Only the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)
Yeah we need a dial to mix accents and dialects, and level of English fluency. I could want 50% English, maybe some Northern English, Welsh or Scottish, and mix in Indian accents, various American, Spanish, Portuguese, Polish, Scandinavian, the odd token Aussie. Etc.
That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.
This has real demand, I ended up in the Gitlab secondary youtube channel one day, ordering by most views, and I found a video [0] of a seemingly normal uninteresting meeting with millions of views. Turns out people were using this as an excuse for looking like they were busy. They disabled comments now but I saved some of them because I thought it was hilarious:
I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful
4.5K
I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol
1.5K
I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason
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Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol.
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I was one of those people skeptical that ad-free YouTube was worth the high price, but now firmly a convert.
Get it! The best deal in streaming content. Unlocks such a better experience you’ll find a dozen whole new areas of valuable & enjoyable content to explore.
One of the best products ever created, and they deserve the dough for serving me all the gigabytes. Fast, reliable, and one product not headed for KilledByGoogle. (Did I jinx it? “We’re transitioning to a vertical-video only platform to meet our billion users where they are…”)
100% agree. I likely would have stuck with adblockers but watching on TV(s) is worth the monthly fee alone. Also you can "watch" (ie listen) in the background on the mobile app too.
The basic install of Kodi on LibreELEC blocks the ads on YouTube. I left Roku after using it for a long time, and the experience with Kodi is far better. Simple setup, too.
For mobile, I use NewPipe which allows background YouTube as well.
Might not work for everyone but I never see an ad on YouTube.
As a first search result, with an ad label is the most common way. I also saw the occasional "regular" ad roll and "sponsored" videos in my feed or whatever it's called.
What a miserable piece of software. We don't go a day without cursing it at my company. Jira was dog slow but it mostly worked, ClickUp is incredibly buggy and trying to be an "Everything app" while failing at basic tasks.
ClickUp was the first software whose AI integration was actually useful to me, but simple because its UX is so mind-bogglingly terrible that I'd rather give an LLM a minute to give me the information I'm looking for.
I try to interface with ClickUp exclusively through the API/MCP whenever possible. LLMs have been a lifeline to having to use that UI. At one point their search was so bad that I wrote my own search by scraping the existing tickets/docs and then setting up webhooks to get future updates and indexing it myself in sqlite and beating their search both in speed (by a count many seconds, sometimes there's would timeout) and in quality most of the time.
But really I live on bookmarks to get to the handful of places I want to go because I hate navigating their UI and the MCP so I can just have Claude move around tickets, log new ones, update statuses, etc.
My grandma who has never used ChatGPT would have probably been fooled. For the rest of us though, this has got that annoying ChatGPT voice inflection that is hard to miss.
It sounds like voice acting. And not particularly good voice acting. Too clear, a bit too bombastic, and as if reading from a script. At least the two that I briefly listened to.
Reminds me of the "boss mode" / "boss key" in old games, like MS-DOS days, which would switch the screen to some spreadsheet mockup or suchlike, updated for the current century.
My favorite was the one in Space Quest III. Instead of showing you a spreadsheet, it would pop up a dialog making it clear that you've been playing a game, and would state exactly how long you'd been playing it. You'd have to dismiss multiple such dialogs before you could get back to the game.
What are all the names for the category of such software... "Self-defense Software", "Busy Simulation Software", "Faux Work Software", "Fake Meeting Software"[0], "Virtual Meeting Simulator"[1], "Prank Screens"[2], ...? Are there many others?
Simple solution for focus time. If it stops people from setting up an actual meeting for something that fits in an email, it is already doing critical infrastructure work.
I am missing something about how this could hypothetically be useful. If I played this in the background it would be far too distracting to get any actual work done.
Trying to access this site on my corporate Windows laptop and it was blocked "by your IT admin" (in Windows itself, not the browser/proxy). So it's already on some kind of list.
Do people in offices typically just blast meetings out of their computer speakers? Everyone I work with uses headphones so we're not disturbing other people in the office...
Depends on the company. At my last job it was rare for anyone to have video on in remote meetings, and at my current job it's rare for anyone to have video off.
At the company I was at from 2014-2021, cameras were always off.
2021-2023, there the cameras were always on. Even during the all-company meetings, at least 80% had their cameras on. Though it was a small company of 75 when I started and 180 when I left (though it was becoming 135 as I was leaving).
At my current place, it's kind of a mix. Small team of 3-5 people, usually on. Larger group meeting, most people off. All-company (about 300 people), only about 50 cameras.
The scripts are hilarious, yet not inaccurate. I can't stop chuckling.
'Are you happy with that?'
'Happy is a strong word'
'OK' moves on to the next topic
206 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 83.0 ms ] threadOnly the British audio works for me, though - if I try American or International, the relevant meetings are silent with a "Join Audio" button which doesn't appear to do anything. (Firefox on MacOS, if that's useful)
That I could enable more South African, or Middle East accents in some meetings would be true to real life as well.
Not Finnish. The silence would not work :)
I play this when I need my family to leave me alone - so helpful 4.5K I play this when I pretend to be busy. This meeting is literally about anything you want it to be about lol 1.5K I love that we all arrived at this video for the same reason 2.6K Every now and then I'll pause it at a good point in between them talking to make my own voice heard contributing to the "meeting" lol. Gets the full effect in! And the beautiful thing is their conversation just flows with it like they heard me lol. 562
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBVtvOpU80Q
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I watch YouTube alot btw. :D
For mobile, I use NewPipe which allows background YouTube as well.
Might not work for everyone but I never see an ad on YouTube.
- A very dissatisfied user
But really I live on bookmarks to get to the handful of places I want to go because I hate navigating their UI and the MCP so I can just have Claude move around tickets, log new ones, update statuses, etc.
I’ve used a few tts providers and although a technical marvel they are all still easily identifiable as ai. Humans are very good at spotting fakes.
This project might work better with mostly canned audio clips of real humans.
What would "lay people" even be in this scenario? I'd wager most people know what a meeting sounds like.
https://biobreak.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/bo...
[0]: https://fakemeeting.app/
[1]: https://z.tools/t/fake-meeting
[2]: https://www.whitescreen.online/
EDIT: seems like British audio does work
At the company I was at from 2014-2021, cameras were always off.
2021-2023, there the cameras were always on. Even during the all-company meetings, at least 80% had their cameras on. Though it was a small company of 75 when I started and 180 when I left (though it was becoming 135 as I was leaving).
At my current place, it's kind of a mix. Small team of 3-5 people, usually on. Larger group meeting, most people off. All-company (about 300 people), only about 50 cameras.