> and you are not a citizen of the British Commonwealth

What do you regard as the British Commonwealth, and what variant of English spelling to you expect people to use who are not part of this grouping?

Just so that you know, in case you don't, "US English" is used just about exclusively in the US, and UK English is used in most of the rest of the world, despite the fact that most of our devices incorrectly default to US English.

I'm interested in this - I am from the Commonwealth and I do use those words, including when I forget with American colleagues.

It never occurred to me that this could ever be perceived as arrogant (even if only when referring to someone with a different background.) And I wouldn't have thought it would mean anything more than a certain language cosmopolitanism, lah ;) (Hope that joke comes through! It's been decades since I had much exposure to Malaysian English.) Can you explain why this might be, please?

Huge quantities of english speakers, who are not from the Commonwealth, learn British English.

Americans finding anyone else arrogant is quite rich.

> you instantly mark yourself as arrogant.

That is simply not true. Maybe that's how you feel about it, but it is generally not the case (or even considered, really).

As a Frenchman, I enjoy writing colour and being arrogant.

Interesting - I'd heard of American Gen Zs using theatre to mean the art form, to distinguish it from just meaning a building, but I hadn't heard of British English being considered a more prestigious register than American English. Is this a new phenomenon?

It gives off arrogant vibes to have one accuse Americans of being arrogant for using alternative spellings.

That's very colorful[sic] thinking.

It's an old meme: https://imgur.com/thats-bit-harsh-steam-XCEdD8W

In the UK, it's considered good form to be humorous when making an argument; I gather that in the US, you're supposed to sound like you're making a speech to prepare troops for war. I apologise if, in the course of describing how a product is unsuitable for use in my culture, I made that argument according to the norms of my culture.

Simplified English is a thing that exists, for clarity - see for example https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Practice

I don't know if the parent comment was trying to equate American English and Simple English - I can see it as a way to dismiss American English as a "lesser" language (which it isn't, as you say), but I wouldn't start by assuming that.

Could the 'Simplified Spelling Board'[1] of 1906 have anything to do with the naming?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board

Yea, it’s insane to try and an entire country’s writing dialect as simplified. I guess it would be the only way to show off his snobbery though.

The elephant in the room here is how you ethically get people to onboard without an existing community / fomo / money.

The trick is getting the content creators there, but most of them are ultimately and fairly interested in making money, and your new platform wont have that for them.

Bluesky has done alright, but that was a black swan event Elon Musk inspired.

> English is a bastard of a language and getting messier every day as new nations adopt it is their standard language.

I disagree strenuously with this idea, because it suggests that there is one 'big' English in which anything goes. A better idea is the one of the register[0]: there are many Englishes, many sets of rules. Different rules are used in different regions, by different groups of people, and have different connotations (e.g., the King James Bible was intentionally written in a form of English that was considered archaic at the time because that would make it sound more grandiose).

If I were to use this tool, I'd be using it to ensure that whatever I'm writing is well-received by my intended audience. Because English usage is so varied, I would need to be able to control the register that it uses to ensure that the output is suitable. The fact that the product website doesn't even mention a list of supported languages, let alone supported dialects and registers within those languages, has a very everyone can see what a horse is kind of feeling[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny

You still need to adapt it to where you are though, people expect this because it causes misunderstandings. If I as a British person go to the US, I know that I can't ask people to go and buy some booze from the off-license and when finished ask them to put their aluminium can in the bin ready for the rubbish lorry while wearing their jumper because that sounds anachronistic.

> contemporary Oxford English

If you chose Oxford because of the Oxford English Dictionary, note that it's not regular en-gb, it's en-gb-oxendict. "the OED often favo[u]rs "-ize" (and its derivatives) over "-ise" for words derived from Greek roots, and may also include historical or less common usages."

Did the website originally say this? I just checked and it says "an" now... Perhaps they didn't use their own tool when writing the web copy.

Pretty sure I had this corrected on more than one occasion when I was at school. Also licence/license. I remember one day figuring out the parallel with advice/advise as a way to remember which was which. So C for the noun and S for the verb.

Weirdly (to my brain), Americans always spell practice with a C, but always spell license with an S.

That's why you need a good spellchecker.

> So is it really not the case that "practice" is US English and "practise" is UK English?

Correct: practice is a noun, and practise is a verb, in non-US English. I don't have my (twenty-volume) copy of the Oxford English Dictionary to hand, but Wiktionary has an explanation under 'usage notes': https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/practise

It's fine if the tool has severe limitations at this stage. However, it's crucial to clearly state what those limitations are: not only does it prevent the flurry of complaints and chargebacks from customers who were disappointed that their specific case is unsupported, but it's also an opportunity to introduce a 'we're on this journey together' aspect that helps to make customers emotionally invested in the product.

