The whole "Trust me bro" thing comes from when they released their backpacks. They had issues with some of the zippers and people wanted to know what the warranty was. Linus said they didnt explicitly have one but that he would look after anyone with issues. When people got a bit rightly pissed about this, he got a bit defensive. "Trust me bro" sprung up as a meme out of that whole saga.
I flipped cars for a few years. Im a pretty good diy mechanic.
The amount of people who cant be bothered scraping off stickers, and giving a car a good detail astounds me. Take the car home, wash it thoroughly, detail the engine bay and interior, and if you have the skills change the oil, air filter and coolant. Those were usually good for a few hundred per flip but the bar to entry is low, anyone can do that.
Also buying cars with 4 steel wheels with bald tyres and finding a set of cheap alloy wheels with good tyres that someone was flogging off were also a good flip if you could find the wheels and tyres cheap and negotiate the car down. "Mate a set of tyres is $600" when you can find a legal set on nicer wheels for $200.
The best ones were nice cars with 1 big problem, "needs a new clutch" or "blown head gasket" made a few grand off those usually because I could spend as long as I needed to to do the job on the cheap by myself.
Linus is the founder, his name is on the buildings, he was CEO at the time of all this shit, he is the cheif on camera personality and he is the majority shareholder. Of course he would be in the video.
Hiring Terren was the smartest thing he could have done, he probably should have gotten someone who understands this shit onboard a long time ago. Even if they were subordinate to him.
Nobody ever got Dysentery or Cholera from poop flavored chocolate.
Its also a playtest.
I'll tell anyone who will listen not to buy a car thats been developed on a new platform for at least 3 years to give them time to find faults in the design in real world conditions. If your playtesting or in early access you are literally playing a prototype, a bunch of content creators spouting off about how its a buggy mess could put a stink on the whole project that people will remember even if its perfectly polished by launch.
Ive told my daughter "Always be nice to the quiet ones and the weird ones. Be nice and be friendly, the extroverts of the world will be fine on their own."
Its a $10,000 fine if you get caught de-catting a car.
Also we have the whole defect notice system, which I'm pretty sure the US doesnt have. We actually hold the end user accountable.
Its not about the cost, its about sending a message.
And also less likely to be married or in a long term relationship, have a baby momma/daddy or be a hopeless deadbeat who cant keep a job... yet.
It isnt fish in a barrel, its a barrel full of fish.
Its really creepy and intrusive. But at the same time, I can find really fucked up porn with literally zero effort.
I mean, if your kid has terrabytes of rough incest bdsm porn people will ask why you werent monitoring their internet use, but monitoring them like this feels like a different kind of weird.
Damn near every aftermarket automotive part I have ever bought contains some variation of the "This is not intended for use on street vehicles, offroad and race use only" somewhere in the description.
I can cut out my cat and weld in a piece of 2 inch pipe and I just created an emissions defeat device... I can fit an oil catch can, if I plug the breather tube back into the intake its legal, if I vent to atmosphere its not.
I mean, people who "roll coal" have no sympathy from me but this case is nowhere near as cut and dried as a lot of people think.
I didnt see anywhere that it was the "only" prototype. I believe it was their most complete or their pre-production prototype.
So likely a hand machined and finished item as opposed to something made with production tooling or in batches to reduce manufacturing cost. Something that could also be sent to reviewers as its essentially what the finished product will be. So not only are they out their best prototype, but the opportunity cost and the potential that someone like EK could have bought it and reverse engineered it to release a competing product with little to no R&D cost.
I want an AI/LLM that has been trained exclusively on the technical documentation and a haynes manual for a make and model of car.
"Hey AI, how do I change the fuel filter and what tools will I need?"
In Australia the limit is 4 per year before you have to apply for a motor vehicle traders licence, but thats per person. The official paperwork on a few of mine may or may not have have had my flatmates details.
Im curious as to how they figure out the difference between title flipping and just some guy selling a car.
Yeah, I'm just smaht enough to know I'm too dumb for that much responsibility.
While I do agree, Id say the counterpoint would be that putting Terren out front when all this happened under Linus's watch could have come across as disingenuous.
"Heres our new lightning rod, yell at him" sort of thing. I very much think they are in a no win scenario with most of this.
I was there, I seent it!
Its unlikely, but not impossible and when you're dealing with preproduction prototypes you are holding someone elses valuable proprietary information, which in the case of this waterblock is unlikely to be something thats worth copying as its a high cost low margin niche product. But someone could.
Its not like it was just expensive or just someone elses property. It was someone elses one of a kind proprietary design prototype, they knew this and they STILL couldnt show the proper care and responsibility. Thats why this admittedly unlikely edge case is a big deal.
While I agree in principle you will never catch 100% of the bugs pre-launch, has there ever been a game that didnt need at least a few patches in the last 20 years?
Id be keen to read the exact wording of the clause "Dont say anything negative" and "dont say anything negative without talking to us first" are very different statements. I can understand the devs wanting a chance to say "Yep, we know about that and it will be fixed pre-launch" or "Ill put in a ticket to get that looked at ASAP" to the playtesters before they trash the game publicly.
Then you look for the other person at the party standing there back to the wall looking like a deer in headlights and make friends or at least form a D&D group.
Lets be real here, the "Kid" is 17.
Now I dont know what a healthy father/son relationship looks like because I never had one but it seems to me that knowing "Dad likes blondes with big tits" might be slightly less scarring than being left entirely to your own devices with no oversight and going down a rabbit hole of xvideos fetish porn.
Theres 2 kinds of men in the world. Those that have beaten their dick, and fucking liars. Maybe this shit is weird and creepy, and maybe they have had honest and open discussions about sex and he is trying to give his son healthy attitudes towards it.
I honestly believe that Linus is a well intentioned dumbass. He likes his people and believes that everyone can just get along and that nobody would harass another employee seriously. He knows that the mistakes are just honest mistakes which is why he gets so defensive, take the whole "trust me bro" thing... I think it never occurred to him to fuck his customers over which is why he didnt handle it well.
He doesnt believe his employees need a union because I dont know about you but if I owned a company Id hope that my people felt looked after well enough that they didnt feel like they needed one either.
But that kind of attitude just doesnt work with so damn many people, he should have hired a full time HR manager YEARS ago, as well as the company lawyer on staff. He SHOULD NOT be doing the WAN show, or if he does it should be on a 5 minute tape delay with someone from legal and hr present.
The reason why so much bullshit corporate structure exists is to largely protect the company from itself.