541–550 of 723 posts
Oh great, Wirecutter is full of paid shills now too. Why the fuck does everything turn to shit? Fuck Google.
greed, for power, for influence, for money, etc…
when the incentives push someone to “race to the bottom” in terms of quality, this is what they do. always. over and over again.
greed leads to a race to the bottom.
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The idea that the difference between 0.9005 and 0.90005 is "small" is … weird. The moment I read that I checked out on the rest of the authors opinions.
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 genuine HEPA filter in a cleanroom [0] is not sitting in front of a fan in the middle of the room. It’s very carefully installed such that all the air coming into the clean area goes through it once. The calculation is entirely different. (A medical or industrial HEPA filter may well be in the exhaust, in which case the considerations are again different.)
[0] There’s none of this “true HEPA” stuff in a cleanroom. There is a filter that meets a specific standard, and that filter will have a gasket that seals with considerable force against the air handling equipment. The “true HEPA” filter in a Wirecutter-approved air purifier achieves nowhere near 99.97% due to the lack of the aforementioned gasket regardless of how amazing the filter media may be.
This article has basic misreading errors. It assumes that everything the Wirecutter says about the IKEA filters and non IKEA filters is a reflection of the difference between HEPA filters and non HEPA filters. But the wirecutter article does not imply that. It mentions the IKEA filter is not a true-HEPA filter and mentions other stuff about the IKEA filter which may or may not have derived from the true-HEPA claim. H…
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As a reader, if I had to generalize; Dynomight is a SF-rationalist-substack-adjacent blogger with a good understanding of statistics. The 2 closest popular bloggers I associate him with are SSC and Gwern; both pretty popular on HN. I particularly loved his blogs on the homelessness[1] and drug[2] crisis in the US. He? digs deep, does the statistical due diligence and usually finds conclusions that richer-academics-me…
Ok. How would you describe SSC's revenue model and incentives, then?
If his incentives were aligned with money, then he'd have tried to monetize his platform far sooner than he did. If anything, a portion of the new subscription money is already being invested into weird community moonshots that would've never seen the light of day.
There is revenue that facilitates means needed to make good content; and then there cases where the revenue is the end. I have yet too see him do the latter and the former is essential to any healthy career.
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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).
I'm hopeful for LMG's lab too. It's still a bit of a gamble, but from the sound of it the company is set up such that they can review products in an objective, data-backed way and tank any blowback from manufacturers that occurs as a result. It's much more focused on enthusiast computer hardware, but Gamers Nexus[0] is doing good things in this space too. Their style is much more dry and data-dense than LMG's though,…
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No, that would mean you support each woman who wants to have one and you probably shouldn't tell them it offends you if they do. Especially if they depend on you financially and you can break up with them without consequence.
I interpret it closer to being pro-choice while hoping to not personally need an abortion. Unions form when workers feel they aren't being heard and aren't being properly represented. Having a union form at your own company is an indication that you failed your employees in one way or another. You can be pro-union while hoping to personally never need one or have to sit across the table from one.
As for unions, everyone should unionize. It's literally the only way to even out the power dynamic. Good companies, bad companies - it makes no difference. There goal is to pay you as little as they can, so yours should be to get paid as much as you can. Unions make that process easier for the majority of people.
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As an Apple fanboy, I can easily say that Linus does not hate Apple. Linus DOES hate a lot of what Apple does; cases where they make things more unrepairable for no real reason, or various socio-political causes (like opposing Right to Repair or unions or whatever). Regardless of that though, I would trust a Linus review of a new iPhone or iPad a lot more than I would trust a lot of other sites, because I know he's n…
As someone who loathes Apple, I disagree. But I do agree that there's basically no place to get a trustworthy resource on Apple. Because, for the same reason I don't trust Linus, money is involved.
Probably more aggro than necessary... Wirecutter takes H13 to be the minimum level that can be considered "HEPA" because that seems to be the "H" in "H13", per the same chart that Dynomight references in Wikipedia (though they cut off that column in their own article).
The point of the article is that the Wirecutter authors don't understand the physics of air filters and gives the difference more emphasis than what actually matters - it doesn't actually make a massive difference in this particular application. For a purifier that intakes and exhausts in the same space, getting more airflow through the filter per hour can mean over time it's basically the same effectiveness, and using a slightly lower spec filter can be a good design trade-off because it doesn't require as much pressure so it can use less power per unit volume of air filtered.
Of course, in other applications, like bringing air into a cleanroom, it makes a massive difference, but that's not what we're talking about.
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I have a service tech for appliances. I just ask him what I should buy. He usually has suggestions from all the cost-ranges. Sometimes, I buy used through him (built-in fridge); sometimes I buy new. Since I had the opportunity to buy a bunch of equipment this year (a huge power surge from my HVAC fried appliances, and bad luck): Built in fridge: GE monogram; Dish washer: anything that is quiet (below 42 dB); Dryer: a…
Clothes washer: Staber My repair guy would bring other techs over to my house to see our Staber washing machine. Nothing else comes close. https://www.staber.com