8 ms·

It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from U

It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause. This article details some of the problems: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html (You may want to scroll down to "Implementing the plan outlined at Torino".) If we end leap seconds, it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours. By 2055, the "minute" displayed on a clock may be incorrect, which again may cause issues with legal timestamps. And by 2083, sundials are measurably wrong. All because programmers wanted to save some lines of code.

lesam 4y ago
Sundials are already ‘wrong’ according to solar time by 30 minutes or more, as an artifact of dividing the world into hour-wide time zones. Astronomy already ignores leap seconds in the same way that modern finance ignores half-crowns and shillings.
- welterde 4y ago
  Astronomy very much relies on the leap seconds. If they ever get abolished it will create lots of headache for all observatories (and hobby astronomers as well), since the telescopes will point more and more incorrectly as UTC drifts away from UT1 (the leap seconds ensure UTC is always within 0.9s of UT1). To explain a bit further: UT1 tracks the Earth's rotation relative to distant quasars and is thus directly the correct clock/reference to use for pointing telescopes. However it doesn't advance at a nice and stable constant frequency, but something that slowly changes over time (and can shift by strong earthquakes) and thus we approximate it with UTC, which runs at a nice constant frequency, but needs occasional correction to match up with Earth's rotation.
  - philwelch 4y ago
    I think we can allow astronomers to keep their leap seconds without requiring them to be imposed on the entirety of civil society.
    - welterde 4y ago
      Why should all purpose be removed from UTC if the alternative without leapseconds (TAI) already exists? Just use that if you don't want leap seconds.
      - lovecg 4y ago
        Well, having worked on legacy systems it’s much easier to keep the existing protocol mostly unchanged than migrate the world to a different protocol. Even if the change is as “simple” as subtracting a constant integer everywhere. Just thinking about all the stored timestamps in all databases gives me a headache…
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        Because UTC already has no other purpose than to be what everybody is already using. The leap seconds in UTC benefit literally nobody. But being a standard is a purpose. Changing to TAI means you are different from everybody else, and still have to fool with leap seconds to know what everybody else is using. Worst of all worlds. (Except Google smearing, which is even worse than that.)
        welterde 4y ago
        That's literally not true, since we astronomers do use UTC as it is intended (since within 0.9s of the correct time is good enough, but being many seconds off isn't anymore for many applications). The argument that the legacy systems should maybe be updated is already being discussed elsewhere, so no need to rehash that.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        If you are doing astronomy with UTC, you are Doing Astronomy Wrong. Have a chat with a colleague. They will set you straight.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
1970-01-01 4y ago
>It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause. Yes, the actual problem exists, and ignoring/discarding reality (i.e. the "science" in computer science) will just cause further problems. If you and your modern stack of code can't handle the leap second, it's simply not production code.
- alecbz 4y ago
  > the actual problem exists I mean this is the whole contention. Meta's claiming this isn't actually a problem worth solving.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Moreso: it is not a problem that dealing with the nuisance that is leap seconds even solves. It is supposed to match civil time to astronomical time, but astronomers don't use it. It just makes things even more annoying for astronomers, and annoys everyone else, over and over again, for no benefit to anyone.
metacritic12 4y ago
Isn't "cause issue with legal timestamps" just a circular definition? Sundials being "measurably" wrong become an issue at long spans. For example, no one wants solar noon to be at 10AM -- but that takes a while.
- philwelch 4y ago
  > For example, no one wants solar noon to be at 10AM -- but that takes a while. Solar noon in Spain is after 2PM already.
bartread 4y ago
> It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause. I agree, but I'm also - sad to say - less than surprised to find engineers at a Big Tech firm taking a high-handed, not to mention narrow and ill-informed, approach over the issue and trying to impose their will on a global scale. My worry here is that, Meta being Meta, they carry quite a lot of influence and may actually gain some traction. EDIT: I'll add a bit more colour here. At the core of our platform we manage a database containing billions of legacy timestamped records (or events, if you prefer), adding more and more every day. Without even giving it a great deal of thought I guarantee you that this proposal will cause us more problems that it solves and will distract us from making more valuable investments of time and effort that would benefit our business should it be implemented. Sure, we can no doubt fix all these problems, but we've got better things to do. I imagine that many other businesses would be similarly affected and would take a similar view. I wholeheartedly oppose it.
- gnu8 4y ago
  That’s all it is, they ran into an engineering problem and they’re trying to get the world to bend to their will instead of solving the problem because they think it will be easier. Mark’s arrogance is nauseating.
  - easytiger 4y ago
    Now expand this reasoning far beyond the scope of time keeping. Big Tech companies/Anti Big Tech lobbyists massively oversimplify in their pitch to influential people to deregulate/overregulate certain areas. In both cases they end up making poor decisions for the general case both end up making the average case worse for everyone except themselves. It's about creating a market where none need exist. Facebook doesn't need to care about time really. It's not remotely important to their business. I've built and worked on platforms with sub microsecond measuring requirements and this stuff didn't bother me. This is idle bad money finding work for itself at the expense of everyone else. Disclosure: I am/was an early investor in facebook in 2012. Mark is turning it all to dirt because he's run out of ideas
  - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ZetaZero 4y ago
> By 2055, the "minute" displayed on a clock may be incorrect, which again may cause issues with legal timestamps. I'm not following here. What defines "legal timestamps" in our current system? I'm unaware of any laws in the US that uses the actual position of the sun to determine the time. "Noon" when the sun is at the highest point, can vary over an hour across a timezone.
- DerpyBaby123 4y ago
  >"Noon" when the sun is at the highest point, can vary over an hour across a timezone. this is "solar noon" - just "noon" denotes 12:00 on the clock [1] [1]https://www.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/ceres/heliodon/staticheliodon/backgroundpages/background/solarvslocal https://www.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/ceres/hel...
- bonzini 4y ago
  Way more than one hour. Even without taking China into account, A Coruña in Spain and Kosice in Slovakia are in the same time zone but they are 30 degrees (2 hours) apart.
- lynguist 4y ago
  A birthday is a legal timestamp. A car crash is a legal timestamp. When the time is off by a minute, these events can’t be catalogued correctly any more.
  - PeterisP 4y ago
    "off by a minute" from what exactly? Shifting the timezone by a couple seconds does not prevent or hinder cataloguing events in any way whatsoever, certainly not more than switching to daylight savings time does or the mere existence of timezones, which may easily be half an hour or even more off from the solar time - the offsets we use for time are effectively arbitrary already, and adjusting the arbitrary choice of the offset by some seconds is not a fundamental difference. Event timestamps already map to different days depending on different timezones, you do need to know which timezone your clock is using, of course, but you already need to do that.
DSMan195276 4y ago
> If we end leap seconds, it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. If we stopped introducing leap seconds, then why would the legal world still care about them?
- whateveracct 4y ago
  I'm assuming because timestamps exist to capture time in the real world
  - alecbz 4y ago
    What do you mean by "time in the real world"? The relative position of the sun to someone on Earth? _Some_ legal uses of time are probably concerned with this, but I'd think it's a pretty small minority.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Islamic time is, technically, but does not distinguish seconds. So, the only place where it could matter, it doesn't.
- jjoonathan 4y ago
  I can believe that a desperate lawyer would argue the semantic distinction between clock-midnight and solar-midnight, but I have trouble believing that this would amount to anything more than one more dumb nit on a pile of dumb nits that the court has to deal with every day.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also I think it would go through legal system in a few years and end decision is that clock-midnight is one that will be followed. Or even have legislation to agree on that and set single law.
  - 4y ago
zozbot234 4y ago
There's no need to "detach" from UTC. Just ensure that TAI (which is consistently free of leap seconds) is also supported on an equal status to UTC, for applications where it makes the most sense. Conflating the two would only increase confusion further.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  Programmers can already do this if they want to. TAI already exists. But they'd have to still display UTC as civil time to end users and I'm pretty sure they don't want to do that either because it would mean just as much code.
  - prpl 4y ago
    the hard thing about TAI is that it’s not properly supported in DBMS, RFC 3339/ISO 8601, etc… This makes it hard to use. It’s actually easier to use MJD represented as a double.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Yes. A different number, but you still have exactly all of the same problems as before.
- uoaei 4y ago
  "Make two parallel time systems and allow conversion between one and the other programmatically" reduces spiritedly and unambiguously to "use one time system and care for it programmatically". By precedent, UTC seems the logical choice for the one time system.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    But the whole point of the OP is that UTC has leap seconds, which are hard to manage programmatically - and may even be impossible, wrt. future dates and times. That's literally the one relevant difference between UTC and TAI.
    - 4y ago
3pt14159 4y ago
If you stop thinking about time being wrong from what is officially correct, and instead see this whole exercise as a error minimization framework I think it is far easier to make the case for ending leap seconds as it is for keeping them. This isn't just about lines of missing code. This is about forcing subterranean or submerged computers to surface. This is about out of sync clocks across information propagation networks across planets. This is about real lives that are ruined because time stamps didn't quite line up, causing delays, deaths, and needless headaches. It doesn't need to be this way. We could just accept a minute of the clock being off from "true" midnight, which doesn't even make sense to me given that few people are right at the astronomic point where midnight is "true" midnight for their timezone. Heck, China is one big giant timezone so who is this actually for, really? The people that care about sundials? Most people don't even grow their own food. We're no longer a sun-driven economy. Well coordinated timekeeping across devices that may not always be able to transfer data is far, far more important. If it's sufficiently wrong by the year 3422 then we'll deal with the fifteen minutes of annoyance then. This is a crazy premature optimization.
- toast0 4y ago
