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You know, this is some shit that I expect when dealing with some shady asshole on ebay, but LMG?
Bro... Are you ok?
I always wondered if Linus was actually a slimy POS, but this Billet Labs situation has cemented it for me. If you haven't watched the Gamers Nexus followup video, definitely watch it.
Must nice to have all that time to care about YouTuber drama
Look, I can't say that I don't understand the sentiment, but people calling YouTubers out on their bullshit is strictly better than 'Nobody ever cares about anything outside of their 60 hour a week jobs that they work to pay for an overinflated cost of living in this hypercapitalist dystopia hellscape that they don't have the emotional capacity to care about because of said 60 hour a week jobs.'
I want to hear about this because it means somebody still cares, somebody is still paying attention to the injustice, however trivial or removed from daily life it is.
Honestly I could care less if it was just YouTuber drama. The reason I care and the reason it makes me so angry is because Billet labs is just a couple of guys trying to make a product. They aren't some big company or anything like that, it's just a couple guys working on a passion project. But then Mr Big money YouTube star does literally everything wrong, doesn't even bother to use the product properly, and proceeds to take a giant dump all over Billet labs.
Yeah, I'm going to be a little pissed off about that. Not because I care about some whiny bitch on YouTube but because I feel for the poor guys who got dragged through the mud and our potentially going to take a massive hit in their business once they finalize their product.
It's not just "YouTuber drama" though; LTT have positioned themselves as The Grand Knowledge on all things tech, so a good number of people turn to them for recommendations. And their recommendations are questionable.
We get it, you don't know who LTT is or their relevance. You can ask directly if you want to learn.
We all have to find something that's entertaining to us, no? If you don't, you deserve some
I've been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It's starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.
It is a water cooling block designed for a specific graphics card. It is a new type of design and Billet Labs sent their best prototype (as in, the only one they had) to LMG for review. Linus proceeded to strap it to a video card where it didn't fit, so bad that there was a 1mm gap (which might as well be a million miles when you're talking about cooling). Of course the performance sucked due to it being strapped to a card it wasn't designed to fit, linus trashed the block and the company.
And here's the part that just fucks me off. Billet Labs SENT THEM THE CORRECT CARD WITH THE BLOCK! There is literally no valid excuse for putting it on the wrong card, Billet Labs sent them the correct one!!!
And the thing that a lot of people aren't understanding is the Billet Labs is not some large corporation, it is two guys putting hard work into a product. Unless I'm mistaken, they have regular ass jobs. People talking about them being able to sue... With what imaginary money? LMG is a 100,000,000 dollar company (at least). Their sloppy, misinformed, shitty, shameful, video basically has the power to cut them off at the knees when they did absolutely nothing wrong.
There is so much more to this, but whatever. Linus is a garbage person. I feel as though Luke is a decent guy but afraid to give Linus the reality check that he desperately needs.
Anyway, the first sentence answered your question I think. I rambled and ranted.
I feel as though Luke is a decent guy but afraid to give Linus the reality check that he desperately needs.
I honestly don't understand why Luke puts up with him. I'd have left years ago. Although I have never been friends with the pompous tit to begin with.
Probably because it’s the best paying job he can ever get. What’s he gonna do when he leaves? Which other podcast/YouTube channel can he work for that’s in the Greater Vancouver Area? If he leaves his live would get upended, he either needs to move or switch careers and in both cases probably takes a salary cut. This is how shitty bosses like Linus retain employees. Just look at other shitty companies where employees don’t have transferable skills that only apply to one very specific industry, like for example the gaming industry. Employees don’t leave even when the bosses behave terribly, like Riot Games
Thanks, the context you provided was important. If it was just the first sentence I would have been left with "ah, it's a water-cooling block... wait, why is it such a big deal that it got auctioned off and lost? Water cooling blocks aren't unusual. I have one in my computer right now." The rest of the comment explained why this particular block was at the heart of such a fiasco and why losing it is so harmful.
