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No leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2026

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

#4

Post by imglorp »

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 $work around 2014 we had three different hardware GPS types which we used for precision timekeeping; some chips, daughterboards, and firmware. One day a leap second arrived -- it gets broadcast to aGPS hardware a day ahead of time -- and all three implementations handled it differently. One handled it, one did something else like ignore it, and I think one even bricked itself. That situation was less than bueno.

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

#5

Post by butILoveLife »

wlkr wrote: post #3

Interesting! There's a lot I don't know about this, but I know a little more now. I'll admit, I naively thought this would be more regular than it appears to be [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

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)

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

#7

Post by throw0101d »

imglorp wrote: post #4

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…

> 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.

There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation's problem, not ours): but given that people can't even get February 29th correct now, and it happens regularly, I don't see how a one-off event would be made to work. It'd be a huge coördination problem.

Just look at the introduction of the Gregorian calendar: it was slightly off since the time of Julius Caesar, but that minor error added up over time, to the point that to get the equinoxes/solstices back to where they 'should' be 10 days had to be removed with the Gregorian calendar. And because of politics (or a religious flavour) it took a long while for everyone to get on the same page.

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

#8

Post by netsharc »

throw0101d wrote: post #6

There was some talk about a negative leap second† a few years ago: * https://www.npr.org/2024/03/30/1241674216/climate-change-tim... † T23:59:58Z would have skipped/suppressed :59 and gone to T00:00:00Z.

You make it sound like time labels like "23:59:58Z" can perform actions (e.g. to skip or "suppress").

I had to look it up: https://www.timeanddate.com/time/negative-leap-second.html . In proper words, the clock ("the one humanity agrees to use) would skip 23:59:59Z.

I wonder how much chaos a minute that only has 59 seconds would cause. Measurements would be off by that missing second (e.g. a pipeline delivering fuel at 60 liters/minute would surprisingly only have 59 liters in that minute..).

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

#9

Post by tialaramex »

throw0101d wrote: post #7
imglorp wrote: post #4

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…

> 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. There is some talk of eliminating the leap second, which would over time have the Earth and sun diverge with regards to noon and such. One 'answer' to this concern is to have a 'leap hour' or something in the future (some future generation…

The calendar adjustments are because the planet's constant orbital period isn't a whole number of days.

The leap seconds were an attempt to have wall clock time map to the planet's rotational angle consistently despite the problem that the planet's spin varies unpredictably.

Yes the "leap hour" is a legal fiction of course. In reality in the event anybody cares about this in the distant future they will make the kind of "drastic" changes you've probably experienced twice a year for your whole life and barely noticed... More likely because the drift is so incredibly slow they won't change anything.

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