  > Well coordinated timekeeping across devices that may not always be able to transfer data is far, far more important. How do you have a well coordinated clock without being able to get four bits [1] per year of leap second data? It's hard to keep within one second of a time standard over 6 months or a year without communication. [1] bit 0: was there a leap second in the most recent period, bit 1: was it positive or negative; bit 2: will there be a leap second at the end of the current period, bit 3: will it be positive or negative. Bike shed my fictious encoding if you like, but it's good enough. Use a whole 8-bits, go wild.
  - aftbit 4y ago
    Cesium reference clocks can operate with accuracy around 10^-14 (aka 0.01 parts per trillion). In a year, a cesium clock would slip by a few tenths of a microsecond. That said, the whole "submerged computer must surface" thing is a bit of a red herring argument IMO. What use case would you have for needing to keep time in sync within seconds with the outside world, but being unable to communicate with that world? If you're trying to plan simultaneous delayed action across the world, it would suffice to merely be in sync with each other, leap seconds ignored.
makeitdouble 4y ago
“civil time” is also a construction that is flexible in many ways, so an influencial group redefining it isn’t out of norm. To note, timezones were introduced for railway purposes, and some country play a lot with them. For “midnight” being far from “the middle of the night”, that’s already a reality for many Chinese living far enough from Beijing, or god forbid regions where “night” doesn’t mean much for half of the year. For all intents and purposes, if a formal definition of time isn’t practical people come up with their own ways.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Midnight isn't midnight for absolute vast majority of people. Even with right sized timezones. That is one spreading from edge to edge... And then there is continental shifting... Which we also don't account for... A few seconds or few minutes really don't make that much difference for average person.
jefftk 4y ago
Your article is from 2003 [1], so when they say "by 2028" they don't mean six years from now. Since the article was published we've gone from positive leap seconds every so often to looking like we may get the first ever negative leap second: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Leapsecond.ut1-utc.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Leapseco... Which means the article's estimates on how long it will be until we're off by a given amount of time are very much obsolete. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030801000000*/https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030801000000*/https://www.ucol...
- amptorn 4y ago
  I think that observation just lends further weight to the argument that the relationship between atomic time and universal time is a dynamic and unpredictable thing, which we need to handle correctly rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    That it is dynamic and unpredictable is exactly why we should not force everybody to track it. Some people: astronomers and orbital mechanicos are obliged to care about sidereal time, regardless. Making me deal with it too is pure tax with exactly zero benefit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BrainVirus 4y ago
>All because programmers wanted to save some lines of code. No, it's because programmers don't want basic timekeeping in all devices involve the worst issues of managing a distributed system.
Ellipsis753 4y ago
When the sun is directly overhead it's meant to be 12:00 - IN THEORY! However as Timezones are pretty wide, most of the time you'll be at least 15 minutes out. Sometimes you'll be out by as much as 3 hours - and you've probably never even noticed! Telescopes already have to compensate for this (as well as for summer time). Leap seconds make a shambles of book keeping too. What is "2022-07-17T12:00:00" + (60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 5) seconds? No one knows! And the answer to that question will change depending on when you calculate it and which updates you installed! So I say ditch the leap second and let it drift. In a few hundred years we could update our timezones if we _really_ want to (timezone changing is actually pretty common, so code should already be handling this edge-case).
prpl 4y ago
Please consider that none of this actually matters if we ditched UTC for TAI. For one, time zones still exist and local solar time is already decoupled from clock time. The worst case scenario is things are different.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Not everybody would "ditch UTC for TAI". Some would, some wouldn't. Now you cannot know whether you will match anyone.
zJlG 4y ago
I'm honestly amazed to see so many people agree with this. Timestamps are exactly what we define them to be. There is no correct and incorrect. One option is to have a system with arbitrary unpredictable leaps to keep it synchronized to within 1 second of the mean solar time over Greenwich, England. Every computer system that has to deal with time accurately needs a lookup table for leap seconds that is occasionally amended, with only a couple months warning in advance. Another option is to just let the clock run at a constant rate. In this case only astronomers have to keep track of the difference between solar time and clock time (which they already do anyway). The fact that the difference will increase to an hour after several hundred years is utterly irrelevant. If people in the future care, they can simply adjust the timezone definitions to compensate, since timezones are already adjusted all the time.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Animats 4y ago
> It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". Yes. Problems with delay time going negative usually come from not using CLOCK_MONOTONIC for delay time. CLOCK_MONOTONIC is usually just the time since system startup. It comes from QNX (which, being hard real time, had to deal with this first), made it into the POSIX spec around 1996, and is now available on all major OSs. But there's still software that uses time of day where CLOCK_MONOTINIC is needed. Then there's the smoothing approach. This document described Facebook's smoothing approach, which has a different smoothing period than Google uses. * Facebook/Meta: "We smear the leap second throughout 17 hours, starting at 00:00:00 UTC based on the time zone data (tzdata) package content." This is puzzling. What does the time zone package have to do with UTC? * Google: 24-hour linear smear from noon to noon UTC.[1] * AWS: Follows Google. * US power grid: Starts at midnight UTC and takes a few hours while all the rotating machinery takes 60 extra turns to catch up. Not sure what telecom is doing. [1] https://developers.google.com/time/smear https://developers.google.com/time/smear
