[HN Gopher] A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software e...
___________________________________________________________________
A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering
(2008)
Author : rrampage
Score : 153 points
Date : 2023-02-28 17:17 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (prog21.dadgum.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (prog21.dadgum.com)
| voberoi wrote:
| Here's a play-by-play of a software engineer at Atari building a
| spellchecker for VAX mainframes in the 80's:
|
| https://atariemailarchive.org/thread/on-building-a-spellchec...
|
| It's a game of problem whack-a-mole in this email thread!
| wirthjason wrote:
| Perhaps that's a good thing. There's so much computing hardware
| these days that some things are basic "free". Liberating (but
| also scary) implication is that we're limited more by our ideas
| than the hardware, so go out there and create something cool,
| there's little stopping you other than the ideas in your head.
| [deleted]
| bluGill wrote:
| As a person with dysgraphia I can assure you that it still is a
| major feet. The algorithms are fast, but they still do a bad job
| of turning the semi-random sequence of letters I come up with
| into real words.
| rvbissell wrote:
| > dysgraphia
|
| > feet
|
| Indeed.
| [deleted]
| VLM wrote:
| Three other things to think about:
|
| 1980s memory models especially dos-era PC was a nightmare but you
| could at great effort work around it. The C / unix memory model
| is actually quite luxurious compared to programming on dos 3.3.
|
| In the old days non-English support was pretty complicated. Now
| you rely on the OS to support UTF-8 and call it good, more or
| less. Was a bigger problem 'back in the day'.
|
| In the old days you'd run a spell checker as a batch process,
| possibly not even part of the editor itself. The point I'm making
| is WRT speed, now a days speed doesn't matter, not because
| processors are faster (although they are, software always expands
| faster than hardware) but because we have integrated app with
| threading, so instead of saving this into a file, then exiting my
| browser and running a separate spell check app then exit and
| start the browser again and load this file back into it, the
| browser simply has a thread doing spell checking "on the fly". So
| in the old days it was VERY important WRT labor costs to spell
| check a 10000 word essay as fast as possible, and on a 8 mhz XT
| that was a trick indeed. But today my multi core multi ghz
| desktop merely needs to spell check on the fly as I'm typing and
| I can't be faster than 100 wpm or so. My desktop had "like one
| second or so" to decide that ghz and mhz are not words and put
| red squigglies under them whereas in the old days you'd have to
| spell check like 1000 words/second to keep the users happy.
|
| So simple ineffective code survives in 2023 because it can lean
| on the OS, its not just that hardware is faster or larger.
| crawdog wrote:
| Word processors in the 70s had this as well. I remember the CPT
| 8100 having this as a selling point in their literature. There
| was no inline correction. Run the program, correct your issues
| then continue!
|
| Anyone else remember Shift+F7? Bring out your Wordperfect
| templates.
| mdip wrote:
| This reminded me of a Mr Wizard's World episode I watched in the
| 80s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz_8AjIgfA
|
| In it he demos the UI of a word processor of that era on a green
| screen monitor. As I had a CGA screen/PC at the time word
| processing was pretty novel to me ... in white and black, but
| most of my friends did not own computers and those that did had
| Commodore 64s[0].
|
| [0] I sat jealous despite sitting before a $3,000 8088 w/FPU,
| 10MB HDD and 640k of RAM that took 2 minutes before it started
| booting from the hard drive (I learned to count in powers of two
| up to 640 that way).
| lxe wrote:
| There are still "hard" problems to solve when it comes to
| spellchecking. For example predictive text and correct typo
| detection. Notice what suggestions the Firefox and chrome
| spellcheckers give you versus what happens when you use google or
| mobile phone autocorrect. There are still differences in
| spellchecking speed, quality, and UX.
| knodi123 wrote:
| I read an article where a software engineer was about to go on a
| long plane flight, so he downloaded a file of all english words
| and tried to write a spell checker during his flight, with no
| internet access, just as an exercise. And when he landed, he had
| finished, and his algorithm was beautiful, simple, elegant, easy
| to understand, and never something I'd have come up with in a
| million years.
|
| It was actually a little depressing - it made me realize that
| some people just have a "something" that I'm not going to get
| through hard work or whatnot.
