• CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      5 months ago

      I talked to a guy that thinks we should just all use Unix Epoch on here once. We’d still need local informal systems to describe the time of day and weekday, but the more I’ve thought about it the less stupid it sounds. Date/time systems are a pain in the ass and necessarily ugly.

      • idegenszavak@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        Shit programmers say…

        The problems of time zones only affect a handful of people, the wast majority of people nearly never think about this.

        Epoch or standard time would just rename time zones, beucause currently you say hour offset from London, with “no timezone” you would have to say something like, noon is at 05:00 utc/epoch at that city, so nothing really changed

        Industries where it actually matters already use UTC for everything, e.g. international flights.

        It would make more sense to switch to base 10 minutes and hours than to “solve” the time zones

        • schnokobaer@feddit.org
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          5 months ago

          Hour. Just a weird way to say 12:00 and 15:00 or 3pm and whatever 12:00 is in am/pm talk

          • samus12345@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            12am is midnight and 12pm is noon. But most people just say “noon” or “midnight” because it’s less confusing.

            • toynbee@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              That is confusing. “PM” is “post meridian” or, as I understand it, after the middle. One would think it wouldn’t be PM until 12:01 or at least 12:00:01.

              Which is why I, as you said, use “noon” and “midnight.”

              • schnokobaer@feddit.org
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                5 months ago

                I can never remember it properly either but when someone reminds me (thanks samus12345) which way around it is it does kind of make sense.

                If you think of 12:00 as literally an infinitesimal slice of time it’s not really possible to give it an am/pm distinction, as it is literally the devider between the two. BUT, in a more real-life approach 12:00 is probably not an infinitesimal slice of time but the minute after a digital clock flipped to 12:00. That can be 12:00:00.00004 or 12:00:30 or 12:00:59.999944. And all those are indisputably pm.