What is up everyone and welcome to the WAN Show! It's the show where anything can happen. Controversy,
hot takes, controversy. And even hotter takes. And even hotter takes! You'll find it all here,
we've got some great topics for you guys today. The PlayStation VR 2 launches next week so we're
going to be running you guys through. Oh no, you're going to have to do this topic because
full disclosure, I have already tried it and I don't know what is or isn't under embargo.
So we'll figure that out. Cool! Also, I mean, I had looked into this a little bit,
but I didn't know the price. You can pay $144 a year for Facebook. Sorry.
Okay, I'm sorry. Okay, what else we got? Linus rage quit a video game. Wait,
did you even know that Linus rage quit video games? Did you know that he even played video
games? Did you? You picked that as a headline topic? Everything else sucked. Nothing happened
this week. I don't know if you paid attention to the news all week, but nothing happened this
week. That was an if you're desperate topic. And I'm desperate. All right, so I picked it.
It's a great topic for if I'm desperate, which I am. The other one is going to be,
oh, I don't know. Amazon expands into telehealth.
Really? Not YouTube ads dubbing podcasts and 1080p premium?
Is that more interesting? We've already talked about 1080p premium.
No, we talked about 4k paid. I'm pretty sure we included 1080p premium.
Or was that just something that we knew at the time? I don't know.
Because I definitely knew that at the time. Let's roll the intro.
Uh, Dan. Oh.
The show is brought to you by The Ridge, Squarespace, and JumpCloud.
Hey, guess what? You guys get to witness a short production meeting.
Yeah, they can't hear you if you're way over there. So that's a challenge.
I don't think he cares. I can try to do the PSVR.
I think the phone should be bigger. And I can't tell that that's real water tubes.
If there's anything we can do about that, that would be great. As for the
GPU challenge, yeah, yeah, sure. That looks good. I'm checking that one.
Oh, you want me to watch Appies? No, no, I wanted an audio pickup.
Wait, you want me to do an audio pickup? Real quick.
He said that. Oh, good gravy.
Okay, Luke's gonna get the show started. See ya.
Oh, so I'm just gonna do it here? Here.
Okay, perfect. Then we'll just, yeah, that's great. Then we'll just get the show started.
All right, our first topic today. So sometimes when the show is late,
that's what's happening. Yeah, this sort of thing.
What was our headline thing today? Console gamer, yes.
PlayStation VR 2. Hey, are reviews up yet? Or like, what's the deal?
What are we allowed to say? It's out?
It's out. People can buy it. People have it.
Then I can talk about it, right? Yeah.
I tried it. Have you tried it? No.
Oh, there it is. Yes. PSVR 2. Luke,
it's enough to make me want a PlayStation. Really?
I want a PlayStation for the first time since the PS2.
Wow. Yeah, I wanted a PS2 because I wanted to play Final Fantasy.
Have you tried the new Facebook one? The thinner one?
Yes. The professional one?
Yes. And this is better?
Oh, dude. Oh.
It's OLED. It's OLED.
Oh, I forgot about that. It's OLED.
That's actually pretty sick. I remember seeing that in the specs and being like,
damn. That's cool.
It's exactly as damn as you think it is. You can have a look.
Am I trying this? No. I mean, you can try it on.
I'll show you the adjustments. So there's two adjustments.
This button at the back pulls it like that. And twist to tighten.
And then there's one here that goes like that. So a little something like that.
The screen though. The screen.
We've got a full review coming soon where we try a bunch of different games and do like
a short comparison against what kind of VR setup you could build.
Like a PC VR setup that you could build for the same price.
But this thing is exciting. It came out this week.
Last week, Sony released a full official teardown showing off the new hardware.
And based on the specs and based on my experience, the PSVR2 is a significant jump.
4.1 megapixels per eye versus one megapixel per eye.
HDR display. Yeah. OLED HDR.
Luke. HDR OLED.
And pupil tracking. Pupil tracking.
That's right. Foveated rendering.
Games look so good in spite of the, on paper, lower graphical performance of the PlayStation
5 compared to a top tier PC. This puts it miles beyond anything else
that's in an equivalent price range, which is 550 US dollars in terms of visual quality.
And I got to, I got to tell you this. Okay.
I expected, I've never actually used eye tracking and foveated rendering before.
I have used eye tracking before, and I know that it's like, can be pretty fast.
Could be pretty okay. It can pull at rates of well in excess of a hundred Hertz, which is,
you know, pretty good, but the eye moves faster than a lot of eye tracking technology.
And my concern was that with foveated rendering, which I guess I haven't explained yet.
What they're doing is they're tracking where you're looking, rendering just that spot.
I think it's what, 4% of your field of view is actually high res and then everything else is
kind of junk tier, even if it was in focus, it would be junk tier, right?
So what it does is it takes that spot you're looking at, renders it at higher quality,
and then everything else kind of goes to crap. And I couldn't tell if it was working from
inside the headset because it's so fast and Alex and.
Oh, right. So if you, if you like think something in your peripheral is, is poorly rendered,
so you go to look at it, it's nicely rendered by the time you get there.
And I thought it just wasn't working. I thought everything was just rendering it full quality
because I'd like intentionally look right. So, but then Alex was my, was my spotter.
And he, he had a TV set up capturing the experience. And we played a little game
where I said I was in horizon, whatever the horizon experience is called.
You had to try to guess where you were looking.
He had to guess where I was looking based on the render quality. And he's just like, yeah, there
and there and there. And so I'd be like, I'd like, I'd look, look at, I'd try to,
I'd try to beat it and see the lower. I couldn't do it.
That's kind of cool.
It's incredible.
Rise and call of the mountain. Is that it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the one. And it is, it is, oh man, it's just, it's moving in the
complete opposite direction of what Met is doing with their VR headsets. It's, it's no,
unapologetically a non standalone VR headset. It's the best hardware they could build into a headset.
It's still tethered.
It's tethered to a box. Deal with it, because that's what it takes to have this kind of
fidelity. I mean, that doesn't mean they haven't streamlined it. The original PSVR had a large
breakout box and a complex AV setup. Whereas this is a single USB-C cable.
Is it possible to turn off the eye tracking?
I don't know. Why would you want to?
People with lazy eyes or other.
Oh, that's a good point. I didn't think of that. Okay. I need to do that audio pickup.
Maybe talk about, I don't know, comfort or something. And you can also.
It has attached earbuds, which I'm not actually as much of a fan of,
because what if you have more than one person at your house that uses it?
Uh, or something. I would prefer the like the disc headphone things that I believe the index has.
Those were totally fine. In my opinion. I don't, I'm not a huge fan of that,
but general comfort and stuff actually quite good. The earbuds come off.
Yeah. Unless they have like built-in headphones that replace it.
I'm not a huge fan of wearing other headphones with it either.
If they have additional headphones that you can buy that come with it or designed for it,
then that's cool. But if not, I don't know personally. But yeah, comfort's good.
This shroud, this like rubbery shroud, it's got a 3.5 millimeter jack.
Yeah. That doesn't solve it for me personally. I don't want earbuds while I'm playing.
But that's a, that's a preference thing. Yeah. They said that I'm not super into that.
Well, here's the thing, right? Though the alternate solutions are either what meta is doing
with garbage tier audio. It sounds so bad or what valve's doing, which presumably is expensive.
The index costs twice as much as this still, and it doesn't even have an OLED display.
Then the screen, the screen door effect, negligible. My understanding is there are
actually headsets out there that are slightly higher resolution. But it's real good. It's
real good. And oh, the, just the persistence is so low. Like I got the headset on, I'm going like
this and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. There's like no smearing. I'm just going to go like this.
This is my new game. This is no external beacons. No, no. It's okay. I hope that valve stays full
purist and sticks with outside in tracking. I literally wired up my house for their base
stations. My, my ceiling in my rec room has 12 volt power run inside it so that I can always have
four base stations. I am a one of a kind. I suspect nobody else has actually done that.
But that's how committed I am to outside in tracking. It really is superior from a
performance standpoint, but it's inconvenient. It's the, I will say for a tethered experience,
the single USB-C cable with no breakout box is pretty sweet because I'm used to like this like
thick cord of like three different cables coming out that has to plug into some like junction box
at some point and then go into your computer and like three different plugs to the point where
you might be like maxing out the USB on the back of your motherboard, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
It's super annoying. Just having one cable is really cool. I'm totally down with that 120 Hertz.
Oh, it weighs less than the previous one. And it did feel like actual IPD adjustments.
Very cool. Yeah. I'm man. I'm excited. However, how are the new controllers?
Great. They're right here. Oh, Hey, what's up? Yeah. Okay. They're a little heavy.
Like rotationally. I find that my hands too big. This is kind of bulky. And
there are definitely some things about the headset that are
Japanese designed. That's one of them. And I personally found that my,
I actually find that very uncomfortable. Roman nose was not super compatible with the headset.
You, you tried sliding it out though. Yeah, but I don't like that.
I like to have the headset in tight against my face because I, I play games that require a lot
of moving around and light leak socks and well, the light leak is really good on it. Actually.
I did notice cause the rubber thingy, but that is usually a reason why you want it closer. But for
me, a big part of why I want it closer is just so that when I move my head, I I'm not, I'm not
feeling that drag. Right. Yeah. It's like less leverage for it to move around on my face. Right.
And so I know someone said, try pushing buttons. Yeah. Even the trigger is like hard because my,
the, the bone of this part of my pinky loop cam. Yeah. So the, the bone of that part of my,
you can, can I show you? I can, I can tell it's colliding and like bending my pinky in.
So even pulling the trigger feels super awkward. Cause if you see the natural position of where
my finger goes on, it isn't like up there, like that's extremely uncomfortable. It's like down
here because it's cranking my hand down. And then even to get to this thumb stick is like
my thumbs on full tilt. So I don't know. I could do it, but not, not the biggest fan.
Bixby asks, what product doesn't have IPD adjustments? Quest 2. Yeah. They're,
they're digital. They're fake. Whereas the PSVR 2 has proper IPD adjustment.
Alpha's Intel says Luke Bing chat GPT knows you were talking about it on WAN show. It asks you
not to be disappointed in its abilities. Yeah. Well, I think I talked about this last show.
I won't get into it too much, but I mentioned how it now has a form of memory
because people are posting conversations that they have with it online and it can search the
internet, right? So it has a form of memory. It can see conversations that it has had in the
future. Not all of them, just only ones that people have posted online and it can see transcriptions
of different things. So if we have closed captions for this video, for WAN show, it might be able to
have access to that. It can't watch the video, but it could watch a transcript and it could see
people discussing what we said on the show as well. If there's text versions of that. So it
would be, I would expect that it would be aware of that. I don't know if you want to call it awareness
or I expect it would be able to search that up, but yeah. Oh, okay. This is interesting. I just
poking into, people are talking about using the PSVR 2 on a PC. But the creator of the IVRE
driver, which is a way to use the original PSVR on a PC basically says, yeah, I don't think this
is going to be that easy. It goes, you'll be wasting your money. There's no guarantee you
could ever use it on a PC and quite a good chance you won't be able to. The original PSVR is
electronically equivalent to a monitor. So it is relatively simple to get a video signal up on it,
reading sensors, et cetera, took a lot of reverse engineering and at least a year from release
before anyone figured that out, took a couple more years before it was usable as a PC VR headset.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's still a work in progress with tracking controllers with the original hardware
over five years from release. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I wouldn't expect that to be a thing.
Yep. Okay. That's fair enough. I mean, it's kind of a, it's kind of a funny thing to me. Like if
people can use it on the PC and they want to use it on the PC, is there really no margin in it at
$500? Like they couldn't just sell it as a VR headset. I guess that wouldn't be very
PlayStation of them. That wouldn't be very Sony of them. Sort of. PlayStation has actually been
moving a ton of games to PC and has been fairly faithful in regards to like patching them and
making sure that they actually run okay. Like when horizon was one of the earlier games that
they brought to PC and it was quite a mess when they first brought it over, but they cleaned it
up. And as far as my understanding goes, it's pretty stable now. Um, so I know in the past,
I would definitely agree with that, but these days they've actually been pretty PC friendly.
Okay. Well, I guess we'll see. Yeah. I don't know. Conrad says it's hard to keep customers in your
walled garden if you open the door. I mean, yeah, that's fair enough. True. Why don't we jump into
our next topic? Who wants to pay $144 a year for Facebook after the massive success of Twitter
blue? Mark Zuckerberg has his eyes set clearly on generating revenue from his user base through
the meta verified program, a monthly subscription with a cost of 12 us dollars that does what? Okay.
It covers Facebook and Instagram includes a blue badge, increased search visibility,
exclusive stickers for stories, direct customer support, and 100 free stars,
a currency that can be used to tip creators. There does not, there does not appear to be any
reduction in ads or data mining. What a deal, Mark, sign me up. I love it. Can we, can we,
can we never normalize this people? It seems to just be a brand thing. Like never can we never,
ever normalize this. Can we always make fun of people for paying for Twitter blue, please? Would
you, would you normalize it if it did do what it says at the end, if it did reduce
or, or let's say it removed ads and removed data. I wouldn't believe them. Yeah, fair enough. All
right. Let's, let's imagine that you knew without a doubt, forget the data mining. Cause I don't
believe them, but we can talk about ads. Okay. If I never saw an ad on Facebook or Instagram again,
I wouldn't pay for this because I don't remember the last time I opened up Facebook or Instagram.
No offense to our dedicated viewers on Facebook. All dozens of you. Yeah. We're streaming there
right now streaming there right now. I don't think either of us have ever seen that page.
Nope. 41 people are watching on Facebook. Oh, very nice. Sup boomers.
Hello fellow boomers. 39 they're leaving in shame. And I took that personally. Don't observe us.
Uh, yeah. So Facebook, um, no, I wouldn't pay for it, but let's say,
let's say hypothetically that it was a service I actually used and cared about.
Yeah. I don't know. 12 bucks a month. Doesn't seem that outlandish. Why would you pay for it
though? As a normal user, what does it even give you as a, as a company? Have you seen how many ads
there are on Facebook? Oh no, we're not talking about our, I was talking about the root thing.
I was no longer talking about the ad removal. Oh, okay. So we're not talking about the real product
or we are going back to talking about the real product. Yeah. So increased search visibility,
stickers, customer support and stars to tip creators. Basically just stars.
Yeah. I mean, if you're a normal user and then what support do you need on,
I mean, you use Facebook, so maybe you're not that good with computers.
Maybe you just need help using websites. I interpret that as the other way around.
Direct customer support. Yeah. Maybe you're all right. Wow. That's an advertised major feature.
I mean, if you need customer support, you should just contact them. Right.
I assume that was some way that like brands could interface. Yeah. Maybe I've got this wrong.
Maybe it's completely the other way around. I kind of hope so, because if they're like,
Hey, yeah, we'll give you customer support for this thing that you're paying for. I would hope
that's not like a thing that they advertise. Yeah, guys. I mean, hit us up. Which one is it?
Meta support also means Instagram support. We recently lost a company Instagram account because
they don't have support for unverified users. Yeah. So it sounds like it's very company focused.
No, it sounds like it's user focused. If you're a user and you like lose your account,
but they should be able to get support. Yeah. But because it wasn't verified. Well, I mean,
just mean anyone who lost their account, whether they're a company or an individual user,
would be pretty bummed about it. Sure. And being able to contact support.
That's terrible. You should just have support for users. I don't disagree. Unbelievable.
This is worse than I thought. And it was already laughable. Man. Shortly after. Okay. So they're
not the first to jump on this. Shortly after Twitter Blue was launched, Tumblr started
selling what they called important blue internet check marks that officially do absolutely nothing
for a one time cost of $4 each. They apparently made a quarter million dollars in profit.
A quarter over quarter increase of in-app purchases of 125%.
The as of a recent update, the check marks are now rainbow colored. Apparently
Tumblr user carpe sons. That is actually unironically what I called them when I was a kid.
You know, those little Capri Sun drinks. I called them carpe sons because I, I don't know,
but I guess I had a little bit of the dyslexia. Anyway, carpe sons apparently spent $120
on check marks, which is amazing. And back to sort of the inspiration for this Twitter Blue,
according to the most recent available numbers, only about 0.02% of active Twitter users have
a paid subscription of any kind. I would have guessed it would have been somewhat similar.
Honestly, if you look at conversion rates for users to external things, like say Patreon,
float plane, Nebula, whatever. I think it's actually usually a little higher than that.
That's cause there's no real value for us, but it's blue pixels. But yeah,
considering how much you get compare it, like that's probably about where I would have slapped
it. Like, I mean, float plane is actually like, we sell it pretty hard these days because it's
a pretty darn good value these days. I'm saying like you, you get a lot if you subscribe to some
creators. Well, I guess it's up to what the creator is offering, but a lot of times I see
you get a decent amount of value if you subscribe to someone's float plane or Patreon or whatever
else, considering what you're getting for the Twitter Blue check mark. How quickly could the
float plane team, um, make like whale check marks because people on float plane are asking for them
I've got offers for like 15 bucks here. You're already paying.
If they want to pay more Luke, can we get a tier that has a check mark?
You can subscribe to the supporter plus tier. Then you get 4k.
No, we need supporter plus plus. We have a, we have a, we have a product the creator
warehouse team is working on that has a size that is extra medium.
There's something in between large and we didn't know what to call it.
We might, we might fix that before we actually want this. Oh my goodness.
Oh, we'll, we'll check in if you guys still want it in like a while when we have bandwidth to work
on something. When the memes are over. Yeah. When the meme is dead, I'll check in if you
guys still want it and then we'll see then. Yeah. We'll call it the take my money tier.
No, that's, it'll have to be whale tier. It'll have to be whale tier.
We'll come up with some other stuff that we can, that we can bundle in or something like that.
I mean, we do care about providing actual value. Uh, like even the whale tickets at
LTX, they, I mean, yeah, it's 10 grand, but it includes like a $5,000 computer.
Don't you get a hotel room? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So there's value in there.
We would need to, yeah, they would have to have value.
Yeah. We're just, we're, we're, we're just, I'm totally down with there being, I mean,
this is up to you guys technically, but I'm totally down for there being like more expensive
tiers that are offered. Yeah. The problem is I don't like make sense. I don't want waste.
Like people are suggesting, uh, like free merch every month tier. And my problem with that is
what if it's something you don't want? Yeah. We don't want you to throw stuff away.
I don't want to ship waste around the world, right? Like it doesn't do anybody any good.
I'd rather you guys just. In general, I usually would say you and I,
but I think in general at the company, we are not into the idea of fast fashion.
We're building things to last. You should be able to keep said thing for a while. If you have it.
Um, we don't want to just create garbage. It doesn't seem good. I don't think there's an
argument for just genuinely creating garbage. Yeah. I just, I'm not that into that. I mean,
the main value is the exclusive content. We've got extras from the build. Uh, we've got, uh,
Oh, these are, these are really fun. We've done a couple of mini moving vlogs for the move over
to the lab. The, the team is doing such an amazing job. We're doing, I think at least
two exclusives per week. So we've got Linus reacts to Dennis and Vance switching roles.
There's an update that is going to be going into beta, which is something we haven't really done
before, but users will be able to opt into beta to be able to use it. Um, it's not out yet,
but we coming relatively soon. That is going to make it so that, uh, when you click on,
if you go back to flow plane really quick, if you, if you clicked on that right there,
it would expand downwards and you would be able to see a bunch of sub channels. So like Mac address
and tech cookie and short circuit. So you'd be able to like a sec effectively filter to the
channel as if it was on YouTube, but then there can also be other things like full plan exclusive
or whatever else. Um, so that's, that's coming. It's a little bit easier because people have
brought up that, I mean, you can just type in the search like full plane exclusive. Um,
but people don't like typing, I guess. So we will bring a new solution.
