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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
[+] [-] georgecmu|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] visarga|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swenrekcah|4 years ago|reply
Then I only now realised I don’t actually want my notes public, I hope there is some form of access control built into this! :D
[+] [-] tdehaene|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kragen|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irae|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TekMol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forinti|4 years ago|reply
Closing a business is a bit of a bother, but it is mostly a question of waiting.
[+] [-] adfm|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] _virtu|4 years ago|reply
Check out TarokoShop's notebooks: https://www.etsy.com/shop/TarokoShop?ref=simple-shop-header-....
[+] [-] picture|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] allenu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tcepsa|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cableshaft|4 years ago|reply
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 :/)
[+] [-] cableshaft|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kingcharles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] artificial|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlantic|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ineedasername|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] asicsp|4 years ago|reply
"Paper Website: Start a tiny website from your notebook" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29174478 (32 days ago, 271 points, 70 comments)
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkdpic|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jaypeg25|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duxup|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slingnow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mNovak|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|4 years ago|reply
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.
[0]: https://bullettrain.co/
[1]: https://www.lemonsqueezy.com/
[+] [-] anonymouse008|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aerovistae|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codazoda|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwawaycities|4 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] reginold|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] esjeon|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] thinkski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbildner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SCUSKU|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thepete2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|4 years ago|reply
Paper website will likely be cloned if it works.