Not the experience I've had TBH. They describe their test methodology as usually involving several people that test and rate sometimes dozens of different products for a variety of metrics, and usually the main author has some sort of background that qualifies them as knowing what they're talking about.
Most recently, I heeded their recommendation that the AKG Y20U is one of the most well-rounded pair of earbuds under $50. Did not disappoint, and that's coming from someone whose main headphones are all mid-high range sennheisers.
There's not too many sites that will have several people thoroughly listen to 30 different pairs of earbuds and score each of them. There's only one site that does this type of shit for more than a single domain of products without a sacrifice in quality.
Even a site which does domain-specific reviews will likely not be able to put together an accurate side-by-side comparison because most of the products they review are likely lent to them by the manufacturer.
To me, that kind of best-of list is only slightly better than the sites that just regurgitate amazon reviews, because when I'm looking for "best of", it's usually going to be something where there is a qualitative difference that you have to experience all of them together to kind of get a feel for. Headphones are a great example.
Like what does a retrospective "best smartphones" list even do for me other than describe features to me that I could otherwise analyze in the Amazon description? Qualitative aspects like display and camera quality, or speaker quality are only possible with a side by side comparison.
In other cases (i.e., when the functionality of the product is basically commoditized), my concern is usually reliability and durability, which a best of list will rarely/never account for. The best you can do is play the numbers game with amazon reviews.
There are cases where this type of model works very well though. SmallNetBuilder is an example of product reviews that are so quantitative that it is very easy to put together a dynamic list that literally always gives you the products that are the best at a certain metric.
The problem is that doing an ACTUAL best-of list is time consuming, difficult, and above all expensive.
Wirecutter is an incredible site, because they are one of the few that actually does proper analysis of the things they are comparing. Think about how expensive and time consuming it is for a site to buy a bunch of the same type of product and actually draw meaningful conclusions from using a dozen of them side by side.
Yeah, I'm very suspicious when these types of claims are made without considering the tradeoff.
I'm very much oriented towards rapid processing of information. On the contrary, I have a much more difficult time with memorization and procedural tasks than other people.
The Richard Feynman archetype has existed forever, I think its just that now everyone who doesn't have that personality is being directed into it by the internet.
moreover, someone who wants to buy a product only needs one seller on amazon or ebay to provide it to them. additional sellers within a certain normal range provide very incremental downward pressure on the price.
glad i can always rely on being intentionally misinterpreted
autism-friendly version: there are far more online retailers than there are online marketplaces that allow independent parties to list their goods with minimal effort and investment
As someone who operated a small ebay business and still sells on ebay, I can assure you that the game is always configured in the buyer's favor. It is beyond easy for buyers to get away with all sorts of return scams and arbitrary complaining.
I have never and will never have an experience in my life where I receive something from eBay or Amazon that wasn't as expected and I am not able to reconcile it. On the contrary, my biggest fear as a seller is that a buyer takes advantage of this leniency.
Think about it for one second. What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing sellers off? Nothing. They have literally nothing to lose by their buyers having slightly fewer choices of who to buy from, on the off chance that seller completely gives up.
What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing buyers off? A potentially life-long customer. There are far more places to buy things than to sell things.
the present the contrary point, apple has no horse in the race in terms of trying to cookie monster all of your data and show you ads 24/7. the same cannot be said of google and microsoft.
the "being a slave" is apple trying to tell you what's best, and very often being correct. let me know how you feel 5-10 years from now when thunderbolt/usb-type-C take over the industry 100% due to apple. how about SSDs? i know a bunch of people that think apple has some magic sauce that makes their machines fast because they had an SSD before.
i also would never use a desktop that didn't run a unix or unix like operating system, so there's that. i also do not enjoy the inconvenience and lack of design sense that comes with linux on the desktop so there's that too.
I think the main problem is how shitty the lowest common denominator of coffee is in the US.
I suspect at least 80% of the population doesn't know what fresh, tastefully roasted coffee actually tastes like.
No doubt, americans love everything to taste like cotton candy, but there'd definitely be more people that could enjoy coffee if they'd ever had it prepared correctly.
I don't care for traditional eastern teas, but I do enjoy flavoured black, white, and rooibos teas, the kind you'd find from teavana or adagio. A little bit of that potpourri shit they put in it goes a long way.