- jsmith45 4y ago
  > What does the time zone package have to do with UTC? The IANA TZ database includes information about leap seconds, and even supports the concept of "right" time zones in which the leap seconds are counted in the Unix timestamps. (Which violates the unix spec, and may cause problems with code that assumes it can do path like `1 day= 24*60*60`, but on the other hand, things like DST already make that unsafe). It is mostly likely simply the case that they are using the leap second data from the time-zone database as a convenient source of this data.
  - Animats 4y ago
    Ah. So that's where the leap second schedule is stored.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      There is no schedule. Just a history of ad hoc announcements.
- 4y ago
philwelch 4y ago
From your link: > In about 600 years TI will be ahead of UT1 by half an hour, and in about 1000 years the difference will be a full hour. That's nothing. Time zones alone already create significantly larger errors. Belgrade and Sevilla share a time zone, but the solar meridian ("noon" on a sundial) is 12:44 in Belgrade and 14:30 in Sevilla. Obviously, the same error is present in the astronomical "middle of the night". This does not, in fact, create "legal issues" for Serbs or Spaniards. In 600-1000 years, around the time that it would actually matter, we're going to have to reform the time system anyway to account for relativistic drift between the surface of the Earth and human settlements elsewhere in the solar system.
btilly 4y ago
We live in a world where civil time moves by an hour 2x a year for no good reason. You FAR overstate the impact on civil society of failing to change it by a second every so often. Ironically even astronomers, who leap seconds were originally for, don't benefit because they need to know the Earth's rotation accurately to subsecond levels.
lucb1e 4y ago
> it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" Honestly from my perspective, 3am is the middle of the night (night-morning-afternoon-evening starts at 0-6-12-18 for me) and somewhere between 4 and 5 most people are probably asleep and the date change should occur. I can't count how often I've heard people clarify what 'tomorrow' means when the word is spoken after "midnight" but before going to sleep. But yeah gotta pick something for the date change, it won't be worth the cost of change now. If we do end up ever switching to something like decimal time, this should be on the todo list though. And I know "midnight" is historically supposed to be about the sun being the furthest from its zenith rather than in the middle between when you go to sleep and get up, however that occurs somewhere around 1am here (01:41 at its extreme, from July 17 till August 5th). If that's not enough to warrant a redefinition, 27 seconds accumulated since we started counting leap seconds are also not enough to warrant an update yet (following Facebook's logic here).
modeless 4y ago
These "problems" are trivial. The day changes at midnight which is 12:00 AM by the clock. There is no ambiguity. Midnight is not literally the middle of the night. The minute on the clock will be correct by definition, nothing will change. Sundials are already wrong. You'll need to try a lot harder to convince me that this is a bad idea. All these arguments based on sun position make no sense in a world where people already live in places where the sun literally never sets or never rises for months, and people already live in time zones offset many, many hours from "correct" time. The sky doesn't fall!
bhk 4y ago
> This article details some of the problems: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html That article is ridiculous. * "Most telescope pointing systems fail" (by 2027) (with 5s deviation from earth rotation). Pointing systems cannot blindly rely on UTC anyway, since (a) even with leap seconds UTC is up to 1 second off earth's rotation, and (b) pointing a telescope depends on where the telescope is on earth, so some offset must be added to UTC by some human. * Hypothesized legal issues... give me a break. It would be much less trouble for humanity to deal with this once every 100 years or so.
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
I don't see how you run into legal problems. The break from one day to the next still occurs at a well defined time, 23:59:59 + 1 second, or 00:00:00. Midnight isn't the middle of the night (or noon exactly at solar zenith), except on 15deg meridians anyway. What will happen is that over time, those "golden" meridians will shift slightly. The only people who will notice are those that are using time for celestial navigation. Terrestial navigation, which is almost entirely done with GPS these days, won't be affected at all (GPS already doesn't use leap seconds). And, yes, sundials will gradually get out of sync, and have eventually to be rotated on their axis to be right.
nullc 4y ago
> only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours. I can't follow your logic here. In any relevant context midnight has a definition, typically UTC midnight in the applicable timezone. Eliminating leap-seconds would make the instant midnight occurs less ambiguous in 2028, because precise timing with leap-seconds is strictly harder than without. (and one can independently realize a time that closely follows TAI but one cannot independently realize UT1 without a VLBI radio telescope array, and one can't realize UT1-TAI without a datafeed because the decisions are subjective). This isn't just a question of 'some lines of code'. Leapseconds cause widespread disruptions even when they don't occur, they cause security vulnerabilities (and slower and less secure systems because they make synchronization unreliable). People are widely deploying "leap smeared" NTP servers to try to prevent some of the worst synchronization faults, but doing so makes it impractical to back out leap seconds to derive TAI (or a more accurate TT) from the system's UTC, particularly because systems don't know if they're leapsmeared or not (and different smear sources use different smearing parameters).

