[HN Gopher] Including "And. And. And. And. And." in a Google doc...
___________________________________________________________________
Including "And. And. And. And. And." in a Google doc causes it to
crash
Author : patneedham
Score : 549 points
Date : 2022-05-05 20:25 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (support.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (support.google.com)
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| Perfect prank document to send to the team. I'm just hoping it
| holds up until the morning so everyone can join the fun and not
| just those of us with bad work time habits.
| loxias wrote:
| I _LOVE_ stuff like this. Reminds me of "OpenOffice does not
| print on Tuesdays"
| https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html
| jrd79 wrote:
| That is an amazing bug.
| vldx wrote:
| I'm very curious what may be the root cause of this.
| baisq wrote:
| Probably something to do with the grammar check (blue
| squiggly line)
| the_biot wrote:
| My guess is on an easter egg gone wrong.
| [deleted]
| t_mann wrote:
| My money is on some conflicting rules in grammar / style
| checks.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| I can't get the bug to reproduce. But maybe someone else could
| try
|
| Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words
| Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have
| been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and
| between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and
| and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after
| Chips?
| mike_d wrote:
| "And." x 5+, case sensitive, new line at the end. Hit refresh
| in your browser and it will throw an error.
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| Replicated on my end on OSX & firefox
| oliwary wrote:
| Replicated on Windows 10 and Chrome too!
| pinewurst wrote:
| OSX and Safari replicated
| [deleted]
| AlexMuir wrote:
| Took me right back one of many detentions I served at school,
| when Mr B Swales set us the challenge of finding a grammatically
| correct English sentence with five ands in a row.
|
| The answer was as follows:
|
| The landlord of the "Dog and Partridge" pub commissioned a
| signwriter to letter a new board outside. On looking at the work,
| the landlord declared that he liked the colour but would prefer
| more spacing between Dog and and, and and and Partridge.
| onionisafruit wrote:
| Why did that lead to detention?
| coreyp_1 wrote:
| I heard it with "Fish and Chips".
| Affric wrote:
| Curiously, if someone wanted to put that on a sign suddenly you
| can take the story to as many "and"s as one might want...
|
| So, the the trick is using it as a conjunction and a noun.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| Here's 21 in a row, by Martin Gardner:
|
| Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words
| Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have
| been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish,
| and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and
| and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as
| after Chips?
| blueberrychpstx wrote:
| When I come across posts like these, I just wonder, "How in the
| world did the user discover this in the first place?!"
|
| Let's place bets:
|
| A) The user just let autocomplete "take it away" (not sure about
| this one since they were able to access the console)
|
| B) Pen Testing?
|
| C) Error copy and pasting?
|
| D) Actual dialog in a sci-fi post-apocalyptic love story where a
| robot discovers the Turing test and attempts to set itself into
| an infinite loop.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| This is just a transcript of a stutter. Too much for modern
| technology to handle. :)
| a-dub wrote:
| E) fidgeting/futzing with stuff mindlessly while in
| conversation/doing something else
|
| personally, i've happened across some pretty serious security
| bugs this way.
| dkarl wrote:
| I've heard people say it, speaking like this: "This would be a
| great solution to the problem, except that it would break the
| admin dashboard. And billing. And SSO. And partner test
| environments. And. And. And. And. And. This would break so many
| things I'm sure I could only name half of them if I tried."
| rhizome wrote:
| Yep. I've written that formulation many many times.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Agreed--it seems likely that the user was writing dialogue,
| taking minutes, or something similar.
|
| Skilled speakers frequently use repetitions of a word (like
| 'and') as an interjection[0]. It's a handy way of giving
| yourself a second to think without saying 'uhh' or 'umm'
| (which, for whatever reason, are considered 'bad'
| interjections), and seems to be a kind of defense against
| being interrupted.
|
| [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 (a Meet the Press
| transcript which contains eight "and, and"s and one "and,
| and, and"!)
| amelius wrote:
| Fuzzing?
| matthberg wrote:
| Apparently from a poem:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31278566
|
| That comment is from the submitter of the issue (and HN post),
| the poem is from Eliza Callahan (copy found here):
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site
|
| The relevant excerpt: "I thought about my body. It's past. It's
| present... Which made me think about the word and. And. And.
| And. And. And. Then."
| OhSoHumble wrote:
| Writing a novel and a character within the novel has a stutter
| or is stammering.
| orblivion wrote:
| C seems very likely to me. I often compulsively copy and paste
| things. You might not call it an error as such.
| fnord123 wrote:
| E) Children playing on the tablet/computer.
| t_mann wrote:
| Some more options: Just a demonstration of how Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V
| works. Literal transcript of a stammered conversation. Poetry /
| word-based art.
| [deleted]
| technothrasher wrote:
| Years ago in school, maybe about 1992 or so, I managed to make
| xdm (X Display Manager) crash and dump me a root window by
| simply holding down a key until the buffer ran out. I remember
| wondering how anybody _didn 't_ discover this before me.
