• @mkwarman
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    1939 months ago

    I’m definitely in the “for almost everything” camp. It’s less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don’t use ISO-8601 is when I’m using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.

    • Dr. Wesker
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      259 months ago

      Yeah, it’s pretty much everything for me too. The biggest exception being when UI is involved and a longhand date format would be more friendly.

    • @[email protected]
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      219 months ago

      In Canada we use MM/DD and DD/MM so you never quite know which it is! There’s an expense spreadsheet I fill out for work that uses one format in one place and the other format in another…

      • @flop_leash_973
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        49 months ago

        Hey, that sounds like my cloud storage providers auto billing system.

        “Your auto renewal will draft on 08/09/23.”

        Is that August 9th or September 8th? Literally depends on where the person you ask is in the world.

      • @mkwarman
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        49 months ago

        That would ruin my entire day

    • @[email protected]
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      389 months ago

      Awful to actually read, though. Using T as a delimiter is mental… At least the hyphen provides some white space

    • @protput
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      9 months ago

      Too long. Even 2023-08-09 is too long for me. But since I like the readability I use 2023.08.09. Less pixels and more readable then 20230809.

        • @Aloha_Alaska
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          9 months ago

          My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

        Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.

  • @varjen
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    949 months ago

    ISO 8601 is always the correct way to format dates.

  • corytheboyd
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    889 months ago

    Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.

    • @[email protected]
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      289 months ago

      Not “many people.” Americans. Americans find it hard to read. I’m not 100% sure but I’m fairly certain everyone else in the world agrees that either day/month/year or year/month/day is the best way to clearly indicate a date. You know, because big to small. America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

      • @[email protected]
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        199 months ago

        I’m pretty sure it’s because of the way we say it. Like, “May 6th, 2023”. So we write it 5/6/2023.

        That said, I think it’s fucking stupid.

        • @Kurroth
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          259 months ago

          Yer, just like the most important day for the seppos… The 4th of July…

          • @[email protected]
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            17 months ago

            I will never stop being impressed by the absolute insanity that is British rhyming slang. Apparently I’ve never heard seppo before, short for septic tank, rhyming with Yank. I just learned a new mildy derogatory term for Americans, nice

        • @DV8
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          109 months ago

          In British English you say the date before the month as well. I know that even saying the month first sounds very jarring too me.

        • @[email protected]
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          39 months ago

          I’m not an American and English isn’t my first language, so the US way to write dates always confused me. Now, I finally understand it! Many thanks, this is legitimately sooooo useful!

      • @[email protected]
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        59 months ago

        I am an American and I use it religiously for the record. Especially for version numbers. Major.minor.year.month.day.hour.minute-commit. It sorts easy, is specific, intuitive, and makes it clear which version you’re using/working on.

      • @glockenspiel
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        9 months ago

        America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

        It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

        America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

        People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

        I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

        Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

        But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.

        • Fonzie!
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          18 months ago

          Bruh even Britain uses day-month-year, even speaks them as “9th of September”.
          “September 9th” doesn’t even make sense in English as there is only 1 September in a year.

          America did this.
          There is no excusing that.

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

        Day/month/year is not in the same category as y/m/d. That crap is so ambiguous. Is today August 9th? Or September 8th? Y/m/d to the rescue.

        • @sfgifz
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          169 months ago

          It’s only ambiguous to Americans.

          • @Drusenija
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            79 months ago

            Or anyone who has to work with Americans. Especially when you also work with other countries as well. You can’t assume dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy blindly in either case. yyyy-mm-dd solves the issue entirely because both sides at least agree that yyyy-dd-mm isn’t a thing.

      • @MKBandit
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        -59 months ago

        Because who cares what day it is without knowing the month first.

    • @[email protected]
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      119 months ago

      I think it’s fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though

      • @GamingChairModel
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        19 months ago

        If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though

        That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:

        • April
        • August
        • December
        • February
        • January
        • July
        • June
        • March
        • May
        • November
        • September
    • SeaJ
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      89 months ago

      I use it all the time when writing dates.

