Comment on German parliament will stop using fax machines

• sweng@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  At horrendous expense, yes. Using it for OCR makes little sense.

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  • Mongostein@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    My phone can recognize text on images. How hard could it be to send that data to an AI?

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    • sweng@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      How many million times do you generally do that, and how is battery life after?

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      • Mongostein@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I wouldn’t do it on my phone. 🙄

        What I’m saying is that it would probably be fairly easy to incorporate an already existing technology in to an AI.

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  • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I was about to say, you could do serviceable OCR on a 486, which illustrates just how little processing power is needed for conventional approaches compared to this hallucinating AI nonsense.

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    • GenosseFlosse@lemmy.nz ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

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      • sweng@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        Doing OCR in a very specific format, in a specific area, usin a set of only 9 characters, and having a list of all possible results, is not really the same problem at all.

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      • DdCno1@beehaw.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I meant OCR of arbitrary printed or faxed text, which really only became feasible for home users in the 1990s. There were professional, but often very limited, solutions earlier than that, of course.

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