We just need to change Earth's rotational speed and orbital period so that the number of days in a year is congruent 0 (mod 10). If we had 1000 day years, then maybe we could have 10 months of 10 weeks of 10 days. Or with 100 day years, we could skip months and just have 10 weeks of 10 days.
Somewhere between Mercury's and Venus's orbits, we could have a year with 100 days of our current length. It would be nice for our existing circadian rhythms but a bit on the hot side...
A bit further than Mar's orbit, we could have a year with 1000 days of our current length, but pretty chilly.
Maybe we could take Mars's orbit, since we think it had liquid water and we've go a greenhouse going anyway... That is about 690 of our current day lengths. But maybe we could spin Earth up to have 1000 rotations per orbit, and each day would be about 16.5 of our current hours.
Given the utter climate chaos we'd get from this, it might be more realistic to move everybody underground and then we can just program the lights to give us whatever decimal time units we want... ;-)
While we're at it, everyone deserves 12h of daylight, so clocks should use exact position to automatically and continuously adjust so that 6:00 is always sunrise, 12:00 is always "high noon", and 18:00 is always sunset. :-)
Some will argue that the minutes should correspond to sun angles over the (eastern) horizon, so you know what kind of hat to wear for a given appointment time. In the tropics, you can have this 6:00..12:00..18:00 daytime a couple times per year. Elsewhere and elsewhen, your clock should asymptotically approach a morning time corresponding to the sun's zenith, then jump to the corresponding afternoon time as the sun starts descending again.
However, after a gathering of stakeholders, it will be determined that everyone can pretend to be at the right tropical latitude to have the sun pass overhead. We will simply add "grocer's quotes" around each clock display or written timestamp, indicating that it is aligned to a hypothetical high noon. Largely thanks to these grocery clerks, we'll never have to design clocks with correct asymptotic behavior for midnight sun and polar night observers.
Of course, the ISO timestamp format will also need to be updated, replacing the timezone suffix with a longitudinal coordinate. Many variants will be defined for using decimal degrees, degrees/minutes/seconds, or floating-point radians for this value. But most programmers will only bother to handle decimal degrees, and many will be lazy and use lookup tables. Clever hackers will decide to save space by discretizing with a formula like floor(longitude / nbins). After careful study, they will settle on the constant nbins=24.
The cynic in me thinks Motorola somehow won't really enable that since it would cut into their recurring sales too much..?
But, I agree. I used several Motorola phones and those were the main two reasons I replaced them. They either ran until the battery was misbehaving or I became concerned about the state of the software. The other reason would be actual tech changes such as LTE/5G and the transitional period where not all models supported all the important radio bands for my providers.
A few Motos have stayed in the family and had amazingly long lives as home devices (no SIM). I'd love for the balance to somehow come out in favor of your hopes. I.e. they decde they can save so much on OS maintenance costs that they don't mind the effect of users holding onto phones longer.
Taking this to an extreme, the whole idea of a TLB sounds like hardware protection too?
As a thought experiment, imagine an extremely simple ISA and memory interface where you would do address translation or even cache management in software if you needed it... the different cache tiers could just be different NUMA zones that you manage yourself.
You might end up with something that looks more like a GPU or super-ultra-hyper-threading to get throughput masking the latency of software-defined memory addressing and caching?
Ironically, your first paragraph sounds like it "operates at awe-inspiring scale and efficiency" because it actually has unfettered capitalism going on behind the scenes!
In theory, a computer should be able to do the same. It could do sensor fusion with even more sense modalities than we have. It could have an array of cameras and potentially out-do our stereo vision, or perhaps even use some lightfield magic to (virtually) analyze the same scene with multiple optical paths.
However, there is also a lot of interaction between our perceptual system and cognition. Just for depth perception, we're doing a lot of temporal analysis. We track moving objects and infer distance from assumptions about scale and object permanence. We don't just repeatedly make depth maps from 2D imagery.
The brute-force approach is something like training visual language models (VLMs). E.g. you could train on lots of movies and be able to predict "what happens next" in the imaging world.
But, compared to LLMs, there is a bigger gap between the model and the application domain with VLMs. It may seem like LLMs are being applied to lots of domains, but most are just tiny variations on the same task of "writing what comes next", which is exactly what they were trained on. Unfortunately, driving is not "painting what comes next" in the same way as all these LLM writing hacks. There is still a big gap between that predictive layer, planning, and executing. Our giant corpus of movies does not really provide the ready-made training data to go after those bigger problems.
Putting your point another way, in order to replicate an average human driver’s competence you would need to make several strong advancements in the state of the art in computer vision _and_ digital optics.
The superstitious bits are more like people thinking that code goes faster if they use different variable names while programming in the same language.
And the horror is, once in a long while it is true. E.g. where perverse incentives cause an optimizing compiler vendor to inject special cases.
I would prefer to see a version that was skillfully translated to modern orthography so that we could appreciate shifts in vocabulary and grammar.
To me, it is nearly like trying to look at a picture book of fashion but the imagery is degraded as you go back. I'd like to see the time-traveler's version with clean digital pictures of every era...
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