this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Which only works when timezones exist. Without timezones, the question would need to be "what time of day is it in ?", and you'd get "morning" or "afternoon". Any answer to that question is inherently more fuzzy than 8:25 or 17:16.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

What time is it in Melbourne?

"The Standard Time is 4:05. The time of day is equivalent to 14:15 in your location."

Wasn't that hard to solve. And it's actually more precise, since it incorporates the changing times of sunrise and sundown.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

oh so now we're right back around at time zones again, wonderful.

except now it's even more fun because there is zero standardization at all, but users are still going to expect for their computing devices to tell them a time that makes sense. Ah, but culture X thinks the day starts "6 hours before sunrise" and culture Y is more "the day starts when the sun is halfway between sunset and sunrise" and culture Z thinks something even more insane. Oops, now we've got locale-based time zones. Locale awareness is honestly even worse than time zones because its just so damn unexpected at times. My own computer has a horrifying mix of US and Europe locale settings, and that is already crazy enough.

stupid people will always think everything is just so simple.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

oh so now we’re right back around at time zones again, wonderful.

Pretty much. Shows how it wouldn't actually help a lot. It's making one thing simpler while making other things more complex. It's interesting to think about new problems it would bring and how would they be dealt with. And how much worse the solutions would be than the current problems.