1. Oh Perplexity, why must you test me so?

I have been a big proponent of Perplexity for a while, mostly because I found it incredibly useful as a research tool. Turns out the reason it was useful as a research tool was it was scraping a load of data that it shouldn’t, pretending to be academic researchers to get access to Twitter, and more. Suffice to say, I no longer recommend it. But more than that: organisations which engage in this kind of perfidious conduct should be actively shunned.

2. The cows are lying down

And speaking of AI, 404 Media decided to conduct an experiment: how much would it cost to basically clone their site using LLMs and off-the shelf tools? The answer: $365.63. And they wouldn’t have to employ any of those pesky journalists to do it.

3. Better by you…

What was the internet like 20 years ago? Without coming across like an old git, the answer is just “better”. Like Richard, I started blogging using Radio Userland, a long-forgotten application developed by Dave Winer. Like everything Winer makes, it was really an outliner (when I first worked at Apple in 1989, we used MORE for presentations – it was also a Winer product, and also really an outliner). It was also local: it generated all the HTML for your blog on your Mac and then uploaded the changed files. I still there there’s something in that approach.

4. Are you though? Are you really?

Ever wondered what it’s like being a low-ranking professional tennis player? No, I hadn’t either — but this great piece in The Guardian had me laughing, then shaking my head, then laughing again. My favourite line: ““I am going to fight my natural hand-to-eye coordination, no matter how bad it is, I am going to hit all of these motherfucking balls until I develop a shot. I am going to do this for months and months and months: I am not going to let these rich fucks beat me.”

5. Breakin’ the law, breakin’ the law

Confession time: whenever I buy an ebook which is encumbered with DRM, I crack it and save a local copy. I don’t give it away, loan it, upload it anywhere — but I don’t trust companies to keep their unspoken promise that I will always be able to access that book. Why don’t I trust them to? Here’s why. And yes, I did have books which used this DRM system.

6. And speaking of Microsoft DRM systems

Oops. Repeat after me: DRM is pointless.

7. Creative destruction

Look, in the great long list of terrible things that the Tories have spent fourteen years doing to Britain, the effective destruction of much of the support for the arts that had been built up for decades may not seem like the worst. But in terms of the breadth of people it affects, it’s probably the broadest. Obviously, underfunding organisations and forcing them to spend more time chasing money than supporting creative work is bad. But they have also hammered funding for adult education cources which aren’t “vocational”, which means that drawing, painting and other creative practice classes are not being cut – something disproportionately affects older people. Capitalism hates creativity.

8. PRs: please don’t do this

I don’t get that many unsolicited press releases these days (don’t think of this as a request) and I doubt that even during the Journalism Peak of my career I got as many as Jay Rayner, but I completely sympathise with his public letter asking that PRs do at least the minimum amount of research before sending him stuff.

9. The grumpiest man from Wales is back

God I love John Cale. Way back in the first years of this century I was lucky enough to see him do readings from his book What’s Welsh for Zen? at Komedia in Brighton, and he almost bit the head off an audience member who was trying to video him. In the twenty four years since he’s just got grumpier and he remains a vital creative force. I adore him.

10. The best reason not to use AI

We really do not need another global power crisis while we’re trying to stop the planet burning.

1. Dell to employees: “screw you”. Employees to Dell: “you first”

Everyone enjoys seeing a few chickens coming home to roost, and especially when the chickens are landing on the roof of a huge corporate entity and crapping all over its well-manicured rooftop executive garden. The latest to find out the hard way is Dell, which ordered its employees to make a choice: become “hybrid” workers travelling to an office 39 times a year (monitored of course) to spend their time on Zoom calls from an empty office, or be “remote” workers. Oh, and if you’re remote, you’re not allowed to get promoted or apply for another role in the company, ever.

No doubt the conversation in the executive suite was about how remote workers weren’t “team players” and so weren’t the kind of people who “deserved” promotion, no matter how well they actually do their job. But it’s turned out that if you choose to wield the stick rather than the carrot, people don’t respond too well: in fact, nearly 50% of employees have chosen collectively to shrug their shoulders and stay at home.

That’s bad enough now, but it’s also really going to choke Dell as a business in the future. Retention is always an issue, and the retention of employees who have no prospects in a company is an almost impossible task. Any competent leader at Dell will be spending a lot of their time in the next year recruiting, while good employees go elsewhere to further their career in remote roles.

