I've done some OCR side projects during hackathon weeks over the years (with google tesseract). This is a neat idea, I can only imagine the difficulty with which transcribing the variety of terrible handwriting will cause frustration and an eventual flood of refunds.
I think from his explanation in the article it's quite straightforward to implement it yourself: get a GPT-3 subscription at OpenAI or MS Azure, use the API as described in the article, voilà.
It looks like he’s first using tesseract to recognize his handwriting and convert it into text. Tesseract doesn’t do a perfect job so the recognized text is full of mistakes. He treats the mistakes as spelling mistakes and “asks” GPT-3 to correct them. This is a very clever idea and will greatly improve current OCR efforts.
Yeaaaah, his handwriting is actual certified art compared to mine . I can't get anything to recognize my handwriting reliably, including the text recognition built into iOS with Pencil - it's just useless.
After I started using a Palm Pilot, my handwriting improved significantly and the changes seem to have been permanent. I get basically 100% accuracy with the Apple Pencil in iOS.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that you are training yourself using a reinforcement learning approach to meet the needs of an imperfect machine learning application.
The insta-feedback. I learned to spell because a little red squiggly line told me to try again. I avoided the right-click to autocorrect. Now everything just autocorrects and I assume people are more and more reliant on it.
To second what the other commenter said to you: I have seen someone with terrible handwriting fix it. He decided he cared, found pens and notebooks he really liked, and started using them attentively. People treat pens like they're all the same, but the drying time, line thickness, weight, drag across the paper, etc. all vary enormously, and if you care, you can probably find the right tool and get your handwriting to a point where you're happy with it.
I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and attention to detail.
This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.
I have terrible handwriting and have had the idea in the past to try and relearn with a new style. Like maybe the way they teach French children in school! But when I looked online for a book on how to learn handwriting as an adult they were all for veterans who had lost their dominant hand and that was incredibly depressing. Anyone have a good resource?
Just copy writing you think is good, and keep a daily journal where you write exclusively in that style. It'll be slow going at first, but it works. Takes about a year before it's totally natural.
My handwriting is much cleaner with a fountain pen than a ballpoint pen. Tools matter. It doesn't have to be an expensive fountain pen or paper, a cheap Faber Castell on printer paper works fine.
Of course your voice is going to sound much better on a condenser mic than on a $1 mic from RadioShack, but that doesn’t mean your voice changed. We’re talking about improving handwriting, if you write someone a note illegibly your excuse should not be that you forgot your good pen at home.
I decided I hated having chicken-scratch handwriting around the end of high school / beginning of college. I literally did writing worksheets (tracing over letters) like I was in kindergarten. And if I wrote a messy word / letter on my homework I'd cross the word out and do it again. It made a huge difference, and I started getting compliments all the time on my writing. It's slipped back into average territory since, but it definitely works!
Same - I find I typically use writing as a tool for thought moreso than a record that I will come back to, though I occasionally take a pass through old notes to see if I had any forgotten gems.
Could you post a link to this guide? My handwriting while not horrible could use some improvement, and is not helped by the fact that I am left handed.
Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one.
"Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.
Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then.
Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.
Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.
Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.
I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be.
Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.
It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.)
I wish Stumble Upon still existed just so I could find the weird corners of the web again. This site and Reddit sort of fill that but also don't quite fit it at all.
I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed.
When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland.
Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
Not to be a downer again but reddit is pretty much dead for this. It's turning into FB more and more every day with a lot of young kids and teenagers filling it with memes and begging for engagement and such. It's not much of an aggregator anymore and is turning into more of an actual social network now except they still have "anonymous" profiles
I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
I've found Reddit improved by careful curation of my subscribed subreddits. If I spent most of my time in there rather than /r/all then it's great. I still feel like scrolling through memes on /r/all from time to time and that has the beneficial side effect of helping me add to those subscriptions.
This is true to an extent, but I find that reddit culture seeps its way into all subs. There is a overreaching lack of seriousness.
It's my observation that the average redditor is more interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown behavior, than actually contributing meaningful conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments.
Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is something serious, such as a forum for advice seeking, people can't help but reply to posts with jokes.
What is worse is when people are downvoted for a reply which is intelligent and serious, but is contrary to popular opinion.
Definitely true about most subs, but not all. Some, such as /r/askhistorians, are very strict about low effort posts so what you end up seeing (amongst a handful of deleted replies) are very well resourced to whatever the subject of the thread is. Of course, this requires an engaged moderating team which not all subs have. That being said, it still doesn't quite match the magic of stumbleupon and clicking a link to be shown a page matching your interests from obscure corner of the web.
To be honest, I don't know why a similar app or extension hasn't come up to replace what Stumble did. Surely there's advertising potential there (1 ad per every X clicks) and even a subscription option (remove ads or access to unlimited interest categories for $x dollars).
I feel like even with moderation, Reddit has a natural limitation by dint of being "adoration by upvote". You can't start a conversation outside of the boxes defined by the sub. If your post comes across as even slightly promoting of an undesired subject it mostly falls into the spam and downvote bucket, unless the sub is very specifically trying to include that, you have gained pre-approval, or you have manufactured some kind of storyline that loopholes both rules and human emotions. The average mod team is prone to abuse of power, so they also come down hard on anything potentially disruptive to the intended discourse. The incentives then move towards posting on Reddit in an intentionally deceptive "influencer" mode at all times - equal parts hype, pity, and outrage.
And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).
I don’t get complaints like this, my Reddit front page looks fine. Are people subscribing to crappy subreddits and then getting mad at the inevitable results?
It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same mind as Uber (well one of the minds).
However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
Uh, this story uses GPT-3 to "improve" content based on a huge training set. Do you think that this will increase diversity and bring more character to the web?
Incredibly cool! This should invite a whole new type of blogger to the internet - well done!
Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.
Fun idea. I have a memory a website from years ago that was photos of writing on a whiteboard or fridge. I'm certain it wasn't accessible nor SEO-friendly though it was inadvertently mobile friendly.
In the US, anyone can sell good or services and do business without formally registering as a business. You're automatically classified as a sole proprietorship, with your legal name as the business name. But there's no liability protection, since you and the business are the same legal entity. That's where LLC or incorporating comes in, along with lots of other reasons to want to formalize the business as a legal entity.
It’s not that bad - make an LLC right now (in most states, it’s a single form to start one), then you have no excuse. Taxes are easy.
You probably don’t even need the LLC, but I like having a bit of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue you unless your project gets big)
I have a number of smaller businesses/products that are part of one business entity:
- IT Consulting practice
- Eletronic device business (sells a single product via internet/mail order)
- YouTube channel/blog
- Fledgling SAS product that's not yet launched (consumes money, not makes it)
I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly, fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's easy.
So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper). Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019 (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, need to get back into it).
But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't clean enough for great OCR).
But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one hand, although it's my writing hand :/)
Google's OCR (as found in Lens, Docs and whatever) is insanely good. At least that was my impression based on my own notes (my writing is horrible and I often add very small side notes).
So this got me trying out various things for dictation and transcription, as that would mean I wouldn't have to type quite as much.
I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to correct it manually.
But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook, which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or else it doesn't really put any into it.
Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would be cool if I could find something decent for that.
Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage
Dragon Naturally Speaking (a paid product) is pretty good at normal dictation. My workplace bought me a copy when I was recovering from wrist surgery and it wasn't bad, especially since I could still use one hand. I've seen people mention using it for programming, with a bit of difficulty and a learning curve. But you can create your own custom commands, which is pretty much required if with keywords in a language that don't have a dictionary entry.
I diligently kept ideas in notebooks for eight years while in jail. When I moved from one jail to another, in year five, the guards lost all of them and I had to start again. When I got out a few months ago I left one of my two notebooks on a table and my friend's dog ate it.
This is really cool. The idea to separate the writing part from the computer entirely (not just the internet) is genius. Also, GPT3 helps out a bit there too.
The OCR coupled with GPT3 worked much better than I would have guessed it would. I wonder how much of that is on the device and how much is in the cloud?
I'd prefer the opposite: display the scanned page but with the OCR'd text virtually placed on the page (and accessible as alt text or something) like a proper OCR'd PDF.
PG did NOT tell people to build businesses that don't scale. He told people to OPERATE businesses in ways that don't scale. That is of course true for this business - the overall model scales extremely well, but obviously what they're doing at the moment isn't scaleable. It is however an excellent proof of concept of the business model.
I could see a good use case for those planning/kanban/mind mapping meetings where you plaster a whiteboard with notes and drawings. Scanning or photographing that isn't so nice. Formatting it into a pleasant, readable wesbite would be pretty cool.
267 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] thread"Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 (32 days ago, 271 points, 70 comments)
But the idea is genius indeed.
Not sure about legal implications of using it though:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/23/1008729/openai-i...
EDIT: it seems I have misunderstood the article - OP probably uses MS API to access GPT-3 anyway, so the point is moot.
After I started using a Palm Pilot, my handwriting improved significantly and the changes seem to have been permanent. I get basically 100% accuracy with the Apple Pencil in iOS.
This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.
Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then.
Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.)
Cities were very often http://city.state.xx.us.
Now many (most?) states have vanity URLs, and the cities are worse. I think Chicago's changed its URL at least three times.
I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed.
When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland.
Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
It's my observation that the average redditor is more interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown behavior, than actually contributing meaningful conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments.
Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is something serious, such as a forum for advice seeking, people can't help but reply to posts with jokes.
What is worse is when people are downvoted for a reply which is intelligent and serious, but is contrary to popular opinion.
To be honest, I don't know why a similar app or extension hasn't come up to replace what Stumble did. Surely there's advertising potential there (1 ad per every X clicks) and even a subscription option (remove ads or access to unlimited interest categories for $x dollars).
And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).
However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.
https://stripe.com/en-gb-de/tax
OTOH, the article is worth a read.
do you make a separate LLC for each project?
how much did it cost to launch the business and what does is cost to keep running (lawyers/paperwork/admin)?
i'm scared of starting my own tiny projects, because of all the bureaucracy involved to even get started
clarification: i'm in EU
i'm familiar with Companies House though
Your residency/citizenship does not play any part in forming a UK LTD. It might affect your ability to open an account with some banks though.
These guys are okay https://www.99pcompanyformations.co.uk/ The whole process takes a few minutes and costs almost nothing.
You can incorporate to reduce liability easily, it does not cost a lot of money in most jurisdictions.
You probably don’t even need the LLC, but I like having a bit of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue you unless your project gets big)
I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly, fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's easy.
But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't clean enough for great OCR).
But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one hand, although it's my writing hand :/)
Oh yeah, camera quality makes a big difference.
I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to correct it manually.
But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook, which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or else it doesn't really put any into it.
Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would be cool if I could find something decent for that.
Dragon Naturally Speaking (a paid product) is pretty good at normal dictation. My workplace bought me a copy when I was recovering from wrist surgery and it wasn't bad, especially since I could still use one hand. I've seen people mention using it for programming, with a bit of difficulty and a learning curve. But you can create your own custom commands, which is pretty much required if with keywords in a language that don't have a dictionary entry.
I don’t see anything in the text that maps to either in the output?
This year I switched from fountain pens and clairfontaine notbook to E-ink tablet, Supernote A5x.
the main purpose is to keep the record in digital formats, And so far I am satisfied. The OCR sucks, though. I hope Supernote may adopt the GPT-3.