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Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work.

Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else.

The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing over Macs.


Different people are going to have very, very different standards for what sounds good in speakers.

For me, the MacBook Pro speakers sound great. My HomePod mini sounds fantastic. Because a) they're literally the best speakers I have ever owned, and b) I have never made Getting The Very Best Sound a priority; it just doesn't matter that much to me. Most of the time, I listen on AirPods.

For other people, music and high-quality sound are more of a way of life. They probably own speakers that cost high three figures (or more) individually. They are more likely to find the MBP speakers to be subpar. I'm guessing you fall into this category. And that's fine: it's just a question of different priorities.

The important thing, for people on either side of that fuzzy line, is to recognize that the other people exist, and in the latter case to recognize that the former group is by far the larger one, and most people in it haven't really heard what day-to-day audio is like from really high-end speakers.


I am going to be less generous and suggest that some people just want to hate on macs for the sake of hating on macs. Sticking it to the “man”.

I’m a bit obsessed with audio.. and I never expect my laptop speakers to match the quality of my fancy headphone setup that probably nets for about $4K.

They are no high-end speaker, but compared to any other laptop speaker I have heard they are amazing.


[flagged]


Thanks for proving his point.


Except, you're proving mine.

In a thread full of people gushing on Mac speakers, me saying it's an okay but overpriced machine is considered "hating for the sake of hating"


But that's not what this subthread is about. It was about different people having different priorities. fsociety remarked (quite correctly) that there are a large number of people who constantly feel the need to denigrate Macs, no matter the context—and you came in and said, basically, "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much."

Were those your words? No, but it sure sounded like it was your implication. You didn't just say they were overpriced (which would be a common complaint, but these days needs a lot more citation, given their extremely good performance per watt, and overall build quality). You said they were ridiculously overpriced, which implies that no reasonable person could look at one and think it was worth buying.

You came into a subthread that pointed out that there are people who like to gratuitously hate on Macs, and you tried to paint it as being the opposite, while damning them with, at the very best, faint praise.


> fsociety remarked (quite correctly) that there are a large number of people who constantly feel the need to denigrate Macs

And in response I remarked (very accurately) that there's an even larger number of people who constantly feel the need to always gush over anything Mac. This very thread is full of such examples.

> "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much."

Misrepresenting much? I said it's an okay laptop. Gets the job done.

> You said they were ridiculously overpriced, which implies that no reasonable person could look at one and think it was worth buying.

That's true. I can get other okay laptops for perhaps half the price. But they won't be as sexy as Apples. They certainly don't have fanboys taking offense at someone saying they are just okay.

> You came into a subthread

I was the one that started the subthread, by daring to say that the M1 I use has a speaker as bad as any other laptop I used. Oh the horror.


The speakers sound amazing to me and are magnitudes better than any other laptop speakers I've had. You saying they are not and that we're just "circlejerking over anything Mac" is objectively false.

Now stop trolling. Your other obnoxious comment about this was flagged and killed. Do better.


The speakers are amazing on my M1. I'm constantly surprised how beefy bass and clean sound they can produce. Don't recall them being so great on my previous MacBooks though.


I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used.

I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.


Yeah, ok. I presume that by your standard anything less than FLAC on a Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus is unworthy your ears but for us mere mortals the MacBook M1 speakers sound amazing for music as well. It's a massive improvement compared to any other laptop speakers I've heard.


Made me spit my coffee.

Have my upvote, you glorious bastard.


Agreed. And I say that when my role is "building software systems"

People with different roles in an organization will have different perspectives and goals. Ultimately the software system being built will have to be a compromise of those perspectives and goals.

Everyone has "skin in the game" to a degree, even if they don't "carry a pager".


> People are so skeptic and negative about humans nowadays.

Any positivity I might sometimes happen to feel about humanity quickly proves to be misguided as soon I read what other humans have to say on the internet.

Just go to Twitter, Reddit, or some comments section on YouTube, and you'll quickly come out hating the species too.


> Europe has nothing.

The company that develops Stable Diffusion is German.

I find it as impressive as ChatGPT.


> when the companies funding the research and launching the products realize that the tools are an existential threat to their profits.

Ahh, like Kodak when they were the first to create digital cameras, a good 10 years ahead of the competition, and decided to shelf it because it would eat the nice profits of their film business?

This strategy always works wonders :)

I would actually like if the big tech companies didn't invest in AI to keep their profits. They would eventually be swallowed by other companies that didn't.


It seems that's more or less what happened with G and what MS is trying to capitalize on.


I wonder did Google see a bit further ahead than MS?

By keeping the AI locked down and secret, out of public reach and accessible only via "products", Google may have actually been smarter, it gives Google a lot of advantages by drip feeding us only enough to keep us using their products and it hides some of the weirdness from us, like the LLM turning into a stalker for 20 minutes.

Obviously MS+OpenAI has maybe taken the "dumb" but effective in the short term path here and just given us raw access to the system without thinking very deeply through the consequences. Maybe they can polish it up in time and make us all become addicted to the product as it stands, let's see.


> We survived nukes because they were heavily controlled and their spread contained

Much to the opposite. We survived nukes because many countries have them.

If only one country had them, I presume it would be a lot more trigger happy, knowing its opponents wouldn't retaliate.


That's exactly how I've been using it. Absolutely amazing stuff. Saves me hours of combing stuff through the internet while coding, so I can focus in the actual problems I need to work on.


> But in some cases there just might me a connection between concepts we haven't seen before that have merit to generate a truly new idea.

But it's important to notice that a language model cannot reason to synthesize new information by making this connection. It can only connect two ideas if those ideas were already connected in the training data. To put in another way - ChatGPT is a new powerful way to organize existing information.

And that's not to be dismissive. Natural Language Processing is a hard problem, and ChatGPT gracefully parses through and generates natural language, giving out mostly correct answers at the same time. But the quality of information it gives improves with my skill to ask it good questions. Not different from a internet search engine that gives you better answers if you now how to make better search queries.


Smaller salary to be able to live in much cheaper cities where your general quality of life will also be massively improved?

Sounds like a win-win to me. Especially considering that the decrease in cost of living probably far surpasses de decrease in salary.


If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

The main thing that is cheaper in cheaper cities is housing. Most of the other stuff people buy costs the same everywhere. If you move to a cheaper place and have a lower income, your non-housing expenses will become a larger portion of your spending.

Once you've worked in tech for several years in the Bay Area or Seattle you will generally be well off enough to buy a home in a nice area and still be able to save or invest a large amount every year. Housing will feel expensive but everything else will feel cheap -- even new luxury cars will cost a fraction of your income. Early retirement will be a definite possibility if you have a basic amount of self control over your spending. And if you have children, they will have access to all the opportunities that some of the country's largest metropolitan areas offer.


> If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?

The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.


You pay more for many products and services in cities but have more choice. You are also taxed at a lower rate, qualify for different rebates.


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