6 ms·

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how

2035 is the agreed drop dead date. Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea that they should be replaced by 2035. Nobody has agreed how to fix it, and "Just turn them off" isn't technically legal. However, "What if there were Leap hours instead?" is technically legal and of course those hours would happen in the very distant future (likely after our civilisation is gone) so it's functionally identical to "Just turn them off" but without legal problems. Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack. You may have heard that controversial UK politician Nigel Farage "resigned" as a Westminster MP recently and that's not technically true because you can't resign, historically people hated that job and so you can't resign and we never changed that, but what you can do, and everybody does, is get assigned an "Office of profit" in which legally the King is paying you, an MP can't work for the King so you can't be an MP any more. The "Offices of profit" in question aren't real jobs† and don't pay real money, like this "Leap Hour" they'd be a legal fiction. So everybody says you "resigned" but in fact you legally can't do that... † I mean, historically they were real jobs that made sense which is why the King paid somebody to do them, but England is very, very old so they haven't made sense for centuries and serve only as a legal fiction today.

jeffrallen 4mo ago
Farage is such an ass, the King should make him feed donkeys or something.
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  "Vote Count Binface and Bin the Cunt" :D There's a long tradition in the UK of having electoral candidates who don't expect to win but run because it's free publicity in a high profile race. "Count Binface" is a comedian who dresses up as a space alien whose outfit resembles well, having a Bin for a face. The serious political parties told Nigel to fuck off, if he wants to step down and then immediately contest the same seat they wouldn't run against him in this farce, but Binface isn't a serious politician so he is running in that by-election. Nigel wanted to be able to do this whole thing about how the establishment is rotten and he (Wealthy public schoolboy who keeps lying to people and doesn't bother going to Parliament even though he was elected to do so) is a true man of the people and can put things right. It got him this far in life. But with the other candidate on your ballot being a space alien it's obvious which of these options is really "the establishment" and it's not the guy whose policies include "Building at least one house†" and who says he comes from a different planet... † British political parties often insist they will build lots of housing because that's popular with voters. But, in practice they don't tend to really deliver because the various groups lobby not to actually build. So "at least one house" is a joke about this phenomenon, while conveniently also being technically possible, Binface could just build a house, that's a thing you can do.
  - f4c39012 4mo ago
    I think it's more than publicity. Anyone can stand as a candidate, and anyone can vote for them. Money and connections and establishment and everything else don't matter, all candidates are equal on that stage. It's both weird and to be admired.
    - duskwuff 4mo ago
      And a bit of "if Farage really wants the seat, he can fight for it". There's something unsporting about letting him win unopposed.
  - overboard2 4mo ago
    Nigel Farage has decided to counter a scandal by throwing himself upon his constituents for judgement, the obviously establishment parties have backed off to allow Binface to run against him in a ~1v1, and you think Binface is more anti establishment than Farage?
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - ceejayoz 4mo ago
      Yes, the MP, former MEP, and founder of a significant political party is closer to being “the establishment” than the comedy candidate dressed up as a rubbish bin.
      - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
        The ex stockbroker who lunches with presidents and takes £5m personal bribes in charge of a party sticked with ex ministers of the crown (at least one who took a bribe) is clearly not the establishment. The liberal elite of plumbers and comedians are
  - aidenn0 4mo ago
    Next we need someone running on a platform promising "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg"
hwc 4mo ago
just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.
- dmurray 4mo ago
  This seems like an interesting solution, even if it's absurdist at first thought. What if we just shift the steel bar in Greenwich 20 metres east or west instead of adding a leap second? Then everything would theoretically be correct. The logical next thing to do would be to move all the time zones as well. But time zones already don't coincide with the lines of longitude in practice; they tend to follow country or internal boundaries somewhat close to the lines of longitude (but sometimes multiple hours away!). After a few thousand leap seconds, maybe one or two countries would feel it was helpful to readjust a time zone boundary to better align with solar time, but in practice this would never be the overriding reason for that decision. You say people's GPS systems would all suddenly be wrong because they depend on locations in latitude and longitude? I don't think this is a problem either: in practice longitude and latitude are given not relative to the steel bar in Greenwich, but to per-continent geodetic datum points. This already prevents continental drift from affecting your coordinates, though a big earthquake can still mess things up.
  - elsjaako 4mo ago
    The GPS meridian doesn't align with the steel(?) bar anyway. There's a Tom Scott video about it.
BoxOfRain 4mo ago
On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.
- dmurray 4mo ago
  Quite a few MPs in Westminster already don't take their physical seats in Parliament (and never vote or address the House) because the conditions attached to doing so aren't compatible with their principles. Maybe Count Binface will be the next.
  - throw-the-towel 4mo ago
    More specifically, that refers to the Northern Irish MPs from the Sinn Féin party who do not recognise the UK Crown as a lawful authority in NI, and hence, refuse to take an oath of allegiance to it. (They used to not recognise the Republic of Ireland as well, until the 1980s I think.)
    - dmurray 4mo ago
