I personally love senko since it can run in seconds, whereas py-annote took hours, but there is a 10% WER (word error rate) that is tough to get around.
I run a small Dwarf Fortress podcast, and I didn't like the transcription options when we started a few years ago, so I wrote some python glue to do diarization (separate out speakers) and transcription using a torchaudio project, and either whisper or openai depending on how I'm feeling that day. Works surprisingly well, with timestamps and clean-up:
That looks really great! In my attempt to do something similar ( https://github.com/drewbuschhorn/DoctorMoon ) I kept having issues from the various publisher's apis not playing nice with each other. How are you guys shimming around that for general science?
Have you considered flagging paths for publications that get retracted? I've always thought that a 'this paper you're using has three retracted parent papers,' would be valuable.
The company owns the wires and radio bands. Maybe by a funny coincidence using alternative blockchains and working remotely for other companies creates an 'unfair to the other users' drain on bandwidth.
I feel like we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories have descended about Mom and Pop operations run out of business but the evil Brusselcrats.
> we had this exact same argument over GDPR, but no horror stories have descended
Romania has already deployed GDPR as a weapon against its press [1]. I also have a short list of anecdotes of economic activity (start-ups and other new market entrants) that would have happened in the EU but, in large part due to compliance costs–including GDPR–wound up happening outside the EU.
And the EU is trying to prevent Romania from doing it. I don't see your point. Romania could just have used another law or just made a new one to harass the press.
> the EU is trying to prevent Romania from doing it
Giving people in power broad discretion with the law and then counting on them being nice is a delicate strategy. It counts on every administration being benevolent.
> Romania could just have used another law or just made a new one to harass the press
There is a big difference between using the authority of the EU, through an EU regulation, and passing a domestic law to go after people you don't like.
More broadly, this argument can be made against any over-reaching law. Just because some hypothetical law could be bad doesn't make an ambiguous law granting widespread power to select bureaucrats okay.
This is not related to business but there's a horror story with Romania (it's in the EU) asking a news organization to provide informants information related to some corruption leaks.
The information is requested by the national GDPR enforcer so it bypasses the prevention written in the GDPR about news leaks.
Now there's a trial going around with this which blocked any further spread of that information until it's solved. It can be easily seen how the GDPR can be weaponized.
Isn't that just straight abuse of the law? AFAIK GDPR only protects your personal information, it can't be used to request someone else's personal information (if anything, you could argue that GDPR prevents you from giving out another person's info).
This isn't the police or the parliament asking for the information. It's the regulatory body that does inspections to companies to see if they respect GDPR.
So the pretext they're using is that they want to see the information to make sure that the news organisation is not selling it or mishandling it to other third parties. In the process, they'll be able to get the information and maybe it will go to the people involved in the corruption charges (which is the head of one part of the Parliament).
They aren't actually following the letter of the law, so to me it's unclear how much they actually abuse the law rather than simply pasting the GDPR logo in one corner in a sort of legal phishing attempt.
GDPR has had a very detrimental effect on user experience, with never ending popups and warnings about crap nobody understands. And being in the EU there's several US publications we can no longer access.
I can buy arguments that extra compliance efforts make some businesses not cost-effective in Europe, but this particular argument is nonsense.
It's like a factory that dumped toxic waste into a river complaining that, because of a ban on dumping toxic waste into rivers, they now "have to" dump them to nearby meadows instead, and that makes local customers unhappy.
"Detrimental effect on user experience" is an intended effect that clearly signals the company doesn't want to stop abusing its users.
GDPR is the size of a novel and attorneys can't even agree yet on what counts as PII. It's nowhere near a crisp law that only prohibits bad things you'd know not to do.
Yes, that's right, it's messy when you are tackling legislation to play catch up with technology. We've seen how wrong it can go with stuff like the last generation of cookie laws that were too tightly coupled to implementation details. GDPR is actually a nice step forward into resolving these huge gray areas that the web and smart phones have enabled as they become mainstream.
The status quo where corporations make vast profits peddling ever finer-grained user data unbeknownst to the consumer with no oversight is not good. A cultural shift is necessary. I'm glad to see the EU has the stones to tackle the issue because there is zero political will stateside for any political action other than driving corporate profits masked by populist appeals to xenophobia and whatever other irrelevant distractions they can cook up.
> Every business: "Hey, we use cookies to provide a better experience. That okay?"
They're not required to unless they're using cookies for something other than providing better experience. Also, that's cookie laws, not GDPR.
It's more like:
GDPR: "We see you doing X, Y and Z which are pretty abusive. We want you to not do X, Y and Z, but if you absolutely must, you can only do that to volunteers and you can't deny service to people who do not volunteer. Oh, and it really must be opt-in."