I have no idea how this tool is better than running local LLM. Should I buy it?

There are many different Englishes. I would bet that this tool does not handle Indian or Malaysian dialects.

British English is still influential over most of the Commonwealth, ie a large number of countries.

Extra space after periods is never correct with proportionally-spaced fonts, which is why all browsers remove it by default.

Two spaces after periods is a kludge invented for typewriters that had monospaced fonts and touch typing teachers need to stop teaching it in the modern era where most writing uses proportional fonts.

browser rendering does. You'd need white-space: pre-wrap rule to retain double spaces.

Harper will detect those errors in its next release.

>LLMs can also correct other sorts of mistakes, such as correcting "The first US President was _Ben Franklin_" to "George Washington".

And they can also cause new factual mistakes that a grammar checker never would!

Most of the time, both legal and technical misalignments walk together. Thank you for noticing this.

Not at all. Most commercial software has a publisher (as legal entity) that is responsible for privacy and takes reputational risks if something goes wrong.

Gosh people love complicating things.

You don't need to fight with installing (the correct version of) java. I wouldn't in my life consider installing java on my OS directly.

For anyone with docker already installed (most people these days)...

  git clone git@github.com:gardner/LocalLanguageTool.git

  cd LocalLanguageTool

  docker compose up

A command without context is not very useful. If anyone wants to run LanguageTool locally, I suggest reading the official documentation page: https://dev.languagetool.org/http-server

Their recommended process is :

1. Install fasttext (it's an official Debian package, but you have to compile it on Windows).

2. Download and uncompress the LanguageTool release.

3. Create a config file.

4. Launch the server with the java command (of course, a JRE must be installed).

5. Connect to the API, e.g. with the browser extension.

Running a ready-made docker image replaces steps 1-4 and removes the need to install Java globally. Some will prefer it this way.

TIL LibreOffice has finally removed Java. Thanks for educating me.

We'll soon need a writing tool that introduces spelling and grammar errors into our text and messes with punctuation so that we aren't accused of using LLMs.

It's hilarious, on some other sites one is immediately accused of using ChatGPT when using the n-dash (–) or m-dash (—) instead of the hyphen (-). Not an issue with the monospaced font here. ETA: I stand corrected.

Open ticket about "don;t" typo, see https://github.com/Automattic/harper/issues/1559

Have you raised these as issues? The developer has been extremely responsive in my experience.

I use Harper in my Neovim setup and its been great. I just add things that are missing from the dictionary when I come across them in my codebase

Well, only Americans use it. There's no point in arguing about it your version of a language is better or worse but for the rest of the world it's incredibly annoying having to correct Zs with Ss when using LLMs or American only software.

I think we need to call American English "American", then you can speak American and I can speak English.

I could care less about this attempt at trolling, but I won't.

We have enough American cultural hegemony as it is. It frustrates me no end that I regularly am unable[1] to configure software to use my preferred version of English.

[1] or it's extremely difficult. CLion I'm looking at you; every available option I have is set to British English, but still you insist on telling me my Colours should be corrected to Color etc. :(

Europe still teaches British English in schools.

Imagine if WinRAR didn't let you archive or name your files what you want. How we were trusted with such DESTRUCTIVE tools all these years is beyond me. /s

They used to have an API, which they removed about two years ago or so. Until then, there were a bunch of 3rd-party Grammarly plugins, including a pretty decent one for VSCode.

Disagreed. It's not concerned with all apps, because most commercial applications have legal entities explaining how they use collected data. In this particular case, this is something called 'Refine', and it's not a legal entity, therefore, questioning its data privacy approach is fully legitimate.

Except the open-source ones, or sandboxed[1] ones without any auto-update functionality (not sure if this app has any).

[1] Loosely; I’d say not referencing any networking entrypoints or dlsym() also counts, as working around that would be very non-deniably malicious.

Yup, but you're automatically giving up a ton of RAM that could be better used for Slack.

https://ai.google.dev/gemma/docs/gemma-3n

What's the rationale behind adding BYOK? Or the advantages?

You do realise you're already using an optimised model built for everyday devices, and that model includes some serious innovations in parameter-efficient processing, right?

You're a great developer, and it looks like you're thinking about adding features like BYOK quickly to please more users. But in doing that, you might be missing the real innovation you've already created. You've basically built a version of Grammarly without the privacy issues that make most IT departments ban it.

No one wants Grammarly or your tool sending corporate emails or documents to a language model. Privacy is what sets you apart from Grammarly. It's your biggest feature right now. Add a big table to your site comparing your products privacy with Grammarly's. That's your strongest selling point, and probably the only feature that can truly compete with the big players.

My advice? Keep improving the app, but keep the model local. Keep it private. That's the killer feature you've got.