• HP has announced two new Pavilion Plus models: An update Pavilion Plus 14 with AMD's Ryzen 7840H CPU, and some 16" piece of junk.  (Liliputing)
  
  The 14" model has a beautiful 2880x1800 120Hz display, the Four Essential Keys, the aforementioned 7840H CPU, and up to 32GB of LPDDR5-6400 RAM.
  
  Yes, the RAM is soldered in place, but at least there's 32GB of it.
  
  Apart from that there's a 5MP camera with a physical privacy shutter, two USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack.  
  
  This is what I've been looking for for the past year.

• A judge has issued a temporary injunction against the Texas age verification law.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The judge has a reasonable take on this:

  "The Court agrees that the state has a legitimate goal in protecting children from sexually explicit material online," wrote judge David Alan Ezra in the junction. "But that goal, however crucial, does not negate this Court’s burden to ensure that the laws passed in its pursuit comport with established First Amendment doctrine."

  The EFF has a reasonable take on this:

  "Once information is shared to verify age, there’s no way for a website visitor to be certain that the data they’re handing over is not going to be retained and used by the website, or further shared or even sold," explains the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for civil liberties online.

  The Free Speech Coalition is a bunch of frauds:

  "We're pleased that the Court agreed with our view that HB1181’s true purpose is not to protect young people, but to prevent Texans from enjoying First Amendment protected expression," said Free Speech Coalition Executive Director Alison Boden in a statement.

  Two out of three ain't bad.
  
  
  
• The US Copyright Office wants public comments on the questions surrounding AI and copyright.  (The Verge)
  
  They won't once they start seeing the comments, because people are crazy.
  
  
  
• The ACLU has joined with whores - by which I mean sex workers, not other leftist non-profits - to file a complaint with the FTC over Mastercard making it harder to pay that $20, same as in town.  (404 Media)
  
  All the other shit payment processors have pulled over the years, not a peep.
  
  Donate to the wrong charity, you'll be lucky if you only go to jail.
  
  But God forbid that you can't put a blowjob on your Mastercard.
  
  
  
• The Church of Scientology is seeking to block the availability of circuit diagrams and spare parts for E-Meters.  (404 Media)
  
  Right-to-repair laws would seemingly require the availability of both diagrams and spare parts, but the "Church" - or rather, Author Services, Inc, a wholly grifting subsidiary, is claiming that the E-Meter is not an electronic device based on scientific principles, but a religious artifact and therefore exempt...  And also an electronic device based on scientific principles.
  
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Friday, September 01 2023 10:40 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: J Greely at Saturday, September 02 2023 10:51 AM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, September 03 2023 05:24 AM (BMUHC)

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• OpenAI has disputed the claims in a class action suit brought by various authors such as Richard Kadrey, and "authors" such as Sarah Silverman, responding with your momma is a derivative work.  (Ars Technica)

  Authors claim generative AI is just a "grift" that repackages original works.

  The first half of this is self-evident.
  
  The second half is like saying steak is just repackaged carbon dioxide.  Yes.  Grass absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to grow.  Cows eat grass.  People eat cows.
  
  But the carbon dioxide is free, so it's irrelevant.
  
  In just the same way, authors - and "authors" - repackage the work of previous authors.  We accept this if they're sufficiently subtle about it, and the flavour comes out different, just like cows and grass.
  
  We don't expect grass to pay for the right to absorb carbon dioxide from the air, nor do we require authors to pay commercial licenses for the books they read as they learn to write.
  
  But if we are served a plate of alleged steak, and it is green and leafy, we tend to riot and burn the restaurant down.  Metaphorically.
  
  Much as I loathe OpenAI as a bunch of useless grifters, what they are doing is clearly fair use under US law.  Which doesn't mean they will win in court, and certainly doesn't mean that that the law won't end up changing.
  
  It just means that they are right.

• Australia's government has dropped planned age-verification legislation for online porn - which is to say, the entire internet - and will instead leave it to the online porn industry - which is again to say the entire internet - to muddle through somehow.  (The Guardian)
  
  Apparently a factor in this decision was the argument that such legislation would unfairly burden the LGBTQ+ community.
  
