Taf the Ghost

Not sure where in the world Madison is, but it started around Midnight Pacific to 3 am Eastern. It was a late night Twitter thread about an explosive topic. Possibly with some alcohol involved. We've got a decade of examples of people ending careers with this setup. It's also been well over a year since she left? There's legal authorities in BC she could have gone to if she felt slighted about the situation. She's made the terrible decision to cause LMG to have to respond legally.

Would appear we got the "attract negative attention on Twitter, get DDoS'd" bot action. They do this for death threats as well. It's always weird to watch it happen in real time.

While I'd generally agree, she's also an adult and it's been a bit. She's now put a bunch of LMG (current or former) staff into the need to legally defend their reputations.

She's a Canadian citizen. I thought she was American, but her family has just been in AZ for a while. Though not sure where she's currently located. There's proper ways to handle things, even if you've had a horrible experience/illegal actions happen somewhere. Late night (maybe a few drinks in?) Twitter threads are absolutely not it.

Canadian company against a Canadian citizen. They can ask for gag orders. We'll never hear anything.

Since she's still going, I hate to be the person to say it: she really needs to stop, take down the thread and get legal counsel. Because she's basically put LMG into a situation they'll have to sue her. She's making declarative statements about violations under BC law, after Linus' response to the Glassdoor post was "if there's an issue, they need to go to the proper authorities", which she clearly hasn't. She has an axe to grind (clearly) about the time there, but late night Tweeting isn't the place for it. This is how you ruin your career.

The one reddit post from 6 months ago sounded like someone that Interned at the place. They knew somethings, but not really much and didn't stick around.

Late night Tweeting is a great way to end up in lawsuits for a lot of people. There's also the little issue that she uprooted her entire life for a job and her brother died during that time period. She could easily be mis-remembering what Linus said, which could easily have been a kind way of asking if she thought working there was a good idea when she clearly was in a very bad space due to logical reasons. Some of the contract stuff, especially about using LMG as a springboard, actually make perfect business sense for the company. A striving "content creator" would have a very different perspective on the situation than a company that doesn't want to invest in someone to then put out a "I'm quitting LMG" video to launch their own YT career. One of the key problems we've seen with Social Media is that people's memories are very poor on details, and an up swell of emotions can easily mix fact and fiction in ways that aren't intentionally malicious. But it does force other parties to respond as if it is. I just hope Linus doesn't make a TwitLonger.

The thread is still going at the moment, but the problem with the account is going to be the "injure myself to take a day off" makes, while a primary source, an unreliable narrator for the social/context details. Though the contract details are probably correct. (She used to stream on Twitch but not sure if she has in a long time.) (Also, there are Worker's Right departments in BC...) I have wondered if some of LMG's hiring practices might end up causing them problems down the line. (Some years ago) We're about to see if that's true.

The "mental gymnastics" would have come up if we found out someone went through a lot of work to avoid the blame for the auction sale happening. The jokey email I don't think was callous, intentionally. It was clearly the only thing that popped out from what should have been a Red Alert situation.

The worst part of the entire cycle, to me, is the email chunk GN posted in the second video. How you do send that email response to anyone? That's a text message to a decade+ buddy about BS, not a work email about someone's very expensive product that you just found out was sold at an auction. What mental gyrations must have happened where a jokey email, after it clearly took some time to track down what happened to the cooler, happens rather than the new CEO sending an apology and a request to sort out the issue.

