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The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

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421–430 of 456 posts

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market makers are always talking about "lowering the spread" being this great thing they're doing to make the world a better place Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread like a crypto exchange, a deeply unpopular corner of the stock derivatives market, or a Craigslist used stuff category, the wide spread is just a mild inconvenience at worst. You get to choose between waiting for a better deal an…

"Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread.." Someone who wants to buy or sell goes to a market in order execute at the best price achievable, and they may be under time pressure. If the spreads are wider at one place than another, participants will gravitate to the place with the narrower spreads. If there is better liquidity at one place than another, activity will move to that place. The purpose…

Unless I'm missing something, a spread between 10 and 20 is not a place where you can 'buy for 10 and sell for 20'.

Otherwise these 2 guys could fill their orders immediately.

10 20 means you can sell for 10 and buy for 20 instead.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#422

I wonder: Why is Daylight Savings/Normal Time not implemented using monotically increasing hours? Day goes up to hour 23 one time of year and hour 25 the other instead of doing a clock hour twice . Would be weird to be able to have 23-hour and 25-hour days. But this seems to be how leap seconds are handled (one 61 second minute)?

That could probably work, but I'm glad that is handled by changing the timezone instead. Otherwise inventors of unix and ntp times would have got the bright idea to rewind or forward those times by a full hour twice a year.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he should get Stephen Colbert's second-by-second day planner.

It's dumb you got downvoted for telling a joke, geez

> geez

This is a euphemism. Please don't use it.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#424
We have a GPS time server (so stratum one) that is set to GPS time, so it's off from UTC by almost twenty seconds because they don't ever apply leap seconds. I love it. Another part of the org pressed me to correct my time to match UTC, but I'm so happy to be done dealing with time changes that I just replied "monotonic time" until they got their own. A few grand to not have those problems is such a bargain!

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market makers are always talking about "lowering the spread" being this great thing they're doing to make the world a better place Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread like a crypto exchange, a deeply unpopular corner of the stock derivatives market, or a Craigslist used stuff category, the wide spread is just a mild inconvenience at worst. You get to choose between waiting for a better deal an…

"Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread.." Someone who wants to buy or sell goes to a market in order execute at the best price achievable, and they may be under time pressure. If the spreads are wider at one place than another, participants will gravitate to the place with the narrower spreads. If there is better liquidity at one place than another, activity will move to that place. The purpose…

I feel like you basically rephrased what I said, but added a little terminology around it and said it's a good thing. Market orders taking 1 second to fill instead of 80 milliseconds isn't a meaningful contribution to society.

Imagine a world with no market makers. There would still be plenty of buyers and sellers of SPY shares at any given time to keep a tight spread and fast execution, but people placing market orders would get slightly worse execution and people who can accept the risk of placing a limit order and waiting two seconds would get slighty better execution. The ONLY real difference is that there wouldn't be some market vampires magically extracting tiny bits of profit all day. Your Facebook shares would still move just fine even if nobody front-runs your order and takes a few cents from you.

I get it, market making is profitable and the victims are distributed widely enough/offset enough by trivial benefits that it's not a particularly bad thing to do. But they aren't making ANY positive contribution to society AT ALL by squatting on the exchange and intercepting all the market orders at a profit.

(Full disclosure: this whole argument obviously goes a different direction when you start talking about derivatives, since market makers are mostly the ones who create and offset the derivatives. I could believe an argument that they're making the world a better place by making it quick and cheap to mitigate financial risk)

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#426
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about this? Frame one: man beats woman at chess. Frame two: woman shoots man with automatic pistol. Not sure how deep the original really is if you think about it...

It's not comparable because computers are things but women are not.

My intention was for the woman to shoot the man, it's possible I wrote it wrong. They could be both men or aliens or even computers/robots with human like intelligence. If they were both thinking computers the "pistol" could really be a human paid in Monero to go smash the other computers hard drives and backups.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yet when I go somewhere with no liquidity and a huge spread.." Someone who wants to buy or sell goes to a market in order execute at the best price achievable, and they may be under time pressure. If the spreads are wider at one place than another, participants will gravitate to the place with the narrower spreads. If there is better liquidity at one place than another, activity will move to that place. The purpose…

I feel like you basically rephrased what I said, but added a little terminology around it and said it's a good thing. Market orders taking 1 second to fill instead of 80 milliseconds isn't a meaningful contribution to society. Imagine a world with no market makers. There would still be plenty of buyers and sellers of SPY shares at any given time to keep a tight spread and fast execution, but people placing market ord…

Rephrasing the same thing but with a little more terminology is what market makers do. :)

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#428
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From 2035 it's going to be less accurate in exactly the same way. I'd argue bombcar's method is more robust. I don't know of anything that actually requires UTC to be within 1 second of average rotation-based time; having it within 2 or 3 seconds is extremely unlikely to actually break anything. But we do generally want to have measured time roughly in line with Earth time in the medium to long term.

How about clocks on Mars? Should these have Earth leap seconds? Time synchronization is already hard enough, complicating it with adjustments based on uneven planetary body movements doesn’t make much sense in a long term.

In the longer term Mars should probably have its own time scale. When we get to further colonization maybe we can use TAI for interplanetary use (but time dilation due to relativity effects is going to be a problem when going to other stars) while still using UTC on Earth.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#429

In 2015 I was working at a "fintech" company and a leap second was announced. It was scheduled for a Wednesday, unlike all others before which had happened on the weekend, when markets were closed. When the previous leap second was applied, a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics for some reason, so needless to say everyone was really concerned about a leap second happening during trading hours. So I was assig…

A bit of a tangent but I have observed that whenever a networking record for bandwidth is broken it is typically by a nonprofit such as a university, but whenever a networking record for latency is broken it is more often than not by someone in the "fintech" industry developing a faster bag-passing mechanism.

It is clear to me that the disparity of latency creates islands of privilege. I mentioned this to someone in the industry once and they replied that what the layman perceives as parasitic middlemen actually provide valuable liquidity. When I asked whether they considered ticket-scalpers to likewise provide liquidity they claimed that was not at all the same thing.

Re: The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

#430
post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone ever heard about audits concerned with subsecond timestamp resolution?

Yes. I've been involved in a few. Well, the resolution and accuracy were part of the audit scope, certainly. Quite common in real-time sports betting world.

Thanks for the chime in. I don't work in fin or even adjacent to it, but in robotics we often have to correlate logs between multiple systems to fully understand a failure and in a lot of those situations milliseconds do matter— when did the sensor reading come in, how quickly did we understand it and alert the other unit, how does this line up with the timestamps on a security cam video we don't control, etc etc.
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