Grok Code Fast 1

I know this sounds like a nitpick, but the first thing I noticed when opening the site is the use of gibberish date order where the day, month, and year parts are out of order.[1]

This doesn't just cause confusion, it's also hard to sort. To confirm my suspicion of sloppy coding, I tried to sort the date column and to my surprise I got this madness:

    1/31/2025
    2/29/2024
    2/29/2024
    4/28/2024
    3/27/2024
    9/27/2023

Which is sorting by the day column -- the bit in the middle -- instead of the year!

That's just... special.

[1] I hear some incredibly backwards places like Liberia that also haven't adopted metric insist on using it into the present day, but the rest of the civilised world has moved on.

not sure if the comment about liberia is tongue in cheek but this is by far the most common way of writing dates in the US

Yes, of course this is tongue in cheek, but it’s the “ha-ha… but serious” type of humour.

Just look at this map: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_date_formats_by_coun...

You’re almost entirely alone in these backwards practices!

Well, not entirely alone, you also have Liberia following your “standards”! There’s two of you! Must be nice.

PS: If Trump actually wanted to make US exports competitive on the world market, step one would be to adopt world standards like metric.

at least we are not on of those poor countries that uses both MDY and DMY

Everytime Liberia is mentioned, I think of two things:

1. That Mickael Jackson song

2. The time that a US president asked the president of Liberia "where he learned English" because he spoke English so well

And now I'll add to my list a third item:

3. Being one of an elite set of countries to use freedom units

Liberia using freedom units is not at all a coincidence. Liberia was essentially a US colony where the colonialists were freed US slaves.

From Wikipedia:

> Liberia began in the early 19th century as a project of the American Colonization Society, which believed that black people would face better chances for freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. Between 1822 and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, more than 15,000 freed and free-born African Americans, along with 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans, relocated to Liberia. Gradually developing an Americo-Liberian identity, the settlers carried their culture and tradition with them while colonizing the indigenous population. Led by the Americo-Liberians, Liberia declared independence on July 26, 1847, which the U.S. did not recognize until February 5, 1862.

The name Libera also comes from "liber" which means freedom.

So it makes sense they would be using freedom units and freedom ways of writing dates; it's in the name.

Yes, the sorting is wrong. That's a good point.

I'm not sure why you're particularly picking on MM/DD/YYYY, saying things like "backwards places". DD/MM/YYYY doesn't sort any better. YYYY-MM-DD is the only one that sorts well. (Some people promote YYYYY-MM-DD though, which I guess is more future proof.)

You are on a site hosted in that backwards country, funded by people from that backwards country, using technology initially developed by that backwards country, on a thread about new SOTA technology originating from that backwards country, almost certainly using software and hardware from that backwards country to spout offensive things about that backwards country.

Maybe the US isn't as backwards as you might believe, or maybe Airbus is a backwards company for using feet and knots? Perhaps different measurement systems have their virtues (give me an exact integer representation of 1/3 of a meter. For a foot it is 4 inches. For a yard it is 1 foot or 12 inches.)

For the record, the US made the metric system the preferred system of measurement 50 years ago. So you are also uninformed in your attempted insult about US exports (1975, Metric Conversion Act). Americans also learn about the metric system in school, and are more than capable of using it when it matters (the American weapons that Europe and Ukraine seem so fond of use the metric system).

I don't live in the US, but I have lived there in the past, and making sweeping insults about 400 million people is something I learned not to do.

It’s hard to explain in words just how frustrating this M/D/Y madness is to everyone else in the world. There is just no sane way to tell what a date is referring to if it has numbers less than 13 for the day part. It becomes a wild guess.

> Some people promote YYYYY-MM-DD though, which I guess is more future proof

It’s the only unambiguous, sortable, sane format and the use of anything else should be deprecated on the web.

>It’s hard to explain in words just how frustrating this M/D/Y madness is to everyone else in the world. There is just no sane way to tell what a date is referring to if it has numbers less than 13 for the day part. It becomes a wild guess.

Those criticism apply to both MM/DD/YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY. (MM/DD/YY and DD/MM/YY are even worse.)

>> Some people promote YYYYY-MM-DD though, which I guess is more future proof

>It’s the only unambiguous, sortable, sane format and the use of anything else should be deprecated on the web.

Are you talking about YYYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-MM-DD? They're both unambiguous and sortable. (Not sortable with the other one though.)