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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures. Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages, different regions etc.

I'm also not sure I'd blame the engineers in SV too much, of course they design software based on their own context. But with tech becoming global, it's a bit sad how it's not prioritized more.

Examples include bad dictionaries in other languages. Bad or no translations. And for instance in Norwegian we quote things like «ord» or „ord“, but all software I use do or makes it harder than just doing "ord". US systems assumes all addresses uses zip codes. My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems. I can't use vpn at work if I'm in a city with the letter Ø in it as some go proxy geoip location thingy crashes. ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off. If I ask it to rhyme, it doesn't but if I were to translate back to English it rhymes. Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.

Or how things are moderated to an US standard. In Scandinavia boobs are fine, and in Danish newspapers you'd see them all the time. With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness".

I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized. Word uses quotes ok and grammar is not terrible. Except it for decades have insisted on writing internet with a capital I for some reason, which we don't do.

View on HN

The one that always gets me is how Google's image captcha assumes everyone knows what American school buses, fire hydrants, crosswalks, and various other street features look like. As a youngish EU citizen I do know those from cartoons and the internet, but I doubt my parents do

> Or how things are moderated to an US standard

It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity

It’s similarly comical how video-recorded board meetings will have grown-up people hold woke signs while others recite from library books with controversial wording, everyone starts shouting, and they get escorted off property for reading aloud the book (available to kids).

It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity.

Maybe it’s just as bad some places in Europe, and it just doesn’t get televised.

> It feels like the US is overstretching its own diversity.

Something about this line is bothering me.

In the US, we're very diverse sure, but also that diversity comes with deep history of violence, struggle, systemic oppression, etc.

To many, current movements might come off like they're overstepping, but so much about our culture is so deeply steeped in the opposite. So much of our daily life has been structured around old deeply racist systems and as a population we're struggling to come to terms with the contradictions of concepts we were taught with the reality. We're taught we're a melting pot of cultures, yet there are so many atrocities in living memory that parts of the population wish would be simply forgotten.

So there is the counter swing of the "woke"(I hate that word and the complete corruption of the concept), which is an attempt to bring these subconscious ideas into the conscious level so we can think about them and confront them, rather than let them continue to simmer.

The overarching goal isn't to make all these things the standard, but to overshoot so that when the cultural tendon relaxes, it falls to a better place.

The "Woke" movements is an attempt to fight a cultural virus, and the remnants of the virus does not like it and gets defensive, and informs other parts of the body that this medicine is actually a virus in of itself. The goal isn't that the medicine becomes a permanent fixture, but that it brings to light the virus and allows the society to understand how to extinguish it.

Nah I agree with OP

The problem isn’t the deep history of discrimination. I consider that something that created a lot of growth.

The problem is discrimination is natural and it is only fought with diversity but there is no such place that is truly diverse.

I live in, by world standards, a diverse part of the LA metro area. Except there’s like no Black people. Now if I go to a more Black-dominated part of LA, there might not be Koreans. Now if I take the entirety of LA, it will have both Black people and Koreans and maybe you could call it diverse? Except there will be very few Nigerians or Kazakhstanis.

The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try. It’s like an electrician who just read some books but has never worked with an actual electrician. My attempts to accommodate a group of people I don’t know will be completely fake. They will know I don’t know a single Nigerian or Kazakhstani.

So when people try to be woke, it usually comes from that level of inexperience. It’s not real diversity. It’s that electrician trying their best but doing it all wrong.

You're talking about something different than u/MSFT_Edging.

> The issue is that I cannot speak for Nigerians or Kazakhstanis however hard I try.

Yup. You demonstrate an awareness, a conscientiousness, that's too rare.

I've been in gatherings (eg board meetings) where someone will presume to speak on behalf of others. While one of those others is sitting right there, trying to be heard.

Not helpful.

And super awkward.

Which reminds me... That All Gas No Breaks guy did a terrific segment about those "antifa" & "BLM" protests in Portland Oregon. Standard in person interviews with a bunch of bored white kids just looking for a fight.

Then the genius bit: No Breaks sought out blacks and asked them about the protests. He just let's them talk, in that great way that he does.

Punchline: the blacks interviewed stated the belligerents a) were missing the point (to listen to black people) and b) were making it that much harder for blacks to be heard.

Typical.

Well put.

The actual substantive issues of racism and diversity have actually been brilliantly taken over by the ultra-rich and political powers that be. What's the real giveaway? Corporations LOVE talking about them.

