Alerts timestamp weirdness

I'm not well read in temporal mechanics. Even with a time machine, how can you get a message with a later date arrive before it was sent? :confused:
You could get a message from the future by travelling back in time with the message, sending it now with now as the time, but with information about the future. That would not show an alert in the future. Perhaps we've all disappeared down a black hole...:roflmao:
 
I'm not well read in temporal mechanics. Even with a time machine, how can you get a message with a later date arrive before it was sent? :confused:
The way the internet handles time it is actually quite easy to get some very strange things.
I went to Florida recently and had put a lot of entries in my Google calendar. When I got there and my devices picked up the new time zone (EST) the entries were all 5 hours off. I had to go through them and set each to EST (I didn't even know that was possible, I'd expected them to just 'be' at the time set), while leaving my UK ones on GMT and thus 5 hours 'wrong' until I came home. Very confusing.
 
Maybe your device hadn't got round to changing its day/date
The device is virtual and (currently) remote. It takes its time from the host PC, and that is not wrong (nor is it ever).
Do I suppose it's some browser/Javascript weirdness? Refreshing the page has fixed it today.

Time is a complete pain from a programmer's point of view. The hours (or is it days?) I've spent (wasted?) agonising over such stuff down the years...
 
I can imagine your pain though I was lucky and most of my programming work only involved timers rather than 'absolute' time.
 
The way the internet handles time it is actually quite easy to get some very strange things.
I'm sure I've received things sent at odd times - ie. the middle of the night. These have usually been automated lists or stuff from the Americas. Thinking about it, if you received something from Australia or New Zealand it could appear to have been sent before it arrived. I always thought the time on most things was recorded when it arrived - "our" time. Then you look at some things on Twitface and realise the times are quite often shot.
Time is a complete pain from a programmer's point of view.
:roflmao: Epoch time has caused me some problems. Then there is taking account of daylight saving time. Should "just work", often doesn't. :(
 
We are not on a time change weekend and everyone involved is located in the UK so none of the usual suspects for time oddities should apply.
What I find most strange is the developers considered the likelihood of future timestamps and built 'Later today' into the alert messages.
Alerts currently showing are normal for me
 
What I find most strange is the developers considered the likelihood of future timestamps and built 'Later today' into the alert messages.
Shirley they just imported an existing presentation function, and that function (being general purpose) already had "future tense" built in?

None of this confusion should happen if all IT time was expressed in a single standard (eg UT) plus a separate local time offset parameter. Is that what @EEPhil meant by "epoch time"? This only works if everyone understands they must compare time values using the epoch time only, and disregard the offset value except for presentation.
 
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Shirley they just imported an existing presentation function, and that function (being general purpose) already had "future tense" built in?
Yes. It probably uses the same set of time 'handling' functions as the calendar, for which that is a valid string.


None of this confusion should happen if all IT time was expressed in a single standard (eg UT) plus a separate local time offset parameter.
I thought that was how it worked, but the implementation by some software is ... a bit lacking?
Also possible that the message board servers are not in the UK and that's another source of mismatches.
 
Is that what @EEPhil meant by "epoch time"?
If you read the analysis of the hmt file you'll see a line 0x0280 4 byte 0x11223344 Recording start time (Epoch format)
A description of epoch time is given at https://www.epochconverter.com/
epochconverter.com said:
What is epoch time?
The Unix epoch (or Unix time or POSIX time or Unix timestamp) is the number of seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970 (midnight UTC/GMT), not counting leap seconds (in ISO 8601: 1970-01-01T00:00:00Z). Literally speaking the epoch is Unix time 0 (midnight 1/1/1970), but 'epoch' is often used as a synonym for 'Unix time'.
But I expect you knew that.
 
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