KnightSirius

Hey all! Happy new year. We’re back at it with a couple long awaited follow ups.

ASUS
I know you have all been waiting for more information regarding the influx of ASUS complaints we’ve seen over the past half year or so. When we last posted an update a few of us had a sit down with our ASUS contact and laid down both short term and long term goals and expectations. Internally, we had a date in mind of when we expected them to hit those short term goals. We are not going to hit that date. While many of you may be happy to hear that we are not renewing with ASUS for 2024, in the end we are a bit disappointed that they have made no progress towards those short term goals. 

There are a couple of additional things I wanted to note, just to offer some transparency. The members of our business team have different relationships with different brands and partners. And ASUS was a long standing one. We truly believed that the contact we have spoken with wanted to facilitate the changes within ASUS. But the problems were so deeply rooted and systemic that we don’t see a timeline where the smaller fixes end up being addressed anytime soon. We really did want to give our contacts the benefit of the doubt, but in the end we have sadly just been left with doubt.

That being said, there are some projects that you may see that are rollovers from last year that we still need to get out in the near future. But after that, we have no plans for 2024. That doesn’t mean the door is closed forever. We do want to keep talking with them, keep monitoring them to see if they take any strides to fixing the issues, especially in their customer support department. 

We also just want to make a quick note that this is on a sponsorship end. I can’t speak if non-sponsored coverage will pop up at some point. Or if one of their GPUs will end up in a build we do on stream. But we will not be taking money or product from them in exchange for anything we produce until we see follow through on improving their products and customer support.

Secretlab
I also wanted to follow up regarding Secretlab because we did see an additional post regarding a customer support rep using some…questionable language. When we last did an update for Secretlab we had expressed that we expected better from them. At that point in time, internally, we had pretty much come to the agreement that we wouldn’t be working with Secretlab until we see much needed improvements.

We appreciate everyone for sharing their experiences with us. While we can’t rectify every problem you may face with a brand, it does help shine a light on larger issues when we talk with our partners. And we like to try different avenues to see if we have any luck. One of which can be putting you in touch with reps from different brands. Again, we ask that you’re respectful to those contacts, to each other, and to LMG staff and moderators as well. 

Thanks again.
 

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.

Hard to believe it's been 10 years, even harder to believe that I was a pretty early user. Didn't realise I had signed up so early on!
I've never posted a whole lot nor consistently but the forum has been a great resource ever since it gained popularity alongside LTT.

Much appreciation to all the Admins and Maintainers that keep this place running, it truly is thankless work!

The LTT Forum is now 10 years old! What started out as an experiment hosted in Linus's garage has now become a thriving community of tech enthusiasts, with some pretty impressive numbers, thanks in no small part to all of you!
 
The forum has come a long way from the incredibly unstable VBulletin 5 beta that we started out with in 2013, and I hope you will agree that it looks far better today than it did back then:

 
The forum exists because of its awesome community. As a small way of giving back, we're going to give away some 1 year Gold Contributor memberships, which give you Floatplane access, based on recent activity on the forum. The giveaway criteria are:
5 will be randomly assigned to the authors of posts made in the past 3 months (so your chance of winning is proportional to the number of posts you have made in the past 3 months), to give something back to everyone that makes this community awesome. Posts removed by a moderator, and posts in Test Posts, do not qualify. 10 will be randomly assigned to members who joined the forum in or before 2015 and have made at least one post on the forum in the past 3 months, to thank our most loyal members. 5 will be given to the members with the most posts that were marked as the best answer in the past 3 months, to say thanks to the members that give the most back to the community. Posts where a member marked their own post as best answer are excluded. Winners will be drawn later this week, and notified via PM by me. The full list of winners will be published here once all winners have accepted their prize.
 
