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That really is the motherload of technical debt.

This discussion really is highlining the cultural differences between software engineers and other engineering fields.

Not really. Adding leap seconds at the end of years is inferior because a year is a human-scale duration.

Planning something “next year” is human-scale. Planning something “next century” is not human-scale because I won’t be alive then.

If we use leap minutes then most people will not see one in their lifetime, compared to everyone seeing multiple leap seconds in their lifetime.

But when that leap minute does eventually occur, it's going to cause havoc in all the systems that don't handle it. Which, let's face it, there are going to be a lot of. Either because they were never designed for it or else the relevant code paths were never actually tested.

You could broadcast a leap minute with a decade to prepare for it and most software would still be developed, used, and die off in the 90 years in between. It's better for 15% of relevant software to have to worry about something so consequentially minor than 100%.

That didn't work so well for y2k issues. Just this month there was an article about a woman that keeps getting id'ed as being 1 year old instead of 101 years old because of a y2k fix.

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