China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations' - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/04/china-gene-edited-baby-experiment-may-have-created-unintended-mutations <comment><USER2> It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mutations are harmful or not, either to the immediate generation or subsequent ones. Because there is so much uncertainty around that question, these kinds of experiments are ethically, and in many cases, legally, prohibited.

<comment><USER3> Random harmful mutations have happened all day every day as long as life has existed. We are basically designed for dealing with it. But worst case, we can eliminate harmful mutations from being passed on to subsequent generations through screening. I wouldn't worry about the long term problems of that, it's fairly easy to solve.

What I would worry about is:

a) Short term suffering from failed experiments.

b) Reduced genetic diversity as everyone scrambles to get "the best" genes.

<comment><USER4> > But worst case, we can eliminate harmful mutations from being passed on to > subsequent generations through screening

Are you suggesting that we should prohibit these babies from reproducing when they reach adulthood? If not, how do you suggest we prevent harmful mutations from being passed on with "screening"?

<comment><USER5> Adults only pass on half of their genes during reproduction. I imagine at least in the case of in vitro fertilization there's a fair amount you can do to make sure the harmful genes aren't the ones passed along, so long as the parent doesn't have two copies of an autosomal dominant harmful mutation.

I wouldn't be surprised if more advanced methods exist either; as a carrier for a rare genetic disease maybe I should figure this out.

<comment><USER6> You can't argue with the "but what if" line of reasoning because there's always another hypothetical that could lead to the destruction of humanity or, at the very least, one more mutant baby than anticipated. And that's the problem here: these arguments boil down to "too dangerous", but that's not a characteristic amenable to empirically grounded, reasoned debate.

We can only have a scientifically constructive discussion within the context of a concrete, particularized therapy--disease, editing vector, gene, etc. Even then it's difficult, but at least you can reach a point at which you can agree to disagree on an actual, concrete scientific question. Everything else is philosophy and politics.

I think what people are trying to justify is an a priori assumption that gene editing (or germline editing if they're a little less cautious) is special and distinct. But I don't think you can scientifically justify that distinction from a harm avoidance perspective. Just because the technique is medically and scientifically distinguishable doesn't mean it's analytically distinguishable. And of course one of the principal drivers of these therapies, at least initially, is stopping the types of mutations that are feared but which already exist in nature.

So it's simply a belief that you hold; full stop. It's a legitimate belief, and may even be strongly informed by science, but it's like believing in God or aliens or the utility of Mars colonization--we might as well just put labels on our foreheads so we know where the argument will end up without actually having to argue. Knowing the other person's starting point, and assuming the best versions of their likely arguments, most of us here can arrive at the other person's conclusions independently.

<comment><USER2> _I think what people are trying to justify is an a priori assumption that gene editing (or germline editing if they 're a little less cautious) is special and distinct._

Gene editing is special and distinct, in the sense that the genome is a complex and nonlinear system, where small errors can be amplified into large consequences, not only local, biological consequences but social as well. In cases where technology offers such potentially extreme leverage, it _is_ scientifically justifiable to tread cautiously to avoid great harm.

<comment><USER6> The same debate occurred regarding innoculation nearly 250 years ago. In fact, it's _still_ occurring. Moreover, we're _still_ stumbling--just last week I think someone posted an article to HN regarding how the use of live polio (IIRC?) vaccines has led us to paint ourselves into a corner, perpetually unable to extinguish the last remaining reservoirs. So the original _concerns_ about what we'd now characterize as "complex" and "nonlinear" have been validated. It was the conclusions that were drawn from those concerns that were invalid--in short, that it was too dangerous to be introduced and managed by humans. The benefits outweighed the harms, even though many of the parade of horribles exclaimed by the skeptics did in fact come to pass. Those horribles ended up being buffered and moderated, because that's how complex, nonlinear systems _also_ tend to behave.

In Complexity Theory, one of the defining behaviors of "complexity", in addition to nonlinearity, is a tendency to return to a quasi-equilibrium state even though it can never reach, let alone stay, at an actual equilibrium. Absent the dual (dueling?) tendencies of spontaneous change and regression, you have by definition either chaos or stasis.

<comment><USER2> It was not the same debate, because innoculation doesn't have as much capacity for far-reaching consequences. With regard to the notion of relying on the stability of a complex system, they tend to return to _a_ quasi-equilibrium state, not necessarily _the_ state they were in before being 'kicked'. And rate of change matters. Gene editing has the capacity to vastly accelerate the rate of mutation---indeed, that's it's purpose. And even if the overall nature of the genomic system remained recognizably mathematically the same, our experience of it in this accelerated state might be quite different.

<comment><USER6> 1) Inoculation resulted in known historical outbreaks that killed many people.

2) Vaccinations, not to mention treatments like antibiotics, _have_ resulted in accelerated mutation of disease. It's a serious concern and a growing problem in ways both predicted and unpredicted.

And, yes, these have occurred _together_.

We can argue in circles all day, unless you can point out some novel effect, even hypothetical, that hasn't already been reported in the literature or debated to death. Arguing that it's "too dangerous" is fair. You just can't argue that reasonable people can't disagree on that score.

<comment><USER7> what is this thread about again? last I checked if I get vaccinated or take some antibiotics this won't result in my children also getting them, and with gene editing that's a very likely possibility. the impact is on a wholly different level. e.g. can somebody get a patent on genes inserted into an embryo? what if the person born from this embryo then passes the gene? there's been rulings about GMO crops about these questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The articles don't really say much about the data. I think this is the same data from his talk in 2018. I read somewhere that one baby is a heterozygous CCR5+/\- knockout and the other is a mosaic. His clinical plan was to test to infect the babies blood a few months after birth, probably someone has done that already. Pity that we have to play hide and seek with this study.

his talk where he probably presented the same data : [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcGALqX_YD8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcGALqX_YD8)

Consent forms that he had published in his website at the time:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061149/http://www.sustc-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061149/http://www.sustc- genome.org.cn/source/pdf/Informed-consent-women-English.pdf)

Second informed consent; [https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061153/http://www.sustc-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061153/http://www.sustc- genome.org.cn/source/pdf/Second-informed-consent-English.pdf)

Ethical approval: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061204/http://www.sustc-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061204/http://www.sustc- genome.org.cn/source/pdf/HarmoniCare-Ethics-English.pdf)

Clinical registry: [https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061216/http://www.sustc-...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061216/http://www.sustc- genome.org.cn/source/pdf/CCR5-Clinical-Trial-Registry- Chinese%20-%20English.pdf)

There is also some info including an excel file with the outcomes of the trial here: [http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=32758](http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=32758)

</comment><comment><USER9> Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level.

the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs during gene transcription and replication and translation is maddening. yes, its sort of like a zipper in some ways, but remember that the geometry of a zipper is 2 dimensional, teeth and grooves. DNA is "zipped" by a protein that will fit with the geometry of hundreds or thousands of nucleotide pairs, and even that is a really basic way of putting it. and that natural system of transcription, translation, and protein synthesis at the core of DNA still makes mistakes.

You think index mismatch by 1 in an array can be a bit tricky, imagine how with DNA you have a long array, sort of, with millions of discrete parts that have start and end segments sort like how memory is managed in ram. CRISPR is in some ways, like trying to write perfect memory safe code in a non mem- managed language. crude metaphor but it was how i thought about it during university learning about both compsci and genetics.

<comment><USER6> > natural system of transcription, translation, and protein synthesis at the > core of DNA still makes mistakes.

Exactly, which means the system is _resilient_ , which means it's more forgiving of random mutations introduced by gene editing, which is perhaps why most scientists are less concerned than you think they ought to be.

Imagine if we took the same approach to surgery--overly worried that scar tissue of any kind at any point would completely disrupt the functioning of an organ. We'd be a hundred years or more behind where we are now. Scientists and doctors understand that the body is both much more complex than a simple machine, but also much more resilient.

Such criticism cuts both ways. Likewise for GMOs. Demanding perfection is unreasonable and unnecessary.

<comment><USER10> There's a huge difference between somatic and germline editing. Surgery is like somatic editing. It's elective, based on medical need, and its effects are confined to one individual. Germline editing is more like forcing an entire population to undergo surgery that is claimed to enhance their bodies.

Nobody is particularly concerned about somatic editing where a medical need exists. Everybody is rightly freaking out about germline editing because it's non-elective for the babies, its consequences are permanent and can be severe, and we aren't good enough at it yet (not even the somatic variety) to claim anything about its safety.

