this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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151
Any good tech sites without the fluff? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/technology
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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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[–] [email protected] 82 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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
[–] expatriado 7 points 1 year ago

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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!

[–] [email protected] 46 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Ars Technica

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year 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.

[–] buran 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] NOT_RICK 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

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

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

[–] hiramfromthechi 4 points 1 year ago

Interesting topics, added to my RSS feed ✅

[–] Snapz 3 points 1 year ago

"Layer the compote to really represent all the states"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

[–] just_another_person 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Notebookcheck and Phoronix (though mostly Linux news)

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

Love Linux hence my name.

[–] just_another_person 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Too much? LOL!!

[–] fubo 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Hey, thanks man, added them the my rss feed

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

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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:

[–] Audalin 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Audalin 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] orangebussycat 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Audalin 2 points 1 year 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.

[–] kSPvhmTOlwvMd7Y7E 1 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year 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 1 year 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.

[–] Vqhm 2 points 1 year 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 1 year ago

techmeme.com is a great aggregator