6 ms·

This title really undersells the absolute insanity of the described solution. This is a beautiful example of "if it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid." Th

This title really undersells the absolute insanity of the described solution. This is a beautiful example of "if it's stupid, but it works, it's not stupid." The justification is very convincing. One thing I'm curious about: how did you build your corpus of meme images and videos?

aemreunal 4y ago
(Not the author) Maybe they leveraged https://knowyourmeme.com/ https://knowyourmeme.com/? But that can't possibly have all the random memes, could it?
- code_duck 4y ago
  OP’s meme site lists where each image comes from. Looking through it I mainly see ifunny and 9gag.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Do you crawl telegram channels?
- mandatory 4y ago
  Author here: KnowYourMeme is one of many sites that memes are continually ingested from (any site that has memes I try to ingest regularly) :)
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    What about copyright?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - spiffytech 4y ago
    How do you ingest your social circle's in-group memes? Are they reliably posted to meme generator sites?
  - aemreunal 4y ago
    Amazing work! Also, thank you for making that feed on the main page, been laughing for a while here :D
    - yojo 4y ago
      Also lost 20 minutes doom scrolling that feed. Add an upvote button and some ML and you could destroy some lives.
    - mandatory 4y ago
      Thanks! Comment made my night.
  - GistNoesis 4y ago
    Nice IPhone cluster. Have you tried something based on deep-learning that uses Transformers : https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark (available weights are for tasks that seem similar to OCR so there is a good chance you can use it out of the box). With a good gpu it should process hundreds to thousands image per seconds, so you likely can build your index in less than a day. (Maybe you can even port it to your iphone stack :) ) https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text (You'll probably have to train on your custom dataset that you have constituted) There are tons of other freely available solutions that you can get with a search for things with keywords like "image to text ocr" "transformers" "visual transformers"...
    - generalizations 4y ago
      Personally, I've been hunting for something that can extract both the text and the associated image. I've never seen anything that can do both.
    - astrange 4y ago
      You can do better than a general image-to-text model reading memes, because they all use the same fonts - so you want something trained off synthetic data made with that font.
  - taneq 4y ago
    All hail the memelord!
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
yeah but lots of things that work are stupid because there are many other solutions that work better, the greatness of this crazy solution is it really seems like the best solution given price requirements.
- jychang 4y ago
  I feel like I’m taking crazy pills in this thread. Am I the only one who talks to Gen Z kids who explore around their iPhone apps? This definitely isn’t the best option given price requirements. It’s not even the most convenient option. I’m around age 30, not 13, so similar to the article, my first instinct was also to create a database and OCR the image. But by total coincidence, yesterday I had a conversation with my 14 year old cousin on the topic of saving memes. Her response was along the lines of “yeah, everyone nowadays just saves the image to your iPhone photos, and then just search for it later from the photos app”. Yeah. This whole article is literally already built into iOS UI, not just a hidden API. And kids all seem to know about this, apparently. This article uses an example meme with the text “Sorry young man But the armband (red) stays on during solo raids”. I saved it in my iPhone photos app… and found it again through the search function in the photos app. https://imgur.com/a/BPICjOz https://imgur.com/a/BPICjOz https://imgur.com/a/55el9uQ https://imgur.com/a/55el9uQ This is a solved problem already, by teenager standards. I felt extremely old yesterday when I was talking to my cousin. And I felt extremely old today, reading this article. This is because looking back, the past few decades of CS cultural intuition have established that text are text, and images are images. Strings and bitmaps don’t mix. This seems sort of obvious to anyone in tech, but I realized that from a clueless grandma perspective, not being able to search up text in photos wasn’t really obvious. Well, the roles are reversed now. Ordinary people now have access to software that treats text as a first class citizen in photos by default.
  - counttheforks 4y ago
    The entire point is to find memes you don't already have.
    - jychang 4y ago
leokennis 4y ago
It reminds me a little of https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/. It allows you to read iMessages on Android and other platforms. To make this work, they will ship you some old iPhone to act as a server "bridge": https://twitter.com/ericmigi/status/1351934418961661959 https://twitter.com/ericmigi/status/1351934418961661959 If it works, it works. But it also speaks volumes about Apple's disregard/inexperience with exposing their stuff via the web - https://www.icloud.com/ https://www.icloud.com/ being the prime example: half the stuff the phone apps can do are not available (cannot create a reminder with a due date...) and the things that are there are slow and buggy.
- dewey 4y ago
  I think I've seen a post from https://texts.com https://texts.com about that they. I don't think they ship you the iPhone though, the host it themselves.
  - kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
    I would imagine the only scalable way to run such a service is to run macOS virtual machines with multiple user accounts for each iMessage user.

