That test was totally inaccurate for me. It got the download right but upload was only 1/12 of my rated speed and 1/12 of what all the other tests (and my actual experience) tell me.
Fast.com has existed for 15 years yet isn't nearly as popular. It's easy to build a new speed test, but much harder to get people to use it.
Downdetector wins because of SEO. Most people don't get there directly, they google for "is $x down" and then get sent to downdecetor. Which from my understanding works by simply showing you how many people came to their site with those search terms. They don't actually check the sites.
Fast is a Netflix product so the fact that you've even heard of it is in direct relation to the weight of the brand that launched it.
speedtest.net has been the first search result on Google for "speed test" for decades. Partly the boost of domain SEO and partly the boost of it being an effective exit node for searches for that term for that long.
(Nobody searches "ookla" and nobody is going to search your tier-3 .com)
I found the whole thing utterly fascinating. Especially the way he talks about Los Angeles.
"Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States."
" First and foremost, cultural substance. But don’t forget that there’s a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don’t have this factory in the Bronx. You don’t have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamor of Hollywood, that’s what I don’t mean. But serious art — all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s, early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It’s a place where you consume culture, New York. It’s generated, in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays — not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians. Also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-olds. I mean, it’s grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already, and it’s going to be big. You see, I’m the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it, nobody notices it, and it’s wonderful to articulate it now."
> Fifty-four tightly clustered, slanted oil wells — the last of the Salt Lake Oil Field — sit snuggly between Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s and San Vicente Boulevard. In fact, the Beverly Center’s odd, curved footprint is designed to accommodate the drilling site, which is hidden by a wall along the street. The wells are almost completely invisible, dwarfed by the mammoth mall and the sprawling Cedars-Sinai Medical Center across the street — the hospital where I was born and where I later dropped my friend off to meet his wife for an ultrasound appointment.
I always enjoy hearing from him because he’s so unorthodox and I never have any idea the approach he’s going to take when giving an interview or answering a question.
And I always feel the need to point out that Grizzly Man was a truly good movie. I’d heard about it for years and based on the premise expected to have a low brow appeal, something for dumb people to feel superior to someone. But no, it was a respectful and in-depth character study (with some downright poetic narration) and probably Herzog’s best movie.
something for dumb people to feel superior to someone.
Herzog has some common themes that he likes to talk about in interviews. One is that "the poet must not avert his eyes". One meaning he gives to this statement is that he takes tv programs like "here comes honey booboo" or "the Anna Nicole Smith show" seriously, because it is a product of our society, even if it seems exploitative in some way.
What I'm getting at is, if he takes exploitative reality TV in good faith, of course he makes his films in good faith with relation to his subject.
If you want to see the extent of his respectfulness and depth, with his courage for self-analysis added on top, My Best Fiend would be my choice. It's a documentary about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was a pretty unhinged actor. It's fascinating to watch Herzog hold his own with Kinski, and to observe the strange mental space Herzog is in, somewhere between crystal-clear vision and complete madness.
Have you tried putting known human writing into pangram? I have. I've gotten 100% AI with multiple samples of my own human writing. It has also given me 50% on things I know were 100% AI written (from my prompts).
Pangram and everything like it is useless. The results are random on known samples.
Pangram specifically (as opposed to most other detectors) publish internal audits, and seem to welcome external audits [0]. I'm not saying that you are necessarily wrong, just that in my opinion they have earned a higher bar of criticism than random one off anecdote.
That's a fair criticism, I certainly didn't run a full benchmark. Just a few of my own pieces of writing. I also did it a few months ago, maybe it's gotten better since.
GP is right. This paragraph is a major tell. If you have read enough ChatGPT output that hasn’t been humanized, you start to instantly notice it:
“ The attacker hadn’t broken into anything. They’d just noticed something I hadn’t: I had a verified email-sending domain attached to open, unverified signup, and that’s a useful primitive if you don’t care what you send.”
I would rather read an email the sender actually wrote even if it looked like your example, as opposed to AI-written. In that sense it is "better" to me.
That's interesting! I have tried to get false positives from pangram and failed, so I trusted it a bit more than any of the others, although I generally just rely on my own intuition. I am curious what your false positive samples looked like, if you're willing to share.
(I'm less interested in false negatives; I have successfully produced those myself.)
It's obvious that existence of AI will hugely dissatisfy people and make them demand authenticity. Market dictates that there will be a satisfaction of that demand even if it is a smoke show.
Anyone with half a brain knows that people can write like that too. Sometimes people reinforce their point. Sometimes they even do it three times.