  Which, well, whatever.  Use their own rules against them.  A win is a win.
  
  
  
• You can track anyone's travels on the New York subway with just their credit card details.  (404 Media)
  
  An MTA official responded to the report, saying "Was that wrong?  Should we not have done that?"
  
  
  
• I've quoted articles from new news site 404 Media a couple of times recently, so I checked to see if they were worth following.
  
  Internal emails show superintendents struggling to comply with "Don't Say Gay" law.
  
  No, it's the usual hyperpartisan liberal dogshit.  Like The Verge, but with worse typography.
  
  
  
• The EPA has removed protections for most of America's wetlands.  (NPR)
  
  Not because they are suddenly pro-development, but because they claimed control over every damp patch and mud puddle in the country, and got a Stinger missile to the face from the Supreme Court.
  
  
  
• If you save - not bookmark, but save, which is a different mechanism somehow - a link in Google Chrome, and Google doesn't like it, they will delete it.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Thanks Google.
  
  
  
• We all know Threads is dead.  But what exactly killed it?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The problem is twofold: First, Twitter already exists.  You can't just build a better Twitter.  If it was still the Day of the Failwhale, maybe.  When it was still under the control of Vijaya Gadde and her Stalin Youth Squad, maybe.  But right now, it's...  Mostly adequate.
  
  Second, people online are mostly either boring or awful, and the ones fleeing freedom of expression on Elon Musk's version of Twitter - the ones flocking to Threads in those heady first minutes - are both.
  
  The article doesn't come to either of those conclusions, though, because it is written by those same people.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 31 2023 11:48 PM (BMUHC)

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• The fan forums for the game War Thunder have once again seen the release of restricted military documents, this time the flight manual for a variant of the Eurofighter Typhoon.  (Cybersecurity Connect)
  
  To be fair, while officially NATO restricted, the manual is available for purchase online...  From Russia.
  
  This follows on from postings of restricted documents covering F15 and F16 avionics and weapons systems on the same forums earlier this year.

• Yes, a pigeon can still outrun the internet.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At least out to a distance of 500 miles, after which the bird runs out of puff.
  
  The pigeons in this case were carrying three 1TB USB drives, weighing 5 grams each.  They could do a lot better with microSD cards, which weigh almost nothing.
  
  Always make sure to wash your pigeons thoroughly before eating them.
  
  
  
• A New South Wales woman suffering from a curious array of medical symptoms, ranging from lung and liver lesions to depression and forgetfulness, has been cured after a three-inch roundworm was pulled from her brain.  (Ars Technica)
  
  This particular species of roundworm has never before been found in a human, much less a human brain, because it is endemic to carpet pythons.
  
  Always make sure to wash your carpets thoroughly before eating them.
  
  
  
• At Hot Chips, Intel has announced a new RISC processor.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It has 8 cores, 528 hardware threads (66 per core - the article has a diagram explaining this strange number), 32MB of on-chip and 32GB of off-chip RAM, and 32 optical interfaces each running at 32GB per second.
  
  Each optical port is as fast as a full x16 PCIe 4 slot.
  
  And Intel plans to bundle sixteen of these chips into a sled (the individual chips use a relatively modest 75W, mostly for those optical links), and then 100,000 sleds into a massive supercomputer.
  
  For close to a billion hardware threads in a single system.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  Price not mentioned.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 31 2023 10:48 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 31 2023 10:53 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Frank at Thursday, August 31 2023 11:00 AM (JqCHh)

Posted by: zoya at Tuesday, September 12 2023 09:20 PM (i6GOX)

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• Kias and Hyundais are too easy to steal, so cities are suing the manufacturers.  (Vice)
  
  Already this year, lawsuits have been filed by Seattle (mayor: Democrat), Baltimore (mayor: Democrat), Cleveland (mayor: Democrat), New York (mayor: Comm...  wait, Democrat), Chicago (mayor: Lizard Person), St. Louis (mayor: Democrat), and Columbus (mayor: Democrat).
  
  Wonder what the common factor might be that all these cars are getting stolen.
  
  And I think rather than adding engine immobilisers to budget cars, manufacturers should look into deploying rabid wolverines.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Asus is not shutting down its Zenfone division, and the Zenfone 10 will not be the last model in the range.  (Android Authority)
  
  So there's that.
  
