Relative times are nice for recent times (e.g. "5 minutes ago" is better than "2025-12-18 13:03"), but they should "decay" into absolute times for anything that isn't fairly recent - like a week or two, perhaps.

It varies by use case. I can think about e.g. an SRS flash card where you next review is in 2 years. I honestly don‘t care if 2 years here means 21 months or 28 months, and I especially don‘t care if the next review is on 21st of February 2028 at 13:52. All I want to know is that the next review is so far in the future it may not actually happen.

That's a fair point. I'm thinking of the use case of formatting a past date on something like a social media post/comment. (For example, a comment on HN - which uses a rather long cutoff for relative dates.)

I agree with you, I also prefer absolute date stamps, including because it might be printed out, etc. However, the <time> command would allow that to work, if it is implemented in a way that allows that to work.

It is particularly annoying in a screenshot or printed document. I rarely print onto paper, but occasionally, I will "print" an interesting blog post into a PDF.

I like it but I think the granularity needs to be fixed. For example, the cutoff points should be 21+ months -> 2 years instead of 13+ months -> 1 year.

So basically you want the cutoff to be > 1.66 of the next unit before you display in that unit. That means 40 hours, 2 days; 11 days, 2 weeks; 6 weeks, 2 months; 20 months, 2 years.

I'm annoyed by things moving unbidden, especially in clickable interfaces. This element being all over Slack, chat apps, etc. means that things are always shifting around slightly and at unpredictable times.