There won’t be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I’ve already said, and I’ve done so privately.
To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn’t go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication… AND the fact that while we haven’t sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I’ve told him that I won’t be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I’ll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of ‘Team Media’. When/if he’s ready to do so again I’ll be ready.
To my team (and my CEO’s team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we’ve been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it’s clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but that’s no excuse for sloppiness.
Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we’re not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it’s sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we’ve communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah… What we’re doing hasn’t been in many years, if ever… and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn’t materially change the recommendation. That doesn’t mean these things don’t matter. We’ve set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven’t seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you’re really looking for it… The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I’m REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I’ve already addressed above) is an ‘accuracy’ issue. It’s more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again… mystery) would have been impossible… and also didn’t affect the conclusion of the video… OR SO I THOUGHT…
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn’t make sense to buy… so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn’t really make a difference.
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn’t mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip. I missed that, but it wasn’t because I didn’t care about the consumer… it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I’ve watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It’s an astonishingly unforgiving market.
Either way, I’m sorry I got the community’s priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn’t show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn’t to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it’s an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y’know, eat).
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I’ve never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient.
We can test that… with this post. Will the “It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they’re taking care of it” reality manage to have the same reach? Let’s see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it’s been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I’m a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
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we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication
I don’t think you’re making the point you think you’re making
Also, Linus is technically wrong on several counts. GN said where it was sold (at an event auction).
also auction == sell: webster definition of Auction: “a sale of property to the highest bidder”
GN even starts by saying it was “auctioned”, only later it says it was sold at an auction.
If that’s how Linus is going to defend “proper journalistic practice”, by ignoring the material he’s criticizing, then he’s lost his North.
Absolutely no excuse that this happened, but I believe the point he is trying to make is that they didn’t make any money on it. Still a shitty thing to let happen, and it should simply never have happened at all, but it’s still better than if they had sold it and made a profit, I guess.
That point didn’t need to be made in the first place because Steve already specifically noted that it was auctioned for charity in his video.
To me, this is just evidence that Linus didn’t even watch the video.
Why would he? You can get most of a videos information by just reading the comments. And those probably all said he sold it.
Wow. I felt so stupid just writing this. I still cant believe he unironically says shit like this
Well, not watching the video would mean not doing due diligence, which would be on-brand for him.
The point isn’t the profit, the point is that a new, maybe secret prototype could have fallen into competitors hands. LMG made a thousand on it? The small, indepedent company that made the water block just lost their main product
This. I’m not sure what the ramifications are, depending on what law may be applicable (like US-american or canadian), but apart from having given away something that in all likelihood they had no right of ownership over, they might even be liable for some sort of confidentiality breach due to that.
It’s a really shitty defense, as they still profited off of it, just not monetarily. And he should realize that and not make excuses.
Is it though? That amount of money is meaningless to a company, which Linus loves to talk about these days.
The problem is, he shit all over a startup company, failed to return the prototype after multiple requests, then when called out on it offered to pay for it and phrased his response to make it seem like he hadn’t spent months ghosting them until another YouTuber brought attention to the issue.
Shitting on it - fine, he’s extremely harsh every time it’s brought up, but he can have his own opinion. I think it’s a bad take, he doesn’t even entertain the idea that they might lower the price, improve it to work on multiple models, or maybe this fits a high end niche for PC ricing - it sounds impractical now, but maybe a few sales would be enough for them to make a more practical version
But whatever, I can get over that. The fact that he didn’t say “we had some miscommunication in my team, this is our bad, we’re having growing pains and I never would have sold it if I knew they wanted it back. We reached out to them to make them whole, but we’ll do better” is pretty incriminating.
That’s not owning up to their mistakes - either they knowingly ignored requests to give it back, which is fucked up, or someone made a mistake and he made excuses instead of owning up to it, and tried to quietly bury the problem and fire back on the guy who called them out
Selling it for clout rather than money doesn’t make it better in any way.
I mean, I get the point that Linus was trying to make, but man he really could have worded it better. As it stands it feels like an “akshually” merged with a technicality-gotcha
Linus does this all the time, he makes excuses based on some technicality that only he understands. He’s said in the past that “it’s only a review if we explicitly say it’s a review, and if it’s not a review we don’t have to be held to the same standards”, despite the fact that most of their viewers won’t assume that distinction, and it’s not exactly obvious with their nonsense clickbait titles on all videos. His ego is way too big and he cares more about being right than making good content.
When organizations mess up, why is their first response to the critique to say “Why didn’t you come to us first?” when they really mean “Why did you make this public so we actually have to do something?”
I get really frustrated with the response because it doesn’t come across as a company actually interested in improving, but just throwing accusations back and trying to beg off the responsibility of actually holding themselves accountable.
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Were the bad results genuine or caused by incorrect testing?
Incorrect testing They didn’t use the GPU board the block was designed for as they apparently didn’t have one available from their inventory Linus found out about that at the start of filming the video review then decided to go full steam ahead anyway Gotta get that video out Didn’t even mention or reference the included manual and other documentation Concluded it was a crap product, a prototype installed on the improper GPU, in the video and also on the WANshow That had to have caused untold damage to the company in revenue and reputation
To make it worse, the company actually sent the block together with a matching GPU and they somehow lost it.
Sold the block. Kept the GPU
“my intention was never to harm Billet Labs”
Kid, you said “nobody should buy it”
I think the end conclusion wasn’t great. He said
It wouldn’t matter if it dropped 20 degrees
It absolutely would matter. Just like how a 4090 costs an absurdly high amount but people will still buy it. For the right person getting 20 degrees knocked off might be worthwhile regardless of how expensive it is.
I mean it is a $800/900+ waterblock. No reasonable consumer should buy it. Its a cool project to show Billet Lab’s ability to fabricate and mill custom parts but this is such a niche thing.