<comment><USER6> IIRC, when I studied biology in secondary school and as a freshman in college, it was believed that gametes were completely isolated and untouchable by viral infections. Turns out this is not true. But if you believe that gametes are incredibly fragile, I can see how it would be easy to believe this as otherwise you'd expect to see mutants everywhere.

I realize the _stakes_ are higher for germline editing, but rationally speaking higher stakes alone don't change the calculus.

<comment><USER10> I don't follow. Gametes _are_ isolated from many viral infections, but even assuming that a gamete undergoes viral mutagenesis, that's not evolutionarily novel (viruses follow relatively predictable insertion patterns, and transposons are basically degenerate/grounded viruses that are almost certain to generate mutation events in any given zygote, unlike viral mutagenesis). It's also outside our control, unlike germline editing, which is _not random_ in completely novel ways.

It is precisely because the stakes are so much higher that the calculus changes. We have to be reasonably certain that we can safely edit germline by experimenting with somatic editing and germline in lab animals before we can do something as consequential as deploying it clinically.

<comment><USER6> Sure, they are more isolated. And in some ways they are more fragile. But my point is that they're not nearly as fragile as we believed. And more importantly a faulty premise--that they're extremely fragile--gave way to a faulty scientific conclusion--that gametes were impervious to common environmental stressors like the many infections that ravage our bodies.

We can't draw simple, categorical conclusions about gene editing, nor even germline editing in particular, because there are no simple, categorical distinctions. Suffice it to say, it's complex. Whenever we try to be reductivist about such things we end up drawing erroneous and even dangerous conclusions; e.g. gamete fragility -> viral imperviousness as solution to observed lack of harm -> underestimation of viral stressors and risks, and overestimation of gene editing risks.

Regarding stakes, what I had in mind was classic economic behavioral experiments where they show that a change in the magnitude of a bet changes choices in an irrational manner even though the expected payoff is exactly the same; even when you take into account marginal utility effects.

Yes, germline edits don't just effect one person, they theoretically could _infect_ all of humanity. But so what? Remember when they were firing up the LHC and people were freaking out at the possible creation of blackholes. Given the error bars in known physics, there was a non-zero chance running the experiments could have destroyed the world.[1] Because nothing we could possibly learn would compensate for losing everything, does that mean we should never have turned it on? No. The calculus didn't change. That germline edits propagate doesn't mean our harm+benefit calculus changes; it's just that one of the risk factors in the equation changes from a 1 to something larger. Other factors, like confidence, may or may not need to be changed.

Regarding the argument that by intervening scientifically we're categorically more culpable than if we didn't do anything, that touches upon the is/ought and naturalistic fallacies. From a utilitarian perspective intervention vs non-intervention is irrelevant. I'm not a Utilitarian (capital U), but I don't see how we can have a _constructive_ , _scientific_ debate outside a utilitarian framework. Such lines of reasoning are more relevant to political and religious contexts.

[1] Well, maybe. Actually, perhaps many physicists would have said that the consensus science would have put the chance at 0. But the best argument was made by people pointing out that the Earth's atmosphere was constantly bombarded by particles far more energetic than what the LHC would create. Which is exactly analogous to germline editing. The fact is, the germline undergoes far more genetic stressors than we once believed. It must follow that it's more resilient than we believed, genetically, developmentally, and from an evolutionary perspective.

<comment><USER10> The concerns about the LHC were a hell of a lot more hypothetical than about germline editing, and that _did_ change the calculus. We _know_ that current genome editing techniques have off-target effects.

You're arguing from some abstract philosophical perspective, but the practical situation is much simpler. Nobody is drawing categorical conclusions and saying that we should _never_ edit the germline, and at the same time the opinion that we should do germline editing _right now_ is fringe. The tools, while much better than ten years ago, still suck. Outside a few well- characterized alleles in Mendelian diseases, nobody knows what to edit, what side effects edits will have or why. It's likely that in a few years we _will_ know, given that we're quickly improving both the molecular techniques and the genome knowledge bases necessary to understand the consequences of the edits. But until then, it's dangerous and unethical to experiment on babies without their consent or pressing medical need, and scientists are right to freak out about it.

<comment><USER6> If you believe that germline gene editing is so risky and potentially costly as to be absolutely unwarranted, then you shouldn't support somatic gene therapy as there remains a very real and non-negligible risk of germline integration. Some vectors might be safer than others, but _proving_ the _impossibility_ of gene integration into the germline seems extremely costly and possibly unprovable. I mean, heck, there's at least one _scientifically_ _proven_ case of a virgin birth.[1] Where does that leave us?

I return to my original point: Demanding perfection [and omniscience] is unreasonable and unnecessary. All of these other concerns are typical of any medical procedure: you attempt as best you can to integrate known risks as well as unknowns (known unknowns and unknown unknowns) into a cost and you compare it to the benefit, and if the benefit outweighs the cost then go for it. For germline editing in particular the costs will likely outweigh the potential benefits in most cases for some time, but we still need to make that determination regularly, honestly, and in context (actual proposed cases), without our fingers on the scale.

Issues like consent are ancillary. And they exist regardless of gene therapy. People don't consent to be born. Or consent to be "identified" through family members choosing to publish their genetic information. Social engineering experiments have lead to holocausts, even when they began innocently; if you go back far enough in the causal chain, they're all innocent and completely unintended. These problems, high-stakes consequences, and paradoxes already exist; we already struggle with them. Gene therapy, not even germline therapy, create fundamentally de novo issues. That's the real hubris, the delusion that we're not already playing with fire.

At the end of the day what the Chinese researcher did was reprehensible, but mostly for very particular reasons. I'd wager big money that a significant plurality of medical scientists, if not a majority, are today already prepared to approve germline editing given a good candidate therapy--patient, vector, payload, etc. As for medical ethicists, as scholars they tend to splinter into radical advocates or skeptics because that's how you get tenure and attention; and unlike doctors they don't get fired (or "disappeared") when they're wrong.

[1] "Oral conception. Impregnation via the proximal gastrointestinal tract in a patient with an aplastic distal vagina. Case report", [http://img2.timg.co.il/CommunaFiles/21227065.pdf](http://img2.timg.co.il/CommunaFiles/21227065.pdf)

<comment><USER10> The original point of yours that I find issue with was about "perhaps why most scientists are less concerned", which is really bullshit because most scientists in the field _are_ concerned about premature germline editing. And the arguments you've arrived to in support of it rest on a bunch of false equivalences.

<comment><USER6> I never said not concerned, I said _less_ concerned relative to the apparent concern in the comment I was replying to. Any error would be in the relative level of concern.

I know of their concerns. A friend of mine just got his Ph.D and has a very interesting story about how he answered a query by one of the CRISPR patent holders (then a student in his program) regarding techniques for delivering an intact sequence to the mammalian nucleus.[1] Prior to graduate school my friend spent several years working at the Craig Venter institute studying rhinovirus (while his wife completed her post-graduate work at NIH), and the technique he utilized at the institute and recommended "coincidentally" ended up being the one used. Which gives credence to the whole argument that the CRISPR "discovery" was basically combining together two already well- established methods for gene editing in an obvious way.

Also, he was the safety directory in his lab, both at school and at the institute. Because of the nature of the work, he would obviously be well aware of the _risks_ involved with any sort of gene therapy. I don't know whether he would approve of germline therapy, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree that any blanket ban with the pretense of saving humanity would be naive as it's quite likely already happening to some extent under the radar, both deliberately and unintentionally. But that's a different sort of argument and doesn't contradict what yours, as far as I understand it.

I just took your argument as being excessively alarmist, and my point boils down to that scientists tend to be less alarmist because they're already inured to these things. They know how the sausage is made, and it's never pretty. They see the enormous holes in knowledge that you can drive fleets of buses through. But they also understand that nature is far more forgiving than popular science journalism would have you believe. "Holy sh+t, I didn't expect that'd work as well as it did" is, I think, not an uncommon experience; likewise for "holy sh+t, that _didn 't_ go as I expected", for that matter.

[1] Or something to that effect. Don't quote me because (a) I'm recalling from memory, (b) he gave me the dumbed down version, and (c) a Harvard e-mail system migration meant that he lost all his previous correspondence so he's likewise recalling his discussion from memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Isn't it the case that each gene does not have a single function? This seems like we're tampering with a many-variable equation for each gene we modify. It's like modifying a function when you're not aware that that function has potentially many side effects, which are necessary.

