The issue with the water block is massive to me. Testing a prototype product on a GPU that it wasn’t made for, giving it a negative review, doubling down on that negative review when called out, promising to return the prototype to Billet Labs, then SELLING the prototype to the public at their LTX expo. As Steve points out, if a competitor gets their hands on that prototype, it could put Billet Labs out of business. This is wild, and LMG should absolutely be called out like this.
There should be actual, legitimate, law enforcement involvement… Cause its literally theft at best, corporate espionage at worst.
A $100million dollar company should be able to reclaim that property even if it means paying through the nose to get it back to the rightful owner. Losing a mass production GPU is one thing, that can be fixed with a check. A one of a kind prototype though? And who would make the decision to give something like that away, especially without consent? Things like that should come with a letter of endorsement of the charity sale, or at least have a (year plus) pause before just giving it away.
Absolutely. If they leaked an intel, AMD, Dell, etc., confidential anything (prototype or not), let alone sold it in an event auction, you know shit would go sideways in a matter of milliseconds… But this is just two randos who made a “crappy product” (allegedly), so… who cares, right?
Until I saw that I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Even knowingly fudging numbers, while bad, is a temptation it’s easy to see someone trying to keep up with the content rat race falling into.
The corporate espionage on the other hand is fucking gross. Unless Billet Labs provides a statement that fully absolves LTT of any wrongdoing and states they OK’d the auction, I’m prepared to not engage with LMG at all anymore. Which sucks because I kinda like their water bottle.
I know we’ve only heard one side of the story so far, so I’ll reserve judgement. If it turns out as bad as it sounds though, they can get Anker’d
It wasn’t knowingly fudging numbers, they mentioned in the video that it was not designed for the gpu.
Yeah I’ve since caught up on the responses, and as far as “fudging the numbers” that was with regards to their errors in other testing; the Billet Labs situation is just flat-out shitty.
None of that was knowingly though, it was accidental and the concern is just the frequency and inadequate response.
It should be sued the hell out of it for that.
Given the level of damage done Yeah, Billet Labs should be suing LMG could end up tanking their company
I don’t know if Billet has the appetite to sue. It seems like Billet and LMG came to an agreement
Linus one-sidedly decided there was an agreement as part of the defensive narrative he was building in a jiffy. I would be curious to know if Billet Labs agrees, in fact, with that so called “agreement” decided by Linus.
You’re right. There was a follow up video from GN with Billet’s response. LMG did indeed send them an email to reimburse the cost of the lost prototype, but they haven’t replied. It’s not as settled as I thought.
They got insanely lucky…
They should seriously get legal repercussions for this particular fuckup
Not too mention totally ignoring the instructions billet labs provided
Billet Labs. Tell your autocorrect to leave the poor souls alone. They already have enough to deal with 😅
Thanks.
I really hated him talking about wanting to review it as a product (which he thought nobody would buy). It’s a prototype. It’s specifically not a product yet. That’s the whole point of a prototype. It’s a concept and idea working towards a launch. For as often as they have videos with preproduction, engineering sample products, he absolutely knows the difference.
They didn’t sell it, the auctioned it 🤡
I’ve had beef with LTT since his series of videos where he tried to use Linux as a daily driver while making absolutely zero effort to understand any of the differences between it and Windows, then proceeded to whine about how it’s not Windows. The part where he broke his system after it explicitly warned him he was about to break it and asked for rather thorough confirmation that he wanted to do so was where I stopped watching him for good.
There’s being ignorant and then there’s being stupid. I fault nobody for being ignorant of how something works when they first encounter it. I do, however, fault them when they demand changes be made without actually understanding the implications of those changes.
The Linux thing I don’t find egregious. Replace Linus with a sizeable majority of the population and they would have done the same thing. I probably would have as well.
If you want to move people from Windows to Linux, Discord to Matrix, Whatsapp to Signal or even Reddit to Lemmy, it needs to be as painless as possible.
Everything that GN points out though is pretty damning.
Billet labs incident is very very troubling. I can’t see other youtubers not getting roasted over doing something like that, and could easily see a LTT video drawing attention to another channel doing something like that. So to find out LTT pulled such a move is a hit to their integrity.
Thats the thing that irks me.
Linus is so free with the criticism when he’s calling out other companies (At least ones that aint paying him off coughASUScough), but legitimate criticism against him is treated like the most awful thing anyones ever done.
It would be better if he wasn’t trying to frame the Labs as being some kind of weapon or insurance to keep sponsors in line. Cool it Deputy Linus. There’s already too many Sheriffs this week with awful takes on journalistic integrity.
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I actually think this would make a fantastic copypasta tbh
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Idk man I’d be kinda chuffed if one of my comments ended up as a copypasta
I’m glad to hear that the experience was relatively smooth for you.
I don’t mean to imply that average computer users are dumb. It’s just that your positive experience came thanks to the numerous improvements made over the years, and I just feel like there’s still a bit of ways to go.
