I was just thinking about that the other day..
I think I'd be ok with this. I love the KDE fuzzy clock that says it's "about lunchtime", much more human than the examples people are decrying here.
In the end though we just used checksums, but over the wire the larger files take too long. This comment has given me an idea!
So for example check modified, inode number against the previous version. If they are all a match consider skipping the checksum. This way you can skip almost all checksums on an incremental transfer. You can have false-negatives but this can often be mitigated by occasionally doing a full rescan or similar.
To be honest, I didn't even try this because the destination machine is Windows, I didnt think inode number had an equivalent in windows, but after googling, there might be a way.
Another great suggestion.
As for the full checksum, I went with a chunk size of the first and the last of the file, (the changes are very small, property based) but I don't think its as reliable.
1 - I rarely eat a meal in the middle of my day. In fact I usually only eat once, so is that one meal lunch? or breakfast? or dinner? or what ??
2 - My day not only isn't the same as yours, it isn't even the same from day to day, so even if I agreed to call my one meal lunch instead of dinner, it does not come at the same time as yours does, and does not even come at the same time from day to day, and does not even come at the same time relative to when I am awake let alone the absoluet time.
It's inconsiderate to think this is reasonable for everyone else because it's reasonable for you. It's like how kids and the untravelled and otherwise ignorant presume everyone else's life is exactly the same as theirs.
I could translate of course, because of course I know what it means for probably the majority of everyone else, but why should I have to do that? This whole topic is about convenience and meaning, and this would be inconvenient and of only arbitrary meaning to me. It would be like calling it "triangle time" sure, I could just know that that means around noon. Why should my interface require me to translate from markers that are meaningful to someone else's life but not to mine?
A worse example just to show what's so wrong would be like calling sunday "church day". Or sunday afternoon "right after church". That would be not only inconsiderate but downright offensive. For a lot of people that would be perfectly fine and some of them would even fail to see why that should be a problem for anyone.
And the offense isn't just mentioning a religion, it's the assumption, the turning anyone else into the exception, when they are not an exception, they are equal.
FTFY