I mean, in 53 years we have added 27 leap seconds, so in 119 years you'll have to set your alarm a minute earlier if you still want to arrive on time.

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)

> 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.

Unless you want to abolish timezones entirely, which would simplify clocks but complicate a whole lot else in society, you're going to need leap-something. Would leap minutes or hours really be much better? The idea that doing things less often causes more problems is a reasonable one.

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 that may exist for millennia, where you're starting to talk about a 10+ minute offset at the current rate.

But I do think there is a valid argument that the infrequency of these events cause more issues than maybe one large adjustment 500 years from now would cause. Not sure where I land on this one.

> 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.

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.

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.

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..).

> since 1972, which is only 44 years ago

Thanks for making me a decade younger :)

They basically are, the algorithm is something like:

At the beginning of january and july, observe the difference between UT1 and UTC. If the difference is >= 0.6s, a leap second will be inserted at the end of june/december. Publish the results here: https://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc

> 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

“Over time” really glosses over how much time it would take. In 500 years there might be half as much divergence between solar noon and 12:00pm as we intentionally inflict on ourselves with DST, or that France and Spain inflicted on themselves in the 1940’s so they could share a time zone with Germany. By the time anyone will even notice we will probably change time systems for other reasons anyway. It’s not even remotely comparable to the Julian/Gregorian issue, which dealt with leap days. Each day has 86400 seconds.

> 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.

<rant> It won't happen on a human scale. So why oh why do we screw around with this moronic leap-second nonsense ? Oh dear, in the year 4000 noon will arrive three minutes earlier compared to now. So? </rant>

In the 56 years since UTC was established, there have only been 37 leap seconds. At that rate it would take more than 5400 years before it would affect solar noon more than DST does. I'm more than okay kicking the can that far down the road in the name of avoiding all the ridiculous solutions that are needed to accommodate leap seconds. We've endured these headaches to potentially solve a problem for people who might not even still be using UTC.

Compare that to removing the leap day, where the start of seasons would be noticeably affected within just a few decades. Hundreds of years ago, a pretty insignificant headache was invented which is providing constant payoffs.

You make a good argument for the opposite of your conclusion. If you’re planning a system that’s supposed to last for millennia, that system shouldn’t depend on the fiat of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service.

If you think you're going to steal days off my life, you've got another thing coming buster!

Let's just do leap minutes. If humanity survives long enough to witness a leap minute without destroying ourselves then that's ample compensation for the minor inconvenience.

So lunar tidal forces are slowing the rotation, but (recently?) Earth mantle/core is causing a speed up, but climate change and melting ice is contributing to the slow down side:

* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/leap-seconds-may-...

* https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/global-warming-influencing-glo...

The general trend is slowing down. Apparently (?) once the day gets to be 24h+0.001sec (+1 millisecond), a leap second would occur about every 1000 days; then when it becomes 24h+0.002sec, a leap second would occur about every 500 days; when it reaches 24h+0.003sec, a leap second would occur about every year; etc.

Statistics is even presented like metaphysical truth. Or at least my experience in engineering school.

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.

>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.

Can you explain how a 10 minute offset would affect you in any way?

For 99% of the world today, high noon =/= 12:00:00. Nothing breaks because of this. The world continues to run.

IMHO the correct way to handle leap seconds would have been at the same layer as timezones, i.e. a display-only thing. Timezone databases are regularly updated, you push out leap second updates there. In the worst case, people's clocks are off by one second but all the underlying timing logic doesn't crash.

> I wonder how much chaos a minute that only has 59 seconds would cause.

The FreeBSD folks test(ed?) their code for these things and it works:

* https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2020-Nove...

Of course third-party userland code understanding what happens is another thing.

> The only people who need it are Astronomers.

And anyone that cares about the relationship of the time of day and the position of the Sun.

Granted, it's not a lot, only a minute per century.

We had a leap hour yesterday...

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.

Leap seconds have so many problems beyond the time adjustment. It's a small/odd enough adjustment interval that there are wildly different approaches like leap smears. On top of being so small, it's rare enough (~every 2 years), depending on how a system is used, lack of proper handling might not be obviously apparent or lack of obvious problem in one implementation ignoring it may lead to lack of care in another implementation which would have a problem ignoring it.

