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jorge1209 t1_ix11u1v wrote

Reply to comment by moleware in The leap second’s time is up: world votes to stop pausing clocks by 1r0ut3

I believe Google already ignores them and just amortizes the leap times over a longer period of time in their data centers.

https://developers.google.com/time/smear

Ultimately that should probably be the solution. Core atomic time sources can just lie in a coordinated fashion to amortize an adjustment as needed.

Astronomers (being the smaller community) can then program these adjustments into their time tables.

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EvidenceBasedOnly t1_ix15nv1 wrote

Just use TAI for storage and low level timekeeping and adjust to UTC and then local time at the input/output stage, just like we do already with time zones.

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jorge1209 t1_ix1b29e wrote

In most use cases it is very helpful for there to be exactly 24 * 60 * 60 "seconds" in a day, but it's not all that important that a second be an SI second.

If you insist that a second is a physical second from an atomic time source you will eventually accumulate some noticable difference between the official time and the astronomical time.

The general public can probably accept a much greater deviation in that than the one second that has been the practice for the last few decades, but if the astronomical community thinks it is worth keeping world time in sync with astronomical time then they should bear the brunt of the adjustment.

A single second amortized over a full day is not detectable by commodity time sources. So if you want to make the adjustment do it that way. Lie about how long the seconds are, just make your lie so small that it falls below the natural variation in quartz time sources.

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