Walt J. Rimmer

I don’t really know how you can threaten someone when you need them more than they need you.

If you leave town, where are you going to go? The city doesn’t need you. If you’re not making what you want/need here, go ahead, leave, the city won’t be hurt by it. You will, though. Because you’ll have to pack up your business, set it up somewhere else, and hope that they do the things you want them to. It’ll be expensive for you, won’t mean a thing to the city.

So how is it a threat?

If Chicken can be a language, that can be a language!

And I don’t mean the actually useful programming language. I mean the esolang one where the only valid character is Chicken.

OK. I think I see more where you’re coming from now. I would say, though, that if the management weren’t rushing production and were better, well, managers, problems like that would be less likely to happen. It’s not that it would never happen, but from what we’ve seen of LTT over the years, this isn’t an isolated incident. While I like the on-screen personalities of people in their logistics department, the truth is that it’s been a mess and has been allowed to continue being a mess. As CEO and owner, ultimately that blame falls on Linus, but it also falls on the head of logistics and other management positions. You could chalk it up to one innocent mistake made by one employee, but it’s at least three mistakes compounding on top of each other which are part of a larger system of mismanagement.

I feel like you think I think that the person who put the block on the table at LTX should be the one being called out. I’m talking about Linus taking responsibility for the toxic management culture at the company, for the management and executives to acknowledge that their treatment of their employees is problematic, and accepting that they are doing things wrong and it needs to change. I’m not talking about a scapegoat and I don’t know where you’re getting the idea that I am.

I’m going to assume most of the stuff about that apology was done in private, where things can be properly be talked about.

Nope. Public. He discussed it with his victim first just how much she was comfortable with him sharing publically, and then he shared everything that she was comfortable with him sharing all publically.

Basic summary which will miss a lot of context because it looks like this is all really a few years coming:

(For ease of flow, I will be using quotation marks in much of this comment, but these are paraphrasing, not direct quotes.)

A YouTube channel called Gamer’s Nexus (GN) put out a video talking about Linus Tech Tips (LTT/LMG) and how they have, through incompetence, negligence, or malice, been putting out bunk data and doing really bad hardware reviews at least in the past year, and some guessing of why it happened. In that video, GN also addressed a controversy over Billet Labs, a relatively new company that is trying to build water blocks for custom water loops. LTT did a video with their prototype some time back, in which they lost the 3090Ti that was sent with the block, Linus decided to instead use it on the 4090 someone grabbed by accident, complained that the water block didn’t work, and went on to say it’s an overly expensive gimmick that didn’t work and no one should ever buy it despite not testing it on the hardware that it was made for. At the time, Linus was called out for this and dismissed criticism saying, “Even if the block had done better on the proper hardware, it was impossible it could have improved,” and, “None of it changes the conclusion that no one should ever buy it.” Billet Labs asked for their prototype (and GPU) back, and LMG said they would send it back. They asked for it back again, were told it would be shipped soon. Then LMG auctioned the block off to the public at the Linus Tech Expo (LTX).

In response to the GN video, Linus Sebastion, owner, founder, and Chief Visionary Officer of LMG, posted on the LTT forums several things such as, “The Gamer’s Nexus video was journalistic dishonest because they didn’t contact us before releasing the video. If they had, they would have gotten important context such as how we didn’t sell the water block, we auctioned it off for charity. And we’ve already come to an agreement with Billet Labs to reimburse them for the block.” The rest of the post went on to deflect blame and never really address the crux of GN’s video which was mostly about the bad data LMG has been putting out in their videos, seemingly caused by an untenable release schedule. GN responded in their weekly news video calling out Linus’ response for gaslighting, lying, and more. He also contacted Billet Labs and found out that they had not come to an agreement for reimbursement, and in fact that since the water block had been auctioned off that they only heard back from LMG about two hours AFTER GN’s first video had been released.