In the social media massively distributed bullhorn industry, these issues are used to create a distracting perma-debate that both parties can employ and divide for their needed political support. But notice that the debates never center on the most important diversity issue: the fact that the rich have almost all the money, is squeezing everyone, and the squeezing appears as fissures along racial and ethnic lines.

Basically, non-whites basically are saying "hey we need money and investment from white people". Which is true! 99% of nonwhite communities need massive investment.

But white people say "we don't have any money". Which is true! Because the white middle class is gone, the upper middle class is now being hollowed out, and generational warfare has left most young "upper class" white people as well as the once-middle-class whites completely laden with loans. So 90% of whites don't have money, and THEY need investment.

So where's the money? Oh ... right.

> the fact that the rich have almost all the money

Obviously not true. The government has almost all the money. When it needs more, it just prints off a few trillion as necessary.

As for the rich, they by and large created the wealth they have. When you invest money in an enterprise that is productive, you're creating wealth.

Both your takes on the rich can be true at the same time. This is still the same stuff Marx, et al. talked about.

> It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity

That's mostly due to TikTok which is even worse than Youtube in its opacity and complete unaccountability to anyone.

IMHO this app is controlled by the Chinese government to a degree that it is intentional that kids can't talk about stuff like sexuality (which has to be censor-named to "seggsual") or suicide ("unaliving") using proper words - sort of like 1984.

Well, IMO, one of the former communist dictatorships doing things that resemble 1984 is... completely unsurprising.

What is different now is that we are getting contact with it. While in the past the Orwellian features were kept inside borders both for propaganda effect and because nobody outside of them would willingly adopt the practice.

Depending on the political situation in your country, your parents probably got the same knowledge of American life from TV series and films. America's monopoly of popular culture is weaker today than it was when they were growing up.

Speaking of monopolies, the article is "celebrating" 40 years of brazen anticompetitive behavior and monopoly that inflicting billions and possibly trillions of dollars of economic damage on the world.

And of course a long slide from any sort of meaningful enforcement on monopolies and cartels, once in the American market, and now largely in the international sphere.

Finally, Microsoft Office itself is an information prison. The information is locked in proprietary and defensively changed file formats that either require more Microsoft "products" to access the information meaningfully, or decades of reverse engineering.

And keep in mind that 90% of the data in office documents is just ... text.

Anyway, Happy Microsoft Word day apparently.

Yes.

LibreOffice seems to work just fine for reading and writing doc and docx and it is completely free and open source.

Not. It’s stronger than it ever was. That’s what speeding up communication did. For now, anyway.

> It's just comical how adults on Youtube talking about adult topics are pressured into censoring even mild profanity

This may come as a shock to people here, but European countries have their own censorship in their own for adults political programs and TV. This idea that it is somehow unique to censor swearing is really weird.

I doubt my parents do

As someone old enough that I could be a parent of youngish EU citizen, I too watched a lot of US cartoons and movies as a kid.

A lot of those points also apply to other European countries.

Though regarding the quotation marks, that seems to be more the fault of the local keyboard layouts. I don't understand why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“. MS Word relies on a software solution to automatically convert "ord" into the German format, but most software (like browsers) understandably don't bother with implementing such replacements. The same thing applies to ' and ’. (Is this even the character I have in mind?)

Regarding ChatGPT being bad at Norwegian: That's excusable, as the performance of the model is dependent on the amount of available training data.

American prudishness. Yeah. Every country has its own preferences, but among Western countries, the US seems special with their aversion to nudity. Excluding Australia perhaps. In the US violence is okay but nudity isn't, in Germany violence isn't okay but nudity is, in France both are okay. The US has a stronger aversion to nudity than most European countries, but it's interesting that in the US a sex scene without nudity appears to be less offensive than a nude scene without sex. As a German, that always seemed absurd to me, and presumably most Europeans would agree. But in the end it means that, because Google is an American company, YouTube globally allows no nudity (not even boobs), while being completely fine with strong violence and even gore.

Regarding am/pm, yeah, that sometimes still trips me up. According to Wikipedia:

> Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown.

> among Western countries, the US seems special with their aversion to nudity. Excluding Australia perhaps.

Australian here. Culturally we seem less comfortable with nudity than a lot of parts of Europe, but we’re not as bad as the US. It boils my blood how much online spaces (like Facebook) are moderated according to American standards.

Most software I use also can’t handle the fact that I mix American and Australian English spelling. (Programming always uses American spelling but I’ll use Australian spelling in other contexts.) All of my devices either complain about “color” or “colour”, and I’m constantly being told off or autocorrected for using my own language in a nuanced way.

> why German keyboards don't have the keys to write „ord“

I'm assuming for the same reason American/English keyboards don't have the keys to write “place”, just "place". Which is because American/English typewriters didn't -- they invented straight quotes to save extra keys. And looking up on Google Images, it looks like German typewriters were the same -- Shift+2 was a straight double quote.

It's my personal opinion that this was the original sin -- that typewriters implemented straight quotes rather than curly quotes, to save an extra column of keys. Imagine there's a parallel universe out there, just like ours, except straight quotes were never invented, and everybody actually types opening and closing quotes explicitly, and word processors never had to invent any "smart quotes" feature at all...

Still, I'm more surprised by German typewriters than English ones. In English, you can "get away" with straight quotes, they don't stick out too badly. But in German, the opening quote is in the totally wrong position, at the top instead of the bottom!

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm a little too young to have experience with typewriters. I assume most European typewriter layouts were even more spatially constrained than the US one (due to the presence of special characters not found in the standard Latin Alphabet), so there wasn't much room to allow two quotation marks. And the fixed-width typewriter "font" didn't look properly typographic anyway.

If the straight quote hadn't been invented, the influence in programming languages would have been interesting. Then presumably there would be no common quotation mark present on all keyboards. So perhaps programming languages would have used various kinds of brackets only. Straight quotes aren't great anyway for most things, as they can't really be nested unambiguously.

On the MacBook keyboard with US or CA input, you can get “” with option left bracket/left curly brace and ‘’ with option right bracket/right curly brace. With a little practice it's not that much harder to do. I'm still not quite up to speed with it, but it's nice. Should contractions also use ’?

Now you know.

There's also ASCII. How many characters can you fit into 7 bits? Compromises get made.

Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_) to underline. While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" and "/\").

In hindsight the underscore and backslash been useful in computing, so I'd say we'd have done better to use the tilde and backtick slots for completing pairs of curly quotes instead! Of course, hindsight being 20/20 and all that...

I think even underscore and backslash weren't necessary in computing, even though they were put to use once they were there. The @ was also really not necessary. And a lot of those invisible characters weren't either. We should have had just one line break character, since the distinction between CR and LF makes no sense for computers, and certainly caused a lot of incompatibility. As you said, hindsight...

CR and LF made sense for mechanical printers.

LF was used a lot for glass editors connected at low baud rates.

>> Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown.

I did not know that. The terms are from the Latin ante meridiem and post meridiem (meridiem, midday, ante before, post after) so it seemed logical to me that any Romance language would have them. But then, English is not a Romance language (but borrowed heavily from them) so, chalk another one up to English being an absolute mess.

You meant to say 'delightful smorgasbord' of a language.

Don't worry; I'll forgive your insolence this time.

I'm originally from Texas. I reserve the right to call English a mess. Y'all should see how Texans pronounce Spanish words.

Other languages write e.g. 6:00 instead of 6:00 am, and 18:00 instead of 6:00 pm. When you talk about analog clocks you can presumably say something like "it shows six o'clock in the afternoon". (What's the opposite of afternoon by the way? Morning? But isn't that the opposite of evening? Or just ante meridiem? But that's Latin.)

In german there is "Vormittag" and "Nachmittag". Vormittag is the time between the morning and noon. Nachmittag is the time between noon and the evening.

Mittag = noon Vor = before -> "beforenoon" (literal translation of Vormittag) Nach = after -> "afternoon" (literal translation of Nachmittag)

But "vormittag" just translates to "morning" (with deepL and google translate).

Though there seems to exist "forenoon".

Oh my god, as a Scandinavian, the whole American thing about boobs is so annoying! It seems like the internet really want to force me to be shocked about seeing a chest, it's so weird. Most of the time, it is completely outside of a sexual context, but videos get 18+ because you apparently take psychological damage of you see a pair of tits before you're allowed to vote.

Actually didn't know about the quote thing though, even though I've loved here my whole life

Until the internet breaks its dependency on advertising income (a significant portion of which are either American or global, meaning they want to be inoffensive to Americans) and the internet breaks its dependency on allowing advertising to be channeled through an American company, moderating to prudish American moral standards is here to stay.