  
  
• GitHub Copilot is great - unless you're trying to get something done.  (Technically a Blog)
  
  Like so many other mis-designed tools, it adds noise more than it helps with the process.  In fact, that's the quickest diagnosis for a mis-designed tool.
  
  
  
• That Snake game has gotten even smaller.  (GitHub)
  
  Here's the entire binary in base-64 encoding:
  
  
  /cVMBKAPALgDAM0Qv9AHieblQJMhyzgvdPeID+RgQNQE1SgEB5hr
  2Pwp3znPd9jR+41BAvbxIOR0zTgtdMlXOA2ILXTMJq2TiCfr0A==
  
  It's playable; I've tried it.  It's not very good, but it does only use 0.00000011% of the RAM on my budget laptop.
  
  
  
• Are your Python strings too slow?  Stringzilla can chew through text data a hundred times faster than the built-in string type.  (GitHub)
  
  It uses SIMD instructions so it won't work if you're running an original model Pentium, but it does support modern x86 and Arm CPUs, meaning anything from the last 12 years or so.
  
  Unless you're running Linux under VirtualBox on Windows 11, in which case it probably just goes splat like MongoDB 5.
  
  
  
• Intel presented more details on its upcoming 144 core server processors this week at the Hot Chips conference.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's an advance over AMD's current 128 core chips...  Except Intel's version uses efficiency cores - E cores - which run at roughly half the speed of full cores.
  
  The details of these E cores are interesting, at least; they look a lot like the fastest high-end cores from just a few years ago.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 29 2023 11:58 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, August 30 2023 08:28 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, August 30 2023 01:40 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 31 2023 10:45 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Thumbnail Checker at Wednesday, December 06 2023 05:03 PM (hDb6o)

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• The creators of seven popular programming languages - Python, Java, Smalltalk, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and Typescript - will be presenting together in Seattle on September 19th.  (Pydata)
  
  That's four presenters - Anders Hejlberg has been a busy boy over the years.
  
  Guido van Rossum will be talking about Python, James Gosling about Java, Adele Goldberg will be representing the original Smalltalk team (all of whom appear to still be with us, and mostly still active, some forty years later), and Anders the rest.
  
  Almost worth going to Seattle for.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• Gigabyte has announced its new Brix Extreme range of NUCs.  (Liliputing)
  
  Mostly these are 4 and 6 core Ryzen 7035U chips - that is, Zen 3 CPUs with RDNA2 graphics.  Adequate but hardly groundbreaking.
  
  But the last model is a Ryzen 7840U: 8 Zen 4 cores and 12 RDNA 3 graphics cores.  This is one of the first 7840U devices I've seen; mostly manufacturers have been using the slightly faster but significantly more power-hungry 7840HS, or the rebadged Ryzen Z1 Extreme.
  
  Anyway, apart from the CPU it offers two SO-DIMM slots for a nominal 64GB of RAM, though 96GB should work, one M.2 slot, two HDMI ports, mini DisplayPort, USB-C with DisplayPort (so a total of four monitors), plus another USB-C without video, and five USB-A ports.  And 2.5Gb Ethernet and a headphone jack.
  
  If that's not enough there's a tiny expansion bay where you can add a module for another 2.5Gb Ethernet port, a second M.2 slot, and for some reason, a serial port.
  
  Prices were not mentioned.
  
  
  
• AMD's Radeon RX 7600 is now available at Micro Center for $229.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's not a high-end card, but that's not a high-end price.
  
  
  
• Amazone just sent a Dear John letter to users of its Honeycode service.  (Honeycode Community)
  
  This was a platform that allowed people who didn't understand how to build applications to build applications that they didn't understand.
  
  The results were rather predictable.

Posted by: SMM World at Wednesday, October 23 2024 05:55 PM (VYkB2)

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• There's nothing like spending a Sunday afternoon sitting in your favourite chair with a warm cup of 9Gbps DDOS attack.
  
  
  
• Running Linux on a Commodore 64.  (GitHub)
  
  With a memory expansion module.  You can't actually run Linux in 64k of RAM.
  
  And even then, it's only been tested in emulators.  It works by running a RISC-V emulator on the Commodore 64, and running Linux in that.  The developer estimates that it would take about a week to boot on real hardware; it takes two hours on an accelerated emulator.
  
  
  

Tech News

• South Yorkshire Police accidentally lost three years of bodycam footage.  (The Independent)
  
  This likely scuttles dozens of prosecutions.  
  
  Rotherham is in South Yorkshire.  So is Hillsborough, where 97 people died back in 1989 as a direct result of police mishandling crowd control.
  
  Back then they used VHS tapes, which couldn't be deleted at the touch of a button.
  
  The VHS tapes of the incident were somehow stolen.  From a locked cupboard, in a locked room, protected by a burglar alarm...  That didn't go off.
  
  Turns out they were the wrong tapes anyway; it was a different set of tapes that proved the police were lying about the event.
  
  
  
• Did you know they have the internet on computers now?  Threads is available on the web.  (ZDNet)
  
  Both the remaining users are reportedly pleased by this news.
  
  
  
• Speaking of losing important files, a crypto startup has gone bankrupt after losing the keys to its main wallet.  (404 Media)
  
  Its main wallet containing customer funds.
  
  They've known about this since December.
  
  Of 2021.
  
  And only now are bothering to tell anyone.
  
  Based on the numbers given in the article, the company was bankrupt even with the contents of that wallet; they're just extra double bankrupt without it.

Posted by: Andreaa at Thursday, July 18 2024 02:14 PM (LC0oe)

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• The EU's Digital Services Act goes into effect today.  Here's what that means.  (The Verge)
  
  It means, "Europe who?"
  
  
  
• How big tech really feels about the EU's crackdown.  (The Verge)
  
  Europe who?

• AMD announced its new Radeon 7700 XT and 7800 XT graphics cars, shipping September 6.  (AnandTech)
  
  I predicted pricing of $449 and $549 respectively, $50 too much in each case to be truly competitive, and I was half right.
  
  The 7700 XT with 12GB of RAM and 54 CUs (cluster units - graphics cores) is $449, slotting in precisely between the 8GB and 16GB models of Nvidia's 4060 Ti while generally outperforming both.
  
  The 7800XT with 16GB of RAM and 60 CUs, on the other hand, is $499, the same price as the 16GB 4060 Ti, which it demolishes, and $100 cheaper than the 4070, which it competes against fairly evenly.
  
  The 7700 XT might receive a small price adjustment before it hits retail (like the 7600), but it's a decent card.  It's just outshone by its big brother.  For an extra $50, just go for the 7800.
  
  
  
• Reviewing the Fanxiang (who?) S770 2TB SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's a perfectly adequate middle-of-the road PCIe 4 SSD, with a couple of bugs.
  
  Like the fact that the temperature sensor always returns the same reading.
  
  I wouldn't buy one, but it appears to be basically functional.
  
  
  
• The College Board, which administers the SAT and Advance Placement exams, also helpfully shares your data with Facebook and TikTok if you access their website.  (Gizmodo)

  "We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies," said a College Board spokesperson.  "In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting."

  Well, that's good to hear.

  After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.

  Oh, that TikTok.

  "Pixels are simply a means to measure the effectiveness of College Board advertising," the spokesperson said. "If a student uses the college search tool on CB.org, the student can add a GPA and SAT score range to the search filters. Those values are passed in the pixel, not because we configured the pixel that way but because that’s how the pixel works."

  We don't share user data with Facebook or TikTok, except when we do, in which case that's just how things work.
  
  Props to Gizmodo here for slapping the College Board in the face with the cold, wet Trout of Fact.
  
  
  
• Why Meta is the only AI company that matters.  (Phind)
  
  Meta's CodeLlama-34B scored 48.8% on the HumanEval test when it was first released.
  
  Phind's fine-tuned version scores 67.6% on the same test.
  
  CodeLlama was released yesterday.
  
  
  
• Everyone involved in web scraping is a hypocrite.  (Eric Goldman)
  
  Many of the most litigious actors against web scraping don't actually own the content they are protecting.

• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art AI for programming.  (Meta)
  
  While this has the same general limitations as other LLMs (like ChatGPT), you can download itself and mess around with the code and models without worrying about leftist lunatics wrapping the whole thing in the curare-dipped razor wire of wokeness.
  
  There are a couple of restrictions on the code license, and more on model license, but you can get the code and the data, and once it's out there you can rely on someone to ignore all the rules, and once that happens there's no putting Pandora's cat back in the bottle.
  
  This is in addition to the recently released Llama 2, a general-purpose LLM, and SeamlessM4T, a transcription and translation system that understands nearly 100 languages.

• The DOJ is suing SpaceX over alleged hiring discrimination.  (The Verge)
  
  Sexual discrimination?  Age?  Race?
  
  No, none of those.  As a government contractor, SpaceX was reluctant to hire illegal aliens.  The DOJ calls them "refugees and asylees" but they would.
  
  
  
• Australia's proposed misinformation legislation imposes penalties of up to $550,000 for individuals contradicting the official narrative.  (Brownstone Institute)
  
  But conveniently grants blanket immunity to government officials and commercial news organisations caught in deliberate lies.
  
  
  
• The PlayStation 5 Pro could offer twice the graphics performance of the regular PS5.  (Notebook Check)
  
  Or it might not exist at all.
  
  One of those.
  
  
  
• After laying off 91% of its staff over a period of 18 months, online mortgage company Better.com has finally completed its IPO - and has seen its share price decline by 93% in its first week.  (Fast Company)
  
  Oops.
  
  
  
• Another look at the Beelink GTR7 mini-PC.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's about 50% larger than a basic NUC, but it does also offer, well, basically what you find in a regular-sized NUC.
  
  It's pretty good overall though.
  
  
  
• How ChatGPT turned generative AI into an "anything tool" that is equally bad at everything it does.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The comments are scathing.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 25 2023 11:11 PM (BMUHC)

Posted by: bob in houston at Friday, August 25 2023 11:19 PM (YBLgY)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, August 26 2023 02:12 AM (r9O5h)

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• A new ruling from the NHTSA says that car makers must comply with Massachusetts' right-to-repair law and provide a standard mechanism for retrieving data from the cars' computer systems for owners and independent repair shops.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eventually.  The ruling allows "a reasonable period of time" for manufacturers to make the necessary updates, without ever bothering to define that.
  
  This overturns a previous ruling saying that manufacturers did not need to comply with the law, issued, uh, two months ago.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile a right-to-repair bill has passed 38-0 through the California Senate and attracted the full-throated support of...  Apple.  (404 Media)
  
  The same Apple that has for years been one of the most aggressive and most disingenuous opponents of right-to-repair legislation.
  
  More on that below.

• AMD will be announcing the Radeon 7800 XT and 7700 XT at Gamescom tomorrow-ish.  AMD has one event at noon on the 25th German time and another at 5pm.  (Videcardz)
  
  Expect these cards to be pretty decent overall, but priced too high, because there's so little competition right now.
  
  
  
• The reason there's so little competition is that Nvidia simply doesn't give a shit.  And the reason for that is that they make four times as much from AI as they do from consumer graphics cards.  (WCCFTech)
  
  And that's revenue numbers.  Margins are a lot better on the high-end AI cards, so the difference in profits would be even larger.
  
  AMD could be more aggressive, but Nvidia can more easily afford a price war right now, so expect prices to remain high at least until Intel releases its second-generation "Battlemage" cards.
  
  
  
• Geekom has announced the Mini IT13, a NUC with an Intel 13900H CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  
  
• SimplyNUC has announced the Onyx, a NUC with an Intel 13900H CPU.  (Liliputing)
  
  That's not a coincidence; both companies are sourcing their motherboards and cases from another manufacturer, and the two are nearly identical.  The Geekom model is blue and has 40Gbps USB-C ports, while the SimplyNUC is black and appears to have 20Gbps ports, but the cases are otherwise the same, and the port arrangement is exactly the same.
  
  On the CPU side the 13900H closely matches AMD's 7840HS, also popular in recent NUC announcements.
  
  On the graphics side, though, the AMD chip demolishes Intel, being nearly three times as fast.  So unless you just don't care about graphics performance, go with AMD.
  
