I just fed this entire thread (excluding your comment pointing out the joke, and the text mentioning that it was a joke) to an LLM, and it did better than the dictionary spellchecker: corrected one real error, left my "squigglies" alone which was attacked by squigglies with the old-hat spellchecker, and specifically noted, without any prompting in that direction, that it left the joke spelling unchanged. It did not rewrite any sentences. I'm all for determinism where deterministic tools work, but the current implementations are so bad I can't blame people for turning to a non-deterministic program if it's still better on average.

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xoa an hour ago | parent [-]

LLMs don't seem to be doing a very good job of clarifying your basic thinking however, in this post or your earlier one. To reply to both:

>I immediately disable spellchecking on every avenue it tries to approach because managing a bunch of dictionaries on every browser/device/application that has its own spellchecker for some godforsaken reason to not have squigglies spammed over every piece of jargon, slang, and slightly atypical spelling is incredibly annoying.

But this is a logic fail is it not? LLMs are irrelevant to this. Your stated problem is "not all software/devices I use has a single shared dictionary/grammar tool to my preferences". That's a very, very reasonable complaint. I agree with you that it's always been tremendously irritating that so many applications won't even make use of operating system dictionaries but rather recreate their own, really that the entire infrastructure around spelling or grammar dictionaries is so primitive.

But how do you think LLMs help? Even setting aside quality concerns they don't magically retroactively make every software/device use them, they're just another tool in the space something could use, or not. So you're still stuck with the exact same problem. You still don't have something sync'd/shared universally across your entire experience. I can see how you could just live within some single environment to avoid that (do everything in a browser, use the same browser company's products across platforms with sync supported, so you can use the browser language tools for everything), but again that's not unique to LLMs. That approach would work for conventional tools as well.

>I just fed this entire thread to an LLM

This is a second logic fail. The entire point and meaning of "non-determinism" is precisely that you can't just do something once and then have that be evidence. If we all did the "same thing", feeding every thread to an LLM, thousands of times we wouldn't all get identical results every time. Sometimes we'd get something else. And the very fact it's rare is one of the core challenges of this entire space, because humans are very, very bad at dealing with things where it works 99% of the time and fails 1% of the time. This has always been true.

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applfanboysbgon an hour ago | parent [-]

> But this is a logic fail is it not?

It is not. The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations. You can expect that it probably works the same from any device or application, because it can surmise slang/jargon from training and context rather than needing to be fed every little individual case as a per-user configuration. There are advantages to making a program more sophisticated than a literal == check against a list of pre-programmed words.

And even if there were an easy and satisfying way to unify dictionaries cross-device, it still wouldn't be a pleasant experience. That first time adding every single jargon term you use is not enjoyable. If there was a solution that just... didn't require that, it would solve a problem current spellcheckers do not solve. And what do you know, it appears there is one!

> This is a second logic fail.

Saying things are logic fails doesn't make them logic fails, all the more so when the failure is your own reading comprehension. I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average. If the non-deterministic error rate of LLMs is below 1%, that still puts it far, far, far ahead of the deterministic tool's error rate.

It may be possible to create a deterministic tool that is better on average, but I haven't seen one. The current tooling is so fucking horrendously bad that after decades they cannot handle pluralising any uncommon word that is pluralised with "ies", for example squiggly is recognised and squigglies is not. That is fucking shamefully bad technology.

	▲	xoa 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		>The LLM approach is not dependent on system configurations How is it not dependent? Like, help me out here: I'm writing something up in vim on my FreeBSD system using the built-in dictionary capability, maybe I've got grammar too with LanguageTool via the ALE plugin. I've added various words to my good words list over time. I save it to a network drive and want to keep working on it and do some graphical formatting as well for output to a different audience with a different tool on an iPad for a flight. How does "the LLM approach" uniquely slot into vim and the iPad app. "Uniquely" as-in a way that you couldn't slot in a shared sync'd dictionary file or whatever else. What if one of the developers doesn't want to and I don't have time or (if it's closed source) can't? How does it help all the other different software I use that are still using their own thing? If by "LLM approach" you specifically mean "I copy/paste into this whole other software, and that software is what I use from different platforms" well, that's nice but it's not an "LLM approach" it's a "copy/paste into different software" approach which again could be done with whatever. I explicitly noted that non-determinism doesn't need to be flawless, only better than the deterministic solution on average. But how do you know what the "average" is? You can't get that from a single shot. And what's the upside vs downside of false positives or false negatives or meaning changes/hallucinations? That's also a point of contention, particularly when it comes to any problem space (coding of course, but also law, medicine etc) where precision in language is important even 1% of the time. And you clearly have an intense personal issue here around grammar/spelling that is not universally shared. Which is fine, but the tradeoffs you're willing to make are also going to be personal. It's also going to vary, just as with using LLMs for coding, based on the user. Some people are sufficiently capable with language to realistically be able to expect to double check an LLM and mostly do fine. It's a lot riskier though for someone with a weak grasp to depend on.