8 ms·

What Parler Saw During the Attack on the Capitol

80 points by Borlands 6y ago

mmastrac 6y ago
Politics aside, is this potentially one of the most comprehensive multi-vantage-point training video datasets available today? I cannot imagine another that contains such a multitude of 1) videos shooters, 2) positions, 3) actual humans and 4) temporal start/end times.
- abcanthur 6y ago
  I would imagine so, great multiangle dataset w crowd sourced labels. Grim, but I do look forward to the meeting of all those videos and a "matterport" style reconstruction. I assume the Nytimes is paying some studio to do this right now.
- rasz 6y ago
  Now imagine letting lose SfM and tracking algorithms on this video dataset and reconstructing full temporal 3D model of the event ala Enemy of the State (1998). Add in some of [1] and we could reconstruct full Cyberpunk 2077 Braindance. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking
trident5000 6y ago
This is great but its been posted 5 times in the last 2 days. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org Regardless, Id like to see this with other events as well, even casual events.
- hajile 6y ago
  Five times and no comments on anything. I wonder why such a trove isn't worthy of discussion? I suspect because if people watched those videos, they'd come away with a very different perspective. Pretty much all you see is people standing around waving signs and chanting -- literally textbook non-violent protesting. Once you see them enter the Capital, you still don't see waves of violence and destruction. There are a couple-dozen aggressive/violent people at most (and those people should definitely be arrested and charged). In contrast, I've seen hundreds of videos of other riots throughout the year where you get hundreds of videos of the violence (along with the videos of people getting chased down and beaten up for violating the "no cameras rule" because they don't want to be filmed doing horrible things. Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction. There was an interesting article I read that the riots this year caused more property damage than any in US history by property insurance claims. That's not including people hurt/killed, all the property damages under 10-20k per building where it costs more to file than to pay out of pocket, vehicles totaled, government buildings ruined (that the people's taxes have to pay to repair), etc. As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital. I also have zero tolerance for those beating up and hospitalizing thousands (probably tens of thousands) throughout the summer. This is in stark contrast to most news organizations and even prominent politicians who stated that the massive violent protest was a necessary and acceptable idea while then decrying the couple dozen violent protestors at the Capital as the basest kind of evil when all of it was evil political violence and was all wrong.
  - trident5000 6y ago
    This is exactly what I was thinking when I watched the videos. It stands in stark contrast to the media narrative.
  - steve_adams_86 6y ago
    I agree. For days I thought perhaps hundreds had been protesting. I was blown away to hear it was thousands, and immediately realized that the media was latching onto perhaps dozens of bad apples, so to speak. I think it’s plain to see that most Americans don’t want to murder politicians. The Republican voters who feel disenfranchised aren’t all sharpening their axes right now. I think it’s insane what happened. It just isn’t representative of republicans. Not sure what to do with that. I’m Canadian so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I only see what the media gives me and I don’t personally know a lot of Americans, let alone republicans.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      There were more than what I'd call dozens, there's already been over 100 arrests and it's early in the investigation. Also basing this on the videos I've seen. There were hallways full of people packed behind barriers, streams of people going by different locations, etc. I wouldn't say violence of this sort is representative of Republicans, but Republicans are too accepting of the extremists that this event grew out of. One of them is the leader of their party.
      - steve_adams_86 6y ago
