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Comment by BobaFloutist | Hacker News Reader

Have we tried my solution of having a continuous curve of time adjustments instead of one big discrete jump? I think that would have been awful in the day of manually set, analog clocks, but surely in 2025 when everything's digital and many things are connected it's totally possible, no?

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My fist reaction was that it would be immediately rejected, but the more I thought about it, it seems like it could work if you moved clocks BACK 5 minutes at the START of each MONTH from July 1st to December 1st, and then FORWARD 5 minutes starting from January 1st to June 1st.

No, the more I think about this, PROGRAMMERS will HATE this.

I’m also not resetting the manual clocks around my home and vehicle every damned month.

I genuinely dont care if we pickstandard time” or “savings time” … i just want my year-round circadian rhythm to not get fucked up twice a year - it takes me so long to get used to the new one and then it gets rug pulled again.

It's still awful. The only devices I own that would give me a reliable time, would then be my phone, laptop, desktop, and maybe my TV. My microwave, oven, thermostat, alarm clock, car, watch, grandfather clock, etc would all be wrong.

You would wreak unmeasurable havoc across the target country.

Yeah at that point I think we'd be better off if everything was just UTC and dealt with locally

Eh, it's like 5 minutes a month they would be off by. Eventually all those devices will be Internet connected anyways and we'll all have something else new to rage over.

The only "advantage" to that is that companies would sell a lot more devices as people end up realising that their phone/central heating/doorbell/dashcam etc doesn't get any OTA upgrades and is now almost always showing the wrong time.

No, the advantage is that it would allow you to optimize for circadian rhythm without having huge disruptions twice a year.

I fully acknowledge that there would be some major disadvantages and challenges, but they mostly strike me as logistical and engineering challenges, rather than technological limitations. My car, which is not connected to the internet, knows when it's been a day, because it gives me time in AM and PM. There's no reason it couldn't count days and automatically adjust time based on this. Same for thermostats, microwaves, ovens, TVs, etc.

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