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Scientists just voted to redefine how the world keeps time (www.scientificamerican.com)
submitted 6 days ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Today an international group of scientists, diplomats, and timekeepers voted to end the leap second, which has been keeping Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) aligned with the time according to Earth’s rotation (UT1) within one second of difference.

A new system, called the “leap hour,” will allow the Earth’s rotation and official time to fall out of alignment by a full hour

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[+] 33 points 6 days ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 10 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca

    If your software is choking on completely expectable events, it it not sufficiently robust.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 days ago

    As you just proved, while it might be possible to write robust software that deals with dates/times, I wouldn't bet on it, and it's Definitely not practical to try.

    But you are right that leap seconds were common enough to try and handle. There's a bunch of ways to handle them though, each incompatible with the others.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 days ago

    There is an easy solution in 100 years. You simply adjust your timezone. Something we already have the capability to do. We already tolerate hour deviations from noon.

    Think of it more like that the arbitrarily zero time point on the globe moves 1 hour west. But we keep longitude fixed.

    The only weird thing is more places will go to +13 and some to +14. But that's all relative.

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