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The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

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Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#81

Post by red75prime »

seidleroni wrote: post #71
embedding-shape wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It helps when you can see the confidence of each token, which downloadable weights usually gives you. Then whenever you (your software) detects a low confidence token, run over that section multiple times to generate alternatives, and either go with the highest confidence one, or manually review the suggestions. Easier than having to manually transcribe those parts at least.

Is there any way to do this with the frontier LLM's?

Ask them to mark low confidence words.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#82

Post by SoftTalker »

zkmon wrote: post #44

It's painful to see that beautiful hand-writing of the past is now pretty much extinct. For me, handwriting of a person speaks a lot about them, not just their mind, but physical state as well.

Penmanship used to be a topic of instruction in school. It hasn't been for quite a long time. Even in the 1970s when we still had to write in cursive, we didn't spend time learning to make it elegant, with a lot of flourishes. We just learned a very plain standard form of writing. By high school everyone had diverged a bit with their own personal style but nothing like the writing of the 19th century.

I once visited a high school where they had a wall of signatures from every graduating senior going back to the 1920s or so. The "personality" evident in the signatures showed a steady decline, from very stylish in the oldest ones to mostly just poorly printed names in the 2020s.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#83

Post by SoftTalker »

debazel wrote: post #64
sph wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Silly comment. Handwriting is proven to be correlated with much better memory retention, which ultimately means much greater degree of association with existing memories and the creation of novel ideas. "The comparison between handwriting and typing reveals important differences in their neural and cognitive impacts. Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive pr…

This paper just says that handwriting requires more cognitive load? Which is exactly my experience with handwriting through my school years. When handwriting notes during lectures all focus goes to plotting down words, and it becomes impossible to actually focus on the meaning behind them.

The actual research doesn't back up your personal experience.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#84

Post by RationPhantoms »

Wouldn't it be easier to train a vLLM on the handwriting style of the historical person in question? An agent graphologist if you will. Surely there is a lot of pattern matching in the way things are written.

Then again, getting this result from a heavily-generalized SOTA model is pretty incredible too.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#85

Post by spiritplumber »

volemo wrote: post #61
ulbu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe akin to how faster conputers bred programs that are slower than before.

Better “thinking” computers will breed worse thinking people, huh?

Dr. Walter Gibbs: Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#86

Post by nikanj »

sph wrote: post #50
nikanj wrote: post #17

The writing is on the wall for handwriting. Zoomers use speech recognition or touchscreen keyboards, millennials use keyboards. Boomers use pens

Silly comment. Handwriting is proven to be correlated with much better memory retention, which ultimately means much greater degree of association with existing memories and the creation of novel ideas. "The comparison between handwriting and typing reveals important differences in their neural and cognitive impacts. Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive pr…

Handwriting might be very beneficial, but so are frequent social visits and those are going away too - a 2025 human spends way less time with friends than a 1975 human did. We are not rational actors, and good habits die easily

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#87

Post by __alexs »

GaggiX wrote: post #13
decimalenough wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to do an OK job: https://g.co/gemini/share/e173d18d1d80 This is a random image from Twitter with no transcript or English translation provided, so it's not going to be in the training data.

That's Gemini 2.5 Flash btw The result from Gemini 3 Pro using the default media resolution (the medium one): "(Заголовок / Header): Арсеньев (Фамилия / Surname - likely "Arsenyev") Состояние удовл- t N, кожные покровы чистые, [л/у не увел.] В зеве умерен. [умеренная] гипер. [гиперемия] В легких дыха- ние жесткое, хрипов нет. Тоны серд- [ца] [ритм]ичные. Живот мяг- кий, б/б [безболезненный]. мочеисп. [мочеиспускание]…

Ok fine I'm impressed

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#88

Post by f3b5 »

volemo wrote: post #61
ulbu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe akin to how faster conputers bred programs that are slower than before.

Better “thinking” computers will breed worse thinking people, huh?

Socrates allegedly was opposed to writing since he felt that it would make people lazy, reducing their ability to memorize things. If it wouldn't be for his disciple Plato who wrote down his words, none of his philosophy would have survived.

So I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I also am not too pessimistic, either. We will adapt, and benefit through the adoption of AI, even though some things will probably be lost, too.

Re: The writing is on the wall for handwriting recognition

#90

Post by ulbu »

volemo wrote: post #61
ulbu wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe akin to how faster conputers bred programs that are slower than before.

Better “thinking” computers will breed worse thinking people, huh?

that, and instead of increases of productivity reducing people's need to work, what might (I think, will) happen is that we will actually have to work more for worse results and lower incomes, for the whims of the executive class and increased energy requirements for LLMs. compound this control over channels of communication (google, facebook, xitter), means of production (microsoft, amazon), with force of social-emotional manipulation of LLMs and we have a really "winner" technology.

I do not think the executive class is actually in on the power of AI to increase productivity, but rather to increase reliance.

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