Linus Gabriel Sebastian & Linus Media Group / Linus Tech Tips - Narcissistic corporate shill YouTuber driving his media empire into the ground. KILL COUNT: 2

[AnOminous]

And then I reminded myself of Linus having like over 100 people in his company that does way fucking less than Roman does by himself.

How the fuck does it take 100+ people to not know anything about technology?

 

[Kees H]

For someone called JerryRigEverything he sure as shit doesn't do any jerry rigging. Also shills battery powered portable heat pumps. Which is such a dumb concept I don't even know where to start.

I have only seen this complete and utter nigger pop up in my YouTube recommendations and I just assumed this nigger was named Jerry, because I only saw him posting dumb Chinese shit reviews. Never realised that he might have thought to make a reference to "jerry rigging" with the dumb chinesium garbage reviews.

 

[TheDataHorder]

These are old Xyratex NetApp systems with Filer head units. They're 2010-2012 tech. They shouldn't be used in prod because they're ancient and finnicky. Even putting modern hard drives in them, they're 6 Gbps SAS and employ hardware RAID which low level formats the drives to nonstandard sector sizes like 520 bytes to add a per-sector CRC. Normal hard drives are formatted as 512 bytes or 4KBytes (for AF drives). Off shelf SAS or SATA drives may not have firmware that's compatible with NetApp units.

They're extremely redundant. The raw capacity is 57.6TB, but the usable capacity is probably as low as 20 depending how they're configured, since they were set up as RAID 10 cutting capacity in half. Then the overhead of hot spares, formatted capacity discrepancy, CRC and more.

LMG doesn't need a system like this for most of their office employees and HR, and the content creators who could benefit from this are dealing with gigantic video and graphics files which require way more disk space and IOPs, so local storage and NAS works better for their needs. They'd need to be occupying two or three floors of an office building before SAN would outperform individual local storage and NAS. iSCSI is also finnicky under Windows in my experience.

LMG has YouTube and Shopify handling the backend of video distribution or payment integration for their company that a SAN would be practical for. They're not processing their own transactions. They probably aren't virtualizing apps internally. They may never need a SAN before they reach 1000 or more employees.

if linus was running hundreds of vms then a SAN would make sense, at that point you need that kind of storage for redundancy and uptime.
but he isn't, hes going on about network booting the editor's workstations and storing their projects.
does he know how slow network booting is? you use network booting for POS and thin clients since the size of their os isnt more then 100mb at worst since all they do is one thing.
booting and using at best a 32gb sized windows 11 partition will be unbelievably slow and will cause more problems then it solves.
and that's if he needs it, the current setup he has now is adequate for the business's needs (the only thing it does needs is a full time compatent IT admin)
i want an actual IT administrator to do a video reacting to their server videos just so i can see the dude tear him a new one.

 

[Susanna]

if linus was running hundreds of vms then a SAN would make sense, at that point you need that kind of storage for redundancy and uptime.
but he isn't, hes going on about network booting the editor's workstations and storing their projects.
does he know how slow network booting is? you use network booting for POS and thin clients since the size of their os isnt more then 100mb at worst since all they do is one thing.
booting and using at best a 32gb sized windows 11 partition will be unbelievably slow and will cause more problems then it solves.
and that's if he needs it, the current setup he has now is adequate for the business's needs (the only thing it does needs is a full time compatent IT admin)
i want an actual IT administrator to do a video reacting to their server videos just so i can see the dude tear him a new one.

Wendell of Level1Techs is too nice to really "tear Linus a new one", but he does have the experience. He did a talk with Allan Jude, a famous freeBSD developer who works a lot with ZFS, and while neither one says it outright, they still make it abundantly clear how much of an idiot Linus is, how inadequate his setup was, and how much work it was to recover data Linus didn't even care about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYAezxwIxUw

 

[Kheapathic]

One thing Linus could do is not have permanent design people on staff. Get a schedule or special item in mind, find a designer and work something out. Steve and Jay have small crews and still manage to do shirts, mats, etc. Once you have a design, all you need is someone to produce said item; the designer is done. Unless you're Macy's or something, you don't need these people on staff.