All winners have now been contacted and received their prize
 
Ts&Cs:
Max one prize per user If a winner already has a Gold Contributor subscription, they will get 1 year free starting from their next billing period Current moderators and administrators, and employees of LMG or its subsidiaries, are not eligible The giveaways will be drawn in the order listed. If an ineligible user is drawn (per points 1 and 3 above), an additional winner will be drawn. Winners will have 7 days from being notified via PM to accept the prize (by replying to the PM), otherwise their prize will be redrawn under the same rules. No cash value, non-transferrable, run at our own discretion, etc. Please don't get mad if you don't win. "Past 3 months" means between 00:00 on 01 October 2022 and 23:59 on 31 December 2022 inclusive, all UTC (so it's too late to try and game the system now). "In or before 2015" means the "Joined" field on the account is before 00:00 UTC on 01 January 2016.

Just going to quote myself from 2 years ago:
On top of that, he is (or at least used to be) extremely ignorant when it came to computers. I cringed so hard when he interviewed that person from AMD about Zen, and he didn't even know what a die shrink was or how using smaller transistors affected power consumption/heat/performance. 
I remember feeling bad for the AMD employee because you could tell he thought Elric's questions were idiotic.
 
It's a shame that he is depressed and wants to kill himself, not saying anything about that, but I don't get how people can like him. 
 
 
Edit: Seems like he hasn't changed during these past 2 years either. I looked him up on Twitter and wouldn't you know it, here is a tweet from earlier this month where he tells people he "hope they die a horrible death" because his package got lost in the mail. 
https://twitter.com/TechOf_Tomorrow/status/938175015819796480

You wouldn't throw the 5600x away, you'd sell it for someone else to use so where's the impact for the environment?

Or they could release the full version of the CPU for the price of the cut down one as clearly they're still making a profit on it. If it can be unlocked and run at the higher spec fine, then all they're doing is artificially cutting it down so they can charge more for the full version (not so they can charge less for the cut down version). It seems like a good deal being able to upgrade your CPU via a software unlock, but really they're just selling you the same product at a higher price.
 
It's just a way to make more money, it's not good for the consumer or the environment.

Did you also add a sticker pack to your order? There were some issues with early orders, which yours must be if you've received it, where the "free" sticker pack didn't process properly and got charged as a separate order meaning the free stickers weren't free. LTT partially refunded those orders with the stickers, which might be the $20 refund you received.
 
$161 of that seems to be your local import fees and taxes. Double check that the PostNord Toll you paid isn't just charging the same taxes that you already paid. There have been some reports of issues where people have paid tax and then when it was imported in to the country they were charged the sales tax again and had to prove that they already paid the tax to get it refunded.

My backpack arrived in here in Sweden today, and boy did the total cost turn out to be a bit more than I expected. I thought I'd compile down all the costs so other swedes can know what to expect when ordering the backpack.
 
In total, I paid about US$457 (~4950 SEK) to have the backpack sent to Sweden (includes overseas shipping, taxes, and toll; about +83%).
 
I put down this info in a spreadsheet. If anyone of you have bought and received the backpack, it would be cool informative to put it down in the sheet and compare costs per country. Post your costs and I'll add it to the list: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1D1826kGD-UV1H7HY32noR0c80q8_1oh8izF7TYWmGR8/edit?usp=sharing
 
Breakdown of costs:
$249.99 LTT Backpack $65.98 Shipping to Sweden $79 Tax -$20 Refund shenanigans. No idea why I got this. ~$82 Toll (PostNord, SEK 980)  

Opinions on curved monitors vary a lot: some people claim it's the greatest thing ever, others say it's just a fad. But so far I haven't seen anyone who actually tried to verify the main claim of curved monitors. Manufacturers claim that the curvature ensures that all pixels on the screen are the more or less the same distance away from your eyes, which supposedly avoids the distortion often seen close to the edges of screens. This claim is wrong. If you do the math, you will find that a curved screen actually makes the distortion worse.
The short explanation is that virtually all cameras have flat image sensors. These sensors do indeed distort the image - objects close to the edges will appear stretched. The thing is, the distortion caused by the flat sensor is canceled out exactly by the distortion of the flat screen. It really doesn't matter that the pixels near the edges of the screen are further away from your eyes, as long as the screen has the same shape as the camera sensor (and the same field of view). If you want a more complete explanation, and some actual proof, read on.
The test image

