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Representative Line: In the Zone

The Daily WTF
3 days 10 hours ago

Robert R picked up a bug in his company's event scheduling app. Sometimes, events were getting reported a day off from when they actually were.

It didn't take too long to find the culprit, and as is so often the case, the culprit was handling dates with strings.

const dateAsString = event.toISOString().substr(0,10); return new Date(dateAsString);

toISOString returns a "simplified" ISO8601 string, which looks like this: YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:ss.sssZ. The substr pops off the first ten characters, giving you YYYY-MM-DD.

The goal, as you can likely gather, is to truncate to just the date part of a date-time. And given that JavaScript doesn't have a convenient method to do that, it doesn't seem like a terrible way to solve that problem, if you don't think about what date-times contain too hard.

But there's an obvious issue here. toISOString always converts the date to UTC, converting from your local timezone to UTC. Which means when you pick off just the date portion of that, you may be off by an entire day, depending on the event's scheduled time and your local timezone.

This code doesn't simply truncate- it discards timezone information. But for an event scheduler used across the world, tracking timezones is important. You can't just throw that information away.

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Remy Porter

Developer made one wrong click and sent his AWS bill into the stratosphere

The Register
3 days 10 hours ago
Yes, he knows the 40x increase could have been avoided with some pretty simple automation

Who, Me?  Welcome to another week of work, a moment The Register celebrates with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you 'fess up to follies, false moves, and faux pas – and explain how you escaped.…

Simon Sharwood

More Tech Moguls Want to Build Data Centers in Outer Space

Slashdot
3 days 11 hours ago
"To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don't make sense," writes the Wall Street Journal. "But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration." "Space enthusiasts (comme moi) have long sought a business case to enable human migration beyond our home world," he posted on X amid the new hype. "I think AI servers in space is the first real business case that will lead to many more...." The argument essentially boils down to the belief that AI's needs are eventually going to grow so great that we need to move to outer space. There the sun's power can be more efficiently harvested. In space, the sun's rays can be direct and constant for solar panels to collect — no clouds, no rainstorms, no nighttime. Demands for cooling could also be cut because of the vacuum of space. Plus, there aren't those pesky regulations that executives like to complain about, slowing construction of new power plants to meet the data-center needs. In space, no one can hear the Nimbys scream. "We will be able to beat the cost of terrestrial data centers in space in the next couple of decades," Bezos said at a tech conference last month. "Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better." It's still early days. At Alphabet, Google's plans sound almost conservative. The search-engine company in recent days announced Project Suncatcher, which it describes as a moonshot project to scale machine learning in space. It plans to launch two prototype satellites by early 2027 to test its hardware in orbit. "Like any moonshot, it's going to require us to solve a lot of complex engineering challenges," Pichai posted on social media. Nvidia, too, has announced a partnership with startup Starcloud to work on space-based data centers. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has been painting his own updated vision for the heavens... in recent weeks he has been talking more about how he can use his spaceships to deploy new versions of his solar-powered Starlink satellites equipped with high-speed lasers to build out in-space data centers. On Friday, Musk further reiterated how those AI satellites would be able to generate 100 gigawatts of annual solar power — or, what he said, would be roughly a quarter of what the U.S. consumes on average in a year. "We have a plan mapped out to do it," he told investor Ron Baron during an event. "It gets crazy." Previously, he has suggested he was four to five years away from that ability. He's also touted even wilder ideas, saying on X that 100 terawatts a year "is possible from a lunar base producing solar-powered AI satellites locally and accelerating them to escape velocity with a mass driver." Simply put, he's suggesting a moon base will crank out satellites and throw them into orbit with a catapult. And those satellites' solar panels would generate 100,000 gigawatts a year. "I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where...most of the power of the sun is harnessed for compute," Musk told a tech conference in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

EditorDavid