| Similar behavior with the university phone system (repeatedly
| pressing '0') eventually dropped me an outside line that I
| didn't have to pay for (yes, for you young folks, we used to
| have to pay for long distance phone calls, on phones that
| didn't fit in our pockets).
| hawski wrote:
| I always suspect that software I'm using is not really
| tested. If there are animations or whatever is happening
| asynchronously monkey bashing will trigger lots of issues.
| spullara wrote:
| When I was a teenager, I got dropped into a shell on a VAX by
| doing the same thing when it was trying to identify the
| terminal type.
| merlinscholz wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25843874
| technothrasher wrote:
| Good to know the new guard is still leading the fight :)
| Thorrez wrote:
| And another one:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7531140
| glitchc wrote:
| Option D is rather romantic. Poor robot fell in love with an
| NFA. He'll never hear the end of it.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Who. Who. Who. Who. Who.
|
| However. However. However. However. However.
|
| Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Whhhhhy
| schmeckleberg wrote:
| did you decide to compress the "5 Whys" into one Why with 5 hs?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
| a_cardboard_box wrote:
| I just repro'd the bug with 5 whys: "Why. Why. Why. Why.
| Why."
| valenaut wrote:
| Reproduced in Safari on macOS Monterey.
|
| "And. And. And. And." caused no problems.
|
| "And. And. And. And. And. And." also crashes (5 "And."s is a
| substring, so makes sense).
|
| I cannot imagine how this bug is occurring.
| [deleted]
| pmichaud wrote:
| My wild-ass guess is a grammar check bug. Since it words on
| both "and" and "but," I'm thinking it's some check related to
| conjunctions.
| aimor wrote:
| I think this is the right track. "However. ", "Therefore. ",
| "Also. " cause the crash too.
| twism wrote:
| Repro'd
| dropit_sphere wrote:
| lolwhat, replicated w/Linux and Chrome just now.
| edgyquant wrote:
| This doesn't work on the iOS app, I've pasted it and typed it
| manually
| strictfp wrote:
| And?
| wardedVibe wrote:
| worth a shot, I tried it, and it worked fine. Then again, I
| couldn't reproduce the original
| shreyansh26 wrote:
| Reproduced on Edge on Windows 11 as well. What a bug! Really need
| to know the root cause of this.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I wonder if this is crashing due to some auto completion
| shenanigans
| mikotodomo wrote:
| OMG I showed this to my friends and now someone in my class keeps
| adding it to our documents.
| zciwor wrote:
| Will 100% be pasting this into a coworker's Google Doc with a
| white font color.
| glitchc wrote:
| Sounds like a totally collaborative/supportive workspace.
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| haha please do this
| mattrighetti wrote:
| Evil
| ffhhj wrote:
| Send it in your resume to annoy recruiters.
| agitator wrote:
| Yes, yes, let's all put this in our resumes.
| _wldu wrote:
| That's probably a cyber crime in most US states.
|
| Edit: You guys have no sense of humor.
| jjeaff wrote:
| You joke, but comparing to past cases, I see no reason to
| believe it couldn't be considered a crime depending on who
| you do it to. All depends on the existence of some grumpy
| idiot with too much power.
| cyral wrote:
| Sounds like a job for the Highway Patrol
| buryat wrote:
| Hackernews is not a place for jokes
| bogwog wrote:
| So why are you here?
|
| (gotem)
| smarx007 wrote:
| Only if it crashes MS Word 2007.
| kappuchino wrote:
| try /s at the end of "offending" sentence, most people will
| look at it more kindly.
| TMWNN wrote:
| manblanket was far too kind.
|
| A. Bierce, J. Swift, M. Twain, D. Adams, and J. Heller are
| all spinning in their graves, while D. Barry and every
| writer at _The Onion_ point their fingers and laugh at you.
| T. Pratchett is dead, but be assured that his last act on
| Earth was to also point his finger and laugh.
|
| Consistently having trouble identifying sarcasm in print--
| without the "help" of idiotic illiterate marks like "/s"--
| is one of the signs of autism
| (<http://www.healthcentral.com/autism/c/1443/162610/autism-
| sar...>).
| ManBlanket wrote:
| I'm sure you're great. Nothing against you, but please
| don't do that. Just write what you mean if you can't handle
| some people misinterpreting a sarcastic remark. Let's think
| about this for a second. What's the point of sarcasm? If
| you have to tell people you're being sarcastic, are you
| still being sarcastic? Not sure what territory, "/s"
| blunders into, but I'm confident it's not sarcasm. It's
| something else that seems kinda... dumb... like on a
| fundamental level. Did people think themselves above
| saying, "jk"? Mostly I've just seen, "/s" beg the question
| of why someone would go and ruin a good sarcasm, or whether
| the thing they labeled as such was ever sarcasm to begin
| with. Like the parent comment here for example, it's not
| sarcasm. There's no biting irony, mockery, or criticism.
