August 30 would be 30.08.2024.
Nope, 2024-08-30
Nope, it’s 30 \ 24 / 08
Relevant XKCD
This is the only rational order, descending in order of magnitude.
How do you abbreviate a date in YYYY/MM/DD format?
In the DD/MM/YYYY format I can tell someone I am available to meet on 26/07; the year is known contextually as it only changes once a year.
If I start to tell people I am available 26/07 am I available for all of July in 2026?
YY/MM/DD or casual short MM/DD (where the year is understood). It’s no different, you just skip the year if it’s a given 😄 But for archival purposes, file naming etc, the YYYY part is mandatory.
07-26, surely?
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 want a 473ml of beer, please and thank you.
That’s called a can. Can I have a can of beer.
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.
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.
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.
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 🧠
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!
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.
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.
Other countries do
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.
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
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! 😅
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.
Yeah linguistics are interesting for sure!
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.
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?
In Europe, we do say 31st August. Want gaslighting, just giving examples.
Alright, that’s fine. Just not commonly said in US.
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
Star Trek really was overly optimistic.
Star Trek future now!
15c better be the temp inside the building, because it sure as shit is hotter anywhere else.
They could be in New Zealand or Chile, if they hadn’t referenced The US… Maybe they are in Nome, AK
Holy shit looked up the temps in San Francisco and yes it’s 15C
Far more likely that whoever installed the clock just forgot to change the units.
Hate to point this out, but the fact there is a “C” on the sign kinda shows that no America did not adopt the metric system. If the US did there would be no reason to have “F” or “C” by the degrees as they are the last hold out.
No, even if you only had one unit for a physical quantity, you would still need to specify that unit to know which physical quantity you are describing. E.g. “That object over there is 15” vs “That object over there is 15 kg”.
The symbol for temperature, measured in Celsius, is “°C”. It’s atomic and can’t be separated, since that would result in °, which represents the angle of something, not the temperature, and C, which is the symbol for Coulomb, which measures electric charge.
In the reference picture of this clock the degree symbol does that. This is something you can see outside of the US on almost all temp readings, my phone for example does not have F or C next to it. (It is still in Celsius since I am not a monster)
I disagree, and would argue that both are about equally frequent. For example, my phone shows °C in the weather widget, while the weather app only uses °. That does not change the fact that the actual unit is °C, and that would not change even if the whole world switched away from °F, and your original comment about the display having °C implying that °F still exists is therefore incorrect.
Watching that episode now
Were you the one sharing some laserdisc screenshots in /c/startrek a while back? I remember being really impressed with the quality.
Is that a laser disc?
Yes sir, and it actually has better quality picture than the DVDs, although it is way more impractical and expensive.
Turns out it was just someone who didn’t know how to change the setting.
Oh shit are the bell riots happening rn? I gotta get prepped
They start this Sunday.
But today is Friday
This is the most unrealistic thing about the episode.
But still write dates wrong
Year-Month-Day is the only way. It’s chronological!
day should be first because it’s the one that changes the most often and we read left to right.
Next you’re going to suggest that 2000 should come immediately after 1000 (instead of 1001) because we read left-to-right.
People be hatin but I agree. in instances where the only goal is for a human to read the date, dd-mm-yyyy or even dd mmm(m) yyyy are better UX.
Putting the year first makes archiving easier. Your computer literally puts everything in order that way. Day first, and it will be sorted by the most frequently changing element.
Also year first allows you to timestamp your files, so they are sorted by what time you created them that day.
Sorting by day, at the end of the year you’ll have files from the first day of each month grouped together, then the second day, and so on. Still searchable, but not as orderly.
yea but I was talking in the context of a clock. for the uses you described YYYY MM DD is obviously better
sorting will be difficult then
use YYYY MM DD in the backend then.
And rhymes
I don’t know the episode, but unless that’s some extremely official time piece controlled by the government or something, it could just be someone like me. I live in the US, and several of the temp gauges in the house are celcius, including the one I keep at my desk and my in room A/C (set at 25 atm).
I also used to keep my car on km/h instead of mph just for fun and confusing anyone who rode with me why I was going 80 on local roads or 130 on the highway.
25? You must be freezing!
(25°F is below freezing point, -3.9°C, but 25°C is a comfortable room temperature, 77°F)
Thank God! As a non United-stasian, I believe this will make things better. The imperial system looks broken as hell to me, if you see a chart comparing both, you will see what I mean.
/not joking, not in the mood of hearing sacarsm.That’s crap. Kelvin is the only true metric temperature measurement.