And failing to retain costs money: way back in my early career, a slightly drunk finance director told me that when you accounted for the time of managers recruiting, the effort to find someone good, and short-term costs of backfilling vacant roles, you were basically burning about £2000 every time you recruited a replacement. The cost to Dell of increasing employee churn, with around 120,000 employees, is a lot: if this move adds another 5% to its churn rate, it runs into hundreds of millions of dollars.

And for what? Because Michael Dell likes to see a “lively” office? Michael, the 1990s called, and they would like their ideas about business back.

2. It was 20 years ago today…

How can it be 20 years since Cory Doctorow travelled from London to Redmond and into the belly of the beast to deliver the good news that DRM doesn’t work? Cory was right: DRM doesn’t work, and it never has. But the tech companies have managed to use its spiritual successors likes parts pairing and app stores, enabled by exploiting the intersection between bad law and technology, to do things which would have sounded wild to them in 2004. Had Bill Gates thought about a software store on Windows that he got 30% of the cut from for no additional work, he would have probably drooled so much the hydration would have killed him.

3. And the bullshit machine goes marching on

I have to confess that I was pretty enthusiastic about Perplexity, which I’ve used as an example of how a large language model-based tool could actually improve on the existing state of the art. And I still believe that search, in the way we think of it now, is going away and will be replaced by conversational engines giving answers that tap into public data. You shouldn’t have to master how to use a search engine (or the frankly shitty experience that most SEO-led pages now deliver) to find what you want. And where you don’t quite know exactly what you want – such as when you’re buying a product – having a conversation with something that knows about products is a better way to do it.

But oh: it turns out that Perplexity not only just makes stuff up, it has been scraping data it shouldn’t have and trying to cover its tracks. Why are startup people, so often, utter shitheads about stuff like this? It’s just so unnecessary.

4. $325m worth of humans delivering pizza

I absolutely love Joan Westenberg’s writing, and this piece on Zume is a perfect example of how she cuts through the bullshit. Zume, in case you missed their flashy pitch, was going to revolutionise food delivery by cooking the food in ovens on route to you. It started with pizza, but, of course, had the stink of “disruption” about it, the kind of smell that always ends up spreading to a thousand other areas. It turned out, of course, that its magic robot roving ovens made pizza that was just bad – so they ended up having stationary “mobile” ovens and using human delivery drivers to actually take the product to the customer.

In other words, VC’s decided that a company of pizza vans was worth $2.25 billion.

Masters of the universe, my ass.

5. Here we go again

Governments really, really, really hate encrypted messaging. The “good” governments hate it because they think it aids criminals; the bad ones hate it because it aids dissidents. And just because we beat them once, doesn’t mean they’re not going to try it again. Meanwhile, you can find me on Signal.

6. But muh users!

I see that Apple is up to its bullshit again? A terrible shame that it’s not going to get its way.

7. AI is a feature, not a platform, not a product

I’ve seen a few articles floating around about how Apple’s “Apple Intelligence” announcements shows that AI is a feature, not a product or platform (Benedict Evans has written a good one) and there is definitely something to this. But it’s worth remembering that the canonical use of “feature not product” was Steve Jobs telling this to Dropbox. And somehow, Dropbox is not only still around, it’s a good product – and still better than anything Apple has developed. What Apple has done is great: but in terms of the future, general purpose intelligence will probably win out for many tasks. Just because automatic gearboxes exist doesn’t mean sometimes a manual shift isn’t the right option.

8. Developers? Before the app store? THIS CANNOT BE

Someone should tell Tim Cook that a reality distortion field only works if you have the charisma of Steve Jobs.

9. Meanwhile, in Keir Starmer’s inbox…

...will be the terrible state of the universities, several of whom are likely to go bust within the first year of a Labour administration. Lots to do, boss, lots to do.

10. Masters of the universe, Redux

Every day, there’s another piece of evidence suggesting that far from being the Übermensch of their dreams, masters of the universe, probably lords of time, venture capitalists are really quite dumb. You have to love it.

1. Looks like a publisher, is actually an AI content farm

I'm still hearing about publishers who think the answer to their prayers is replacing human writers with large language models. But the real issue, and the one that actually puts the whole publishing model at risk, is the ability of companies to just start up massive "news" websites, win for a few months before Google works out they are are crap, rinse and repeat. BNN was an example o this. I saw it a lot for a while, but then it vanished. Here's the story.

