This is the perfect job for AI, in that it's handling work the human didn't care enough to do manually. Although of course I don't care either. No value judgment there, just an observation. Imagine a place - a field let's say, part of a farm, long ago, but it had a road built through it, and thereby became a non-place, a patch of ground nobody dwells in or pays attention to or cares about, because when they're on it they're always heading somewhere else. The AI phenomenon is like that.
25 Years of Eggs
51–60 of 86 posts
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#52I 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.
Quite, I threw a so-so photo of an old, long receipt at Qwen 3.5 0.8MB (runs in <2GB) and it nailed spitting 20+ items out in under a second. AI is good at many things, but picking modern dependencies not so much.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#53Inflation 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…
I feel like those links are more useful than the target essay.
Reading through them, I wonder why CPIs aren't based on empirical correlational patterns between prices over time? Sort of like in these articles:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1796/1/... https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1011.pdf
Or maybe they are? I'm not an expert in this and reading through some of the government literature there's no mention of this.
Then at least you would know that a given price marker is a good empirical index of how other prices are changing also, at least for a given dimension/component.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#54I 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.
I was surprised to learn (from this article) that there are local models that can do this (not sure if there are any that run on hardware I actually have though, unlike Tesseract which works fine on the scanning hardware I set up for it ~5 years ago.) For privacy reasons, cloud-based OCR is a non-starter...
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Capturing the egg price from known egg receipts was the problem I was focused on, but you're right that there was also a filtering problem in the original spec. You get my upvote for continuing to make the problem interesting for me! Had the filtering been done during the initial document storage, then the cost would have been much cheaper than your $2,000 estimate. Essentially binning the receipts based on "eggs" or…
Also, playing hotdog-not-hotdog on a receipt, looking for the price of eggs, and then entering them, is a very different job than the open-ended case of "enter all the relevant information from this receipt. There is large classification task that also has to take place to group name-brand items into generic categories (an open set that you don't know from the start) suitable for analyzing.
So, I've actually done similar work to this: getting paid piece-rate to manual enter data from paper invoices into an accounting system. It was so long ago I can't remember how fast I got at it, but it was way slower than 2 a minute/120 an hour. I doubt I got much more than a dozen an hour done. So, my gut reaction is that your estimate on the human cost is off by an order of magnitude.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#56Many states passed requirements for cage free eggs that went into effect by end of 2024 so that has had some effect on prices.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#57Overall this feels less like a quirky egg project and more like a blueprint for how messy real-world data pipelines are going to look going forward
>>Here’s what made the quality good: every time I caught something, I could show the agents what to look for and they’d go fix it everywhere. ... >>These are the days of miracle and wonder. I can’t wait to see what [the next] 30 years of eggs looks like.
Not convinced of that edit - or at least, my read was "revisit this 5 years from now", not 30...
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#58Question: Do big chat providers tool call an dedicated OCR, or is it part of the LLM?
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#59It’s so exciting to read more and more articles like this, using LLMs to discover clever solutions. I mean how many of us have dreamed of scanning years of receipts, waiting for that moment when you know a DIY solo application is at hand. I’m not being sarcastic, I too have a drawer full of Costco receipts which to me are data waiting for insight, not just crinkly paper. It’s more than being clever, it’s the realization of using a device not as a tool, but an equal partner who can suggest what tools and approaches to do. The end product of the LLM is not the point (although it can produce it better than ever), it’s the way an LLM can elevate messy knowledge work. A single person can now say that analysis knows no bounds.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#60The most surprising thing about this whole story is that he's been scanning all his receipts for the past 25 years. I've never heard of anyone doing this before and don't really know why you would want to.
Still, it made for a somewhat interesting exploration of AI techniques.