      I think they don't approve of the Crown as an authority even if they agree it's lawfully established? It's more like an atheist refusing to swear an oath before God in a courtroom: even if you agree that the law says you must do so, you might still not want to give God that recognition. But worse, because God might also be the defendant and the judge in this case, and you have to swear not only that He might witness your testimony but also that you pledge allegiance to Him, so swearing that oath really impairs your ability to participate in a fair trial.
prerok 4mo ago
So, it's solving a real problem, why are we dropping it? I mean, why does everybody agree it's a bad solution?
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  Basically we guessed wrong. We thought knowing "Solar time" would be more useful than in it, and we thought these "Leap seconds" would be less trouble than they are. It's like you buy a cat to help with your rodent problem, figuring the cat will eat mice and isn't much trouble to look after, but after purchasing a cat you find that your problem was actually rats, your cat is terrified of these large dangerous creatures and sometimes gets bitten by them necessitating expensive vet bills and now you need to pay a lot of attention to the poor animal and also now need to buy cat food.
  - prerok 4mo ago
    Heh, I like the analogy but my question was really why it was considered such a hassle. I mean we deal with daylight saving time all the time and I know it's not the same because the leap second affects UTC, not just local time zone, it's just that you are either dealing with monotonically increasing time like epoch, or you are dealing with "human" time and I found no distinction in the latter. Is it "just" that leap seconds or delay seconds caused problems in epoch to utc conversion? Note the just in quotes, but did I just answer my own question? :)
    - defrost 4mo ago
      It's a hassle for anybody doing or recording "physics" as they cannot log against UTC (which may or may not have an added second or removed second in some interval if it happens to overlap the adjustment zone). Those things that really do rely on actual "elapsed time" rather than the difference between two recorded "book times". Does this happen? Yes, a few times in my career in geophysical exploration - it's why multiple bits of gear are synced to a reference "real clock" which gets logged against the raw GPS epoch time (real time since Sunday last week(?)) and processed "UTC" time (some variation of it).
dooglius 4mo ago
What does "technically legal" mean here, what authority is that coming from?
- tialaramex 4mo ago
  The co-ordinated universal time, UTC exists by international agreement. In the 1960s lots of countries signed a treaty so that's the "authority" AIUI. The treaty says everybody agrees that this new standard will try to track "solar time" which felt intuitively reasonable. They want something equivalent to the old GMT which was really based on solar time, except more modern. At first the idea was, well, we just work out how fast this damp rock spins more precisely and we can use that to ensure everything works forever. More precise measurements of the damp rock showed that, annoyingly, Mother Nature did not provide the spinning rock as a precise clock, it spins slower and faster according to a huge number of variables and so the best we can do is measure the spinning against an actual clock. So, "Leap seconds" were born to meet that legal requirement to have UTC match the solar time. The "leap hour" would likewise fulfil this requirement, just in a deliberately useless way because we actually do not care about precisely tracking solar time. If we did, almost every human in the world would be perpetually annoyed because of course our present system of "time zones" means on average we're at least 30 minutes wrong!
b112 4mo ago
Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea No. Not everybody. I prefer accurate time, and all the complaints I've heard hold little water. My servers need to timesync forwards and back all the time, eg timedrift. They need to jump to new times, or slowly drift, depending. VMs can be hypervisor starved, or need to move to a new host. Servers also need to handle missing time. Any daemon or program which cannot handle this is buggy, broken, and needs to deal. Leap seconds are just part of all of this, and present no new issues compared to normal time change. I question the capabilities of any engineer who singles out time second as difficult to deal with, time is constantly changing on servers. Constantly. So back to the start, no... everybody doesn't agree. Google isn't "everybody".
- campground 4mo ago
  Accurate to what though, and for what? We decide what the standard is, and it seems like it would be a lot easier to have accurate time if we aren’t adding or subtracting seconds here or there. Does it really matter if the sun crests the horizon a second earlier than it did ten years ago? If it does, isn’t it much easier to just adjust your sun-cresting time?
charlieyu1 4mo ago
Leap minutes. You only change your clock when you have accumulated a minute of error. Then you only need to change it once per century
- roryirvine 4mo ago
  That actually sounds like the worst of all possible worlds! It's infrequent enough that most systems won't bother implementing it, but a big enough time difference that it absolutely must be handled correctly at the right instant. You'd be setting yourself up for a millennium bug-sized panic every century. And as soon as that the generation that experiences one retires, their successors will start saying "there's not going to be a leap minute for the next couple of decades, and there's no chance our code will still be running then...", and the cycle will repeat. Again and again and again. The leap hour proposal is better because if it really is still relevant in however-many-thousand years, we can do a long-term plan to handle it which includes giving a century of notice.
markdown 4mo ago
> Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack The 999 year lease to essentially make land practically freehold is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease It's caused significant controversy in my (former colony) country where all other long-term leases are 99 years. The landowners are insisting that their ancestors were cheated and they want their land back.
sajithdilshan 4mo ago
[flagged]
- klausa 4mo ago
  I found the anecdote about it being technically impossible to resign as an MP interesting and am glad that the person posted it.
ChrisRR 4mo ago
What a weird tangent

