Programmer Humor

Why... why is the world like this?

Based on a completely superficial review there are three almost guaranteed ways to become unhinged; studying infinities, refactoring legacy code, and working with timezones.

go to bed at 2pm and get up at 10pm

While we are making reasonable demands, stop using 12 hour time. Sincerely, everyone else.

No

Those that propose moving to UTC should take responsibility and take the +12h offset. Why should we let the brits enjoy +0 offset while the rest of the world got the short end of the stick (especially those living in the pacific)?

If it makes a dev’s life easier there’s no reason not to upend half the planet.

Why switch? It's not too complicated a concept for the average person to understand and deal with. In fact, it's intuitive. Sure in software the logic has a few nuances that are a bit complex when needing to deal with local time and timezones, but that's why we make the computers do the tricky work.

Because it makes getting an intuitive sense of what solar time it is somewhere harder.

Can I call my grandma in a different country? Hmm what time is average midnight there. Okay 8 (so far, same thing as looking up a timezone), and it's 18:00 now, so 10 hours after midnight, which is like my 23:00. Needlessly complicated with extra steps for the average person.

Sure, you can say, I'll call you X and that will mean the same thing everywhere, but does not have any information about solar time. And these days, it's automatically converted if you use a calendar (which you should). This is the point of programming, to make the USERS life easier, not the dev. The end is more important than the means, I think we can agree.

Or: what time is it where my grandma is? Okay, cool, I have a sense of what that is immediately after knowing the answer.

There are reasons we do things this way. Working roughly to solar times has more benefits than being able to say a time and it mean the same moment everywhere.

I say we leave things the way they are, works okay.

Except the length of a second is different on the moon because of relativity. So even utc is wrong.

So, in this case a moon timezone, and more generally a "space timekeeping framework" makes sense because time actually moves at a different speed on the moon, so epoch times wouldn't actually stay in sync.
If the goal of "time" is to make it easier to reason about simultaneous things, then space makes that way more complicated.
It's just tricky to condense that into a headline that conveys the point.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11150

As in, it is perpetually 4:20 PM on the moon?

In the military that’s all we used. It’s called Zulu time in the Army and it makes for coordinating events in multiple time zones fairly easy. I would assume the moon would be the same since there will 100% be a moon base with military.

That's actually what they're doing. The reporting said timezone when the actual order is more about time standards.

They're creating coordinated lunar time, as a complement to coordinated universal time, so it's a different time system with details about how it relates to UTC.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Celestial-Time-Standardization-Policy.pdf

Timezones on the moon don't serve as much function, because the day/night cycle is closer to a month long, and doesn't map to human rhythms at all. In a hypothetical where we have moon colonies on opposite sides of the moon, there's no reason for them to not still have synchronized day/night, since it already has no relation to the movement of the sun in the lunar sky.

Adds moonlight savings

No, the moon's rotation isn't on a 24-hour cycle. I'm not an astronomer, but I pretty sure since it's tidally locked to earth and on a 28-day cycle around the earth, a lunar day is actually 28 Earth days, but I'm not actually sure how that would factor into the number of time zones (I'm pretty sure it would be more complicated than just 24 time zones to match 24 time zones on earth, though).

Plus, I think the speed of the moon relative to the sun is different enough from Earth that you need to take relativity into effect, which is the real headache here.