5 ms·

I would be astonished if the average non-programmer knows what "UTC" means.

by arrowsmith 1y ago

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.
- arrowsmith 1y ago
  Yes, everybody obviously knows about time zones. I’m saying that if X had announced that the issue happened at “10am UTC” or whatever, most non-technical people wouldn’t know what time that is.
sgarland 1y ago
OK, but this was from Twitter.

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.
arrowsmith 1y ago
Yes, everybody obviously knows about time zones. I’m saying that if X had announced that the issue happened at “10am UTC” or whatever, most non-technical people wouldn’t know what time that is.

sgarland 1y ago

OK, but this was from Twitter.