This is really cool. Use of GPT-3 to augment OCR is an amazing (and, retrospectively, obvious) insight and a great immediate use case for these language models.
I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible.
It's an old idea, using a language model on top of character level OCR. Works well for general text but doesn't solve random sequences of digits and letters. So you can't use it to correct your invoices where you have lots of out-of-dictionary tokens.
I've always found it somehow ironic that a human can correctly recognise printed characters even if parts of them are missing and the word is misspelt or in a language the human does not know at all, but computers have to resort to language models because an exact comparison of part of the image with other parts of the image (where the same letter is printed in the same font) for some reason is not feasible?
Humans must be using a language model for image recognition when reading though. Otherwise things like failing to spot the the is a duplicate word wouldn't happen so often.
Another interesting quirk of human reading is that it is pretty agnostic to the actual order of letters in a word as long as the first and last one are placed correctly
I think people use font models rather than just language models. The post office is perhaps the best example where despite a known list of addresses and intended format they still backup OCR with people.
> The post office is perhaps the best example where despite a known list of addresses and intended format they still backup OCR with people.
To be fair, the amount of people who write their own address incorrectly is staggering.
I'm in eCommerce and easily 70%+ of addresses have some sort of minor error in them. Around 5-10% are just plain bizarre, with things like two suburbs being included or the street name not including the Rd/Av/Dr etc.
I'd suspect this is one of those problems that seems easy in the lab but quickly degenerates when you consider the human aspect of it.
People do things like include two suburbs because they know that (eg) in order for it to reach their address correctly, it must first reach the human at point A that will correctly pass it to the human at point B, where it otherwise cannot arrive at point B because point B does not receive normal postal service, possibly because of a jurisdiction dispute in 1974 that placed their address in a zip code that’s different from all of their neighbors.
Can you tell that I know a bunch of people with these kinds of issues? You may already know that programmers mess up names all the time, telling people that their last name must be their surname, or that you can’t be an O’Reilly or a Robertson-Peele, or that “Mary Anne” is not a single name, or that your middle name cannot be your “primary” name, or that you must have more than one name, or that your legal name is invalid because it’s not the name you were born with, or that all 3yos have names, etc.
Well, take all of those issues, and add the vagaries of geography, and you’ve got mail delivery.
I have a weird address, and easily 30% of websites insist on fucking it up by applying validation rules that might make sense from 20,000 feet, but don't actually work in practice for our address.
The most straightforward of them is that some validation services insist that our ZIP code is for the next town over instead of the one we live in, which has its own post office. Nothing correct happens if our mail goes to the wrong post office because they (rightly) have no idea how to deliver mail to us.
I wouldn't be so confident that 100% of that 70% don't know their own address. For at least some of those cases, I'm willing to bet they know something you don't about the vagaries of mail and package delivery to their address.
> using a language model on top of character level OCR
But if you know you're going to use a language model after the OCR, then you don't OCR to a single character, but rather to a distribution of character similarity (e.g. the 90% least similar or clipping at a certain similarity threshold). Then the language model should have more to work with (although TBH its work becomes more complicated).
If a dictionary satisfies your definition of a language model, yes, with predictably poor results[1]. If I understand correctly, Google Books approach[2] represented a major improvement in accuracy of automated OCR (and this is for printed text!), but I would venture to say that implementing a language model like this would be far beyond the scope of a 'tiny project'.
“ The error does occur because image segments, that are considered as identical by the pattern matching engine of the Xerox scan copiers, are only saved once and getting reused across the page. If the pattern matching engine works not accurately, image segments get replaced by other segments that are not identical at all, e.g. a 6 gets replaced by an 8.”
It would also be great if you could delete a page by taking a picture of the notebook entry completely scribbled out, or a video of tossing it into the fire. We need a product roadmap for this!
That is not the first time I see one of your stories and it always brings me a smile to see your new ideas and how implement them.
It also amazes me how some countries make it so easy to open a business. Doing so in Brazil would be a legal nightmare. Your projects are super inspiring and I always have a mind to leave my job and start doing the same. I should probably move to the US or Canada first, otherwise it might not be possible for me.
Just for starters, every company is a liability for you as a person. Your "equivalent of credit score" will be forever impacted by each legal entity you start.
A company in Brazil needs to fit into categories. So if you have an e-commerce company that sells food, you can't use the same entity to provide a service, for example, the email provider with emojis the original poster did previously. You need a new legal entity for that.
If you have one of the companies not pay by itself, closing it is a nightmare. I have a company that is closed, not debts, not a single problem, for 15 years already inactive. That company is considered a liability for my current company and me as a person. Once you have 3 companies in your name, you start having trouble in Brazil, as you fall into "risk" territory for taking credit, opening accounts, renting offices or apartments, etc. And if one company wants to receive payment in foreign currency, you also have to generate quarterly financial reports, and all sorts of bureaucracy. Each step of the way you find new problems.
The rules are so extensive and so hard to navigate that you can't be the only person working on that. If you want to be like the original poster, you need an accountant that will charge you per company a fair amount of money, and it will still give you a lot of work to communicate with your accountant about each of the issues.
Yes, it is OK for someone that was always an employee to open a restaurant and have a living from that afterwards. Specially since it is a well stablished business category. But serially opening companies in Brazil is not a good time at all.
Disclaimer: I am not a professional in this area, I am a software engineer and I do have 2 companies in Brazil, one operating and one closed. Most of my knowledge is either self-taught or learning through my business accountant.