        You're right, it was more than dozens. I think my mental model is something like: - Dozens of severely bad actors - many of which actually did intend abduction or murder. These people are terrifying. - Hundreds of bad actors. People attempting to subvert democracy which, despite sounding alarmist or cheesy without proper context (You need to see the videos to understand, I think) is also very scary. These people will hurt you for their political cause. - Thousands of people convinced that their political system, their democracy, isn't serving them. This is alright with me - I think they were convinced by the bad/severely bad actors, and I believe this happens on all political spectrums. I know many "left leaning" folks with arguably insane ideas about politics and society in general, so this isn't a republican disorder. I don't resent them or even myself for coming to unreasonable conclusions and I believe they're actually trying to improve their situation in the way they know how. Being wrong in and of itself isn't a crime, I suppose. Protesting on bad information is unfortunate, but not criminal. I have sympathy for all of these people. Things seem pretty awful for them right now, whether it should or not. It all seems very self-inflicted. Regardless, it seems a lot of manipulation has been involved. It's very cult-like. Power hungry folks have recruited disenfranchised individuals to serve their agendas. It's really sad. The rest of the republican voters will be a mix of these groups, but I suspect they've come to terms with the election despite disappointment. They don't want to zip tie anyone in congress or illegally overturn the election. The bad actors really should experience consequences. They are a rot that contaminates the people around them. Whether they intend that or not, have good intentions or not, they have become so unreasonable and dangerous that they need to be contained at the least. I believe that includes Donald Trump most of all.
heavensgateboy 6y ago
Watch the video "12:16 p.m. • Around D.C." and you can clearly see content-aware deep fake filling of crowds to increase the appearance of their magnitude. The so-called "Parler dataset" is completely useless as anything but a curiosity with respect to examining the nature of emerging digital ground-truth and perception metrics. Nothing contained in it is verifiable, and in my opinion it would be wise to be very skeptical of anything you encounter regarding it.
- colpabar 6y ago
  > you can clearly see It's not clear to me, could you elaborate?
  - heavensgateboy 6y ago
    https://imgur.com/rJ2RSH8 https://imgur.com/rJ2RSH8
    - hajile 6y ago
      Of all the arguments to be had, this seems the weakest. 75M people voted for Trump. Of those, almost 80% believe the election was stolen. According to Politico, there's still 10% (higher by some other polls) of Democrats who also believe the election was not legitimate. Getting just 1% of them (the serious believers) to show up would be around 700,000 people. Most claims are under half that number. That's not a lot when considering true believers who think it's their last chance to save America.
      - heavensgateboy 6y ago
        Are you arguing that because there are hypothetically a million mobilizable supporters of Trump that the image doesn’t clearly contain deep fake crowd size expansion? Refer to the image. It is as clear as day.
        hajile 6y ago
dudeithinkBLM 6y ago
Doesn't exactly look worthy of losing our collective freedom of speech and right to assemble over. A stark contrast over the story being pushed in the media. Yet this event will be used as a scapegoat to push those very things in the near future. Just know that any laws passed or precedents set will be used first on the "radical right", will undoubtedly be used on the anti-vax and conspiracy crowd but will eventually be used on the anti-war left, and then simply "dissidents". If you haven't realized it yet, the wheels are turning to silence unapproved narratives forever. The media campaign just screams the phrase "manufacturing consent".
- deeviant 6y ago
  So it's not the people that participated in an seditious attack on the capital and the most cherished democratic process, the democratic choosing of the US president that are the problem here? They built gallows outside the capital, they screamed "hang Mike Pence" because he didn't literally attempt to end American democracy for them. It's still "those other people who want to take our freedumbs away" that are the problem? This feels a lot like the group of people whose first reaction to when a school gets massacred by yet another school shooting is, "My Second Amendment is going to be under attack now, this sucks!"
  - prohobo 6y ago
    Exactly, that's how this works. They take all of our freedoms away while you cheer them on. You know, this isn't the first time it's happened. People aren't just pulling this out of thin air. There's a very long history of these things playing out that way, time after time. We are currently in an era, since 2001, where every time the government or corporations decide to do something to "protect" us, they end up pushing us further into serfdom. What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.
    - deeviant 6y ago
      > What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different. Yes, let's talk about history. Let's see, was there another case study in history where you have a failed coup attempt spurred on by a egotistical leader whose shtick was to scapegoat sections of the population and play "us vs them" politics? How did that turn out?

