The clue was in “user facing bits”. UTC represents time as an absolute. If you want to show local time, or deal with daylight savings you run UTC through a function on its way to the user.

ISO 8601 goes from 1582 (Julian calendar adoption) but can go even further with agreement about intention and goes down beyond the millisecond. Not sure why I want an integer from the year 2000 which only represents seconds.

The sane way of dealing with it is to use UTC everywhere internally and push local time and local formatting up to the user facing bits. And if you move time around as a string (e.g. JSON) then use ISO 8601 since most languages have time / cron APIs that can process it. Often doesn’t happen that way though…

Probably only works for dumb bots and I’m guessing the big ones are resilient to this sort of thing.

Judging from recent stories the big threat is bots scraping for AIs and I wonder if there is a way to poison content so any AI ingesting it becomes dumber. e.g. text which is nonsensical or filled with counter information, trap phrases that reveal any AIs that ingested it, garbage pictures that purport to show something they don’t etc.

So people most familiar with a system have an affinity to it? Colour me shocked. I expect Windows users would want to return to Windows for their own reasons.

It’s worth wondering how much fabric softener would cost someone over their adult lifetime as an exercise. Let’s say 50 years of adulthood, and 12 bottles a year costing $10 each. That’s six grand. For something that serves no functional purpose, makes towels less effective and has an environmental impact.

So yes it’s a scam. If someone really needs to use fabric softener, at least buy a cheaper supermarket brand and use it sparingly.

“I’ve never physically hurt anyone” says the guy who just dismantled USAID dooming tens if not hundreds of thousands of people to die through starvation, disease and conflict.