Bullshit. ISO 8601 IS THE SUPERIOR DATE STANDARD
Tomorrow is 2024-08-30. DEAL WITH IT.Stardate, 2024-08-30T06:34:17.993Z
Hilariously, Star treks “stardates” are not uniform. The format shifts season to season and show to show.
It’s standardized now
1725020287 is the true time as of right now
Metric is about measurements, not formatting. The date measurement is in days, months, and years for both ISO 8601 and what’s shown.
This is the ideal file date format for sure.
I always prefer it without the dashes. And just add on HHMMSS while we’re at it!
America officially switched to the metric system decades ago. We just don’t use it on a daily basis, but officially the US is metric.
In 1988 Congress passed the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act, which made the metric system the preferred system of weights and measures for U.S. trade and commerce.
In 1991 President Bush issued Executive Order 12770, which mandated the transition to metric measurement for all federal agencies.
I remember learning all metric in elementary school in the early to mid 80s much to my mother’s chagrin (any thing I learned that was different than what/how she learned in Catholic school was bad, including a second language). Then having to relearn standard in middle school. I still have to count all of the lines on a tape measure.
As a metric-raised guy I find extremely difficult following the tutorials of woodworkers that start putting 2feet 3 inches and 9/16 in the measurements that converts to 700,0875mm wich i guess is an approximation of 70cms
Things like woodworking are exactly where the imperial system came from. Because daily usable lengths like a foot are using base 12 not base 10, it can be divided much more evenly even before needing fractions.
I was taught the metric system in US Schools in the late 80s and 90s.
Sure we don’t use it daily but I still know it.
I know that I need to convert to it and how to convert to it if necessary.
For anything that’s not interacting with a human I’d use the metric system, for anything interacting with a human I’d display both.
I want a 473ml of beer, please and thank you.
That’s called a can. Can I have a can of beer.
Also known as “Not enough” XD
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 🧠
that’s already how i save versions of my files. dd-mm-yy doesn’t make sense with files.
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
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…
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.
Not a problem for the FRC, and 2023-W20 compares just fine with 2024-W20. Same part of the year, and the weekend is in the same spot.
Keeping them around is a sensible fail-safe in case some nuclear power sets us back into the dark ages.
Honestly can’t tell if you are joking but I really hope you are
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.
Other countries do
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
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.
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! 😅
Yeah linguistics are interesting for sure!
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.
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
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?
Touché.
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 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
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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!
Bake in metric and rejoice when recipes actually work!
wait you don’t use scales when cooking???
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.