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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)

#161

Post by Lio »

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.

Completely agree.

I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in.

Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep.

It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body.

What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating light on it in the first place?

It’s a fan. The fact that it’s working tells you it’s working.

A Jobs or Torvalds type character would have pointed that out.

I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.

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

#162

Post by socalgal2 »

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?

[flagged]

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

#163

Post by socalgal2 »

nicce wrote: post #24
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…

Bit off-topic - macOS has excellent built-in dictionary. Just select the word in any app, press Ctrl+Command+D and it opens it. It even guesses most incorrect words correctly. Also translation available if it exist for current keyboard locales. E.g. > No entries for "typoglycemia", did you mean "hypoglycemia"?

that's great. I usually use the context menu on MacOS and the "Define" option on long press on iOS

That said, trying to use long press on iOS (or whatever it actually is), is one of those places that often drives me nuts. I don't know if the issue is a specific app or the OS or what but sometimes I want the popup menu to appear and I can't get it to appear. Or I do something to make it appear but it doesn't appear for x hundred milliseconds, during which I think it didn't get my gesture so I start a new one, just as it's finally responding in which case my new gesture dismisses it. Repeat 3-4 times before I'm ready to tear my hair out

It also shows why canvas based websites suck. Open Google Docs, select a word, press Cmd-Ctrl-D, ... nothing. Try it in gmail (which is not canvas based) and it works.

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

#165

Post by arrowsmith »

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.

Yeah, with an attitude like that it's no wonder his products were such failures.

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

#166

Post by seszett »

Lio wrote: post #161
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.

Completely agree. I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in. Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep. It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body. What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating l…

> I suspect though that it’s often a case of people noticing these type of design flaws but not having the authority to fix them while those with the authority don’t care.

Kinda related but also not really, my own pet peeve is the pouring spout in many products, coffee machine, water jugs, buckets... they might look effective but I find that more often than not, they are curved too much and drip all over when actually pouring.

And I always have to wonder, after serving coffee from one of those things, did the person who design it never even try it just once? Didn't they ever use such a thing, they never ever poured water from a pot?

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

#167

Post by jdsnape »

eru wrote: post #140
foundart wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In comments on an article about spellchecking no less

In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.

I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years!

I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice

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

#168

Post by reissbaker »

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…

I mean, TBH I would expect this to be true: an LLM is trained over a massive corpus of internet data, which contains many typos, and is required to accurately predict tokens despite edit errors. A spellchecker is typically running a deterministic algorithm really, really quickly, and has hardcoded limits on acceptable edit distance (and has no learned knowledge of what looks correct/incorrect to human eyes). An LLM should generally trounce a spellchecker at figuring out what you meant to type, unless the spellchecker is secretly a tiny LLM / ML model of some kind under the hood.

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

#169

Post by eru »

jdsnape wrote: post #167
eru wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, both fair and fare are words in English. Which shows that spell checking needs to know a lot about grammar and context to work in general. Basically you need an LLM. Or if not a 'large language model', perhaps at least a small language model.

I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker when I was using it in school - which predated LLMs by many years! I suspect an LLM wouldn’t be the most optimal choice

Depends on what you mean by 'optimal'. Ie what are you optimising over?

In terms of 'can I run it locally on an early 2000s machine?' LLMs are definitely the wrong choice.

In terms of 'what can I quickly hack together in 2025 regardless of variable cost?' LLMs might be the right choice.

> I wonder how it does work, I remember MS Word having a fairly decent grammar checker [...]

You can get pretty far with some lookup tables and some heuristics.

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

#170

Post by netsharc »

Lio wrote: post #161
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.

Completely agree. I was given a small electric fan. It’s great in that it’s portable and I can use it in some of the crummy hotels I have to stay in. Unfortunately, it has a bright blue LED on it so it’s a pain to use at night when you’re trying to sleep. It’s so bright that even covered with tape it still shines through the thin plastic of the fan body. What really gets me is why they bothered putting an operating l…

Can't you improve this product with a screwdriver (to open it up) and wire-snipper (to cut off the LED)?
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