Aside from that, when people criticized the video because he was essentially bashing a small company made by 2 dudes^1 , he then went on a rant on a WAN show saying that he wouldn't review the thing again because he is not going to waste employee time and money into doing a proper review. And that he does't really care because, ultimately, he thinks it's a product that nobody should ever buy because it's too expensive, even if the performance was great.
All said by the dude that used to make the weirdest shit and pay a shit ton of money for garbage, but god forbid someone made a waterblock for water cooling enthusiasts (you know, the kind of person that likes spending money on these products just for funsies, like audiophiles).
That block is the internet, Jen. It's incredibly important that you protect it or the elders will be irate
It's a novel design of watercooler, on one side you screw a CPU, on the other side you screw a GPU, in the middle you screw the water pipes. So you get an i7-13700k + rtx 4090 in the size of an ITX motherboard, and because everything is screwed together is super rigid.
is a super niche and super expensive stuff that cater to 0.000001% of PC users, but seeing him shitting on the product like this ("it's a shitty and expensive product that doesn't make sense and nobody should buy it") is painful
After all isn't he always buying expensive and niche stuff for himself like insisting on having the monitor, keyboard and mouse cables converted to fiber optic because the PC must be in a custom rack design in the basement cooled with the water of the swimming pool. That instead is a cheap idea that everyone can do?
I saw the video on it. It is an extremely overbuilt water cooling system that LTT completely fucked the review on. I don't really know if the cooler was any good since the testing was far from complete.
Wait they sent a 3090 too? Why Linus tried it with a different GPU then?
Because they're a disorganized clusterfuck and he couldn't be bothered to slightly delay filming to get the proper card. Because for whatever reason they've decided they must churn out content at such a high pace that everything they do is like this now.
Honestly the only videos from the last year where I remember things not being totally jank were videos with Emily, but she's barely been in anything since coming out a few months ago.
Because they lost the GPU, I kid you not.
The logistics team is like four people and they have a gigantic warehouse of mess. They sometimes show it in videos, I'm surprised they can find anything.
The thing I don't get about them is they keep going on about how they want to do all this professional grade testing. Ok cool, but that requires careful planning, and that does not go long well with their 10 million videos a day at any and all costs policy that they are currently pursuing.
The company I work at has an almost identical type of chaos and a good chunk of colleagues going in, taking something and not informing it was taken until we do inventory and have 30k of stock missing in some corner someone forgot to count.
We are currently in the process of doing it but we are only ~15 heads, 6 of which are currently not on holiday, we as 1st/2nd level helpdesk need to support our customers and it's just a mess.
Now multiply that by the many employees has and how fast it needs to process it and I am kinda surprised how they havent folded yet in that regard alone.
People seem to constantly underestimate how important logistics and inventory tracking really is
I work in the freight industry and I'm constantly finding shit that isn't labeled properly, packaged properly, or even put on the correct trailer. And that's just me as one dude on a loading dock with about 150 doors and about 40 people buzzing around on forklifts.
Literally last month I found half a dozen pallets ranging in cost from $1000 - $75000 that had been pushed deep into a storage area that freight isn't supposed to be near and had been misplaced over a year prior.
The only reason I found them was because I was investigating trying to find a pallet worth almost $200,000 that someone had misplaced the day before. It was in that area as well.
Maybe I came to the channel late, after it's prime, but I have never seen the value of LTT & affiliates.
The review videos have seemed sub par when cross checking against multiple reviewers.
The entertainment videos felt cringey even when they covered a subject I was interested in (PlayStation dev kits, other obscure tech)
It was a quick unsubscribe when I felt my time was getting wasted.
I'm with you here. That channel and Linus have always just seemed like clickbait clowns to me, felt scummy
Mate, you should never think an online influencer/store is on your side. They're not.
Not even Steve from Gamer's Nexus is your friend.
Can you still practice safe exchange with them? Yes, just be informed of your rights.
Edit/addition: Didn't check the link. Thought this was about the last drama.
This addresses new issues, and it's important to solve those issues.
