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Yeah, I think labelling it "error" is a bit of a strange way to look at it to be honest.

It's only error if you're trying to measure time in seconds, but are doing it with a clock that can only measure hours and minutes. If you want to know the current minute, then a clock that can measure minutes it is 100% correct.

It's an interesting thought experiment, but really all it's saying is that half of the time 10:00 is closer to 10:01:00 than 10:00:00, but this imply you care about measuring time to the second which prompts the question why it's being measured in minutes?

To be charitable, I suppose in the real world we might occasionally care about how close 10:00 is to 10:01 in seconds, but the time shown on phones can't tell us that so on average we will be about 30 seconds out.



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