But yeah. Oh, also while we're talking about those types of things, uh, merch messages,
people have, have commented many a time, including I, that you can't do merch messages if you use
shop pay. So if you like use Shopify fairly actively, it skips past where merch messages in
is, which is pretty annoying for people. And that's why the merch messages are for those of
you who are new, merch messages are down here instead of Twitch bits or YouTube super chats or
whatever, where you just throw money into the ether and then maybe we acknowledge your message.
Maybe we don't. Uh, merch messages are a way that you can send in a message to the show like this.
Hey, how'd you decide on Laslo supernova? Um, I think Edsel was a fan and got in touch and we
had a relationship with a monster cat and basically, um, Laslo agreed to do a slightly
customized version of the intro song for us that exactly matched our animation. And it, I don't
know, it was so good. And it was so iconic that we just kind of kept it forever. Um, I mean,
I can still jam out to it and I've heard it so many times. We have stopped using the intro,
uh, as Dan noted in the response there in every video, but we do still use it sometimes. Um,
the issue is just that if you're throwing away like seven seconds of retention right at the
beginning of the video, there's highly valuable retention too. Yeah. It's just the branding is
great, but the, um, the effect on viewership of not just that video, but your entire library
is not positive. So it's something that we've started to shy away from. Anyway,
what was I talking about? Merch messages, what they are, right? Merch messages, what they are
is a way to send in a message to the show and if we don't get to it for whatever reason or,
um, you know, whatever, at least you get your order in the mail. So you get a hoodie or a,
or a, Oh, do you have a, like a right to repair pin plan? That's a really good idea. Hey Dan,
do you mind firing that over to Sarah? Righto. And then maybe, uh, maybe, yeah,
maybe she could do up something like that. Basically instead of the only thing that you get
being a chance for your streamer person that you're watching and to enrich Google or Amazon.
Now you definitely get something and there's a free added bonus that genuinely costs nothing
that we might respond. Yeah. So it's cool. And Oh, we launched a new product today.
Man, we're getting, okay, we're getting all this out of the way here. Oh wait. Okay.
But the clarification there is where it happens has changed. It's in, I believe the cart now.
So everyone can see it all the time. Doesn't matter if you're using shop pay. Doesn't matter
if you're wanting to use Apple pay that came up last time, whatever you can all see it. So
it works. Awesome. Love it. And we launched a new desk pad, the WAN desk pad. It's a desk pad,
but with a WAN logo and an orange accent and very LTT when branded and all that good stuff.
I opened the desk configurator. Of course I'm going to open the desk configurator.
This allows you to set your desk width, your desk depth. You can set a style. You can see what
different sizes of desk pad will look like. You can move them around and go, you know,
I'd really like my desk pad to sit something like this. You can add a monitor. Wait. Oh,
I thought you could add a monitor. Well, there's a keyboard anyway. So you can kind of play around
with it and figure out what size makes sense for you. Oh, you got to set a monitor count.
Oh, look at that too. Boop. You can kind of move them around. Look at that. How fun is that?
You can check enable rotation and like turn them. If you have angles, you can really see how your
desk is going to look. I mean, that's rotating though. Yeah. Well, there's your problem.
There's your problem right there. Yeah. That was a lot of work, but it's really cool. So that's
good. All right. So Luke. Yes. Are you signing up for Facebook plus or Facebook premium? What
are they even calling it? Meta verified. Are you signing up for meta verified? Is it the new meta?
No, definitely not. And I can't believe it's 12 bucks a month. That's actually insane.
Like I guess, well, I guess again, it really feels like they're very specifically
targeting. Dan, or should I call you moiré? Yeah. That sweater though. My goodness. Okay.
Not camera friendly. See you later. You don't have to take off your sweater. It's cold in here.
Are you signing up for meta verified? No. All right. Thanks Dan.
It really, especially with the price, it feels like it's targeted towards
customers or people who want to use Facebook in a professional manner. Yeah. That's fair.
Yeah. All right. Let's talk about a little topic that I call. I hate building PCs for people.
Yeah. Luke. I do too. It really does feel like a no good deed goes on punished kind of situation.
Doesn't it? It does. I like building PCs for specific people. And at this point I pretty
much only build PCs for people that I have built PCs for in the past. So I know how they will
deal with it. Okay. So here's the situation. I built a PC for someone back in.
This can't be right. I think I know. Okay. Well whatever. It was a while ago. It was a couple
months ago or something like that. Okay. I don't think you know who it is. Okay. I don't think you
know who it is. I'm going to be anonymizing it fairly well. Can I see the name? I mean,
sort of. I really don't think it's who you think it is. I have no clue who that is. That's not
who I thought. That's fine. It needs to be completely anonymized. In February, early
February, I get a message. I'm just wondering how to get my monitor to 144 Hertz. Cause apparently
it's 60 right now. I kind of go, all right. It was definitely at 144 when I gave it to you, which is
all I care about. This is one of those situations where the PC wasn't free, but it was like
very not retail. If you know what I mean, like there's, there, there was,
there was some wheeling and dealing that happened to make sure that this person who was, you know,
a family friend definitely got like something a lot better than they would've walked out of
Best Buy with. Sure. So as far as I'm concerned, I have done my good deed already. Business over.
Yeah. Our transaction is now complete. So I kind of go, are you using HDMI or DisplayPort?
HDMI may be stuck at a lower refresh rate. Just basic troubleshooting. I don't know what that
means. Sorry. How can I check? And I kind of go, you're going to have to look up how to check.
Use Google. Okay. All right. Two weeks later. I've been having problems connecting my headset mic.
When I checked, it's not registering. It doesn't say the model of headset. Here,
I'll show it to you screenshot. I'm like, I don't know. If I was in front of it,
I might be able to figure it out, but you might just have to find some troubleshooting guides.
I get no fewer than one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,
twelve messages over the next three days that go as far as, I'm pretty okay. I really think this
is urgent. Please reply to this quickly. I can't do anything on my PC. And I'm just,
I'm sitting here going. What's my incentive to do a favor for anyone at that point?
You know, like I don't, I want to try. I found a, I found a website called let,
let me GPT that for you. Okay. We're going to Luke screen. We're going to Luke screen. Here we go.
Here we go. If it works. Okay. I mean, this is one of those troubleshooting things that is
so broad that I'm just wondering what it's going to say. Sure.
Yeah. All right. I mean, this is good troubleshooting so far.
Is this Bing or is this chat GPT? I'm assuming this is chat GPT. Okay. I don't actually know.
I've never actually used this website before. I was just thinking like, there's got to,
it has to exist. And then, yeah, it did. Performing Google search. It must be, wait.
What? Okay. It's scrolling down. What is this? What is this bot doing?
It clicks the first hit for you. This is maximum tier snark.
Wait, it just moves it there. I have to click on it. You have to click it.
Amazing. That makes sense. That would probably violate Google's T's and C's if it actually
clicked a link for you. Hilarious. All right. Anyway, I feel like this is one of those,
am I the a**hole things, right? For basically just saying, so my response,
my response to this wall of text is, sorry, I really can't dig into issues like this.
If there's a problem, you'll have to shut it down for now and take it to a computer shop,
or you can try and fix it yourself. I didn't have anyone to help me troubleshoot and things
usually worked out okay. Tongue, smiley face. A little bit of sass on the end.
Little, little bit of unnecessary sass on the end. But here's the thing. I mean, okay.
Have you, have you read these articles? And I've heard anecdotally from some, a couple of people
I've talked to this about recently, one who's a teacher and one who worked in an office. And I've
read articles about this too, that apparently the younger generation in spite of growing up
with computers is entering the workplace with fewer functional computing skills.
They grew up with less computer problems because things worked more often.
So that's the thing, right? Is this just tough love? That's, that's what I thought I was doing.
Like, look, no, if you want to solve this, if you want to play video games.
I didn't want to pry, but is this a younger person?
This is a younger person. Yes. So I got that vibe. And in that case, I mean, I,
it seems more fair. I don't know.
Cause I mean, realistically, what do young people even do?
Honestly, you're done. You're done your obligations for the day by like three o'clock.
Is that when school ends? I don't even remember.
Yeah. So figure it out. Like I, I, I'm not trying to be a jerk about it or anything,
but that was how I learned. The only reason that I'm doing this today that I know any of this stuff
is because I was highly motivated to fix my computer because I wanted to play video games.
Me too.
And it's amazing, right? Kids can figure out just about anything, just about anything.
I'm surprised. Yeah.
That first one, they didn't just Google it because like my,
my monitor's not running at the right refresh rate. Whatever is like super Google.
What is HDMI? Super Google.
I have to confess that the second problem with the headset is probably a more challenging problem,
but I was already kind of in the wrong frame of mind from being asked what HDMI is.
So maybe there was a little bit of snark, but it's also true, right? Like the reality is
that I am highly disincentivized to build computers for people. If they're going to
bother me about how they work, when it's not an actual problem with the computer.
I mean, maybe we need to just pull the audience here. I don't know how to set up polls. I forget.
I've got some, some people that I've been like building computers for since like high school,
but I still build computers for them whenever they need new ones.
They'd never bother me about pretty much anything. Yeah.
Just like they've never actually built one on their own. And every once in a while,
it'll be, it'll be like, you know, like three or four years or maybe a little bit more,
but they'll be like, Hey, like, uh, you still down? I'm like, yeah, sure. Whatever.
They haven't bugged me since then about that at least. So it's like, yeah, why not?
It doesn't really matter to me. Like if, if we're still going to have the understanding that like,
you got to maintain it over the next while, but yeah, I'll put it together for you. I don't mind
that. Yeah. Chad is pretty universally aligned on this. I do think don't build computers for
family. Don't build computers for friends because every time you do it, you turn into tech support
for it forever. I do think, and there used to be a thread on the forum and this would
annoy the heck out of me, which was, I don't know exactly what it was called,
but it was some, something about like, um, it was called tales from tech support.
I've heard that before. Yeah. I think that's what it was. Yeah. I don't remember. Um,
I know there was a subreddit for it. There was a thread on the form, all this kind of stuff.
That kind of stuff used to bother me because a lot of the stories that would end up in there
just mocking people were actually just people being like just gatekeepery and losers. Yeah.
Like if, if like, yeah. Okay. Don't build computers for family, except it kind of depends.
Yeah. Like maybe you should. Yeah. I did one for my parents back in the day and they haven't needed
an upgrade since then. You know, what's really fun. There's an NCIX tech tips episode where I
build, um, where I fix a pin on like a, a, a venom X3 or something like the Athlon X3,
a triple core. And that CPU is that, Oh no, no. Phenom 720. I don't know. Whatever that CPU
is in my parents' computer to this day because it was broken. And I was like, can I just have this?
And they were like, it's a broken CPU. Get out of here. I'm like, okay, cool. Um, so that, that,
that still works. They don't bother me about it though. I built one for my sister. Um,
she also hasn't bothered me about it. Thankfully her hubby is pretty technical though. So she
wouldn't really need to. I will say I have some privilege here because my family's quite technical.
Yeah. They're both very technical. Yeah. But like if my mom has computer problems,
I'm going to help my mom with her computer problems. Yeah. Same with my aunt. Like there's,
there's and I'll like write down on the, all the steps on the piece of paper. I'll record
a little video for her of like how to do it and stuff. Like if this is a family member that you
only ever have contact with when they have computer problems, that's the worst. That's
one thing. That's its own kind of realm. I have one of those extended family member who I literally
hear from once every year or two when they want to ask me something about a computer. Yeah. See
like that's annoying. But if this is a family member that you're in like pretty consistent
contact with or like raised you or whatever else. Or tries to help themself. Yeah. That's a huge
part of it is if I don't have to explain the same thing over and over and over again, I have a ton
more patience for it. Or maybe they're super not technical, but they like gave it a shot.
Just couldn't figure it out. You know, and didn't make it worse hopefully. Yeah. Sometimes a problem.
Uh, but like there's, there's things like that where it's like, man, I can just get over it.
There's also other ones that I used to find in those threads, which were people literally just
complaining about the fact that they had to do a job. Like they were, that used to drive me nuts
too. They would like be in technical support at a company and then they'd be like, these idiots
have computer problems. It's like, yeah, it's why you're here. You're welcome. Yeah. Like,
what do you want? Like stop, stop complaining. They have, they have like things that they would
rather not do at their job as well. I don't know. Those types of things used to bother me. Like,
don't complain about helping people that help you. Yeah. Like it should be a cyclical thing.
If these people like raised you and in a not completely terrible way, maybe I'll
carry on it with that. Yeah. Based on how you turned out, I don't know if you owe them any
tech support. Um, I think I owe them lots. Um, but yeah, like if there's, if there's,
I don't know, just don't be super salty all the time about doing good things for people. But
if people are just trying to extract value from you and they don't care about you at all,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Don't deal with that either.
Yeah. I think both of them are valid stances. I'm holding the line. I'm basically just going,
yep. If I could figure it out, then you can figure it out. And if you can't figure it out,
then I already saved you hundreds of dollars. You can take it to a shop. You already did a lot.
So I'm over it. Yep. All right. That's it.
Next up. Do you really care that much that I rage quit a video game?
That's a headline topic to you. Uh, I don't know. Sure. I, none of these other things
interests me. I would have like tried to submit topics, but I was genuinely like getting concerned
partway through the week. Cause I was like, nothing's happening. Nothing's happening at all.
What are we going to talk about? There was like, oh, okay. Uh, a minor continuation on the like
Microsoft Sony and Activision Blizzard, uh, thing, but like that's been going on for a million years.
And I think people barely care until it gets finalized. Like, do they actually get to buy
ABK or not? Um, and it hasn't been finalized yet. So how about Canada may force Google and
meta to pay for Canadian news. Is that interesting? Cause we've already talked
about this at least two times. Well, there was when Australia started doing it. We've
already talked about Canada and the, yeah. Okay. I mean, I think it's worth talking about.
We can go into it. Yeah. It's still a maybe though. And it was a maybe.
It's not her fault. Are you going to, are you going to look right at her and not read this?
I can't use it. She can't make things exist. You can't like knock on like Nvidia store and be like,
Hey, do something controversial. Unlaunch your GPU. Like I said, I don't think the writing's
bad. It's just nothing happened for a period of five weeks. Google will be testing blocking links
to news articles from appearing in searches for around a million Canadian users. The test is a
response to Canada's proposed online news act, which would obligate them to pay for links to
media content that appears in Google searches. Google has described the bill as overly broad
and meta has stated that they might restrict access to news on their own platforms should
the bill pass into law, which is I think what they're trying to do is get people to go to
the original sauce for the news. So mission accomplished, I guess Australia passed a similar
law back in 2021. Back then Google conducted similar tests and meta restricted links to news
articles on its platforms. Eventually, however, both meta and Google agreed to licensing deals
estimated to be worth at least 200 million Australian dollars annually. We have a note
here. Australia is home to Rupert Murdoch, possibly the world's largest news magnate.
The meta and Google's of the world might not feel the same pressure to give into Canada's demands.
We want more money. How about some of that internet money?
Stephen Abootman. Anyway, a spokesperson for the Canadian Heritage Minister described,
man, imagine that like being your job. Like I'm in charge of Canadian heritage. Like, okay. So
what, like HBC and like Canada goose like coats? Like I, I don't know. Yeah, I'm sure beavers
described Google's actions as a threat and said, Canadians won't be intimidated
at the end of the day. All we're asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists
when they use their work. Complicating matters. It's debatable to what degree meta in particular
can be described as using the work of journalists. Links to articles and other news content are
typically posted to Facebook and Instagram by users and often by the journalists themselves.
Google could be accused in certain instances of replacing the need to click through to articles
by extracting snippets that directly answer users questions. But it's hard to say how exactly that's
going to shake out. The government States that regulators will determine which organizations
will be required to negotiate licensing agreements for news content, according to principles such as
power imbalance and quasi monopoly status in a given market. So the discussion question here is,
is it reasonable for large platforms to simply not link to content that they would otherwise
have to pay for? I mean, it's completely up to them. Yeah. And then it's completely up to users,
whether that platform still has any value to them, right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm trying to think like
based on how I interact with my Google news feed, I'm not sure how to feel about this because on the
one hand, I simply just do not read any article that's paywalled, but on the other hand,
I still like seeing the headlines just because I kind of, it's nice to just kind of know what's
going on. And then if I, if it is particularly pressing, then what I can do is I can just sort
of see what people are saying about it and read the comments, figure out what at least people,
what general sentiment towards it is. And so just not having sort of any awareness of it at all,
unless I start actually going to like news media websites, which I don't remember the last time I
ever did like organically just navigated directly to a news site. This isn't a super Western thing,
but there is a decent amount of countries that have their own kind of news access stuff.
I wouldn't be surprised if there was like an inside of Canada aggregate for these types of.
Canada inside news source. Yeah. The CBC. No, I'm just being one of them, but yeah. Fair enough.
Yeah. I don't know. Like what, what are you going to do? Where will you get your news?
Reddit? I'm usually happier when I disconnect more from the news.
Yeah, that's true. But yeah, I don't know. I've also
find that I'm usually happier when I use things like Reddit and other various
attempts to get you to infinite scroll type applications less.
So I've just been more and more disconnected moving forward.
I don't know. Reddit usually makes me pretty happy.
That was a really well-timed phone buzz.
I'm not, I'm not taking it. No bait. I'm not fighting.
Let's talk about the first time that I have rage quit a game.
Yeah. Like ever.
I actually think this should be somewhat interesting.
I recently purchased an Apple TV and a, an Apple arcade subscription for one game.
Talked about it many times on WAN show. There was a lot of excitement for this.
Yes. And it was the follow-up to what?
It was, well, it's not a follow-up to anything, but it's a very like traditional style RPG,
like JRPG and the, the team behind it, which includes here Nobu Sakaguchi
of final fantasy six fame, sort of like one of my favorite games of all time.
Also Nobu Matsu. I can't remember how to pronounce this last name. I'm sorry.
But the composer for basically like every final fantasy game ever.
So they're on it. A bunch of other folks from sort of that, that era were like, okay.
For both of the two headliners, they were kind of going, this could be our last game.
Let's, let's, let's do it traditional style. It's called Fantasian and it's Apple arcade
exclusive. I eventually gave up on it ever coming to anything else because I realized,
Holy crap, Apple funded the whole thing. This wasn't a licensing agreement.
They actually just funded the game.
It's also just for user context on the Apple app store is rated 4.7 out of five on RPG site.
I don't know what that is. It's rated nine out of 10. And then Google users have given the
game a rating of 94% or 94% of users liked the game. I guess it's a rotten tomato style.
And it's absolutely beautiful. So the environments are actually done in dioramas.
So they are, these are all miniatures. Oh wow. And then the characters and elements of the game that
you can interact with like chests. Like even, even like the fight environments are all done
in diorama form. It is gorgeous. It's utterly unique. Is this an actual diorama? Yes. Then
you have digital characters that then they scan, they scan it and then digital characters move
around with it. Yeah. It's, it's, it's beautiful. It definitely has some problems. I wouldn't say
that it takes a particularly enlightened approach to its female characters. So for better or for
worse, it's a very traditional JRPG, but that's frankly speaking, not what put me off of it.
What put me off of it was the fact that it was mobile first.
Now you might be wondering if that was the issue, why did I put over 30 hours into it?
And that's a fair question. Well, you were pretty dedicated, right? You bought,
you were excited for it for a long time and you bought the hardware in order to play it. Yeah.
Um, but the problem is not anything to do with controls. It had full support for controller.
Everything was perfect. And I actually spent the vast majority of my time playing it or actually
all of my time. Cause that was where the Apple TV is, uh, in the theater. So I was playing like
on a big screen, no problems, but I reached about the midpoint. Uh, I think it's the midpoint of the
game. It's I think it's late in part one. I mean, I don't know because I am never going to finish
the game. I reached the point where the boss fights started to become hideously unfair.
