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

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441–450 of 456 posts

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

#441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What is your goal? Is it better markets, or getting rid of market makers? You seem fixated on the latter, to the extent that you will define away the quality measures of a market to get there. The vampire/victim labelling you use is unreasonable. Market makers rest liquidity on the book and then other participants choose to interact with them. Both participants have chosen to enter the deal. You propose a market with…

My goal is for market makers to quit publicly jerking themselves off over what great and noble people they are, since they're just useless scavengers.

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

#442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> high level gambling This is a weasel phrase. Insurance is high level gambling as well. They both use risk models to decide at what price they will sit on the opposite side of a trade for. Decide where you really draw the line and if it’s time horizons that’s pretty arbitrarily stupid. Insurance uses re-insurance quite quickly to de-risk their own books so pretending trading within a minute vs daily/hourly is pretty…

You didn't want to understand me. Sure both use risk models, but exactly this still doesn't make them anyhow relatable? And sure I know still that everything is interconnected, but it is clear that if someone complains about fintech (but other arguments then immediately go into the "oh you say fintech, but what about .."), he doesn't mean the necessary stuff like payments processing or normal markets. anyway fine to…

No, I’m saying your hand-wavy “fintech is bad” doesn’t actually point to any thing in particular. Most of HFT is not “do the same thing as the other players, but faster”.

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

#443
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most HFTs primarily engage in market making (matching buyers and sellers) which absolutely is a very useful and necessary function to society unless your position is that markets should not exist. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_maker

You could hold the position that markets are good but not everything should have a market. For example you can forbid futures and derivatives without forbidding good old stock trading.

Futures are massively useful to both halves in commodities markets (producers and consumers). Why would you want to ban them?

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

#444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you mean by that but nanosecond precise timing across cpu cores have been reliable for quite a while now. Key words: constant TSC, invariant TSC, TSC clocksource

The hardware providing those nanoseconds is not nanosecond accurate (unless using atomic clock) However they may be more accurate than 1ms. The guy is saying the timeslice given by the OS for a program to run in has at best a 1ms slot because the OS is switching between threads on a 1ms timeslice basis So unless you're polling, the timing at which you ask the hardware for nanoseconds will jitter with 1ms offsets

No, TSC on modern CPUs is much more granular that that. No atomic clocks needed, just a normal quartz crystal. This is how ptp works and you can definitely get sub nanosecond accuracy from it. Wrt scheduling quantum, this is entirely configurable and subject to scheduling policy, priorities and additional mechanics such as isolcpus and nohz. GP's comment is just plain wrong.

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

#445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your goal? Is it better markets, or getting rid of market makers? You seem fixated on the latter, to the extent that you will define away the quality measures of a market to get there. The vampire/victim labelling you use is unreasonable. Market makers rest liquidity on the book and then other participants choose to interact with them. Both participants have chosen to enter the deal. You propose a market with…

My goal is for market makers to quit publicly jerking themselves off over what great and noble people they are, since they're just useless scavengers.

[deleted]

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

#446

Hot take… Storing anything as UTC was a mistake and we should be using TAI for all storage and computation, only transforming into more human friendly formats for display to end users. This never needed to be a problem except we decided to make it harder to use TAI than UTC and so everything got built up off the backs of legacy bios level hardware supported UTC style clock behaviour, when we should have been using TA…

As spacecraft start making return trips to Earth we'll run into similar adjustment problems because TAI doesn't progress at the same rate at different altitudes and accelerations, so there'll need to be a re-sync at some point. Satellites already have a similar problem but can just use direct synchronization with Earth since it's so close. In theory spacecraft could do the same direct synchronization to Earth time, b…

TAI is independent of the altitude.

The clocks that were used to build TAI (its a co-ordinated average of dozens of atomic clocks around the world) became sufficiently accurate that the difference in each second based on the altitude of the clock measuring it in the early 70s. As a consequence of this it was decided that as of 1 January 1977 00:00:00 TAI would be corrected to correspond to what TAI should be if measured by clocks at the geoid (mean sea level) and as a result it has no relation to altitude or accelerations. There is also (because metrologist are like this sometimes) a continually published version of what TAI was before 1 January 1977 00:00:00 but it is now named EAL (Échelle Atomique Libre, meaning Free Atomic Scale)

In addition to this, we have already designed and maintain equivalent time standards to TAI, but for the Earth's barycentre Geocentric Coordinate Time (TCG - Temps-coordonnée géocentrique) which is roughly speaking TAI for a clock orbiting the sun, where the earth moon barycentre orbits, but without the earth & moon gravitational influence... and for the entire solar system Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB, from the French Temps-coordonnée barycentrique) which is roughly speaking again, equivalent to a TAI style clock but this time subtracting the entire solar system, as if a clock keeping TAI was just orbiting the galaxy at the barycentre of the entire solar system.