When has there ever been a dispute that streamlining sugar into your body is terrible? Any heavily sweetened liquid is about the most nutritionally useless thing you can consume.
Sodas sweetened with sugar and processed sweets are cigarettes-lite, and perhaps one of the most detrimental affects of industrialization. These are all engineered to be as consumable and non-fulfilling as possible. The worst part is that no one takes them seriously and people are indoctrinated into them from childhood.
I'm firmly of the belief that everyone should look at sugar with a very compartmentalized portion-based mindset. Allow yourself a single sugar-based, relatively satisfying (ice cream isn't a bad bet) dessert a day, if any at all, and make sure you control the portion. This notion that it's just okay to be drinking sugar whenever is and has always been insane.
I think it's too early to say for certain, but I think at the very least a situation will arise from this deal. It is likely that it will either be good or bad for the consumer.
anecdotally, my father who had me at 45 was more athletic than 90% of people half his age. I still turned out borderline autistic (kidding -- I think).
my dad has a similar personality though, so I don't know how conclusively we can talk about the role of age.
I suspect the theory in OP is valid, or that your father/parents have more time to raise you (i was using the internet by 4), or a combination of both. Athleticism seems like a stretch. Fat parents aren't having autistic genius children.
My parents also worked from home, which further corroborates the time argument. My dad also spent a lot of time teaching me how the world expects me to act and how to be socially successful. I think in a lot of cases that part is missing because the borderline-autistic-genius parent are themselves socially inept.
If you can't hop on the line and flip burgers, you don't know what flipping burgers correctly looks like, you can't gauge how much time and energy is needed to flip one, and your employees don't respect your ideas about how they should be flipping them.
>is it in Program Files, Program Files (x86), or App Data? Why isn't this thing in the start menu? where are the configuration files for this app? where is the actual executable for this thing that launches on boot?
Is it in my dock? > have I learned how cmd+space works? > Is it in my applications folder? > I do not yet have this application on my computer.
> Notice how over 50% of the howto computer books in bookstores are on how to use Apple product, despite being less than 5% of the market?
Perhaps this is because Windows machines are widespread appliances and are on every desk and in every school, and the layman, who wants to use Mac at home and thinks all new things require instruction manuals, is much more likely to be buying a Mac guide than a Windows guide?
How does it not make sense that all of your applications are literally self contained packages (folders, quite literally) in a folder called Applications? The only proprietary knowledge here is knowing that the file explorer is called Finder.
I will admit that the "correct" way of doing a lot of things isn't immediately obvious. For instance, cmd+space is how you are supposed to touch applications that aren't in the dock, and it works 10x better than start menu search.
The whole program files/start menu construct is a MESS when you actually consider all of the things going on behind the scenes. It would make much more sense for there to be a "Programs" folder that transparently shows the user everything on the system. If shit like DLLs and configuration files can't be stuck inside of it like a folder, stick it in Program Data and registry.
I hate identity politics of any sort, but as usual, there's complete and absolute dementia for the past 8 years of our purportedly muslim lizard infidel head of state that is trying to destroy our country with non-christian values.
you realize you can spin this for every government service, right?
"if you didn't explicitly engage in a contract to receive something in exchange for something of yours, you don't deserve it"
this argument doesn't work because we, like any modern society, afford people the guarantee of certain things without directly paying for them, like primary education and emergency services. clearly these things were all instated during a period when americans didn't all have it in their heads that their entire life is cowboys and indians.
you have to actually prove why someone's right to live is superseded by some pipe dream that everyone gets exactly what they deserve. giving inane examples of low-priority patients who would 100% be on a waiting list in any other country is irrelevant.
the wild west pipe dream won't work unless healthcare and education are 100% privatized and transparent with no risk-distribution system whatsoever. the second made-up numbers get involved is the second it's no longer a free and rational market.
Slashdot Mirror
holy shit, I'm out the door within 20-30 minutes of rolling out of bed.
For individual reviews, yes.
The guys that are comparing products are *most likely* spending out of pocket for a good percentage of the items.
