What The ‘Flick’ Is Facebook Doing With Time?

Facebook likes to brand itself as a technology company and with that in mind, it also likes to invent new things. One of its latest and most bizarre inventions is apparently a new unit of time called “Flick,” which the social network believes will help programmers. Considering the actual issues that developers have to deal with regarding the challenges of calculations in modern technology, however, “Flick” could actually turn out useful.

As CNET points out, programmers often have to contend with things like refresh rates when developing new technology, which can be a nightmare to create calculations for. Seconds and fractions of a second are usually the standard units of time that a lot of developers use, but many have found that these are simply not convenient enough.

Just to give people an idea of what programmers have to deal with when working on display factors, games with 60Fps only have 16.667 milliseconds to load the next scene or environment in a game. That number needs to be rounded off to the nearest millisecond, which can be a nightmare in terms actually programming that into the game. Rounding errors are common, which can cause delays in development.

This is where the “Flick” comes in. One of these units is basically equivalent to 1/705,600,000th of a second, which would make it much easier to use than milliseconds. Coming back to the 60Fps example, the same scenario requires 11,760,000 flicks instead of 16.667 milliseconds. Which one looks like it would lead to more stable programming?

Facebook might have actually created something that could revolutionize coding with “Flicks.” People might not have much interest in how many flicks there are in a second, but coding sheets will absolutely love it, TechCrunch reports.

This development really only applies to programmers and developers, though. For the rest of the users on Facebook, this doesn’t have to be of any concern.