No it is not. You might find it simple, if you don't compare to places that are easier.
First you need to file all the paperwork. Then you wait. Once you get approvals, you can't do anything without a bank account, and opening the bank account is a lot of trouble too, because they want to triple check everything.
From zero to operational is a long way, and with lots of legal liability along the way. I have a company closed for 15 years that still counts as a liability to me when I try to do anything, like renting an apartment.
You might be right in "opening" paperwork only being kinda OK. But you certainly can't do it like the original poster, that codes for a week or two, opens a new business and move on to new projects in series. (Yeah, not every project of his is a new company, but IIRC the larger ones become new companies).
This is absolutely true for most companies, but in this specific case he could open a “MEI” type of business (individual micro-entrepreneur) on the government website and use the CNAE 8219-9/99 (“Digitator” or typist) to receive immediately a CNPJ, which would allow him to launch the site on the first day and charge customers, paying very few taxes and without a lot of bureaucracy (well, he would end up needing to deliver some papers to the city hall after that and also generate all the invoices, but this can be done days later, during the first month of CNPJ creation).
AFAIK it works only for his first company, which is fair, MEI is ok for a first company. But not for serial projects like his, with many different areas of business.
Also, sorry to say, but I would never have a MEI myself. The mixture of your personal legal entity (for US citizens, think of your social security number) being legally bound to your CNPJ (for US citizens, an LLC or other company) is another problem entirely. If your company gets audited, all your personal accounts and your IRS get audited at the same time? Hard no for me. Thank you.
It is perfectly possible to carry out multiple activities with the MEI, although the list of permitted activities is quite limited, specially for online businesses.
But the issue you mentioned indeed makes this solution a lot less interesting.
I don't get the appeal of Atlas. You end up having to deal with bureaucracy and taxes in the US in addition to your home country, and if you need any legal/financial advise you now need someone who knows about the situation in multiple countries.
Maybe it makes sense if you want to get funding from US investors, but for a small self-funded business I just don't see the appeal.
He would still need to pay taxes in Brazil, and explain why it's not international money laundering. Same if the money touches the US, will have to pay taxes there too, then transfer it to Brazil for more taxes and paperwork.
I haven't heard of Stripe Atlas. And it actually sounds like a good idea.
I'll take a deeper look, but you could have a company in Brazil that interfaces with the company you create with Atlas. In none of my comments in this thread I am trying to aviod taxes BTW. Would be great, sure, but not the objective. I am impressed by the lifestyle the original poster, it inspires me, to the point I would like to be able to do it. Taxes need to be part of the equation, but being viable and practical would be the main issue.
Marshall McLuhan would have appreciated this. Most everyone is familiar with his “The medium is the message” phrase, but if you dig a little deeper, you’ll come to appreciate his fascination with “Technology as extension of the human body.”
That brio pen; the light bulb illuminating your workspace; the words you write; they’re all extensions of your body — from transcribing your internal thoughts, through your extremities, through transmission and distribution.
If the author is reading this, I hope you’ll consider connecting with a few reputable online stationary retailers to offer a curated collection of reasonably-priced premium notebooks and pens. Additionally, consider expanding your original scope to include tags, which would open up your platform to paper-based automation opportunities.
If you’ve made it this far and are just looking for the best cross-platform handwriting recognition, check out the Nebo app. It requires a stylus, but it’s the best I’ve come across and it reads PDFs, too.
Slightly off topic, but I'm a bit of a paper snob at this point. While Moleskine is not the bottom of the barrel I still find for use with fountain pen inks they're not the best. You haven't lived until you try out some Tomoe river paper.
The Clairefontaine paper used in Rhodia's Rhodiarama notebooks are also excellent. The soft cover Rhodiarama are some of the best paper for really watery inks. Another fantastic option is Midori's notebook paper, their whole design and the open grid option are really pretty. https://www.midori-japan.co.jp/md/en/products/mdnote/ Also if you're willing to over pay, the Kleid 2mm grid notebook with OK Fools paper are among the highest quality I've used. It has handy feature of detachable pages too.
While we’re on paper, I have a Field Notes “Expedition” special edition. [0] It has waterproof paper which is ‘fun’ but actually pretty useless as ink doesn’t really hold.
So I had it for years and it went unused. And then I used a pencil! (Mitsubishi 9850 HB, thanks for asking.) [1] Oh and it is the most fun in the world! It’s like writing on a pat of butter with the tail of a fox. It’s the smoothest thing you’ve ever felt.
Now it lives in the kitchen and I record meat temperatures and whisky cocktail ratios and it is my favourite book.
Fun fact - I worked for a bit in Japan for Yupo (the company that makes the paper of the same name and used in this notebook) as part of the project team that was overseeing the construction of the Yupo plant in Virginia. I was originally hired through an English language school on contract to help with editing the English translations of their technical documentation but also got to do some things like porting a sheet temperature simulator from MS-DOS to Windows.
If you want some waterproof notebooks that aren't quite as impractical as those Expedition ones (they always smeared for me too), you might try Rite in the Rain. Had a great time using those over the years.