After that, people on Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, and other social media started looking back at previous accusations against LTT, LMG, Linus Sebastion, and other related entities and saw a long pattern of bad behavior that had mostly been dismissed in the past. A former employee, Madison Reeve, posted a long series of posts on X (Twitter) detailing a toxic work environment mostly consisting of toxic management treating employees like they should be happy to work there when they have a nearly impossible task of getting a tremendous amount of content out at an accelerated rate for a barely livable wage for the city that they’re in. But on top of that experience that she said was shared with many other employees, she as a woman also faced a lot of misogyny and even some sexual harassment, eventually culminating in her self-harming quite seriously simply in the hopes that she wouldn’t get in trouble for taking a day off.

Since Madison’s allegations, LTT made an apology video which did not really address the sexual harassment allegations or even the toxic workplace stuff. What it did have, however, were a couple of humorous seques to their sponsors, some bloopers, LTT merch, a reminder to visit the LTT store, and Linus again trying to deflect the blame away from himself. In my opinion, the apology comes off worse than tone deaf, it comes off as downright insulting even if you pretend that they didn’t know about the Madison Reeves accusations before making it. Now, finally, they have gotten Linus to potentially shut the fuck up like he probably should have from the start and the recently-hired new CEO is stepping in to say, “I’m appalled at these accusations, we’re going to not only conduct our own review but also hire someone to review us.” Keep in mind, however, this was someone who, when it was announced that they’d hired him, Linus said on the WAN Show that he’d been a shadow-CEO working at the company for six months to make sure that he fit with the corporate culture and got along with management. Meaning that he knew about their toxic management before he formally accepted the job.

To some extent, I agree. But while you’ll never craft a perfect response and some people will always call your response, “Not enough,” or, “Disengenous,” there are better and worse ways to do it. Dan Harmon sexually harassed a coworker, created a toxic work environment, and harmed one of his writer’s careers. When that started to come out, he talked to her first, then he laid all the cards on the table, took full responsibility, and talked about how he’s trying, not always succeeding, but trying to improve and not do the same things again. It’s impossible to ever say that a simple apology is enough, but even the person he hurt said that his was the kind of apology that people should strive for. It was brutal, honest, and it didn’t shy away from anything. He admitted fault and talked about the very real and non-idealized path forward.

LMG’s response… Was horrible. Even if the apology was only for the bad data stuff, it felt like one of his joke videos like the April Fool’s Day slave farm video, in tone. Sponsor segues, jokes, merch promotions, things like that. I admit that maybe a little humor could be justified because some people make jokes when they’re stressed out, I do that! My mom was damn near on her deathbed a few years back, barely made it out of that alive, and between the sobs, I cracked jokes because that’s how I handle things, so I fucking get that! But that was a scripted video that was supposed to be their apology to the fans, and it felt like an insult. They didn’t feel like they were taking the accusations seriously, it didn’t feel like they were taking responsibility for the problems, and it didn’t feel like they were serious about making changes going forward. It felt like a hollow, “This will help us ride out the storm,” response.

So, I agree with you that even if they’d done the best apology video they possibly could have, people would have still criticized them for it. You’re right. There’s no way around that. But it doesn’t change that that’s not what they did. They put out that apology video instead. And that was just an insult.

So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.

I don’t think it’s that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn’t know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer’s Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he’d have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn’t until he made that first bad response and Gamer’s Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.

People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren’t safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they’ll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that’s just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren’t willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.

The LTT scandal won’t be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It’s one relatively small company. But my point is that it’s the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, “Just hating,” or, “Don’t understand what they’re talking about!” The Gamer’s Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn’t being fair to them either. That created an opening.

