UTC exists as a historical compromise because the British felt that GMT was the bees knees and the French felt differently. The letter order is most definitely a compromise between French and English word order. You can call it Universal Time Coordinaire.

Historically, GMT became the international time reference point because the Greenwich observatory used to be the leader in the field of accurately measuring time. It probably helped that the British navy had been dominant earlier and lots of countries around the world and across time zones had been colonised by the British.

UTC is an international standard for measuring time, based on both satellite data about the position and orientation of the earth and atomic clocks, whereas GMT is a time zone. Nowadays, GMT is based on UTC not independent telescopic observation.

What’s the difference? You can think of a time zone as an offset from UTC, in the same sense that a 24h clock time is an offset from midnight. GMT = UTC+0.

Technically, UTC isn’t a valid time zone any more than “midnight” is a valid 24h clock time. UTC+0 is a time zone and UTC isn’t in a similar sense that 00:00 is a time in 24hr clock and “midnight” isn’t.

Of course, and perfectly naturally, I can use midnight and 00:00 interchangeably and everyone will understand, and I can use UTC and UTC+0 interchangeably and few people care, but GMT = UTC+0 feels like the +0 is doing nothing to most eyes.

Fun fact: satellite data is very accurate and can track the UTC meridian independently from the tectonic plate on which the Greenwich observatory stands. The UTC meridian will drift slowly across England as the plates shift. Also, the place in the stars that Greenwich was measuring was of by a bit, because they couldn’t have accounted for the effect of the terrain on the gravitational field, so the UTC meridian was placed several tens of metres (over 200’) away from the Greenwich prime meridian. I suspect that there was a lot more international politics than measurement in that decision, and also in making the technical distinction between UTC and GMT, but I’m British, so you should take that with a pinch of salt.

The problem isn’t having empty values, it’s not tracking that in the type system, so the programmer and the compiler don’t have any information about whether a value can be null or not and the programmer has to figure it out by hand. In a complex program that’s essentially completely impossible. The innocently created bomb that causes your program to crash can be in absolutely any value.

There are ways to track it all by disallowing null and using optional values instead, but some folks would rather stick with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s.

In a discussion about whether null should exist at all, and what might be better, saying that Optional values aren’t available in languages with type systems that haven’t moved on since the 1960s isn’t a strong point in my view.

The key point is that if your type system genuinely knows reliably whether something has a value or not, then your compiler can prevent every single runtime null exception from occurring by making sure it’s handled at some stage and tracking it for you until it is.

The problem with null is that it is pervasive - any value can be null, and you can check for it and handle it, but other parts of your code can’t tell whether that value can or can’t be null. Tracking potential nulls is in the memory of the programmer instead of deduced by the compiler, and checking for nulls everywhere is tedious and slow, so no one does that. Hence null bugs are everywhere.

Tony Hoare, an otherwise brilliant computer scientist, called it his billion dollar mistake a decade or two ago.

Well, UTC didn’t exist in 1800, it would have been GMT, and that might not have been too popular so soon after the war of independence. Even if you convinced all of the USA to use one time zone for the railways, it would be different elsewhere and you’d still get time zones.

Maybe you’d get further with the project with the airlines in the first half of the twentieth century, but I’m not sure that that level of internationalism would have gone down well in a rather war torn world.

Yeah, Seasonal Affective Disorder is a recognised medical condition and its symptoms get worse the further from the equator you live. Don’t know why folks are downvoting you for having it.

Not any more. But some of the IRS guys are smokin’ hot, I’m sure, if that’s what you’re into.

Thank you for being on the Internet.

That was helpful, thanks. I’m very much looking for insight, explanation and experiences.

If I’ve grasped what you’re saying (and please re-steer me if not), the male gaze is a kind of societal expectation that women would present themselves in certain ways to walk the tightrope of some sort of impossible-to-attain universal male approval, and where women are harassed on the one hand for for not pleasing male eyes and on the other hand, harassed for pleasing male eyes - an obviously lose-lose situation. As such then, this male gaze would exist in the way some men behave towards women and in the head space this takes up in the minds of women who have been repeatedly hit with these expectations.

