But still write dates wrong
Year-Month-Day is the only way. It’s chronological!
day should be first because it’s the one that changes the most often and we read left to right.
People be hatin but I agree. in instances where the only goal is for a human to read the date, dd-mm-yyyy or even dd mmm(m) yyyy are better UX.
sorting will be difficult then
use YYYY MM DD in the backend then.
Next you’re going to suggest that 2000 should come immediately after 1000 (instead of 1001) because we read left-to-right.
Putting the year first makes archiving easier. Your computer literally puts everything in order that way. Day first, and it will be sorted by the most frequently changing element.
Also year first allows you to timestamp your files, so they are sorted by what time you created them that day.
Sorting by day, at the end of the year you’ll have files from the first day of each month grouped together, then the second day, and so on. Still searchable, but not as orderly.
yea but I was talking in the context of a clock. for the uses you described YYYY MM DD is obviously better
And rhymes
While you’re at it, switch over to DD/MM/YYYY for the date format. The only 2 configurations that make sense is that or YYYY/MM/DD. Either go general to specific or specific to general, MM/DD/YYYY makes no sense.
No, switch to ISO8601
Bonus benefit - files starting with ISO dates sort alphabetically 🧠
Overly strict for anything day to day, overly permissive for anything important.
RFC 3339 is where it’s at.TIL.
For purposes of this post though, RFC 3339 and ISO8601 are identical. Dates in the format YYYY-MM-DD, so 2024-08-29 is both RFC3339 and ISO8601 compliant.
Not an expert, just spent around 2 minutes looking at https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/
Where
Months are the craziest, weirdest, stupidest measure humanity has used for this long. ISO8601 week dates make more sense, or even the French Revolutionary Calendar. Humans organize all of society by weeks, not by months. Compare last January to next January, or last February to next February for metrics. Do they have the same number of weekdays vs weekend days? Even if they do, do they happen at the same point in the month so you can compare the flow of the month? Now compare two weeks, and that’s apples to apples. Group by weeks instead of months and your irregular, bumpy graph smooths right out. We only hang on to Gregorian months out of inertia.
Months are one of the best ways for a low-tech/pre-tech culture to keep track of dates (using the Zodiac for something it can actually do—act as a calendar you can see no matter where you are in the world).
Keeping them around is a sensible fail-safe in case some nuclear power sets us back into the dark ages.
If that were true, intercalary months shouldn’t have been necessary.
I’m pretty sure that “oh, shoot, things got wonky… toss a 13th month in here real quick” is due to people trying to force months to fit weeks.
It’s the opposite of what I was saying about the role that months play in timekeeping & how they work.
ALSO, the same can be said for weeks & leap days… so if it’s a point against months, it’s just as much a point against weeks.
DD/MM/YYYY is absolutely crazy. There is only one format that makes sense.
Just draw the triangle the other way for DD/MM/YYYY. It makes sense that people want to know the day first, that is the most important part tbh
Just draw it wrong and it will make sense!
No, the most important part is having a standard to conform to that makes sense, like ISO 8601…
It makes sense because of the way we say the date - eg today is November 21st, 1999. We don’t usually say it’s the 21st of November in conversation.
Eta: I wasn’t giving any value statement for the date order lol. Just explaining the rationale for why the date is written in that order - that’s how people talk. If linguistics as a concept bothers you, well… that’s on you.
Try this…
"What date is it today? "
“Today is the 31st”
“31st of what?”
“The 31st of August”
“…?”
“Today is Saturday the 31st of August, 2024”
Etc.
See. It works even more so
“Today is Saturday the 31st of August, 2024”
No one says that in the US like that lol. Like say that sentence out loud, that’s so long and exhausting and stilted for no reason. If my friend said the date to me like that, i would think they were upset about something or being weird. We’d automatically switch it over and say “August 31st, 2024,” or even “8/31/24” because when people ask for the date while writing a check, for instance, they are going to write it numerically anyway.
Idk what’s the point of your argument. To gaslight me in how everyday Americans talk?
“31st of what?”
You had to invite the other speaker in this scenario to mirror your format before they’d actually imitate the stilted way of saying “31st of August.” Not even in your fantasies do Americans talk like that naturally.
