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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • If you’re dark at 4 pm, then you’re only getting 8 hours of sunlight. Someone is going to be getting up in the dark, getting home from work in the dark, or both if your employer manages to time your particular work day just right.

    What you need is “Personal Daylight Time" or PDT. See, we just need to put an abstraction layer between the icky science of the earth rotating and the sun being overhead at a particular time each day, which can be terribly annoying for those who talked through science class in 3rd grade.

    Everyone who wants something other than “Standard” time just puts the times they’d like the sun to rise and set each day. The app then maps those times to the local sunrise and sunset. When you get your work schedule or dinner reservation, the app converts from the (completely unreadable) standard time based on your location on earth to your personal time which you feel maximizes your personal enjoyment. Likewise, you can send an invite in your time, and the recipient will see it in their time.

    It’s just like having Google Calendar manage times zones for you when you have a distant Zoom call. Simple, no?

    *Note: you will experience faster or slower personal seconds throughout the day depending on your preferred sunrise and sunset days, and it will vary by day.







  • I’m an engineer. I use all of it. I use it whether I’m writing technically correct and accurate forensic reviews or doing math in my head (or on paper) to analyze a condition in real time or checking a complex finite element model to ensure that there are no improper assumptions or invalid boundary conditions. AI/ML is really useful for some things, and deadly for others.

    Rote memorization may seem unnecessary, but a mental catalog - whether it be quotes, body parts and systems, equations of natural phenomena, or even manufactured parts and specifications - is the hallmark of someone who can work independently in a real time industry. It may not matter for some jobs, but it’s make or break in others.



  • Yet. Infrastructure on this scale moves slowly and the transparentness of pricing changes on short time lines in physical stores is hard to track. It exists in emergency economies - we call it price gouging - but that’s usually quite obvious. The idea of dynamic pricing has existed forever - hotels, airline flights, movie tickets, taxi rides, even electric rates. As technology advances it offers the opportunity to use the technology to shorten the time window for pricing changes more and more. An extra two tenths of a percent profit seems like a trivial amount. Amazon and Walmart combined for more than a trillion dollars in sales last year. 0.2% is a very non-trivial $2 Billion. If it becomes available, it will be exploited.