In 1993 I worked with some of the world’s best OCR scanners and various text to speech systems, as a volunteer in a program to help blind graduate students.

By 1997 I was deploying industry leading speech to text at a major clinical and research hospital….

The technology and subject matter has been familiar to me for three decades, particularly the pace of development and change.

The Verge, for example, clearly explained in 2016 that fake generative speech was not yet realistic.

Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence has produced what could be some of the most realistic-sounding machine speech yet…although it was less convincing than actual human speech. […] WaveNet isn’t going to be showing up in something like Google Assistant right now — its step-by-step processing system requires a comparatively huge amount of computing power.

More to the point, the initial paper outlining the technology was only published in September of 2016.

Adobe infamously in 2016 did a gimmicky demo of voice-editing “Soundshop” (e.g. Photoshop for sound) and it was very unconvincing.

At a live demo in San Diego on Thursday, Adobe took a digitised recording of a man saying “and I kissed my dogs and my wife” and changed it to say “and I kissed Jordan three times”.

Obviously reducing signal quality is like using a smudge tool on a photo. If your finger pushes color pixels enough, a digital image of a brown cow might be made to look instead like a very blurry mud puddle, yet that is not true generative photography let alone speech.

The Adobe product news in fact admitted a large gap between their stunt and reality:

…a spokeswoman stressed that this did not mean its release was imminent. “[It] may or may not be released as a product or product feature,” she told the BBC. “No ship date has been announced.”

Adobe basically announced software for autotune, which was like announcing nothing at all.

To be fair, the main stage stunt inspired further research such as more Google papers (e.g. Tacotron) and a Masters Degree thesis in 2019, which clearly states the state of things expected in 2020.

Recent advances in deep learning have shown impressive results in the domain of text-to-speech. To this end, a deep neural network is usually trained using a corpus of several hours of professionally recorded speech from a single speaker. Giving a new voice to such a model is highly expensive, as it requires recording a new dataset and retraining the model.

Thus it was around 2020 when quality and performance improved noticably. However, researchers still referenced expensive compute power and at least 50 hours of sample audio from a targeted speaker for proper fidelity.

All this goes to show 2016 definitely was not yet a time for fake speech with a target voice to be easily generated. The mass popularization of fake speech came later with attention-seeking projects like 15.ai.

Now that we have context and history set, take note of how the pathological liar Elon Musk is now making absurd claims about voice in court.

A plaintiff was set to depose Elon Musk regarding his very infamous comments in 2016 like this one:

A Model S and Model X, at this point, can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person. Right now.

Or the many written ones like these two statements fraudulently pushing people in 2016 to trust Autopilot as crash avoidance (an obvious and dangerous lie):

Despite overwhelming proof to the contrary, Musk had his lawyers argue that he should not be deposed because (1) he doesn’t have a very good memory and (2) he “like many public figures, is the subject of many ‘deepfake’ videos and audio recordings that purport to show him saying and doing things he never actually said or did.”

If you ever wondered why Musk uses an X in all his companies, this is it.

The amorphous, undefined, irresponsible X signifies a shallow childish vision of always being able to avoid shame, blame and accountability.

I really didn’t need to prove that the technical voice capabilities actually did not exist in 2016. I did it only because it is so easy to prove Musk a liar.

Musk makes false claims about technology capabilities, over and over and over again. In this case his false claims in 2016 are meant to be covered up with him making false claims in 2023.

In other words, we knew in 2016 he was completely divorced from reality and there are copious examples of him overpromising and underdelivering safety features.

When Musk said in various ways in 2016 that his car was safer than a human, I started a presentation series right then explaining how that was not true. I gave a keynote at a security conference on it.

Musk did not at any point contradict, or in any way indicate that he disagreed with, his ongoing VERY INFAMOUS widespread statements about Tesla safety attributed to him. Over and over he said outlandish and dangerously irresponsible things about Tesla.

I noticed and tracked the clear dangers to society because I was always waiting on him to stop misrepresenting safety, to become responsible.

Obviously, just like his cars, he only learns how to be worse.

