No, they just didn’t kill enough whistleblowers…

a set of only 9 characters

🤔

OCR existed long before the 486. AFAIK it was already used in the 70’s or 80’s to scan mail and presort them based on the postcode. I remember that postcards had light orange boxes (presumably because this color was invisible to B/W scanners?) with dots inside where you where supposed to write the postcode numbers in.

ChatGPT can recognize text on images already.

I still remember that in the 90s till the 2000s you would get maybe 60 to 90 minutes of battery life out of a new laptop. Then it jumped to 4 or more hours thanks to better batteries, more energy efficient CPUs and displays.