Context^piped^^-^^invidious^^-^^lemmy^
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.^[https://linustechtips.com/topic/1526180-gamers-nexus-alleges-lmg-has-insufficient-ethics-and-integrity/page/16/#comment-16078641; archive]
Check LinusTech's profile for further discussion and comments he's had.^[https://linustechtips.com/profile/3-linustech/; archive]
Yeah, I don't think they were directing that at fair, but negative criticism. Linus is very clear that he welcomes constructive criticism always. The "we're human" comment is, imo, clearly directed at the people going out of their way to just call them names and generally be shitty.
Hah, I mean, that's a big portion of the discussion we're having. Yeah, there was a "miscommunication" and the item was auctioned off for charity rather than returned. They explained in the video how it happened, and that prior to any of this blowing up they had already contacted Billet Labs about covering all costs associated with their mistake. It's an ongoing meme in the LTT episodes that the guy who fucked up sucks at his job and is always about to get fired. But in the explanation video, I got the sense that he wasn't really joking about not knowing if he was going to be fired this time.
Yes, a waterblock is strapped onto the CPU, water passes through it and takes heat away from the CPU, thereby cooling it. It seemed like in their rush to get the video out the door, they ignored several flaws in their testing setup (like choosing the wrong GPU), and then Linus just concluded it wasn't commercially viable anyway and didn't care to retest it. The larger issue people have with them is that they're setting too stringent of deadlines for themselves, and it's hurting the quality of their content. This just seemed to be a recent case that had collateral damage involved.
I think they've taken better steps toward that with the followup video I put in my edit. Also, that is really interesting that Bard knows about the situation. Afaik it's wrong about actually "returning" the waterblock, since it sold, but they have agreed to cover any associated costs. Hard to quantify those costs if it ends up ruining their company as Billet seemed to imply (they said that it was their "only" prototype or something. Maybe they mean "only one they have for demoing to reviewers"?) I wonder if Bard is "watching" youtube videos, or just getting an auto transcription or what...
I just wanted to say, I really appreciate you taking the time to reply to me on this! It's helped me see things from a different viewpoint, and also come to the realization that perhaps part of my viewpoint has been at the very least, colored by what's been going on in the media. Generally I (at least I like to think) that I'm not as prone to that occurring, but this situation is a bit unique as I don't normally watch LTT/LMG's videos so perhaps I'm subconsciously "filling in the blanks" so to speak with what is being mentioned.
In regards to Bard and whether its actually "watching" videos or not, I do think that it's somewhat able to watch them. I asked it to identify what is the "musical term" for something that occurred at a timestamp for a song in the game Destiny 2's OST after providing a YouTube link - it told me that the term was "tintinnabulation" which was correct, and gave me an opinion on what it thought of the song in general. The interesting thing of course is that since its an OST, it is highly unlikely that there was say, an article or Reddit comment that it could cross reference to get that answer. I've certainly seen Bard hallucinate answers before (such as today when it gave me an rclone command that didn't exist) but I don't think that was one of those cases. It'd be cool to see Bard and other LLMs do an actual active search rather than just referring to its training set so that the answers are more accurate, but I suppose we'll see!
Woah, I feel like no one is talking about Bard, but that's pretty impressive. Will have to check it out. Cheers 👍