I’m not even saying we SHOULD keep it that way - it makes things confusing at times. Just that common use has kept it ordered this way.
In Europe, we do say 31st August. Want gaslighting, just giving examples.
Alright, that’s fine. Just not commonly said in US.
I wouldn’t even notice it as unusual, even though it isn’t my usual order. It could vary by region or profession, or maybe it’s just you that notices it this acutely. In plain English emails and other narrative text, I always use “Sat Aug 31” (adding the year only when ambiguous), which is short but complete, and includes the day of the week, which is much more important to humans than the month anyway.
Are you just completely ignorant to the subject of linguistics?
I love that Lemmy dinguses are downvoting you for being completely rational and normal.
Story of my account. These words exist as a monument of spite
Other countries do
Sure, other countries do and that’s fine too. I’m not saying it’s good or bad or placing any value on it because it’s not that big of a deal to me. And I used to regularly deal with this because I’d write dates for official international paperwork pretty often.
I’m simply saying the reason we order our dates the way we do, and are resistant en masse to changing it, has to do with the way we say the date and so it makes the most sense to the general public to write as we speak. I literally don’t care how the date is written because I can and have done both. I’m not prescribing action here either.
Well bully for them. They aren’t 'Murica, and you can’t make us do anything we don’t want to!
/s but not really. It’s far too accurate for far too many of my countrymen
Here in the UK we would say “I will visit you on the 19th of September” for example. I have never heard anyone say the month first. It’s just different custom. We also drive on the other side of the road…! At the beginning it would have been helpful if the world would have agreed on a standard either way. Then it would stop confusion. (And less car accidents from people on holiday/vacation on the wrong side of the road! 😅
Right, we’d automatically just say September 19th here.
It’s also why we say September 11th, and why “4th of July” is said the way it is - it’s a special day so it gets ordered differently to draw attention to it and to make it appear like a more formal holiday, since saying Day of Month is considered a more formal way of speaking here. Juneteenth also follows the Month/Day naming scheme.
Yeah linguistics are interesting for sure!
Hate to point this out, but the fact there is a “C” on the sign kinda shows that no America did not adopt the metric system. If the US did there would be no reason to have “F” or “C” by the degrees as they are the last hold out.
No, even if you only had one unit for a physical quantity, you would still need to specify that unit to know which physical quantity you are describing. E.g. “That object over there is 15” vs “That object over there is 15 kg”.
The symbol for temperature, measured in Celsius, is “°C”. It’s atomic and can’t be separated, since that would result in °, which represents the angle of something, not the temperature, and C, which is the symbol for Coulomb, which measures electric charge.
In the reference picture of this clock the degree symbol does that. This is something you can see outside of the US on almost all temp readings, my phone for example does not have F or C next to it. (It is still in Celsius since I am not a monster)
I disagree, and would argue that both are about equally frequent. For example, my phone shows °C in the weather widget, while the weather app only uses °. That does not change the fact that the actual unit is °C, and that would not change even if the whole world switched away from °F, and your original comment about the display having °C implying that °F still exists is therefore incorrect.
I think our whole timeline spans from some Romulan plot about something involving handing a compilation of Federation history to some weird guy… What was his name? Gene Roddenberry?
Bullshit. ISO 8601 IS THE SUPERIOR DATE STANDARD
Tomorrow is 2024-08-30. DEAL WITH IT.Stardate, 2024-08-30T06:34:17.993Z
1725020287 is the true time as of right now
Hilariously, Star treks “stardates” are not uniform. The format shifts season to season and show to show.
It’s standardized now
Metric is about measurements, not formatting. The date measurement is in days, months, and years for both ISO 8601 and what’s shown.
I always prefer it without the dashes. And just add on HHMMSS while we’re at it!
This is the ideal file date format for sure.
That’s crap. Kelvin is the only true metric temperature measurement.
I wish.
Just start being that pedantic asshole that people hate, and insist on using it. When someone asks what the temperature is, give it to em in c and make them do the conversion.
I set all my stuff to metric years ago and use it pretty much exclusively. I don’t actually make other people convert, I do it for em. But still.
