Over the course of 15 hours, I've become very conscious of my presence on the internet, and it all began with my father unintentionally showing the reach of various actions I've taken around the web. He originally tried to show me some records of his grandfather, but he eventually showed me Google image search results of himself, and I, of course, ended up appearing in the results since my name is literally a superset of his. I soon realized that comments I've made on YouTube videos have been indexed by Google. Internet privacy is a one-way street: you can park on the side, or you can keep driving down, but going the other direction requires immense amounts of work. The farther up the street you travel, the farther you've lost your privacy. Going up the street will let you access a greater amount of destinations, but the moment you wish to hide yourself from the people you don't want to find you, you can't just switch the gear into reverse and drive up the str
God help you if you ever decide to implement camera functionality in Android. I didn't have much planned today, but thank goodness I didn't. The Setup Here's the dilemma: I wanted to make a very simple app that will let me take a photo of text and have it read out to me. Using the Google Cloud Vision API , I can essentially scan documents and listen to their contents instead of having to use my eyes and scan the thing. It will be great for accessibility and so on, but the thing is I can't have the Cloud Vision API scan documents that I haven't taken. I want to do processing in the cloud to model common app architecture and to reduce strain on the client app. Here's the service flow: Client app takes photo Client app uploads photo to Cloud Storage for Firebase Cloud Functions scans the document for text Cloud Functions updates Firebase Database with scanned text Client app intercepts database update Client app speaks text from database The Co