"To authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time" is just the best preamble ever.

What causes the unpredictability in this? I would have guessed we have earth's rotation and orbit down to many decimals. Does geological activity, weather, or something else cause rotation speed differences that we just can't predict?

They should have a global holiday to celebrate the people who maintain time/date related code in OS kernels that keeps the world from imploding.

Hear me out. We can just mount jet engines along the equator and rotate them 180 to gain or lose time. And then connect them to my snooze button.

As one HN comment said years ago: I feel leap seconds have always lived in the wrong abstraction layer.

They should live in the same abstraction layer that does leap days and daylight savings: the time zones.

If the UTC-TAI offset remains at -37s, then it also means the UTC-GPS offset remains at -18s. TAI and GPS have a constant 19s offset from each system.

My longevity will extend one second into the future in nominal terms, increasing the chance to reach the 22nd century a tiny bit.

> The difference between Coordinated Universal Time UTC and the International Atomic Time TAI is :

>

> from 2017 January 1, 0h UTC, until further notice : UTC-TAI = -37s

This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds? I also don’t understand the reference to 2017.

What happens to systems such as Spanner under these circumstances?

Is it a headache or a non-issue

I enjoy how Chrome asks me if I want to auto translate from German to English. Where did it get German from? It's French!

World will end at 26 December so no leap second needed

Does this mean the negative leap second isn't happening anymore?

Cool, I don't have to set my clocks back this December.

The real Time Variance Authority

This announcement is very much a nothing burger; it’s already been more or less decided that adding leap seconds just isn’t going to be a thing anymore (in our lifetime). Here’s on article from 2022: https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/end-of-leap-secon...

Notice they only said leap second.

Meanwhile....

International timekeepers to vote on changing the leap second to a leap hour

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/international-tim... (https://archive.ph/GnQUj https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842329)