Not actually what I meant. I would have no idea if he mixed personal money and business money directly, but as the co-owner of the business with his wife, and last I knew they were the only owners but I’m not actually certain about that, they could have allowed for the company to keep a better safety net and reduced their own take-home as owners even while keeping their compensation as CEO and CFO. Instead, they made a lot of large purchases, I’m not sure which allocation they took this stuff from because a lot of it was their own but a lot of it also became content for the channel so I have no idea if it was personal or company money they spent, while claiming that the company was in a debt that would take years to see any return on much less profit. It seemed a little tone-deaf to be moving from a small mansion to a “real” mansion while also complaining that the company they owned and at the time were CEO and CFO of was taking on dangerous levels of debt.

Now, I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have a salary or that he shouldn’t be able to spend his own money. But he’s talked before about how his finances and the company’s profits are closely linked as the owner of LMG. He has said, “Any extra profit that we have as a company goes in my pocket,” when trying to explain how he thought stepping down as CEO and hiring someone else would create less incentive to run the company for maximum profitability. That has… It’s own problems that tie in with his wanting to keep employees hourly and not salary and a bunch of other things, but none of that was my point or the point of this comment. The truth is that we don’t know how he runs his business in great detail or how the financials are handled. But at the very least, it was not a good look even at the time before this most recent controversy.

Well, then it’s a good thing that he didn’t also blow a bunch of money on a mansion, a “true” mansion, and then a badminton court. That would have been a real waste of money that could have gone to a safety net for the company instead, so, you know, it’s great that he didn’t do anything like that.

I like what Linus states

I’ve only watched LMG content for a few months, but this out-of-context snippet sums up my feelings on the company.

Sebastian says that it’s a consumer-first, employee-second, profit-third company. But his actions don’t always support that.

Sebastian says that he doesn’t believe anyone should ever be a “fan” of anything because it’s irrational. But then he turns around and dismisses anyone who doesn’t show his brand absolute loyalty.

Sebastian says a lot of shit which sounds absolutely amazing if you can assume it’s true. And the problem is that you can’t assume that the company line is true coming from any company. You can just watch their business practices and make the best judgment on if the company seems honest. And Linus Sebastian, who effectively is the company as the owner and face of it, has increasingly come off as dishonest. It makes it damn near impossible to trust any of the good things he says that he does.

Getting a second OS on that drive is doable, but I mean, I find it a headache sometimes, not sure about other people. But if you’ve got a spare flash drive, you can live boot into some free distro to run some tests.

But, sorry, no idea what the root cause of it might be. Last time I saw something like this was when I had a Windows 8 laptop that got an update to Windows 10 and I got hit with a rare bug that apparently only occurred in some Windows 8 laptops that updated to Windows 10 where my boot drive (an HDD) would be constantly at 100% read/write without actually reading or writing anything. But it was sure trying to. There were about seven potential solutions for that and none of them worked for me. I ended up just mostly ditching the laptop as it had other issues as well, like a failing WiFi adapter somehow.

Huh… For troubleshooting, would you be able to boot into something other than Windows and see if the problem persists?

I’m not a 16:10 zealot, but I can understand why some people like it. Firstly, no, it’s not inconvenient to have black bars along the top and bottom of media. I don’t see why it would be. That used to be the most common experience for watching widescreen media, and it still is the experience with some ultra-wide screen media for anyone without an ultra-wide screen display. I don’t see anything that would be inconvenient about it and can even see the convenience if you, say, need to pull up a status bar on the top or bottom and don’t want it to obstruct the media playing.

But the biggest argument I’ve heard is for people using the display at least partially as a workstation. A lot of UIs on production software are cramped for space, trying to give you as many tools as you need on screen at once. Yes, these are somewhat customizable, but screen real estate can be critical in some of these. I never thought about it until someone mentioned 16:10 and how it can help, but there are a lot more times when I could have really used just a little more vertical space to make things more convenient than horizontal. The example that really made me think about looking at 16:10 the next time I get a monitor is that I do video editing sometimes, and they mentioned that a 16:10 will give you an extra channel or two to work on compared to a 16:9 display.

