This is my experience as well. I run a bootstrapped business, so we don't have a ton of backing. We can't afford the top design firms, and Fable can do better than those within our budget. So it's not that we prefer AI over human designers; we just don't have the money!
The voices sound really pleasant and realistic. Sadly it doesn't support SIP. I found forwarding streams with websocket for phone calls tend to introduce some unwanted latency that's quite noticeable in a conversation. I've found a lot of success with GPT-live-1 so far, but the generated voices are lacking something I can't put my finger on.
I made the mistake of agreeing to undertaking that I would not use the trademarked brandname of one of my competitors' keyuwords in our Google ads bidding. Talking with a lawyer after the fact, I learnt that we can freely use the keywords but agreeing to the undertaking is a more serious and legally binding corporate promise. Now they are bidding on my brand names but we can't bid on them. So, I do agree Google search sucks, heh.
Kmart in Australia is pretty good to be fair. Cheap goods with good enough quality. I put them above Temu or Shein. For toys or pet accessories, they are unmatched in price anywhere else.
I am using Kotlin with Quarkus for my healthtech startup (founded last year), mainly because it just works. JVM is a very optimised piece of software, and it can handle almost anything you throw at it. And I like writing Kotlin, which I think is more expressive compared to something like Go, while being less verbose than Java. Contrary to popular opinion of not touching ORMs, I use Hibernate, and it might be the best ORM available. None other ORM library comes close - but that's just my opinion. Sure, I can handwrite SQL queries, but as a startup, my data schema is always changing and I don't want to spend my time updating those raw queries when Hibernate can do it for me. I use it at my day job as well.
For me is the opposite. I make a list of things I have done for the day. You know you need to push harder if your list has less than 5 items by lunch time.
A hack I found that's useful for me is to keep a daily log. I list down what I have achieved in a day no matter how small they may be, e.g adding contents to company wiki, clearing a jira ticket, reading an interesting article, etc. I keep the log in a simple text file for each day, in a repo on github. I always find the urge to add something to this log whenever I get back home.
Machine Learning and Ethereum dapps. I will be taking machine learning electives at school and my employer is looking for ways to make use of blockchains, so I got those going for me :)
It depends on my mood. When I am in the gym, I mainly listen to music to get pumped. When I am coding, I do it to get more focus. Sometimes I do it after pulling all-nighter and too sleepy to read useless corporate emails. It does the trick.