In any case, for awhile, the date you picked depended on who you were writing to. And then also the relative standing. If he was of much lower standing you might force your own calendar on them.
Also, I think with the previous calendar it was always a bit debatable what year december belonged to. I can’t quite remember the details.
There was some of that indeed, depending on the centralization of the country e.g. Spain and France adopted the gregorian calendar wholesale because the king decreed it, but in less centralised countries like the Dutch Republic or Switzerland it happened by region (the seven catholic cantons switched to the gregorian calendar in 1584, the protestant canton only switched over piece by piece during the 18th century, and Schiers and Grüsch were the last remnants of Julian calendar in the entirety of western europe, only adopting the gregorian calendar in 1812).
... and then there's Sweden, which started on a plan to gradually approach the Gregorian calendar by skipping leap years over 40 years, except they immediately forgot to skip the second and third so concluded the plan was stupid, then instead of switching to gregorian they reverted to julian, before finally switching to gregorian 40 years after that.
And still use, in fact!
Super easy for astronomy as you don't need to handle timezones and other junk
“My Lord, you can attack them until March of next year!”
“Then March of next year it shall be!”
Congress did something similar last year - National Emergencies declared by the president, such as for tariffs, are required by law to be reviewed within 15 days by Congress. So Congress redefined the calendar so that the remainder of the days during that session are not officially considered to be calendar days. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/congress-johnson-calen...
Checking the wiki, eu5 has an advance (guess these are like the nation ideas in eu4?) for Julian calendar which gives you +10% to orthodox or miaphysite nations. I doubt it has any effect in the calendar system in the games UI.
Paradox's Clausewitz game engine seems to handle "negative" years very poorly, so stuff like historical Roman emperors in Crusader Kings have some oddities. It's probably also why Imperator: Rome uses ab urbe condita dating (aside from immersion).
The Elder Kings 2 mod actually has custom date handling (it's actually a custom date localisation system) to enable transitioning to the 3rd era on founding the Empire of Tamriel.
There are no computers, sensors, watches, or spaceships. There are also no TV-style distractions, and a lot more people are growing food. When would you notice that the longest day of the year is a few days away from what the books say it's supposed to be?
For that matter, the printing press was only a century old. How well-known was it that particular days are meant to be the longest or shortest of the year?
If the rate of drift was like 5 days per year, then sure, people'd probably notice in a year or two — three tops, right? But how fast would the drift be? It's a question about how much people can detect small changes in daylight and how big the change actually is.
I also observe that we put up with tons of drift in our months: the new moon is hardly ever on the first of the month! And that's really easy to detect (within a day or two). So maybe people would notice a drift relative to the seasonal cycle and just not mind, the way we don't mind a drift relative to the lunar cycle.
Some of the earliest things we have a sun-based calendar trackers, which need not be more complicated than a stick and a rock (meaning millions more have not survived).
I use HTTPS only. I don't think HTTP is acceptable for anyone let alone a technical blog post. It takes a few minutes, and it prevents me and all your visitors from getting all kinds of MITM injections.
Thanks.
HTTPS on a blog does nothing. It doesn't protect you from anything. I guarantee you're not getting "all kinds of MITM injections" on this block of text. The only reasonable desire I can think of for "HTTPS everywhere" is hiding the content from your ISP but a) they still see the URL so they can get the content if they want it, and b) if you're so worried about that, use a VPN which coincidentally is even better because it will also hide the URL, and most importantly c) it puts the onus on you, the person who wants the thing, instead of hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of text-only website owners who rightly couldn't care less about HTTPS.
You actually can’t guarantee anything of the sort. BGP hijacks are real.
That's incorrect, a MitM can only reveal the server hostname by inspecting the SNI during the TLS handshake, but the HTTP request, including the URL and headers, is encrypted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...
More annoying is the slightly shiny/shaded text that is supposed to highlight something. Who chose this style palette?
Millions of routers are compromised. BGP attacks happen. Anything http stands out as an interesting target for injection.
This position is foolish. It’s not a major ask to enable https.
If you control the IP a domain name points to, you can get a certificate issued. Https might help on a small BGP takeover, but it might very well not.
You cannot browse to sites under any regime and execute code while expecting security to exist.
(This is a general remark, but it goes for a blog post like this as well.)
And the best Windows malware is actually digitally signed.
With static webpages, the concern isn't someone snooping in on what I'm reading. It's someone injecting content, probably malware, into the page. Let's say I have a zero-click exploit for Chrome. What can I do with it? If I just stick it on a page I control, best I can hope for is spamming it all over the web and hoping someone clicks on it. Probably not a lot of impact before it gets patched. If instead, I can wait until some router firmware gets pwned, or an ISP, I can do a mass attack where I make all the vulnerable routers inject my exploit into all non-HTTPS web requests. Much greater exposure.
A long-standing HN guideline. Regardless of how merited the complaint may be.
I don't remember turning it on but it's probable that I did, it's not a default yet but will be come October: https://blog.google/security/https-by-defau/
It could make it less likely for a CA with buggy code to accidentally issue a cert for your domain.