For the last 20 years I have installed linux 1-2x a year to see whats new, do some rice and leave it like that. My work is tied to the adobe/capture one and it’s much easier to have windows than use other solutions. I installed linux on my mom’s pc that i maintain and it works like magic.
Yes! The Linux coverage from LTT is positive and encourageing UNLESS Linus is in the video then he looks for any excuse to raise his voice and yell “this is stupid” or “its going to break on me in 5 minutes”. Emily’s very good coverage of PopOS back in 2019 ish got me into Linux and I have not looked back. Its disappointing to see how with many things (not just Linux) how Linus will change the direction of a video to be more entertainmenting/clickbaity at the cost of good information and quality.
I think what becomes clear when watching a lot of videos is that Linus is more of a tech fanboy that is good at all the high level stuff and can sell it in an entertaining way. He is not however someone who is super into the weeds of a specific technology, tool or system beyond applying his „I’ve worked with technology before“ knowledge.
They have other folks on the show for that.
It that being said. I wouldn’t fault him for his experience with PopOS!. That was totally on the OS and not his fault.
That bit was important to include in the video in my opinion because of the circumstances.
He didn’t break his computer while messing around with the kernel, changing system settings by recklessly copy&pasting random commands he found on the internet. It happened while trying to install a very popular software from the distro’s official package manager, following what’s otherwise standard installation procedure. A lot of people broke their systems the exact same way until that bug was fixed.
We all like to pretend Linux is “there”, but it was a clear and important example of how it’s not really. Because the user is dumb and the user has no idea what they’re doing. At least that’s the core assumption an OS should operate under if it is to be used by anyone and everyone. You can’t claim even your grandma can run Arch when trying to install Steam can bork your system. And no, warnings are not a valid defense in this case. You will never teach the average user to not ignore those. Unfortunately it’s the OS’s job to protect the user from their own recklessness, and again, warnings are not always enough. Especially when you’re getting warnings while doing something so mundane.
I think he was using Manjaro for those videos. It’s a bad distro and I would know because I used it for years. It’s more the fault of Manjaro than linux itself.
None of the problems Linus had in that video where distro problems. Most of the problems he had were due to the DE chosen and not understanding it. And that he kept trying to do things in dumb as fuck ways and excused that behavior by framing it, “tHaTs wHaT aVeRaGe uSeR dO.” And that was just an excuse for being lazy because why was that the set expectation for the video? It wasn’t, he was just being lazy and making a veiled attempt at hiding his incompetency.
He would have been much better off with the default Manjaro DE XFCE or instead Cinnamon or MATE instead of KDE which is made for hardcore tinkerers and doesn’t have very great defaults in my opinion. But feel free to point me to the issues you think where distro issues because I’ve already had these debates on reddit when the video aired and no one could point to a distro specific issue.
Also, Manjaro is a great distro, I’ve also used it for years on various desktops and laptops. One brand new gaming laptop that no other distro the trackpad would work on and Manjaro worked right out of the box. Not Ubuntu, not Fedora, not PopOS.
Also that website that gets parroted on reddit all the time on why Manjaro is bad and no one should use it is full of misinformation and misunderstanding of the technical issues in much the same way LTT content is always poorly researched and gets things wrong. Almost every single point on that website is invalid. We can get into the technical details, I’m willing to do it.
But that’s how the typical user behaves. I love Linux and what you can do with it, but it’s so tone deaf to think oridanry people are going to behave any diffeent than Linus did. People just don’t have the time to take that effort you expect of yourself, only enthusiast have this kind of time. Other people are enthusiastic about other things. We need to all respect this.
Ugh, it’s so frustrating. Linux will continue to be irrelevant to consumers as long as this attitude of “just put in the effort to understand” persists.
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That’s what I hate about the open source crowd’s “everyone can check the source code” argument! How many users actually do that? It must be pretty fucking close to 0%! A dev with malicious intent could easily introduce shit in an update that no one would notice for an extended period of time if ever!
Don’t hate the argument. It actually makes sense. We are just lacking the tools. And it’s open source, so it’s up to us to make the tools (open source or not).
That’s what I hate about the open source crowd’s “everyone can check the source code” argument! How many users actually do that?
It’s still a decent argument. While many/most may not be able to read it and understand it it is still better to have some (outside the project) that can look at the code and check it independently.
It must be pretty fucking close to 0%!
It certainly depends on the project and how much it is used. A library someone threw together on an afternoon will unlike a bigger project like NGINX, have little to no external eyes on it.
Though it’s not just about reading it. Open source projects (depending on their size) can usually react faster when a bug or problem is found within it.
A dev with malicious intent could easily introduce shit in an update that no one would notice for an extended period of time if ever!
The same can be said with closed source applications. A dev or the entire company (if they where to go down such a path) could also easily introduce something nasty. In that case there would be no way at all to confirm that anything bad or upright malicious was introduced (unless it gets so bad that it would trigger an Anti-Virus or is easily noticeable).
Is Open Source alone making software more secure (or prevent malicious actions)?