I made a simple test image in Blender. It's a simple rendering of a grid of spheres. Each of the spheres is perfectly round, but you can clearly see that the spheres close to the edges appear stretched. I'm intentionally using a very wide field of view (roughly 90 degrees) to make the effect more obvious. You can download the original source files at the end of this post.
Flat monitor
Let's see what happens when the test image is displayed on an ordinary flat monitor. This is a model of a basic 16:9 monitor (64cm x 36cm, roughly 29"):

This is what it would look like when you're sitting directly in front of it:

The spheres near the center look fine, but those closer to the edges are stretched. But watch what happens when you rotate the camera towards one of the corners:

Somehow, the spheres in the corner now look normal whereas the spheres in the center are stretched! No, I didn't mess with that image, there's no Photoshopping/compositing/whatever going on here. All I did was rotate the camera. How is this possible? Simple: when the camera faces the corner of the screen instead of the center, the screen tilted relative to the camera. This tilt compensates the distortion that we saw earlier.
Does this also work in real life? Of course! You just have to sit in the right spot, so your field of view matches that of the camera. Since I used a very wide field of view for the test image (90 degrees), you need to sit very close to see it properly. For example, if your screen is 50cm wide, your eyes should be 25cm away from the screen to watch the test image. Ideally your eyes should be in the center, but you obviously can't have both of your eyes in the center at the same time. In order to get a perfect result, you should close one eye and make sure that your other eye right in the center of the screen. Now open the test image in your browser, make it fullscreen (press F11 - this is important), and watch. You shouldn't be able to see any distortion at all, no matter where you look.
Curved monitor
Now let's try this again with a curved monitor. I couldn't find any actual specs regarding the amount of curvature used by real monitors, so I just used a screenshot of Linus' LG 34U97 unboxing video to get some numbers. The 34U97 is 83cm wide, and based on the unboxing video, it looks like the center is recessed about 2.5cm compared to the corners (which is far less than the photos on the product page suggest - typical marketing I guess). This corresponds to the curvature of a circle with a 7m diameter, which means the 'sweet spot' is located 3.5m away from the center of the screen (makes sense for a TV, but rather strange for a computer monitor IMO). Anyway, I took the model that I used earlier and gave it the same curvature as the 34U97, and this is the result:

You can clearly see the curvature when you're sitting right in front of it, but does it actually make the image better? Not at all. The edges are closer to you, which means the spheres near the edges appear even larger than they were already! Now let's rotate the camera again:

It's still more or less okay, but it's not as 'perfect' as with the ordinary flat monitor.
Highly curved monitor
Let's try this again with a monitor with a higher curvature, just to see what will happen. The 'sweet spot' for this monitor is just 1m away from the center (instead of 3.5m).

It just gets worse. Here's a comparison of the three cases. I've overlaid a green circle on top of the spheres to show you the distortion:

In the case of the flat monitor, the distortion is canceled out almost perfectly, resulting in a near-perfect circle. In the other two cases, not so much.
So why do movie theaters use curved screens?
Because the projectors used in movie theaters contain lenses, which adds lens distortion. The screen is curved to cancel out the lens distortion. Monitors do not use lenses, so there's no reason to make them curved.
Don't cameras have lenses too?
There are many different types of camera lenses and they all have a unique distortion pattern. To make things even worse, the distortion pattern depends on zoom and focus as well. There's no way you can compensate all those different distortion patterns just by using a slightly curved screen. Only the camera crew can properly correct lens distortion, since only they know what lenses were used to capture the footage.
What about improved viewing angles?
As far as I can tell, this claim is actually correct. For example, the edges of the 34U97 are tilted about 7 degrees compared to a flat monitor. This should effectively increase the maximum viewing angle by 7 degrees. So if you're willing to accept a small amount of distortion to get a better maximum viewing angle, a curved monitor makes sense. There's some good news though: as Linus correctly pointed out, the curvature has little effect when you are sitting further away from the screen. And you get the best possible viewing angle when you're sitting in the 'sweet spot', which is 3.5m away from the screen. So a curved screen could actually make sense for a TV, but not for a computer monitor. Of course the distortion increases once you move away from the center, but you still get most of the benefit of the improved viewing angle.
What do you think? Would you still buy a curved monitor to improve the maximum viewing angle, even if the image becomes slightly distorted?
Source files (Blender)

We're Hosting A LAN Event!
 
