Not to mention the whole self-driving car thing is much less further along than the big money grifters would have you believe.
AI simply isn’t that good without constraints. Yay, it can follow a highway line and use GPS. But can it navigate a (barely) single-lane badly edged rural road under thick forest canopy on a steep incline full of switchbacks? Or a huge intersection under construction with lines painted over lines and maybe a sign or something to indicate where you should be driving? Or a renaissance festival they have near where I live where the parking is all in a giant field with no roads and a couple guys waving sticks to direct parking? Or…the list goes on and on.
Yeah, a really good example of how US-centric the web unfortunately is and how it goes way deeper than this when you look at the huge list of falsehoods programmers assume because they are overwhelmingly white, male and English speaking.
As a programmer, there are lots of things programmers mistakenly assume because they are white, male, and English speaking, but time is one of those things everyone gets wrong.
Well it’s not meant to be a gotcha, at least i’m not intending it to be, like - “Ha! Check your white male privilege!” I’m sure many male programmers would react very negatively to lists like this when we should be working to make the tech sector as culturally broad as possible.
Never roll your own date classes, kids. Even the pros get it wrong. And don’t try to get clever with your date handling either; always use the date class’s built-in methods for handling any kind of change. At least that way you’re less likely to goof something up.
(Note: this advice still applies to JavaScript, even though its Date object is a complete disaster. Who on Earth zero-indexes the month?!)
I still remember the big Azure outage I think it was in 2012, when Microsoft screwed up a date calculation because of leap year: Just add one year to any date to get a date one year in the future, right?!
On February 29th, this caused their infrastructure to issue invalid certs to VMs which then propagated because those VMs became unusable, so more VM’s were brought online and given the same faulty certs. DOH!
I have scripted a Twitter bot pulling data from the Esri web server hosting data from the RKI to create some Covid-19 graphs. It usually breaks every second week when someone messes with the date column.
That would be a good test if someone is human. Just give them something to break. No proper machine will make the fucking same error over and over and over and over and over again.
I think so, at least.
Also, what the hell did this discussion on the General Moderation Topics topic morph to? This must also bean example of human…
…
…
ingenuity, I guess.
Or was it attention span?
Dealing with time is an incredibly complicated situation, though I’d disagree that it’s about gringos (full disclosure: I’m a gringo). On the other hand, the handling of names very much is a place where too many programmers think that all names work like they do in American English - never mind that even in American English there can be wide varieties (two, three, or four names and/or hyphenation, for instance).
Of course, for decades, technology was a problem, particularly character sets. Unicode and UTF-8 are a whole lot nicer than seven-bit ASCII, the umpteen national ASCII variants, and a zillion proprietary extended ASCII versions we had before then. (ETA: to say nothing of non-Latin scripts!)