Leap hour replaces all of that with what is more or less equivalent to a change in DST rules (except for more time zones at once). DST changes don't go perfect either by any means... but we do them regularly enough without the world crashing down that doing an additional shift change of an extra hour every 5000 years is almost certainly less hassle and breakage than the leap second approach breaking things every ~2 years.

The problem is that Earth's rotation isn't consistently faster. Some years leap seconds need to be added, some years they need to be removed. Would be far better to leave them alone, let them average out, and as the GP said let the people who care about this add the offset they need.

Which means that time changes slowly enough that we don't notice. At some point everybody goes work half an hour earlier because it makes sense. Schools start earlier, shops open earlier. It doesn't have to be coordinated worldwide. Every region or even town can have its own customs. Then people notice they are in the wrong time zone and a country moves to a different time zone.

Statistically, nobody on Earth knows what UTC is. People know about their local time zone and how it related to time zones in other countries. Where the position of the sun is relative to UTC, almost nobody knows.

Yes I would assume that the NTP daemon would handle a leap second arrival with guarantees of (1) gradual application over a longer period and (2) never moving the clock backwards, only slowing it a little.

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.

DST changes are pre-scheduled. Throwing a random hour in/out at (say) June 30, 2029 may be something else. Unless the jump is treated as a TZ change in tzdata?

It is way more easy to let UTC (without leap seconds) just drift away from the zero meridian and move countries to different time zones when convenient. We mess around with daylight savings time often enough that nobody will notice if we have change local time every couple of thousand years.

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 isn’t quite that smooth in practice.

There was a resolution in 2022 to make a decision in or before 2035, to increase the allowable deviation from one second to a longer interval, like one minute. But that would become more frequent in the long run as well, and likely would still cause disruptions whenever it happens. Though on the other hand there would likely be a longer advance notice for it as well.

Yet high noon at my current location comes at 12:03 (1:03 with DST). It's three minutes off. If I lived further west in my timezone, noon would come much later.

How can people manage with noon off by minutes, yet want leap-second accuracy every 6 months?

That's much worse than the Y2K problem.

> Some years leap seconds need to be added, some years they need to be removed.

Is that true? Per Wikipedia:

> Since [1972], 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC, with the most recent occurring on December 31, 2016. All have so far been positive leap seconds, adding a second to a UTC day; while a negative leap second is theoretically possible, it has not yet occurred.

Either way, it's due in part to Earth's rotation slowing down, so the average drift would still be non-zero.

> We had a leap hour yesterday...

Prescheduled.

Now tell everyone we're having one June 30, 2029, and see how things go.

The idea is that we've advanced so far that it is simply not a problem anymore.

More like every 2 years.

But yes, point taken.

The counterpoint is that it costs little.

I think in 100 years more or take if the exponential curve doesn't level off we're gonna each near super intelligence and some form of fusion at minimum. At worst we just eradicate ourselves.

We've not had to apply negative leap seconds yet since leap seconds were introduced in 1972, but that wasn't the point.

The time period of the Earth fluctuates a lot [0] and actually in 2020 it was less than 24 hours, but not a large enough change to warrant a negative leap second. If you go back to the 1940s, we would had needed negative leap seconds if we had leap seconds at all then, and going back 150 years we would have needed multiple negative leap seconds every year for several consecutive years.

What we can say is that on average, it is close enough to 24 hours and the average over hundreds of years is even closer to 24 hours that it's not worth adding these extra seconds as you'd then need to remove them again later on.

[0] https://c.tadst.com/gfx/900x506/graphlength-of-day.png from https://www.timeanddate.com/time/negative-leap-second.html

If we eliminate leap seconds, we'll need a leap hour in ~500 years. It could be announced 50 years in advance.

> The counterpoint is that it costs little.

Radical changes to time-related software cost little ? Stop press !

> 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.

What radical software changes are you doing?

I haven't once done a single software upgrade related to leap seconds.

It took much longer than that, although to be fair the Catholic countries had switched in much sooner than 50 years.

In the US DST was changed in 2005 and the change went into effect in 2007.