2. Publishers doing the right thing

Over here, a group of publishers are suing Google for rigging the ad market. I don't know, yet, which publishers, but my gut feeling would be it's mostly small ones as larger ones tend not to want to antagonise Google. This is of course a better approach than anything which relies on copyright, news taxes and so on, because it's simply true: Google and Facebook have, between them, stitched up the ad market.

3. Alexa, why does my toothbrush not work?

Things which rely on a connection to the internet to work are always vulnerable to simply being switched off by the people who made the product, and there's no better illustration of this than Oral-B "smart" toothbrush. Part of me thinks that if you bought a toothbrush you could talk to you take a little bit of the blame, but I have also been caught by products which promised to have functionality which later disappeared. So I can't blame you too much if you bought a toothbrush expecting to be able to, erm, use it to manage your smart home.

4. Garry Tan promotes antisemitism

You might not know about Garry Tan yet, but you're likely to hear more about him. He's one of those venture capitalist vultures who seem to believe that having a lot of money makes them smart, but of course he's as dumb as the next arrogant bozo. He's so dumb, in fact, that he has taken to promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories aimed at George Soros. Well, he's either dumb or just a racist. Which is it Garry?

5. Was Jack Dorsey always this awful? Reader, I am adding to this headline purely to avoid my own law, because yes, yes he was

Dorsey doesn't like plebs, doesn't want to take any responsibility for anything and has a shitty beard. That's all.

6. The Tories hate the young, but luckily the young hate the Tories

It's entirely predictable that the Tory manifesto will be full of regressive nonsense, but what they have managed to do in recent elections is dangle just enough carrots towards young people to make them, at least, not bother to vote Labour. Usually this involved some magic incantation involving the word "aspiration". Not so now! Showing once again that Sunak has no political instincts at all, he has instead adopted a "fuck you young people" approach which is likely to get people voting against him, while adding nothing significant to his popularity amongst older voters. Stupidity, he is it.

7. Things I did not realise about my home town

It basically was the place the modern version of Dracula first made his appearance. Go, Derby!

8. Speaking of the undead

Tim Montgomerie, editor of Conservative Home, expects to see a poll which has Reform ahead of the Tories. I wouldn't be surprised either, and it will probably mean the Tories lurch even more to the right. But: they should also remember that they are so far behind in most polls that even adding every single Reform voter to their tally would still see them lose, comfortably. And it would probably alienate what few more moderate Tories they have left.

9. Now that's the right way to do AI

Opt-in. Not opt-out.

10. At last

On one hand, Apple actually building a proper password management app is a good thing. The password keychain functions are a little bit buried at the moment, which discourages people from using them -- and using a password manager is a great way to Do Better Secures. But... Apple's features can be a bit of a roach motel: you can get in, but you'll never get out again. So far, that hasn't been true of passwords, but let's hope no bright spark in Cupertino thinks that now is the time.

There’s a lot of AI in this edition. Sorry. One day I’ll stop talking about it, probably when silenced by the machines. For those whose interests are less one dimensional, I’ve included some actual culture towards the end.

1. Google zero is icumen in

As Nilay Patel writes, “the entire business of the modern web is built around Google”. We, as publishers and makers of stuff, have allowed the ludicrous situation where a single company has effectively enclosed the web. And it’s not like we weren’t warned. But as Nilay also writes, and I’ve written about extensively, that era is coming to a close. The consequences of this will be huge and painful but the key point for publishers is simple: don’t let it happen again.

2. Reader, they are letting it happen again

Oops.

3. “Publishers lack strategic patience”

Focus on your audience. Do great journalism. Get it to your readers. Don’t sell your Crown Jewels. Jessica Lessin, who has built a successful subscription business based on exactly this process, notes that publishers lack strategic patience, which is one of the reasons they constantly jump into bed with tech platforms then wonder what happened when the platforms treat them as suppliers and not partners. This is completely correct: publishers are not good at strategically cultivating a long-term relationship with their audiences. That would require investment and hard work, rather than focusing on short term revenue.

4. Who amongst us etc etc

And that’s why you end up with companies like AdVon, which specialises in in producing cheap AI-generated affiliate content which gets published on well-known brand sites. How do brands like USA Today or Sports Illustrated end up putting something which is obviously going to damage brands over the long time on their sites? Because they have no long term strategy.