Every business: "Hey, we do X, Y and Z. That okay? [x] no >>> [ ] <<< !! YES PRETTY PLEASE".
Seeing HackerNews complain about GDPR is a strange experience. Every day I utilize GDPR to ensure that I am not tracked by the websites that I visit. The expectations of GDPR are lower for smaller companies.
> Hey, we use cookies to provide a better experience.
Cookies are a separate law and entirely unrelated to GDPR.
Also the annoying "this is what we are doing, you have to agree to this to proceed" is explicitly forbidden for the GDPR. So your criticism does not apply.
You can thank large media conglomerates for the latter, all it takes is one executive decision for dozens of networks and websites to start geo-blocking Euorpe.
GDPR is still fairly new, and it usually takes a while for the full consequences of complex new legislation to be felt.
As an American who spends a lot of time in Europe, what I have noticed is that a majority of local news sites in the US block me from accessing them using IP geolocation.
An old client of mine, an actual mom and pop operation in Germany was harassed and was almost ran out of business by a law-firm who went around, the moment GDPR dropped, trying to find targets to sue.
They received a letter threatening a lawsuit due to the fact that they had a newsletter sign up form without double opt-in feature on their site and some explicit legal documentation missing. Other than that it was a really simple presentational site made in Wordpress. Our business relationship ended years ago but I received a mail from them years ago asking for help in putting those things in because they were afraid of having to deal with legal stuff over such small bs. I obviously did.
Now I don't know German law, as I'm not German, but it felt like they were really afraid that it could happen.
These are enforced on a national level though aren't they, in the UK ICO doesn't have the resources to hunt people down and are probably only going to enforce action against major players in the market as they are under the most scrutiny.
The problem comes when a nation decides to use those rules in a way that is detrimental to the populace or a service they see as troublesome.
GDPR has a very worthy purpose though: companies were taking far too many liberties with people's personal data. I don't see analogous problems with copyrighted material (there is some infringement, but it doesn't really seem problematic to society).
That's not what it's for. The GDPR legslates what events one can remember (using incrementalisim). It's ultimately an attack on general purpose computing.
But people can store data on themselves on their own PC of course. I don't see how GPDR affects that. I don't want a GPC that sends personal data back to the mothership anyway.
It's incremental. The companies covered by the EU's GDPR are untimately comprised of people too. It's easiest to start with a subset, and the GDPR is no exception to that rule.
Ya lost me on the reporting to the mothership thing, that is definately what many power centers would like, for example, non-DRM 3D printers that can cheaply print metal objects will be reserved for criminals in countries controlled by repressive regimes because they can make effective life saving tools.
It's not clear what's going on with GDPR, good test cases are only now starting to be tested. But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
> But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
They are not blocked. They have chosen to take their services offline because they don’t think changing their business model such that it no longer depends on aggressively tracking their users is worthwhile or cost-effective. Which is fine by me imho.
You must understand the economics. Newspapers have zero cash on hand these days, so their choice was to fire staff to allocate money for GDPR or not. Seeing how staff is at a minimum, that was the practical option. Result is equivalent to censorship. I'm surprised you don't find this a terrible outcome.
I don't agree that if a business chooses not to operate in a country, because it's unwilling to spend the money required to comply with the country's laws, that that is equivalent to censorship.
Another person's personal information is not protected speech.
I always viewed it as a transaction--go to the news site and read the news, in exchange they will sell data on what articles you're reading, etc.
I was fine with that transaction. In fact, I would rather have them sell my data instead of charging money.
Consumers have a choice on whether or not they want to go to these sites, it's not like they are forced to give away their personal information to news sites.
I would say the GDPR blocking news sites is a net negative because it denies consumers the choice to read news stories.
> I always viewed it as a transaction--go to the news site and read the news, in exchange they will sell data on what articles you're reading, etc.
And I always thought (back in my more naïve days) that I read the site in exchange for being advertised to. Point being, the exact details of the transaction were never shown to the visitors. GDPR fixes that by forcing companies to state the terms of this transaction explicitly, and actually ask the visitors if they're willing to participate in it.
GDPR isn't blocking any sites, it's only disallowing a very particular way of getting users to give up their data and then monetizing that data. Nobody is entitled to their business model working forever, and some companies prefer to shut off a large segment of their market instead of updating their business model. It's their choice.
Agree. There are ways to protect your data if that’s important to you. If I walk out in the middle of a freeway I should expect that I might be hit by a car rather — the EU instead says, “let’s ban freeways”.
