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1. Russ Sharek (russsharek@mastodon.art)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 11:21:32 UTC Russ Sharek

   Does anyone use/understand/like the old swatch internet time?

   I recently was reminded of it and suddenly it seems more sensible and useful than it ever did before. Likely an artifact of my wacky sleep schedule.

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

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   • Alice and the moon 🌛 (loveisanalogue@mastodon.art)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 14:03:12 UTC Alice and the moon 🌛

     in reply to

     @RussSharek Decimalisation makes me sad !

     Having everything base 10 is a utilitarian dystopia to my mathematical brain.

     The 24 hours and 60 minutes is to me a great reminder of how we are descendants of history, building on work and discoveries done by ancient civilisations.

     Whenever I think of 60 minutes, I think of the Babylonian people's mathematics.

     And 24 hours reminds me of ancient Egypt. At the time, hours did not have a fixed length. Now that's what I long for !

   • Russ Sharek (russsharek@mastodon.art)'s status on Sunday, 30-Jan-2022 14:03:12 UTC Russ Sharek

     in reply to

     • Alice and the moon 🌛

     @loveisanalogue

     I really appreciate your poetic pushback on this. It's good to remember that we aren't numbers, or ruled by them.

     Go team squishy organic nonsense. :)

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   • Mike, First of His Name (mike@social.chinwag.org)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 06:21:47 UTC Mike, First of His Name

     in reply to

     @RussSharek I wrote a CGI script to embed it in a web page, back in the day. Shared a lot of code with a page visitors counter badge, heh.

     I got people yelling at me for using a "proprietary" time format, when it was really just a simple math function performed on UTC. Nobody really got it.

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   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 06:42:53 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     The least arbitrary division of the day must be to use the smallest possible divisor, which is binary fractions. 86400 is about the same as 65536, so you get second-ish precision with 16 bits, which can be represented by four hex digits. Time zone is UTC, obviously.
     
     As I started typing this it would soon be 14:30:00 here. That would be ...
     
     $ printf '0x%04x\n' $(((14 * 3600 + 30 * 60) * 65536 / 86400)) 0x9aaaEasy! You can see that it's afternoon as it's later than 0x8000. 😁
     
     Oops, wrong timezone. UTC that will be 0x4555. You know that's slightly after 06:00 UTC as it's slightly after 0x4000.
     
     This silly idea is slightly more intuitive than I expected.
     
     @RussSharek
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 06:48:14 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to
     Actually if we skip time zones we might as well skip leap seconds, so that should be TAI rather than UTC, it's just a few seconds difference.
     
     @RussSharek
   • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 07:36:14 UTC Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     in reply to

     • notklaatu
     @klaatu @RussSharek It tells you that original Unix UIDs are a whole number of bytes, 2 bytes, wide. Same with UDP and TCP port numbers. Same with PIDs until a few Linux versions ago.
     
     A geek who dabbles enough with bits and bytes will know by heart that 10 isn't a nice and round number, 1000 isn't a nice and round number, they're just arbitrary numbers, but 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384, 32768 and 65536 are all very fine and round numbers, as is e.g. 16777216.
   • notklaatu (klaatu@mastodon.xyz)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 07:36:15 UTC notklaatu

     in reply to

     • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     @clacke @RussSharek 65536 is the number of default number of subuids permitted on a Linux system. I feel like I've gained insight into something. I just need to figure out what.

   • Russ Sharek (russsharek@mastodon.art)'s status on Monday, 31-Jan-2022 11:30:12 UTC Russ Sharek

     in reply to

     • notklaatu
     • Santa Claes 🇸🇪🇭🇰🎅

     @clacke @klaatu

     Time based on bytes instead of beats...interesting.

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