No. But it can be a sizable improvement. Just like security through obscurity1/2 (when given as an isolated argument) is not making software more secure (dare I say it decreases its security; when used in isolation).
His series on linux got me interested in linux and a few weeks before the first ep came out I made the switch. I had been using linux as a brand new user for 4 weeks when watching his “review” of linux and I thought it was unfair. But linux made a good first impression on me and I am still daily driving it and now all my machines run linux.
Yeah, this irked me too. I get trying to be the average person (and Pop! was also bugged at the time), but I find it really hard to believe that the average person would approach linux and completely ignore serious warning messages.
I work in IT. Average people tend to fall into one of two categories when presented with big scary warning messages.
Category 1: They freak out and immediately ask for help, and tend to be very skeptical of anything you tell them to do until the message goes away.
Category 2: They ignore the message and YOLO it like Linus did, then call for help hours or days later when something inevitably breaks.
It’s rare for either group of people to read an comprehend the message in it’s entirety.To be fair to the newcomers, most tech literature (messages, UI text, manpages, etc) is written by people who already know, for people who already know. It is meant as a reference for developers, not as an accessible documentation. So, for newcomers, the documentation, and accessible communication, is severely lacking at best, and non-existent at worst.
I some cases sure, but a lot of the time it’s simple stuff like “Save changes before quitting?” or “You need to restart to apply updates. Restart now?” and they still can’t figure it out.
I find it really hard to believe that the average person would approach linux and completely ignore serious warning messages.
Have you met people? They do this with Windows.
In that case, there’s no reason to pretend to be the “average person” at all, and Linus may as well have just learned how to use a system before reviewing it.
Good God that was infuriating. Watching the prompt pop up when he was installing Steam or whatever asking him to confirm if he really wanted to remove the GUI was awful. He just said yes and felt like Linux was the issue. Nope.
In the years I have spent IT adjacent, the primary difference I have noticed between Windows and Linux has nothing to do with drivers, OS, UI, or anything like that. It’s that Windows has long conditioned users to hit OK on anything that pops up. Linux expects you to read it and make a choice, and it’s usually not that difficult of a choice. Linus pulled up a web page, blindly followed instructions without reading, and borked his install. Predictable. It’s the same behavior that gives grandma a computer virus.
I started the video shocked that GN would do a video like this at all. I was 100% ready to blame GN for being petty. As I watched and listened, though, he made really good points, and I can’t help but agree. Especially on the points where Linus doubles down on really bad takes instead of doing the right thing, insisting it doesn’t matter (there are loads more examples than just Billet).
The one thing he didn’t say that I wish he had, though, is to remind people that he’s focused on industry journalism, not just hardware itself. This isn’t a hit piece, it’s an information piece, where he holds industry players accountable. Not unlike his journalism on Newegg and Asus. No, it’s not positive, but it’s honest, and it informs and benefits consumers.
Exactly my experience as well. I even started the video thinking Steve misrepresented what Linus meant with “ignoring relationships”.
I waited a minute, cleared my mind, had a second listen, and no, what Steve said actually made a lot of sense.
I got the sense that he didn’t really want to have to do a video like this. He kind of said as much a couple of times. And in one section he mentioned he has kind of tip-toed around directly calling out LTT on specific screwups for some time. Like posting his results that contradicted theirs with the hope that people would notice but without directly going “looks at LTT’s bogus numbers wtf”
I kind of felt like he got to a point where he couldn’t in good conscience ignore it any longer because the pile of fuckups had gotten too big and too egregious with this billet labs fiasco.
I’m glad he did the vid because, yeah, he has done a good job of holding others accountable as you said, and this is exactly the same ethos. It’s tough because I imagine you don’t want to be seen as just doing hit pieces against the competition. There’s an inherent conflict of interest at play. But given sufficiently good evidence and enough of it, I think that puts those concerns almost entirely to rest.
The kind of person to be doing reviews is someone who values the truth – accurate results and sound conclusions – over money, ego, fame and popularity, etc. Someone with a great deal of curiosity, skepticism, mental flexibility, and humility. Sounds like that is the near polar opposite of Linus.
I find it hard to believe, sometimes, that fully grown adults exist who cannot admit their mistakes which just reminds me of how damn lucky I am to work where I do, with a culture that encourages fessing up and fixing rather than covering up and blaming. Where the overwhelming majority of people I have ever worked with is about doing the right thing with an eye primarily on the goal rather than their own ego and ambition.
Yeah, he didnt do a video to roast LTT and he also didnt insult him.
He just stated what he sees as going wrong at LTT and how it could be fixed.
I stopped watching LTT a long time ago because of similar reasons, it was just so frustrating to see them start a project, barely finish it, release the video and the not finish it.
Other times they made a big mistake in the middle and continued with the video “because we dont have time to fix it”.
I prefer Youtubers that may have months between videos, but when a new one is out, I nkow its going to be a good one.
And if they do a project, when it has an issue, they either continue the video until it is fixed, or they read it in the comments and someday we will get a follow up.
