5 ms·

It is a cute idea but unfortunately (or fortunately?) this particular implementation of the camera comes with (a) opinions, (b) typos, and (c) probably trolls,

by drostie 15y ago

It is a cute idea but unfortunately (or fortunately?) this particular implementation of the camera comes with (a) opinions, (b) typos, and (c) probably trolls, if they know that their text will automatically be accepted and printed out. I guess these factors could probably be reduced with more money? I don't mean paying more for the job: I mean using the API to ask a second human to verify the results of the first human and/or fix typos.

scraplab 15y ago
I think you're missing the point of it.
- drostie 15y ago
  Am I? Would the point somehow be served if you took a self-portrait and the response back was "haha ur so ugly"...? (I should add that I know that Amazon offers a review process, but I am not sure how it integrates with the above camera, and I am thus assuming that the camera automatically has to accept a description as correct before printing it out. This might not be the case; and I don't know.)
  - huskyr 15y ago
    You are. This isn't ment to be a completely realistic project ready to be shipped, it's a glimpse of the future, or maybe an art project. I think it's wonderful to see out-of-the-box stuff like this appearing on Hacker News.
    - drostie 15y ago
      My apologies; I suck at communicating. I think I agree. This camera is cute but this particular implementation has flaws -- that's what I said before and what I hoped would be my take-home message, and I guess I didn't highlight that enough. I certainly didn't intend, "oh, fix this before it goes into production!" or anything like that.
    - Volscio 15y ago
      Yep, Matt Richardson (my classmate at NYU/ITP, but I wasn't in the course he made this for) makes some pretty cool stuff: http://mattrichardson.com/tech/ http://mattrichardson.com/tech/ He made a project for physical computing class that took hashtagged tweets and displayed them via laser onto phosphorescent vinyl, which caused them to fade away over time. He's also a writer for Make: http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/ http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/ I think the key is that he's one of those people who are experimenting with mashing up not only different technologies but also different generations of technologies. I guess one could call this stuff "parlor tricks" as one other person said but I agree that it's totally within the spirit of hackernews.
  - JohnLBevan 15y ago
    That raises another good point - privacy. I take a pic of my girlfriend on the beach, and some random guy on the Turk gets a copy to distribute / use as they like. This means building this functionality into a standard camera would need an option to turn off the "auto-annotate" feature selectively if using the human method. My example's obviously quite tame, but there are a plethora of more serious ones (including people who'd want to use the service to keep electronic copies of legal documents and have the annotation feature provide a quick cataloguing system).
- SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
  What IS the point of it? It seems like a parlor trick to me, especially with the "send it to my friend and have him describe it" option. I don't see how this gadget is particularly useful in any way, any more than the first "automated chess device" with a midget inside moving chess pieces around was actually revolutionary. The comments on how it would be useful for the blind (with braille or speech synthesis) is as close as I've seen to a reasonable justification for it. Even then it's a stretch. Beyond that, basing it on Mechanical Turk means every "photo" costs money, and frankly doesn't provide much value. If you want to caption your photos it would be much better to do it AFTER you've pruned the ones you don't care about, so you're not paying for descriptions of 100 throwaway photos for every keeper. In which case the fact that the camera itself is hooked up to Mechanical Turk is just a gimmick, since it would be easier to run a script on your desktop or on a server.
jwco 15y ago
No need for (b) typos and (c) trolls, but (a) opinions are output that computers currently fail to effectively provide, but things that much of human society currently depends on. I was going to cite medicine and marketing as examples, and act like science doesn't depend on opinion, but that is actually very false. The scientific process is basically 1) experiment/observe (i.e. take pictures), 2) form opinions (calling them "hypotheses") about what we observe and 3) decide what to do next to convert that opinion into a truth value.

by drostie 15y ago

scraplab 15y ago

I think you're missing the point of it.

drostie 15y ago
Am I? Would the point somehow be served if you took a self-portrait and the response back was "haha ur so ugly"...? (I should add that I know that Amazon offers a review process, but I am not sure how it integrates with the above camera, and I am thus assuming that the camera automatically has to accept a description as correct before printing it out. This might not be the case; and I don't know.)
- huskyr 15y ago
  You are. This isn't ment to be a completely realistic project ready to be shipped, it's a glimpse of the future, or maybe an art project. I think it's wonderful to see out-of-the-box stuff like this appearing on Hacker News.
  - drostie 15y ago
    My apologies; I suck at communicating. I think I agree. This camera is cute but this particular implementation has flaws -- that's what I said before and what I hoped would be my take-home message, and I guess I didn't highlight that enough. I certainly didn't intend, "oh, fix this before it goes into production!" or anything like that.
  - Volscio 15y ago
    Yep, Matt Richardson (my classmate at NYU/ITP, but I wasn't in the course he made this for) makes some pretty cool stuff: http://mattrichardson.com/tech/ http://mattrichardson.com/tech/ He made a project for physical computing class that took hashtagged tweets and displayed them via laser onto phosphorescent vinyl, which caused them to fade away over time. He's also a writer for Make: http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/ http://blog.makezine.com/author/makemattr/ I think the key is that he's one of those people who are experimenting with mashing up not only different technologies but also different generations of technologies. I guess one could call this stuff "parlor tricks" as one other person said but I agree that it's totally within the spirit of hackernews.
- JohnLBevan 15y ago
  That raises another good point - privacy. I take a pic of my girlfriend on the beach, and some random guy on the Turk gets a copy to distribute / use as they like. This means building this functionality into a standard camera would need an option to turn off the "auto-annotate" feature selectively if using the human method. My example's obviously quite tame, but there are a plethora of more serious ones (including people who'd want to use the service to keep electronic copies of legal documents and have the annotation feature provide a quick cataloguing system).
SomeCallMeTim 15y ago
What IS the point of it? It seems like a parlor trick to me, especially with the "send it to my friend and have him describe it" option. I don't see how this gadget is particularly useful in any way, any more than the first "automated chess device" with a midget inside moving chess pieces around was actually revolutionary. The comments on how it would be useful for the blind (with braille or speech synthesis) is as close as I've seen to a reasonable justification for it. Even then it's a stretch. Beyond that, basing it on Mechanical Turk means every "photo" costs money, and frankly doesn't provide much value. If you want to caption your photos it would be much better to do it AFTER you've pruned the ones you don't care about, so you're not paying for descriptions of 100 throwaway photos for every keeper. In which case the fact that the camera itself is hooked up to Mechanical Turk is just a gimmick, since it would be easier to run a script on your desktop or on a server.

jwco 15y ago

No need for (b) typos and (c) trolls, but (a) opinions are output that computers currently fail to effectively provide, but things that much of human society currently depends on. I was going to cite medicine and marketing as examples, and act like science doesn't depend on opinion, but that is actually very false. The scientific process is basically 1) experiment/observe (i.e. take pictures), 2) form opinions (calling them "hypotheses") about what we observe and 3) decide what to do next to convert that opinion into a truth value.