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This isn't a "tech article", it's an article about tech. This is a normie article from a normie news outlet for normie readers.
Also from the article:
A previous version of this article said it was "not clear why WhatsApp settled on the oddly specific number." A number of readers have since noted that 256 is one of the most important numbers in computing, since it refers to the number of variations that can be represented by eight switches that have two positions - eight bits, or a byte. This has now been changed. Thanks for the tweets. DB
That weird ass explanation with switches and "one of the most important numbers" still sounds absolutely clueless.
Still, it works well for "normies"...
I liked the switches analogy! Generally about binary though; I agree it doesn’t connect back to the number of users application.
And yeah most important number…sounds like they were quoting an LLM.
“Quoting” is generous.
One of the most important numbers? I'd argue the most important number in computing is either 1 or 0...
What the fuck is a power of 2??? I’m vibe coding python AI.
Isn't python a snake? /s vibecoders wouldn't know
What do you bet that if you were Vibe coating in python it would import a library so it could do zero indexing again?
Vibe coating in python
I coat my python every day winknwink
God that sounds like some shit you'd read in a gibson novel from the 90s.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world...
One is one of them
That quote really is the problematic part. The part about switches is fine - it's an attempt to explain tech to a "normie." But for a tech writer to ever say it's not clear why they settled on 256 is worse than embarrassing. They had to be corrected by tweets.
Anyone whose ever had an intro to computers class has had a computing professional explain computers using simple language and analogies. That's the way this kind of thing should work. It sounds like this author has no more clue about computing than the target audience, which isn't going to work out well for the reader.
If you look what the last articles for the independent Doug Bolton (the guy who wrote the stuff in question) wrote, it was Condom discovered inside woman's appendix, and afterwards he only wrote for "Movers & Makers Cincinatti" and some stuff looking like crawler bait for "Old Times Music" so i'm pretty sure the Independent didn't want him anymore
Maybe he's a vibe journalist.
Honestly chat gpt would probably be better at this.
That is both sad and likely accurate.
It doesn't really matter that it's a "normie article for normie readers". Writing articles is journalism. Not knowing 256 offhand? Permissible. Being a journalist who wrote an article and didn't even do the bare bones of research? You're still a bad journalist, and as callous as it is, you should lose your job and livelihood. Bad journalism is too dangerous to just let it fester like this.
The newspaper he was writing for is a major publication he absolutely could have asked someone.
The problem here is the newspaper didn't care enough about the article to put anyone on it who is even remotely familiar with technology. They probably thought of it as just some throwaway piece to fill out a bit of space. Which to be fair it would have been had it not been for that comment.
It used to be common for uh, writers, journalists, to have at least basic familiarity with what they're writing or reporting on.
Its not like this is journalistic malpractice, spreading lies, fabricating a quote, supporting a bs narrative by being very selective with context and such...
... but it is pretty embarrassing.
People seem to constantly confuse 'i use computer technology' with 'i understand how computer technology works'.
Like uh, Gen Z and A are the most digital, online generations yet... but many of them can't type on a keyboard, have no idea what a file/folder structure is.
I think you're highlighting two different problems here.
I agree that Gen Z and younger are, on average, far worse at basic computer skills than many seem to assume. It makes me reflect on my tech-learning throughout my childhood, as a Millennial. I think that part of it is that many erroneously assume that because Gen Z has grown up online, that this will lead to proficiency, but the kind of tech they've been exposed to is largely walled gardens and oversimplified UIs. That assumption of proficiency leads to scenarios where their lack of skill is only discovered when they enter college, or the workplace. I am astounded at the prospect of people not even knowing the difference between "Cut and Paste" and "Copy and Paste". It's grim.
