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Andrei Chiffa

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  1. Ok people, you were all right and I guess I got a bit carried away with the true scale of the drama and owe you an apology.
  2. Most of us who spotted them left comments under videos, which sometimes were buried, sometimes rose to the top. That's a proper journalistic investigation - and you might be giving GN ideas if he decides to keep on going. For now it's a highly likely mechanism chain with anecdotal supply. His takes on Apple's hardware ecosystem closedness without ever accounting for the software side of the things (8 years of patches and support vs ~0, maybe 2 if you are lucky), or the market fragmentation making it impossible to find parts (replaced two batteries in iPhones and Apple watch, could not find parts for any Android my parents owned after even 2 years), definitely led to perverse incentives for both Android phone manufacturers and led consumers buy phones that became e-waste 2-3 times faster than if they were "mindless Apple sheep".
  3. Vice and opportunistic troll has. The problem with Linus/GN/Madison is that all three of them has a lot of hardcore fans that have nothing else going in their life and value integrity and being generally nice to people above all else (comes with having been a bullied nerd kid I guess). They are not stopping, ever, and there are enough of them to keep downvoting his videos and squatting comments/reddit/twitter/... until things are set right. The problem with an extremely loyal fanbase, is that when they turn on you, they will hound you.
  4. Tbh, he should have found a C<X>O for each of his sub-branches and trusted them to do a good job instead of personally reviewing every single draft and video before release. He did it for Mac Address, and it was arguably the best decision he ever made wrt covering Apple products, because his own takes on anything Apple-related are completely clueless. Not that his takes on other topics were highly informed (Twitter, RTX 4090 pricing, unionization, ...). Had he the cover of the other C<X>O, he would have had the excuse of "that's my opinion, but realistically <name> would not allow me to do it if it's not a good idea, in the same way he did it with Yvonne on a WAN show when it came to the Creators Warehouse and Labs investments. I have no idea if Terren Tong was the right person to become the CEO of the LMG, but someone like him was loooooong overdue.
  5. No, but this has no importance on the internet celebrity wars. Every single of LTTs videos will be downvoted into oblivion and brands sponsoring them - receive a ton of hate, until something drastic is done about the situation. Rabid Linus vs reasonable Luke is a running joke, but realistically something just as drastic as a swap might be needed in the short term for a full recovery.
  6. They weren't expecting to have to deal with Madison going public or leak of internal recordings confirming it. So one week was only to deal with GN allegation and damage control over Linus' response on forums here. Madison's allegation ins themselves were pretty bad, but the additional sex joke innuendos in the excuse video managed to not only add fuel to the fire, but made a number of long-term LTT supporters and Linus fans to pull out their pitchforks. At this point they have to first address this, or they will have all their videos downvoted into oblivion and no one left willing to sponsor their videos in the future. And that probably will need more time and something more drastic than a single week moratorium. Probably something like Linus going on an executive leave and Luke taking over the CVO role in the interim for at least a couple of months.
  7. Had the same question yesterday, so let me re-link again the excellent @McGherkin's summary
  8. Tbh I don't think that such an environment should be accepted in any workplace (but I am also a European), but IMHO the problem of the LMG is that they build their image specifically as the type of people who would not be doing it. Given the amount of shit Linus gave to other companies that did not do their work properly (starting with cancelling tours and booth visits stories on WAN all the way to Anker), fans listened to LTT's advice and used their guidelines to drive major purchases. GN's video basically suggests that in some areas they don't clear the bar they set for other companies they set, and Linus' initial response pretty much confirmed all of it, which understandably made a lot of fans with a Manichean vision of the world take LTT off the "Good little guy" list and put them on the "Evil large corporation" one. So basically GN video by itself could have been a "woopsie, thanks Steve for expressing your concerns and let us look into it and get back to you", followed up with a "yeah, we fucked up with the waterblock and the mouse; here is why it happened, here is how we are ensuring it will never happen again, and how we are making it up to companies that got hurt in the process", leading to a teary redemption and even more Linus fandom; but instead became a spiraling disaster that cannot be blamed on anyone but Linus because of his knee-jerk reaction. However at this stage it is much more about Madison, because LTT does have a reputation for a bro culture and when Madison left, Max (only other strong character young female public-facing employee before her) suggested that she left for the same reasons as Madison. As far as LTT reputation goes, it's hard to do worse.
