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Comment by Entalpi | Hacker News Reader

Its like we have built our entire lives around another time system! /s

You get similar problems converting between Freedom degrees and Celsius. Its just what people have built an understanding of.

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I disagree, it’s not equal but different. The French famously tried to switch to a decimal system for angles before, but failed in no small part because of the relatively few unique prime factors. Being able to divide evenly by three turns out to be more important than five.

To quote yet another time format: NTP 64-bit timestamp format (rfc8877), which is 32 bits seconds since epoch + 32 bits fixed point second fractions. (Outside of Network Time Protocol, you'll find this baby for instance in ISOBMFF ProducerReferenceTimeBox(prft)).

Here seconds are just 1/(24*60*60) of a day as expected, but the base 2 fixed point part, where a tick "is roughly equal to 233 picoseconds" makes you want to pull your hairs out if you just want to accurately express milliseconds. (Similarly for other timescales frequently used in media processing, like 90kHz, 25, 60 or 29.97)

The answer to all this is of course: hand waving — "you don't need that". Your time can be perfectly accurate in itself (ie. an accurate discrete sample of continuous time), even if no accurate conversion exists to some other time system.

You meant "Fahrenheit" rather than "Freedom", didn't you?

I think they said what _they_ meant _and_ still meant what _you_ said.

Is this a common joke?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/freedom_units

Thanks, I've learnt something today.

Just out of curiosity: is it just a joke, or is there an idiocy behind, such as Sovereign Citizen or similar?

It's tongue in cheek or wink wink. No one uses it seriously but there is sometimes an undercurrent of resistance to what's seen as an external cultural standard. But you'll never see it used as a kind of rallying cry.

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