In my professional experience, having needed to work with relatively unsophisticated people across many time zones, the only thing that worked consistently was "[City] time". That way people could always check 'what time is it in X now' or 'when it's X in [City], what time is it here', and get correct responses.
Descriptors like "Mountain time" are too vague, especially when there are various places that do/do not practice DST within that timezone, or there are similarly named time zones internationally. (Australia has Eastern and Central time too, for example, and in summer - which is northern hemisphere winter - they split into four different time zones due to varying DST practices.)
Trying to be overly clever and exactly specify the time zone, e.g. "MDT", leads to lots of subtle mistakes in my experience. Often people will think they know what that is, and then get it wrong. Or their calendar app will helpfully suggest MST and they'll click on it, not noticing the difference. Or they'll just scramble the letters when writing them down and wind up with "NTT time" or "AT&T time" or some such.
If we assume that the ideal time for 8 months of the year is DST and for 4 months is standard, but we want to eliminate the switch, then permanent DST gives you only 4 months out of the ideal timezone rather than 8.
Indeed, it is my opinion. It's not in the minority so much as it runs counter to what lobbyists with vested interests have loudly promoted. Most people haven't given the matter much thought and don't have an opinion on it (let alone an informed one).
"Morons" was an overly dramatic way of putting it but it is very clearly the technically deficient choice as will be apparent to anyone who bothers to consult the history books. The US already attempted permanent DST in 1974 but quickly repealed it. Russia similarly tried it out from 2011 to 2014 before switching to permanent standard time instead. The UK also tried it at one point before abandoning it. Mexico might have tried it for the longest, from 1996 until 2022 when they too switched to permanent standard time. (Actually I'm unclear why Mexico gave it up. They're far enough south that the difference between the two shouldn't be particularly impactful.)
I'm really curious how people will feel about it after experiencing a year of continuous PDT. I expect I'll personally like it, but the polling will be interesting for sure.
In the winter I can see arguments both ways (though I'm personally in the evening light is better camp). But in the summer, it already gets light earlier than almost anyone would want to be awake. An extra hour of sunlight at 4am is little benefit to anyone, and likely just makes it harder to sleep. Light evenings in the summer are wonderful though. I think part of the health argument against DST is that those light evenings make it harder to get to sleep at night, which is fair, but I still wouldn't want to give them up!
Why does the regular voting system fail here? Are there just too many Show HNs for people to process the new ones, so the good ones get lost in the noise?
I like to think the machines actually were using them for processing power, and the humans themselves just misunderstood (or oversimplified for Neo) what was actually going on.
Processing power is my second favorite explanation.
My first favorite would have been: they don’t use the humans for anything, the pods are just the most efficient way to store humans. The machines think they are being benevolent, just want peace and quiet and for humans to stop doing dramatic things like scorching the sky. But I don’t know where the plot would go from there.
There is backstory that the films could have gone into, though I don't know if it was written before or after the first film. The humans in the matrix were allied with the machines and they put them in the matrix to protect them from the war. They were being benevolent.
The name is extremely off-putting, but I can see how they would want to be diplomatic toward the administration in using their chosen name. Save the push-back for where it really matters.
If they had access to them in Ukraine, both sides would already be using them I expect. Right now jamming of drones is a huge obstacle. One way it's dealt with is to run literal wired drones with massive spools of cable strung out behind them. A fully autonomous drone would be a significant advantage in this environment.
I'm not making a values judgment here, just saying that they will absolutely be used in war as soon as it's feasible to do so. The only exception I could see is if the world managed to come together and sign a treaty explicitly banning the use of autonomous weapons, but it's hard for me to see that happening in the near future.
Edit: come to think of it, you could argue a landmine is a fully autonomous weapon already.
Hah, I had the same realization about landmines. Along with the other commenter, really it would be better to add intelligence to these autonomous systems to limit the nastiness of the currently-deployed systems. If a landmine could distinguish between a real target and an innocent civilian 50yrs later, it's be a lot better.
It's weird that people still think that the people who's job it is to kill people, or make things that kill people, really care about people more than the killing part. They don't give a shit who blows up, as long as no one comes knocking on their door about it.
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