Thoughts

Background : For years, I had a habit of writing whenever I traveled. No laptop, no apps, just a pen, a notebook, and pages of cursive observations about airports, flights, fellow travelers, and the emotions that come with being away from home. Two decades later, I decided to digitize those notebooks and make them available on Kindle, eventually publishing them as Transit Tales: Between Airports and Emotions: Travel Blog 20 Years Too Late (View on Amazon). As a first step, I assumed modern LLM-powered handwriting recognition would effortlessly convert the pages into text. Instead, the journey led to an unexpected discovery: handwriting recognition is still far from "solved." The apparent success of modern handwriting recognition is increasingly a combination of imperfect OCR and powerful language-model reconstruction. What users see is often not what the system read, but what the system inferred. Handwriting Recognition: Better Than It Looks, But Not For The Reason You Think ...

Dated: 2008 (OCRed from Handwritten Notes) Mumbai – London – Dallas – Las Vegas – Chicago → London – Peterborough → London – Mumbai I start off from home with a heavy heart – not sure why because it is just a few days trip. Maybe it is the healing wound in my back or the thought of seeing your family for a few days – not sure, might not really be able to analyze. I came in early – reaching terminal 2C of the international airport. Very crowded – the vehicle in which I came goes all the way to the end and takes a turn and drops me at the gate – I see BA and enter showing my e‑ticket . I see not many people; it is 10:00 pm – the flight is at 02:15 am. I make some initial inquiry and stand in the queue – the wait continues – the queue length increases as it takes 2 U turn and the baggage screening has not yet started – whew… more wait and around 11:30 the baggage screening counter opens – the queue begins to move slowly – both checked‑in and hand baggage go through the X‑ray machine – bo...