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25 Years of Eggs

john-rush.com

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Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#21

Post by stavros »

cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#23

Post by PowerElectronix »

vitus wrote: post #13
PowerElectronix wrote: post #5

Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.

It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI. Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures... Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111 CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL Core CPI (without…

That is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu.

I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#24

Post by sgbeal »

egeozcan wrote: post #15
sgbeal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. There's got to be a "it's a chicken/egg problem" joke in there somewhere, but i'm not seeing it.

I actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up. Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but…

> (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).

FWIW, you made an eggceptional attempt :).

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#25

Post by ProllyInfamous »

>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.

This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.

[spoiler: the tech caught up, the data is interesting]

I read a lot. This article, entirely.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#26

Post by DeathArrow »

Without 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond.

I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#27

Post by N_Lens »

cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

AI has some weird unexpected uses that haven’t been fully uncovered yet, while it fails to scale or match the needed accuracy on expected usecases.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#28

Post by ismailmaj »

I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020.

My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#29

Post by bombcar »

egeozcan wrote: post #15
sgbeal wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. There's got to be a "it's a chicken/egg problem" joke in there somewhere, but i'm not seeing it.

I actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up. Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but…

You’ve got two weeks to work on this before Eggster.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#30

Post by qoez »

cheschire wrote: post #6

Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…

Imagine how many 2001 era eggs he could have bought with that $101
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