Blade404

I don't know if the monitor can give you permanent eye damage but this post has given me permanent brain damage.

Why the outrage?

The amount of people creating accounts or burner accounts to not folly their mains to say "here is my opinion" to then add nothing of value is crazy. I stick by what I said before. People on both sides appear to be misinterpreting what is meant by each others wording and meanings.

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.

Thanks for the concern everyone. We are still in recovery mode over here and working with YouTube to get everything restored. Will hopefully have a video (or at least an update on WAN Show) to share with you all ASAP, but we want to make sure we get the details right since smaller channels may rely on our experience to help harden their own security.

This is in the hope it'll help other international customers of LTT store. Please note that this is not a complaint directed at LTT. Although there is an aspect to this storey which involves a mistake by LTT, upon contacting them, it was instantly resolved. In fact, I wasn't even aware of LTT's mistake until they informed me of it and resolved it. This is more to illustrate that you may receive a bill from a third party for customs charges, and if you do, you should have a close look at that bill. Just for the record, I wish to state that I am just an average consumer and have no expertise when it comes to importing/exporting and taxes.
 
Recently, I purchased a few items from LTT store with a combined value of USD 229.98. I live in Northern Ireland, and in this case UK import customs apply. On top of the 229.98, LTT charged me for shipping and for VAT. As it turns out, the UK policies on imports mean that for shipments with a value of over GBP 135.00, which was the case here, the VAT needs to be paid in the UK instead of in Canada. This is why, when I contacted LTT, they recognized the mistake, and refunded those charges to me.
 
The reason I contacted support in the first place, was because I received a letter from the courier Parcelforce requesting me to pay a bill of GBP 69.49 (close but not "nice") in order for them to deliver the parcel to me. This bill consisted of the following charges.
 
Customs Duty - GBP 11.24 Excise Duty - GBP 0.00 Import VAT - GBP 46.25 Other - GBP 0.00 Clearance Fee - GBP 12.00 Total - GBP 69.49   Another thing to note is that this letter referenced the country of origin as Germany, instead of Canada. I found this rather peculiar.   I paid the bill in order to receive the parcel, but upon receiving it, I found documentation in the form of a Customs Declaration CN 23. This documentation clearly stated the country of origin to be Canada and the total value of the items to be USD 229.98. I took some time to visit the HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs) website in order to try to figure out what charges would be appropriate for the items I had purchased. I soon found that due to a trade agreement between Canada and the UK, the tariff for customs duty on these items should be 0.00%. Aside from this, I calculated the 20% VAT which is applicable in the UK for these items to be USD 46.00, which at the current exchange rate corresponds to a value of approximately GBP 33.92. It seems like someone at Parcelforce just entered the USD amount into their system as if it were a GBP amount.   As a result from my findings, I have contacted the courier Parcelforce to claim back the approximate amount of GBP 23.57 which I had been overcharged for customs duties and VAT.   So, to sum things up in short for you, if you find yourself getting slapped with an extra bill for your LTT purchase, double-check the following.   Are the VAT charges by LTT appropriate for that particular order? Are the charges for customs duties applicable for the trade between Canada and your country for that type of items and their value? Are any VAT charges levied in name of the country you live in appropriate and correctly calculated?   Just wanted to leave this here in the hope that it might help someone else. I'll certainly be having a closer look at any future customs charges I might receive.    

here are some information that was provided to me by Nick Light on twitter
https://www.lttstore.com/pages/statement-on-taxes-in-europe-uk-and-norway
 
my understainding is that for order more that 150€ shoppify should not charge the VAT for order to the EU but it's not working
for order less that 150€ it should charge the tax but then the importing services should not but some do anyway because they don't manage the new IOSS correctly

I can't believe is been 14 years since I last did any Folding.. ?
 
Back then it took me months and the use of several PCs to get to 562k points.. now my GPU alone can do that in a day..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

This has to be one of the scariest technology reads in a while.. ?
 
The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It - nytimes
 
 
The potential for mis-use here is too huge for me to even begin to contemplate.. its the stuff that should be left as a Hollywood movie plot, not in the hands of a Startup..

I can't believe is been 14 years since I last did any Folding.. ?
 
Back then it took me months and the use of several PCs to get to 562k points.. now my GPU alone can do that in a day..

I can't believe is been 14 years since I last did any Folding.. ?
 
Back then it took me months and the use of several PCs to get to 562k points.. now my GPU alone can do that in a day..

I trundle about in either of these when I have to leave the comfort of my WiFi... BMW M135i and a M240i ?

I trundle about in either of these when I have to leave the comfort of my WiFi... BMW M135i and a M240i ?

I trundle about in either of these when I have to leave the comfort of my WiFi... BMW M135i and a M240i ?

At the same time a lot of people can, we have a lot of professionals that lurk here on the forums, it's not all teenage weebs like we like to joke about