|
| *edit: ah, found it. https://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Don't get me wrong, Peter Norvig is awesome, but if you're
| already familiar with levenshtein or even hamming distances,
| it's pretty straightforward to hack together a spellchecker.
| azurelake wrote:
| I mean, he definitely knew about the concept of edit distance:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edit_distance before writing this
| code, which is the most difficult part. Here's a practice
| problem: https://leetcode.com/problems/edit-distance/.
|
| So in this case, the special "something" he has is quite
| literally the amount of hard work he put in to learn this
| stuff. And if you take this opportunity to learn about edit
| distance, you'll be one step closer to that special someone you
| want to be.
| corobo wrote:
| Do you allow yourself to be bored at all?
|
| I recently realised I've been missing my "something" for a
| while.. ya I've not had a dopamine free moment since doom
| scrolling became a thing.
|
| Not comparing somethings, I probably couldn't write a spell
| checker much less a beautiful one, but my creative juices are
| much less clogged up since allowing myself to get bored.
|
| I believe it's being able to combine a learned skillset with
| raw creativity that gives a person that something you refer to.
| JoshCole wrote:
| You know how there is that joke about reasoning about multi-
| dimensional structures?
|
| "To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize
| a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly.
| Everyone does it."
|
| - Geoffrey Hinton, A geometrical view of perceptrons
|
| Well, you actually can come up with Norvig's spellchecker very
| easily with a similar trick. Just tell yourself: to deal with a
| really hard problem, just argmax with an okayish heuristic.
| Everyone does it.
|
| Solutions like this seem impossibly elegant because they
| tolerate a whole lot of error, but they are actually extremely
| obvious when you tolerate error.
| nottathrowaway3 wrote:
| That "something" is basically passion and motivation, a child-
| like fascination with computers and the powers they can give
| you. People like this are so valuable and great to work with
| not because they have some innate power to understand
| algorithms, but because they sell a brand of optimism
| reminiscent of the "old" tech industry, the American postwar
| optimism of the 90s, where new things actually _were_
| revolutionary.
|
| Let's be real, in 5-6 hours he designed a very nice, simple
| algorithm to produce likely words from a dictionary based on
| frequency analysis, and produced 30 lines of Python code
| implementing it. A lot of engineers today could have done this.
|
| The "specialness" was that he did it on his own time and
| enjoyed it.
|
| There was an xkcd relevant here about enjoying Python:
| https://xkcd.com/353/
| aflag wrote:
| Many developers would come up with that once they know the
| answer. Not as many will find the answer.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| True genius is coming up with something so obvious everyone
| thinks "that's nothing, I could have done that."
|
| Complexity is the product of lesser stars in the firmament.
| stevenspasbo wrote:
| You're in for a bad time if you're going to be comparing
| yourself to Peter Norvig.
| feoren wrote:
| These ideas are extremely powerful. I built a spell-checker
| largely based on this article, by parsing English Wikipedia. At
| scale it needs a trie and a distance metric with better-scaling
| performance metric, but it works really well. These go
| together: your error metric is a priority-based multi-headed
| traversal of your trie -- this emulates comparing your word to
| _every word_ in your dictionary; you can compare against a few
| million words very quickly.
|
| Because it's based on Wikipedia, it can correct proper names
| too. It's very extensible: by changing the error model, you can
| get fuzzy auto-complete that can look at "Shwarz" and suggest
| "Schwarzenegger" (even though you missed the 'c'). You can
| extend it to looking at multiple words instead of just letters,
| for correcting common word-use issues as well.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I built a spell checker in the D compiler, where the
| dictionary consists of the symbols in scope. It is very
| satisfactory.
| agencies wrote:
| Is the code or expanded explanation available?
| cortesoft wrote:
| It is a bit strange to me that it would be surprising that
| there are people way better at programming than you. The chance
| that you would be at the far right of the bell curve for any
| skill is pretty small, by definition. Almost everyone is going
| to not be the best at your thing. I don't know why it would be
| depressing to not be the best.
| addaon wrote:
| > any skill is pretty small, by definition
|
| I challenge this, especially the "by definition" part. It
| depends on how many skills you recognize.
