obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish
Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link, (please forgive me for being lazy and not formatting it correctly)
Abolishing time zones brings many benefits, I hope. It also:
- causes the question “What time is it there?” to be useless/unanswerable
- necessitates significant changes to the way in which normal people talk about time
- convolutes timetables, where present
- means “days” (of the week) are no longer the same as “days”
- complicates both secular and religious law
- is a staggering inconvenience for a minimum of five billion people
- makes it near-impossible to reason about time in other parts of the world
- does not mean everybody gets up at the same time, goes to work at the same time, or goes to bed at the same time
- is not simpler.
As long as humans live in more than one part of the world, solar time is always going to be subjective. Abolishing time zones only exacerbates this problem.
Timezones make intuitive sense for humans
UTC / Unix timestamps make intuitive sense for computers
The issue is bridging the gap
Well, a large part of the issue are all the damn exceptions
Eh, I think the article blows the situation out of proportion. Overall you’re still in the same situation as before. Instead you would just be looking up a timetable of sunrises/sunsets, instead of a timezone chart. It ends up mostly reframing the question from “what time is it there?” to “what time of day is it there?”. The real version of “after abolishing time zones” is “google tells me it is before sunrise there. It’s probably best not to call right now.”
I’ve been using UTC on my own clocks without issue, and the change is not some completely reality-breaking thing - not anymore than DST. From a matter of personal perspective it just shifts what time correlates to what time of day.
using UTC also simplifies the questions “what times can I call you at?” And “when should we have our call?” since you have the same temporal standard. Even before that, I was scheduling calls with family by stating the call would be at such-and-such time UTC.
The biggest difference is with when the date changes, and I think that ultimately is the hardest pill to swallow, and that’s even compared to stomaching the sun rising at 2 AM. Having it change from June 5th to June 6th in the middle of a workweek, or even jumping to another month would bother alot of folks in a significant fashion.
Ultimately it’s just a personal practice. No nation is going to abolish time zones if everyone still uses time zones. I just prefer it for various reasons.
If you want your sunrise to be at 12am, go ahead.
If you really want to fix something. Fix months
Between the two, months is much harder. With time, you just set your clocks to UTC. To get months fixed you need mass adoption, rewriting calendar software, etc.
Bold of you to assume people will agree to having sunrises at 9am while some other country gets the privilege of getting it at the usual 6
You’re upset that it’s sunrise at 06:00 somewhere and not that some other lucky bastard landed sunrise at 00:00?
(that might actually happen over the ocean, I have not checked)
Yeah it’s just being angry about the fact that the Earth is rotating ball. Wanting to abolish timezones is different from Flat Earth only be degrees.
Sure the “what time is it there?” question goes away, but it’s replaced by “what are your business hours?”
Ultimately it will be daytime in one part of the world while it’s night in another part of the world. That will always cause problems.
This is a fantastic write-up, thanks for sharing!
Na let’s keep timezones, there useful for humans who generally want time to mean something, but lets ditch daylight savings time, all it does is make scheduling a massive pain twice a year, and messes up everyone’s sleep cycle. Without it, timezones would just be a fixed offset from another, minimizing trouble.
Timezones are kind of a necessary evil though, because without them then you’d have to check regions (or zones) to see if 1PM in China is the same thing as 1PM in Australia is the same thing as 1PM in Bolivia.
Even then, 1pm in Beijing is something different than 1pm in the Tibet since all of China is technically one time zone.
It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.
Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.
It’s called temporal hour. Many cultures around the world had such a time system. Like in Japan they made clocks and watches that could tell temporal hours called wadokei.
You’ve got make sure you program the time machine correctly though…
and bring enough stolen plutonium when you visit 1955
😄
Timezones are fine to program around.
DST is a bit of a pickle to plan around, but can be done just fine by a computer program.Historical dates; considering leap years, skipped leap years, and times when leap years weren’t a thing or when humanity just decided we skip a bunch of years; are the bane of all that is good.
Proleptic Gregorian Calendar enjoyers
I hear timezone names can also be a slight issue at times, some Australians call the eastern time zone EST. Leap years aren’t so bad at times either though. Kind of agree with the rest of it, much of the complexity is from historical dates.
We call eastern coast time AEST
I know most call it AEST, but there are some who call it EST.
fr i keep saying this and nobody seems to think it’s a good idea.
Fuck timezones, me and my homies operate on UTC.
UTC is timezone too. It has leap seconds. IAT is atomic time. It is perfect.
I say we ditch this nonsense altogether and go back to vague descriptions of the Sun’s position in the sky.
“many moons ago, when the sun was low in the sky…”
Isn’t that UT0?
The title partially answers this.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/gmt-utc-time.html
GMT is a time zone officially used in some European and African countries. The time can be displayed using both the 24-hour format (0 - 24) or the 12-hour format (1 - 12 am/pm).
UTC is not a time zone, but a time standard that is the basis for civil time and time zones worldwide. This means that no country or territory officially uses UTC as a local time.