And the vibe that I'm getting is whether this is because it was designed for mobile to keep
you playing endlessly so that you'll keep your Apple arcade subscription or whether it's because
it was designed for an all you can eat platform instead of to be sold for 59.99 or 69.99 on a
platform like Nintendo switch, where they'll actually get like a, uh, an enormous amount of
revenue that's really easily attributable to this game. Uh, or whether it's because Apple
just doesn't really understand gaming and didn't invest money in certain critically important
aspects of the development process. Whatever the reason is, the game basically falls apart in terms
of difficulty curve. And it's not just difficulty. I don't mind playing a difficult game. I don't
mind sitting in a boss fight for 45 minutes, but what finally made me just put down the controller,
turn off the system and walk out of the room was this fight with, um, some spirit
Wolf thing or something like that, that basically I kid you not, you can be half an hour,
40 minutes into the fight and just with a couple of bad RNGs be at a, at a, at a, at a non-progression
bug essentially, uh, because what one of its ability, okay, so it's got a few abilities. First of all,
a problem with the game in general is that your party is three, uh, which means that if anyone
gets knocked, it is now two turns to be back to health, which is a full cycle of your buffs
wearing out and their debuffs wearing out where you cannot do anything, right? Plus whenever
anyone gets knocked, not only do they lose any buffs, but they also get knocked in terms of their
turn position. So they lose a turn. You can't just pick them right back up and then go, okay, but they
get a turn. Now they can heal in there and you're back in the, in your back in the fight. So, uh, so
this particular boss has, uh, a one, two where it can knock one of your characters, then take
another action. That other action can be to summon minions. Those minions then get turns right away
before you can pick up that knocked character where they can also summon minions. I believe
it can summon up to nine total minions and then randomly that, uh, that boss or not randomly,
but every once in a while, and it does seem to be a little bit RNG, it can cast a barrier spell on
itself that takes 20 hits to wear down. Now what's really interesting about this barrier spell
is that when it casts it, it casts it on itself and all minions at the same time.
Now you have a lot of your attacks, like cleave everything. You have multi-hit attacks. The most
you can do is eight, but in that fight, one of the characters is locked. So normally you can
actually cycle your characters during a fight. There's so many cool game mechanics, like the
ability to use your entire RPG party in one fight is super cool. And there isn't like a turn weight
penalty to it or anything like that. You can just use your entire party in any combination you want
in any battle, which is kind of awesome. If one of them gets knocked, no, you can't swap them.
You have to rez them and then swap them. And so I can see why they make you wait after someone's
rez because otherwise that would be a super cheap move or whatever else. But honestly,
the boss fights are like so long that, you know, I don't know. I'm pretty sure they could have
balanced it if they really wanted to. Anyway, the point is that you have one character that can hit
for eight and that character is not the one that you are locked to in that fight. So you must have
at least these two and then you can essentially swap out the other one. And then the most you can
do with anyone else is maybe three or four in one go. And that would be to sometimes multiple
targets, sometimes to a single target, but that eight one is a single target. Now you can only do
that obviously if you haven't had someone one-hitted and then have to spend a cycle
picking them up. How often does this one shot happen and is it avoidable? Pretty often no,
it's not avoidable. And you were asking about cleaving the barrier. The answer is no.
You cannot eliminate the barrier. You can cast barrier that'll absorb up to five hits,
but most enemy attacks other than just like a basic strike will eliminate your barrier.
It'll absorb some damage, but it'll be gone. So it's an imbalanced barrier mechanic.
It can cast it, as far as I can tell, whenever it wants on its entire supporting party. And so what
happened was I knew about the barrier thing. I knew that it could hit itself and the other
wolves around it, but I'd had pretty good luck clearing out the crowd and making sure that it
couldn't hit a large enough crowd with this barrier thing. And then finally, I lost it
a couple of times, even though I am at the recommended level. And finally, I had one
where it actually cast barrier. I should have taken a picture of it because it would've been
kind of funny to show you, but it's this entire army of completely invulnerable opponents until
I can hit them each 20 times. And I'm just sitting here going, if they play tested this
at all, that's not fun. That's not fair. There are strategies you can use. Like I looked it up
old school style, right? Okay, how do I beat this boss? And it's like, oh, okay.
This one character has an ability that if you happen to invest in that branch in the tech tree
and you've played around with it, you'll know it can be useful for this. And it's like a vacuum.
It's like a suction ability that takes all the enemies and puts them in one place so that your
multi-hits, so that essentially you can hit them all in one go. Except even that didn't
solve it because I cheesed it. I looked it up and I was like, okay, I'm going to use vacuum.
But now I must have a fixed party. I have to have the guy that's locked, the guy that can actually
hit for multiple hits. And then I have to have vacuum buddy, who's essentially a chemist,
which is like, fine. But not great DPS. And oh yeah, did I mention the boss has like a ton of
health? So it's going to be a long fight no matter what you do. So you can, so you can cheese it with
this, but guess what? Vacuum doesn't have a hundred percent hit rate. So even when I cheesed it,
I missed like three of them on a vacuum and then it cast barrier. And at that point it's unbeatable.
And I'm sitting here going, well, okay, then there's another cheese you can do. Apparently
one of the guys has like a payback type ability. So if he takes a bunch of damage, he can pay it
back. But that just counts on you managing to crowd control and stay alive long enough.
Now the obvious solution to this grind, a few levels once again, which is why you think it
feels like it was incentivizing staying on the subscription. Oh, it gets worse than that.
Once again, the mobile subscription nature of the game rears its ugly head, but this time,
because it was intended as a, as a multi-part release, right? Like I waited, I'm like,
I'm not playing part one, then part whatever I've, I want to know how many parts there are.
And I want to sit down and I want to play it in one go, but because I'm apparently getting close
to the end of part one, what happens is the leveling curve changes and the experience that
you gain for fighting sort of this tier in this version of the world, this part enemies
goes dramatically down. So if I was to try to grind it, I could be playing for hours and hours
and hours just to do a little bit more damage against this thing. When the problem isn't even
that I'm not doing enough damage, like that might help with crowd control a little bit and okay,
it could make it beatable. But the real problem is that this is an utterly imbalanced fight and
that it's not fair. Guys, he didn't mean cheesing because he was using character's abilities. He
meant cheesing because he looked up how to do it online. Yeah. Yeah. That's cheesy. I like
figuring things out. Like there's one, okay. There's one boss that also is pretty, pretty
gross. It gets to cast poison on you every single turn, not its turn,
every turn it gets to cast poison on you. So unless, unless you happened to get a bunch of
like poison resist stones that you can equip or whatever else you are poisoned literally the
entire time. And there are other things you might want to equip that aren't poison. And at that
stage in the game, you can only have one of these gems for each of your characters. But, you know,
I figured it out. I figured out that you can block poison with that barrier spell. It'll block
poison. So at least my entire party wouldn't be poisoned all the time. Just whoever got their
barrier knocked down like, okay, fine. You know, I can work around that. But when there's a one hit
that is, and it's like a way overkill one hit, like there's no amount of leveling up
that would make it not a one hit anymore. It's just not fun. I don't want to just sit and res
and just use Phoenix downs. I find completely random one hit mechanics to be very lazy game
design in my opinion. Unless there's, you know, things that you can do, then it's fine. And there
isn't. Yeah. Like there, there's another one where I had to look this one up too, where you can
blind it. And there's like some gaze move that it uses, but at least there were hints. Like I,
I looked it up and I was like, Oh, okay. That kind of makes sense or something. So, so if you
blind it, it can't use its gaze ability. But this one, as far as I can tell, it's just immune to
everything. And one hits you and casts barrier on everything. Kuzemchik says, honestly, it feels
like Linus doesn't play many Japanese games. The problem is not the difficulty. The problem is the
unfun-ness of the way that the fight is balanced. And what's really frustrating is I feel like they
were almost a victim of their own ambition here because a lot of the game is really creative.
They've done an incredible job of making boss fights, not just feel like a grind
in a lot of cases. And even the random battles, they've got this awesome mechanic where random
battles do hit you randomly, but you can enable this device that you carry called a dimension
that will absorb anywhere from 10 to five random encounters. And then you fight them
all at once. It's only about that. That actually sounds super cool. Yeah. So you get way more time
to just experience the environments. And then the fight is probably like really epic. And the fight
is actually way more fun, especially because so many of the abilities can be chained or
can pierce or can be curved and arced and stuff. It's actually really fun when it's really fun.
It's just that it's obvious that it didn't get proper QA. Because when you reach a non-progress,
I consider a non-progression point. If your whole party is up and all that happened was you
you know, had an ability that RNG didn't grab enough of those guys. And it just can RNG cast
this ability that completely ends it. And you're like half an hour into a stupid fight. Lots of
bad game design and Korean games expect you to farm. Sure. But I can't even because the curve
is so low at that point. That's the core problem. Yeah. So I can't, I can't just grind. Yeah.
Because the curve is so low. Okay. Like I don't even, I don't even mind grinding once in a while.
Like that. Okay. So that's another issue is there was another one I ran into, which is in this
place. For those of you who have played it, as far as I can tell, not many people have,
there's not a lot of discussion about it, but there's a section called the triangle of calamity
that I accidentally like wandered into at some point. I didn't think there was a way to get out
of it. So I had to look that up as well because I ran into a boss fight there where even after
spending like an hour or two, just, just grinding, just leveling up because the issue there was that
one of my characters who I really needed because their abilities are the weakness of the boss or
whatever was way lower because I rescued her way later in the time when the party splits up.
Anyway, the point is I did a bunch of grinding there and that was when I figured out that the
higher level ones were like basically not moving anymore. These lower ones were leveling up. Yeah.
But I went into this fight and I also couldn't win that one, even with grinding, because it also had
a cheap mechanic where it splits into three of itself and it's, it's randomized which ones do
what. And so if you happen to hit it with an ability that like marks it, so you can taunt
them. If you happen to hit it before it splits, then you can tell which one is real. But if you
don't and you hit them, they hit you super hard to the point where it's like one or two turns wasted
in order to like pick up a guy again. It's like, this is ridiculous. So I went straight from that
one over to the other one and the, this barrier thing. I was looking at nine wolves with 20 hit
barriers on it and I'm just like. I don't even want to play anymore. Yeah, I don't even want to
play anymore. Like you might be able to get through this, but it's just like, oh man. Yeah,
why, why am I bothering? This isn't, this isn't fun. This is one of the reasons why I actually
like FTL so much is the final boss fight. It's very satisfying because like there's, there's
three stages to it. And in between every stage, it's a spaceship game in between every stage,
the, the boss will like warp away. So you kind of have a second to like lick your wounds and
get everything kind of back in order. But you, you can't like travel cause it's going to come
right back and you're trying to defend this base, right? So you have enough time to like,
if there's literally like fires and holes on or in your ship, you can like patch it up.
Yeah. They, uh, Fantation has a boss that's like that. It's running away from you and you can kind
of take, if you wait too long to start attacking it and like catching up to it, then it like gets
away. But if you don't wait too long, you, you do have a little bit of time to take care of yourself
for a second then re-engage. Yeah. I think that's really cool. And like the ways that the, the,
the fight evolves over time as you fight it is, is interesting. Um, I, I have always wanted
like an FTL two to come out. Uh, instead they worked on a, another game called into the breach,
which was cool. I'm not particularly super into it, but it's cool. Um, I, I do hope that they
make another, another iteration of it at some point. I've always wanted it to, uh, there's,
if I remember correctly, there's eight zones in the game, the eighth zone being where the boss is.
And I kind of wish it at the end of every zone, there was like a mini boss of some sort. Right.
I think that would be cool. Um, but yeah, I don't know. CW says LTT is the only channel I've ever
seen that claims they can't read super chat. Sounds like a load of bull to me. Uh, we've shown
screenshots of it lots of times, how the dashboard didn't work. It actually does work now, but we're,
I'm just over it at this point. Um, yeah, there you go. If you super chat, it'll show up at the
top thing for people that are watching on YouTube. Yeah. So that'll be cool. Um,
FTL is really well balanced. Yeah. There's, I mean, like with pretty much any game,
there's things that are stronger and there's things that are weaker, but I personally find
the balance enough to be able to be fantastic. And I, I really like how with all the different
ships and stuff, you can have these really interesting different fields to, to the run
that you take. Okay, here we go. Citizen being posts on a float plane straight from Reddit,
like, excuse me, 20 barriers, question mark, question mark, a basically guaranteed instant
death attack, 10 plus allies on the battlefield at once that can all receive 20 barriers.
This fight is a total cluster and even with arrow rain plus Sam Adair to try to handle the
barriers, it is still ridiculous. Yeah. Those, those mechanics don't sound fun to me. Um,
like I, I, I tried every possible combination of things to try to break the barrier. If you
could break the barrier, no problem. Let's go. But an unbreakable 20 hit barrier is just stupid.
I always say if you're, if you're playing like some type of MMO or even just like, uh,
there's a bunch of these like, like four player RPGs and there's a boss fight and the boss has
an ability where it just like targets one of your party members at random and it's like, you're dead
in 10 seconds. It's like, okay, I guess I'll do what I can for 10 seconds and then just not be
able to play the game. Like this isn't a fun mechanic. Like it, please like try to find some
other way to add difficulty to this fight. I don't know what it is. You can split the party. Like
there's interesting things that you can do to reduce the amount of party members, but when you
take two, one or two party members, don't just kill them. Put them in like a different scenario.
Make it so that there's like some hallway they have to, they get like teleported back or something
and have to solo fight through this hallway and to regain with the party or whatever it is. I don't
know. There's other things that you can do, but like Twitch chats having a pretty good moment over
here asking if I tried a suplexing the boss or casting vanish and doom. Um, you know what? Yeah,
sure. There might be like a bugged way to beat it, but I'd rather not play a game than do that
quite honestly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, it just, I don't know. It made me really sad cause it
was a game I really wanted to play and I feel like it was, it was doomed to not be as good as
it could be because of what it is and because of how it was funded. Okay. So I was going to say,
if you had to pick one or the other, do you think it's more the funding lack of time, lack of QA?
Absolutely. So you, you don't think it's more the mobile design? No, the creativity was so high.
The mobile issue is, well, they're, they're part and parcel, right? It's built for the subscription
model where revenue cannot be easily attributed to that title. Right? So yes, you can see play
time, but that doesn't necessarily tell you. And, and like, I don't know how many people
are subscribed to Apple arcade, right? I suspect that it's a lot less than this would have sold
if it had come out as a dedicated release for switch in terms of revenue. I mean, these are,
these are industry legends and I would have bought it if it was on switch and the demand for, you
know, traditional style JRPGs warts and all is pretty high. Like you look at the number of
smaller indie games that are, that are sort of chasing that, that older sort of SNES era style,
right? Like there's a couple that are on my to playlist that I am super excited about.
But it was, it was an utter, it was an utter disappointment. This one.
That is sad. Game development's hard.
And it was just, it had so many good ideas. Yeah. Like really, I was really enjoying it. Music's
so good. Like just everything about it was awesome. I know you sort of already answered this,
but if you had some way to just delete that boss, would you do it and then keep pushing forward?
Yeah, I'd like to keep playing it, but I'm just worried that it's just not going to get any
better because it's just such an obvious QA problem. If they had had enough people play
through this, they would have found this error. It's, it's an error. Like it is.
With how their development path went, they might've had to crunch really super hard to get that first
act out and had bad QA because of it. Yeah, that's what I suspect.
And then, but they, they might not have had to crunch as hard for the further acts.
Yeah, maybe. Thunderclash says some of the bosses are ridiculously hard to the point
that Hironobu Sakaguchi had to release videos in his channel showing how to beat some bosses.
I mean, as long as there are hints, you know, in the gameplay that tell you,
then fine. You know, okay. I had to look it up. I don't mind. I would rather like,
if I can't figure out how to beat something in a game, which happens and I have to look it up,
I would rather I look it up and go like, Oh yeah, I'm stupid. Yeah. Instead of I look it up and I go,
there's no possible way I would have ever figured that you were supposed to look at the symbol in
the bottom left-hand corner on the bottom of the physical box when you took it home. Like, no,
I don't screw off. I looked up two things in Breath of the Wild. In like some, in the cult
headquarters, I looked up how to get through this wall. I was stuck in this room. There's
this like stealth section. And did you play Breath of the Wild? You never part of it. You
didn't finish it. I adopted it as my, I'm going to play this on planes game. And then travel stopped.
I get it. Yes. Cool. Okay. So anyway, there's this like stealth section and I
would get to the end room. I'm like, this has to be, this has to be where I couldn't figure out
where to go. And then, so I finally, I felt like an idiot because you just have to switch to like
your Sheikah something, something. Anyway, one of the walls is magnetic and you can move it or
something or you can throw things or I can't remember. You can blow it up. I don't remember,
but if I had just turned on, like it's like, it would be like playing Batman Arkham Asylum,
not being able to figure out what to do and not using detective vision or whatever. Right. Like
just felt like an idiot. I don't mind stuff like that. It's way easier to absorb because I can deal
with just me being dumb. But the second thing I looked up in Breath of the Wild is like some,
it was some quest or something where you have to find the thing between the thing that looks like
a thing. And I found somewhere in the game that matched the description perfectly. And you know
how big that game world is. And so I spent all this time, like wandering around there,
just like fighting things and looking for, I forget if it was a chest or. I never actually
played this game either, but I do know all the things you're talking about so far because I had
to benchmark it. Right. And I had to find like a benchmarking section. And eventually there was
this like room that you could fight in that would spawn exactly consistent enemies in exactly
consistent positions. And you can do the exact set of moves against them every time and it worked
fine. So I remember that. Wait, from Breath of the Wild? No, Arkham Asylum. Oh, Arkham Asylum.
Oh, okay. Yeah. No, no, I'm not talking about Breath of the Wild again. Oh, okay. Yeah. So
there's this like quest you have to, you have to be like on a mountain and it has to be night and
it has to be this and it has to be that or something. And I found a spot that actually
matches the description. So I had to look that one up and I was like, I wasn't even mad about
that when I was mad at myself about the stupid hideout though. Yeah. Super mad. Yeah. Yeah.
Giga clan hideout or whatever it is. Try the demo suit. You think I've put, if you're talking about
Breath of the Wild, I've played a decent amount of it and I enjoyed it. I just, I don't know,
my brain never shifted to like, Hey, I guess we should play this not on planes.
Cause my whole thing was like, I'm enjoying this, but I don't want to like sprint through the game.
I'm just going to play it when I'm on planes and then we're good. Cause I would notice like,
I have an eight hour flight, start playing Breath of the Wild, feel like I've still just barely
started playing and I land and I'm like, Oh, this is great. I want to keep this superpower. I don't
want to finish it. M Kirsch asks, I think I know what you're talking about. Is it the one from a
crossover with another game? I think so. I think it is. Oh, that's kind of annoying. Yeah. This
is a really good comment from a cornosian over on float plane. If you could delete the boss,
if the game gets to the point where the only way to advance is to actually cheat,
the game instantly stops being fun for me because I know if it gets inconvenient again,
I'll just cheat again. I don't want to cheat. I want to play the game. I want to play the game,
right? I don't want to just put in cheat codes. That's not fun for me, right? It's kind of like,
Oh man. I mean, it's like anything, it's like in sports, right? Like if, if, if it's,
if the only way to continue to play is to just cheat, are you playing, are you competing,
are you, what's the point even anymore then? This whole cheating thing is, has been a fairly
major conversation in my circles for a bit now. And we, we talked about this. Yeah. You were
going to talk about, so like he quit Tarkov. Yeah. What the you quit Tarkov? That's weird.