|
| The chance of being the best artist (to the extent that such
| a statement is reasonable) might be one in eight billion.
|
| The chance of being the best automotive sharpie artist is,
| similarly, one in eight billion.
|
| The chance of being the best artist /of some particular skill
| set/ is, then, much higher -- if you recognize only a few
| thousand distinct skills here, you're already at one in a
| million.
|
| Then realize that those who are likely to be surprised that
| there are better programmers than them are /not/ likely to be
| surprised that there are better artists than them. So we're
| assessing across all skills.
|
| The chance of being on the far right of the bell curve of a
| specific skill is pretty small. The chance of being on the
| far right of the bell curve for /any/ skill is quite high,
| with only eight billion people around.
|
| Find what you do better than anyone else, embrace it, and
| enjoy it.
| armatav wrote:
| Yeah and that "something" is a deep interest.
|
| You can do similar things in domains where you're so interested
| you can't think of doing anything else.
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| To be fair even Norvig's implementation wasn't great for a
| mobile device. It can be improved with a more efficient trie
| structure...
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Do you have any links?
| jpollock wrote:
| The hard part in the early spellcheckers wasn't figuring
| out that you want to find a set of words with a minimum
| edit distance from the input.
|
| The hard part was fitting the dictionary in memory, and
| then searching all possible strings 1 and 2 edits away from
| the input to find the candidates.
|
| The progress is that we don't have to care about storing
| 2.5MBytes (they ran on machines with 640k!) in RAM, or
| searching it 100,000 times (e.g. edits2('something')).
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| It's really nice and I'm a fan of the man but... Even back then
| it was a really simple spellchecker. Back then stuff like the
| "metaphone" and "double metaphone" algorithms already existed
| (suggesting candidates based on similarly sounding words). Fun
| algorithms 'em metaphones I'd say. Relatively easy to
| implement/port (been there, done that).
|
| I'm sure there's better stuff now.
|
| Also it's possible to better ranks candidates to fix typos by
| taking into account the layout of the keyboard (e.g. on a
| QWERTY keyboard is you see "wery" it is, despite having an edit
| distance of 1, highly unlikely the person typing meant to type
| "very". "weary" is much more likely). So just sorting by edit
| distance and then suggesting the most common word often doesn't
| result in the best candidate being shown first.
|
| And then context. Ah, context. I type this and my browser isn't
| aware I'm talking about algorithms and not only says
| "metaphone" is incorrect but suggests "megaphone".
|
| So... The matter still isn't settled if you ask me.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Soundex is an earlier method.
| andersource wrote:
| To be fair, Peter Norvig [0] isn't just another software
| engineer, he's a hardcore CS researcher, co-authored the most
| popular (pre-DL) AI textbook, was head of NASA's Computational
| Sciences Division, etc.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Norvig
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| I think what they're saying is that some people are Peter
| Norvig and got lucky, and other people won't get there with
| any amount of study or practice. He's definitely not an
| average engineer, and as a result most people shouldn't
| expect to have the same level of ability
|
| I had the same thought - read the URL and then said "Oh well
| that's Peter Norvig he's just weird in a cool way"
| some_furry wrote:
| My aspiration as a programmer and security engineer is to
| one day be regarded as "just weird in a cool way".
|
| Until that day comes, I keep working at it.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| That's also how I live my life haha, much less stress
| about people judging you if you can write it off as "yeah
| but I'm cool in other ways"
| eointierney wrote:
| Ha! Love this. Bet you're already weird in a wonderful
| way :)
| celim307 wrote:
| I'm conflicted on calling him "lucky", and I don't think
| you mean to discredit him, but yeah he's had genetic and
| societal gifts but I'm sure his work ethic is what makes
| him exceptional
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| For a measured response - yes I agree, it's a combo of
| luck and effort, but the effort can't compensate for the
| luck.
|
| For my true response that probably isn't as popular - he
| may have an amazing work ethic but that's also just
| coming from how he was raised, so it's still luck, the
| same person born in a different environment wouldn't have
| done the same things - both nature and nurture are
| external forces
| WalterBright wrote:
| Geez, I've been told I have an unfair advantage because I
| have a predilection for working hard.
|
| At what point should people stop making excuses and
| claiming to be a victim?