The average consumer wouldn’t buy a block to begin with. I know quite a few guys that have spent thousands on their hardline setups, adding another $1000 CAD is a drop in the bucket to them. There is a market for it, just not a large one
I do wish they would have tested it properly, because it was like watching a Top Gear episode where they drive a lambo around a gridlocked city and then say, “not worth the money, sucks”. You’re right, there is a market for it, just not a large one. But also as the other guy said, no reasonable consumer should buy it. All of this is irrelevant to the larger discussion at hand, of course.
And they wouldn’t watch Linus video on it going on the wrong gpu. Those insane people can do what they want but its clear Linus is typically catering to tech “normies” they will do the occasional commercial tech but those are typically using them in ways they weren’t meant to in a rather silly/pointless deployment. I’m not here to say what Linus did to the prototype was great since really auctioning it off is pretty abhorrent but I think people are over exaggerating about him going to be the “death of a startup” when local youtuber “funny” man makes a stupid video on it installing it on the wrong gpu, which has been clearly pointed out to death in the comments even before this controversy popped up.
From Billet lab’s own website, it seems custom parts may be their bag and even though the video was negative on the monoblock (as we already established the reasons why) LTT seemed rather positive about the company, just not the product.
If you’ve got an idea for your next PC, let us know. If anyone can make it happen, we can.
Think this is a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Where I can see where Linus is coming from since he is quite frequently told he is out of touch as shown with his recent “house” videos. I think this could have easily swung the other way of “Wow Linus, of course the techtuber who gets free shit would advertise a 900$ waterblock, we can barely afford the gpus to put these on but he wants us to buy something that cost half the price of the already overpriced gpu its being put on”. Like custom water cooling loop are fucking cool but you get to a huge point of diminishing return. Like if we believe Billet Lab’s own results, the difference between Monoblock and EK quantum magnitude & EK-Quantum Vector is only about 3-5 degrees. People can burn their money how they want but I am pretty certain LTT has made a video saying they actually don’t encourage consumers to watercool their PCs since while its better its typically just a worse user experience (This is me paraphrasing).
And they wouldn’t watch Linus video on it going on the wrong gpu.
They absolutely would, it’s literally the only video on it in huge part because Linus managed to give away the only prototype without permission, accidentally ensuring exclusivity.
And sure, they’d know he fucked up but it might still sway their opinion, maybe even unconsciously.
Oh and when you ask what Linus is going to do to prevent crap like this in the future (after already tripling down on their stupidity with the testing) is “nothing, it’s a one in ten years occurrence”.
The guy absolutely can’t stop jamming his foot in his mouth.
Myself and the guys I was referring to with crazy hardline loops are on first name basis with Linus, we all played left 4 dead together way back when before he even had a YouTube channel (ClosetGamer, anyone?) so his influence with these type of enthusiasts is still pretty strong, at least here in Canada. However he definitely lost a lot of respect with this response of his but honestly I didn’t expect anything different from him
It’s his job to say who should buy it. That doesn’t mean he wants to take food off the tables of manufacturers. A review is useless if the reviewer cares more about not hurting the manufacturer than being straight about the product. That said, the review should obviously be done with a responsible level of thoroughness and competence, but that’s a separate issue.
Well a review is also useless (or at least extremely disrespectful) if it comes from a place where it unfairly tests the product and shoes it in a bad light from the beginning by fucking up the process.
Like sure, the conclusion would likely be the exact same. But you still need to actually test that, and give the product the benefit of the doubt that it actually might be better than it seems and showing it that way.
There’s still a difference between “this is a shit product and nobody should buy it” and “this works as advertised, is cool but nobody should buy it”, since in the latter case someone will definitely still buy it for some reason even if it’s impractical.
It’s his job to say who should buy it.
No.
It’s his job to provide accurate data, and possibly a recommendation for those wanting to know his opinion.
It’s the consumer’s job to look at the data in the review and determine whether or not to buy it.
You don’t see GN failing to properly review a 4070 Ti because “nobody should buy this”. They do the review properly and then say “nobody should buy this” after having given accurate data.
You don’t get to skip doing your literal job just because you don’t think the product is worth buying.
“It’s his job to say who should buy it.”
Is it though? I suggest his position is more that of presenting what’s there, rather than make the choice for those interested in buying something like that…
A decent reviewer would present the data/facts and would let people make their own conclusions. It’s not wise to outright say do/don’t buy this. People aren’t very smart and are extremely easily lead to make decisions based on their feelings towards the speaker instead of something sound like logic/morals/ethics.
“Nobody should buy it” is probably true, but it’s not the problem here. LTT did not do their due diligence before publishing that conclusion. Even a product that no rational consumer should buy deserves a fair review that explores why you might buy it anyway.
we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity
Jesus. It doesn’t matter whether you sold it or auctioned it. It doesn’t matter if it was for charity. What matters is that IT WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND PROTOTYPE THAT DIDN’T BELONG TO YOU AND YOU AGREED TO RETURN IT (and the RTX3090 they sent with it), and you didn’t do what you promised.
Everything wrong with LTT is summed up in this response. Instead of going to the company’s CEO and composing a response on behalf of the company, we get a bunch of over-personalized complaints about hurt feelings and imperfection, fired off only 3 hours after the GN video, that make it 100% clear this is all about Linus’ personality rather than a dispassionate review of the facts.
Even better is that GN did say “auctioned” and not “sold”. Can’t even get that right.
Besides - isn’t the term typically used “sold at auction”?
Typically followed by whatever exorbitant amount someone paid for something that’s only that valuable because too many people have too much money, but that’s a topic for another day.
Not a great look here overall. Was definitely hoping they would take a little bit more accountability. The solution seems simple. Spend less money on egregiously expensive equipment and spend more money on making sure things are accurate before they go out the door.
I think that is the most frustrating part, is the main criticism is take time, get it right, and that seems to be something that Linus totally ignored in his response.