Not the experience I've had TBH. They describe their test methodology as usually involving several people that test and rate sometimes dozens of different products for a variety of metrics, and usually the main author has some sort of background that qualifies them as knowing what they're talking about.
Most recently, I heeded their recommendation that the AKG Y20U is one of the most well-rounded pair of earbuds under $50. Did not disappoint, and that's coming from someone whose main headphones are all mid-high range sennheisers.
There's not too many sites that will have several people thoroughly listen to 30 different pairs of earbuds and score each of them. There's only one site that does this type of shit for more than a single domain of products without a sacrifice in quality.
Even a site which does domain-specific reviews will likely not be able to put together an accurate side-by-side comparison because most of the products they review are likely lent to them by the manufacturer.
To me, that kind of best-of list is only slightly better than the sites that just regurgitate amazon reviews, because when I'm looking for "best of", it's usually going to be something where there is a qualitative difference that you have to experience all of them together to kind of get a feel for. Headphones are a great example.
Like what does a retrospective "best smartphones" list even do for me other than describe features to me that I could otherwise analyze in the Amazon description? Qualitative aspects like display and camera quality, or speaker quality are only possible with a side by side comparison.
In other cases (i.e., when the functionality of the product is basically commoditized), my concern is usually reliability and durability, which a best of list will rarely/never account for. The best you can do is play the numbers game with amazon reviews.
There are cases where this type of model works very well though. SmallNetBuilder is an example of product reviews that are so quantitative that it is very easy to put together a dynamic list that literally always gives you the products that are the best at a certain metric.
The problem is that doing an ACTUAL best-of list is time consuming, difficult, and above all expensive.
Wirecutter is an incredible site, because they are one of the few that actually does proper analysis of the things they are comparing. Think about how expensive and time consuming it is for a site to buy a bunch of the same type of product and actually draw meaningful conclusions from using a dozen of them side by side.
Yeah, I'm very suspicious when these types of claims are made without considering the tradeoff.
I'm very much oriented towards rapid processing of information. On the contrary, I have a much more difficult time with memorization and procedural tasks than other people.
The Richard Feynman archetype has existed forever, I think its just that now everyone who doesn't have that personality is being directed into it by the internet.
ok, good luck. may alexa ratings be with you.
moreover, someone who wants to buy a product only needs one seller on amazon or ebay to provide it to them. additional sellers within a certain normal range provide very incremental downward pressure on the price.
glad i can always rely on being intentionally misinterpreted
autism-friendly version:
there are far more online retailers than there are online marketplaces that allow independent parties to list their goods with minimal effort and investment
I don't know where you guys get this shit from.
As someone who operated a small ebay business and still sells on ebay, I can assure you that the game is always configured in the buyer's favor. It is beyond easy for buyers to get away with all sorts of return scams and arbitrary complaining.
I have never and will never have an experience in my life where I receive something from eBay or Amazon that wasn't as expected and I am not able to reconcile it. On the contrary, my biggest fear as a seller is that a buyer takes advantage of this leniency.
Think about it for one second. What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing sellers off? Nothing. They have literally nothing to lose by their buyers having slightly fewer choices of who to buy from, on the off chance that seller completely gives up.
What does a company like Amazon or eBay lose by pissing buyers off? A potentially life-long customer. There are far more places to buy things than to sell things.
I use mac.
sorry, missed a word, "never had an SSD before"
>slave
the present the contrary point, apple has no horse in the race in terms of trying to cookie monster all of your data and show you ads 24/7. the same cannot be said of google and microsoft.
the "being a slave" is apple trying to tell you what's best, and very often being correct. let me know how you feel 5-10 years from now when thunderbolt/usb-type-C take over the industry 100% due to apple. how about SSDs? i know a bunch of people that think apple has some magic sauce that makes their machines fast because they had an SSD before.
i also would never use a desktop that didn't run a unix or unix like operating system, so there's that. i also do not enjoy the inconvenience and lack of design sense that comes with linux on the desktop so there's that too.
I think the main problem is how shitty the lowest common denominator of coffee is in the US.
I suspect at least 80% of the population doesn't know what fresh, tastefully roasted coffee actually tastes like.
No doubt, americans love everything to taste like cotton candy, but there'd definitely be more people that could enjoy coffee if they'd ever had it prepared correctly.
imagine if the US's main public health concern was teeth whitening paste for every citizen.