Clairefontaine paper is my go-to whenever I want to do ink-intensive writing (think calligraphy)
I has beared the high debit of my noodlers ahab, and even my dip pens with flexible and/or large nibs, all of that with relatively watery ink (l'artisan pastellier's), and without ever bleeding through
Too bad that since I moved to America, I haven't been able to find paper that good for this affordable a price
I may have to try out Tomoe some time. I used Moleskine long ago but eventually moved away to Leuchtturm 1917 notebooks. I find their paper works really well for my fountain pen usage. I even write on both sides of each page, something I avoided on cheaper notebooks.
If you're on board with loose-leaf, I haven't found a better paper than HP's Premium LaserJet paper for use with fountain pens at a reasonable price point. I know it's a bit counterintuitive ("Printer paper? Seriously?!") but it has worked great for me for years. Not too scratchy or feathery, and no bleed through. Given that I'm often doing the equivalent of semi-throwaway rubber-ducking with it I greatly appreciate being able to use both sides!
So I diligently kept a pen and paper journal about my game designs for three years (wrote about 100,000+ words on paper). Switched to digital for a year, wrote 120,000 words just in 2019 (starting every morning sitting at a Starbucks and writing it helped), switched back, then switched back again, doing less and less words each year (for 2021 I'm at like 15,000 words, so pathetic, it's only like 12 entries total, need to get back into it).
But for the pen and paper I was manually transcribing it to digital (and still only transcribed about half of it). I didn't know OCR had gotten that good (and still suspect my writing isn't clean enough for great OCR).
But maybe I should give this a try, might be enough to get me back in the habit. Also trying to avoid doing as much typing lately (because of some arthritic-like pain in the fingers on one hand, although it's my writing hand :/)
So this got me trying out various things for dictation and transcription, as that would mean I wouldn't have to type quite as much.
I tried using Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage. Tons of mistakes I had to manually correct, couldn't say too much at all without it being so garbled I didn't remember what I really said to correct it manually.
But then I found out about built-in Apple Dictation on Macbook, which sends it to Siri, and I tried reading some old journal entries, and it's actually pretty darn good! I might be able to get through transcribing my other notes using it with minimal corrections. Just need to make sure you state punctuation, or else it doesn't really put any into it.
Still didn't seem that great for programming code though. Would be cool if I could find something decent for that.
Windows Speech Recognition, and it's unfortunately seems to be pretty garbage
Dragon Naturally Speaking (a paid product) is pretty good at normal dictation. My workplace bought me a copy when I was recovering from wrist surgery and it wasn't bad, especially since I could still use one hand. I've seen people mention using it for programming, with a bit of difficulty and a learning curve. But you can create your own custom commands, which is pretty much required if with keywords in a language that don't have a dictionary entry.
I diligently kept ideas in notebooks for eight years while in jail. When I moved from one jail to another, in year five, the guards lost all of them and I had to start again. When I got out a few months ago I left one of my two notebooks on a table and my friend's dog ate it.
Google's OCR (as found in Lens, Docs and whatever) is insanely good. At least that was my impression based on my own notes (my writing is horrible and I often add very small side notes).
I love this. It's hilariously written at the same time that it shows building something that is useful into a business without worrying about whether it would scale to Unicorn size.
On the downside, the Moleskin IDE the custom one the author had made in China are extremely biased against people with bad handwriting. More attention to accessibility may be required.
Seriously though this seems great if you have a bunch of notes and journals that you'd like to digitize. I have a small journal with my own recipes from over the years, and digitizing it has been in the back of my mind for a while-- if Paper Website can defeat my astoundingly awful handwriting.
Three above this story on the front page is an article called "The Web Is Fucked", complaining about how there's no character on the web any more, and lamenting the 90s, Geocities etc. etc. I'd say this story refutes that one.
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.
Makes me wonder how interesting the web might be if I just started doing that again, and how boring it might have been if I'd just had a working search engine back then.
Then again I also seem to remember getting bored enough with the web to only spend an hour or two on it at a time. Also I was in middle / elementary school so that might have played a role too.
Yep, I got it on the first try. personalrobotics dot com. Not a neat robot hacker website, not even a company selling robots. Just a $300k domain squat.
Thats a good point, I remember a bit of this back in the day but not sure how common it was. One my best friend and I still joke about to this day was tree.com, I seem to remember it wasn't even for sale, just a squat for squats sake or something. Good times.
This makes me remember that my primary way of finding new things on the web back in middle school was just typing educated guess urls in until I found something.
It was nice back in the early days when you wanted U.S. state government information, you could almost always enter something like http://state.xx.us and get the state's home page, then explore from there. (Where xx was the state abbreviation.)
Google built their index by externalizing the human cost of curation, aka Webrings. Now all the webrings are dead, because humans are easily tempted by lazy search into not maintaining them. I wish they weren’t. They were a better form of curation than anything since.
I wonder how realistic a hybrid of human and algorithmic curation would be.
Obviously the internet has an enormously long tail, but if a company could ‘curate’/rank the top 10,000 most popular sites, that might still be useful.
I wish Stumble Upon still existed just so I could find the weird corners of the web again. This site and Reddit sort of fill that but also don't quite fit it at all.
Not to be a downer again but reddit is pretty much dead for this. It's turning into FB more and more every day with a lot of young kids and teenagers filling it with memes and begging for engagement and such. It's not much of an aggregator anymore and is turning into more of an actual social network now except they still have "anonymous" profiles
I guess it's what the people running it want but I find myself going there less and less every day and only look at a few curated subs
I've found Reddit improved by careful curation of my subscribed subreddits. If I spent most of my time in there rather than /r/all then it's great. I still feel like scrolling through memes on /r/all from time to time and that has the beneficial side effect of helping me add to those subscriptions.