lesam 4y ago

Sundials are already ‘wrong’ according to solar time by 30 minutes or more, as an artifact of dividing the world into hour-wide time zones. Astronomy already ignores leap seconds in the same way that modern finance ignores half-crowns and shillings.

welterde 4y ago
Astronomy very much relies on the leap seconds. If they ever get abolished it will create lots of headache for all observatories (and hobby astronomers as well), since the telescopes will point more and more incorrectly as UTC drifts away from UT1 (the leap seconds ensure UTC is always within 0.9s of UT1). To explain a bit further: UT1 tracks the Earth's rotation relative to distant quasars and is thus directly the correct clock/reference to use for pointing telescopes. However it doesn't advance at a nice and stable constant frequency, but something that slowly changes over time (and can shift by strong earthquakes) and thus we approximate it with UTC, which runs at a nice constant frequency, but needs occasional correction to match up with Earth's rotation.
- philwelch 4y ago
  I think we can allow astronomers to keep their leap seconds without requiring them to be imposed on the entirety of civil society.
  - welterde 4y ago
    Why should all purpose be removed from UTC if the alternative without leapseconds (TAI) already exists? Just use that if you don't want leap seconds.
    - lovecg 4y ago
      Well, having worked on legacy systems it’s much easier to keep the existing protocol mostly unchanged than migrate the world to a different protocol. Even if the change is as “simple” as subtracting a constant integer everywhere. Just thinking about all the stored timestamps in all databases gives me a headache…
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      Because UTC already has no other purpose than to be what everybody is already using. The leap seconds in UTC benefit literally nobody. But being a standard is a purpose. Changing to TAI means you are different from everybody else, and still have to fool with leap seconds to know what everybody else is using. Worst of all worlds. (Except Google smearing, which is even worse than that.)
      - welterde 4y ago
        That's literally not true, since we astronomers do use UTC as it is intended (since within 0.9s of the correct time is good enough, but being many seconds off isn't anymore for many applications). The argument that the legacy systems should maybe be updated is already being discussed elsewhere, so no need to rehash that.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        If you are doing astronomy with UTC, you are Doing Astronomy Wrong. Have a chat with a colleague. They will set you straight.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

1970-01-01 4y ago

>It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause. Yes, the actual problem exists, and ignoring/discarding reality (i.e. the "science" in computer science) will just cause further problems. If you and your modern stack of code can't handle the leap second, it's simply not production code.

alecbz 4y ago
> the actual problem exists I mean this is the whole contention. Meta's claiming this isn't actually a problem worth solving.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Moreso: it is not a problem that dealing with the nuisance that is leap seconds even solves. It is supposed to match civil time to astronomical time, but astronomers don't use it. It just makes things even more annoying for astronomers, and annoys everyone else, over and over again, for no benefit to anyone.

metacritic12 4y ago

Isn't "cause issue with legal timestamps" just a circular definition? Sundials being "measurably" wrong become an issue at long spans. For example, no one wants solar noon to be at 10AM -- but that takes a while.

philwelch 4y ago
> For example, no one wants solar noon to be at 10AM -- but that takes a while. Solar noon in Spain is after 2PM already.

bartread 4y ago

> It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". This article glosses over the real world problems that detaching from UTC will cause. I agree, but I'm also - sad to say - less than surprised to find engineers at a Big Tech firm taking a high-handed, not to mention narrow and ill-informed, approach over the issue and trying to impose their will on a global scale. My worry here is that, Meta being Meta, they carry quite a lot of influence and may actually gain some traction. EDIT: I'll add a bit more colour here. At the core of our platform we manage a database containing billions of legacy timestamped records (or events, if you prefer), adding more and more every day. Without even giving it a great deal of thought I guarantee you that this proposal will cause us more problems that it solves and will distract us from making more valuable investments of time and effort that would benefit our business should it be implemented. Sure, we can no doubt fix all these problems, but we've got better things to do. I imagine that many other businesses would be similarly affected and would take a similar view. I wholeheartedly oppose it.

gnu8 4y ago
That’s all it is, they ran into an engineering problem and they’re trying to get the world to bend to their will instead of solving the problem because they think it will be easier. Mark’s arrogance is nauseating.
- easytiger 4y ago
  Now expand this reasoning far beyond the scope of time keeping. Big Tech companies/Anti Big Tech lobbyists massively oversimplify in their pitch to influential people to deregulate/overregulate certain areas. In both cases they end up making poor decisions for the general case both end up making the average case worse for everyone except themselves. It's about creating a market where none need exist. Facebook doesn't need to care about time really. It's not remotely important to their business. I've built and worked on platforms with sub microsecond measuring requirements and this stuff didn't bother me. This is idle bad money finding work for itself at the expense of everyone else. Disclosure: I am/was an early investor in facebook in 2012. Mark is turning it all to dirt because he's run out of ideas
- 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

ZetaZero 4y ago

> By 2055, the "minute" displayed on a clock may be incorrect, which again may cause issues with legal timestamps. I'm not following here. What defines "legal timestamps" in our current system? I'm unaware of any laws in the US that uses the actual position of the sun to determine the time. "Noon" when the sun is at the highest point, can vary over an hour across a timezone.

