Can we take a longer hiatus on leap seconds, maybe 79 years or so, and only update once a century? Local apparent noon being off by 30 seconds or so has approximately zero impact on my daily life, but stupid things in datetime libraries do occasionally have impact. If we can’t throw off the oppression of UTC and greet TAI as liberators, at least adjust the clock at regular, very infrequent dates.
Instead of inserting a leap second, can't we standardize leap smearing like Google does? <a href="https://developers.google.com/time/smear" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/time/smear</a>. This will probably also work for negative leaps.
Many computer programs use UTC time (which means you have to deal with leap seconds) when they really should be using TAI (which is based purely on the physical progression of time on the earth's geoid, with no arbitrary input that has to be updated periodically). <a href="https://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html" rel="nofollow">https://cr.yp.to/proto/utctai.html</a><p>Generally, you should only be dealing with UTC for things that have to display/accept a time to/from human users; there's no reason for computers to reason about the interval between events using UTC.
Re: the 'negative second' fears - in usual operation, NTP adjusts your local machine downward all the ... time.<p>There's really nothing to be afraid of; a few services would implement some skew, the rest of us would get NTP updates and life continues.
Just because everyone seems to be complaining about leap seconds: I think they are the right solution for the problem. I do hope we won't need a negative leap second, that would break a lot of code for sure.<p>Time related stuff sure is messy.
> NTP or kernel timekeeping code expects that it will be an appalling shitshow.<p>I’m curious what systems would catastrophically fall apart if time went back one second?
> At the moment the Earth is rotating faster than in recent decades: these shorter days, with a lower length-of-day, means the milliseconds accumulate more slowly, and we get fewer leap seconds.<p>Does anyone know why Earth's rotation has sped up?
We should have two “keep on your toes” leap seconds per year, one +1 and one -1 (can it be done ?) in lieu of daylight savings time or together with it for those that still keep it.