5 ms·

"On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST" Sigh. Get PST/PDT right or just say PT. (No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizo

"On May 14 at approximately 3:15 AM PST" Sigh. Get PST/PDT right or just say PT. (No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST.)

sgarland 1y ago
Or, you know, UTC. It is always baffling to me when large, global companies allow the use of anything else, especially in anything incident-adjacent.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  I would be astonished if the average non-programmer knows what "UTC" means.
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    Surely anyone who has ever had to coordinate across timezones is aware of UTC?
    - peterfirefly 1y ago
      No. The best you get is people having a vague notion of GMT.
      - Retr0id 1y ago
        From the layperson perspective, I'd say GMT is basically the same thing
      - arrowsmith 1y ago
        And British people reliably say "GMT" to mean "the current time in the UK", even when those aren't the same thing. (The UK is on BST for half the year, including right now.) Which of course is the same mistake as the PDT/PST thing that sparked this whole thread.
    - layer8 1y ago
      Anyone who had to coordinate across timezones "knows" that there is no shared standard time.
  - tialaramex 1y ago
    You mean specifically? Sure, I can well believe that even most programmers have no idea what's going on because it's very crazy, you need to know about TAI and UT1 and that they by definition can't be aligned but we insisted on fudging it anyway. But as to the more general sense that there's presumably some single global time, I actually expect that's common knowledge, you don't need to have thought about the details and realised how complicated it would be for this idea to be attractive. If anything I expect most people misunderstand from the wrong direction - they'd be surprised there isn't universal time because the general population grasp of relativity is too weak for them to see why it would be nonsense. I would guess lots of the world population thinks of this single global time as GMT, the predecessor of UTC, but that's only like people thinking of SSL when they actually mean TLS, no big deal.
    - layer8 1y ago
      > But as to the more general sense that there's presumably some single global time, I actually expect that's common knowledge It surely isn't, because, well, everyone knows the time is different around the world and hence there's no global time.
      - tialaramex 1y ago
        Locally my source would be biased because of course I live in a country where the time actually is called GMT for half the year, so from their point of view what's going on is that there is global time and it's their time. History of imperialism you know, that's why there's so much of other people's stuff in our museums. If there really wasn't global time, this couldn't work, time zones, all of that jazz won't work if you have a system where relativity matters, for example enormous variation in height above sea level, a particularly enormous planet or very fast spin. Or if your perceptual scales are very different, but for us, here, there is global time.
      - esafak 1y ago
        It doesn't mean we can provide them with sound defaults just because they don't know.
    - 1y ago
  - sgarland 1y ago
    OK, but this was from Twitter.
- EasyMark 1y ago
  I wish I could beat this into my team. We're mostly good now but every now and then it comes up. I do allow UTC offset if it's included in the timestamp, but sometimes it's dead obvious the time is off by our local offset but not reported as such.
mentalgear 1y ago
It's a show of their cultural professionalism/.
jcranmer 1y ago
> No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST. Arizona is on year-round MST, Hawaii on year-round HST. Also, American Samoa is year-round SST, Guam and the Northern Marianas are in year-round CHST, and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are in year-round AST. (If you're keeping track, yes, all of the US territories do not use DST.) Indiana used to largely observe year-round EST, but the governor changed that several years ago, much to the chagrin of some of the Indianans I know.
- sgarland 1y ago
  Indiana has one of the most fucked-up TZ delineations in the country. Northwest corner: America/Chicago. Southwest corner: America/Chicago. Everywhere else, including directly North/South of those two quadrants: America/New_York.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    Since you're trying to use IANA time zone names, I don't think any of those are correct time zones for Indiana. The IANA time zones use the definition of "has shared the same clocks since January 1, 1970," which means if a county in Indiana has switched from Eastern to Central (or vice versa) since that point, it gets a new time zone. The Eastern Time Zone portion of Indiana has switched from not observing DST to observing DST, which means it's separate from America/New_York. Per the Wikipedia article, there's 11 IANA time zones in Indiana alone.
    - 0_____0 1y ago
      Reading comments like this bolsters my appreciation for why aviation went "nope, you're just using UTC now. Chicago, Lagos, Doha, Novosibirsk... All UTC, err, Zulu time."
  - os2warpman 1y ago
    My family is from Washington County, Indiana. The western-most parts of the Washington county are further west than the easternmost parts of some of the counties that are in America/Chicago. But the center of commerce, information, entertainment, and all other infrastructure for Washington County, Indiana is Louisville, KY (lollvole). Louisville is America/New York. When you make an appointment at UofL Jewish you don't care when the sun rises and sets or when the sun is directly overhead-- you care that the clock on your kitchen wall matches the clock in the doctor's office. Washington County used to be as remote and desolate as you can think of but nowadays it is practically a suburb of Louisville. Farms along 150 are being turned into subdivisions as quickly as farmers can die off so their kids can offload the land. Same thing with the north west part of the state. Chicago suburbs want to be synced up with Chicago. The southwest part of the state, specifically grain elevator operators and other businesses, want to be synced up with the logistics hubs of St. Louis and Nashville. Most of the rest of the state is farms. They don't care and just do what Indianapolis does. I've never understood people who say we have the jacked-up time zones because of farmers. The number of farmers who look at the clock before starting work for the day can be counted on zero fingers. I grew up with "fast time" and "slow time" and once you are accustomed to it, it takes about as much mental effort as blinking. Internet people want things to be orderly. Consistent. Algorithmic. REAL people want to make it to their appointments on time and want the only business serving the area for 150 miles to be open when they call.
computerthings 1y ago
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sgarland 1y ago