The problem is not in posts that fail to pass some half imaginary authenticity check. The problem is in technology that makes us want those checks.
Reddit had a term for people who read the new page -- the knights of new. The small group of people who make the site work by traipsing through the sludge that is the new page, finding the gems within.
We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content. One was placing one new item at the top of your home page and changing that every couple of minutes. The other was the "rising" sort, which was similar to the hot sort on the front page, but much higher velocity.
None of them really worked all that well. The group of people who read new are a unique breed. :)
Reddit, as I'm sure you know well :D, also had the advantage that non-mega subreddits would often only have a single page of new posts per day to look at. So if you were trolling subreddits direct instead of just the ones you follow (I always hated the combined view) or /r/all then it effectively functioned the same as looking at new.
Anyway, back to the original question: I don't normally follow newest regularly but if I'm on a long flight or something I might get bored and poke around there is anything else there. Often there is something good which never bubbles up.
What percent of the knights of new in 2026 are genuine vs sock puppets designed to seed engagement and get the snowball moving? Probably not a lot, considering most posts on reddit these days seem to come from spam bot accounts that do nothing but post identical links to dozens of subreddits. reddit now allows media accounts to post directly from their own managed accounts, violating the old rules against self promotion.
Looking at New makes for an unfiltered experience, and you accept the nonsense that comes with that, on any platform. At that point it's still unaffected by the hivemind consensus.
> We did a lot of experiments to try and get more people to look at the new page or new content
Is that what "best" sort is doing when browsing a specific subreddit? Occasionally I'll notice some crappy 1 minute old post on my feed that's out of place and realize the sorting was reset to "best" instead of "hot" instead
"Best" may include some new posts, I actually haven't checked, but the thing that stands out to me is how old many of the posts are. Ever since Reddit made "best" the default sort on the app I notice that any new subreddit I go to will show me at least some posts from more than two weeks ago. It's really baffling that Reddit seems to think it should be preferred over "hot".
I was going to comment I've never seen this before. Then I went to a subreddit and it hit me that I only use old reddit, which lacks the "best" feature.
I'm not sure why people tolerate the new reddit website. It is so slow, busy, and chock full of ads. When I open it on the phone you are straight up missing a lot of discussion comments, so it is broken too. You click a comment it looks like it has no subcomments under it. You click the permalink opening that comment thread in a new window, and there's still no subcomment under it. Now you prefix old. to the url, now you see the subcomments.
Makes me wonder how much discussion there is that is just not observed at all by a good fraction of the site who browses these same threads. Two universes on the same post.
I prefer the new design because the text is readable on my phone, and it has a native dark mode. I don't see any of the ads because I use an ad blocker.
Also, I have no idea what you mean about the comments thing. I can immediately see all comments other than the ones that have been collapsed due to having negative karma.
I don't know how else to describe it beyond what I've already done. Are you sure you are seeing all the comments? Have you tested with a post? I don't use the app fwiw. Only tested with the mobile website and it has been like this for years.
I still use old.reddit.com on the phone. Works fine with pinch and zoom. Super performant too, loads in a fraction of the time which is necessary with mobile connections and spotty coverage. I just saw the native reddit app for ios at least is like 450mb. WTF...
I don't use the native apps. They are bloated, disgusting messes. I just messed around with old.reddit and compared it to new reddit for around thirty minutes. I noticed no performance differences, and I noticed no discrepancy in comments. I don't know what to tell you. The only time I see fewer comments is when I use an incognito window, but that's just because it's not logged in.
I agree, and I previously used a 3rd party app myself (Reddit Is Fun). The sad thing is that I actually completely understand why they shut down the free API access. The AI bot scrapers are absurdly aggressive, and bandwidth isn't free.
On Reddit I often sort by new for comments (which I know isn't the same as new topics), especially on thoughts over whatever thing I'm looking up. Does Hackernews have that ability or am I being blind?
My read on HN comment sorting is that just like its frontpage, everyone sees the same comment page. New comments are added to the top, and quickly sink below others unless they are engaged with.
This is just a guess tho, as my account can't (yet?) see comment upvote counts.
No accounts (except the actual admins/mods) can see upvote counts on comments. That was a deliberate choice from a long time ago for reasons expressed at the time (by pg, IIRC) that I can't seem to locate now. The site originally made them public, but eventually made them private.
I always thought of 9/11 as the major event for older millennials. I used to think it was all millennials, but many weren't even in kindergarten when it happened.
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