Them: GMT, of course.

Me: So that’s 7PM London right now, and changes to 6PM in November?

Them: What no are you stupid. Always 6PM GMT.

Me:* jumps off a cliff*

Sorry, but are you under the impression that GMT means London time, or that it observes British Summer Time?

Reminds me of a LARP I was on one time. A group of people I was doing stuff with ended up always meeting at 10 because we redefined "10" to mean "whenever we all meet".

Don’t get it. Is this implying GMT has daylight savings?

Or requires a timestamp with zone offset, but ignores the zone offset, so you have to send the timestamp itself with a zone offset of zero relative to the systems timezone, but can't just omit the zone offset, because it's required.

When the API returns UTC, but mandates that you give it an offset which it will add or subtract from the UTC time, while still adding the Z at the end.

To be fair, returning the actual timezone (as defined by tz.db) is useful if you don't just want the current time since you'll be able to take DST into account. Not sure how Vienna is -8 though, it should be +1 (or 2 depending on DST).

What you're proposing is literally time zones but without shifting the actual clock, you still end up with all the issues and you remove the link between the hour of day and the sun's position for people lol

Plus who gets to decide that everyone switches over and what is the new global time?

Implementing such a change has another problem: Who gets to have the time-zone that's noon at noon?

Are we going to let the British continue to get away with it? Even the excuse of "that's the way it has to be to keep things simple" would cause the French to revolt. Again. They still don't like to talk about the fact that it's Greenwich and not Paris that's the prime meridian.

Swatch's "Internet time" was a decimal system designed to mitigate the problem because no-one would have any idea what the old time was supposed to be, but people are used to the base-60 system. It didn't and won't catch on.

And it doesn't fix the "0 isn't my midnight" problem, which is pretty close to the original.

It also doesn't fix the "what time of day is it elsewhere in the world" problem, which still requires knowledge of time differences. You know. Time zones.

So organising a meeting for 03:30 has the problem of that not being working hours for some people, and you have to look up what working hours are in each area. What problem is that supposed to solve?

Instead of store hours like this:

• Monday 6:00-18:00
• Tuesday 6:00-18:00
• Wednesday 8:00-18:00
• Thursday 6:00-18:00
• Friday 6:00-18:00

We can have store hours like this:

• Sunday 22:00-Monday 10:00
• Monday 22:00-Tuesday 10:00
• Wednesday 0:00-10:00
• Wednesday 22:00-Thursday 10:00
• Thursday 22:00- Friday 10:00

Boy, I would love to live in a place where store hours would be like this. So convenient.

And I’d love to have the change in the day be sometime in the middle of the day so that “see you tomorrow” means sometime later in the day. Or maybe different areas would use different conventions to refer to the time when the sun is out and most people are doing things and the time when most people are asleep.

It would also be so pleasant and relaxing to visit a new country and constantly have to calculate the country’s time offset in my head. There would probably be an app on my phone that I would constantly look at that would convert the time where I am to the equivalent time I am used to. I won’t have a sense of when meals are or when I should expect stores to be open, or when it’s reasonable to wake up without converting to the time I’m used to. Some might say the thing I’m used to is my time “zone”.

It would also be great for TV shows and books to always run into issues when talking about the time because there’s no universal reference.

Even the actual convenience of scheduling a meeting with people in different parts of the world has issues. Now, you know that whatever time you say is the time for all people. But instead of being able to just look up each person’s time zone and see “oh, it would be 3am there, so they’d be asleep”, you’d have to go to some website that tells you what time most people sleep or what time most people eat meals, or whatever, and see by how many hours it differs.

UTC is better than most, but leap seconds are still awful. Computers should use GPS or TAI everywhere. Dealing with time zones and leap seconds is for human readability and display purposes only.

Store absolute time in something like Epoch (seconds since 1970-01-01) plus local time zone

Sorry, why would you be "boned" if you have UTC time? Are you thinking of the case where the desired behavior is to preserve the local time, rather than the absolute time?

If you use utc here and a time zone definition changes, you’re boned

I'm pretty sure that things like the tz database exist exactly for such a case.

This is absolutely fundamentally wrong. What you've described is what Nodatime calls an Instant, and it's a very important data class, but there are valid reasons to use other classes.

A LocalDateTime cares about the date and time locally. An event scheduled for 8am every Monday might use this. It would update accordingly if you move locations to a new locale.

A ZonedDateTime can almost be directly translated into an Instant, except that one time zone might change. If you go into or out of daylight saving time, or your region decides to change its time offset. Oslo time is still Oslo time. You use this if your event occurs at a specific time in a specific location.

An OffsetDateTime is like a ZonedDateTime, but instead of being tied to a specific time zone (e.g. "Oslo time") it's tied to a specific UTC offset (e.g. UTC+1).

You don't have to use Nodatime, but you should at least think deeply about what your time objects actually represent and what is the best way to represent them.

See the creator of Nodatime's presentation about thinking deeply about time for more.

Well if it's a 32bit timestamp you're screwed after 19 January 2038 (at 03:14:07 UTC)

Why in the ever-loving fuck would it do that? My hatred of Go only continues to grow.

Is '06 the year? What in the crime against humanity...