I had a need to scan serial numbers from Apple's product boxes out of pictures taken by a random person on their phone.
All OCR tools that I have tried have failed. Granted, I would get much better results if I used OpenCV to detect the label, rotate/correct it, normalize contrast, etc.
But... I have tried the then new vision model from OpenAI and it did the trick so well it's wasn't feasible to consider anything else at that point.
I have checked all S/N afterwards for being correct via third-party API - and all of theme were. Sure, sometimes I had to check versions with 0/o and i/l/1 substitutions but I believe these kind of mistakes are non-issues.
I have a small rackmounted rendering farm using mac minis, which outperform everything in the Intel world, even order of magnitude more expensive.
I run macOS on my personal and development computers for over a decade and I use Linux since inception on server side.
My experience: running server-side macOS is such a PITA it's not even funny. It may even pretend it has ssh while in fact the ssh server is only available on good days and only after Remote Desktop logged in at least once. Launchd makes you wanna crave systemd. etc, etc.
So, about docker. I would absolutely love to run my app in a containerized environment on a Mac in order to not touch the main OS.
Funny, I ran a bunch of Mac minis in colo for over a decade with no problems. Maybe you have a config problem?
Of course, I had a LOM/KVM and redundant networking etc. They were substantially more reliable than the Dell equipment that I used in my day job for sure.
Software-wise it's much different to an expected behavior. For example, macOS won't let you in over SSH until you log in via Remote Desktop. You'll get "connection closed" immediately.
Or sometimes it will.
And that depends not on the count of connection attempts or anything you can do locally but rather on the boot process somehow. Sometimes it boots in a way that permits ssh, sometimes not. The same computer, the same OS.
Then after you login on screen sharing and log out, macOS will let you in over ssh. For a few days. And then again will force you to login via GUI. Or maybe not. I have no idea what makes it.
I have trouble reading macOS logs or understanding it. It spews a few log messages per second even idle. If you grep ssh these messages contain zero actionable data, like "unsuccessful attempt" or similar.
Another complaint is that launchd reports the same "I/O error" on absolutely all error situations, from syntax error in plist to corrupt binary. Makes development and debugging of launchagents very fun.
What would a containerization environment on MacOS give you that you don't already have? Like concretely - what does containerization mean in the context of a MacOS user space?
In Linux, it means something very specific: a user/mount/pid/network namespace, overlayfs to provide a rootfs, chroot to pivot to the new root to do your work, and port forwarding between the host/guest systems.
On MacOS I don't know what containerization means short of virtualization. But you have virtualization on MacOS already, so why not use that?
On macOS probably I'd like chroot and pid/mount namespaces. I'd like to install OS and dependencies in a container and run my application from there so that it does not interfere with host OS. My app is GPU heavy and has lots of dependencies (OpenCV, LAPACK, armadillo, lots and lots) and I'd like to not pollute the host OS with it.
Also I want to run the latest OS with all security patches on the host while having a stable and known macOS version in a container given how developer-hostile Apple is.
What you want is virtualization, not containerization. And you have this already. Since MacOS doesn't have a stable syscall interface, decoupling the host/guest in a mount namespace and chroot would lead to horrible breakages when the system libraries of your container are out of date with your host OS. So you would have to share the host OS and a big portion of the userspace to begin with.
Or you can package your app as a .app and not worry about it, there's no "pollution" when everything is bundled.
Yeah, seems like on macOS that level of isolation is achievable solely with virtualization unlike in Linux. We were talking about missing things in macOS and containerization is one of them.
I had a need to scan serial numbers from Apple's product boxes out of pictures taken by a clueless person on their phone. All OCR tools failed.
Vision model did the trick so well it's not even funny to discuss anything further.
"This is a picture of Apple product box. Find and return only the serial number of the product as found on a label. Return 'none' if no serial number can be found".
Anecdotal evidence of a multilingual person living in a country desperately scrambling to transition from one language to another:
I grew up in Geneva. So French at school and among friends. Then my parents and I moved to Ukraine and lived there since the independence, so Russian at home and that's my mother tongue. Ukraine has been rushing to transition its population to Ukrainian for a decade or two - all with limited success. And on top of that I am as close to being a native English speaker as possible while living abroad.
So what happens in an environment like that? Looks like people tend to express and think about different parts of life in different languages. When I think legal matters in my homeland, it's mostly Ukrainian. When I think about IT and computers and while lurking here or on Reddit, it's English. Daydreaming about childhood: French. When stressed: brain loses everything but English. Inner monologue: mostly Russian.
So, to sum up the question: can one lose their native tongue? Answer: I have no idea.
Not that I ever had to actually speak Ukrainian, I knew it so much better than the vast majority of our political elite. However as I was leaning Polish I have discovered that it sneakily replaced Ukrainian in mind. Just a couple months ago I have met a moron here in Warsaw who went to accuse me of shit and I wanted to answer him in perfect Ukrainian and... I couldn't. Not a word. All Polish.
All OCR tools that I have tried have failed. Granted, I would get much better results if I used OpenCV to detect the label, rotate/correct it, normalize contrast, etc.
But... I have tried the then new vision model from OpenAI and it did the trick so well it's wasn't feasible to consider anything else at that point.
I have checked all S/N afterwards for being correct via third-party API - and all of theme were. Sure, sometimes I had to check versions with 0/o and i/l/1 substitutions but I believe these kind of mistakes are non-issues.
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