dmazzoni

But if your goal is to be a musician, a music degree is basically useless. Whether you want to play in an orchestra, perform in a rock band, or compose video game soundtracks, nobody cares whether you have a degree or not - they want to hear you perform.

Consider that there is some in-between.

Some college students may be genuinely interested in one particular subject, but they're required to take a bunch of other courses, and consider those to just be hurdles.

I still think they're better off at least making an effort and trying to learn something, but I do think it's important to note that just because a student has no interest in one particular class, doesn't mean they have no interest in any class.

The Grammy awards for music are the same thing. Members aren't required to listen to the nominated albums, and every member gets to vote in every category.

I had a friend who was a Recording Academy member as a classical musician. He thought it was strange that they asked him to vote for the best hip-hop album since he doesn't listen to hip-hop at all.

So for many of the categories that are a little more niche, it basically turns into a popularity contest, rather than the opinion of true experts.

Ha ha, that's a great idea!

I love the idea of embedding sensitive topics that ChatGPT and other LLMs will steer clear of, within the context of a coding question.

Have you ever had any candidate laugh?

Any candidates find it offensive?

They're not the only good speakers these days, though.'

When they came out, there was nothing else that had their combination of sound quality and app features.

Before their new app, the competition had basically caught up, Sonos was only marginally better in a few ways.

With their new app, I'd never recommend Sonos.

I have some old Sonos speakers that have been gathering dust for a while.

I decided to sell them because they still have some value but I don't really want them, especially with what the company has done recently.

However, I wanted to set them up again to make sure they work. I spent hours trying to get them to set up again with no luck. I'm sure this is exactly what other users are experiencing. The old app was so nice and reliable. I don't have an opinion on the new app because I just literally can't get it to connect.

And I know they're not dead. One has an audio-in jack and still plays. It works great. There's no reason any of them shouldn't be fine. The only thing that changed was the app. I just want to get them set up so I can sell them on Marketplace for a good price as fully working.

That's an example of something that can be done well or done poorly.

AirBnB, UberEats and Facebook are all built with React Native and they have excellent performance.

Using a JS framework for your UI doesn't inherently mean it will suck. It can be done well.

If you expect it to be half as much work, you'll be disappointed.

If you expect it to be a tradeoff that makes some things easier and some things harder, and you're willing to invest in making it excellent, then it can be a very reasonable choice.

At many companies accessibility and DEI are rolled into the same office.

https://blog.google/authors/eve-andersson/

Do you actually have experience with those programs?

Here's what DEI programs actually do in practice, in my experience.

As a simple example, let's say there is an opening for a somewhat senior position, like a director. Your team does some interviews and wants to make an offer. DEI vetos it because every single candidate they interviewed was a white male. They don't tell you who to hire or not to hire, they just say that if you couldn't even find even a single woman or POC to interview, then you didn't look hard enough. Go back, consider more candidates who might not fit your preconceived notion of what you thought a person in that role should look like.

If after interviewing more people you still pick a white male, that's fine. DEI offices never force diversity and standards are not lowered. But they do have an impact - by considering more diverse candidates, that naturally leads to more diverse candidates being hired.

That's just one example of what they do.

You can argue the merits of the specific programs, but it's not true at all to say that those programs are just "puffery".

How do you propose a company like Honey should make a profit without deception and scams?

Their product is supposedly: install a FREE extension and you get discount codes applied for you at retailers when you check out.

It turns out they were able to be profitable by making themselves the affiliate every time you purchase something, but that's scammy because it's stealing from others who actually generated the referral.

But what other non-scammy business model could they have? There's basically no business model for what they're trying to offer that makes sense other than end-users paying for it.

> I’ve worked in CG for many years and despite the online nerd fests that decry CG imagery in films, 99% of those people can’t tell what’s CG or not unless it’s incredibly obvious.

I've noticed people assume things are CG that turn out to be practical effects, or 90% practical with just a bit of CG to add detail.

I'm a fan of more frameworks for desktop apps that wrap system webview rather than embedding Chromium.

Chromium is awesome and all, but it's just way overkill for many apps, and doesn't make sense for the download size and the need to support auto-update for security features.

Yes. There are far fewer people at each higher level.

> It's not even clear why they need a browser in the mix; most of these services have APIs you can use

They have APIs to schedule meetings.

They don't have APIs that give you access to the compressed video stream.

They join a 3rd-party meeting using a browser.

Then they capture the video from the meeting in Chromium.

Then they need to send that captured video to another process for compression and processing.

No, WebSockets isn't the most efficient, but there aren't that many options once you're capturing inside a web page.

