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Comment by lopis | Hacker News Reader

I really like that XKCD comic about identifying birds in a photo, so it's unfortunate that it didn't age that well. How could we rewrite that comic to today's tech? I was thinking something like:

A: I want to create an app that scans good feedback of our brand online...

B: there's a li rary for that, consider it done

A: ... and understand if they are actually being sarcastic.

B: I'm gonna need 5 years and a lab of experts.

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It aged perfectly IMO. Maybe the timeline was a little bit off, but it did indeed take several years and a huge amount of effort by experts to make object recognition available "off the shelf".

And even then, problems can quickly escalate from "any programmer with a little experience can do it" to "we need a team of data scientists and data engineers".

Yeah, and even though Merlin and Google Photos (for a broader set of things) are pretty amazing, a naturalist familiar with the area will probably still blow them with the things they can recognize quickly even without having a great view.

When was that XKCD published (https://xkcd.com/1425/) ? Yeah, I remember seeing for the first time, I don't remember my reaction then. But now when I see it, I am stumped!

September 24th, 2014.

To know the date of publication of a given xkcd comic, go to https://xkcd.com/archive/, search for the title you're after, then the date of publication is displayed in the mouse-over text.

So, five years and a pandemic. Not too shabby of a prediction, that!

Somewhat relevant:

TornadoGuard https://xkcd.com/937/

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