Yeah, seems I'd be doomed for doing interviews on my Windows laptop for the webcam and the compatibility with my bluetooth headset rather than my linux desktop. Tunnel vision and a lack of empathy are negative signals, so you could say I'd have dodged a bullet, but unfortunately in these situations I'd need the job more than the job would need me.
From my perspective, I think it shows poor judgment that you've chosen hardware where you can't get your webcam and bluetooth headset to work under Linux. Or you haven't bought a wired headset and a USB webcam that you've researched and know works properly under Linux. It sounds like the alternative you've chosen is to take interviews using an OS and development environment you're not comfortable in, which seems like a foolish choice to make.
These days it's not difficult to buy hardware with Linux in mind, even on a budget. (And if you have two computers, I feel like budget is probably not really a problem for you.)
Even if you bought with Linux in mind, there’s no guarantee what works today works tomorrow. I have a Linux box that had working HDMI audio. A recent set of updates to the audio subsystems now means that when the box boots, the HDMI devices are muted by default. It seems like something changed in the order that things are initialized and the HDMI devices aren’t present when the audio system is initialized so none of your saved settings are re-applied. Every boot now requires manually fiddling with the audio settings to reset where audio should be going and unmute the devices. If my choice when going into an interview is the box that you need to buy specific hardware for and hope that no one re-configured the audio subsystems in the last update or the box that runs an os by a company known to put explicit code paths to recreate a prior edition bug that other software relies on… I might choose the latter too, even if it is windows. Of course I’d also probably choose the latter because there’s a non zero chance the interviewer is going to want to use some conferencing software or website that doesn’t work in Linux regardless of how well matched my hardware is.
I simply don't use a headset or a webcam with my home Linux setup, because it's often been a hassle to deal with, and my work setup is separate. For screen-sharing type coding interviews, I have a perfectly functional remote SSH setup from my windows laptop, which took less time to setup than the last time I fiddled with a bad headset connection on Linux a long time ago. I find the "not using all of screen real estate" accusation to be strange as well, because usually screen-sharing is ergonomically limited to 1 screen, but people may usually work with two screens and not have developed habits to make 1 screen work.
Yeah, Nvidia has trillions at stake, Intel a mere 100B. It's more in the interests of Nvidia to interfere with Intel's GPU business than to help it, and the only things they want from Intel are the fabs.
People should stop using the Photos app. It is an application designed to lock you in first, make your life hard second, and manage your photos a far third. If photos are important to you, you should never ever put the master copies in an opaquely-managed proprietary container. It prevents you from auditing your files easily, it also prevents you from making backups in other media. Photos isn't even useful; leaving the photos as files allows you to pick multiple tools to manage them better.
Even if a system doesn't look authoritarian, corruption happens all the time. Those involved in corruption naturally want more power for themselves. Additionally some people actively thirst for more power for whatever reasons, and most people don't want to be constrained in their jobs, and they are all aligned in expanding governmental power. You need some discipline to commit to the idea that "I don't want the ability to see encrypted chats, even if that makes my job 90% easier to do", and I don't trust most people to have it.
I think they just do what they have done well. LLMs don't take demand away from HPC, like physics and weather simulations. Arguably if some of their competitors divert resources to LLMs it might even be better for them.
I hate Garmin with a passion because their watches are effectively region-locked by language support, an insanely consumer-hostile move in this day. I was unable to use any features related to text or whatsapp messages because the watch shockingly could not decode messages in my native language.
Their software was also so flaky that I was woken up by a faulty vibration alert in the middle of the night multiple times during the few months I wore the Garmin Instinct Solar, and at least twice I was unable to fall back to sleep. That is, the watch was supposed to be in silent or DND mode, but the watch probably crashed or reset in the middle of the night, losing the silent or DND state, allowing an alert to go through. The sleep tracking was also very inaccurate, and sleep tracking is the single most valuable metric for me.
To this day I fantasize posting a video where I smash my Garmin watch to pieces alerting other people how bad it is. Still, the hardware was near perfect and it's hard to hate the watch itself. But because of the software issues, it was no better than a dumb watch to me. I hate Garmin the company.
Garmin devices have historically had two regions for languages: Asia and everywhere else. I suspect this is due to some legacy limitations in their proprietary OS around Unicode support. Years ago, it was very difficult to implement full support for all languages on a single device with very limited hardware and battery power.
Historically, in order to get support for one of the Asian languages, you typically had to buy the watch in the exact right country, not anywhere else.
Same sentiment here. I constantly get 90+ scores when I wake up feeling like shit.
A 20€ chinese smart band combined with Sleep as Android provided much more accurate sleep tracking than a 800€ Garmin.
The only 2 garmin specific features I use are (compared to what I had before):
1. LED flashlight, love always having a pretty good light on my wrist (I'm talking about the actual flashlight some Garmins have, not the "use display as a flashlight" feature)
2. GPS that does not drain phone battery
3. Looks
Everything else for me is worse than a cheap chinese smart band.
I suspect the lack of success of the teams resulted from overfitting for the more standard pattern that is solving a max flow, and I also suspect the organizers are deliberately using this to trick the contestants. Spending time to practice coding vanilla algorithms to solve either max flow or a linear program is a waste of time for >99% of computer scientists.
People obviously turning out LLM code uncritically should be investigated and depending on the findings made redundant. It's a good thing that it allows teams to filter out these people earlier. In my career I have found that a big predictor of the quality of code is the amount of thought put into it and the brains put behind it - procedures like code review can only catch so many things, and a senior's time is saved only when a junior has actually put their brain to work. If someone is shown to never put in thought in their work, they need to make way for people who actually do.
One drawback cited consistently about Tesla cars is poor suspension. They may or may not have better design overall, and have better EV manufacturing than US competitors, but I don't see an "immense advantage" when they fail to address one of the things many users easily feel.
They designed the car bodies to be light for battery-related reasons, but in doing so, the cabins of even their luxury cars sound like budget economy vehicles.
Also one way Chinese EVs combat their efficiency disadvantage is fast charging and large batteries, and the charging cost is so negligible anyway that largely the user experience has been the same. Tesla has very little first mover advantage left against Chinese EVs, if any. It's sad that other Europe and US manufacturers haven't been able to be competitive, and probably Ford and GM will never be competitive because of protectionism.