 

[Miller]

Wendell of Level1Techs is too nice to really "tear Linus a new one", but he does have the experience. He did a talk with Allan Jude, a famous freeBSD developer who works a lot with ZFS, and while neither one says it outright, they still make it abundantly clear how much of an idiot Linus is, how inadequate his setup was, and how much work it was to recover data Linus didn't even care about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYAezxwIxUw

There's another Wendell video that was pretty good, the one where he went to GN to update their server. It was also fascinating to see the difference between Steve (GN) and Linus on the way they use their server. For Steve, he clearly said that he doesn't need to save all raw videos because to him what has been published is the final cut, unlike Linus who totally needs to be able to access to that raw 4K video from 5 years ago RIGHT NOW.

 

[Slav Power]

There's another Wendell video that was pretty good, the one where he went to GN to update their server. It was also fascinating to see the difference between Steve (GN) and Linus on the way they use their server. For Steve, he clearly said that he doesn't need to save all raw videos because to him what has been published is the final cut, unlike Linus who totally needs to be able to access to that raw 4K video from 5 years ago RIGHT NOW.

The one that had the skit where they tried to summon Wendell through a ritual to help with their storage issues, and they've almost summoned Linus, where Steve reacted "NO NOT HIM"?

 

[WelperHelper99]

There's another Wendell video that was pretty good, the one where he went to GN to update their server. It was also fascinating to see the difference between Steve (GN) and Linus on the way they use their server. For Steve, he clearly said that he doesn't need to save all raw videos because to him what has been published is the final cut, unlike Linus who totally needs to be able to access to that raw 4K video from 5 years ago RIGHT NOW.

Literally the server problem could be solved by tape storage, or even just saving shit to Blu Ray's, which are scratch resistant and have a long lifespan

 

[Soggy paper straw]

One thing Linus could do is not have permanent design people on staff. Get a schedule or special item in mind, find a designer and work something out. Steve and Jay have small crews and still manage to do shirts, mats, etc. Once you have a design, all you need is someone to produce said item; the designer is done. Unless you're Macy's or something, you don't need these people on staff.

I can almost understand 1-2 designers. What I am confused by is that "size specialist" and TWO social media people. They should all know about social media, they are a social media company.. they even have what I think is an SM analyst - so those two social media managers do what? Write the couple of tweets they post?
LTT hosts have a parasocial relation with their viewers. People want Linus or the other hosts to write the tweets and interact with them, not Random-Madison-Replacement-Dude.

---

This is a very boring finding, but here it is.

This is from an AMA, don't even know if I or someone else posted it already. Anyway, it does not add a lot of info. He had a sad childhood, divorced parents, blah blah blah, poor victim Anthony.

Spoiler: [From Reddit LTT AMA - Divorce and childhood]

I'm not really supposed to be part of this AMA, but I kind of want to jump in on the depression thing while I'm waiting for some stuff to install because it's something that I think is important, and something I've dealt with for basically half my life. It's a unique kind of hell when you're your own worst enemy, and you project all of those negative thoughts and emotions onto everyone else as though they feel the same way about you that you do.

For me, I don't know if I can pinpoint a singular issue; I've never had high self esteem, and my physical appearance doesn't exactly help matters... I think the straw that broke the camel's back though may have been my parents divorcing when I was a kid... But not the act itself. Just how my world slowly unraveled afterwards. Like Linus, I eventually got to a point where flunked out of school because I couldn't bring myself to care about it even if I had the energy (I usually didn't - Just slept through the school day).

It got better after that, but it's been an up and down roller-coaster ride for me over the years since. It can be almost literally paralyzing... Cognitive behavioral therapy didn't help me, but in the couple years leading up to working at LMG, I learned mindfulness, and for me, being able to identify negative emotions and what causes them helps tremendously, even if I can't avoid it. So I was on an upswing when I applied for my position here, and while I wasn't exactly confident, I felt like I could handle the challenge - That I needed a challenge and more importantly a CHANGE in order to get my life back on the rails. It was the push I needed.

I don't know if, when, or how it'll strike me again, but working at LMG has been one of the most amazing things I've done in my life, and when I think back to the darker days of my life, it was videos like LTT's that got me through it, because it was all I had the wherewithal to do. A video a day? Something to look forward to for tomorrow. It's part of the reason I applied to begin with.

