The fundamental one is: "I'm so very clever, and I've dealt with dates my whole conscious life, I can probably think of all of the edge cases off the top of my head!"
Rather than "I'm so clever" it is more "this isn't complicated". One can argue they mean the same thing, but I'd say they mean different things if comparing to an outside scale. The solution to thinking you're so clever is to reduce your arrogance, but the solution to thinking problems are simple is to stop assuming any problem is simple.
If they copied that date from some automated system it might as well be any of these.
Humans usually say “New York time”.
I'm guilty of this too, since I can never remember which part of the year constitutes "on" and which is "off", only where the boundaries are. If I stop and think I can usually remember "spring ahead is turning it on", but never off the top of my head.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Arizona
The Navajo Nation is within Arizona's boundaries, and it does observe DST. And the Hopi Reservation is within the Navajo Nation, and it does not observe DST.
And since Arizona is surrounded by California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Mexico, all of which do observe DST, that means you have an island of no-DST (Hopi) inside an island of DST (Navajo) inside an island of no-DST (Arizona) inside an area of DST (adjoining US states plus Mexico).
There are days where I think I should go back to a mechanical watch and adjust the time each day at high noon. It won’t agree with anyone else’s time most of the time, but at least it will be correct.
Are people really that fragile? Yes and no.
The solution to thinking you're so clever is to reduce your arrogance, but the solution to thinking problems are simple is to stop assuming any problem is simple.
Isn't humility the answer to both? Someone should develop a humility course for programmers involving an "ultra drone," writing the date/time library for it, and some simulated world test cases. Such "humility exercises" are found in various disciplines. There's one for CIA analysts, involving analyzing US Civil War sites via sat photos, then having them visit in person.
It's not fragility, so much as perspective.
When you are thinking something is simple, and you say "Am I'm thinking I'm impressed with my own cleverness?" it's easy to say "no". Because it's not arrogant to think you can accomplish something simple.
When you are thinking something is simple, and you say "Am I assuming simplicity?" it's easy to say "yes".
Realizing you're committing the fallacy is the first step to avoiding it.
f.lux gets it right if I set my zip to Barrow, AK. Why can't Apple, with how many orders of magnitude more resources at their disposal — including knowledge?
(Posted at (5+4i):(37+5.23812i) AM)
Presumably in this case you would have arrived at an answer along the lines of "yes, so long as there's always a sunset". Which should then prompt the question: hang on, is there always a sunset? A quick scan over whatever datafile it's using for input should answer that.
AM and PM are "ante meridian" and "post meridian": before" and after. But 12 is on* the meridian; neither one. You can meaningfully say 12:00:01 am, or 11:59:59 pm, but for 12 sharp nobody can say whether am or pm is dark or day.
Airlines schedule flights at 12:01 for this reason.
0 was invented for a reason. This am/pm stuff is so confusing.
I’m no domain expert but I’m guessing flights are scheduled at 12:01am because people are bad at time. For instance some people would think 12am is the last minute of the previous day instead of the first minute of the next day. 12:01 removes the potential ambiguity.
There isn't a flight at midnight, but there are fewer flights then anyway, and it may be confusing to some which day the flight is on. Of course, the flights around midnight have departure times of 2350 and 0015.
And now we're back to the original problem.
This is all because of the fact that we're trying to represent the time taken by the earth (an arbitrary planet that has no impact on the universe whatsoever) to revolve around the sun (an arbitrary star) in terms of the amount of time the earth takes to rotate around itself. These two obviously unrelated things are somehow merged into to create an unsolvable clusterfuck. To make matters worse, let's sprinkle some politics...
* Absolute Time: A time value fixed to UTC.
* Fixed Time: A time value fixed to a specific time zone.
* Floating Time: A time value that is interpreted according to the time zone of the observer.
What do you call this type of worldview where you just view everything as completely meaningless or devoid of any value? Is it really straight up Narcism? I mean my god no wonder this is one of the most depressed generations on record.
Apologies for the off-topic comment, I just felt compelled to post this. We are the most meaningful, most important things in the universe until we know or learn otherwise. We are the most intelligent, most accomplished life forms in our known existence. Viewing it as arbitrary might be "technically true" but then again what do we know? What if we are it? It is just as plausible as the other view: that we are just on a billion year course for the eventual heat death of the universe and the end of existence all together.
Treat yourselves as special, you are. Treat others that way too. You'll also be a lot happier. Sorry for the platitudes.
If you're the only one in a talent contest, you're the best ... and the worst.
It's ok though, it doesn't matter.
Do you believe that animals have meaningful conversation? Or that humans do?
Does the universe speak? If it did, would you know?
Do you understand its language? Can you hear it?
There's also something else: nothing.
We’ve needed to coordinate actions forever and the sun was the only reliable way to do that for a long time. Nothing arbitrary about where our time came from.
Before then? Eh. Objectivity is overrated and an imperfect time system is a nice reminder that life doesn’t revolve around us and what we want.
Or, this is true, if you allow that "day" is defined by sunrise to sunrise (or sunset to sunset, depending on your religion), which in the region discussed would give you one sunrise per revolution around the sun.
Either one of those truths could be the basis for fixing this bug.
EDIT: Rather than a bug (in the implementation), this may be better classified as an under-specification.