I recently had something of a minor blow up with a family member because they weren't realizing the severity of an issue, when it could have gotten really bad if not dealt with. (Thankfully, it actually turned out to be very minor, but the lack of massive flashing Red Lights in their head was a huge issue.) That's basically the biggest issue with the Billet Labs CPU Cooler prototype. The video was bad as a review. I found it funny as "Linus and crew show why you should RTFM" video, though I think I closed it before the conclusion. But everything from there just screams complete and total systematic failures. How'd they lose the 3090 Ti that was sent with it? How does it not end up in a box for shipping, with label but waiting on other stuff? How does the LTX crew, looking for silent auction items, come across it in the first place? LTX made a custom little sign for the item for the auction, how did no one ever check if this might need to be returned? When someone finally responded to Billet on August 10th (was it Adam?), how was either Nick Light or Linus not informed? How did no one in leadership know about this on the 11th? What story was spun to Linus after the video dropped and he had to contact Billet? (Pretty sure Linus doesn't work Mondays, right?) Why is Linus downplay the issue in his post when this is a blatantly obvious problem? I made a comment in this thread a bit before Linus' post saying they needed to contact their lawyers. That Billet is willing to take a check is a solid thing, because LMG had civil and criminal liability with this event. As someone on Reddit pointed out, the cooler was likely sent through customs with no duty, making it non-sellable in Canada and a tax code violation to have done so. Another issue to add on top of that. It goes to reinforce the issues that have been there with LMG for a while. They might have just coalesced into this whirlwind of terrible decision making, but basically everyone in the entire company has some liability for these problems. Some of this stuff is just basic communication.

Bro, give it up. "We accidently sold a R&D cooler worth a lot of money in the charity auction after we said we'd return it" is Escalate to the Top on the Weekend material. Ignoring the fact Billet responded on a Thursday. It wasn't a problem Linus should have had to take care of. That Billet had to go through GN to get any response truly is an issue.

Being a long time LTT watcher and Hardware Unboxed paid member, we've chatted about the Labs. Realistically, GPU & CPU automated testing for Gaming benchmarking isn't viable. However much money you throw at it. If there's a true undercurrent to some of the drama, it's probably that. And it isn't new. Ian Cuttress did it for years at Anandtech, and his results always had a lot of outliers that no one else could ever replicate. (DX9 was notably a mess.) Nothing has changed in that regard. Even throwing 100s of hours at machine vision to verify the results. All you're going to end up with is numbers and someone will have to go back to constantly retest the stuff that breaks/throws out errors. That said, Production Benchmark testing works great in automation. ServerTheHome has years of data that shows that. And a lot of the other stuff (mouse, keyboard, psu) testing all works generally well for longer, automated tasks. But Gaming doesn't. If Labs starts throwing out massive amounts of Gaming Data, it's going to end up driving the "tech youtube scene" to constantly have to both defend their own data and debunk the Labs data. Since few are in the weeds on this stuff, it's going to be lost on most just how much of a disaster the Labs would be at the current "LTT Quality Standard" for testing result, and how much damage it could do to everyone else in the space. GN definitely has a survival motive with the videos, but it's a lot more complicated than most understand.

LMG has had a good relationship with Asus for years. (And there's probably some issues they've had that got glossed over going back a decade we're forgetting.) It's probably why they've hired former employees. But, yeah, there's definitely some perception issues that need to be managed.

The phrase of art is "appearance of impropriety". It's not that you've done anything wrong. It's that a reasonable person will question the nature of your honesty if you're aren't clear about certain "interests" involved. LMG has a couple(?) of former Asus employees, works with them for years, and seems to give them a bit of a pass on things. Some basic disclosures solves a lot of issues. Oddly enough, LMG doesn't have this issue with Intel, because they've roasted them enough over the years that ever "gets" that Intel can take some heat. At least sometimes. Actually, in totality, I think LMG has shown a great amount of "appearance management" with the big 3 consumer producers (Intel, Nvidia and AMD) compared to a lot of the brands that sell their products.

I don't really have much of anything else to add to this topic, but, yeah, 200 pages. It's quite clear the response to the initial video didn't go well.

While the context of the clip should matter, Linus isn't going to live that one down for a while. "Here's our $10,000 testing machine" and "Here's our $200,000 signal testing lab" stuff, and a couple of hundred to at least test something as it's intended to be used comes off as woefully out of touch. While it's likely the functional conclusion wouldn't change (product is probably too custom for a sustainable business but cool as a 1-off), it'd be like testing a super car (even a really, really prickly one) and not at least getting a proper lap in with it. Even if it blows up afterwards. "Thing does a thing" and you don't technically see if it does "the thing". That's just cruising for very negative feedback.