I wanted to learn more about women’s perspective on this. Sometimes my “don’t be a dick” plan needs more detail, and being more aware of what kind of behaviour is problematic might steer me better. I’ve heard the phrase male gaze but I don’t think I fully understand what is meant by it, and I feel your question may point to and illuminate a kind of discrimination that I want to avoid.

You gotta be there for the homies. Make sure they’re getting enough ejaculation in their week.

Put your hand on your mate’s shoulder and look him right in his eyes. Say
“Did you cum yet today, bro?”
If he says no, say “Get on it, dude, you gotta keep those stats up for a healthy prostate. You matter. Don’t neglect yourself.”
If he says yes, say “Nice one, dude. Keep it spurting.”

If you shower together after gym, you could keep it more lighthearted and positive: Give his todger a playful tap back and forth and ask “Did you tug this trouser truncheon yet today, bro?”

They might not be as body positive as they need to be. We all worry sometimes that our danglies aren’t as handsome or fulsome as some we might have seen, or that our friends don’t rate our equipment highly, so help him associate his passion baton with your approval: whatever his size or shape, hold it in your hand and look at it properly. Don’t let go but make eye contact and say “Duuude, this is a Great Cock,.” Emphasize the capitalized words with a firm but gentle shake, like you would if you were shaking his hand. “Keep it in Shape. Give it a Workout. Every Day.”

If you’re good friends then while you’re cupping his crinkly kiwis, you can reach two fingers behind and press gently, saying “I care about this prostate in here, man. It needs exercise. Don’t skip dick day. Every day is dick day.” Don’t use this one with guys who are really just acquantances or colleagues, they might feel you were being a little over-familiar or might not be ready for that level of intimacy and close friendship. It takes a while for most guys to trust each other with their baby bakin’ smooth shaven sacks / hairy hangers and taint touching’s for best buds.

Sorry to look twice, but wow, nice cock, bro.

Not a proof, but a thought experiment. Imagine you have a bunch of equilateral triangles made of plastic that have mangetout sides so they stick to each other. How many can you have around a point?

Two triangles just stick to each other flat and you don’t get a 3D shape.

Three triangles makes the top of a triangular pyramid and you can add one more on the base to get a tetrahedron.

Four triangles makes the top of a square based pyramid and you can make another one like that and put it underneath, giving you an octahedron.

Five triangles makes the top of a pentagonal based pyramid. You could make another one and stick it underneath, but it wouldn’t be regular because the top and bottom points would be surrounded by five triangles whereas the ones on the sides would be surrounded by just four. The trick here is to make a band of ten additional triangles pointing up, down, up down etc to go between the two layers. Then two triangles from the top layer touch at a point where a down, up, down junction is and you get five triangles around the point there too. Same for the bottom layer. Now you have an icosahedron.

Six triangles makes a flat plane and you’ll just tile a surface rather than make a solid.

Seven or more triangles is too many to even lie flat and it’ll go all wrinkly on the large scale.

You may be thinking of a D60 dice, which is based on a stellated dodecahedron - stick three pentagons together at each point but turn each pentagon into the base of a small pentagonal based pyramid. It’s not regular because the points don’t all have the same number of sides touching them, but it is very pretty and rolls very nicely.

I took care of our young kids for a fortnight “instead of working” when my wife was rushed to hospital. It was far more exhausting than doing the day job. I don’t know how single parents cope at all.

Sure, if anyone who voted against aid for Ukraine moves to Russia and conscripted, everyone who voted against raising the minimum wage gets paid it, and everyone who complained about pronouns gets deliberately misgendered for the rest of their lives.

I think they’re antisocial media. Reddit more than lemmy, though, which feels a bit like a community sometimes.

Please know that you are precious as you are.