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0 pointsGeekyBear1mo ago0 comments

> publishing articles that are 90% press material from some company and most of the times seems to have very little technical knowledge.

Unfortunately, this is my impression as well.

I really miss Anandtech's reporting, especially their deep dives and performance testing for new core designs.

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zdw1mo ago

The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:

1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement

2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it

3. Companies who write things because they sell things

A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.

Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.

Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.

The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website. I'd imagine that when Anand joined Apple, this was likely the case, and if so that makes total sense.

GeekyBearOP1mo ago

When Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since.

It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPEC having been the gold standard of performance comparison between dissimilar cores for decades.

zdw1mo ago

There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.

I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.

gowld1mo ago

> The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website

This is true, but those jobs are much worse than writing jobs. So it comes down to how much you value money and what it buys. Most people earning "way more" are spending "way more" to try to pay back the soul debt the job takes away. When you dig deep, it's not "way more" utility.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

zdw1mo ago

The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space:

1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement

2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it

3. Companies who write things because they sell things

A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels.

Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Arstechnica (specially John Siracusa's OS X reviews) are the rare category 2.

Category 3 are things like the Puget Systems blog where they benchmark hardware, but also sell it, and it functions more as a buyer information.

GeekyBearOP1mo ago

zdw1mo ago

There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.

I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.

gowld1mo ago

> The problem is that category 2 is that they can fairly easily get jobs in industry that pay way more than writing for a website

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse