Honestly there are so many tangentials in this post that it's really quite hard to get through without losing track of what's what, or what's real and what's hy

Honestly there are so many tangentials in this post that it's really quite hard to get through without losing track of what's what, or what's real and what's hypothetical. The article mentions network delay filtering algorithms that fall in broad categories x and y, but doesn't mention what NTP actually uses (linking to some pdf presentation elsewhere). Then there's a section about clock selection (which I understand to mean server selection) where it sounds like clocks are selected at random, no matter if they're on another continent, it's just favored if it has a low stratum. Then NTP talks to up to 5 servers and averages the resulting clock diff and, uh, applies that "using the PLL/FLL clock control system". This refers to some phase lock loop stuff from what earlier seemed to be a tangent: how quartz clocks work internally. So NTP actually tells the hardware to adjust how fast it counts? That sounds like I'd have heard of before but okay. If the offset is large and it's not enough to slow down or speed up your internal quartz for a time, it'll instead just update the time. The TL;DR seems to be this picture: https://sookocheff.com/post/time/how-does-ntp-work/assets/ntp-pll.png https://sookocheff.com/post/time/how-does-ntp-work/assets/nt... Where you can understand "selection and clustering algorithms" to mean "removing outlier data points" and substitute "combining algorithm" with "average the values". The abbreviation VFO is never mentioned on the page but this must be variable frequency oscillator, commonly referred to as "clock" -- if I understood it correctly. What this "filter" is, that is applied to each peer, is unclear to me.