29 ms·

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

1473 points by patneedham 4y ago

sharmavinu0024 4y ago
good tool for everyone.
Normal_gaussian 4y ago
Perfect prank document to send to the team. I'm just hoping it holds up until the morning so everyone can join the fun and not just those of us with bad work time habits.
goody71 4y ago
Will Pat Needham get any Google Bux for finding this?
jrd79 4y ago
That is an amazing bug.
- vldx 4y ago
  I’m very curious what may be the root cause of this.
  - t_mann 4y ago
    My money is on some conflicting rules in grammar / style checks.
  - baisq 4y ago
    Probably something to do with the grammar check (blue squiggly line)
  - the_biot 4y ago
    My guess is on an easter egg gone wrong.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
X6S1x6Okd1st 4y ago
Replicated on my end on OSX & firefox
- oliwary 4y ago
  Replicated on Windows 10 and Chrome too!
- pinewurst 4y ago
  OSX and Safari replicated
blueberrychpstx 4y ago
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 itself into an infinite loop.
- dkarl 4y ago
  I've heard people say it, speaking like this: "This would be a great solution to the problem, except that it would break the admin dashboard. And billing. And SSO. And partner test environments. And. And. And. And. And. This would break so many things I'm sure I could only name half of them if I tried."
  - rhizome 4y ago
    Yep. I've written that formulation many many times.
  - marcusverus 4y ago
    Agreed--it seems likely that the user was writing dialogue, taking minutes, or something similar. Skilled speakers frequently use repetitions of a word (like 'and') as an interjection[0]. It's a handy way of giving yourself a second to think without saying 'uhh' or 'umm' (which, for whatever reason, are considered 'bad' interjections), and seems to be a kind of defense against being interrupted. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 (a Meet the Press transcript which contains eight "and, and"s and one "and, and, and"!)
- amelius 4y ago
  Fuzzing?
- orblivion 4y ago
  C seems very likely to me. I often compulsively copy and paste things. You might not call it an error as such.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Whhhhhy
- schmeckleberg 4y ago
  did you decide to compress the "5 Whys" into one Why with 5 hs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
  - a_cardboard_box 4y ago
    I just repro'd the bug with 5 whys: "Why. Why. Why. Why. Why."
valenaut 4y ago
Reproduced in Safari on macOS Monterey. "And. And. And. And." caused no problems. "And. And. And. And. And. And." also crashes (5 "And."s is a substring, so makes sense). I cannot imagine how this bug is occurring.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pmichaud 4y ago
  My wild-ass guess is a grammar check bug. Since it words on both “and” and “but,” I’m thinking it’s some check related to conjunctions.
  - aimor 4y ago
    I think this is the right track. "However. ", "Therefore. ", "Also. " cause the crash too.
twism 4y ago
Repro'd
dropit_sphere 4y ago
lolwhat, replicated w/Linux and Chrome just now.
strictfp 4y ago
And?
- wardedVibe 4y ago
  worth a shot, I tried it, and it worked fine. Then again, I couldn't reproduce the original
shreyansh26 4y ago
Reproduced on Edge on Windows 11 as well. What a bug! Really need to know the root cause of this.
endisneigh 4y ago
I wonder if this is crashing due to some auto completion shenanigans
zciwor 4y ago
Will 100% be pasting this into a coworker's Google Doc with a white font color.
- glitchc 4y ago
  Sounds like a totally collaborative/supportive workspace.
- mattrighetti 4y ago
  Evil
- _wldu 4y ago
  That's probably a cyber crime in most US states. Edit: You guys have no sense of humor.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - cyral 4y ago
    Sounds like a job for the Highway Patrol
  - buryat 4y ago
    Hackernews is not a place for jokes
    - bogwog 4y ago
      So why are you here? (gotem)
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      It is if the jokes are really sophisticated or clever. No reddit style stuff.
  - kappuchino 4y ago
    try /s at the end of "offending" sentence, most people will look at it more kindly.
LordDragonfang 4y ago
If I had to guess, I suspect this is due to some very weird edge case with their recently implemented grammar checker. Doesn't appear to be an issue for the android app, but that might be a cache thing.
aliljet 4y ago
And here's a link to a document where you can see the bug in action. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-au2LMGdX2M1VVKTWpax67tNo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-au2LM...
- MiddleEndian 4y ago
  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.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    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).
    - MiddleEndian 4y ago
      No, it's on, just tried it again, got the blue underlines and everything. Original tab doesn't crash, new tabs crash (although I can usually get a few characters in before the crash), once I close the original tab obviously the crashes are permanent.
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  It's interesting seeing how many people interact with that link. +40 users in a matter of minutes, and some instant spam suggestions too. Kind of funny. Thank you for the repro case!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aliljet 4y ago
  And changing this link to a view-only authorization. It appears the bug is fixed.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wardedVibe 4y ago
didn't happen in firefox on Ubuntu
ricardobayes 4y ago
I'm glad I was here when this historical event happened.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sillysaurusx 4y ago
Sort of related, last night I managed to make Clang crash by feeding it a certain C++ program: https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png It was very surprising that there was a way to get Clang to segfault. Should I report it somewhere? The code is basically doing a recursive template expansion with some C++20 concept constraints. So it's not quite as simple as "And. And...", but it's similar in that certain input text causes a crash. I just have no idea whether to report it, or where.
- tylerhou 4y ago
  Clang segfaulting is somewhat common. It usually doesn't happen, but sometimes when I write some cursed template metaprogramming code it crashes and I'm not surprised. In your case, especially because you are using C++20 concepts, that is a newer feature and you probably hit some less-tested codepath.
- mtoner23 4y ago
  Definitely report it, it'll be fun to see what happens. https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html
  - sillysaurusx 4y ago
    Thank you for the link! Maybe that should've been obvious to me, but it really wasn't -- I had no clue where to start. The segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug report" with no more info. Really appreciated. In that case I'll spend some time to clean up the repro case and submit it. Thanks again.
    - D-Coder 4y ago
      > The segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug report" with no more info. The message should include the URL. Sounds like a bug that should be reported.
- mshockwave 4y ago
  > Should I report it somewhere? Please do. You can open an issue (Bugzilla has been deprecated) on LLVM's github repo: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project
magneticnorth 4y ago
Reproduced on Brave browser on Mac OSX. Hypothesis from chatting about this with people nearby - somehow this string makes the grammar engine search space too large (that's the AI that predicts your next words) and it's running out of memory.
captaincaveman 4y ago
has anyone tried "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or."?
- 8bitben 4y ago
  Actually yes. Didn't crash it!
- soperj 4y ago
