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Comment by haileys | Hacker News Reader

I thought it was funny that the author used a variety of OCR tools with mixed success before spending a lot of time manually fixing up the output from the best one, rather than just typing it in

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That was also my thought… but I grew up mashing rubber keys for hours copying “games” out of magazines and books! Then hours after fixing all the typos!

I spent hours typing 6502 assembly. It went a lot better when someone dictated: LDA, STA, BEQ, LDY, STY...

I ran it through paddle paddle OCR and it flawlessly did it. Google's OCR through my phone's Google lens had also worked at getting a very good extraction but not 100% correct. Definitely would spend less time fixing it than hand copying.

IDK what the author was using but I feel like he could have shared how his OCR attempt went, but I am thinking he tried some naive OCR tools.

Author here - that's a good idea actually, it shouldn't be too hard to compare the various attempts. The tools I used were whatever my Android built-in is (likely Google Gemini, but I can't tell whether this is something Samsung has replaced in OneUI); tesseract; tesseract with various tweaks and charsrt restrictions; Claude; and finally, manual fixes based on disagreements between all the previous.

Took me almost 2 minutes for 4 lines (and I missed a character in one of them!). I would opt for OCR too, obviously so I'm prepared for the next bash t-shirt I'd come across...

I think this is a case where two people can successfully complete the task manually faster than one attempting to automate it. Get a ruler, read five centimetres of characters to your colleague, have them type it in as you go, then repeat that five centimetres back to you. Correct as you go. Format your string with the same line-breaks as the t-shirt, and remove them at the end, so you can be sure you've got the correct length on each row. Trial-and-error adjust the five-cm distance depending on your success rate as you go along

All in, you should have a non-corrupted string in 10-15 min.

Feels like my experienced reality of task automation in corporate environments. We routinely have engineers spend 40+ hours automating tasks that an entry level person can do manually in 10 minutes and only need to be done weekly. Automation at all costs seems to be the future

It’s certainly not a new phenomenon. I appreciate this XKCD [1], with a chart of “How long can you work on making a routine task more efficient before you’re spending more time than you save”

It’s not the final word, since automation has other benefits: documenting the procedure’s steps, reducing human errors, increasing consistency, etc.

1: https://xkcd.com/1205/

"just typing it" would be more error prone for the average human

Not really. Transcribing long sequences of nonsense is annoying but quite easy to do without error as long you're patient enough to follow a simple process of reading, typing, and double-checking character-by-character.

Gemini3.5 Flash didn't have a problem OCR'ing and base64 decoding it, despite the OCR step having errors, it just fixed them in the base64 decoding step.

(Author here) Yes I agree. It was a fun side-quest though. Reminds me of https://xkcd.com/1205/

I'm guilty of this, but for me this kind of thing is optimizing over annoyance rather than time.

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