Received a message telling me to expect a delivery "between 09:50am and 2:45pm". To their credit, they avoided quoting the estimated range to the minute (or to the second!), but the implication of quoting such limits to a precision of 5 minutes is nonsense given that the window of uncertainty is 5 hours.

When developing software systems, understand your domain and understand your users. Your users are human, so go with "between 10am and 3pm" to sound like you know what you're doing.

You also see it when people are switching between units. For example, a journalist asking Google for a unit conversion on an approximate figure in one system of measurement into another.

"The car went another two kilometers (1.243 miles) before it was stopped by the police."

"He was said to be about 6 feet (182.88 cm) tall."

Such numerical solecisms are all the more ironic in outlets that claim they value accuracy in their reporting.

I still remember a moment about 10 years ago (note that I say "about 10 years ago" and not "about 3652 days ago") when a project manager showed me a plan that showed me progress on a task that had been estimated at around 2 months.

"We're 52.5% complete on this task," she told me.

That many significant figures on something as woolly as progress on an estimated multi-person task is just noise.

"There *is* a chance you might be about half done, but even that's optimistic," I said.

In such cases, it makes the company and the software authors look incompetent and clueless about their own domain, whereas they should present the exact opposite.

This doesn't mean that your plan or your calculations don't contain such precision, but there is an art to presentation logic and UX that has been developed over many decades — as well as experimental science and metrology over centuries — that often seems thrown out the window when it comes to presenting something in a window.

I sometimes receive notifications that I can expect a delivery in a 2-hour window such as "between 12:07 and 14:07".

To quote to the minute shows a failure of understanding of what an approximate range is, as well traffic and logistics.

It's a 2-hour window of imprecision. Quoting to the minute shows a deep lack of understanding. Quoting to 5-minute intervals is just about acceptable. To 10- or 15-minute is more appropriate significance. But honestly, in this case, to the hour is just fine.