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My guilty pleasure is 9gag. It's blocked in the office (thankfully), so I spend way too much time on it when I'm not at work. I used to read a lot of webcomics

My guilty pleasure is 9gag. It's blocked in the office (thankfully), so I spend way too much time on it when I'm not at work. I used to read a lot of webcomics (XKCD, Joy of Tech, Pon and Zi, QuestionableContent, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Brads) and user-generated art (DeviantArt). 9gag lowered the barriers to entry and made it easy for images to become viral. It's also now transitioned into auto-playing videos instead of static pictures, which is killing comics :(. My boss asked me to watch the CS231n lectures and learn TensorFlow, but he didn't give me a dataset. So I downloaded the history of the 9gag hot page, over 60k images. I'm also interested in learning languages, and I find that comics with dialogues are a great way to learn how to talk to people. I then wrote my own image viewer to let me tag pictures as a comic/not comic. So now I'm still wasting time looking at memes, but I can pass it off as "productive" work, training a machine learning model to find dialogues for language learning.

roboyoshi 8y ago
That sounds awesome and now I want to know how it performs. Is the dialogue like 2 teenagers communicating purely with memes? Also I'd love to get my hands on those 60k images.
- peterburkimsher 8y ago
  Right now I'm still just sorting out the comics (with dialogue) from memes (without). If I transcribe them, I could build a chatbot like you describe. I'd rather just hand them over to friends who could translate them. HowardInterprets has translated some comics from Chinese to English, and when one of those reached 9gag, I got my inspiration to use this with my tutor for weekly Mandarin class. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos Do you have a server that can receive 7.12 GB? I like Mega.nz but it makes free users wait 5 hours after 2 GB. Make contact if you need the data; you should be find my email address without much difficulty.
C_System 8y ago
This is a great story, it's like triple-dipping. You're getting a) paid to b) learn and c) look at memes.

roboyoshi 8y ago

That sounds awesome and now I want to know how it performs. Is the dialogue like 2 teenagers communicating purely with memes? Also I'd love to get my hands on those 60k images.

peterburkimsher 8y ago
Right now I'm still just sorting out the comics (with dialogue) from memes (without). If I transcribe them, I could build a chatbot like you describe. I'd rather just hand them over to friends who could translate them. HowardInterprets has translated some comics from Chinese to English, and when one of those reached 9gag, I got my inspiration to use this with my tutor for weekly Mandarin class. https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos https://www.facebook.com/pg/Howardinterprets/photos Do you have a server that can receive 7.12 GB? I like Mega.nz but it makes free users wait 5 hours after 2 GB. Make contact if you need the data; you should be find my email address without much difficulty.

C_System 8y ago

This is a great story, it's like triple-dipping. You're getting a) paid to b) learn and c) look at memes.