GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter? (bloodinthemachine.com)

A game: find an English word with the fewest hits. (It must have at least one hit that is not an OCR error, but such errors do still count towards your score. Only spend a couple of minutes.) My best is "scintillating" : 3.

Kortaggio · 2h ago

This write-up about the site is also fascinating: https://pudding.cool/2025/07/street-view/

dang · 1h ago

Added to top text. Thanks!

m_kos · 1h ago

GitHub of the person who prepared the data. I am curious how much compute was needed for NY. I would love to do it for my metro but I suspect it is way beyond my budget.

https://github.com/yz3440

LeifCarrotson · 42m ago

I would wager the compute for the OCR is cheap. Just get a beefy local desktop PC, if it runs overnight or even takes a week that's fine.

It's the Google Maps API costs that will sink your project if you can't get them waived as art:

https://mapsplatform.google.com/pricing/

Not sure how many panoramas there are in New York or your metro, but if it's over the free tier you're talking thousands of dollars.

daemonologist · 16m ago

The linked article mentions that they ingested 8 million panos - even if they're scraping the dynamic viewer that's $30k just in street view API fees (the static image API would probably be at least double that due to the low per-call resolution).

OCR I'd expect to be comparatively cheap, if you weren't in a hurry - a consumer GPU running PaddlePaddle server can do about 4 MP per second. If you spent a few grand on hardware that might work out to 3-6 months of processing, depending on the resolution per pano and size of your model.

ks2048 · 28m ago

It says 8 million images. So, 13.2 images/second for one week.

I'm wondering about more the data - did they use Google's API or work with Google to use the data?

dumbfounder · 10m ago

Search for “fart” if you want a good laugh.

dang · 1h ago

Related. Others?

All Text in NYC - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42367029 - Dec 2024 (4 comments)

All text in Brooklyn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41344245 - Aug 2024 (50 comments)

lildvlpr · 29m ago

I immediately looked up "Blob Dylan"

wilson090 · 52m ago

This would probably make John Wilson's job a lot easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_To_with_John_Wilson)

cobbzilla · 20m ago

Searching for “foo” is humorous, it’s mostly restaurants with signs that say “food” but the “d” is cropped.

WorldPeas · 2h ago

hah, it can find all the KEST GAK stickers now: https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=kest

adrianparsons · 27m ago

https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=ana+peru

JackFr · 1h ago

Can’t find me any REVS tags. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(graffiti_artist)

Instead shows me thousands of “Rev“

egypturnash · 50m ago

I typed in "fart" and none of the results on the first page were actually the word "fart".

dumbfounder · 9m ago

I also did this. But I wasn’t mad, I was amused.

shibeprime · 50m ago

520 matches on "hotdog" 8084 matches on "massage" in no particular order

tills13 · 1h ago

I _love_ this but it's pretty bad. I searched for "Morgue" and one of the matches was the "2025 Google" watermark which it thought was "Big Morgue"

Again, a complex problem and I love it...

ya1sec · 42m ago

amazing. look up some graffiti writers you know

IAmGraydon · 1h ago

As others have mentioned, the idea is so cool, but the text recognition is abysmal.

brentm · 25m ago

Pretty cool

theodric · 1h ago

Cool concept, but the accuracy seems quite low. The hits for "pedo" are pretty hilarious, though! https://www.alltext.nyc/search?q=pedo&p=2