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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 28, 2025

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Was there a specific use-case for the highly strict clock synchronization?

High frequency trading. A single trade goes through many computers. And the even stream can be a fire hose at times. It's helpful for corroboration if the logs all agree on the exact time. Helps you be less embarrassed when regulators ask questions.

Computer timekeeping has always been a personal nemesis (NTP sync errors, RTCs failing, random clock drift, time being an hour off randomly due to strange bugs, Windows and Linux not playing nicely on a dual-boot system even when I beg windows to use UTC, there are so many problems) so it’s interesting to read about how complex it is to keep clocks in sync.

It's pretty awful. For awhile a lot of computers had broken clocks too that weren't even possible to discipline. And you can have substantial drift if your computers use different time sources. And maybe your computers will keep your rigorous time but networked appliances won't give a shit.

Every big tech company tends to have a shared internal doc outlining The Way they've handled time that's usually a fascinating archeological adventure.