You're saying this to someone who twice took a 24-hour train from Beijing to Hong Kong to buy an Apple computer for 27% less due to HK not having an additional electronics tax.
A lot of my friends in Taiwan used to buy macs in HK for the same reason.
What is truth anyway? I see it as a quicker version of browsing to web to get a summary of what people say. As you said, with search you get a bunch of websites where strangers talk about a certain topic. You read a dozen and see if they agree with each other or if they sound legit.. There is just a huge overlap between what we consider true and what (an overwhelming majority of) people agree on. A lot of things are reduced to the consensus. If you ask a non-obvious question, you usually get an answer "a lot of people you consider trustworthy dedicated some time studying this question and agreed that the answer is X". But then people can be wrong, a big group of people can be wrong, people can be bribed or perhaps you don't actually trust these people that much. The internet can't tell you the truth. LLM can't tell you the truth. But they can summarize what other people in the world say on this subject.
As if a normal person would bother lol. If I was discriminated this way just because of my country of birth, I'd stop engaging with such an organization at all.
Most people working on the Linux kernel are being paid by their employers to do so. This creates roadblocks for those companies. The days of the kernel being developed by a majority of idealistic developers is long gone.
There is a big difference between learning something to become a skilled professional versus just a hobby. A lot of things I learned are for myself. I want them to be fun. There is no end goal. I don't want to compete with anyone, I don't want to prove anyone I am very good at this. I am learning new skills for fun and I intend to get enjoyment from practicing them. Throwing at a hobbyist "now repeat this 1000 times to get it perfect" is how you kill motivation.
All headset mics have the great advantage of minimizing the influence of room acoustics. Speech is easiest to understand without reverb. Putting the microphone close to your mouth is cheaper than room treatment.
The benefit of a headset is not solely the improved microphone, it's also that the headphones mean your microphone is only picking up your speech, and not your meeting's output audio.
If you are using both your laptop's microphone and speakers, then Teams/Zoom has to decide whether to play audio to you, or pick up audio from you. If you're talking at the same time as someone else, the audio quality for everyone in the meeting suffers.
Modern systems don't work in a half-duplex mode like this.
All laptop speaker/mic combos use AEC[1], where they can both playout and pickup at the same time. There is actually 2 layers of this in many systems, one provided by your device, and a 2nd layer provided in software by Zoom/Teams/Meet etc.
What can happen is that the meeting audio is a mixture of the top-N loudest participants. N+1 people talking will conflict badly.
Your comment is phrased as though you think you're correcting me, but your point seems to be agreeing with what I said. My point is not at all about the technological ability of a computer to simultaneously process audio input and output.
The "limitation" arises because Teams/Zoom/etc all have mechanisms to prevent audio feedback. Participant A, using their laptop's microphone and speakers, will cause unpleasant audio cutouts for every other participant whenever they talk, even if Participants B-Z are all wearing headphones that prevent their microphone from picking up their audio output.
Frankly, I hate apple audio products. Apple has a veneer of “industry leader” which makes people think they’re the best they can get, so they don’t look for alternatives. But oh my god apple mics are my bane on a day of calls. They’re “acceptable” in that, yes, can understand you. But their grating low quality is just uncomfortable. Like, I fully expect apple to rope out an AI model that reconstitutes people’s voice to sound normal just so they can keep trying to convince people they don’t need a headset or a boom mic.
Agreed. I've been using them for the better part of a decade (and full time since 2020) and I've listened to recordings of myself - sounds absolutely acceptable, and better than a bunch of USB mics I've tried.
So is verbal communication, whether poetry readings, speeches, presentations, or even just skilled conversation.
The problem is that if an employee's job involves giving presentations, they'll likely be explicitly trained on it and given additional tips of they're struggling. Most offices haven't established a training process for written communications - even emails, guidance is often "Do it right. No, not like that, right, like this."
Ironically, the worst offenders are often the most "technical" people. It's like the old "comments bad, code should be self-documenting" BS. No, code is written for people, and software is written for people. Technology will always eventually bump up against its social and human context.
To be effective, you need to be skilled at both the code AND the written word, because these are all vehicles which are ultimately used to communicate with other human beings. Just like it's a myth that you can get into software in order to avoid dealing with those pesky human beings. Truly effective people understand their weak points and work on them; they don't pick a job that they think will enable them to run away from them and avoid them.
How do you engage emotionally over Zoom? I prefer WFH actually, but every time I try anything else it feels really empty. It's fine if there is no alternative (e.g. talking to friends abroad), but I really can't imagine how to have a dance party over Zoom.
Why do you bother even watching it at this point? I think I watched exactly one soccer game in last 5 years (it was a final of something big, can't remember now), there are a lot of other interesting activities in life.
