To many it's a trip to a time before they existed. I imagine my kids would have some difficulty to understand some key aspects of the computing experience back then.
I highly recommend anyone to look up how PTP works and how it compares to NTP. Clock sync is very interesting. When I joined an HFT company, first thing I did was understand this stuff. We care about it a lot[1].
If you want a specific question to answer, answer this: why does PTP need hardware timestamping to achieve high precision (where the network card itself assigns timestamps to packets, rather than having the kernel do it as part of TCP/IP processing)? If we use software timestamps, why can we do microsecond precision at best? If you understand this, it goes a very long way to understanding the core ideas behind precise clock sync.
Once you have a solid understanding of PTP, look into White Rabbit. They’re able to sync two clocks with sub-ns precision. In case that isn’t obvious, that is absolutely insane.
[1] So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers. Once, an audio engineer absolutely talked my ear off about ptp. I had no idea that audio people understood clock sync so well but they do!
> So do a lot of people. For example audio engineers.
Indeed. PTP (various, not-necessarily compatible, versions) is at the core of modern ethernet-based audio networking: Dante (proprietary, PTP: IEEE 1588 v1), AVB (IEEE standard, PTP: 802.1AS), AES67 (AES standard, PTP: IEEE 1588 v2). And now the scope of the AVB protocol stack has been expanded to TSN for industrial and automotive time sensitive network applications.
But that's often _the source_ you need to work around; there is no way in hell that they're going to get all the light/sound/video/graphics ... etc people in the same 2 square meter area to put on a show like the super bowl :).
For smaller events like a touring act or even a venue with a few hundred people capacity you still need a single master clock but this time it's not "wall time" and is "absolute" time. E.g.: a musician at the front of the house chooses when to start and the video/lighting guy in the back needs to be on the same page so the visuals line up [0].
> Not even if you test hundreds of pairs to find a match?
Assuming you do find _a_ match, you still need everything else to be in sync across the different temperature(s) that each component will be operating at
I find time accuracy to be ridiculously interesting, and I have had to talk myself out of buying those a used atomic clock to play with [1]. I think precision time is very cool, and a small part of me wants to create the most overly engineered wall-clock using a Raspberry Pi or something to have sub-microsecond level accuracy.
Sadly, they're generally just a bit too expensive for me to justify it as a toy.
I don't work in trading (though not for lack of trying on my end), so most of the stuff I work on has been a lot more about "logical clocks", which are cool in their own right, but I have always wondered how much more efficient we could be if we had nanosecond-level precision to guarantee that locks are almost always uncontested.
[1] I'm not talking about those clocks that radio to Colorado or Greenwich, I mean the relatively small ones that you can buy that run locally.
Ask ChatGPT to generate product or business names for you. A lot of them contain the word “loom”. I know someone who recently vibe coded a thing and had an AI name it and it also has “loom” in it.
I’m not suggesting that that’s what happened with this project. I have no idea how much AI they used for any of it. But “loom” seems to appear in a lot of ChatGPT generated product names lately.
I’ll have to look into that when renaming this. I didn’t do any product research before, and it looks like there are bike saddles, power generators, and mattresses all with the same name .
One more strange place: the barbershop in Leadenhall Market.
You can see the wall right in the barbershop.
In fact, this wall drove their rent higher and eventually they closed.
(Forgive the sob story, but the barber was amazing, and they closed down + fired everyone with no notice to customers. I have not been able to track him down since!)
If this guy is interesting to you, I recommend "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry"[1]. Really good computing history book, and I've read a lot of them. Lee is a major character in the book.
It's important to note that this page is almost 10 years old.
I do find myself self-censoring in 2025, but it's for a far more boring reason than surveillance capitalism. It's because leaders on the far right literally said people should snitch on each other and dox each other.
Much as I hate to say it, I'm sure people on the right have felt the same way for at least a decade.
I definitely try to avoid any public statement of political nature online. You never know how the tide will turn at some point and who gets into power. And then you do not want to have a record of having said the wrong thing about the new guy(s) at the top in your past.
Not sure if you have read whole comment before posting this...
