Even if decent, I’d be surprised if the microphone compares well to the BoomPro (it’s farther from your mouth so will pick up more noise, and most non-standalone mics are optimized for low cost not quality)
I think most earbuds are a lot worse than Pixel USB-C buds for calls—it looks like these have a relatively nice microphone, and relatively poor noise isolation (= allow you to hear your own voice much better)
benkuhn
Karma: 3,197
Oh OK, then the audio improvements the post describes will work fine as-is (except for the non-headset mic) and the video ones are probably not worth it. And I guess the networking advice becomes “invest in properly debugging your wifi” instead of running a cable.
I assume you don’t care about video if you’ll be walking around? (I think you lose a lot by giving up video, but de gustibus non disputandum.)
For audio, you could possibly wireless-ify the audio setup in the article with something like an AptX Low Latency to 3.5mm adapter and switching from the BoomPro to the Antlion ModMic Wireless (since I don’t think those adapters support mics).
Note that Bluetooth sucks and I haven’t tested this so it may not work as well as it sounds like it should. But if you want to keep open-back headphones and a good mic, that’s probably your best bet.
Tips for the most immersive video calls
Yay, happy to hear it was helpful!
FYI, you can also disable the red circle from within the Slack preferences (maybe you already knew this, but if not, sorry the post wasn’t more explicit!)
Thanks, fixed!
Tools for keeping focused
Attention is your scarcest resource
I’m confused about the “because I could not stop for death” example. You cite it as an example of GPT-3 developing “the sense of going somewhere, at least on the topic level,” but it seems to have just memorized the Dickinson poem word for word; the completion looks identical to the original poem except for some punctuation.
(To be fair to GPT-3, I also never remember where Dickinson puts her em dashes.)
Be impatient
Grubhub used to be over 50% but is now behind Doordash, so maybe doesn’t qualify.
Apple has a monopoly on iOS app distribution (aside from rooted phones) and is using it to extract rents, which is what the link is about.
Firefox has 4% market share compared to Chrome’s 65%.
Amazon has 40-50% of the ecommerce market depending on which stats you trust.
Google Search has 85%+ market share.
Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a “monopolist” is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm’s market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages.
Oops this was super unclear, sorry—the thing that ties together all of these crappy websites isn’t money issues, just that they’re the winner in a network-effect-based business, thus have no plausible competitors and no incentive to become more useful / less crappy.
What is a “real average”?
What should we do about network-effect monopolies?
I have almost no discipline, I’ve just spent a lot of time making my habits take so little effort that that doesn’t matter :) Figuring out how to make it easy for myself to prioritize, and stick to those priorities, every day is actually a common recurring weekly review topic!
(I considered laying out my particular set of todo-related habits, but I don’t think they’d be very helpful to anyone else because of how personal it is—the important part is thinking about it a lot from the perspective of “how can I turn this into a habit that doesn’t require discipline for me,” not whatever idiosyncratic system you end up with.)
Yeah, if you don’t want to DIY it, you can apparently also use a teleprompter for a similar effect. I haven’t tried one, but am curious to! The only trade-off I can think of (other than cost and being cumbersome) is that you probably sacrifice some image quality from all the reflection shenanigans, but not sure how big of a deal that would be.