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Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

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Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#221
post #217
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite prompt: asking "How many e's are there in the word egregious". Always says three (ChatGPT 3.5, 4, 4 turbo). When you ask it which three, it realizes its mistake and apologizes (or sometimes tells you where they are that is completely wrong). Looks like it just outputs gibberish for these things.

It’s always gibberish, it’s just really good at guessing. I forgot what exactly it was I was doing. We were trying to get it to generate word lists of words ending with x or maybe it was starting with. For a marketing PoC and it made up oceans of words that not only didn’t start/end with x but mostly didn’t include x at all. Isn’t this also why it can pass CS exams and job interviews better than like 95% of us, but t…

But also it doesn't see characters. It sees tokens. The only way it would be reliably able to solve it is if it had a lookup table of token to characters. Which it likely doesn't.

You couldn't do it either unless you learned the exact matchings of all tokens to all characters in that token and their positions if you were given tokens as an input. You would have learned the meaning of the token, but not what the exact characters it represents.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#223
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, both ChatGPT-4 and Gemini Ultra affirmed that it's a valid date. Gemini reasoned through it and GPT-4 ran python code to make sure 2024 was divisible by 4.

Interesting... But that isn't exactly true! Centuries that are not divisible by 4 don't count!

I've yet to come across a form of 100 that isn't divisible by 4... since 25 usually still exists!

But I do remember there being some weird niche rules about which years are or aren't leap years, so I'm guessing your comment is basically right just wrongly worded?

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#225
post #103

We have a product that uses ChatGPT via the API, using the 3.5 turbo version. Our query involves some dates. Instead of giving back text like it usually does, today it has been giving errors because it does not think 2024-02-29 is a valid date. This is easy to reproduce with the web interface, at least sometimes [0]. It start out by saying it's not a valid date and then as it's explaining why it isn't it realizes its…

ChatGPT thinks today is March 1. Go ahead and ask it what today’s date is.

> No, 2024 is not a leap year. Leap years are years divisible by 4, except for years that are divisible by 100 unless they are also divisible by 400. Therefore, the next leap year will be 2024.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#226
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with my colleagues most recent top model Samsung Galaxy Watch :]

Are they using a third party watch face? My Galaxy Watch 4 has no issues.

I have a custom watch face on my GW4 and it's showing the 29th

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#227
post #15

> A number of New Zealand petrol pumps stopped working on Thursday due to a "leap year glitch" in payment software, fuel stations and the payment service provider said. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/leap-year-glitch-...

I'm sure it's more complicated than "we didn't think about leap years", but it certainly sounds pretty amateurish. Old programmer rant: In my day, we fixed the Y2K bug - we went to the future and back several times a day!

It does sound amateurish eh? I do most of my business logic inside Microsoft SQL Server Stored Procedure, and MS SQL just takes care of date pretty well.

But then, come to think of it, you don't need to use SQL to have good date logic. C# and Java both have excellent date handing libraries. I don't know about C++, but I'd be surprised if there was not a modern date library for C++, so I am of the opinion there should be no excuses for software not to work on the 29th of Feb.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#228

Last night around 8:00 PM I noticed the time on my Linux laptop was wrong. I tried to reset it manually and got a "Cannot set current time" error. Closed the dialog and a minute or two later the time reset to the correct value. I shrugged it off as something random. Then today I get home from work, un-suspend that same laptop and the time and date are both wrong now. It has it as around 10pm last night. Turn off auto…

If you have date/time problems that are unrelated to leap years, there's a 1/~1,461 chance of it happening on a Feb 29th.

Given how many devs/techies/linux users/(and even non-techy users of tech) will encounter random time or date related bugs and problems every year, it would be surprising if there weren't a few people getting that coincidence every time a Feb 29th rolls round (or put another way, it seems likely that there's more than one person in the world having a similar "no idea what caused that" date/time bug every day of the year, including this one). So maybe related, but I wouldn't call it one hell of a coincidence if it's not related.

Re: Ask HN: Did you encounter any leap year bugs today?

#230

One thing I have learned from HN is that datetime issues are hard, prolific, programming language agnostic, and not to trust myself to get the logic right. (The same applies to floats.)

just like you don't roll your own crypto, you don't roll your own date libraries.

Facts!
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