Do you use mongodb to make it web scale? You turn it on and it scales right up.
Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
61–70 of 154 posts
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#62I wonder how it fares against deep-fried "E" or Opossum memes?
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#63The photo under Upgrading the iPhone OCR Service Into An OCR Cluster . In the future, data centres are going to host racks of iPhones.
To be fair...insane performance in a tiny cool package...iPhones would make great servers if you could order them without the screen/camera etc. :-)
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#64I'm curious how well the iPhone OCR actually works. How do you deal with errors? Is the error rate low enough that you can accept the output from the iPhone OCR as is or do you also run it through a cleaning process (e.g. spell check)?
For a single data point, it works exceptionally well for me. I routinely copy-paste from images or screenshots, and it rarely fails (mostly for handwriting or obscure fonts).
I am not sure if the Photos app search also uses the same OCR. But sometimes I search for a word and iOS will find a photo that has that text in a 50x20 cluster of pixels somewhere far in the background...it's remarkably good.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#65The photo under Upgrading the iPhone OCR Service Into An OCR Cluster . In the future, data centres are going to host racks of iPhones.
To be fair...insane performance in a tiny cool package...iPhones would make great servers if you could order them without the screen/camera etc. :-)
There's your startup right there - washing line racks of discarded iPhones, near bleeding edge, busted screens, still functional o/wise.
Low entry cost, recycling, eco-friendly, . . . a deck that writes itself.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#66really amazing! I love the solution and the project in general
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#67I had a friend in med school who wrote a very early note-taking app for the iPad. Turns out that there was no way to render PowerPoint files when the iPad first came out. He realized that the iOS/Mac OS "quick preview" function could be used to take screenshots of each PowerPoint slide. For a brief time, his was the only app that could display PowerPoints (albeit, they were just screenshots!). There's a lot of hidden utility in Apple libraries.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#68I wonder how the performance of Vision.framework on desktop Mac hardware compares to a cluster of phones. (The author mentions that it was "fairly slow", but it sounds like they were running an iOS app in the simulator and not a macOS app.)
I would expect an M1 native Mac app to work similarly well. Though the iPhone solution may win on price.
The framework is supported on macOS (even tvOS apparently) https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#69Thank you for building this! It's so much fun. I looked for memes that I saw years ago and found them in seconds. Excellent work!!
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#70This title really undersells the absolute insanity of the described solution. This is a beautiful example of "if it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid." The justification is very convincing. One thing I'm curious about: how did you build your corpus of meme images and videos?
yeah but lots of things that work are stupid because there are many other solutions that work better, the greatness of this crazy solution is it really seems like the best solution given price requirements.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills in this thread. Am I the only one who talks to Gen Z kids who explore around their iPhone apps? This definitely isn’t the best option given price requirements. It’s not even the most convenient option.
I’m around age 30, not 13, so similar to the article, my first instinct was also to create a database and OCR the image. But by total coincidence, yesterday I had a conversation with my 14 year old cousin on the topic of saving memes. Her response was along the lines of “yeah, everyone nowadays just saves the image to your iPhone photos, and then just search for it later from the photos app”.
Yeah. This whole article is literally already built into iOS UI, not just a hidden API. And kids all seem to know about this, apparently.
This article uses an example meme with the text “Sorry young man But the armband (red) stays on during solo raids”. I saved it in my iPhone photos app… and found it again through the search function in the photos app.
This is a solved problem already, by teenager standards.
I felt extremely old yesterday when I was talking to my cousin. And I felt extremely old today, reading this article. This is because looking back, the past few decades of CS cultural intuition have established that text are text, and images are images. Strings and bitmaps don’t mix.
This seems sort of obvious to anyone in tech, but I realized that from a clueless grandma perspective, not being able to search up text in photos wasn’t really obvious. Well, the roles are reversed now. Ordinary people now have access to software that treats text as a first class citizen in photos by default.