| It's just a silly non-sequitur joke remark. You'd have to
| be like legitimately autistic or something to not see that,
| and at that point, "/s" is just a drop in a bucket. I mean
| hot-take here, sorry, but let's think twice before adopting
| social queues from reddit.
| nephanth wrote:
| Indicating sarcasm is not necessarily ruining it though.
| Look at IRL sarcasm, it will generally be accompanied
| with the right tone of voice and expression / body
| language that make its presence unequivocal. That doesn't
| necessarily ruin it
| Fogest wrote:
| It's the same reason why I often throw a emoji on the end
| of a sentence to a friend. Sometimes the sentence on its
| own can sound aggressive or hostile and a quick fix for
| that is a little emoji that can help make sure my tone is
| clear. I view something like "/s" as being quite similar
| to this. You're not ruining the sarcasm, but instead
| ensuring your tone is properly understood.
| marvin wrote:
| The very best sarcasm is so perfectly balanced and
| indistinguishable from the real deal, that it will leave
| its audience wondering but not missing the _potential_
| for sarcasm. Then the person that delivered it will
| promptly move on, before the audience gets a chance to
| really think about it.
| iinnPP wrote:
| You can say this and express it as a joke but the text reads
| like poor criticism.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I read it as a joke, but I started with an assumption of
| good intent.
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Following the guidelines I see
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible
| interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one
| that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith
| [deleted]
| elektrons wrote:
| I'm curious what this will do to a google form.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| If I had to guess, I suspect this is due to some very weird edge
| case with their recently implemented grammar checker.
|
| Doesn't appear to be an issue for the android app, but that might
| be a cache thing.
| aliljet wrote:
| And here's a link to a document where you can see the bug in
| action. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-
| au2LM...
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Google Docs crashes in Firefox on Windows 10 with your link.
|
| When I re-create the document from scratch, it does not crash.
|
| When I copy the link to my non-crashing document and load it in
| a new tab, the crash then occurs when I edit the document in
| the new tab but not when I edit it in the original tab.
| tyingq wrote:
| Maybe your "spelling and grammar" isn't on by default? Try
| toggling it on in your "from scratch" document (little "A"
| icon with a checkmark).
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| No, it's on, just tried it again, got the blue underlines
| and everything. Original tab doesn't crash, new tabs crash
| (although I can usually get a few characters in before the
| crash), once I close the original tab obviously the crashes
| are permanent.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| It's interesting seeing how many people interact with that
| link. +40 users in a matter of minutes, and some instant spam
| suggestions too. Kind of funny.
|
| Thank you for the repro case!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wardedVibe wrote:
| didn't happen in firefox on Ubuntu
| oblosys wrote:
| Here's a bug I discovered in MS Word in 2004, which has survived
| the past 18 years of updates and is even present in the web
| version: https://1drv.ms/w/s!AgYiBqBjIZZpfkcvO9jnOel9T2o?e=tFA4wp
| If you join the two lines using a backspace at the start of the
| second line, the second line turns into gibberish.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Aw man, the way MS Word leaves bold/italic markers lying
| around [the subject of that comic] and greedily applies
| formatting to stuff you purposefully didn't select, drives me
| bonkers ... mind you I caught LibreOffice emulating this
| behaviour the other day (after an update), I hope it can be
| retamed ...
|
| RIP WordPerfect 'reveal codes'.
| oblosys wrote:
| Unfortunately, I lost the recipe (18 years is a long time),
| but I vaguely recall that the first line had markup that got
| canceled out, and that trying to delete the newline somehow
| deleted the end tag for that markup instead of the newline.
| It also happens when pressing delete at the end of the first
| line.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Show all styles, then select all instances of style where
| it's bold and/or italic.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| Rewritten for clarity (and because I now actually know what's
| happening):
|
| If you look at the XML (change .docx to .zip) in styles.xml you
| see the declaration of the style "BodyText3":
| <w:style w:type="paragraph" w:styleId="BodyText3"><w:name
| w:val="Body Text 3"/><w:basedOn
| w:val="Normal"/><w:semiHidden/><w:rPr><w:rFonts
| w:ascii="Wingdings"
| w:hAnsi="Wingdings"/><w:i/><w:iCs/><w:strike/><w:color
| w:val="FF0000"/><w:sz w:val="52"/></w:rPr></w:style>
|
| The first line ("paragraph") has its style set to "BodyText3",
| but also has formatting on that section of text itself,
| overriding it. Once the lines are joined into one paragraph,
| the paragraph formatting appears in the second part because
| that text does not have a style to override it.
| oblosys wrote:
| Cool! This was pre-XML Word, and since introducing it became
| impossible at some point, I always just figured it had been a
| bug. Probably the bug was only in the creation, as I do
| remember the sequence of edit actions made no sense. I think
| it even had to include an undo.