Linus’s response.
I honestly fully stand by GN in this and while I think LTT should have had the opportunity to respond to the allegations before the video went live, since this is the proper Journalistic thing to do, it should be considered that ltt has a huge audience and influence in the tech sphere so I can only assume GN didn’t want them to get ahead of the curve? It’s sad if it has come to this.
I also don’t know how exactly ltt could respond to the observations GN made since it’s a piece about what happened in videos they posted. They can’t really deny what happened. All they could do is lower their head and promise to do better.
Ugh, Hes trying so hard to double down on his comments, while giving plausible deniability to his doubling down, especially with the Billet block.
And its so fucking stupid to complain that the billet waterblock is expensive and stupid, considering ALL the stupid, expensive, wasteful bullshit hes done on his channel… Its double stupid that hes still using his basis on using the wrong card that didnt fit it as his argument.
It’s a bit conceited off him to assume he knows what’s best for his viewers. A review is supposed to give unbiased, timely, and accurate information about a product and let the customer decide if it’s worth their money. A reviewer can give opinions, of course, but only after the concrete numbers. Linus has no idea what $800 is worth to any given viewer; I bet there are many who would happily pay that much for a custom water block if it was the best on the market. To bad we don’t know how good it is because ltt didn’t adequately test it.
800 is probably one of the cheapest “omg this is expensive and no one will ever buy this thing ever” things he’s ever showecased/made/used/etc.
Which just makes the whole argument stupid, and bunk.
Dude spent thousands of dollars to make a shitty desk with a computer in it, ffs.
So, you may not have caught this… Billet labs sent them the correct card with the block. LTT fucksticks lost the goddamn card.
I’ve got to say, I’ve noticed a lot of the things Steve mentioned in his video, and I agree with the vast majority of what he said, but I still do watch LTT occasionally because it’s still often entertaining, but man Linus’ response rubbed me the wrong way. Aside from addressing the auctioning the water block thing, he didn’t really address anything and most of it came off as woe is me. It sounded like he thinks the GN video is why people are upset rather than the countless mistakes and corrections they’ve had to do in the past just 6 months. It seems to me like he’s missing the issue most people have.
Server capacity exceeded Thankfully I got to read it before their forum server took a dump for some reason
I don’t feel Linus could have said anything to Steve to stop the video Really, Linus/LMG needed the wakeup call They have been making bigger and bigger stumbles and it’s not just due to growth as Linus uses it as an excuse He also said nothing would change as a result of the Billet debacle, just a tightening of documentation but it a sign of bigger issues It was the result of multiple levels of failure He should have stopped the video when he knew they didn’t have the right GPU there and even pointed out quite authoritatively to is employee his mistake in not identifying the GPU A symptom of rushing out videos on a very tight schedule possibly
The big reason Steve didn’t go through Linus first, and he mentions it a few times in the video, is because LMG is no longer a small company or a one man YouTube show. They’re s big company. I know Linus works hard to hit that YouTube grind, but he still sees himself as a small YouTuber.
I mean Steve would have done this same piece had it been gigabyte, Newegg, or whomever on that larger scale.
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?
Follow up on Linus’ response from GN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso
Reading this is like when the Irish kid warned us all to not get frostbit.
Not fully LTT related, but man is it hard to write an apology, everytime I read one online I’ve never seen people think that the person was truly apologetic.
Fully LTT related, Personally seeing the character, I’d say he is indeed apologetic, I can fully see how this error could be made from what was written in his response and hell a lot of people could have done so I’d say personally. I personally think he would be apologetic and wants to do better, this guy wants to go far to do well, he’s a guy that wants to do a lot
Edit: Yeah I can understand, if you’d like to share your point of of view with me feel free to do so, I’m a chill person, just wanted to share my point of view and it’ll be a pleasure to read others
Writing this 12 Horus later. Decides to rewatch the GN video, some of those errors are really big and have to absolutely be fixed or be repaired as much as possible, and some definitely come from the size of the company which is becoming really big creating communication errors, which the bigger a company gets, the bigger the projects 5hey can work on and the slower it goes, if, it wants to keep the same quality. Seeing the Waterblock being in auction is a really really big error, and can definitely come from not enough communication between a person that knows it has to be sent back and a person that’s thinking of a charity
Not fully LTT related, but man is it hard to write an apology, everytime I read one online I’ve never seen people think that the person was truly apologetic.
Its only hard when you’re a narcissistic egomaniac that finds it clinically impossible to admit even the smallest amount of fault without blaming the entire world for it .
Its no wonder why most internet apologies are written like this, because most people having to write them end up being in the position because they are narcissistic egomaniacs that think they can do no wrong to begin with.
I don’t know Linus personally the way you do, but he ran LMG as if it was still a small company running out of a house instead of a midsized one. The vibe I got was that the mistake of putting the Billet item on auction wasn’t made by Linus personally, but my a staff member, that would explain that apology with Linus not taking personal responsibility because he felt like it wasn’t on him to manage the movement of this one item.
