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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of the voice ban Thatcher enacted in the UK back in the late 80s relating to the Troubles.

It was illegal to broadcast the voices of representatives of specific political groups (apart from during elections). Mainly Gerry Adams, who was leader of Sinn Féin, a party strongly linked to the IRA and terrorism.

The law was overly specific, so broadcasters, including the BBC, just dubbed his voice with a soundalike.

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Spitting Image had a lot of fun during those days with puppets and voice actors.

Puppet Gerry Adams made a comeback on radio years later: https://youtu.be/vutbvLbRiMk?t=64

I would love to see a revival of this tbh. Everyone could benefit from not hearing or reading <insert rich guy that shall not be named> ever again.

I wish there was a browser extension where you you ad-block people’s voices while still hearing the news.

When shit like that works well by default with very little effort or downside? That’s some AI I can get excited about.

This tennis thing is so cool, I hope we see more shit like this where AI comes down on the side of the little guy.

> I wish there was a browser extension where you you ad-block people’s voices while still hearing the news.

You're gonna freak out when you find out about reading.

That's pretty good, I'm stealing that. You've just motivated me to go buy the cord I need for my Kindle and probably made my life a few percent better by doing so.

if (voter == 'left')

then insert(billionaire[0])

else if (voter == 'right')

then insert(billionaire[1])

else insert(billionaire[2])

let billionaire = ['Elon Musk', 'Bill Gates', 'Mark Zuckerberg']

I’m a leftist but not an American and I would prefer not to hear from any of those billionaires again, nor any others for that matter.

This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the ridiculously simple understanding of the political landscape that seems to be rampant among the tech industry.

Surely nothing bad can come out of laws impeding the expression of opinions

The opinions were expressed, just with an actor's voice.

The person you replied to was themselves replying to someone talking about a theoretical future ban, not the past ban, and since that first person was talking about a positive of no longer hearing from unspecified famous people they clearly weren't talking about a law that would once again make it easy for impersonators to make it so that people still hear the same views in the same voices just technically spoken by actors.

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