3 ms·

I think part of why people's preferences get so different in different sides of a timezone is as much because the hour-wide timezone is too wide. If you asked p

I think part of why people's preferences get so different in different sides of a timezone is as much because the hour-wide timezone is too wide. If you asked people to use a thirty-minute timezone or fifteen-minute timezone agreement would be a lot easier, and a lot easier to match local noon to timezone noon for the most people covered. Of course, there would be just as many arguments against that because people would hate having to learn that many timezones and do that much more timezone math. We finally have the technology to make that easy for a lot of people (phone clocks auto-sync to local time, for instance; most schedules are posted on websites and have computers involved; fewer analog clocks in general remain in the world).

hnlmorg 7mo ago
I do like your optimism but most of modern communication isn’t done via meeting invites from Google / MS Office. I might say to someone on Slack: are you free at 14:00 UK time? Or organise a time on a Zoom call. Because so much of modern technology is already soulless, I’d hate to see a future where the only practical way to organise some time with someone becomes via business productivity suites.
- WorldMaker 7mo ago
  In Discord you have Time tags for things like like "Are you free at <t:unixtimestamp>?". There's a well known tool called Hammertime [1] to make it easy to create those tags and copy/paste them into place. (I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at work.) We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier to use like <mylocaltime:14:00> or <mylocaltime:3/2 2pm>. We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience and date math libraries). Will we? Probably not. Unless we did something wild like move to 15-minute timezones and force ourselves to. [1] https://hammertime.cyou https://hammertime.cyou
  - hnlmorg 7mo ago
    That’s handy. But who’s going to teach the other 98% of the worlds population who don’t use Discord and who aren’t good with technology like us?
  - extraduder_ire 7mo ago
    I've gotten in the habit of giving times in UTC explicitly when talking to people in other timezones. Even if I give a time in another specific timezone. (All of my computers get a world clock with a few locations and UTC) A friend of mine works in a company with employees all over the world for 24hr coverage with handoff meetings where shifts overlap, seeing them do it for call times sold me on the idea.
    - WorldMaker 7mo ago
      It's still possible for the world to adopt something like Swatch Internet Time for coordinating across timezones/"without" timezones. Possible, but probably unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

hnlmorg 7mo ago

I do like your optimism but most of modern communication isn’t done via meeting invites from Google / MS Office. I might say to someone on Slack: are you free at 14:00 UK time? Or organise a time on a Zoom call. Because so much of modern technology is already soulless, I’d hate to see a future where the only practical way to organise some time with someone becomes via business productivity suites.

WorldMaker 7mo ago
In Discord you have Time tags for things like like "Are you free at <t:unixtimestamp>?". There's a well known tool called Hammertime [1] to make it easy to create those tags and copy/paste them into place. (I miss Hammertime sometimes daily when using Slack at work.) We could standardize such tools. We could make them easier to use like <mylocaltime:14:00> or <mylocaltime:3/2 2pm>. We have the technology (decades of date parsing experience and date math libraries). Will we? Probably not. Unless we did something wild like move to 15-minute timezones and force ourselves to. [1] https://hammertime.cyou https://hammertime.cyou
- hnlmorg 7mo ago
  That’s handy. But who’s going to teach the other 98% of the worlds population who don’t use Discord and who aren’t good with technology like us?
- extraduder_ire 7mo ago
  I've gotten in the habit of giving times in UTC explicitly when talking to people in other timezones. Even if I give a time in another specific timezone. (All of my computers get a world clock with a few locations and UTC) A friend of mine works in a company with employees all over the world for 24hr coverage with handoff meetings where shifts overlap, seeing them do it for call times sold me on the idea.
  - WorldMaker 7mo ago
    It's still possible for the world to adopt something like Swatch Internet Time for coordinating across timezones/"without" timezones. Possible, but probably unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time