I assume that that is a factor (although I'm not sure about the significance), and I'm more or less tolerant of these things depending on context. That Github w

I assume that that is a factor (although I'm not sure about the significance), and I'm more or less tolerant of these things depending on context. That Github was the particular instance that motivated the post was not a coincidence. I'm not calling for ISO 8601 by force (not seriously anyway) and it's not just relative vs. absolute. Relative timestamps must be a better choice for some use cases. But the horrors I'm describing are not just relative timestamps, they're non-linearly quantised (probably not a strictly correct term), obfuscated, and relative.