| jacobr1 wrote:
| It matters where you set the achievement bar. Sure, if
| the goal is "internationally recognized expert," perhaps
| luck is a stronger factor.
|
| But if the goal is, "strong enough programmer to write a
| spell-check algorithm from first principles," then work-
| effort might very well compensate for a lack of
| advantages in upbringing or other "luck-factors."
| navane wrote:
| If he is halve the genes given to him, halve what his
| environment has given to him, does he even exist? Do any
| of us exist?
| thewataccount wrote:
| > I'm conflicted on calling him "lucky", and I don't
| think you mean to discredit him,
|
| I don't think saying he was "lucky" is discrediting him -
| simply because there's many people who got 'lucky' but
| didn't push themselves to fully capitalize on it the way
| he did.
|
| Basically he's both "lucky" but also extremely driven and
| uses it to his fullest potential.
| richardlblair wrote:
| Luck is like 5% of any equation. He had the gift and he
| was disciplined enough to execute on it.
|
| That 5% luck probably got him an extra 10-20% further
| than anyone else. However, in a room with equally
| disciplined individuals you wouldn't be able to discern
| the lucky from the hard working.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| the hardworking are lucky to have been born with that
| personality trait.
| teshigahara wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better the original is not the same as
| what is displayed now[0] so it did not take just one flight to
| achieve elegance, and also included some bugs which were
| mentioned in the errata later[1].
|
| [0] -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20070410053746/http://norvig.com...
|
| [1] -
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150906100448/http://www.norvig...
| : ctrl+f "Update"
| Leherenn wrote:
| It's still pretty bad in some fairly common languages like
| French. For instance "'" really trips spellchecker, as well as
| some tense (subjunctive). For instance "que je n'embete".
| pcj-github wrote:
| Actually there's way more to it than loading
| /usr/share/dict/words into a perl hashtable and calling it done.
| A good spellchecker from scratch is still a massive engineering
| effort in 2023.
| encoderer wrote:
| This reminds me of an article on the JoS blog where Joel
| describes how hard/impossible it is to do real-time spell
| checking on the web with red underlines on the typos.
|
| It really is mind blowing for those of us who remember spacer.gif
| and are still hacking today. The web has really grown up.
| kens wrote:
| It's kind of amazing how many hard computer problems from the
| olden days were solved by having more memory. When I got started
| in computer graphics, there was a lot of research work on how to
| render images a scanline at a time, since that's all the memory
| you had. Once you could get enough memory to hold the entire
| image, you could use a Z-buffer and rendering became kind of
| trivial.
|
| Another example is the post on HN yesterday about old videogames
| and how they used a bunch of different hacks such as sprites and
| tiles because there wasn't enough memory for the whole screen.
| https://nicole.express/2023/yes-popeye-the-sailor-man.html
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The "current hotness" for spellcheck would be to use a large
| language model (LLM) like GPT-3 that can use several paragraphs
| of context to disambiguate between alternatives.
|
| However usefully accurate LLMs are still too big to work locally
| in a laptop or PC, so once again we're back to having to
| liberally apply black magic to squeeze the models into something
| an integrated GPU can run in its "tiny" VRAM that's actually
| gigabytes in size.
|
| The more things change, the more they stay the same.
|
| PS: Spell check is a trivially solved problem for most languages,
| but not all! Hungarian is notoriously difficult, and there are
| ongoing projects to improve this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunspell
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Dadgum/Prog21 must be one of my favourite blogs of all time.
| Hugely influential on me. It's a shame he doesn't post anymore.
| Daub wrote:
| I am dyslexic and my spelling is completely garbage without
| spellcheck. Even so, Spellcheck cannot recognize many of my
| misspellings.
|
| I have always wondered if there is a way to recognize the word I
| am trying to spell by its shape (form) and length.
| taeric wrote:
| The really mind blowing thing about that 2 meg dictionary, is
| that it can completely fit in cache for many computers nowadays.
| Just mind blowing that the optimized linear scan search today is
| competitive with faster methods from yesteryear. (Heck, the
| unoptimized scan is probably more than competitive.)
|
| This does have me curious how big the ZDD for the dictionary
| would be. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-
| suppressed_decision_diagr...
