• @j4k3
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    10526 days ago

    MM ≠ MM !!!

  • Fushuan [he/him]
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    9326 days ago

    “Europe”, as if there weren’t several languages in Europe with different date formats per language…

      • htrayl
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        526 days ago

        Meh. It’s getting a lot of hate here, but I think it works well in casual short term planning. Context (July) - > precision (15).

        If I want to communicate the day in the current month, I just say the day, no month.

        • stebo
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          1826 days ago

          ok but by that logic you’d start with the year

          • @[email protected]
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            1026 days ago

            No because the year is a super large time; there’s a reason people always say they take a bit to adjust to writing the new year in dates because it’s s long enough period of time that it almost becomes automatic.

            For archiving, sure; most other things, no (logically, ISO-8601 is probably the best for most cases, in general, but I’ll die on the hill that MM-DD-YYYY is better than DD-MM-YYYY).

            • stebo
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              2726 days ago

              well either you omit the year, or you start with it

              americans start with the month and end with the year, which is totally wild

                • stebo
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                  325 days ago

                  Because it’s consistent that way. Why not is the real question?

                • @[email protected]
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                  125 days ago

                  Because “context -> precision” is exactly the reason someone earlier gave as reasoning for the American system?

              • @[email protected]
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                -126 days ago

                Again, – within most use cases – it really isn’t.

                In your day to day, will you need to know the year of a thing? Probably not; it’s probably with the year you’re currently in.

                Do you need to know the day of the month first? Probably not unless it’s within the current month so you need to know the month first.

                Telling me “22nd” on a paper means nothing if I don’t know what month we’re referring to; and, if I do need to know the year, – well – it’s always at the the of the date so it’s easy to locate rather than parsing the middle of the date, any.

                • stebo
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                  726 days ago

                  In your day to day, will you need to know the year of a thing? Probably not; it’s probably with the year you’re currently in.

                  that’s why I said you could omit it. did you read what I wrote?

            • @[email protected]
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              225 days ago

              the year is a super large time

              Not when you’re old… I’ll be 50 this year, they’re flying by.

    • @comtact
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      125 days ago

      Keep that kinda talk up and you’ll go straight to tariff!

  • @[email protected]
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    5426 days ago

    This pyramid visualisation doesn’t work for me, unless you read time starting with seconds.

    • @[email protected]
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      2926 days ago

      A pyramid is built bottom to top, not top to bottom. That’s also one of the strengths of the ISO format. You can add/remove layers for arbitrary granularity and still have a valid date.

      • Zagorath
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        2726 days ago

        Yeah, but people read top to bottom. The best way to do it would be to have upside down pyramids. With the biggest blocks at the top representing the biggest unit of time (YYYY) and the smallest blocks at the bottom representing seconds & smaller.

      • @[email protected]
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        2826 days ago

        I get it, just pyramids are misleading, also year-month-day is better because resulting number always grows. 😺

        • LenaOP
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          626 days ago

          A bit out of context, but is your username and instance a reference to nescafe?

        • @olympicyes
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          526 days ago

          Hold on there pal that time zone is ambiguous. Did you mean 11:40:20 UTC? If so, don’t forget your Z!

          • Zagorath
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            126 days ago

            I mean 11:40:20 in what NodaTime would call a “LocalDateTime”. i.e., irrespective of the time zone.

            (And incidentally, if you’re working in C# I strongly recommend the NodaTime library. And even if you’re not, I strongly recommend watching the lectures about dates and times by the NodaTime developer, who demonstrates a way of thinking about dates and times that is so much more thoughtful than what most standard libraries allow for without very careful attention paid by the programmer.)

  • lazynooblet
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    5226 days ago

    I work with international clients and use 2025-01-26 format. Without it… confusion.

    • @ByteJunk
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      3126 days ago

      That’s an ISO date, and it’s gorgeous. It’s the only way I’ll accept working with dates and timezones, though I’ll make am exception for end-user facing output, and format it according to locale if I’m positive they’re not going to feed into some other app.