<comment><USER12> Actually, that's exactly what it is. Genes are the most tightly coupled code in existence (literally!), and we've barely scratched the surface in seeing what changes we could make and where to make them without bringing the whole thing crashing down.

<comment><USER13> Who coded that crap?!

<comment><USER14> Maybe it's Gods DRM.

<comment><USER15> It's God's job security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's unsettling how many pleasant euphemisms I'm seeing that amount to "any kids who get _really_ fucked up by gene editing will die before they reproduce, so it's fine!"

</comment><comment><USER17> China demonstrates that it is willing to cross moral boundaries (CRISPR, IP theft) and sacrifice the present to improve the future (Massive infrastructure paving over individual properties).

Western world shows exactly opposite trends - absolute refusal to make any sort of sacrifices (see: reaction to Carbon taxes, minority property owners blocking major infrastructure projects), prioritizing status quo at the cost of hurting future generations (see: Prop 13 in CA, highly cumbersome firing process in France), risk aversion (see: reaction to Nuclear energy proposals)

If China was not facing adverse population pyramid coupled with hostility to immigration, it would have had an easy way to global supremacy. Though Western world is trying very hard to erase that advantage by both producing fewer babies and raising barriers for immigration.

* albeit for a small marginal minority, never for the elites

<comment><USER18> IP theft isn't a moral boundary; it is a legal one. Pro- and Anti- IP positions are not moral positions. I can't claim moral superiority to you because I think copyright should be a year longer or shorter. Enforcing IP law that retards the lifestyle of 20% of the worlds population is arguably the immoral position.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The shocking and disturbing thing about it is the ignorance the general public showed toward it. "Super baby", "supermen army", people just assume that this much touted CRISPR is precise, that human actually know more than a tiny bit of the human genome. All in this current wave of technological optimism.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't have to be precise (at this stage). Two things about China:

1) They have a massive population. ~1.386 Billion people. Large enough to conceal large populations (100's of thousands of people) without drawing attention to cities, supply chain movements, etc.

2) There are no problems with using unethical or illegal actions to advance the CCP's agenda. See: parting out fully conscious and unanesthatized prisoners for organ transplants, etc.

I have no doubt that they will (if they aren't already doing it) devising experimental gene-edits and applying it to batches of hundreds or thousands of babies, and seeing what happens as they grow up. They wouldn't even need to hide them from the general population, with the whole pervasive surveillance / facial recognition / etc. thing they've got going on they could release the children into the general population and track them across their entire lives covertly.

I'm not saying that we'll end up with a supersoldier scenario or anything like that, but this could lead to a medical advantage over the west that could have tremendous implications economically and to security (the possibility of blackmailing someone into spying in exchange for medical treatement).

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Identical twins have hundreds of differences across the entire genome. None of those are carefully planned.

Prior to that, during generation of sperm and egg, many other unintended mutations occur. Each chromosome typically breaks and misjoins (crossing haphazardly with the matched one) about 3 times.

This experiment is really mild by comparison.

</comment><comment><USER22> This will end with China and other countries not interested in moralistic faffing about full of actual superhumans, won't it?

</comment><comment><USER23> This seems like as good opportunity as any other to remind that the previously published study that those gene-edited babies will have shorter life expectancy, that was used to bash He Jiankui previously was retracted [0]. It almost looks like some scientists are envious of him and scramble to find something to use against him. There are risks to many medical procedures and only time will show if these are more or less serious.

That said, I don't think that attempting to grant immunity to disease you might never encounter and is possible to be well treated (if not cured) nowadays was a right reason for first human gene edit. If it fixed a single gene disorder which would allow some parents to have their own healthy biological child, it would be certainly more palatable.

[0]: [https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03032-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03032-2)

</comment><comment><USER24> >While the team targeted the right gene, they [created] novel edits whose effects are not clear.

Welp. If it's not the right gene, you can bet it's probably just going to cause cancer or something.

<comment><USER25> It is the right gene; it's allegedly not the right allele.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there any evidence that the gene edits were actually targeted at HIV immunity? Seemed like an odd selection, I always figured it was a cover story.

</comment><comment><USER27> Even if the technique were perfect, there are unintended consequences to letting people pick things.

You can think of the one child policy as a precursor experiment to letting people select genetic attributes (gender in that case). People selected the trait that they thought was "better" (male). The unintended consequence wasn't that it turned out men are not good, but that too many men instead of woman was bad for the population in general.

</comment><comment><USER28> Are there any guarantees we are not going to repeat mistakes from dog breeding?

</comment><comment><USER29> Every human has 60000 mutations per day on average.

<comment><USER30> Those are in individual cells, and almost certainly all different, so they have little overall effect. This is something that (if it works correctly) affects every cell, in the same way. That's very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> the thing with ethical germline edits is that it implies recording all future progress of the edit.

ie continued gene level surveillance for all progeny

</comment><comment><USER32> We let people breed with anyone they want to, and look at the reject rate on that.

</comment><comment><USER33> No shit.

</comment><comment><USER34> Not prohibited in China by ethics or legality.

<comment><USER35> "A team of investigators told the official Xinhua news agency on Monday that a preliminary investigation had concluded that He had "organised a project team that included foreign staff, which intentionally avoided surveillance and used technology of uncertain safety and effectiveness to perform human embryo gene- editing activity with the purpose of reproduction, which is officially banned in the country"."

[https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2182964/chin...](https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/2182964/china- confirms-gene-edited-babies-blames-scientist-he-jiankui)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> The article doesn't explain what the unintended mutations might be..?

<comment><USER37> Telekinesis, rapid regeneration, blue hair

<comment><USER38> We would favor _painless_ rapid regeneration, though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Unintended mutations happen all the time naturally. Some are beneficial, and some are harmful. This just speeds up the process a bit. Life has natural processes to error-correct, otherwise it would not have survived for millions of years.

<comment><USER40> Sure, but too many unintended mutations in too short of a time period and you end up with things like cancer or fatal congenital diseases. Gene editing with CRISPR is potentially increasing the mutation rate by orders of magnitude. Where is the line?</comment></comment>


Law Enforcement's "Warrior" Problem (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://harvardlawreview.org/2015/04/law-enforcements-warrior-problem/ <comment><USER2> I don't think the problem is a select few American police officers, I feel its too widespread to blame it on a few bad cops. Without to sound predudice I think the problem IS cultural.

It seems to be something related to American egos that is accelerated 1000x when moved into a position of authority like a police officer.

I'm in the UK, and yes we have our problems however it seems reasoning or social skills of our officers are night and day and reflect behaviour observed of society as a whole.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure it's entirely possible to dismiss cultural difference in the opposite direction, however. The Police Activity channel on YouTube has tons of unedited bodycam footage from officer-involved shootings and other events across America: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXMYxKMh3prxnM_4kYZuB3g)

I'd encourage you to watch the entire list of videos to get a sense for what policing is like in parts of America, and what circumstances lead to the use of deadly force. Some of them are difficult to watch, but it showcases both good and bad examples of how to handle extremely dangerous situations.

It's not an enviable job - the number of videos that start out as a routine traffic stop with the cop having amiable conversation, and then rapidly escalate to a situation where the suspect is pulling a gun on the officer, is truly mind-blowing.

<comment><USER4> The US has the highest gun ownership (1.2 per capita), double the country next on the list.

When police officers from Europe come to visit, the first thing that surprise them is how tense the police is. They are constantly in fear of getting shot.

Reducing civilian gun ownership would help a lot to reduce violence, cops and non cops alike.

<comment><USER5> > The US has the highest gun ownership (1.2 per capita), double the country > next on the list.

And, looking at the list [1], gun ownership does not seem to correlate highly with crimes involving guns. Honduras is #55 according to Wikipedia, Canada is #7. So why aren't Canadian cops constantly in fear for their life, but Hondurans are? It does not seem to be the number of guns.

It'll still be a nice thing, I guess. But it's hard to do and takes decades to have impact if you don't have a very compliant population.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country)

<comment><USER6> One issue is that in almost every other country, handgun ownership is much more restricted. A police officer is much less likely to be surprised by someone pulling out a hunting rifle or shotgun. You can't just carry one of those around in your glove compartment or in a concealed holster.

<comment><USER3> Those shootings almost _never_ involve CCW-holders. It's often people with prior felony convictions who own firearms illegally.

In Canada there are lots of gang members who carry illegal handguns. We just don't have the same degree of poverty as some parts of the US (even though our GDP/capita is significantly lower).

