The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks

Post by eternityforest » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 10:44 PM UTC

krick wrote: post #210

slavik81 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to keep UTC matching the solar rotation, why do you specifically require leap seconds? Why not leap minutes? Or leap milliseconds? The choice of ±1 s as the acceptable error seems arbitrary.

Because a minute is a huge amount of time (and, by the way, don't forget, that minutes don't exist, I just understand that you mean 60 seconds) and there is no such thing as "leap milliseconds" because UTC is literally just counting seconds. Basically, UT1 already is an implementation of what you call "leap milliseconds". Not literally, but achieves the same thing. And it is way too complicated to use it in practice…

Post by willis936 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

N19PEDL2 wrote: post #123

bewaretheirs wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drift is sufficiently slow that you can fix it with a "leap hour" when needed -- perhaps once every five thousand years. This could be handled for civil/local time via an adjustment in the timezone definitions (something which happens a few times a year today), leaving the underlying UTC timebase unchanged.

Then let's skip the leap hour too: just let UTC and UT1 diverge up to 86400 seconds and compensate that by changing the time zones when needed. Then, when the drift reaches 86400 seconds, the clock times are aligned again. At this point we just need to re-align the dates too, and this can be done by skipping February 29 on a leap year (which should be quite easy to implement in software).

Post by throw827474737 » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

kortilla wrote: post #235

jimmaswell wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Think of all the time that could be better appropriated than on fintech in general. Seems like such a waste of resources siccing a bunch of computers against each other in a zero sum game of stock arbitrage. I will admit some of the stuff tech comes out of it is cool on its own at least.

Yeah, they could have been working on something truly valuable like violating people’s privacy with ad-tech. Or maybe sucking millions of hours of people’s lives away with TikTok algo improvements. Maybe they could be working on the next MoviePass! > zero sum game of stock arbitrage. By your definition insurance is zero sum as well. But people find that generally useful. Taking risk off of peoples hands has value eve…

Post by codetrotter » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 10:49 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #259

divbzero wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good story regardless, but if you do want to derive some morals from the experience: – Seemingly simple tasks can be more complex than you expect (“add a leap second on this Wednesday”) – Real world systems can be more complex than you expect (“bunch of software I never even knew existed”) – Planning and testing can make a big difference vs. just winging it (“a bunch of our Linux servers had kernel panics f…

>Sometimes the best solution is not a technical solution (“halt the markets for 15 minutes before/after”) We've had an election recently, right on the day when DST changed. On the night of counting of the votes, the clock went 2:59 AM -> 2:00 AM. To save themselves trouble the Statistics Office instructed all vote counters that under no circumstances are they to enter or update anything in any system during the repea…

    TZ=Europe/Oslo date -I seconds -jf %s 1667091599

    2022-10-30T02:59:59+02:00

    TZ=Europe/Oslo date -I seconds -jf %s 1667091600

    2022-10-30T02:00:00+01:00

Post by naniwaduni » Fri, Nov 18, 2022, 10:50 PM UTC

krick wrote: post #166

techdragon wrote: post #80

Hot take… Storing anything as UTC was a mistake and we should be using TAI for all storage and computation, only transforming into more human friendly formats for display to end users. This never needed to be a problem except we decided to make it harder to use TAI than UTC and so everything got built up off the backs of legacy bios level hardware supported UTC style clock behaviour, when we should have been using TA…

I'm not sure I support your "hot take" — it is hot and requires a lot of contemplation. But that's not the point, IMO. The point is, that there ALREADY EXIST both TAI and UTC. TAI is true monotonic (whatever it means in a relativistic universe) and doesn't make any compromises. UTC abolishes monotonicity in order to keep both the length of a second and the time relationship to the orbital rotation. They both work. Fo…