Join us on July 29th, 6:00PM - July 31st, 10:00 AM for 40 straight hours of gaming!
 
Ticket Info
 
BYOC - $112.46 CAD
This ticket gives you access to:
x1 Regular BYOC seat (4'x30") All BYOC seats have a ViewSonic® ELITE XG240R 24" 1080p 1ms 144Hz available for use during the LAN if desired.
 
You are required to bring:
Your Computer Mouse, Keyboard, Mousepad, Headphones Ethernet cable (25ft minimum) If you are under 18 you must be accompanied by a chaperone or guardian (who also has a ticket). Please see event page for additional details.
 
Whale - $5,938.24
You're a certified WHALE. Don't worry about bringing any hardware to the event, we'll build a PC for you. With this ticket, you'll receive:  
  - x1 Premium BYOC Seat (8'x30" table)
  - x1 Deluxe Office Tour
  - x1 $250 lttstore.com Voucher
 
Physical Goods and Merchandise , which includes:
x1 lttstore.com Backpack x1 Whale LAN Hoodie x1 Signed lttstore.com Mousepad x1 Logitech Pro X Superlight (Black)  x1 Logitech G915 TKL Lightspeed w/Tactile x1 Logitech G Pro X Wireless Headset x1 ASUS TUF Gaming VG27AQ Monitor x1 PC              - AMD Ryzen R7 5800X
             - EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 ULTRA GAMING (LHR)
             - ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING
             - SAMSUNG 980 Pro 1TB M.2
             - G.Skill 32 GB Trident Z NEO DDR4 RAM CL16 - 3600
             - EK AIO Elite 360mm D-RGB
             - Cooler Master V850 GOLD V2 80+ Gold Power Supply 
             - Lian-Li O11D Mini (White or Black) 
 
*The listed Whale ticket price includes the  BC PST 7% of $329.99 for physical goods and merchandise listed above of the value of $4,714.17.
 
PST-1470-4234
 
Office Tour Add-on - $50 CAD
Take a tour of the office during Whale LAN, available for the first time since remodeling the office!  
 
What to expect at WHALE LAN:
Scheduled tournaments and challenges Linus' Power Hour sessions (Game of the hour) Lounge with local co-op and party games LMG Staff hanging out and playing games LAN Cache server for quick access to some popular titles  
LAN Schedule
 
BYOC Load-in Time: Friday, July 29th @ 4:00PM
Official Start Time: Friday, July 29th @ 6:00PM
Official End Time: Sunday, July 31st @ 10:00AM
 
 
What you'll need to bring:
Your computer Peripherals (mouse, keyboard, headphones, mousepad) An ethernet cable (25ft minimum) Optional:
Monitor (If you opt-out of the provided monitor, which is a ViewSonic® ELITE XG240R 24" 1080p 1ms 144Hz) Chair (If you want something a little more comfortable)  
 
Important Info
Tickets are not transferable and not refundable. You must have a BYOC or Whale LAN ticket in order to redeem your Office Tour Add-on A film release and event waiver must be signed prior to attending (online or when checking in on-site) Guests under 18 must have a guardian/chaperone attend the event with them, see additional info below.  
For guests under 18:
We required anyone under 18 attending the LAN be accompanied by a chaperone or guardian, everyone attending the event must have a ticket to enter the venue. There are no 'guest passes' specifically for chaperones or guardians due to capacity limits at the venue.
Ages 18-17 must have a guardian onsite after 10pm until 8am. Ages 16 or younger must always have a chaperone onsite with them.  
 
Extras!
 
