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No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

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Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#211

Post by usr1106 »

Isn't this anti-news? I vaguely remember they have stopped introducing leap seconds until further notice because they cause too much trouble with today's computing systems. On my phone now and did not research it, as I say vaguely remember. Now we are 37 seconds off. Nobody of us will have to worry that Christmas is around Easter time. We can leave that problem to future generations much more responsibly than many other problems.

That the notice comes every 6 months is just to meet the letter of the original international treaty.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#212

Post by Dibby053 »

defrost wrote: post #210
Dibby053 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Timekeeping is timeless. We count the number of orbits around the Sun from a specific guy's birthday 2000 years ago, our 12 months are named after rulers of an empire that hasn't existed for almost as long, and weekdays are named after the pagan gods that guy replaced. I don't know why there are 7 days in a week, but supposedly there are 86400 seconds in a day because some Bronze Age people liked the numbers 60 and 1…

Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use. The Julian period is a chronological interval of 7980 years, derived from three multi-year cycles: the indiction, solar, and lunar cycles. The last year that was simultaneously the beginning of all three cycles was 4713 BC (−4712), so that is year 1 of the current Julian period, making AD 2026 year 6739 of that Period. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org…

By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.

>You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?

Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#213

Post by defrost »

Dibby053 wrote: post #212
defrost wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use. The Julian period is a chronological interval of 7980 years, derived from three multi-year cycles: the indiction, solar, and lunar cycles. The last year that was simultaneously the beginning of all three cycles was 4713 BC (−4712), so that is year 1 of the current Julian period, making AD 2026 year 6739 of that Period. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org…

By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication. >You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames? Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some…

> the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication.

Save for those that care about missing days and months.

As long as cross country events prior to ~1756 aren't being discussed, things get messy and non uniform fast.

Also, there are Gregorian adjacent calendar variants with a Year 0

> some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.

A future where the spin of the earth still isn't a uniform metronome - a future with the same issue that exists today (and last century).

> their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support

Much of this support has _already_ been added - SKA data networks, for example, have to account for timing issue caused by receivers on one side of planet turning toward a source Vs those on the other side turning away - and reconcile that with past data from the other side of the orbit when the planet was moving toward Vs now when it moves away.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#214

Post by maxnoe »

NooneAtAll3 wrote: post #49
flohofwoe wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently December 2016 was the last time a leap second was inserted, at least that's what Wikipedia says: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

we were ought to insert a negative leap second, but cowards got too afraid it would break code

No, the current rules are being relaxed because with the current ones, a negative leap second _might_ happen in the near future.

It did not happen yet. No negative leap second that should have been inserted was skipped.

See this chart here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DUT1#/media/File:Leapsecond.ut...

You can see the the positive leap seconds as jumps upward once the graph reaches around -0.5 s.

We were never close to reaching +0.5 seconds with a positive trend and we are still relatively far away from that.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#215

Post by mizmar »

Dansvidania wrote: post #180
eqvinox wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really annoying part is that "leap smearing" (where people decided to just mush the leap second across about day) has made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard, since some leap smearing approaches affect that as well. Which destroyed any assumption a developer could make about CLOCK_MONOTONIC, since you won't know if leap smearing is in use :(. (And depending on the leap smearing implementation, it also smears…

I don't think I understand.. can you please dumb it down even more? I'd figured that UNIX time just counts actual seconds and that leap seconds and similar calendar shenanigans would be a problem of mapping epoch to the correct date, so that if normally epoch X maps to date D then both epoch X and X+1 map to date D. Am i to understand that leap seconds "stretch" a epoch unit ? so that some epoch second "lasted longer…

The seconds to calendar date conversion doesn't actually need to know about leap seconds. At the seconds representation level, the same number is repeated twice (or the smearing trategy happens).

So the times before and after leap second get converted the the same date regardless of whether you know about the leap second or not. Edge case is that once second occuring twice. You might have seen that 23:59:60 seconds timestamp somewhere.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#216

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

usr1106 wrote: post #211

Isn't this anti-news? I vaguely remember they have stopped introducing leap seconds until further notice because they cause too much trouble with today's computing systems. On my phone now and did not research it, as I say vaguely remember. Now we are 37 seconds off. Nobody of us will have to worry that Christmas is around Easter time. We can leave that problem to future generations much more responsibly than many ot…

The fact that it’s only 6 months seems insane to me and probably the cause of the problem, if time was +- 60 seconds nobody would notice, so a more manageable solution would be to implement an arbitrary leap about once a decade, with a decades notice so everyone can sort their systems with plenty of notice. 6 months for a world wide coordinated execution is laughably optimistic.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#217

Post by hdgvhicv »

ceejayoz wrote: post #190
overboard2 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nigel Farage has decided to counter a scandal by throwing himself upon his constituents for judgement, the obviously establishment parties have backed off to allow Binface to run against him in a ~1v1, and you think Binface is more anti establishment than Farage?

Yes, the MP, former MEP, and founder of a significant political party is closer to being “the establishment” than the comedy candidate dressed up as a rubbish bin.

The ex stockbroker who lunches with presidents and takes £5m personal bribes in charge of a party sticked with ex ministers of the crown (at least one who took a bribe) is clearly not the establishment.

The liberal elite of plumbers and comedians are

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#218

Post by hdgvhicv »

0ckpuppet wrote: post #194
doctoboggan wrote: post #30

What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?

I predict there will be a news story or broadcast news pundit who blames this on climate change. bonus points if it winds up on dytime talk shows

Well melting ice certainly go tributes

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#219

Post by hdgvhicv »

alright2565 wrote: post #173
eqvinox wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really annoying part is that "leap smearing" (where people decided to just mush the leap second across about day) has made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard, since some leap smearing approaches affect that as well. Which destroyed any assumption a developer could make about CLOCK_MONOTONIC, since you won't know if leap smearing is in use :(. (And depending on the leap smearing implementation, it also smears…

> made CLOCK_MONOTONIC unclear in this regard I don't understand what you mean. Doesn't smearing still mean the clock only goes forward? It's still steadily incrementing. The only difference is that a second is slightly longer/shorter than you expect, but you already have to account for that if you're doing the kind of physics experiment where it would matter.

If you have one event per millisecond then you get 86,401,000 events on a day you smear, and that’s inconsistent with the 86,400,000 you get on days either side.

Re: No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

#220

Post by sajithdilshan »

tialaramex wrote: post #70
_alternator_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short, yes, the weather, geology, and signicantly, human movement of water via aquifer draining and dam building, as well as glaicial and ice melts, all contribute to unpredictable changes in the earths rotational period, as well as the axis of rotation. The models for this are IIRC trigonometric polynomials of fairly low order, so even if we could model the unpredictability perfectly, truncation error would limit…

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally i…

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