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Steps to reproduce:
|
| 1. Create a Word document (most likely using the Blank
| document template, Normal.dotm)
|
| 2. Type text of first line; press Enter; type text of second
| line (technically Word calls these 'paragraphs'--Shift+Enter
| inserts a newline within the same paragraph)
|
| 3. Place cursor on first paragraph
|
| 4. Click a Paragraph Style from the Styles ribbon section to
| apply it (e.g., the second one, No Spacing)
|
| 5. Right click the style; choose Modify...
|
| 6. Change the formatting (e.g., the font to Wingdings)
|
| 7. Confirm the dialog
|
| 8. Select the entire first paragraph (doesn't matter whether
| you include the end-of-paragraph/newline)
|
| 9. Use manual formatting to override your changes to the
| style so the text matches the default style, Normal (e.g. use
| the listbox in the ribbon to change the font back to Calibri)
|
| Done; if you now delete the newline, the second paragraph
| merges with the first and takes on its style, as parent
| points out.
|
| Styles are the "proper" way to format Word documents
| (interesting to see what fraction of users actually use
| them). They're like a mix of HTML tags and styles: each
| paragraph (div) must have exactly one Paragraph Style, and
| each span of text can only have one Character Style. "Manual"
| formatting has highest precedence, followed by Character
| Style, followed by Paragraph Style. The benefits are the same
| as in HTML: semantic correctness and easy restyling of the
| entire document (e.g., by applying Themes from the Design
| tab). This sequence of steps is a fairly good demonstration
| of how they're used.
|
| Edit: clarify
| oblosys wrote:
| Just to clarify, this is not how I created the original
| document in 2004 :-) There were certainly no paragraph
| styles involved, and the edit actions had to include an
| undo, or it wouldn't happen. There was also no style
| inspector yet.
| HPsquared wrote:
| So... Working as intended then, seems like.
|
| This kind of thing can be easily debugged using the style
| inspector, "reveal formatting" which shows the formatting
| applied to the selected text and whether it's from paragraph
| formatting or direct text formatting.
| kingcharles wrote:
| How did you create the document? When I hit backspace it does
| "turn into gibberish", but because it seems to inherit the type
| choices from the ether between the two lines to put it into
| Wingdings in red with italic and strikethrough. Did you create
| that type setting?
| oblosys wrote:
| I ran into it while editing an interview text that had colors
| for people's names. It was surprisingly easy to reproduce,
| but creating the buggy documents got fixed at some point. The
| font and styles were altered slightly for dramatic effect.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Wow, this is pretty silly, odd! :-)
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I'm glad I was here when this historical event happened.
| queuebert wrote:
| I tried this on my typewriter, and nothing happened.
| bitwize wrote:
| I wonder if "James where John had had had had had had had had had
| had had a better effect on his teacher" does someone's grammar
| checker up in knots. Or any of the old standbys, like "Police
| police police police police police".
| queuebert wrote:
| Or "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo
| buffalo".
| skerit wrote:
| That was fun!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| thekiptxt wrote:
| > Google Docs uses a "Markov Chain" to predict the next word for
| autocompletion purposes. In this case, of course, since we've
| already written "And" 5 times, the only logical next word would
| be "And", as showed in Djikstra's 1989 paper on the subject.
| Therefore, the Markov Chain never terminates and hence the memory
| chain overflows with infinite ands.
|
| Does anyone know why this bug doesn't repro for some words other
| than And if this is the case?
| ghayes wrote:
| That statement follows with:
|
| > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov
| modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would
| try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way
| Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple
| times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good
| luck Google Docs team
| akersten wrote:
| How is it not code review first comment to limit that lookup to
| like, 10 steps at most? Baffling
| timando wrote:
| Probably because that commenter just made it up.
| [deleted]
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm not sure that comment is true based on the second paragraph
| of it:
|
| > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov
| modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would
| try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way
| Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple
| times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good
| luck Google Docs team
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Sort of related, last night I managed to make Clang crash by
| feeding it a certain C++ program: https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png
|
| It was very surprising that there was a way to get Clang to
| segfault. Should I report it somewhere?
|
| The code is basically doing a recursive template expansion with
| some C++20 concept constraints. So it's not quite as simple as
| "And. And...", but it's similar in that certain input text causes
| a crash. I just have no idea whether to report it, or where.
| tylerhou wrote:
| Clang segfaulting is somewhat common. It usually doesn't
| happen, but sometimes when I write some cursed template
| metaprogramming code it crashes and I'm not surprised. In your
| case, especially because you are using C++20 concepts, that is
| a newer feature and you probably hit some less-tested codepath.