To tide you over until tomorrow we've got a few Whale LAN wallpapers, available on Imgur and attached to this post: https://lmg.gg/hhIX4

after the fans are installed, if you watch him install the PC, you'll see he has fan splitters there to connect the fans to the motherboard of his system.
 

Sorry, I think we are talking about the same thing.

What I was trying to say is that what you are asking about, isn't a simple thing and it's a lot harder than it sounds.  I certainly wasn't trying to imply that anyone doesn't exist, but trying to point the challenges posed.

You are totally correct that there are women that watch LTT shows.  

It's not just an issue of scale and numbers, but mens and womens clothing are separate markets with different clients, different colours, different sizes.  More SKUs means it is a larger investment, which for a smaller segment of your audience is a hard business decision to make.

When it comes to surveys and potential customer feedback it is hard to understand what people want, because people are individuals and building mass market products has to appeal to many people.  So synthesizing all the voices into a single vision for a product is hard.

If you minimize styles and colours for a narrow focus, you risk alienating other potential customers.  Or you can order lots of variety and colours and have few hits in the mix and you have a lot of branded merch you can sell, which is expensive for the wallet and planet.

I don't understand designers, just the logistics.

I think focus group and surveys to accurately determine the size of the market is really important.  

But as someone that has been in charge of ordering products and interacting with customers to order what people want, it is very very hard to get customer feedback and accurately model that to an entire market.

A minority of people with loud and vocal voices can skew the data, and this can be a very costly mistake.  

It seems like the Linus Store is being very conservative moving into this new market, and as someone that has cut purchase orders for hundreds of thousands of dollars of product I hope sells, the stress of the uncertainty with this sort of thing is brutal, so I understand why they are taking a slow and cautious approach.

Would be more surprising if they were positive.
 
 
Still disappointed in LTT for deciding that this is the sort of people they want to do collabs with. Even giving the benefit of the doubt that they just didn't know, it's disappointing that they didn't look into who they're collabing with before getting to the point of no return and having to go through with the collab.

This pleases me.

Yes forgive me for missing the nuisance in sponsor video vs bought video that promotes the product. Where should have i posted this?
 
This hits hard for me as I was active/passionate about consumer rights, open source, etc back in 2010 timeframe when Cricut went after suing people for writing software to expand support of their machines. They were the poster child back then for everything LTT stands against now a days for right to repair, right to own, anti-cloud, anti-DRM and anti-ewaste, etc.  There's still issues as recently as last year that people are fighting. They remove support for older, functioning cutters and no one else wants to support them for fear of more lawsuits. And their calling the new machine "maker" to try and rid themselves of the blowback from all their anti-maker behavior is just insulting. 
 
It's just a shock to see an LTT video showing them in a positive light. Sponsored or not. 
 
Their major competitor, Cameo, on the otherhand isn't open source, but people have written third party apps to no consequence and has a true maker community around it. 
 
Sorry. Rant over. This just happened to be my new favorite YouTube channel (LTT) bring up some old wounds of mine from rallying against companies like Cricut more than a decade ago. 

but also a bit about promoting the product. while the complaint should be targeted if it was a sponsor, it's also warranted to let their history of this product to be pointed out. As Yvonne did try to cover some of the issues about this product.

Just saw the Yvonne Cricut video and I was shocked that terribly anti-consumer company got past your screeners as their history checks off most of Linus's pet peeves. 
 
Anti-consumer.
Sued third party that wrote linux support for it. 
Forced DRM cartridges for a while. 
Tried forcing cloud requirements with paid restrictions. 
 
Source.
 
Some quotes:
 
"The “update” would have limited Cricut owners to uploading just 20 designs to their own devices each month, unless they paid for Cricut’s $8-per-month-minimum cloud service,"
 
"forced customers to use a cloud service to upload designs to their own machines"
 
"There’s not a lot of recourse for people who wish their machines worked differently. Cricut’s owner, Provo Craft, sues makers of third party software to make sure customers stay locked into Cricut’s software and cloud storage system. "

feel like a lot of newer products are like that, manscaped is also a bit shady. some complain about poor performance etc. when older equipment was made to last much longer or for a decade with the same blade and motor. hate that these "modern" shavers that barely shave, lugs instead of cuts, weak engines/motors, guards and can handle a bit of mishandling. would be nice to see manscaped with a good tool, but seems overpriced ... yeah.
 
wish more mainstream with better products would be sponsoring, instead of a lot of digital e-waste products or just more expensive products.

