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150

Any good tech sites without the fluff? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am looking for some good tech sites that have longer articles and indepth reviews. Preferably without an obvious biased towards a particular company or brand. edit: I should have clarified what to was looking for. I would like to compile a list of lesser-known but useful websites so that I can stay current on tech news without having to deal with the "fluff" that some of these sites now contain or the never-ending stream of anything remotely technological that you'd receive at the Verge, Ars Technica, etc.

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[–] lustrum 87 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Here's some that I follow:

Anandtech^1: Great general tech website, has some deep dives. It did used to be a lot better
Chips and Cheese^2: Insane deep dives into architectures and chips.
More than Moore^3: Ex Anandtech editor in chief, does great breakdowns of new AI tech and silicon.
igor's Lab^4: Does some great deep dives into various GPU and CPU issues.
KGOnTech^5: Only just followed this blog, seems to do a good teardown on the apple headset.
Krebs on Security^6: Blog by one of the best security researchers and breaks down vulnerabilities
EE Times^7: Good well written site with overviews on many areas in tech
Techspot Featured Articles^8: Mainly gaming and GPU/CPU, but does some good articles exploring games, tech etc

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

i am a EE major and i didn't know about EETimes :O

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks, there are a few I haven't heard of.

[–] lustrum 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Here's another good idea if you don't follow RSS feeds, I use these at work to aggregate some sites together:

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I'd loved Anandtech in the past, for how they used to be. hadn't heard of those other numbers 2,3,4 before, thanks for posting them!

[–] SleepyWheel 52 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Ars Technica

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Ars Technica has to be some of the most reputable high quality reporting in tech. I got hooked way back when they’d publish twenty plus page reviews covering operating systems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I think they still do that. They’ll probably have in-depth reviews of iOS 17 (and its watch and iPad counterparts) on Monday or Tuesday and Sonoma coverage a week after that, so we’ll know for sure soon.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I love Ars. Eric Berger’s space coverage is fantastic

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (4 children)

If i may be so bold, I and a few others write about tech at https://theluddite.org/.

I focus on the intersection between technology and human decisions. A lot of tech coverage has a techno-optimist, or tech-as-progress default perspective, where tech is almost this inexorable, inevitable, and apolitical force of nature. I strongly disagree with this perspective, which I think is convenient for the powers that be because it obscures that, right now, a few rich humans are making all our tech decisions.

I also write code for a living, which shockingly few tech writers and commentators have ever done. That makes it possible for me to write stuff like this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Jesus Christ, that is as hilarious as it is painful. You'd think they look at their own click-through stats for a site and realise that it's popular enough, but you'd be wrong.

Anyway, you earned yourself a bookmark.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Yes, exactly. I don't understand their need for content on a site. Shouldn't it be enough from their point of view to have a as most sites as possible integrating their ads? Why bother about the content?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Working in BI, I'm afraid I have a possible explanation for how it came along. It's a stupid one and may be entirely erroneous, but it lines up with what I know. Take it with a grain of salt, in any event.

It probably emerged from some analytics indicating that certain types of websites with certain traits retain a lot of long-term traffic, leading to terribly oversimplified assumptions and resulting guidelines about what makes a website profitable for them.

Knowing manglement and BI, they might not understand the full complexity of such analyses, and the analysts themselves may not understand it either, and the ones engineering the data models to feed the reports to detect those trends to inform management may have a flawed understanding of both the data structure and the semantics of it, and of the way their facts will filter through into insights and finally decisions.

So eventually, some analyst shows charts displaying X fact sliced by Y dimension, and the key influencers that emerge from those charts end up being "blog pulls more than no blog", "traffic scales with content" and so on, and from there, the executives decide the policy to favour sites with blogs and enough content.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

You might be interested in one of my oldest posts: https://theluddite.org/#!post/why-attention-economy

It's about what you're saying. I come to an adjacent but slightly different conclusion than your comment.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

So if I'm reading this right, what you're saying is that the content bloat exists so that existing engagement metrics look better? That tracks. The idea that they're grasping entirely wrong facts instead of "just" misunderstanding the dimensions' causal relations, didn't occur to me, but given that it's a simpler and still just as plausible explanation, Occam's Razor suggests it's more likely. In fact, I'd bet it's (more) correct.