5. Now this makes sense

“A new theory: somewhere in the Silicon Valley universe there’s a cadre of techies who have eidetic memories and they’re feeling them start to slip. Panic time.” Wendy Grossman (who you should read every week) makes me feel a bit seen. I was arguing earlier in the week about how Microsoft’s Recall feature was a boon to people like me who are getting to the point in their lives where memory isn’t as much of a given as it used to be. Is it a good feature? Unknown until we have hands on with the code and implementation. Is the principle that machine learning should happen on-device a good one? Yes.

6. Black boxes you can trust

Now this will be interesting: Apple is rumoured to be planning to implement a black box system for cloud-processed AI features. Given the company’s PR line on privacy, this would make sense – and might actually put some pressure on others to do the same.

7. Fixing old computers is the hotness

The Canon Cat is one of the more fascinating old computers, designed by Jef Raskin after leaving Apple and probably much closer to his original vision for the Macintosh than Steve Jobs’ cut-down Xerox Star. This article goes through restoring one, which means diving deep into the hardware with some interesting historical asides.

8. Under-sung hero of the week

Isabella Blow.

9. “We conflate all these scales of harm”

A fascinating interview that I had missed with RF Kuang, who talks about everything from so-called cancel culture to why she’s very bad at taking holidays (something we share).

10. What was new is old now

I never really got on with New Atheism, for the same reason that I never really got on with hardcore rationalists: it smelled like macho bullshit dressed up in pseudo-scientific clothing. The recent trend of new atheists turning out to be ardent supporters of transphobia and hostility towards pro-Palestinian activists makes me think my gut feeling about them was correct. New atheism was always a conservative and reactionary movement, led by privileged white men as convinced of their own infallibility as the hardcore religious they spent so much energy opposing. “New Atheism will continue to haunt us for as long as we refuse to acknowledge that the way things are always includes the possibility that things could be different.” Amen to that.

What a weird week. You might have noticed Microsoft had a few announcements. I’m not going to dwell on them – but what I will say is that moving AI from the cloud to the device while preserving privacy is hard, but a lot easier than keeping AI in the cloud. And so to the links…

1. Privacy sandbox is coming, and publishers might be in (more) trouble

Does Google hate publishers? You should know all about “privacy sandbox”, its not-really-private way of using aggregate data to target ads to people, which will just cement its position as Lord of The Ads. One thing that still isn't clear is if, in fact, publishers that don't use it will get downranked in search. At a time when AI answers and Google's general love of all things Reddit are already making them suffer. It will neither confirm or deny this. Which usually means it's going to do exactly that. If you're a user, Kagi is over there (and it's incredibly good).

2. Speaking of the media apocalypse…

This is one of the most depressing things I have read in quite some time. Audience from social media: dying. Audience from Google: dying. CPMs: Hilariously bad. One slight positive: Journalism has always existed with various business models, and it's not always been about scale and advertising.

3. Ben and Satya talk cricket. Oh, and AI

I've always loved Ben Thompson's work, even though I often don't agree with him these days. This long interview with Satya Nadella is worth a read in its entirety, and no, it doesn't feature cricket. Well only a bit. Related: I recently set up a new PC. What sport did it automatically show me in the widgets? Cricket. I see what you did there, Satya.

4. Twenty-four hours

Did you know that the Japanese used to have their own system of timekeeping which had longer or shorter segments depending on the time of year? And they built beautiful, elaborate clocks to tell time in it? I didn't, and now I really want to use that time system myself.

5. Not sent from my iPad

MG Siegler -- who, I am glad to say, is back writing regularly about tech -- hits the nail on the head about the latest iPad, and iPads more broadly. It's frustrating when you hit a wall with software like Safari, and you hit a wall far too often.

6. Reading comprehension and the age of AI

It's not just AI that threatens the truthfulness of our politics and culture: we have also lost, in some cases, the ability to read and comprehend long-form, detailed content. We have become the tldr; society.

7. The coming apocalypse in UK universities

Unless you work in the sector, you might not realise quite how stuffed UK universities are. And when I say “stuffed”, I mean “pretty close to technical bankruptcy and no longer able to carry out their core function”. It's yet another thing which the inevitable Labour government is going to have to pick up and fix, with both short and long-term measures required.