DerpyBaby123 4y ago
>"Noon" when the sun is at the highest point, can vary over an hour across a timezone. this is "solar noon" - just "noon" denotes 12:00 on the clock [1] [1]https://www.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/ceres/heliodon/staticheliodon/backgroundpages/background/solarvslocal https://www.bsu.edu/academics/centersandinstitutes/ceres/hel...
bonzini 4y ago
Way more than one hour. Even without taking China into account, A Coruña in Spain and Kosice in Slovakia are in the same time zone but they are 30 degrees (2 hours) apart.
lynguist 4y ago
A birthday is a legal timestamp. A car crash is a legal timestamp. When the time is off by a minute, these events can’t be catalogued correctly any more.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  "off by a minute" from what exactly? Shifting the timezone by a couple seconds does not prevent or hinder cataloguing events in any way whatsoever, certainly not more than switching to daylight savings time does or the mere existence of timezones, which may easily be half an hour or even more off from the solar time - the offsets we use for time are effectively arbitrary already, and adjusting the arbitrary choice of the offset by some seconds is not a fundamental difference. Event timestamps already map to different days depending on different timezones, you do need to know which timezone your clock is using, of course, but you already need to do that.

DSMan195276 4y ago

> If we end leap seconds, it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours. I'm not sure what you're getting at here. If we stopped introducing leap seconds, then why would the legal world still care about them?

whateveracct 4y ago
I'm assuming because timestamps exist to capture time in the real world
- alecbz 4y ago
  What do you mean by "time in the real world"? The relative position of the sun to someone on Earth? _Some_ legal uses of time are probably concerned with this, but I'd think it's a pretty small minority.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Islamic time is, technically, but does not distinguish seconds. So, the only place where it could matter, it doesn't.
jjoonathan 4y ago
I can believe that a desperate lawyer would argue the semantic distinction between clock-midnight and solar-midnight, but I have trouble believing that this would amount to anything more than one more dumb nit on a pile of dumb nits that the court has to deal with every day.
- Ekaros 4y ago
  Also I think it would go through legal system in a few years and end decision is that clock-midnight is one that will be followed. Or even have legislation to agree on that and set single law.
- 4y ago

zozbot234 4y ago

There's no need to "detach" from UTC. Just ensure that TAI (which is consistently free of leap seconds) is also supported on an equal status to UTC, for applications where it makes the most sense. Conflating the two would only increase confusion further.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
Programmers can already do this if they want to. TAI already exists. But they'd have to still display UTC as civil time to end users and I'm pretty sure they don't want to do that either because it would mean just as much code.
- prpl 4y ago
  the hard thing about TAI is that it’s not properly supported in DBMS, RFC 3339/ISO 8601, etc… This makes it hard to use. It’s actually easier to use MJD represented as a double.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Yes. A different number, but you still have exactly all of the same problems as before.
uoaei 4y ago
"Make two parallel time systems and allow conversion between one and the other programmatically" reduces spiritedly and unambiguously to "use one time system and care for it programmatically". By precedent, UTC seems the logical choice for the one time system.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  But the whole point of the OP is that UTC has leap seconds, which are hard to manage programmatically - and may even be impossible, wrt. future dates and times. That's literally the one relevant difference between UTC and TAI.
  - 4y ago

3pt14159 4y ago

If you stop thinking about time being wrong from what is officially correct, and instead see this whole exercise as a error minimization framework I think it is far easier to make the case for ending leap seconds as it is for keeping them. This isn't just about lines of missing code. This is about forcing subterranean or submerged computers to surface. This is about out of sync clocks across information propagation networks across planets. This is about real lives that are ruined because time stamps didn't quite line up, causing delays, deaths, and needless headaches. It doesn't need to be this way. We could just accept a minute of the clock being off from "true" midnight, which doesn't even make sense to me given that few people are right at the astronomic point where midnight is "true" midnight for their timezone. Heck, China is one big giant timezone so who is this actually for, really? The people that care about sundials? Most people don't even grow their own food. We're no longer a sun-driven economy. Well coordinated timekeeping across devices that may not always be able to transfer data is far, far more important. If it's sufficiently wrong by the year 3422 then we'll deal with the fifteen minutes of annoyance then. This is a crazy premature optimization.

toast0 4y ago
> Well coordinated timekeeping across devices that may not always be able to transfer data is far, far more important. How do you have a well coordinated clock without being able to get four bits [1] per year of leap second data? It's hard to keep within one second of a time standard over 6 months or a year without communication. [1] bit 0: was there a leap second in the most recent period, bit 1: was it positive or negative; bit 2: will there be a leap second at the end of the current period, bit 3: will it be positive or negative. Bike shed my fictious encoding if you like, but it's good enough. Use a whole 8-bits, go wild.
- aftbit 4y ago
  Cesium reference clocks can operate with accuracy around 10^-14 (aka 0.01 parts per trillion). In a year, a cesium clock would slip by a few tenths of a microsecond. That said, the whole "submerged computer must surface" thing is a bit of a red herring argument IMO. What use case would you have for needing to keep time in sync within seconds with the outside world, but being unable to communicate with that world? If you're trying to plan simultaneous delayed action across the world, it would suffice to merely be in sync with each other, leap seconds ignored.