In my naive position as BI developer, I tend to insist my "customers"/consumers focus on clarifying the questions they want to answer, so that I can find the appropriate measures to calculate, then work on narrowing down the disconnect between what data I have and what they want to know.

Of course, the situation "my consumers have latched on to this specific measure, how do I explain that it doesn't actually answer the question they're asking?" and the related problem of "how do I explain that the question they're asking isn't quite as simple?" occur often enough, but between the faith in my abilities and understanding of our data (on which I've become the de facto authority) and my own practice at picking examples that show such disconnects, it's usually little more than a routine exercise.

But most of my consumers (or at least the contacts for my models and reports) are operative or lower management that have either been relying on my service for years now or come to me after word-of-mouth from other people that have, so the bullheadedness of C-level executives just grabbing a single, intuitive measure and holding on to that - actual semantics be damned - is far from my daily business.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Yup that's about right. I think the obsession with engagement comes from a cultural desire to appear objective. It's performative more than it is rational.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, that one is on my To-Read-List still. I'll move it up.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Yeah, the broken Internet is just so much dumber than people think. Welcome aboard!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Great article on Google Adsense :) I accidentally clicked on one of the ads. Enjoy the extra penny.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Haha thank you. I've generally found that Google decides most of the ad clicks that come from my site are "invalid," so it'll pay me and then take it back 🙃. 90% or so of my ad revenue has been reversed within a day or two. We're talking like 12 USD so it's not like I'm losing a fortune, but still!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Crazy. And their algorithm for that is probably also not transparent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Interesting topics, added to my RSS feed ✅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

"Layer the compote to really represent all the states"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Notebookcheck is pretty dry but their reviews are more thorough and technical than most.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Notebookcheck

The name makes it sound like blogspam, but the first time I went on there I was incredibly blown away by how through they were. It was for a laptop and went to the level of determining variance in brightness across the screen and stuff like that.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

LOVE Notebookcheck. It's probably my most trusted source when buying / recommending laptops and components

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Notebookcheck and Phoronix (though mostly Linux news)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Love Linux hence my name.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You expect people to read usernames on here as well as the post??? 🙄🙄 GEEEEEEEZ 😂

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Too much? LOL!!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

https://lwn.net/ for Linux-related articles.

[–] sorrybookbroke 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hey, thanks man, added them the my rss feed

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm putting together an RSS feed reader myself. What are some good sites on yours?

[–] sorrybookbroke 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

No clue if it's your kind of thing, but I've been liking okimj.org, this week in neovim, and coding horror. I'll admit I'm kinda new at this entire rss thing too lol. Here's all I've gotten so far:

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Many such articles are reposted on HackerNews occasionally: https://news.ycombinator.com/

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I’d stay off HackerNews. It’s got a lot of headassery.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Probably. Still, it might be useful for blog discovery. One doesn't have to read the comments.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They commenters are the best reason to use HN. There are few forums with so many well connected users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Sure, they're just typically from the same industry with similar perspectives, similar blind spots and similar affinity for rants on topics X, Y and Z. Some get annoyed by this after a while so ignoring comments is a valid choice if you feel like that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

lol comments are the best part. That's top one for best comments out in the whole internet

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Any specific area you're looking?

If you're looking for super broad. BBC's tech section is decent. There's also always slashdot.

If you're looking for like more PC/gaming stuff, anandtech, techpowerup, and wccftech generally seem decent. Tomshardware news is decent too, but the only reviews I'd trust there are Aris' power supply reviews and articles.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Check out r/NewMaxx by u/NewMaxx on Reddit. That subreddit is focused on SSD news and a great source for it, but the articles linked on the sub are generally good sites for tech news in general.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

The Register has broken some good stories.

Also an excuse to read Simon Travaglia's BOFH https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/bofh/

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

techmeme.com is a great aggregator