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25 Years of Eggs

john-rush.com

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Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#31

Post by ProllyInfamous »

wolfram74 wrote: post #12
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…

I mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?

Not yet.

>>So I told Codex “we have unlimited tokens, let’s use them all,” and we pivoted to sending every receipt through Codex for structured extraction. From that one sentence, Codex came back with a parallel worker architecture - sharding, health management, checkpointing, retry logic. The whole thing. When I ran out of tokens on Codex mid-run, it auto-switched to Claude and kept going. I didn’t ask it to do that. I didn’t know it had happened until I read the logs.

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For anybody still thinking my goodness, how wasteful is this SINGLE EXAMPLE: remember that all of the receipts from the article have helped better-train whichever GPT is deciphering all this thermalprinting.

For a small business owner (like my former self), paying $1500 to have an AI decipher all my receipts is still a heck of a lot cheaper than my accountant's rate. It would also motivate me to actually keep receipts (instead of throw-away/guessing), simply to undaunt the monumental task of recordskeeping.

----

>>But the runs kept crashing. Long CLI jobs died when sessions timed out. The script committed results at end-of-run, so early deaths lost everything. I watched it happen three times. On the fourth attempt I said “I would have expected we start a new process per batch.” That was the fix ... Codex patched it, launched it in a tmux session, and the ETA dropped from 12 hours to 3. Not a hard fix. Just the kind of thing you know after you’ve watched enough overnight jobs die at 3 AM.

>>11,345 receipts processed. The thing that was supposed to take all night finished before I went to bed.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#32

Post by moron4hire »

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…

You're counting just the egg-having receipts, but there were over 11 thousand receipts they had to go through to get to that 500-ish subset. I'm assuming OP wanted to process all of the receipts and then selected just eggs for a simple analytics job. With your rates, the human would cost almost $2000.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#33

Post by BitsAndObjects »

The AI writing of the article made me give up halfway through. It’s a neat idea but the writing style of these AI models is brain-grating, especially when it’s the wrong style choice for this kind of technical report.

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#35

Post by knollimar »

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…

There's no way there wasnt a more efficient way of doing this. Way too many tokens per receipt.

I'd wager gemini flash could get decent results. Id be willing to try on 100 receipts and report cost

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#36

Post by MarceliusK »

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…

[dead]

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#37

Post by bix6 »

PowerElectronix wrote: post #23
vitus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a good read if you haven’t seen it. Spoiler alert it’s private equity. Shocker I know.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-b...

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#38

Post by MarceliusK »

ProllyInfamous wrote: post #25

>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.

Technically interesting and genuinely well-written end to end

Re: 25 Years of Eggs

#39

Post by MarceliusK »

egeozcan wrote: post #2

I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs! Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OC…

I wouldn't read this as "AI can't do this efficiently yet" but more like "we're still figuring out the playbook"
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