He is laser focused on the criticism of a single video and missing the greater concern being raised.
This read more like a “We did nothing wrong. And what we did do wrong we already discovered ourselves and have been working to improve. And those self improvements are not showing an effect because we just need more time. But I promise we try to be better. Please just ignore that the quality hasn’t improved recently and believe me.” than a “We done fucked up, gonna have to see how to fix this. Will report back with an action plan to make sure this doesn’t happen again once we have it laid out”
Very disappointed in Linus here, haven’t been watching them recently but it’s sad to see him fall to what seems to be greed.
How am I not surprised this is how he would respond. This is the same guy who said “AdBlock is piracy,” he doubles down on every shitty take he has.
I still don’t get his fame and how deeply embedded ge is in the pc/gaming community.
Haha he’s so funny because he drops expensive things and pushes expensive products.He’s the CEO of Linux, it’s even named after him.
TIL
Satan’s making a joke. Linux was developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds of Finland. LTT is Linus Sebastian of Canada.
I was just following the joke. Linux, the kernel and Linus Sebastian are probably the same age, from my point of view (yeah, I’m old).
Never heard of before and dgaf about whoever Linus Sebastion is. All this stuff I’ve been seeing about what an asshole “Linus” is thinking it must be some kerfuffle about Linus Torvalds but the bits and pieces I read made no sense. Even less now I’ve figured out it’s just some random asshole named Linus. How did I end up here? Take me back to my room, please.
Same for me. I have been reading Linus (Torvalds) posts since decades and it really seemed out of character to me. I even clicked on the link but I admit that I haven’t yet understood what is going on. I have decided that it’s not for me…
Yeah I mean it’s kind of wish fulfillment innit? Like Scrapyard Wars, or Whole Room Watercooling, or building 5-figure rigs, or his tech’ed out data collection mansion, that’s all stuff most people won’t be able to do themselves, but they want to watch someone do it.
His fame, like most fame, is the duality of a carefully curated persona as cool and hip, and an arrogant micromanaging back half. Most people are only going to see Wish Fulfillment Linus, and Egomaniac Linus only comes up rarely (and mostly on his podcast).
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Yes, the impracticality is one of the major points of wish fulfillment. It’s fantasy and most reasonable people don’t actually want the crap Linus builds. They just want to see it, it’s make-believe.
And I wouldn’t call destroying a startup’s intellectual property, ignoring their requests to return it, and then selling the detritus as “merch” at an auction “just having some fun.” That’s what I would call negligent and unprofessional.
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With respect, whether it can properly be called “intellectual property” or not, is not the point.
It was a one-of-a-kind engineering sample that LTT agreed to send back when they were done with it. LTT did not fulfill their obligation, and when Billet Labs asked about it, they got stonewalled.
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“IP” or not, this is costing them money to manufacture a new prototype.
Reddit always had such a boner for him. Maybe it’s because I’m old, but I clicked on one of his videos a decade ago, when people were posting gifs of him dropping things. I found the grating and annoying, and never went back. It also really looked like all of the drops were for quick popularity via Reddit gifs. It worked well.
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It is wrong, actually. Piracy is illegal, adblocking is not.
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Creating adblockers, hosting those adblockers, using adblockers, or providing a service that removes ads is not illegal (in countries I know of). Piracy, like you said, can vary. For many places, downloading pirated content is not illegal (although in some places, I believe intent is also a part of this story), hosting content you don’t own is illegal (even if it has ads, and of course there is nuance here when it comes to user-submitted content and where you are), etc. Generally, adblockers never involve any kind of “is it legal” consideration, while piracy does.
Looking at it from a different point of view, piracy is the act of acquiring content that requires payment without paying for it, while blocking ads is basically the opposite - you’re denying content you don’t want while accepting the rest. Taking something without permission generally raises ethical questions for the receiver, while forcing someone to take something they don’t want generally raises ethical questions for the sender. (Of course, this also comes down to whether the receiver agreed ahead of time to receive both the content they wanted and the content they didn’t want, but that’s not the case here.)
You’re right, there’s no difference. Downloading a video “from a pirate site” that is freely available is also not piracy in the colloquial sense. Otherwise it’s also piracy for me to download a tiktok and sent it the mp4 to a friend directly. Your argument’s great but doesn’t make the point you want it to.
If TikTok doesn’t allow you to download their videos and share them outside of their website, based on the EULA agreed to when you made your account, then yes it’s piracy. Justifiable piracy, but still piracy.
(I have no idea if TikTok allows this)
So Piracy is not a matter of law, but a matter of TOS now?
Youtube had to pay for the bandwidth and got nothing
This is not entirely true because youtube gave your ISP some server appliances to install in their network that locally cache and serve youtube videos to minimize actual traffics to youtube. When you watch a youtube video, your video traffic is most likely being served locally from your ISP’s datacenter instead of from youtube’s datacenter. Youtube doesn’t pay your ISP for hosting their appliances in their network (not for bandwidth, electricity and cooling). You, as a customer of your ISP, are the one that pay for the bandwidth.
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I don’t even think he’s pulling it out as an intentional tactic, I get the feeling he legitimately wants to be a good guy and is barely able to handle the suggestion that he isn’t acting like one. Just a fragile ego and self-image.
I think you’re right to an extent. Everyone wants to believe they are the protagonist, so when they’re presented with something that threatens that world view they get very defensive and start attempting all kinds of weird deflections. Louis Rossmann has talked about this in the past on his channel. He takes the rather extreme view that he is always the bad guy by default, but that view does at least acknowledge that he is also not the good guy by default.
That said, I do still think there are aspects of the apology which are insincere and non-accidental attempts to shift the narrative and mislead people about what has actually happened.