I've been playing this game for six years. Yeah, I know. Yeah. And so he just like messaged me on
discord, just like out of nowhere. Yeah. I quit Tarkov. I'm like, Hey, I don't believe you. And
B what really quit for now? I believe you now that you explained why, but like, yeah,
let's talk about that. So Tarkov was made by a developer called BSG. And it's a, it's a really
fantastic game because like, okay, so I know some people aren't going to like firearms. My grandpa
was a Marine and then he got into the police force afterwards. He used to train me doing drills down
in Arizona, all the type of stuff. So Tarkov's customization level with firearms is completely.
A feature for him, a bug for me. Yeah. It's completely unquestionably unmatched.
Like it's, it's absolutely wild. The degree that they went to all these different systems
that they have in the game, the medical systems are really just amazing. There's all these
different components. The fact you can get like hit in a particular spot and have to use a
particular kind of first aid. Like, yeah, like you can have, there's different types of bleeds
and you need different types. You need a certain type of bandage for like a light bleed.
You need things like a, a, a cat for a heavy bleed, something like that. Like there's all these,
it's, it's a re the game has an insane amount of depth. I've, I've played Eve online and the depth
in Tarkov feels like it like competes with it really heavily. And yet it still has that action,
that shooter action. Yeah. There's really, really intense moments. Like there's,
it's really, it feels extremely unique. There's a few games that have tried to come out and
be escape from Tarkov, but like more for normies and it just, it's not escaped from Tarkov
anymore. Never really works out. Honestly, even as someone who is a relative normie,
I enjoy Tarkov more than I'm sure I would enjoy something that's trying to be Tarkov because it's,
I don't know, you're just kind of along for the ride. I mean, part of it is I'm playing with
these guys, right? So I'm just like, I'm going to have a big backpack on and I'm going to put
a backpack in it and then I'm going to put a backpack in that. It's fun running around with
Russian nesting backpacks. But like this most recent wife and it's, it's always fun near
the beginning of a wipe because no one has cool gear like as a, as a, so, okay. The game wipes
every once in a while your character loses all of their custom stats and you have a stash where
you can store all these like different firearms, body armors, medical supplies, money, whatever.
Every once in a while there's a wipe. You lose all that stuff. Your character fully resets.
Wipes are actually really fun. I know a lot of people are going to think like,
oh, you lost all your progress. Yeah, but now everyone is on the same playing field and you're
playing with these like janky guns. So the recoil stuff is horrible. You're gonna like run up to
someone and they're going to have like an AK-74 that like doesn't even have a buttstock. So they
try to fire and it's just gonna like fly all over the place and it's just very interesting. But this
swipe comes around. The beginning of it is really fun. Having a ton of fun with it. And then they
patch some things that made the game better, but those patches introduced randomly invisible
players. Kind of an issue. Not only are they invisible, but nothing that they do registers
on your side. So if they like throw an item on the ground, it's invisible to you. If they make
any amount of noise, you can't hear it. If you know 100% where they are and you shoot them,
nothing will happen. They take no damage. And they can see you. They can interact with you.
They can kill you. They can take all your stuff. Really, really frustrating. At the same time as
that's going on, Google it. It's AK-74. At the same time as that kind of stuff's going on,
sound is like super messed up. Completely messed up. There's no real functioning vertical audio.
Sounds are just coming in completely random directions. Like I'll watch someone walk
like left to right in front of my screen and hear them like back there and it sounds like
they're upstairs. Like it just nothing makes any sense with audio. Crazy lag all over the place.
Everything is just super wacky. So you have invisible players, which people eventually
figure out how to intentionally do so they can make themselves invisible. And it happens to
people at random. And you have audio coming from all over the place. And cheating is a genuine
major problem in every single multiplayer game that exists. Yeah. So you were saying there's
like a big Tarkov creator that cheated to find cheaters or something like that? Like cheated
for science? That is not public yet because that video is not out. Cool. And I mean no offense,
but they're not that big of a Tarkov creator. But they're cool. They make cool stuff. They're
growing. They'll get there. I believe in you. I mean, should we just promote them at this point?
Yeah, it's goat moth. He's going to be making a video, which we kind of just ruined. I'm sorry.
I apologize. We didn't ruin it. We hyped it. It's genuinely fascinating. It's wild because he does
this whole thing. Wow. I'm just going to completely ruin it. I'm sorry, bro. I'm going to go into it.
Okay guys, just go subscribe to help make it up to him. The O in goat is a zero. Go find him.
So he, Oh man. Wow. I hope he's okay with this. I'm just going to send it. The worst that can
happen is he can never talk to you again and tell everyone he knows about what an utter piece of
untrustworthy you are. So no, for sure. It's not that bad. I've had worse. It's deeply fascinating.
He showed me a bunch of clips where you have to go watch it because the feeling that you get from
it is actually really interesting. And it might only happen to people that have played Tarkov,
but I think you should watch it anyways, because like I said, cheating in every single game,
if it has multiplayer is rampant, to be completely honest. It's genuinely rampant.
Cheats are so sophisticated now. Joe just linked. Is it public?
Oh, this is from two months ago. Yeah. He made that video two months ago. But yeah, cheating in,
in, in games is rampant. You see people get caught that are streamers for cheating,
like consistently. It's happening all the time. We've had people get pulled out of live events,
professional players on professional teams getting caught live because they loaded stuff
onto their mouse that when their mouse was plugged in the computer, it would inject and then
give them whatever advantage. Like there's cheaters at every level and there's tons of them.
The problem with Tarkov is there's very little being done to stop them, right? Very little.
There's no way to watch a replay of the match after the match is over. And whenever I mentioned
that people are like, Oh, it's a, I don't want kill cams in Tarkov. I'm not asking for a kill cam.
I do not want there to be additional information that I could give to other people that are
currently playing the game. But once that match is fully complete, it would be good if I could
watch it back because Tarkov has horrible servers. It has horrible desync. It has horrible tick rate,
all this type of stuff. So it's really hard to tell if someone is aimbotting you or if there's
crazy desync and you just haven't seen them come around the corner yet or whatever else.
So people have known that there's tons of cheaters in Tarkov forever. There's a bunch of ways to be
able to know that, but people have known for a long time. But the degree of which
has been hard to tell. There's a type of cheating that people have known about,
which people call ESP, which is essentially wall hacks. You can see through walls, right?
Is it going up? Oh yeah. There we go. Good. There's a type of cheating in Tarkov called ESP.
Not only can you see through walls, but next to people's names, you can see their name,
you can see their KD, you can see their full inventory, you can see the things that they
have picked up in the raid so far, you can see where they're facing, everything. And that is
effectively, for BSG right now, not detectable. How is that even possible? And because there's no
replay system, there's no way to see people's perspectives after the match, there's no kill cam,
there's no Counter-Strike style Overwatch system, there is nothing if that's the only way that
they're cheating. They're not actually aimbotting, they're not fly hacking, they're not clipping
through walls, whatever. They just know where you are all the time. Which in Tarkov is everything.
Absolutely obscene level of advantage. You're like never gonna know. So what he did was he
wanted to look into how bad this thing is. I don't want to spoil the whole video. Well, they're all
gonna watch it. But yeah, you do need to watch it. What he did was he went out and did the bad.
He got an ESP. Because the only way to figure it out is to go do it. And what he would do,
and I'm not gonna tell you how because you gotta go watch the video, but... Gode is publishing the
video now. That's probably good. What he would... Okay, I'll... Yeah, I don't want to spoil it too
much. Man, I don't want to screw him over. Spoil it a little, it's fine, it's fine. He would test
people. So he brought on like a code of rules because he doesn't want to spoil the game,
right? He doesn't want to make the game worse for legitimate players. So he would just
follow people around that he thought was cheating. He refused to kill any actual players under any
circumstance. So sometimes he'd be following some around and an actual legit player would come up
and kill them. And it is what it is. He just has to go into another match and figure it out. Sure.
But he'd follow these people around and watching how they would react was so interesting. Took him
a little while to figure it out, but there's been this thing in Tarkov for a long time,
which people call the wiggle. It's where you look at someone and you just lean,
lean peek left, lean peek right, and do it over and over again. So your character just goes like...
Yeah. What does it mean? Like friendly or like... Back in the day, if it was two non-cheating
players that saw each other, it was a way to indicate, yo, like I'm cool. We're friendly.
They've added VoIP to the game now so you can talk to each other. That's not really necessary
anymore. So legit players don't really wiggle anymore. But if you can see the other person at
600 meters through three buildings in a mountain because you're wall hacking and they wiggle at you
and they're staring right at you, well, you can wiggle back.
So cheaters are using it. He figured out that people were doing this as a sign of like,
yo, I'm also a cheater and friendly because there's no possible way they could see you.
Right. So he would just go harass people.
And if you're a normal player, you'd have no idea that he was there. Right. So he's not actually
bothering any normal players. Right. Because there's a lot of stuff that you just to be
clear, like it's not like for those of you who don't play Tarkov, which by the way, I totally
understand. It's pretty intense. It's fair. There's lots of things that you can do in a lobby
that are not just PvP. Yeah. So there's there's like kind of like missions that you can complete
and all that kind of stuff. So just because there are there's a wasted slot in the lobby
doesn't mean all of a sudden that this this instance is now completely broken and totally
imbalanced. Not a problem. He actually probably was not hurting the gameplay experience for the
legit players in the lobby at all. I seriously doubt that he was. And like there's legit players
that killed him. It's also when he was showing me some of these clips, it was it was soul wrenching
because he would follow these guys around for like a long time. And you're convinced inside. You're
like, nope, these guys are legit. Like they haven't looked at them. They haven't wiggled back. They
haven't done anything like good. Good. Yeah. And then he's still following them. He's still
following. He just doesn't give up, doesn't give up, doesn't give up. And then one of them will look
over and through multiple walls just doo doo doo. And the second you see them start leaning back
and forth, it's just it kills you, man. And the amount of times that it happens is deeply
disturbing. It's like almost every match. It's also whole teams of players who run up against
a four stack of players that are cheating. And confirmed because it's easy to confirm.
Right. Because you can't see each other. And oh, right. His cheat thing. Yeah. If there is no line
of sight, it shows a green box around them. If there is line of sight, it shows a red box around
them. So you know 100% if they can see you or not. And he'll even do things like he'll pull his knife
out. Yeah. And then they'll pull their knife out. You can't see each other. You're too far away to
hear it. He'll even have people that like they can't see him and they'll be like, oh, why do you
have your knife out? They can't see him, bro. Like it's so brutal. It's so terrible. So I like, I can't
knowing that there's like going to be a cheater in every lobby. Yeah. Why would I play this game?
How's that even fun? Yeah. And like, sure. They're not rage hacking. Like people's like, oh, I get
killed by like fly hackers in Tarkov, like every match. No, I don't believe you like at all.
And after watching goat doing this deep, deep dive, I don't believe you even more because now
I know what they're all doing. Almost all of them are just running. So basically for someone like
you that is actually respecting the integrity of the game, which is a very, it's a very sim
like game, you know, there's, there's no, um, you know, there's no halo style radar where if people
are around you and moving, you just have a dot that shows you where they are or whatever else.
Like you actually rely on visual comfort. There's no outlines showing whether people are friendly
or an enemy. And there's camouflage too. And that's a huge part of the game. Yeah. Like
camouflage actually serves a purpose. Like it's very sim like, and so what you're essentially
realizing is that nobody is actually playing Tarkov. Yeah. People are just playing run around
and dunk on people who are trying to actually play Tarkov. And like, that's, that was one of
the weird things about him showing me a bunch of this footage as well is like, he'd run and hide
in some bush and a player would just cruise right on by. And instead of being like, yeah,
you're playing Tarkov, you hit effectively and he ran by. I'm now like, Oh, like what a cool dude.
He's playing the game legit. I'm like proud of this guy. Who's not killing goat right now because
not because he's not killing him, but because he's not cheating. So he didn't know that he was there.
Apparently the videos, the video is live now, so you can go check it out.
I think he was planning on releasing it tomorrow and all this stuff and I just ruined everything,
but whatever. It's probably for the better. Uh, my bad. You can hate me later. Um,
but yeah, I, that, that, I don't know. It soul crushed me. Cause I, I always had this like
assumption cause every once in a while someone would get you and it's just like, man, like,
really? How did they possibly know I was there? It didn't feel like an aim bot. It didn't feel
like anything else, but I was just like, come on. Like I, I was very stealthy. We have multiple
people on this team. Like maybe Joe and I will be flanking from different angles and they like
perfectly transfer and it's a really big angle. All this like weird stuff. It's just like, man,
like I just don't really believe that. And now it's like, well, like it doesn't even have a
kill feed for example, which is good technically. Yeah. Which is, which is, which is true to its
sim nature. You actually have to, you actually have to see the opponent drop and you have to not
just see them drop. You have to see them not be picked up unless you're cheating and then it tells
you they're dead. Yeah. And it can be hard to keep an eye on them because you gotta, maybe,
maybe they've got friends. You don't know if they have friends because you can't, it's not like
everyone's in a party of three or a party of four. You can't take that for granted. Um, it's, it's a
super cool concept for a game, but I'm looking at it now going, man, you know, was every match that
I was ever in compromised? Probably. And he asked me a really interesting question. I thought,
which was how much cheating is acceptable, right? Because you have to understand at some level,
there's cheaters in every game. There's cheaters in war zone. Yeah. There was cheaters. I don't know
about League of Legends, but I know back in the day, Dota, the Warcraft three mod Dota,
there was cheaters in that because you could remove the fog of war. If there's a multiplayer game,
there's going to be at least someone who's finding an unfair advantage. And there is no way that
companies are going to be able to defeat this completely on their own because, uh, like how
are you supposed to detect someone taking an external video camera that isn't plugged into
the computer that just looks at the screen and performs actions onto a motorized mouse? Yeah.
You cannot detect that. Nope. Nothing's even connected to the computer. Yeah. So like no
extra software running. It's not, it's not reading memory that it wasn't supposed to.
So like battle eye or whatever the heck, whatever company has that's supposed to detect cheaters is
never ever going to detect that. And people do do that type of stuff. So the solution is to bring
back the physical LAN party, but okay. So that actually helps a ton. That helps a ton. But like
I mentioned, there's still people that cheat on mine. And then when you catch them, you shame them
and they never get to come again. They're banned from every game. Yeah. Now they can't play anymore.
Yeah. I think the stakes are a lot higher. They definitely are. I seriously doubt there's
like, there's, there's no possible way there's as many people cheating on LAN, but like, it's an
interesting question. Right. And it kind of comes down to the reason why Tarkov is currently ruined
for me. Yeah. Is because I am now deeply questioning every single engagement I ever have
win or lose. Doesn't matter. Yeah. And that's, that's not, that's not fun. No. It's kind of like,
Oh, okay. You know what I find really not enjoyable is like, you know, that I play badminton,
I get pretty competitive. Well, I get pretty competitive about anything and I'm really
passionate about badminton and I love it. Really enjoy it. I, I, I, as someone who's always trying
to improve, I love playing with higher level players because they, they push me to my limit.
Right. But one of the things that I don't enjoy is playing outside of a competitive setting.
I love playing ladder nights. I love playing anything where, where the, the match matters
and the more it matters, the better. So my favorite format to play is like a point differential
format where every point matters because it's like a team format and the winning team is determined
by the total point difference in your matches. I like that. So I always, so the more everyone's
fighting for every point, the more I enjoy the experience because it's not, I would rather lose
narrowly than win by a big margin. It's kind of my, my general philosophy. And I don't enjoy
playing when the other person's not trying, you know, when like the integrity of competition
matters a lot to me and I think you're, you're the same way. And so while I enjoy playing with
players who are much better, I, if, if I feel like it's a total waste of their time and they're
giving it like a 60% effort, I'd rather be both just conserved our energy. Yeah. I, I would,
I want it. I don't mind losing as long as I can reflect on that situation and figure out how I can
do better moving forward. And maybe that's not an immediate thing. Maybe in a, in, in like a
shooting game, it's like, okay, I need to sit on some aim trainers. Cause honestly, this guy kept
his aim around me significantly better than I kept mine on his. And I lost cause he's just better at
the game. Yeah. It's like, okay, well I, I want to practice that. Someone just mentioned in the
chat, Valve just banned 40,000 players from Dota. We do need to talk about that. Yeah. So like,
it's not, it's not just shooters either. It's super cool. They put a honeypot into the game.
So there's like a particular memory, like a, like a chunk of memory that had some kind of useful
data, but that they made it so the game would never actually look in it. So only third-party
applications were checking it. And so they basically just went, yeah, with a very high
degree of certainty, we can tell that every single one of you who checked the values in this,
I think it was, was it Ram or was it storage? I can't remember, but anyone who looked at this
is a cheater. Bye-bye. See you later. I mean, for a free to play game, like realistically,
they'll be back with a new account and whatever, but still they lose whatever they had, whatever
they had at least inconveniencing them as good tools of ownage says, and then we've actually
talked about this. You know, I, I, I think I've, I've gotten less certain seeing the,
the catastrophe that was stadia and the complete lack of newsworthiness of anything that's going
on with, I don't even remember what Amazon's game streaming services called anymore. I mean,
Nvidia has had some big wins lately. They announced that partnership with Microsoft,
but a tools of ownage talks about, well, the solution could be game streaming so that
everything is server-side everything that wouldn't help with something like a camera pointed at the
screen and like the mouse playing thing. But I, other than farming gold or something, you know,
like there's an old reference, you know, wow, wow, wow. Style. Right. You know, that I think,
I think that if the cheat gets to the point where they're not even sitting in front of the computer
anymore, I think a lot fewer users will be incentivized to do it. I think the,
the problem that I'm having with this type of stuff is, is how intense it is, you know? Like
it's, it's, it's very overwhelming. Yeah. Things need to be done about it. Yeah. Game streaming
though. We've talked about how that could be the reason, like I talked about like gaming experiences
that are impossible with everyone, with everything done client side, like, like massive environments
or, you know, massive, massively multiplayer games and things like that. But I think getting rid of,
I'm not getting rid of, but dramatically reducing cheating could be a major incentive. There's,
there's some interesting stuff too, like certain cheats that people use for Tarkov,
you can't actually run if you have Valorant installed.
Valorant's super invasive like ring zero ridiculous anti-cheat will find the Tarkov one and freak out.
Wow. So there's another thing where like part of this argument wants me to, wants me to like,
I almost want my gaming computer to be like a specific device for gaming, like I almost want
my gaming computer to go more into like the console direction where it's like, okay, well,
yeah, I sat here on a WAN show and got mad about Valorant's ring zero anti-cheat. But at the same
time, I don't want cheaters in my game. Pretty okay with like installing a separate SSD or
partition or whatever. And just having that for only games and I use it for nothing other than
games. And I just let invasive stuff come in and people are going to bring up, well, I can look at
it. I don't know what the exact perfect answer is, but like,
this ain't it is what I have to say. Yeah. You know what might be it? Maybe we should do a
couple of merch messages. Dan, do you want to hit us with some merch messages while we,
before we do some more topics or sponsors or whatever the heck it is, if you guys are not
familiar with merch messages, you check out the cool stuff on lttstore.com. We showed off the new
WAN desk pad. We've also launched a lot of great stuff recently. The track suit is actually doing
really, really well. You guys seem to be super into that. Or you can just, if you just want to
send a merch message, you can just like pick up a gift card or something like that. You can pick
something up later. If nothing catches your fancy, but Dan might reply to you. If you have like a
shout out, it can go up here, but he usually selects a few for me and Luke to address on the
show. And we're going to do a couple of those now and then we'll do some more later. Sure. I'll
go in here from Matthew. Hi Linus and Luke, long time fan, first time merch messenger, mystery
shirt for that real life loot box. When it comes to hiring, do you find all applicants are fans?