I feel like when Linus was still CEO, he made too many choices too fast, and that's caused the situation LMG is in now.
They have to rush content to get bills paid in time.
An extremely impulsive CEO is never good.
I've always held the opinion that any celebrity or influencer or whatever is absolutely fucked up in some way. You just have to hope they're fucked in some way that is relatively harmless
At least with Steve I get the general impression he genuinely cares about people and what he does. He also seems like a genuinely nice person
Whereas for Linus, it has felt for a while that he is basically just a business person who does this because it's profitable (I think he used to care though).
I have seen a ton of LMG videos and it's very obvious that Linus doesn't handle conflict very well and will just immediately dig his heels in if he feels that he is in the right.
Here is the way I see it: Regardless of who is right or wrong, this is a series of unfortunate events that happened. Small mistakes or misjudgments don't always show themselves immediately. However, give it enough time and the floodgates will open and expose everything all at once, for better or for worse. When this happens to people who truly intended no malice, it's a fuck of a thing to deal with and usually gets worse before it gets better.
When all of your mistakes are gathered in one place for everyone to see all at once it can seem much worse than it actually is.
Am I justifying the actions of LMG? Hell no! They need to fix their issues immediately only because they have such a large fan base that listen to their every word.
Regardless, I have sympathy for them.
These are not "mistakes", these are willfully evil acts.
I'm just going to quote another comment here:
Billet Labs sent their best prototype (as in, the only one they had) to LMG for review. Linus proceeded to strap it to a video card where it didn’t fit, so bad that there was a 1mm gap (which might as well be a million miles when you’re talking about cooling). Of course the performance sucked due to it being strapped to a card it wasn’t designed to fit, linus trashed the block and the company. And here’s the part that just fucks me off. Billet Labs SENT THEM THE CORRECT CARD WITH THE BLOCK! There is literally no valid excuse for putting it on the wrong card, Billet Labs sent them the correct one!!!
Combine that with the image in the OP, and there's just no excuse. These are not the actions of someone that "intends no malice". This is not an "accident". This is not a "learning opportunity". This is not a "mistake". This is a person doing everything in their power to selfishly extract every dime they can from both their viewers and this startup.
They intentionally lied to the viewers because trashing a product gets more views. They intentionally lied to the startup because they got more money from selling the prototype.
They do not deserve any sympathy.
Except this "series of unfortunate events" appears to be entirely self-inflicted.
We're not talking about a couple of hobbyists making YT videos in their spare time; LTT/LMG are by this point a huge media content factory whose unrelenting drive to produce the next hot slice of monetized infotainment means they are making constant (and often quite large) errors and not giving these products the time and attention required to assess them properly.
If you have the time, Gamer Nexus' initial video critique where they matter-of-factly listed all the reasons why LTT need to seriously reevaluate how they do business is a very interesting watch.
https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=99
Edit: wow, it seems to have finally sunk in - LTT posted this video not two hours after I posted my comment.
(Piped link because apparently the apology video is monetized 😑) :
Linus' fan base allegedly drove a little boy to suicide, and the mother subsequently took her own life as well.
Oh and it seems this is not all of it, an ex-employee came out on twitter about sexual harassment, extremely bad work conditions and so much more.
The timing of it is weird to say at least but there's a lot.
The fact that these allegations come in quick succession is rather logical, I'd say. It's much harder to come out against someone who is a generally beloved public figure, so when the allegations finally start, many people see their chance to have their voice be taken seriously.
It's been repeatedly proven that large companies get a impenetrable wall of armour based on fear of speaking out due to fear of retribution or breaking an important connection. Once that wall is broken it allows grievances to finally pass though.
This incident has made me reevaluate some things. I could see this being a one off thing. Like an inventory error or a communication error. But the rebuttal was wild. Cancelled my floatplane subscription for now. Maybe they'll turn it around down the road, but this one was a big mess up.
Damn this is really sad to see for the longest time LMG was one of the few companies I actually liked and trusted
The channel was much better when they were in the house and the backups were stored on a toilet.