I actually did (was going to travel internationally), and it wasn't as useful as you'd think. I would be talking to someone, and in the background someone else would be talking, and it would translate both people.
Only worked in a 1:1 in a quiet place. Still, can't complain for free.
As sister comments have pointed out, I find that it's very much dependent on the phone you're using. If it can't even show me a waveform then I don't think it's going to be able to tease out any sort of speech
Sorry I wasn't clear. It's about the hardware microphone. They're usually optimized to filter out far field sounds and only focus on near field sounds. So if you're trying to understand a conversation from even 10 ft away, it can be a problem. Not saying that's the situation that you encountered, but it does make sense that a $50 phone versus a $500 phone might have different capabilities when it comes to the microphone
It's not a model problem, but it is a SW problem. It should be able to distinguish nearby people from people farther away and give me options to set a threshold on who to include.
I've not been able to access web.archive.org from my work computer - I always get the 429 error.
But I then pull out my phone and can access it just fine. All along I was assuming my company was blocking it. Still weird that it happens every time from my work PC and never from my home one.
I assume that's because the IP range of your company network overlaps with a range used by some scrapers, and if it doesn't happen on your phone even in the corporate network, then IA probably checks some extra signals like the user agent in addition to the IP
Are there any decent/reputable residential proxy companies? I’m pretty sure I’ll end up needing one occasionally, for those days when my residential IP has a poor reputation score.
There are definitely factors beyond IP being used. A week ago I found that all requests from Chrome-like browsers got a 429 across more than a half dozen networks and several machines, while Firefox reliably worked. I assume this was an overzealous policy on UAs.
You should file a support ticket with your manager and the IT security or support desk. Show them the evidence of 429s that are blocking your assigned tasks during working hours. Also include the screenshots and files that you downloaded on your personal device in order to access your work-related materials. Be sure and thank them for adequately configuring the MDM on your personal mobile device so that you could do these work-related tasks. You should definitely also file an expense report to request reimbursement of your personal mobile bill, any data charges incurred, and the hours of networking or collaborating with external colleagues, while you were working on these work-related projects with your personal device.
Your workplace is probably redirecting traffic through a datacenter IP range. Especially if they have their own datacenters like google, microsoft, oracle, amazon, etc.
Try making a vpn via digital ocean for example and you'll see similar patterns.
They seem to be aggressively blocking IPv6 source IPs. I ran into this problem over the past month traveling. I got nothing but 429 errors until I switched on my VPN (which is IPv4 only) and magically the Wayback machine worked again. The lack of transparency on the part of IA is very frustrating.
> What I do care about is the fact that H1-B locks immigrants to a company
They're free to change companies if the new company sponsors them. It may reset the timeline for applying for a green card, depending on the location and job type of the new job. Generally, if it's the same type of job in the same city, it doesn't reset.
People (including Indians) do it all the time.
Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
In Japan, your work visa belongs to you. You’re free to quit your job immediately upon getting your visa. It’s mandatory to notify immigration of changes to your employment status within 2 weeks but they’re not deporting you just because you switched jobs.
I used to work as a contractor in the earlier stages of my career, that meant that sometimes jobs only lasted 3 months.
> They're free to change companies if the new company sponsors them.
That's a much smaller pool of companies. The company already has to be participating in the H1-B program in order to sponsor someone.
> Do you know counterexamples?
Most of them happen under the likes of the EU where citizens of member nations have the freedom to migrate.
But even in the US, we have the green card (as you note) which you can get without doing H1-B. Getting a green card means your legal status isn't tied to employment.
> Most of them happen under the likes of the EU where citizens of member nations have the freedom to migrate.
Yes, but this isn't the same. As a US citizen, I don't have that freedom in the EU, correct?
> But even in the US, we have the green card (as you note) which you can get without doing H1-B. Getting a green card means your legal status isn't tied to employment.
True, but we're talking about employment visas. What the US has is likely standard in most countries when you don't have permanent residence.
Not to mention that many (most?) countries have a much more difficult path obtaining permanent residency compared to the US. You want to live there? Get an employment visa and stay on that visa forever.
> Yes, but this isn't the same. As a US citizen, I don't have that freedom in the EU, correct?
If you are from Cuba, you don't have access to the H1-B program. All nations have restrictions one which nations can and can't participate in their immigration and to what extent.
So yes, it is the same, the US just isn't a part of the EU. The relationship between EU nations is much closer to the relationship (pre-trump) between the US and Canada.
> True, but we're talking about employment visas.
No, actually what you specifically asked for was
> Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
A green card is not a visa, but it is a mechanism to go to a country for employment without having you legal status tied to a specific company.
> If you are from Cuba, you don't have access to the H1-B program. All nations have restrictions one which nations can and can't participate in their immigration and to what extent.
Yes, but the restrictions on which countries' citizens can be part of the H-1B program is tiny compared to the list of countries that cannot participate in the EU program you're mentioning. With the US, it's practically a rounding error (or was, at least pre-Trump).
> No, actually what you specifically asked for was
>> Going to a country for employment and having your legal status tied to a company is pretty standard across the world. Do you know counterexamples?
Yes, I said "Going to a country for employment". If you have a green card, you are not going to the US for employment. You are in the US, or going to the US to receive the green card. Getting employment is incidental.
By counterexamples, I meant other countries where you get in via an employment visa and don't have your presence tied to the employer.
TN visa is much more restrictive than H1B. Only for citizens of two countries, and only for certain professions. I know Canadians who have no hope of getting a TN visa (wrong profession), but have come on H1B.
