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I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this

I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this the wrong approach?

techdragon 3y ago
As mentioned in a reply to a sibling comment. GPS time is (to a human relevant usable level of accuracy) TAI minus 19 seconds. The issue is that you can't really "run TAI" on something, most firmware isn't designed to keep track of time this way and so expects to be working with UTC, the differences are subtle and basically boil down to "has no leap seconds and requires some math to accommodate this fact" and "expects leap seconds to exist, and be handled by humans and synchronization tools"... the latter which is fundamentally assuming that time is non-monotonic is at odds with the way that hardware clocks work in silicon and circuity. So while you can design software to record things in TAI, and if you build your own hardware and firmware use TAI on that hardware and firmware... at a normal day to day level you can't really switch... but you can join the slowly growing collection of educated and aware people that appreciate the UTC/TAI mismatch in our software systems and push in the correct direction. The arguments about freezing UTC and not adding any more leap seconds to it are on the face of it, just stupid, we have GPS time which is fixed to TAI, we have TAI itself... we don't need to fundamentally change UTC just because we fucked up all the computers but just don't want to fix them properly. This is one time where counter to the Simpson's meme, the children are in fact wrong. UTC is harder for the computers to use, and that's because UTC was the wrong choice, so the answer is to stop having the damn computers use UTC as the internal time representation and switch to having them use an appropriate internal time representation.
- killjoywashere 3y ago
  I seriously think the most effective way to get everyone to TAI would be for Apple to do it: make it part of their WWDC keynote. Every political leader would learn about TAI within 24 hours, from a politically neutral, technological source they consider a lodestar. They would ask their people, who would document the ask in a formal inquiry to the science and technology people in their government, who would then respond with an executive summary of a detailed plan to implement TAI on all government systems.

I would love to run TAI on my devices. But where can I find a public NTP server that offers TAI, or a GPS module that gives the same? Do these exist? Or is this the wrong approach?

techdragon 3y ago

As mentioned in a reply to a sibling comment. GPS time is (to a human relevant usable level of accuracy) TAI minus 19 seconds. The issue is that you can't really "run TAI" on something, most firmware isn't designed to keep track of time this way and so expects to be working with UTC, the differences are subtle and basically boil down to "has no leap seconds and requires some math to accommodate this fact" and "expects leap seconds to exist, and be handled by humans and synchronization tools"... the latter which is fundamentally assuming that time is non-monotonic is at odds with the way that hardware clocks work in silicon and circuity. So while you can design software to record things in TAI, and if you build your own hardware and firmware use TAI on that hardware and firmware... at a normal day to day level you can't really switch... but you can join the slowly growing collection of educated and aware people that appreciate the UTC/TAI mismatch in our software systems and push in the correct direction. The arguments about freezing UTC and not adding any more leap seconds to it are on the face of it, just stupid, we have GPS time which is fixed to TAI, we have TAI itself... we don't need to fundamentally change UTC just because we fucked up all the computers but just don't want to fix them properly. This is one time where counter to the Simpson's meme, the children are in fact wrong. UTC is harder for the computers to use, and that's because UTC was the wrong choice, so the answer is to stop having the damn computers use UTC as the internal time representation and switch to having them use an appropriate internal time representation.

killjoywashere 3y ago
I seriously think the most effective way to get everyone to TAI would be for Apple to do it: make it part of their WWDC keynote. Every political leader would learn about TAI within 24 hours, from a politically neutral, technological source they consider a lodestar. They would ask their people, who would document the ask in a formal inquiry to the science and technology people in their government, who would then respond with an executive summary of a detailed plan to implement TAI on all government systems.