That’s all it is, they ran into an engineering problem and they’re trying to get the world to bend to their will instead of solving the problem because they think it will be easier. Mark’s arrogance is nauseating.
Right back atcha.
We have three alternative time systems and a big bag of issues with each of them, but you think the extremely mundane argument that we should prefer one bag represents nauseating arrogance because you think that your favorite bag -- a different one -- is obviously correct? Come on. Do better. Be civil.
That is effectively proposing the deletion of the most commonly used time system of the three primary time systems from existence and forcing everybody and all existing systems that use it to convert to what is effectively TAI.
That is not mundane. Mundane is arguing that everybody should use TAI. Arrogant is arguing that we should force everyone to do it by redefining their dependencies under them.
Arrogant is imposing a big nuisance on everyone every year or two. It is not arrogant to ask for a nuisance affecting millions to be dropped.
If there was a scheme that fixed only the wrong usages, that would be fine. But, it is frankly absurd that we should even consider breaking carefully designed programs correctly using their dependencies to fix programs incorrectly using their dependencies especially when it is trivial for the wrong usages to be fixed manually.
Not announcing any more leap seconds will break exactly nothing.
People using the wrong dependency should fix their system to use the right dependency. They should not campaign to steal the name and replace it, that is absurd.
The only people who care or need to do not use UTC. They use TAI, and a separate continuous log of fractional seconds.
UTC has one role, and that is Standard worldwide civil time. Telling people who need Standard civil time to use TAI makes everything strictly worse: not only do you then not match most of the world, but you still have to track irregular, unpredictable corrections to be able to sync with everybody else.
That is what is proposed to be fixed and that you are arguing against for reasons you don't know or, apparently, care about.
Switching civil time to TAI would break everything, most of which cannot be fixed. Random breakage is the problem. More breakage would be strictly worse.
That's just... completely incorrect and totally false? Have you ever even worked for a business? Have you ever read how time libraries are actually written?
Please, go read the Python `datetime` library: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0fe645d6fd22a6f57e777... which is used to calculate a UTC timestamp: https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/0fe645d6fd22a6f57e777...
It is literally built on the exact assumption that 0 means January 1, 1970 and that right now is (number of seconds in a day) x (number of days since Jan 1 1970). If we stop adjusting UTC, then by this time next year UTC will be one second out of date with our wall-clock times, and calling `datetime.now().isoformat()` will give us a timestamp that's 1 second off from the wall-time of a user. At one-second past midnight on the 20th of the month, your computer will incorrectly be spitting out timestamps saying it's exactly midnight of the 19th. That's what you might call a major breaking change.
Big Tech companies/Anti Big Tech lobbyists massively oversimplify in their pitch to influential people to deregulate/overregulate certain areas. In both cases they end up making poor decisions for the general case both end up making the average case worse for everyone except themselves. It's about creating a market where none need exist. Facebook doesn't need to care about time really. It's not remotely important to their business.
I've built and worked on platforms with sub microsecond measuring requirements and this stuff didn't bother me. This is idle bad money finding work for itself at the expense of everyone else.
Disclosure: I am/was an early investor in facebook in 2012. Mark is turning it all to dirt because he's run out of ideas