jeffrallen 4mo ago

Farage is such an ass, the King should make him feed donkeys or something.

tialaramex 4mo ago
"Vote Count Binface and Bin the Cunt" :D There's a long tradition in the UK of having electoral candidates who don't expect to win but run because it's free publicity in a high profile race. "Count Binface" is a comedian who dresses up as a space alien whose outfit resembles well, having a Bin for a face. The serious political parties told Nigel to fuck off, if he wants to step down and then immediately contest the same seat they wouldn't run against him in this farce, but Binface isn't a serious politician so he is running in that by-election. Nigel wanted to be able to do this whole thing about how the establishment is rotten and he (Wealthy public schoolboy who keeps lying to people and doesn't bother going to Parliament even though he was elected to do so) is a true man of the people and can put things right. It got him this far in life. But with the other candidate on your ballot being a space alien it's obvious which of these options is really "the establishment" and it's not the guy whose policies include "Building at least one house†" and who says he comes from a different planet... † British political parties often insist they will build lots of housing because that's popular with voters. But, in practice they don't tend to really deliver because the various groups lobby not to actually build. So "at least one house" is a joke about this phenomenon, while conveniently also being technically possible, Binface could just build a house, that's a thing you can do.
- f4c39012 4mo ago
  I think it's more than publicity. Anyone can stand as a candidate, and anyone can vote for them. Money and connections and establishment and everything else don't matter, all candidates are equal on that stage. It's both weird and to be admired.
  - duskwuff 4mo ago
    And a bit of "if Farage really wants the seat, he can fight for it". There's something unsporting about letting him win unopposed.
- overboard2 4mo ago
  Nigel Farage has decided to counter a scandal by throwing himself upon his constituents for judgement, the obviously establishment parties have backed off to allow Binface to run against him in a ~1v1, and you think Binface is more anti establishment than Farage?
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ceejayoz 4mo ago
    Yes, the MP, former MEP, and founder of a significant political party is closer to being “the establishment” than the comedy candidate dressed up as a rubbish bin.
    - hdgvhicv 4mo ago
      The ex stockbroker who lunches with presidents and takes £5m personal bribes in charge of a party sticked with ex ministers of the crown (at least one who took a bribe) is clearly not the establishment. The liberal elite of plumbers and comedians are
- aidenn0 4mo ago
  Next we need someone running on a platform promising "Truth, Justice, Freedom, Reasonably Priced Love, and a Hard-Boiled Egg"

