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

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 on water: "I said fxxking INSTANT ON!!" The poor guy collected his prototype and exited the room. Later the MacBook Air launched... it fxxking turned on the moment you open the lid

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's hard to pinpoint exactly what it is, but yes, there seems to be an increasing number of small issue with Apple devices. They aren't major stuff simply not work, but yes, spam filter being pretty terrible, text overlapping on non flagship phones (e.g. the iPhone SE). All sorts of minor annoyances.

> 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?)

That light was really helpful to do the occasional late night visit to the bathroom in a home where I lived where there were no light controls at the bedside.

It used to be that if you typed, deleted the correction, and retyped, that spelling would now be the preferred and you wouldn’t have to play that game anymore. Apple broke that years ago.

> they really don’t want you saying bad words of any kind.

Not true anymore, I just typed fuck in this comment without having to fight it. They made a change I think last year and they even announced it.

> they do not look at context at all

Also not true. It's true that they're not perfect at it, but replacement after you typed 2 more words happen specifically because it can tell better what you want to say. Sometimes works against you because language is highly personal.

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

These user activated dictionaries tend to be excellent (even in vim, a pretty barebones system, I tend to get fantastic guesses from the machine).

Actually, come to think of it, the problem must be a bit easier than on smartphones, right? Real keyboard input is very precise. Smartphone keyboards already guess what word you were trying to spell, so they are influencing the typos in the direction of likely words… cannibalizing the very guess list that the dictionary uses!

Alfred ties into it nicely too, you can type `spell someword` and the completions below have the various spellings of words, fuzzy matched. Select one and the word goes onto your clipboard

I would like this too. This approach would also fix the most common failure mode of spelling checkers: typos that are accidentally valid words.

I constantly type "form" instead of "from" for example and spelling checkers don't help at all. Even a simple LLM could easily notice out of place words like that. And LLMs also could easily go further and do grammar and style checking.

I've seen this in a UI. They went a step further and you could select a word (well token but anyway) and "regenerate" from that point by selecting another word from the token distribution. Pretty neat. Had the heatmaps that you mentioned, based on probabilities returned by the LLM.

This should also be pretty cheap (just one pass through the LLM).

That's how BERT is trained, masked language modeling

in fact it can work at the language level completely with a prompt like "mark parts of this paragraph that don't flow well".

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

“The careless, the inept, the spelling disabled will be able to survive in a world of words by relying on computers to conceal their own weaknesses.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/06/02/t...

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.

I think this happens every time something gets automated away, and in a way it's true. I'm sure a lot more accountants knew 123x27 by heart before than they do now. The problem is LLMs take out the whole process of thinking, and that is going to be a problem: you generally need to think even when you're not in front of a screen.

I remember hearing this as late as the early 00s. I'd buy electronic dictionaries and spell checkers at yard sales and things like that, and use them in class. Multiple teachers were disapproving of it, despite it basically just being a paper book dictionary in a small, TI-92 shaped device. 10 year old me never saw how flipping through some obnoxiously heavy book in the back of the classroom was better than just punching in a few letters, hitting the "show definition", and ensuring I was spelling and using "curmudgeonly" properly.

Same went for using MacWord vs AppleWorks. MacWord had a built in dictionary, AppleWorks didn't.

> 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.

I don't remember any particular negative reaction to spell-checkers like the 'calculator panic'.

Perhaps partly because most schoolkids then wouldn't have been using word processors as their main writing tool at school and people using them in a corporate environment were pleased not to make embarrassing errors in their emails.

It was the opposite experience for me. Before spellcheck was commonly part of the web browser, I would go back and reread some very early emails and/or usenet posts from myself. And realize how atrocious my spelling was.

I actually consider spellcheck to have improved my spelling dramatically over the years. The little red squiggles under words have helped me to recognize my misspellings, especially the words that are hard for me to get right consistently.

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

   I have a spelling checker    
   It came with my PC   
   It highlights for my review    
   Mistakes I cannot sea.    
   I ran this poem thru it   
   I'm sure your pleased to no   
   Its letter perfect in it's weigh   
   My checker told me sew.

One of my favourites was 'rouge elephant'.

> 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.

> I failed that interview by overengineering.

Almost. You needed to clarify what the interviewer was asking and discover requirements. As much as HN likes to hate on coding interviews requiring specific algorithm knowledge, determining requirements is very much part of the job, and engineers have a tendency to build what they want to build, not what the customer wants.

Marvin the Paranoid Android voice. 'Oh... that. Just do a linear search on a dictionary. Put the small words first. I know it's woefully inefficient but you won't fuck that up'

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

Romanization systems for Chinese vary, but all have the issue that a single "word" in the romanized system can map to dozens, if not hundreds, of actual "words" in the target language.

Pinyin is sort of the standard for romanization, although other systems exist, as well as inputs that aren't based on romanization (bopomofo).

Take the pinyin `fei`. Just looking at the tones that can be on this word, it can mean at least 4 words (my dictionary app couldn't find any neutral tone words). In reality, its at least dozens, each with different contextual meanings.

IIUC there are ambiguity problems in Chinese and Korean, just less than there are for Japanese. Korean input has no end-of-character marks and multi-character entry could be split different ways, Chinese has bunch of homonyms-in-Latin, and Japanese is a huge mess(like always, if I think about it...)