80 points by Borlands 6y ago

Politics aside, is this potentially one of the most comprehensive multi-vantage-point training video datasets available today? I cannot imagine another that contains such a multitude of 1) videos shooters, 2) positions, 3) actual humans and 4) temporal start/end times.

abcanthur 6y ago
I would imagine so, great multiangle dataset w crowd sourced labels. Grim, but I do look forward to the meeting of all those videos and a "matterport" style reconstruction. I assume the Nytimes is paying some studio to do this right now.
rasz 6y ago
Now imagine letting lose SfM and tracking algorithms on this video dataset and reconstructing full temporal 3D model of the event ala Enemy of the State (1998). Add in some of [1] and we could reconstruct full Cyberpunk 2077 Braindance. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04826.pdf VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking

trident5000 6y ago

This is great but its been posted 5 times in the last 2 days. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=propublica.org Regardless, Id like to see this with other events as well, even casual events.

hajile 6y ago
Five times and no comments on anything. I wonder why such a trove isn't worthy of discussion? I suspect because if people watched those videos, they'd come away with a very different perspective. Pretty much all you see is people standing around waving signs and chanting -- literally textbook non-violent protesting. Once you see them enter the Capital, you still don't see waves of violence and destruction. There are a couple-dozen aggressive/violent people at most (and those people should definitely be arrested and charged). In contrast, I've seen hundreds of videos of other riots throughout the year where you get hundreds of videos of the violence (along with the videos of people getting chased down and beaten up for violating the "no cameras rule" because they don't want to be filmed doing horrible things. Most of those didn't have large groups just standing around waving signs and chanting -- almost everyone was involved in the violence and destruction. There was an interesting article I read that the riots this year caused more property damage than any in US history by property insurance claims. That's not including people hurt/killed, all the property damages under 10-20k per building where it costs more to file than to pay out of pocket, vehicles totaled, government buildings ruined (that the people's taxes have to pay to repair), etc. As I said before, I have zero tolerance for the violent people at the Capital. I also have zero tolerance for those beating up and hospitalizing thousands (probably tens of thousands) throughout the summer. This is in stark contrast to most news organizations and even prominent politicians who stated that the massive violent protest was a necessary and acceptable idea while then decrying the couple dozen violent protestors at the Capital as the basest kind of evil when all of it was evil political violence and was all wrong.
- trident5000 6y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking when I watched the videos. It stands in stark contrast to the media narrative.
- steve_adams_86 6y ago
  I agree. For days I thought perhaps hundreds had been protesting. I was blown away to hear it was thousands, and immediately realized that the media was latching onto perhaps dozens of bad apples, so to speak. I think it’s plain to see that most Americans don’t want to murder politicians. The Republican voters who feel disenfranchised aren’t all sharpening their axes right now. I think it’s insane what happened. It just isn’t representative of republicans. Not sure what to do with that. I’m Canadian so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. I only see what the media gives me and I don’t personally know a lot of Americans, let alone republicans.
  - kadoban 6y ago
    There were more than what I'd call dozens, there's already been over 100 arrests and it's early in the investigation. Also basing this on the videos I've seen. There were hallways full of people packed behind barriers, streams of people going by different locations, etc. I wouldn't say violence of this sort is representative of Republicans, but Republicans are too accepting of the extremists that this event grew out of. One of them is the leader of their party.
    - steve_adams_86 6y ago
      You're right, it was more than dozens. I think my mental model is something like: - Dozens of severely bad actors - many of which actually did intend abduction or murder. These people are terrifying. - Hundreds of bad actors. People attempting to subvert democracy which, despite sounding alarmist or cheesy without proper context (You need to see the videos to understand, I think) is also very scary. These people will hurt you for their political cause. - Thousands of people convinced that their political system, their democracy, isn't serving them. This is alright with me - I think they were convinced by the bad/severely bad actors, and I believe this happens on all political spectrums. I know many "left leaning" folks with arguably insane ideas about politics and society in general, so this isn't a republican disorder. I don't resent them or even myself for coming to unreasonable conclusions and I believe they're actually trying to improve their situation in the way they know how. Being wrong in and of itself isn't a crime, I suppose. Protesting on bad information is unfortunate, but not criminal. I have sympathy for all of these people. Things seem pretty awful for them right now, whether it should or not. It all seems very self-inflicted. Regardless, it seems a lot of manipulation has been involved. It's very cult-like. Power hungry folks have recruited disenfranchised individuals to serve their agendas. It's really sad. The rest of the republican voters will be a mix of these groups, but I suspect they've come to terms with the election despite disappointment. They don't want to zip tie anyone in congress or illegally overturn the election. The bad actors really should experience consequences. They are a rot that contaminates the people around them. Whether they intend that or not, have good intentions or not, they have become so unreasonable and dangerous that they need to be contained at the least. I believe that includes Donald Trump most of all.

