Live data from Hacker News

I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

roberdam.com

341–350 of 424 posts

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am using it with friends and family, and tell them beforehand about the experiment

What about going out to a restaurant, a party, a date, or even somebody you bump into on the street? You're recording a lot of people, which to me is a huge invasion of privacy. What do you do if someone is uncomfortable with being recorded?

In New Hampshire and a few other states it is illegal to record audio from other people without permission. I know because I was part of a team building a social network (CenceMe) that shared sensor data from phones so people could see what others were doing. We wanted to use machine learning on audio and aside from the fact that it would have greatly reduced phone battery life we found it was illegal in the state we were doing experiments in.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.

Respectfully, I don't think that's true. "The Cloud" is just computers in a warehouse somewhere $5/month's worth of "cloud" is going to work out to be less actual raw CPU resources than a low end raspberry pi running full time in-house

I don't actually think they're true.

One second of Google cloud TPU has roughly the same number of floating point operations then 4 hours of raspberry pi 4B time.

So 3 minutes of cloud TPU time already covers your whole month of raspberry pi usage. Pretty sure it costs them less than 5$ as well, since they have the hardware anyways.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#343
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing your experience, why you started, what you want to get out of this etc? I'm interested to read your experience.

Have you seen the show "My Strange Addiction"?

This one https://www.wikiwand.com/en/My_Strange_Addiction?

No i haven't.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.

Respectfully, I don't think that's true. "The Cloud" is just computers in a warehouse somewhere $5/month's worth of "cloud" is going to work out to be less actual raw CPU resources than a low end raspberry pi running full time in-house

I don’t think a $5 instance is enough for ML/AI workloads. You need something with a GPU.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#345
post #37

I remember an Asimov short story in which scientists developed a machine that could see backward in time. If I recall correctly, the upshot was the government became terrified because any machine that can see 1000 years into the past can also see 1000 milliseconds into the past and therefore functionally be used to spy on anyone in real time.

There was an article some years ago (2 or 3?), that described a drone (or drones?) that flew 24/7 over Mexico city taking high resolution video of the entire city at all times. Whenever there was a crime, the police could zoom into that location at the time of the crime and then run backwards to see where the vehicles came from. They then knocked on that door. I'm disappointed that I can't seem to find it using Googl…

I remember the same article, although I can't find it now.

These two seem to reference the same demo, although neither are the article I remember: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-23/watch-thi...

There's this reference to it: https://www.pressreader.com/usa/the-washington-post/20140206...

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-baltimore-secret-sur... has a lot more details

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not sound like a realistic capacity plan. The reason this works in the cloud is the inference can be run in parallel on a huge amount of hardware for a short time. To run those kind of models on your rinkydink computer would take forever.

Respectfully, I don't think that's true. "The Cloud" is just computers in a warehouse somewhere $5/month's worth of "cloud" is going to work out to be less actual raw CPU resources than a low end raspberry pi running full time in-house

"The cloud" is also massively parallel software. If I run a Google search, many thousands of CPUs will be brought to bear on my query, and a gazillion DIMMs, and all the throughput of a hell of a lot of SSDs, and so on. If you just happened to have a copy of the web, and an index of it, on "a computer" no matter how big, it would be impossible to get prompt answers.

If Google (or whomever) needs to run voice models, they take your query and all the other queries that arrive in the same millisecond, smoosh them all together and shove the batch into a TPU and run it. You don't have any TPUs and you also don't have any traffic you can use to amortize the cost of your infrequent queries.

The idea that you could run these kinds of ML inference tasks is economically fanciful. You would need a huge investment in hardware and the opex would be ridiculous.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#347
post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For normal blog posts, no, but OP is submitting as "Show HN" which requires it to be something readers can try on their own: > Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html This is an on-topic blog post, but it doesn't seem to fit the criteria of a Show HN.

Hm, how can you tell it was a Show HN? Doesn't seem to be in the title. Maybe it was before?

Yeah, the title originally had the "Show HN" prefix. Looks like it's been updated since.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#348
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble with any such footage is that it can be used against you ("as the the defendant's own records show, they were present in the murder area") but they generally won't extricate you when produced by you, since you clearly have a motivation to use it selectively. So you showing a picture of yourself reading a book during what you claim is the murder night is not an alibi, because it could have been produced at…

Why not just have the device occasionally send sha256 sums of chunks to a third party service, like Twitter tweets, where it's clear you can't forge the date of the message? If you need to produce some chunks, the matching hashes provide an independent time stamp showing you didn't just produce the content at any time. This sort of trick is already commonly done to demonstrate prior knowledge of something at a later…

You could queue it up to send chunks of reassuring alibi video (or checksums of same) while you are doing your murders or crimes.

Put another way, the possibility that you could have done that renders the timestamping useless.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording. Hm. Will a T-shirt with “my phone is recording everything” be enough? Interesting- secret recording is punished more severely than use of such recording. Logic? Also, the difference between image and sound recording. Secret image recording in public space is basically ok, while so…

No. It's not enough to vaguely inform people. You must get their consent. T-shirts say lots of things that are hyperbole or bluster. Like "official boob inspector" is not generally understood to mean that you're announcing you literally are a licensed doctor.

> You must get their consent.

The article cites law, like with recent court cases. Let me add the exact court case they cite:

The law only applies to secret recordings, however, so affirmative consent is not necessary when all parties are aware of the recording. Curtatone v. Barstool Sports, Inc., 169 N.E.3d 480, 483 (Mass. 2021).

I am not trying to inform others of recording, actually, by my T-shirt sign. I trying to protect myself against the wrong law. If I was a lawmaker I would probably make all recording in public spaces legal. But if use of recording inflicts harm on you - you should be allowed to sue for damages. Probably you are already allowed anyway.

Again: a harmful use of recording without concent or notification should be punished, not the recording itself. I think.

Re: I record myself on audio 24x7 and use an AI to process the information

#350

This is known as life logging with adjacency to sousveillance and it’s a fascinating topic. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance We in general don’t want to be watched by others, but a managed record of our own activities can be extremely valuable, and even more so if you find yourself wrongly accused. Further it can be used to shine a light on corrupt officials, one exa…

> Further it can be used to shine a light on corrupt officials Little Brother surveillance. It would be nice not to be surveilled at all, but since that's not an option the answer to "quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is us.

Little Brother is one of Cory Doctorow's books: https://craphound.com/littlebrother/about/

I read it and it was as fun as it was chilling.

Post reply on HN