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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5340 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What's the best way to copy long passages from a physical book?

Typing takes forever, so that's out. I've tried Googling a digital copy of the book, but a lot of times the books I read aren't scanned or are in the form of PDFs without copiable text. I usually usethe Google Lens function of my Camera app to grab text using OCR, but it's only about 95% accurate, meaning I often have to go back through and correct a lot of erroneous letters and punctuation. Is there a smarter way to do this?

You might be interested in the approach described in this blog post. TL;DR take a first pass with OCR and then pass it through GPT-3 with a prompt like "The following text contains typos; please fix them." The author claims it's very accurate (enough so to support a paid product), and I thought it was a pretty clever trick when I read about it.

This is awesome, thank you!

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