fogbound.net




Sun, 6 Nov 2022

Daylight Savings / Standard Time

— SjG @ 8:13 pm

We’re all sick of switching the clocks. We’re all tired of the argument over whether it’s better to wake up or go home in the dark during the winter months. I propose we chuck it all. Instead, we can each declare our own time zone.

For me, 6:45AM will be defined as the moment the sun rises. All my clocks will be calibrated on that basis.

You can declare your own time zone. You could choose to be UTC minus 7 hours, say. So how would we ever agree on a time to do anything?

Naturally, technology comes to the rescue as it does in all possible things. Each personal time zone will have associated with it a 64-bit number; the first 32 bits will map to the algorithm in use (sunrise/set, offset of UTC, etc.), and the second 32 bits will be data (e.g., coordinates and minutes after sunrise or hours offset). When scheduling with another person, one will merely say something like “let’s meet at 9AM 62c8179014da91e0042e74adc5e21485808faa6c” to which they’ll reply “oh, ok, that’s around 7:45AM 06d7c6a02a43c7d42dc67ac53874228209a349dc for me.”

Naturally, all of our phones, virtual assistants, and other devices will implement one version or another of this system. I can already foresee that the NIST standard will be implemented with proprietary extensions by Apple, and Android devices will support NIST standard 1.5 in a non-backwards-compatible way. Microsoft, of course, will license the Apple extensions, but only support about 30% of them.

Because of the beautiful and elegant simplicity of this system, programmers will no longer be driven to drink by the idea of time zones or daylight savings time. Instead, they will rejoice, download the libraries from GitHub, and everything will fall apart splendidly.

Filed in:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.