31–40 of 50 posts
Neat article, but I feel like I have no idea why they're doing this! Is transcribing code from images really such a big use case?
It fills me with a deep sadness that we created deterministic machines then, though laziness, exploit every opportunity to "contaminate" them with sloppy practices that make them produce output with the same fuzzy inaccuracy as human brains.
Old man yells a neural networks take: We're entering a "The Machine Stops" era where nobody is going to know how to formulate basic algorithms.
"We need to add some numbers. Let's point a camera at the input, OCR it, then feed it to an LLM that 'knows math'. Then we don't have to figure out an algorithm to add numbers."
I wish compute "cost" more so people would be forced to actually make efficient use of hardware. Sadly, I think it'll take mass societal and infrastructure collapse for that to happen. Until it does, though, let the excess compute flow freely!
Tesseract OCR was created by digital (DEC) in 19_8_5 (yes, 40 not four YEARs ago). Now go back and read the article and ROFL with me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original tesseract OCR has no neural nets. It bare little resemblance to the modern version.
It's still 40. Why not use Ollama-OCR?
Neat article, but I feel like I have no idea why they're doing this! Is transcribing code from images really such a big use case?
It worries me that stuff like that becoming easier will lead to wacky data pipelines being normalized (pulling display output off systems and "scraping" it to get data, of dubious quality, versus just building a proper interface). The kind of crowd that likes "low code" tools like MSFT's "Power Automate" is going to love to make Rube Goldberg nightmares out of tools like this. It fills me with a deep sadness that we…
Anything that mentions tesseract is about 10 years out of date at this point.
5.5.0 released November last year. Still a very active project as far as I can tell and runs on CPU. Even compared to best open source GPU option it is still pretty good. VLMs work very differently and don't work as well for everything. Why is it out of date?
Using Surya gets you significantly better results and makes almost all the work detailed in the article largely unnecessary.
Stop accepting PDFs and force things to use APIs ...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The original tesseract OCR has no neural nets. It bare little resemblance to the modern version.
It's still 40. Why not use Ollama-OCR?
Is it, though? If the important parts of the code are new, does it matter that other parts are older or derived from older code? (Of course, I think this whole line of thought is pointless; what matters is not age, but how well it works, and tesseract generally does seem to work.)