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Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

findthatmeme.com

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Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#71

Post by karatinversion »

jychang wrote: post #70
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I only realised quite recently that I could now select text in images on my iPhone the same way I could if I was looking at a web page.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#73

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

Are you going to open source the "app" part of it ?

I would love to replicate this setup for my own project....

I am thinking, load balanced, multi location redundant "iOS machines" with 3-4 phones in with power backup and internet dongle.

We could use something like zerotier/tailscale to get internet access from outside your local network

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#74

Post by CiceroCiceronis »

This is really brilliant to see, and I've been surprised for quite a long time that nothing similar exists. I think it's a real shame that few people with interest in memes have interest in building solutions like this that help us engage with them.

People in the 21st century know a lot about the mistakes of the past century that led to much popular culture of the time being lost (especially terminally online people who've watched lots of Youtube documentaries about lost Dr. Who episodes and so on), so it surprises me how little we try and avoid those same mistakes with today's ephemeral pop culture in the form of memes. People like yourself who want to help make the internet's huge corpus of memes tractable are part of the solution in terms of meme archival and cultural memory.

(There's a good meme metadiscussion group on Discord, "The Philosopher's Meme," which you might be interested in joining. People there would be very keen to discuss what you've made.)

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#75

Post by jychang »

karatinversion wrote: post #71
jychang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I only realised quite recently that I could now select text in images on my iPhone the same way I could if I was looking at a web page.

You can do this back in 2021!

https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/copy-paste-text-from-photos...

I really want to emphasize how insane this situation is, because I think most tech people won’t realize what’s happening unless it’s pointed out.

If you’re a typical tech person, you probably look at this, go “oh, iOS Photos now OCRs every photo. Cool, that’s 2000 or 2010 era fancy tech, boring these days. And then a search engine on those strings, yeah cool, nothing too mind blowing”. The sheer boring-ness of this by tech people standards meant that this iOS UI change went under the radar.

That’s not true for non tech people.

The people who discovered this, put this to use immediately. You can search up anything from an image now. Old memes? Sure. Forgot the name of a restaurant you went to, but remember that you took a picture of the menu and the beef dish was amazing? Search up the word “beef” and it’s probably in there. Took a screenshot of an article, remember 1 or 2 words from it, but can’t find it on Google? Search for those 1-2 words you remember to find the screenshot, then use the phrases in the screenshot to find the article on google. Trying to find a picture of a cat you saved? Type in ”cat” and search for it. Yes, the photos app can do that too.

Screenshots are cheap and instant. Kids never delete them. It’s like how Gmail “archive” feature in 2005 revolutionized email because you never had to delete an email. Well, iCloud Photos “optimize storage” means that you can effectively store infinite screenshots.

There’s another UX revolution happening in terms of saving information. It’s just that photos became easily instantly searchable, and nobody seemed to have really noticed the implications this has on storing memories, and boosting recollection. This can possibly be the equivalent of “you’ll always have a calculator in your pocket” but equivalent analogy to memory techniques like spaced repetition.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#76

Post by jychang »

CiceroCiceronis wrote: post #74

This is really brilliant to see, and I've been surprised for quite a long time that nothing similar exists. I think it's a real shame that few people with interest in memes have interest in building solutions like this that help us engage with them. People in the 21st century know a lot about the mistakes of the past century that led to much popular culture of the time being lost (especially terminally online people…

Not familiar with Discord, do you have a link to that group?

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#77

Post by OJFord »

urbandw311er wrote: post #43
kevmo314 wrote: post #41

Could you expose your iPhone cluster as an OCR API? Seems like it would be competitive with the GCP API.

I wonder if there might be something in the Apple TOS prohibiting this.

I think there is right? At least assuming it's the same as Macs where the minimum billing period is 1 day, because you're technically renting a physical Mac (and 1d is the minimum that qualifies as adhering to that).

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#78

Post by CiceroCiceronis »

jychang wrote: post #76
CiceroCiceronis wrote: post #74

This is really brilliant to see, and I've been surprised for quite a long time that nothing similar exists. I think it's a real shame that few people with interest in memes have interest in building solutions like this that help us engage with them. People in the 21st century know a lot about the mistakes of the past century that led to much popular culture of the time being lost (especially terminally online people…

Not familiar with Discord, do you have a link to that group?

https://discord.com/invite/8MVFRMa

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#79

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jychang wrote: post #70
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would you solve sourcing and distribution using just iOS though? Sure, it's built into iPhones, but if you want to create a comprehensive globally accessible meme search I don't think you can do that by saving memes to your iPhone.

Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine

#80

Post by jychang »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #79
jychang wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How would you solve sourcing and distribution using just iOS though? Sure, it's built into iPhones, but if you want to create a comprehensive globally accessible meme search I don't think you can do that by saving memes to your iPhone.

A kid doesn’t care about that. They just save the memes they like, including the custom ones that their friend made which doesn’t make any sense to anyone else. You don’t need a comprehensive global search engine, if you have a tool that will tell you exact personalized answers to images you’ve saved before. And kids these days save everything; it’s like how people use Gmail, no point in deleting if you just archive.

If you’re talking about kids without iPhones, then I don’t know, I’m assuming there’s probably some competitor apps on android now.

But I think you’re thinking too narrow. Don’t worry about a meme database. What about a searchable visual database of everything you’ve ever seen?

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