About a week ago, my blog provider Typepad threw a banner across the top of the editor. It warned that some things might be a little unstable, and if we just patiently kept clearing the cache and refreshing our screens then it would eventually work out.
That is not a normal message from your IT team. But, it was honest, and I like that.
I typed a few words and didn't see much wrong. Then I typed the word "May".
"Ma" came out. I thought part of my touchscreen was dead, because capital Y didn't work either.
I just chose another word, and that was fine, until I had another word that really required a "y".
I did the cache/refresh trick recommended on screen several times. Odd screen images began to show up after I refreshed.
I just typed in Word and did a copy / paste, and the next day the letter y was back.
Still, strange. Not a normal error. Wh would that happen?
... that is phenomenally weird. Y???
Posted by: KC | July 16, 2024 at 12:07 PM
KC - I know! It's so atypical for programmers. And you know how bad my typos are, it's amazing I even spotted it.
Posted by: theQueen | July 16, 2024 at 06:21 PM
My best guess is if someone's doing some character filtering/replacement [i.e. swapping " with the unicode codepoint for "] due to a database exploit (i.e. https://xkcd.com/327/), then if they accidentally added "y" to the list somehow and failed to provide a character-escape for it to be replaced with? Or accidentally included "y" in a list of not-allowed over-wide characters? But data sanitization has been normal for literally decades now, so... I don't know.
Some bugs are just weird, weird bugs. At least it was *every* y rather than every 7th y or something similarly less-consistent...
Posted by: KC | July 18, 2024 at 11:51 AM
(ohhhh or if someone tried to be "smart" and used AI to "write" some code, that can also generate spectacularly weird bugs that can be difficult to track down! But I would have expected a version rollback for breaks in any case other than "there was a necessary security fix" case.)
Posted by: KC | July 18, 2024 at 11:53 AM
KC - the only language I know is PL/SQL. I understood the words "character-escape."
Posted by: theQueen | July 18, 2024 at 06:09 PM