this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (2 children)

A lot of that is doable now - like, how many grocery stores are even nearby to someone, so writing a custom bit of code to check the website of each, one by one, and looking for previously manually-identified items could be automated.

One major downside is prioritization of large chain stores at the expense of smaller mom & pop ones that don't maintain a constant inventory system accessible via the web. Someone could even volunteer their time to build them a database backend, but still they'd have to see the value in actually scanning the items every time or else it would quickly fall behind.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, it wouldn't be a huge lift if you're familiar with python.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)
#!/usr/bin/env python  
import groceryshoppingoptimizer

Done!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's precisely what I was thinking, but reflecting more on it, I don't know how well it would handle the webpages, so maybe some other languages mixed in too (I'm out of date, maybe PHP?). If AI writing code worked it would lower the barrier, but I'm not certain we're quite there yet to trust anything it would create.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Python web scraping is just fine, with the llms you.have the option of either extracting the html and having the LLM read.over that, or having a vision ai OCR the page and make its own decision of what to extract.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah I was going to say, I’ve done similar for clients with regards to competitor pricing