8. No, today's AI isn't sentient (but this article is rubbish)

There are few people with any knowledge of AI who claim that today's large language models (LLMs) are sentient, but that's the straw man this article starts with. Worse, though, is to follow. Despite it being co-written by a proper professional philosopher, the writers seem blissfully unaware that its insistence human-style embodiment is required for AI is one of those points that has been debated for longer than computers have existed. Read, but then read some proper philosophy of AI.

9. Media companies are making the same mistakes with AI they make with all new tech

Jessica Lessin has written a good piece for The Atlantic on how media companies' rush to make deals with the likes of OpenAI to provide access to their content is short-sighted and stupid. She's right: it is. When are media companies going to learn that when tech companies refer to “media partners” they mean “suckers”?

10. How do you become a writer? You write

Oh Ursula, how right you were. She was talking about fiction, but the same is true of any kind of writing. How do you become a journalist? Write journalism.

1. Yes, Apple, we're also talking about you

Cal Newport reckons that it's time to dismantle the technopoly. Taking a cue from Neil Postman's (great) book, he defines this as the “submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology.” Postman was writing in 1992(!) but if you think about the technopoly as it exists today, we're really talking about how every single technical development is thought of as an unalloyed good, from AI scraping the whole of human knowledge to Apple crushing creative tools into a product it sells (at a 40% margin). We'll come back to that one later.

2. And speaking of dodgy corporate behaviour

Along comes Google, which – against the orders of the DOJ – routinely destroyed internal communications. The only reasonable conclusion is it did this deliberately. A fine will be just “cost of doing business”. It's time to dismantle corporate repeat offenders.

3. Maybe Facebook might end up interoperable

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been a target of the far wing for a while, who see it as a charter for “big tech” to stifle their speech (which, of course, means not letting the right stifle the speech of its enemies). But as Cory Doctorow explains, it's also the only thing which stops big tech companies from censoring anything which might cause them to end up in court for libel. More than that, though, a case which is currently going through the courts might end up with Facebook and others being prevented from messing with tools which let you customise your feed on their services – for example, by filtering out all that “for you” crap which the algorithm wants you to get angry about.

4. This week's product I am a little obsessed with

An e-reader that's the size of a phone and runs Android? You have no idea how hard it is for me not to hit the buy button on this one.

5. Hey, so what about that Apple ad?

Like John Gruber, I didn't think too much about Apple's “crush” ad when it was shown as part of the introduction of the new iPad Pros (more on those anon). But the more I thought about it, the more I realised quite how tone deaf it was. The intention was to show all those wonderful creative tools being squished into an iPad, which could do it all. The execution was showing many lovely things being destroyed. How did that get past Apple's senior team? That's the bit which, if I were an Apple shareholder, I would worry about.

6. And so on to the product I'm not obsessed with

Yeah, new iPad Pros. Yeah, M4 processor. Yeah… same old iPadOS. For about the tenth year running, I'm left hoping this will be the year when Apple finally produces an operating system that can make the most of all that power. I suspect I'm going to be disappointed, again.

7. Tesla is doomed, redux

Honestly, if I held Tesla shares, I would be looking to sell them at the earliest opportunity I could take a profit. Unless Western governments intervene plenty of car companies will go to the wall because when it comes to quality EVs, Chinese manufacturers are miles ahead. So why am I mentioning Tesla is particular? Because it's vulnerable, and the stock is still massively overpriced because Musk has managed to convince suckers investors Tesla is a tech leader.

8. Where the world of scams is going

It's going to get really bad. Five years from now, this kind of fake person attack will be both commonplace and convincing, and I really don't know how we combat it.

9. You can't have it both ways, Elon

“X Corp. wants it both ways: to keep its safe harbours yet exercise a copyright owner’s right to exclude, wresting fees from those who wish to extract and copy X users’ content.” This is another example of how the safe harbour provisions of US law for internet companies are a double-edge word. On one hand, they protect them from libel based on what their users say. On the other hand, they can't then claim all the intellectual property rights over that content as if they were publishers. X Corp isn't the only company to want a smorgasbord of rights, though: Meta had previously made the same kind of claim, and lost.

10. “Blockchain Rasputin over here is mad that moderation exists”

Headline of the week, easily. Moreover, Jack Dorsey man, WTF happened?

