Maybe they want to compile the Apollo Guidance Computer source code...

https://www.softwareheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/...

> To best support software engineers when they want to transcribe code from images, we fine-tuned our pre-processing pipeline to screenshots of code in IDEs, terminals, and online resources like YouTube videos and blog posts.

Even with these examples that seems like a very narrow use case.

From an accessibility standpoint, yes. To be able to pattern match where you are in I.D.E without using an accessibility api

The product appears to be similar to Microsoft's embattled Recall feature. In order to remember your digital life it takes frequent screenshots.

I guess it would be excellent to evade security monitors to take unauthorized copies of your employers codebase.

It worries me that stuff like that becoming easier will lead to wacky data pipelines being normalized (pulling display output off systems and "scraping" it to get data, of dubious quality, versus just building a proper interface). The kind of crowd that likes "low code" tools like MSFT's "Power Automate" is going to love to make Rube Goldberg nightmares out of tools like this.

It fills me with a deep sadness that we created deterministic machines then, though laziness, exploit every opportunity to "contaminate" them with sloppy practices that make them produce output with the same fuzzy inaccuracy as human brains.

Old man yells a neural networks take: We're entering a "The Machine Stops" era where nobody is going to know how to formulate basic algorithms.

"We need to add some numbers. Let's point a camera at the input, OCR it, then feed it to an LLM that 'knows math'. Then we don't have to figure out an algorithm to add numbers."

I wish compute "cost" more so people would be forced to actually make efficient use of hardware. Sadly, I think it'll take mass societal and infrastructure collapse for that to happen. Until it does, though, let the excess compute flow freely!

Well, at least I can apt-get install tesseract.

That doesn't hold for any of the GPU-based solutions, last time I checked.

5.5.0 released November last year. Still a very active project as far as I can tell and runs on CPU. Even compared to best open source GPU option it is still pretty good. VLMs work very differently and don't work as well for everything. Why is it out of date?

I just built a pipeline with tesseract last year. What's better that is open source and runnable locally?

VLLM hallucination is a blocker for my use case.

Quite simply, you’re completely wrong. Modern tesseract versions include a modern LSTM AI. It can very affordably be deployed on CPU, yet its performance is competitive with much more expensive large GPU-based models. Especially if you handle a high volume of scans, chances are that tesseract will have the best bang per buck.

I'm guessing to automatically scrape videos for future training rounds.

Eh, imagine poor documentation where people take screenshots of steps and don't write them out.

I can also imagine plenty of YouTube tutorials that type the code live... seems fairly useful

The original tesseract OCR has no neural nets. It bare little resemblance to the modern version.

What is this argument? Much software we use today was created in the 80s.

Unix was created in _1971_ and here we are still running processes and shells like it’s the 70s. Why not just have an LLM dream up the output?