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I started a paper website business

daily.tinyprojects.dev

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Re: I started a paper website business

#161

Post by georgecmu »

visarga wrote: post #129
georgecmu wrote: post #92

This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…

It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.

If a dictionary satisfies your definition of a language model, yes, with predictably poor results[1]. If I understand correctly, Google Books approach[2] represented a major improvement in accuracy of automated OCR (and this is for printed text!), but I would venture to say that implementing a language model like this would be far beyond the scope of a 'tiny project'.

[1] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Limits_on_the_Applicati...

[2] https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/docs/Improving_Book_OCR_by_A...

Re: I started a paper website business

#162

Post by Swenrekcah »

georgecmu wrote: post #92

This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…

I actually just now bought their subscription with the particular idea to use it with my reMarkable.

Then I only now realised I don’t actually want my notes public, I hope there is some form of access control built into this! :D

Re: I started a paper website business

#163

Post by amenod »

deegles wrote: post #10
abadger9 wrote: post #6

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.

He really glosses over how he uses GPT-3 to correct the text...

That's a really interesting part, and probably why the OCR works good enough for such case.

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.

Re: I started a paper website business

#164

Post by bloak »

visarga wrote: post #129
georgecmu wrote: post #92

This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…

It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.

I've always found it somehow ironic that a human can correctly recognise printed characters even if parts of them are missing and the word is misspelt or in a language the human does not know at all, but computers have to resort to language models because an exact comparison of part of the image with other parts of the image (where the same letter is printed in the same font) for some reason is not feasible?

Re: I started a paper website business

#165

Post by TekMol »

irae wrote: post #154

That is not the first time I see one of your stories and it always brings me a smile to see your new ideas and how implement them. It also amazes me how some countries make it so easy to open a business. Doing so in Brazil would be a legal nightmare. Your projects are super inspiring and I always have a mind to leave my job and start doing the same. I should probably move to the US or Canada first, otherwise it might…

Why would it be a legal nightmare in Brazil?

Re: I started a paper website business

#166

Post by forinti »

irae wrote: post #154

That is not the first time I see one of your stories and it always brings me a smile to see your new ideas and how implement them. It also amazes me how some countries make it so easy to open a business. Doing so in Brazil would be a legal nightmare. Your projects are super inspiring and I always have a mind to leave my job and start doing the same. I should probably move to the US or Canada first, otherwise it might…

It's not hard at all to open a business in Brazil, unless you work with things that require safety inspections (food, health, chemicals, etc).

Closing a business is a bit of a bother, but it is mostly a question of waiting.

Re: I started a paper website business

#167

Post by allenu »

_virtu wrote: post #83

Slightly off topic, but I'm a bit of a paper snob at this point. While Moleskine is not the bottom of the barrel I still find for use with fountain pen inks they're not the best. You haven't lived until you try out some Tomoe river paper. Check out TarokoShop's notebooks: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-... .

I may have to try out Tomoe some time. I used Moleskine long ago but eventually moved away to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. I find their paper works really well for my fountain pen usage. I even write on both sides of each page, something I avoided on cheaper notebooks.

Re: I started a paper website business

#168

Post by ineedasername »

I love this. It's hilariously written at the same time that it shows building something that is useful into a business without worrying about whether it would scale to Unicorn size.

On the downside, the Moleskin IDE the custom one the author had made in China are extremely biased against people with bad handwriting. More attention to accessibility may be required.

Seriously though this seems great if you have a bunch of notes and journals that you'd like to digitize. I have a small journal with my own recipes from over the years, and digitizing it has been in the back of my mind for a while-- if Paper Website can defeat my astoundingly awful handwriting.

Re: I started a paper website business

#169

Post by ineedasername »

Swenrekcah wrote: post #162
georgecmu wrote: post #92

This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models. I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible. [1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/3600026614…

I actually just now bought their subscription with the particular idea to use it with my reMarkable. Then I only now realised I don’t actually want my notes public, I hope there is some form of access control built into this! :D

some form of access control built into this!

It would also be great if you could delete a page by taking a picture of the notebook entry completely scribbled out, or a video of tossing it into the fire. We need a product roadmap for this!

Re: I started a paper website business

#170

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

FalconSensei wrote: post #149

My main impediment for using anything like that is that my handwriting is incomprehensible to anyone except me. Like, my wife takes some time to figure out what it's written there, and sometimes - after long enough time passes - even myself

Maybe there's an inherent bias that people who prefer to hand write have better handwriting and therefore have a better experience. It's possible that most people with bad handwriting are more prone to want to type.
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