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Comment by percentcer | Hacker News Reader

This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.

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Or one person types 76 pages. This is a thing people used to do, not all that infrequently. Or maybe you have one friend who will help–cool, you just cut the time in half.

Typing 76 pages is easy when it's words in a language you understand. WPM is going to be incredibly slow when you actually have to read every character. On top of that, no spaces and no spellcheck so hopefully you didn't miss a character.

Seems like a job for an LLM

Quite the opposite if you want to trust the results

The first week of my PHD was accurately copying DNA sequences from an old paper into a computer file. 10 pages in total. I used OCR to make an initial version then text to speech to check it

76 pages is a couple of months of work

As TFA says, the hard part is that "1" and "l" look the same in the selected typeface. Whether your OCR is done by computers or humans, you still have to deal with that problem somehow. You still need to do the part sketched out e.g. by pyrolistical in [1] and implemented by dperfect in [2].

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46906897

[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46916065

> Just get 76 people

I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.

Amazon Mechanical Turk?

No, I don't think so :) -- https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/mechanical-turk-workers-ar...

First, build a fanbase by streaming on Twitch.

You think compelling 76 people to honestly and accurately transcribe files is something that's easy and quick to accomplish.

Non-engineers are perfectly willing to volunteer their time to do drudgery. It's one of my opseng career's distinguishing specialties: I'll do drudgery rather than code when appropriate, rather than avoiding it or sulking about it (as was a common response at work for some number of decades!). Learned that lesson when I was 18 from an internship (where I completely failed to deliver any work product due to trying to code around the work). It's part of why I'm going into accounting: apparently having the stamina for dreary work is rare?!

Also look up double/triple data-entry systems, where you have multiple people enter the data and then flag and resolve differences. Won't protect you from your staff banding together to fuck you over with maliciously bad data, but it's incredibly effective to ensure people were Actually Working Their Blocks under healthy circumstances.

Captcha!

Friend, have you ever heard of secretaries?

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