| nopakos wrote:
| By chance, I was just reading that typing "x = 4.725" on Atari
| ST Basic crashed the computer. Still not fixed 35 years later
| :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_ST_BASIC#Bugs]
| dzaima wrote:
| Note that it might be worth trying the latest clang version
| first. The latest proper version is 14.0.0 from Mar 25, which
| is only a month old compared to the 7 months of 13.0.0, but if
| it's something that's condensable to a single file, you could
| test it on https://godbolt.org/z/hv41441jK, which has daily
| builds.
| mtoner23 wrote:
| Definitely report it, it'll be fun to see what happens.
| https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Thank you for the link! Maybe that should've been obvious to
| me, but it really wasn't -- I had no clue where to start. The
| segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug
| report" with no more info. Really appreciated.
|
| In that case I'll spend some time to clean up the repro case
| and submit it. Thanks again.
| mshockwave wrote:
| > Should I report it somewhere?
|
| Please do. You can open an issue (Bugzilla has been deprecated)
| on LLVM's github repo: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
| hoten wrote:
| You should report it to their GitHub repro:
| https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
| magneticnorth wrote:
| Reproduced on Brave browser on Mac OSX.
|
| Hypothesis from chatting about this with people nearby - somehow
| this string makes the grammar engine search space too large
| (that's the AI that predicts your next words) and it's running
| out of memory.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| has anyone tried "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or."?
| 8bitben wrote:
| Actually yes. Didn't crash it!
| soperj wrote:
| or "&&. &&. &&. &&. &&."?
| AccountAccount1 wrote:
| I find it very poetic that this crash was triggered by a poem,
| here's the poem:
|
| > Duration and the body: I thought about something I had read a
| while ago which said that a body, the body, is defined by
| duration. That a body in the present is inseparable from its
| previous state, that a body is linked in a continuous strand...
| and so on and so on... I thought about my body. It's past. It's
| present... Which made me think about the word and. And. And. And.
| And. And. Then.
|
| > Now. Now. Now. Now. Now, I felt in the present like I was
| living always alongside a previous body. This is why I had
| expected to find myself in the apartment when I returned home
| from California.
|
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/
| quakeguy wrote:
| Your username screams for an equal exploit tbh.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Their password is probably PasswordPassword2
| munk-a wrote:
| And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet
| with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| arjvik wrote:
| At the very least, you're forgetting that non-binary
| individuals can have feminine-sounding names.
| munk-a wrote:
| I've found gender to be generally irrelevant to most of my
| social interactions. I'm, personally, in a committed
| relationship and not picky genderwise anyways so, as a
| habit, I've been trying to remove any and all gendered
| pronouns[1] from my speech. I find it pretty silly that
| gender plays so central a role in grammar. It, IMO,
| elevates it above how we should conceive of it - just one
| of many attributes a person has and a not particularly
| central one at that.
|
| I'm sorry if this habit of mine caused you offense but it's
| a pretty silly thing to get annoyed by.
|
| 1. Edited - originally just pronouns (not gendered
| pronouns).
| JasonFruit wrote:
| munk-a wrote:
| "Themselves" is, at least as far as I learned english, a
| proper usage in that context. I adjusted "pronoun" to
| "gendered pronoun" above just in case, in this modern
| world, the meaning wasn't somehow clear. This feels like
| an unnecessary amount of pedantry for a simple comment.
| dataflow wrote:
| "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they
| took it upon themselves to take everything."
|
| What would be the correct pronouns here in your view?
| munk-a wrote:
| I'm suddenly very interested in the distinction here - as
| yea themself also works in both of these contexts but
| themselves feels like a very distinct connotation and not
| incorrect. I can't point to a specific grammatical rule
| or learning to base this feeling off though - I don't
| know why it feels correct it just does.
| OJFord wrote:
| Not who you're asking, but I would say 'themself' here. I
| can't see that it's ('themselves' is) not plural.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Honestly, while I might _say_ such a sentence, I wouldn
| 't allow myself to _write_ it.
| dataflow wrote:
| I'm curious what the closest sentence you would allow
| yourself to write would be.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'd go with, "Someone I don't know came into this room
| and took everything," or even, "Someone came into this
| room. I don't know them, but they took everything." I'm
| not against a neuter pronoun where it's justified, but
| there was no need for it here, and it was worse than
| several alternatives.
| rilezg wrote:
| it's pretty common to use 'they' when gender is unknown
| or irrelevant
| [deleted]
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _" Themselves" is still a pronoun, and a plural one, at
| that._
|
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/themselves,
| see "Can they, their, them, and themselves be used as
| singular pronouns?"
