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

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331–340 of 498 posts

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

#331

All street lamps in Paris turned off at midnight :) https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-pourquoi-les-rues-d...

The street lights use some sort of timer that's tracking dates? Don't they typically just use light sensors to know when to turn on? It seems to me that'd be a simpler solution and also provide light during solar eclipses, thick storms, etc.

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

#332

Why this is not a global holiday? Let's all come together and agree to do nothing on this bonus day. Calendar Problems solved.

We should get it off work. We aren't getting paid for the extra day of work right?

Exactly. Off the books for everyone.

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

#333
post #193

Yes, an amusing one: the Android app for the Berlin public transport, on the 29th, listed the results with the date of the previous day (28th). The funny thing is that the list is prefaced by a banner saying that this is a known bug, and the results actually refer to the 29th. Interesting way to workaround a bug :)

I think this is it here, yes? https://twitter.com/abhyudaypratap_/status/17632771389442543...

Yes :)

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

#334
post #307
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to know that a word is made up of the individual character tokens A token is the smallest unit, it's not made of further tokens. It maps to a number.

He's saying the LLM will figure out how many letters are in each token.

It's as feasible as telling how many chars in html lead to this comment by looking at a screenshot. LLM doesn't see characters, tokens, numbers or its own activations. LLM is a "set of rules" component in a chinese room scenario. Anything an operator of that room does is lower-level.

GGP's idea suggests that an LLM, allegedly as a whole-room, receives something like: "hey, look at these tokens: , please infer the continuation". This puts it into a nested-room's-operator position, which (1) it is not, (2) there's no nested room.

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

#335
post #307
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to know that a word is made up of the individual character tokens A token is the smallest unit, it's not made of further tokens. It maps to a number.

He's saying the LLM will figure out how many letters are in each token.

They cannot “figure” it, they could learn it but for that it would need to be in it's training data (which isn't because nobody is writing down the actual pairing in every byte pair encoding in plain text. Also the LLM has no clue about what encoding it uses unless you tell it somehow in the fine-tuning process or the prompt.)

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

#337

All street lamps in Paris turned off at midnight :) https://www.leparisien.fr/paris-75/paris-pourquoi-les-rues-d...

Oh! The street lamps on my campus didn't come on tonight when it got dark—it didn't occur to me then but this could totally be why.

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

#339
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…

Blows my mind that people consider using ChatGPT for serious applications. I mean it's fine as a code autocorrect/autocomplete tool as in GitHub copilot. But it should not replace the code itself. You encounter a bug in the code, you fix it, you never encounter it again. But ChatGPT will repeat the same mistake sooner or later. That's not how we should engineer solution for critical problems.

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

#340
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're begging the question. [1]

"Feb 29 + 1 year" is verbatim restatement.

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You can say Feb 29 + 365 days = Feb 28. (And Feb 29 + 730 days = Feb 27.)

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EDIT:

Note that in the context of birthdays, people use "calendar years," not "unit of time which is ~1 revolution around the sun."

Birthdays aren't celebrated every X million seconds after the moment of birth.

They are celebrated the same day each calendar year -- notwithstanding the fuzzy concept of "same day" for incongruent calendar years. There's no singuar right answer, but that is the core question: "what is the same day next (calendar) year?"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

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