What True 'Local OCR' Means: Keeping Every User Byte Off the Network

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A developer has outlined what genuine browser-based OCR privacy should require, arguing that 'runs in your browser' is meaningless unless every user-derived byte — including source files, filenames, PDF passwords, and extracted text — is prevented from crossing any network or process boundary. The article highlights subtle privacy leaks common in so-called local OCR tools, such as sending extracted text to error-reporting services or exposing PDF passwords via URLs. To handle the CPU and memory demands of on-device OCR without freezing the browser, the author recommends offloading processing to a dedicated Web Worker using transferable objects like ImageBitmap to avoid costly memory duplication. The pipeline is split into two model stages — a text detector and a recognition model — with strict input validation checks on image dimensions, pixel count, and file type before any inference begins. The author also stresses that network policy should be automatically testable, with tests designed to fail if any uniquely marked user data appears in outgoing requests.

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Adjust animation speed via playback FPS, not by redrawing sprite sheets

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Anthropic's Claude Agents Formally Prove Fermat's Last Theorem in 11 Days

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

Six Missing Features Forced a Self-Hosting Lexer to Grow from 129 to 355 Lines

A developer building 'lm', a small statically-typed low-level language with four compiler backends, attempted to port its JavaScript lexer into lm itself as a self-hosting milestone. The port revealed six core language gaps — including no pointer-to-local, no constants, no character literals, no string type, no labelled loop breaks, and no hex notation — that together caused the lm lexer to be nearly three times longer than its JavaScript equivalent. The absence of a centralised advance() function forced inline duplication across 14 call sites, which introduced a latent correctness bug in column counting that only goes undetected due to incidental newline resets. The developer intentionally chose the lexer as the first porting target because, at 129 lines, it was small enough to abandon if the language proved inadequate. The exercise served as a planned diagnostic, exposing fundamental expressiveness limits before the project scaled further.

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