this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
1093 points (97.0% liked)

Comic Strips

16475 readers
3020 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

Web of links

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 days ago

Simplicity and precision.

Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.

Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.

It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.