Because then one day you wake up early in the morning to find the noonday sun staring at you. It will take a while though. On second [heh] thought, you might not wake up. But some distant relative would.
That's an interesting idea, but it could be argued that this assumes that all of the world's timezones will agree to observe the same set of leap seconds as they currently do.
Otherwise, it shifts timezones from being 15 minute granularity to 1 second granularity. Not technically impossible, but will definitely make cross-boarder meetings interesting once the discrepancy becomes large enough. I feel the 15 and 30 minute timezones are already bad enough.
Leapseconds don't track solar time particularly well-- they track a 'mean time' (because there are large periodic variations!) which you can't even directly observe-- across the year the span is about 30 minutes.
If you have an application that needs a precise solar/astronomical time, you need to back out the leap seconds and then apply a more accurate correction already.
Because of this, I think it would be completely reasonable to just move timezones by 1 hour once the adjustment would be an improvement in accuracy--- which I seem to recall can be estimated to take about 4500 years. The adjustment is already compatible with existing software, and infrequent planned changes of this sort already happen for political reasons.
It won't hurt most usages, it will greatly help computer and recordkeeping usage, and precise solar/astronomical time will also be derisked due to fewer snafus with backing out leapsecond or incorrectly applying them.
The issue will become more critical as we deploy more timing sensitive distributed systems, and especially a low cost atomic timekeeping improves.
It seems likely me that some optical clock designed could eventually be miniaturized and give e.g. 1 second per 32 years drift performance (1ppb-- which is what commercially available miniature atomic clocks can already do) in an affordable and power efficient device. Then you could have correction/communication-free time to 'conventional precision'. But if an unpredictable feed of leap seconds is required you can never have that.
Ah, but then whose time would that be? How do you keep track of what solar time was parallel to 'your' time?
Time is such a fickle thing. Every atom in the universe knows what time it is, but between the effects of gravity, the speed of light and some quantum stuff it is amazing that we can agree on this at any level at all. I spent a lot of time earlier this year getting some ultra stable clocks to run without shelling out 5 digits and it was a very interesting little detour. Eventually I settled on an old atomic clock module from a decommissioned cell tower, not quite 'miniature' but small enough (I've seen some of the newer ones and they are incredible). The thing is precise enough to show the day/night deviation in phase from DCF77 to my home a few hundred km away.
Doesn’t the veterinarian own their own skills, after having spent decades in school to learn them (and perhaps being saddled with student loans to do so?)
What if they just moved? Or should we have US-style global taxes following them around even then?
Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.
This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.
Surely the only rational reason to care about liability is you get paid in the bad outcome.
Let's assume you get paid 0$ for AI mistakes -- no liability at all. Then your EV is roughly:
(AI accuracy - human accuracy) * (cost of accident) - (1 - human accuracy) * (human payout)
Now I don't know about you, but even with pretty big numbers on the human payout scale and relatively small differences, I would not accept 10 million (presumably paid to my next of kin) to die. Does lead to weird situations where I may prefer humans for minor medical procedures where I can take the risk -- but only in edge cases.
Or is there some weird punishment thing going on here?
Data point of one, but after a few months of uselessness, I have managed to get some pretty serious, measurable performance improvements with AI optimizations -- order-of-magnitude speedups of business critical processes which took days as well as significant latency reductions.
But you need a really solid workflow, solid benchmarks which run quickly, and a lot of tokens -- plus a rigorous profiling workflow.
I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.
Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.
I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.
Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?
Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.
But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.
There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.
The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.
A better technical solution imo is more P2P hosting -- say content addressing. Something designed to deal with the scrapers -- and maybe even make them bear infrastructure costs.
Honestly, I'll take it a step further: what's wrong with training?
Having principles means applying them uniformly -- even to large entities or those you hate (it's fine if the principles themselves have size bounds in them, though -- versus them being implicitly glued on -- but then you need a universal justification for why that size. Which is possible and valid.)
I think that one should use the best algorithms, the best information, the best knowledge they have access to -- period. I don't like using gimped machines, I don't like making gimped machines, and I certainly don't like being sold them.
So I'm not going to turn around and say LLMs need to be gimped via arbitrary restrictions on their training data.
I agree. As soon as I understood the gist of how modern models do what they do, I found it unreasonable to apply any stricter standards to their "learning" than we do to humans. Humans learn by reading ideas and looking at images, then go on to have ideas and draw images based on that training.
We have definitions of plagiarism and copyright infringement that apply to people based on what they put out into the world, not how they trained themselves to get there[0]. Artists literally trace art and study specific examples in detail to learn, and that's not a bad thing. Humans can also accidentally plagiarize or make things identical to past works - it's easy to think a great guitar riff just came to you when it was really based on a song you heard years ago that stuck in a part of your mind but you don't even consciously remember the influence, for example.
It would certainly be nice for AI output to provide citations if it realizes it's using a significant chunk of an idea from its training that has a clear source (or many), though this is difficult in the same way it would be difficult for me to cite where I learned about the Towers of Hanoi. The AI frequently does web searches for specific resources to get ideas from these days, which are easy for it to cite.
However, it would have a chilling effect on progress as a whole if we all started jealously guarding our ideas so close to our chest that machines couldn't read them and only a select few humans who passed some kind of gate (or even paid us) were allowed to see them. We would be nowhere close to where we are if we had always had such a mindset.
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[0] We use proven absence of viewing certain material as a legal shield against copyright infringement e.g. clean room engineering, but this isn't strictly necessary, and possibly even discouraged with modern precedent: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
- always use atomic time
- adjust civil timezones as needed to match astronomical time well enough
Somehow, I don’t see most political and contingent timezones lasting long enough to shift by an hour…