+1 on rooibos and flavoured teas.
I don't care for traditional eastern teas, but I do enjoy flavoured black, white, and rooibos teas, the kind you'd find from teavana or adagio. A little bit of that potpourri shit they put in it goes a long way.
What is the "worse and worse"?
When has there ever been a dispute that streamlining sugar into your body is terrible? Any heavily sweetened liquid is about the most nutritionally useless thing you can consume.
Sodas sweetened with sugar and processed sweets are cigarettes-lite, and perhaps one of the most detrimental affects of industrialization. These are all engineered to be as consumable and non-fulfilling as possible. The worst part is that no one takes them seriously and people are indoctrinated into them from childhood.
I'm firmly of the belief that everyone should look at sugar with a very compartmentalized portion-based mindset. Allow yourself a single sugar-based, relatively satisfying (ice cream isn't a bad bet) dessert a day, if any at all, and make sure you control the portion. This notion that it's just okay to be drinking sugar whenever is and has always been insane.
I think it's too early to say for certain, but I think at the very least a situation will arise from this deal. It is likely that it will either be good or bad for the consumer.
anecdotally, my father who had me at 45 was more athletic than 90% of people half his age. I still turned out borderline autistic (kidding -- I think).
my dad has a similar personality though, so I don't know how conclusively we can talk about the role of age.
I suspect the theory in OP is valid, or that your father/parents have more time to raise you (i was using the internet by 4), or a combination of both. Athleticism seems like a stretch. Fat parents aren't having autistic genius children.
My parents also worked from home, which further corroborates the time argument. My dad also spent a lot of time teaching me how the world expects me to act and how to be socially successful. I think in a lot of cases that part is missing because the borderline-autistic-genius parent are themselves socially inept.
If you can't hop on the line and flip burgers, you don't know what flipping burgers correctly looks like, you can't gauge how much time and energy is needed to flip one, and your employees don't respect your ideas about how they should be flipping them.
>is it in Program Files, Program Files (x86), or App Data? Why isn't this thing in the start menu? where are the configuration files for this app? where is the actual executable for this thing that launches on boot?
Is it in my dock? > have I learned how cmd+space works? > Is it in my applications folder? > I do not yet have this application on my computer.
> Notice how over 50% of the howto computer books in bookstores are on how to use Apple product, despite being less than 5% of the market?
Perhaps this is because Windows machines are widespread appliances and are on every desk and in every school, and the layman, who wants to use Mac at home and thinks all new things require instruction manuals, is much more likely to be buying a Mac guide than a Windows guide?
This seems like a VERY conditioned bias IMO.
How does it not make sense that all of your applications are literally self contained packages (folders, quite literally) in a folder called Applications? The only proprietary knowledge here is knowing that the file explorer is called Finder.
I will admit that the "correct" way of doing a lot of things isn't immediately obvious. For instance, cmd+space is how you are supposed to touch applications that aren't in the dock, and it works 10x better than start menu search.
The whole program files/start menu construct is a MESS when you actually consider all of the things going on behind the scenes. It would make much more sense for there to be a "Programs" folder that transparently shows the user everything on the system. If shit like DLLs and configuration files can't be stuck inside of it like a folder, stick it in Program Data and registry.
I hate identity politics of any sort, but as usual, there's complete and absolute dementia for the past 8 years of our purportedly muslim lizard infidel head of state that is trying to destroy our country with non-christian values.
you realize you can spin this for every government service, right?
"if you didn't explicitly engage in a contract to receive something in exchange for something of yours, you don't deserve it"
this argument doesn't work because we, like any modern society, afford people the guarantee of certain things without directly paying for them, like primary education and emergency services. clearly these things were all instated during a period when americans didn't all have it in their heads that their entire life is cowboys and indians.
you have to actually prove why someone's right to live is superseded by some pipe dream that everyone gets exactly what they deserve. giving inane examples of low-priority patients who would 100% be on a waiting list in any other country is irrelevant.
the wild west pipe dream won't work unless healthcare and education are 100% privatized and transparent with no risk-distribution system whatsoever. the second made-up numbers get involved is the second it's no longer a free and rational market.