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Time’s up for the leap second as scientists swap it for the leap hour
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Kwerl lemmy.zip lavenie@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2026-09-28
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57   Original
otp sh.itjust.works otp@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2023-11-06
#2 · Quote Reply

This was a vote to basically say "the future will deal with it".

An hour is a long time! This means that, in an area that observes DST, they could be off by 2 hours. Not to mention China's one timezone situation.

I feel like a leap minute would've been more reasonable to deal with. Unless they're just betting on humans not needing computers (or, uh...time tracking) by the time a leap hour would be relevant

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🌸𝓯𝓵𝓸𝔀𝓮𝓻🌸 sh.itjust.works Flower@sh.itjust.works
Joined: 2026-04-29
#3 · Quote Reply

This was a vote to basically say "the future will deal with it". An hour is a long time! This means that, in an area that observes DST, they could be off by 2 hours. Not to mention China's one timezone situation. I feel like a leap minute would've been more reasonable to deal with. Unless they're just betting on humans not needing computers (or, uh...time tracking) by the time a leap hour would...

3 hours. Some places are in the wrong timezone for economic reasons. Lot's of western european countries should be in GMT according to longitude.

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Kirp123 lemmy.world Kirp123@lemmy.world
Joined: 2025-02-06
#4 · Quote Reply

3 hours. Some places are in the wrong timezone for economic reasons. Lot's of western european countries should be in GMT according to longitude.

Spain is in CET even though most of the country is at the same longitude as the UK. Time zones have been turned into a political concept more than a purely geographic one.

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Windex007 lemmy.world Windex007@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-07-02
#5 · Quote Reply

I know this is intended to help, but as a software Dev who does work where absolute time between two arbitrary clock times does need to resolve to the second... This is that xkcd comic about a 14th standard.

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NeatNit discuss.tchncs.de NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined: 2024-01-05
#6 · Quote Reply

"We already have daylight saving where we change by an hour and no one gets bothered about that,"

What the fuck. EVERYONE gets bothered about that!

I can actually get behind this leap hour idea, but holy crap that is a bad way to present it

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NeatNit discuss.tchncs.de NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined: 2024-01-05
#7 · Quote Reply

This was a vote to basically say "the future will deal with it". An hour is a long time! This means that, in an area that observes DST, they could be off by 2 hours. Not to mention China's one timezone situation. I feel like a leap minute would've been more reasonable to deal with. Unless they're just betting on humans not needing computers (or, uh...time tracking) by the time a leap hour would...

I agree about leap minute, I really don't see why they leaped (ha) straight to an hour.

Well, I kinda do - working with whole-hour offsets is kind of a solved issue (timezones, DST) whereas there isn't really a solution for a minute. The clever people at Google (IIRC) came up with the "smear second" as a pretty elegant way to implement a leap second, but the same approach wouldn't scale all that well to a full minute. You'd have to smear it over 2 months or something.

But if the time does come to implement a leap hour, that's going to be just as hard to deal with! You basically have to redefine UTC to be what was previously UTC+1:00, and then what? Computers can't deal with that any more than that can deal with 61 seconds in a minute.

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Tanoh lemmy.world Tanoh@lemmy.world
Joined: 2023-06-24
#8 · Quote Reply

I agree about leap minute, I really don't see why they leaped (ha) straight to an hour. Well, I kinda do - working with whole-hour offsets is kind of a solved issue (timezones, DST) whereas there isn't really a solution for a minute. The clever people at Google (IIRC) came up with the "smear second" as a pretty elegant way to implement a leap second, but the same approach wouldn't scale all tha...

There are already timezones with 15 min offsets. 15, 30, 45. India standard time for example is +5:30 from GMT.

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