13 ms·
Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/
by aib 6y ago
Can we please also take a moment to wish tiny inconveniences upon designers of applications which ignore my locale and present me with "11:06 AM" or worse, "04/05/2020"?
- Kye 6y agoSeriously. All the apps that default to 24 hour time when it's not what my device is set to are annoying.
- gambiting 6y agoWould I be incorrect to assume that something like 17:00 will be understood by literally everyone in the world(if maybe not the preferred format) though? Using AM/PM is worse in a sense that say someone in Poland will literally have no idea which means which. 24 hour clock has no ambiguity. Unless I'm wrong and there are countries or cultures which literally won't understand what time 17:00 is?
- Kye 6y agoI don't intuitively know 17:00 is afternoon. I have to think about it. You get used to what you grow up with.
- dkarp 6y agoIt also may or may not be evening [1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evening
- myrandomcomment 6y agoIf you are an American joining the military is a quick lesson. Dates are d/m/y and time is 0000hrs. Distance for anything that is not your PT run is in KM. I had lived overseas so not a big deal for me, but others in my unit struggled for a bit. I have forced doing both f/c, mi/km and 12/24 on my family from the start. Both my wife and kid where pretty happy I did when we started traveling outside the US quit a bit. No issues on if they needed a jacket, how far away it was and what the transport schedule said.
- pjc50 6y ago17:00 is unambiguous. 9:00 could be AM or PM. 09:00 nearly always means 24H format; but what about 11:00? Siri should just start using "Zulu" time. /s
- Recursing 6y agoI think almost everybody in European countries knows about AM/PM, but I certainly get confused by 11:59 AM vs 12:00 AM
- Kye 6y agoOn the topic: Siri will ask you to clarify if you set a reminder too close to midnight. "Did you mean 11am tomorrow?" It also works on the other side: set a reminder for "2" at 1am and it'll ask you to specify.
- criddell 6y agoI've never been able to keep 12 AM vs 12 PM straight in my head. If I have to put something on my calendar or set an alarm for that time, I always use 11:59 AM or PM. Is there a mnemonic or trick for remembering?
- mc32 6y agoYes, you can’t have 12:01AM being in the afternoon, so 12:00AM must be one minute before 12:01AM, so it is also dark.
- lebuffon 6y agoIt might go back to Anglo-Norman (Frenchish) language: Apres midi Post midi
- gmac 6y agoIt's usually held to be Latin: ante and post meridiem[1]. But surely the whole point is that midday itself is neither before nor after midday, while midnight is precisely equally both before and after? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock
- lozf 6y agoBut "apres" also means after.
- latch 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_representation_b... with a nice svg on the side. I wouldn't say "entire countries", but definitely a lot of people. I grew up (in canada) with 12 hour clocks.
- greggyb 6y agoIn the US, I have definitely met people who will profess not being able to understand military time (this is a common way to refer to 24-hour time). They would recognize it as a time, but not get any other context from it.
- JNRowe 6y agoIn the real London it is not entirely uncommon to find yourself in a conversation with American tourists where they're asking/complaining about "military time" on train timetables. The odd thing about it being most platforms have a countdown-style timer much like you'd find in a US metro system. I understand that sometimes they're just trying to interact with locals while on vacation, but it always seems like an odd starter. Depending on my mood you'll get a friendly chat about time displays¹, or a curt "it says 2 minutes 'til next train". 1. 24hr analog clocks worth visiting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd_Gate_Clock https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd_Gate_Clock , or metric time, or Swatch time, or ... I'm just as boring with strangers as with friends ;)
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoThere are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. And even for the Americans that do know, virtually all of them (unless they are in the military or another profession that commonly uses 24h time), will have to "translate" by subtracting 12 in their head for PM times. 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US.
- Jedd 6y agoThe demographic you're referring to - North Americans within the USA who don't know how 24-hour time works - are < 2% of the world's population.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoSo? What's your point? If you're selling something in the US, and it gave time in 24hr time as the only option, most Americans would hate it.
- Jedd 6y agoMost?
- snowwrestler 6y agoTrue but the GP asked about "literally everyone in the world" and the parent is a correct and useful answer to that question.
- Jedd 6y agoYou're right. I tend to assume people that use the word 'literally' are using it incorrectly - as parent did. It's sad, but an ineluctable truth, that this word is almost always misunderstood and misused. In the (again, regrettable) common usage use of the word -- ie. 'almost all' -- the claim is likely valid.
- Beldin 6y ago> 24h time is extremely rare in everyday use in the US. Sure. > There are huge swaths of Americans who will literally not know what 17:00 translates to in AM/PM. 1. Same is true for most people in the world 2. Wait, you mean they don't know if 17:00 is early morning or late afternoon?? Seriously, I have a hard time to believe that. I'll believe that most Americans need to convert to am/pm, but not that "huge swaths" literally cannot understand this. My expectations of the average USA'ian are better than that.