Does that make it difficult to hire? Not even close. Honestly, the bigger we've grown,
the lower percentage that claim to be, claim to be viewers. Especially as we've
grown outside of hiring just video editors and tech writers. I've also had experiences where I
think what's happening is there's fans of the channel that know people that do things that
we're hiring for that like link them the job posting. Cause I've, I've asked people like,
like, how did you find this? And they're just like, oh, it's a job posting. What do you mean?
What, like what's, what, I don't want to give away what interview I'm talking about too much,
but let's say, this is not the question I asked, but it's like, what's your favorite video?
It's a shame if someone complained about your interview process on Reddit or something.
What's your favorite video or something? And they basically just go like, I don't know. I don't
watch at all. And it's like, oh wow. Like I didn't actually expect that, but cool. Like the WAN show,
WAN show writer, new WAN show writer who hopefully we can introduce. She makes it through her
probation. Was basically, I was like, have you watched the WAN show? And she's like,
well, I did as preparation for this job. Fair enough. Yep.
Yep. It's like my SO super into it. All right. Fair enough. I've ranted against,
I think it's like star Wars and halo where they specifically hired people that did not
like the franchise. Cause they like wanted to make it different. I think that's stupid,
but you don't have to hire people that are preexisting fans either. Like
I think I just heard them.
Emotional damage. Yeah. Yeah. I think you threaded that needle. Well,
making the reference recognizable without crossing into like questionable.
Any who got them. You want another one? Sure. This one's from Mason. Hey, Linus and Luke. I
know bringing on guests isn't a common theme for the WAN show, but is there a person that
if you had the opportunity to bring onto the show, you would. Bill Watterson, my hero.
Yeah. Well, you know what? The reason I was thinking about it was because
he's like one of the few creators ever that I would just buy anything that he licensed.
Like I have never not enjoyed, I would have Calvin and Hobbes anything. Yeah. And he stubbornly
refuses to give it to me because he's like, eh, you shouldn't merchandise things for money. And
I'm like, okay, that's fair. And I respect it, but I really want to throw money at you. So this
we're at an impasse here, just create more stuff then. And, but I mean, the last thing,
the last thing I would want to do is bother him though. So I was, so anyway,
the reason I was thinking about it was because I was sort of reflecting on my fandom. I'm not a
fan of much. I am a fan of Bill Watterson. And what made me think about it was the conversation
we were having a little while back on WAN show about fan interactions and what the right way
or wrong way to approach them. And what I realized is that while you and I talked about what works
for us, I feel like you would have to tailor it. If I ran into someone that wants to be talked to
and wants to be approached, I would take a different approach. Whereas if I ran into
Bill Watterson, I would say absolutely nothing. I would just go, and then I would like leave.
Right. Because do you think, do you think it's appropriate to do like the head nod at least?
Um, I don't know. I've done that before everything I've ever read about him
and he doesn't do a lot of interviews. He just, he just, he just like seems to value his privacy
and uh, fair enough. I just like, okay. But if I had it, if I could pick anyone to have
on the WAN show, all right, let's go. Cool. Let's go. As long as it wouldn't bother him,
I would respectfully ask for him to be on the WAN show. So assuming, assuming like, uh, um,
um, it's a consensual, I can have anyone on the WAN show, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Cause that'd be uncomfortable. Like I can force anyone at gunpoint to be on the WAN show.
Like, no, no, no, no, that's not cool. I think,
huh. I think Todd Howard,
because I would genuinely be very interested in the conversation more than I would actually
be interested in like, I'm going to fanboy over Todd Howard, you know? Okay. Sure.
I don't know. I can tell him that the WAN show just works.
Wow. Give us one more and then we'll move on. All right. That sounds good to me to roast him. No.
And I understand why people would say that, but just to talk, yeah, I would, I would ask him
things that I think people that would want to roast him would ask, but I would also ask him
things that I think are automatic wins it just because horse armor exists and some other things
have happened. He hasn't made absolutely legendary products at the same time. So yeah, that's fair.
Okay. This one's from Marcus. Any tips for devices slash tech to have in a studio student apartment?
A computer.
Studio student apartment, battery banks?
Yeah. A laptop.
Light bulbs. TI 83 plus graphing calculator. I mean, or whatever, whatever the probably much
newer one is. No, it's still that one. Is it really? Shut up. No, it's not.
As float plane chat. I'm pretty sure it can't be. What is it? Sorry.
TI 80 something has been 83 plus was what I said. There's gotta be a newer one. There's no way.
And there's still $200. That's stupid. That's stupid. We should, we should make a clone on
LTT store. TI 84 apparently. No, no, they've moved on. They've moved on. TI 84 silver.
Wow. Except I'm pretty sure that has been there for like at least a decade.
Okay. Yeah, no, there's the 84 plus. Yeah. All right. TI 89 titanium.
Let's go. Wow. This thing looks ancient.
All right. All right. Why don't we move on to our next topic? Oh,
Oh, they have, they have like, uh, TI inspire and it has like a color screen and stuff.
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today using the link down below. What do you want to do for our next topic? I am just kind of
staring at merchant messages, hoping to get to those. Um, uh, really like very little happened
in the world of tech this week. It was all like legal stuff. Okay. I want to talk about Amazon's
telehealth expansion. Amazon bought American healthcare provider, one medical, which offers
subscribers 24 seven on demand telehealth services and same and next day in-person medical
appointments at one of its 125 offices. The deal was announced last year, what was delayed by an
FTC antitrust investigation. Amazon is looking to expand one medical to compete in us primary
care against other outpatient clinic chains owned by CVS Walgreens and Walmart. This has raised
concerns about vertical consolidation as large corporations increasingly buy up smaller players
in the market. Amazon already offers medication through its online pharmacy and the acquisition
will give Amazon access to even more medical data, which it uses for analytics and machine learning,
both on patient health outcomes and staff wellbeing. There's definitely no issue with
the people that sell you food and everything else that you buy in your life. Also having all of your
medical data. Cool. Sweet. I think if people watch the show for a while, they know that I'm
probably not so into this, but I for one think it's great. I don't believe that at all. Yeah.
I don't know. I don't like that. Yeah. I wonder what's interesting is if you are currently a
customer of one medical and you don't want your medical data being taken by Amazon. I wonder what
rights you have. Cause it's like, I don't think you can GDPR it cause it's an American American.
Yeah. Yeah. I get, so basically is it just all going to Amazon no matter what there,
there might be a way to deal with it, but I don't know. I don't know. So consider if you are a one
medical customer, I'm willing to bet there was something in their T's and C's that's like, yeah,
we'll keep everything super private and we won't share it with anybody. By the way,
we might get acquired at some point. Yeah. Um, I mean that's, it's usually in there.
Yeah. I don't know. It's kind of depressing. The like, what industry are they going to not be in
in 20 years? I mean, wall E is looking more and more prophetic by the time, by the time,
by the day, uh, I don't remember what the super company was in that one by and large or by N
large or something like that. Yeah. So I think they were basing it off of like,
it was Amazon plus Costco or something as far as I could tell. It was like,
basically they were just involved in everything from
merchandise sales to space travel. Okay. It's Amazon. Yeah. Fair enough.
Yeah. I mean, at a certain point you have so much money that you can just buy your way into
literally any industry. We are now a market leader. Yesterday we did not exist.
We just bought, we just bought the, the, the human, the, the actual physical assets and the,
like the human, like knowledge, capital, the entire like essence of this entire industry
now belongs to us. LOL by the way, the prices are double now. Hope you like that. Cause we,
I mean, we spent a lot on this and we are think of the shareholders.
We've talked about this before. It's like when, when Best Buy came up into Canada,
it wasn't like Best Buy and Future Shop fought for a while. Future Shop was
basically exactly the same as Best Buy in Canada, but worse because the salespeople were commissioned
and really pushy. Yeah. Yep. So that and their color was red instead of blue. Other than that,
it was like, it was yellow? Best Buy? No, Future Shop. Yeah. I just know Best Buy yellow.
Best Buy is blue. Shut up. Yeah. Hold on. Poll. Poll. Best Buy is blue. No, that's it.
Don't go on the website. All right. Poll. No, no, I don't know how to create a poll.
I don't remember. You always show it to me and then I always forget.
It's so straightforward. Best Buy is what? Primary color?
Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. In the meantime, uh, what were we, what were we talking about? I can't remember. We were
talking about the buy and large. Yeah. I, man. So Amazon's they've got ring, so they've got
cameras all over your house. They're going to have your medical data. So they're going to know,
like, don't they have that little robot with the camera on it too? The little like drone thing
and stuff like, uh, they know all the products you buy. They're the primary employer in more than one
you know, significant municipality. Not only can they deliver your food, but they also have,
uh, what's that? Big food chain. Oh, Whole Foods. They also own Whole Foods. Uh, yeah.
Terrifying. It's blue, bro. 87. It's yellow. 52 for yellow. What? No. Yeah, 50, 55, 55 for yellow.
Not percent. Yellow's going up. I think you guys are just trolling me. No, it's blue. Yes,
yellow is the accent color, but it's blue. When you walk in there, what are they wearing? When
you, when you go up to the store, what color is the Best Buy logo on? Boom. Got them. Roasted.
The background's blue. Shut up. It's yellow, isn't it? The tag? The tag is yellow, right?
I'm pretty sure the tag is blue. Oh, that tag is yellow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, no. Luke scream,
what color? What color is the? No. There, there. That's what I'm talking about. Look,
it's the background is blue. I think, I think the, I think this is old. What color was the
favicon? What color does Best Buy think their color is? Go back, go back. No, you go back.
You have to go back. Favicon yellow. BestBuy.com. No, no, no. Best Buy, uh, employee. And you're
wrong. They're wearing blue shirts. They're all wearing blue shirts. That doesn't mean their
color is blue. Their color is still yellow. And look, the banner, this, oh, that's a windows.
No, we're not looking at your screen anymore. We've had enough of your screen. The uniform is
blue and yeah, the yellow logo is old. The entire building is blue. I don't know, guys. I don't know.
Um, it's a good way and show when we're debating what color Best Buy is.
We do have an update for you guys. Um, uh, this came up on Reddit and it's an update to the Apple
unlock a story that we talked about recently. So apparently a large number of recent gen
Macs have wound up unusable on the secondhand market due to an activation lock. Apple does,
it turns out, have the ability to distinguish between locked devices that have been reported
missing or stolen and locked devices with a clean record. And in some circumstances,
Apple can and does unlock those devices upon request. So this is interesting because when
we were talking about this, we were basically saying, well, Hey, in the interest of reducing
the incentive to steal a device, we actually kind of support, um, non bypassable device locks,
right? Except that it is bypassable. So this complicates things. Uh, users of our slash set
up app have submitted dozens of devices through Apple's activation lock removal service. And a
few patterns have emerged. One only devices with a clean status were unlocked. What does that mean?
Which makes sense that it was not reported stolen or missing makes sense to the vast majority of
devices unlocked were an iPhone eight or earlier. The iPhone eight was discontinued in April of
2023. All unlocked devices had been unused for at least a year for when devices were unlocked. It
appeared to happen through an automated system. When devices were rejected, it took significantly
longer and went through a human review. So unless there was a fundamental change in the system after
April, 2020, this would seem to indicate that Apple might have the ability to unlock newer devices or
could contact the original owner of the device and inform them of the unlock request, giving them the
option to confirm or deny. We have raised issues with that though. Yeah. There's, there's potential
like privacy issues. Um, I think there's just potential customer experience issues. Like I just,
I wouldn't want like, okay, so what I haven't used my HTC Vive in four years and for whatever reason
it was locked somehow. Um, and HTC just what like phones me and it's like, Hey, can you deal with
this? Like, I mean, yeah, I guess so. But also, sorry, why would just sound like a scam. Why,
yeah. Why are you contacting me? This is weird. Email or phone or whatever. I would just assume
it was a scam. Yep. Yeah, I get that. It's chat still seriously talking about best by color. Oh
no, they're not. Um, anyway, I don't know. I just continue to be disappointed by Apple's
attitude, you know, where they, they'll, they'll talk about how great they are and environmentally
friendly they are and whatever, whatever, whatever. And then when push comes to shove and
they have an opportunity to keep devices out of a landfill, they invariably do not take that path
because at the end of the day, the only thing they're shareholders care about is how many
iPhones they sold this quarter. It's just all there is to it. And if they were just,
if they just owned that and they weren't so like hippie touchy feely about everything,
I'd be like, okay, yeah, fair enough. So you're soulless and evil and you just wear it on your
face. Like, okay, fine, fine. But just the duplicitous, the duplicity, duplicitousness,
two-facedness. There we go. Nice. I just, I find it so hard to deal with.
There's one that we might actually disagree on, which might be interesting. Hit me.
Uh, China suppresses. I disagree. China suppresses public. No they didn't.
Regulators in China are apparently telling Chinese tech companies to restrict access to AI power
outside of China and to report to the government before launching their own in-house chat bots.
No, I disagree. AI image generators are already censored in China and Baidu's chat bot Ernie will
refuse to generate images of Tiananmen square. That makes sense. Synthetic content like deep
fakes are far more restricted than in the West, not only to protect citizens from impersonation,
but likewise to restrict the potential for parody and mockery of Chinese authorities. It is possible
that the same factors that make large language models sometimes respond unpredictably or
fabricate information may also make them difficult to effectively censor unless their data set is
also fully censored. Yeah, this could be, I've, I've just unrelated to these notes here. I was,
I was reading about this and apparently there's some criticism in China of the government's
efforts to restrict this, the data sets of these large language models and basically going like,
look, uh, because of, you know, what, you know, you're being thin-skinned about, you know,
Winnie the Pooh generated images or whatever, we're gonna fall behind America in this tech
war. Are you serious right now? Here's the thing though. Yeah. What is your stance on them?
So I didn't actually know the whole thing, which is why we're going to disagree. So I'm gonna,
I'm gonna narrow it down slightly. So just them blocking, uh,
uh, let's say outside of China made. Yeah. That doesn't surprise me at all.
What is your stance on that? Well, I mean, what do you think they should do? I just think it's
stupid. So what is your, I think I knew you said that at some point. I don't know if we were like
talking about it offline or what. So that's why I thought we would disagree because I don't
actually necessarily think it's that stupid because, and my reason for this is look at how
we're all reacting to TikTok existing at all in the West. China's using a different algorithm
here to get the kids to watch dumb things so that they don't have good aspirations when they're
getting older and all this type of stuff that we have talked about on the WAN show before.
I don't know that I would assign causality necessarily to those things. I think there are,
there are much, I think, I don't think TikTok's helping.
As far as my understanding goes, there is a difference in the algorithm for in China and
out of China, where in China, it directs them more to like science and education type topics
and like wellness stuff. And outside of China, it directs them to just who's making them watch
the app more. Yeah. Okay. Which is to be completely honest, not different to how basically anything
that's made in the West is made anyways. So the criticism there is interesting, but you know,
but I don't know if I was, if I was the Chinese government, I would be concerned
about like chat GPT. I think I would be losing this tech war. Not only just that, but we've had
the conversation here, right? To be able to make these things work better. Say you're a software
developer to make it be able to work better. You might have to give it some information.
So if they allow everyone to use it, imagine you were a developer for X government. Let's
let's remove China from the conversation because there's a lot of situations there. France.
Let's say you're a developer for the Paris is not on fire for a change and you have other concerns.
There's other stuff to work on. It doesn't smell like pee right now.
Love you. Love you, France. Beautiful city. But like, it's interesting because
it incentivizes you giving it a lot of information because it will work better if you do. Right?
Like it is actually a massive security problem. We talked about that on one of the first
episodes. We talked about chat GPT at all, which was like, oh yeah,
it can't read your internal API docs unless you give it to it. Yeah, then it can.
And like people have a hundred percent done that. I guarantee it. I know that people have done that.
I don't know. It's interesting this and the deep fake stuff like, yeah, we can,
I've taken this stance a bunch of times on the show, which is where like,
if you start banning this stuff, other countries are just going to surpass you.
Like, it's not like other people aren't going to make it. So at a certain point,
like what's the point, but then we have also brought up the argument of like, yeah,
they were bad, which was nice. But when people deep faked us having a conversation on the WAN
show, that kind of sucked. When people deep faked other people in significantly worse ways,
that sucked a lot more. Like, I don't know. It's not like there isn't problems with these
technologies. And if they make it so that you're only allowed to use ones that are made in country,
they might be able to have more control over it. There's also the downside that that might
restrict their level of innovation or whatever else, which is concerning, but I don't know. It's
deep fakes AI technology. It's a really interesting landscape and I can understand
why different governments might react to it in a variety of different ways is, I guess,
all I can say I can run at 3,200 megahertz respectfully asks us to delineate between
Parisians and the rest of the French Parisians are specifically known to be the worst in italics.
I don't know. This is one of those things where everyone's perception and everyone's
experiences are different. You know, I hear a lot of the reputation that the French tend to have,
whether we're talking Quebec or Parisian or France, French, the rest of the rest of France,
my experience has been very overwhelmingly universally positive in all of those places.
So I just don't really, I shouldn't say I don't really get it. I should say I can respect it
because every time I've talked to anyone about it or witnessed anything, the issue they have is
if you don't even make an effort to engage with them on their turf in their way. So if you just
walk up to someone in Montreal and speak English where realistically like a solid, like 75% of
people speak fluent English anyway, they're just going to pretend they don't understand you and
you can basically just f*** off. Whereas if you walk up and you're just like
toilet, there's going to be like, don't worry about it. Toilet's over there. And, you know,
let me know if I can help you with anything when you come out. Like they're chill, right?
Make even the slightest effort. And it's like, fine. And honestly, I can't,
oh, are we going to get spicy today? I can't say I don't feel the same way. Like I don't get running
into people like in my neighborhood where I live who don't speak a single word of English, even
though they've lived here for 25 years. I have a, okay. Yeah. That's a different thing. I have a
different take on that. Cause I find it fun. I've encountered it. And I'm just like, I don't like
if someone, if someone speaks to you in a language that you don't understand, and I've seen this on
both sides. Yeah. When, when I don't understand the, yeah, whatever. I've just seen it on both
sides, but if someone speaks to you in a language that you don't understand and then gets mad at you
for not understanding it, when in that language, which is really funny. And they just like start
yelling at you still in that language, assuming you're going to understand it now. It's like,
bro, no, I don't, I have no idea. But yeah, like I was in, I'm just going to divert because I think
we're going down a not great path. So I'm going elsewhere. Um, I was in, I was in Paris slash
France because it wasn't just Paris visiting shadow fairly recently. And we weren't like
in shadows offices the whole time we cruised around, we're checking out different tourist
destinations with no different cafes doing whatever, all that kind of stuff. It was great.
Everyone was really nice. I don't know. I didn't really get it. I did walk past part of the street
that legitimately made me almost hurl because it was just like, I mean, New York's the same,
any like big city that had a sewer designed like 300 years ago or whatever is
going to be like that. Yeah. It was like brutal. But based on what people had told me
earlier in that same day, I had remarked about how I was confused because it didn't smell bad at all.
And I was confused. It was just very, this like one specific spot whenever we'd walk by it,
it was really bad. But yeah, people were nice in Paris. People were nice in other parts of
France that we went to. I had no problem with it. That might be because of like how I interacted
with those people. So they were respectful back. I don't know. Um, but yeah, I had no problem there.
I thought everybody was great. Uh, board Aga asks is line to say you're an American speak English
fellow? Absolutely not. A I'm not an American and B uh, it's not like the area that I live in is
like a, you know, a little Italy type area or anything like that. It's like
literally everything's in English. You would have to have completely inoculated yourself from
anything and everything in order to not be exposed to it and to not have to use it at all. Like it's
kind of, it's, it's shocking. It's like almost admirable. If I moved to Japan, I would want to
learn Japanese. Whether you wanted to or not, you just probably should. Um, is sort of obvious to me,
but fair enough. Yeah. The should just doesn't apply. Cause for me, I would want to anyways.