makeitdouble 4y ago

“civil time” is also a construction that is flexible in many ways, so an influencial group redefining it isn’t out of norm. To note, timezones were introduced for railway purposes, and some country play a lot with them. For “midnight” being far from “the middle of the night”, that’s already a reality for many Chinese living far enough from Beijing, or god forbid regions where “night” doesn’t mean much for half of the year. For all intents and purposes, if a formal definition of time isn’t practical people come up with their own ways.

Ekaros 4y ago
Midnight isn't midnight for absolute vast majority of people. Even with right sized timezones. That is one spreading from edge to edge... And then there is continental shifting... Which we also don't account for... A few seconds or few minutes really don't make that much difference for average person.

jefftk 4y ago

Your article is from 2003 [1], so when they say "by 2028" they don't mean six years from now. Since the article was published we've gone from positive leap seconds every so often to looking like we may get the first ever negative leap second: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Leapsecond.ut1-utc.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Leapseco... Which means the article's estimates on how long it will be until we're off by a given amount of time are very much obsolete. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030801000000*/https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://web.archive.org/web/20030801000000*/https://www.ucol...

amptorn 4y ago
I think that observation just lends further weight to the argument that the relationship between atomic time and universal time is a dynamic and unpredictable thing, which we need to handle correctly rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  That it is dynamic and unpredictable is exactly why we should not force everybody to track it. Some people: astronomers and orbital mechanicos are obliged to care about sidereal time, regardless. Making me deal with it too is pure tax with exactly zero benefit.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BrainVirus 4y ago

>All because programmers wanted to save some lines of code. No, it's because programmers don't want basic timekeeping in all devices involve the worst issues of managing a distributed system.

Ellipsis753 4y ago

When the sun is directly overhead it's meant to be 12:00 - IN THEORY! However as Timezones are pretty wide, most of the time you'll be at least 15 minutes out. Sometimes you'll be out by as much as 3 hours - and you've probably never even noticed! Telescopes already have to compensate for this (as well as for summer time). Leap seconds make a shambles of book keeping too. What is "2022-07-17T12:00:00" + (60 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 5) seconds? No one knows! And the answer to that question will change depending on when you calculate it and which updates you installed! So I say ditch the leap second and let it drift. In a few hundred years we could update our timezones if we _really_ want to (timezone changing is actually pretty common, so code should already be handling this edge-case).

prpl 4y ago

Please consider that none of this actually matters if we ditched UTC for TAI. For one, time zones still exist and local solar time is already decoupled from clock time. The worst case scenario is things are different.

ncmncm 4y ago
Not everybody would "ditch UTC for TAI". Some would, some wouldn't. Now you cannot know whether you will match anyone.

zJlG 4y ago

I'm honestly amazed to see so many people agree with this. Timestamps are exactly what we define them to be. There is no correct and incorrect. One option is to have a system with arbitrary unpredictable leaps to keep it synchronized to within 1 second of the mean solar time over Greenwich, England. Every computer system that has to deal with time accurately needs a lookup table for leap seconds that is occasionally amended, with only a couple months warning in advance. Another option is to just let the clock run at a constant rate. In this case only astronomers have to keep track of the difference between solar time and clock time (which they already do anyway). The fact that the difference will increase to an hour after several hundred years is utterly irrelevant. If people in the future care, they can simply adjust the timezone definitions to compensate, since timezones are already adjusted all the time.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Animats 4y ago

> It's frustrating that programmers want to redefine civil time just because it is "hard". Yes. Problems with delay time going negative usually come from not using CLOCK_MONOTONIC for delay time. CLOCK_MONOTONIC is usually just the time since system startup. It comes from QNX (which, being hard real time, had to deal with this first), made it into the POSIX spec around 1996, and is now available on all major OSs. But there's still software that uses time of day where CLOCK_MONOTINIC is needed. Then there's the smoothing approach. This document described Facebook's smoothing approach, which has a different smoothing period than Google uses. * Facebook/Meta: "We smear the leap second throughout 17 hours, starting at 00:00:00 UTC based on the time zone data (tzdata) package content." This is puzzling. What does the time zone package have to do with UTC? * Google: 24-hour linear smear from noon to noon UTC.[1] * AWS: Follows Google. * US power grid: Starts at midnight UTC and takes a few hours while all the rotating machinery takes 60 extra turns to catch up. Not sure what telecom is doing. [1] https://developers.google.com/time/smear https://developers.google.com/time/smear

