Australia/Lord_Howe is 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.

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.

To me, one of the key framing ideas that almost all dates/times are actually a set of matching-rules that you are monitoring for. You can guess how many seconds will elapse until the match triggers, but you can't be totally sure [0] until it happens, and in some cases it will never quite happen at all. [1]

Then the second half is often to reverse your "I think it will happen X seconds from now" delta-guess into "I'm also guessing that your timezone's clocks will say Y when it happens."

Just don't forget to keep track of which timezones is controlling the event versus which timezones it is being displayed in. ____

[1] Your UTC estimate might occur plus or minus leap seconds. TAI is safer, unless somebody discovers something exciting and new that changes the behavior of cesium atoms.

[0] Such as if the time zone vanishes because the country is gone. Or perhaps the 1:30 to 2:00 thing couldn't exactly happen because the clocks went forward from 1:00 to 2:00 with a missing hour.

Agreed, and the humor is restrained. Often there are posts (which tend to also have an annoying amount of gifs) which just overdo it. But here it’s neatly used to lighten the writing.

Nice morning reading