@grishka to me it's slightly better UX to see human...

@grishka to me it's slightly better UX to see human readable time intervals like that for relatively short periods of time. It's easier to reason about someone that was last online last week, than someone was seen on the 8th of Jan 2025. For intervals longer than a couple of months I'm ambivalent...

Like 14 January at 9:38 | Wall-to-wall | Open on metalhead.club

4 comments

Gregory

@mariusor but the problem with that is that "last week" loses an entire week of precision. Such a timestamp provides no useful information. I can understand it with "X hours ago", but any units larger than an hour are meh because an unacceptable amount of precision is lost

14 January at 9:41 | Open on mastodon.social

marius

@grishka why do you need more precision for this thing though? Why does it matter if it's been 7 days ago, or 13?

I don’t exactly remember the rules I'm personally using for human readable dates but I think I have smth like 1,8 weeks... Which one might argue it's not much better... :D

14 January at 9:49 | Open on metalhead.club

dmitriid

@mariusor @grishka

On social media this perhaps is fine.

But I've seen this in dev tools like GitHub and CircleCI where you often need precise dates to see the broken commit, the artifacts that went into prod etc.

Google Cloud at one point had relative dates and then US-formatted dates *in logs*

It's like these companies don't use their own products.

14 January at 13:35 | Open on mastodon.nu

marius

@dmitriid yep, I fully agree that the context is important. From @grishka 's screenshot I interpreted that to be a social media website, but it could have been github for all I know. :D

14 January at 16:30 | Open on metalhead.club

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