jsmith45 4y ago
> What does the time zone package have to do with UTC? The IANA TZ database includes information about leap seconds, and even supports the concept of "right" time zones in which the leap seconds are counted in the Unix timestamps. (Which violates the unix spec, and may cause problems with code that assumes it can do path like `1 day= 24*60*60`, but on the other hand, things like DST already make that unsafe). It is mostly likely simply the case that they are using the leap second data from the time-zone database as a convenient source of this data.
- Animats 4y ago
  Ah. So that's where the leap second schedule is stored.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    There is no schedule. Just a history of ad hoc announcements.
4y ago

philwelch 4y ago

From your link: > In about 600 years TI will be ahead of UT1 by half an hour, and in about 1000 years the difference will be a full hour. That's nothing. Time zones alone already create significantly larger errors. Belgrade and Sevilla share a time zone, but the solar meridian ("noon" on a sundial) is 12:44 in Belgrade and 14:30 in Sevilla. Obviously, the same error is present in the astronomical "middle of the night". This does not, in fact, create "legal issues" for Serbs or Spaniards. In 600-1000 years, around the time that it would actually matter, we're going to have to reform the time system anyway to account for relativistic drift between the surface of the Earth and human settlements elsewhere in the solar system.

btilly 4y ago

We live in a world where civil time moves by an hour 2x a year for no good reason. You FAR overstate the impact on civil society of failing to change it by a second every so often. Ironically even astronomers, who leap seconds were originally for, don't benefit because they need to know the Earth's rotation accurately to subsecond levels.

lucb1e 4y ago

> it doesn't take long - only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" Honestly from my perspective, 3am is the middle of the night (night-morning-afternoon-evening starts at 0-6-12-18 for me) and somewhere between 4 and 5 most people are probably asleep and the date change should occur. I can't count how often I've heard people clarify what 'tomorrow' means when the word is spoken after "midnight" but before going to sleep. But yeah gotta pick something for the date change, it won't be worth the cost of change now. If we do end up ever switching to something like decimal time, this should be on the todo list though. And I know "midnight" is historically supposed to be about the sun being the furthest from its zenith rather than in the middle between when you go to sleep and get up, however that occurs somewhere around 1am here (01:41 at its extreme, from July 17 till August 5th). If that's not enough to warrant a redefinition, 27 seconds accumulated since we started counting leap seconds are also not enough to warrant an update yet (following Facebook's logic here).

modeless 4y ago

These "problems" are trivial. The day changes at midnight which is 12:00 AM by the clock. There is no ambiguity. Midnight is not literally the middle of the night. The minute on the clock will be correct by definition, nothing will change. Sundials are already wrong. You'll need to try a lot harder to convince me that this is a bad idea. All these arguments based on sun position make no sense in a world where people already live in places where the sun literally never sets or never rises for months, and people already live in time zones offset many, many hours from "correct" time. The sky doesn't fall!

bhk 4y ago

> This article details some of the problems: https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html https://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html That article is ridiculous. * "Most telescope pointing systems fail" (by 2027) (with 5s deviation from earth rotation). Pointing systems cannot blindly rely on UTC anyway, since (a) even with leap seconds UTC is up to 1 second off earth's rotation, and (b) pointing a telescope depends on where the telescope is on earth, so some offset must be added to UTC by some human. * Hypothesized legal issues... give me a break. It would be much less trouble for humanity to deal with this once every 100 years or so.

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

I don't see how you run into legal problems. The break from one day to the next still occurs at a well defined time, 23:59:59 + 1 second, or 00:00:00. Midnight isn't the middle of the night (or noon exactly at solar zenith), except on 15deg meridians anyway. What will happen is that over time, those "golden" meridians will shift slightly. The only people who will notice are those that are using time for celestial navigation. Terrestial navigation, which is almost entirely done with GPS these days, won't be affected at all (GPS already doesn't use leap seconds). And, yes, sundials will gradually get out of sync, and have eventually to be rotated on their axis to be right.

nullc 4y ago

> only until 2028 - until "midnight" is sufficiently far from "the middle of the night" that you will have to consider the legal issues caused by events that happen just before or after 0000 hours. I can't follow your logic here. In any relevant context midnight has a definition, typically UTC midnight in the applicable timezone. Eliminating leap-seconds would make the instant midnight occurs less ambiguous in 2028, because precise timing with leap-seconds is strictly harder than without. (and one can independently realize a time that closely follows TAI but one cannot independently realize UT1 without a VLBI radio telescope array, and one can't realize UT1-TAI without a datafeed because the decisions are subjective). This isn't just a question of 'some lines of code'. Leapseconds cause widespread disruptions even when they don't occur, they cause security vulnerabilities (and slower and less secure systems because they make synchronization unreliable). People are widely deploying "leap smeared" NTP servers to try to prevent some of the worst synchronization faults, but doing so makes it impractical to back out leap seconds to derive TAI (or a more accurate TT) from the system's UTC, particularly because systems don't know if they're leapsmeared or not (and different smear sources use different smearing parameters).