I feel like I might have done something similar in his shoes. It makes me sad because I’ve been watching since the NCIX days I think Linus is a lot better than this but I can put myself in his shoes and it probably feels a hell of a lot like people dogpiling on him out of the blue (even if that’s not entirely the reality) and a betrayal by the industry he helped grow for over a decade. I don’t see him as a villain by a long shot but his go go go attitude is toxic at times and has come to a head.
His post to me reads more as someone who is anxious and scared of what might come next. I think he fucked up by not waiting to put some distance between himself and the reckoning so he could address it properly with a clear head.
Linus hasn’t distanced himself enough from the company. If LMG “wants to be a real company”, which it is now, it needs to be able to take criticism. Nobody is criticizing any individual at LMG, we are criticizing the company. Companies are not individuals and need a mechanism for dealing with any criticism, abuse, harassment, dogpiling, ect that’s not a defensive CEO taking it personally and blurting out their emotional reaction. I don’t know how Linus can live being the sole punching bag for such a large company.
Absolutely, I’m just understanding of his perspective as the person who started it all and has that deep emotional attachment to it, which as someone who has watched it grow from nothing has a small taste of, his name is all over it, it’s hard to not take criticism personally, it doesn’t excuse what he said but it makes a lot more sense in that context.
Incidentally they have been deliberate about rebranding as acronyms etc to move his name away from the brand a little, since it’s no longer just “Linus and friends” and a whole ass thing.
They just posted a better response on Floatplane this morning it should hit YouTube soon
Sometimes he makes so many mistakes that I wonder if it’s pretending to ignore it for views or just didn’t know that. A man with decades of experience like him can’t make such simple errors.
Like in the recent unRAID video, he replaced a data drive with one bigger than the parity drive. Anyone with more than 1 hour of experience with unRAID knows that the parity drives must be the biggest in the array, how he couldn’t know that?
Probably a video like “i swapped the broken disk with a similar one and voila problem fixed” wasn’t as interesting as 25 minutes of “OMG I am losing all my data why this isn’t working OMG let’s do this other wrong approach now OMG”
He was pretty clear through that whole video that he didn’t know what he was doing. That video was purely for entertainment, and it was obvious from the first minute.
Ironically he comes off as a guy that’s not good at computers even though he really likes them. It’s amazing he’s been able to make a very successful career out of that.
To be fair he needs to know a shitton about a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with computers, like how to run a business, or make videos. It’s reasonable to expect that he won’t truly be the most knowledgeable in all aspects of “tech”.
The funny thing is he knows a shit-ton about computers. Unfortunately, he knows enough to think he won’t be blind-sided, or get tripped up by things he decides to ignore for the sake of (excuse my language) engaging content. In a way, the fact that he steps on a rake every so often just raises his profile.
Because I don’t think you or any of the people in this thread would spout the vitriol they have to his face if they recognized him as a human. Consider a friend you have that you’re close to. Now imagine they fucked up in the way linus did. How do you approach them about it? Do you say, “hey man, I think you were in the wrong there, let’s talk, I want to understand where your head was at”? Or do you jump straight to, “you never learn from your mistakes, that’s why you keep acting like a fool. I can’t be bothered with your superficial attitude”?
There’s a disconnect between people communicating on the internet. Most humans aren’t evolved to have sympathy for hypothetical people, much less intangible celebrities, much less communicating asynchronously. We’re evolved to look each other in the face, read each others’ emotions, and adjust the conversation accordingly to be most effective. None of that can happen here.
I have not watched this video, nor do I really watch any of the LTT/LMG’s videos so I’m just a third party observer here. However, this goes both ways - are the others correct when they said that their video directly said “No one should ever buy this”?
If so, using the same example I’m sure you’d expect that your friend wouldn’t say “No one should ever buy this” when you ask them for a review on something you made. Yes, Linus and his team are human - but so are the people who made the original product. I get the feeling this isn’t the first review that LMG hasn’t exactly given… glowing reviews to, either.
Plenty of people go on tirades about those that they don’t actually have a personal connection to, it’s unfortunate but as you said, is all too very common especially when you’re a person who’s in a higher position than those complaining about you. As the (previous now, as far as I understand?) CEO of a company though you don’t double down on your mistakes because that only makes the situation worse.
And of course, if you go and do something silly say, on the road - you very much are likely to get someone to speak how they truly feel about you.
My boss is the CEO of a smaller company (we are a team of about 10 people at a time, max), we were talking about the situation today - and he said “When we make a mistake, my job is to address the issue but at the same time, not add fuel to the fire. Because we probably were wrong, and when you have a ton of customers complaining on that scale then you probably were in the wrong.”- I do not know how much total profit either of them make, but my boss isn’t the CEO of a massive company like Google and started off as a one-man-shop too.
Before I send you this novel, just want to preface with, thank you for your respectful response.
So to address your first point, not sure if you were intentionally pivoting the metaphor or not, but I just want to be clear that my “you and a friend” metaphor was intended to be analogous to the Linus/audience relationship, not Linus/Billet. Linus isn’t directing the “we’re human” line at Billet Labs, he’s directing it at us onlookers responding to the situation. I assume that LMG and Billet Labs have a completely different relationship regarding this situation with completely different motives and emotions and dialogues involved, versus the relationship between LMG and their audience. The audience is currently giving a ragebait response, I’m sure LMG is getting their fair share of death threats right now, but also generally seeing a lot of the more typical toxic responses that often accompany a cancelling, and THAT is the vitriolic reaction I’m referring to when I talk about “you and a friend”. People say things over the internet to faceless celebrities that they would never in a million years say to another human no matter how wrong they were; they know not to because it’s not constructive and only burns bridges. But random strangers don’t have a bridge they’re caring for with Linus, because they don’t have any tangible relationship with him. That’s all I’m saying.
