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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)

#151

Post by chamomeal »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #75
zimpenfish wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 le…

Holy shit my phone has been gaslighting me this whole time???

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

#152

Post by dsign »

mrweasel wrote: post #56
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…

> because that would mean that soon people would stop learning how to spell and just general dumbing down? I'd argue that negative people where correct. People can't spell anymore, not even with a spellchecker. Maybe they never could? I'm not against spellcheckers, I think they are amazing, but they haven't helped much.

WordStar is not the problem, StarWars is. Popular culture has become so vapid that when it comes to writing and the thinking behind writing, most people fare worse than an LLM. I know that old people have been saying this basically since ancient Greece, but it bears repeating: the youth is lost.

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

#153

Post by eru »

qmr wrote: post #146
eru wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Not necessarily. There's plenty of people described as 'quiet and polite, but firm' or some similar variations.

What founders / CEOs can you name described by those qualities?

I'm not sure you need to restrict yourself to these. You can also look at eg political leaders.

Lee Kuan Yew is one example that comes to mind immediately. Warren Buffett might be a good example from the world of business.

(Your favourite search engine or chatbot is probably more than happy to give you a steady stream of other examples.)

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

#154

Post by denkmoon »

ttoinou wrote: post #106
csb6 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

Try saying the same things over and over to adults for years

Alignment of incentives. I'm sure the personal humiliation of being yelled at by Jobs was a reasonably strong incentive, but I'm certain the perception that failing to deliver would have him personally sending you to the dole queue asap was even more of a strong incentive.

Compare to most corporations where the only thing you can do to get fired is fail at office politics and failure to deliver/delivering the lowest quality crap that can be passed off is just business as usual.

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

#155

Post by brabel »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #79
gitpusher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.

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

#157

Post by ethan_smith »

rkagerer wrote: post #59

This article ends too soon! Show me the techniques and solutions those clever programmers of old came up with. Did I miss a link somewhere to subsequent posts?

Early spellcheckers often used Bloom filters to efficiently store dictionaries in minimal memory - a probabilistic data structure that could determine if a word was "definitely not" or "possibly" in the dictionary using just a few bits per word.

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

#158

Post by jbs789 »

csb6 wrote: post #104
gitpusher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds like a petulant child. Wholly unnecessary to get his point across.

To me it sounds like the symptom (emotion) of someone who deeply cares.

These things need to be well-placed to be effective. Sounds like it was.

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

#159

Post by polishdude20 »

brabel wrote: post #155
mathiaspoint wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have to agree with that as a lead. Most developers claim to be done with a task without taking care of the small details that users will immediately notice. It’s a constant struggle to try to get them to care about what is actually the value of the feature they are implementing, let alone chase on their own initiative the small issues unless painfully listed in some requirements document.

As a dev Im always noticing these little problems in my designs but my boss just wants the thing done asap without worrying too much about it being nice to use.

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

#160

Post by socalgal2 »

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…

Currrent MBPs have bright green/orange charging lights on both sides of the magsafe connector. They're bright enough I have to block them when I'm in a hotel and my laptop is in the same room.
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