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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

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Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#151
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this story makes me glad I don’t work there for some reason.

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 would get a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-tag pointe…

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?

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#152
post #120
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#154
post #81

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.

But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/

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'.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#155

``` 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.

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.

Interestingly, "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or." doesn't trigger it.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#156
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

Some people might get off on that kind of culture. But this story makes me glad I don’t work there for some reason.

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.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#157
post #151
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would get a callback with the end-of-open-tag and start-of-close-tag pointe…

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…

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 "[name redacted]" character in the previous post

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#158
post #114
post #81

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.

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": 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 beca…

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.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#159
post #152
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 doe…

That is a great point. Thanks for typing this out! Appreciate it.

Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash

#160
post #81

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.

But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/

Show all styles, then select all instances of style where it's bold and/or italic.
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