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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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The only BASED solution is to represent all time as the number of seconds from the beginning of the UNIX epoch.

What time is your party?

Answer: 1734224199.

Seriously, though, I love Donald Trump doing stuff like this. For years (decades?) NPR types have written lazy think pieces calling for the abolition of DST. It's just pure candy for the midwits. And now Trump is going to give it to them, good and hard.

Normally I would expect some loser journalist to write a story with the title "here's why DST is good, actually". But I don't think we will get one. I don't think they even believe their own bullshit anymore.

This would make "there are roughly pi gigaseconds in a century" an actual useful fact.

Vernor Vinge and his metric time, using orders of magnitude. How long is 10^4 seconds? Fifteen minutes less three hours.

Fifteen minutes less three hours

*Three hours less fifteen minutes (imagine "less by")

Also, obligatory reminder that binary is better than decimal

The fact that Unix time is based on UTC, which observes leap seconds, and not TAI, which is monotonic, is IMO a pretty poor decision. It's not "the number of seconds since the epoch", it has weird jumps and skips.

This matters little since leap seconds will be abolished in the medium term and the difference between UTC and TAI will simply be a constant.

And noon will never be noon as UTC drifts away from solar time.

Do views on leap seconds in UTC (among people geeky enough to care) line up with views on DST in ways which reflect the underlying logic of "noon is noon"?

In my experience, the few folks that care about "noon is noon" (say, those aligning telescopes) already aren't using UTC because the second granularity of leap seconds isn't good enough, and the statement is only true for a single meridian within your time zone anyway.

For example, almost all satellite navigation (also used for time synchronization of local clocks) uses monotonic time on the backend.

It won't necessarily drift very much away from solar time.

On 18 November 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) resolved to eliminate leap seconds by or before 2035. The difference between atomic and astronomical time will be allowed to grow to a larger value yet to be determined. A suggested possible future measure would be to let the discrepancy increase to a full minute, which would take 50 to 100 years, and then have the last minute of the day taking two minutes in a "kind of smear" with no discontinuity.

Hey, programmers have to stay employed somehow.

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