I have no horse in this race. Will still watch Techquickie and the occasional GN video.
You are ignoring the vast bulk of the Billet story if you think its just about the whoopsie selling.
Also new information in a GN follow up to Linus’s statements showed that he outright lied about compensation to billet. its revealed by Billet themselves that there was no compensation agreement, That he hadnt even spoken to Billet labs until he sent a email at the same time he made his forum post, hours after the original GN video aired, That Billet had yet to reply to at the time of his post.
He lied about everything, to fool people into thinking hes some poor misunderstood victim.
A classic narcissist response.
I just saw the follow up
A bit harsh, but deserved in this case. I mean, wrt Linus. He should really go touch grass with a cup of tea…
I like GN and LTT for casual watching. But I’m very disappointed Steve opted to not do the proper thing and provide the accused party the opportunity to respond to his allegations. It comes off really hypocritical when he’s calling out one media group for lack of ethics/integrity/accountability and rushing videos out without proper checks and procedure in place and then rushes a video out and doesn’t give them a chance to respond first. And I don’t say this just because it’s GN and LTT. Could have been J2C and Hardware Unboxed or something and I’d still have this same opinion. I highly respect GN for the work they put in l, the content they make, and their quality, but this is a bit disappointing to see. Hopefully LTT cleans up their QC pipeline and thinks their actions through, and hopefully Steve at GN does too.
A bad day all around in my book.
I don’t agree.
and then rushes a video out
I don’t think this felt rushed. I think, as he said in the video, this has been brewing for months, and it felt thought through and thorough.
Steve opted to not do the proper thing and provide the accused party the opportunity to respond
I think if it was one mistake they would have done exactly that. But as it’s been a consistent trend over months or even years of sloppiness and mistakes and rushed videos, you can’t just have a word with someone and fix that overnight. I think publishing the video and their thoughts, and rallying the community to raise awareness and force them to improve, is the right move.
The most noticeable thing for me are the constant annotations. Sometimes there are so many that I’m not sure why a whole video is up if it’s half assed and they want to salvage it through bandaids.
Bot holy shit they are become sloppy and borderline corrupt. Thanks to GN for calling them out.
Yep, upon seeing the GN video, I have to say that my trust in LMG went 🔻 and my trust in GN went drastically 🔺. Not that I distrusted GN before, I have occasionally checked their videos for years, but, even though I respected them for their content (for example with the hazardous Case & PSU reporting they did, and the manufacturers’s propensity to ignore GN), I never knew they had such insights wrt other tech creators.
PC Jesus is all knowing
Omniscient. 😈
Mann this was juicy. Tech Jesus was pissed, goddamn.
Rightfully so. And someone who is not afraid to risk everything to speak the truth is someone who deserves my respect.
What they did to Billet Labs is evil. I hope LTT gets sued for it.
They’ve already paid what Billet requested, hopefully they also get some publicity out of this to help with the nonmonetary damages as well.
It’s clear that it wasn’t done maliciously, but there must be something seriously wrong with their processes for this to happen in the first place. The other comments they made were just adding insult to injury.
Edit: To clarify, they claimed to have accepted a quote that Billet sent them according to Linus on the forums. This ended up being a lie according to Billet.
Sounds like GN is interested in reviewing it properly.
Linus decided to not explain at all how this cooler went up for sale instead he doubled down on it as a glitch and no changes will be made to the SOP.
“We’ve investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong” basically
They haven’t yet tho, they only responded to billet with a blanket statement that they’ll reimburse them for it. After GN called them out on it, and minutes before making a community post in which they said they have already come to a agreement.
I made my comment before the second GN video came out confirming the timeline, it seems pretty scummy.
Linus said on the forum that they had agreed to pay Billet’s quote, after the 2nd GN video it seems like this wasn’t true.
Malicious or not isn’t the point! It’s unprofessional as fuck, is what it is. I knew LMG was unprofessional (I mean, look at their infra up to very recently), but not to that extent. That is properly flabbergasting.
No they haven’t, Linus didn’t even offer compensation until this video came out.
The timeline wasn’t known when I made my original comment. His original response implied that they had agreed to the quote long before, though after the second GN video it was made clear that this wasn’t true.
Having worked in jobs where you ship and receive stuff, you do certainly acquire a drawer full of strange stuff that is stuck in ownership limbo of “its not ours but we can’t get it to the proper owner for one reason or another either” (especially when its an item crossing largely unrelated subsidiaries of a company)
I can 100% see a communication breakdown of “oops we need to send this back” then it not getting sent out and remaining in limbo, but the person in charge of the collection of ownership limbo items should be damn well aware that these are items that probably need to go back and should have stopped it from being auctioned off!
