[M4v3R]

Browser text entry on mobile phones is notoriously hard to get right and some bugs are literally unfixable [1]. I'm a frontend developer in my day job and I struggled with this even before AI was a thing. I think you just accidentally picked one of the hardest tasks for the AI to do for you.

[1] Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/xaksu6/on_ios_safar...

[stavros]

Huh, that's actually my exact bug. I didn't realize this was so hard, thank you.

[mmastrac]

I have a reasonably good solution for this project of mine you might find useful:

https://grack.com/demos/adventure/

The trick for me was just using a hidden input and updating the state of an in game input box. The code is ancient by today's standards but uses a reasonably simple technique to get the selection bounds of the text.

It works with auto complete on phones and has been stable for a decade.

[adelineJoOs]

hidden input box is something I heard before from some hacker-ish old collegues - seems to be a powerful and reliable approach to store state & enable communication between components!

[mmastrac]

Oops, I worded my comment poorly -- it's not a hidden input, but rather a "CSS-visibility-hidden textbox input". Hidden inputs are useful but something completely different.

[adelineJoOs]

Gotcha, thank you for the clarification!

[stavros]

That's promising, thank you! I'll ask the LLM to implement it.

[gwern]

https://xkcd.com/1425/

One of the frustrating things about web dev, I find, is the staggering gulf between apparently nearly identical tasks and unpredictability of it. So often I will find myself on gwernnet asking Said Achmiz, 'this letter is a little too far left in Safari, can we fix that?' and the answer is 'yes but fixing that would require shipping our own browser in a virtual machine.' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Vecr]

Did an LLM convince you to put in the anthropic argument entry in the galaxy brained section? Claude Opus?

https://gwern.net/blog/2025/conference-size

[gwern]

Actually, I came up with that all on my own after I noted to myself that capture-recapture would work; and it amused me so much that I resolved to try to come up with a proper list filling out the idea. I did get some of the other ideas from LLMs, though.