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.[1]
Check LinusTech’s profile for further discussion and comments he’s had.[2]
Spot the difference:
You download a video from a pirate site.
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.
If TikTok doesn’t allow you to download their videos and share them outside of their website, based on the EULA agreed to when you made your account, then yes it’s piracy. Justifiable piracy, but still piracy.
(I have no idea if TikTok allows this)
So Piracy is not a matter of law, but a matter of TOS now?
This is not entirely true because youtube gave your ISP some server appliances to install in their network that locally cache and serve youtube videos to minimize actual traffics to youtube. When you watch a youtube video, your video traffic is most likely being served locally from your ISP’s datacenter instead of from youtube’s datacenter. Youtube doesn’t pay your ISP for hosting their appliances in their network (not for bandwidth, electricity and cooling). You, as a customer of your ISP, are the one that pay for the bandwidth.