There’s “shipping things back” and there is “handling confidential samples”. I can understand if you end up with a few extra versions of a product you made a test run of, and no party actually wants to store it, because it has no marketable value past the demonstration of its existence; but anyone sending a “hand picked golden sample” for review would be expecting it back… There’s no world in which such a sample would acceptably be auctioned off.
do we know how much was paid to ltt (or charity) for the cooler at auction? I haven’t seen a figure
LTT has lived long enough and grown large enough to see themselves being the villain. I suppose fame and wealth can corrupt a person easily, the arrogance in the response from Linus is disappointing.
LTT hasn’t been a serious or informative tech channel for years, you don’t watch their video for information but for entertainment. They try to right the course by creating the Lab team but miss the point when they don’t change their mindset.
It’s like Top Gear vs Fifth Gear back in the days. You don’t buy a new car base on the reviews on Top Gear, likewise if I want useful consumer advice, LTT is the last place I look.
Is watching this video considered piracy if there are no ads to skip over?
This comment is where LTT started going down for me.
I listened to an episode of the wan show once and I was out. He showed such disdain for his own audience.
Someone gave like $100 or something insane for a super chat question and he was rude to them.
Someone gave like $100 or something insane for a super chat question and he was rude to them.
Should’ve bought a backpack instead. /s
Bro, the simple fact that Linus failed to recognize that ads are most of the time forced on you, with no paid opt-out alternative, had me cursing at him.
It’s not piracy if I can’t pay to get the product unaltered. PERIOD.
YouTube premium is exactly that though, isn’t it? Not that I agree with either side, just trying to comprehend
You still get their obnoxious “screwdriver, lttstore, waterbottle” reminders in every single video. Their 10sec in-video ads aren’t that bad, but other channels have 2min ads within 8min videos. Which mean’s paying users still get more ads than someone with browser extensions/modified apps.
The whole thing is a race to the bottom. People use adblock because there are just too many Youtube ads. Creators get less money from Youtube, so they resort to more and more in-video ads, and eventually SponsorBlock gets more appealing.
Yeah, I’ve generally liked LTT’s approach to ads since it means I can hit the right arrow key twice to skip the ad entirely but I hear you for sure.
there’s midroll ads baked into every video
I’m ok with the little “buy our merch” bits, but yeah the sponsor spots have always rubbed me the wrong way, especially as a YouTube premium subscriber
YouTube premium is supposed to be this, but it is apparently glitching enough that you get plenty of results for “YouTube premium still showing ads” web searches, and it does nothing against sponsor spots.
I would shut up if Google implemented a sponsor block feature for premium users, and fixed their ads showing to (too many) premium subscribers. Buy they don’t. As it stands, paying for premium to opt-out from ads is as efficient as using
DoNotTrack(which is effectively just added data for fingerprinting) to opt-out from tracking. It makes you part of the problem when you clearly intend to be part of the solution. 🤷♂️You can make a Google search and find almost anything, just because a handful of people claim to have an issue doesn’t mean that there really is one. You can find issues with any service. This point is incredibly overblown. Also if you sign up for premium and it’s still showing you ads you can contact support or cancel it. That said, I’ve had premium for a couple years now and have never seen an ad. I mostly use it because we watch a lot of YouTube on our Roku and there is no way around ads on that without premium.
Also if you sign up for premium and it’s still showing you ads you can contact support or cancel it.
So, you mean, like not having a paid option to remove the ads? 😉
As for contacting support, hiding ads isn’t rocket science. Ad blockers have done this reliably for decades. There’s no logical reason support should be needed.
Huh. I’ve had Premium for years and never once had it show me ads anyway. Crazy that other people have.
I suppose it works better on some setups than others 😉
It’s also that so many ads are malicious and present in incredibly bad faith. Maybe that ad from Welches is fine, even if I had to watch it 3 times back to back, but that mobile game ad that hits my block list for malware isn’t. Treating them the same is what the website does, even though some are malicious, so I treat them the same and block them all.
Remember when they used an unlicenced version of OCCT commercially?
https://linustechtips.com/topic/1411603-ltt-is-stealing-software-from-occt-and-ignoring-his-emails/
And linus’ response to it is the same smug doublespeak as he’s using now. God I hate this dude.
Evergreen joke lol. Always use adblock and sponsor block folks. Always.
Anyone else stop watching ltt already just because of boring topics, if you can even figure out what the topic is with their hyper clickbait titles?
I use DeArrow basically exclusively for LTT.
For those who don’t know it, that’s a crowd-sourced youtube title replacement script, intended to purge the platform from clickbait. Made by the same devs behind the SponsorBlock addon.
I use it too but find it isn’t kept up by the community nearly as much as sponsor block
I tried it but it slows down loading YouTube in Firefox too much ale it’s not as kept up as I would like it to. Out of my subscriptions only LTT and Tom Scott videos are ever maintained in there.
Yeah those are the 2 where I see it most as well. And Tom Scott isn’t even that clickbaity.
Yeah LMG is just a content farm at this point and they have maxed out their clickbaity titles with Linus making weird faces. It’s a shame.