hwc 4mo ago

just move the prime meridian. the one we use for timekeeping doesn't have to aligh with longitude forever.

dmurray 4mo ago
This seems like an interesting solution, even if it's absurdist at first thought. What if we just shift the steel bar in Greenwich 20 metres east or west instead of adding a leap second? Then everything would theoretically be correct. The logical next thing to do would be to move all the time zones as well. But time zones already don't coincide with the lines of longitude in practice; they tend to follow country or internal boundaries somewhat close to the lines of longitude (but sometimes multiple hours away!). After a few thousand leap seconds, maybe one or two countries would feel it was helpful to readjust a time zone boundary to better align with solar time, but in practice this would never be the overriding reason for that decision. You say people's GPS systems would all suddenly be wrong because they depend on locations in latitude and longitude? I don't think this is a problem either: in practice longitude and latitude are given not relative to the steel bar in Greenwich, but to per-continent geodetic datum points. This already prevents continental drift from affecting your coordinates, though a big earthquake can still mess things up.
- elsjaako 4mo ago
  The GPS meridian doesn't align with the steel(?) bar anyway. There's a Tom Scott video about it.

BoxOfRain 4mo ago

On the subject of amusing British political legislation, should he defeat Nigel Farage in the resulting by-election Count Binface will not be able to wear his costume in Parliament; not only is business attire required in the House of Commons, it's specifically forbidden to wear a suit of armour there due to a law from the 14th century. For those unaware, the major parties have declined to participate in the by-election triggered by Farage's resignation seeing the whole thing as a farce. As a result Farage will likely face only Count Binface, a space warrior from Sigma Six. He'd get my vote purely on the basis that he's promised to bring back Ceefax, and build at least one affordable house.

dmurray 4mo ago
Quite a few MPs in Westminster already don't take their physical seats in Parliament (and never vote or address the House) because the conditions attached to doing so aren't compatible with their principles. Maybe Count Binface will be the next.
- throw-the-towel 4mo ago
  More specifically, that refers to the Northern Irish MPs from the Sinn Féin party who do not recognise the UK Crown as a lawful authority in NI, and hence, refuse to take an oath of allegiance to it. (They used to not recognise the Republic of Ireland as well, until the 1980s I think.)
  - dmurray 4mo ago
    I think they don't approve of the Crown as an authority even if they agree it's lawfully established? It's more like an atheist refusing to swear an oath before God in a courtroom: even if you agree that the law says you must do so, you might still not want to give God that recognition. But worse, because God might also be the defendant and the judge in this case, and you have to swear not only that He might witness your testimony but also that you pledge allegiance to Him, so swearing that oath really impairs your ability to participate in a fair trial.

prerok 4mo ago

So, it's solving a real problem, why are we dropping it? I mean, why does everybody agree it's a bad solution?