I’ve been doing that. I’m noticing it working. People around me may not like it, but they’ve figured out about how much a meter is
It works pretty good, and you eventually you figure out which of your friends don’t actually like you! Lmao
Also state your height in cm.
Us metric people usually say it in meters. I’m one meter 86.
Leave off the word “metre” and it doesn’t matter whether you’re using metres or cm. You’re “one eighty-six”. Is that a lazy way of saying “one [hundred and] eighty-six”, quite common when talking about numbers in the hundreds, or the lazy way of saying “one [metre] eighty-six [centimetres]”, a common shorthand similar to shortening “six [feet] five [inches]”? The answer is it doesn’t matter!
I’m American and that’s how I’ve started giving my height. I’m 191.
Unless you’re reaaaally small
I’m one eighty six… kilometers!
I use metric temperature when I talk to my kids. Now they give me a hard time when I give them a Fahrenheit value! Keeps me honest I guess. I’ve also got my oldest using a 24 hour clock.
I never understood why people get their panties in a twist when I use 24h times. I get that it’s confusing if I drop the colon and just write 1854, but 18:54 isn’t that hard to figure out, is it?
Edit: Corrected 25h to 24h, thanks to MindTraveller for
mockingpointing out my errorI’m never going to get used to twenty five hour times.
Fuck, I missed that typo
Temperature was the first thing that really clicked for me, and the only one I never have to think about to translate, I just “know” what the temperature is both. I learned it by thinking of it as percentages. 0 is freezing, 0% of boiling. 100 is boiling, 100% of boiling. Lol. 30-40% of boiling is hot, and pretty good for a bath. Haha
Cook in metric and use a scale!
wait you don’t use scales when cooking???
Yeah, it’s sort of rare outside of, like, foodies and and YouTubers to use weight for cooking. We switched to it about a decade back, and it’s been amazing. That’s actually what got me to switch to metric for just about everything.
From what I can tell Americans used to use scales for dry measures (in ounces) but somewhere along the line, they switched to volume measures for everything.
As a Canadian, it’s really frustrating because often will get the American versions of UK cookbooks here which are both not metric and not weights.
I enjoy my Australian cookbooks with metric weights.
Bake in metric and rejoice when recipes actually work!
This was something I found strange in the new Alien: Romulus film, why were the temperature readings in a science vessel for a space faring civilisation in Fahrenheit!?
I’m with the whole ‘metric is better crowd’, I mean base 10, c’mon that makes shit easy. On the other hand, I prefer Fahrenheit for temp 100%, Celsius is just not good for it (personal preference I guess). A lot of that is probably due to growing up in the USA, but having lived in a few other countries I just prefer Fahrenheit.
Edit: dang ya’ll, didn’t mean to cause all the drama, I’ll calm down now… I guess personal preferences get taken as personal attacks sometimes lol
Quick Celsius breakdown from a Canadian:
- 40+ - most Canadians stop eating food and hope for a quick death
- 35 - you might just be able to live with this if you do nothing at all
- 28 - right about the place where comfort gives way to a general sense of warmth, something that makes any Canadian uncomfortable
- 23 - room temperature, and why “room temperature IQ” is an insult only Americans could have come up with because their scale was made by a madman
- 15 - If it’s Autumn you are wearing a light jacket, if it’s Spring you are sweating
- 5 - sweater time
- 0 to -10 - that stereotypical TV winter experience, where everyone is skating and sipping hot chocolate? Yeah that’s like half the year here. You better like hot chocolate.
- -15 - We enjoy the fresh air, others will probably find it painful to breathe directly; put on a scarf! Do not brush your teeth immediately before going outside unless you want to experience mint-flavoured pain.
- -20 - Canadians put their boots on by now. Exposed skin on a windy day can get frostbite in as little as 10 minutes.
- -30 - We will debate putting a coat on to put the garbage out at this temperature, usually erring on the side of caution in case your kids lock you outside again. Seriously invest in good winter gear for this, this temperature can kill surprisingly fast and it only gets increasingly unpleasant from here.
- -40 - turns out you can’t form snowballs in hell because the snow is too crispy
@CancerMancer
Very much depends on both the humidex and wind chill. Basically, it’s the ‘feels like’ temperature that matters rather than the literal one.I live in one of the more humid areas of Canada and when people tell you it can’t get humid when it’s that cold I wonder if they’ve ever experienced how the cold can just cut right through your clothes.
