cocalc VS awesome-falsehood

I have some unit tests for billing and subscription code for my company that started breaking in CI today due to the leap day: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/commit/8575029c2b76787...

1. I'm integrating ChatGPT extensively into https://CoCalc.com. This integration makes a lot of sense, because cocalc is a platform in which relatively inexperienced students use Jupyter notebooks, linux terminals and Latex. So far, the most popular feature by far is a "Help me fix this" button that appears above stacktraces in Jupyter notebooks.

2. One software engineering challenges is that ChatGPT often outputs code in markdown blocks. I've had to emphasize in prompts that it should explicitly mark the language. I then got inspired to make it possible to evaluate in place the code that appears in these blocks using a Jupyter kernel, and spent a week making that work (so, e.g., if you type a question into the chatgpt box on the landing page at https://cocalc.com, and code appears in the output, often you can just evaluate it right there). There seem to be endless surprises and challenges though. For example, a few minutes ago I realized that sometimes the giant tracebacks one gets when using Python in Jupyter notebooks are so big (even doing simple things with matplotlib) that they end up resulting in too much truncation: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/issues/6634

3. I'm mostly using GPT-3.5-turbo rather than GPT4, even though I have a GPT4 api key. Aside from costs, GPT4 takes about 4x as long, which often just feels too long for my use case. The average time for a complete response from GPT-3.5 for my application is about 8 seconds, versus over 30s for GPT4.

Github's implementation is really lazy. There are many much better approaches to precisely this problem. E.g., Jupyter notebooks implement one that has matured in the wild over a decade. There's this very flexible markdown-it plugin that implements anther https://github.com/goessner/markdown-it-texmath, and my version of it here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/blob/master/src/packag... which I rewrote in typescript with a focus on the same semantics as Jupyter has, but for CoCalc, and I've been working on using unifiedjs to provide more general latex for Markdown (not just formulas) here https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc/pull/5982 Parsing math is much easier if you use a plugin to an existing markdown parser, rather than trying to do some hack outside of that (which is what Github probably does, and also what Jupyter does).

Billing. It always has to be the billing. For a list of all other edge cases, you have: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#readme

Falsehoods Programmers Believe in: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Also, a list of other falsehood-programmers-believe collections: awesome-falsehood.

> I feel like there's a "Fallacies programmers believe about text" that should exist somewhere

I got you covered.

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#international...

http://garbled.benhamill.com/2017/04/18/falsehoods-programme...

https://jeremyhussell.blogspot.com/2017/11/falsehoods-progra...

https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/archives/30296

There's an excellent GitHub repo that lists a lot of common falsehoods regarding names. I'm not sure how useful it'll be to OP, but the repo in general should probably have way more attention than it already does.

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#human-identit...

A decent list for this about prices and currency https://gist.github.com/rgs/6509585 and the full list of other falsehoods https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

If you're interested in this sort of thing there's a whole bunch more: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

It's saddening to see the number of people who critique the idea of storing time as an unsigned integer by immediately responding that that means that times before 1970 cannot exist. This bespeaks of a continuing poor knowledge of the subject, despite all of the "falsehoods that programmers believe about" documentation that has grown up.

* https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#dates-and-tim...

Microsoft, for one example, has been modelling times as a 64-bit unsigned 100-nanosecond count since 1601 (proleptic-Gregorian proleptic-UTC) for about 30 years, now.

* https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/minwinba...

Daniel J. Bernstein in the late 1990s chose a 0 point for an unsigned count so far back that it pre-dates most estimates of the point of the Big Bang.

* http://cr.yp.to/libtai/tai64.html

1970 is not the mandatory origin for every timescale. (Indeed, in the early years of Unix itself there wasn't even a stable origin for time.) It is not a valid reason for dismissing the idea of storing time as an unsigned integer.

It's also sad to note that the headlined page's first sentence has one of the very falsehoods that programmers believe about time in it.