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The joke is that as a person who lives on the East Coast, I end up with files or whatever from Dec. 31, 1969, which is a very random date until you realize it's localizing the zero timestamp into my local timezone. My brother-in-law once asked me why he had a bunch of photos in his photo library marked as Dec. 31, 1969 and I had to explain it to him.

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Another thing that will cause 31 December 1969, regardless of timezones, is the use of -1 as a sentinel value, because taken as a literal time value that's one second before the start of the epoch, and thus it's also on 31st December 1969.

But if you checked the time and it's some hours off, rather than a second or two, then yes, that's timezones.

Well, isn't the number always interpreted as seconds (or milliseconds) at UTC? In theory if the system's timezone is set to e.g. +10:00, -1 (seconds) is 1970-01-01 09:59:59 local.

Be careful out there; back in 2006 I learned the hard way that FROM_UNIXTIME(-1) would instantly crash the MySQL build we had in prod.

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