Why can't large tech companies that need synchronization similarly switch to an alternative time without leap seconds?
Already decades ago many have proposed to use only TAI internally in computers, instead of UTC, which is not a time.
UTC should have always been used only to compute the local times, together with the time zones, only for human interfaces.
There have been for decades libraries for using TAI instead of UTC, and even versions of Linux or *BSD kernels patched to do time keeping in TAI, not in UTC, eliminating all problems with the leap seconds.
Unfortunately the use of TAI has remained a niche, but that was the right solution.
Time may change forwards and backwards, because my computer clock may be fast or slow. The same logic to correct for leap seconds, can be used if my computer is 2 sec fast.
And your code had better handle it, and the os, libraries, it really is only hard ), if you have to support 1000s of novice devs.
Honestly, this issue screams education problem. "Time is a mess" should be taught alongside buffer overflow attacks and networking theory (in fact, networking theory is a great place to teach "time is a mess," because you can roll it in alongside ideas like "simultaneous action is a lie" and "clocks are always wrong anyway").
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/leap/
Time in the real world can use leap hours, the next of which will be in approximately 3000 years.
This is all quite hypothetical as it’s hard to predict whether anything like our current technological civilization will exist thousands of years from now, but even if it does, a simple mechanism exists to avoid problems (just have each jurisdiction change their local time when they decide they want to).
I can’t see any downsides for literally anyone from this proposal, other than the insignificant downside to the British that they will lose the prestige of being the place that global standard time is based on.
> lose the prestige of being the place that global standard time is based on.
You joke, but that's actually a source of some of the opposition. :(
It infuriates me that the BBC World Service insists on announcing the time as "<something> GMT", pronounced in a smug tone of voice. The GMT timescale no longer exists; nobody broadcasts it. What the announcers are broadcasting is the BBC's ignorance. I find it embarrassing and jingoistic.
They've also adopted an idiosyncratic way of pronouncing the time itself: "The time is Four, GMT". Everyone else says "Four O'clock", or "four hundred hours" or "four AM". The Beeb are almost completely immune to complaints; they've outsourced their complaints department, and the contractor's brief is to make sure no complaints reach programme makers.