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| It will even fit within 5mb of browser local storage.
| hawski wrote:
| That is nice, but the browser storage limit is more
| arbitrary, cache size is limited by hardware.
| thangalin wrote:
| In some ways, I think computational linguistics (for English) has
| missed a mark. We have dictionaries, lexicons, grammar engines,
| spell checkers, pluralization rules, tries, quotation
| disambiguation, sentiment analyzers, and more. You'd think we
| could roll all these into a unified, standard definition format.
|
| My KeenWrite editor, for instance, uses:
|
| * https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenSpell (spell check, lexicon)
|
| * https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes (curls straight
| quotes)
|
| * https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenWrite/blob/main/R/pluraliz...
| (pluralization)
|
| I was looking at integrating LanguageTool[0] for grammar and
| realized that it has partial functionality for KeenQuotes (lexing
| and tokenization), duplicates the SymSpell algorithm used by
| KeenSpell, and because it offers grammar corrections it likely
| can pluralize words, as well.
|
| Unifying those for English alone would be a massive undertaking.
| At present, KeenWrite parses prose in multiple, redundant passes.
| While this works, I think it'd be great to start with a basic
| lexer/tokenizer that can emit tokens at blazing speeds[1], which
| feeds into higher-level abstractions.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/languagetool-org/languagetool
|
| [1]:
| https://github.com/DaveJarvis/KeenQuotes/blob/main/src/main/...
| irrational wrote:
| Based on so many titles, posts, comments I see everywhere, the
| major feat now is getting people to use the spellchecker.
| dang wrote:
| It used to be a popular submission topic too (still is, and used
| to as well):
|
| _A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering
| (2008)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296900 - Dec
| 2020 (143 comments)
|
| _A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
| (2008)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10789019 - Dec
| 2015 (29 comments)
|
| _A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4640658 - Oct 2012 (70
| comments)
|
| _A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3466388 - Jan 2012 (61
| comments)
|
| _A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=212221 - June 2008 (22
| comments)
| mthoms wrote:
| Mildly funny anecdote: An early version of WordPerfect spell
| check insisted on turning the company name "Unisys" into
| "anuses". That was a good laugh.
| mcguire wrote:
| From Jon Bently, the history of Unix spell checking. [PDF]
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3532.315102
| Finnucane wrote:
| I spent some years working as a freelance proofreader and
| copyeditor, and came to regard writers' use of spellcheckers as
| basically a guarantee of my future employment.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I dunno, there was an article in _Creative Computing_ magazine
| circa 1984 about how to code one up in BASIC that required a
| little creativity but made it look pretty easy. If you sort the
| words in the document it is pretty quick to check them against a
| dictionary on disk.
|
| Turbo Lighting, though, took advantage of the comparably large
| memory of the IBM PC to do something that really blew people away
|
| https://books.google.com/books?id=MC8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA7&lpg=PA...
| earlyam wrote:
| Random story. I was a young kid in the 90's and my dad took me by
| the biggest house I'd seen at that point in my life for some work
| party or something. Really nice landscaping, etc. It was clear
| the owner had A Lot Of Money.
|
| I asked him afterwards how the guy got so rich and he told me
| that he wrote Microsoft's spellchecker.
| twodave wrote:
| Now it's just a major pain in my butt. At least the ones on
| phones. Half the time they replace a legitimate word with the one
| they thought I actually meant. They're almost always wrong.
| jandrese wrote:
| It still blows my mind that when growing up I had a Commodore 64
| word processor with spell check. To run the spell checker you had
| to hit the button to start the spell checker and then turn the
| floppy upside down while it ran through the document.
|
| This means you had to store in a measly 64kb not only the code
| for the spell checker, the entire contents of the document,
| KERNAL overhead, and enough data for the spell checker to run.
| Remember that the Commodore 64 had an incredibly slow disk drive
| (300bps) and the disks only supported 160kb of data. Any scheme
| that required a lot of disk access would be terribly slow. Yet
| somehow it worked and wasn't outrageously slow. I suspect the
| program was unloading big chunks of its own program to
| aggressively reuse the memory space but even then it seems like
| magic.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's pretty amazing between now and then.
