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Comment by dpassens | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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