I had the same problem with and older Netgear router. It turned out to be a bug in the scheduling settings. It had the ability to disable network access between specific times on a daily schedule. The feature was enabled by default, but no times were set to disconnect. You'd think that would mean the connection would never go down, but a firmware update changed that. Every morning at ~3:00am the network would go down for 1 minute. Disabling the feature entirely resolved the problem.
Looks nice, but no ability to set default playback speed means I'll stick with (the rarely updated) Vanced. I never watch YT content at <1.25x speed unless it's to hear a music track.
It also looks like it doesn't have the option to login and sync, so I'd be seeing already watched stuff on between desktop and mobile. I understand why some people wouldn't want that, but I use the feature all the time and would like the option.
I might try it as a kind of backup app for things I want to track, but don't want suggestions for (mostly technical videos).
The problem for me is that I honestly can't think of more than a half dozen instances in the last 20+ years where ads made me aware of something new that I actually wanted, and zero of those were web-based. I can't think of a single time ads swayed my opinion to purchase something I didn't want or caused me to buy something earlier than I would have otherwise. At BEST there have been a few ads that have led me explore options within that market, but the company posting the ad had zero impact on my decision (it almost deters me, since that ad money could have been spent making the product better or cheaper, so the competition is probably a better buy).
Why would I want even 1% of the content I'm consuming to be polluted with irrelevant garbage? That's a huge amount of time and mental effort filtering out stuff like toothpaste ads because I googled directions to my dentist's office.
Nope. Ad blockers on EVERYTHING and custom CSS for sites that whine about ad blockers or display a sea of whitespace to inflate page view times.
There's no way 3 rubber bands turns a surgical mask into an N95 mask. There are studies that look at the abilities of different materials, removing the seal component entirely, and the two masks have very different profiles. (I don't have them saved, but I've come across several over the last few weeks when looking into alternative to N95 masks. Here's an article I found with 5 minutes of searching that has some refs to relevant studies: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/04/commenta...)
Better seal than a surgical mask without them? Even that I would contest because you are loading the area directly in front of the mouth with more moisture and higher air pressure than designed. Exhaling will puff a regular mask out slightly, which diffuses the exhaled breath across the surface. This straps a 3"x1" segment of fabric to the lips and nostrils and you lose that diffusion. I'd also imagine this would make reuse even more risky, since the rubber bands would wear the hydrophobic coating off and snare small strands of fabric. And then there's the sterilization/sanitization of the rubber bands. And the aging/failure rate of these bands. And then... you get my point.
Maybe they meant well, but this is the type of bad information that is actually dangerous. "Tell Martha in procurement that we don't need the fancy masks and put in an order for 10,000 rubber bands. Why? This MIT Apple Engineer said so."
Going by the downvotes there are a lot of very anxious people out there who desperately want to believe that they can MacGyver their way to personal safety.
Compared to chloroquine this seems like a mildly risky thing, but until they conduct a double-blind physical test, get it reviewed by experts, etc, it shouldn't be out in the public. A good engineer would know that.
> There's no way 3 rubber bands turns a surgical mask into an N95 mask. There are studies that look at the abilities of different materials, removing the seal component entirely, and the two masks have very different profiles.
They don't have different profiles. Surgical masks too use nonvowen polypropylene meltblown filtering material covered in polypropylene spunbond. It is pretty much as good as it gets in terms of materials. The only way to do better at material level is to increase the surface area to be able to make the material thicker, like folding more of such material in enclosures, also adding a valve for breathing out to be able to remove the inner spunbond layer in favor of a thicker meltblown layer. But none of it matters in practice much, because much bigger problems are airtight seal, easiness to breath, to talk, to wear, convenience, proper use, things like that.
However, I don't expect proposed solution to work for most people, the surface area is too small and will make it too hard to breath.
But please stop this "dangerous information" bullshit. Your comment is much more ignorant, misleading and dangerous, than the website.
