Woah woah woah woah!
I dunno how many times this has to be said!
He didn’t SELL it! He AUCTIONED it!
That’s a distinction that needs to be made!
Comment on HW News - Linus Tech Tips' Terrible Response, ESMC, & Starfield x AMD GPUs
Nefyedardu@kbin.social 10 months ago
So let me get this straight.
- Linus screwed over a small two-person startup with his own incompetence by using the product in an unintended way and not using the GPU and instructions which were provided for him.
- Stole their prototype which they needed to develop their product further, even going so far as to sell it at auction.
- Goes on record to say "yes, we screwed up but it would cost $100-$500 to fix it so I'm not going to and no, I'm not apologizing for that". (That amount of money is chump change to him.)
- Lies about offering to recompense the company. They didn't do that until after getting called out.
- When he gets criticized for screwing over this company for his own mistakes, rather than owning up he tries to gaslight everybody into think he is somehow the victim?? "Today was so hard bros" oh poor wittle multi-million dollar Linus... I'll be sure to pray for you while I struggle to pay my rent.
What a fucking piece of shit, fuck him. I hate people like this that simply can't own up to mistakes and have to deflect all criticism.
Bobert@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
dorkian_gray@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Solid summary, yep. I will say though that while I understand your anger and certainly share in your disappointment, Linus has a pretty good (but not spotless, not by a long shot) track record of doing the right thing and being a decent dude, and I think he deserves a bit more grace than the more vitriolic comments have been giving him. Saying he’s a piece of shit is a bit much, in my opinion.
As a long-time viewer, it’s hard to see. I hope he sits and thinks on this whole situation, and comes around to apologise to Billet, to GN, and to the community he spent so long building. In the absence of that, I really hope someone from LMG outlines the steps they’ll take moving forward to address the points raised in the GN videos. I love LMG’s content, it would be a shame to lose them over all this.
frezik@midwest.social 10 months ago
I was almost ready to be with you, but after reading the tweet from Madison elsewhere in the thread, Linus is going to have to go above and beyond to fix things.
dorkian_gray@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Link for any wanderers who haven’t seen it yet: threadreaderapp.com/…/1691693740254228741.html
Oof. I’m glad she finally felt like she could speak out properly. How she was treated is simply awful. At this point I just really hope I’m not wrong about Luke, I like him 😞
linearchaos@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I feel what you’re saying and I feel like I should be agreeing with you. But we do have to be careful here.
What we know and what we see coming out of LMG is what they want us to know and see. When there’s a video of Linus making it right, It’s because they wanted to make a video showing him making it right. You’re not going to see videos of him making it wrong and screwing over people, (if he does) It would be bad for business.
Likewise one ex employee’s statement of bad treatment there isn’t gospel He has hundreds of people. There are plenty of people that have left and there’s not a lot of consensus that I found that things are horrible there other than pace.
His response to GN is obviously trash, written in a moment of anger. He tends to put his foot in his mouth on live streams when he starts getting angry about a subject.
Him not sending back the prototype block, honestly is probably standard operating procedure. I wouldn’t send anything to them that I didn’t expect to lose. They receive so much equipment from so many places that they don’t even open for years, that they’re probably kind of blind to it actually being a hardship on a smaller place. I see the lie about him saying he already offered to pay them back a bit more problematic.
As far as his actual reputation or his character alignment sheet, we don’t really know. I would assume that if he was chaotic evil that we would hear a hell of a lot more about that. The guy he brought in to run the place is an insulating factor. When it was pitched it seemed that he was there to insulate Linus from the company, it’s also likely that he’s there to insulate the company from Linus.
