Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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Joined 1 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月15日

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  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    11 小时前

    The difference is just another nit pick someone will find excuses to argue over

    No, it isn’t. The scientific research actually suggests that keeping DST is worse than switching back and forth. I have to admit I find that confusing, since a lot of the specific studies I’ve looked at concentrate on the effects caused by the switchover itself, but the meta-analysis doesn’t mince words:

    In summary, the scientific literature strongly argues against the switching between DST and Standard Time and even more so against adopting DST permanently.







  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    13 小时前

    Oh, I see. Yeah I suppose it is, now that you point it out. It comes from:

    • .gov: the US government
    • .nih: the US National Institutes of Health
    • .nlm: the National Library of Medicine
    • .ncbi: the National Center for Biotechnology Information

    But really, I only know it because it’s a very common host that comes up when you’re searching for published research papers. I just see “bunch of Ns .gov” and know it’s reliable.



  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    13 小时前

    Yeah you’re absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I’d usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.

    And when you’re attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It’s in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I’m of the opinion that the distinction between “what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?” and “where does this time sit in relation to their working day?” is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    13 小时前

    I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.

    But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I’ve had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.

    But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.




  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    14 小时前

    You add a whole number of hours and for some a half

    Or three quarters in a few cases.

    And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 “ideal” time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.

    And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.


  • Oh whoops! My mistake! I’ll edit the above comment to fix that. It was Kurzgesagt who was in the wrong.

    The drama was (to copy/paste an earlier comment, because it’s rather lengthy):

    It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.

    K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.

    And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.

    Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.


  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlWorst is UTC vs GMT
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    14 小时前

    Dates and times aren’t that hard—honestly!

    Video is a lecture about how to think about dates and times, through the lens of a specific open source .NET library designed to aid with applying that thinking. It points out how most languages’ standard libraries really work against you, because they conflate different concepts. For example, an Instant (a specific point in time, globally recognised) and a LocalDateTime (a date and time in a way that is irrespective of your location—for example you might want your alarm to wake you at 8:00 am on weekdays, and still do that if you move to a different time zone), a ZonedDateTime (a date and time tied to a specific location—like if you want to say “the meeting starts at 10:00 am Oslo Time”), and an OffsetDateTime (a date and time tied to a specific UTC offset—which is not necessarily the same as a time zone, because “Oslo Time” is a time zone that doesn’t change, but its UTC offset might change if they go in or out of DST, or if a place decides to change, like how Samoa changed from UTC-11 to UTC+13 in 2011.

    These are all subtly different concepts which are useful in different cases, but most libraries force you to use a single poorly-defined “DateTime” class. It’s easier and requires less thought, but is also much more likely to get you into trouble as a result, precisely because of that lack of thought, because it doesn’t let you make a clear distinction about what specifically it is.

    His library is great for this, but it’s very worth thinking about what he’s talking about even if you don’t or can’t use it. As he says in wrapping up:

    You may be stuck using poor frameworks, but you don’t have to be stuck using poor concepts. You can think of the bigger concepts and represent all the bits without having to write your own framework, without having to do all kinds of stuff, just be really, really clear in all your comments and documentation.