This is true to an extent, but I find that reddit culture seeps its way into all subs. There is a overreaching lack of seriousness.
It's my observation that the average redditor is more interested in gaining upvotes via silly class-clown behavior, than actually contributing meaningful conversation. Or interested in upvoting silly comments.
Even in subreddits where the topic of discussion is something serious, such as a forum for advice seeking, people can't help but reply to posts with jokes.
What is worse is when people are downvoted for a reply which is intelligent and serious, but is contrary to popular opinion.
Definitely true about most subs, but not all. Some, such as /r/askhistorians, are very strict about low effort posts so what you end up seeing (amongst a handful of deleted replies) are very well resourced to whatever the subject of the thread is. Of course, this requires an engaged moderating team which not all subs have. That being said, it still doesn't quite match the magic of stumbleupon and clicking a link to be shown a page matching your interests from obscure corner of the web.
To be honest, I don't know why a similar app or extension hasn't come up to replace what Stumble did. Surely there's advertising potential there (1 ad per every X clicks) and even a subscription option (remove ads or access to unlimited interest categories for $x dollars).
I feel like even with moderation, Reddit has a natural limitation by dint of being "adoration by upvote". You can't start a conversation outside of the boxes defined by the sub. If your post comes across as even slightly promoting of an undesired subject it mostly falls into the spam and downvote bucket, unless the sub is very specifically trying to include that, you have gained pre-approval, or you have manufactured some kind of storyline that loopholes both rules and human emotions. The average mod team is prone to abuse of power, so they also come down hard on anything potentially disruptive to the intended discourse. The incentives then move towards posting on Reddit in an intentionally deceptive "influencer" mode at all times - equal parts hype, pity, and outrage.
And there's both a reason for that being the case(nobody wants spam, and moderating can curate effectively in the best subs) and for it being harmful(community interaction ossifies into a familiar set of things that get upvotes, which subsequently pollutes every thread).
I don’t get complaints like this, my Reddit front page looks fine. Are people subscribing to crappy subreddits and then getting mad at the inevitable results?
I don't really think it's that the niche stuff has moved away from the web - it's that nearly every functional discovery mechanism (that my now 30ish year old self knows about) has been captured by advertising or killed.
When all you ever get served up is links to the same drivel promoted by folks who have no honest interest or curiosity, but are essentially mercenary marketing/sales (sorry - influencers blegh...), then the web starts to feel like a bland wasteland.
Some of this is entirely related to being older - but I do genuinely think the current tech powerhouses on the web are trying their damn hardest to kill off any & all organic discovery mechanisms they can. Often through completely disingenuous means. If that fails, they buy them and shutter them, or roll them into the brand where it becomes the same drivel again.
It's so bizarre to me that StumbleUpon came from the same mind as Uber (well one of the minds).
However true or untrue all of the political intrigue, journalistic threats, etc., it's just crazy to me that such an innocent corner of the web that I loved so much in the mid-late 2000s was sending death threats to journos in London not 8 years later.
"Back in my day," we had to look for fun compared to the expectation that fun will be delivered to you at your beck and call. How times have changed. When you grow up with something, it's just accepted as normal. You have to have known a time without it to truly get the difference.
Uh, this story uses GPT-3 to "improve" content based on a huge training set. Do you think that this will increase diversity and bring more character to the web?
All I want is a dead easy way to make a landing page + account + payment options for a tiny prototype SaaS like this (e.g. I supply a few APIs as 'backend' and the rest just works) -- quite similar to the One Item Store the author made. I can only imagine how many people have had to repeat all the same boring steps for some small proto.
Hey have you tried/considered BulletTrain[0] or lemonsqueezy[1]?
I also have something that I'm working on for this -- I've used my tool (which isn't productized yet, it's still ~4 templated repos) to launch 2 projects (in bio) so far and am working on a third product, but BulletTrain/lemonsqueezy are two much more polished options I know about -- maybe you should give them a try?
Is the thing you're trying to sell an API? Or is it a resource-provisioning sort of SaaS (they sign up, you spin off a persistent worker or something). I model them as the same in my thing (the provisioned "resource" is the API key), but I think that's one of the big differences in which tool will work easily for you.
Incredibly cool! This should invite a whole new type of blogger to the internet - well done!
Curious - I'm looking at your other projects as well and the design is quite good. Are you using a firm for design, or do you have any front end frameworks to recommend? For some reason design consistency the way you have it is extremely hard for me.
A lot of this seems manageable to me - like I could imagine myself being able to build it - but I have no idea how the author handled the domain names part and hosting all these websites. How did you just "throw together" a registrar and a hosting service? Seems like they built heroku and namecheap as side facets to their "tiny project." I must be missing something.
Startup Founders often say, “do things that don’t scale”. If I were trying this, I might just register the domains in my account, list myself as the admin, and list them for everything else. No building necessary until you prove the idea.
Exactly. For a $99/year subscription it makes sense to manually perform a one-time setup. That being said, domain name registration APIs are a thing [1]. Hosting should be even more trivial with a multi-tenant architecture.
Ben Stokes is an inspiration to me. I get excited reading any of the TinyProjects posts. It's so refreshing to see a solo dev building and shipping so much. Hoping I'm tracking for that kind of ability as a full stack dev.