🤷‍♂️ seems normal to me... 

Where in the YouTube terms of service is that stated?
https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms
 
Again, I have no contract with YouTube that stipulates I have to watch their ads. If I were to subscribe to Netflix, I'd have a contract with them that outlines the service I receive and the payment I provide. YouTube doesn't have that. Ergo I still maintain that piracy does not apply, because I have not broken any copyright or any other part of my agreement with them as per the terms of service. Linus even agreed to that during the WAN show, it's the first thing that he said when Luke asked him if he were to back up that assertion "in the legal sense". So that's it, it's not piracy.
 
And I find it funny how many people get hung up on the idea that it needs pointing out that blocking ads hurts the bottom line of content creators. I'm sorry, but if that really was the intended message, who exactly needs to hear that blocking ads in services financed by ads will have an impact on their bottom line? If a simple truism warrants a tweet from Linus, you have to ask yourself what the intent behind it was. Even among the tweets highlighted in the video, there was arguably a single person who thought creators could also thrive without payment. But Linus still kept pushing this idea that there was an agreed upon price that a viewer of the video needs to pay. There isn't. Not outlined in the terms of service or anywhere else. And I still maintain that the transaction isn't "Hey viewer, here's a video, pay me by watching ads". The actual transaction is "Hey Google, here are my viewers. Pay me for their time spent watching your ads".
 
Bottom line is, blocking ads is akin to piracy the same way murder is akin to involuntary manslaughter, as I pointed out earlier. One aspect of either result might be the same, but that does not make either of them the same thing.

Not really. The term piracy is strictly used in the context of copyright infringement. Blocking ads on YouTube does not infringe on any copyright. It is per definition not piracy, not under any interpretation of the term. 
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#"Piracy"
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-piracy?r=US&IR=T
 
If people wish to insinuate that blocking ads is piracy, then I expect someone to quickly file a lawsuit against anyone providing ad blockers. Then we'll see if a court agrees that the task of blocking ads constitutes piracy. Because I still remain unconvinced. 

1) Murder and involuntary manslaughter functionally both have the same impact. Does that make them the same? If not then
2) Why is Linus calling piracy and adblock "the exact same thing"?
 

Except it isn't. I have no agreement with any single content creator. YouTube is an open platform that offers me content for free. It implements ads the same way every other website does. My dealings are with YouTube, not with any one content creator on the platform. And I choose to block YouTube's ads.
 
Honestly, this just seems like Linus once again put his foot in his mouth. Why alienate anyone who would be content to support your business if it meant offsetting ads and sponsor segments by encouraging buying merch as a better alternative? Yeah no, let's make a dumb comparison to a TV show that isn't offered on a free service to begin with that isn't paid for with ads. To pretend like there's an equivalence between a streaming service behind a paywall and blocking ads on YouTube is disingenuous at best.
 

 
Honestly, this pretty much ensures that I'll never whitelist your channel from either adblock or sponsorblock. And no, again, my payment for the content isn't ads. I get to watch it for free. Linus is paid by Google for the opportunity to show me ads. He's not paid by me watching the ads. This is such a hilariously wrongheaded way of framing this entire scenario. If a service is free for me to use, I'm the product being sold. That's the long and short of it. And I choose not to be sold. Hence why I block ads everywhere possible. If Linus isn't happy with that arrangement, he's more than welcome to take all his content off YouTube and put it behind his Floatplane paywall. If that's a sustainable business move for him, good for him. I won't mourn his disappearance from YouTube. Every YouTuber is replaceable and there are more than enough people ready to jump into his niche if he were to pack up and leave. But to call it piracy is wrong by every metric imaginable. Words mean things and you don't just get to redefine them to suit your whims.