tialaramex 4mo ago
Basically we guessed wrong. We thought knowing "Solar time" would be more useful than in it, and we thought these "Leap seconds" would be less trouble than they are. It's like you buy a cat to help with your rodent problem, figuring the cat will eat mice and isn't much trouble to look after, but after purchasing a cat you find that your problem was actually rats, your cat is terrified of these large dangerous creatures and sometimes gets bitten by them necessitating expensive vet bills and now you need to pay a lot of attention to the poor animal and also now need to buy cat food.
- prerok 4mo ago
  Heh, I like the analogy but my question was really why it was considered such a hassle. I mean we deal with daylight saving time all the time and I know it's not the same because the leap second affects UTC, not just local time zone, it's just that you are either dealing with monotonically increasing time like epoch, or you are dealing with "human" time and I found no distinction in the latter. Is it "just" that leap seconds or delay seconds caused problems in epoch to utc conversion? Note the just in quotes, but did I just answer my own question? :)
  - defrost 4mo ago
    It's a hassle for anybody doing or recording "physics" as they cannot log against UTC (which may or may not have an added second or removed second in some interval if it happens to overlap the adjustment zone). Those things that really do rely on actual "elapsed time" rather than the difference between two recorded "book times". Does this happen? Yes, a few times in my career in geophysical exploration - it's why multiple bits of gear are synced to a reference "real clock" which gets logged against the raw GPS epoch time (real time since Sunday last week(?)) and processed "UTC" time (some variation of it).

dooglius 4mo ago

What does "technically legal" mean here, what authority is that coming from?

tialaramex 4mo ago
The co-ordinated universal time, UTC exists by international agreement. In the 1960s lots of countries signed a treaty so that's the "authority" AIUI. The treaty says everybody agrees that this new standard will try to track "solar time" which felt intuitively reasonable. They want something equivalent to the old GMT which was really based on solar time, except more modern. At first the idea was, well, we just work out how fast this damp rock spins more precisely and we can use that to ensure everything works forever. More precise measurements of the damp rock showed that, annoyingly, Mother Nature did not provide the spinning rock as a precise clock, it spins slower and faster according to a huge number of variables and so the best we can do is measure the spinning against an actual clock. So, "Leap seconds" were born to meet that legal requirement to have UTC match the solar time. The "leap hour" would likewise fulfil this requirement, just in a deliberately useless way because we actually do not care about precisely tracking solar time. If we did, almost every human in the world would be perpetually annoyed because of course our present system of "time zones" means on average we're at least 30 minutes wrong!

b112 4mo ago

Everybody agreed that "Leap seconds" are a sufficiently bad idea No. Not everybody. I prefer accurate time, and all the complaints I've heard hold little water. My servers need to timesync forwards and back all the time, eg timedrift. They need to jump to new times, or slowly drift, depending. VMs can be hypervisor starved, or need to move to a new host. Servers also need to handle missing time. Any daemon or program which cannot handle this is buggy, broken, and needs to deal. Leap seconds are just part of all of this, and present no new issues compared to normal time change. I question the capabilities of any engineer who singles out time second as difficult to deal with, time is constantly changing on servers. Constantly. So back to the start, no... everybody doesn't agree. Google isn't "everybody".

campground 4mo ago
Accurate to what though, and for what? We decide what the standard is, and it seems like it would be a lot easier to have accurate time if we aren’t adding or subtracting seconds here or there. Does it really matter if the sun crests the horizon a second earlier than it did ten years ago? If it does, isn’t it much easier to just adjust your sun-cresting time?

charlieyu1 4mo ago

Leap minutes. You only change your clock when you have accumulated a minute of error. Then you only need to change it once per century

roryirvine 4mo ago
That actually sounds like the worst of all possible worlds! It's infrequent enough that most systems won't bother implementing it, but a big enough time difference that it absolutely must be handled correctly at the right instant. You'd be setting yourself up for a millennium bug-sized panic every century. And as soon as that the generation that experiences one retires, their successors will start saying "there's not going to be a leap minute for the next couple of decades, and there's no chance our code will still be running then...", and the cycle will repeat. Again and again and again. The leap hour proposal is better because if it really is still relevant in however-many-thousand years, we can do a long-term plan to handle it which includes giving a century of notice.

markdown 4mo ago

> Now, I'm English, and England loves this sort of hack The 999 year lease to essentially make land practically freehold is one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/999-year_lease It's caused significant controversy in my (former colony) country where all other long-term leases are 99 years. The landowners are insisting that their ancestors were cheated and they want their land back.

sajithdilshan 4mo ago

[flagged]

klausa 4mo ago
I found the anecdote about it being technically impossible to resign as an MP interesting and am glad that the person posted it.

ChrisRR 4mo ago

What a weird tangent