Thread

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

226 points · 79 comments · benbreen

jamienk · 1790908837 · 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. komali2 · 1790910256 · focus · HN ↗
  I set up an OCR flow using local models on all my many tens of journals stretching back the last 30 years.
  I would say it's about 80% accurate, which means it's missing enough key words to make a lot of it uselessly unintelligible. I can easily compare the images against text I turn up in a grep which is nice if I'm looking for something.
  Allegedly Claude set up a system for retraining for my handwriting, but it would require me to manually revise several hundred pages by hand so I don't think I'll ever do it.
  <a href="https://github.com/508-dev/journal-ocr" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/508-dev/journal-ocr
  1. jiggawatts · 1790947594 · focus · HN ↗
    Accurate text OCR from bad handwriting is still very much a "bleeding edge" frontier capability that isn't practical with local models.
    GPT 6.1 and Gemini Flash 3.8 both do pretty well, their OCR of your sample image is only "wrong" in the sense that the original has typos and they corrected some inadvertently and/or filled in gaps where you had "unintelligible" in the canonical text.
    If you have the budget and want the best possible results, you need to run each image through multiple models and then combine the outputs into a final "merge these" prompt. Better scanning helps too, your sample image is rotated and you used a phone in low light. Try a DSLR or a flatbed scanner and process only one page at a time instead of two at once.
    jamienk · 1790948019 · focus · HN ↗
    'run each image through multiple models and then combine the outputs into a final "merge these" prompt' << How to do this? This would be an amazing workflow to get documented. This could be the start of a full-service company "send us a bunch of notebooks, get back HIGH QUALITY text version"
    komali2 · 1791001878 · focus · HN ↗
    That's the workflow in the GitHub repo I linked, I guess the person you're replying to didn't look. You could just change the calls to be to frontier models instead of local ones if you want.

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