If you see me in a video, I'm probably wearing a watch - It's an activity tracker I wear as part of a medical study to help identify risk factors in relapses of major depression, and hopefully even if it doesn't help me in the future, it'll help others who have lived or will live the life I did get off the roller coaster sooner. Too many brilliant minds have already been lost because they couldn't see an end to their pain (and it IS painful... Physically as well as psychologically).

TL;DR though, mental health is honestly just as important, if not moreso than physical health. If you're going through depression or know someone who does, make sure you get the help you need, and try to hang in there. The one positive thing I can tell you is that your experience will give you a kind of empathy that's incredibly rare in this world, and when you're no longer alone in the darkness, you'll have the tools to help those who still are.

Anyway, it does say that being hired by LGM was a highlight of his life and a turning point.
What would you guess? He was a user of the LTT forum! Giving away his Best Buy advice for free

I think he may have changed his name from Runefox to NeoFrux, keeping still the furry theme...
Look who is also there! Kazu! Or better known as Eric(a), which had already been archived/found about a week ago


Even interacted with Nick (COO):


How many furries, friends with this Kazu person, from Newfoundland are on the LTT forum..?


This is very boring, if anyone is interested here are all his actions related to this account.
He does discuss with other users some job ad for LTT which was very slightly interesting, but most is him giving advice to people on computer parts
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

 

[Kheapathic]

i want an actual IT administrator to do a video reacting to their server videos just so i can see the dude tear him a new one.

Not gonna tear into him, but one of his big mistakes is how you store things. Key point, his server crashed and risked losing "all" that data; it means he's not compartmentalizing his storage. Every department (finance, video/editing, marketing/design, etc) should have their own pool; and with that pool should comes its own unique backup. That way if a catastrophic problem does occur and wipe out, let's say the finance department, it's not gonna take your marketing or other data with it.

But what did Linus lose, mostly a bunch of ancient raw footage; okay, it's all one thing, but there are also ways to cut it up and compartmentalize it, and this should be done as years (if not decades) of raw footage is a lot bigger than rendered videos. He could cut it up by what year it was in, what kind of video it was (hackintoshing, review, etc), what type of object they covered, etc. But all that aside, if it's really important to him (like he claims it is); he should follow the 3-2-1 rule of backups, that is 3 backups, across two mediums, and one off-site. But he's a sperg who has a hard-on for watching all his old raw footage for some reason; then have a backup copy (3-2-1 of them) and a "working" copy. The backup can stay nice and shiny and pristine in a vault, while Linus can have his dedicated file storage to document how he's aged poorly. He's a fucking multi-millionaire business owner, he can afford it; write it off a business expense too.

Seriously, with how he bills himself a tech channel; by the Grace of God, Rules of Nature, and anything else you can invoke, he should fucking know better. Oh, you're doing some sort of big update/upgrade to your device; make a current backup in case something goes wrong. Have a lot of stuff you don't want to lose, make a backup. You own a business that uses a lot of data, make a fucking backup. One of the first and easiest things you find yourself doing as a System Administrator is doing backups, even if all you're doing it running tapes, it's your safety net in case something goes catastrophically wrong. But he's Linus "Faggot" Sebastian; the tech guy who doesn't follow any common sense rules.

 

[AnOminous]

But he's Linus "Faggot" Sebastian; the tech guy who doesn't follow any common sense rules.

It pisses me off that this ignoramus is somehow rich off shitty soy facing content that he's constantly wrong about or when he's right it's total basic bitch shit. He's the Jack Scalfani of tech but with better PR apparently.

 

[Kheapathic]

It pisses me off that this ignoramus is somehow rich off shitty soy facing content that he's constantly wrong about or when he's right it's total basic bitch shit. He's the Jack Scalfani of tech but with better PR apparently.

While I'm sure the videos won't change, I'm seriously curious if there's gonna be behind the scene problems. After their channel got hacked, they posted a SysAdmin position opening, and then Linus got his old boss to be his new boss. Sure him and his wife retain ownership, which gives them a level of veto power; but having someone run the day-to-day and hopefully someone who is no nonsense about keeping the LTG network alive and working, Linus is gonna have his toes stepped on... and I wonder how much he'll be okay with because it keeps shit alive and how much he'll whine about or God forbid exercise his "I fucking own you" card.

