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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

#231

Post by haritha-j »

ncallaway wrote: post #161
dcminter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilariously, no. That would be the Monster Raving Loony party who will apparently also be standing in this by-election. Count Binface has ruled out a pact with them.

I was very disappointed to hear that the Monster Raving Loony party is deciding to stand and split the vote. I thought this was an opportunity for them to be tactical, but no. (this is a joke)

Their policies are obviously not compatible, I just don't see how that could work out for either party. Sure you could get more votes that way, but the honourable thing to do is to run seperately.

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

#232

Post by tialaramex »

donall wrote: post #193
dmurray wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likewise, nobody will be all that surprised, or disappointed, if Binface never takes his seat. It's much more of a protest vote than voting Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland, and voters will have achieved their aim of Farage not getting in. Actually, I'd take issue with describing Sinn Féin as a protest vote at all. They've historically been the only choice that even claim to represent constituents in many areas. And the…

Agree that SF is not a protest vote but they do vote and debate. Since their first major electoral victory over 100 years ago they have been clear that they represent their constituents to the best of their abilities (I won't opine on the quality of representation in this forum). That has always involved a cabinet, votes, debates, and eventually a bicameral legislature. The key aspect is that they consider the Englis…

The thing is, an SF MP can't vote or debate because they, by policy, refuse to attend. You're correct that the party has representatives in the other bodies which it does recognise but those aren't the same people.

So for example Órfhlaith Begley was elected MP for West Tyrone. Her voters will have known she's not going to Westminster, and she didn't - but she's not in some parallel institution instead, AFAIK there isn't one. Nicola Brogan represents West Tyrone as an MLA in Stormont, because Sinn Féin does recognise the Assembly and you can't say well but there's a body in Dublin. Dublin doesn't control West Tyrone so what would she even do there?

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

#233

Post by chippiewill »

ralferoo wrote: post #230
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?

Quite the opposite. The earth's rotation can vary by quite a few seconds each year. But over hundreds of years, the variations mostly cancel out, which is why I think trying to add or remove leap seconds are a bad idea. The only people who care about such things are space agencies, and they can apply whatever offset they want, it doesn't need to affect everyone else. Arguably, the only real-world impact this drift ha…

> the variations mostly cancel out

I don't think we know this do we? we haven't been measuring accurately enough for long enough to be confident that it does in fact cancel out. In fact for the period of time where we've been applying leap seconds they were happening with significant frequency and always in the same direction. It's only been very recently that there's been the realistic suggestion it might drift in the other direction.

If anything people have been suggesting that if we do get rid of leap seconds that we can just wait until the offset is enormous instead (say an hour) because it would take a very long time to happen. But even still, that does actually affect everyday people (because people would surely notice when solar noon is an hour later/earlier). Although pragmatically the obvious solution there is to change timezone instead.

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

#234

Post by tialaramex »

cwillu wrote: post #177
prerok wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I like the analogy but my question was really why it was considered such a hassle. I mean we deal with daylight saving time all the time and I know it's not the same because the leap second affects UTC, not just local time zone, it's just that you are either dealing with monotonically increasing time like epoch, or you are dealing with "human" time and I found no distinction in the latter. Is it "just" that leap…

‹looks around from saskatchewan, hoping that this is the moment the rest of the world realizes that dst is also a stupid and wasteful hassle.›

Lots of places have gone "Actually this seems like a bad idea". Not too much has actually happend about it, that's trickier.

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

#235

Post by chippiewill »

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…

No, they haven't done that yet. It's just a proposal, but it's not likely to be formally stopped until 2035.

The reason we've stopped having leap seconds is because the drift between TAI and UT1 slowed down and has actually been very slowly drifting in the other direction.

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

#236

Post by CamouflagedKiwi »

aidenn0 wrote: post #137
tialaramex wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Vote Count Binface and Bin the Cunt" :D There's a long tradition in the UK of having electoral candidates who don't expect to win but run because it's free publicity in a high profile race. "Count Binface" is a comedian who dresses up as a space alien whose outfit resembles well, having a Bin for a face. The serious political parties told Nigel to fuck off, if he wants to step down and then immediately contest the s…

Next we need someone running on a platform promising "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg"

I would certainly vote for Vimes if he stood.

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

#237

Post by kristianc »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #101
tialaramex wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-elect…

Between 2002 and 2013, Hartlepool in North East England elected a local football mascot known as H'Angus the Monkey as their mayor, winning three elections. I think he did ditch the monkey costume between elections, maybe Binface could do the same?

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

#240

Post by wahern »

mimo84 wrote: post #238

With the Temporal API will all of the browsers / nodejs etc be able to get the time right when performing operations around that time or will they need to be updated in order to not mess up calculations?

Temporal API seems to be based around Unix/POSIX timestamps, which ignore leap seconds. In Unix time a day is always 86400 "seconds". This makes it trivial to do UTC calendar arithmetic into the past and future without recourse to a database and without necessarily having to deal with fractional seconds. Leap seconds are handled by the OS by repeating or skipping a second, or slewing the length of a second for some period before and after the leap second.

Most datetime APIs are fundamentally designed and intended for supporting calendar and wall clock operations for business functions. If you need SI seconds for scientific purposes, you really need to use alternative APIs and facilities that provide and guarantee the semantics required all the way down to the hardware level. Likewise, if you want timers, etc, for software facilities like thread sleeping, you use dedicated interfaces like monotonic clocks. If leap seconds are phased out, this won't really change the situation. It was wrong for software to rely on Unix timestamps for, e.g., mutex algorithms before and it'll be wrong if and when leap second clock adjustments are gone.

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