This is always a fun discussion, as the reality is the local time makes enough sense for people to just use it. Having to deal with times across the globe is the anomaly, not the norm. Such that it is unsurprising that it is difficult to do.<p>Even more amusing, the time being fixed length days is definitionally not the norm. Is why the Pacific Northwest is miserable right now. Sun is barely up by 8, and largely down by 5 in the evening. Moving the agreed offset for when we should be awake, as we will do in a couple of weeks, does little to help.<p>And I want to double down on how I worded that. I often see it proposed that we should all move to UTC or some such, but just change when working hours are. But, largely, that is exactly what daylight saving's time is. Yes, it is couched in silly phrasing of "saving daylight," but it is functionally the same as everyone agreeing to move school hours by an hour.<p>I will also double down on my silliest of hot takes. With computers in control of most clocks, I think the problem with DST is that it moves everything by an hour. We could, with today's technology, move to something where the clock moves +10 minutes for 6 months and then -10 minutes for 6 months every year and nobody would even really notice.
> In 1900 this dataset of 282 named timezones indicated 220 different offsets (from UTC), and while some of these were integers, (e.g. Europe/Prague, Europe/Rome), the majority were not - for example Moscow was 2 hours, 30 minutes and 17 seconds ahead.<p>Moscow changed after that to 2 hours, 31 minutes and 19 seconds for a few years before aligning with a ‘whole hour’ timezone. Fascinating - thanks for sharing!
I just had a huge and surreal argument with Google's Gemini about the current time in other time zones.<p>It was Sunday, 10/13. I asked what time it was in London:<p><pre><code> It is currently 1:39 PM MST. As GMT timezone is 7 hours behind MST, the current time in London is 6:39 AM GMT on Sunday, October 13, 2024.
</code></pre>
Well, no, it's not.<p>So I started grilling it on simple math ("What is 13:39 plus seven hours") and the real offsets of the time zones, and it would respond correctly, and then I'd ask for the current time again, it'd apologize profusely, and give me some B.S. calculations right on the same line!<p>I started inquiries about other places, like NZ and across the International Date Line, and it was spectacularly wrong. Some places like PDT it was OK. And it was repeatedly getting tripped up and apologizing and immediately supplying the wrong info again.<p>I was not trying to trick it; I was not going into ambiguous situations or half-hour zones. My locale doesn't observe DST, but it was clearly adapting for MST vs. DST zones.<p>The other comical thing was that Gemini would sometimes refuse outright to give the current time, referring me to other methods, as if there were some security blocks on that query. But only sometimes!<p>I simply must conclude that time zones are one of the most difficult programming problems. And I don't know how LLMs do time/date calculations. But Gemini clearly has a long way to go from these simple math confabulations!
My favorite video about the madness of timezones: <a href="https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY</a>. Many great examples, but the one that blows my mind is Israelis and Palestinians living in West Bank observing different timezones in the same geographic location.
Needs a 2021 in the title. I was curious if it took into account the controversial changes in the tzdb from 2021 <a href="https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/28/time_zone_database_controversy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/28/time_zone_database_co...</a> since those would have changed the pre-1970 data.<p>But the visualisation was made around Jul 2021, so it avoids those changes (but also the more recent ones): <a href="https://github.com/colineberhardt/timezone-viz">https://github.com/colineberhardt/timezone-viz</a>
we are getting a moon time zone, maybe, eventually, requires international agreement so maybe never<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243405460/space-news-moon-nasa-time-zone-white-house" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/2024/04/09/1243405460/space-news-moon-na...</a>
Discussed at the time:<p><i>Exploring 120 Years of Timezones</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28537438">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28537438</a> - Sept 2021 (9 comments)