Whether you look at the reign of a Tillerson, or the “Christian warrior” Pompeo, the GOP leadership destroyed the State Department and it’s having a disastrous effect right now.

Foreign Policy:

Morale has hit rock bottom at Foggy Bottom, as American foreign service officers languish and Rex Tillerson builds a mini-empire.

GovExec:

State Department Says It’s Rebuilding After Trump ‘Decimated’ It, but Will Still Fall Short on Some Key Biden Goals

One simple explanation for why State was ruthlessly gutted and attacked by the White House occupant after 2017 was… to hide extensive executive branch corruption in foreign affairs.

[State] noted that there had been a “lack of adequate recordkeeping pertaining to diplomatic gifts” between Jan. 20, 2017, when Trump took office, and his departure from the White House four years later.

Indeed, attacks on State ran so hot that the White House setup an illegitimate shadow State to block U.S. legislative support for a country defending itself against Russian oligarchs.

It’s obvious who and why the anti-democratic, corrupt oligarchs were gifting.

They’ve been derided as a “deep state,” slurred as “Obama holdovers,” threatened with draconian budget cuts and told President Donald Trump doesn’t even need them. …diplomats have described being sidelined on Ukraine policy as Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and political appointees — apparently at the president’s direction — pursued a “shadow” foreign policy that included withholding some $400 million in military aid to Kyiv. Their boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, has attacked [open support of Ukraine against Russia] as “troubling” and defended the legitimacy of Giuliani’s efforts.

This all unfortunately matters a lot right now.

With violence rapidly unfolding in Sudan, the State Department relic — hollowed-out and politically compromised by the GOP — is flailing and failing Americans.

CNN spoke with multiple people whose family members are among the “dozens” of Americans who want to leave Sudan, and they said the State Department has provided “barely any assistance” since the deadly violence between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) broke out more than a week ago.

That fighting between the rival military groups has left hundreds dead, including two Americans, and thousands wounded, and has left the country at risk of humanitarian disaster, as those still trapped in their homes face shortages of food, water, medicine and electricity.

“To be honest with you, the State Department was useless, utterly useless throughout this entire period” […] “It was quite perplexing because I don’t understand how other nations were able to secure buses and evacuate their citizens and devise plans to get hundreds of their citizens out, and we’re patting ourselves in the back for getting 70 diplomats out.”

Not that perplexing. The damage done to State was very real, extremely difficult to undo, and the GOP’s handwork predictably is now killing Americans.

Evacuating all U.S. diplomats and their families while abandoning 16,000 Americans to escape on their own without any diplomatic support is simply un-American.

By contrast, Britain, France and Germany have sent airplanes to Sudan to help evacuate their citizens, and other countries, such as India, have organized convoys to Port Sudan on the Red Sea.

[…]

Bushra Ibnauf, co-founder of the Sudanese American Medical Association, was fatally stabbed Saturday on his way to his hospital. Ibnauf’s elderly parents were not entitled to an evacuation, so he had planned to stay to take care of them…

Reporters have pointed out that State is floating Americans wanting to evacuate by telling them to find a private car, magically fill it with gas, and drive themselves for days next to a bus provided by some other foreign country evacuating its citizens.

In other words, a GOP-drenched kid at the lowly Sudan desk with naive libertarian ideals thinks this is the moment that extreme selfish privatization theory will finally work.

“Seriously, man, what is this?” Khiri asked in outrage. “I am shocked. … Why are you asking us to follow the Turkish or the Emirates bus? How can she drive without a break for 22 hours? I felt humiliated. What are the Americans doing?”

France, Germany, Italy, UK, Spain, Holland, Turkey, Japan, South Korea, Jordan, South Africa, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are just some of the countries that have evacuated their citizens (as well as those of other countries).

Germany is looking like it knows exactly what to do, evacuating 1,000s of EU citizens.

The German parliament, the Bundestag, has given its approval for the evacuation operation carried out by the German military in Sudan, several days after it began. It was a rare, almost unanimous vote in the Bundestag, with 663 in favor and none against.