It would be a net positive if Google's advertising business was broken up along regional lines for anti-competitive practices and also being anti-cultural. Anybody want to suggest it to the EU?

Sure relative to Europe America has prudish standards. But what about the Arab sphere? China? India? You know, like 3-4 billion people?

Yeah, I think America has pretty liberal standards.

Interestingly, the US seems fairly similar to Japan: Large tolerance for violence, small tolerance for nudity. Which is strange, given that US has much stronger connections to Europe. (Though I'm not a Japan expert.)

Didn't Japanese culture get pretty much rewritten after WWII to be US-compatible?

The US forced the Japanese to rewrite their constitution with input from the US, the Japanese government and from non governmental groups. US demands were mostly to make it harder for militarists to seize power. Probably the biggest changes was press freedom and the legal rights of women.

My impression of the place is you have a modern industrial society replacing large parts of the preexisting feudal culture. Important, Japanese feudal culture is not the same as western Europe feudal culture. More face culture, less shame culture. And Japanese aren't as much prudish, as conservative and obsessed with decorum.

Still can't find the source of it, but I remembered more details behind the "culture rewrite" hypothesis I read the other day. That source argued that US didn't just defeat Japan, but it thoroughly broke the cult of emperor that existed there until end of WWII, and thus (implied) from the POV of the whole society, the west slew their god, and became a new role model.

The Japanese culture is still very different from the Western one. It's more similar to South Korea probably, perhaps even China in some ways.

On the other hand, there are literally billions of people in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures for whom photos of bare boobs are also taboo, so this seems like a case of just having to deal with being a minority in a public square.

Are you asserting that those billions of people who also aren't getting their way (as all decisions are made by Americans, whom are not at all numerous either offline or online) are a minority?

No, just that you can't please everyone, I think.

I'm asserting that multinational corporations typically aim for the lowest common denominator. For boobs, that's to avoid showing them.

In many African countries boobs are even less taboo than in Europe though. In some countries women were pretty much always topless before westerners arrived (in South America, Africa, and countries like Bali). The aversion to nudity seems to be the strongest in Muslim countries.

> Oh my god, as a Scandinavian, the whole American thing about boobs is so annoying! It seems like the internet really want to force me to be shocked about seeing a chest, it's so weird

My favorite are medical tiktokers sharing gynecological information talking about vajujus and peepees so the algorithm doesn’t punish them for foul language.

My personal pet peeve is American SaaS companies not comprehending that half the world starts their week on Monday. All those systems for requesting PTO, sick leave etc. are so confusing if you’re not extra careful.

I raise your one day off by switching places for month and days.

Nah, it's just that Silicon Valley folks are used to 0-based indexing instead of 1-based.

Shows the superiority of the software artists at silicon valley

Related to that is all the angst about how Sim City basically just lets you make car-centric hellscapes, not at all unlike San Jose, the city in which it was birthed.

And City Skylines inherited a lot of that legacy, that designs centered around mass transit and cycling (such as one would find in Europe or Japan) really only become fully practical with a bunch of mods installed.

The whole game of City Skylines is based around a grid-shaped city and clearly delineated zones for housing, commerce, and industry. It's never going to be able to model a European city (or an old east coast US for that matter).

Its not just the car centric hellscapes, but the assumption the only way a local authority exerts any control over building is zoning (for residential or commercial, never both), the grid, the assumption that high density means towers with parking lots in between, the lack of any social housing (and indeed the assumption low income workers are entirely unnecessary to a properly functioning city), the assumption that the best way to make your city really attractive is regressive taxation to attract the rich and scare away the poor etc etc...

I visited Amsterdam recently and instantly noticed something weird about the road layouts there. I did some research - they differentiate between streets (meant for short distances, or getting to a local destination) and roads (meant for long distance travel - or driving past a location). As a visitor, it seems brilliant. And it makes way more sense than what a lot of roads look like here - with cyclists trying to fit in with high speed traffic.

Novel approaches to urban planning seems like an obvious thing to put in to urban planning games. What a missed opportunity.

Urban planners have coined the word "stroad" for the hybrid monstrosities.

I’ve noticed this a number of times in recent travel— Kyoto, New Orleans, Quebec City, all very old places where the narrow side streets (often with little to no sidewalk and certainly no dedicated bike space) are in fact a paradise for walking and biking, despite what you might think listening to some urbanism advocacy.

Another example I recently ran into is Google translate stripping gender from words even when translating between languages with grammatical gender.

