• Madrigal
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    595 days ago

    Imagine thinking that’ll be the biggest date-related computing problem for a galactic society.

    If you really want to make programmers despair, point out:

    • massive variations in day, month and year lengths on different worlds.
    • some worlds may not have “months” (no moons, or many moons).
    • ambiguous definition of “year” for multi-star systems.
    • days may be longer than years (hello Venus).
    • communication latency across interstellar distances.
    • tine dilation.
    • WasPentalive
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      33 days ago

      Nah, all this is solved with star-dates. One of the Federation’s crowning achievements - Warp Drive is small potatoes compared to getting hundreds of delegates from as many different worlds to all agree on one calendar system that is not based on their own world’s orbit around its primary… Diplomatic impossibility, but they managed it.

    • @UnsavoryMollusk
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      94 days ago

      Relief point: we will still be using unix timestamp.

      Anxious point: we will still be using unix timestamp.

    • @[email protected]
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      5 days ago

      That’s easy. We’d just use Greg time.

      Greg’s age and mood is highly deterministic, and he has atoms in his body present from the big bang. His sense of time varies, and seems to accelerate as he gets older, and he will tell you about it with extreme detail down to either 2 decimal places or 3 beers. If you call him up and ask him what time it is, the degree of the obscenities used in his reply is usually a good enough correction coefficient when calling over long distances.

      Also two of his kids hate him, and his current wife is thinking of leaving him; all countable metrics that one can use to ascertain what stage in his life Greg is at, and thus what the local date/time in your area is, based on all the above Greg stats.

    • Dhs92
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      185 days ago

      Don’t we technically already have to account for time dilation for things like GPS satellites

      • Madrigal
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        24 days ago

        It’s what happens when James uses the good dining forks to unjam the cupboard door again.

    • @[email protected]
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      85 days ago

      We’re all just going to use tz_database and turn the maintainer into a ghost trapped in the machine for all of eternity.

      • Madrigal
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        14 days ago

        Well, that was certainly the peak of human artistic achievement.

    • @kameecoding
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      55 days ago

      I will just rely on ISO 8602 to introduce a universal time format

      • Madrigal
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        14 days ago

        Then your only challenge will be converting to and from human-friendly formats and cleansing user input. Easy.

    • @4z01235
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      35 days ago

      Also, interplanetary timezones and leaps.