Yes it was common from every corner before. However now, it is encouraged from the governments. That means any laws that could help from cyber- or any other form of bullying will disappear. No matter how one think it was weak in practice, freedom of expression is going disappear completely.
Eh. Here we had some leftists in previous government. They had fancy idea to make hate speech an administrative offense. Because apparently penal offense process was too complex so they couldn’t trial as many people for online comments as they wished.
On top of that, they tried to change defamation law to include not only factually wrong information, but also make it a libel if the person felt like it was offensive.
Thankfully neither of above passed. Especially since we have a different crop of lunatics now who would be happy to abuse above laws…
TBF the individual at the center of it did suffer consequences. They were fired and struggled to find employment after the fact, and PyCon updated their attendee rules to include a clause on public shaming.
The thing that frustrates me the most about digital ID cards is not themselves on merit but rather modern Labour's political abilities.
Like, the UK economy is stagnant, there is a cost-of-living crisis, and Labour needs to present the public with an alternative to Farage. And the answer is... digital ID cards?
Completely agree. I'm not too bothered Digital ID cards, I was mildly annoyed by the idea of actual ID cards (manly the cost) but as a free digital app, I don't have many objections. I've seen it from colleagues in Denmark. If they manage to build in some zero knowledge proof of age I might even support it.
But how this is supposed to stop immigration, illegal or otherwise, is beyond me.
I mean it's obvious to anyone who isn't an idiot that we shouldn't. However, populist parties banging the drum on this are looking likely to be at least the second biggest party in the next general election (and that comes with some wishful thinking given the recent polls). Labour's approach seems to be to validate their scaremongering but to claim they can deal with it without going full on Third Reich...
Oh, yes, I understand. Yeah, if this is meant to speak to Reform voters, it’s really unclear if it actually makes sense to them or anyone if this is actually an immigration thing.
Starmer seems to be under the impression that Labour needs to focus on immigration to stave of Reform. This is a mistake because most people don't really care about immigration as such, they care about cost of living, health care, and basic things like that. Research and polling in many different countries over many different years have shown this again and again and again. People like Farage like to present "one easy answer to all problems politicians don't want you to know!" First: EU, now: immigration, next: gingers?
Focusing so strongly on immigration and related issues only strengthens Farage. It does nothing to convince the die-hard Reform people and alienates your own voters. We're already seeing Labour split to a new party (well, assuming it doesn't implode in classic left-wing infighting). It's lose-lose.
Labour won 2/3rd of MPs with just 1/3rd of the vote, the biggest gap between MPs and vote share in modern history by quite a margin. In many ways they "lost" last year's election because that's a very underwhelming result after running against a deeply unpopular government that's been in government for almost 15 years. They've been on a thin ice since day one.
All of this is such an obvious mistake that I truly don't understand what Starmer is even thinking.
I feel like there are two things... one, do Reform voters even understand that Digital ID is a response to immigration? It's not clear to me that they even do.
Two, obviously immigration is not the issue. As I understand, Starmer is going to attempt to mount a serious counter-narrative to Farage. I really hope that his answer will not be "look, we hate immigrants too!" They tried that a few months ago, didn't they? The whole "island of strangers" Enoch Powell thing. I hope that that was as bad as it gets.
If you want to improve the capacity of the state to deliver services and improve the lives of citizens, being able to easily tell who is who across a range of government departments is a pretty good place to start.
You're right. Another positive note is Miliband's stuff with energy -- my understanding is that they are doing mostly the right things and succeeding in the political battles they need to win.
But there's also the issue of selling this to the public. The stuff you and I are talking about is quiet, probably because it's not sexy. The digital ID thing is loud and prominent.
This is why "green new deal" is a good idea -- it's a loud, good way to sell the public on something they'd otherwise fail to understand.
Yes, this. I feel like I’m going crazy. I pay for the extra Opus usage and I keep checking the model switcher to see if it has automatically switched to Sonnet. It has not. I just have a lot more experiences of it feeling anecdotally dumb lately.
You keep the karma you've already received, but the project creator submitted the original post and also included the blog post in the comments (after it was too late to change the post URL) and we always prefer to give precedence to the person who submitted the first post about a topic. It's not personal or unusual, it's the way we've moderated HN for years.
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