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Comment by squiggleblaz | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it could be a candidate. Any system which can't be expressed in standard software is stranger than every system that can be.

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Not necessarily. To be inexpressible in software, all it has to do is be unpredictable; it can still be boring.

Let me define "local snoozing time" (LST): it's set to my local standard timezone as of today, but every time I hit the snooze button on my morning alarm it shifts 9 minutes backwards (the length of the snooze). By definition, I wake up at 8am in LST, regardless of what the world is doing.

If the time shifts by more than one hour compared to the prevailing timezone, LST shifts forwards by a whole number of hours on Saturday morning, 2am LST to minimize that difference.

This timezone is "boring" but uncomputable, since it depends on unpredictable events.

But whether standard software is able to express this system is up to the software, not the system, no? Why is this way of timekeeping weird, apart from the arbitrary decision not to support it?

The decision to not support it isn't "arbitrary" per se; it's a function of utility vs cost to implement (which a healthy dose of fudge). "Standard software" for timekeeping is far more useful precisely because it is used by far more people.

Maybe arbitrary was the wrong word. I understand that this is an implementation cost issue and I'm not saying that the decision not to pay this cost wasn't reasonable. My objection is not with tzdb, but with the characterisation of a real-life practice as weird just because software doesn't accommodate it. Shouldn't what people do be the reference for what is normal, rather than the rules encoded in software?

Software doesn’t accomodate it because it’s weird relative to literally the rest of the world.

Sure. But that's completely different from saying it's strange because software doesn't accommodate it.

Is it?

Yes, it is, because in your phrasing the fact that nobody else keeps time that way is the cause and lack of support in software the effect. The comment that I originally responded to is phrased as though lack of software support is the cause of weirdness.

I object to the latter since software is not the source of truth, the social practices it aims to encode are. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this particular practice is so rare that it is out of scope, but this makes tzdb a not quite correct approximation of reality, rather than reality an approximation of tzdb.

Individuals are full of conflicting incompatible desires and people as they group are exponentially so.

There are people who want to end any other human to ever live homeless in starvation or any kind of poverty and there are people who want to eliminate anyone they judge as threat or a nuisance while reinforcing there feeling that they dominate everything that will ever matter in the world and the rest.

Software can help all kind of purpose.

I would agree it's weird, but not because software doesn't support it, but because it's different from what the vast majority of the population of the world does. The fact that software doesn't support it is a downstream consequence of that.

I agree with that take. It's also quite different from saying that it's weird because software doesn't support it, which is the claim I took issue with. Maybe I should've phrased my comment differently.

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