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Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely do not believe that nobody has given you a coherent list of reasons.
I didn't say no one ever has, just that there's a very strong negative reaction even when they don't have reasoning for it
Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
Hot take: Leap seconds caused by astronomers refusing to modify their own software, instead getting the rest of the world to modify theirs. Too facile?
Hot take: Leap seconds caused by astronomers refusing to modify their own software, instead getting the rest of the world to modify theirs. Too facile?
Astronomy commonly uses TAI or raw GPS time. In fact if you look at video footage from NASA control rooms and such there's usually a GPS second clock up on the wall somewhere.
The motivation for leap seconds wasn't astronomers, but to just keep civil time tied to solar time long term. However, the unpredictability of these leap second additions has proven to be pretty annoying, causing bugs and such. This is why google and others actually "smear" the introduction of their leap seconds over half the day.
Considering the current difference is 37 seconds, its natural to wonder if this is worth it. Certainly most people wouldn't notice relative to dawn dusk for a very long time, long enough that the entire concept probably wouldn't even make sense anymore. So why not just stop? That's the basic argument here.
Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
Thanks to glaciers melting, earth rotation is (temporarily) accelerating. Because of that, positive leap seconds, regular before, didn't happen since 2017 - so there could very well be (recent) software out there that has that code-path broken, and nobody noticed yet.
And due to exact same geophysical effect we might see a negative leap second - something that never ever happened before. What are the odds that every single piece of software gets that one right?
Currently software has to be built to accommodate leap seconds. They happen frequently enough that you'll find out within a few years whether your software breaks when time suddenly skips forward or backward. If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute, we're going to end up with software that was never written to expect time to change in such a way, hasn't had a real world t…
>If we kick the can down the road such that eventually we'll need to add a leap minute
The drift is not in a single direction. The total drift is not going to be significant for a very long time if ever.
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 TAI from the start. Yes I know it would have been harder, but we got off our collective asses and decided to fix our short sighted decision making for Y2K date storage, why not this… if it truly costs as much for everyone to endure a leap second why wasn’t it just fixed from the bottom up and rebuilt correctly!