- ancarda 6y agoHell, I live in the UK and I can't stand 24-hour time ("military time"). I have to convert in my head every single time by subtracting 12 to figure out what the time actually is. I hate 24 hour time so much. I won't use software that can't be configured to AM/PM.
- gambiting 6y agoYep, if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable. First one because in a lot of countries people genuinely won't know what AM means, the other because there's only one clear way of reading it, but it's not consistent between countries.
- mc32 6y agoThe AM isn’t the main problem. It can be looked up. The issue is whose 11AM? What time zone?
- Normille 6y ago>if you're presenting to international audiences then either one of those two is unacceptable... I used to have all my domain names registered with Namecheap. I'd get emails from them saying things like '<whatever>.com is due to expire on 3/7/2018' --so, naturally, [being based in UK] I'd note on my calendar to renew the domain at the beginning of July, only to have it almost expire on me at the beginning of March. I emailed Namecheap several times about this, asking them to use less ambiguous dates in their reminder emails and, each time, got snotty replies saying "We are a US company and we use US date order" [which wouldn't have prevented them using something like "March 7 2018"] to which I pointed out that they had a global customer base, so should avoid expressing important data in formats which their oversees customers would mis-read. They refused to budge on this so, as each domain expired, I renewed it with another registrar instead and Namecheap lost all my business, my repeat business and my future business for ever. All because they were too damned stubborn to move away from using an ambiguous date format. Weird!
- anoncake 6y agoIf someone doesn't know what AM means, they don't know English anyway.
- Normille 6y agoIt's Latin
- 6y ago
- ojilles 6y agoThe best are that have a settings page where they try to give an example. But use a day-of-month =< 12. Like your example. It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear.
- Youden 6y ago> It couldn't have hurt to use and example of "22/05/2020"; then it is still infuriating, but clear. Assuming you're addressing OP with this part, I think that was their point. When an application presents you with "04/05/2020", you have no way of knowing whether it means crazy American dates or normal-people dates.
- kohtatsu 6y agoThis is reason enough for me to use 2020-04-05 exclusively. Lexical order is a bonus.
- OrangeMango 6y ago> "04/05/2020", you have no way of knowing whether it means crazy American dates In just about every professional setting I've been in (in the US), Americans are just as confused as everyone else. We deal with people and documents/data from the entire world too. We look for clues elsewhere, such as other dates from the same source that have any number greater than 12, etc. There are very few documents these days where you be 100% confident without some other confirmation.
- hprotagonist 6y agoit’s %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %z as God intended! (and i’m an american!)
- tryauuum 6y agoIs it a joke? Year should be in the first column.
- mhandley 6y agoAgreed - really wish more people would use ISO date format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
- drivers99 6y agoThere’s a subreddit for that too. https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ISO8601/
- smiley1437 6y agoThere’s also an xkcd for that https://xkcd.com/1179/ https://xkcd.com/1179/ (Because there’s an xkcd for pretty much everything)
- mark-r 6y agoI LOVE the hover text on that one.
- karatestomp 6y agoI think formats with month and day before year are popular (and possibly emerged originally) for cases in which the year's only really included in case you're not sure whether you're reading something old and the date's already passed, that is, the date is referring to something 12 months or less away, which is probably a very high percentage of dates people encounter day-to-day. This puts the most useful information up front. The alternative being dates that omit the year entirely, which are also very common.
- larrik 6y agoI actually didn't realize am/pm wasn't something Europeans did...
- ranieuwe 6y agoWe love what US calls “military time”
- sgjohnson 6y ago24h clock isn't exactly military time. 14:30 in military time would be fourteen hundred thirty hours, or one-four-three-zero hours, or in written format 1430Z, Z being Zulu (UTC), or an actual offset.
- jki275 6y ago"military time" is a 24 hour clock. 14:30 is almost without exception read as "fourteen thirty" in military time. I've never seen it either of the ways you describe above.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoUh, they invented it. I guess they forgot.
- Beldin 6y agoUK'ians do use it. French, Germans, Swiss, BeNeLux, Italians, Spanish, Polish not. Don't know about the rest, but would be surprised if anyone in Europe but the UK used it.
- frosted-flakes 6y agoThey still know what it means though. Clocks are still divided into 12 in Europe.
- Thlom 6y agoNot if you don't have to use it for whatever reason. Personally I never learned the difference between am and pm before I got a job where I had to interact with people who used it. Still not sure if noon/midnight is 12am or 12 pm though ...
- netsharc 6y agoOr calendars that start on Sunday (since I'm European and am used to calendars starting on Monday). Forget to notice the label once and one could end up booking a hotel room for Thursday to Saturday.
- Avamander 6y agoSo most of Google? Google Calendar, Search, Maps and others all tend to be very stupid in that aspect.