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Scientists just voted to redefine how the world keeps time
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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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.