Hacker Remix

An amateur historian has discovered a long-lost short story by Bram Stoker

314 points by lermontov 2 days ago | 123 comments

mmastrac 2 days ago

I started a quick transcription here -- not enough time to complete more than half the first column, but some scans and very rough OCR are here if anyone is interested in contributing:

https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill

Top and bottom halves of the page in the repo here:

https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-1.png https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/scan-2.png

EDIT: If you have access to a multi-modal LLM, the rough transcription + the column scan and the instruction to "OCR this text, keep linebreaks" gives a _very good_ result.

EDIT 2: Rough draft, needs some proofreading and corrections:

https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/story.md

quuxplusone 2 days ago

Seems like you don't need an LLM, you just need a human who (1) likes reading Stoker and (2) touch-types. :) I'd volunteer, if I didn't think I'd be duplicating effort at this point.

(I've transcribed various things over the years, including Sonia Greene's Alcestis [1] and Holtzman & Kershenblatt's "Castlequest" source code [2], so I know it doesn't take much except quick fingers and sufficient motivation. :))

[1] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/10/22/alcestis/

[2] https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2021/03/09/castlequest/

EDIT: ...and as I was writing that, you seem to have finished your transcription. :)

mmastrac 2 days ago

I finished a very rough, tesseract + LLM transcription, but it absolutely needs editing passes.

I've done transcription in the past myself (did two books for standard ebooks with some from-scratch transcription and lots of editing) and I know the pain. I've always found it easier to fix up OCR than type the whole thing by hand because I've found my error rate of eyeball transcription to be higher.

If you want to tackle the proofing passes, I'm happy to add you to the repo :)

wahnfrieden 1 day ago

Use LiveText API. Much much better accuracy than Tesseract. You can rent access to it.

CoastalCoder 20 hours ago

Anyone know why the parent comment would be downvoted?

I know nothing about OCR, so maybe it's obvious to others.

dylan604 16 hours ago

It reads as a drive by advertisement. Also, people like full local vs renting as a default.

wahnfrieden 15 hours ago

It is full local and offline. I also don’t work for Apple or own shares in case you thought I have a financial stake in mentioning their products

dylan604 13 hours ago

I didn't down vote. I answered the other question. Your comment reads like an ad. That tends to get downvoted. This entire conversation about why the down votes should be down voted

also, if it is full local and offline why does it need to be rented?

wahnfrieden 12 hours ago

it doesn't need to be rented if you have an apple device

wahnfrieden 15 hours ago

No good reason. Votes come from clueless people too. Don’t trust votes on HN

eru 1 day ago

> Seems like you don't need an LLM, you just need a human who (1) likes reading Stoker and (2) touch-types.

LLMs are increasingly becoming cheaper and more accessible than humans with a baseline of literacy.

notachatbot123 22 hours ago

They are also nowhere as good. Not everything has to be solved by cheap* technological processes.

*: If you ignore the environmental costs.

eru 21 hours ago

> They are also nowhere as good.

They are better than me at many tasks.

> Not everything has to be solved by cheap* technological processes.

> *: If you ignore the environmental costs.

For many tasks, inference on an LLM is a lot cheaper (including for the environment) than keeping a human around to do them. As a baseline, humans by themselves take around 100W (just in food calories), but anyone but the poorest human also wants to consume eg housing and entertainment that consumes a lot more power than that.

homebrewer 20 hours ago

This feels like it was taken from the brave new world. Humans are already around, unless we're going to kill one off for every job replaced by an LLM, I'm not seeing how it is going to reduce environmental footprint.

eru 6 hours ago

That's a weird conclusion to make. Are you parodying Brave New World here? Because they use a lot of human labour. (The book talks about not using labour saving devices, because that would give people to much freetime, but they also talk about not breeding only 'alphas' because they wouldn't want to do the menial work. They leave the reader to figure out that you should combine both of the failed ideas to get one that works.)

We can reduce the environmental footprint of specific activities by replacing humans. Yes, we would only reduce the _overall_ footprint by reducing the number of humans.

CoastalCoder 20 hours ago

If you're looking at it simply from a resource standpoint, we should ask what those humans would be doing otherwise.

I'm assuming that powering them down isn't a viable option, unlike with GPUs in a datacenter.

eru 1 hour ago

Yes, opportunity costs are important.

Presumably the humans would be enjoying with some other activity. Eg they could be working on carbon capturing projects? Or producing electric power via pedaling, etc. I don't know.

I was purely talking about the environmental impact of this one activity.

throwaway0123_5 18 hours ago

> I'm assuming that powering them down isn't a viable option

Sadly that might be assuming too much... here and on reddit I've seen a handful of people who have said that we should continue with AI progress even if it causes the extinction of humans, because we'll have ~"contributed to spreading intelligence throughout the universe and it doesn't really matter if it is human or not."

