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Clock but the PM quit and was replaced halfway through the project. Handover instructions: "Make the clock hands show the current time" (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] 53 points 11 months ago (36 children)

That might be a good thing for all the gen alphas who can't read a clock. There are a lot of them.

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  • [–] 26 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    There are computer science students who don’t know what a filesystem is.

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  • [–] 34 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Ok boomer. No one uses sundials anymore either. /s.

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  • [–] 10 points 11 months ago* (2 children)

    Yeah but it's sad that you'll never appreciate the aesthetic of a good analog watch face. Every kid I see with a smartwatch uses a digital face.

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  • [–] 38 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    i'm less concerned with the loss of an aesthetic and more concerned with a transformation around how time is perceived entirely. when we made the shift from sundials to 12 hour clocks, it was part of an industrial revolution that saw the workers go from taking life day by day with a greater degree of flexibility to highly regimented and dehumanizing subsegments of time. now we've gone from the largest unit of time we display being 12 hours to 1 hour. we feel a constant state of disconnection from the moments that got us to this moment and a lack of concern about the future moments as our environments are further degraded.

    i'm less worried about millenials, gen z, and gen alpha not liking rolexes than i am about our constantly grinded down state of being. we percieve time differently than the generations that came before us and it makes us feel isolated and like everything is moving too fast. and much of the wisdom about how to transition from a colonial society to a post colonial society is to collectively slow down and i don't know how capable we are of that as we lose the slow sweeping hour hand displaying a fractional time rather than a number constantly climbing but always displaying an exact timestamp rather than a set of portions

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago

    When I see these generation-hating comments — specifically older generations hating on something the younger generations do — I can’t help but think about whose fault it is for whatever slight the older generation feels.

    Who created digital clocks? Who created iPads and iPhones? Who created video games? Every single generation has their own slang that each previous generation fails to understand (not because it doesn’t make sense, but because the previous generations are too lazy and/or stubborn to learn).

    /soapbox

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (3 children)

    I'm mostly talking about this entire comment thread and not just this comment, but what's with people on Lemmy and putting so much value on analogue clocks? I saw someone here a few weeks ago, who said that you couldn't be intelligent if you didn't know how to read a clock. I can read analogue clocks and I can understand why people like them, but digital clocks have their own advantages and I can absolutely understand people preferring them. It almost feels like a similar situation to 12 hour vs. 24 hour time, where people who use one system don't understand why they would want to use the other one.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago

    Probably because they’re dead simple.

    It’s not even about preference but about versatility and adaptability.

    You don’t have to be prefer to use them, but being able to deal with the unexpected and figure out the unfamiliar is generally a sign of intelligence.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (18 children)

    Plenty of people older than Gen Alpha very much prefer digital clocks too. I can read analog clocks but it takes me several seconds to convert it to digital time (which is how my brain thinks). As far as I'm concerned, analog clocks are a relic of the past and it's a good thing to abolish as many of them as possible.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (16 children)

    but is it good that we think differently than prior generations thanks to the advent of the affordable digital clock in the 1970s? i think we lose something in that conversion that we might not be fully appraised of until the last analog clock is gone. a policy of elimination seems concerning to me because it presumes that a single perception is the superior perception rather than a different perception

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (15 children)

    What does that even mean...? If you know of something specific that is superior about analog compared to digital clocks, I'd like to hear it.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (12 children)

    The main positives of an analog clock revolve around how it visualizes time time relative to other parts of the day.

    When the hour hand is on 9, you can see at a glance it is two hours from 11 and three hours from 12 without needing to do the calculation in your head. When the hour hand is in the upper right, you know is it shortly after noon or midnight depending on how bright it is outside. When looking at the minute hand, if you see something started at 2:10 you don't need to remember the exact time, just where the minute hand was when you started and estimating being half or a third done until 3:10 is pretty easy. 15 minutes is easy to figure out because it is a quarter of the circle.

    It conveys this at a glance without needing to focus so much on the exact hour or minute. Visualizing our time results in thinking about how we are using our time.

    Like anything else, that doesn't make it superior in every situation and they suffered from constantly being out of sync with each other by a few minutes or seconds.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (10 children)

    When the hour hand is on 9, you can see at a glance it is two hours from 11 and three hours from 12 without needing to do the calculation in your head.

    I don't think most people need to do a mental calculation to know that 9 am is 3 hours from 12. That's just a fact that's easy to remember since you're exposed to it so often.

    When the hour hand is in the upper right, you know is it shortly after noon or midnight depending on how bright it is outside

    And when the digital clock says "1" or "2" you know it's either afternoon or the middle of the night. Even better, if you're using 24 hour time you know precisely if it's afternoon or early in the morning even if you're in an underground bunker.

    When looking at the minute hand, if you see something started at 2:10

    Yes... you can just remember the "minutes" part of the time on a digital clock was too.

    15 minutes is easy to figure out because it is a quarter of the circle.

    15 minutes is easy to figure out on a digital clock too because it's ultra simple math to just add or subtract 15 from a number below 60.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (9 children)

    I'm imaging you dismissing the idea of a pie chart because obviously 8 is twice as large as 4 and knowing 8 is 2/3 of 12 is just a fact people know because they are exposed to it so often.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (8 children)

    You should know that pie charts are widely seen as being very ineffective ways of communicating data.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (7 children)

    All of the examples of bad pie charts are completely different than a pie chart viewed straight on with only two values. You know, the thing pie charts are perfect for.

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  • [–] -1 points 11 months ago (6 children)

    With only 2 values? Why would you want that? And what makes you believe they're as good as a bar chart for that?

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (5 children)

    why would you use a bar chart to display a proportion?

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (4 children)

    Because it's easier for humans to read?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (3 children)

    i'm not convinced that's true though. bar graphs are best for visualizing a simplification of an aggregate set and comparing it against a related aggregate set. that doesn't sound like a good way to visualize a proportion. much better to display a whole broken down into the componets of that whole.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    i'm not convinced that's true though.

    Ok, well the people I linked to have done actual usability studies to back up their claims. But, you have a feeling?

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (1 child)

    i read them and am not refuting them. the conversation is about bad and good situations for pie charts. we're talking about a scenario in which what is being compared is two proportions. a scenario in which the articles you linked said a pie chart is a reasonable visualization

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago

    i don't think one or the other is strictly superior. there's been a lot of scientific research (paywalled, thanks, academia, or i'd link it) about how this changes our perceptions of time. there is yet to be any study into how this change in perception changes anything or everything else. that is what i am worried about. jettisoning something potentially useful and turning it into a lost technology, on purpose, before we even know what the consequeces are

    link to a summary popular science article to get anyone interested started

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  • [–] -2 points 11 months ago

    I've never liked them. It's a design that's like "give me a rough approximation of the time" vs. a digital clock that gives you the precise time. And, if all you want is a rough approximation of the time, a digital clock is still probably better because you just read the first few digits.

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