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The weirdest bug I've seen yet

engineering.gusto.com

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Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#122

Post by [deleted] »

sethammons wrote: post #117

> The code for our main navigation bar has a fair amount of metaprogramming, and chasing down threads here was often more confusing than not. One more point for Don't Be Clever. As Brian Kernighan put it: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

[deleted]

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#124

Post by ianlevesque »

natbennett wrote: post #105
ecshafer wrote: post #87

I don't think I would believe myself if I found this being a specific gif. This is a great amount of coincidences in code to cause this. Grammarly is an application that I don't get. The fact that people are installing, basically spyware, on their computers just to get grammar suggestions to make their writing more boring and add a spellchecker (which is already inside web browsers) is pretty astounding to me. The fa…

There are a lot of people whose professional outcomes are meaningfully constrained by their ability produce clear business English. I know a guy who used to get inexplicable feedback about his communication that boiled down to “write better.” This limited his ability to get promoted. He runs all his comms through ChatGPT and asks it to “make this more professional” and doesn’t get that feedback anymore.

I get that people don't care or understand this, but that's also saying he cc's OpenAI, and therefore probably Microsoft, and therefore almost definitely the NSA, on all his business communications. What a world.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#125

Post by Aerbil313 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #118
thaumaturgy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office setting…

I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels. Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.

That’s definitely outdated. Literacy rate of my “third world” country is %16 higher than US atm.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#126

Post by gumby »

mardifoufs wrote: post #118
thaumaturgy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People that are comfortable with text-based forums may not realize the extent of illiteracy and semiliteracy in the US. Decades ago, a small company was able to convince most of the education system (public and sometimes private) to use a teaching method based on junk science. The end result is that there are many millions of adults in the current workforce who can barely read, and many of them work in office setting…

I'm not sure that's specific to the US, and I don't even think that particular teaching method has been used here in Quebec, yet we still see broadly similar literacy rates and levels. Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is. Maybe that's outdated though, I'll do my research.

> Last I checked US students rank well and are near the top in most education global rankings, so I think bad education is more of a global problem than Americans think it is.

US is at the bottom of the OECD PISA rankings (as it is with life expectency too), though on a global basis you're right (better than Morocco or Indonesia on both criteria).

Shockingly Australia has fallen quite a bit from the initial PISA study where it was ranked #4, now almost as bad as USA.

https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/pisa-scores-by-country

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#127

Post by londons_explore »

FrankWilhoit wrote: post #93

Error code 5, on Windows, means that the code tried to dereference a null pointer. I'm guessing that the GIF content is corrupt, containing some 0x00 bytes where they shouldn't be. Then the question becomes, whose responsibility is it to program defensively against things like that? If, as may well be, Chrome is using some third-party library nested several layers deep to render GIFs, then would there be any action t…

Lets be honest, it was probably some grammarly .dll that had been injected...

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#129

Post by chatmasta »

computerfriend wrote: post #16

If they can figure it out, they're sitting on potentially a very valuable exploit.

Yes, I too would like to read more details about this. It's a great writeup from an engineer who got stuck debugging this. But I hope some experts in security or reverse-engineering can replicate it and take a closer look. There's definitely a more interesting story here, probably regarding the localhost bridge between Grammarly extension and desktop.

(Grammarly has a bug bounty btw... and their chrome extension has quite a large surface area...)

If OP is here: can you provide the raw .gif file? (And if you're feeling generous, maybe even a minimal ruby example that replicates that templating setup, although it sounds like that wasn't required to reproduce it in the end.)

P.S. "For security reasons, we do not have Chrome crash reporting enabled" - maybe consider disabling Grammarly extension for the same reasons ;)

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