  • @czardestructo
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    3626 days ago

    I’m almost 40 and now just realizing my insistence on how to structure all my folders and notes is actually an ISO standard. Way to go me.

    • @valkyre09
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      1726 days ago

      I stumbled upon it years ago because sorting by name sorts by date. There was no other thought put into it.

      • clockworkrat(he/him)
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        926 days ago

        It’s incredibly annoying that in clinical research we are prohibited from using it because every date must comply with the GCP format (DD mmm yyyy). Every file has the GCP date appended to the end.

  • Bo7a
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    3026 days ago

    I don’t know why anyone would ever argue against this. Least precise to most precise. Like every other number we use.

    (I don’t know if this is true for EVERY numerical measure, but I’m sure someone will let me know of one that doesn’t)

    • @[email protected]
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      426 days ago

      They are all equally prescise. American one is stupid just like their stupid ass imperial units. European one is two systems slapped together(since they are rarely used together and when they are its the iso format) and iso is what european standard should be.

      • Bo7a
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        26 days ago

        You misunderstand my comment.

        I’m saying the digits in a date should be printed in an order dictated by which units give the most precision.

        A year is the least precise, a month is the next least, followed by day, hour, minute, second, millisecond.

    • Amon
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      26 days ago

      All my homies hate ISO

      Said no-one ever?

      EDIT: thanks for informing me i now retract my position

      • @[email protected]
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        3626 days ago

        Nah, ISO is a shit organization. The biggest issue is that all of their “standards” are blocked behind paywalls and can’t be shared. This creates problems for open source projects that want to implement it because it inherently limits how many people are actually able to look at the standard. Compare to RFC, which always has been free. And not only that, it also has most of the standards that the internet is built upon (like HTTP and TCP, just to name a few).

        Besides that, they happily looked away when members were openly taking bribes from Microsoft during the standardization of OOXML.

        In any case, ISO-8601 is a garbage standard. P1Y is a valid ISO-8601 string. Good luck figuring out what that means. Here’s a more comprehensive page demonstrating just how stupid ISO-8601 is: https://github.com/IJMacD/rfc3339-iso8601

          • @[email protected]
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            325 days ago

            Sure, it means something, and the meaning is not stupid. But since it is the same standard, it should be possible to be used to at least somehow represent the same data. Which it doesn’t.

            • @[email protected]
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              125 days ago

              I think it is reasonable to say: “for all representation of times (points in time, intervals and sets of points or intervals etc) we follow the same standard”.

              The alternative would be using one standard for points in time, another for intervals, another for time differences, another for changes to a timezone, another for …

              • lad
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                325 days ago

                The alternative would be

                More reasonable, if you ask me. At least I came to value modularity in programming, maybe with standards it doesn’t work as good, but I don’t see why

                • @[email protected]
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                  125 days ago

                  Standards are used to increase interoperability between systems. The more different standards a single system needs the harder it is to interface with other systems. If you have to define a list of 50 standard you use, chances are the other system uses a different standard for at least one of them. Much easier if you rely on only a handful instead

              • @[email protected]
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                124 days ago

                True, that is reasonable. However sometimes it could be represented as scope creep. Depends on the thing, really. The more broad a standard is, the easier it is to deviate from given standard or not implement certain feature because there is not enough resources to do so.

                I’d rather have multiple smaller standards than one big. However, I understand your reasoning.

        • Amon
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          426 days ago

          Thx i take that back

  • @[email protected]
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    1726 days ago

    I know, why don’t we all agree to agree and use every single possible format within a shared spreadsheet

  • Miles O'Brien
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    1426 days ago

    In one work report, I recorded the date as “1/13/25”, “13/1/25” and “13JAN2025”

    I have my preference, but please for the love of all that is fluffy in the universe, just stick to one format…

  • @[email protected]
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    1426 days ago

    I often have to refrain myself from using ISO-8601 in regular emails. In a business context the MM/DD/YYYY is so much more prevalent that I don’t want to stand out.

    Filenames on a share drive though? ISO-8601 all the way idgaf