I don’t have that much of grasp of the youths social mores nowadays, but my general impression is that these things are important for a smaller and smaller subset of people. 20-25 years ago gender-conforming behavior was aggressively enforced through bullying among teenagers.

Ok, this is funny. I uploaded a somewhat bad pdf scan of a microfilm (just five pages), and Gemini got completely obssessed with one word, despite "Thinking" being set to low. It has been over 10 minutes and Gemini repeatedly says it will move but it apparently cannot.

Gemini did extremely well with clear Spanish and Portuguese handwriting - note how it cleanly transcribed the marginalia in that 1598 Spanish document.

I think the challenge is less linguistical than computer vision + hard hands. I do not read Danish (which I assume is a language with not that much training data), but this LLM transcription seems fairly decent at a cursory glance (I already sent it to a Danish historian for inspection, of course)

I don’t think anyone has any idea of what to do.

Exactly.

Well, one thing that surprised me quite a bit is that it did very well in Chinese when I tested it in an early nineteenth-century land grant of one of @profmarylewis.bsky.social's students - at least according to said student, as I sadly do not read Chinese.

Really good piece about how to teach the humanities in the age of LLMs: we have to help students develop their abilities to think on their own and collectively. I would not follow everything he does, but this is definitely the direction to go (gift link).

This one is interesting because it clearly shows the advances from the perspective of someone who is not in the technical weeds and did not expect that improvement. Put together, they clearly show the tremendous advance in in Gemini’s paleographical abilities.
Via @johngmarks.com

Léo and Transkribus usually cost 10-15 cents a page, but Gemini’s API costs less than half a cent per page. It requires some technical expertise, but Mark Humphries created an app to make it easier and is now working on a website to make it easier still. Take a look at his substack.

Per my tests, Gemini does well with seventeenth and eighteenth French official records, like Marine or COL, because the handwriting is usually amazing.

Will read it, but yes, it’s pretty good for good English handwriting - and insanely cheap to do at scale. LLMs hallucinate like crazy for bad hands, and even more so in other languages, like Portuguese or Dutch. For those, Transkribus is still the gold standard, although Leo is getting better fast

Figured out, thanks! It is easier than I expected.

Yeah! That’s the next step.

Yeah, everyone says so. I’m almost certain I will do it.

Kind of like Adobe offering to summarize "long documents" for you...

That sounds like a very good compromise! I’ll probably do something like that next year.

Is this a thing?!