11–20 of 466 posts
So this is a thing: I caught the Snake emoji behaving differently in some code because it was coded one thing before #celebrity-thing, and the opposite months later. Snake Emoji Kanye vibes are the weirdest timezone.
I love time/date problems. One of the best references on the subject of calendars is "Standard C Date/Time Library: Programming the World's Calendars and Clocks" by Lance Latham. He really goes into a lot of detail on various calendaring systems, some really cooky, https://amzn.to/4hjv5L3 BTW. A long, informative post without a single mention of AI. A rare thing these days.
Reminds me of when Tom Scott descended into madness at trying to account for time zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
It is not because most of the world do summer time and that when they do they have a 1h transitions that we should take it for granted.
This article do not mention the Chatham Standard Time Zone from Chatham Islands archipelago in NZ which is 45 minutes ahead of New Zealand Daylight Time, nor the Central Western Standard Time (Australia/Eucla). Also wikipedia mention there is a "train timezone" for the Indian Pacific train. I wonder if other trains have a dedicated timezone?
Without any additional update to the tz database, all annual transitions are assumed to continue indefinitely. So TZif version 1 would repeat transitions up to January 2038 (i.e. the end of signed 32-bit time_t), while version 2 or later would keep them for the compatibility (see the section 4 of RFC 8536) but also include the algorithmic description in the footer for later dates.
Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm).
But I do agree with leap seconds: it's absolute trivia, not a useful thing for a programmer to know. Your computer smears them and you don't even know when they happened. You could completely forget them. Except that countries transitioned from ignoring leap seconds to considering them, so the switch in Australia from "GMT+x" to "UTC+x" a couple of decades ago was the transition from ignoring leap seconds to incorporating them. The fact that this is almost universally ignored is probably for the better.
Timezones are fun...