Second, I don’t think “no one should ever buy this” is the insult people are hearing it as. As a reviewer, LMG’s job is (typically) to measure the portion of their audience that a product is the best option for, quantify that portion, and notify them of the product. But when a product is the best option for virtually no one, it’s simply a statement of fact to say “no one should buy this”. I don’t know what line of business you’re in, but I’m sure you’d agree that you should be able to have a meeting with your CEO, and say in no uncertain terms exactly who your target demographic is, and how large that group is at any given time. I have to assume Billet Labs is fully aware that the current product at the current price point is only commercially viable for less than 20 people’s usecase. But being commercially viable is not their current goal, which leads me to the problem I have with Linus focusing on that point in the video: It’s literally a limited batch prototype. It’s not relevant to say whether anyone should buy it, because they aren’t even manufacturing them to be sold yet. The supercar analogy is apt, because people don’t watch Top Gear to be told that no one should buy a Lamborghini (even though it’s true), they watch it to see the car “rip” as it were.
I think that’s the safe (arguably “right”) statement for your CEO to make, and this is why you usually get the generic, no stance, “we’ll do better” statements we often see in these situations. I do think Linus could have done a better job not coming off as defensive, because he does seem to understand that he had the wrong mindset about the product from the start. But the “we’re human” statement I think is a normal human response to a situation where you’re being flooded with hatemail, from people you’ve never met, over a situation that there is still confusion around, and you’re just doing your best to correct your mistakes.
Linus has said he’s stepping down from the company multiple times before. I wonder if this will be his “that’s it, I’m done” moment, or if he doesn’t want this to be how he goes out. Hoping the latter, but we’ll see…
Edit: just saw that they put out a video addressing the situation. Glad his wife and the new CEO know how to do damage control better than him.
No worries! I’m glad that it did come off as respectful, I’m all too well used to replying to someone with a differing viewpoint/perspective than theirs on “the other site”, and them interpreting that as me attempting to be hostile - which is never the case! For what its worth, I do agree that in general a lot of people when they post comments online have a bad habit of being incredibly disrespectful with what they say. I was raised to follow the golden rule of “treat others the way you wish to be treated”, and I have always felt that it costs nothing to be kind and respectful to people by default. I even have a habit of trying to be as respectful as I can to AIs/LLMs such as Bard when I talk with it - which I’ve been told is “silly”, but again it doesn’t cost me anything to be nice, and on the logical side at the very least maybe it’ll help the “training” of the AIs. There is absolutely never a situation that calls for sending out death threats and personal attacks to others online.
The rest of my response will be a bit of a novel itself, so that I can further explain my reasoning behind my original comment - definitely feel free to skip over it as I do have a bit of reputation for having err, extended, responses 😅… Mainly the intent is not to try to change anyone else’s viewpoint/opinions, but as a bit of a demonstration that I’m not trying to jump on the “LTT bad” bandwagon that seems to be occurring throughout the internet right now.
I did understand that when you mentioned the you/friend metaphor that you were specifically talking about it from a Linus and audience perspective - I do agree with that metaphor in general 100%, but I do think it should extend to Linus / LMG and the people they are referring to in their videos as well, since if the point of applying the original metaphor is to emphasize that Linus and his team/company are humans the same applies to those behind the products in their reviews. Hence why “no one should ever buy this” comes off a bit… off-key to me when you then turn around and respond to incoming negative feedback as “we’re only human” (and to be fair, that does need to be said / reminded to some people) when it doesn’t really feel like that was kept in mind during the original video along with the actions they took in addition to it (I heard something about not giving the original company their prototype back as originally agreed upon, and instead selling it at a silent auction…?), but I’ll put an asterisk on that opinion since I don’t really watch LTT in general.
Now, I don’t think that them giving their opinion on the product itself is a problem - as you mentioned, that is the purpose of a review. For me, when I watch reviews I’m not really looking for their final verdict (such as “Don’t buy this product” or on the opposite token “Go out and buy this product now!”). Instead, I’m looking for the objective markers and testing of said product. I don’t know Linus or anyone on his team personally (or even the random people who post reviews for products on Amazon) so realistically a final verdict doesn’t really hold a lot of weight to me. There are a ton of cases of reviews where their use case or setup doesn’t really match mine which further on makes a final judgment a bit like just noise to me. However, the facts and outlines that they provide in the review does matter to me because that allows me to make an informed opinion. Sadly this doesn’t apply to everyone, and some people will take their final judgment at face value and as 100% fact, which can be really damaging to a product/brand when you’re as large as LTT.
I’m not a hardware person (my strengths are pretty much all in the software side) but as far as I gathered, the GPU that they used for this waterblock (which I didn’t even know what that was prior to all of this, I guess its a type of cooler?) wasn’t even met for the product that this company designed so the whole premise of the review is basically “fruit of the poisonous tree” in my eyes, and is precisely the type of reason why I don’t like final judgments/verdicts.
I work in the IT industry, and since we are a smaller company I’ve “worn a lot of hats” so to speak. My main task is to provide technical support to our customers but I’ve also been a part of other roles such as our internal development team, our internal (quality control/assurance/“HR”) and external (customer escalation) supervision team. Since our target audience is a very wide audience due to the very specific IT space we’re in, there have been a lot of occasions where there is someone whose using our services that (for lack of better words right now as I’ve just woken up) are using it for an unintended use-case.
I think its really easy for someone on our team’s perspective to pull a classic Steve Jobs “You’re holding it wrong” type of response, and when I was more focused on our internal supervision side of things one thing I heavily pushed for was “It’s not the customer’s fault if they got the impression that our service was meant to be used this way” - instead I pushed for improving the way we advertised our services whether on the actual advertisement side of things, or the “pre-sales advertisement” side. I think that’s a core value that we’ve all generally held at my place, but when you’re putting in your heart and soul to provide support to someone and they scream at you, its sometimes easy to lose track of that which is why I really do also feel for Linus in some of the comments that have been directed at him and his team. Vitriolic comments and death threats are by no means okay whatsoever, however (and I really don’t like saying “however” here because I know that comes across badly given the prior statement - so to the potential reader, please don’t misinterpret that) sometimes you do need to take some humility for the actual mistake that was made (and often that mistake wasn’t intended or even directly your fault - but that doesn’t mean that its the consumer/customer’s fault either).