(German) die Banditin -> (Spanish) el bandido

(Spanish) la bandida -> (German) der Bandit

So it always turns a female bandit into a male one.

Because it goes via English?

I am not sure but I think I heard Google Translate always goes via English.

> Because it goes via English?

That's my understanding, yes.

That explains SO much.

Yandex Translate gets it wrong in the same way, suggesting that they also go through English instead of Russian, or something else is going on.

Based on this 2016 Google Brain article, “Zero-Shot Translation with Google’s Multilingual Neural Machine Translation System”, I assumed Google Translate directly translated languages:

https://blog.research.google/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-w...

But I just tested some end-to-end translations of some random simple sentences from German and Spanish Wikipedia. The translations are identical whether I translate them directly or via English as an intermediate step. This didn’t prove that Google Translate is using English (or some other interlingua), but at least demonstrates doesn’t not use one. :)

German example:

de = Wikipedia ist ein Projekt zum Aufbau einer Enzyklopädie aus freien Inhalten.

de:en = Wikipedia is a project to build an encyclopedia of free content.

en:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.

de:es = Wikipedia es un proyecto para construir una enciclopedia de contenido gratuito.

Spanish example:

es = Wikipedia es una enciclopedia libre, políglota y editada de manera colaborativa.

es:en = Wikipedia is a free, polyglot and collaboratively edited encyclopedia.

en:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.

es:de = Wikipedia ist eine freie, polyglotte und gemeinschaftlich bearbeitete Enzyklopädie.

I fully agree with you. Another gripe to add to the list is the Anglocentric expectation made by American software [0] that any full personal name with three words must necessarily mean (given_name) (middle_name) (surname), to be displayed as "Givenname M. Surname" and initialised as "GS" (skipping the ostensible "middle" name). Nevermind the diversity of conventions across cultures [1], every name must obviously follow American cultural expectations.

[0] Also British, Canadian & Australian software, but with few exceptions (Shopify, Atlassian…) few of these have such global presumptions as US software products.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989683

Time for a timeless classic piece of writing: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1].

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I've encountered software that just assumes everyone MUST have a middle name. I'm German, I have no middle name. Some software (well, online forms) make this a "hard" assumption, so you have to put an "X" or something in the middle name field; it'll scream otherwise

I am an American and have no middle name and I cannot recall any software that forced me to enter one.

A funny/sad aspect of it is that I get the impression that violation of the /^(?<first>\S+) (?<middle>\S+) (?<last>\S+)$/ custom isn’t even all that rare in the USA because it’s still moderately common to reuse names and add ordinals, a practice which has largely fallen out of practice in other English-first countries (so that violation of the convention has become rarer in them, though certainly there are other deviations—e.g. I have a great aunt with no middle name).

Poor old John Smith Ⅳ (pronounced “John Smith the Fourth”) probably gets turned into the initials “JI” (because let’s be real, he actually wrote “IV” rather than “Ⅳ”).

I also know Americans who go by their middle names because everybody in the family has the same first name, with the first name turned into an initial before their middle name. Usually software can handle this by entering "J Bob" in the first name field, but not always. Sometimes software asks for first name and middle name separately, and then you know you're going to have trouble because another system thinks "J Bob" is your first name and the two won't match.

I think a single field for the entire name would be ideal, with an optional second field for "how should we address you?" so that the software doesn't have to play games with asking gender and breaking out the last name to fill out a form letter with "Dear Mr. Smith, ..."

Names are not strings. Until software developers get that through their heads, the situation is going to stay broken.

I consulted on a project for a US-based airline. The horror show that is Sabre infests everything, and Sabre doesn't understand any character that didn't exist in six-bit BCD

> Names are not strings.

So what are they?

Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not.

To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array.

Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.

There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.

Point me to the international standards for representing money.

ISO 4217

TIL

Without making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.

> making assumptions

We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.

The main problem with the single field idea is alphabetisation.

> My name contains a letter not in ascii, breaking lots of systems

Tell me about it. In my native language (European) we have accents at the end of some words (like città or pubblicità; city and advertisement respectively).

As someone that works with typography in someway or another, I can't count how many times I had a font that didn't support the character à or é or whatever and I had to choose a font that looks similar to the one I want but that if you look at the text for even a few moments more, you are guaranteed to notice it.

An even more disappointing fact is how many people use the apostrophe instead of the accent for capitalized letters (E' instead of É) because there no É button on the keyboard. Shift+è brings up é

> Some systems ask me to input a time in am/pm and I've no idea which is when.