So like it, yeah, it'd be almost irrelevant. All right. Why don't we move on to YouTube
adding dubbing podcasts and 10 80 premium.
So before we get into this, I just want to shoot in cause I like recommend using it. I complained
on the show fairly recently, I think three or four shows ago about how, despite being,
being a premium member and despite literally every single video that I would click on manually
switching it to the highest possible resolution for a long time, being really diligent about it,
every single time it was still automatically putting me at the bottom resolution forever.
I complained about that while I was on the show. I had the idea of like, I should just make
an extension that automatically picks the highest possible resolution. And then while I was sitting
there thinking about that, being like, I shouldn't announce this, I should just do it. Someone
mentioned in chat like, Hey, there's this extension that does this. And I was like, Oh, sick. So I went
home, checked it out, got it, installed it, and have been running it for a long time. And it's
great. So mine just automatically picks his, uh, picks absolute maximum now. Cause I was like,
for a long time, it was just be like, Oh, whatever, like 1080 piece. Fine. I don't need
to like crank everything so crazy, but no, they wanted a war. Now it's max every time.
No matter what you're going to get. Um, anyways, the actual topic
following last week's leadership change, YouTube has announced a series of new features, including
experimenting with a new 10 80 peer EME. I'm sorry, no, I was going to say 10 80 P premium,
but it's 10 80 premium video quality with a higher bit rate. Uh, despite concerns,
YouTube does not currently appear to intend to decrease the quality of the current 10 80 P
setting, um, to encourage paying for the premium version. Uh, but the new 10 80 premium will run at
13 megabits per second instead of eight megabits per second with unpaid 10 80 P.
I'm sure it's still variable. I think that's just like a general target.
Yeah. This is just an average for the last year. A small group of creators has been testing a new
dubbing system soon to roll out more broadly, which adds the option to create multiple dubbing
tracks on a single video, uh, similar to the current system for subtitles, rather than having
to create a different video for each language. I believe we were part of that beta. So that
includes us. We have, we have tested it. I'm really excited about it. I think, uh, I, I pinged
out about it earlier this week and I think I was told that the, the first like integrated
into the workflow video is going to be very, very soon. Let me just have a quick, you know what?
I might've talked to him in person. I think it just popped in on him. So Nope, I don't know.
I don't have it on my, I don't have it on my phone, but I think we're going to be ready to
roll out. I think we're doing Spanish first. Don't quote me on that, but I'm, I'm pretty sure cause
that's what most of our initial testing was done on. It will also be possible to designate tracks
and videos as podcasts in YouTube studio, as well as adding them to YouTube music. Oh, okay.
Dan's not there. So, um, I guess I don't really know, uh, chair, uh, chair secret labs chair.
Nope. I guess he didn't make it in time. Uh, we're done having this conversation. Sorry.
Sweater on screen. Do you have any idea how our podcast platform uploads work?
Cause I don't even know. I have recently found out because we didn't know. Yeah. Uh,
so podcast uploads are handled by Sven. That's random. Very random. Yeah. This is going to
change. Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I, I only just learned this. Oh, okay.
Okay. We're looking into it. There might be some reasons, stuff like that,
but it's also like not automated reasons like that. We rolled a, a 106 sided die and it landed
on Sven. Like I think you have been chosen. I think things like Spotify, you are the 1%.
I think maybe things like Spotify might get different ads than other platforms.
Correct. Yeah. There are specific ad reads and then because our ad reads are a variable length
and at variable points in the video, I see it can't be automated. It's just whenever I feel
like doing it and also for a different amount of time, right? Cause you don't, you wouldn't do it
for like, okay, for the exact next 90 seconds, no matter what we are doing an ad, like a section of
ads, like it's not structured like that. Right. So you can't really automate it. So that means
if there's a long weekend, it's not going to be up on podcasting platforms until Tuesday,
by which point you might as well just start watching clips because you know,
who has time to watch like a four hour podcast? So we're like hyper hamstringing our own podcast.
Yeah. It's kind of hilarious how when show is as far as I can tell, actually an enormous podcast.
Yeah. And yet we do everything we can to make, try to make it not impede its success. Yeah.
Yep. I don't know, man. I put these wrinkles here on purpose. You guys know that, right?
Oh yeah. It's brutal. But yeah, I, I think the irreverence is why they like it.
I want it to be automated in some way. It's a feature. I just don't know if it can be
because of how we structure the ad spots unless we started doing like we have the timer, right?
So unless we started doing okay, there's the, but there's some amount of variance in the recording
start in the recording end. So it's always going to be a little odd. I don't know if there's some
way where we could automatically splice out if we started being really rigid about the duration of
ad spots and when we did them and stuff like that. Yeah. But we don't want to do that. So like it,
it keeps coming back to you. I love how you use this, the word we to mean Linus.
Yeah. If we, you used it after a while. If, if you,
Hey, I stopped signing things for you. Is that,
Have you though? Yeah, because now I can just sign things as myself on behalf of the company.
We just, we just changed that. What was I going to say? I'm not hearing any of this,
but yeah, if we want to have custom ads on those platforms,
it's going to have to be manual to some degree. Yeah. Dark 24 says no Linus.
It is not why we like it. Some of us tolerate it because nothing will change. No matter what we say
you being a troll is not funny. Why am I laughing then?
Casual forgery on the WAN show. It's been, it's been enough time statute of limitations, whatever.
I don't think a week counts. Hey, come on.
Oh geez. Sign my screwdriver. Yeah. At LTX. I'll sign everyone's stuff as Linus.
There we go. Sorry. Okay. Yeah, I'm doing great.
Okay. LTX 2023 BYOC update. Hey, speaking of LTX, what a great segue. Yeah. We know not everyone was
able to get a Whaleland BYOC ticket, but we were able to shuffle the layout a bit and we're selling
more to 38 more tickets. That's it. We sold all of them in like the first day. That's going to do
nothing. I mean, okay, look, the thing is we can't take up the whole floor plan with BYOC. Otherwise
it wouldn't be LTX. It would just be Whaleland. Yeah. There needs to be like fun things to do at
the convention. Yeah. And so it's, it's a balancing act, right? So I get it. But anyway, I think at
some point we're going to get to a point where the BYOC gets like its own floor. Yeah. Vancouver
convention center has multiple buildings. Yeah. So the BYOC could just have its own thing. Totally.
And you could be in BYOC land, which would actually be great for security anyway. So you're in BYOC
land and then you just walk across like this little courtyard or like external Plaza thing.
And then you're in the other building, you're in LTX. I mean, I could see us getting there.
Yeah. LTX is like kind of awesome. Well, at least the last one was presumably this next one will be
good. Yeah. Assuming it continues to grow at the pace that it has been over the last two and then
what looks like it's going to happen for this next one, it could be like a 10, 15, 20,000 person
convention by like 2025, 2026. Like it's, it's pretty exciting. It's, it's really cool. Anyway,
BYOC tickets, those 38 will go on sale March 3rd at 5 PM Pacific time. So if you didn't get
a BYOC ticket and you're into it, um, go for it. Uh, there's some notes in here for LTX 2019.
We apparently made the mistake of opening up too many more BYOC seats at once. So we'll be offering,
Oh, there'll be several waves of small batch tickets provided that we sell at each wave.
Um, so if you already have a ticket and want to purchase BYOC instead, please just do so
and then reach out to support at info at ltxexpo.com. So we can refund your original
ticket. All right, cool. So that way you will, if you like had any extras on your original ticket
or whatever, we can get you sorted out. Should we do a few merch messages? Yeah. Oh,
Google was accused of destroying evidence. We could talk about that. Um, blah, blah, blah.
They were accused of destroying evidence by the American government.
Something antitrust epic games. This is a real podcast.
I mean, the headline kind of says it all. That's okay. That's what I was saying about
the topics for this week though. They're just like legal stuff, which nothing else happened.
Blue Origin can make solar panels out of moon dust. All they have to do is go to the moon.
Um, they hope to market this innovation to NASA.
Yeah. Cool.
Maybe they'll win something from NASA that space X doesn't get. All right, let's do some
merch messages. Okay, sure. We, uh, we've got one here from Kira. Uh, happy Friday. Happy Friday.
Would you say in the programming world, it's more important to be an expert in one language
or proficient in many. Do you have a favorite slash least favorite language? Oh, uh, I think
it all depends on what you're doing. Um, like there's, there's people that get paid a lot to
be extremely knowledgeable in like a very old antiquated language that no one learns anymore,
but like airports or nuclear silos or heavy industry or whatever still uses it.
And they need you to come make some change to it like once a year. And they'll pay you like
literally I have heard of contracts where someone flies in, works for like one to five days,
flies out and gets paid 200 grand. You just have to hope that comes along. You need to be
the best one. You have to hope it comes along cause this isn't going to be like a perpetual
thing. It's just me a one-time thing. I'm not actually saying this is like necessarily a good
career path to be clear, but I know that there are people that do it. It's like you can just say
COBOL. That's yeah, that's one of them. There are others as well. So like that's a situation where
being an expert in one language would be good. Being proficient in many though has some other
aspects of it that might be good. Like I'm assuming if you're proficient in many, that
means that you're actively learning. And if you're trying to stay with the trend of technology,
the current like language that's going to be the best at doing whatever is basically constantly
changing. So if you're only an expert in one, you're like, no, this is the only one I learned.
Well, you're just going to fall behind and you either luckily become that like one COBOL guy
that gets paid 200 grand to do the thing or you don't and then you just don't have a job. So like,
I don't know. Do you have favorite, least favorite language? Not really. I really like...
He hates French. I do actually really hate French.
Such a hater. Literal, literal hater. Not France, but French. I even like hearing
people speak French and stuff is fine, but I just, when I was learning it in school,
I did not like it. But yeah, I like to see a lot, which might come as a surprise, but yeah.
Okay. This one's from anonymous. Hello, Linus and Luke was just wondering if either of you
have watched Jeff Geerling's six month review of the screwdriver and what your thoughts are on it.
No, but I read the comments. I'm serious. I'm not going to dance around it. That's what I do.
I am glad that he has had an overall positive experience with the screwdriver.
As a YouTuber who sort of understands how retention curves work and how
consumption of media through headlines works as a king tier consumer of media through headlines,
I can't say that I'm stoked that the thumbnail and title focused on it breaking when actually,
if you make it quite deep into the video, it turns out he broke it on purpose.
So it's kind of like, a lot of people are only going to see that. And I understand what your
point was. It was, you know, like a multi-layered sort of critique of the average YouTube viewers
tendency to not watch the whole video. But like,
since we all know that, and since we're not going to change that,
now a lot of people are just like, LTT screwdriver broke, and it's like, okay, cool.
So that is not the best, but yeah, I'm glad he likes it.
Yeah, fair enough.
Okay, this one's from Austin. What is your favourite LTX19 moment? Mine was when I got
to chat with Linus for a second and he told me the name of a banger pizza plate. D plus pizza.
D hot, I think actually, but yes, close enough.
D plus pizza is a completely different thing. I think that guy got arrested.
I don't know what I'm talking about. No, I don't. The guy who, you know, on the pizza.
I didn't know. Oh yeah. That's the thing. Oh yeah. That's you don't want that pizza.
No, you don't. When you and I, I don't know if we like ran the line or just walked the line,
but when people are lining up to get inside, you came and grabbed me and you're like, let's like
go to the end. Yeah. And then it was like, holy. Yeah, that was fun. When was his end?
That was really cool. You know, the line is going to be like twice as long this time, right?
Let's go for a run. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. This one's from Jackson. Hi Linus, Luke and Dan. I'm an avid car enthusiast and wanted
your opinion slash thoughts on why auto manufacturers give zero F's on upgrading
the electronics in cars infotainment centers in particular, because that's why it's a lot cheaper
to know because you'll buy it anyway. You piece of being on super old processes is like genuinely
way cheaper and actually can have reliability advantages. But the main reason, the main
primary reason is because just, they don't want to change their technology. They just have stuff
works for them and they just keep doing it. I also honestly think most people
don't really care that much. Yeah. Well, the thing is that it bothers them,
but they'll buy it anyway. And as long as that continues to happen, then I mean,
that's one of the things that I was most supportive of Tesla about their better infotainment systems
that I think have put a significant amount of pressure on the legacy automakers to
build better infotainment systems. At the same time, Google and Apple pushed CarPlay
and Android auto forward, which has been just enormous for me. The last thing that I ever
had any care for was updating the stupid integrated map, stupid integrated navigation
garbage in my stupid car. Take it to a dealer to get a new map. Are you fucking kidding me?
Like, no, I like on principle, I don't even want your new map. I don't even care if it's
fucking free. I don't want it stupid. I have a data, I have a computer in my pocket that has
a permanent data connection that already takes all my information anyway. So it might as well,
just go to them instead of you and them. So anyway, I'm, I'm a huge, huge fan of being
able to just set my infotainment system to not use the OEM software and just use my phone.
And it's great, which by the way I figured out that issue with the navigation. So it just
changed the defaults there. There is a setting in Android auto that I didn't notice the first time
that brings that restores that bottom navigation bar that shows you your, your previously opened
app and has controls or it has your turn by turn super glitch and Twitch says this is super wrong.
The life cycle of a car is five to seven years started before they're released.
You are super wrong. That's actually not the reason. And you can kind of look into why the
Silicon shortage, the great Silicon shortage of the Corona virus pandemic affected the auto
industry more than just about any other industry and affected the legacy automakers more than Tesla,
who actually uses modern technology in their cars. The reason is that they are supply
constrained. S semiconductor manufacturers want to move on from these ancient processes
and they just don't want to redesign things. I've heard horror stories from like small,
small design teams that are like, yeah, literally the problem is that the one person who designed
that board doesn't work here anymore. And nobody else knows how to like make one. So we keep using
the same board. Oh man, that that happened, kills me. You lose a lot of knowledge when you lose
certain members of teams. Check this out. This is how you update the maps for my car.
That is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. A $180 DVD. Don't forget about the $32 shipping
for a DVD, which makes a ton of sense in the age of broadband internet. So annoying actually like
I've known about this. I have obviously never updated the maps, but I've known about this the
whole time. I should check. You should pirate it. I should check if other people are privateering
this software just out of curiosity. I mean, I already said you should pirate it. I don't
think you really need to beat around the Bush at this point. There's gotta be, there's gotta be
like an entire, like private tracker or something for that. Or, you know, people can be shockingly
dedicated to shockingly specific causes. I should look into this because apparently that was the
last year that they were going to do it for that vehicle as well. So it'd be 2021. That's another
fantastically stupid thing. Yeah. I really want something that will just stop getting updated at
some point when you arbitrarily decide there's not enough, this particular vehicle left on the
road that that makes, ah, that makes such sense. It's good. It's great. Yeah.
Might as well ship on a floppy disk. Yeah. What are we cooler?
Okay. This one's from Thomas. Hey, Linus and Luke. I've been buying some products,
both physical and digital to help my productivity. What consumer grade products in the last five to
10 years have aided your productivity the most? Consumer products, man. I like having a big
monitor. I was going to say monitors. I like my, my quadrants. I have four 1080p screens,
each of which is 21 inches, which is like perfect for me at 0% scaling. So I just have a ton of
information on my screen. I love it. Yeah. I monitors as well. This one's from Chris.
I just started a new career as an AV tech for a community school system. We've been busy
installing new interactive TVs. What kind of tech, uh, that if you've seen would be helpful
for teaching our youth? They are super cool. Um, I mean, it's super expensive and kludgy,
so it's a long way from, I think being legitimately useful for like at scale for
educational purposes, but man, three printers would have been super cool. I would have loved to
learn about a bunch of schools jumped on three printers right away, which I just thought was
brilliant because I didn't think they would necessarily do it, but that is an absolutely
wicked skill to have when you're growing up. Yeah. Like if your reaction to something breaking
in a, in a physical way in your house is, Oh, I can fix that by like printing a new part
or whatever, epoxying it on or whatever that is. Yeah. That's super cool. So cool.
Okay. This one's from Charlie. Hi Linus and Luke. It's probably been answered before,
but what is the average age of your viewership love from New Zealand?
This data is always going to be skewed. Um, like I I've, I've seen reports from our audience
many, many times like, Hey, I couldn't help noticing that you guys say you're only like
1% female, but I'm definitely a chick or whatever. And Google thinks I'm a dude or something
because I'm into dude stuff, but just letting you know, you know, like I, I hear that a ton.
I don't know what that voice was. Don't worry about it. But like, I've, I I've definitely
gotten people reaching out to me who are like, you know, just as an FYI, you were talking about
how you guys skew heavily male and I'm not going to dispute that. But what I will say is that
we do exist. We do exist. And Google often misidentifies, um,
misidentifies people, especially ones who are not logged in, which is a significant
number of users, interests and stuff. Exactly. So they'll profile you and just kind of assume that
because you looked at a razor once that you're a guy, cause it had a blue handle instead of a
pink one or whatever arbitrary bullshit. Right. So there's that. And we also get a lot of people
telling us say, Hey, yeah, I'm into it, but I always watch with the hubby, you know, stuff
like that. Right. So it would be his account. Yeah. So I can, I can tell you, I can tell you,
Oh, I know. I can tell you what Google reports to us. I'm just saying that I used that as the
gender, as an example of a way of, uh, as a, as a way to illustrate that this data is like,
when I was a kid, if I was signing up for a website, I would go put in my birthday.
And then when I hit the Euro, just whip the scroll wheel and click on something random.
Like I still do that. If steam pops up an age restriction thing on my logged in account with a
credit card, what are you doing, bud? Right. Like I've had my, I, my account is old enough to vote.
Right. So what, what, what is the point of this? Um, I, and I understand what the point is,
but that doesn't mean I have to have patience for it. And so yeah. Oh really? Maybe it's a setting
or something. I said it once. I know the screen you're talking about. Yeah. It's your birthday.
I said it once. And now it takes that same thing I put in last time and has it by default. I haven't
seen that weird. You know what? Maybe it's depending. I use new computers all the time
because I'm always benchmarking. It's probably because I've done that on that computer probably
cached somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So I run into it all the time. I'm like, stop wasting my time.
Um, and so yeah, I just whatever and just select something random. Yeah. Get out of my way. Um,
anyway, so the average, okay, so hold on. Oh, what, what median mode average? Um,
the bulk of our viewers, 70% of them are 18 to 34, which is exactly what I would expect. Honestly
sounds probably accurate. Yeah. Am I aging out of our audience? It's okay. There's these new
filters now that make you look younger. Oh, it'll never matter. Oh, we got this. We talked about
this quite a while ago talks filter. Or was it, what are we talking about here? We talked about
how you were worried about different features, uh, making you look older and then people not
wanting to listen to tech person because they were tech boomer. Yeah. I do think there's a
best before date on like there is 100% filters that already exist that happen live. That's
crazy. That make people genuinely look significantly longer, younger, and it looks
actually like quite good. That's wild. It will totally be a thing and it will be like
indistinguishable later on. I mean, if we keep putting wrinkles in the backdrop, then they'll
distract from Linus. Yeah. Then they won't even be looking at me. Exactly. Yeah. Um,
yeah. Uh, then the next big group, 17% is 35 to 44 and then it trails off significantly from there.
45 to 54 is 6.4 and then it's peanuts, um, below 18 and above 55. Um, but then again, I think
there's a lot of younger people that are just clicking 18. I'm certain the below 18 number
is smaller than it is in reality, but I bet you that what is it? 18 to 35 one is actually
probably pretty accurate. Yeah. I think the 25 to 34 one is probably the most accurate
because that'll be the ones that are like have credit cards entered in the site and stuff like
that. Um, where you can like really make a solid guess as to how, how old these people are. Yeah.
