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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

#121

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 itsel…

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."

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

#122
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/

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.

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

#123

``` 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.

Probably just getting triggering excessive backtracking on some regex.

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 dug into it. 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 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.)

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

#124
post #18

And here's a link to a document where you can see the bug in action. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-au2LM...

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.

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).

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

#125
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/

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

#129

``` 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.

Ah. So not something with the text data model.
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