• mkwarman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m definitely in the “for almost everything” camp. It’s less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don’t use ISO-8601 is when I’m using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.

  • unomar@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    ISO-8601 over all other formats. 2023-08-09T21:11:00Z

    Simple, sortable, intuitive.

    • protput@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Too long. Even 2023-08-09 is too long for me. But since I like the readability I use 2023.08.09. Less pixels and more readable then 20230809.

        • Aloha_Alaska@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Same number of pixels, they are just different colours. But you still paid for them.

      • Pinklink@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.

  • corytheboyd@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.

    • Djtecha@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I think it’s fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though

        That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:

        • April
        • August
        • December
        • February
        • January
        • July
        • June
        • March
        • May
        • November
        • September
    • dilawar@lemm.eeB
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      1 year ago

      As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.

  • TeckFire@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.

    • Zink@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      I do too, even in notes at work or handwritten stuff at home. I don’t always need to be reminded of the year first, but sometimes it becomes important on older stuff.

      Plus when you’re in the US and work with people from Europe, the unambiguous ordering of month and day is a nice safeguard against silly misunderstandings.

  • realbaconator@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.

  • words_number@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!

    Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.

        • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world
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          My grandmother was born in 1896 and lived to be 102, just long enough for the pre-Y2K computer systems in hospitals to think she was a two-year-old.

          • Puttaneska@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Ouch!

            I lost about an hour of my life trying to create a historical timeline in MS Excel. Eventually learned this is impossible with dates earlier than 1900.

    • sift@lemmy.world
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      It’s how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It’s easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.

        When is your independence day, again?

        Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use “{ordinal} of {month}” (11th of August), “{ordinal} {month}” (11th August), and “{month} {ordinal}” (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use “{number} {month}” (11 August). That doesn’t have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.

            • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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              1 year ago

              “Fourth of July” is the name of the holiday. It happens on “July 4th”.

              “Independence Day” was a movie in the 90’s. We never say “Independence Day” around here unless the topic is Will Smith or REM.

                • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s kinda tongue in cheek, but that’s how we say things in my part of the US. “Fourth of July” is spoken of exactly as if it were the name of the day, like “Thanksgiving” or “Christmas”. Just like we still refer to “Cinco de Mayo” even though we don’t speak Spanish.

                  Obviously it’s not really called “Fourth of July”, but nobody ever says “Nth of Month” here otherwise. And I’m kinda grateful as I like “bigger to smaller” notation. Yeah, mm/dd/yyyy sucks, but saying it that way is pretty expressive because the year rarely matters. So it’s like “Hours and minutes” or (yeah, sorry Europeans) Feet and inches. Bigger before smaller quickly expresses precise information to our caveman brains. At least to my caveman brain.

                  Also, the movie really wasn’t that good in retrospect, but we had some sort of fever about it because it was expensive with lots of explosions, and good music licensing. And both patriots and antipatriots had something to get out of it because aliens blew up the White House.

        • sift@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.

          I’ve never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country’s other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn’t (and shouldn’t) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.

      • CoolMatt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I’m canadian and I’ve always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that’s weird.

        • abraxas@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Except that mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy can be ambiguous, I definitely prefer the former if I’m not using an ISO date. But normally I just write ISO and my head translates to MMM dd,yyyy

    • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Do people outside of the US not say dates like “June first” etc? M/D/Y matches that. It’s really not weird at all, even if the international ambiguity is awful.

      • tchotchony@mander.xyz
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        1 year ago

        Flemish here (aka dutch-speaking). We say first June, sixth November etc. English isn’t our native language, so M/D/Y is weird as fuck and completely illogical to us.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Yes it is objectively weird.

        When you write down “07/01/1967” are you unaware that it is unclear whether you’re referring to July 1st or January 7th?

        And despite the fact that you’re writing something down for the express purpose of communicating information, and you’re choosing to shorten it’s written format to save time and space, you’re ok with either

        a) just leaving it ambiguous and communicating poorly

        or

        b) having to write extra words to give it context, taking up more space than just writing out “July 1st, 1967”?

        1967/06/01 clearly communicates we’re starting with the year and going biggest to smallest time increments. There is no ambiguity as to which order it’s ever in, and it’s far shorter than the full written date.

        At a fundamental user experience level, it is objectively nonsensical to choose the American date format when your goals are 1) clearly communicating a date and 2) doing it shorter than writing out the words.

        • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          It’s not unclear to americans. “Objectively” is hilarious here. If it’s in the format people expect, then it’s perfectly fine in context. Sorry that US traditions don’t suit your fancy.

          It’s definitely confusing in an international context, but well-estsblished conventions don’t change easily.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            1 year ago

            It’s not unclear to americans. “Objectively” is hilarious here. If it’s in the format people expect, then it’s perfectly fine in context. Sorry that US traditions don’t suit your fancy.

