this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
896 points (94.9% liked)

Programmer Humor

32464 readers
205 users here now

Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

peak colonial baggage

I get the thought, but wouldn't changing it just end up performative?

I think changing the date system from AD/BC to CE/BCE is peak performative, and that's coming from me as an atheist. We still use the same years based on the mistaken belief of when the Christ was born.

Where would we change UTC to be? Best place I could think of is where the current International date line is in the middle of the Pacific but that area is already a clusterfuck of zig zagging not that current UTC 0 is much better. And then, what do we call it? Do we keep UTC because it was a compromise between English and French speakers? Should we go with Mandarin Chinese since that is the most widely spoken language natively in the world? But there is plenty of colonialism within Chinese history of the Han people versus all other Chinese ethnicities and languages. Or English because it is the most widely spoken language when adding first and additionally spoken languages (definitely colonialism there)?

I'd sincerely love to know your thoughts on this. I've pondered it before and couldn't come up with a good change besides using an artificially made language like Esperanto but that comes with a whole host of other issues.

[–] Morphit@feddit.uk 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

wouldn’t changing it just end up performative

Exactly. Sidereal time does get rid of time zones and leap years, but it's still referenced to a single physical object and relies on a arbitrary choice of start point. So it doesn't create some perfect cosmic time standard.

The international date line doesn't help since that's just 180° offset from Greenwich itself.

The point of standards is that they can be followed by everyone. The AD/BC epoch is fine. The Greenwich meridian is fine. UTC is fine. Changing them would cause so much disruption that it cannot be worth it.

Daylight savings can go die in a ditch though.

[–] DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 4 months ago

"Daylight savings biting curb at 4k" as the kids would say.