Comment by tptacek 7 hours ago
No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art. The appeal to authority isn't going to play here, because you can just click through to the archives and see what they're trying to figure out.
> Go ahead and find something hard, and relate back the steps you took to find it.
This is a strawman[0] argument. You proclaimed:
A lot of what they want transcribed is totally
straightforward to OCR
If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero
they want.
There are two claims. The main one is that all of these documents are easy to individually transcribe by machine. The other is that a whole lot can be OCR'd, which is pretty simple to check.
That's not a claim that processing the entire archive would be trivial. And even if it was, whether that would make someone the "hero they want" is part of what's being called into question.
So your silly demand going unmet proves nothing.
Also, "give me an example please" is not a strawman!
If you actually want to prove something, you need to show at least one document in the set that a human can do but not a machine, or to really make a good point you need to show that a non-neglibile fraction fit that description.
I did in fact do it, and what I got was much, much easier than the samples in the article, which 4o did fine with. I'm sorry, but I declare the burden of proof here to be switched. Can you find a hard one?
(I don't think you need to Wikipedia-cite "straw man" on HN).
> No. Sign up and look at the current missions. A lot of what they want transcribed is totally straightforward to OCR --- not even LLM, OCR. Whatever's going on, and I'm not second-guessing them, a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art.
If it's that easy, then do it and be the hero they want.
Or maybe, just maybe, "a pretty big chunk of their problem appears to be well within the state of the art" is a sweeping generalization lacking understanding of the difficulties involved.