Kind of puzzled about timestamps

[jonhall80 at comcast.net]

And of course if it is an old enough date, it may be at one of those magic "timestamps" that never existed.....

"It is turtles all the way down."


> On 03/06/2021 7:46 PM Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 9:57 PM Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at hackerposse.com> wrote:
> > And as a general word of advice from someone whose been burnt way too many times:
> > if you're going to put timestamps in your filenames, either just use UTC
> > or explicitly indicate which timezone the timestamps are assuming.
> 
> Even that's not enough, because the stupid humans keep changing what
> the time zones mean.  Say you find a file that has a stored time of
> 2007 MAR 31 17:00 UTC.  If that file was written before 2005, then the
> offset to US Eastern is 5 hours.  If that file was written after 2005,
> the offset is 4 hours.  Which did the human mean when they instructed
> the computer to write the file?  No way of knowing, in the general
> case.
> 
> -- Ben
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