Pushing the whole company into the past on purpose
30 comments
·January 9, 2025Animats
fanf2
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.
singleshot_
I’m not sure I get the fifty years bit at the very end. Anyone care to explain?
drewbug01
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.
singleshot_
Aye, that makes sense (not the slurs, but the explanation). Thanks.
gred
She loves the smell of censorship in the morning.
nonrandomstring
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?
fishstock25
> watch -n1 date
Um, that's a pretty inaccurate way to notice an offset in the millisecond range, isn't it?
quitit
>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.
senkora
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.
sunshowers
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.
pfannkuchen
You can’t call Christians mentally ill on Facebook? Really?
jimbob45
[flagged]
sunshowers
I'm advocating for moral virtue and the reduction of suffering, but short of that I'm arguing for the same standards. I'm an Indian immigrant living in the US.
pjc50
Newsflash: people don't like being called mentally ill on either continent.
morkalork
If an adult told you they believed Santa was real, you'd call them mentally ill and yet..
ClassyJacket
[flagged]
klooney
Facebook maybe? She mentions the cat factory
ashoeafoot
"Reenact the past , be the past, past becomes glorious present" Isil
wodenokoto
> 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
isoprophlex
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
declan_roberts
[flagged]
isoprophlex
The moment big tech senses a shift in the political magnetosphere, they don't just bend, they quantum tunnel into perfect alignment with the new paradigm. What's more, in this case it is as if they were waiting for permission to shed their liberal democratic haha rainbow flags exoskeleton and reveal their true form without even bothering with keeping up appearances
Punchline being that these tech companies were never the bastions of progressive values they claimed to be -- they were surfing the zeitgeist until a bigger wave came along
this_user
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.
jazzyjackson
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.
XorNot
The hypothesis I saw proposed is that his marriage is breaking down/actually done. Basically he's going the Elon route.
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.