I’m not sure I get the fifty years bit at the very end. Anyone care to explain?
I believe the author worked at Facebook in the past. The "fifty years" bit is likely a reference to that company's recent policy change that explicitly re-authorizes the use of what are rightly considered slurs - even if they were common sentiment to express publicly fifty-some years ago.
Aye, that makes sense (not the slurs, but the explanation). Thanks.
Is there a standard "smearing" period now? For a while, Google had a 24 hour adjustment period, 12 hours on each side of the leap second, while Facebook used a shorter period.
Not as far as I know.
The cosine adjustment that Google originally used is not the best: NTP aims to measure the difference in rate between the client’s hardware clock and real time, and it works best if the rates are fairly constant. With the cosine smear, the rate changes continuously! If you use a simple linear smear, NTP just has to cope with two small rate changes at the start and end of the smear.
The smear needs to be slow enough that NTP’s algorithms have time to react without overshooting; 24 hours is a reasonable choice tho you can go a bit faster. There’s some disagreement about when the smear occurs relative to the leap second; if the leap is in the middle of the smear the max offset is 0.5 seconds, but if the leap is at the end of the smear the offset is always slow. They were able to test the up-to-one-second-slow scenario in a system-wide live trial, whereas they could not do the same for the sign flip. I think if you can cope with a 0.5 second offset from real time then a 1.0 second offset should not be much more troublesome.
Nice descriptive article. I've done this on purpose too to debug remote filesystem syncs and cryptography problems where machines are out of sync. My GPS wall clock is handy for adjusting NTP, but the time it takes to scan my eyes from the wall back to the monitor.. you really do need two stacked like she did. So I now figured to use transparrent terminals each logged into a different host and lay them over one another running "watch -n1 date".
Would have been nice to have some more network, code and command line examples. You need to set up a local ntpd and need to point your local master at that temporarily. A better utility to write would be "timediff -s1 -s2" that takes two time servers and shows the offset. I bet there's a way to do that in one line. Anyone?
> watch -n1 date
Um, that's a pretty inaccurate way to notice an offset in the millisecond range, isn't it?
That doesn't even show ms. Add something like +%s%N (ns) to the options if you want finer resolution.
The problem is using watch you have no control* over when in each second it's getting the time, so it could be nearly a second late (e.g. it's getting the time once per second, but happens to be doing it when it's a few milliseconds away from ticking over to the next second).
* Okay, you have a little control in that you can press enter, or otherwise set it running, at a particular moment.
"Reenact the past , be the past, past becomes glorious present" Isil
>Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge just sent it back fifty years. Way to upstage me, dude.
Seeing that this was written by Rachel by the Bay, I thought it was going to be a post about Facebook's recent policy change, and indeed it was.
> Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge just sent it back fifty years. Way to upstage me, dude.
I feel like there's a link to a story missing there
The guy in charge being Lizardman, who almost tripped over his own claws to get rid of fact checkers, to allow calling non-heterosexuals metally ill, etcetera etcetera now that we are witnessing the second coming of The White House Cheeto
It's about the company's recent course change, which includes Zuckerberg's Joe Rogan interview from last week. IMO this has a lot to do with the younger generations. Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent election, and Zuck has probably realised that he needs to align Meta with them if they want to remain a relevant player in the social media space.
I don't buy it, Gen Z hasnt swung right, but the young left has swung apathetic. Zuck has his own reasons for sucking up to Trump and it's not to stay popular with the kids, who have already moved on from Meta properties.
The hypothesis I saw proposed is that his marriage is breaking down/actually done. Basically he's going the Elon route.
This is why it's important not just that people do the right thing but also why they do it. Circumstances can change, but if people do the right thing for the "right reasons", then what they do won't change.
Doing sth because of somebody's spouse is a bad reason, imagine the relationship goes sour and they face a divorce, boom they change their tune.
What's important is that we break these companies up so they aren't used as tools by the powerful. Neither Zuckerberg's or Musk's income streams should be allowed to have such an important effect on everyone's lives, but as long as these communication companies are allowed to exchange their obedience for a regime's lack of antitrust enforcement, our 1st Amendment rights are meaningless.
> This is why it's important not just that people do the right thing but also why they do it.
I care about what Zuckerberg, Loraine Powell Jobs or Musk feel the right thing is about as much as I care about what my bus driver thinks the right thing is. What we need is a functioning government.
Zuch was granted his wish and was turned into a real boy. And now he knows he can do a lot better.
> Gen Z were heavily supporting Trump in the recent election
What on earth are you talking about? 18-29 year olds were the most Democratic age group, as usual. 18-29 year old men might have slightly favored Trump, but to a significantly lower degree than older men.
This seems to be the reason for writing about the topic right now:
> So, yes, in June 2015, I slowed down the whole company [Facebook] by a second.
> Of course, here it is ten years later, and the guy in charge just sent it back fifty years [by ending fact checking?]. Way to upstage me, dude.
The fact checking is the tip of the iceberg — it's what the marketing machine led with because it's the least objectionable. Far far worse is letting queer people like myself be called mentally ill, though not any other group (e.g. religious people). Yes, it's part of the common discourse, but the common discourse is objectively morally abhorrent.
I worked at FB for a decade, and I now am rooting for its complete destruction.
You can’t call Christians mentally ill on Facebook? Really?
You can, and they do. Viscously and constantly. But also men in general, you can insult them every way, with every slur, every generalization, and every assignment of evil intention.
Facebook maybe? She mentions the cat factory
That policy change reads like a more liberal version of Obama's first term compaign platform on social issues.
Lets not pretend that the current climate in SF isn't both way outside the Overton window for most of rest of the US and most of California until ten years ago.
With this comment you seem to be putting the Overton window farther right than I’ve seen it in recent memory —- outside of very rural areas.
Wtf is this comment in relation to? Certainly not the article which is about a strictly technical issue or how to deploy time smearing for the first time.
It's a reference to the very last paragraph of the article.
And the title.
Read to the end. The time smearing article was just a clever ruse to set up her political jab.