heavensgateboy 6y ago

Watch the video "12:16 p.m. • Around D.C." and you can clearly see content-aware deep fake filling of crowds to increase the appearance of their magnitude. The so-called "Parler dataset" is completely useless as anything but a curiosity with respect to examining the nature of emerging digital ground-truth and perception metrics. Nothing contained in it is verifiable, and in my opinion it would be wise to be very skeptical of anything you encounter regarding it.

colpabar 6y ago
> you can clearly see It's not clear to me, could you elaborate?
- heavensgateboy 6y ago
  https://imgur.com/rJ2RSH8 https://imgur.com/rJ2RSH8
  - hajile 6y ago
    Of all the arguments to be had, this seems the weakest. 75M people voted for Trump. Of those, almost 80% believe the election was stolen. According to Politico, there's still 10% (higher by some other polls) of Democrats who also believe the election was not legitimate. Getting just 1% of them (the serious believers) to show up would be around 700,000 people. Most claims are under half that number. That's not a lot when considering true believers who think it's their last chance to save America.
    - heavensgateboy 6y ago
      Are you arguing that because there are hypothetically a million mobilizable supporters of Trump that the image doesn’t clearly contain deep fake crowd size expansion? Refer to the image. It is as clear as day.
      - hajile 6y ago

dudeithinkBLM 6y ago

Doesn't exactly look worthy of losing our collective freedom of speech and right to assemble over. A stark contrast over the story being pushed in the media. Yet this event will be used as a scapegoat to push those very things in the near future. Just know that any laws passed or precedents set will be used first on the "radical right", will undoubtedly be used on the anti-vax and conspiracy crowd but will eventually be used on the anti-war left, and then simply "dissidents". If you haven't realized it yet, the wheels are turning to silence unapproved narratives forever. The media campaign just screams the phrase "manufacturing consent".

deeviant 6y ago
So it's not the people that participated in an seditious attack on the capital and the most cherished democratic process, the democratic choosing of the US president that are the problem here? They built gallows outside the capital, they screamed "hang Mike Pence" because he didn't literally attempt to end American democracy for them. It's still "those other people who want to take our freedumbs away" that are the problem? This feels a lot like the group of people whose first reaction to when a school gets massacred by yet another school shooting is, "My Second Amendment is going to be under attack now, this sucks!"
- prohobo 6y ago
  Exactly, that's how this works. They take all of our freedoms away while you cheer them on. You know, this isn't the first time it's happened. People aren't just pulling this out of thin air. There's a very long history of these things playing out that way, time after time. We are currently in an era, since 2001, where every time the government or corporations decide to do something to "protect" us, they end up pushing us further into serfdom. What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different.
  - deeviant 6y ago
    > What I don't understand is how people still don't know their history, and think this time it's somehow different. Yes, let's talk about history. Let's see, was there another case study in history where you have a failed coup attempt spurred on by a egotistical leader whose shtick was to scapegoat sections of the population and play "us vs them" politics? How did that turn out?