With that as the extreme end of the spectrum, I suspect the group of people who simply aren't considering what happens to obsoleted humans is much larger, and corporations certainly haven't demonstrated much interest in caring for those who technology has obsoleted in the past.

Tbh it is really disheartening to see so many technologists who seemingly only care about technology for its own sake.

arp242 13 hours ago

> For many tasks, inference on an LLM is a lot cheaper (including for the environment) than keeping a human around to do them. As a baseline, humans by themselves take around 100W (just in food calories), but anyone but the poorest human also wants to consume eg housing and entertainment that consumes a lot more power than that.

Obviously not true because that human is alive regardless, and has mostly the same base energy needs no matter what they're doing.

Reducing humans to just energy-using machines is an absolutely insane misanthropic take.

eru 6 hours ago

Huh? I am talking about the environmental footprint for this activity.

The human would presumably do something else they enjoy doing more, if a machine took that specific job.

cxr 1 day ago

Too late. You have already been scooped by, of course, tumblr:

<https://woodsfae.tumblr.com/post/764918993659330560/gibbet-h...>

oliyoung 1 day ago

A battle of a Tumblr user named Woodsfae versus advanced LLM transcribing new goth literature?

That's like bringing a knife to a gun fight my friend, never underestimate the power of a committed Tumblr user

CoastalCoder 20 hours ago

It's like bringing a Goth to a Vamp fight.

(Southpark homage)

drivers99 1 day ago

In the scan, where it says "and shortly came to the edge of the Punchbowl and easted my eyes on its beauty" OP changed "easted" to "cast" and the tumbler one says "easted[sic]" ([sic] is theirs). I wonder if it's supposed to be "feasted".

simonw 2 days ago

I tried extracting the content using Google Gemini 1.5 Pro 002 using https://aistudio.google.com/ - the first page (scan-2) worked fantastically well, the second page not so much. Here's what I got so far: https://gist.github.com/simonw/ba87f507ef5c11d3335959c055533...

mmastrac 2 days ago

I cropped the columns out into six files -- it might have an easier time with these:

https://github.com/mmastrac/gibbet-hill/blob/main/col-1-a.pn...

reaperducer 2 days ago

…and my wife's Halloween present has been printed.

Tip: Load the pngs into Preview, hit "Auto Levels," and crank up "Sharpness" on each one. Looks pretty good!

qmr 2 days ago

[dead]

staticman2 2 days ago

I remember reading somewhere- I think it was in an annotated addition of Dracula, or maybe it was a journal article- that said that Bram Stoker wrote a large number of novels but everything he wrote other than Dracula was awful. Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.

red369 1 day ago

It seems that often even Dracula is viewed as a "good bad book". Not high quality literature, but great to read.

I realise I've used vague terms in that sentence, even setting aside the tricky question of what makes the things often described as great works "greater" than things that are looked down on, but might be much more popular.

I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example. It was by a famous author (as I remember), but I can't remember, and can't find, the foreword or the novel I'm thinking of.

inejge 16 hours ago

I once read a great foreword to a novel lamenting the loss of "good bad books", citing Dracula as an example.

It's an article/essay by George Orwell (actually titled Good Bad Books), available online.

latexr 19 hours ago

> Per Wikipedia he wrote 14 books, supposedly he was only able to write one good one.

It’s interesting that Dracula falls right in the middle of his career. It strongly suggests it was a fluke. Doesn’t look like he ever had an inkling of how famous the story would be, the Wikipedia page says he was best known while living for being a personal assistant and business manager to some other bloke. That’s a bit sad.

pozdnyshev 18 hours ago

[dead]

nu11ptr 1 day ago

Not a novel, but the short story "Dracula's Guest" I thought was quite good. I was sad it was so short.

red369 1 day ago

In addition to the Dracula's Guest short story, I actually liked quite a few of the other stories in the book Dracula's Guest.

By the way, for anyone who is thinking of reading Dracula's Guest, it is likely it was intended as a first chapter of Dracula, but was cut.

xenospn 20 hours ago

Not much to add, other than the fact I’m reading your comment at Bran Castle :)

paulette449 23 hours ago

I have just finished reading Carmilla [1], a vampire novella by another Irishman, Sheridan LeFanu, which pre-dated Dracula by 25 years. I much preferred it to Stoker's book.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla

barrkel 20 hours ago

It's fantastic to look at an old newspaper from those times. Such an abundance and density of reading material.

politelemon 2 days ago

You can read it here: https://catalogue.nli.ie/Record/vtls000924296

Go full screen and go to page 2 it starts at about the middle.