No, EU says "let's put signs that point to where there are (previously invisible) freeways".* GDPR does not ban any practices, it just says that certain practices need to be communicated to and approved by the people affected by them.
I personally don't think that it is any government's business to regulate a company that is not inside its jurisdiction, I also don't think think it should be their prerogative to stop me from engaging and communicating with one just because they rightfully say that it's not their job to bend the knee to them. As an adult the EU is neither my parent nor my guardian.
You’re muddying the waters. Just because someone doesn’t want to take on the compliance burden does not mean they have an antisocial business practice. What you’re saying does not logically follow.
It does, you just made an illogical connection. I didn't say that companies who self-block must necessarily have antisocial business practices. I only said that GDPR is banning those practices. I also said that companies have a choice between removing themselves from European market or adjusting their business model to be compliant.
> companies have a choice between removing themselves from European market or adjusting their business model to be compliant
The problem isn't only adjusting business models. It's proving you've adjusted your business model to twenty-eight EU regulators. If one of them misbehaves, you now have to wage a legal fight in a foreign jurisdiction. Against those costs and risks is a minimum required revenue. If that revenue doesn't exist, it doesn't make sense to serve that market. Regardless of your business model.
So if a law gives you a choice in how you choose to censor a work of literature, would it be the artist's self censoring and not an act of government censorship? Assuming we applied the same logic.
> But the fact that many American newspapers, for example, are blocked in Europe is certainly something to worry about.
There's just one large company that decided to block EU visitors: Tribune Publishing[0]. Yes, them blocking Europe is bad. Them owning so many local newspapers that this decision even makes an impact is a bigger problem.
I'm not saying that they're the only ones blocking Europe, but I am saying that we wouldn't think of it to be as wide spread if it weren't for Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and LA Times (among others).
The GDPR is very similar to the old Data Protection Directive, which came into force in 1995. Many member states had done a piss-poor job of implementing and enforcing the DPD, which was largely the motivation for passing the GDPR. Directives have to be transposed into national law by individual member states, while regulations are immediately applicable across the entire Union.
I'm not saying there won't be an effect, but having an effect it's why you pass a law. But 8 months in, and the landscape doesn't seem radically altered.
If anything, major players deciding not to compete in a market is good to my mind, as a means of increasing a diversity of business styles. Laws like this make businesses pay for the actual cost of thier hidden externalities.
[humor] Given the "quality" of reporting in most of the publications here, we should be thanked for that outcome [/humor]
More seriously, GDPR should not extend beyond its jurisdiction. It does though, and there are consequences. Blocking european IPs cost (loss of revenue) must be balanced against compliance costs.
Claims that "they've had N years to prepare" are specicious, if for no other reason than they aren't bound by the specific law. Meanwhile the law introduces a new, potentially large, liability. Which results in companies self censoring by geolocation.
This is what you call an unintended consequence. Remote access to quite a few resources outside of Europe is likely to be restricted should this pass into EU law. As we like to say here, elections have consequences.
FWIW, I support the aims of GDPR, and wish we would get a sane law on this here in the US as well. But I don't want our law extending to others. That would be unfair to them.
Have you ever heard about the financial law Fatca? Please read up. What about sanctions of Iran that the US forces the rest of the world to go along with?
The US is probably the biggest "exporter" of laws that are forced down the throaths of all other countries.
American newspapers don't need to care about GDPR. Most websites don't need to care about GDPR. Europe does not get to dictate how non European based websites operate. The GDPR can be outright ignored for a significant part of the internet. I have no idea why an American newspaper would give a shit about GDPR. They could literally put a huge banner up saying "fuck GDPR" and face zero legal consequences.
I’m not sure how accurate that is. It’s obvious to me that American companies larger than mine have cared enough to take action. If they really had no obligation I’m sure they would have simply done nothing.
I'm a liberal partisan, so fwiw, but I don't think in a professional setting you ever try to wrestle something out of someone's hands. This is all uncharted territory in the White House press room, but when I've seen a similar situation in science conferences, they usually stand in front of the person who won't yield the mic and ask for it back until the mic gets cuts.
But the WH had to double down and say that JA "placing hands on" on the intern, which is close to a specific legal phrase related to assault and battery charges, unless they were saying he was: trying to find the intern, confirm her into his church, or provide faith healing services.
Good points. I was also surprised the mic didn't just get cut. I'm wondering if someone told the intern to grab the mic, since I agree it's unprofessional. Maybe reaching out the hand was supposed to be more of a prompt to hand it back, but things got heated. What a mess.
I'd love to see Republican senators voting to fund an antifa 24/7 channel. I mean, they can't even get behind Sesame Street so I'm sure that wouldn't be a problem.
