A lot of people were basically wiretapping themselves AND their businesses (!!!) with the Mercor Insightful app.

While a lot of Mercor "contractors" claim Mercor over-reached with data gathering, it's kind of smart because people are too afraid to complain too much knowing they'll not only lose their primary job, but also put a spotlight on forbidden dealing with their company's private information.

[0] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mercor-ai-startup-personal-data-...

Selling the solution to the problem you caused ought to be illegal.

Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.

It’s not better in all ways, of course, but the alternative is not “everyone gets cheap credit extended to them” but rather “people who rich people know and trust get cheap credit extended to them, some others get more expensive credit, and some get no credit extended”. It’s not obvious to me that that’s better.

I got a lot of inexpensive credit extended to me throughout my life, without any rich people knowing me from Adam.

Most tech solutions are built on the problems they created. This includes phones, cars, computers, every software upgrade, and almost every electronic gadget. You are forced to use them because the world around you is no longer compatible with the way of life that was before the introduction of these tech.

Similarly, phones are required now for some activities, like online banking. First it was an option, then it became the norm.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

In my view the problems of “communication over distances”, “quickly traveling over distances” and “having information to process” all existed as problems well before we invented these solutions.

So that leaves only the idea that we’re forced to use these tool because the world has changed. That is frequently true but hinges on the amount of effort an individual is willing to make - and their economic prowess in an economy that rewards groupthink.

I stand by my original statement: selling solutions to problems you created ought to be illegal.

Now 40k people have learned that biometrics aren't passwords. You can't rotate your voice.

"My voice is my passport. Verify me."

I have to renew my passport every 10 years or so. How do I do that with my voice? I guess it's time to take some vocal lessons.

The fediverse take on that was "customers are advised to rotate their faces and birthdays."

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...

Do you need to calibrate it to be able to repeat it, and does that calibration change if you are at a different altitude and in different conditions, such as humidity?

Does merely changing altitude (or ambient pressure) change voice enough to be considered different by a recognition or synthesizing system?

In reality, some phlegm aside, their voice is still the same in any way that matters.

If you knew people who didn't smoke and started (not uncommon in the 80s and 90s, quite a few people I know started smoking in university, or after the stress of a first job, some even later), and also the inverse, you can trivially hear it for yourself.

I guess you don't listen to Sinatra.

Although it does seem to affect some people more than others for sure, I guess it depends how and what you're smoking.

The ability to switch mid-sentence is mostly just something I discovered I can do and is fun. But the ability to pass as my real gender is something that helps me feel safe. And when needed, being able to occasionally pass as my prior gender (e.g., when calling my bank until I can change my name/gender legally), it also quite useful.

But pitch is far from the only thing that someone gendered one way or another in western culture (and presumably elsewhere). Resonance, weight, breathing patterns, word choice, and prosody all matter too. That's way too much to go into in a post here on HN, but the easiest one to understand is resonance or "size." Female-perceived speakers have higher resonance / smaller size. This means that some of the higher harmonics are amplified more than the lower harmonics, an it's called a "small size" because the actual resonating area from the larynx to the tongue is made smaller (mostly through tongue placement). Male-perceived speakers do the opposite, creating a larger space for resonance and resulting in a lowered resonance.

I know quite a few cis people who are also going through some of this training to help with their voice acting, or even just for fun.

There are a lot of good (and unfortunately some bad) resources online for trans voice training in both directions. My personal favorite (and where I started my lessons) is Seattle Voice Labs, but Online Vocal Coach / Vox Nova is also a great resource.

One thing I've been feeling itchy regarding this domain is that a lot of existing resources are shallow and there aren't many gamified options even though things like rhythm game feels like a perfect fit. I think not a negligible number of people, especially young and inexperienced, are struggling with aggressive or dis-satisfied sounding voices against their intent. Just a laptop app to feedback the error between their intended voice and recognized voices to let them minimize the error feel like a useful thing to me.

IMO, the best way to learn to control your voice is to learn to hear variations in size, weight, pitch, open quotient, prosody, etc. From there you can become your own coach so you're not focused on an app while having a real world conversation with someone. Would a gamified version help? Possibly.

(sorry for the delay, I have no idea if you'll see this. I wrote it last week but apparently never pressed the submit button??)

Here is a clip of him when someone called his studio thinking they were the local Pizza Hut. Phil does all the other voices, including the phone system.

https://share.google/QHNkgsOdvGj7tapfk

Well met, fellow Uplinker!!

I'm pretty sure this person worked at Playtronics.

Voice fingeprinting is essentially useless because it is easily recorded and reproduced.

Voices aren't strong.

There just aren't that many unique characteristic parameters behind a voice - it's largely dictated by an evolutionary shared shared larynx and vocal tract. They aren't fingerprints.

The fact that human voice impersonation is not only widely possible but popular should give you an indication of this. Prosody, intonation, range, etc. - it's all flexible and can be learned and duplicated.