<comment><USER6> There are just less handguns in Canada period. The U.S. has roughly one handgun for every two people. In Canada it's about one handgun per 35 people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article misses the point. These types of "cultural" issues are important but secondary- the issue is that the police are breaking laws and getting away with it because of qualified immunity. They need to be held accountable, otherwise is the culture really going to change?

<comment><USER8> I disagree. The warrior culture of policing sets the baseline for all behaviour. Officers justify lawbreaking to one another out of solidarity. The belief that "it's a war out there and enemies can jump out at any moment" underlies the concept that the law is secondary to officer survival.

When you create a proper guardian police force, officers become friendly and respected community members; they become good neighbours. What then stops them from committing crimes against members of the public is the same thing that stops most family members from committing crimes against one another: a sense of belonging, investment, and care for a community. The best example of this style of policing that I can think of is the classic small town police in small town dramas or sitcoms like Corner Gas [1]. Notice how the police officers eat at the local diner which serves as a third place [2] for the community.

Of course, the disappearance of third places from American social life is another big factor in this complicated puzzle.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPrBAEqGwKE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPrBAEqGwKE)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place)

<comment><USER9> You are conflating TV with reality. In Minneapolis police just shot and killed a BBQ owner who had been feeding them for free for years.

<comment><USER10> _a BBQ owner who had been feeding them for free for years_

That's concerning, isn't it? There are federal and state statutes about bribery and gratuities, and the fact that police officers took him up on the offer day by day is worrying for many reasons. And at the end of the day it didn't even help him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think this is the key point:

> Sue Rahr, a former sheriff [...], put it this way: "We do our recruits no > favor if we train them to approach every situation as a war. To do so sets > them up to create unnecessary resistance and risk of injury."

If you treat everyone like they want to kill you, you telegraph that through your actions and mannerisms, and induce the very escalation you are worried about.

</comment><comment><USER12> There are a few issues. One thing that I don't see mentioned very often is that a police officer is actually very rarely _necessary._ But they are called in anyway. There is a kind of litigiousness to American culture. Two people mad at each other? "Watch me call the cops." Someone nodding off near the front door? Call the cops. Domestic dispute? Call the cops. The cops are not really useful in any of these situations and, because of all of the problems mentioned here, often escalate the situation and make things worse.

Cops frequently end up playing the role of social worker, mental health counselor, relationship mediator, addiction counselor... and with their incredibly violent and often racist attitudes the result is predictable.

I am glad that finally these issues are being addressed. They have been festering for decades.

<comment><USER9> Nothing wrong with having one number to call for help. The problem is when only one kind of responder responds. That happens because we have too many armed, bored police and too few of other kinds of social services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A major problem I see is the idea of only one kind of social adjustment role: the uniformed police officer.

There are situations where the warrior mindset are needed. We do need people who can deal with extremely dangerous situations involving lethal force.

However, many, many situations need social workers more than they need warriors. If anything the warrior could back up their unarmed counterpart.

Why aren't there other roles with different capabilities that work in concert with warriors?

I'm not sure it makes sense to only seek to retrain when probably a great share of existing police officers could be replaced with more effective counterparts with some of the same powers but completely different skills and assignments.

It is teams of skilled specialists that solve difficult problems, why do we have only one person to mend so much of society's challenging circumstances?

<comment><USER14> I've known a few officers and they usually refer to themselves as "social workers in uniform."

<comment><USER15> They don't know what "social worker" means then - social workers have the task of helping, not murdering, people. We should hold the cops to the standard they hold us: if there is not proof of innocence, or if they have the wrong pigmentation, or if they are near a citizen having a bad day, or the moon has a phase, its justified and heroic to fuck their life, no questions.

<comment><USER13> It's just not always like this. If this is all you've seen, or all you believe current police do, then you aren't seeing it all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It should be noted in the title that this piece is from 2015.

<comment><USER17> Given that, I'm curious to know if anything has changed in the last five years, or if the article still accurately describes police training today. I would guess that it does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Note that this is much more prevalent in the US than anywhere else.

Part of it might be gun prevalence, but the problem seems to be largely cultural to me. Police Unions abhorrent behavior entrench it, too.

<comment><USER19> Where besides the US do you see gang violence making cities deadlier than a warzone? The militarization of police seems to be a function of adapting to the job they're responsible for.

<comment><USER20> No, it's a fight fire with fire mentality that causes militarization. From a European perspective the lack of preventative measures could seem laughable if it wasn't so serious. Mental health for starters. Gun availability obviously too. Police here (OK, not all Police traditions do this here either) take deescalation training far more than gun training. There's a few case studies on French-Dutch comparisons in that regard that should be enlightening.

You don't need to win in a gunfight in order to win.

<comment><USER5> > From a European perspective

I don't think there is a European perspective. We haven't had anything close to the gang crime problem in the US in a long time, and when we did have it, guns weren't a thing.

It's obvious that there are lots of issues, but "look, we don't have them because we do X" doesn't work when we didn't have anything comparable in the first place. I'm certain that we would see _very_ different policies if London, Paris or Berlin had the murder rate of Chicago, and it wouldn't be "let's spend more money on mental health".

<comment><USER21> Gang crime is only one small piece of why the police in the US are the way they are.

It's not hard to find stories about police brutality and police corruption in areas far from any gang activity (small towns in the midwest, for instance). You can also find stories about police departments in similarly small towns that have been able to obtain serious military-grade equipment that they definitely don't need.

And even separate from all that, you have things like civil asset forfeiture, where the police think it's totally reasonable and OK to just steal people's stuff, without the people being even _suspected_ of any crime, and the law (in many places) allows it.

This is all part of a culture that tells cops they are above the law, they have the power, and everyone else just needs to bow down and accept that.

Then you combine that with the serious, organized efforts white supremacist groups have gone to over the years to essentially take control of the police force...

Yeah, the biggest "gang crime problem" here is the gang in blue.

<comment><USER5> > This is all part of a culture that tells cops they are above the law, they > have the power, and everyone else just needs to bow down and accept that.

Certainly, I agree with that. And the US culture is very different from European cultures (which is not a surprise, given how quickly the country changes and how young it is). Comparing it to Europe where we're sitting on a very different (and much more stable still) culture with very different traditions, a completely different approach to individualism vs collectivism etc, isn't helpful, and you won't get anywhere if you dismiss 99% of the difference and then say (yes, I'm exaggerating, and no, I don't mean you specifically but people who like to point to Europe in comparison) "well, clearly, it's because the citizens don't have guns and the police wear friendlier uniforms".

<comment><USER20> Its not very different, it just went overboard with parts of protestant ethics. And you can quite literally see the price of this. However, seeing and analyzing your own problems and wrong views is always harder than seeing others. Especially when you consider some of the ideas that lead to those outcomes as somehow fundamental cornerstones (right to guns for instance, but also the ethics of eye for an eye).

American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either, it just is favoring certain ethics that are counterproductive to a peaceful society. Reminds me of certain other fundamentalist places in the world. It of course makes sense it would turn out this way, many early settlers went across the Atlantic precisely to be able to practice their fundamentalist versions of protestantism. Some of that carries of into this I am sure.

Seriously, take up some literature on deescalation tactics for police, and in particular evidence based effectiveness of such methods in comparisionto other tactics.

<comment><USER5> > Its not very different, it just went overboard with parts of protestant > ethics.

That's a small part of it, yes. But mostly, it's very individualistic, and it's very different from European cultures in that regard which will obviously result in very large differences in results.

> American isn't changing faster or slower than any other place either

Errr, yes it is. The demographic make-up of America has been determined by waves of immigration, that changes culture. And it has been happening _much_ faster than in other places. You're rewriting history and I don't understand your motives.

<comment><USER20> You should read up on Protestantism in Europe. Netherlands in particular if you want to understand American Protestantism. So many settled east(ern Europe) as well as west. Those story don't get the same footlight as American ones, but if you dig a little, it's there. It's really not different.

Migration is similarly not exclusive to America. Tons happens in Europe too, we're humans after all! Moreover, country and language borders tend to create different spaces for local differentiation, which is something that is much rarer in the US due to the fact that Americans (almost) all speak English. It's no accident you will find most variance in places people do _not_ speak English (Cajun culture, Spanish-American culture) or a very different English (South<>North, poor neighborhoods/cities vs affluent areas).

