time

Time synchronization is rough

CloudFlare on the frustrations of clock skew:

It may surprise you to learn that, in practice, clients’ clocks are heavily skewed. A recent study of Chrome users showed that a significant fraction of reported TLS-certificate errors are caused by client-clock skew. During the period in which error reports were collected, 6.7% of client-reported times were behind by more than 24 hours. (0.05% were ahead by more than 24 hours.) This skew was a causal factor for at least 33.5% of the sampled reports from Windows users, 8.71% from Mac OS, 8.46% from Android, and 1.72% from Chrome OS.

They’re proposing Roughtime as a solution.

Where Do They Find The Time?

Clay Shirky recently posted (wayback) a transcript of his Web 2.0 Expo keynote. …If you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project — every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million […] » about 500 words

…And A Mechanical Turk To Rule Them All

Paul Bausch has concerns about Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:

I can imagine a world where my computer can organize my time in front of the screen better than I can. In fact, I bet [Amazon’s Mechanical Turk] will eventually gather data about how many [Human Intelligence Tasks] someone can perform at peak accuracy in a 10 hour period. Once my HIT-level is known, the computer could divide all of my work into a series of decisions. Instead of lunging about from task to task, getting distracted by blogs, following paths that end up leading nowhere, the computer could have everything planned out for me. (It could even throw in a distraction or two if that actually increased my HIT performance.) If I could be more efficient and get more accomplished by turning decisions about how I work over to my computer, I’d be foolish not to.

Foolish not to, but who wants to work at the behest of a computer? And that’s Paul’s complaint.