51–60 of 159 posts
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> We had a leap hour yesterday... Prescheduled. Now tell everyone we're having one June 30, 2029, and see how things go.
If we eliminate leap seconds, we'll need a leap hour in ~500 years. It could be announced 50 years in advance.
Which is about how long it took for folks to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
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More like every 2 years. But yes, point taken. The counterpoint is that it costs little.
> The counterpoint is that it costs little. Radical changes to time-related software cost little ? Stop press !
I haven't once done a single software upgrade related to leap seconds.
Leap Seconds need to be abolished. The only people who need it are Astronomers. They could just use an offset. Implementing leap seconds correctly is a huge burden, for no gain. Where I live, high noon today occurs at 1:03 PM. No one is complaining that it is 3 minutes (or 63 minutes) off. It's a non-issue for 99.9% of the population.
Hmm. I understand that perspective, but I'm not sure I agree. It does seem to matter over a relatively short & realistic time scale. According to the Wikipedia page, there have been 27 seconds added since 1972, which is only 44 years ago. At that rate, that's about 1 minute per 100 years. We have many systems that have existed for several centuries and I think it's not unreasonable to start making plans for systems t…
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They teach us Scientific Realism in school, but reality is that we are really using Instrumentalism. That said, no one wants to admit it, so contemporary science follows Falsification, where we find ways to not actually make claims about reality. (Which as an Instrumentalist/pragmatist, I love Karl Popper, its just not metaphysical truth. And that would break Popper's heart)
A distinction without a difference. The only way we can interact with the world is via senses, via instruments, via measurement. We can rehash solipsism, but seeing as how that is an immediate dead end we all agree there is a physical reality. If there is in fact a reality, then we are measuring something real.
I think it matters. No the planets are not doing circles around the sun. Circles don't actually exist, they are doing elipses.
Also 'real' has quite a few meanings. If I ask the question 'Are you closer to a keyboard or the gym?' does that question exist?
This kind of stuff does end up mattering. It becomes much more noticeable in psychology (and biology). If you read Freud, Adler, or Jung, you will say 'Oh extrovert! I've seen that before!' But then you realize its vague and almost always true. Its like a horoscope.
So if we think there is a truth to reality, we look for perfect relations. If we think its impossible for humans to figure out, we look for best fits.
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They teach us Scientific Realism in school, but reality is that we are really using Instrumentalism. That said, no one wants to admit it, so contemporary science follows Falsification, where we find ways to not actually make claims about reality. (Which as an Instrumentalist/pragmatist, I love Karl Popper, its just not metaphysical truth. And that would break Popper's heart)
> They teach us Scientific Realism in school. I'd argue the opposite is true for anyone who has studied statistics which is largely built on Instrumentalism (think George Box: 'All models are wrong, but some are useful') and Popperian falsification (Null Hypothesis testing). We are absolutely taught to treat models as predictive tools rather than metaphysical truths.
And taking fluid dynamics, we used renyolds number, which is a made up ratio that helps for decision making... Its not like when we answered questions, we could answer the grey area we are discussing.
If I had to guess, I think its due to western civilization being built of Platonism (and even Aristotle was infected). Our science and morality is later built by platonic realism. Only in the last 100-ish years are we starting to get over it.
Responding to a deleted comment: > ... the "invisible infrastructure" of the web; balancing historical accuracy with the technical need to minimize zone fragmentation is a much more complex trade-off than it appears on the surface ... The complexity goes up tremendously if some condition is rarely encountered: eg leap second. This means it gets pushed to a "corner case" and tested more lightly and more rarely. At $wo…
Just here to reinforce your point. The last leap-second I encountered (also the 2014 one) crashed my MySQL databases. you wouldn't assume that it depends on time like that, because honestly why would it? "surely it's fine, NTP corrects drift of a second fairly frequently"- but a leap second is not a drift, it's something quite insane unless your primitives are solid. Nobody would test for this.
I wonder if all NTP implementations don't follow those guarantees?
Oh and another app that hates clock jumps used to be sshd; it would just bail out and drop all connections. We found that out while chasing ANOTHER bug in SunOS on a T4: they didn't have it mutexed right so it possible to read its RTC register while it was in the middle of getting updated so the client would read a garbage time. We chased NTP for a week before realizing it was the kernel.
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If we eliminate leap seconds, we'll need a leap hour in ~500 years. It could be announced 50 years in advance.
> It could be announced 50 years in advance. Which is about how long it took for folks to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.
How about a leap minute instead so we only have to worry about this when it's not a problem anymore :)? We will either hit the fermi filter or accend intelligence.
That's much worse than the Y2K problem.
How about a leap minute instead so we only have to worry about this when it's not a problem anymore :)? We will either hit the fermi filter or accend intelligence.
The length of day increases by around 1.7 milliseconds per century long term (due to the moon’s gravity continuously slowing down Earth’s rotation), which without leaps seconds translates to around one total minute per century. Note that this is cumulative: next century you will need two leap minutes, and so on. Of course, there are significant shorter-term variations in Earth’s rotation due to other factors, so it i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we eliminate leap seconds, we'll need a leap hour in ~500 years. It could be announced 50 years in advance.
> It could be announced 50 years in advance. Which is about how long it took for folks to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.