I guess I wasn't being clear. The original comment I was responding to was:
> What I do care about is the fact that H-1B locks immigrants to a company and tie their residence in the us to their employment.
I am merely pointing out that most countries lock employment visas to the employer. It's fine not to like it, but I'm highlighting that this is pretty normal - the US is not an outlier.
Foreign language teachers is the one category where it's easy to believe it's hard to find local talent. I've seen them in small towns across the country. Sure, you may have a Vietnamese speaking US citizen in New York, but they don't want to move to a small town in the Midwest.
> So they are claiming that ACR is done entirely through audio processing, and no visual data from the screen itself is used? That...doesn't seem plausible.
It apparently is.
Do you know the Nielsen Ratings? That's exactly how they know what people are watching these days. I've been contacted by them to be one of their subjects. They ship you a device that listens and recognizes based on content. They look for certain "fingerprints" in the audio and match against that - it's not capable of recording our conversations, etc (or so they claimed).
Regardless of it being how it always was done, such a finger print can easily be injected into LG's advertising ecosystem to infer everything about your demographic and what your interests and income might be and hit you with more specialized ads.
What we watch is not OK to be fed ads, especially if I wasn't using their service to being with and its monitoring the audio from any input to do this.
In this way, smart tvs and smart home devices are effectively hostile devices behind your router at home.
Yes. It’s also horrible that they have microphones in your home listening to your conversations. LG knowing what I’m watching is awful, but it seems even worse for LG to listen in to the conversation I have with my loved ones about it after. I don’t want to be under surveillance in my own home.
If you want true, verifiable privacy and control, it's not an Apple TV that you need. Any old laptop or desktop computer can be used to stream content from the Internet using a Web browser or other "apps."
It does let you do that, but only on platforms where they can enforce HDCP. So e.g. Edge on Windows or Safari on macOS work fine, and I think Chrome recently joined the list too. But not on Linux.
I.e. spend more money to do things the TV can perfectly well do. We should make the spying illegal so we can use the devices we buy to their full potential without being sold to advertisers. "Give money to this other company that may or may not also be collecting data and may also sell you out in the future" is a suboptimal solution.
It is pretty neat and several resources online explaining it but it chunks the recoding and does a hash of the fft of each frame i think which reduces the data a lot. The server has a pre hashed database https://hackernoon.com/how-shazam-works-in-a-nutshell
TV shows are completed and in the can well before air date. It is entirely plausible that the interested party in having the content identifiable by Shazam like services submit whatever needs to be submitted for new content
I have also wondered about the possibility of media emitting some kind of hidden identifier. Can normal speakers emit noise outside of human hearing that could contain a unique id? Would not even need to be a lot of data that could be broadcast.
Yes, it's possible. Some sports broadcasts do this. The ones I'm familiar with use a high pitched tone on the edge of human hearing but still audible to most people.
Streaming services watermark the video as opposed to the audio as I understand it.
But that's for tracing pirated content back to the originating user account. It's not particularly useful (also entirely unnecessary and overly complicated) if your goal is to ID a piece of content as opposed to an account.
That's not necessary. If a service has access to the raw audio of a show, it can fingerprint each second of that audio in a way that can be matched in a tiny amount of computation even for a recording in a noisy environment.
That can't recognize what you say. But, it can ID where you are in a specific show out of zillions of hours of shows.
I know a guy who made a Shazam-like phone app that can listen to a few seconds of noisy audio and make a fingerprint that can be used to quickly ID those specific few seconds out of a pre-fingerprinted archive of an enormous amount of audio (zillions of hours of TV). Making the fingerprint requires a tiny amount of very smart code (in C with no dependencies). But, the fingerprint is not useful for understanding audio that's not in the archive.
I participated once or twice a good number of years ago, and it was kind of a pain: It involved keeping a paper ledger of what was watched, and when. Correspondence was all handled by regular mail.
(As I recall, they included a small amount of cash ~every time they sent more correspondence and this was a primary motivator to keep going with it.)
Nielsen is global Company that is used for pricing ads on TV stations around the world. Their way of doing it from what I know personally is that they sign up people to put this ACR boxes voluntarily and then based on extrapolation of data - they can tell you pretty close what was the viewership across demographics. Similar to how election polls are done - you just need a good sample.
nielsen's ACR method is embedded into millions of devices and vendors. No need for a microphone, it's processing the audio signal being sent out. A microphone would be a wasted conversion..
(your car infotainment also likely has nielsen tech in it most likely, as they bought arbitron and gracenote)
As far as I know, watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization. Nielsen researched and developed ACR technology but it never required watermarks.
When Nielsen first started collecting data (1950s), they handed out diaries to a group of around 5 000 selected households. Nielsen would then collect these diaries and extrapolate viewing patterns across the entire population.
After that came phone surveys. Next step (1980s) was the "people meter", a small box attached to the TV that could automatically detect which channel was tuned and which household members were in the room.
In the 1990s the set-top box made all of that redundant as the cable and satellite providers could directly see which channel every single box was tuned to at all times.
Broadcasters: the cutting edge of streaming information is ours! Now let's make it so everyone unknowingly broadcasts as much info back to us as possible!
> watermarks never took off because the technical complexity and lack of standardization
Both audio (sports) and video (netflix et al) watermarks are alive and well. They are used to trace piracy (ie account ID), not for content ID (at least AFAIK).
Yes, but ... did it ever occur to you that similar sites in the pre-LLM days made as passion projects by one person likely contained a similar number of errors?
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