    • dilawarB
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      09 months ago

      As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.

      • @zovits
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        59 months ago

        Nah, letters bring another complexity - besides with them Feb gets sorted after Dec.

      • @[email protected]
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        59 months ago

        The letters make no sense to me. Like Jul, Jun, I’m constantly mixing them up. Give me a good solid number like 07 or 10. No mixing that up. Higher numbers come after lower numbers, simple as.

  • xttweaponttx
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    859 months ago

    It warms my heart to see so many comments in the camp of “I use it everywhere”. Absolutely same here. You are my people.

    • @[email protected]
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      149 months ago

      Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don’t make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn’t make any sense, and don’t make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.

    • @GamingChairModel
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      69 months ago

      You never know when something might need to become a filename, so you might as well just use ISO 8601 for everything.

  • @realbaconator
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    779 months ago

    ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.

    • @[email protected]
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      169 months ago

      If you’re using a *NIX command line, something like

      mkdir $(date +%F)_photos

      is super handy.

    • RedEye FlightControl
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      119 months ago

      I do. Anything I have to put a datecode on, always gets a stamp of YYYYMMDD.

        • @[email protected]
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          69 months ago

          That is the basic format of ISO8601, hyphens are only used in the extended format which is encouraged to be used in plain text.

          See ISO 8601:2004 section 2.3.3 basic format

  • @TeckFire
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    769 months ago

    Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.

    • @[email protected]
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      109 months ago

      I do too, even in notes at work or handwritten stuff at home. I don’t always need to be reminded of the year first, but sometimes it becomes important on older stuff.

      Plus when you’re in the US and work with people from Europe, the unambiguous ordering of month and day is a nice safeguard against silly misunderstandings.

      • @[email protected]
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        49 months ago

        …and if I don’t need the year, my eyes simply skip to the dash and continue to read from there.

  • @[email protected]
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    9 months ago

    I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!

    Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.

      • @[email protected]
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        389 months ago

        Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).

        AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD… yet. Don’t let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.

        • @arbitrary
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          279 months ago

          YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD

          What the actual fuck

          ‘hey man, what date is it today?’ ‘well it’s the 15th of 2023, August’

            • @Futurama
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              59 months ago

              I want to try this, too. Make it more possessive, though. The 15th of 2023’s August. Really add to the confusion.

        • naticus
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          159 months ago

          I’ll avoid those at all cost and go with the new standard of YY-MM-DD-YY. What’s the date today? 20-08-10-23

          • rustydomino
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            39 months ago

            whoa, take it easy there Satan.

          • @[email protected]
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            49 months ago

            What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.

            You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.

      • @[email protected]
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        149 months ago

        Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.

        • @ChickenLadyLovesLife
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          9 months ago

          My grandmother was born in 1896 and lived to be 102, just long enough for the pre-Y2K computer systems in hospitals to think she was a two-year-old.

          • @Puttaneska
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            19 months ago

            Ouch!

            I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.

    • @sift
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      9 months ago

      It’s how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It’s easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.

        • @GamingChairModel
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          9 months ago

          Oct = 8
          Nov = 9
          Dec = 10

          In metric time there are only 10 months per year

      • Zagorath
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        119 months ago

        We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.

        When is your independence day, again?

        Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use “{ordinal} of {month}” (11th of August), “{ordinal} {month}” (11th August), and “{month} {ordinal}” (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use “{number} {month}” (11 August). That doesn’t have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.

        • [rdh]B
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          -29 months ago

          When is your independence day, again?

          July 4th, why?

            • @[email protected]
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              -19 months ago

              “Fourth of July” is the name of the holiday. It happens on “July 4th”.

              “Independence Day” was a movie in the 90’s. We never say “Independence Day” around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.