I have a similar problem. Sometimes someone writes a date in the American MM/DD/YYYY format instead of the DD/MM/YYYY one and unless it's something like 08/24/2023 where there is no month 24, it can be pretty disorienting to me. That's why I really like the ISO (please fill me up on the number) YYYY-MM-DD: it's both clearly distinct for the other two and standardized across the world

> I actually think MS products are fairly good at this. They are big enough and have been around long enough to be fairly well localized

100% agree with you, although there are some other production that do a pretty good job (both FOSS like Jellyfin and commercial like Affinity Photo). Fun fact: Microsoft Word 2007's dictionary doesn't have the surnames of some of my classmates but has mine (which is something so rare it's basically impossible)

> because there no É button on the keyboard

On a Mac it’s easy. Just hold down the letter and you will have options for pretty much any accent. Holding Capital E for example on iOS: Ë É E È Ê Ě Ę etc..

But most of the people that make this error are non-tachsavy Windows users. And while there is Microsoft's PowerToys[0] with the Quick Accent tool that does the same thing, I doubt many people know about it.

> on iOS

I think this works for any mobile keyboard (for example, AOSP's default keyboard supports that). In my language at least, the use of a capital letter with an accent is pretty rare, especially when we're talking about quick messages (which is what your most likely to write on mobile)

[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/powertoys

> ISO (please fill me up on the number)

8601

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

Speaking of dates, if you live in the US did you remember to move your clocks back an hour last night? If you live in Europe, it's next week.

In Europe it was last week.

My bad. I knew it wasn't the same as the US, making scheduling across time zones even more of a pain than usual.

It's not even American prudeness is many cases, it's "making sure everything is advertiser safe" as interpreted by poorly paid Filipino moderators.

"Advertiser safe" means something else for a US American (person/company/advertiser) than for a European.

Of course, and yet it turns into the same thing when your advertisers are based in Dubai.

There does indeed seem some overlap here between the US and Muslim countries.

I know that being progressive is really important to the self esteem of you Euros, but you all need to stop letting it cloud your worldview so much.

"cloud your world view"?

Grammar suggestions in Office 365 is terrible. It just can’t guess the document’s language when it doesn’t align with the browser’s language settings.

The automated suggestions are still so poor and out of touch with reality, I reckon they will only be useful to dyslexics who are throwing dice anyways.

I appreciate your thoughts. You made me realize AM (antemeridian, before noon) and post meridian (after noon, 24 hours mod 12) aren't universal standards!

Not even in the USA.

Noon and midnight are especially difficult for people used to the 24 hour system. Noon is neither ante nor post meridiem. And midnight is both.

I don't follow - Noon is 12pm, midnight is 12am.

The word "meridiem" means "noon", the middle of the day. Noon itself is neither before nor after noon.

You're right that by convention noon is assigned a pm tag and midnight is assigned an am tag. But midnight, when the calendar date changes, is confusing enough to people that e.g. airplane departures will be scheduled for 11:59 pm rather than 12:00 am, because there's no ambiguity about when 11:59 pm will happen on Wednesday, whereas it isn't clear when midnight will happen on Wednesday -- technically, if it's Wednesday, midnight already happened on Tuesday night.

It is far more common for people to end their personal day after midnight than it is to begin it before midnight, so the convention directly contradicts the way pretty much everyone views "the day".

Which is very confusing. Why does 12pm follow 11am and 12am follow 11pm?

Maybe because 12:00 being consistent with 12:01 was more important than it being consistent with 11?

I personally enjoy using 24-hour clocks on all devices I can.

Speaking of 24 hour clocks: my oven clock shows midnight as 24:00, and then changes to 00:01 at 1 minute past midnight. I've never seen any other clock show that; very strange.

I thought that was normal at least when writing or saying things.

Use of either mechanical displays or on computers time selecter widgets does mean that 24 is not shown anywhere,

Because that's how the numbers are arranged on the clock face/sun dial

I grew up in the UK and still couldn’t tell you this off the top of my head. Most people can’t - when setting up systems with a cutoff date/time I’ve regularly been asked to have them expire at 11:59pm, because it avoids any ambiguity here.

I think that's generally a sensible idea. Anything which required a schedule for humans to read - theatre performances, trains, planes, etc - are better off being scheduled for 23:55, 23:59, 00:01 or 00:05 than exactly at midnight because lots of people don't understand or get confused whether 00:00 on a date means the start or the end of the day.