I managed not to do any writing at all this week, as I'm off work over the coming days and so didn't have a lot of time. But I can't miss out on my link blog because if I did, the backlog of fun things to write about next week would end up so big I would have to make it 20 blue links. And who wants that? So here we are.

1. Microsoft takes security seriously (again)

Anyone old enough to remember Windows in the 90s knows what an awful, insecure mess it was. In 2002, Bill Gates sent out a memo on “trustworthy computing” and, within a couple of years, Windows security had improved massively. Now, Satya Nadella is doing the same thing – but his memo isn't quite as good. It's overdue: Windows has, once again, become a buggy mess and where there are bugs there are security holes. Why now? Mainly because putting AI into Windows will be the foundation of keeping people on the platform, so an insecure Windows is, once again, a bad thing for Microsoft.

2. Why I don't trust Google with my files, redux

It's not just that I don't trust Google not to scrape the content I create to build some mega profile of me and target ads. Heck, thanks to NextDNS and uBlock Origin, I don't really often see ads unless I want to. It's that I know creating content where you don't have a local backup is a bad idea. And this is why. Yes, you can use Google Takeout to export your Google Docs into formats that other apps can read, but for all that is holy, please don't use their web apps to write the only version of your novel. If you really want to use a browser to write, sign up for a free Nextcloud account and use Collabora Office, which saves files as OpenDocument by default.

3. Hell freezes over

I have always had a lot of time for Paul Thurrott. He's been writing about Microsoft for almost three decades and has always been an unapologetic fan of Windows. But he's also a strong critic of some of Microsoft's business practices, and he's not afraid to talk about the enshittification of Windows 11. And now he's reviewed a 15in MacBook Air and loves it. Everything that Paul says tallies with my experience on the 13in Air. It's an absolutely joyous machine to use, although the base model doesn't have enough storage (forget the complaints about 8Gb memory, for the usage that you're going to put this machine to, it's fine).

4. And they wonder why people are “quiet quitting”

As I occasionally say to young journalists, you owe the company that you work for precisely nothing apart from the work you're contracted to do. If someone comes along with a better offer, don't think you should stay because of “loyalty”. While no employer, I have ever worked for likes laying people off, or in fact has done it except where there's been good reason to do it, neither will any employer avoid making you redundant because you're “loyal”. This person at Tesla seems to have found that out the hard way.

5. Fusion failures

There is no one better at writing about the core technology in the Mac than Howard Oakley, my former colleague at MacUser who spent several decades writing the help section. I don't know how many readers Howard saved from some kind of technical jam, but it's a lot. Howard probably knows more about the Mac than anyone outside of Cupertino (and most likely quite a lot more than most inside Cupertino), and this example looking at the technology of Fusion Drives (and why they fail) is a good example. He's also one of the nicest people it has ever been my privilege to work with.

6. Fast fashion is bad, and Shein is the baddest

OK, maybe not the absolute worst, but there are good reasons to never buy anything from Shein if you want to avoid things like forced labour and the destruction of the planet.

7. And speaking of brutal companies

There are so many reasons why Amazon should be broken up, but this look at its absolutely atrocious business culture and ethics just adds to the pile.

8. You never think it will happen to you, until it happens to you

Gen X -- my people! -- are apparently finding it really tough to get jobs, thanks to a combination of ageism and, well, more ageism. We are, apparently, set in our ways and expensive, which means no one wants to hire us. And, of course, women get it worse than men.

9. The cost of doing business

The headline on this piece from Om says it all: “billions in profits, millions in fines”. Fines will never keep pace with the money that tech and comms companies can make from abusing customers. Only break-ups and active restrictions will ever work. I can't think of a single example where a mere fine has caused a tech business to change its ways.

10. Tech journalism, or just “journalism”?

I left this one until last, and it's a great piece: Asterisk Mag has had a look at the quality of technology journalism in the mainstream and found it wanting. It notes that it often focuses on scandals, personalities and sensationalism due to competitive pressures in the media industry, rather than, you know, actual insight into tech. And they are right, but I think even if you look outside the mainstream it's pretty dire. Try reading the kind of in-depth technical analysis you got in Byte magazine and then looking through even Ars Technica (which is good by today's standards) and you can see the difference. This is mostly down to economic pressure: at least from the perspective of journalists themselves, research shows that when times are tough, quality declines. And times, now, are very, very tough indeed.