Step outside of the Anglosphere!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Has anyone considered a PTSD epidemic among the LE community. These people are sent out day after day to possibly hostile situations. Usually it's not good news they come across due to the nature of the job. Some of them have likely seen colleagues be seriously injured or killed. As these protests have shown they face widespread hostility even when they haven't actually done anything themselves individually. Cross that with the usual mix of mental issues present in a population and it seems to me like you have a situation where people forced to the edge snap. Like other roles in society they can't complain about what's wrong with them or they risk losing their careers and family's financial security. Empathy cuts both ways, yes government injustice isn't right but if we don't understand people's circumstances we blind ourselves to a possible solution.

<comment><USER23> As much as I see the present situation as intolerable and inexcusable, I suspect chronic stress likely plays a role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Very good, adult take. Calm, balanced, and not anti-police.

<comment><USER25> Don't dismiss people being angry and upset at police right now like this. It's extremely disrespectful towards the very real problems they face.

<comment><USER26> I'm not seeing anything dismissive in OP's remark. Opposing police brutality is not the same thing as being anti-police.

<comment><USER23> In context with earlier comments, it's a credible interpretation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23412122)

<comment><USER24> Yes, I am pro-police, and anti-looting. That categorically doesn't mean what you think it means though. I support racial justice. I support police reform, demilitarization, and pushing back against police unions. I think unjustified police brutality, like in the case of George Floyd, should be prosecuted, and it undermines the respect many people have for the police profession. This respect is a _requirement_ for the police to be effective. I also think Chauvin should have been fired in disgrace years ago.

My suggestion was in regards to the rather extreme and unjustified comments the public officials were making (and continue to make) towards the police. I hope it is obvious to everyone that without police NYC will be utterly fucked within 24 hours. I stand by those suggestions. If push comes to shove they should go on strike. The vast majority of them are good men and women, and they deserve to be respected.

In other words, I'm not 15 years old, I see nuance, and I want some real, lasting solutions to these issues. Sue me.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Neural text to speech with dozens of celebrity voices - <AUTHOR> http://vocodes.com <comment><AUTHOR> I've built a lot of celebrity text to speech models and host them online:

[https://vo.codes](https://vo.codes)

It has celebrities like Sir David Attenborough and Arnold Schwarzenegger, a bunch of the presidents, and also some engineers: PG, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg

I'm not far away from a working "real time" [1] voice conversion (VC) system. This turns a source voice into a target voice. The most difficult part is getting it to generalize to new, unheard speakers. I haven't recorded my progress recently, but here are some old rudimentary results that make my voice sound slightly like Trump [2]. If you know what my voice sounds like and you kind of squint at it a little, the results are pretty neat. I'll try to publish newer stuff soon, and that all sounds much better.

I was just about to submit all of this to HN (on "new").

Edit: well, my post [3] didn't make it (it fell to the second page of new). But I'll be happy to answer questions here.

[1] It has about ~1500ms of lag, but I think it can be improved.

[2] [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgnq09YjX6pYwf4ubFYHukDafxP...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vgnq09YjX6pYwf4ubFYHukDafxPNeEpH/view?usp=sharing)

[3] I'm only linking this because it failed to reach popularity. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965787](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965787)

<comment><USER2> What is the reason for them being almost all men?

<comment><USER3> It's extremely hard to get women's voices to sound right in TTS, at least back when I was working on it. It was a striking difference, and I'm not sure why.

e.g. I tried to do an Alyx version of [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koU3L7WBz_s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koU3L7WBz_s) but it came out sounding nothing like her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> On a more positive side to this technology.

I've been wondering about the possibility of using this sort of tech (or the API offerings from Azure or GCP) to provide voice overs in video games.

By that I mean for smaller budget Indie development, it would be certainly interesting to either be able to generate voice audio from transcripts in order to add voices to background NPCs and so on (or even the possibility of doing it at run time to produce much more dynamic worlds).

I guess the biggest blocker is the difficulty in conveying emotion with what is currently available as well as the difficulty in getting pronunciation correct (especially with nouns).

<comment><AUTHOR> There are half a dozen startups in this space that provide the tech. They use embedded style tokens or sliders to change the emotion, pitch, timbre, etc. I don't have links off hand, but they're not too difficult to find.

These companies tend to focus on off-the-shelf turnkey solutions, so they'll have a suite of a few voice actors to choose from for different character archetypes.

<comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, are there legal concerns?

E.g. training off Schwarzenegger and offering an Arnold transform

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not a lawyer, but I think we're entering into a legal gray area. There are the existing frameworks of copyright, parody, free speech, slander, libel, etc. that are all somewhat tangential to this.

I believe (I'm not certain) that celebrity voice _impersonation_ is legal as long as it is not used to sell or endorse a product.

Most models are trained on the original speaker's voice, but maybe only a little bit. Models might incorporate learning from many speakers. We might even be able to boil down a speaker representation to a small vector encoding in the future. It'll be interesting if we can capture the representation of a person with just a few numbers.

I don't think the legislature should be overly protective against machine learning. It seems obvious to me that neural networks will play a huge role in creating entirely virtual musicians and influencers. We're already seeing this start to happen. r9y9 on github has published some models that rival Vocaloid in lyrical ability.

At the same time, we don't want these techniques used to commit fraud, slander, or have them be used to falsely accuse someone of committing some act. These are things we might need new legal protections for.

But I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm not a lawyer.

<comment><USER5> I asked not because I expected an answer, but because I figured you'd have an insightful opinion.

It's essentially the performance of a composition vs the composition question again: at what point am I mimicking someone to the extent they have a valid claim on a portion of my work?

I expect it'll enter the courts a few milliseconds after someone clones a dead actor (without their estate's permission) for a new performance.

There's always been an inherent tension in the US distinction between a law of nature and a creative work though. It seems a bit silly for me to claim patent / trademark on a vector that encodes my likeness.

<comment><USER6> I suspect there's some plausible deniability built-in that might allow for such matters to be legal.

For example, lots of people sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. So if you trained a model with tall, deep-voiced Austrian man, you could probably get something that people will immediately associate with Arnold without actually being his voice, or someone emulating him. Because much of what Americans associate with his voice is really a regional accent which is relatively uncommon in the US.

There may be a little bit more difficulty getting away with with someone like Gilbert Gottfried, whose voice is much more unique. But I do think you could get away with creating a voice that people _think_ sounds just like him, but doesn't hold up in a side-by-side comparison.

What I think will happen is celebrities like Morgan Freeman will use their voice to train models like this, then gift these to their estates for use in the future.

<comment><USER7> > So if you trained a model with tall, deep-voiced Austrian man, you could > probably get something that people will immediately associate with Arnold > without actually being his voice, or someone emulating him. //

I think "passing off", an unregistered element of trademark laws, may be pertinent here. If the public think that there's an association and you're knowingly trading on that, even if the public are wrong, then you can be 'passing off' your output as someone else's goods/services/[vocal renditions].

It's likely you'd have to be very careful about use of copyright material for training the voice (eg extracting metrics that describe the voice). Fair Use might apply in USA though (even commercially).

 _IANAL, this is not legal advice._

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oh jeeze. I had to. Switch it to Bill Gates and pop this in:

> I'm going to steal your soul. One injection at a time. Slowly, over the > course of the next decade, the entire essence of your being will be > demolished until your body is nothing but a vessel for my command.

<comment><USER9> It's pretty childish, but it was quite satisfying to hear George Bush confess to being a war criminal too!

<comment><USER8> It'd be irresponsible not to be childish with this thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> That's super cool.

I am worried about the potential abuse of this service, are there any existing services that can help to identify audio deep fakes like this one is for making them?

Found Resemblyzer: [https://github.com/resemble- ai/Resemblyzer](https://github.com/resemble-ai/Resemblyzer)

<comment><USER11> Such a system will always suffer from false positives and false negatives.

On a more positive note, when deepfakes become a problem, we will see the emergence of a culture where unsigned authoritative content is not paid any attention.

<comment><USER12> _> we will see the emergence of a culture where unsigned authoritative content is not paid any attention_

If current events are any indication, that culture will only emerge 30 years after the tech becomes widely usable, and in the interim will lead to absolute chaos in the form of weaponized disinformation.

<comment><USER13> It could be built into Youtube or twitter to pop up a little "this could be a fake voice" banner

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is my pandemic side project, and I'll be happy to answer any questions about it.