I do enjoy though where systems have to deal with 'weird' days. I believe in the UK the rail ticketing system works on essentially a 26h day - that is to say if you buy a ticket at on 5th November, it will be valid until 04:00 on 6th November, so in some sense the hours 00:00-04:00 belong to both days.

I remember reading somewhere that some systems use a 26 hour clock in that it's literally valid 00:00 to 25:59, or 28 hr for 00:00 to 27:59. 24:30 10/1 and 00:30 11/1 mean the exact same thing, it's a notational convenience to not have to worry about date boundaries between days.

Trying to find the source again but not having success.

TV stations use this system. A schedule for any given day can be up to 27 hours iirc.

The Thomas Cook European Rail Timetable uses 00:00 for a train departing at midnight, and 24:00 for a train arriving at midnight.

> Most people can’t

Bias. Most people can. I'm in the UK, too.

I have no idea, I can never remember, it makes no logical sense - no, 12 noon is NOT post-meridian, it IS meridian. I usually go 11:59 or 12:01, and then I'm still not sure if it doesn't put the entire hour in some interdimensional hole where this doesn't make sense.

The interval is clopen. Hence the convention that noon accords to PM

Noon is the meridiem that AM and PM reference. At precisely 12:00 it is neither before nor after noon, because it is noon. That makes it hard to intuitively know whether the mid-day 12:00-12:59 should be AM or PM (and vice versa with midnight).

It can obviously be learned, but it's something lots of people have trouble with. I was probably in my teens before I finally got that memorized enough to keep them straight. Lots of things happen at 11:59 PM (due dates being the most prominent example) because it's less potentially ambiguous than 12:00 AM the next day, even though it's functionally the same thing.

And yet we have survived with the convention that 12AM is midnight, and 12PM is noon for centuries.

Noon is also not "12:00" - it is the infinitely small moment at the strike of 12:00. Instantaneously it becomes post-meridiem. 12:00:00.0000000000000000000000000000001 is after noon.

Yeah, but because if analog clocks here in Austria we have no problem to convert back and forth. Are there no analog clocks in Norway?

There are, but we just skip the AM/PM part most of time, because it's obvious from context which one you mean. And if it's not you'll just say "... in the morning/afternoon/evening"

AM: morning, PM: afternoon/evening

Yeah, but this is the problem - why noon is "afternoon"?

"12:00:00 + ε" is after noon, but your clock will not show a difference.

Clopen intervals in order to have a well-specified time system.

[0] [12:00 PM, 12:00 AM) for after the noon instant

[1] [12:00 AM, 12:00 PM) for before the noon instant

24-hour time is superior to the mod-12 time system in almost every way but mechanical clock faces and soldier shifts under early systems that used sun dials. However, the equivalent question can be asked by a day is a clopen interval of [00:00 current day, 00:00 next day)

In 24-hour time, those are 12-24 and 0-12, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

A place open 24 hours/day is open in the period 0-24.

I don't follow your point. Are you correcting my point on clopen intervals and mod bases?

I think clopen is too complicated in that it expresses ranges that are not practically useful, like (10,11], and it complicates expressing something like "Open 0-24", where your notation appears to require a date.

I think you get the essential utility you want in a 24 hour clock by simply letting 24 (or "24:00:00" when fully written out) be a way to represent the end of the day.

It's also already in use, with examples at https://ioi2023.hu/faq/ , http://www.garageferrarimilazzo.com/en/ , and https://jozsefvaros.hu/english/news-in-the-district/2022/12/... .

Noon isn't really before or after noon, but we want to lump it together with one of them, so we picked the one that made 12:00 and 12:01 go together. (Edit: or for that matter, 12:00:00 and 12:00:01, down to arbitrary closeness, as sibling comment points out)

People in 24h cultures always use 12 analog hours in normal situations, but the 24h system is needed for situations where it is easy to make a mistake.

When is dinner?

- It's at seven.

When does the flight depart?

- At 19:00

> People in 24h cultures always use 12 analog hours in normal situations

No, we don't. The only person I know who by default uses 12h is my grandmother. Everybody else always uses 24h.

Do you mind me asking where you are?

All my experience has also been using 12h time in casual situations in 24h countries. I'm curious of a country that doesn't, and whether that's true of the whole region.

Poland. It seems to be more of a generational thing than regional. People over the age of 70 seem to use 12h. Younger ones use 24h.

