Show HN: Gitlab Meeting Simulator 2024
benjamin-brady.github.io
Gitlab's meeting recordings on YouTube have tens of thousands of views by people pretending to work. Now you can appear to be in the meeting using your own webcam.
benjamin-brady.github.io
The gitlab thing is just “harmless” fun but real scams will force chnage - I predict in five years
- every large and maybe small companies will have public private key based approvals (not “I approve” in an email from an iPhone).
- PKIs will then be everywhere (at last!)
- meetings will be recorded and transcribed (which will have huge knock on effects)
- the push back against remote work will be real and large. Not sure what side I am on
So in conclusion, the argument is that the existence and threat of deepfakes will cause companies to abandon digital transformation entirely and move back to the 80s...
On the flip side, my wife does medical coding, which is entirely remote and doesn't require a constant line of communication to management or your coworkers, for that matter, unless there is a problem, most of which can be rectified with an email, chat or Zoom meeting. There is no compelling reason for her to show up to an office to do computer-based work that can be done literally anywhere with an Internet connection.
As the US moves forward with continued remote work, I think it's important that companies be honest with the realities of the market they are in and plan accordingly.
Turns out the issue is not in the remote\office style but in the processes applied to the organization.
God forbid there might be actual people (including developers) who prefer to work in an office with others. Impossible!
It's hard to make a hybrid approach work, where some people are mostly in the office, and some people are always remote.
However the extra burden falls mostly on the remote people, so I see not much of a reason to disallow people from going remote.
RTO is clearly not about 'end-employee' preferences, having an office can be about that, but RTO is just come to the office regardless of your preference.
It is a remarkably halting experience I used to joke about, but after years of a considerable amount of wasted time that leaves me running to meet deadlines and shipping dates, I have trouble laughing at it anymore.
I'm at a small company where we've started recording, transcribing and taking minutes of all meetings with AI. Then that gets fed into a RAG system and we can see what's been said when.
If you're doing it in person than all of that information will just float out of everyones heads by the end of the week.
There's a push _for_ remote work because it's actually convenient to find out what you need to do and when it needs to get finished by.
The next thing we're doing is buying everyone an intous screens so we can share whiteboards which is the last thing that in person meetings were good for.
The issue is that in person you constantly have informal "meetings" where information is shared and impossible to record, unless you force everyone to walk around with sound recorders on. Which come to think of it is something that might well be done in some companies I've worked for before.
>The only problem is identifying who is speaking which could be a deal breaker for some uses.
Trivial, it's a problem that's been solved for a while and I managed to get it working in a couple of days of messing about.
I'm positive that people working remotely can just as easily have informal meetings were they won't be recorded. In fact, I'm absolutely sure that a good segment of the workforce will make sure they have meetings in that informal sense, specifically so the recordings aren't happening.
Could you please share details on tooling for this?
I use audacity to capture the audio stream live, whisper.cpp with person segmentation to extract the text with notations on who was talking and a fine tuned llama model which is trained on data specific to the companies market to extract the minutes. It's a couple of passes for the model to write the prompts to extract the data into minutes.
The RAG system is just untrained sbert weights of every sentence in the recording and minutes shoved into the vector postgres. Queries are @mentions in the company chat.
Basically a bunch of python scripts held together by duct tape and chewing gum.
That's got nothing to do with the LLM used to do the summary but part of the RAG system.
To be clear, my issue was I could only capture the streaming audio of my mic or the people on the call. Never both at the same time.
I just have a dummy user that joins the meetings so people known when they are being recorded. I imagine I accidentally dodged a bullet there since that user isn't supposed to have audio in and the audio out is directed to audacity and muted otherwise.
> whisper.cpp with person segmentation
Super curious about this bit. Did you use the --diarize or the --tinydiarize flag? How accurate/reliable was the segmentation? Sounds like it was good enough to use at the very least. I had looked into this a few months ago but thought it wasn't good enough yet.
Jokes aside, excel is the most powerful business software ever. Everyone use it.
Maybe it works better with an American accent.
HHHa, tell me you're middle management without telling me you're middle management.
The squares in the video reorganize about halfway through, but the overlay self-view video that's been added awkwardly stays the same. Maybe it would make more sense if it was fixed in the bottom right corner like normal Zoom calls?
What I need is the inverse of this, a virtual me that I can send to zoom meetings where I 100% won't have to interact
An all hands where a director lays out a strategy that was already laid out in an email and will be reiterated in another email and also will be the OKRs? Sure that's relevant to my work but I'm not going to say anything, but nobody can really say they have better things to do that go to the directors meeting about the whole purpose of our job (even if it doesn't change my personal work)
Or even sometimes things like stand-ups where half the people are going to say something along the lines of "working on the same thing I've been working on all week with slight incremental progress"
As in “Ferris Beuler’s day off”?? Hilarious!
Last year, I took a screen recording of an hour long Zoom meeting on my work machine and sometimes play that on screen in my home office when I need to set aside a bit of extra quiet time. Family will walk in, see the meeting on screen and immediately walk out.
I felt really bad about doing this, but now seeing that other people do it (and you've made a website solely dedicated to this purpose), I feel less bad. :)
But seriously, great job on this!
I have this problem. I plan to try this trick myself. Sad that it’s necessary, but happy that this may be a solution.
Turns out it's not AI, just a recording of generic desk jockeys using generic corporate meeting-jargon.
I recently got accused of writing like GPT, and I had to inform the accuser that, alas, I've been uncool since long before GPT.