*Leap seconds* were one-second adjustments occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) between 1972 and 2016
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_secondOpen linkView original on lemmy.mlSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.mlhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_secondOpen linkView original on lemmy.ml
11 replies
Ok they stopped doing it in 2016 because it’s all caught up now and everything is fixed and working properly now right?
What? So now it can be off by up to an hour before it gets adjusted?
Kerberos and SSL require no more than a 5 minute deviation. This is gonna be fun. Though I guess as long as everyone is synchronized or pulling from the same source it doesn’t matter. What’s an hour between friends.
Kerberos and SSL don't care if the earth is in the correct position (reasonably or otherwise) relative to the sun and/or planets. Clocks being in sync with the physical planet is irrelevant. They are still gonna be just as in sync globally along each other with sub-second precision as always (sub-ms precision in many cases).
Being up to an hour off will start having a noticeable impact on sunset/sunrise, but for some reason we fuck with that twice a year by an hour anyway so who cares I guess?
It's essentially a 'We don't really care if it's in perfect sync to the earth spin all the time, we'll just sync it manually at some point in the future'. Which, fair, do you really care if 12pm is the exact physical high noon or off by a few minutes?
As an environmental scientist, I care. It hurts me that there is a drift in my data that is entirely anthropogenic and I must spend time to account for.
That's perfectly understandable, but it's more a hindrance than any sort of benefit for most people and computer systems, isn't it?
We have DST changes because when we should have an extra hour of daylight matters. If its going in one direction though, we can just make DST 2 hours earlier and standard time 1 hour earlier. Not sure of direction. Cancel changes midway through.
DST is the dumbest thing ever and needs to die.
It would be dark at 9am where I am on some winter days without it. Without standard time, I'd get woken up at 4:30am though, some days.
I've lived in Norway, so I know all about sunlight and the lack of it. There's no benefit to DST that couldn't be obtained by other methods, without messing with time and messing up everybody who has international connections.
AND THEN you get the call from the astrophysicist who says "by the way we just had a leap second"... and at this point you just kind of go "what?"