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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

  1. jamienk · · focus · HN ↗
    My dad died and had many many notebooks of his journals with very hard-to-read handwriting. Is it worth the effort to scan all of these so I can feed them in and go to work. Seems like so much minutia is out there, ready to be meta-understood.
    1. onetrickwolf · · focus · HN ↗
      I think scanning is worth it. There's a lot of cheap services out there that do it but it's also not too hard to find relatively cheap scanners that will process stacks of pages if you are willing to destroy the binding.

      I scanned quite a few documents many years ago and it's been fun trying new tools every couple of years to see how good they are getting. I would say it's still not 100% there, but if you have them scanned you can basically just just keep trying and compare the results.

      I think the only disappointment in recent years has been that storage has gotten more expensive instead of cheaper. I was waiting for SSDs to get cheap enough to justify moving all my documents to a fast flash array to process and search through them faster, but that doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon.

      1. nater5000 · · focus · HN ↗
        >I was waiting for SSDs to get cheap enough to justify moving all my documents to a fast flash array to process and search through them faster, but that doesn't seem like it will happen anytime soon.

        How much data are you working with? lol

        Seems like you're doing something professional-grade if this is the case. I imagine most people, like the OP, can basically use whatever machine they have laying around and never be concerned with storage size/speed.

        I'm also curious if you've tapped into cloud computing. Not that using the cloud is cheap, but I suppose if I was in a position where I'm concerned with the cost of SSDs for a processing task, then I'd be exploring all of my options and I'd be surprised if the cloud wouldn't be an "easy" solution.

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