Does that mean 16:10 is better? Not inherently. It’s going to be better for some people. Maybe for most people. But not everyone is going to need it, not everyone is going to use it, and not everyone is going to even want it. I grew up with SD TVs watching VHS tapes with big black bars on the top and bottom because I wanted to see the whole movie and not a pan-and-scanned half-frame re-edit, so I don’t see any problem with having black bars on the top and bottom of my screen. That’s just normal. But you kind of called it an inconvenience, so to you it’s bound to be weird. So for you, maybe a 16:9 is better than a 16:10 could ever be because it fits your use case better, fits your tastes better.

I disagree with the other user that you HAVE to get DDR5. You probably don’t. It really depends on what you want your computer to do and your budget. But it is true that to upgrade your CPU you will probably have to upgrade your motherboard and likely your PSU. If you’ve ever been riding the line of hitting the max wattage on your power supply, you will need a new PSU. This is a problem that I ran into when I looked to upgrade my computer because modern CPUs tend to have a lot of power-suck potential.

The real question you should be asking is why you want to upgrade and what you’re going to use that upgrade for. After that, you can start looking at your budget and trying to figure out what you’re going to buy. If you want to stick with older generations or sockets like you have, you’re also going to have to keep in mind that you’ll likely be buying used as almost no one keeps new old stock of these things. That comes with a sharp drop in price, which is great especially since it often provides the best dollar-to-power ratio. But it comes with drawbacks like the risk of faulty parts and no warranty.

If you insist on sticking with the LGA-1151 motherboard that you have, do know its limitations in excess of which CPUs are compatible with it. It can’t run DD5, but you probably don’t need it to. DDR5 is still pretty young and pretty expensive. Its raw clock speed is impressive, but you’re going to be getting worse timings unless you make some sacrifices. And a lot of users won’t be taking advantage of that extra speed anyway. Do know if it can handle M.2 chips because if you ever want to upgrade storage, they’re getting to be the best deals around with SATA SSDs often having similar longevity, similar capacity, and sometimes even similar prices, but far lower speeds. And hard drives are becoming less and less reasonable unless you NEED a lot of relatively cheap, slow storage right now like for a NAS. Even then, SSD NAS setups are becoming more reasonable and already are more reliable. That isn’t important to everyone, but it’s something to keep in mind.

If you want to stick with your LGA-1151, I’m not sure which revision your board/socket is, you can look that up, but that means you’re dealing with your same sixth-generation CPU’s siblings or their seventh-generation cousins. It’s possible that your board might support eighth-generation, but I doubt it as the socket went through a minor revision, and the new one often only supported eighth-generation. This really limits your ability to upgrade. It’s likely that if your budget is tight you’ll want to upgrade to 10th- or 11th-generation CPUs if you’re sticking with Intel or look at some AMD CPUs and see what your options are in your budget range. You might even be able to get a 12th-generation build done for a reasonable price. I recently did a 13th-generation build for myself and kind of regret it. The price-to-performance difference between 12 and 13 is not great and the most recent components have been seeing a higher failure rate, possibly due to changes brought on by the pandemic.

All this can get overwhelming, I know, I’ve been there. And it takes some time for all the information to start sinking in and making sense. But in truth, it all comes down to asking that initial question: Why do I want to upgrade? If you want to upgrade just to play games, well, firstly, what kind of games? Most games are not going to bottleneck at the CPU, even with one as old as yours, though there are some CPU-intensive titles and genres. If you want it to be a slightly better but not state-of-the-art workstation, what kind of work is it going to be doing? Programmers and accountants are going to want beefy CPUs to process lots of data (more and faster RAM isn’t a bad idea for either of them) whereas video editors and graphic designers are probably going to want mid-tier ones and spend the extra on a better GPU and RAM. And a million other use cases. It can be hard, especially if you’re just starting out, to actually answer these questions honestly. But I know from experience that if you don’t take the time to, you will end up with buyer’s regret. I won’t be able to answer a lot of your questions, but if you want to ask me anything more, feel free to.