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Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

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Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#331

Post by jterrys »

cush wrote: post #301
mrkwse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).

Phones and anything Apple are reviewed to oblivion. There are some incredible consumer product review YouTube channels out there too.. The Best one imo is project farm ( https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vO3UX4oEnZI ). If you're into headphones, Crinacle's site/YT are on a completely different level than any other review site I really hope LMG does videos in these styles with their lab

Project Farm is pretty great. Got great advice for water filters, car wax, and drills

There really are brands out there that charge 200% more for a shittier product to just get carried by brand recognition alone.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#332

Post by diffeomorphism »

etchalon wrote: post #307
weaksauce wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird. it is. that's one minute of filtration and the difference is minuscule. over time, this would trend to zero. in 10 minutes you'd expect to be near the steady state of the room. (obviously not completely steady state since you are filtering some already filtered air and probably introducing more particulates but close enough for an approx…

It's a 10x difference. It's not small. In a sealed environment, you're right, you'd eventually end up with all particles filtered. But homes are not sealed environments.

What? Where are you getting the 10x from? Both numbers are about 0.9 and the difference is about 0, not 10. If you are refering to the sticker number, yeah the whole point of that calculation is that a 10x sticker number does absolutely not translate to a 10x difference.

> but homes are not sealed.

Correct, but neither are they ultra high throughput (at which point any filter sitting in the room would be useless anyway, since you never get the filtered air). So "not sealed" is too vague to make any conclusion.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#333

Post by aylons »

wgjordan wrote: post #211
aiisjustanif wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references. I personally feel the quality of Wirecutter has gone down since NY Times just a bit. However, after almost a decade of reading Wirecutter they have overwhelming provided a decent “why you should trust us” section for staple consumer items. There is a good example from just today. [1] You can always say they should do more, but honestly th…

>> They didn't actually try any of the products themselves (they admitted as much in the article). > I’m going to dissent here on this thread because I’m not seeing any references. OK, here's one such reference in "The Best Baby Formula" [1]: > We didn’t do any testing for this guide, because babies have minds of their own, and it would be impossible to control for all of the variables that might make a baby prefer o…

This actually speaks a lot in favor of Wirecutter. I wish more guides would be upfront about limitations like this and this is a very reasonable justification.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#334

Post by fnimick »

fartcannon wrote: post #329
mrkwse wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be interesting if LMG can pull off what Linus is aiming for with the massive investment in a laboratory environment. There are huge parts of the tech market where the most critical reviewing you can find is anecdotal accounts of if the reviewer liked a product or not (or the more clinical reviews are drowned out by the anecdotal noise).

Do you trust Linus, though? He often promotes himself as without bias, but he very clearly hates Apple (except the watch). He also loves things he already understands (anything Microsoft). He's got heavy duty fanboyitis. And he's clearly someone you can buy demonstrated by his flip flopping AMD/Intel/NVidia praise. I don't think he outwardly lies (at least not in a way that matters), or anything, but he's got pretty…

He's also vocally anti-union and actively tried to stop his employees from marketing themselves on personal social media (to stop them from building a following and then leaving, I'm guessing), so I refuse to watch any of his content or support his business in any way now.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#335

Post by hexane360 »

etchalon wrote: post #307
weaksauce wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird. it is. that's one minute of filtration and the difference is minuscule. over time, this would trend to zero. in 10 minutes you'd expect to be near the steady state of the room. (obviously not completely steady state since you are filtering some already filtered air and probably introducing more particulates but close enough for an approx…

It's a 10x difference. It's not small. In a sealed environment, you're right, you'd eventually end up with all particles filtered. But homes are not sealed environments.

(0.9005 - 0.90005) / 0.90005 = 0.00049997222

It's a 0.049997% difference, not a 10x difference.

