This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Anyone watching LTTs server videos hopes it is only for entertainment as following what they do other than for your home lab would be a disaster.
However they are building up the LAB and are selling it as serious detailed reviews.. This would be a shift from their current content.
Flip side Gamers Nexus is hard core serious and I always have to skip through their videos as they put me to sleep.
To be fair, GN provides excellent Chapter selection to encourage you to skip to whatever you want to know. You don't have to watch the whole thing if you don't want to. I'm more annoyed by them using those idiotic clickbait thumbnails. Complete no-go for me.
As someone who's been running unRAID out of a tower and like 5 drives; it's weird watching like four people who are definitely more tech savvy than me just bumble fuck their way through all this server stuff with enterprise level gear. Like I do more research for myself and I'm not jumping on video. Ultimately I like the videos, I enjoy seeing the approaches, but they try to come off like authority figures. Then they don't even know how to properly parity swap and make unRAID look harder than it is.
it's weird watching like four people who are definitely more tech savvy than me just bumble fuck their way through all this server stuff with enterprise level gear.
As someone who is very technically savvy, let me assure you that these guys are clowns. They are tech entertainers, not experts. Give yourself some credit.
Linus posted a response on the LTT forums:
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.
Did this motherfucker just respond by chiding someone else for not following “proper journalistic practices” after completely fucking burying a company without reaching out to them about their prototype product?
If Linus knew he wasn't going to recommend anyone buy the waterblock no matter how it performed, but also didn't want to show it off as a niche 'supercar' of waterblocks, then why agree to review it at all? Was he maybe not in the loop at all until shooting the video?
Seems like there was no good way for this to turn out for Billet which is a real shame since they seemed to just want to show off something cool and maybe get some publicity for their startup.
And auctioning off their handmade prototype, even accidentally and for charity, is a collosal fuck up that really can't be solved with money alone.
I find him only responding in the forums sketchy, like I a lot of people have an will watch gamers Nexus video and will want a response from Linus. If Linus actually wanted to clear the air why wouldn't you do it on the wan show, he did it with the trust me bro situation. Almost nobody who watched the GM's video will read this post and I think that's what Linus wants, less eyes on the situation.
A couple of other things am sorry but DW guys we had a bit of a miscommunication with billet labs and sold their best prototype but we are gonna pay them back soon*tm is an awful way of handling it.
Also with the inaccuracies he doesn't actually address the problem, they are making too many videos too quickly, no matter how many checks and balances you put in if you rush people you will get a rushed shitty product. Not to mention he doesn't actually respond to the glaring issues of benchmarks being wrong or them trying to get the benchmarks to fit amds given ones or hell the clear conflicts of interest with noctua or Asus
Linus criticizing Steve on “proper journalistic practices” shows an incredible lack of self-awareness.
tl;dr with commentary:
On testing errors: Yep, we're trying to be better. [i.e. Let's move on and forget this ever happened.]
On the Billet auction: We're trying to do the right thing after a miscommunication. [This one's probably the best response, but that's not a high bar.]
On the Billet hit piece: We were only assholes to them to get them to be better. [MAJOR abuser vibes. "I wouldn't have beat you if you didn't deserve it".]
On releasing knowingly inaccurate videos: This is actually a good thing because we show our mistakes with footnotes. [WTF]
On conflicts of interest from corporate partnerships: Crickets [No surprise]
(like the fact that we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication…
Steve never uses the wold 'sold' in his video, and uses the word 'auctioned' twice.
Not sure if this gets seen by anyone from LTT, but I’m a regular consumer of their products (ie., their YT content).
I find that more and more of their videos don’t seem to end with some satisfactory conclusion, and quite a number of it is way too janky when with a little more thought and planning, could have been done and concluded much better.
Take for example the fanless heatsink dipped in ice bath video, or the car radiator water cooling video. It’s always them trying to fix some jank or scramble on camera to fight some spontaneous issues or leaks or whatever. It’s fun, yes, entertaining, yes, but utterly unsatisfactory in the end. Reminds me of a post-nut sad depression wank.
