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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

That, and many reviewers are given the "here's 20 products, I need an article hitting these buzzwords in X Weeks" task.

You can't just do that and get in quality testing time with more than one or two products.

Reviewing things fairly and helpfully is hard and takes time, and especially as AI slop takes over writing (thankfully it looks like this article at least has a byline), I think it's going to be harder and harder to find actual useful human reviews to guide decisions.

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Come on, these are air quality measuring devices. You set them all up, set their panels next to each other for the duration of the testing, and then you evaluate their performances. It doesn't take much time. You look at them when you take readings at whatever interval to compare accuracy. You glance at them to see readability. It doesn't require a lot of effort.

This is quite different from being tasked with comparing bicycles which would require a lot of effort to give equal time to each one. Unless the journo was a world class rider, I'd be shocked if they rode any one of them for more than 5 minutes.

Applied inversely to bikes: Come on, these are bikes. You get on the bike, you pedal around, it doesn't take much time.

These devices usually have between 3-8 sensors inside (with wildly varying quality and quality control), run firmware that _usually_ has access to your WiFi or requires an app to run on your phone (security implications), and are meant to exist in your home for years at a time.

Good reviews which consider all those aspects take time and effort, even for simpler devices.

If you are actually in good faith comparing the zero energy collecting of values from a set of monitors to the physical exertion of riding a bicycle as the same thing, then I just cannot have a conversation with someone that is deliberately being that obtuse.

Why do you believe that collecting data, collating it into useful information and making conclusions from that information is "zero energy"? Yes, testing bicycles will require more calories and exertion, but that doesn't mean that testing computers, sensors, or other technological devices is a zero energy effort.

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