Thread

1. bluebxrry · 1790157857 · focus · HN ↗

   I loved Grammarly. But it has changed post LLM boom. The underlying concept was awesome as they take grammatical rules from a book of english grammar rules into a linter. Then it let you select the tone and adjusted some for marketing/engagement so it sounds good on Twitter. I have severe dyslexia and struggled with tone.

   Lately, like following ChatGPT 3.5 release era, I had found Grammarly now replacing entire sentences with LLM replacement which are random and inject bias to being near useless. It did this some before. The problem is I can't even tell if it's defensible from a grammatical point when it uses an LLM to do this. At some point Grammarly reached too far in the cookie jar and I no longer trusted that someone who read the Grammar rule book verified any part of the elaborate suggestions.

   I haven't logged in for months. I guess I was no longer learning from it. I need to take a closer look but sys admin outrage from pushy sales people doesn't bode well in my mind.

   1. beej71 · 1790173303 · focus · HN ↗

      I suspect Google did the same thing with docs. The last time I tried it, about 10% of the suggestions were simply incorrect.

      I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.

      1. stuxnet79 · 1790176632 · focus · HN ↗

         > I need to find an old school grammar checker that works on the command line with markdown.

         You might be interested in Val - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.vale.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.vale.sh&#x2F;

   2. AbstractH24 · 1790180629 · focus · HN ↗

      What is Grammarly anymore, even? Is it Superhuman? Is it Fathom? And what are either of those even?

      Even before all that, I switched to Quillbot because Grammarly would always mess up the formatting in my emails in gmail (but only when you viewed it from mobile). Quillbot isn&#x27;t totally better than that, but at least its cheaper.

   3. MacNCheese23 · 1790192004 · focus · HN ↗

      The same fate hit deepl. What most english users don&#x27;t know is that translation from english to another language was always at best - horrible and not usable without much manual effort. The same goes the other way around when you are writing technical documents.

      Deepl however - 7-8 or more years ago was bright star - i do not say this lightly but their translation (i can only vouch for german&lt;-&gt;english) was out of this world in comparison to everything else like google translate, yahoo or whatever.

      It was basically so good - i just kept writing in english even though its not my first language but its easier for technical documentation and i use it to translate back to german instead of doing it the other way around.

      But then, when the first mass hysteria of chatgpt 1 etc hits - it good worse fast - nowadays - it can not do any good translation service at all - it is far worse than what the competition offered 7-8 years ago! It makes no sense a lot of times.

      1. paimapi · 1790194352 · focus · HN ↗

         Looks like approx 7 years ago was DeepL&#x27;s first Series A - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracxn.com&#x2F;d&#x2F;companies&#x2F;deepl&#x2F;__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NWY3gI5ttRRBOXtV7p6GCqJE&#x2F;funding-and-investors" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tracxn.com&#x2F;d&#x2F;companies&#x2F;deepl&#x2F;__mTFDDSjOlFbUE5DY_w1NW... - they got funding from btov and Benchmark

         Benchmark is very AI-pilled: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.entrepreneur.com&#x2F;business-news&#x2F;ai-is-replacing-jobs-in-these-two-fields-benchmark-vc-says&#x2F;490091" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.entrepreneur.com&#x2F;business-news&#x2F;ai-is-replacing-j... and is very bullish on it, too: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gtmnow.com&#x2F;benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-puttagunta&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gtmnow.com&#x2F;benchmark-ai-startup-investing-chetan-put...

         it also looks like DeepL went from using a CNN engine to an LLM in 2024 (coinciding with its $2 billion valuation and Series C) which is likely why it seems to hallucinate a lot more now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DeepL_Translator#Translation_method" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DeepL_Translator#Translation_m...

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