility where all clocks were in "master timezone" of the country without daylight saving offset. 6 months a year we put "+1" sign made of electric tape to not forget about that it's summer and 0400 is actually 0400+TZ+1. I worked there for 5 years and never got used to it.
Wow. This is amazing. Who knew this only worked with UTC!! /s
Missives like this just make me embarrassed for us “technical folk”.
That's because you committed one of the capital sins for a programmer: you tried working with time. The old mantra "use a library" still rules.
> I decided time zones should be abolished, and everyone should use one coordinated time. Why care if the sun rises at 8 or 21?
You seriously need to go out more often.
Pretty much that. Most mammals I can think of live by what the sun, one way or another.
Source: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4183310/#:~:text=Gl...
Sunlight is different everywhere. But not everything timed is tied to sunlight. There is no reason that the time should be 12:00 at peak sunlight locally.
UTC is an issue near the international date line. I could see residents of Pacific islands wanting to not have the date change mid-day. Should think about adding hours 24, 25, 26, etc. to Wednesday that are equivalent to hours 0, 1, 2, etc. on Thursday.
(And as a quant who did a lot of time programming for financial markets, fuck Daylight Saving Time and the leap second.)