I agree, this is pure (US) boomer behavior, they still think that the world will care about them almost a century into the future from the moment of their deaths. The world won't do that, one of the reasons being that said boomers have been quite talentless given their resources.
Vanity is not a trait exclusive to people born in an ill-defined interval of time. You internet using people need to come up with a better term for people you want to blame for everything bad in the world. Jobs, Wozniak, Berners-Lee, or that Ethernet dude, Metcalfe, are not responsible for the end of the world.
We are now in a weird middle ground where we want to write things OCR algorithms have trouble transcribing which also means we write things people with accessibility issues have trouble seeing. No child left behind?
It's like the old tale about the national park bin with the smartest bear / dumbest tourist crossover, except we're now comparing capabilities of the smartest AI with disabled humans.
I think the difficulty was specifically with CAPTCHA challenges, which had to be quick to generate but still legible - OCR on physical documents has to be robust to a different set of problems
That said, what kind of errors are you getting? I think the main practical difference between Tesseract's LSTM-based OCR and newer VLM-based OCR like PaddleOCR [1] is (hopefully) getting to skip making heuristics for the layout of the document, but errors possibly compounding over multiple tokens - are you getting individual illegible words or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout?
>> no matter how I scan receipts or documents, the OCR output seems far worse than human
> what kind of errors are you getting?
Just noticeably worse character recognition, particularly where the document is faded, water-stained, or the paper document (not the scan) was low resolution to begin with, as compared to 'normal' human recognition.
I was largely using Tesseract in conjunction with the self-hosted Paperless-NGX, and I wanted to stay free/local without yet investing in AI-focused hardware. But you're right that AI will continue to advance, including in smaller local models, and it looks like Paperless 3.0 released recently (after my testing earlier in 2026), including with AI functionality.
> or having the documents smooshed together because the OCR can't parse the layout
I haven't even been worrying about that yet - I'm just at the point of trying to get the OCR characters right. :-)
Well, I used specialized software specifically for solving CAPTCHA on select few file sharing websites. My later experience with general purpose OCR software was just as awful as yours. But it's a product problem, not technology problem - you really don't need an advanced AI for it, you just need a good implementation of traditional shape-matching OCR that doesn't seem to exist anywhere for some reason.
If you can get a cautionary tale on having children out of this article, your powers of interpretation are immense or you didn’t read the article at all…
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” why bother reading the rest of the story
So let it be. Why don't we build another place for our memories to go? Why don't we build the _unstructured_ internet, where the intelligence is not in the mind but in the eye and the pleasure is in finding not in disseminating?
Let’s say I want to produce a QR code that is as close as possible to an image (let’s say the Nike swoosh logo), if I just added that to the center and added the 3 orientation markers on the corners it wouldn’t be a proper QR code yet, my question is what is the minimal amount of edits I would need to do from that symbol to get a valid QR code?
I’m thinking of something like people buying and hoarding domains in early 00’s (even now), if I could generate the minimal QR code (minimal is important here in the same way that .com is treated as superior to .ca or .net) of well-known symbols and buy the resulting domain it points to (if it even points to a domain) couldn’t I sell this to companies with the associated domain as a re-direct as well?
Looks like this is definitely possible, the results aren't as clean as you might hope though. Maybe they could be improved by introducing some intentional errors (which were explicitly avoided here).
You could maybe determine this using a SAT solver. You would have to encode the entire QR code specification. I was thinking of doing this to find a minimalist QR code that just had as few black cells as possible.
Using their logo in this way is probably a trademark violation, so they would be able to get your QR code “for free” (minus the costs involved with consulting their legal division).
At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
Then I remembered a passage from 'Never Split The Difference' by Voss (a book on negotiation) which went something like:
If you can get a person to "You're right" you haven't done anything. If you can get them to "That's right" you've hit the sweet spot.
When you prompt an A.I. you have pre-conditioned the answer on something which came from yourself. There is something about this which turns what would normally be a "You're (the LLM) right" to a "That's right" and that something is an implicit desire toward "I'm right".
Side note: In 'The Dawn of Everything' there is an interesting passage about the notion of private property arising from the idea that injecting some of yourself (labor) into a thing (land) makes the thing an extension of yourself (property). Doesn't this logic extend to this kind of psychosis? The C-suite's aren't deffering to A.I. they are deffering to themselves via A.I.
> At first I was gonna say that if a person prefers the response of an A.I. to yours it is a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
I think that people in general need to be better at receiving information that isn't perfectly pitched to them. It is a useful life skill to be able to understand the substance of someone's argument, and to look past the superficial way that it is presented. Postel's law applied to human communication.
Someone can be very frustrated and angry, and it can be upsetting to hear how they're presenting their argument, but they can be correct.
Another person can also whisper everything you want to hear in your ears, but lead you down the wrong path.
In a well-functioning society, I would think our senior leadership would be experienced and actually good at doing this and it would be expected of them. Flipping that around and blaming the subordinate for how they've pitched the message is backwards and probably not societally healthy.
> a reflection of your own lack of understanding, articulation, effective communication, etc.
After many years of bashing myself for not being understood at the workplace, I now realize that I never questioned if leadership was actually competent.
If they want to work with engineers effectively they have to understand jargon, communication styles, they have to understand the big tradeoffs and requirements that comes with owning a codebase at least on a rudimentary level.
You can't just go to business school and effectively manage trains and railroads if you had no clue about them.
So if you don't know how to communicate effectively with engineers whom you are paying for solving technical issues and not for their eloquence you are not competent.
We should stop apologizing for our existing when we try tell our bosses not to run into an iceberg, just because ChatGPT told them: "You're absolutely correct! The ship you built is stronger than the iceberg as it is made of metal and ice is just water.".
There are manifold objections to Locke on property or rather on the appropriation of alien nature into one’s own. This characterization of the theory is the real psychosis
People who care about their health aren't ignorant about that. I think that can apply to software too: if you care about safety or privacy you might think twice before using vibe-coded software.
That is a significant leap in logic. A vibecoding tool is not a McDouble. Nor is Chris Kempczinski the same person as Dario Amodei.
The biggest difference is that there are only so many ways to eat a McDouble, but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code and asking for structural reworks or refactors that please your code taste. In fact one of the best use cases for AI coding tools is vibe refactoring old apps where the code is straight up horrible.
> but you can actually wield a vibe coding tool with skill. There's nothing stopping you from looking at the code
It’s hard to give something like “vibe coding” a rigid definition, but I think we can all agree that it’s inversely correlated with "looking at the code". The more I examine the code while building, the less the activity is about vibes.
So, used this way, it's true that it's not a McDouble anymore, but it's also not so much of a vibecoding tool anymore either.
i have never had a "mcdonald's mcdouble", whatever that is. i cook my own burgers because i am a human being and i want to eat real food, not nauseating slop that should only be fed to livestock
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