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Notice they only said leap second. Meanwhile.... International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour https://www.scientificamerican.

Notice they only said leap second. Meanwhile.... International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-timekeepers-to-vote-on-changing-the-leap-second-to-a-leap-hour/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... (https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329)

_joel 4mo ago
really, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.
- icepush 4mo ago
  We can change that!
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  A leap hour wouldn't affect you. In practice it will never affect anyone because it's a legal fiction, but even if you pretend to believe we would actually introduce this "leap hour" it would be in the distant future long after we're all dead and if there are still humans who have any idea the year 2026 happened they're not sure which of Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Tony Stark and John McClane were real people. Edited to add: This is such a ridiculously long time frame that they might not be sure whether we were worried about climate change, for them that's either a disaster they survived (and maybe most didn't) or it's a weird blip in their historical charts which they struggle to explain. Did our civilisation do something very, very stupid? There is a flammable gas deep underground, did we set fire to it because we were crazy? Why the hell would we have done that? There are signs we deliberately set fire to the coal which is a toxic rock also found underground? That would explain the global climate going nuts. Maybe it was a ritual or something. Ancient people are mad.
  - Epa095 4mo ago
    Up until now we have added 1 leap second every 2 year (27 leap seconds since 1972). So if it continues like this, in 7200 years it would be 1 whole hour, and in "only" 3602 years it will be closer to the next hour than the previous (so a natural time to add the leap hour).
  - Dibby053 4mo ago
    Timekeeping is timeless. We count the number of orbits around the Sun from a specific guy's birthday 2000 years ago, our 12 months are named after rulers of an empire that hasn't existed for almost as long, and weekdays are named after the pagan gods that guy replaced. I don't know why there are 7 days in a week, but supposedly there are 86400 seconds in a day because some Bronze Age people liked the numbers 60 and 12. Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute, their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support for it in a C library that only understands (now, 128-bit) Unix timestamps.
    - defrost 4mo ago
      Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use. The Julian period is a chronological interval of 7980 years, derived from three multi-year cycles: the indiction, solar, and lunar cycles. The last year that was simultaneously the beginning of all three cycles was 4713 BC (−4712), so that is year 1 of the current Julian period, making AD 2026 year 6739 of that Period. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day > Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?
      - Dibby053 4mo ago
        By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication. >You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames? Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.

_joel 4mo ago

really, my I just don't have the time to keep up with this.

icepush 4mo ago
We can change that!
tialaramex 4mo ago
A leap hour wouldn't affect you. In practice it will never affect anyone because it's a legal fiction, but even if you pretend to believe we would actually introduce this "leap hour" it would be in the distant future long after we're all dead and if there are still humans who have any idea the year 2026 happened they're not sure which of Donald Trump, Taylor Swift, Tony Stark and John McClane were real people. Edited to add: This is such a ridiculously long time frame that they might not be sure whether we were worried about climate change, for them that's either a disaster they survived (and maybe most didn't) or it's a weird blip in their historical charts which they struggle to explain. Did our civilisation do something very, very stupid? There is a flammable gas deep underground, did we set fire to it because we were crazy? Why the hell would we have done that? There are signs we deliberately set fire to the coal which is a toxic rock also found underground? That would explain the global climate going nuts. Maybe it was a ritual or something. Ancient people are mad.
- Epa095 4mo ago
  Up until now we have added 1 leap second every 2 year (27 leap seconds since 1972). So if it continues like this, in 7200 years it would be 1 whole hour, and in "only" 3602 years it will be closer to the next hour than the previous (so a natural time to add the leap hour).
- Dibby053 4mo ago
  Timekeeping is timeless. We count the number of orbits around the Sun from a specific guy's birthday 2000 years ago, our 12 months are named after rulers of an empire that hasn't existed for almost as long, and weekdays are named after the pagan gods that guy replaced. I don't know why there are 7 days in a week, but supposedly there are 86400 seconds in a day because some Bronze Age people liked the numbers 60 and 12. Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute, their woes will pale in comparison with those of the poor soul who has to add support for it in a C library that only understands (now, 128-bit) Unix timestamps.
  - defrost 4mo ago
    Yeah, nah - that "we" doesn't cover all the other calendars also in use. The Julian period is a chronological interval of 7980 years, derived from three multi-year cycles: the indiction, solar, and lunar cycles. The last year that was simultaneously the beginning of all three cycles was 4713 BC (−4712), so that is year 1 of the current Julian period, making AD 2026 year 6739 of that Period. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day > Even if one day humans have to account for relativity in their commute You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames?
    - Dibby053 4mo ago
      By "we" I mean ~everybody, as the Gregorian date with year 1 as the (wrongly dated?) birthyear of Jesus Christ is the standard for most domains in international communication. >You don't think there aren't already application domains that have to account for relativity differences between reference frames? Of course, GPS for one. My point is about the legacy of it all. Long time after those satellites are down, some future astronomer will be translating timestamps between GPS time and UTC, entirely aware of leap seconds and atomic time and whatnot, just to make sense of 21st century observations.