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by zowie_vd
1305 days ago
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I don't think there is a practical need for UTC to be synchronized with the rotation of the Earth for a long time, because although the error accumulates, it only accumulates very slowly. That being said, it's unclear how people would solve the problems that will arise once that long time has passed. In any case, although it's probably too late for leap seconds, untying the definition of Unix time from UTC would allow astronomers to decide with more freedom what the future of UTC is going to be. |
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I feel like we should be able to easily "bundle" leap seconds into existing leap days on leap years. Make February 29th just some random number of seconds shorter or longer than, say, February 28th. Most people feel February 29ths are weird anyway, few people would probably notice when they have strange amounts of seconds in their final hour. Some software might hate it if Feb 29 23:59:56 rolls over to Mar 1 00:00:00 or much more rarely there's a Feb 29 23:59:62 (or using the existing Unix time "smearing" technique, some Feb 29 you get three or more Feb 29 23:59:59 timestamps in a row), but other than that it would 1) be on a predictable day, and 2) a day that's already a weird every 4 years except every 400 outlier that's already expected to be an edge case.