aemreunal 4y ago

(Not the author) Maybe they leveraged https://knowyourmeme.com/ https://knowyourmeme.com/? But that can't possibly have all the random memes, could it?

code_duck 4y ago
OP’s meme site lists where each image comes from. Looking through it I mainly see ifunny and 9gag.
solarkraft 4y ago
Do you crawl telegram channels?
mandatory 4y ago
Author here: KnowYourMeme is one of many sites that memes are continually ingested from (any site that has memes I try to ingest regularly) :)
- counttheforks 4y ago
  What about copyright?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- spiffytech 4y ago
  How do you ingest your social circle's in-group memes? Are they reliably posted to meme generator sites?
- aemreunal 4y ago
  Amazing work! Also, thank you for making that feed on the main page, been laughing for a while here :D
  - yojo 4y ago
    Also lost 20 minutes doom scrolling that feed. Add an upvote button and some ML and you could destroy some lives.
  - mandatory 4y ago
    Thanks! Comment made my night.
- GistNoesis 4y ago
  Nice IPhone cluster. Have you tried something based on deep-learning that uses Transformers : https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark https://github.com/roatienza/deep-text-recognition-benchmark (available weights are for tasks that seem similar to OCR so there is a good chance you can use it out of the box). With a good gpu it should process hundreds to thousands image per seconds, so you likely can build your index in less than a day. (Maybe you can even port it to your iphone stack :) ) https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text https://github.com/microsoft/GenerativeImage2Text (You'll probably have to train on your custom dataset that you have constituted) There are tons of other freely available solutions that you can get with a search for things with keywords like "image to text ocr" "transformers" "visual transformers"...
  - generalizations 4y ago
    Personally, I've been hunting for something that can extract both the text and the associated image. I've never seen anything that can do both.
  - astrange 4y ago
    You can do better than a general image-to-text model reading memes, because they all use the same fonts - so you want something trained off synthetic data made with that font.
- taneq 4y ago
  All hail the memelord!

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

yeah but lots of things that work are stupid because there are many other solutions that work better, the greatness of this crazy solution is it really seems like the best solution given price requirements.

jychang 4y ago
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills in this thread. Am I the only one who talks to Gen Z kids who explore around their iPhone apps? This definitely isn’t the best option given price requirements. It’s not even the most convenient option. I’m around age 30, not 13, so similar to the article, my first instinct was also to create a database and OCR the image. But by total coincidence, yesterday I had a conversation with my 14 year old cousin on the topic of saving memes. Her response was along the lines of “yeah, everyone nowadays just saves the image to your iPhone photos, and then just search for it later from the photos app”. Yeah. This whole article is literally already built into iOS UI, not just a hidden API. And kids all seem to know about this, apparently. This article uses an example meme with the text “Sorry young man But the armband (red) stays on during solo raids”. I saved it in my iPhone photos app… and found it again through the search function in the photos app. https://imgur.com/a/BPICjOz https://imgur.com/a/BPICjOz https://imgur.com/a/55el9uQ https://imgur.com/a/55el9uQ This is a solved problem already, by teenager standards. I felt extremely old yesterday when I was talking to my cousin. And I felt extremely old today, reading this article. This is because looking back, the past few decades of CS cultural intuition have established that text are text, and images are images. Strings and bitmaps don’t mix. This seems sort of obvious to anyone in tech, but I realized that from a clueless grandma perspective, not being able to search up text in photos wasn’t really obvious. Well, the roles are reversed now. Ordinary people now have access to software that treats text as a first class citizen in photos by default.
- counttheforks 4y ago
  The entire point is to find memes you don't already have.
  - jychang 4y ago

leokennis 4y ago

It reminds me a little of https://www.beeper.com/ https://www.beeper.com/. It allows you to read iMessages on Android and other platforms. To make this work, they will ship you some old iPhone to act as a server "bridge": https://twitter.com/ericmigi/status/1351934418961661959 https://twitter.com/ericmigi/status/1351934418961661959 If it works, it works. But it also speaks volumes about Apple's disregard/inexperience with exposing their stuff via the web - https://www.icloud.com/ https://www.icloud.com/ being the prime example: half the stuff the phone apps can do are not available (cannot create a reminder with a due date...) and the things that are there are slow and buggy.

dewey 4y ago
I think I've seen a post from https://texts.com https://texts.com about that they. I don't think they ship you the iPhone though, the host it themselves.
- kaladin-jasnah 4y ago
  I would imagine the only scalable way to run such a service is to run macOS virtual machines with multiple user accounts for each iMessage user.