this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Scientists just voted to redefine how the world keeps time (www.scientificamerican.com)
submitted 1 week ago by ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Today an international group of scientists, diplomats, and timekeepers voted to end the leap second, which has been keeping Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) aligned with the time according to Earth’s rotation (UT1) within one second of difference.

A new system, called the “leap hour,” will allow the Earth’s rotation and official time to fall out of alignment by a full hour

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[–] joey_builds@eviltoast.org 1 points 1 week ago

Every dev who has debugged a timestamp bug at 2am is quietly celebrating this. The amount of engineering hours burned on leap second handling in NTP, databases, and distributed systems is staggering, and the 'smearing' workarounds were never pretty. I remember reading that a big chunk of notable service outages over the years lined up with leap second insertions, which is exactly the kind of correlation you never want your infrastructure to have with an astronomy committee's decision. Trading that pain for a drift that only matters centuries out is a genuinely good deal.