Yup, max out the potential for a channel so start another one and so on It’s quite the furious wheel they have spinning
Stopped since 2017 when they started using dumb thumbnails and titles, I knew it was just going to be another clickbait channel and I was right. This channel started my hobby since 2011, I even made LTT forum account on day 1. But I found GN since, so that’s nice.
Stopped when Linus showed his continued ignorance towards Linux, his Stockholm Syndrome towards Windows and his general lack of geekiness. He is an ignoramus playing “Legos” and wants to see results, that’s it.
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Linus went communist? I know he is not a fan of people using ad blockers because he views it as stealing from him.
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Bro are your period and comma keys broken
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It’s a shame how people don’t understand simple, polite requests to respect others.
Yep, that’s about when I told YouTube to not recommend that channel.
I used to watch the wan show, but stopped because Linus was frankly becoming pretty unrelatable. It’s sad to see them lose the plot like this, but I’m not surprised. I think Lmg has been growing far faster than they could keep ahead of, and the train is off the rails now…
I feel like growth is poison for content companies, especially niche content. I get where a million-view video and the associated cash is great reward. I get that people can consume content so much faster than it’s created that a known creator’s revenue is limited only by the rate they produce. Gotta be tempting to squeeze just a little more, cover a less interesting topic, or skip a difficult detail to get that extra bit of revenue. It’s the fundamental process of enshittification, and it works on everything from LTT to EA to walmart.
Expecting people to give up money, rewards and fame - to stay a small dedicated provider with ideological purity - when there are crowds outside the door begging for just a little compromise, just this one time, is a big ask. But it’s also why there’s so much churn in media. Young turk comes in with great content, gets an audience, gives in to enshittification, and gets replaced by the next young turk.
Not just content companies. Growth is essentially magnification with added synergy. Take one dysfunctional individual, they’re bad alone, put them in a relationship with another dysfunctional individual, and it’s exponentially worse. Corporate growth has to be done carefully.
I stopped watching when they got a Tuxedo laptop to review it, and instead of actually reviewing it the entire video was a shitpost because the laptops can have the keyboard font customized and the dumbass set it to wingdings.
I liked the LTT Translator twitter account before it got sold off / hacked / whatever. It was fun trying to guess what the fuck their stupid title even meant. At this point why even bother with a title, might as well just call each video “click me pls”
They wouldn’t do it if it didn’t work, unfortunately.
The dearrow extension normally has pretty sane titles for the videos. I cannot take a look at most of youtube without it.
I used to watch several videos a week, but now I find them outlandish and clickbaity, so I basically just watch LMG Clips.
With this latest piece of info I don’t think I trust them anymore
Will Linus watch this one or will he just read the comments?
Probably wont find out until next WAN show, and I’m sure we’ll see the same look we see in Lukes eyes every time Linus starts off being blatantly wrong and unable to admit it.
Genuinely gotta wonder how much more of it Luke has in him.
I hope the community doesn’t let him skirt past it on WAN.
I thought they already addressed the water block thing on wan
I remember the mouse, I don’t remember the water block. I don’t recall the part where they auctioned off a prototype though.
I think they discussed it before that happened. I think it was like the week after the video originally came out or something. I think they apologized, but said it still wasn’t good value?
What When he trash the product and company a second time
He already did, you can find it here:
I would quote it, but it is too long to be a reasonable comment.
Wow you’re right that is extremely long. Tldr seems to be he’s saying he didn’t do anything wrong and he’s disappointed Steve didn’t just send him a quick text about it. I feel like it would have been better for Linus to own the mistake at this stage and get the prototype thingy back as it’s not like he’s short on cash or anything. I’d say he comes off like a bit of a jerk. We’ll see how this one shakes out.
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Not every story requires a reaching out for comment.
I don’t feel this story did. Linus is just perturbed Steve didnt reach out and give him an opportunity to pressure Steve into not running the story.
Yeah, either that, or trying to lie to Steve aboht shit like the Billet Labs thing.
It’s ironic that he feels like he’s being bashed by Steve for not contacting him after he bashed an indie company without contacting them prior to posting the review. A review that was very poorly done and, essentially, put them in the worst of lights possible. All right before selling their product on an auction.
What a piece of shit.
I am a fan of Linus. To say he had a bad take is an understatement.
Linus wouldn’t like it that you’re a fan, he hates that whole concept of being a fan
He said he made those mistakes, he’s sorry, he’ll try not to do it again, but they’re not a big deal.
Several step in the narcissist prayer in his response.
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it wasn’t that bad.
And if it was, that’s not a big deal.
And if it is, that’s not my fault.
And if it was, I didn’t mean it.
And if I did, you deserved it.
This post made it even worse. First, you criticise back, saying that you’re disappointed with Steve? Steve had nothing to do calling him before publishing the video, the damage was done. Also the own company CEOs were complaining about the block and the information presented at GN was well funded.
You may as well be using ChatGPT to make the text because it’s 1000< characters worth of nothing.
Hes angry that he didnt get the chance to pressure Steve into backing down, Thats all it is.
