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A comment on Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE. Parent comment

Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by bombolo on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @05:52AM (#33704350)
USA at some point had an anti-missile system that needed periodical reboots because it was originally designed for short deployments, so the floating point variable for the clock would start to lose precision after a while.
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Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by saagarjha on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @06:26AM (#33704584)
Which, of course, led to people dying when the drift was too great.
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Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by perihelions on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @08:08AM (#33705319)
Context for those unfamiliar:

https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~arnold/disasters/patriot.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIM-104_Patriot#Failure_at_Dha...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=patriot%20missile (HN threads)

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Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by mlindner on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @08:22AM (#33705458)
Fixed point, not floating point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-point_arithmetic
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Re:Why Twitter didn’t go down: From a real Twitter SRE by gcr on Tuesday November 22, 2022 @10:53AM (#33707066)
Floating point clocks do lose precision after long enough time though; see https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/dont-store-that...

Storing floating point coordinates for example is what causes the "farlands" world generation behavior in Minecraft, for example.

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