Company gets involved in "drama". Issues statement. Community has worse reaction after response. Statement has thus failed. Fairly basic logic, assuming you aren't a bot.

While they haven't done in much over the last couple of years, the "Handy Tech under $100" is a great series. And LTT goes out of its way to explain where everything came from since they're endorsing the utility of products. It's pretty obvious most can understand why they would disclose all of that. As LMG brings the Labs online, all of those industry connections now "shade" results if they aren't declaimed and managed. GN is rightly pointing out what one part of LMG clearly understands something while another part is clearly not being mindful of the exact same reality. (Also, the PSU video with all of the errors was really bad. They basically made the same mistakes that the PSU Tier List has to go out of its way to attempt to prevent for others because of the random naming issues with PSUs.) You can always give advice/insight into a situation when you aren't a completely neutral observer, but the only way it doesn't look like manipulation is if you explain your bias/interests and explain your reasoning. This allows the neutral parties to judge the veracity of your statements and make their own decision. Which, again, is going to matter for the Labs. Also, one subtle point from the video, which did come across a bit like salt from GN Steve, but it really does matter: the fact that LMG can in situ replace a YT video is both very potent/useful and really raises big ethical concerns when used. It's one of those situations where it really needs to be noted somewhere and what was changed.

Well, I think we can officially say Linus response failed, as we approach 200 pages. Inter-related, but I know Linus has ADD. Has he been on uppers (legal or not) to attempt to wrangle stuff in? His combativeness shift over about the last year (since we've been getting video clips of it) reminds me a bit too much of a friend that had issues with ADD meds. They were mostly fine, but way over responded to anything they thought my be criticism. (It was really annoying, which is what helped us to convince them to change meds.) It was like their self-defensive instincts were on red alert at all times. Also related, it's clear they actually need more staff in the Shooting / Writing side. They're timelines are getting to compressed and they need a larger buffer space.

They misplaced the 3090 Ti that was went by Billet. The "review" actually gets worse the more information we get. They could have canceled the shoot until they were at least prepared.

The actual team that would have known about the issue with the CPU Cooler directly works with Linus on a regular basis. It was a Teams message away. Though Linus really didn't need to be contacted.

Selling a R&D piece at an auction that was supposed to have been returned (and apparently only now finding their 3090 Ti) is a problem so massive you should be calling senior staff in over the weekend. Which ignores the fact that Billet responded during business hours on a Thursday. While resolving the issue might have taken time, the fact that an LMG employee didn't stop and escalated it all the way up isn't just a massive failure. It sounds like complete malfunction of internal communication. Also, the fact Linus didn't find out about it until Monday is an indictment on its own. I like Linus and LMG (note how long I've been here). But don't defend catastrophic personal and systematic incompetence.

It's called an Ambush Piece, though nearly all of GN's first video is actually observations and commentary on publicly posted material. You don't call a company for comment on their Financial Reports when you're just responding to them. The issue would be around Billet Labs. However, it took Billet getting a hold of GN to get anything done. Which really means it would have required GN Steve to contact Linus. <--- This is the massive dysfunction. While GN Steve has definitely had his own "bee in the bonnet" moments and gotten really worked up about minor things (because no one is perfect), resolving the Billet Labs situation changes very little about the video. While Linus may think that it's only happened once in 10 years, the reality is a malfunction that bad requires a massive analysis of their internal systems. They should be pleased that Billet is just willing to take a check. LMG, the company, committed a crime (via negligence) under local law. At the same time, Linus wants to bring in Labs to do far more testing of manufacturer claims. Which means significant errors in their work is a massive problem. It's pretty obvious GN Steve has been getting feed back from industry contacts about the issues around LMG. This wasn't a hit piece. This was a combination of Intervention and Warning for future disasters if the ship isn't patched up.