Their issues are:
"Billet review" is downplaying by an extreme degree.
They reviewed a cooler prototype designed for one GPU using a different one and claimed the product was not worth a purchase for anybody, ever. Linus was aware of the issue, but said the cooler was bad "regardless of what the true results would've shown" and not worth "$500 of extra time reviewing it correctly".
Then, they took this internal prototype that the company lended for review and, after claiming to be ready to give it back two times, SOLD IT to a random third party during an event. An event where competitors from the original company were visiting.
The company already confirmed that was their best prototype and they were relying on it to iterate on the design.
So LTT accepted a lent prototype from a new company, absolutely trashed the product in a review they purposely published with wrong methodology, then stole the prototype and sold it to God knows who.
I think that their point that it's an $800 product for a last-gen card, there really isn't anyone out there that should buy this, and therefore it's a bad product is valid. They could have handled the whole thing better and honestly should've just scrapped the video before release.
Auctioning off the prototype when the company asked for it back is pretty inexcusable. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't malicious, but they clearly have problems with internal communication of things like this are happening.
At any rate, it's going to be a spicy WAN show this week. Linus needs to actually watch the video and address this point-by-point. If he "reads the comments" or cherry picks some of GN's weaker arguments he's just going to end up throwing fuel on the fire.
Seemed like fair criticism to me, honestly. I enjoy watching LTT, but if they want to be a reliable source of data with "The Lab", they can't continue acting purely as an entertainment company.
Ultimately this is probably a good thing. From what I've gathered of Linus he is a person that can recognize his mistakes, but only once you get past his stubbornness. His response saying they should've hit him up is kind of classic response. What could you have said really? Like GN is right that like almost every video has a pinned comment or on screen edit of a correction. And you know these companies are complaining. Yet it continues.
Having their audience put them to task will go a long way to making them recognize it is a bigger issue than individual videos. I'm really curious about the idea of Labs being able to actually test things publically in a way consumers haven't been able to. (Give me more of transparency like digital foundry for games and Jerryrig everything for durability.) So they need to pull their shit together if they want to claim to be a data driven lab. Like accuracy is all that matters.
I think the ethical concerns section is overblown. LTT is almost harsh on their sponsors and I got a kick out of Linus starting the last video talking about Framework saying how he doesn't actually use the Framework laptop as his daily driver at the time and complained about it.
It very much feels significantly more like incompetence than malice (not that I think any particular person at LMG is incompetent. The processes likely are however). Honestly LMG just probably grew way faster than any of their processes could scale.
Their production cycle seems to be more targeted at producing content, moreso than anything else, like integrity or correctness.
I've noted several errors myself, most of the ones I've seen are relatively minor, and mostly pedantic, but they're inaccuracies nonetheless.
If LMG wants to move towards being more journalism and a reputable source of accurate information, which, from everything they've done recently (most notably the lab), they seem to want to be, then they need people to go and fact check everything, and scrutinize final products to ensure accurate information. Making sure that inaccuracies are caught and sent back to the beginning of the pipeline to be re-reviewed, and if necessary, re-shot.
They can't keep doing things by the seat of their pants and hoping for the best.
My hats off to GN for bringing it to light, and hopefully some meaningful changes come from this.
For some great irony check out this wan show segment where linus talks about how he doesn't like that a prototype (backpack) of theirs ended up in the hands of the public https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwgZaSYuBLc&t=3209 Time 53:29, in case the timestamped link doesn't work
What I thought was interesting about this is that apparently not only me, but tons of other people have all kinda felt like LTT has seemed off the past year or so, and this video kinda explained it all
How Linus publicly responds to these very fairly laid out criticisms will really affect their standing in the tech review space going forward.
Linus generally sucks at taking warranted feedback & criticism, so I can see him crashing and burning super hard in whatever post or podcast comment he makes publicly about this.
