Maybe we need open source credit scores. PRs from talented engineers with proven track records of high quality contributions would be presumed good enough for review. Unknown, newer contributors could have a size limit on their PRs, with massive PRs rejected automatically.
The Forgejo project has been gently trying to redirect new contributors into fixing bugs before trying to jump into the project to implement big features (https://codeberg.org/forgejo/discussions/issues/337). This allows a new contributor to get into the community, get used to working with the codebase, do something of clear value... but for the project a lot of it is about establishing reputation.
Will the contributor respond to code-review feedback? Will they follow-up on work? Will they work within the code-of-conduct and learn the contributor guidelines? All great things to figure out on small bugs, rather than after the contributor has done significant feature work.
I think you have this backward. Standard time is during winter. Daylight savings is during summer.
That being said, I used to hate the switch, like you. Now, I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options. Just look at the history of DST. We've tried it all. We've tried year-round standard time. We've tried year-round DST. We've tried switching at all sorts of different dates. Every system has it's problems and it's advantages. The current system is basically the one that actually pissed people off the least.
oh, yes, I got that mixed up. That also mean permanent winter time would be better for the sleep not permanent summer times (it was whatever the "standard" time was as far as I remember). Either way people cant decide on what time they prefer makes any change harder.
> I'm convinced it's the best of only bad options.
idk. the time switch every year comes with an increase in traffic accidents for up to a weak after it happens. While most jobs today either aren't overly dependent on sunlight anymore or don't sync up with e.g. start of school or similar anyway (e.g. field work). I guess that argument does differ for any area widely dominated by farming and limited farming automation.
to some degree thats my point for most jobs either
- you don't care about the clock but some time relative to sunrise
- aren't dependent on sunlight on your job anymore
- anyway have to head out very early before sunrise (for most of the year)
sure maybe DST does save a small bit of electric bill in some jobs, but thanks to modern light technology it's not really that relevant anymore, on the other hand the reliable increase in traffic accidents every time we switch to summer time does matter.
Now there still is the argument about what is healthier (ignoring the known unhealthy switching times) but there is so much with way stronger effects in modern life (e.g. TVs, bright white LED lamps etc.) that I'm not sure if the effect if even realistically measurable.
Everybody think DST is the worst and needs to be replaced in some way or another. Most people don't realize that their proposed "solution" has already been tried. Your particular solution of "year-round DST" was tried in America in 1973-1975. I'll just quote Wikipedia:
> During the 1973 oil embargo by the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), in an effort to conserve fuel, Congress enacted a trial period of year-round DST (P.L. 93-182), beginning January 6, 1974, and ending April 27, 1975.[17] The trial was hotly debated. Those in favor pointed to increased daylight hours in the summer evening: more time for recreation, reduced lighting and heating demands, reduced crime, and reduced automobile accidents. The opposition was concerned about children leaving for school in the dark and the construction industry was concerned about morning accidents.[18] After several morning traffic accidents involving schoolchildren in Florida, including eight children who were killed, Governor Reubin Askew asked for the year-round law to be repealed.[19]
> Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%.[19] Some schools moved their start times later.[19] Shortly after the end of the Watergate scandal caused a change of administration, the act was amended in October 1974 (P.L. 93-434) to return to standard time for four months, beginning October 27, 1974, and ending February 23, 1975, when DST resumed.[18][20] When the trial ended in October 1975, the country returned to observing summer DST (with the aforementioned exceptions).[12]
Schools in the U.S. in general start way too early. The AAP recommends no earlier than 8:30 AM [1]; the average across the U.S. is 8:00 AM [2], and close to 20% of suburban high schools start before 7:30 AM. An 8:30 AM start time would be after sunrise in every major municipality in the U.S; sunrise in Seattle and Duluth (the most northerly major cities in the continental U.S.) on Dec 21 is at 7:55 AM.
GP was proposing year-round standard time, not year-round DST.
Sure. Russia abolished time shifting in 2011, but since then they've had 1 national and several regional time zone adjustments as people grapple with the reality of having to commit to 1 time zone at high latitude. The EU was in discussion to abolish their shifting around 2018, and the Russian example was often cited by the opposition as a cautionary tale. The EU might have gonna through with it otherwise.
Outdoor lighting is a lot cheaper now than it was in the 1970s. I think we can give it another shot after 50 years. And it's worth pointing out that Arizona has gone without DST for the last 50 years and seems to be doing fine.
Interestingly part of the UK approach then was to make street lighting more efficient, around that time a lot of low-pressure sodium lamps were installed. They used so little energy they were only beaten for efficiency by LEDs in this decade, but the monochromatic yellow light was seen as unacceptable by some countries which continued to use inefficient high-pressure mercury then later high-pressure sodium.
I miss the humble SOX lamp to be honest, they made night look like night rather than a poor approximation of day. They also had benefits for wildlife, much of which is insensitive to the 589 nm wavelength as well as astronomy where the light is easily filtered out.
France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening. So does Spain and Portugal but I'm too lazy to check since when. I don't think automobile accidents is a very good metric to evaluate the interest.
It's basically a trade off between light in the morning and the evening. When Britain tried, they saw that it was mainly impactless with regards to the total number of accidents. They still reverted.