<comment><USER14> After some experiments with playing text to people around me, we decided that a huge factor in the perceptive quality of the voice comes from knowing who you are listening to before you get to listen, with the best perceived quality when the listener actually gets to see the picture of the voice's owner. Was it a deliberate choice to add those photographs for this reason?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Guess the server is overloaded now. All I'm seeing are errors.

Tip: It's a cool idea to put some ready made samples under the photos. A lot of people like myself only want to hear some demos and pre saved mp3 samples are more than sufficient for that sort of thing. It will also help reduce your server loads.

</comment><comment><USER16> I think you're going to have legal risks with a project like this. At some point a celebrity is going to sue and we'll find out what the law decides.

</comment><comment><USER17> I was wondering, wouldn't it be possible to classify the voice of every celebrity based on moods so one could make the voices less monotonic? So one could then add text metadata for the text-to-speech conversion, e.g. "[Angry] I have a dream, [Calm] but it has a patent so you can't copy it! (laughter) [Calm-fade-to-angry] In reality insomnia took it from me!"

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. These are called "style tokens" and they're an active area of TTS research.

The problem is that currently your training data has to be annotated with these tokens, and that adds a lot to the difficulty of creating data sets.

I imagine that over time this will get much easier to do.

<comment><USER6> Are there good emotion detectors for speech-to-text? Much like they have for facial recognition?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not aware of any, and I haven't had much time to look as I'm not to the point of doing style tokens yet. I'm certain this would be useful for annotating data and for all sorts of other applications. Sentiment analysis, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I skimmed your about, where you mention it as a hobby demo of your deep work.

Do you have a GitHub or technical documentation about how you build this sort of thing to work at scale?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can make a blog post later, but at a high level:

A rust TTS server hosts two models: a mel inference model and a mel inversion model. The ones I'm using are glow-tts and melgan. They fit together back to back in a pipeline.

I chose these models not for their fidelity, but for their performance. They're 10x faster at inference than Tacotron 2. If you want something that sounds amazing, you're better off with a denser set of networks, like Tacotron 2 + WaveGlow. You should use these for achieving superior offline results for multimedia purposes.

Instead of using graphemes, I'm using ARPABET phonemes, and I get these from a lookup table called "CMUdict" from Carnegie Mellon. In the future I'll supplement this with a model that predicts phonemes for missing entries.

Each TTS server only hosts one or two voices due to memory constraints. These models are huge. This fleet is scaled horizontally. A proxy server sits in front and decodes the request and directs it to the appropriate backend based on a ConfigMap that associates a service with the underlying model. Kubernetes is used to wire all of this up.

<comment><USER19> This is incredibly cool. Do you mind sharing how big the models are, and what kind of instances you're deploying them on?

I ask because I help maintain an open source ML infra project ( [https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex](https://github.com/cortexlabs/cortex) ) and we've recently done a lot of work around autoscaling multi-model endpoints. Always curious to see how others are approaching this.

<comment><AUTHOR> glow-tts:

        total 4.2G
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_alan-rickman_ljstx_2020.07.22_expr-1_chkpt-4765.torchjit
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_anderson_cooper_ljstx_2020.07.21_expr-1_chkpt-6622.torchjit
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_arnold_schwarzenegger_ljstx_2020.07.16_expr-2_chkpt-9045.torchjit
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_barack_obama_ljstx_2020.06.28_expr-1_chkpt-1729.torchjit
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_ben-stein_ljstx_2020.07.21_expr-1_chkpt-7516.torchjit
        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 110M glow-tts_betty_white_ljstx_2020.06.28_expr-1_chkpt-1666.torchjit
        ...

melgan:

        -rw-r--r-- 1 bt bt 17M melgan_manyvoice5.0_2020-07-23_12d5838_10760.torchjit

(All the voices use the same melgan, or derivations of it.)

I'll edit my post later with my deployment and cluster architecture. In short, it's sharded and proxied from a thin microservice at the top of the stack. I'll probably introduce a job queue soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd love to have an option for Majel Barrett

<comment><USER21> I was going to mention the same. It would be a childhood dream come true to talk to my computer and have it talk back to me in the TNG computer voice.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fantastic suggestion! I'll get to it!

<comment><USER22> Semi-serious follow-on question- would your model be able to produce voices like GladOS, which are highly processed, but in a consistent manner? Or are there too many assumptions baked in regarding normal human speech?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Can you comment a bit on the tech on this? I tried something similar with songs: I wanted artists X to sing a song from artist Y. I cleaned the voices, the audios, but the transfe rjust didnt work. I didnt do any annotations on the text (it shouldnt be that hard since all lyrics are available), but if you could recommend a path or maybe an open source project I be grateful. Thanks and great work by the way!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

There are a lot of neat research threads ongoing in terms of generating vocals.

Nvidia published Mellotron (code + paper + models), and the results are promising:

[https://github.com/NVIDIA/mellotron](https://github.com/NVIDIA/mellotron)

[https://nv-adlr.github.io/Mellotron](https://nv-adlr.github.io/Mellotron)

The best results I've seen are from researcher Ryuichi Yamamoto (r9y9 on Github). He continually publishes astonishing results and novel architectures:

[https://github.com/r9y9](https://github.com/r9y9)

[https://github.com/r9y9/nnsvs](https://github.com/r9y9/nnsvs)

[https://soundcloud.com/r9y9/sets/dnn-based-singing- voice](https://soundcloud.com/r9y9/sets/dnn-based-singing-voice)

These results lead me to believe he's going to have a replacement for Vocaloid soon.

There's lots more stuff out there, and I can come back and edit my post later.

Some folks are getting good results by simply combining Tacotron with autotune:

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qR8I5zlMHs) Mister Rogers sings Beautiful World (amazing, super charming, and shows the promise of this tech)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1jrDgbRs9Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1jrDgbRs9Q) (Tupac, possibly NSFW lyrics)

\- [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW16_W0K3qU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW16_W0K3qU) (Tupac with various results, possibly NSFW)

There's a lot that gets posted to /r/VocalSynthesis and occasionally /r/MediaSynthesis

<comment><USER23> Thank you very much, I will look at them!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My bill gates input

"My name is Bill, the lord of computers. I love computers, and they love me too. I'll give you a computer, maybe one, maybe two. If you are lucky it might not even crash on you. Love your computer, like your daughter or your wife, treat it with kindness, and it will reward you for life! I am bill the god of computers. Bow to me now or I will be sod you."

</comment><comment><USER25> I definitely need this. Looks like I have to wait until you are off the front page of HN though.

I am a writer and found that the best editing comes when I am reviewing audio files of my books from voice talent. Of course, then it is way to late to change anything. With a tool like this I can revise as much as I want!

</comment><comment><USER26> You haven't done very many female voices. Is this a limitation of the modeling process?

</comment><comment><USER27> This is great. I've been thinking about doing something similar with cartoon characters to build a Disney-style companion for my son as he gets older. I'm imagining something like an Alexa assistant but with Mickey Mouse's voice.

<comment><USER7> I know caselaw isn't settled at all on all this but I'd absolutely avoid posting anything on the web mentioning D' and the black and white mouse again unless you are interested in finding out firsthand how the law gets settled here ;o).

Not legal advice, of course.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Very cool, and easy to use!

Can you give some more info on how you generated the models? I'm also interested in the tech stack you're using to implement this webapp... Would love some details!

..What's next?

<comment><USER29> > What's next?

Text To Video webapp that renders text to video + voice synchronised of famous people.

Who wouldn't like to laugh 5X more when social scrolling?

The first platform that enables creators with the ability to produce deep fakes of celebs from text that they can broadcast as HQ video content to their audience will kill both Youtube & Instagram.

Ranking based on likes so the best jokes of the day are trending on top of the feed.

Recommendation engine with a multibandid ML algo from the start so you can leverage all that incoming data.

<comment><USER28> Awesome. here come the 'deepMemes'!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I assume that if somebody had physically lost their ability to speak, it would now be possible to generate a pretty reasonable synthetic voice. Should we all be archiving a high-quality voice sample as insurance?

The implications for security are huge. If your friend calls you up for a very quick chat from an unknown number and asks you to remind them of your address, are you going to ask for authentication to prove it's really them and not a convincing synthetic voice?

</comment><comment><USER31> This could make video games take up so much less space and have much more robust speech, especially from NPCs.

Subreddit simulator is pretty convincing conversations, putting that to high quality voices? mannnn, so many good applications.

Speaking of which, why don't people just talk about the good applications. You'll get ostracized for speculating more bad things about COVID, but talk about how doomed we potentially are with deep fakes? Give that blogger a pulitzer prize!