  
  
• OptiLOL: When adding a print statement makes your code run twice as fast.  (Medium)
  
  This is really a case of a failed compiler optimisation; adding the print statement allowed the compiler to find that optimisation.
  
  It is a very specific issue related to branch predictions (the ChatGPT explanation inserted into the article is correct but eye-glazingly dull) but basically this is just a compiler bug.
  
  
  

What Is Apple Up To Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Friday, August 25 2023 08:59 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, August 25 2023 11:12 PM (BMUHC)

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• SeamlessM4T is an AI speech recognition, transcription, and translation service from Facebook that understands nearly 100 languages and speaks 35.  (Facebook)
  
  And you can download it.
  
  The whole thing is on GitHub.
  
  The code is pretty small - SeamlessM4T itself is 272kB, and the libraries it uses are less than 4MB in total.  The model that makes it work is a lot larger at 10GB - still only about about 40 cents worth of SSD space.
  
  Facebook is one of the few honest actors in AI research right now, and even if they're doing it out of spite - firing open-source torpedoes at rival companies - it's still welcome.  I'm not going to shed a tear if decades from now submersibles are taking vacationers to the wreck of OpenAI at the bottom of the Atlantic.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why does the US government want to ban TikTok?  Because it's a tool of Chinese intelligence - or because it's not a tool of US intelligence?  (Gizmodo)
  
  Surprisingly, given the facts presented and not Gizmodo's spin, it appears to be the former.  The draft rules are not to spy on TikTok's users but to monitor TikTok itself - to spy on the spies.
  
  
  
• In which The Verge takes a short break from hating Elon Musk to hate Ron DeSantis.  (The Verge)
  
  The article is about YouTube's deal with Universal Music Group to block otherwise legal creation of music using AI reproductions of the voices of artists signed to that label.
  
  You can't copyright what you sound like, but YouTube will take the music down anyway, just as they took down unapproved narratives regarding the Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague, something you will not find five thousand word diatribes published about at The Verge.
  
  So what does Ron DeSantis have to do with all of this?
  
  Absolutely nothing.  The Verge is off its meds again.
  
  
  
• Hookworms may help stave off type 2 diabetes.  (New Atlas)
  
  The paper by Australian researchers, published in Nature, suggests that the anti-inflammatory response triggered by the parasitic worms helps counteract the metabolic processes that lead to diabetes and other health conditions.
  
  Hookworms have also been suggested as a treatment for autoimmune diseases for much the same reason.
  
  Yes, it's bloody Aussies again.  I suppose that living on a continent where all of the animals and most of the plants are actively trying to kill you makes a parasitic worm infection seem less of an issue.
  
  
  
• What happened to The Wirecutter?  (The Atlantic)  (archive site)
  
  Short version: They got bought by the New York Times.

  Once, Lam assigned a reporter to review bike locks by talking with prolific bike thieves; the writer ended up interviewing a man who'd very likely stolen his old bike. The piece was a hit. "Every extra hour we put into a piece, I still argue it added to the revenue a post would generate," Lam told me. "The better it is, the more money it brings in over time." Wirecutter paid freelancers hourly, often spending thousands of dollars on sprawling features that generated money through the site's affiliate-link model - commonplace now, but a drastic departure from the banner advertising that was standard at the time.

  Quality reporting?  Not at this newspaper!

  In 2016, the site sold to the Times, as a service-y complement to the newspaper's own journalism. It didn’t take long for Wirecutter staffers to realize that the Times' ambitions for the site far exceeded Wirecutter's own expectations of moderate, steady growth. According to multiple former employees, whom I am keeping anonymous because they still work in the industry, the Times' leadership wanted the site to double the amount of content it produced in order to juice revenue. Those employees said Wirecutter's top editors argued that the site's business would not scale directly, because a minority of articles, many of them for big-ticket items such as appliances, generated the bulk of the company's revenues. But the mandate remained: Wirecutter would need to double its staff and double its output.

  If your site depends on affiliate links for revenue, reputation is everything.  So the new owners threw that out the window.
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, August 24 2023 02:52 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, August 24 2023 07:05 AM (BMUHC)

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