Edsger – a handwritten Clojure REPL for the reMarkable 2
65 points by nathell
65 points by nathell
this is unhinged. and it makes me wish very badly that i still had my remarkable2.
This is super cool - although LLMs for OCR worry me a little - how well does it do exact transcriptions? I would expect it to e.g. "correct typos" sometimes, which might not be desirable?
They are to some WER, because they bottom out much faster than an LLM that can make similar contextual inference that is required to read for example my handwriting.
Very strange to me to use an LLM for transcription when handwriting recognition is perhaps the canonical example of things that non-transformer neural nets are good at.
Newton had on device OCR. It's definitely possible, but I agree using a remote LLM is easier than writing a special purpose OCR.
To get around the "invalid or partial input?" problem, what if you signaled completion with a symbol like §? The control loop could strip those out and only submit to eval after they're found.
I often wince a little to see things named after famous programmers, often with little relevance to the tool itself. "Claude" in particular -- I can't reason if Shannon would approve or be aghast (tending to reason the latter). Otherwise, a very intriguing program :p Brings "writing out programs by hand" to a new level.
I figured I might as well name it after Dijkstra considering his propensity for handwriting, and the fact that this uses a font mimicking his handwriting for output :) But yeah, you never know.
Fantastic work. I'd love to see this released as a general library or something, so I can hook it into whatever REPL I want! (Or REPL-shaped program; I imagine this would be very nice as an interface to a chat app, for example)