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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)

#141

Post by eru »

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.

Yes, Steve Jobs was a jerk.

Alas, human don't come fully customisable. You get to pick from the packages on offer. And it seemed like for Apple Steve Jobs' good parts only came as part of a package that also included his bad parts.

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

#142

Post by eru »

elzbardico wrote: post #125
IshKebab wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it requires being an arsehole. Just being firm. That doesn't require arseholery.

People will call someone who doesn't bend to the status quo an asshole.

No. Not necessarily.

There's plenty of people described as 'quiet and polite, but firm' or some similar variations.

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

#143

Post by aidenn0 »

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…

I had an English teacher who allowed submissions only on typewriter or hand-written with spellcheckers mentioned as the reason.

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

#144

Post by qmr »

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…

[flagged]

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

#145

Post by aidenn0 »

Finnucane wrote: post #35
chilipepperhott wrote: post #8

Checking if a word is spelled correctly is easy. It is providing high-quality suggestions that is hard.

As a copyeditor/proofreader, the number of times over the years I've had to fix the low-quality (i.e, wrong) suggestions is quite large. ("he had a small plague on his desk" remains a favorite.)

"He looked in the [car's] grove department" is still my favorite.

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

#146

Post by qmr »

eru wrote: post #142
elzbardico wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will call someone who doesn't bend to the status quo an asshole.

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?

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

#147

Post by qmr »

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"?

There's also a gesture. Triple three finger tap or some such like.

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

#148

Post by aidenn0 »

DevX101 wrote: post #13

It still is? Few engineers could build a good spell checker without external libraries, giving a database of valid words.

TFA is just about flagging misspelled words, not making suggestions. That's something I would expect any undergraduate to be able to write.

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

#149

Post by aidenn0 »

mandeepj wrote: post #85
Aurornis wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Few engineers could build a good spell checker without external libraries, giving a database of valid words. Writing a spell checker that quickly identifies if a word is in a list of valid words (the problem described in the article) is a trivial problem for anyone who has basic algorithms and data structure knowledge. It's the classic example for using a trie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie The problem describ…

> 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.

OK. You have no hard disk, just a 360K floppy.

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

#150

Post by dsign »

anuramat wrote: post #120
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…

That's how BERT is trained, masked language modeling

I've used BERT to do that sort of thing. It was a prototype and I was using Pytorch, also, I'm not an expert on Pytorch performance. I also tried with models that succeeded BERT for masked token. My issue with it is that it was slow :-( . My second issue with it is that it wasn't integrated in my favorite word editor. But definitively useful.
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