Second that. His thinking and what he does is astounding. I am envious of his ability to string things together but most so of his thinking of new ideas.
I'd prefer the opposite: display the scanned page but with the OCR'd text virtually placed on the page (and accessible as alt text or something) like a proper OCR'd PDF.
I've done some OCR side projects during hackathon weeks over the years (with google tesseract). This is a neat idea, I can only imagine the difficulty with which transcribing the variety of terrible handwriting will cause frustration and an eventual flood of refunds.
Yeaaaah, his handwriting is actual certified art compared to mine . I can't get anything to recognize my handwriting reliably, including the text recognition built into iOS with Pencil - it's just useless.
To second what the other commenter said to you: I have seen someone with terrible handwriting fix it. He decided he cared, found pens and notebooks he really liked, and started using them attentively. People treat pens like they're all the same, but the drying time, line thickness, weight, drag across the paper, etc. all vary enormously, and if you care, you can probably find the right tool and get your handwriting to a point where you're happy with it.
I decided I hated having chicken-scratch handwriting around the end of high school / beginning of college. I literally did writing worksheets (tracing over letters) like I was in kindergarten. And if I wrote a messy word / letter on my homework I'd cross the word out and do it again. It made a huge difference, and I started getting compliments all the time on my writing. It's slipped back into average territory since, but it definitely works!
I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and attention to detail.
This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.
I have terrible handwriting and have had the idea in the past to try and relearn with a new style. Like maybe the way they teach French children in school! But when I looked online for a book on how to learn handwriting as an adult they were all for veterans who had lost their dominant hand and that was incredibly depressing. Anyone have a good resource?
Just copy writing you think is good, and keep a daily journal where you write exclusively in that style. It'll be slow going at first, but it works. Takes about a year before it's totally natural.
My handwriting is much cleaner with a fountain pen than a ballpoint pen. Tools matter. It doesn't have to be an expensive fountain pen or paper, a cheap Faber Castell on printer paper works fine.
Of course your voice is going to sound much better on a condenser mic than on a $1 mic from RadioShack, but that doesn’t mean your voice changed. We’re talking about improving handwriting, if you write someone a note illegibly your excuse should not be that you forgot your good pen at home.
Same - I find I typically use writing as a tool for thought moreso than a record that I will come back to, though I occasionally take a pass through old notes to see if I had any forgotten gems.
After I started using a Palm Pilot, my handwriting improved significantly and the changes seem to have been permanent. I get basically 100% accuracy with the Apple Pencil in iOS.
There is a delicious irony in the fact that you are training yourself using a reinforcement learning approach to meet the needs of an imperfect machine learning application.
The insta-feedback. I learned to spell because a little red squiggly line told me to try again. I avoided the right-click to autocorrect. Now everything just autocorrects and I assume people are more and more reliant on it.
It looks like he’s first using tesseract to recognize his handwriting and convert it into text. Tesseract doesn’t do a perfect job so the recognized text is full of mistakes. He treats the mistakes as spelling mistakes and “asks” GPT-3 to correct them. This is a very clever idea and will greatly improve current OCR efforts.
I think from his explanation in the article it's quite straightforward to implement it yourself: get a GPT-3 subscription at OpenAI or MS Azure, use the API as described in the article, voilà.
Could you post a link to this guide? My handwriting while not horrible could use some improvement, and is not helped by the fact that I am left handed.
A neat idea would be to allow prisoners that don't have internet or computer access to publish their own writing in an easy way. Sure, a family member could take the letters and published themselves, but it might be neat to see the image of the letter from prison as well.
All his projects are fun…one of his prior projects (mentioned in the article) is Mailoji.
I registered a few and messaged him suggesting it would be cool if I could transfer the Mailoji email addresses with a code so I could hide them in NFTs only the owner could see…I think by the very next day he added the transfer code feature (and didn’t fail to give it the attention of his own style complete with an emoji gift box).
Mailoji looks neat! Do you have a link to the gift box feature?
You and the author might also check out the new ENS (Ethereum Name Service), it support emojis for use as crypto identity/wallets. "Triple pures" (three base-level emoji) are popular as a wallet address.
At the time I used the gift feature it was just an option within the dashboard, but checking now there is an entire page explaining it (really well done)
And I’m a giant fan of ENS as a protocol. FYI even though there is a 3 character minimum because they use Unicode there are a few hundred emojis that are technically 3 characters allowing for registration of single character emoji ENS names. Beware though Unicode also allows Zero Width Joinder characters so there are people who add them in bad faith in attempt to sell desirable names to unsuspecting buyers that don’t get what they think they are paying for.
Edit: the link was bad, but example of legit single character emoji ENS is [pirate flag].eth you can search it directly in the ENS App
This idea carries some decent vibes. Pretty cool, seriously.
But I think I can't use this service:
(1) It requires "editing" for web publication, and I know I'm too lazy to keep up with that.
(2) I find myself mostly scribble with pencil and paper, and write on computer. This is partially because my handwriting is in another dimension in terms of recognizability.
(3) I sweat a lot, and that ruins paper notebooks pretty quickly, normally within 2~3 months of daily use. (So I use legal pads.)
So, personally, I've always thought about the reverse: write pages with computer, and make a book out of it for archival, like, yearly.
Still, I'm yet to carry out this idea, because:
(1) I'm unsatisfied with currently available text-based document formats - either too limited (markdown), too biased (ReST), or too verbose(HTML/XML). I'm hoping to build something like Notion(block-driven) out of plain-text document format.
