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   myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:23 JST myrmepropagandist

   Why do time zones and daylight savings jump by full hours? This is madness and it leads to unnecessary human suffering. With the power of mathematics and quadratic/sinusoidal regressions we shall heal this harm. Let time be a continuous function. Let timezones change by micro seconds as you move over the earth. Let us creep forward over weeks, no more “spring forward”! We shall seep back— never falling.

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     BluRae (blurae@artisan.chat)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:21 JST BluRae

     in reply to

     • Rufus J. Cooter

     @RufusJCooter @futurebird It becomes an International Date Gradient! Is it tomorrow here? Yesterday? Kind of!

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     Rufus J. Cooter (rufusjcooter@mstdn.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:22 JST Rufus J. Cooter

     in reply to

     @futurebird I like it! One ? tho': what do we do about the international date line?

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     Queen of New York (queenofnewyork@newsie.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:25 JST Queen of New York

     in reply to

     @futurebird As a programmer, I hate and love this. :)

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     Bujold (bujold@dice.camp)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:31 JST Bujold

     in reply to

     @futurebird There's this Tom Scott video where he spends ten minutes explaining all the weird edge cases that make writing code involving dates and times such a nightmare. If your idea came to pass and he wanted to update the video, it'd probably be ten full minutes of screaming in horror and despair at the camera

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     myrmepropagandist (futurebird@sauropods.win)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:33 JST myrmepropagandist

     in reply to

     • Bujold

     @bujold I’m kinda in to that tho.

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     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:35 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • Bujold

     @bujold @futurebird

     If Homo sapiens was an intelligent species, it would have long junked UTC for ATI -- which is the same date/time calendar, except for the leap seconds.

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     Bujold (bujold@dice.camp)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:35 JST Bujold

     in reply to

     • Jorge Stolfi

     @JorgeStolfi @futurebird Boy do I have some good news for you: https://phys.org/news/2022-11-global-timekeepers-vote-scrap.html

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     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:36 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • Bujold

     @bujold @futurebird

     >> so as to keep UTC 12:00:00 close to their meridian crossing.

     But those leap seconds are irregular and unpredictable. Computers must keep a table to know which days had "23:59:60" showing on the clock, and which days jumped from "23:59:58" straight to "00:00:00". A table that must be updated whenever the IAU decides to add another one of those crocks.

     The leap seconds make it impossible to compute a date N seconds in the future.. >>

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     Jorge Stolfi (jorgestolfi@mas.to)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:37 JST Jorge Stolfi

     in reply to

     • Bujold

     @bujold @futurebird

     UTC is one of those egregious screw-ups that only an international committee can make.

     The powdered wigs at the Greeenwich Observatory were adamant that "noon" should be when the sun crossed their petty little meridian. But once the second came to be defined by atomic clocks, the irregular rotation of the Earth made that event wander by several seconds away from atomic 12:00:00. So the wigs convinced the IAU to insert or remove "leap seconds" in some days >>

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     Patrick Lam :tinoflag: (va2lam@mastodon.nz)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:47 JST Patrick Lam :tinoflag:

     in reply to

     @futurebird I just found out about the old Japanese clock. Always six hours of day and six hours of night. Hour length varied.

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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:48 JST clacke

     in reply to

     • notsoloud
     @notsoloud @futurebird The difference is if you do it over 24 hours or over a year.
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     notsoloud (notsoloud@expressional.social)'s status on Sunday, 26-Mar-2023 22:11:49 JST notsoloud

     in reply to

     @futurebird
     Your idea was implemented for the leap second: The Google leap smear.

     Instead of handling leap seconds in all their code, Google had their time servers fall half a second behind slowly over 12 hours. Then after the leap second, they were ahead by a half sec, which they caught up to over the next 12 hours. That way they kept all their servers in sync without the dreaded step change, and apart for 24 hours (+a second), also in sync with everyone else.

     http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2013/04/23/leap-smear/