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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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Which meaningless drama did I miss here?
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.
Linus being a punk ass bitch, again. 😅
We need “Linus Responds to GN Responding to Linus Responding to The Problem with LMG” 🍿
Did he respond to the response to his response to the controversy?? His forum account at least hasn’t posted in 23 hours.
Nope
Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY
There are some steps mentioned that they will take, like not making any videos for a week and reviewing internal processes. Getting some Southpark-y “I’m sorry” vibes there, at least it’s something though.
But the video (at least its creation if not its release) seems to predate the Twitter/X thread of a former LTT employee alleging sexual harassment and other toxic workplace behaviour: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1691693740254228741
So not very surprisingly most Youtube comments I’ve seen refer to that bomb dropping.
This isn’t “something”. This is a “we’re sorry (not really)” video. If you watch it in the context of “I have no favorites in this game” and look it it pretty objectively, it feels like just a bait to try to stop the bleeding.
A week? To refine all the processes in that size of a company? No. I’ve gone through these processes before and it takes months to evaluate, talk to employees, get processes down properly, especially when you need to really start over from the standpoint of “this isn’t working”. They even mentioned they are still having scheduled videos coming out… Did they check those for errors first? I doubt it.
A week to get their inventory control back on track? With the size of their warehouse? No way.
The fact that they let Linus get on there and make the tone deaf statement he did, still backtracking on the billet labs fiasco. He acted like a petulant child who doesn’t have remorse.
They are going to post their updates to their processes on floatplane? What. The. Fuck. So no communication through YouTube. You have to pay in order to see how they will do better.
And. They monetized the apology video. They knew they would get the most views ever out of that one. And they monetized it.
I’ve watched quite a bit of their content and had trusted it in the past… but I have the same feeling about them now that I had when I found out about Jared from adventures with purpose and his whole “I’m just here to make as much cash as I can” attitude, aside from the fact that he’s a child rapist. It just feels scummy to me.
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.
“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.
Still kinda bummed on his response. I don’t think they can afford to slow down on video released owing to their large teams now. It just doesn’t feel sustainable anymore. I stopped watching when their quality started declining
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.
GN has made a section on this at the start of their HW News video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3byz3txpso
I don’t see that already posted here. Of particular note is that Linus lied regarding the Billet Labs repayment agreement. Otherwise, I’ll let Steve speak for himself.
When they mess up (which happens a lot), why does he always go down the “you’ve hurt my feelings, we are only human route” ? That’s why they never learn from their mistakes and carry on acting like fools.
I can’t be bothered watching most of their videos anymore because they are so superficial, it’s clear he’s done no or little research and (if it’s on a topic I’ve got some interest in) I can see it’s really innacurate.
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.
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.
This is the same guy who said “AdBlock is piracy,”
Spot the difference:
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You download a video from a pirate site.
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You download that video from Youtube and skip the ads.
In number 2) Youtube had to pay for the bandwidth and got nothing, so it’s literally worse for them than just pirating it from an unofficial source. You might not like “AdBlock is piracy”, but that doesn’t make it wrong.
It is wrong, actually. Piracy is illegal, adblocking is not.
That’s what they want you to believe, but piracy is not illegal in itself. Making copies is the illegal part. But that’s something you only do when you upload, not when you just download or stream.
PS: Some exception do apply, but that depends a lot of the content and the country you are in. Interestingly, Youtube does not explicitly disallow adblockers in their ToS, they do however disallow the access “using any automated means”, which would fit for
yt-dlp.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.
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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
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).
I mean it’s kind of wish fulfillment innit?
Not really, most of the crap they build is completely impractical and gets disassembled after they are done with the videos anyway, including this water cooling block. No reasonable person would spend $800 on that thing, but it might still be fun to see what it can or can’t do. It’s just messing around with tech and having some fun, just sometimes they overstretch the fun part and the review side of things suffers.
Wish fulfillment is what I’d call something like MKBHD, as that’s has all the latest hottest tech gadget nicely presented, just like an ad.
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.
And I wouldn’t call destroying a startup’s intellectual property
Intellectual property doesn’t get stored in copper blocks. They can load up their CAD files and machine a new one. That thing might have sentimental value, but that’s about it.
“IP” or not, this is costing them money to manufacture a new prototype.
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.
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.
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
