You're Wrong About Dates – and Your Code Is Lying to You

The AI-specific use of em dash with the list of three near-synonyms following, the "it's not just this", the "it's a fundamental shift". This article seems AI-generated or at the very least AI-massaged.

Once you suspect AI has been used to write something, you're not sure if the 'author' has bothered to double-check the article for veracity, or if you're going to be doing this work for them.

It's terrible.

> The truth: your current date system isn’t just awkward — it’s wrong. We fixed it. And if that feels unsettling… maybe it’s time your code grew up.

Whoever wrote this (whether carbon or silicon; I lean toward the latter) ... should find another line of work.

Even the example used on the blog post is wrong (in my timezone)...

Start = date(2020-02-23) End = date(2020-04-05)

Duration = End - Start // 42 days Duration as hours // 1008 hours

2020-03-29 was the start of Summer Time, so only 23 hours long. So the duration in question should be 1007 hours.

Having a span of time using days as the only unit is fine. But there no way to convert that into a different time unit without knowing which specific days we mean.

What happens if the duration concerns something that physically moves? Was the software running on a ship that travelled from Europe to Australia between February and April?

Honestly, gushing about how dumb everyone else is, without mentioning even basic wrinkles like this just screams Dunning Kruger.

It’s this. The current crop of LLMs have latched onto a small number of mannerisms that they constantly overuse, along with a weird TEDx voice and belief that everything is game-changing. It wasn’t so bad until recently, but it’s gotten so much worse lately – the overuse of these things would practically be a verbal tic if a human used them so often.

It’s incredibly tiring to read, especially as it uses so many words to say so little. Take this for instance:

> it’s a fundamental shift in how your software thinks.

This is pure, unmitigated horseshit. We’re talking about date representation not a major paradigm shift. But LLMs spit out this crap all the time. It’s not saying anything, it’s just putting one word in front of another.

The human who publishes this should be reviewing it to catch it when it goes off the rails like this, but it seems like it was published with no human oversight at all, or at least none that is able to catch it talking nonsense.