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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

#181

Post by to11mtm »

generationP wrote: post #146
toddmorey wrote: post #139

Once my college professor was working on her research paper and told me she was struggling get text to stay underlined. Assuming a simple user error, I expected to help her out in 5 minutes. Over three hours later, we discovered that the combo of her specific video card driver version along with her specific printer driver version would keep text from printing out underlined.

Huh? How does a video card affect printing?

One of the ways to print things (especially on windows) is Via GDI. [0]

Basically using the OS's rendering to make a raster that is then sent to the printer. The main thing the printer's driver does in this case is know how to take the bitmap and tell the printer to print the bitmap (i.e. chunking data and/or sliding the right commands into the bitmap stream)

Contrast to, say, PostScript which allow for more compact and better scaling definition of what to print. This obviously works better for quality, however for a long time the issue was you then had to have sufficient processing power on the printer itself to handle it.

[0] - Search for 'GDI Printer' for a little more info.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#182

Post by pavel_lishin »

jvanderbot wrote: post #165
pavel_lishin wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read comments online, and in my experience the most difficult writing to parse isn't from foreign speakers who drop articles or mis-conjugate things - it's from people whose writing is just, for the lack of a better term, bad . This is very common on places like Nextdoor or Facebook. It's things like: - total stream-of-consciousness gibberish that could probably be assembled into a coherent statement if the writer…

> - total stream-of-consciousness gibberish that could probably be assembled into a coherent statement if the writer would re-read what they wrote and edit it This drives me nuts . Did anyone see this [1] on HN the other day? People in comments were springing up to defend this atrocious writing style. Make a paragraph. Make a point. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38275905

I'm not a huge fan of that, but it looks like poetry, and what's more, it looks intentional. The author was going for something, and is probably aware that some folks won't like it.

That's a whole different beast from an email I'll get from a coworker/neighbor where I cannot parse what's even being asked of me, and where the writing is so confusing I don't even know how to ask them to clarify their statement other than to tell them to start over, possibly all the way from kindergarten.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#183

Post by almostnormal »

ianlevesque wrote: post #124
natbennett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> [...] and therefore probably Microsoft [...]

Where it will go through teams, outlook/exchange, or O365.

Not leaking data is no longer as easy as it used to be. Just some forms are more accepted than others.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#184

Post by saagarjha »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #39
simion314 wrote: post #11

I am using chromium to print web pages to pdf, and I have some images that will crash chrome's to pdf process, I found nothing wrong with this images, the metadata is fine (nothing weird in it). The other bad thing it does not reproduce n my dev machine only on the production server , so nothing I can do, in rare cases an image will always crash crhomium, I find it, open it and re-export it and then it works.

This sounds more like a hardware fault than something wrong with the software, especially since it doesn't seem to be deterministic. But stranger things have happened, and given the enormous surface area of a modern computer (hardware, software, drivers, state, etc.) can anything truly be deterministic?

Most bugs are software issues, though.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#185

Post by saagarjha »

simion314 wrote: post #95
LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds more like a hardware fault than something wrong with the software, especially since it doesn't seem to be deterministic. But stranger things have happened, and given the enormous surface area of a modern computer (hardware, software, drivers, state, etc.) can anything truly be deterministic?

It happens with that image no matter what. I can have a html with 100 images and one bad image, I make one new html only with that image and it still has the problem. My guess is that probably a bug in a low level image decoder. My local machine has different kernel, different libs, plus I have different cpu,gpu and X11 on top so too much difference and I do not have the expertese to do aremote debug(or local)

If you can grab a crash log I am sure the Chrome team would be happy to look at it.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#186

Post by pixl97 »

ianlevesque wrote: post #124
natbennett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As good as the average corporate IT security is that I've witnessed via my work, passing said data to NSA/OpenAI is the least of their issues. Far less scrupulous hackers are running amok as it is.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#187

Post by zztop44 »

ianlevesque wrote: post #124
natbennett wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

About 0.1% (0.001%??) of business communication might have adverse consequences for you/your company if forwarded to Microsoft or OpenAI or the NSA. The rest is absolutely fine. And you’re probably already using Gmail or Android or Chrome or Exchange365 or iOS or *something* that could theoretically forward your comms to a tech company (and the security state).

Compared to the alternative of having your colleagues think you’re a bit stupid just because you were raised speaking a language other than English, or your parents weren’t middle class… using Grammarly or ChatGPT is a no brainer. I’d support anyone using whatever tools they can to overcome discrimination and thrive.

The alternatives are:

1. Educate everyone in the company to stop discriminating against people based on language ability (impossible??)

2. Provide a local self-hosted version of the tools (although as a worker at RandomCorp, I would probably prefer to forward all my comms to Microsoft than to management!)

3. Tell people facing discrimination to just shut up and deal with it.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#188

Post by saagarjha »

nonethewiser wrote: post #168
aaaronic wrote: post #143

This is _so_ familiar! I have seen accessibility tools in Chrome lead to this kind of issue in the past with a dropdown menu -- to the point where it could be replicated with a miniscule amount of HTML. The particular bug I hit 2 years ago was in Chromium-Edge, but the symptoms and cause were very similar. Grammarly almost certainly leans on some of the accessibility tools in Chrome. These tools are somewhat differen…

So the theory would be that grammarly desktop sees the gif (what? How?) and calls some browser accessibility function on it (or?) which chrome cant handle and it crashes?

Perhaps it has an extension that it installs that does this?

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#189

Post by mardifoufs »

gumby wrote: post #126
mardifoufs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stud…

Honestly what surprised me the most from your very informative link was that France is lower than the US! I'm probably biased but I've always considered the French education system to be quite rigorous and well rounded, with a few different education paths to fit different student profiles from a pretty early stage. Especially compared to canada, which in my experience has a rather weak and rigid curriculum.

(Though I dislike the way french and European higher education in general works. You're basically boxed in to your specific domain or degree that you often don't even really choose and changing or switching careers is almost impossible. The choices you make in high school basically define what you can even study in, and thus what you can do for the rest of your life. I think that's one thing the US does super well, even more so considering that degrees are less important there in the first place.)

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#190

Post by mardifoufs »

Aerbil313 wrote: post #125
mardifoufs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the functional literacy rate though?
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