Preferences

[flagged]

Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY). Dashes are for weirdos like me, and only for ISO dates, never DD-MM-YYYY.
> Germany uses DD.MM.YY(YY)

And I assume this is the usual one in Europe in general for a human-readable context, like within a sentence. And as you said, dashes only in YYYY-MM-DD which is hopefully used always in any data context.

Never really seen it in several European countries
It's more about the order DD MM YYYY than the separators.
Hard disagree. The separator choice implies different ordering to me and to many others.
I never knew that, actually. I developed a habit of writing my dates with dashes instead of slashes because I thought the latter looked too much like the number 1. Makes me wonder how many people I've confused after they read paperwork I dated. I currently do ISO order with forward-slash as a separator, which might be similarly confusing.
There are systems out there that do YYYY/DD/MM. AFAICT YYYY-DD-MM is only used by evil pranksters, so a date that starts with a 4 digit number and uses dashes is relatively safely assumed as YYYY-MM-DD.
Ok what's 2/8/24 in words?
February 8th, 2024 a.k.a. 2024-02-08 a.k.a. 08.02.2024.
In your country maybe, and it narrows it down to approximately one.
2nd of August, 2024 or Feb 8th, 2024.
two slash eight slash twenty four
The order is common throughout much of the world.

The separators (especially with that order) are not.

Oh my, you needed chatgpt to check that? ;) Btw, it is a kind of useful to have the date ordered in the obvious minor to major way...
Would you write the time as SS:MM:HH?

DD-MM-YYYY isn’t as logical as you think. If it was actually consistent then it would be 82-20-0002. Only ISO 8601 and friends are consistently arranged. Anything else is simply a convention that makes sense to those accustomed to it.

I don't need AI to check this info.

In the same way I don't need a car if I have a horse :)

I could have spent much more time compiling the same information myself.

You're free to keep using horses though.

For this in particular you don't need to spend time on it, it's already been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_countr...
indeed. Thank you for the link kind one
You don't need a car to go to your neighbor.

But it's actually worse than that: while both the car and the horse will correctly move you from A to B, you can't cite an LLM output as a source and can't use it to check something. You can use it as a source of inspiration at best.

Here your LLM output is wrong. Someone from Germany wrote they most commonly use dots, in France we use slashes and I think countries around all do one of the other.

So yes, there's no way around doing it like we always did: find a reputable source to back a statement. And ChatGPT does not do this.

Better use a horse than a roulette.

Roulette? It's often correct enough, if you know how to ask, so more like a superhuman than a roulette.

If ChatGPT behaves like a roulette to you I'll attribute that to operator error.

When evidence is needed, "often correct enough" is not sufficient. You need reliable and correct for sure.

I assume you understand how LLMs work? Probabilistic word generation? That can't possibly be used as a source. It literally works by making up things that look probable. It can be used to find a source, but you still need a source.

The LLM might be correct often enough, but you'll only know the LLM is correct in the case at hand by checking at a source…

> If ChatGPT behaves like a roulette to you I'll attribute that to operator error.

I never used it. I know LLMs can be impressive and useful, but sourcing is not among the use cases. The operator should be operating the right tool for the job in the first place.

Shit I say is hopefully correct often enough, but I still can't use myself as a source.

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal