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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

#201

Post by robocat »

akira2501 wrote: post #136
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…

It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end. The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to…

To reinforce your point: I have dyslexic friends and family that have learnt to write over time. Very difficult, but they have learnt because they had to for high paying jobs.

One friend literally couldn't read. He took himself through adult reading courses. He ain't no Shakespeare, but I can now txt him and get a written reply.

Tech is helping, but the underlying reason for the change is their own initiative.

I would judge that none of the friends or family illiteracy was actually caused by our schooling system in New Zealand. Some people just struggle and our pedagogy will always be imperfect. Certainly I can see some failures in my own schooling that still exist and I would like to see fixed (mostly get rid of 99% of the deep crap).

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#202

Post by nonethewiser »

bayindirh wrote: post #50
tedivm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it actually a Chrome bug though? It only happened when the Grammerly desktop app was installed. My guess is grammerly is doing something sketchy.

Maybe adding Grammarly created enough of a lag causing the GIF file to be shown?

That doesnt hold when you consider they opened the gif in the browser with and without grammarly and it only crashed with. So its not simply a bad gif and chrome.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#203

Post by nonethewiser »

meandmycode wrote: post #158
MattDaEskimo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm thinking the same thing. It could be that Grammerly injects it's own loading spinner with the same filename into the HTML. I wish they tried to simply rename the file instead of remove it.

The pr seems to suggest it's not the filename though given the new file was named the same and didn't crash. I would guess grammarly is hooking chrome and potentially trying to read metadata about images, and the particular gif had metadata in a format they hadn't expected.

But only in Chrome. Not necessarily inconsistent with what you’re saying, just an interesting wrinkle.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#204

Post by WarOnPrivacy »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #166
akira2501 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd to read the story of an adult who believes they're a poor reader, still to this day apparently, because of what happened to them 30 years ago. Odder still that the article leaves itself the only conclusion of going all the way back to grade school and trying an entirely different strategy and hoping that just "works out" in the end. The lack of "continuing education" in the era of the internet is baffling to…

I think about this a lot, too. My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I? I think there are two reasons: a lack of focused effort, and the steadily increasing demands of adulthood. I do reasonably okay at self-guided education when I want to, but there's definitely a difference vs. a structured secondary education environment, where there is accountability and other…

> My academic interests are pretty broad, and I could improve in every subject, so why don't I?

My suspected culprits:

1) The massively increased complexity of ordinary living is overconsumining our personal resources. and

2) For post-GenX and later, the erasure of childhood (free-roaming & peer-only hours) sabotages[1] the reward systems (joy) that supercharge early learning.

The less joy there is to facilitate learning, the more effort is required (from otherwise overly depleted resources).

[1] similar to what abuse and neglect do

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#205

Post by willsmith72 »

generationP wrote: post #148
_jal wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Grammarly is an application that I don't get. You write like a native speaker, so I'm not surprised. But imagine having a few years of school-German, and then taking a German language job. I'd bet there would be times you'd want a writing assistant, too. There are also plenty of native English speakers who for whatever reason got a crappy education, and didn't get a lot of writing feedback. As far as corporate secu…

Learning a language at school, you will soon be better than natives at grammar. It's the vocabulary, idioms and implicatures that will be tripping you up. Does grammarly really help with those?

hah better than a German at German grammar? don't think so

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#206

Post by nonethewiser »

JohnMakin wrote: post #28

I have a saying that isn't perfectly true but often will apply to "fixes" like this - If you don't know why the fix worked, you may not have actually fixed it.

I agree 100% and the observe this all the time with things that “magically fix themselves.” But Im not sure it applies here since they seemed to have actually quarantined it.

I suppose since they dont know the root cause it’s impossible to say. But I think the saying would fit better if they kept the gif but made some change that seemed to fix it without knowing why.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#207

Post by nonethewiser »

derefr wrote: post #163
JohnMakin wrote: post #28

I have a saying that isn't perfectly true but often will apply to "fixes" like this - If you don't know why the fix worked, you may not have actually fixed it.

And in fact, I don't think they have fixed it. I've seen "Error 5" plenty of times in Chrome. It seemingly occurs whenever I have a lot (100+) of tabs open for any site where each page allocates at least one accelerated drawing canvas (a literal , or a , or a .gif .) I've seen it happen on Reddit (but only new reddit, not old reddit!) and on a number of other sites. I hypothesize that Chrome simply has a global (i.e.…

They said it also crashes when they just load the gif. It seems hard to believe they always had tons of tabs open for these tests.

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#208

Post by anitil »

jonathrg wrote: post #138
robocat wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I added to all pages in a single-page-web-app after discovering some bug or other with Chrome screwing up the page. Apparently the new incantation to fix an app (can be applied to an element) is (ugly: I presume it isn't CSS to avoid supporting dynamically changing it): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_att... Every now and then I would look at the meta tags for a major single page app and disc…

I first read this as "translate to Norwegian"

It's the reverse-Norway problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26671136

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#209

Post by Szpadel »

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…

that.

especially what is puzzling me is:

> For security reasons, we do not have Chrome crash reporting enabled.

so we do not want to have stack traces or whatever else this includes for security reasons, but installing basically keylogger that does spell check is ok

there are companies that forbid using chatgpt for even html development because this could leak company secrets, but grammarly on confluence/jira is just fine

Re: The weirdest bug I've seen yet

#210

Post by spuz »

guessmyname wrote: post #171
digging wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even know how to look for something unusual in a gif's source code but I also feel this is the most compelling part. I wish they'd uploaded it.

> I wouldn't even know how to look for something unusual in a gif's source code but I also feel this is the most compelling part. I wish they'd uploaded it. GIF stands out as a widely understood file format [1][2]. To kick things off, delve into the GIF file using a hexadecimal editor. HexFiend [3], for instance, offers a template for visualizing GIF file structures [4]. Another excellent option is Synalyze It! [5],…

Another good option is ImHex which is an open source hex editor that supports file patterns. The gif pattern is one of the patterns already available:

https://github.com/WerWolv/ImHex

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