Ireland, New Zealand and Finland used 24 casually when I was there

Ireland uses 24h clock in writing (including casual writing, text messages, etc.), and it wouldn't be at all unusual for personal digital clocks to be set to 24h clock, but I'd be surprised to hear it in speech.

I've never heard anybody from a 24h country use 24h unless it's regarding situations where there cannot be any ambiguity. You either live in an exceptional place, or interact with exceptional people. World you really say "At fifteen o'clock" instead of "At three o'clock" or "Three in the afternoon"?

Yes.

You obviously haven't been to France.

But it's still not helpful with AM/PM. If I see 12 and it's dark outside then I know it's midnight, otherwise it's noon, and that's what I will say to someone who will ask "what time is it?". I still don't know if it's PM or AM.

Ah right, for that particular time its difficult. Yeah, I have to google that.

One kind of bad localization that happens every now and then is that the time is given in 12-hour clock but the am/pm particles are translated (to some reasonable thing). While a proper localization in those cases would just display 24-hour time without any am/pm equivalents.

If I could edit the comment after a few hours, I would fix the spelling. Apologies! (Ante meridiem & post meridiem)

>> Often the software doesn't take into account how things work in other languages

Not just languages. In my area we run into constant issues with MS products using American date/time formats in places it isn't wanted. For half of ever month this is a big deal, even inside the US as many organizations use the international standard. People cut-and-paste from popup windows or error logs only to discover that the tiny bit of MS code that generated the notice doesn't respect realworld date formats (day-month-year) and just defaults to the US format (month-day-year). Non-MS software (apple/google) and open source more often than not respect date formats. It is MS that seems to just not care.

I was once involved in a heated debate re a contract when everyone suddenly realized the issue: 05/06/18 had been confused with 06/05/18, resulting in an extra month of costs being attached. I think to avoid further ambiguity I jokingly rewrote it as "On the sixth day of the fifth month of the year of our lord two thousands and eighteen and ..."

> I'm a but wary in general about how US tech used around the world slowly erodes the nuances of different cultures

This is a plus, not a minus. It doesn't matter what (reasonable) standard we go with, as long we go with one. I'm excited for a time when all humans speak (and read, if reading is still needed by then) the same easy-to-learn logical language from childhood.

When English and Norwegian become special interest topics that niche scholars learn as part of their grad work, we'll all be better off.

https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/Marain

It would be cool to have a universal language, but English is the JavaScript of spoken languages – universal because of coincidence rather than good design.

... and not afraid to steal bits from another language.

English would be fine as a lingua franca if you could reasonably infer pronunciation from spelling and spelling from pronunciation, like e.g. in Spanish.

Any information exchange erodes culture. Movies, music, academia, anything.

But I think that’s a good thing. Other people feel differently and want to preserve small patches of “pure” cultures, but I think the world is better and richer when hugely diverse cultures are diffused widely.

I might agree with you in theory. In reality the American culture spreading across the globe is just sad to me. I don't want to get a Subway sandwich in the US, let alone Germany or Signapore...

Ideally we would want to spread the best parts of different cultures around the world, not indiscriminately everything from one specific culture. There are many things about US American culture that are great, others are not so great.

> With global networks, we're now moderating to American "prudeness".

We're moderating things to the most influential country that uses that language. If you don't use English then you'll see tons of content that would not fly in the English internet. Searching for "watch rick and morty free" gets you to paid services and malware sites, while searching for that same show in a less popular language gets you a very fast pirated stream with subtitles in that language as the first search result. This is very useful for watching pirated English content as long as you don't mind the foreign subtitles.

The point was probably that e.g. YouTube or Facebook have strict rules against nudity in all countries, because US American culture has a strong aversion against nudity. (Perhaps due to the influence of Puritan settlers on the early US, or something like that.)

MS teams quick prompts are heavily americanised imo and sound unnatural in my culture

>ChatGPT can output in my language, but the language is stiff and feels off.

I'm Spanish and I'm tired of American companies pretending only Mexican Spanish exists.

Same with European Portuguese, I can’t actually use Siri or any voice controlled software because I refuse to speak in Brazilian Portuguese. It is so unnatural (frankly I don’t know how), I would just prefer to speak English.

Fewer than 5% of native speakers are Portuguese...

I’m Mexican and I’m tired of the entire world pretending all Hispanic countries are perfectly happy with peninsular Spanish :)

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