I have different technical questions I want to ask. I went to Stack Overflow and they blocked registration with a VPN. It’s really fucking annoying. I can buy a residential IP to bypass this, but I’d rather just not use these enshitified platforms that are so hostile to VPNs.

Is there any decent alternative to Stack Overflow? I have tried getting AI answers to the technical question but they are not good.

And no, I can’t just create a github ID using VPN to login, they block github logins based on IP also.

  • jdr8@lemmy.world
    2·
    2 days ago

    Ok so from the error, you have a version of pillow that is incompatible.

    You have to downgrade pillow to version 11.

    That’s the first step.

    EDIT: Sorry just saw the rest of your comment. Do you really have to use that tech?

    You have other alternatives. Amazon AWS has a service for handwriting ocr, can’t remember the name though.

    You can also have a look at this, but it’s paid: https://www.handwritingocr.com/

    More ocr alternatives: https://github.com/michaelben/OCR-handwriting-recognition-libraries

    +1 for tesseract. I knew about this one a while ago. It may not recognise all handwriting, but you can train it to get better at it.

    • someone@lemmy.todayOP
      11·
      2 days ago

      I don’t trust big tech to not extract data and metadata and save it. Many companies get served with government requests to save data and keep it secret. Even if handwritingocr.com doesn’t have such an agreement, it could run on AWS and that has an agreement. I would much rather do this locally. Some of the writings are confidential. Handwritingocr.com says data is encrypted in transit and at rest, but it’s not open source and even if it were I can’t verify the server code.

      also Tesseract is CPU only, right? It will be so slow.

      • jdr8@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 days ago

        Fair point.

        So what about Tensor flow and some local LLM to do the job?

        You just need to find a reliable LLM in HuggingFace, for example.

        • someone@lemmy.todayOP
          1·
          13 hours ago

          That’s exactly what I am trying to do, I’m just not that sure how to do it. I have the hardware needed, I just need to set up a docker with PyTorch and then find a way to set up Gradio inside that and then add TrOCR from hugging face, and then I’m good. I just am not totally sure how to do that and it seems hard, and when I ask AI for advice, it often is like “just run the following” and it’s wrong, and I’m not skilled enough to know why.