The signals are simple too, because we have to encode and decode them quickly. You may or may not be able to picture and rotate an apple tree in your head, but you can easily read this sentence in the voice of David Attenborough.

Moreover, you can easily fine tune a voice model to fit any other speaker. You can store the unique speaker embeddings in a very thin layer. Zero and few shot unseen sampling can even come close to full reproduction. You can measure this all quantitatively.

Voices are not, and never have been, fingerprints. They're just not that unique.

The problem is that even if you know that, you still get bombarded by banking apps promising "biometrics are more secure than passwords, switch now!"

also this took me way too long to realize it had nothing to do with warhammer.

I feel like we're right on the threshold where we give up and start interacting with slop like it's human written.

I like to tell them this story that I read somewhere a decade or so ago. It might not be a true story (I never checked) but it's a helpful way of thinking about it.

Bob landed a great job and decided to celebrate by buying a new luxury car (a BMW in my recollection, but could be wrong) that had a thumbprint authentication for unlocking and for starting it, so you never have to carry external keys. One day a thief decided to steal Bob's car. They broke in to his house and tied him up. When they demanded the keys and he said there weren't any, they decided to cut off his thumb and use it as the key. Now Bob has no thumb and his car still got stolen.

I did find your story from 2005 about a man having his finger chopped off once the thieves realized they would need his appendage every time in order to start the car2.

https://news.sky.com/story/french-police-investigating-serie...

[2] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18624943-600-finger-c...

In the idealized world, the legal system is meant to provide an accessible alternative to violence for reconciling disputes, but it's increasingly wielded as an impossibly kafkaesque system meant to maintain corporate power over individuals.

I think "CYA" is an overly-flowery term for the reality that they're blocking every avenue for legal recourse, while a variety of other avenues still exist for which adding friction requires the maintenance of expensive and ongoing costs (owning multiple residences, hiring security, etc.)

(To be clear, I am advocating for a more accessible and level legal system, not for UHC-style violence.)

Ah, I see. So, when discussing ways to ensure cuatomers cannot utilize our warranty process, I'll make sure to do so in ways that are not traceable and won't show up in discovery.

The bigger the company, the more speculation there is about stuff people don't actually understand.

In other cases I have heard people who ought to know better speculating about “what if” they didn’t have to follow the letter of some corporate policy that was rooted in risk avoidance. Again, it looks bad but it doesn’t mean anything concrete (except that the person might have iffy judgment).

Hey, fuck you too buddy.

I said this based on my years of working at companies on projects specifically to do things like delete all data as soon as it was legally permissible so it could never come up in court again.

And most of my “let’s take this offline” chats have led to discussions around doing illegal shit.

Hell, I had one manager give me handwritten code on paper and instructions to commit it under my name. The code in question would cause sales to go through without the discounts presented to customers because the discount service was buggy and his metrics were based on successfully completed sales. Even threatened to fire me when I said no, and only backed down when I put the paper in my pocket and asked if he would like for anyone else outside the room to see it or if he would not use me as a fall guy.

If your employees “don’t know what they’re talking about” then either they are not representative of the companies views and have no power to enact illegal policies for the company, or they do and you don’t have controls. Trying to hide that shit by default means you don’t get the benefit of the doubt, like you are giving them.

The situations you describe are not what I have experienced, which I guess makes me lucky.

My point was that in discovery, the idle chatter of know-nothings looks bad. But if there are companies that really have something to hide, well I guess that's what discovery is for. And as for your manager pal, if someone did that I'd be looking for work that very afternoon.

apology accepted and I rescind my insult.

> My point was that in discovery, the idle chatter of know-nothings looks bad. But if there are companies that really have something to hide, well I guess that's what discovery is for. And as for your manager pal, if someone did that I'd be looking for work that very afternoon.

I did, switched jobs a few weeks later after that. Did keep the paper and let him know I still had it just to fuck with him back during those weeks however.

> The situations you describe are not what I have experienced, which I guess makes me lucky.

It may be the opposite and I was just unlucky, but I have run into multiple situations with companies making 100s of millions to billions a year where that sort of behavior occurred, so if people are being trained to hide unfortunate conversations then I am going to assume the worst barring large amounts of contrary evidence.

Back when the relevant laws were written, most communications was oral and in-person, writing was reserved for the "important stuff". We now apply the laws that were designed for memos to messages on Slack, which are a lot like conversations than permanent documents.

Heard that first from a US mil commander who once ran for a minor political office like state rep.

This is an overly flowery way of saying: violence.

The worst of the consequences are the same. People end up dead, destitute, and/or with long-term health consequences and are unable to enjoy the fruits labor in the worst cases. In the milder cases i think i'd prefer a bruise for a week to a huge financial loss.

The good thing about the grift economy is it grifts itself, like the turtles!