Okay. This one's from Matthew. Hi Linus and Luke. What are some red flags you look out for when
interviewing staff on a side note as a developer or seeing a float plane developer's blog slash
newsletter would be awesome. We just don't have the bandwidth for it. Yeah.
Maybe eventually I know Conrad has mentioned, uh, being interested in writing a, a newsletter
for, uh, the LTT store before. So it's not like there will be no development stuff ever,
but like, yeah, we, we definitely do not have the bandwidth. I mean, Luke had the idea of doing
one like right at the start and he was like, yeah, even just, even if no one reads it, it would be
so cool to look back over it, you know, five years down the line and it would be, but we've just been,
I've documented a lot of stuff anyways. I've like really old school screenshots and videos.
Remember I had the idea of, um, of linking every comment and like every tweet where people told
us we'd failed and like printing them out so that we could wallpaper like our office with it.
Yeah. Um, we, we would actually have enough, would we have enough devs like in person here to have
like a space where we could have put that? Probably. I think we could have done it at the lab.
Once we're local, there will be at least three of us. Yeah. We need to do more float plane merch.
That's a good point. Rod. Sorry about that. We'll, we'll, we'll do it. I promise. Um,
Oh, I think our printer is finally back up and running and we're going to be doing some printed
t-shirts again. So maybe we could do a blue, just like float plane logo one. Speaking of, uh,
working here and stuff. Yeah. There's two, there's lots of roles on the site actually,
especially if you want to work for labs. Oh my goodness. Uh, but there's two new ones,
uh, that are kind of in my realm. One of them is a float plane project manager.
It is a relatively small team. You will also have to do development. Um, but, but as a float plane
project manager, so we're looking for someone to try to like work on tasking and help guide the
ship. Um, so apply like mini Luke kind of, but they will also do development and be much more
in on things if that makes sense. Okay. Uh, and then the other one is for Linus media group.
So what I need to do is delete this stuff and just go to just jobs. Nice. And it's,
that's totally elegant infrastructure administrator. Oh yeah. Wow. We're finally
doing it. We are finally doing it. It's about time. How much you want to bet that that particular
posting gets a lot of applicants? I think it's going to get a bunch and I, I will throw out a
warning here. Uh, this is a relatively senior position. And one of the reasons why it's a
relatively senior position is because your decisions and actions are going to have to
stand up to criticism against not only me and AJ and Linus and Jake. Yeah. Don't forget about Jake.
Jake is Jake likes to criticize and other Jake. Yeah. Oh yeah. Other Jake and lots of other people
don't forget about the 14 million out there and the entire audience. Yeah. So no pressure. And
they love picking on infrastructure things that we do at the office. So you're going to be
criticized for what you do now, even if you get it completely right. And it's actually the best
solution for our needs. There will be people out there who are experts in their domain, but have
no idea what it is exactly that we do here. And we'll suggest all kinds of the number of times
over the years that I've been torn apart for not setting up a San. And I'm just like,
no, no, that's just actually stupid and has nothing to do with what we do here.
Chill. Um, it's amazing. It's, it's actually, it's not that I don't know what it is. It's not
that I couldn't afford one. It's that it would be stupid. Uh, and so yeah, you'll, you'll,
you'll be dealing with that and it'll, it's, you're not a team of one. Oh, San storage area
network. You're not a team of one. You'll be working with, uh, Dan. Actually, you'll be working
with another person that I can't name because they're probo. Um, you'll be working with me.
You'll be working with AJ. You will have resources and stuff, but I want this person to come in to be
fairly high level infrastructure, security, all that jazz. Um, so yeah, uh, apply. It's going to
be pretty epic. Uh, the stuff that you do is going to show up on video. It should be actually
a very fun job if you're into this type of stuff, but just, yeah, understand that it is a relatively
senior position. We're not looking for someone like just out of school, something like that.
Um, because not only will you be maintaining what is here, but you're going to have to, uh,
would they work with me? They work with Jamie. I kind of don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so.
I mean, maybe, but yeah, I don't think so. Um, not only are you gonna have to maintain what's
already here, but you're going to have to keep it moving forward and you're going to have to
facilitate, um, someone like Linus or Jake or whoever else going like, Oh, I want to try this
thing for a video. And then them coming in like a wrecking ball and doing whatever they want to do.
And then you either need to, uh, pick it up where they left off and, and bring it to full
implementation or, uh, deconstruct and keep going with what we had, yada, yada, yada. So it's,
it's going to be an interesting role, but yeah, apply.
Cool. And what kind of red flags would you look out for when interviewing them?
There's a first time chat over here on Twitch, typical Twitch. Um, one big red flag would be
this question from dimension. Is there a link to the job posting? That's the first test.
If you can't find it, you're not hired. I mean, I, and you know what, maybe that makes me like
kind of a merciless, but I just don't really care. Um, at a certain point, like if you don't,
yeah, if you don't have problem solving skills, like if you don't want it, then yeah, that's,
that's, that's a huge red link. You'll never make it here. If you're like, if you don't want to
micromanage, we don't have the people to micromanage. If you tell me in an interview
that you don't really want the job and I'll be like, then I don't really want you here.
I have genuinely had that before. Yeah. Like why, why are you applying? I don't understand.
Like if you're, why don't you go, well, go find something you want to do. I don't want to stand
in the way of your happiness. Like you spent, it's 40 hours a week of your life, right? Like if
you're not going to enjoy it, then get the fuck out of here. Like why, why, what are you doing?
Yeah. What are you doing? Take care of yourself, right?
I'm sure you're not going to like it every single day.
I don't. Yeah. Nobody does.
Who does? But you know,
at least a little bit. Well, there has to be things,
there has to be things that make up for it, right?
Joe, it's, it's, I made it hard required on this one. We, I know developers are not exactly
necessarily known for their social skills and wanting to communicate a ton.
Yeah. But we had a position
fairly recently where the, the file drop for resume and cover letter was a required field,
but you could just upload one thing. So like the vast majority of people just uploaded a resume
with no cover letter, even though it says that you have to upload a resume and cover letter.
And we were just like, fine, but now got them two separate fields, both required get owned,
submit the darn cover letter. We actually do read them. Come on.
Phase 32 says applicant gatekeeping. Weird. It's not weird. It's literally an entire job.
Yeah. That's the whole point.
That's like, Oh man, that's such, that's such a terrible take.
So, so what would your process be if someone doesn't care at all and doesn't want to, okay,
imagine it's like,
I mean, it depends on how many applicants you have. If you have to fill a position
and one person applies and they're like, eh, well, you have to fill a position.
Sure. I guess that sounds like an awful place to work.
Yeah. I don't think I'd want to be on either side of that interview table.
It's like, well, I might hate you, but I guess we're going to work together. Well,
I might hate working for you, but I guess I'm stuck with it. Thanks for the money.
That sounds like the worst thing ever. And like, I've had people that, uh, in
interviews have told me that, I think we talked about this earlier in the show, even, uh, that
they have like no idea who we are or what we do really, but they like really love this thing that
they do. And they're excited to be able to do it in this environment. And I tell them different
projects that we want to work on. And they're like, yeah, that sounds sweet. Like, okay, great.
Like, I don't care if you're excited about working here because of what, like the, the,
the fandom of it that has no benefit or I don't care either way, but if you're excited about
doing the things that we do, then that's great. Yeah. Twitch is like still being Twitch,
a robotic sausage over there. My probably terrible take is that asking for the link
is problem solving through communication. No asking the CEO where the link to apply is,
is not problem solving. Taking something that could take actually less time by typing a very
similar thing to that, but not the same thing into Google and immediately getting results.
Instead of doing that, taking two people's time, throwing it out into the ether in like a fast
moving live chat. It's not better. That's that's that is problem solving, but that's a really
bad solution. And you're the problem. It's like, I don't know what else to tell you.
Oh, I love you Twitch chat. I do think that this has gotta be like Twitch chat, just be in Twitch,
be in Twitch chat, which is the only reason I'm going to give them attention for it.
What if some, what is your opinion on people typoing their own email
and what is your opinion on it? If it's very obvious how it happened, like it's dot,
uh, OCM happens. It depends though. If they're applying for an accounting position,
then they're out. Got it. Put a zero in the wrong spot. You better double check your
whereas if they're applying for a creative position where really what I need is dragon
energy. And if they've got a little bit of the dyslexia or they fat finger a key on their
keyboard once in a while, that's not a game breaker. Everything is context dependent. Right. So,
um, yeah, I mean, if you could, if you were just going to create a flow chart of how to weed out
applicants, then you might as well just be an AI, right? You've got to be, you've got to be
actually thinking otherwise. Yeah. Again, why don't I just replace you with a robot? Right.
One interesting one that I've ran into, and I will warn people of this again,
cause I suspect we're going to get a lot of applicants for this. It's super neat.
And honestly, even if you're, if you're applying for the infrastructure position, especially
if you're running your own mail server or whatever, like that's pretty cool.
Make sure it works. Yeah. Had that problem a lot. Oh, just people like submitting cool,
like projects they've worked on and you look at it and you're like, this is very broken and it
doesn't submit. Yeah. Here's my portfolio website. It's been under construction for six years.
There's nothing literally interesting on it at all. And it barely loads. It's like,
you probably would have been better off just not showing me that right. Um, or, or mail servers,
which have like major issues. So I literally can't even email them back from Gmail. That's
also a problem. Like there's be a little careful with things. Check your stuff, check your stuff.
I had somebody who, uh, they, they linked a portfolio website that I think they like didn't
pay their hosting or something. So I went to go check it and it was like very clearly offline.
So I messaged them about it and they're like, oh yeah, like I haven't actually checked that
in quite a while. It's like, maybe do that before you apply, bro. Right. Those types of things. So
you're basically looking for basic due diligence. Yeah. Cause a lot of the roles that I'm hiring
for, that's actually really important. Right. Yeah. And there's, I don't know. It's one of
those tough things, right? Like there's personality traits that you can't really expect to train.
Like you can train a skill, but you can't train an attitude in a lot of cases. And so if someone
has an attitude of perfectionism, then that's a very, that's a very desirable trait again for,
you know, something like an accounting position. Depends. Yeah. You might not actually want that
all the time because perfectionism will often also mean that they take more time to do things.
Yeah. So like, it depends. Yeah. And
I think, yeah, I think that's, I think we've talked about a lot of red flags. We've given
a lot of hints to the WAN show audience for how to, uh, how to, how to avoid our traps here.
Okay. So I won't email the CEO asking for the application form. Got it. Yes. Success.
All right. Next up is from Alex. Hey, Linus and Luke. What's something tech related that you
vastly disagree on and have just agreed to disagree? Razor laptops.
I don't think I disagree. Well, we did for a long time. We had a strong
disagreeance about those for a long time, all the way back to pre Linus media group, actually.
Really? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I thought, I thought their switchblade thing was stupid.
I thought it was cool, but like cool. And like, I'd like to see where this goes in the future
kind of way. Not like a, this is a good laptop kind of way. Eventually you want,
I think we were still not Linus media group yet. Maybe we were just still working
NCX once a week. I don't know. You know what I didn't have, I had never really like owned a
razor anything and I didn't have firsthand experience with their QA. Yeah. I did at that
point. Sure. So that's fair. Yeah. We disagreed. Um, but that's, I don't know if that's really
like a technology. Is it like technology disagreement? It just says tech related,
tech related. I mean, I've made fun of you for like standing Firefox for the longest time,
especially when it was going through its very long period of being a complete and absolute piece of
shit. Yeah. Um, I actually think Firefox is in a good state right now, but the problem with it is
site compatibility. Like when I, I told you that I tried to switch to it. I think we've talked about
this on the show, so I'll try to keep it short, but I did try to switch to it and it was actually
very good. I really enjoyed using it. And then I had to use the Patty website, the scuba diving
website. Yep. That's a terrible website. I don't doubt it doesn't work on Firefox at all. So it's
just like, okay, I guess I have to go back to Chrome. Other than that, I actually really enjoyed
the Firefox experience. I thought it was really good. I have to pee. It hit me like a ton of
bricks. I'll be right back. Okay. I drank this whole thing. I don't think most tech stuff we
disagree on though. Um, let me see if I can find some Luke specific one. Yeah. Yeah. Fact oriented.
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that came through. He was saying we're both pretty fact oriented. Um,
which is true. Like we both had, um, Athlon 64 AMD processors in our systems forever ago and then
ran Intel for a long time when Intel was running, winning. And it wasn't because we like liked AMD
and then liked Intel. It was because AMD stuff was awesome. And then Intel stuff was awesome.
And now we're both back on AMD stuff cause now AMD stuff's awesome. Like it's more about just
like what's good at the time. You know, I've got a specific one here for you, Luke. Sure. This is
from Matthew. Hey Luke, what do you think about the recent layoffs at the big tech companies?
Do you think they will continue or will they start to rehire? And what about float plane?
Well, full planes hiring right now. I announced a position, I think 10 minutes ago. So that's
the thing. A full plane will also probably, but it's going to somewhat depend on how things go
in a variety of ways. Uh, but we will probably be hiring again before the year is over, but I don't
know when it's very likely that's going to be like Q3 or even maybe Q4. Like it might be near the end
of the year, but it's very likely we'll be hiring again. Um, and we're finishing up a hiring wave
for the labs web development team right now. I know the labs local team is hiring, I believe,
a junior software developer. Um, like, yeah, we're, we're hiring and we, we didn't have like
giant layoffs. Um, so we are not in that category. Um, will it continue? I, I don't know. I'm not
really in the like Silicon Valley world, so I have no idea. I suspect companies that haven't done it
yet. I would be concerned. Um, but if your company has done one of those massive layoffs,
uh, I think they're probably done now unless they're Twitter. Well, um,
uh, and yeah, I've already seen some of those companies start hiring again. I think a lot of
them, once a couple other companies started doing it, tried to use like, oh, it's just the industry
as a scapegoat to get rid of sections of the company to like slim down and cost effective
ways. Not because they had to, but just purely because of like, they thought the stock would go
up. All right. So smell my hand fresh. Can you identify that smell? We have new soap and I was,
I was kind of identified like being used, like theme, but yeah, like what, what, what's that
smell? Lavender watermelon and mint. Yeah. Watermelon and mint soap. What, what is watermelon
and mint? What doesn't smell like watermelon and mint. Very unlikely combination. Maybe like
watermelon flavored gum. Yeah. I was going to say like chemical watermelon. Maybe chemical watermelon.
Yeah. Anyway, totally normal. Real podcast. We have fun here. This one's from Jacob. Does the
LTD backpack have enough space to soar a full face motorcycle helmet and ride a 01 Honda shadow 69k
miles baby. And most backpacks are uncomfortable and small or too expensive with bad quality.
That's a good question. You might be able to pack it in there, but I wouldn't say the back would be
particularly comfortable. Yeah. I don't know that I would. Yeah. I don't know that I would recommend
it. Check the dimensions there on the site. This is an anonymous one. Hi Linus, Luke, and Dan.
YouTube has been recommending the old videos of yours with Brian, the electrician. Great theme
song. Where's he been? Uh, Brian moved. Oh yeah. He's not local anymore. I was kind of wondering.
Yeah. I messaged him recently. I just sent him a screwdriver. Just like, Hey, how's it going? Do
you have a screwdriver? He's like, no, I'm going to buy one. I'm like, no, you're not.
Um, so he has a screwdriver now says he likes it, but that's, that's about it.
Yeah. Yeah. This one's from Garren. Hey guys. I've been a fan for about eight years now.
Did a project for school graphic design recently involving advertising for companies.
Do y'all have a brand standard manual or something similar? If we do, I've never seen it,
but I wouldn't be surprised if, um, like a pitch deck. No, I have no idea. No, it's like,
it's like a whole like guideline thing for like how many pixels far away you need to be from the
border of something. And like, if it's on a dark background, what does it look like? And if it's
on a light background, what does it look like? I'm pretty sure Sarah has something like that,
but I don't think I've ever seen it. Canadian rail branding is like the best one ever.
It's really detailed about all sorts of, yeah. Um, this one's from tugs question as a small
business owner with success. What do you feel your biggest, we are effed moment was and how
did you overcome it? Oh, uh, that's a pretty easy one. Uh, in the very early days when we had no
money, we, uh, Yolo went outside and filmed a video in the rain and I kind of figured,
well, there aren't that many gaps in the chassis of the Sony FS 700 camera. Um,
Oh, did you think it was going to be the windy day? No, the drive to the ferry. Oh, well that
was just, we could have died, but other than that, it would have been fine. No, let's not talk about
that. Um, let's talk, let's talk about instead, uh, going out and filming in the rain because
they didn't really seem like there were that many gaps in the chassis. Uh, we finished the shoot,
got back to the house. I went to turn on the camera and black screen. So I disassembled it
to the greatest degree that I could that night after everyone else had gone home or to their
room upstairs. Uh, it was very early days and I didn't have a space heater other than a radiant
style one. And I didn't really want to point a radiant style heater at my black camera. Um,
not knowing, you know, what was sensitive or not sensitive to heat. So the only blower style air
cooler I could conceive of was a test bench with a G force, uh, 40, 80 on it or four 80. Yeah. With
a four 80 on it. And so I think I put a couple of them on there, fired up for Mark or like some
other stress test in SLI and basically just put the camera in the exhaust so that whatever was
in there might hopefully evaporate. If I remember correctly at this point in time, I had a four 80
in my system and we ripped it out of my system to help this heating project, which was just very
funny. Yeah. So that was terrifying because at that point, if we had money, not had a camera,
I didn't really have a way to get another like camera easily. We were, it was, it was tight.
Yeah. It was tight. Even the method of getting that one was fun and exciting. Yeah. Yeah. Like,
yeah. Let me like import it from the States or something like that. And then like in a
specific way, we shipped it to NCIX who, uh, I forget why, but it was like hard to get it
in Canada for some reason. It was stupid. Yeah. Okay. Let's get you another one here. No,
we're not talking about the ferry thing. This one's from
yeah, no, no, it's not happening. This one's from Connor. Tell us about the ferry thing. No. Okay.
Uh, hi guys. I like the screwdriver now getting in the water bottle. My question is what is the
most notable thing in everyone's opinion to spring out of the LMG media universe minus the Lambo?
Oh, it's gotta be the like sad Linus or Linus selfie like memes. I did not see that.
What about the, wait, I don't know if this is fair. I was going to say your original
screwdriver was orange and that literally set the color for the company forever.
That's pretty notable. Yeah. I don't know that it sprung out of us though.
Like, uh, that's why I kind of, yeah, the, the LTT cinematic universe, I think.
Um, yeah, I think it would be, uh, there's the Christmas album. Sorry. I couldn't even finish
that. It's a real thing by the way. You can DM the CEO and ask where to buy it.
Uh, or you could just go with, that might be faster. Yeah. It's awful. I still,
and I, I could filter them out, but I don't want to because I, every single time it happens,
I just laugh so hard. I still get emailed every single time one of them sells.
Every time I get like a ping on my phone, I'm like, Oh, what's going on?
And I see what email it went to. And I'm like, Oh, interesting. Like, I wonder what this is.
And I drag it down. It's like, you've sold one, one copy of the LG Christmas album.
And just every time it cheers me up, it's great.
Because you know, that someone just purchased raw trash, like it's so bad.
It's digital garbage. It's an actual waste of zeros and ones.
It's so bad. It is so, so terrible. Plug boy 1321 says, Oh God, I forgot about that album.
It needs whatever the opposite of a Grammy is. I had it on my phone for a while because I don't
even remember why it literally wasn't to listen to you, but it was on a local file on my phone.
So Google play music back in the day would just randomly start playing it.
If I had it on like play random songs, because it would be like, it's in your local files.
You must like this music. So I'd be like driving along and I'd be listening to whatever.