  or "&&. &&. &&. &&. &&."?
nofunsir 4y ago
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. (1) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (2) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
mtgx 4y ago
iagocds 4y ago
The Android App does not crash, but if i try to open the file at the web version it crashes
Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
Typing "And. And. And. And. And." did not reproduce the bug, but copy/paste the "And [...]" from the title of this post did. EDIT: Ah, I had to reload the page, thank you child comments.
- mshockwave 4y ago
  on my side it didn't trigger the crash right away but if you refresh the page, a popup with "Something went wrong" will show up
- lopatin 4y ago
  Typing worked for me. You have to refresh.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    Refreshing was the key. Just typing it in does nothing, but refreshing or opening a saved document from your documents in docs with the text in it already leads to the crash.
    - Helmut10001 4y ago
      Does not work for me in Google Docs, no matter if copied, or reloaded, refreshed etc. Perhaps they fixed it already.
westonjackson 4y ago
Disable spelling and grammar checks in a separate doc and return to the broken doc is a possible workaround
sam1r 4y ago
I’m willing to bet it’s related to this. Google docs is trying to guess something for autocomplete, similar to their gmail feature to complete your sentences. Which means, on a privacy standpoint, whatever you’re writing and guessing, they are absolutely processing something. We the user are the product, apparently. This is mildly creepy to me because, I do vent on google docs sometimes. And assume only I can read it..
- simonh 4y ago
  It’s literally called a word processors, so I suppose it processes the words. I don’t have a problem with that, as long as my data is only used for purposes I have approved and to provide features I use.
  - sam1r 4y ago
    How is my comment downvoted? Top comment mentions it being grammar related, which requires processing however many written words before, to provide a possible suggestion. Considering an “and” clause to meet all possible cases of suggestions may cause the program to crash.
    - nl 4y ago
      I think you are probably getting downvoted because it's Google Docs, running on Google's Servers, with Google's autocomplete and grammer checkers and spell checkers and auto-templates and everything else running against it. Of course "Google" can read your doc. That has nothing to do with "you being the product" (infact it's the opposite since free Google Docs is a loss leader for their paid GSuite product). That doesn't mean a person is reading it.
      - sam1r 4y ago
        That is a great point. Thanks for typing this out! Appreciate it.
throw7 4y ago
I've had emails crash gmail on my phone still to this day. Typically it's stuff like output logs. My guess is something to do with the repetitive lines, but who knows.
kklisura 4y ago
``` TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'C') at Ccf (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-client_js_prod_kix_app.js:1183:846 https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...) at Bcf (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-client_js_prod_kix_app.js:1183:338 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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
  - dr-detroit 4y ago
- tus666 4y ago
  Makes sense. I was thinking something to do with document compression but that sounds more likely.
- lqet 4y ago
  Yup, it is also partially underlined in blue and a popup suggests to replace "And. And." with "And And" just before it crashes.
- a-dub 4y ago
  does it talk to a grammar check api endpoint or is it done locally? would be funny if it were a remotely exploitable bug in an api endpoint.
  - r0snd0 4y ago
    Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail to perform grammar checks? Doesn’t sound too exciting.
  - a-dub 4y ago
    > Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail to perform grammar checks? Doesn’t sound too exciting. famous last words. finding security relevant bugs is often a game of identifying what the original developers might have found to be not "too exciting" or places they were out of their depth and then focusing intense effort on finding their mistakes.
Patrol8394 4y ago
Once a customer was able to destroy an old ES cluster because they copy pasted some text from a PDF into a search box ... that text got sent directly to the ES cluster without much escaping ... there were lots of "*" in there. The query complexity exploded, ES ran out of memory, and the index got corrupted and I don't remember why, it could not recover. We had to re-index all the data. Lots of fun. Lesson learned: prepare for the impossible, keep your infrastructure up to date, escape queries :)
- ffhhj 4y ago
  Maybe escaping the character wouldn't help if every * is telling the server to process a long loop, but some max range or time to perform the task. I can't tell which company, but I managed to do exactly that you described a few months ago, with a valid query, and it's one of those companies you can guess if I tell you the first letter of its name.
- rawoke083600 4y ago
  Yup seen that in a few online "stores" or companies where they use SOLR or ES. Putting in '' will make boxes explode* (ok not really). What is twice is bad as that the worst of these, fail (at least to my eye) on two fronts. 1) Allowing SINGLE character searches. I.e No min query-length. 2) Not escaping querying - lucene(solr/es) syntax. You can sometimes see the front-facing "html/js/api" is just a thin layer over ES/SOLR.(Which is not bad by itself) it's when you don't know the limitations or what sort of queries are x100 harder to do than orders.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
edgyquant 4y ago
This doesn’t work on the iOS app, I’ve pasted it and typed it manually
oblosys 4y ago
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 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.
- kingcharles 4y ago
  How did you create the document? When I hit backspace it does "turn into gibberish", but because it seems to inherit the type choices from the ether between the two lines to put it into Wingdings in red with italic and strikethrough. Did you create that type setting?
  - oblosys 4y ago
    I ran into it while editing an interview text that had colors for people's names. It was surprisingly easy to reproduce, but creating the buggy documents got fixed at some point. The font and styles were altered slightly for dramatic effect.
- MauranKilom 4y ago
  But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/ https://xkcd.com/2109/
  - oblosys 4y ago
    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.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Aw man, the way MS Word leaves bold/italic markers lying around [the subject of that comic] and greedily applies formatting to stuff you purposefully didn't select, drives me bonkers ... mind you I caught LibreOffice emulating this behaviour the other day (after an update), I hope it can be retamed ... RIP WordPerfect 'reveal codes'.
bitwize 4y ago
I wonder if "James where John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on his teacher" does someone's grammar checker up in knots. Or any of the old standbys, like "Police police police police police police".
- queuebert 4y ago
  Or "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
  - jethkl 4y ago
    This topic also came up a few weeks ago. I speculate there is no upper bound. A similar example using "Hawking": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626497#30653029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626497#30653029
skerit 4y ago
That was fun!
calebegg 4y ago
Something I recently found out about is you can go to https://docs.new https://docs.new to create a new Google doc.
