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by usr1106 19 days ago
Isn't this anti-news? I vaguely remember they have stopped introducing leap seconds until further notice because they cause too much trouble with today's computing systems. On my phone now and did not research it, as I say vaguely remember. Now we are 37 seconds off. Nobody of us will have to worry that Christmas is around Easter time. We can leave that problem to future generations much more responsibly than many other problems.

That the notice comes every 6 months is just to meet the letter of the original international treaty.

2 comments

No, they haven't done that yet. It's just a proposal, but it's not likely to be formally stopped until 2035.

The reason we've stopped having leap seconds is because the drift between TAI and UT1 slowed down and has actually been very slowly drifting in the other direction.

The fact that it’s only 6 months seems insane to me and probably the cause of the problem, if time was +- 60 seconds nobody would notice, so a more manageable solution would be to implement an arbitrary leap about once a decade, with a decades notice so everyone can sort their systems with plenty of notice. 6 months for a world wide coordinated execution is laughably optimistic.