|
| Way back when I wrote a DOS file manager that fit in 32K of
| assembly language. As I recall, at one point I upgraded it to
| use two different 64K segments when running by putting the code
| and in-memory information about the files in different
| segments.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| If you think this is great and/or immediately thought of using a
| trie to reduce storage costs, then let me introduce you to
| https://blog.burntsushi.net/transducers/ which pushes storage
| reuse over the edge to almost competing with compression like
| gzip while still allowing you to consider edit distance while
| finding possible alternatives.
|
| typeaheads/autocomplete and spellchecking both need this so worth
| a read.
| polytely wrote:
| Great stuff, I never deal with stuff like this in my day job
| and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to follow what
| was going on, which means the author did a great job.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Yes, sad that we don't get to work on actual
| algorithms/leetcode-like problems in the job. Instead it's
| just hundreds of cocoapods, gems, npm packages, and build
| tools to make a contact form or profile page.
| ccooffee wrote:
| Great article, thanks for sharing!
| denvaar wrote:
| Also recommend "Compact Data Structures" by Gonzalo Navarro if
| you're into compression and data structures.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| He's got a point: increase in minimum memory and increase in CPU
| performance means that superior programming isn't always
| necessary.
|
| People regularly produce for fun what used to be a masters thesis
| level of work these days. I'll cite that YouTube video of someone
| making a reaction wheel system that can get an inverted Lego
| pendulum to stand up, and stay up under perturbations. The Lego
| part isn't the main work. The main work is software, a PID
| controller of the reaction wheel.
|
| Something else has happened. There's enough people who know
| enough that the knowledge is just sloshing around, waiting for
| others to do cool things with it.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| > He's got a point: increase in minimum memory and increase in
| CPU performance means that superior programming isn't always
| necessary.
|
| Fun part about this is that it might actually make it slower!
| Between cache misses, pre-fetchers and branch mispredictions
| the more naive search may make things significantly more
| predictable for the out of order execution on modern processors
| that the result is actually faster when you don't try to be
| clever with some of this.
|
| You still have to benchmark and not do things completely wacky
| but it's kind of interesting how things have changed because of
| the scale of the pieces.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| A good example from Bjarne Stroustrup
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQs6IC-vgmo
| BashiBazouk wrote:
| And still is for most. I'm a horrible speller, but fairly
| consistent in my mistakes. Usually I use the wrong vowel with a
| similar sound in the middle of a word. It's amazing how few spell
| checkers can handle that. The google search bar is the undisputed
| king in spell checking in my experience. Microsoft word, even
| from way back, has been good. Thunderbird from about a decade ago
| was the most infuriatingly bad spellchecker I have ever
| encountered. I always recognize the correct spelling when I see
| it. So, in Thunderbird it would commonly refuse to suggest the
| word I was looking for but would often give me the "un" version
| of that word. I mean, come on. I can get the first letter right
| 9,999 times out of 10,000 and that is probably a gross
| underestimation. And the few I would get wrong are a handful of
| edge cases...
| eastbound wrote:
| Now be French like me and have words spelled with an E en
| English and A in French (I recommend/je recommande), and try
| telling Google that, despite them forcing themselves to guess
| that you are French despite having set the browser to English,
| the Google Settings, the OS, and using a VPN to ensure to get
| all ads and search results in English, you really, really want
| to be _recommended_ the English spelling of words so that you
| don't do en /an mistakes ever again...
| jrumbut wrote:
| A good one still is. When I got my most recent phone (Galaxy 22,
| but I jumped several versions in the upgrade so I don't know when
| the change happened), the spellcheck engine regressed massively
| from previous editions.
|
| I'd be so curious to hear what the change was. It's absolutely
| awful to use!
| benj111 wrote:
| Is it not based on your history? I know the suggestions seem to
| be. If so and it's stored locally it could just be that it's
| having to start again from scratch?
| progmetaldev wrote:
| It definitely does make use of your history.
| jrumbut wrote:
| It used to be very clearly based on history, so every time I
| restarted my phone I'd get the classic "duck" correction.
|
| Now I couldn't tell you what it's doing, but it doesn't
| appear to be using history. For instance, the same technical
| terms get autocorrected again and again.
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