metalliqaz 4y ago
The following also triggers the bug: Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.
croddin 4y ago
"Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.\n" also breaks it.
croddin 4y ago
"Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, Anyway. Anyway.\n" will break it too. Anyway...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
patneedham 4y ago
Discovered by Eliza Callahan triggered by a poem in the middle of her novel. (Friend of a coworker) That poem can be found here: https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ - if viewing on mobile you have to Request Desktop Site for some reason, at least on Android it initially shows up as a Lorem Ipsum page
- raldi 4y ago
  On iPhone Chrome it doesn’t show up either way.
- pvillano 4y ago
  it appears to be bugs all the way down
- roughly 4y ago
  As arguments for the thesis that the tech world needs to embrace the humanities go, an author discovering a bug in a google product by writing a poem is pretty good, if maybe a bit too on the nose.
  - hackernewds 4y ago
    Perhaps that is the missing link for why tech is so artificial and not humanly. we could use some more art than capitalistic efficiency in the Apple logo
- _rf 4y ago
  I know you didn't write that poem, but I'm 99% certain the apostrophes in "I thought about my body. It's past. It's present." have no business being there :)
  - fluoridation 4y ago
    Seems like it could go either way.
  - burkaman 4y ago
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Who. Who. Who. Who. Who. However. However. However. However. However. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.
- js8 4y ago
  Google engineers should ask "Why." five times to get to the root cause.
mikotodomo 4y ago
OMG I showed this to my friends and now someone in my class keeps adding it to our documents.
queuebert 4y ago
I tried this on my typewriter, and nothing happened.
- peterburkimsher 4y ago
  I tried this on my typewriter, And. And. And. And. And. <nothing></nothing> Probably because it's out of paper. Related: how is paper fed into an Apple Magic Keyboard - Hebrew? Edit: Tried to reproduced with Arabic keyboard, plugged in now. Accidentally inverted right-to-left in brain. dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA.
AccountAccount1 4y ago
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/ https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/
- quakeguy 4y ago
  Your username screams for an equal exploit tbh.
  - BizarroLand 4y ago
    Their password is probably PasswordPassword2
    - tsukurimashou 4y ago
      HunterHunter
    - meshaneian 4y ago
      Why not PasswordPassword1?
      - mellavora 4y ago
        naw, it is *** That's what I see, anyway
    - AccountAccount1 4y ago
      Well shit
- deleted 4y ago
jonnycomputer 4y ago
Favorite comment on that page: "Google is a small indie company btw" So, more seriously, what might cause this (mis)behavior?
draxil 4y ago
Sounds like a feature, not a bug.
fareesh 4y ago
Did this bug emerge after their Orwell word policing update?
rossdavidh 4y ago
Looks like HN is able to handle it just fine, though. :)
vesinisa 4y ago
I remember discovering that pasting a specific emoji to Google Slides causes the slide to become "poison". You could not view or edit it, the web UI would crash if you clicked on the slide. I discovered this by accident, but did not think much of it as I was able to work around by deleting the slide from the document overview.
munk-a 4y ago
And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  - arjvik 4y ago
    At the very least, you're forgetting that non-binary individuals can have feminine-sounding names.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    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).
    - JasonFruit 4y ago
      - munk-a 4y ago
        "Themselves" is, at least as far as I learned english, a proper usage in that context. I adjusted "pronoun" to "gendered pronoun" above just in case, in this modern world, the meaning wasn't somehow clear. This feels like an unnecessary amount of pedantry for a simple comment.
      - dataflow 4y ago
        "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they took it upon themselves to take everything." What would be the correct pronouns here in your view?
ronald_raygun 4y ago
I can't get the bug to reproduce. But maybe someone else could try 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?
- mike_d 4y ago
  "And." x 5+, case sensitive, new line at the end. Hit refresh in your browser and it will throw an error.
  - erwincoumans 4y ago
    It has been "Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed." now.
AlexMuir 4y ago
Took 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 and and, and and and Partridge.
- coreyp_1 4y ago
  I heard it with "Fish and Chips".
- Affric 4y ago
  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.
- justinpombrio 4y ago
  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?
  - CaptainNegative 4y ago
    Can't one just keep recursing further? Only with very careful intonation and appropriate pauses after a comma can someone read Gardner's above sentence aloud such that a listener can fully grok the connection between "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and "and", and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and "and", and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and". (sentence due to Python 3).
mxuribe 4y ago
Wow, this is pretty silly, odd! :-)
herpderperator 4y ago
Google 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
fortran77 4y ago
It crashes for me in Chrome on windows 11, but not Edge.
loxias 4y ago
I LOVE stuff like this. Reminds me of "OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays" https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html
- cybertoad 4y ago
  Haha, thanks for sharing
- apanloco 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing, that's hilarious :D
- below43 4y ago
  This is another classic from his list "We can't send mail more than 500 miles": https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/500mile_email.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/500mile_email.html
thekiptxt 4y ago
> Google Docs uses a "Markov Chain" to predict the next word for autocompletion purposes. In this case, of course, since we've already written "And" 5 times, the only logical next word would be "And", as showed in Djikstra's 1989 paper on the subject. Therefore, the Markov Chain never terminates and hence the memory chain overflows with infinite ands. Does anyone know why this bug doesn’t repro for some words other than And if this is the case?
- sailingparrot 4y ago
  That comment is a joke. SmartCompose does not use a Markov Chain, it is either still an LSTM or got upgraded to a small transformer based model.
- ghayes 4y ago
  That statement follows with: > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good luck Google Docs team
- akersten 4y ago
  How is it not code review first comment to limit that lookup to like, 10 steps at most? Baffling
- timando 4y ago
  Probably because that commenter just made it up.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  I'm not sure that comment is true based on the second paragraph of it: > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good luck Google Docs team
srinathkrishna 4y ago
What's pretty annoying is that users are providing free QA for Google!
analog31 4y ago
An odd coincidence, I recall that pressing an operator button on an older HP calculator would also cause an error, because the stack was 4 levels deep.
selimthegrim 4y ago
Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
seangrogg 4y ago
“And.” I wrote. “And. And. And. And.” That was the part that led to the apocalypse. This was not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