 

[Nabeshin]

Linus mentions to please don't bully the pool company he called out last week

Linus knew what he was doing, the bullying was inevitable. I know Linus is retarded but he isn't that retarded, he tried to bully the company to do a over engineered job for them that can fail in many ways possible and Linus wouldn't accept fault of it.

A "fun" thing from this is that this probably will blacklist Linus and make his pool repairs to be very expensive in the entire region where he is. As someone from a family of small business owners, competition isn't something as Linus and many people thinks it is(except in high specialized fields) where is haram to talk about or buy in another company to a customer or employee.

Spoiler: Autistic ramblings that competition isn't what people thinks

For example, stores to not have everything of the area, so when a store don't have a brand, thing or doesn't have it in stock we recommend for the customer to go to the competition, even the bosses buys a lot of things in their competitions and they're usually friends or are in friendly terms.

Like how we buy things there and they buy here, the apex of this was during the pandemics where the entire logistics were fucked and everyone couldn't get things to buy, we used to take part of their surplus and they part of ours surplus or common items that we both sold through barter (paying by "giving it back" when their stock replenished or by trading).

Most stores works like that where the owners and employees are in friendly terms, so after that call-out of Linus, I wouldn't be surprised if every pool company in BC had him blacklisted.

because Zoomer autist introverts

While I got fired from my tech work recently(layoffs and bureaucracy things) one thing I can say for sure from working there is that this isn't the zoomers fault, it's mainly an employee and managers fault. When I was there I worked in a lot of projects and while the company has a "family" and safe-space thing that every GPTW company boost about one thing I realized was when I was on the most productive and most complex project and team. The management was entirely differently, the managers weren't assholes but they were serious and wouldn't let a employee go out with a wrist slap for doing something wrong(this is one of the reason that I loved that team even if it was painful to work there) while the other teams there was a lot of management problems.

But he's Linus "Faggot" Sebastian; the tech guy who doesn't follow any common sense rules.

This is due his community, they boost his ego so much that he can't do anything wrong, more than once when people corrected him there, they silenced the person criticizing, just for the person to be right. One of my first posts here was about this guy, LaLzw, who's criticizes Linus on everything he does wrong and after the first server disaster he claimed that Linus team was retarded, inept and they should stop trying to DIY servers(in a prettier way ofc) because he is doing it wrong. Linus got mad at him and said if he followed every pro tip, he would be homeless. Just for 1 year later for him to lose data from the same things that he said.

The post in question on their forums: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1389194-ltt-is-about-to-change/page/5/#comment-15110669

 

[Kheapathic]

For example, stores to not have everything of the area, so when a store don't have a brand, thing or doesn't have it in stock we recommend for the customer to go to the competition, even the bosses buys a lot of things in their competitions and they're usually friends or are in friendly terms.

Like how we buy things there and they buy here, the apex of this was during the pandemics where the entire logistics were fucked and everyone couldn't get things to buy, we used to take part of their surplus and they part of ours surplus or common items that we both sold through barter (paying by "giving it back" when their stock replenished or by trading).

Most stores works like that where the owners and employees are in friendly terms, so after that call-out of Linus, I wouldn't be surprised if every pool company in BC had him blacklisted.

While I don't work in gaming (gambling/Casino) anymore, I can also attest that hotels do this. They don't get together as a group and seek to price fix (they don't, every place knows where they are in the pecking order and won't try to charge above their weight); but the person who sets the rates and everything at each property, they're friendly with the others. They can call up the other casino and be like, "Hey, it's Heather, what are your guys's rates gonna be for 4th of July?" Then they talk for 30 minutes about everything from work, to kids, and vacation plans. Yes they're competing, but they also talk to each other; especially when it comes to bad customers who are just filthy/bad hygiene, trash rooms, or God forbid bed bugs. They may be competition; but they're also friends, and they talk to each other.

 

[Fools Idol]

How the fuck does it take 100+ people to not know anything about technology?

It sort of make some sense if you understand that LMG in it's current incarnation is more of a tech YouTube channel larping as a big media company. LMG have a ton of bottlenecks in the video perdition pipeline because of their insistence on doing things that don't really have much relevancy to the content of the video in question. Sure the video's look nice and it's very professional (although really amateurish in places too) but they are always in need of more editors, writers, cameras operators, etc. The more core staff you have also means more support staff too.

