Useless Conversation

[ezrast]

Lol we couldn't figure out the metric systems and you nards want different days in the middle of the day.

To be fair, 10 is a shitty base for a measuring system.

[Yegolev]

You do need to follow up on that assertion.

[ezrast]

Base 12 numbers are easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, so they're better for mental arithmetic like dividing a restaurant bill.

I actually count in base 8 in real life sometimes because I can do it rhythmically (like counting musical beats: ONE two three four, FIVE six seven ten, ONE two three four, FIVE six seven twenty) and it's easier not to lose my place among high numbers. I convert the end result back to base 10 afterwards, of course.

You want to make programmers' lives easier, standardize on base 16.

Decimal has nothing going for it but finger-counting, and that's largely cultural. You can just as easily count to 12 on a hand by pointing your thumb at each finger-section in turn.

[Samwise]

+1 for octal.  That way you keep the finger-counting benefits (and you can use your thumbs as the eights place), and you don't need to invent new digits, but everything is still relatively easy to divide into various factors of 2.  Hexadecimal breaks at byte boundaries more easily, but you can't count to it on your fingers and you need to use funny letter-digits to write the numbers out.

[Reg]

I really liked living in San Francisco where the winter-summer day length variation wasn't nearly as drastic as it is up here in Toronto.

[Abagadro]

In addition, imagine setting up a conference call with multiple time zones and sending out that calendar invite.

Outlook does that automatically. Do it all the time.

[Samwise]

In addition, imagine setting up a conference call with multiple time zones and sending out that calendar invite.

Outlook does that automatically. Do it all the time.

Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at with the idea that it'd be pretty trivial to adapt scheduling software to handle a timezone-less world.  We already have to handle situations that are a lot more complicated than different offices simply having different workdays.

[NowhereMan]

In fairness I can imagine a single time zone being something where we would look back and think 'how the fuck did people cope before?' much like we did when national time became a thing and we all wondered how the fuck people dealt with a 20 minute time difference between neighbouring towns. China is already part way there since they just force the whole country onto Beijing time but the way of doing that has its own problems (Oh you're in the far Northwest and it gets bright at 2am in the summer and dark at 8pm? Too fucking bad in Beijing the time is fine, everyone still starts work at 9am).

I don't think that being a better solution than getting rid of DST is any argument to not get rid of DST though. We're not even calling for really changing anything, just stop changing one thing.

[Samwise]

Oh you're in the far Northwest and it gets bright at 2am in the summer and dark at 8pm? Too fucking bad in Beijing the time is fine, everyone still starts work at 9am.

This is in a nutshell why I think timezones (and the prescriptive workdays they imply) are a bad idea.  There are actually some benefits of DST in terms of maintaining a little more consistency between when the sun comes up and when you start work -- if we didn't "fall back," I'd be waking up in darkness for half the year and that'd fuck with my sleep a lot more than spending a couple of days adjusting to the one hour time change does.  DST is just a really hacky fix for that problem that has a lot of bad side effects.  (And a lot of people in a lot of places probably don't happen to get that benefit because they're getting up an hour before or after the sun regardless.)

You could get the benefits of syncing up with daylightt without DST if it were more standard practice for businesses to have "summer hours" and "winter hours" that were different, or if working hours were just in general more flexible, but our rigid insistence that NINE AM IS WORK TIME means that if you want the work day to match up with the sun, which is a constantly moving target, you have to move the entire clock, rather than just moving the work day.  That's dumb.

[Polysorbate80]

Random tech rant:

After getting complaints from viewers about the quality of one of our livestreams from campus last week, we discover that UStream routed distribution through a server in Amsterdam    Not surprisingly it got a li'l bit of buffering on the way back to Idaho...

Nothing against the Dutch, mind you.  I aim this at IBM, who also jacked our rates horribly since their takeover.  We're switching CDNs.

[Strazos]

Nine AM start time? Sounds luxurious.

[Reg]

When I was a lad we DREAMED of a 9:00 am start time!

[Trippy]

I quit a job cause they changed the rules to make us programmers come in at 9 AM.

[Samwise]

I quit a job cause they changed the rules to make us programmers come in at 9 AM.

Last time I had a job where I had to be in before 10AM was in high school.

[calapine]

Nine AM start time? Sounds luxurious.

That. Normal for offices is 8:00 am.

[Selby]

I'm at work at 6:30AM every day... 9 or 10AM start times mean the day is already almost half over!

[Rendakor]

My default start time is 8am but certain customers often necessitate coming in at 7am or earlier.

[schild]

I don’t even function until 11am.

[Teleku]

We did swing shifts in Moscow, and since everybody wanted to come in early and leave early, I just did the 9-6 shift two years straight.  So that was nice!

Back to 8 AM here.  Which is better than Bangkok, where the Embassy's official start time is 7 AM (and I think management did that on purpose).

[IainC]

I start at 10am here in Thailand.

When I worked in Madrid, I had a period of two weeks after I started, where I didn't have to come to the office and work, but I was still on payroll so that I could find an apartment and do all the Spanish government paperwork that was needed. First day off the plane, I wander over to the office to ask when I should come in the next day to sign my contract and set up appointments for the various bureaucratic stuff.

"Oh, just come first thing in the morning!"
"Ok, when is that"
"11:30"

[Morat20]

So, part of Houston is on fire.

And by "part of Houston" I mean "I can see the fire from my front yard".

And it's spread (started with one tank, spread to two, and then to eight overnight). They're clearly just trying to contain it and let it burn itself out.

About the only good news is the chemicals currently burning don't release anything too nasty as a byproduct of combustion and burn very enthusiastically and thoroughly (so no spreading pools of deadly gasses, or massive concentrations of carcinogens raining down people). And the prevailing winds are the right speed and direction to prevent even the closest neighborhoods from being filled with smoke. If you're not near the blaze proper, there's no issues with air quality. (And last I checked, they had about a dozen groups -- plus as many independent local contractors -- doing air quality tests).

Still it's a proper mess. You can see the smoke from 20 miles away, at least. And that was when it was one tank on fire.

[Engels]

I took an internship in Barcelona. I'd show up at 8, along with the custodial staff. The office staffl would come in at 10. The boss would arrive at 11:30 with a hangover, faff about till 1ish, then have an 'early lunch' (lunch was officially 2-4), then not be back in the office till 5,

[Mandella]

I don’t even function until 11am.

Yeah I don't roll out of bed until the crack of noon.

Also, don't burn up Morat20!