Summer humidity is absolutely the worst though, and people die here every year because of it.
@CancerMancer
I spent my summers in Toronto growing up, but never experienced a Toronto winter until I moved there. I’d experienced –40 in Edmonton. But I’d never experienced –10 in Toronto!
@CancerMancer @ITGuyLevi Also, at -20 C, your nose hairs freeze and you can feel it. You /are/breathing through your nose at this tempeeature right? You don’t want the rest of your airways to freeze.
@CancerMancer @ITGuyLevi i once went on a TV shoot near Winnipeg with a reporter who thought it pretty funny that i was wearing a hat when it was only -20 and windy
The increased measurement in the Fahrenheit scale allows for more precise representation of the temperature between humans.
Whole numbers and a larger scale for human ranges.
That said, the same thing can be done with metric by using the magical
decimal, though idk if I’ve ever seen a temperature in C related that way.What? 1 °C is absolutely a fine enough stepping for everything the average human will want to convey about temperature.
Some people actually think they can tell the difference between 70 and 72 Fahrenheit and those people could save a lot of money on medications by switching entirely to placebos for everything.
That said, the same thing can be done with metric by using the magical decimal, though idk if I’ve ever seen a temperature in C related that way.
People using Celsius that ever cared that temperatures didn’t add decimals for increased precision in weather reports, please raise your hand.
👋
Having grown up with Fahrenheit there is a difference between 78 degrees (26ish) and 80 (still 26ish)
The increased granularity for human ranges actually is noticeable.
If you think I’m advocating for Standard over Metric than you’ve wholly misunderstood me.
The metric SYSTEM is hands down the better of the two.
There is a difference. Does it matter? Eeeeh…
78 F is 25 C and 80 F is 26 C.
Just saying “ish” doesn’t suddenly make them the same. In C they are different numbers.
For weather prediction it usually isn’t that accurate anyway, and varies over time and location a lot.
For the thermostat it does matter, but usually you can set these in steps of 0.5°C. Mine reports back in 0.1°C steps.
They all keep dying in Alien films though, so it tracks with the level of incompetence shown elsewhere.
August 30 would be 30.08.2024.
Nope, 2024-08-30
This is the only rational order, descending in order of magnitude.
How do you abbreviate a date in YYYY/MM/DD format?
In the DD/MM/YYYY format I can tell someone I am available to meet on 26/07; the year is known contextually as it only changes once a year.
If I start to tell people I am available 26/07 am I available for all of July in 2026?
07-26, surely?
YY/MM/DD or casual short MM/DD (where the year is understood). It’s no different, you just skip the year if it’s a given 😄 But for archival purposes, file naming etc, the YYYY part is mandatory.
Nope, it’s 30 \ 24 / 08
Relevant XKCD
I don’t know the episode, but unless that’s some extremely official time piece controlled by the government or something, it could just be someone like me. I live in the US, and several of the temp gauges in the house are celcius, including the one I keep at my desk and my in room A/C (set at 25 atm).
I also used to keep my car on km/h instead of mph just for fun and confusing anyone who rode with me why I was going 80 on local roads or 130 on the highway.
25? You must be freezing!
(25°F is below freezing point, -3.9°C, but 25°C is a comfortable room temperature, 77°F)
Laughs in 8th day of the 30th month.
Year 24
Some beautiful Trigintember weather we are having.
Star Trek really was overly optimistic.
Star Trek future now!
Watching that episode now
Were you the one sharing some laserdisc screenshots in /c/startrek a while back? I remember being really impressed with the quality.
Is that a laser disc?
Yes sir, and it actually has better quality picture than the DVDs, although it is way more impractical and expensive.
Is anyone here planning to watch the episodes over the time they’re supposed to occur? I’m thinking of watching part 1 tomorrow due to it being the date on the calendar onscreen, and part 2 the next day.
if you were going to do that it would make sense to watch part one tomorrow and part two on Sept 3rd.
True, that would be better. I was just going to watch them two nights in a row, but I might do that instead!
Oh shit are the bell riots happening rn? I gotta get prepped
They start this Sunday.
But today is Friday