  9. Had the same question @McGherkin did an excellent write-up in response:
  10. In other news, Reddit top page is 8 posts about LTT out of top 10. Same ratio going down into the top 40. I guess LTT finally made it on other platforms, but I doubt they will have a lot of sponsors remaining after this incident.
  11. It's an excellent summary with some great sense of humor - thanks! Overall, to me it looks like LTT is going down the way of TechCrunch and Linus is going down the way of Michael Arrington, for exactly the same reasons. I do hope that they'll be able to stop, but I did leave my fair share of comments going in the same direction as GN under Linus' videos over the last year and am not surprised by the allegations from Madison (Max made the same when she quit). Years ago (as in 2015-2016) Linus made a comment on WAN show about the "deplorables" being his core audience. I don't think he is wrong - in that tech is probably a way to avoid them gravitating towards extreme right and manosphere - but that also probably needs to be articulated to female employees who will attract their attention, as well as fans that graduated to employees from that community; and made excessively clear internally on the HR-policies-that-cannot-be-overridden-by-Linus upfront for everyone joining.
  12. Ok, for those of us living under a rock, what exactly happened that needed that video? Like jokes have been increasingly tasteless and some takes - rather dumb over the last year or two - but what triggered the release of that video specifically? And why it had no context to it?
  13. Thanks, but I know my model number and have already ordered replacement for it. What I am interested in now are reputable manufacturers who would have batteries that would also last 3.5 years instead of 1.5.
  14. I have a lovely Dell Inspiron 15 Gaming that is still going strong after > 5 years. The only part that truly gave up after all that time is the battery, which I replaced back in late 2021, after 3.5 years of use, after it could not hold an hour of document editing work. The replacement one I got then (K KUYER) breathed a new life into it, but it is now getting to the same threshold after only 1.5-ish years, looking that the replacement part was not as good as the original. Is there anywhere a list of quality replacement batteries manufactures, to know which batteries would last; to minimize e-waste generation?
  15. Thanks for taking the time to respond, Riley! While I absolutely agree that no corporation is to be "trusted" on their word (and that's why I am looking forwards to more data coming out of LTT labs), some companies do a better job at aligning their actions with their statements. Some companies do extremely well. Currently, among large corporations, it's Hugging Face putting their money where their mouth is; but before Musk Twitter AI/ML safety team, for all the flack they were getting, were doing a pretty good job and not only letting external researchers look at their data for free, but also acting on the reports they were receiving. While OpenAI has it's issues, they do have team that works on negative impacts of LLMs and that has impact into what goes into production. For all the jokes the "we are not releasing GPT-2 due to the risk of misinformation" got in 2019, retrospectively, they were not wrong. This continues to this day - GPT-4 paper contained 50 pages of description of critical failure modes and what they did to mitigate it; and they are accepting external collaborators who want to break their products and publish their findings, after OpenAI patches systems in production. Unfortunately Google until now has shown a callous disregard for ethics and safety of AI/ML. Google search top blurb has been broken for years in dangerous ways, and nothing was done to mitigate even widely reported errors. YouTube algorithm has been hijacked without them noticing or doing anything about it until it grew into a major scandal with legal ramifications (ElsaGate/DistrubedElsa). If we focus just on recent LLM developments, the LaMDA paper (which is the architecture behind BARD) only has 1.5 pages on safety, with 0 evaluation examples or results provided. Sparrow - the next iteration of conversational search LLM Verge recently confirmed they were working - does barely better, by bumping it to 3.5 pages and showing some experimental results. To the best of my knowledge, no one external is let anywhere near their production models or algorithms, nor do they act on reports based on user interfaces (but I think you noticed it already with spam in Youtube comments).
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