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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?

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

As the proud new owner of a leap day baby, I find this to be extra hilarious

Congratulations!

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

#264
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.

openai actually in their platform for billing, etc shows that its actually march 1 as well.

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

#265
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do leap day birthdays get handled in general? How is the right age iterated every year?

Sadly, I can say from experience the American draft does not count the number of birthdays celebrated to figure out if you're eligible to serve.

You got drafted when you were five?

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

#267
It's scary how much code out there is less than 4 years old, and even scarier how much of it is because someone decided to somehow rewrite it unnecessarily and thus introduce this bug. I don't even want to know how many people think the code they wrote will be in use for more than 4 years.

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

#268
post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do leap day birthdays get handled in general? How is the right age iterated every year?

Both Feb 28 and Mar 1 are commonly used to celebrate birthdays. AFAIK there is no firm convention. Feb is more natural ("My birthday is in February"), Mar is more logical (the 60th days of the year).

Is March more logical? Feb 29 + 1 year = Feb 28.

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

#269
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.

As of 10 PM US/Eastern, ChatGPT 3.5 answers as follows for me:

> You: what is today's date?

> ChatGPT: Today's date is February 29, 2024. Please note that February 29 occurs only in leap years. If you have any more questions or if there's anything else I can help you with, feel free to ask!

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

#270
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.

ChatGPT is specifically bad at these kinds of tasks because of tokenization. If you plug your query into https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer , you can see that"egregious" is a single token, so the LLM doesn't actually see any "e" characters -- to answer your question it would have had to learn a fact about how the word was spelled from it's training data, and I imagine texts explicitly talking about how words are s…

> If you plug your query into https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer, you can see that"egregious" is a single token

That says it's 3 tokens.

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