On a side note, since I mentioned Google’s LLM “Bard”, I asked it to review this comment and see what its thought on my comment was - I was actually a bit surprised that it seems to know about the situation that occurred here since it was so recent. If anyone is interested, here is what it said when I provided a copy of this comment. Honestly, I never thought to ask Bard to review a comment before I send it, seems like a great case for LLMs.
comes off a bit… off-key to me when you then turn around and respond to incoming negative feedback as “we’re only human”
Yeah, I don’t think they were directing that at fair, but negative criticism. Linus is very clear that he welcomes constructive criticism always. The “we’re human” comment is, imo, clearly directed at the people going out of their way to just call them names and generally be shitty.
(I heard something about not giving the original company their prototype back as originally agreed upon, and instead selling it at a silent auction…?)
Hah, I mean, that’s a big portion of the discussion we’re having. Yeah, there was a “miscommunication” and the item was auctioned off for charity rather than returned. They explained in the video how it happened, and that prior to any of this blowing up they had already contacted Billet Labs about covering all costs associated with their mistake. It’s an ongoing meme in the LTT episodes that the guy who fucked up sucks at his job and is always about to get fired. But in the explanation video, I got the sense that he wasn’t really joking about not knowing if he was going to be fired this time.
as far as I gathered, the GPU that they used for this waterblock (which I didn’t even know what that was prior to all of this, I guess its a type of cooler?) wasn’t even met for the product that this company designed so the whole premise of the review is basically “fruit of the poisonous tree” in my eyes, and is precisely the type of reason why I don’t like final judgments/verdicts.
Yes, a waterblock is strapped onto the CPU, water passes through it and takes heat away from the CPU, thereby cooling it. It seemed like in their rush to get the video out the door, they ignored several flaws in their testing setup (like choosing the wrong GPU), and then Linus just concluded it wasn’t commercially viable anyway and didn’t care to retest it. The larger issue people have with them is that they’re setting too stringent of deadlines for themselves, and it’s hurting the quality of their content. This just seemed to be a recent case that had collateral damage involved.
sometimes you do need to take some humility for the actual mistake that was made
I think they’ve taken better steps toward that with the followup video I put in my edit. Also, that is really interesting that Bard knows about the situation. Afaik it’s wrong about actually “returning” the waterblock, since it sold, but they have agreed to cover any associated costs. Hard to quantify those costs if it ends up ruining their company as Billet seemed to imply (they said that it was their “only” prototype or something. Maybe they mean “only one they have for demoing to reviewers”?) I wonder if Bard is “watching” youtube videos, or just getting an auto transcription or what…
I just wanted to say, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply to me on this! It’s helped me see things from a different viewpoint, and also come to the realization that perhaps part of my viewpoint has been at the very least, colored by what’s been going on in the media. Generally I (at least I like to think) that I’m not as prone to that occurring, but this situation is a bit unique as I don’t normally watch LTT/LMG’s videos so perhaps I’m subconsciously “filling in the blanks” so to speak with what is being mentioned.
In regards to Bard and whether its actually “watching” videos or not, I do think that it’s somewhat able to watch them. I asked it to identify what is the “musical term” for something that occurred at a timestamp for a song in the game Destiny 2’s OST after providing a YouTube link - it told me that the term was “tintinnabulation” which was correct, and gave me an opinion on what it thought of the song in general. The interesting thing of course is that since its an OST, it is highly unlikely that there was say, an article or Reddit comment that it could cross reference to get that answer. I’ve certainly seen Bard hallucinate answers before (such as today when it gave me an rclone command that didn’t exist) but I don’t think that was one of those cases. It’d be cool to see Bard and other LLMs do an actual active search rather than just referring to its training set so that the answers are more accurate, but I suppose we’ll see!
Woah, I feel like no one is talking about Bard, but that’s pretty impressive. Will have to check it out. Cheers 👍
Man, I’ve had a feeling that LTT and LMG’s content more generally has been less and less about consumers and more about selling things to people. I guess it’s called “advertainment” - but it’s just so intolerable now. I don’t feel connected to, or like any of the content is relevant anymore to a regular person.
When your employees are complaining that they can’t create the content to the standard they want to because of time, it really sounds like a management problem. One they Linus seems determined to ignore so that they can keep raking in big sponsorships and sales of their overpriced over hyped merch so they can buy ever bigger mansions.
The whole tone of the enterprise is off and the vibes are bad.
One they Linus seems determined to ignore so that they can keep raking in big sponsorships and sales of their overpriced over hyped merch so they can buy ever bigger mansions.
I don’t think it’s that bad; Linus’ heart seems to be in the right place but his ego and occasional lack of self-awareness does definitely hurt at least the image. But that’s something the new CEO can actually fix, potentially.
As for the need to make money and churn out content, I kinda get the need; he probably feels immense pressure because in order to sustain 100+ people they do actually need to put out a shittin of content and can’t really take a break.
With that being said issues like these should be a very strong signal that change needs to happen, and dismissing people’s concerns and not being able to put his ego aside will hurt them a lot if this continues.
I think you nailed the response here. They need the new CEO to be there full time too.
What’s ltt and lmg?
I believe it stands for Linus Tech Tips and Linus Media Group
Linus Tech Tips, Linus Media Group
Linus has always struck me as someone who thinks he knows what he’s talking about, acts like he does, and can sell it. When, in fact, he’s nothing but veneer on top of a moron. This, to me, proves it. I’m so glad I never got caught up in his cult of personality.
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And to be honest, if I had the media empire he has built up and the pressure and fortunes that come with it, I would probably turn into an asshole too.
