[Noseshine]

You make sure the material is "boring" so that you can concentrate on what the talk is really about: The people in front of you. They change every time, sometimes radically (composition of the audience and context). You want to waste as little conscious thought as possible when it comes to the material you are presenting so that you are free to dedicate yourself to the audience.

How boring does it get for a painter to use the same kinds of brushes for all their paintings? Or for a musician to use the exact same instrument? It doesn't, because they are not what you focus on.

It may get boring to minimally refactor the same code twenty times -- the code is the focus of the action. When giving a talk about the code the focus is what you want to achieve with people, not with code.

If you are there and really only care about the thing you want to present instead of the people in front of you then sure, they will probably notice.

Disclaimer:

This goes along with the other sub-thread here about the value of recording talks. What I say above is more about talks that are about convincing and motivating people. I don't mean that as in "motivational speeches" at all, but an Apple keynote about their new products is in that category. You want to give people a "look behind the scenes", at the person, because technology fails if the people and/or organization(s) fail no matter the quality of the technology. If the talk is about the latest internal optimizations of the V8 Javascript runtime giving the talk once and then point to the recording, or even just a lengthy blog post may actually be better and the main reason there is a talk is "the conference is there anyway and why not". But that's the kind of talk I would put only minimal effort into and it still works, because I don't need to convince and engage people, only to inform them.

[JustFYI]

Yes, we truly live in the age of useless bullshit. 99/100 talks I've watched from YouTube make me skip through the bullshit and see if there's even a single slide with some interesting content in it.

[daveguy]

1.5x and 2x speed on the desktop version of YouTube (and the ability to set playback speed in most media apps) helps with that.

[Noseshine]

I prefer the (open source) videospeed Chrome extension [0]. It gives me a much wider range (thus far I used up to 5 x speed; audio is blanked above 3 x speedup), 0.1 increments - and keyboard control. The latter is essential to me, I can watch sections of online lectures at high speed and quickly slow down without fumbling for the mouse to watch the few sections that demand more attention at lower speed.

[0] https://github.com/igrigorik/videospeed

[JustFYI]

Desktop YouTube shows a preview when you mouseover on the timeline. You can get through a 1-hour talk in 20 seconds or so with that.

[daveguy]

Right, but at 2x you can actually watch the whole thing in half the time. If it's not too technical you can come away with 100% of the information. The more technical or unfamiliar accents the more backups you will need.