| nofunsir wrote:
| James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a
| better effect on the teacher. (1)
|
| Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
| (2)
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
| mtgx wrote:
| iagocds wrote:
| The Android App does not crash, but if i try to open the file at
| the web version it crashes
| calebegg wrote:
| Something I recently found out about is you can go to
| https://docs.new to create a new Google doc.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Favorite comment on that page: "Google is a small indie company
| btw"
|
| So, more seriously, what might cause this (mis)behavior?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Typing "And. And. And. And. And." did not reproduce the bug, but
| copy/paste the "And [...]" from the title of this post did.
|
| EDIT: Ah, I had to reload the page, thank you child comments.
| mshockwave wrote:
| on my side it didn't trigger the crash right away but if you
| refresh the page, a popup with "Something went wrong" will show
| up
| lopatin wrote:
| Typing worked for me. You have to refresh.
| noobermin wrote:
| Refreshing was the key. Just typing it in does nothing, but
| refreshing or opening a saved document from your documents in
| docs with the text in it already leads to the crash.
| draxil wrote:
| Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
| fareesh wrote:
| Did this bug emerge after their Orwell word policing update?
| westonjackson wrote:
| Disable spelling and grammar checks in a separate doc and return
| to the broken doc is a possible workaround
| metalliqaz wrote:
| The following also triggers the bug:
|
| Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.
| croddin wrote:
| "Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.\n" also breaks it.
| sam1r wrote:
| I'm willing to bet it's related to this. Google docs is trying to
| guess something for autocomplete, similar to their gmail feature
| to complete your sentences.
|
| Which means, on a privacy standpoint, whatever you're writing and
| guessing, they are absolutely processing something.
|
| We the user are the product, apparently. This is mildly creepy to
| me because, I do vent on google docs sometimes. And assume only I
| can read it..
| simonh wrote:
| It's literally called a word processors, so I suppose it
| processes the words. I don't have a problem with that, as long
| as my data is only used for purposes I have approved and to
| provide features I use.
| sam1r wrote:
| How is my comment downvoted?
|
| Top comment mentions it being grammar related, which requires
| processing however many written words before, to provide a
| possible suggestion.
|
| Considering an "and" clause to meet all possible cases of
| suggestions may cause the program to crash.
| nl wrote:
| I think you are probably getting downvoted because it's
| Google Docs, running on Google's Servers, with Google's
| autocomplete and grammer checkers and spell checkers and
| auto-templates and everything else running against it.
|
| Of course "Google" can read your doc. That has nothing to
| do with "you being the product" (infact it's the opposite
| since free Google Docs is a loss leader for their paid
| GSuite product).
|
| That doesn't mean a person _is_ reading it.
| sam1r wrote:
| That is a great point. Thanks for typing this out!
| Appreciate it.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Looks like HN is able to handle it just fine, though. :)
| croddin wrote:
| "Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, Anyway. Anyway.\n" will break it too.
| Anyway...
| [deleted]
| vesinisa wrote:
| I remember discovering that pasting a specific emoji to Google
| Slides causes the slide to become "poison". You could not view or
| edit it, the web UI would crash if you clicked on the slide. I
| discovered this by accident, but did not think much of it as I
| was able to work around by deleting the slide from the document
| overview.
| herpderperator wrote:
| Google has responded:
|
| > Dear Google Docs users, we are aware of the issue and working
| on a fix right now. Thank for surfacing this issue and sharing it
| with us. We will keep you posted!
|
| > Deving
|
| > Google Employee
| throw7 wrote:
| I've had emails crash gmail on my phone still to this day.
| Typically it's stuff like output logs. My guess is something to
| do with the repetitive lines, but who knows.
| kklisura wrote:
| ``` TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'C') at
| Ccf
| (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...)
| at Bcf
| (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...)
| ```
|
| Has something to do with grammar. The document does not fail when
| `Show grammar suggestion` is turned off.
| croddin wrote:
| Also, Therefore, And, Anyway, But, Who, Why, Besides, However.
|
| Each in caps 5 times with the same word with a period and space
| after each word and newline at the end is what I have found so
| far.
|
| Can anyone find others?
|
| Edit: added words that work found in other comments, and found
| more.
| cmg wrote:
| Interestingly, "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or." doesn't trigger it.
| [deleted]
| dr-detroit wrote:
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Ah. So not something with the text data model.
| a-dub wrote:
| does it talk to a grammar check api endpoint or is it done
| locally?
|
| would be funny if it were a remotely exploitable bug in an api
| endpoint.
| r0snd0 wrote:
| a-dub wrote:
| > Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail
| to perform grammar checks? Doesn't sound too exciting.
|
| famous last words. finding security relevant bugs is often a
| game of identifying what the original developers might have
| found to be not "too exciting" or places they were out of
| their depth and then focusing intense effort on finding their
| mistakes.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Probably just getting triggering excessive backtracking on some
| regex.
| KMag wrote:
| Ironic, from the authors of RE2. They know the correct way to
| implement regexes.