(2) I fiercely hate proprietary note-taking services and apps. I've already had enough headaches: pages lost, broken import/export features, backup restoration failures, etc. Never gonna spend a single penny on them.
Hey Ben, just wanted to say great post! A lot of these comments are fairly negative, and I imagine they can weigh on your psyche. I just wanted to say I am thoroughly impressed with your execution on the project as well as your ability to market your product. Really impressive stuff, big fan :)
Out of curiosity: Is the first OCR example really the best you can find? Is there no open source solution that outputs good results for handwritten notes?
There are open source "computer vision" libraries which work really well, but, also there is a file on your filesystem with all the words, so you could pass over the OCR'd text to fix "typos".
To be clear I did not mean it as a dig on your service! It's a really cool idea, sorry for not saying it before. It was just a perfect irony.
You could also do some heuristics like not accepting emails with excessive HTML. Though I'm not sure how much it'd work, since you already require confirmation so presumably the spammers actually have someone authorizing the publication. (I didn't test your flow since I have nothing that warrants posting to say)
PG did NOT tell people to build businesses that don't scale. He told people to OPERATE businesses in ways that don't scale. That is of course true for this business - the overall model scales extremely well, but obviously what they're doing at the moment isn't scaleable. It is however an excellent proof of concept of the business model.
In the US, anyone can sell good or services and do business without formally registering as a business. You're automatically classified as a sole proprietorship, with your legal name as the business name. But there's no liability protection, since you and the business are the same legal entity. That's where LLC or incorporating comes in, along with lots of other reasons to want to formalize the business as a legal entity.
I have a number of smaller businesses/products that are part of one business entity:
- IT Consulting practice
- Eletronic device business (sells a single product via internet/mail order)
- YouTube channel/blog
- Fledgling SAS product that's not yet launched (consumes money, not makes it)
I live in the US. To incorporate here, you file paperwork with your state. You don't need a lawyer, just send in the filing fee(s) with the completed paperwork. If I remember correctly, fees were somewhere around $100-$200. I have an accountant do my corporate taxes. He charges me $400. I file the sales tax paperwork myself on my state's web site. It's basically: How much do you owe us? And then you pay it. Most eCommerce storefronts keep track of the sales-tax stuff for you so it's easy.
It’s not that bad - make an LLC right now (in most states, it’s a single form to start one), then you have no excuse. Taxes are easy.
You probably don’t even need the LLC, but I like having a bit of a legal umbrella (though chances are, no one is going to sue you unless your project gets big)
I am so happy about this site as a few months ago I had a similar idea after speaking to some relatives who wanted badly to blog but was just terrified of the tech. After chatting for a while afternoon in between copious amounts of tea and cake, we came upon a design that involved pen/paper or a typewritten page, and an app that would convert this into a blog post. I hope this does really well and will be sharing this with that group.
It would be great to see Gpt-3 taken further than this so there’s less need to mess with the layout afterwards. Maybe you describe a sketch and Gpt-3 draws you their best bike riding avocado? Or you add something that says “photos from todays trip” and it spins up the album roll. This would detract from the simplicity and may not make the product any more successful- but it would be very cool.
I like using paper to journal about my day or write about random thoughts I might have that I'd like to flesh out further through writing. A few inconveniences of writing it though is that you might want to selectively share some stuff from time-to-time, lack of ability to add media (though a portable printer kinda solves this problem), and having a limit of space, relying on indexing journals when they fill up. A lot of the caveats are solved by privately blogging, though I do miss writing instead of typing everything.
Something like this is almost a sweet spot of keeping the paper version as a "draft copy" while being able to enrich a digital version of your journal. As someone in the thread mentioned, being able to have private pages would likely encourage people to try it out for their journalling purposes. Otherwise, the project looks amazing!
I don't know if I want to use it, but I love this idea. The post promoting it was fantastic and the "you've been on a paper website the whole" time thing at the end was great. Serious inspiration food, thank you for posting.
Fun idea. I have a memory a website from years ago that was photos of writing on a whiteboard or fridge. I'm certain it wasn't accessible nor SEO-friendly though it was inadvertently mobile friendly.
This is amazingly inspiring. Not only is it a whole end to end brand and product but it solves a problem that keeps coming up in this community, about making the web fun again.
Reminds me a little of jeffbridges.com/latest. Dude hand letters and draws his entire website. Might be cool to have an option to keep the original writing without the OCR?
Trying the free trial - this is awesome! And it actually read my truly awful handwriting quite well. The website design and the technology is inspiring. Thank you!
This is really cool. The idea to separate the writing part from the computer entirely (not just the internet) is genius. Also, GPT3 helps out a bit there too.
The OCR coupled with GPT3 worked much better than I would have guessed it would. I wonder how much of that is on the device and how much is in the cloud?
How does this GPT-3 based correction system work on unique names (last names) or on numbers or on things that can't be learned from an Internet corpus?
Likely not great, if it hasn't seen it before. You could fine tune it if you had large amounts of data that sat outside of the internet corpus, but it doesn't sound like that's happening here.
This is a great idea and I’d love a future with an explosion of paper websites. However, I’m saddened that after all the attention and clicks the annual revenue is only $3600. It really shows the difficulty of getting someone to pay for your service. I wonder if an alternate revenue model would have been more successful?