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fedeb95 4y ago
lol
mintplant 4y ago
Relatedly, I have a string of text that, when pasted into Windows 11's Notepad, consistently causes it to crash. I don't know who to report this to.
- nograpes 4y ago
  Okay, I'll bite. What is the string?
- rdudek 4y ago
  Don't keep us hanging like this, what's the string?
  - mintplant 4y ago
    Unfortunately I can't share, as it's related to a not-yet-public project.
    - neerajsi 4y ago
      Do you get the standard reporting error to Microsoft dialog when it crashes? Hopefully someone will be able to look at that. In typical cases only a small summary with the stack is uploaded so your content should not be visible to whoever is looking at the dump.
ayashko 4y ago
Reminds me of an old joke; – I bet you a beer you can't make a logical, grammatical sentence with five ands in a row – I used to be a sign writer in a previous life and one of the jobs I had was to repaint the sign hanging over the door to this very pub. Except the publican was adamant that he wanted more space between the words. Where exactly I asked? In between the Pig and and, and and and Whistle he replied.
- interestica 4y ago
  And this joke reminds me of a Garden-path sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
bspear 4y ago
How random. Can't wait to try this
rikeanimer 4y ago
omg I tried to post a reply on that support page and it errored out saying "you need to be signed in ..." while I could literally see my sign in logo top right corner of the page. fking google. there are good [as well as technical humurous] comments on the page.
piemadd 4y ago
sounds like a markov chain going berserk
bufferoverflow 4y ago
I'm surprised Google didn't fuzz Google Docs.
Ansil849 4y ago
This reminds me of when Google claimed that the number one was copyrighted [1] [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-containing-1-as-a-copyright-infringement https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-con... I don't recall that the reason for that bug was ever explained. I wonder if the reason for this one will be.
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Reminds me of this old Star Trek chestnut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg
daniel_iversen 4y ago
Reminds me of this episode from IT Crowd :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc
iamyatin 4y ago
6th May, with the "And. And. .." crash found on Google Docs Skynet rose to the surface.
mark_prutskyi 4y ago
lol
okaydeveloper 4y ago
The engineer at Google will be sweating now. The secret is out.
smcnally 4y ago
“And And! And.” was Outspan Foster’s band before joining “The Commitments”[0] and later The Frames (as Glen Hansard). The screenplay was written before gDocs. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes/qt0310982 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes/qt0310982
tnli 4y ago
Little Andy we call him.
eek2121 4y ago
Guess they already fixed it.
graderjs 4y ago
What if you put it in a spreadsheet cell, calendar description, drawing text or email?
truly 4y ago
It seems to be fixed now. It would be fascinating to read an analysis of what exactly leads to the bug.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
likortera 4y ago
Wonder if this was discovered because of a Mars Attack ET using it.
Nitramp 4y ago
I think the engine is just offended by your terrible writing style.
petters 4y ago
I had an exam in image analysis once. There was a photo of a text "Sea and land". The task was to "determine the cross ratio between sea and and and and and land".
kabes 4y ago
Is this fixed? Can't seem to reproduce this (chrome on ubuntu)
yashg 4y ago
Nothing is happening. Tried in both Firefox and Chrome.
whoevercares 4y ago
someone cut a sev2
tmalsburg2 4y ago
Can't replicate this bug in current Firefox on Ubuntu 21.10. They've probably fixed it.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
I couldn't reproduce the bug. Just five and's with periods and spaces in the body of a document?
mc4ndr3 4y ago
Grammar check problems strike again.
ineedasername 4y ago
Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. doesn't crash it
blatherard 4y ago
It's been fixed. > May 6, 2022 Update: We have fixed an issue in Docs related to repetitive use of the word ‘and.’ This fix should soon be in place for all customers.
- glouwbug 4y ago
  Maybe we can push to the front page all the issues with gmail so they can fix that too
kodeninja 4y ago
Big Andian bug.
raffraffraff 4y ago
Only tangentially related, and not at all serious, but this reminded me of the Irish film "The Committments" (1991) in which a working class Dublin guy puts together a soul band. He's introduced to two promising musicians who are already in a band... Jimmy: What do you call yourselves? Derek: "And And And." Jimmy: "And And fuckin' And?" Derek : Well, Ray's thinking of putting an exclamation mark after the second "and." Says it'd look deadly on the posters. Jimm: Psshh... Outspan: You don't like it? You think it should go at the end? Jimmy: I think it should go up his arse. Outspan: Well, we're not married to it.
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[deleted]

1473 points by patneedham 4y ago

good tool for everyone.

Perfect prank document to send to the team. I'm just hoping it holds up until the morning so everyone can join the fun and not just those of us with bad work time habits.

goody71 4y ago

Will Pat Needham get any Google Bux for finding this?

jrd79 4y ago

That is an amazing bug.

vldx 4y ago
I’m very curious what may be the root cause of this.
- t_mann 4y ago
  My money is on some conflicting rules in grammar / style checks.
- baisq 4y ago
  Probably something to do with the grammar check (blue squiggly line)
- the_biot 4y ago
  My guess is on an easter egg gone wrong.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

X6S1x6Okd1st 4y ago

Replicated on my end on OSX & firefox

oliwary 4y ago
Replicated on Windows 10 and Chrome too!
pinewurst 4y ago
OSX and Safari replicated

blueberrychpstx 4y ago

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 itself into an infinite loop.

dkarl 4y ago
I've heard people say it, speaking like this: "This would be a great solution to the problem, except that it would break the admin dashboard. And billing. And SSO. And partner test environments. And. And. And. And. And. This would break so many things I'm sure I could only name half of them if I tried."
- rhizome 4y ago
  Yep. I've written that formulation many many times.
- marcusverus 4y ago
  Agreed--it seems likely that the user was writing dialogue, taking minutes, or something similar. Skilled speakers frequently use repetitions of a word (like 'and') as an interjection[0]. It's a handy way of giving yourself a second to think without saying 'uhh' or 'umm' (which, for whatever reason, are considered 'bad' interjections), and seems to be a kind of defense against being interrupted. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna42822623 (a Meet the Press transcript which contains eight "and, and"s and one "and, and, and"!)
amelius 4y ago
Fuzzing?
orblivion 4y ago
C seems very likely to me. I often compulsively copy and paste things. You might not call it an error as such.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Whhhhhy

schmeckleberg 4y ago
did you decide to compress the "5 Whys" into one Why with 5 hs? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys
- a_cardboard_box 4y ago
  I just repro'd the bug with 5 whys: "Why. Why. Why. Why. Why."

valenaut 4y ago

Reproduced in Safari on macOS Monterey. "And. And. And. And." caused no problems. "And. And. And. And. And. And." also crashes (5 "And."s is a substring, so makes sense). I cannot imagine how this bug is occurring.

deleted 4y ago
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pmichaud 4y ago
My wild-ass guess is a grammar check bug. Since it words on both “and” and “but,” I’m thinking it’s some check related to conjunctions.