Everyone seems to be focusing on the school car accident. I was focusing more on "Over three months from December to March, public support dropped from 79% to 42%". People just don't like waking up super early in winter.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer
That's a weird way of putting it, but sure. Spain is also famous for their absurdly "late" schedules (e.g. dinner at 11pm). People will naturally adjust if the baseline is offset like that. France does as well, but to a lesser degree. Importantly, both countries still observe the shift twice a year, because having a DST shift is actually popular (at high latitudes; obviously it makes no sense in the tropics).
France is offset by at least one hour from its actual time zone, Portugal by two. I don’t really see what’s weird here. It’s exactly the effect of year long DST. It goes all the way to two and three hours in summer.
Apparently people don’t really care about the winter mornings when they are used to it because approximately no one wants to get back to a normal time zone there. Some people are even arguing for keeping the even more extreme DST year long.
I will hazard that your stats from the 70s have everything to do with habits and very little to do with the actual effect of shifting time long term.
> France has year round DST and an hour on top during summer since 1940 and far less car accidents than the USA both in the morning and in the evening.
In 2019, the European Sleep Research Society (ESRS), the European Biological Rhythms Society (EBRS), and the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR) wrote a joint statement to the European Commission advocating for permanent establishment of a more natural time.
Actually, the document only argues for permanent CET and ending DST. It does not mention change of time zones.
The logic would be sound however. Social Jetlag is real. I for one loath DST and switching back to CET noticably improves my sleep and overall well being.
Have we tried my solution of having a continuous curve of time adjustments instead of one big discrete jump? I think that would have been awful in the day of manually set, analog clocks, but surely in 2025 when everything's digital and many things are connected it's totally possible, no?
My fist reaction was that it would be immediately rejected, but the more I thought about it, it seems like it could work if you moved clocks BACK 5 minutes at the START of each MONTH from July 1st to December 1st, and then FORWARD 5 minutes starting from January 1st to June 1st.
No, the more I think about this, PROGRAMMERS will HATE this.
I’m also not resetting the manual clocks around my home and vehicle every damned month.
I genuinely dont care if we pickstandard time” or “savings time” … i just want my year-round circadian rhythm to not get fucked up twice a year - it takes me so long to get used to the new one and then it gets rug pulled again.
It's still awful. The only devices I own that would give me a reliable time, would then be my phone, laptop, desktop, and maybe my TV. My microwave, oven, thermostat, alarm clock, car, watch, grandfather clock, etc would all be wrong.
You would wreak unmeasurable havoc across the target country.
Eh, it's like 5 minutes a month they would be off by. Eventually all those devices will be Internet connected anyways and we'll all have something else new to rage over.
The only "advantage" to that is that companies would sell a lot more devices as people end up realising that their phone/central heating/doorbell/dashcam etc doesn't get any OTA upgrades and is now almost always showing the wrong time.
No, the advantage is that it would allow you to optimize for circadian rhythm without having huge disruptions twice a year.
I fully acknowledge that there would be some major disadvantages and challenges, but they mostly strike me as logistical and engineering challenges, rather than technological limitations. My car, which is not connected to the internet, knows when it's been a day, because it gives me time in AM and PM. There's no reason it couldn't count days and automatically adjust time based on this. Same for thermostats, microwaves, ovens, TVs, etc.
But it's becoming increasingly clear that LLMs based on the transformer model will never be able to scale their context much further than the current frontier, due mainly to context rot. Taking advantage of greater context will require architectural breakthroughs.
Will it though? The human mind can hold less context at any one time than even a mediocre LLM. The problem isn't architecture. It's capturing context. Most of it is in a bunch of people's heads and encoded in the physical world. Once it's digitized and accessible through search, RAG, or whatever, the LLM will be able to use it effectively.
> I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code?
I hear this so much. It's almost like people think code quality is unrelated to how well the product works. As though you can have 1 without the other.
If your code quality is bad, your product will be bad. It may be good enough for a demo right now, but that doesn't mean it really "works".
Because there's a notion that if any bugs are discovered later on, they can just "be fixed". And generally unless you're the one fixing the bugs, it's hard to understand the asymmetry in effort here. No one also ever got any credit for bug-fixes compared to adding features.
There is space for a generic tool that defines code quality as code. Something like ast-grep[0] or Roslyn analysers. Linters for some languages like Go do a lot of lifting in this field, but there could be more checks.
With that you could specify exactly what "good code" looks like and prevent the LLM from even committing stuff that doesn't match the rules.
I know how important code quality is. But I can't (or don't have energy to) convince junior engineers and sometimes project managers to submit good quality code instead of vibe-coded garbage anymore.
> If your code quality is bad, your product will be bad.
Why? Modern hardware power allow for extremely inefficient code, so even if some code runs a thousand times slower because it's badly programmed it will still be so fast that it seems instant.
For the rest of the stuff, it has no relevance for the user of the software what the code is doing inside of the chip, as long as the inputs and outputs function as they should. User wants to give input and receive output, nothing else has any significance at all for her.
Sure. Everyone remembers from Algorithms 101 that a constant multiple ("a thousand times slower") is irrelevant. What matters is the scalability. Something that's O(n) will always scale better than something that O(n^2), even if the thing that's O(n) has 1000x overhead per unit.
But that's just a small piece of the puzzle. I agree that the user only cares about what the product does and not how the product works, but the what is always related to how, even if that relationship is imperceptible to the user. A product with terrible code quality will have more frequent and longer outages (because debugging is harder), and it will take longer for new features to be added (because adding things is harder). The user will care about these things.
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