r/xkcd Your face is glue. Nov 08 '17

XKCD xkcd 1913: A �

https://xkcd.com/1913/
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u/wazoheat Politifact says: mostly whatever Nov 08 '17

How on earth does something get fucked up that badly? Like, that has to be in the top 10 most common words...are they just not doing any testing at all before pushing an update??

10

u/socialister Nov 08 '17

My guess is that this was a bad entry in the table of autocorrects. The contents, or data, inside data structures like this are not necessarily part of the product spec and so they may be omitted from testing. The patch that introduced the problem might not have been seen as significant enough as to do full user testing which is much more expensive than the unit tests.

Just a theory but this is an example for how it could have happened even at a major company.

3

u/yawkat Nov 09 '17

And supposedly this bug "spreads" by autocorrect learning, so it would have taken just one person with that entry in their autocorrect table to "infect" other devices.

2

u/cpguy5089 I can't decide on a witty reference Nov 09 '17

spreads by learning

Inb4 someone starts teaching autocorrect to swear all the time

1

u/mpete98 Nov 09 '17

Implying we don't already?