Or, you know, UTC. It is always baffling to me when large, global companies allow the use of anything else, especially in anything incident-adjacent.

arrowsmith 1y ago
I would be astonished if the average non-programmer knows what "UTC" means.
- Retr0id 1y ago
  Surely anyone who has ever had to coordinate across timezones is aware of UTC?
  - peterfirefly 1y ago
    No. The best you get is people having a vague notion of GMT.
    - Retr0id 1y ago
      From the layperson perspective, I'd say GMT is basically the same thing
    - arrowsmith 1y ago
      And British people reliably say "GMT" to mean "the current time in the UK", even when those aren't the same thing. (The UK is on BST for half the year, including right now.) Which of course is the same mistake as the PDT/PST thing that sparked this whole thread.
  - layer8 1y ago
    Anyone who had to coordinate across timezones "knows" that there is no shared standard time.
- tialaramex 1y ago
  You mean specifically? Sure, I can well believe that even most programmers have no idea what's going on because it's very crazy, you need to know about TAI and UT1 and that they by definition can't be aligned but we insisted on fudging it anyway. But as to the more general sense that there's presumably some single global time, I actually expect that's common knowledge, you don't need to have thought about the details and realised how complicated it would be for this idea to be attractive. If anything I expect most people misunderstand from the wrong direction - they'd be surprised there isn't universal time because the general population grasp of relativity is too weak for them to see why it would be nonsense. I would guess lots of the world population thinks of this single global time as GMT, the predecessor of UTC, but that's only like people thinking of SSL when they actually mean TLS, no big deal.
  - layer8 1y ago
    > But as to the more general sense that there's presumably some single global time, I actually expect that's common knowledge It surely isn't, because, well, everyone knows the time is different around the world and hence there's no global time.
    - tialaramex 1y ago
      Locally my source would be biased because of course I live in a country where the time actually is called GMT for half the year, so from their point of view what's going on is that there is global time and it's their time. History of imperialism you know, that's why there's so much of other people's stuff in our museums. If there really wasn't global time, this couldn't work, time zones, all of that jazz won't work if you have a system where relativity matters, for example enormous variation in height above sea level, a particularly enormous planet or very fast spin. Or if your perceptual scales are very different, but for us, here, there is global time.
    - esafak 1y ago
      It doesn't mean we can provide them with sound defaults just because they don't know.
  - 1y ago
- sgarland 1y ago
  OK, but this was from Twitter.
EasyMark 1y ago
I wish I could beat this into my team. We're mostly good now but every now and then it comes up. I do allow UTC offset if it's included in the timestamp, but sometimes it's dead obvious the time is off by our local offset but not reported as such.

mentalgear 1y ago

It's a show of their cultural professionalism/.

jcranmer 1y ago

> No, I don't think they were intending to speak from the perspective of Arizona or Hawaii, the only parts of the US that use PST but do not observe DST. Arizona is on year-round MST, Hawaii on year-round HST. Also, American Samoa is year-round SST, Guam and the Northern Marianas are in year-round CHST, and Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands are in year-round AST. (If you're keeping track, yes, all of the US territories do not use DST.) Indiana used to largely observe year-round EST, but the governor changed that several years ago, much to the chagrin of some of the Indianans I know.

sgarland 1y ago
Indiana has one of the most fucked-up TZ delineations in the country. Northwest corner: America/Chicago. Southwest corner: America/Chicago. Everywhere else, including directly North/South of those two quadrants: America/New_York.
- jcranmer 1y ago
  Since you're trying to use IANA time zone names, I don't think any of those are correct time zones for Indiana. The IANA time zones use the definition of "has shared the same clocks since January 1, 1970," which means if a county in Indiana has switched from Eastern to Central (or vice versa) since that point, it gets a new time zone. The Eastern Time Zone portion of Indiana has switched from not observing DST to observing DST, which means it's separate from America/New_York. Per the Wikipedia article, there's 11 IANA time zones in Indiana alone.
  - 0_____0 1y ago
    Reading comments like this bolsters my appreciation for why aviation went "nope, you're just using UTC now. Chicago, Lagos, Doha, Novosibirsk... All UTC, err, Zulu time."
- os2warpman 1y ago
  My family is from Washington County, Indiana. The western-most parts of the Washington county are further west than the easternmost parts of some of the counties that are in America/Chicago. But the center of commerce, information, entertainment, and all other infrastructure for Washington County, Indiana is Louisville, KY (lollvole). Louisville is America/New York. When you make an appointment at UofL Jewish you don't care when the sun rises and sets or when the sun is directly overhead-- you care that the clock on your kitchen wall matches the clock in the doctor's office. Washington County used to be as remote and desolate as you can think of but nowadays it is practically a suburb of Louisville. Farms along 150 are being turned into subdivisions as quickly as farmers can die off so their kids can offload the land. Same thing with the north west part of the state. Chicago suburbs want to be synced up with Chicago. The southwest part of the state, specifically grain elevator operators and other businesses, want to be synced up with the logistics hubs of St. Louis and Nashville. Most of the rest of the state is farms. They don't care and just do what Indianapolis does. I've never understood people who say we have the jacked-up time zones because of farmers. The number of farmers who look at the clock before starting work for the day can be counted on zero fingers. I grew up with "fast time" and "slow time" and once you are accustomed to it, it takes about as much mental effort as blinking. Internet people want things to be orderly. Consistent. Algorithmic. REAL people want to make it to their appointments on time and want the only business serving the area for 150 miles to be open when they call.

computerthings 1y ago

[dead]