Honestly the only thing out of all this that rings unassailably true is the untrustworthy data claim. He’s placing himself and his company to be a ultimate source of truth for benchmarking. But he comes right out and says that he won’t strive to make a better benchmark for a product for $500 when the number is obviously off. There really isn’t a lot of room for that in what he’s trying to build. If you’re going to come out and prove that power supplies, video cards, CPUs and motherboards make the numbers they say they’re going to make, you’re not going to do that with incorrect testing, shrugs and accusations. He’s going to need to be honest to a fault and transparent. If he expects us to take the data seriously he’s going to have to get out of this “oh that’s good enough I’d trust it so you should trust it” mentality.
dorkian_gray@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I kinda covered it in this comment about the latest video response: lemmy.world/comment/2474701
But the gist of it is that while the video was a much more considered response to the situation (closer to what I expected out of them from the get), and now we will wait and see to see if they make good on it. We don’t have to “trust them, bro”; people are watching, and we will hold them to account if they don’t follow through. All that means for me is that I simply don’t watch this kind of content if I can’t trust it. What drew me to LTT in the first place was the genuinely useful information coupled with high entertainment value; if they can get that balance back, and stick to the guidelines they say they’ll publish, then I see no reason not to accept that they’re doing the right thing with regard to their testing and the accuracy of their reporting.
Same goes for their response to Madison’s statements, and their “crunch culture” in general. I agree that Madison is just one voice of many, but that doesn’t mean she’s the only one either. What I hope is that it never happens again, but if it does I hope the support for Madison this time will encourage anyone else to speak out about such issues.
TL;DR, Indeed, don’t take them at their word that they’ll do better. Watch, and see if they do.
buckykat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
It’s not just the Billet Labs thing, GN showed a pattern at LMG of rushing out bad test data and therefore wrong conclusions to keep up the frankly ridiculous volume of videos they put out.
fireflash38@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s the sort of thing that makes me really, really sad for the people working there. That crazy breakneck pace cannot be good for mental health.
buckykat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
This is the kind of thing a union (which Linus, of course, has said he’s very against) would help with
MonkCanatella@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
I kept thinking about that watching GN’s last video and how it’s so perfectly in line with what GN exposed.
jwagner7813@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Unions, the bane of rich people that take advantage of their workers via positions of power.
GravenImages@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They somewhat recently did a “what do lmg employees really think of working here” video, and it seemed like the #1 complaint was the pace. I really hope they take this criticism to heart and just… Slow down for a bit
CoolSouthpaw@lemmy.world 10 months ago
But they won’t. Cos $$$.
galloog1@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Part of the equation here is the transparency. It’s good that they are transparent and I do think they listen. Part of the interesting side to watch is the interaction with the community.
Nefyedardu@kbin.social 10 months ago
I used to like LTT up until their "Linux Challenge" videos which were just a pain to watch. Shit like this coming from the biggest tech channel on youtube just drives me up the wall.
Postcard64@lemmy.world 10 months ago
After this happened, GitHub added a Download button to their for preview pages. So they themselves considered it was enough of a problem/inconvenience to not have a download button.
catastrophicblues@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
That bit made me cringe. You go to the file, and can download using the Raw button or using wget. It’s not hard, it’s ignorance.
greybeard@lemmy.one 10 months ago
It also has nothing to do with Linux and everything to do with how Github works. I actually give him a pass on nuking X while installing Steam, that shouldn’t happen(although he did get a nice big warning, but that warning was far from user friendly). But some of the other stuff they ran into was “This doesn’t work exactly like windows, therefore is bad.” type stuff.
transistor@lemdro.id 10 months ago
How would someone who doesn’t use GitHub or linux know how to do that?
sj_zero 10 months ago
I loved watching him type out "yes I understand the thing that I'm about to do is going to break my computer" and then complain that the thing that he did broke his computer!
Bootheal0179@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Linus shits on entrepreneurship with his continual BS with easily caught bad data. No reputable companies should touch him. Anything he pushes to his viewers should be suspicious. I’ll be wondering how much LMG gets under the table for posting positive reviews.
tony@lemmy.hoyle.me.uk 10 months ago
I’ve seen videos where he’s just basically repeating the script marketing have given him… zero difficult questions. No doubt they’re quite lucrative.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Unfortunately they’re his most accurate ones.