            Yes, if you chose the objectively wrong way of doing something and then tell everyone that you’re always going to do it the wrong way, then yes, people will expect you to do it the dumb way. Congratulations. That’s how choosing a protocol works. That doesn’t mean that some protocols aren’t objectively worse than others.

            It’s hilarious that you think “objective” is hilarious, given that you’re reasoning is based 100% on the subjective experiences of Americans.

            • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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              1 year ago

              That’s how formats work, I hate to break it to you. The ambiguity sucks, but the format itself makes perfect sense given the way americans say dates.

              • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                1 year ago

                The ambiguity sucks, but the format itself makes perfect sense given the way americans say dates.

                We all say dates the same.

                It’s objectively dumb because it’s the format that results in ambiguity. Again, the point that it’s good cause Americans are familiar with it is a subjective criteria, since it only applies to American’s experience with using it, whereas the ambiguity of an out of order time span is an objective one.

                • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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                  1 year ago

                  Only the combination of formats results in ambiguity. Neither format is ambiguous on its own.

                  Standardization is good, and if someone were to change it should probably be the US given the apparent worldwide consensus otherwise. That doesn’t make either format good or bad on its own.

                  What I take issue with is people acting like the US format is some kind of bizarro nonsense when it in fact makes perfect sense in terms of matching spoken dates. That is hardly a weird basis for a format.

                  Each has its tradeoffs, and which set of tradeoffs is better is a subjective matter. I agree that d/m/y makes the most sense for an international standard (if not y/m/d), but to claim that the US format itself is somehow objectively bad is silly.

      • Senchanokancho@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        In Germany we say things like “we meet on the twelfth fifth” (Zwölfter Fünfter), which is the twelfth day of the fifth month. Often times the year is also shortened to only the last two digits, so it could be twelfth fifth twenty-four in dd-mm-yy format.

        Of course we also use the names of the months, but sometimes we just number them.

    • FleetingTit@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      ISO 8601 ftw. Here’s the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:

      2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M

        • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month? P1M. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days? P30D. Want to say it in hours? Add the T separator: PT720H.

          I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:

          20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv

          (“--” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/” in file names)

          If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me uptime but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.

          $ bkuptime
          P2DT4H22M4S/2023-08-15T02:01:00+0000, 2 users,  load average: 1.71, 0.87, 0.68
          
  • cerberus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    ISO 8601 is amazing for data storage and standardizing the date.

    Display purposes sure, whatever you feel like

    But goddammit if you don’t use ISO 8601 to store dates, I will find you, and I will standardize your code.

    • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I actually need to standardize my code. I’ve got “learning F2” as something I want to do soon. The goal: use the exif data of my pictures to create [date in ISO 8601] - [original filename].[original file type termination]

      So a picture taken the third of march 2022 titled “asdf.jpg” would become “2022-3-3 - asdf.jpg”

      Help? lol

      • notabot@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        If you’re on Linux exiftool can get the creation date for you: exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' FILENAME, and you could run tgat in a loop over your files, something like:

        mkdir -p out
        for f in *.jpg
        do
        createdate=$(exiftool -p '$CreateDate' -d '%Y-%m-%d' "${f}")
        cp -p "${f}" "out/${createdate} - ${f}"
        done
        

        Obviously don’t justbgo running code some stranger just posted on the internet, especially as I haven’t tested it, but that should copy images from the current directory to a subdirectory called ‘out’ with the correct filenames.

        • metaStatic@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          ok I think I finally need to ask

          What the fuck is up with the html code? Ive seen this in a lot of posts and it just throws me every time.

          • notabot@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            I don’t see any HTML when I look at that comment from Lemmy, but kbin seems to make a real mess of rendering code blocks. Basically that bit had a few lines of code they could yse to do what they wanted.

      • Samsy@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        I did this in the past and I would search through my notes… If I had notes ffs.

        • snek_boi@lemmy.ml
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          I’m using NixOS. Ext4 filesystem. As to language, I’m not entirely sure what you mean. If you refer to the character set in the filenames, I think there are no characters that deviate from the English alphabet, numbers, dashes, and underscores.

          • cerberus@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Oh ok so you’re more so working with folder structure etc, so bash for when you plug-in a card?

            I’m thinking in more programmatic terms, there’s definitely some bash scripting you can execute. Or just go balls out and write a service that executes on systemctl

  • Jamie@jamie.moe
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    1 year ago

    I enforce ISO 8601 for the shared storage in my office. Before I got there, files were kinda stored in all kinds of formats, but mostly month first.

    I tell the person under me she can store her files in her user any way she wants, but if it goes into shared storage, it’s ISO 8601. I even have a folder in there called !Date format: YYYY-MM-DD Description to help anyone else remember.

    • Rootiest@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Haha I did the same.

      It was the Wild West, no standard, everyone used their own date format all in the same shared storage.

      I’ve got most of the office doing it correctly now

  • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    YYYY-MM-DD for everything. My PC clock, my phone and even my handwritten notes all use that format.

    The only other acceptable format is military notation: DD MMM YYYY.