Comment by rock_artist
1 year ago
> Finally, I’d like to end this piece with a comment on the Cable TV-ification of the web. A core belief that Anand and I have held dear for years, and is still on our About page to this day, is AnandTech’s rebuke of sensationalism, link baiting, and the path to shallow 10-o'clock-news reporting. It has been our mission over the past 27 years to inform and educate our readers by providing high-quality content
That’s the core of it. And too bad they’re off. Finding a news outlet that isn’t “tweeting” an article and isn’t a blog post on HN was great. And while they mention Tom’s hardware. It always felt (to me) less verbose where I needed it.
Fair well.
Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means. Weird that I come across it so often, but never stopped to think what it means. :)
Also consider Goodbye, God be with ye. [0]
Adiós - A diós - go to god. [1]
[0] https://www.thetabernaclechoir.org/articles/goodbye-is-short...
[1] https://www.spanishdict.com/answers/145252/origins-of-adis
> Tangential - your last line made me think about what "Fare well" means.
Fare is unrelated to fair:
> From Middle English farewel, from fare wel! (and the variants with the personal pronoun "fare ye well" and "fare you well" used in the Renaissance), an imperative expression, possibly further derived from Old English far wel!, equivalent to fare (“to fare, travel, journey”) + well.*
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/farewell#Etymology
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fare
So to say "farewell" to someones is "have a good journey (in life?)".
In German there's a similar word, "fahren", which means driving or traveling. In Dutch the word "varen" mean to sail or in an older sense of the word "to move".
I can only assume, but considering the Dutch "vaarwel" is so close to English, I'm going to guess it means "Go well" - or more poetically when speaking of one's path in life: may fate treat you well.
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> Fare is unrelated to fair
True, but ‘fair well’ was likely just a misspelling.
> So to say “farewell” to someones is “have a good journey (in life?)”
On the wiki page for ‘fare’, you have to scroll a little to see the most relevant usage - see Etymology 2 definitions 2, 4, and 5. To get along, to pass through an experience, to happen, to progress.
As a verb, farewell is roughly synonymous with ‘be well’. (This agrees with have a good journey in life, but it doesn’t need to be thought of as travel or an analogy to travel, the meaning and common usage of farewell is already abstract and more general than travel, e.g., “how has your business fared?”)
As a noun, farewell has come to mean a valediction (the opposite of a greeting): wishing someone well when parting. Funny enough, valediction in multiple dictionaries I just checked is defined as a farewell or as the act of bidding farewell.
Que te vaya bien!
You just gave me jamais vu.
Tom's Hardware has been biased towards intel(reg the recent 13th,14th gen over-voltage issues), Anand Tech seemed quite reliable in comparision.
I remember waaaaay back in the day when Tom’s Hardware was mocked as Tom’s Hotware because they did some testing of what would happen to AMD and Intel CPUs if the heat sink spontaneously fell off while they were running. I think at the time, the AMD CPU melted itself, which Tom’s Hardware criticized. It did seem back then that there was a subtle anti-AMD bias on the site, but I haven’t paid close attention to it over time. It’s interesting to hear that the accusations of Intel bias still exist!
Gamers Nexus also showed in their video that TH's writer was the moderator of intel subreddit and they had been deleting posts on the recent issues with intel CPUs.
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To be fair I've accidentally run a CPU without a heatsink and it did a thermal shut down while testing a BIOS issue. It's a useful feature.
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“We dont play silly cheap web traffic games” [proceeds to pointlessly split every article across 10 pages]
I don't know your age but rest assured that when Anandtech started, and for the following 7-8 years, doing that was absolutely needed for a good user experience. Try loading a giant single page with dozens of images on a 28.8kbaud connection... It will not end well
Lol I read plenty of long articles on a 14.4kbps connection and have been around long enough to know you’re using baud incorrectly :-)
Without trackers and superfluous images, excessive CSS etc you could load a nice long article reasonably quickly. Text does not need to be split like that. It was done for $$$. Ars even offered a pagination escape hatch as a premium benefit at one point.
The print version concatenated all the pages. They did it to allow users to not load all the charts all at once.
farewell*
fare thee well*
Google captured the web with their search product. Then they monopolised it with Adsense.
And absolutely did not optimize for returning quality information.
> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
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Seems like less something that Google did and more just a natural consequence of the massive economic value of being at the top of the ranking and therefore tremendous incentive to hack the algorithm with advanced SEO.
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To be clear, Google very much had and has a culture of optimizing for (a certain) quality. They definitely fought spam.
It just so happens that their culture and employees value a “quality” that is distinctly incongruent with the wider 6b-person public. And also they completely dropped the ball on spam 10 years ago when (among other things) Matt Cutts left.
Don’t write off Google. They are an important case study of their own flavor of greed.
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No doubt, but AI is already and will continue to make the web a true hellscape. The shitshow Google has created is nothing compared to what’s coming, sadly. Big tech is truly ruining everything.
In what sense did they monopolise the web with adsense?
I never thought I would pay for searching information; yet now that I do, it's decidedly not google exactly because of this. Adsense hot garbage.
I was really surprised they survived this long. Long, overly elaborate, badly structured, too technical, and hence boring for the average joe, kinda articles all around.
Future plc and their rooted in the 2000s, absolutely horrible website structure that is forced on every news outlet they own... bleh. Ancient mammoths need a good spanking.
The whole point of some of their articles was to go into the more esoteric technical details rather than gloss over them like some other sites. So in that aspect you are correct: it wasn’t for “the average joe”. However, for some people it was what they wanted.
That attention to technical detail and knowledge is why people like Der8auer have an audience today and people respect his opinion.
Der8auer doesn't cover CPU architecture hardly at all. He mostly just does overlooking, which is orthogonal.
Have you ever wondered whether these long form articles give you ANY substantial knowledge or only the illusion that you gained something...
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For those of us with an attention span, long investigative reading is enjoyable and the knowledge gained is beneficial
I'm surprised people today even learn to read. Just watch youtube.
i was shocked when i realized some people cant write but use emoji as mean of communication
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