Urgh. Got woken up at 3:19am by a test if the earthquake alert system that was supposed to happen at 10:19am... but they accidentally scheduled it in UTC instead of California time zone!
I mean, time zones are hard, but still - such a rookie error
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-10-19/california-earthquake-early-warning-test-goes-off-seven-hours-early
@simon after the silver alert last year and the hawaii false alarm, can we *please* take the keys to the emergency alert system out of the hands of whatever absolute shithead is driving it? The *vast majority* of government alerts delivered to my phone have been fuckups of one stripe or another
@glyph @simon I hate these things and it feels like some Soviet style bullshit that I can't turn them off on "my" phone BUT to be fair, I think "all the alerts to my phone using the system have been some kind of mistake" is approximately what I would expect here even in competent hands.
Considering that as far as I know there has never been a situation where the relevant features of the system would be useful, all such notifications are bound to be tests or mistakes. Tests must necessarily be rare for the system to have any kind of validity, and for rare things where you get one shot it's incredibly hard to anticipate everything.
To me, "Get the time zone right and don't notify people in the middle of the night" seems pretty basic, but potentially there are dozens of things that they did right that I wouldn't think of and that would seem like elementary mistakes to someone else.
