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Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

refine.sh

181–190 of 220 posts

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#181
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour . If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

> and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping? Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default…

Plenty of European companies and organizations use American spellings. In general I’d say it’s pretty much random and 50/50.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#182
post #100
post #80

I'm really wondering if/why Grammarly still has a business case, in this age of LLMs.

It's beyond me how they still refuse to offer an official API. Gemini subscription costs as much, allows me to do much more, and I can call it from vim or emacs without some arcane acrobatics

They used to have an API, which they removed about two years ago or so. Until then, there were a bunch of 3rd-party Grammarly plugins, including a pretty decent one for VSCode.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#183

If you are running local LLMs what is the hardware requirement in my machine? Don't see any mention of that.

Gemma 3n (the model used by this app) would run on any Apple Silicon device (even with 8GB RAM).

Yup, but you're automatically giving up a ton of RAM that could be better used for Slack.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#185

It does this This phrase is offensive and violates my safety guidelines. Therefore, I will not revise it. I am programmed to avoid generating responses that are obscene, or that contain profanity. because what's under the hood is this, and prompts are hardcoded unsloth/gemma-3n-E4B-it-GGUF You are a precision editor guided by a custom style manual. Your tasks are ordered by priority. Your primary rule is to consult t…

Incredible. Has any non-AI grammar checker ever returned a "safety" refusal to the user before? Is this the power of LLM wrappers?

Imagine if WinRAR didn't let you archive or name your files what you want. How we were trusted with such DESTRUCTIVE tools all these years is beyond me. /s

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour . If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

As a Frenchman, I enjoy writing colour and being arrogant.

Come on, write couleur and let them eat cake ;)

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#187
post #25

The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence: > Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice. In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g. : > I go to my practice to practise medicine. The problem I have with this website is that it's…

In American English, "practise" is incorrect. So if the screenshot is taken from a user using the en_US locale it is correct. Perhaps, if your locale is en_GB it will correct "practice" to "practise", but you can't know that from a screenshot.

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#188
post #25

The screenshot shows the (corrected) example sentence: > Sometimes I still make mistakes with articles and prepositions, but my grammar is getting better every day I practice. In American/Simplified English, this is grammatically correct. However, in 'full fat' English, practice is a noun, whereas practise is a verb; e.g. : > I go to my practice to practise medicine. The problem I have with this website is that it's…

So apparently the tool is slanted toward American English where the non-word practise is properly treated as a spelling error like colour . If you use these words in writing for Americans and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth, you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

> you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

That is simply not true. Maybe that's how you feel about it, but it is generally not the case (or even considered, really).

Re: Show HN: Refine – A Local Alternative to Grammarly

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly not the case in the majority of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, East Africa, West Africa, South Africa, PNG, Fiji, Philippines, South Asia and South East Asia. Really it's mostly just America and Canada that use American. I could cite many sources but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_s... provides a simple view.

We don't use American English in Canada either.

Oh! I'm sorry, I must have misread!
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