And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.
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Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
161–170 of 441 posts
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#162Earlier 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…
There wasn't a post-mortem in my case.
I had thought of the case for 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.
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#163Google 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
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I probably should have left [redacted]'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.
In context, there was a heavy note of respect for someone's abilities and disappointment that they weren't performing at a top level. He wouldn't have been so harsh with someone who was new or was a weaker engineer, or someone who wasn't used to New York culture.
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#165Took 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 an…
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.
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#166Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#167And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.
Quoted post unavailable.
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).
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#168It crashes for me in Chrome on windows 11, but not Edge.
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#169Took 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 an…
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?
Re: Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There wasn't a post-mortem in my case. I had thought of the case for 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 pip…
Parent comment is onto something. You sound traumatized.