|
| Though, when I worked on Google's indexing system, some
| researchers were having machine learning generate regexes to
| run on every page in the visible web... and mis-implemented
| the feature to re-compile the regex to DFA (which re2
| effectively lazily converts to NFA via memoization) for every
| single page load. The speed of the indexing system dropped in
| half one day, and <Edit: Name Witheld> dug into it. <Name
| Withheld> took the gperf graph showing the giant node for
| regex compilation and wrote a savage meme "Your mother
| doesn't work here. Optimize your own code.", and sent it out
| to the researchers in question and also the indexing team.
| Maybe 6 months earlier, I cut into the same researchers for
| writing and approving C++ header file changes that defined
| (and leaked) macros "DO" for "{" and "OD" for "}" so that
| they could write C++ a bit more like Bash. As I remember, the
| macro leak for DO caused compilation errors in SpiderMonkey,
| which I fixed. After fixing the breakage, I just left an
| extra comment on the code review "Really? Leaking DO and OD
| macros to avoid typing curly braces?" without emailing any
| lists. They were really embarrassed removed DO and OD within
| a couple of days, and <Name Withheld> didn't know that I had
| laid into them a bit 6 months earlier.
|
| (I had implemented some very coarse-grained super-lightweight
| type-based data flow analysis into SpiderMonkey, which is why
| some of the Google headers were being included while
| compiling SpiderMonkey.)
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Re2 is also slower, so they might not be using it for high
| volume stuff.
|
| Also I've heard that Google automatically fails people who
| use regex in interviews, so their average engineers
| probably aren't the best at it.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this
| story makes me glad I don't work there for some reason.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Conversely I would prefer to work in a place like that.
| Professionalism at scale isn't achievable by tolerating
| idiotic behaviour and being nice to everyone no matter
| how dangerously stupid they are being.
|
| There is a point where _someone_ has to put their foot
| down and demand things be done properly, otherwise the
| inevitable consequence is a giant mess leading to
| disaster.
|
| You might be used to small startup teams with
| responsible, experienced developers.
|
| Out there in larger industry you get people doing
| absolutely crazy things that break huge, expensive
| systems.
|
| There's a difference between "oops I didn't realise this
| library doesn't scale the way I assumed it did" and
| "rewriting language symbols because I'm too stupid to use
| more than one syntax forever and ever."
|
| "The standard you walk past is the standard you accept."
|
| Are you saying you would walk past C code with DO...OD
| instead of {...}?
|
| Would you accept that standard to be "nice"?
| a-dub wrote:
| having spent time on both sides of the fence, i've
| noticed that there can be a rivalry of sorts between
| software engineers and ml/ds/researcher types.
|
| researcher types often get to work on problems that swe
| types find interesting, so some swes get grumbly.
| researcher types also tend to write pretty horrific code
| which adds salt to the wounds.
|
| but there also can be a sort of envy that emanates from
| the research side. many are fully aware of their
| shortcomings and are envious of the swes ability to get
| things done on computers cleanly.
|
| it often seems that there can be yearning to wear each
| other's hats from the two groups. if i were running a
| company i think i'd try to break down that wall as it
| would probably make a lot of people happier.
|
| of course, the right answer here isn't a meme... it's
| performance regression tests in the ci suite. and maybe a
| little training on why customizing a programming language
| with macros is bad.
| KMag wrote:
| > maybe a little training on why customizing a
| programming language with macros is bad
|
| Both the author and the reviewer had passed C++ style
| certification. They knew why it was bad. They just got a
| little lazy and wanted to write their code in a way that
| felt familiar to them, and figured it was harmless. I got
| a bit grumpy at having to drop what I was doing right
| away to fix their mistake due to their laziness.
| KMag wrote:
| There's a good deal of responsibility in writing code
| that is going to run over every single page (and PDF
| document, MS Word doc, the higher ranked Flash
| animations, etc.) in the visible web.
|
| For my part, I once made a bad assumption about how the
| Google SAX-style parser handled callbacks for zero-length
| XHTML start-stop tags. I presumed that <title/> would get
| a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-
| tag pointers being equal, at the character after the
| close of the tag. Instead, the parser called the callback
| with the start-of-close-tag pointer after the start-of-
| close-tag pointer. (I had misinterpreted the API as
| passing pointers to the start and end of enclosed
| content.) I had test cases for un-closed <title> tags and
| <title></title>... but when my code hit production, the
| few pages (fewer than 1 in a million) that expressed an
| empty title as <title/> caused my code to try and
| construct a string with negative length and crashed that
| portion of the indexing system. I was right to feel very
| embarrassed for my oversight.
|
| I remember the savage meme so clearly because it was
| quite out of the norm, and I felt bad for the guys since
| they were so quick to fix things even when not publicly
| shamed. (Only the author and reviewer got notified when I
| left a comment on their code review.)