<comment><AUTHOR> > This could make video games take up so much less space and have much more > robust speech, especially from NPCs.

Maybe, maybe not. You'll see some of the model sizes I posted in comments above. These are quite large, and adding models for multiple speakers gets quite large. These have to live in memory and probably can't be paged in selectively.

Once we achieve high fidelity multi-speaker embedding models (where multiple speakers are encoded in a singular model), then we'll have something compelling. I imagine the models will become less dense over time as well.

Furthermore, if the models are deterministic, then the designers will know what each line will sound like exactly before it's produced.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I keep getting hit with the rate limiter so I wasn't able to try it :(

> There was an error and I still haven't implemented retry to make it > invisible. You can absolutely submit your request again a few times; this is > a self-healing Kubernetes cluster. Some models (voices) get more load than > others and/or are scaled to fewer or more pods. There's also a rate limiter, > but there aren't error messages yet.

</comment><comment><USER33> Nice work, I love this sort of stuff!

I know there's legal (and perhaps ethical?) issues to work out, but I really wish tech like this, if fine-tuned, could be used to resurrect stuff like Jim Henson's original Kermit voice; the Muppets' new voices all sound horrible. I'd love for fictional character voices to become immortal.

</comment><comment><USER34> I think the site's being hugged to death by HN. I can't get any of the voices to work, they all error out.

</comment><comment><USER35> Having met some of the people on there, this is uncannily accurate, especially in the High Quality voices. Well done!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is good fun. I went with "Meanwhile, the young males form groups and compete in trials of strength and courage in an attempt to catch the attention of herding females" and surprisingly Richard Nixon sounds just as good saying this as David Attenborough

</comment><comment><USER37> Gilbert Godfrey sounds like "Bonzi Buddy" from the old desktop widget days... Those were some crazy times

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BonziBuddy)

</comment><comment><USER38> It doesn't like spelling mistakes.

Ask it to say " The Aristoocrats!" with Gilbert Goddfried.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's currently sourcing phonemes from a lookup table called CMUdict, which is constructed by Carnegie Mellon [1]. That database has 140,000 entries, but even so, you'd be surprised how many common words are omitted. And of course it is missing terms for things like "pokemon" and "fortnite", which I had to add myself.

I don't have generic grapheme -> phoneme/polyphone prediction, but that's something I look to add soon. In my literature review I didn't see anything in this space, so I was thinking I might have to come up with something novel.

[1] [http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi- bin/cmudict](http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict)

<comment><USER13> Espeak-ng also has extensive language rules to turn things like letter and abbreviations into pronounceable text [https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak- ng/blob/master/dictsourc...](https://github.com/espeak-ng/espeak- ng/blob/master/dictsource/en_list) you can get it's ipa output with "speak-ng -q --ipa=3"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> If I supply you with isolated Robert Plant vocals and transcripts, would you consider training a model? That could be some 'interesting' output results with the dynamics and range of his singing.

</comment><comment> j-james For something with a similar concept, but entirely different execution, see the classic website "Talk Obama To Me".

[http://talkobamato.me](http://talkobamato.me)

</comment><comment><USER40> I just want to hear Douglas Rain's voice coming out of my computer.

</comment><comment><USER41> Whats a good open source solution for Text to speech?

Current cloud based solutions from AWS/Google Cloud/Azure are pretty expensive.

</comment><comment><USER42> Is there a reason why no female voice is available in this great project?

Do we have more data on male speech than female speech?

<comment><USER43> What iconic female voices would you add?

<comment><USER44> > What iconic female voices would you add?

Cate Blanchett, Sarah Silverman, Katey Sagal, Jennifer Tilly, Laura Prepon, Viola Davis, Judi Dench, Whoopi Goldberg, Julie Andrews, Lake Bell, Jane Lynch, Joan Rivers, Martha Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Sarah Vowell, Shoreh Aghdashloo...

<comment><USER45> Whoopi and Joan Rivers are the only two from that list that I actually know what they sound like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is this ethical?

<comment><USER47> I too expected more discussion of this. People play around with these things because they're interesting, then mostly hand wave away concerns about the implications with "well, people will just have to learn to be skeptical of recordings". But what we're really doing is muddying a previously reliable avenue of gaining quality evidence about the world. I expect this opinion is unpopular on HN but I think people shouldn't be developing these things, companies shouldn't be working on them, and they should be banned before they get to the point of causing real harm. I also believe that _can_ be prevented by drying up funding and research, because bad actors have to rely on the body of existing work to make their bad actions practical.

<comment><USER48> As NN models get more advanced generating speech synthesis will get progressively more convincing and less expensive to implement, even if the models aren't built for speech synthesis specifically. The same can be said for image generation/transformation. If we are to continue develop AI then this is likely inevitable. There are benefits to these models for mute people, for example. Adversarial models can be built to detect fake audio samples. Regulation (ex: adding tells/signatures in commercial products) would also help. The government would have to ban most AI research or they would only be prolonging the inevitable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Looks awesome, but haven't been able to get a result back yet. I think you may be getting hugged to death :)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's odd. I'm testing it right now and it's working. Which voices are you trying, and which device and browser are you using?

<comment><USER50> I've tried Gilbert Gottfried and NDT. I do get a console error about CORS: > Access to fetch at '[https://mumble.stream/speak_spectrogram'](https://mumble.stream/speak_spectrogram') from origin '[https://vo.codes'](https://vo.codes') has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.

Using Chrome stable

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh man, I thought I had this CORS stuff sorted.

Thanks for the help and info!

I'm using version 84.0.4147.89 (Official Build) (64-bit) and getting back responses.

I got the following response headers:

      access-control-allow-origin: https://vo.codes
      content-length: 151689
      content-type: application/json
      date: Mon, 27 Jul 2020 15:55:37 GMT
      vary: Origin
      x-backend-hostname: tts-group-1-965d444f5-7kvkm

I'll try to dump the cache and reproduce.

edit: I must have an old browser. It works everywhere I'm testing it. CORS is hard. :(

<comment><USER49> I'm also on Chrome (84) macOS, using the Craig Ferguson model.

I switched to Safari and Disabled CORS, but a 500 error is coming back now. So maybe the 500 response is the root cause, and the error handler is not returning CORS headers, masking the issue on Chrome.

Edit: by putting in a shorter input (sentence rather than paragraph) I was able to get a response.

<comment><AUTHOR> I need better error messages, but I believe it should respond with something stating the length is too long.

What might've happened is that the instance your request was farmed out to might have been OOM killed. I've provided lots of memory, but these models are pretty massive and each inference run has to spin up a lot of matrices in memory.

This is all CPU inference, not GPU.

When the pods get OOM killed, they spin up again. The clusters for each speaker are about 5-10 pods apiece (with some double tenancy).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Played with the gilbert gottfried speaker option, gave me serious Twin Peaks "Red Room" vibes.

</comment><comment><USER52> Wondering whether there is an androgynous TTS voice that sounds neither male nor female.

</comment><comment><USER53> Please add Steve Jobs. I miss him

</comment><comment><USER54> Apparently alone in the world, I really want a Dalek voice.

</comment><comment><USER55> How long does it take to generate a good quality voice?

<comment><AUTHOR> I trained a base model on the Linda Johnson speech (LJS) data set for several days.

I then transfer learned for each of these speakers. Some speakers have as little as 40 minutes of data, others have up to five hours. The resulting quality isn't strictly a function of the amount of training data, though more typically helps. It's also important to have high fidelity text transcriptions free of errors.

The transfer learning runs vary between six hours and thirty six hours.

I'm using 8xV100 instances to train glow-tts and 2x1080Ti to train melgan. I'm continuously training melgan in the background and simply adding more training data. The same model works for all speakers.

<comment><USER56> Have you had any success with using speaker embeddings to generate voices with fewer samples of speech? I did some cursory experiments but I couldn't get too far beyond getting pitch similar to the target speaker.

My reasoning for this approach: IMO, if the model learns a "universal human voice", it shouldn't need too much additional information to get a target voice.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did! I tried creating a multi-speaker embedding model for practical concerns: saving on memory costs. I'm going to have to add additional layers, because it didn't fit individual speakers very well. I wish I'd saved audio results to share. I might be able to publish my findings if I look around for the model files.

I think you're right in that if we can get such a model to work, training new embeddings won't require much data.

<comment><USER44> Hmm. Would a multi-speaker model be able to interpolate between voices (eg. halfway between Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones)?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Well, there goes the neighborhood...