- aimor 4y ago
  I think this is the right track. "However. ", "Therefore. ", "Also. " cause the crash too.

twism 4y ago

Repro'd

dropit_sphere 4y ago

lolwhat, replicated w/Linux and Chrome just now.

strictfp 4y ago

And?

wardedVibe 4y ago
worth a shot, I tried it, and it worked fine. Then again, I couldn't reproduce the original

shreyansh26 4y ago

Reproduced on Edge on Windows 11 as well. What a bug! Really need to know the root cause of this.

endisneigh 4y ago

I wonder if this is crashing due to some auto completion shenanigans

zciwor 4y ago

Will 100% be pasting this into a coworker's Google Doc with a white font color.

glitchc 4y ago
Sounds like a totally collaborative/supportive workspace.
mattrighetti 4y ago
Evil
_wldu 4y ago
That's probably a cyber crime in most US states. Edit: You guys have no sense of humor.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- cyral 4y ago
  Sounds like a job for the Highway Patrol
- buryat 4y ago
  Hackernews is not a place for jokes
  - bogwog 4y ago
    So why are you here? (gotem)
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    It is if the jokes are really sophisticated or clever. No reddit style stuff.
- kappuchino 4y ago
  try /s at the end of "offending" sentence, most people will look at it more kindly.

LordDragonfang 4y ago

If I had to guess, I suspect this is due to some very weird edge case with their recently implemented grammar checker. Doesn't appear to be an issue for the android app, but that might be a cache thing.

aliljet 4y ago

And here's a link to a document where you can see the bug in action. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-au2LMGdX2M1VVKTWpax67tNo/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KKZHZpKRFRBddEvjFc-au2LM...

MiddleEndian 4y ago
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.
- tyingq 4y ago
  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).
  - MiddleEndian 4y ago
    No, it's on, just tried it again, got the blue underlines and everything. Original tab doesn't crash, new tabs crash (although I can usually get a few characters in before the crash), once I close the original tab obviously the crashes are permanent.
sillysaurusx 4y ago
It's interesting seeing how many people interact with that link. +40 users in a matter of minutes, and some instant spam suggestions too. Kind of funny. Thank you for the repro case!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aliljet 4y ago
And changing this link to a view-only authorization. It appears the bug is fixed.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wardedVibe 4y ago

didn't happen in firefox on Ubuntu

ricardobayes 4y ago

I'm glad I was here when this historical event happened.

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sillysaurusx 4y ago

Sort of related, last night I managed to make Clang crash by feeding it a certain C++ program: https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png https://i.imgur.com/r5MC2aK.png It was very surprising that there was a way to get Clang to segfault. Should I report it somewhere? The code is basically doing a recursive template expansion with some C++20 concept constraints. So it's not quite as simple as "And. And...", but it's similar in that certain input text causes a crash. I just have no idea whether to report it, or where.

tylerhou 4y ago
Clang segfaulting is somewhat common. It usually doesn't happen, but sometimes when I write some cursed template metaprogramming code it crashes and I'm not surprised. In your case, especially because you are using C++20 concepts, that is a newer feature and you probably hit some less-tested codepath.
mtoner23 4y ago
Definitely report it, it'll be fun to see what happens. https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html https://llvm.org/docs/HowToSubmitABug.html
- sillysaurusx 4y ago
  Thank you for the link! Maybe that should've been obvious to me, but it really wasn't -- I had no clue where to start. The segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug report" with no more info. Really appreciated. In that case I'll spend some time to clean up the repro case and submit it. Thanks again.
  - D-Coder 4y ago
    > The segfault just said "Please attach these files to the bug report" with no more info. The message should include the URL. Sounds like a bug that should be reported.
mshockwave 4y ago
> Should I report it somewhere? Please do. You can open an issue (Bugzilla has been deprecated) on LLVM's github repo: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project

magneticnorth 4y ago

Reproduced on Brave browser on Mac OSX. Hypothesis from chatting about this with people nearby - somehow this string makes the grammar engine search space too large (that's the AI that predicts your next words) and it's running out of memory.

captaincaveman 4y ago

has anyone tried "Or. Or. Or. Or. Or."?

8bitben 4y ago
Actually yes. Didn't crash it!
soperj 4y ago
or "&&. &&. &&. &&. &&."?

nofunsir 4y ago

James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher. (1) Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (2) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...

mtgx 4y ago

iagocds 4y ago

The Android App does not crash, but if i try to open the file at the web version it crashes

Sohcahtoa82 4y ago

Typing "And. And. And. And. And." did not reproduce the bug, but copy/paste the "And [...]" from the title of this post did. EDIT: Ah, I had to reload the page, thank you child comments.

mshockwave 4y ago
on my side it didn't trigger the crash right away but if you refresh the page, a popup with "Something went wrong" will show up
lopatin 4y ago
Typing worked for me. You have to refresh.
- noobermin 4y ago
  Refreshing was the key. Just typing it in does nothing, but refreshing or opening a saved document from your documents in docs with the text in it already leads to the crash.
  - Helmut10001 4y ago
    Does not work for me in Google Docs, no matter if copied, or reloaded, refreshed etc. Perhaps they fixed it already.

westonjackson 4y ago

Disable spelling and grammar checks in a separate doc and return to the broken doc is a possible workaround

sam1r 4y ago

I’m willing to bet it’s related to this. Google docs is trying to guess something for autocomplete, similar to their gmail feature to complete your sentences. Which means, on a privacy standpoint, whatever you’re writing and guessing, they are absolutely processing something. We the user are the product, apparently. This is mildly creepy to me because, I do vent on google docs sometimes. And assume only I can read it..

simonh 4y ago
It’s literally called a word processors, so I suppose it processes the words. I don’t have a problem with that, as long as my data is only used for purposes I have approved and to provide features I use.
- sam1r 4y ago
  How is my comment downvoted? Top comment mentions it being grammar related, which requires processing however many written words before, to provide a possible suggestion. Considering an “and” clause to meet all possible cases of suggestions may cause the program to crash.
  - nl 4y ago
    I think you are probably getting downvoted because it's Google Docs, running on Google's Servers, with Google's autocomplete and grammer checkers and spell checkers and auto-templates and everything else running against it. Of course "Google" can read your doc. That has nothing to do with "you being the product" (infact it's the opposite since free Google Docs is a loss leader for their paid GSuite product). That doesn't mean a person is reading it.
    - sam1r 4y ago
      That is a great point. Thanks for typing this out! Appreciate it.

throw7 4y ago

I've had emails crash gmail on my phone still to this day. Typically it's stuff like output logs. My guess is something to do with the repetitive lines, but who knows.

kklisura 4y ago

``` TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'C') at Ccf (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-client_js_prod_kix_app.js:1183:846 https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-...) at Bcf (https://docs.google.com/static/document/client/js/157553674-client_js_prod_kix_app.js:1183:338 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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
- dr-detroit 4y ago
tus666 4y ago
Makes sense. I was thinking something to do with document compression but that sounds more likely.
lqet 4y ago
Yup, it is also partially underlined in blue and a popup suggests to replace "And. And." with "And And" just before it crashes.
a-dub 4y ago
does it talk to a grammar check api endpoint or is it done locally? would be funny if it were a remotely exploitable bug in an api endpoint.
- r0snd0 4y ago
  Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail to perform grammar checks? Doesn’t sound too exciting.
- a-dub 4y ago
  > Remotely exploitable bug causing grammar check api to fail to perform grammar checks? Doesn’t sound too exciting. famous last words. finding security relevant bugs is often a game of identifying what the original developers might have found to be not "too exciting" or places they were out of their depth and then focusing intense effort on finding their mistakes.

Patrol8394 4y ago

Once a customer was able to destroy an old ES cluster because they copy pasted some text from a PDF into a search box ... that text got sent directly to the ES cluster without much escaping ... there were lots of "*" in there. The query complexity exploded, ES ran out of memory, and the index got corrupted and I don't remember why, it could not recover. We had to re-index all the data. Lots of fun. Lesson learned: prepare for the impossible, keep your infrastructure up to date, escape queries :)

ffhhj 4y ago
Maybe escaping the character wouldn't help if every * is telling the server to process a long loop, but some max range or time to perform the task. I can't tell which company, but I managed to do exactly that you described a few months ago, with a valid query, and it's one of those companies you can guess if I tell you the first letter of its name.
rawoke083600 4y ago
Yup seen that in a few online "stores" or companies where they use SOLR or ES. Putting in '' will make boxes explode* (ok not really). What is twice is bad as that the worst of these, fail (at least to my eye) on two fronts. 1) Allowing SINGLE character searches. I.e No min query-length. 2) Not escaping querying - lucene(solr/es) syntax. You can sometimes see the front-facing "html/js/api" is just a thin layer over ES/SOLR.(Which is not bad by itself) it's when you don't know the limitations or what sort of queries are x100 harder to do than orders.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

edgyquant 4y ago

This doesn’t work on the iOS app, I’ve pasted it and typed it manually

oblosys 4y ago

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 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.

kingcharles 4y ago
How did you create the document? When I hit backspace it does "turn into gibberish", but because it seems to inherit the type choices from the ether between the two lines to put it into Wingdings in red with italic and strikethrough. Did you create that type setting?
- oblosys 4y ago
  I ran into it while editing an interview text that had colors for people's names. It was surprisingly easy to reproduce, but creating the buggy documents got fixed at some point. The font and styles were altered slightly for dramatic effect.
MauranKilom 4y ago
But it's not some form of this? https://xkcd.com/2109/ https://xkcd.com/2109/
- oblosys 4y ago
  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.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Aw man, the way MS Word leaves bold/italic markers lying around [the subject of that comic] and greedily applies formatting to stuff you purposefully didn't select, drives me bonkers ... mind you I caught LibreOffice emulating this behaviour the other day (after an update), I hope it can be retamed ... RIP WordPerfect 'reveal codes'.