In an unsealed environment, the steady state will be related to amount filtered * % filtered / amount exchanged for any given time period. The difference in % filtered is not a significant factor in the above ratio.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#336

Post by fnimick »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #276
wincy wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about this too. He did a breakdown of how much money they get from ads and it’s not much considering how many employees they have. They have a lot of sponsorships and selling swag but I’m just not sure what their maximum size is as just another YouTube channel, even one with lots of revenue streams.

Honestly, I think Linus has reached the point where even if his endeavour fails his family will be OK. Plus, he'd get to spend more time with them.

Dude literally has a brand new house where he wrote off all the renovation as business expense as he was filming it for his channel. He's totally fine.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#337

Post by plushpuffin »

applecrazy wrote: post #311
mschild wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main problem is probably finding any mainstream consumer TVs that are non-smart. I have looked and beyond some obscure brands or short of incredibly expensive commercial models there are barely any options.

Any TV is stupid if you don’t connect it to the Internet.

I haven't bought a TV in about ten years and I've started shopping recently, knowing I'll probably have to get one soon. What I'm interested in, knowing I'll probably have to do this (smart TV with no internet), is what the out-of-box experience is without internet.

Will it have preloaded ads that will never change because it can't download new ones? Will there be huge gray boxes where the ads should be in the UI? Will it try to connect to open WiFi or use HDMI to share my streaming box's internet connection? Will it nag me with an alert box in the middle of the screen asking me to connect it? Will it disable features if I don't give it internet access? Will there be bugs and performance problems requiring me to update the firmware, and if I do, will that firmware update introduce any of the above?

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#339

Post by fooqux »

birdman3131 wrote: post #277
throw0101a wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Wirecutter is a highly flawed review site, but at least it's a real one. There are vanishingly few left for general consumer products. There's WC, Consumer Reports, and what else? I like America's Test Kitchen for kitchen-y stuff. Project Farm (on YouTube) for tools / DIY stuff perhaps.

I like a lot of project farm's videos but his electrical tape video was far off the mark of what actually matters. They were good tests for tape but bad tests for Electrical tape.

Fair, and I'd also say that many of the tests he does could really use more data points. For example, testing torque using bolts- I've had a few bad bolts in my life that were weaker than they should have been. I really hope he does that but edits it out.

However, I would say that's the price you pay for an independent reviewer these days. He's (presumably) not simply reading a carefully prepared script by the vendor. That he actually pays for all the things he reviews is astonishing. Likewise, I'll forgive him the occasional bad video.

Speaking of, in the electrical tape video you mention, he tests for things he cares about. Presumably you would have want him to test resistance I presume? I would think so too, but in doing some research while responding to your post, that doesn't seem what anybody actually cares about. Most tapes advertise heat resistance only. I can't actually find a mention of tape in the NFPA, aside from checking it for heat-damage, which makes sense as in house wiring you would be using wirenuts, not tape to actually bridge and insulate connections.

Frankly, I can't think of a single time I've ever cared about it being an insulator since I was a kid hacking together batteries and wires. All that said, on second thought, I guess his video is fine after all; in my book, at least.

Re: Contra Wirecutter on the IKEA air purifier

#340

Post by csours »

rcoveson wrote: post #322
csours wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author explicitly states that it's small in the home use context. If you're talking about medical or cleanroom manufacturing contexts, yes it's a huge difference.

The difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is not huge in a medical context, or in a chip fab context, or in any other practical context. We're not talking about the difference between 0.0005 and 0.00005. The numbers in question are 0.9005 and 0.90005, and the point being made is that the 0.9 problem dwarfs the 10x efficiency difference way over in the thousandths place.

That difference is from his comments on the toy model of 1000 cubic feet room and 100 cubic feet per minute recirculating air.

In an operating room or chip fab, the room would be over pressure and the new air coming into the room would be filtered. The cleanliness of that air would be determined by the quality of the filter.

Also, if you need air that clean, you need to have strategies for all sorts of things besides filtering.

The point is, you need to be very careful when you put numbers on the internet, and when you read numbers on the internet. Numbers make things feel more real than they are.

For me to actually trust the numbers here, I would need to see the graphs for multiple runs of each filter.

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