The goal doesn't need to be to make money. The goal could just be to think of something new and have fun. And I think the author has clearly done that.
I could see a good use case for those planning/kanban/mind mapping meetings where you plaster a whiteboard with notes and drawings. Scanning or photographing that isn't so nice. Formatting it into a pleasant, readable wesbite would be pretty cool.
My main impediment for using anything like that is that my handwriting is incomprehensible to anyone except me. Like, my wife takes some time to figure out what it's written there, and sometimes - after long enough time passes - even myself
Maybe there's an inherent bias that people who prefer to hand write have better handwriting and therefore have a better experience. It's possible that most people with bad handwriting are more prone to want to type.
Yeah, I think it's kind of a vicious cycle: I have terrible handwriting, I'm not used to the movement - my hands hurt more with a pen than keyboard, I'm extremely slow (or the result is unreadable). So I keep typing
Fron an engineer's point of view, it's impressive how technically simple this is (author is basically assembling preexisting common building blocks)
Yet how great the added value is: it opens a whole new way of blogging
I like this idea for the very simple fact that I now know its plausible to write blog content with a pen and paper and then some GPT-3 AI will scan those words and make it into digital text for me.
I love this, for the simple fact it's one step closer for me to be a programmer without needing to sit at a computer or even use one. It's very far fetched right now, but I would love that.
How about a notebook that scans for you? I.e. one side is a notepad, other side has a tiny camera on rails, close the notebook and it automatically scans and uploads the written page.
I really like the gpt-3 idea. I have a notebook full of short story ideas that I've been too lazy too transcribe, but now I have a way to get things onto my computer!
What is "Get Rich Quick News"? The author included those specific details so I responded to them. I don't think either action reflects too much on this forum.
I wonder what value you could add to this with a notebook printed with digitally referenced paper? By printing an unobtrusive sort of barcode on each page, you could determine which part of which page of which notebook each scanned pixel came from, and what lighting conditions it was photographed under. What could you do with that?
Well, the simplest and most greyface application is forms; you can define particular areas of each page as being particular form fields. If you're blogging, you might have a field for a "slug" that appears in the URL, for example, or a field for tags, or checkboxes for some tags (plus a special page to declare the meanings of the checkboxes). Or, if you're tracking expenses, you could have a checkbox for each expense category and columns for the date and the amount. For recipes, you might have a section for listing ingredients, with a column for unit of measure, a column for quantity, and a column for the ingredient name. Etc.
For me, the special feature of paper notebooks that cellphones and other computers suck at is drawing. If I want to draw a diagram or illustration, it just works much better on paper: my pencil point occludes much less drawing area than my finger does, there's no tracking error where the ink appears 2 mm to the side of the point, it has much lower latency, and I can draw finer lines. But scanning those drawings into a computer is a pain, because I have to illuminate them evenly and hold them flat while I photograph them, which still probably involves some perspective distortion. Barcodes on the paper, together with reference lines and reference color swatches, could solve that problem, as well as providing information about which parts of the paper are occluded, if any.
For a few special applications like numismatics and entomology, the paper could provide a precise physical measurement reference for specimens.
Combining drawing with filling out forms, you can make a font from your handwriting; this is enormously easier if you can correct the various distortions. In http://canonical.org/~kragen/oilpencil/ I spent about 24 hours fiddling with various graphics programs, but there was a website I found somewhere where you can print out a form, draw the font on it, upload the scan, and download your TrueType font. This kind of thing might help with training OCR, too, especially if you don't have access to GPT-3. (Or if OpenAI decides to peremptorily destroy everything you've built because one of your users uses your service to write about their dead fiancee: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-opens-gpt-3-for-everyo...)
Other ways to combine drawing and filling out forms include sketching orthographic projections to build 3-D models; coloring a coloring book; drawing maps for Minetest and similar grid-cell games (especially 2-D ones); drawing heightfields; and sketching different keyframes of an animation to automatically morph between. You could even draw a 2-D continuum of keyframes, thus providing an animation character that's continuously variable along two different axes; you might put time on the theta axis and some sort of emotion along the radius axis.
(You can also apply these ideas with drawings that are input via other media, such as touchscreens, Wacom tablets, and mice, not only scanning paper. When you're scanning paper it's hard to get feedback as you're drawing, although you could maybe glance at your cellphone screen periodically, or use a projector like DynamicLand, or have a continuously updated monitor using a webcam feed. It could even use the occlusion information from the barcode to patch in remembered images wherever your hands were occluding the paper.)
What should the barcodes look like?
In 02001 Anoto announced their "Digital Paper" approach: https://www.wired.com/2001/04/anoto/. As explained in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_paper this uses an unobtrusive 2-D barcode scanned by a camera in a "digital pen" (later called the "Fly Pen", 02005) to locate the pen in an enormous global "virtual desktop"; I think the NeoLAB "Neo smartpen" works the same way. This was all before cameraphones went mainstream and high resolution. They got 300 patents but fortunately everything they filed in 02001 expires this year. Anoto's barcodes use a grid of slightly displaced grid dots.