Well that’s too bad that you automatically expect that to be the case. But I never called him an asshole, I called him a moron.
I think his laziness and sloppiness is better than actual malice, at least. He didn’t mean to sell someone else’s prototype, he just didn’t bother to check if it was okay, like he didn’t bother to test the prototype on the card it was designed for.
I guess it’s okay, then, that he’s just incompetent while reaching hundreds of thousands or millions of people he influences on purchasing decisions. I mean it’s not like most or all those people believe and trust him or anything.
EDIT> Oh and this seems apropos. Hmm, maybe there indeed is malice.
Same, I never liked his content. He’s so “hype guy” cringy to me. I have friends that are somewhat techie that love him and think I’m just hating on him but he’s always been very annoying and came off as fake, like the fake persona that a cars salesman has. I’ve never watched a whole one of his videos, just can’t stand them.
Edit note: The recent Twitter thread from the former employee eclipses either of the situations in this comment in terms of needing response/corroboration. I think it largely stems from the same problem: overwork and mismanagement.
The Billet situation appears to be a genuine fuckup that LMG has to make right with them, but outside of that I don’t care tbh.
The data integrity situation is the one that needs to be properly addressed for the sake of their channel.
Sorry Linus, I’m not buying the “you should have told us” line. The fact that you and your staff were well aware of the problems of rushing to release content (to the point of releasing public video on it), means it’s not that people weren’t telling you.
You have two basic options to fix it.
Option A: You need more staff to vet the accuracy and more hosts to have time to cut/re-shoot parts that were incorrect. Clearly you and your staff each have too much on your plate.
Option B: You need to slow the rate of your content releasing right down, to ensure you can double and triple check benchmarks, staff that bring up concerns aren’t brushed off or put in a footnote/comment.
GN or anyone could tell LMG this, but especially option B isn’t something a company with a “growth-mindset” would want to hear.
The communication re: the auction of the billet product appears to be a genuine fuck up, and LMG needs to do as much as it can to own that.
The review, and subsequent doubling down on WAN of [sic] “do not buy this product” , however, is down right negligent. Billet are a start up and every review or demo of their product is absolutely critical to their success. To say “we want you to eat” is borderline offensive. LMG must recognise the majority who watch LTT are often casual and will forever just remember “Linus said no” and not question it further.
While I commend the attitude of not being drawn into an online pissing contest with GN, I think the least they could do is remove the video, retest and evaluate, and offer a sincere apology for the previous efforts.
Everything else is a QC issue. Do less with more, and you won’t have to spend so much time putting out very public fires such as this.
While Linus’ handling of the situation is terrible, I agree there is nothing this waterblock could do to change that conclusion for the price that it costs, so the drama around that does seem silly to me.
But that’s missing the point of the product isn’t it? I agree with the super car analogy here. Linus was reviewing the thing like it was a car to bring the kids to school or go grocery shopping. Yes it’s wildly impractical, the kids don’t fit and the gas mileage is terrible. But that’s not the point of the product.
They should have tested it properly, praised it for the extreme engineering and beauty and then added as almost a footnote it’s super expensive and impractical.
And this coming from the guys that made a $100,000 dollar desk recently. I’m sorry Linus your desk sucks, it’s way to heavy, way too expensive and super impractical. But they didn’t say that, instead showing off how beautiful it turned out and what an awesome thing it is.
LMG must recognise the majority who watch LTT are often casual and will forever just remember “Linus said no” and not question it further.
So they are casuals primarily but you expect some subset of them to be willing to buy a $900+ waterblock? I feel I’m going through brainrot right now with this shit. Any enthusiast is probably not going to take the youtuber “funny” man, who thought it would be a good idea to watercool his PC rack with his pool with no heat exchanger in between said rack and the pool installation or really any other dumb watercooling project they have done (that typically end in failure), as a person you should go to for your boutique custom water cooling needs. Like even in the video they were pretty blatant on how its going on the wrong gpu.
As Linus said, think of it like watching a Top Gear/VIN Wiki video about a super car. I just want to see it at its best, and going fast.
Yeah, talk about some downsides but recognise this isn’t a product for everyone. His attitude of “don’t buy it at all” was really bad faith.
3-5 degrees is the difference between this and its ek equivalents as posted by the manufacturer. This drama has been going on for a fucking month now. In a fucked up way, LTT covering this waterblock in the worst way possible has probably landed more eyes to Billet Labs than a proper one. Whoopie fucking doo a new custom boutique waterblock that cost nearly half the price of the card its meant to cool. I’m not here to defend the recent thing with the auctions since that is horrible and there is really no defense for it (I can understand how it could have happened but it should never have happened). I just think if there wasn’t drama this would have just been a filler episode everyone would have forgotten about since there is nothing to this block beyond it basically being made of solid copper and cools both the cpu and gpu at the same time. Its a nice work of milling and I applaud Billet Labs on their workmanship. This beyond the most recent revelation feels like such a nothing burger that has continued to grow pointlessly.
Edit: Which has only continued to grow because Linus never figured out to stop putting his fucking foot in his mouth.
He just uses the same excuses that GN talks about being issues in the video. It would not be “impossible” to test the water block properly, he just doesn’t want to spend money to make proper journalism.
Didn’t he hire a whole bunch of testing experts and built a “lab”? Hard to see he has all that talent and equipment behind him with results like these.
But they couldn’t find a 3090 to test it with! Not even the 3090 that the company sent with the cooling block. Cough.
We know that we’re not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it’s sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing.
Yeah, well, that’s one of the main issues addressed in this video: You are not transparent about this, when you swap out videos without notice or bury corrections in a non-pinned comment.
Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn’t materially change the recommendation.
If the listing is wrong, who guarantees the lab tests on which the conclusion is based on are not wrong?
The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes.
