• 1 Post
  • 6 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: May 10th, 2023

help-circle
  • i switched all my devices to UTC about a year ago when a surprise DST transition caught me in a pissy mood.

    it’s fairly internalized by now. i don’t think it’s that much harder than developing an intuition for both Celcuis and Fahreinheit temperatures. sometimes i’ll glance at the clock while at a friend’s house and it says 09:00 and i do a double-take because “how is it already going-to-bed time?” before i realize it meant 9PM local time, not 09:00 UTC (1AM local).

    but it’s the things you don’t think about that make it difficult. set your phone to UTC and 24hr time. first thing you’ll notice is that every weather app blissfully ignores your settings, because they’re showing you weather for a specific place, and assume you care about the time local to that place. second thing you’ll notice is that half your IM apps are going to actually be using AM/PM still. they’ll even mix AM/PM with 24hr within the same app. you read “message received 11:20” and it could mean like 3 different things.

    not to mention all the physical stuff: car clocks, oven/microwave clocks, … a lot of these in the US don’t even give an option for 24hr time, and “11:20 PM UTC” is just so cursed.







    • 99% Invisible (Roman Mars)
    • Slate Star Codex (narrated form of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten column)
    • Jack Rhysider - Darknet Diaries
    • Maggie Killjoy - Cool people who did Cool Stuff
    • Cory Doctorow’s podcast
    • Jennifer Briney - Congressional Dish
    • Lex Fridman

    the first three are all tightly scripted storytelling: generally non-fiction, but exciting or interesting. sorted by general audience -> niche audience.

    the next three edge into political territory, sorted from politically-adjacent to 100% political (not punditry):

    • Maggie’s focuses on telling history. but she’s self-described anarchist and it bleeds.
    • Cory’s is a narrated form of his blog. usually the overlap between tech & national policy.
    • Congressional Dish is literally Jen watching hours of C-SPAN and reading 1000’s of pages of text from bills to give actual deep-dives into congressional happenings.

    Lex Fridman is if Joe Rogan was hosted by someone who actually did his research upfront, planned out his questions, and chose guests that are less divisive, and more academic or entrepreneurial.

    if you listen to any of these, please leave a recommendation for something similar you think i would like! ❤️