MudMan

Admittedly it’s WAY easier to operate a motor boat than a sail boat, so depending on how you like to recreationally bleed your unlimited money I can see reasons for that choice.

But I fully agree that we’ve had renewable energy-based ships with unlimited range for millenia. The claim that “The aim was to demonstrate that zero-emission sea travel [is possible today]” broke my brain a little.

Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.

The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.

We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.

I don’t know that it’s an eyesight issue. I mean, if you have good enough eyesight to read stuff on your phone screen you have good enough eyesight to see the difference.

It may be an awareness thing, where the more you care about photography the more the limitations of the bad cameras stand out. And hey, that’s fine, if the phone makes good enough pictures for you that’s great. Plus, yeah, you can get phones with the exact same lens and sensor where one of them has a big fat bump that is deliberately blown up to make the cameras “feel” premium. There’s been a fair amount of marketing around this.

But if you compare A to B it’s very obvious. Camera bumps became a marker of premium phones for a reason.

Yep. That sample above is from a review, but digging into my own archived photos at the time it’s crazy to see how much blur picutres taken from moving vehicles have, even in direct daylyght, and how grainy indoors images are, even when well lit. That thing was genuinely just opening itself up for a while and hoping for the best.

I am annoyed by most phone trends of the past decade, but… yeah, if you go back to a 2014 phone today there is some readjustment between what you remember phone photo and video looking like versus what they actually look like. That was the Galaxy S5 year. That thing had a single camera you would consider unacceptable as your selfie shooter today.

EDIT: This thread made me go look up reviews, and man, yeah, I remember every single indoors photo on my own S5 looking just like this. What a blast of nostalgia. I didn’t realize there is a digital equivalent to 80s pictures having gone all sepia and magenta-y, but here it is.

Well, then you don’t need a phone review, do you?

Which is fine. Most people don’t need a phone at any given time. You go check reviews for phones when you need one and when you care about the differences between them. If you just need a phone-ass phone you can just go to your carrier and grab whatever is packed-in, no need to check reviews for that, most phones just fine work out of the box these days.

See, this is the exact process I am trying to describe. I’m sure that made sense in your head, and I’m sure if you think about it for a second you’ll realize that Target will very happily set up an affiliate link, just as Amazon does. And, of course, a whole bunch of the SEO listicles are the SEO hooks of bigger traditional review sites, including RTINGS, IGN or whatever. For the sake of argument, punching in “best bluetooth speaker” on DDG returns SEO listicles from Tom’s Guide, Wired, RTINGS, the New York Times, CNET and The Verge, in that order.

Which is not to say it’s not annoying, affiliate links and SEO have done terrible things to how practical reviews on websites are presented and parceled out. But that’s not to say they aren’t done honestly or lack validity on the sites that do it right, which are also the more successful ones.

I am… unfamiliar with the ecosystem of print newspaper appliance reviews, but I can tell you that having sloppy or obsequious reviews isn’t generally a sign of having taken a bribe or even having any direct influence from the manufacturer. Reviewing things is hard, by definition you are not in the same position as the people who will buy the thing later. It can be difficult to make that shift and appreciate value, particularly when it comes to tech where reviewers are often assessing the cool factor of whatever is new on the market while users just need a tool for everyday life.

Also, good reviews and hostile reviews aren’t the same thing. This depends a lot on what is being reviewed, and it’s not to say extremely protective reviews are bad themselves. This is more true in media reviews than on tech reviews, but even on tech reviews, some of my favorite people working generally provide fairly positive reviews, or very neutral spec reviews with relatively little judgement. Very often I don’t need to be protected from harm, I just need a savvy overview of a thing before I pull the trigger.

But also, let’s be clear, don’t book product placement that looks like a review. And if you do, make it a full on ad and make sure it’s presented as a sponsorship, although even when big names do that while trying to stay honest, or because they genuinely like the thing I don’t particularly like it.

It really isn’t, which is why it’s news when something like that comes out. People sometimes confuse being cynical with knowing how things work.

That said, this one is confusing, because it really does seem like Google is blurring the lines here between an ad spot or a product placement spot and pre-release samples for tech influencers intending to review them.

