Including “And. And. And. And. And.” in a Google doc causes it to crash (opens in new tab)

"Although", "Besides", and "Moreover" also trigger the behavior.

Though, when I worked on Google's indexing system, some researchers were having machine learning generate regexes to run on every page in the visible web... and mis-implemented the feature to re-compile the regex to DFA (which re2 effectively lazily converts to NFA via memoization) for every single page load. The speed of the indexing system dropped in half one day, and <Edit: Name Witheld> dug into it. <Name Withheld> took the gperf graph showing the giant node for regex compilation and wrote a savage meme "Your mother doesn't work here. Optimize your own code.", and sent it out to the researchers in question and also the indexing team. Maybe 6 months earlier, I cut into the same researchers for writing and approving C++ header file changes that defined (and leaked) macros "DO" for "{" and "OD" for "}" so that they could write C++ a bit more like Bash. As I remember, the macro leak for DO caused compilation errors in SpiderMonkey, which I fixed. After fixing the breakage, I just left an extra comment on the code review "Really? Leaking DO and OD macros to avoid typing curly braces?" without emailing any lists. They were really embarrassed removed DO and OD within a couple of days, and <Name Withheld> didn't know that I had laid into them a bit 6 months earlier.

(I had implemented some very coarse-grained super-lightweight type-based data flow analysis into SpiderMonkey, which is why some of the Google headers were being included while compiling SpiderMonkey.)

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.

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).

I always wanted to start a Yello cover band called Purple, just to perform a song called "Oh No!"

Mmmmm, Ugly... More ugly... Such a bad time... A really bad time...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jJkdRaa04g

Try saying "a Nand and an And" in a way that your students can understand you.

But also this was from an early draft so it could be a mistake.

1. Create a Word document (most likely using the Blank document template, Normal.dotm)

2. Type text of first line; press Enter; type text of second line (technically Word calls these 'paragraphs'--Shift+Enter inserts a newline within the same paragraph)

3. Place cursor on first paragraph

4. Click a Paragraph Style from the Styles ribbon section to apply it (e.g., the second one, No Spacing)

5. Right click the style; choose Modify...

6. Change the formatting (e.g., the font to Wingdings)

7. Confirm the dialog

8. Select the entire first paragraph (doesn't matter whether you include the end-of-paragraph/newline)

9. Use manual formatting to override your changes to the style so the text matches the default style, Normal (e.g. use the listbox in the ribbon to change the font back to Calibri)

Done; if you now delete the newline, the second paragraph merges with the first and takes on its style, as parent points out.

Styles are the "proper" way to format Word documents (interesting to see what fraction of users actually use them). They're like a mix of HTML tags and styles: each paragraph (div) must have exactly one Paragraph Style, and each span of text can only have one Character Style. "Manual" formatting has highest precedence, followed by Character Style, followed by Paragraph Style. The benefits are the same as in HTML: semantic correctness and easy restyling of the entire document (e.g., by applying Themes from the Design tab). This sequence of steps is a fairly good demonstration of how they're used.

Edit: clarify

This kind of thing can be easily debugged using the style inspector, "reveal formatting" which shows the formatting applied to the selected text and whether it's from paragraph formatting or direct text formatting.

RIP WordPerfect 'reveal codes'.

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 (a Meet the Press transcript which contains eight "and, and"s and one "and, and, and"!)

The number required was pretty high, but you could get to it by copy pasting an already typed (In the emergeny dialer) number for a while, crashing the lockscreen until the next reset

At one such position (reasonably well-known product within the tech world), there was clear pushback not to file bugs of this nature.

I didn't stick with that position long.

In that case I'll spend some time to clean up the repro case and submit it. Thanks again.