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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

devblogs.microsoft.com

21–30 of 127 posts

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#21

I wish there was a button on my keyboard that I could press when there's a red squiggle in the last N words, which would cause my computer to fix the underlined word to its best guess. It should wait until a few words later, to get more context. It should flash the new word as it's being inserted, so I can easily see what it's done. Spell check used to be kind of lousy, but with AI I imagine it would have a very high…

Most mobile keyboards will do autocorrect as you describe it, and show top-N alternatives when you go back and tap on the autocorrected word. I prefer this to it mocking my mistakes and making me pay penance by manually accepting the correction.

I prefer the opposite since it absolutely trashes proper nouns and makes it extremely annoying to type bilingually.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#22

I wish there was a button on my keyboard that I could press when there's a red squiggle in the last N words, which would cause my computer to fix the underlined word to its best guess. It should wait until a few words later, to get more context. It should flash the new word as it's being inserted, so I can easily see what it's done. Spell check used to be kind of lousy, but with AI I imagine it would have a very high…

> with AI I imagine ...

I think that might be just imagination - android autocorrect in particular got sufficiently worse that I finally turned it off (I still use it as a "typing assist" - it only displays choices that I can tap to replace, or (more often) ignore.)

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#23
When you work in multi language environment the squiggles are often less than useful. They are just visual noise I must fight or ignore because the system tries to guess the language of the text I'm writing and it is most often wrong. And manually switching language settings between each interaction is way to inconvenient.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#24
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.

Citogenesis! https://xkcd.com/978/ Can't believe we got to see one in the wild, and with clear attribution to boot.

Mobile version

https://m.xkcd.com/978/

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#26
post #8

Amusingly, Chen's article refers to the Wikipedia page as evidence that Tony Krueger did the port. The article's evidence for that in its latest version? A link back to Chen's article...!

To make the chronology clear:

• The Wikipedia page from before the reference to Chen's article was added: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip%27s_Challeng... — it cites two sources for "coded by Tony Krueger" ("About box from the game") and for "written [by Krueger] in a single summer" (a forum post).

• Chen's article mentions "Tony Krueger is remembered in Wikipedia as the person who ported…", then adds a footnote: “Probably not as widely documented is that he accomplished this without the source code: He reverse-engineered the MS-DOS version and then reimplemented it for Windows.”

• The Wikipedia article then cites Chen's article for this additional information.

It's all fine and proper. I've just edited the citation to make this clear again.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mobile keyboards will do autocorrect as you describe it, and show top-N alternatives when you go back and tap on the autocorrected word. I prefer this to it mocking my mistakes and making me pay penance by manually accepting the correction.

I prefer the opposite since it absolutely trashes proper nouns and makes it extremely annoying to type bilingually.

The worst is when it automatically corrects, you delete the correction and type the exact same thing, then it automatically corrects to something else, repeat.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most mobile keyboards will do autocorrect as you describe it, and show top-N alternatives when you go back and tap on the autocorrected word. I prefer this to it mocking my mistakes and making me pay penance by manually accepting the correction.

Yeah I'm thinking about my desktop computer. Also, I find that the autocorrect on my phone is not that good, especially when the first letter is incorrect.

macOS at least will autocorrect stuff by default... I typically turn it off within a few days of a fresh install after getting annoyed by some correction I didn't want.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#29
Another thing that has been completely broken by Microsoft over the years. Spell check in Word today is absolutely godawful, it generates more false positives than true positives by a massive margin. Shit like "the" having a red squiggle. Drives me insane as every time I see it I think about how far software has fallen.

Re: In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

#30
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s an xkcd for that but I’m on my phone and too lazy to look it up.

Citogenesis! https://xkcd.com/978/ Can't believe we got to see one in the wild, and with clear attribution to boot.

I have left comments on HN and Reddit and then found them rolled into Google's AI search summarizer OR the knowledge box with _extreme rapidity_ such that when I went, mere moments later, to go re-check some fact I had cited, I found my own comment at the top of the results, repeated back to me, but with authority and gravitas, ensconced in the austere trappings of the knowledge box.
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