Getting text from some seed packet labels

I’ve been enjoying following along with Simon Willison as he plays with LLMs via his llm tool but haven’t tried it out yet. Now I have a small task in mind — I recently planted some seeds, taking a photo of each seed packet while I was at it. I’d like to extract the plant names from these photos. The first step is to install the llm tool along with llm-mlx to get variants that should run better on Apple hardware: % brew install llm % llm install llm-mlx Let’s get Gemma and give it a try: % time llm mlx download-model mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit ... llm mlx download-model mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit 45.79s user 94.39s system 47% cpu 4:54.10 total First shrink the images a little using my scaleimage utility: % cd ~/Downloads/seed_packets % alias scale_image scale_image='java -jar $HOME/bin/scaleimage-1.1-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar' % scale_image --max-width 600 --max-height 600 *.jpg % llm -m mlx-community/gemma-3-27b-it-qat-4bit 'Extract text from the image.…

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