America however is looking exceptionally selfish and corrupt right now. GOP isolationists have setup the opposite of power projection.

Protecting American civilians abroad used to be a sacrosanct government mission. Now it’s falling to private citizens.

Americans are perhaps lucky State didn’t offer them a privatized evacuation plan based on Trump Airlines (bankrupt) serving Trump Steaks (bankrupt) if only evacuees show up with a truckload of gold bars and take no receipts. Human trafficking by mercenaries as a market-based response to crisis is the dumbest take ever for America.

Kind of like the GOP plans for healthcare, prisons, education, transit… we need to talk about abject failures of over-privatization to protect private citizens: “inaction from profiteers“.

But seriously, even the Marines looking at their Djibouti-based MH-47 Chinook operation supporting a Navy SEAL evacuation of U.S. diplomats are asking WTF about citizens.

If I were to hazard an early guess, based on my own personal reviews of British Foreign Office archives, a xenophobe embedded in State is working this crisis to slam the door in the face of Black Americans as a political stunt.

American citizens trapped by violence and somehow being blamed for their needs while unworthy of help, is something that reads like a page straight out of early 1900s extreme nativist/isolationist handbooks.

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Update: The State Department has contracted over a dozen buses, to be monitored by Pentagon drones, as an evacuation path.

The group of mostly Americans — along with some Germans, Norwegians and local staff — were driven on seven buses contracted by the U.S. and monitored by armed drones on the journey, a Pentagon official told NPR. The U.S. government contracted 16 buses total and will use the remaining buses if a second convoy is needed.

These buses are headed to a port for ships into Saudi Arabia. The official statement from State still mixes in some unnecessary victim blame/shame like some kind of game:

We messaged every U.S. citizen in Sudan who communicated with us during the crisis and provided specific instructions about joining this convoy to those who were interested in departing via the land route.

Who communicated with us.

Interested in the land route.

Need they be so tone-deaf?

Corruption, graft… you name it and Twitter has it. Like a sloppy dictatorship, where lies are piled upon lies, nothing within the Twitter walls has meaning anymore.

After Twitter tried to put heavy pressure on its users to pay for their own identity, the accounts showing up with a “Blue” receipt are now… dead people.

These celebrities “subscribed to Twitter Blue”. Except they are dead.

Blue in the face.

Twitter Blue effectively has become an indicator someone is no longer able to speak because they have died.

Tesla has setup a very tightly controlled and hidden system of car distribution and repairs, which usually tends to hide incompetence. The usual counter argument they will make is that things can be done opaquely better than anyone else could openly, without providing a means to verify such claims.

That bold positioning results in Tesla dealers being thrown into a particular spotlight when they have large destructive fires, illuminating how they aren’t better after all.

Florida had a big one just last year, as did Massachusetts. A giant $300K damage one in California was interesting, particularly because Tesla said they couldn’t figure out the causes. Korea reported one too. And now we have another dealer on fire, confirming Tesla really doesn’t know what it’s doing.

Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue officials said crews responded to the Tesla dealership property in the 2700 block of North Federal Highway just after 6:30 a.m.

When they arrived, one Tesla was engulfed in flames and the fire was spreading to an adjacent Tesla, officials said.

“I heard a big boom and saw flames coming out of the Tesla dealership,” witness Kassandra Mitchell said.

At this point you might think twice before taking your Tesla to a dealer, let alone buying from one. A private and independent engineer/mechanic is likely to be far more competent than the Tesla ones.

That may not be a viable option, however, since storing and working with the faulty Tesla designs carries huge fire dangers.

Gruber Motors was a repair shop that specialized in fixing Tesla failures, which completely burned down twice already.

As with a previous fire we had in May of 2017, this fire again consumed the entire building and all its contents, which illustrate the potent nature of Lithium Ion vehicles once they ignite.

Gruber had 30 Tesla waiting on repairs and calls itself “independent Tesla service organization”, so when they say LIon vehicles they meant Tesla and only Tesla.

This is not an EV Problem. This is not a battery problem. This is a Tesla problem.

How many Tesla are in your lot?