Honestly, cynicism aside, The Verge does a good job of breaking it down, including clarifying that they are under no such stipulations for their own review, so I’d recommend just reading the article in full.

It is a replacement for a specific portion of a very complicated ecosystem-wide integration involving a ton of interoperability sandwiched between the natural language bits. Why this is a new product and not an Assistant overhaul is anybody’s guess. Some blend of complicated technical issues and corporate politics, I bet.

So an interesting thing about this is that the reasons Gemini sucks are… kind of entirely unrelated to LLM stuff. It’s just a terrible assistant.

And I get the overlap there, it’s probably hard to keep a LLM reined in enough to let it have access to a bunch of the stuff that Assistant did, maybe. But still, why Gemini is unable to take notes seems entirely unrelated to any AI crap, that’s probably the top thing a chatbot should be great at. In fact, in things like those, related to just integrating a set of actions in an app, the LLM should just be the text parser. Assistant was already doing enough machine learning stuff to handle text commands, nothing there is fundamentally different.

So yeah, I’m confused by how much Gemini sucks at things that have nothing to do with its chatbotty stuff, and if Google is going to start phasing out Assistant I sure hope they fix those parts at least. I use Assistant for note taking almost exclusively (because frankly, who cares about interacting with your phone using voice for anything else, barring perhaps a quick search). Gemini has one job and zero reasons why it can’t do it. And it still really can’t do it.

I once had a guy walk into the subway, sit down, loudly declare he’d sneak into a military base, steal a tank and kill us all, then rant for a while about specific ways to kill his fellow passengers, including some very specific grenade action.

Then he sat there in silence for a couple of minutes, quietly turned towards the too-horrified-to-change-seats nerdy guy to his left and politely ask him if he had a lighter for his cigarrette.

It was a morning train, most people just kept trying to nap.

I know a few. Xerox is used for photocopying in other languages. Kleenex is the accepted term for “paper tissue” in Spain. Zodiac and Vespa are used for specific types of ship and motorcycle in multiple places, even when not manufactured by those brands. Thermos is a brand name, used in multiple countries as well. Sellotape is used in the UK for transparent sticky tape.

I don’t speak every regional variant of every language, but the short answer is this is definitely not a US thing. At all.

“Jello” is a brand name, which I think may be the example most people in the US specifically don’t realize. There are tons of others.

I think “googling” counts because a) it kinda makes sense even without the branding, b) I hear it all the time, and c) I say it myself even though I haven’t used Google as my default search engine for ages.

For context, Meta reported 40 billion in revenue during that period, with 24Bn in expenses and made 13bn for the period. All those numbers are up from the same period last year.

So I’m gonna go with “probably, yeah”.

Is the fuel in this case a bunch of damaged 13 and 14th gen CPUs?

Oh, gotcha. Yeah, direct phone-to-phone transfers have been rare and mostly replaced by cloud shares for me. It’s just easier to add the file in question to some cloud destination that allows link sharing instead.

To share from where to where? For sharing with your own computer at home I just have a SMB share and I use Cx File Explorer to access it like I would on a PC. For direct phone to phone sharing… I haven’t had to do that in ages, so I wouldn’t know. I have a number of solutions for cloud file sharing that are platform agnostic, though.

Oh, I absolutely could have. It would lose a couple of cores, but the 13th gen is pretty linear, it would have performed more or less the same.

Thing is, I couldn’t have known that then, could I? Chip reviews aren’t aiming at normalizing for temps, everybody is reviewing for moar pahwah. So is there a way for me to know that gimping this chip to run silently basically gets me a slightly overclocked 13600K? Not really. Do I know, even at this point, that getting a 13600K wouldn’t deliver the same performance but require my fans to be back to sounding noticeable? I don’t know that.

Because the actual performance of these is not to a reliable spec other than “run flat out and see how much heat your thermal solution can soak” there is no good way to evaluate these for applications that aren’t just that without buying them and checking. Maybe I could have saved a hundred bucks. Maybe not. Who knows?

This is less of a problem if you buy laptops, but for casual DIY I frankly find the current status quo absurd.

Whoa, that’s even worse. It’s not just the uncertainty of knowing whether Intel will replace your hardware or the cost of jumping ship next time. Intel straight up owes you money. That sucks.