Take the time it needs to produce correct reviews then. Who wants fast but false results?
Edit: Follow up on Linus’ response from GN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso
not a good look, Linus. If he were actually serious about handling mistakes and issues head-on, none of this would’ve happened because he would’ve publicly corrected his employee when he claimed their testing methods are superior to others’
Pretty sure he did that on the WAN Show
The critiques that Steve laid out in this video were perfectly fine, highlighting the shortcomings of LMG when it comes to actually reviewing content (which is what they’re pivoting to, away from 100% entertainment content). A typical Linus arrogant take where he’ll learn nothing.
Which meaningless drama did I miss here?
In a video on a different channel (not from Linus media group) a LTT employee criticized other YouTubers like gamers Nexus saying they’re not as thorough as them, so gamers Nexus made a 40 minutes video (not monetized, Linus wouldn’t have done that) with a compilation of some of the biggest errors LTT made in the last year.
Mostly the issues that were pointed out is that
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After being sent a prototype of a water-cooling block that will be on sale in November 2023, he didn’t follow the instructions and attempted to install it on a wrong GPU, and that meant there would be a 1 mm gap between the die and the block and wouldn’t work at all. The conclusion of that video was that it was a shitty product and nobody should buy it. For a start-up with 2 people is a death sentence. Later in his hours long wan show (that I never see because too long) he doubles down saying “why I should spend $500 in salaries to test it with the right equipment, it’s a shitty product and nobody should buy it”. The sample was not returned even if it was requested back and instead they sold it at an auction
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For a mouse review they said it had terrible gliding and it was awful, but they didn’t RTFM and didn’t remove a protective film on the bottom (but IMHO it should arrive to the customer without protective films)
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Various instances of the hosts that says something but then it’s corrected by just an asterisk on the screen
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Various instances of clearly wrong tests (coolers that suddenly in a single test perform significantly worse than the average, newer GPU models that run much faster than the average)
And he didn’t point another problem with a video published a few hours earlier: LTT reviewed a virus removal Stick and the conclusion was that even if the ads are misleading and the website is scammy, the product itself isn’t that bad. But he tested on a diy computer. Any prebuilt computer released in the last two years has secureboot and automatic bitlocker encryption with keys in the Microsoft account, meaning that this antivirus removal USB drive wouldn’t even boot, and if it could, it couldn’t access any file on the computer
Any prebuilt computer released in the last two years has secureboot and automatic bitlocker encryption with keys in the Microsoft account, meaning that this antivirus removal USB drive wouldn’t even boot, and if it could, it couldn’t access any file on the computer
I was disappointed this issue was not addressed at all during its review. The type of person this product is aimed at wouldn’t have a clue this was potentially the case.
Thank you for your detailed reply! I personally view LMG videos as purely entertaining, they shouldn’t trash other people for data quality or accuracy, since they are rather weak in that field as well. Rather they should focus on entertainment for entertainment’s sake, where they are - at least in my opinion - stronger than a lot of the rest.
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Linus is responding to this video from Gamers Nexus: https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc
It’s a long video, but the tl;dr is that LTT are getting sloppy in their reviews, making mistakes, and not fixing them in a clear manner. Additionally, there are some larger issues around a recent review of a gpu heatsink.
there are some larger issues around a recent review of a gpu heatsink.
Worse than that. LMG may have killed the startup behind the GPU water block. They sold off their one and only functioning prototype, despite being asked to return it before they sold it. This could result in the block being cloned by a competitor
Why is it that Billet Labs themselves haven’t spoken publicly about this? At this point, the story is being told second hand. I’m not saying it’s not true, I’m just saying that taking it at face value is a bit iffy considering it’s coming from someone else. Maybe I missed it, and they DID say something, but I literally have to take it at face value that Steve is telling the ENTIRE story, or that he even got the ENTIRE story.
I’m not against accountability, but a lot of this could have been handled privately. Again, not taking sides here, but Steve gets most of his attention from just going after other companies, whether deserved or not. I rarely hear about GN unless there is SOME kind of controversy going on (hardware issues and him having very valid input on it, or basically company drama). I just feel like this is pointlessly dividing a community in to Team LMG vs. Team GN thing, and it’s dumb.
No really, hear me out on this. Steve has said in the past he wants to be treated like he is doing journalism, and intends to hold himself to journalistic standards (he said this during the NewEgg thing). It’s pretty standard when doing a story to get commentary from the party your story is about. Because journalism is, at least supposed to be, about telling the WHOLE story. Both sides. Instead, it’s more of a hatchet job. There are ways to go about “calling out” a company that doesn’t involve telling what is ultimately a one-sided story with the veiled challenge of “prove me wrong.” That’s not journalism. That’s drama for views.
Billet Labs have spoken out about this (GN shows YT comment they made on the LMG vedio). They are not being very vocal about this. GN shows a video of items LMG has on display to be sold at the auction. You can clearly see the GPU water block on the table. Everything GN reported on is public record, including LMG responses. Nothing GN said is speculative. The video is just a report on public facts. Contacting LMG is superfluous.
Calling out BS doesn’t make you the bad guy. GN made it quiet clear, that point of the video was not for drama but help LMG do better for the sake of the industry and the consumer.
I’m not on team LMG or team GN. I’m on team a larger company has no right to hurt a smaller company because they don’t think their product has merit.
Contacting LMG is superfluous.
I mean it is common journalistic courtesy to allow the criticized side to give you a statement when you’re doing a piece on them, but it’s also reasonable to not do it in some cases.
I’d be worried that Linus would (unknowingly/“accidentally”) prime his fan base against this critique if he talked about it, say, on the WAN show, and often the first to come out with something seems more “trustworthy” so it might’ve been a shitstorm for GN too.
I also doubt he’d have anything reasonable to add, which he clearly doesn’t, judging from what he posted since the video released.
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Same here, I feel like I’m missing a lot of context.
