Everyday, as an American

Bob@midwest.social to Lemmy Shitpost@lemmy.world – 1247 points –
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Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number

the 24 hour clock

I switched to it in my later teens when I realised how many cases it would be better in.
Conversion during conversation might be an extra step, but I'll be pushing for the next generation to have this by default.

Also, much better when using for file names.

Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There's a reason why it is the ISO

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The conversion is pretty much the only hurdle I ever hear about, but that’s easy enough. How many songs/films talk about “if I could rewind the last 12+12 hours”…it’s just a matter of making it fit in context people can understand when they know a day is 24 but are used to 12.

ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.

ISO and while we’re at it, the NATO phonetic alphabet for English speakers. “A as in apple B as in boy” means fuck all when you’re grasping for any word that starts with that letter, and if English isn’t your first language fuckin forget about it.

err... didn't get what you're trying to say

We standardized an alphabet among all countries for clear communication.

Here is an example of it going wrong.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

wrong.

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

I'm pretty sure that's an example of why you should use the chosen ones instead of going "mancy/nancy" all over the place.

Also, didn't they just make a standard for themselves and other just took it because it was probably easier than making one for their own language (oh right, NATO... but let's be honest here, NATO is just a forum for America to flaunt its power while PR-ing peaceful, so it makes sense they use English, which is also easier to be a second language than most other ones).
Though I feel like China might have made their own.

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The radio words were chosen to be distinct, such that for people who trained in them, it would be easier to distinguish letters being spoken over low quality radio.

Not very relevant in the era of 2G HD audio, and now VoLTE.
But when there's a bad signal and you have to tell someone a callsign, it makes sense.


I like ISO, because in whatever cases I have interacted with it, it has made programming easier for me.

I like YYYY-MM-DD, because when files lose their metadata, if they are named using this, I can still sort by name and get results by date.

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Conversion during conversation might be an extra step

Conversion is always extra step, but you don't need it if you use same timezone as other participant.

Also, YYYY-MM-DD. There's a reason why it is the ISO

Big-endian is big. Alternatively DD.MM.YYYY or DD.MM.YY for little-endian lovers.

Except no because the digits themselves are still big-endian. That's nUxi.

It's more along the lines of most signigicant bit/least significant bit, rather then byte order.

Right, and the most significant bit of the whole date is the first Y in YYYY, which we can't put at the end unless we reverse the year itself. So we can either have pure big-endian, or PDP-endian. I know which one I'm picking.

Your literal statement is also just wrong. The solitary implication of endianness is byte ordering, because individual bits in a byte have no ordering in memory. Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory. Hex readouts order nybbles on the same axis as memory so as not to require 256 visually distinct digits and because they only have two axes; that's a visual artefact, and reflects nothing about the state of memory itself. ISO 8601 on the other hand is a visual representation, so digit and field ordering are in fact the same axis.

Every single one has the exact same address; they have significance order, but that's entirely orthogonal to memory.

We are talking about transferring data, not storing it. For example SPI allows both for LSb-first and MSb-first. In date digit-number-date is like bit-byte-word.

Right, and in data transfer every byte can be placed in an absolute order relative to every other. And the digits within the respective fields are already big-endian (most significant digit first), so making the fields within the whole date little-endian is mixed-endian.

I have iterated this several times, so I worry there's a fundamental miscommunication happening here.

big-endian (most significant byte or in our case number first).

Digit in base2 is bit. Endianess is byte order, not bit order. MSb-first is bit order.

Ok, I think I see the problem. To me, MSb (Most Significant bit) isn't an ordering at all, just a label that one particular bit has. To specify an ordering, you'd also need to say whether that bit comes first or last. This concept doesn't exist in computer memory because, as previously mentioned, bits in a byte aren't ordered in memory. I was thinking of the individual digits in a field (each Y in YYYY) as separate bytes in a word, so endianness order makes sense to think about; separate fields in this analogy were contiguous like struct fields. I think my mental model is sensible, since ISO 8601 is fundamentally a sequence of characters, which are all in an absolute order.

This concept doesn't exist in computer memory because, as previously mentioned

Yes. And it starts to exist when transferring data over serial connection. SPI, USB, you name it.

Why no base10 clock?

base12 has the advantage of being divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while base10 is only divisible by 2 and 5.

So you're arguing in favor of feet and inches?

The Dozenal system does have some advantages over base10. Feel free to poke around []https://dozenal.org/drupal/content/brief-introduction-dozenal-counting.html to learn a bit about Donzenal/Duodecimal counting and maths.

And to bring up a point, why did every nation that adopted the metric system require a law(s) to force people to use it? Complete with penalties if you don't. If it was such a good and great idea, people would have naturally gravitated to it don't you think?

Ahh, another connoisseur of the Dozenal system! Everyone should add a little dek and el to their life!

You listed 2 twice(thrice if counting 6) for base12 and once for base10. Generally, when talking about bases better talk only about prime factors. Base12 has 2 and 3 as prime factors, while base10 has 2 and 5.

You don't need to add or multiply time very often. Division is super important tho, and base60 is better than base10 for that.

Too easy. Plus we put in the 3/5 “compromise” so you can’t expect old white racists to learn proper math

The French did try it back when they were in the process of changing to the metric system in the 1700s. Even THEY quickly determined that, much like the creation of the universe, it was a very bad idea. And it was very quietly dropped. French tried hard to scrub that moment of insanity from the history books. But well, the internet is truly forever in both directions I guess.

Metric time quickly got out of sync with the periods of light and dark. Mother Nature evidently doesn't like humans dicking around with the time periods of her celestial movements. (Dozenal for the win!)

The 12 hour one is just so wildly dumb and inconsistent.

Why does it go from 11 AM to 12 PM to 1 PM?

If America is going to go through the trouble to convert everything to metric, might as well switch to base 10/decimal time as well lol

Why would you demand metric everything and not metric time?

Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around

Also, it’s hard enough getting people to equate Km and C with known quantities, Americans can’t handle base unit shifts like that

Cause then we’d be thinking we’re monkeys on a spherical rock in a vacuum instead of calibrating clocks to a radioactive element to make sure everyone tunes in to wheel of fortune on time while this oblate spheroid tumbles around

Just a little sodium chloride

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I love the 24 hour clock and living in London, UK I used it all the time. However, I remember one time I bought movie tickets at lunch for 17:30 and my brain thought it was for 7:30pm and I called my friend at the last moment saying: "you have to leave work early if we're gonna make it!"

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