Thank you, I remember being young and trying them for the first time excited as American culture had bigged them up no end, and they turned out to be bland as anything and nothing on a custard cream.
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.
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD… yet. Don’t let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.
You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don’t say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
That’s probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I take issue with is people acting like the US format is some kind of bizarro nonsense
It objectively is, and Ive explained why numerous times.
If you don’t have an argument beyond ‘it makes sense cause we’re used to it’, then you don’t have an argument about why one is better than the other, you have a weakass dodge the conversation feelgoodism. It is the textbook definition of a subjective criteria.
Learn how to be fucking wrong gracefully. Jesus Christ.
You haven’t explained what is objectively wrong other than you don’t like it. My argument is more than just being used to it, closely matching verbal convention is useful.
Also, it’s funny that you think I’m arguing either is objectively better than the other.
My argument is more than just being used to it, closely matching verbal convention is useful.
No, it’s not, because even in the states you say it like three different ways and the English language is constantly changing and inherently has no rules on what order you need to say them in. The choice of which way to express the 1st of January in the English language is purely a subjective one.
And I have explained what is objectively wrong with it, it’s out of order from a numerical time length standpoint.
How is a lack of magnitude order objectively wrong? A date format is ultimately a language feature, and the US format successfully transmits the needed info just fine within its natural context.
It may seem objective from your perspective, but language is used in many more contexts than those you are familiar with.
You don’t know what objectively means because you’re entirely up to your neck in bias. You care way too much about this thing that does not matter to remotely have an objective view here. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re being objective, this is clearly some sort of obsession for you.
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.
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.
From a technical perspective that’s less an issue with people and more an issue with the technology design. People aim for the most comfortable, ergonomic way to hold a smartphone. Which is, you already know it, holding it “vertically” (= long side up, small side sideways). You can easily do it with one hand, whereas you usually need two hands to hold it horizontally. However, it is easily possible to place the camera sensor chip such that it can capture images in widescreen format even when holding the device vertically. Manufacturers usually don’t do this, because they want to allow a more intuitive handling, like “what you see is what you get”. If you hold the phone horizontally, this is directly reflected by a widescreen image and the other way around.
Since people also usually hold their phones vertically when using apps, several platforms, like YouTube for example as well as their content creators, have developed improved support for this. So you can continue mindless scrolling while enjoying more of an image. If the videos / images were in widescreen, the image would be scaled down and details might be missed when holding the device vertically. You would have a lot of black and just a small box in the middle with the images or videos. Probably everyone who reads this will have experienced this.
However, this is of course annoying for people who don’t mind holding the phone horizontally or who are watching videos on a widescreen device like a PC monitor. And that’s not a surprise. We humans evolved to have a larger field of view in horizontal than in vertical direction. We can see more to our sides, but less in up-down directions.
I don’t fear that movies or shows will be recorded in this format (other than for artistic purposes), since that’s a thing where even the comfortable “vertical phone holders” will prefer the wider screen format. But for cheap low effort content or shorter videos and if the target platforms are usually used on smartphones, this is probably a nuisance we have to learn to live with. ;)
That’s all fine and dandy, but what I can’t excuse is people exporting a portrait format to widescreen with black bars. Or the reverse, for that matter.
Donate a dollar to Lemmy org, lemmy.world, and your own instance. Raise awareness and funds, so the DDoS attackers can feel good about themselves for something besides just bitching behind a curtain
From what I understand radio shack was an American electronics shop, blockbuster was like netflix but in physical form and more expensive. And the dude in the bottom right is Charles Manson.
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