No it doesn’t. “Time zones around the world are expressed using positive or negative offsets from UTC, as in the list of time zones by UTC offset.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time
Time now in UTC is 10:33, no matter where on the planet you are.
UTC is expressed using positive or negative offset from IAT
That doesn’t mean it’s a timezone
I’d fuck with atomic time, but at that point i want a perfect calendar system also.
UTC has leap seconds to keep it aligned with earth’s rotation. Otherwise all timezones would slowly shift away from having any correlation with solar time. Between UTC and IAT, UTC is the more human-useable and thus better.
The post is about developers.
Ive been using utc personally for over a year and i use it in context of vrchat since it yields one less necessary conversion to other people’s timezones because only the offset is needed (as opposed to memorizing both offsets, which is much harder because of that nasty nasty daylight savings and its weird anomalies) but they still hate it and tell me to use a “normal” timezone lol. I had gotten 1 person to switch. And she since switched back. Shit don’t work in practicality but I’m still gonna use it out of stubbornness
Go play EVE Online. The servers used to have (still, do I think, but shorter) daily downtime that was scheduled using UTC and it led to everyone using UTC since the game server itself used that time.
if i can’t have anything nice, you can’t have anything nice, and only the people who can’t have anything nice will have something nice >:)
There’s dozens of us! Yeah practically it’s almost entirely an aesthetic effect. I’ve kept it that way and haven’t had any problems from it, though.
One of my favorite T-shirts. https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo
(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)
At least most of us don’t need to worry about time dilation caused by relatively yet. Have fun with that, space faring developers.
We kinda do, with GPS satellites that have to correct their clocks due to the effects of gravity and speed
And communication with space probes
It’s only bad when used incorrectly. Just store time in UTC and convert it to timezone of your setting to present it. Most modern languages offer a library that makes it just one more line of code. Not only it’s then clear and unambiguous, it supports all timezones.
Doesn’t always work, especially if you need to work with any sort of calendar or recurring schedule.
Yeah, timestamps should always be stored in UTC, but actual planning of anything needs to be conscious of local time zones, including daylight savings. Coming up with a description of when a place is open in local time might be simple when described in local time but clunkier in UTC when accounting for daylight savings, local holidays, etc.
bingo. Timezones became easier when I learned that all apps and databases should have all times be in UTC. Let the UI do it’s thing and accept local time and convert it, and vis versa.
+1 for this. This is kinda the same issue with encoding, just UTF-8 everything and move on.
The notifications in one of our systems is aligned with UTC because it needs to be for a whole bunch of background services to function. Periodically (every couple of years) someone raises a ticket to complain that the time of their notifications is an hour out, and the 2nd line support worker will think “well that’s easy, I’ll just change the server time to BST”. This then brings this whole suite of applications to a crashing halt as everything fails.
I fucking hate timezones. Whatever it is, I’d rather read the current clock as 4 a.m. even if it’s noon than have timezones.
Only freaks have AM/PM in their time system.
24hr clock supremacy
Well you can. Just switch your clock to UTC and you’re done. You won’t even have DST to deal with.
I’m not a solipsist.
IMO, the biggest problem with timezones is that the people who initially created them were fairly short sighted.
That and there have been way too many changes to who lives in what timezone. The one that boggles my mind is that apparently there’s a country in two timezones, not like, split down the middle or anything, but two active timezones across the entire country depending on which culture you’re a part of, or something. It’s wild.
I still don’t know if there’s any difference between GMT and UTC. I couldn’t find one. They both have the same time, same offset (+0), and represent the same time zone area.
I use UTC because I’m in tech, and I can’t stand time formats, so I exclusively use ISO 8601, with a 24 hour clock. Usually in my local time zone, via UTC. We have DST here which I’m not a fan of, but I have to abide by because everyone else does.
My biggest issues with time and timezones is that everyone uses different standards. It drives me nuts when software doesn’t let me set the standard for how the time and date is displayed, and doesn’t follow the system settings. It’s more common in web apps, but it happens a lot. I put in a lot of effort to try to get everything displaying in a standard format then some crudely written website is just mm/dd/yy with 12h clock and no timezone info, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.
Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.
UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.
What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.
Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.
Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.
Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.
That’s quite the lesson you just laid down.
It’s actually made things a lot more clear for me. To put it as tersely as I can, UTC is the international time, GMT is a timezone, which also happens to be UTC+0.
So GMT is a place/zone/region of earth, and UTC is a time coordination, with no physical location (beyond the prime meridian, which is where it is tracking the time of).
Awesome.
I know people who actively fight me on ISO 8601. They don’t like the way it sorts their files/folders, reliant on whatever behavior the operating system does. Whenever data recovery happens or their files are moved, all the change times are blown out the window and the sorting they expect is blown away.
I’m not yet using a 24-hour clock. But it has me thinking. That’s not such a bad transition for 24-hour local time into UTC. Or just using both. At some point the inconvenience of the local will become vestigial and UTC is what remains.
I use 24h clocks and ISO 8601 dates almost always
Honestly, I’m better at organizing code than I am my actual life
DST
stardate superiority
Worst is UTC vs IAT