I had a side job as a tech reviewer ~15 years ago and I can tell you why this is never going to happen. It's a classic case of "works in theory, but impossible in practice." What you're actually asking for is a database of every permutation of hardware, hardware revision, firmware/BIOS, benchmarking software, benchmarking software version, driver version, OS, OS patch, user selectable feature state, etc. is tracked and tested. It's a nearly infinite data set size, and you'll still miss things like ambient room temperature/humidity for CPU thottling, that one finicky USB device you spilled water on that sometimes disconnects randomly, and specific workflow quirks.
"Objective" benchmarks were an almost tractable problem 15-20 years ago, but with the way modern OSes run background tasks, access network resources, and perform self-maintenance, it's even more difficult to bridge the synthetic-to-real world divide.
So, you select a point of reference (e.g. - new GPU), you choose the most common system components and a selection of components that tell a story (usually "if you're building a new PC now, here are the options"), you assemble the current versions of all software/drivers, and run your tests x times. The good sites will have "sub-stories," like specific workflows or new/changed features, but once you get to around 4 of these, you start hitting too many permutations to clearly communicate the significance of your choices.
Even if you crowdsourced it, it's A) extremely difficult to verify the integrity of results and prevent manipulation from marketing departments or brigading, and B) an unrewarding, tedious process where the best practice is to leave the machine untouched for hours. Most of the crowdsourced benchmarking sites are set up to be little competitions and sanity checks when overclocking. For a pure review of shipping hardware/software, you run the benchmark and you're done. It isn't particularly fun, requires invasive cataloguing of system specs, and isn't very new-user/first time builder friendly.
Dynamic graphs would be nice (I love them), but I suspect many review sites have run the numbers and found they reduce overall web metrics. Many (I would argue most) people don't notice interactive page components, aren't interested enough to turn their quick article skim into a deep dive, or are reading in less optimal settings (e.g. - on phone on the toilet). Instead of getting 7 page views for 1 minute each with separate graphs, you're getting 1 page view for either 1 minute (probably 70%) or 10 minutes (probably 30%) with a dynamic graph.
I'm a total data junkie and I WISH there was a good solution to these problems, but there isn't a practical implementation that I've seen or dreamt up that doesn't have enough variance to render the point of having such fine-grained data moot.
Also check out Project Farm's channel. It's a little more automotive based, but the product comparison tests are extensive. If you ever wondered which type of drywall screw could resist the most sheer force or if you can use Zippo lighter fuel in an engine, this is a great channel.
My only criticism is sample size is usually small (3-5 samples), and no checking on variation between product lots. But, it's one guy doing all this for free, so I can't complain.
I dunno. Warframe feels "cool" from the start, while PoE requires $50 to not walk around with tin pot on your head and bad renfest garb at max level, even though the level 3 next to you is creating and destroying dazzling universes of light because they paid $250.
I have ~80 hours in PoE and started because it looked fun and the microtransaction system seemed reasonable. I stopped because it's pretty clear that what their system lacks in straight gambling mechanics, it more than makes up for in sly psychological tricks.
PoE's "micro"transaction system is much closer to a paid mod or DLC model. Yes, they're mostly cosmetic and QoL items for sale, but they certainly don't feel optional if you've ever played any other RPG or loot-heavy game. Like you mentioned, prices are stupid high and there's nothing "micro" when decent cosmetics run $40+ and a single full effects set is $150+.
The main story takes 20-40 hours, and pretty early on you'll almost HAVE to buy additional loot storage. It's a loot heavy game with no easy way to sell loot that doesn't require storing it (no gold or credits), so they're banking on people getting annoyed by their stash system (which really sucks) and purchasing the added storage. Rolling a new character uses that same storage, so you feel the pinch at each playthrough.
And even if you complete the story, store bought armor at level 2 looks infinitely better than anything you can actually earn through skill or play time. I mean, they already sell "supporter packs" with effects/pets/etc you can't buy a la carte or earn, so the whole facade of these cosmetics "paying to support the game" is already cracked.
