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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

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Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#71

Post by ww520 »

IshKebab wrote: post #49
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".

Or the incentive aligned.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#72

Post by zimpenfish »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45
keiferski wrote: post #19

Is there a reason why Apple's iPhone spellcheck is often really poor, significantly worse than both LLMs and just...human eyes? I often find myself butchering the spelling of a word in a way where the correct answer is obvious to human eyes (probably because of "typoglycemia" [1]) and an AI LLM immediately understands what I meant to say, but Apple's spellcheck has "No Guesses Found." Does anyone else have this exper…

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

> From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar

One of the most aggravating things in iOS. Trips me up almost every day (and it's been there for what? 10 years now?)

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#73

Post by [deleted] »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #65
athrowaway3z wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a related idea for a while now. Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'. You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or p…

I've seen this in a UI. They went a step further and you could select a word (well token but anyway) and "regenerate" from that point by selecting another word from the token distribution. Pretty neat. Had the heatmaps that you mentioned, based on probabilities returned by the LLM. This should also be pretty cheap (just one pass through the LLM).

[deleted]

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#74

Post by simianwords »

athrowaway3z wrote: post #27
yndoendo wrote: post #18

It is 2025 and the best spell checker is a search engine. Numerous time an application will not provide the correct word. Only solution is to try the word in a search engine and try using in a sentence if that fails. In my opinion, this is where ML/AL local model, no internet required, would be the most beneficial today. Even had to use a search engine with, "thoughts and opi" because I forgot how to spell opinion be…

I've had a related idea for a while now. Instead of how LLMs operate by taking the current text and taking the most likely next token, you take your full text and use an LLM to find the likeliness/rank of each token. I'd imagine this creates a heatmap that shows which parts are the most 'surprising'. You wouldn't catch all misspelling, but it could be very useful information to find what flows and what doesn't - or p…

in fact it can work at the language level completely with a prompt like "mark parts of this paragraph that don't flow well".

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#75

Post by AnotherGoodName »

zimpenfish wrote: post #72
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

> From.the.overly.prominent.full.stop when searching textually in the url bar One of the most aggravating things in iOS. Trips me up almost every day (and it's been there for what? 10 years now?)

Wait until you realize that the icon of the period and spacebar don't at all line up to the touch area due to touch gravitation. You can tap slightly more on the spacebar side and still end up with a period. https://www.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1ekszul/comment/lgn...

So if you suffer from this it's not even your fault. You're literally hitting the spacebar but some incentive at Apple in their org structure has led to the period literally having waaaay too much weighting and the lack of exec oversight at Apple in the post Jobs days is leading to us all.typing.periods.whenever.we.just.wanted.to.search.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#76

Post by efitz »

Having a dictionary is a prerequisite but is only a small part of the spell check problem. Plus, plain text word lists are slow to parse in the 80s; better going with a Trie or some other exotic tree structure that is naturally compressed but O(log(n)) instead of O(n) to traverse.

The computer has to figure out whether the word is in the dictionary, but it also has to figure out a suggestion for what to change it to.

And even after just that, we already have a bug- homonym mistakes- homonyms are in the dictionary but they’re misspelled (that was intentional btw).

How misspelled is another problem. We’ve had Levenshtein et al algorithms for a long time, but how different can you get? A really badly misspelled word might not have any good replacement candidates within your edit distance limit.

There are also optimizations like frequently mistyped words (acn-> can), acronyms, etc.

It was never just about size.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#77

Post by kergonath »

runako wrote: post #36
torium wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

Not as much with spellcheckers because even when they started to get popular, it was apparent that many people cannot spell English. So it was very natural. People pushed back on the grammar checks when they landed in Word. Before that, people pushed back on calculators in secondary schools. This was a huge point of contention all classes except trigonometry, and calculators were definitely not allowed in the SAT/ACT…

> People pushed back on the grammar checks when they landed in Word.

Word’s grammar checker has improved quite a lot. But I absolutely hate the style checker and its useless advice. Yes, I know how the passive voice works and yes, it is appropriate in this sentence. Also, it’s not really a problem in English but Word still can’t do spaces properly so it wants to put normal spaces everywhere and it’s fucking ugly. I wish it would spend as much time fixing inappropriate breaking spaces (in English as well).

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#78

Post by taftster »

torium wrote: post #31
jimt1234 wrote: post #12

Can confirm. The first time I saw an automatic spellchecker was probably with WordStar around 1989, and it blew me away. How can the computer know all the words? That's insane! Sounds lame, but it's true. It was a different world.

Since you're old enough, here's a question for you. Do you remember if at the time the first spellcheckers were invented, people were negative on spellcheckers, because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? It seems that anything that helps people gets this reaction these days. On the one hand, the argument 100% resonates with me. On the other hand, spelling…

It was the opposite experience for me. Before spellcheck was commonly part of the web browser, I would go back and reread some very early emails and/or usenet posts from myself. And realize how atrocious my spelling was.

I actually consider spellcheck to have improved my spelling dramatically over the years. The little red squiggles under words have helped me to recognize my misspellings, especially the words that are hard for me to get right consistently.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#79

Post by mathiaspoint »

gitpusher wrote: post #69
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

I worked at Apple and heard a lot of Steve stories. He really did personally approve everything. He would be sitting in a room, and team leads would all line up to give their quick 2-minute update. So it's the MacBook Air guy's turn. He comes in and places his prototype down in front of Steve. Steve opens the lid. Two seconds later he picks up the laptop and heaves it so hard it skipped across the table like a stone…

Good product development really does seem to require some sort of leader who demands quality and smacks people when they don't deliver. Linux is nice because of Torvalds for example.

Re: A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)

#80

Post by abullinan »

IshKebab wrote: post #49
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but it’s much broader. Just in general the lack of Steve Jobs noticing these glaring issues and coming down hard to solve them is pretty clear. I remember when macbooks briefly came out with a ridiculously bright standby led that required Black electrical tape over if you wanted to sleep with it in the house. Shortly after no more status leds on any MacBook (thank you!). Nowadays i find non stop little annoyances…

I've also found a lot of this stuff is due to naysayers telling people that things can't be fixed (because really they don't want to bother). You need a strong leader to say "no it can and we will".

It takes a village. Also to be successful in tech it takes an asshole. No way around it. At some point all successful companies share an overly aggressive visionary. The entire company doesn’t need to be toxic, but the apex does. If you don’t like it, don’t climb the ladder.
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