The cutting edge of this is building up astronomical data on ultra stable pulsars to use as "external" reference clocks far outside the solar system, but the complexities of subtracting the effect of all the universe the pulsars' radiation beams pass through before they get to us, makes it quite challenging. But the utility for deep space navigation has made it an active funded path of research for at least the last decade. (to get a GPS equivalent at lunar distance and beyond where it becomes rapidly impractical to have a GPS like orbiting constellation due to inverse square radio broadcast power limits, good radio can pick up GPS at the moon but the location precision out at that distance... is not great)

The cosmic microwave background dipole may be indicative that we can use it as an absolute frame of reference but settling that with enough certainty to base an official time standard on it, seems like some time away based on the state of things between cosmology, astronomy, astrophysics and metrology.

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

#447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eliminating leap seconds was only a half measure. They should have finished the job by adding rockets to the Earth to ensure that its rotation will stay at exactly 24 hours. If they weren't going to do that, then why eliminate leap seconds? Kicking the problem down the road doesn't really solve the problem, it just makes it worse later.

Surely it’s all the test firings of Merlin and Raptor engines that’s slowing the earth down in the first place? I mean first he screws up twitter, now it’s time itself. (/s)

He is absolutely, singlehandedly destroying Twitter-- no sarcasm.

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

#448
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, in principle there’s TAI for that. But civil time in most countries is defined in terms of UTC/GMT.

I agree actually. A lot of the blame is on unixtime trying to roughly align to UTC rather than TAI. But we're here now and we have to fix this. So anything that moves us away front his problem is helpful.

Absolutely! A large part if h the blame here rests on Unixtime (which is a monotonic count of seconds elapsed) trying to use a time standard where those seconds are not innfact monotonic. Unixtime is basically “TAI done wrong” and the failure to correct this early on … ideally they should have aligned themselves to TAI instead of UTC since originally Unixtime was not actually aligned to any particular time standard then in the mid 70s it was decided to align it with elapsed seconds of UTC time as of a fixed date.

This decision just dominoed down through time causing enough friction that we computer programmers outweighed the metrologists and they caved and abandoned properly keeping UTC in order to stop causing problems for everyone else due to our continued failure to fix the root cause of these issues.

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

#449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same way you add a full year without knowing if a country will change timezones or vote to drop daylight savings: you distinguish between timestamps and calendar dates, and keep updated your timezone/leap second database.

That doesn't answer my question. What I mean is that "a day" is not a fixed length, but depends on the existence of leap seconds. Most days have 24 60 60 seconds, but not all. Say I have a timestamp in the future, and I want to add a day to this. Then the first approximation would be to add 24 60 60 seconds. However if there occurs a leap second in that day, the correct thing is to add one more second. But I do not n…

You have to differentiate between calendrical and chronological calculations.

So to walk through your requested example…

You store a TAI time stamp of when you originally chose a specific date/time and then you store either a chronological time stamp (the TAI value) or a calendrical timestamp which is a struct/dict/etc storing the desired year month day, time and timezone and notionally the calendar system unless you want to assume the Gregorian calendar and risk confusion with Julian calendar dates which are still in use for astronomical record keeping. With these two values you can calculate what to change in the struct to account for any time change, a day not being fixed as a number of seconds allows accurate calendar calculations. You increase the day value and make sure you don’t have to “carry” a month in the months column.

Yes this is more calculations when modifying a value compared to just adding a bunch of seconds but that’s the issue at the heart of this problem, calendars and chronological elapsed seconds are fundamentally different and we computer programmers tried to take a big shortcut by using a single seconds value for both… and thus… here we are with the present state of affairs.

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

#450
post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interesting thing about DST is that it's not really repeating the hour, if you include the time zone offset in your time stamp. Here, look. Using the time zone for Norway in this example, with the `date` command on macOS. First the last second before DST ended in Norway this year. TZ=Europe/Oslo date -I seconds -jf %s 1667091599 2022-10-30T02:59:59+02:00 Then the second after. TZ=Europe/Oslo date -I seconds -jf %…

The problem is that nobody does it, for example no DB (AFAIK) does it, they all store dates as something like a Unix timestamp. And for a lot of things problems would be solved with +01:00 offset while for others you actually want Europe/Berlin offsets

Postgres and Oracle has TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE. MSSQL has DateTimeOffset.
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