</comment><comment><USER58> who owns the likeness of a voice? anyone? are these legally safe to use in a product?

</comment><comment><USER59> Did you use machine learning ?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, forks of two open source pytorch models.

[https://github.com/jaywalnut310/glow- tts](https://github.com/jaywalnut310/glow-tts)

[https://github.com/seungwonpark/melgan](https://github.com/seungwonpark/melgan)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Needs more Christopher Walken

<comment><AUTHOR> I both love your HN username (I hope you don't troll dang), and think that's an awesome suggestion. I don't know why it didn't occur to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> i can't be there only one wondering where is Morgan Freeman? :')

</comment><comment><USER61> WOW!!! :)

</comment><comment><USER62> really impressed by this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I kind of want pg to see :)

If he thinks this is egregious, I'll take it down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> well done.

</comment><comment><USER64> hiii

</comment><comment><USER65> Hate to be that guy but I can't participate in this discussion due to javascript being required for the landing page.

As an outlier not running javascript, I'm reaping what I sow, but it would be nice to me and others in the same boat if projects make their landing page viewable without the need for javascript.

<comment><USER66> There's a text area and a button to say what you typed.

Surely you can enable or use a browser with JavaScript when you choose to?

<comment><USER65> If you don't have javascript you see only "This page requires Javascript", when I would hope, even if the thing requires javascript to operate, I could at least find out if it is worth switching to another machine with X11 and firing up firefox.</comment></comment></comment>


Self.HackerNews - Just wanted to say thanks - <AUTHOR>

One of my projects - a website I run that provides free content and more in depth paid content recently had a redesign were I took a lot of inspiration from articles I have found on Hacker News.
The design went live almost a week ago and memberships are way up, it is averaging out as an increase of around 300% per day, and although it is too early to say for sure, the churn rate seems to be down as well.
This means almost an extra £40 per day income after expenses and tax with less work than I was doing before.
So listen guys - thanks! <comment><USER2> Good work tosbourn! Like f3r3nc, I would also like to read more about your process on redesigning it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Grats! Would you mind sharing the site itself, maybe along with how it looked and how it looks now?

</comment><comment><USER4> Congratulations! As both f3r3nc and mforsberg, I too am interested in your redesign process ^_^

</comment><comment><USER5> Good stuff :)</comment>


IFlowReader, Apple doesn't owe you shit. Stop whining. - <AUTHOR> http://moneymachinefactory.org/blog/iflowreader-apple-doesnt-owe-you-shit-stop-whining/

<comment><USER2> I can't agree more! My biz model changed 5 times during the past 2 years. It's the internet baby, quick to adapt or die!</comment>


Source Maps Are an Insufficient Debugging Format for the Web - <AUTHOR> http://fitzgeraldnick.com/weblog/62/ <comment><USER2> We do need a good way to inspect the JavaScript heap when it contains data structures from non-JavaScript languages. However, I'm not convinced this should be represented as data. It seems better to represent it as a reflection API that's implemented as a JavaScript library provided by the compiler. The debugger can load the javascript file into the web page when needed, and it can use whatever data format it likes.

Chrome is working on a way to this [1]. However, it's not done yet, and it needs to be be turned into a real standard. It's also not likely to work well for asm/wasm as-is.

New standards are important but we also need to properly implement the standards we already have. Sourcemaps have been around for years but they're not fully implemented by most browsers that claim to support it. (Firefox sourcemaps didn't work well when I tried it in January, though some bugs have been fixed since then.) I think someone needs to write something like the Acid tests [2] for browser debuggers.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FTascZXT9cxfetuPRT2eXPQK...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FTascZXT9cxfetuPRT2eXPQKXui4nWFivUnS_335T3U/edit#heading=h.xuvxhsd2bp05)

[2] [http://www.acidtests.org/](http://www.acidtests.org/)

<comment><USER3> Reflecting over JavaScript objects isn't going to allow you to reconstruct the original source structures from a non-trivial transpilation. Any case where there isn't a 1:1 mapping won't work.

The Chrome feature you link to deals with custom formatting of JavaScript objects, which is not the same thing. For example, what happens when two JS objects map to one object in the source language? The browser requires knowledge of the source language to handle that. Also dumping objects is very different from inspecting the scope tree - the latter requires knowledge of the current stack frame, closures, etc. which are only available to the debugger.

<comment><USER2> I agree that inspecting the stack is different than inspecting the heap; the Chrome proposal doesn't cover that. But we could come up with a similar API allowing the debugger to pass in a representation of the JavaScript stack to a stack deobfuscator and get back a language-specific representation of the stack for display; it's basically the same thing. (A complication: when a program is written in multiple languages that call each other, we need to figure out which language each portion of the stack belongs to.) Stack frames are often not one-to-one either due to inlining and variable reuse, but for a given stack frame and a given location in the source code, there will be some interpretation of the JavaScript stack frame that makes sense.

The idea is that the reflection library has all the language-specific knowledge baked in, because a compiler generates a different .js file containing debugging information for each program, just as it generates a source map today.

More generally, any information sent as a data file can just as easily be sent as a JavaScript file if we can come up with a suitable API. A data format will in general be less flexible than one that includes the possibility of running code.

<comment><USER3> Scopes are tree-shaped, what more flexibility do you need? Do you have a reason to believe that DWARF, which has stood the test of time, is somehow lacking in this regard? Don't forget that unnecessary flexibility is really just needless complexity. As the article says, the final mapping from a debugger entry to a value can be performed using JavaScript in order to have flexibility where it is actually needed.

Any API which inspects the stack is (obviously) going to have to run in a separate thread/stack which then means you won't be able to use plain JavaScript to retrieve in-scope object values, as in the article. Instead you'll have to introduce an API which provides a means to reflect over the other thread/stack's scope tree - so the "less flexible" scope tree will simply be baked in to your (by this point very complex) API.

<comment><USER2> I'm not that familiar with DWARF, but its support for languages that aren't C seems to be limited. Go apparently emits DWARF information [1] but it's regarded as a language that doesn't have good debugger support - for example, see [2]. Apparently Haskell (ghc) has some support but it's pretty limited? [3]

It's not used at all for Hotspot, V8, or Dart. The way these languages work is that they have a debugger protocol that allows the debugger to connect to the runtime system. That isn't so far from providing a debugging library written in JavaScript.

So I think if DWARF can work, it needs to be proven.

[1] [http://blog.golang.org/debugging-go-code-status- report](http://blog.golang.org/debugging-go-code-status-report) [2] [http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2h57hf/trouble_debug...](http://www.reddit.com/r/golang/comments/2h57hf/trouble_debugging_go_program_with_gdb/) [3] [https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DWARF](https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DWARF)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> fyi, the author of this post is the lead developer of mozilla/source-map, the defacto SourceMap library.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm fairly new to the web-development, and on my new job I've been tasked to use java (new to me) with gwt (just knew the name) which is translated to javascript (yes, not enough experience there).

Now SourceMaps and Chrome/Firefox debugging tools are great savers. I wish Eclipse had better debugging (actually it seems it has, since it's also new to me, the curve for learning it is much steeper - I'm an ex - Visual Studio Debugger guy :)).

But even with SourceMaps gwt translated (from java->javascript) names do not always match - often _g or _0 _$ are added, and object properties are intermixed with original java defined ones, and some internal - I'm used to it now, but was wondering whether it would've been better if it work ideally (e.g. show real Java "view" of the things even from the "Javascript" land). While this might've been the right choice, what I have now gives me more usable information.

What doesn't work always, is that sometimes the debugger would display the javascript, not java code (maybe gwt's fault, or something I do incorrectly with gwt's SuperDevMode )

I wish there is an option (for gwt, and other languages) to somehow show the transition, and allows intermixing when displaying. To give you an example - When debugging "C/C++" code most of the debuggers can intermix the assembly generated code in there... I'm not sure whether this would be as good as intermixing java and javascript (or say another language with javascript) because they look very similar, but at least to allow me to sometimes see the javascript, rather than always show me the java code (it's possible that this is already available, and I haven't found it yet).

</comment><comment><USER5> "We can embed snippets of JavaScript within the debugging data to locate a binding's value." \- I see this as a security risk, but then again so much code is executed by the browser so it probably is okay.

<comment><USER6> It would be executing in the same tab as the javascript that the user is debugging, so it's no different than the javascript on the page in the first place.</comment></comment>