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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

#181

Post by tialaramex »

dmurray wrote: post #176
throw-the-towel wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically, that refers to the Northern Irish MPs from the Sinn Féin party who do not recognise the UK Crown as a lawful authority in NI, and hence, refuse to take an oath of allegiance to it. (They used to not recognise the Republic of Ireland as well, until the 1980s I think.)

I think they don't approve of the Crown as an authority even if they agree it's lawfully established? It's more like an atheist refusing to swear an oath before God in a courtroom: even if you agree that the law says you must do so, you might still not want to give God that recognition. But worse, because God might also be the defendant and the judge in this case, and you have to swear not only that He might witness…

For oath swearing it turns out atheists weren't why we fixed that. Some of the Christians also refuse to swear oaths. For Quakers obviously God exists - they're Christians, but a mere court of law here on Earth is no reason to go around swearing when they believe God has explicitly ordered them never to do that. They'd need orders from God, not some judge.

So for them rather than for atheists England made it possible to Affirm that you're not lying. This will work in Parliament, and it's pretty routine these days that a new member is like nope, no swearing for me, I can promise I'm not lying but I never swear or I won't swear to God.

However, Parliament does require allegiance to the King because this is a constitutional monarchy, if they wanted to be a Republic they'd get rid of the King as a group, that's not up to you as an individual member. Not much notice is taken of how much you seem to mean it about allegiance to the King, because after all plenty of members are known to hold Republican sentiments, but you are required to say the words unlike the stuff about swearing which is optional.

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

#182

Post by amiga386 »

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)

But if Count Binface convinces them to tactically withdraw, that would be a Loony–Bin pact

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

#183

Post by nemomarx »

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…

I think for the stretch of time where a leap second is smeared, the epoch second would drift by a tiny fraction for each second or etc? So you'd have some chunk of UTC time where each second lasts something like 1.0005 epoch seconds, maybe? This would make converting from unix time to UTC need extra arbitrary handling for display, at least.

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

#184

Post by NetMageSCW »

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"

Careful with eggs - Trump promised cheaper eggs and look what happened.

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

#185

Post by Telaneo »

prerok wrote: post #134
tialaramex wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically we guessed wrong. We thought knowing "Solar time" would be more useful than in it, and we thought these "Leap seconds" would be less trouble than they are. It's like you buy a cat to help with your rodent problem, figuring the cat will eat mice and isn't much trouble to look after, but after purchasing a cat you find that your problem was actually rats, your cat is terrified of these large dangerous creatur…

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…

> I mean we deal with daylight saving time all the time

And I wish we didn't every year!

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

#186

Post by eqvinox »

nemomarx wrote: post #183
Dansvidania wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think for the stretch of time where a leap second is smeared, the epoch second would drift by a tiny fraction for each second or etc? So you'd have some chunk of UTC time where each second lasts something like 1.0005 epoch seconds, maybe? This would make converting from unix time to UTC need extra arbitrary handling for display, at least.

> I think for the stretch of time where a leap second is smeared, the epoch second would drift by a tiny fraction for each second or etc? So you'd have some chunk of UTC time where each second lasts something like 1.0005 epoch seconds, maybe?

Yes, 1.0000116s (or 0.9999884s), and to be clear it was never intended like that. It got started after a bunch of bugs in leap second handling caused issues & some people thought it would be better to just stretch/compress time for a period around leap seconds, for docs refer to e.g.: https://developers.google.com/time/smear

Personally speaking - it's a great way of just pushing the problem around, further complicating an already complex situation. 11.6µs is very measurable on a modern system.

> This would make converting from unix time to UTC need extra arbitrary handling for display, at least.

Except you need to know that leap smearing has been applied… which of course noone records. Most systems can't even signal it, much less store. If you need that level of precision, you better make sure none of your systems uses it or you're just screwed.

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

#187

Post by eqvinox »

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…

> I'd figured that UNIX time just counts actual seconds

It doesn't. UNIX time is 1:1 with what your clock reads, you can convert between 2026-07-10 00:12:25 UTC and 1783642345 by simple math (note how the last digit is the same; but the leap second offset is 37s, that wouldn't align. The TAI timestamp for the same moment in time is 1783642382.)

> 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.

It's the other way around, if you need to get the exact seconds between two UNIX timestamps (or calendar date/time), you need to check if there were any leap second changes between the two.

Counting actual seconds is TAI [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Atomic_Time], that one is really just "number of Caesium hyperfine transitions since X", and now the mapping to a calendar date/time for display is a bit involved.

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

#188

Post by eqvinox »

eqvinox wrote: post #127
AbstractH24 wrote: post #125

ELI5: How does this impact UNIX timestamps? Particularly for things that are in maintenance mode or otherwise minimally maintained. Nothing I do requires this level of precision, but certainly there are things that do.

UNIX timestamps are fully ignorant of leap seconds, i.e. pretends they don't exist. That means there can be physical seconds of time that cannot be referenced with a UNIX timestamp (when a leap second is inserted) as well as UNIX timestamps for seconds that don't exist (when a leap second is deleted).

"fully ignorant" might not have been the best wording there...

- clarification: "fully ignorant" from a human perspective, using dates and times. UNIX time lines up with those.

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

#189

Post by fooqux »

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?

Even the migrations of animals can impact it, although they usually cancel out over the course of a year I think.

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

#190

Post by ceejayoz »

overboard2 wrote: post #113
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…

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.
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