Remember how aggressive he was on the phone to support staff with the manufacturing requiring their first-party hub for updates (they never claimed to support home assistants in the first place)?
That’s where showed his face and lost it.
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Might be a bad example but that stuck to me: Under no circumstance, you should talk like this to customer service. Always remember that the other end is a human and being rude makes it hard to offer a solution.
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How do I deal with support? Start nicely (with good companies that’s all you need) and slowly provide hints they screwed up allowing them to keep face as well as being the one offering it instead of reacting to the demand. If they don’t understand: tell them. The last resort is the blacklist (company, date, reason) paired with DNS blocking (in case I forget about it).
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Want an example of a blacklisted company? Asus.
They don’t have any technical support unless you are an influencer or some big shot buying frequently truckloads of products. I might be able to get somewhere by being a dick but do I always want to push hard to escalate it?
Just call it a day (aka. scrap those products) and buy Asrock. This was definitely a quality-of-life improvement.
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Btw. Extracting firmware can be difficult. Nordic had a horrific bug in the NRF52, WCH has a bug in the CH552 allowing to out the firmware by software. For ST STM32F it’s complicated. They have a design flaw but exploding it requires decapping the MCU and knowing in which area of the die the readout protection bit is located. Haven’t checked if they fixed it with the newer G, U and MP series.
Best part:
“The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools”
Didn’t even take the time to proofread his response to someone saying he needs to slow down and verify things…
Here’s an unreasonably long quote:
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.
Thanks for reading this.
Linustechtips.com server is toast ATM
Only comments. Some new shmuck will have to condense it down to tldr it to him. Hot take will be funny like last time this happened
Almost forgot that happened. Thanks for reminding.
Damn this is eye opening for me. LTT was always my most trusted source for tech reviews. I noticed that they’d make little mistakes every once in a while, but didn’t realize it was part of a larger problem. I actually made a Ryzen 9 7900 buying decision recently because of this video which made it seem like the best value (especially compared to their very confusing 7950x3d review). After watching this GN video though, I feel stupid for not even thinking to check other channels before making a buying decision.
(Although honestly this is a major upgrade over my previous hardware, so even if it wasn’t the best possible option, it’s still a net positive for me.)
I really hope LTT takes this criticism seriously. It’s always gratifying to see misbehavior have consequences on the internet, but these independent reviewers are pretty much the only people on our side as consumers. I’d rather see a course correction than a crash, especially since LMG in particular has a uniquely powerful position and can have real impacts on manufacturers that benefit consumers.
Dude sold out forever ago. ALL INFLUENCERS ARE JUST CORPORATE MOUTHPIECES.
Do people still watch Linus for actual reviews? The amount of times him and his team get basic facts wrong makes it unwatchable for me, from that standpoint.
At this point it’s just an entertainment production, watching Linus Tech Tips for actual tech review content would be like watching the original UK Top Gear for actual car reviews. Which makes LTTs foray into more data/fact driven stuff all the more puzzling. They had a good thing going with the more entertainment focused angle, hired some people that were funny, but I don’t know what happened to that.
Ever since they started their “labs” they’ve been trying to push themselves as actual reviewers and no longer casual tech reviews.
Which makes little sense to me. They carved out a very nice place on the internet being entertaining instead of half the video being spreadsheets and stats about computer hardware. Seems as if they want their fingers in every pie now.
I was surprised to learn that they have their own streaming service, full service production agency and tech convention, and that their store sells a lot more than just t-shirts.
It seems safe to say that yes, they do want their fingers in every pie.
Linus stepped down as CEO. He clearly just wanted someone else to make the profit-worship decisions.
I mean yeah that’s exactly why they’ve split of into multiple channels to convert a wider spectrum of content. I wouldn’t be surprised if they start another channel with tech comedy skits.
Linus always wanted to be more, to go back to helping people with good guides and reviews, but he just can’t seem to stop with the entertaining for long enough to actually produce high quality informational content.
I never have. General industry commentary, I have a few times, but when I want actual facts and what feels like a thorough dive, I’ve always done HUB and GN along with text reviews (which I prefer) from places like Tom’s Hardware
Linus is tabloid-style to me and it’s junk food at best
Edit : Linux changed to Linus. Though Linux is some tasty junk food
Linux is tabloid-style to me and it’s junk food at best
Safe to assume you meant Linus?
Fuckin android many words after-the-fact autocorrects
dont you love it?
How autocorrect just decides to go back and change a word from the last paragraph with no warning and suddenly your concise argument looks like you do not have the human standard amount of neurons
Yet a few replies after that one I had to edit my sentence because it has no problems leaving a word spelled as “woth”
There’s literally nothing else it can be except for with
I dunno, it they use RedHat, I’m with them on that one. 😁
Reviews are probably the only thing that I consistently watch. I tend to agree with others here that a lot of the other videos recently haven’t been catching my interest. That or it’s just a behind the scenes of Linus’ home project.
A tech creator that big can never be trusted. I take his opinions with a grain of salt no matter how flashy his production is
My take on it:
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?