bitwize 4y ago

I wonder if "James where John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on his teacher" does someone's grammar checker up in knots. Or any of the old standbys, like "Police police police police police police".

queuebert 4y ago
Or "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo".
- jethkl 4y ago
  This topic also came up a few weeks ago. I speculate there is no upper bound. A similar example using "Hawking": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626497#30653029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30626497#30653029

skerit 4y ago

That was fun!

calebegg 4y ago

Something I recently found out about is you can go to https://docs.new https://docs.new to create a new Google doc.

metalliqaz 4y ago

The following also triggers the bug: Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.

croddin 4y ago

"Also. Also. Also. Also. Also.\n" also breaks it.

croddin 4y ago

"Anyway. Anyway. Anyway, Anyway. Anyway.\n" will break it too. Anyway...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

patneedham 4y ago

Discovered by Eliza Callahan triggered by a poem in the middle of her novel. (Friend of a coworker) That poem can be found here: https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/ - if viewing on mobile you have to Request Desktop Site for some reason, at least on Android it initially shows up as a Lorem Ipsum page

raldi 4y ago
On iPhone Chrome it doesn’t show up either way.
pvillano 4y ago
it appears to be bugs all the way down
roughly 4y ago
As arguments for the thesis that the tech world needs to embrace the humanities go, an author discovering a bug in a google product by writing a poem is pretty good, if maybe a bit too on the nose.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  Perhaps that is the missing link for why tech is so artificial and not humanly. we could use some more art than capitalistic efficiency in the Apple logo
_rf 4y ago
I know you didn't write that poem, but I'm 99% certain the apostrophes in "I thought about my body. It's past. It's present." have no business being there :)
- fluoridation 4y ago
  Seems like it could go either way.
- burkaman 4y ago

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Who. Who. Who. Who. Who. However. However. However. However. However. Why. Why. Why. Why. Why.

js8 4y ago
Google engineers should ask "Why." five times to get to the root cause.

mikotodomo 4y ago

OMG I showed this to my friends and now someone in my class keeps adding it to our documents.

queuebert 4y ago

I tried this on my typewriter, and nothing happened.

peterburkimsher 4y ago
I tried this on my typewriter, And. And. And. And. And. <nothing></nothing> Probably because it's out of paper. Related: how is paper fed into an Apple Magic Keyboard - Hebrew? Edit: Tried to reproduced with Arabic keyboard, plugged in now. Accidentally inverted right-to-left in brain. dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA. dnA.

AccountAccount1 4y ago

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/ https://durationandthebodyelizacallahan.cargo.site/

quakeguy 4y ago
Your username screams for an equal exploit tbh.
- BizarroLand 4y ago
  Their password is probably PasswordPassword2
  - tsukurimashou 4y ago
    HunterHunter
  - meshaneian 4y ago
    Why not PasswordPassword1?
    - mellavora 4y ago
      naw, it is *** That's what I see, anyway
  - AccountAccount1 4y ago
    Well shit
deleted 4y ago

jonnycomputer 4y ago

Favorite comment on that page: "Google is a small indie company btw" So, more seriously, what might cause this (mis)behavior?

draxil 4y ago

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.

fareesh 4y ago

Did this bug emerge after their Orwell word policing update?

rossdavidh 4y ago

Looks like HN is able to handle it just fine, though. :)

vesinisa 4y ago

I remember discovering that pasting a specific emoji to Google Slides causes the slide to become "poison". You could not view or edit it, the web UI would crash if you clicked on the slide. I discovered this by accident, but did not think much of it as I was able to work around by deleting the slide from the document overview.

munk-a 4y ago

And thus has Eliza Callahan suddenly found themselves a poet with a lot more name recognition among tech workers.

JasonFruit 4y ago
- arjvik 4y ago
  At the very least, you're forgetting that non-binary individuals can have feminine-sounding names.
- munk-a 4y ago
  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).
  - JasonFruit 4y ago
    - munk-a 4y ago
      "Themselves" is, at least as far as I learned english, a proper usage in that context. I adjusted "pronoun" to "gendered pronoun" above just in case, in this modern world, the meaning wasn't somehow clear. This feels like an unnecessary amount of pedantry for a simple comment.
    - dataflow 4y ago
      "Someone came into this room. I don't know them, but they took it upon themselves to take everything." What would be the correct pronouns here in your view?

ronald_raygun 4y ago

I can't get the bug to reproduce. But maybe someone else could try 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?

mike_d 4y ago
"And." x 5+, case sensitive, new line at the end. Hit refresh in your browser and it will throw an error.
- erwincoumans 4y ago
  It has been "Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed. Fixed." now.

AlexMuir 4y ago

Took 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 and and, and and and Partridge.

coreyp_1 4y ago
I heard it with "Fish and Chips".
Affric 4y ago
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.
justinpombrio 4y ago
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?
- CaptainNegative 4y ago
  Can't one just keep recursing further? Only with very careful intonation and appropriate pauses after a comma can someone read Gardner's above sentence aloud such that a listener can fully grok the connection between "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and "and", and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "And,", and "And," and "and", and "and" and "And", and "And" and "and", and "and" and "and,", and "and," and "and", and "and" and "and", and "and" and "and". (sentence due to Python 3).

mxuribe 4y ago

Wow, this is pretty silly, odd! :-)

herpderperator 4y ago

Google 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

fortran77 4y ago

It crashes for me in Chrome on windows 11, but not Edge.

loxias 4y ago

I LOVE stuff like this. Reminds me of "OpenOffice does not print on Tuesdays" https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html

cybertoad 4y ago
Haha, thanks for sharing
apanloco 4y ago
Thanks for sharing, that's hilarious :D
below43 4y ago
This is another classic from his list "We can't send mail more than 500 miles": https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/500mile_email.html https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/500mile_email.html

thekiptxt 4y ago

> Google Docs uses a "Markov Chain" to predict the next word for autocompletion purposes. In this case, of course, since we've already written "And" 5 times, the only logical next word would be "And", as showed in Djikstra's 1989 paper on the subject. Therefore, the Markov Chain never terminates and hence the memory chain overflows with infinite ands. Does anyone know why this bug doesn’t repro for some words other than And if this is the case?

sailingparrot 4y ago
That comment is a joke. SmartCompose does not use a Markov Chain, it is either still an LSTM or got upgraded to a small transformer based model.
ghayes 4y ago
That statement follows with: > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good luck Google Docs team
akersten 4y ago
How is it not code review first comment to limit that lookup to like, 10 steps at most? Baffling
timando 4y ago
Probably because that commenter just made it up.
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Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
I'm not sure that comment is true based on the second paragraph of it: > Obviously, this is partly intentional- Gregory Markov modelled his famous Chain after his younger brother, who would try to finish all of Gregory's sentences for him. The one way Markov could fool him would be to repeat the same word multiple times, and then say "Jinx", also I made all of this up, good luck Google Docs team

srinathkrishna 4y ago

What's pretty annoying is that users are providing free QA for Google!

analog31 4y ago

An odd coincidence, I recall that pressing an operator button on an older HP calculator would also cause an error, because the stack was 4 levels deep.

selimthegrim 4y ago

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man. Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.

seangrogg 4y ago

“And.” I wrote. “And. And. And. And.” That was the part that led to the apocalypse. This was not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence.

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fedeb95 4y ago

lol

mintplant 4y ago

Relatedly, I have a string of text that, when pasted into Windows 11's Notepad, consistently causes it to crash. I don't know who to report this to.

nograpes 4y ago
Okay, I'll bite. What is the string?
rdudek 4y ago
Don't keep us hanging like this, what's the string?
- mintplant 4y ago
  Unfortunately I can't share, as it's related to a not-yet-public project.
  - neerajsi 4y ago
    Do you get the standard reporting error to Microsoft dialog when it crashes? Hopefully someone will be able to look at that. In typical cases only a small summary with the stack is uploaded so your content should not be visible to whoever is looking at the dump.

ayashko 4y ago

Reminds me of an old joke; – I bet you a beer you can't make a logical, grammatical sentence with five ands in a row – I used to be a sign writer in a previous life and one of the jobs I had was to repaint the sign hanging over the door to this very pub. Except the publican was adamant that he wanted more space between the words. Where exactly I asked? In between the Pig and and, and and and Whistle he replied.

interestica 4y ago
And this joke reminds me of a Garden-path sentence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

bspear 4y ago

How random. Can't wait to try this

rikeanimer 4y ago

omg I tried to post a reply on that support page and it errored out saying "you need to be signed in ..." while I could literally see my sign in logo top right corner of the page. fking google. there are good [as well as technical humurous] comments on the page.

piemadd 4y ago

sounds like a markov chain going berserk

bufferoverflow 4y ago

I'm surprised Google didn't fuzz Google Docs.

Ansil849 4y ago

This reminds me of when Google claimed that the number one was copyrighted [1] [1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-containing-1-as-a-copyright-infringement https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-drive-flags-text-files-con... I don't recall that the reason for that bug was ever explained. I wonder if the reason for this one will be.

dreamcompiler 4y ago

Reminds me of this old Star Trek chestnut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WRtqmHpLvg

daniel_iversen 4y ago

Reminds me of this episode from IT Crowd :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc

iamyatin 4y ago

6th May, with the "And. And. .." crash found on Google Docs Skynet rose to the surface.

mark_prutskyi 4y ago

lol

okaydeveloper 4y ago

The engineer at Google will be sweating now. The secret is out.

smcnally 4y ago

“And And! And.” was Outspan Foster’s band before joining “The Commitments”[0] and later The Frames (as Glen Hansard). The screenplay was written before gDocs. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes/qt0310982 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101605/quotes/qt0310982

tnli 4y ago

Little Andy we call him.

eek2121 4y ago

Guess they already fixed it.

graderjs 4y ago

What if you put it in a spreadsheet cell, calendar description, drawing text or email?

truly 4y ago

It seems to be fixed now. It would be fascinating to read an analysis of what exactly leads to the bug.

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likortera 4y ago

Wonder if this was discovered because of a Mars Attack ET using it.

Nitramp 4y ago

I think the engine is just offended by your terrible writing style.

petters 4y ago

I had an exam in image analysis once. There was a photo of a text "Sea and land". The task was to "determine the cross ratio between sea and and and and and land".

kabes 4y ago

Is this fixed? Can't seem to reproduce this (chrome on ubuntu)

yashg 4y ago

Nothing is happening. Tried in both Firefox and Chrome.

whoevercares 4y ago

someone cut a sev2

tmalsburg2 4y ago

Can't replicate this bug in current Firefox on Ubuntu 21.10. They've probably fixed it.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

I couldn't reproduce the bug. Just five and's with periods and spaces in the body of a document?

mc4ndr3 4y ago

Grammar check problems strike again.

ineedasername 4y ago

Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. Buffalo. doesn't crash it

blatherard 4y ago

It's been fixed. > May 6, 2022 Update: We have fixed an issue in Docs related to repetitive use of the word ‘and.’ This fix should soon be in place for all customers.

glouwbug 4y ago
Maybe we can push to the front page all the issues with gmail so they can fix that too

kodeninja 4y ago

Big Andian bug.

raffraffraff 4y ago

Only tangentially related, and not at all serious, but this reminded me of the Irish film "The Committments" (1991) in which a working class Dublin guy puts together a soul band. He's introduced to two promising musicians who are already in a band... Jimmy: What do you call yourselves? Derek: "And And And." Jimmy: "And And fuckin' And?" Derek : Well, Ray's thinking of putting an exclamation mark after the second "and." Says it'd look deadly on the posters. Jimm: Psshh... Outspan: You don't like it? You think it should go at the end? Jimmy: I think it should go up his arse. Outspan: Well, we're not married to it.

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