The poor quality of journalism may be linked to this, but I think it's larger than that. It seems like it's not a great time to be a journalist at the moment (my writer friends tell me that increasingly, the only work they're able to find is copy-editing AI shit). Private equity is fucking up so much of the world — journalism included. Polygon is an example of an outlet that was apparently sustainably profitable, before it was sold and experienced mass lay-offs; an individual company's success doesn't matter to the big conglomerate that owns it. I know that other journalistic companies have fallen to the same fate too.
It also seems that tech journalism ends up being especially shit. I didn't start noticing it properly until I watched this podcast episode from "Tech Won't Save Us". The TL;DW of it is that tech journalists like Kara Swisher like to pretend that they speak truth to power, and fire hard-hitting questions at big tech people, when that's patently bullshit and it's clear that they only get the access that they do by playing softball with the powerful. We can't blame a few individuals for the entirety of the tech journalism problem, but I reckon it's a big part of it when so many of the established, big names in this space don't seem interested in actually doing tech journalism (and smaller names who want to ask journalistically interesting questions don't get platforms or access to ask those questions).
Our information ecosystem is not in a great place. I've found it tremendously beneficial to curate the news and information I'm exposed to (praise be RSS), but that has been a gradual process of actively working to notice good journalism in the world and build up my mental "rolodex" of people whose perspectives I trust to be worthwhile (even if I don't necessarily agree with said perspectives). However, this is an area that I care deeply about, and thus it feels worthwhile to spend that energy to curate my infosphere. Most people won't have the inclination or energy to do this work, which is unfortunate.
I almost entirely agree with what you've said here, I just didn't feel like writing out all the nuances, and was trying to just do a surface level analogy.
The only part where I even sort of maybe disagree is... there are actually good tech news sources, they just tend to be either fairly or highly specialized, and/or pretty niche, literally just a guy, or a couple people, running a website basically like its still Web 1.0 days.
But absolutely yes, the broader audience that an outfit appeals to, the broader scope of things they try to cover... its a joke, doing comprehensive reviews of everything would take a whole bunch if teams of specialists, so... most don't even bother, and just link to somebody else who did that, and try to summarize it ... and thats a best case scenario.
It is truly horrendous with video game journalism.
Beyond the surface level stuff of seemingly arbitrary and nonsensical review scores, the incestuous access journalism aspect of it that turns most of them into just advertising...
Almost none of these people offer a meaningful critique of like, the business strategy, the corporate culture, the deals between companies, the astoundingly high usage of contractors and just endemic, obvious galactic levels of incompetence management shows all the time.
Again, there are a few exceptions to this, they'll cover some obviously heinous shit like sexual harassment and absurd crunch seasons, they'll report on unions trying to form, and there are a few actually decent investigators...
... but by and large, there is basically no investigative journalism into say, an utterly collapsed, decade spanning, $400 million dollar game that just flops in a month... not on the level that I feel is journalistically called for there, which would be roughly 'this is Enron', 'this is Lehman Brothers'.
They live in this silly nonsense world where the gaming industry is fucking huge and important, but they still mostly cover it like disaffected former fanboys/girls, rather than taking it as seriously as it should be taken.
Because there is no meaningful dissection of how truly idiotic and evil just now routine AAA corpo game publisher logic works, at like a macro to microeconomic comprehensive analysis level... we instead get the masses dramatically oversimplifying things on that front, and then focusing waaaaay too much on whether or not its ok for characters to have pronouns.
Like, me, I am the only person I am aware of who has been saying:
Kernel level anti cheat is not actually necessary, it doesn't even achieve what it purports to, thus, it just serves as a way to to maintain a corporate grip over the platform (Windows) of the PC gaming market.
Similarly, the entire real time ray tracing paradigm of Nvidia/Unreal Engine is also a fucking scam, though I am at least seeing more people do comprehensive breakdowns on why that is the case, of course the PC hardware reviewers are very fed up with this by now... but still only a few go into the massive economic impacts of that and thus broad societal implications.
...
There, your essay provoked my own rant-essay, lol.
I could write on this for days if my wrist was so fucked, bleck.