This looks like a huge issue as far as moving from a "haha wacky video" tech channel to a "hard data driven testing" tech channel, but also it's not like they haven't done "serious" reviews prior to the Labs stuff in the past so I'm not about to hand wave away their issues as "growing pains" or anything like that; it's just indicative of sloppy workflow and low effort internal culture.
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?
He already made a post in the LTT forum excusing himself and implying GM is bad journalism for not contacting him or LMG to ask for comment. Including the beautiful gem “We haven't paid yet but we agreed to financially compensate [the heat sink company] for their prototype”. The backlash from his own community was so great they deleted the post.
The one that gets me the most is the Billet Labs copper water cooler... Like holy shit how big of an asshole do you have to be to NOT return to them what you agreed to return, and then to just auction it off
It's so idiotic that it can't be malice.
It's just Linus overworking his employees.
LTT's response was that they did not sell it, they auctioned it. As if that somehow makes it better?
They also made it seem like they had already come to an agreement on compensation but they clearly did not until after GN's video and even after they had made their own claim.
I keep trying to be charitable and think of it in an "incompetence rather than malice" way, but Linus lying, twisting and tripling down isn't making it easy.
I filtered out ltt on yt a long time ago bc they were clickbait tech trash, like the journalistic equivalent of people magazine
I unsubscribed from LTT years ago when the silly content ramped up.
YouTube kept suggesting LTT and I had to block the channel so I'm not really familiar with their content anymore, looks like they only got worse.
This is shameful.
And Linus/LTT will have excuses over excuses instead of sincerely apologizing and actually trying to get better.
Doesn't matter for me, I've stopped watching them years ago. Their extremely clickbait titles make it hard to search for anything anyways.
I watched LTT for Top Gear of computer hardware videos. This commentary from GN made me wonder when was the last time they did one. I couldn't remember and unsubscribed.
I'd be interested in videos by Alex, Nicholas and maybe few others. Hope they go their own way some day. Alex videos are probably quite expensive to do so he's probably stuck there :/
LTT needs to make sure quality catches up to quantity wrt their yt videos. Essentially, they need:
More technical experts/researchers to find and filter news/info before it goes into the script.
Quality control after shooting a vid, i.e. they must be willing to reshoot segments with wrong info, not just put a note on the screen or in the yt comments
Both requires a huge investment in manpower and studio space. As it is, they are short staffed and juggling sets for shoots. If Linus wants to go on this path of business growth, he has no choice in this matter. They can't go on like a small garage operation anymore.
Well he's not exactly known for taking warranted criticism well...
What the fuck are you doing, LTT? Go get the fucking prototype back and return it.
Billet labs has come out and said that LTT has suggested they could get the cooler back for them, and billet labs declined and said they would just take the reimbursement.
They said their reasoning for that include (they said more, but just a few brief reasons) the fact that they can't know if it's still in the condition required, and if not, how much time and money it would take to repair it
they don't know if it would have all the various pieces still attached, once again, not knowing how much time or money it would cost to replace those
they've already begun work on recreating the prototype
they've confirmed it didn't go to a competitor, so less worries about ip issues
Finally and the biggest thing to me that I was unaware of before reading their statement, they sent LTT a 3090ti to along with the block to test it, LTT then proceeded to lose it (which is why they used the wrong card in the video) and just recently found it, which meant LTT had not only their block but a 3090ti for 9 weeks so they didn't know if LTT could get it back how quickly they would send it to Billet.
Linus has already put out a response and it's not great either. There's some points of contrition, that it was done on his watch so ultimately he's reasonable, but overall he justifies their actions as a company coming into it's stride and being transparent with their mistakes (instead of them just rushing out content without proper vetting)
It's not a great look, but it's one I've come to expect from him given how he's handled previous community backlash with the backpack, screwdriver and other scenarios.
This is painstakingly well thought and put out. Stuff needed to be said, and let us hope the community voices it as well.
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