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Really?
|
| Is there any science showing rude reviews improve some
| metric or some greater good?
| KMag wrote:
| It wasn't the best way to criticize the code review. If I
| could go back in time 15 years, it's also not the first
| mistake I would fix. It stuck in my mind because I felt
| bad about it. I was frustrated that I had been hounded to
| drop what I was doing and fix the build because of clear
| style guide violations that a reviewer let slip. (A
| couple years later, Google implemented every commit
| getting a full compilation and run of all tests that
| code-coverage showed affected the covered code. These
| days, I wouldn't have been hounded to fix a build break
| caused by someone else.)
| jolux wrote:
| What does it mean that you were right to feel
| embarrassed? You were wrong to make the mistake, sure,
| but that happens. That's what a mistake is. It's not
| clear to me what shame helps in this instance. If
| somebody has a pattern of not meeting a quality bar with
| their code that's one thing, but otherwise cutting people
| up for mistakes really seems like bad culture. Aren't you
| supposed to practice blameless postmortems and all that
| at Google?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| My recollection from my time there, as well as one of the
| biggest cultural differences noticeable between my and my
| workplaces since, is that big chunks of the company
| really do believe in the blameless postmortem ideal.
|
| But culture isn't a magic tool that completely
| neutralizes assholes, and there are assholes in _every_
| organization of sufficient size, like the "Frank Dabek"
| character in the previous post
| KMag wrote:
| I probably should have left Frank's name out of it. He's
| a nice guy, but a bit cynical and rough on the edges, at
| least he was 15 years ago. He fit in well in New York,
| brutally honest, but actually generally nice.
|
| Edit: I should point out that we were in Google NYC, as
| were the researchers. We had lunch with them some times.
| I remember the first name and face of the guy who
| submitted the slow code, but forget his family name and
| intentionally left his name out.
|
| New Yorker to New Yorker adds a lot of context. Google's
| corporate culture is generally very Californian, but this
| happened all within the New York office between people
| who generally got along pretty well and knew each other
| decently.
| the-rc wrote:
| Yeah, that might have made it sound as if he's always
| like that. To his credit, he was one of those that had to
| be involved when things got desperate, e.g. the insane
| and massive data recovery to prevent the index from
| growing stale during a PCR that wasn't properly planned
| for (if you were around, you know what I'm talking
| about).
| KMag wrote:
| There wasn't a post-mortem in my case.
|
| I had thought of the case for <title/> but basically out
| of laziness talked myself out of writing a separate test
| case for it, presuming the test cases for a zero-length
| title and an un-closed title covered the corner cases.
| (The entire document was guaranteed to be converted to
| valid UTF-8, perhaps with invalid character substitution
| characters, by that late in the Content Converter
| pipeline.)
|
| So, as soon as someone asked me if I had changed the
| title parsing code, I was 50% sure of which corner case I
| had screwed up before looking at any code. It took me
| about 30 minutes to submit a code fix with updated test
| cases. I think less than 1 billion documents had been
| processed, resulting in less than 1,000 pages missing
| updates due to my bug.
| danuker wrote:
| Parent comment is onto something. You sound traumatized.
| KMag wrote:
| I was a couple years out of school, and felt a lot of
| responsibility. It wasn't really a big deal, but it
| didn't feel like it at the time.
| tus666 wrote:
| Makes sense. I was thinking something to do with document
| compression but that sounds more likely.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| I see Google has finally implemented the Zombie Strunk & White
| AI like I requested years ago.
|
| I did not expect them to weaponize it, but Skynet does as
| Skynet does.
| lqet wrote:
| Yup, it is also partially underlined in blue and a popup
| suggests to replace "And. And." with "And And" just before it
| crashes.
| patneedham wrote:
| Discovered by Eliza Callahan triggered by a poem in the middle of
| her novel. (Friend of a coworker) That poem can be found here:
| https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ - if viewing
| on mobile you have to Request Desktop Site for some reason, at
| least on Android it initially shows up as a Lorem Ipsum page
| Patrol8394 wrote:
| Once a customer was able to destroy an old ES cluster because
| they copy pasted some text from a PDF into a search box ... that
| text got sent directly to the ES cluster without much escaping
| ... there were lots of "*" in there.
|
| The query complexity exploded, ES ran out of memory, and the
| index got corrupted and I don't remember why, it could not
| recover.
|
| We had to re-index all the data. Lots of fun.
|
| Lesson learned: prepare for the impossible, keep your
| infrastructure up to date, escape queries :)
| ffhhj wrote:
| Maybe escaping the character wouldn't help if every * is
| telling the server to process a long loop, but some max range
| or time to perform the task. I can't tell which company, but I
| managed to do exactly that you described a few months ago, with
| a valid query, and it's one of those companies you can guess if
| I tell you the first letter of its name.
| fortran77 wrote:
| It crashes for me in Chrome on windows 11, but not Edge.
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