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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)

#101

Post by bell-cot »

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…

> Is there a reason why ...

Yes: Apple doesn't care.

> Does anyone else...

Yes. I just typed in "Tipografical earer" - and iOS 18.6 suggested "Tipograxical" for the first word, and one of "eared", "eager", and "eater" for the second word.

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

#102

Post by uticus »

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…

emoticons

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

#103

Post by mandeepj »

dhosek wrote: post #91
mandeepj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you store your list of 200K words on a system with only 256K of memory? Your hard disk is almost always larger than your RAM. You only load into memory what's needed at the moment. I hope that gives a hint on how to proceed with the above problem.

But you don’t necessarily even have a hard disk. You might only have a 320K floppy. Floppy-only computers were pretty common in the late 80s when I was in undergrad.

Let's replace "hard disk" with "external storage". Shall we?

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

#104

Post by csb6 »

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…

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

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

#105

Post by el_benhameen »

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 have definitely noticed this too. I also use the built in swipe to type feature, and it may as well be a coin flip as to whether it gets the word right. I get that swiping is vague, but even a little bit of frequency prediction would tell you that “sounds good” is going to be more likely than “sings hood”. It’s an absolutely infuriating feature.

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

#106

Post by ttoinou »

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.

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

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

#107

Post by ttoinou »

abullinan wrote: post #80
IshKebab wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Surely there must be some counter examples. Collison brothers at Stripe ?

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

#108

Post by Gibbon1 »

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…

What I think is one should question if something is the point of the exercise.

I'd argue that where writing spelling is something completely arbitrary and thus of no fundamental importance. Arithmetic is the same way, lots of algorithms to do that and they are all valid. So calculators and spell checkers are fine. And you should use them.

The same is not true for grammar. Getting AI to write an essay for you.

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

#109

Post by pcrh »

grishka wrote: post #63
numpad0 wrote: post #46

It's also a key enabler to CJK typing on computers. CJK scripts never map to keyboards well, so instead of actually typing, approximate representations are typed in and regularized into written forms using similar technologies as spell checkers. It's a neat thing if you speak one of the languages, sort of interesting that a similar tool haven't been integrated into English keyboards.

Doesn't Chinese input usually work by typing Latin codes for characters? Korean characters represent syllables made up of shapes representing individual sounds, those fit on a keyboard just fine. And I'm not sure about Japanese, there they may use something like spell checkers to map kana to kanji. Another interesting challenge with CJK languages was just displaying them. You need higher-resolution graphics and a muc…

This is a history Chinese keyboards before word processors, and even as they were first introduced: https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinese-keyboard

Very interesting! It was certainly a different technological challenge...

Also discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40537464

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