The Fly Pen provided a sort of graphical user interface on the paper, using audio for output. It was sort of aimed at kids doing schoolwork and playing games. It failed in 02009. The founder started a new company called Livescribe focusing on notetaking; the Livescribe smartpen allows you to spatially organize and annotate a continuous audio recording. It has been more commercially successful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livescribe
Tiny unobtrusive dots might not reproduce reliably on a cellphone camera, though having been published in WIRED in 02001 means the technique is in the public domain (or will be next year). A better idea might be to use thin horizontal and vertical grid lines whose thickness varies slightly, perhaps in a pastel subtractive primary like cyan, magenta, or yellow; then you can optionally remove them in software after scanning. Scanning a whole page at a time, instead of a tiny area around a pen point like the "digital pens" described above, gives you a great deal more space for redundant page ID data in the barcode; probably 48 bits or so is sufficient.
It feels less like a paper website business and more just like a traditional website builder except with some OCR to turn notebook pages into web pages.
Like, you've still got to edit the page to add links, images, colours, etc. In fact, that seems like the most complicated part.
It's a fun gimmick and a nice selling point. But someone will be able to use this idea for Wordpress/Wix/Squarespace plugin. Would be surprised if they didn't produce their own feature to do the same thing eventually.
It'd be way cooler if you could draw links on the page and it would figure that out. Or draw a box with some links in it and generate a header. Draw a box for a place holder image and generate that. The next iteration would obviously be using paper to design the actual site and then using CV to generate the markup/styling.
* I primarily see this as, not a traditional website builder, but as a way to take paper journals and transform them into web journals/blogs.
* As someone who has tried all manner of tools and software for journaling (literally like tens of software apps), I've found that my brain just works best with a nice paper journal and a great pen (I highly recommend the prismacolor premier fine marker). It just works far better for me than anything else.
I'm so glad this project is at the top of HN. It is the ultimate "hacker project" of someone that scratched a personal itch, and found out other folks would be willing to pay for it.
I completely disagree. No one is ever going to write out a url by hand on notebook paper. Even in the rare case that a url would fit on a single line, it's just needlessly cumbersome work to do. I think the project author did a great job allowing for further site customization (styles, images, etc.) without overcomplicating the hand-written portion.
Yeah it's integration of OCR and a lightweight CMS that also conveniently rolls together fees for hosting and GPT3.
I was a little surprised that the paper part is used only for plain text. It would sort of make sense to have at least a few formatting and layout features.
I'm not saying it's trivial to build this. I'm just saying that the "paper website" part is greatly exaggerated. The real meat of the pie is in website builder which _is_ more complicated than tweaking some parameters on some off the shelf OCR/GPT3 solutions.
It's cool, I've never shipped a project like this, and probably never will. But I've worked on my fair share of software so I know what it takes behind the scenes.
You are not looking at this from user perspective. It's very much a paper based flow for them. Where it wins is that it lets people forget about digital devices while creating their content while letting them choosing to share some of it online post that. There are magic notebooks, magic pens etc that use ocr to achieve the same but you still need to do the creation using those devices (which are at least twice the $99 price).
Because you are a developer, you are thinking in gpt/ocr/website building etc. Lot of people especially older generations eager to share stuff will find this useful if not amusing. For them its write something on paper and get a link back. Real users don't care about WordPress plugins.
> You are not looking at this from user perspective.
They are looking at it that way. Because what you just described would be great for the user. The only problem is that what you described doesn't match how this service actually works. That it should work like but doesn't is the entire basis for Philip-J-Fry's comments. Both comments here make it clear enough what he or she is talking about, so the response admonishing them (to empathize with the users) is odd.
You both have a point, except yours is a narrow(er) engineering one. OP solved a real-world problem, and actually solved enough of it to be useful to many people, who were thrilled enough to become customers. That is impressive by itself, but what makes it even more impressive is that it is a new niche!
Would adding new features make it easier to create more complex pages? Yes. Would it improve the experience for the users? I doubt it. It's like adding full text editing mode to a chat - technically viable, but takes away the magic - just give me text and emojis and stop there.
That's not what parent said at all, if anything he meant the very opposite. He was just suggesting missing features. The site is a nice tiny project but it's not what you'd expect when you think of making websites from paper, you'd think it would understand layouts and convert them to CSS or let you create a sitemap from a tree but as it is it's just OCRing text and uploading it to a page with an editor next to it.
"You can build this trivially" is a fair criticism once you build your own products and realize how rampant IP theft is. Aside from that, the infamous dropbox comment you linked doesn't at all say "you can build this trivially".
No doubt we're all more motivated by ego than we believe we are, but comments that take a supercilious stance and put everybody else down don't help—and are not part of the culture we're hoping for here.
IMO it’s a generally good mentality — the fact that dropbox is not that hard for your average programmer to replicate (by plumbing with existing tech) is exactly why you have so much variety in the software space.
Of course, turning a functional program into a function business is no simple feat, but no one should be looking at these things and thinking “it takes a genius with a once-in-a-lifetime idea” — because, well, it clearly doesn’t. And it’s really not the most incredible or innovative idea.
The intelligence was largely in transforming something you could do into something you could easily do — and identify that it has a potential for profit, and identify how to extract that profit, and executing on it long enough to achieve that profit.
I think that's in play either way--people need to tell or be told that their idea is actually technically challenging, unusually insightful into business or users, etc. Critics are silenced because there must be no way they've read patio11 if they're posting, etc. Capacity for mutually appreciative disagreement is low on HN.
The average business is not brilliant and yet is still not easy to execute long enough to succeed. Life is hard.
I wish Remarkable took this idea -- they really oversold their OCR capabilities[1]. It works great in their support and promo videos, but I found the actual performance to be absolutely terrible.
[1] https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000266143...