"It looked like it was time to bite the bullet and write an OCR iOS server in Swift."
Quite a large bullet required, one with plenty of chewing left in it.
Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
81–90 of 154 posts
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#82That's genius. I realized the cost advantage of text to speech on an old android versus Google cloud
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
(Not the author) Maybe they leveraged https://knowyourmeme.com/ ? But that can't possibly have all the random memes, could it?
Author here: KnowYourMeme is one of many sites that memes are continually ingested from (any site that has memes I try to ingest regularly) :)
All hail the memelord!
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else. Local search isn't enough then.
Though I share your feelings somewhat - I was completely surprised by what you wrote in the comment higher up about iPhone gallery search. I didn't realize this is possible in a reliable fashion, much less off-line and deployed in a mass market device.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.
Count me in. If you asked me about the OCR itself, I'd probably say "yeah, it's mostly been solved for a good decade for print books and articles, but it's unreliable enough". I somehow never considered OCR might have gone better - possibly because my main exposure was through badly OCRed book scans and a built-in OCR in some PDF reader I used at one point.
It definitely didn't occur to me that OCR works well enough on arbitrary images, and it's cheap enough compute-wise that you could do it locally in a casual fashion.
Nice thing you have there in the Apple garden. Over here in Android land, I have the opposite problem. You say:
> 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.
and all i can think of is how I recently became convinced that a Samsung flagship is losing my photos. There's been a couple cases over the past few months when I felt really damn sure I made a set of photos of something (e.g. remodeled kitchen), but when I checked on the phone, it turned out those photos don't exist, or there is maybe just one where I expected 5-10. They aren't in the gallery. They aren't in the filesystem. Poof, gone.
So either I'm getting senile in my 30s, or something is off with the way my phone stores photos. I did a web search for this the other day, there are relatively recent reports on-line complaining about the same thing, but no one has any evidence. I'm thinking about doing an experiment now (basically make extra photos every day and document them in a paper notebook, and check after half a year if the photos match the notes) - but the point of me sharing this is: I no longer trust new tech, smartphones in particular, to handle basics correctly. Much less do something advanced like reliable text search on images.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else . Local search isn't enough then. Though I share your feelings somewhat - I was completely surprised by what you wrote in the comment higher up about iPhone gallery search. I didn't realize this is possible in a reliable fashion, much less off-line and deployed in a mass market device.
> The use case for the meme database is slightly different: it's to find that meme you saw somewhere else.
The whole idea is that whenever you find a meme you like you save it, so all search is still local
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#87I tried a few memes. The results were quite poor, and vastly inferior to just using Google. In the case of text searches I had to scroll through dozens of results before finding the original meme images.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#88Love the hackiness of this - however, the vision framework is available on Desktop macs as well - https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision
and specifically:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/vnrecognize...
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#89> My preliminary speed tests were fairly slow on my Macbook. However, once I deployed the app to an actual iPhone the speed of OCR was extremely promising (possibly due to the Vision framework using the GPU). I was then able to perform extremely accurate OCR on thousands of images in no time at all, even on the budget iPhone models like the 2nd gen SE. I suppose that’s an old Intel MacBook? I’d be very surprised if t…
I think he was running it in the simulator - which won't perform anywhere near as fast on this type of thing.
Re: Building an Internet Scale Meme Search Engine
#90Where did the original set of meme images, gifs, and videos come from?