              • @CurlyMoustache
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                19 months ago

                I see this weird argumentation every time the dating system comes up 🙄

                • @[email protected]
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                  9 months ago

                  It’s kinda tongue in cheek, but that’s how we say things in my part of the US. “Fourth of July” is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like “Thanksgiving” or “Christmas”. Just like we still refer to “Cinco de Mayo” even though we don’t speak Spanish.

                  Obviously it’s not really called “Fourth of July”, but nobody ever says “Nth of Month” here otherwise. And I’m kinda grateful as I like “bigger to smaller” notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it’s like “Hours and minutes” or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.

                  Also, the movie really wasn’t that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.

        • @sift
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          -69 months ago

          It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.

          I’ve never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country’s other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn’t (and shouldn’t) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.

      • @[email protected]
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        29 months ago

        Saying it like that is no problem and not ambiguous. Writing it like that makes no sense though.

      • @[email protected]
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        9 months ago

        It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don’t say it that way?

        Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.

        • @duffman
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          19 months ago

          That’s probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.

      • @CoolMatt
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        09 months ago

        I’m canadian and I’ve always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that’s weird.

        • Zeragamba
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          79 months ago

          As a different Canadian, I always use YYYY-MM-DD and a 24 hour clock.

        • @[email protected]
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          29 months ago

          Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I’m not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy

    • @[email protected]
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      189 months ago

      ISO 8601 ftw. Here’s the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:

      2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M

      • Zeragamba
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        19 months ago

        nearly forgot that 8601 has support for durations as well

        • baltakatei
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          19 months ago

          It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month? P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days? P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add the T separator: PT720H.

          I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:

          20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv

          (“--” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)

          If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me uptime but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.

          $ bkuptime
          P2DT4H22M4S/2023-08-15T02:01:00+0000, 2 users,  load average: 1.71, 0.87, 0.68
          
  • @cerberus
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    439 months ago

    ISO 8601 is amazing for data storage and standardizing the date.

    Display purposes sure, whatever you feel like

    But goddammit if you don’t use ISO 8601 to store dates, I will find you, and I will standardize your code.

      • Rootiest
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        139 months ago

        Epoch is also acceptable if humans don’t need to understand it

      • @cerberus
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        29 months ago

        I will agree it’s a valid storage but it has to be specified in ms

    • @[email protected]
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      49 months ago

      I actually need to standardize my code. I’ve got “learning F2” as something I want to do soon. The goal: use the exif data of my pictures to create [date in ISO 8601] - [original filename].[original file type termination]

      So a picture taken the third of march 2022 titled “asdf.jpg” would become “2022-3-3 - asdf.jpg”

      Help? lol

      • @[email protected]
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        69 months ago

        If you’re on Linux exiftool can get the creation date for you: exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' FILENAME, and you could run tgat in a loop over your files, something like:

        mkdir -p out
        for f in *.jpg
        do
        createdate=$(exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' "${f}")
        cp -p "${f}" "out/${createdate} - ${f}"
        done
        

        Obviously don’t justbgo running code some stranger just posted on the internet, especially as I haven’t tested it, but that should copy images from the current directory to a subdirectory called ‘out’ with the correct filenames.

        • metaStatic
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          29 months ago

          ok I think I finally need to ask

          What the fuck is up with the html code? Ive seen this in a lot of posts and it just throws me every time.

      • @cerberus
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        19 months ago

        Can you give more context, what are you using? Language / system / etc?

        • @[email protected]
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          19 months ago

          I’m using NixOS. Ext4 filesystem. As to language, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. If you refer to the character set in the filenames, I think there are no characters that deviate from the English alphabet, numbers, dashes, and underscores.

          • @cerberus
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            19 months ago

            Oh ok so you’re more so working with folder structure etc, so bash for when you plug-in a card?

            I’m thinking in more programmatic terms, there’s definitely some bash scripting you can execute. Or just go balls out and write a service that executes on systemctl