I've been a paying subscriber since 2009 and I'm still happy with it. I agree this article is a dud and I could do without the Wired articles (thankfully they're easy to identify and skip even if you miss the by-line -- just look for the first paragraph that's all setup and zero content). But they still seem like a fine outlet for high-level science & tech news.

Agreed. Unfortunately there don’t appear to be any viable replacements. Ultimately I just read less in general now which sucks. I hate what the internet has become.

Ars in 2008 was the place where people found out you could run arbitrary floating point computations on a GPU. I've never heard anyone talking about it but without those forums deep learning would still be this thing that looks interesting but is really hard to train at scale and no one bothers with.