So they release about 7 videos a week with an unknown number videos in the production pipe line at any given time. Now, if it was just a guy with a basic script talking about X,Y,Z with some B-roll for YouTube then he could probably only need like 10 people but isn't really how they roll. For starters the script for any given video goes though a number rewrites and reviews before an filming can be done. Hosts are an issue too, if person X is on the books for video Y but they can't do it for some reason then the video can't be filmed, which isn't helped by the fact that many of the staff seem to have multiple roles in LMG. The filming then involves the video itself and the B-roll, both of which apparently have to be booked because they insist on using sets like it QVC or something. They use film grade cameras which need trained operators and introduce tons of technical problems. The biggest of which is probably the editing, it's one thing to edit a 1080p video from multiple angles (plus B-roll) but doing that with 4K, HDR, etc and it's easy to see why editing is probably a massive bottleneck. Linus's obsession with data hording causes tons of issues in of itself. These bottlenecks are one of the reasons that the Short Circuit channel exists

Then there's product development staff, I have no idea what these people do or why they "need" so many because LMG doesn't really make anything. They've got some graphic t-shirts (ugly as fuck btw), a screwdriver that uses a licensed design, a backpack and a stupid water bottle. To be fair making a fucking keychain can be a nightmare but the product development seem to be very amateurish imo.

Floatplane is probably the smartest thing they've done. People seem to think it's a YouTube alternative but it isn't, what it is a is Patreon alternative with a robust video player (hopefully anyway). Floatplane can't be cheap to run and it need it's own specialized staff so that's more people.

Labs is a weird one, on the one hand I understand what they are going for and I like people bringing more stuff in-house but I not sure on whether the info it produces will be all that valuable. I think the most important thing is the automation they are going for to help speed up the videos production pipe line.

 

[mandatorylurk]

Lab update tour, still looks like there's no cohesiveness to the idea but the CNC machine is pretty neat. No A/C in the warehouse proper despite ordering it a year ago (very sus), I see no fans so ventilation with tech stuff on top of it seems to be stupid. It's weird how their writer's room looks just like it did at the old location which, why not just stay there?

Pretty moment where Tranthony's desk is all the way in the corner of the writer's room, where his dilation can be hidden.

 

[Pee Cola]

Floatplane is probably the smartest thing they've done. People seem to think it's a YouTube alternative but it isn't, what it is a is Patreon alternative with a robust video player (hopefully anyway). Floatplane can't be cheap to run and it need it's own specialized staff so that's more people.

Is there any other content on Floatplane other than LMG-owned channels and DankPods' drum stream? and whilst I love my nigga DankPods, I wish he wasn't so enthusiastic about fellating Linus at every opportunity

 

[Fools Idol]

Is there any other content on Floatplane other than LMG-owned channels and DankPods' drum stream? and whilst I love my nigga DankPods, I wish he wasn't so enthusiastic about fellating Linus at every opportunity

I know that Ian from Forgotten Weapons has an account. I remember several tech YouTubers signing up when it started but I don't know if they've kept up with constant uploads.

 

[Nabeshin]

Labs is a weird one, on the one hand I understand what they are going for and I like people bringing more stuff in-house but I not sure on whether the info it produces will be all that valuable.

It's a tinfoil hat though but I still believe that the Labs was created because of youtubers like d8bauer and Gamer Nexus "labs" where their videos about in depth testing had more viewers than the average ltt video

 

[Gamepads]

It's a tinfoil hat though but I still believe that the Labs was created because of youtubers like d8bauer and Gamer Nexus "labs" where their videos about in depth testing had more viewers than the average ltt video

Considering Linus' willingness to splurge on equipment, yes. He's not taking pause and thinking about if it's going to be worth it, he just assumes it will because "ohhhhhhh in-depth analysis."

Whereas Steve did go over their costs/overheads for the company when it comes to what they produce. Heck, his second to last rant video with der8auer has him go over thermal conductivity gear. Is it worth dumping 70k$ on a machine that pumps out numbers that are just easily manipulated by marketing? Not really, but Linus would sure jump the gun on that if wasn't for the fact that the duo went on about how it's BS.