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Re:MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices by hinkley on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:09PM (#44849707)
> In healthcare, patient data types get coerced incorrectly, potentially leading to wrong medication dosing recommendations.

May have changed, but unlikely. I worked with medical telemetry as a young man and it was impressed upon me thoroughly how important parsing timestamps correctly was. I have a faint memory, possibly false, of this being the first time I wrote unit tests (and without the benefit of a test framework).

We even accounted for lack of NTP by recalculating times off of the timestamps I. Their message headers.

And the reasons I was given were incident review as well as malpractice cases. A drug administered three seconds before a heart attack starts is a very different situation than one administered eight seconds after the patient crashed. We saw recently with the British postal service how lives can be ruined by bad data, and in medical data a minute is a world of difference.

Re:MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices by deathanatos on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:19PM (#44849794)
> May have changed, but unlikely. I worked with medical telemetry as a young man and it was impressed upon me thoroughly how important parsing timestamps correctly was.

I also work in healthcare, and we've seen HL7v2 messages with impossible timestamps. (E.g., in the spring-forward gap.)

Re:MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices by hinkley on Saturday August 09, 2025 @04:46PM (#44850045)
Since we were getting low latency data inside HTTP responses we could work off of the response header clock skew to narrow origination time down to around one second, and that’s almost as good as NTP can manage anyway.

As RPC mechanisms go, HTTP is notable for how few of the classic blunders they made in 1.0 of the spec. Clock skew correction is just my favorite. Technically it exists for cache directives, but it’s invaluable for coordination across machines. There are reasons HTTP 2.0 waited decades to happen. It just mostly worked.