They also play that game where you have to buy a custom currency (points) in $5 increments and the vast majority of the items are priced at odd increments, so you're almost always leaving money on the table.
They could offer multiple monetization schemes, like an unlock with each expansion to allow earning some variation of the nice skins and additional storage, while still keeping the game F2P (though I'd love to see them lock applying purchased cosmetics behind a level requirement). I'd be happy to pay $60 for the game and $30-40 per expansion, but I'm not going to just start dumping money into a game to get past the artificial stash constraints or rent worthless digital paint jobs.
There are too many sneaky little quirks that just happen to favor spending money for me to feel good about the game.
> store bought armor at level 2 looks infinitely better than anything you can actually earn through skill or play time
You touch on the two things that make me hate free to play games. It seeps into the design philosophy in a way that makes the experience worse for everybody because they need to incentivize buying stuff. A lot of people like playing dress-up, but there's no way to do that in PoE without paying crazy amounts of money.
Like the halo 3 days where the "cool" looking armor was because you completed difficult challenges, or you could dress up however you want, without spending $150
Firstly, if you run out of 4 stash tabs during the story you're picking up way too much. Easy mistake to make, but POE drops way too much loot and most of it is useless. If you're attempting to sell what you've found in the story you're also just wasting space.
Supporter packs aren't there for value, they are there as a "supporter pack". You buy it to give money to the dev, and you get some cosmetics, as well as most of the price of the pack as premium currency, which you can spend on more cosmetics, or stash tabs. I'd argue that character MTX isn't even worth spending money on given the amount of flashy skills and effects there are, that obscure your character, but that's a different argument.
If you're happy to pay $60 up-front for the game, why not just buy the stash tabs and be happy? $60 buys you more than you'll ever fill up.
As someone who played for ~3 years before dropping a dime on the game, I have to say I don't see the "quirks" other than stash space. The only other incentive is the regular "spend points to get a free box" where everyone just spends the equivalent of $0.50 on a bug to get theirs, using up the leftover points they had.
The missing code in question is from 2014? No one in the last 5 years suggested keeping a yearly snapshot, or making a backup prior to each major release? That's not an "Oopsy, I'm new to this field" error.
After skimming some of the Steam reviews, the cynic in me thinks they didn't want to bother supporting the game anymore after the one that followed (My Time at Portia) took off, so they made up a story that would get them more sympathy than an abrupt announcement that the MP portion would be discontinued. I mean, there's no direct evidence of this, but you'd think that in 5 years... hmm...
Looking at a Unity forum thread from 2015 that the U-Link dev responded in, it seems the writing was already on the wall, which should have triggered a reassessment of their game's use of that component. It's also mentioned that ULink support ended in a reply from 2016 and it released as open source. (https://forum.unity.com/threads/is-ulink-dead-update-devresp...)
That's as far as I care to look into it, but something feels off.
I call it "collapsing into the mean" - all recommendation engines (as the currently exist) will eventually corral you into the most vanilla, mass marketed set of recommendations and then fail miserably when any conflicting data is presented. We've effectively turned the web into cable TV circa 1990 - a finite set of junk food level entertainment sources that we voted for because they were "eh, good enough" and easy to find.
With as many YouTube videos that I've watched since 2005, you'd think they might recommend a video with less than 1000 views once in a while. I've found 1 new channel in the last 6 months and used the "Not Interested" option more times than I can count. And the rules are unclear. I don't want tech reviews from 5 years ago, but if I hit Not Interested, does that influence the channel, topic, age, keyword, etc recommendation frequency? I don't mind old DIY or woodworking videos, I'm subscribed to the channel, and watched the recommended video 5 years ago. (Of the current 12 YT Recommended videos, 2 are labelled Watched and only 2 are less than a year old.)
I think part of it stems from the lack of user organization features. Offer too many and you scare away users, while the people with vested interests dump money and time in to wash out any negative opinion (see Amazon reviews). Offer too few and you get poor recommendations during on-boarding/startup.