> Their current approach is what I'd think would be a temporary solution while they reverse engineer the streams (or even get partnerships with the likes of MS and others. MS in particular would likely jump at an opportunity to AI something).

They support 7 meeting platforms. Even if 1 or 2 are open to providing APIs, they're not all going to do that.

Reverse-engineering the protocol would be far more efficient, yes - but it'd also be more brittle. The protocol could change at any time and reverse-engineering it again could days between days and weeks. Would you want a product with that sort of downtime?

Also, does it scale? Reverse-engineering 7+ protocols is a lot of engineering work, and it's very specialized work that not any software engineer could just dive into quickly.

In comparison, writing web scrapers to find the video element for 7 different meeting products is super easy to write, and super easy to fix.

> Here they have a nicely compressed stream of video data

But they don't.

They support 7 different meeting providers (Zoom, Meet, WebEx, ...), none of which have an API that give you access to the compressed video stream.

In theory, you could try to reverse-engineer each protocol...but then your product could break for potentially days or weeks anytime one of those companies decides to change their protocol - vs web scraping, where if it breaks they can probably fix it in 15 minutes.

Their solution is inefficient, but robust. And that's ultimately a more monetizable product.

> Why don't they just write the meeting output to hls

They're capturing video from inside a Chromium process. How exactly do you expect to send the raw captured video frames to hls?

Are you proposing implementing the HLS server inside a web process?

The initial approach was shipping raw video over a WebSocket...between two processes running on the same machine.

That doesn't sound like a ridiculous idea to me. How else would you get video data out of a sandboxed Chromium process?

I'm assuming it's because the compressed video on the wire is encrypted?

Their business is joining meetings from 7 different platforms (Zoom, Meet, WebEx, etc.) and capturing the video.

They don't have control of the incoming video format.

They don't even have access to the incoming video data, because they're not using an API. They're joining the meeting using a real browser, and capturing the video.

Is it an ugly hack? Maybe. But it's also a pretty robust one, because they're not dependent on an API that might break or reverse-engineering a protocol that might change. They're a bit dependent on the frontend, but that changes rarely and it's super easy to adapt when it does change.

> It's called a directory copy. Cut + paste. I'd add a tag with a comment pointing to the old repo (if needed). But probably after a few weeks, no one is going to look at the old repo.

Not in my experience. I use "git blame" all the time, and routinely read through commits from many years ago in order to understand why a particular method works the way it does.

Luckily, there are many tools for merging git repos into each other while preserving history. It's not as simple as copy and paste, but it's worth the extra efford.

I don't understand the logic behind this argument.

Yes, some people made a bet on office real estate, and they're in a bad position right now.

But those aren't the same people who are running businesses that use those offices. Why would most businesses care if real estate is propped up or not? How would increasing utilization of their buildings actually help them?

Chrome already has optional built-in support for generating alt text for images. It's been there for years, using a server-based API.

It does seem possible that this could be replaced with a local model in the near future. It's not clear the average user has the hardware specs for this to be an option today, but it will increasingly be plausible.

Keep in mind, though, that alt text is just one small part of making a web site accessible.

I think they're saying is that in Google's very early days, they gained market dominance against a dozen other search engines simply by being better. It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine.

> It also impedes accessibility-related plugins trying to extract the content and present it to the user in whatever way is compatible to their needs.

I'm not sure I agree that this is relevant advice today. Screen readers and other assistive technology fully support dynamic content in web pages, and have for years.

Yes, it's good for sites to provide content without JavaScript where possible. But don't make the mistake of conflating the "without JavaScript" version with the accessible version.

I think it'd also be worth comparing it to cars that have more basic collision-avoidance.

I don't expect Tesla's FSD to be perfect. But I do expect it to not be worse than the simple and effective collision avoidance that nearly all new cars have.

I sincerely hope this is just marketing, because none of the actual properties of blockchain make any sense whatsoever for this type of application.

Blockchain is decentralized. Why would you want that property for vehicle ownership that's specific to one department of a particular U.S. state? Having servers around the world sounds like a security risk, not an actual benefit to Californians.

Blockchain transactions are permanent. How is that helpful if a title is stolen, or transferred fraudulently, or illegally? What if a transaction contains sensitive or private information, or inappropriate language?

It wasn't a file full of zeros that caused the problem.

While some affected users did have a file full of zeros, that was actually a result of the system in the process of trying to download an update, and not the version of the file that caused the crash.

Why can't they just do it more like Microsoft security patches, making them mandatory but giving admins control over when they're deployed?