And then out of nowhere, I just hear Lina singing Silent Night,
like the album in a full-blown exclusive. He told me to upload it for Christmas.
And then I don't remember why I didn't, but there was some reason, but I'm planning on doing it next Christmas.
Look, if you guys are watching us, like laughing about this and thinking, Oh man,
this must be like hilarious. It's worth buying. Just understand that it's bad and don't do it.
Yeah, it's not worth it. It's like $5 and it's not worth it.
It's, it's like, it's a level of cringe, which is not actually very entertaining.
Yeah, I mean, look, I'll take your money, but don't give it to me. It's $3.
Buy something on the store. It's $3 and it is not worth it.
It's even missing songs and there's nothing we can do about it.
It's missing songs, like songs that were in the teaser or that we advertised.
Lost tracks. I remember trying to hunt it down. I don't remember all the details, but
apparently, yeah, there's just songs that are just gone. So people, you don't even get the full album.
Cause I figured once we figured out that it was missing songs, cause it's just like a zip.
If I remember correctly, it's not like get it in a reasonable way.
So when I, someone told me it was missing songs, I asked about it internally and they're like,
oh yeah, we just don't have those. So then I had to update it being like, uh, yeah, these don't exist.
Whatever.
10100, oh yeah, my phone's going. Oh no. Why?
You guys are stupid. Stop.
I want to remaster it.
It's not worth it.
Can I please spend time on this?
Absolutely not.
Much more important things to do.
Forbidden.
Forbidden.
Five people have bought it.
Please.
Oh, the other fun part is the email comes in and how our Envision Powerboard, the software
that we use for the forum, how it works is you could get commissions off of things that you sell.
It has to be uploaded by an account. So it's uploaded by my account,
but the commission is just set to 0%. So every single time it emails me,
it's all excited. It says you have earned $0.00.
7 people bought it. Genuinely, it is not worth it.
You're going to download it because you're like, this is a fantastic meme.
You're going to play one song and just be like, ugh.
You're not going to make it through a full song. I promise.
No, it's bad. It's really bad.
I wonder if I can find the lyrics. I think I did it in a Google Doc.
Only 5 are you nuts? That's the amount of emails that I have right now,
but like it might, they might stroll in slowly over time.
Oh no, that's the wrong, this is the wrong account. Or rather, this is the right account.
This is the account I'm supposed to be. Oh boy. Every time I refresh, it goes up.
We should have increased the price. Yeah, no, we shouldn't.
We will not increase the price. Okay, so hold on.
Christmas might not work here because it's going to bring up like Christmas parties and stuff like
that. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I wonder how, maybe if I try lyrics or something like that.
What year was it? What are you trying to do?
That would have been 2015. Man, these are in no particular order.
There was the, the announcements on YouTube. Lyrics.doc.
What's this? Who dis?
Linus Tech Tips Christmas Album. Yeah, the Linus Media Group Christmas Album promotional video
from seven years ago is still up. It's 301,000 views.
Copy of Linus Tech Tips Christmas. Here we go. Here we go. Original Christmas song track list.
Jingle Bell's not done yet. Deck the hall, Silent Night, The First Noel, 12 Days of Christmas,
Joy to the World, O Come All Ye Faithful, Christmas Tree, Hark the Herald Angels Sing,
We Wish You Merry Christmas, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.
Now of course, we rewrote the lyrics with tech. Okay, so Jingle Bell's never got done by anyone.
It just says, Jingle Bell's claimed not done yet. So people signed up for which song they
would do. Oh yeah, we had to write some.
Everyone had to write a song. And then I think I went through and did a pass
of like kind of fixing them a bit. Yeah.
So here we go. Deck Your Rigs by Colton. Deck your rig with silent cooling.
Tis the season to be greedy.
Fa la la la la la la la la. Yeah, that gives you some idea.
Silent case, Nick. Silent case filled with fans. Running low RPMs. Blowing air.
Dan's like cringing in actual pain behind the camera.
I have worked with worst artists. This is pretty good, actually.
The first iPhone. Lord Jobs did say that the patents he filed were perfect that day.
I just refreshed and we're over 50 now. Oh no.
I'm remastered. So you just made $150.
I don't care what you say.
Yeah, not really because a $3 transaction is like 20% fees.
Oh man. Okay. Anywho.
Why was it uploaded to Spotify two months ago? Well, because two months ago is probably Christmas.
So somebody just did that. Yeah, that kind of makes sense.
Why does this have 28 monthly listeners on Spotify?
I don't know, but that's awful. It's genuinely really bad.
Yeah, it's as bad as what I just did, except I'm probably one of the better singers here.
I was handpicked out of school when I was a youngin to join out of school primo choir.
While I was there, the choir teacher said that I asked too many questions.
And I don't know exactly what I said, but I said something along the lines of,
that's stupid. Stood up, walked out to where my mom was still sitting in the car in the
parking lot and was like, we're done. Let's get out of here. And never went back.
And then I hit puberty and my voice cracked and now I can't sing at all.
Nice. It's so bad.
Nice. It's horrible.
I'll like be singing along to a song in the car and then like some, some map thing will happen.
So the song volume goes down. I hear myself.
So you still got the ear, but you don't have the voice.
Yeah. And then it's best to just do this.
Yep.
Next up is from Nick. Hey Linus and Luke, loving my LTT backpack and screwdriver. Kate,
can't wait to see what's next. Linus,
do you find that your kids' hobbies and interests are influenced by your work and love of technology?
Uh, I mean, we definitely have a lot of tech in the house. And I think that, you know,
when you're bored, uh, it's not much of a stretch to be like, um, video games are fun.
Uh, in terms of tech though, you know, if anything, I think it can be an impediment
sometimes because I'm so quick to kind of jump in and try and fix something.
Cause I just want it fixed that, you know, I think that there's room for me to
make my kids do more problem solving on their own too.
Yeah.
Okay. This one's from Richard. Hi. What do you make of Google's recent breakthrough
in quantum computing error correction? Uh, will we be seeing it in the wild anytime soon?
I'm gonna be honest with you. I am not a physicist soon.
I seriously doubt it. And I mean, quantum computing is going to be a hell of a thing
when it hits. Yep. Also I will, I will, I'm going to say it cause he wanted us to show it,
but I don't actually think showing the dashboard is a good idea. The facelift that happened in
merge messages looks great. Conrad, you did a good job. There you go. Recognition served.
Thanks Conrad. Okay. This one's from David. Thank you for years of great content. Question for you
too. If given an option and having an access to one company and their top secret project,
what company would that be? Valve. There. I win. That's the best answer.
Their top secret project. Could it be projects or just project? Whatever the best one is.
Hmm. You just get to see their one coolest top secret project.
Does DARPA count? DARPA? No. I don't think it's a company. No, pick a company.
I don't actually know like how they work.
Why don't you just pick like Palmer Lucky's stupid defense company or something then?
Anduril? Yeah, they're probably working on it. I'm pretty sure it's the reason why I know that
off the top of my head is I'm pretty sure it's the sword from Lord of the Rings. I think it's
named after the same thing. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it totally is. Anduril. Got him.
Nah, I'll be boring to say Google just because I want to see what...
I am right now extremely interested in large language models, right? I want to see what
they're capable of with like nothing holding them back. All right. Everything. I want to see it all.
Okay, this one's also from Nick. Hi from Melbourne, Australia. My gym had just installed adverts on
the mirrors. What are your thoughts on paying for a gym membership and having to look at ads
while working out? I would switch gyms.
I don't go to the gym, so I guess I have... I can't imagine that I would like it.
I would switch gyms because you're supposed to be paying attention to your... You probably
wouldn't care because you wouldn't see it anyways, to just be honest. But like people are supposed to...
Yes, people use the mirrors for vanity. No problem. Don't care about that if you do it or not.
But the mirrors are supposed to be there in a functional way so you can watch your form.
If you're being distracted by an ad that is intentionally trying to grab your attention away,
that's actually like not a good thing. That's fair.
And I don't want the idea of like I'm pretty deep into a workout and my brain is wandering a little
bit and I start staring at some ad and then I hurt myself like, no, I want to be able to focus.
Screw off. I would switch gyms. I was just out of principle. I'm gone.
By the way, did you watch the worst tech ads video by any chance?
Yes, actually. I'd seen a lot of those before.
Some things never change.
Yep. When Yvonne was like, why did you know it was MSI? And you were trying to explain like,
I just do? I felt that. I was like, yeah, it's just MSI. It's just what they do.
I don't know, man. Oh, man. All right. Next up.
This one's from Elijah. I want to buy a QD OLED, but the S95B doesn't support Dolby Vision like
my 4K Blu-ray player. I can't afford Bravia. In your opinion, what's the line between sunk
cost fallacy and investing in an ecosystem? Investing in an ecosystem is bad.
But once you are invested in an ecosystem, I mean, basically you just have to kind of go...
How much money do you have? Because like if you're...
Yeah, wait, why are you buying an S95B if you can't afford a Bravia? You should just wait
a generation when QD OLEDs will get way cheaper. Like that's the actual solution. The answer is
always wait and buy it second hand or wait for the new one that is better because
that will cover literally every outcome. So maybe if it's like stereo 3D or something like that,
and there doesn't continue to be new development, there will definitely be a period before it
becomes a collector's item, like a CRT period, you could call it, where getting it will be
extremely cheap. So you can either wait for a new one that's better and cheaper. It's technology,
right? Like it's predictable. Or you can wait and get it secondhand from someone who
doesn't manage their money as well as you do, because you're going to be smart like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was reacting to something in chat, don't worry about it.
All right, cool.
Moving on. Next one.
Okay. This one's from Hector. Linus, what is the story behind the katana you have on your
fireplace? I've seen it in multiple videos and wanted to know if there's a story behind it.
Also, any update on the LTT screwdriver holster?
The story behind the katana is I was at the Richmond night market with Yvonne,
and I had always wanted a sword because I am a man child.
Weeb.
And no, not that.
I know. I have a sword too.
Yeah. See, like I was the kind of kid who would be like 13, like hanging out in House of Knives,
being like, oh, swords. I mean, they weren't even like real. I'm pretty sure they were decorative,
but I didn't care. I just like swords, you know, like they're big and long and manly.
They're swords, right? Like what's to not like about it? So I just like swords. And I was finally
sort of an adult. And I was like, I don't have to ask my mom for the sword this time,
because she's not here. So I'm going to ask my girlfriend for a sword.
She didn't actually buy it for me. I just wanted approval. And she was
desperately in love for some reason. So she said, yeah, you can have a sword. And now I have it.
And now it's on our mantle. As a reminder that she has more love for me than since.
I, swords are just cool and stuff. And when my brother got married, he chose me as his best man.
And I don't know how true this is, but I believe there's some history behind best man
actually being originally best swordsman or best fighter. So I brought a sword to his wedding.
Nice.
With his, like, I asked him, obviously I'm not that guy. The photos that they have
of mostly actually his wife standing there in her like full bridal gown thing, holding this
gigantic sword actually looks so sick. Nice.
Like they're super cool. I don't know. Yeah. But yeah, I still have it. It's dope. And it is
Andriel, which is why I always remember the name of his company.
Round pile and float plane. My love of swords versus my fear of knives.
Love it. Okay. Sorry. No, no, no. Next up is from Artem. I am currently studying for mechanical
engineering and I have noticed that you have been hiring more people with an engineering
background. What have they studied and done to make you hire them?
They studied engineering and then we needed engineers. I mean,
we've never really had a need for engineering in the past because we're a media production
company. A lot of people don't understand what kind of company we are. Like, remember I talked
about how we got that, that offer to purchase a little while back, right. On my show last week,
we've gotten more than one. That was like a serious one where they actually had some idea
what the heck it was they were buying. But we've had so many people reach out thinking that we're
a tech company and like, you know, trying to offer, you know, possibilities for a partnership
or like, uh, like I had, man, I had this, I had this one, uh, one guy approached me because
his company, um, is like a trucking company and soon there's going to be these mandates around,
uh, like trackers and the trucks or something like that. And they were like, yeah, maybe we could
co-develop one. I'm like, we are a media company. Yeah. Um, we're, we're not a tech company,
but that's changing right. With float planes and labs and creator warehouse. So we have a lot more
need for engineers than we used to because before it was like, no, we need video editors and writers
and creatives. Now we need more of the hard sciences. Right. So, um, that's why. Yeah.
Wait a second. Linus media group is a media company.
Is it a Linus company too? Is it a group?
Next up is from Michael. Uh, Hey Linus and Luke. I'm a systems administrator for a school district.
How do you feel about one-on-one technology in education? Do you feel the benefits outweigh
the cost and e-waste? I think it's one to one. One to one. I'm not actually sure.
Oh, like one device to one student. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I guess one to one is a different, yeah.
I mean, given that these people are going to have one device dedicated to them for their like
entire life, as far as I can tell, I don't think this paradigm is going away anytime soon. It seems
sensible enough issue is cost. Um, I mean, well, what we need is we need a way to make sure that
these devices can be used over an extremely long period of time. I think framework has the right
idea, but their Chromebooks are so expensive that they'd be uneconomical, uh, for a deployment like
this. Um, I think that as, as costs continue to come down for something serviceable, we're not
going to get around the e-waste problem. Um, other than, you know, the first are reducing or sorry,
we're using whatever it is. No, we're not reducing anything. Well, whatever using it for as long as
possible where we can do that, but it's still going to be an increase in consumption. So it
is not the first stars, what I was trying to say. Um, yeah, I just want to see longer lifespans,
I guess, but I don't inherently think that sharing a computer, you know, with my, with my classmates
was particularly beneficial in typing class. Like we just kind of should have both had one. I don't
know. Yeah. My only concern is school districts that would definitely in no way be able to afford
it, which is a thing. Um, so we need more money in education. Yeah. See, I, I, I, I don't think we
have the same, um, issues around district to district funding as I, as I know are very common
down south. I know my, like in the boonies high school was like broke as all heck. Have I told
you the story of one of the reasons why one of the best things like ever, I, I, I'll just say
his name because he's awesome. And I believe he's a principal now. Uh, but my computer teacher,
Mr. Trattle did a lot of things for me that were like very foundational in my opinion. Right. But
one of the things that he did, maybe he doesn't want to tell me the story, but I'm going to go
for it. Here we go. Um, he convinced a bunch of trucks that were going around to other school
districts, picking up old computers, old computers, old monitors, old computer parts, whatever,
and taking them to recycling facility to come by our school. Um, but just like leave it there for
a little bit and then they could take our stuff and take off. And what actually happened was
when the guy wasn't with the truck, all the computer students ran out and like basically
grabbed everything they could off the truck and ran it into one specific classroom and then left
it there. So we had like all this e-way stuff, none of the computers worked. Right. And then it was
a project in the class to go through all these computers, verify what components worked, and
build computers. And we built an entire classroom. That's cool. It was such an incredibly cool and
fun project for a bunch of kids that like, yeah, a decent amount of kids in my school had computers
at home, but not all of them. Oh, for sure. And you're not going to be allowed to just rip apart
random computers in class because we only have so many. Now we had a bunch of spare parts to keep
the rest of the labs up and going. We got a new lab and you had all these kids that had some form
of ownership over these PCs because they made that. Yeah. Which we would have never had the
ability to do that. Oh, a bunch of people are saying, dude, that's awesome. Mr. Trattel was an
absolutely insanely fantastic computer's teacher. He also like, he went to BCIT for a summer course.
He did a course over the summer at BCIT and then took what he learned there and taught a brand new
course that didn't exist in our school system before called 3D game programming, which was just
an amazing course. And it was like diluted from what was taught at BCIT, whatever. It wasn't the
same thing, but like he did just passionate teachers are a game changer. It was, it was
fantastic. I mean, I, I write for a living now and it's only because of my AP English teacher. Yeah.
I had a very unsurprisingly due to dyslexia and all these other issues. I had a very poor score
in English for a really long time. And then I had one teacher that was just super inspiring and like
believed in me and understood the problems that I was having, but was like, you're still creative.
You can drive this forward. And just my average English just shot up. And then I took AP English
with another teacher and it wasn't as good because he didn't share the same things, but I was
confident at that point. So I was able to carry it through and still passed and did okay there.
I don't know. That was, that was amazing. I don't even know how I got on that subject, but
that was one of the like coolest things I've ever taken a part of. Watching everyone else in the
class just be so excited every time a part would pass. Yeah. Yeah. And we had to, we, we didn't
know if a single component worked. Right. So at the very beginning, everyone's trying to find like
the first functional motherboard. Right. And then we use that to like pass all the Ram and like trying
to figure all these different things out and like, that's a cool puzzle. And then when you would go
into that lab to do whatever class, it might not even be a computer class, but you might need to
work on computers for whatever reason, you'd know like what the good computers were. Nice. So you'd
like try to snipe the good one and stuff. Like it was just, I don't know. It was so cool. So, so,
so cool. I might have some parts of that story wrong. My, whatever age I was when that happened,
Brain might have remembered it in certain slightly more fantastical ways. Like maybe it was totally
above board how he got those computers. I don't know. But, but it was just incredibly fun. And I
know that the project of like trying to pass good all these components and building all these custom
computers is a thing that a lot of other schools didn't have that opportunity. And I know we did
it because not only did we need another lab at the school and we couldn't afford it, but it was
one of the coolest ways that he could introduce like hardware to a computers class possible.
It was absolutely fantastic. Huge amounts of respect for him. Okay. Next up from Russell. Oh
man, I never know what to say. Uh, I wonder if Linus would write an audio, uh, sorry,
autobiography one day, or has it all been left out there on the interwebs?
Um, I went as far as I think I have a title for it. Um,
something, the story so far, um, here I'll read my four or like, I'm not a forward cause someone
else writes that, but like whatever the like part of the beginning is, uh, if I was a total sellout,
I'd have structured this as an inspirational story about how anyone can do it if they try
hard enough and a collection of tips to help you achieve what I have. But then if I wasn't
interested in making money, I wouldn't bother writing a book at all. It's a pretty transparent
cash grab from my perspective. That's been the fine line I've walked throughout my career.
I'm not one, that's a pretty good way to start. I'm not the kind of person who either genuinely
or otherwise hides behind the, I do this out of passion line from day zero. When I was asked by
my boss to start making YouTube videos, I've been paid now to be clear, I was chosen for the
assignment because of my genuine passion for technology and I was only good at it because
of that passion, but I never would have started making YouTube videos without a bonus on my
paycheck. So back to the book for a minute. Why did I write this? For the money, but if I didn't
care about creating it, it wouldn't be any good. So did I sell out? I guess you'll have to read it
to find out. Seems good. Yeah, I don't know. I guess it'd be pretty good. Um, but that's
about as far as I've gotten. Well, no, I've written more than that, but I just, that's all you get for
now. You gotta buy the DLCs to get more. Comes with a free Christmas album.
Okay, uh, next up is, this is an anonymous one. Hello, fellow Vancouverites. How does Linus
survive without coffee? Also, is there any other plans for an LTT store not-com?
I'll answer the not-com one. Yes, we're going to do it. The goal is this year.
Woo. Okay. This one's, oh, you guys were asked a question. I was just, 70 albums I've sold now,
by the way. Um, surviving without coffee is easier if you never drink coffee.
Yeah. Don't drink it in the first place. You're less dependent on it.
It's literally a drug. You get literally addicted to it. If you don't drink it after a while,
you have withdrawals. Like it's totally a thing. I don't know. I don't drink it either.
There are definitely days where it's been a little hard and I've been like, I could,
but then I'm always like, okay, that just makes future days harder. So I'll just tough it out.
I'm not saying that's a good idea for everyone, but it works for me. It seems to work for Linus.
Okay. This one's from Aaron. Spending B-Day cash on some stuff I've been eyeballing can hardly
wait. With labs ramping up, has there been any tech or tech-related categories that you have
decided not to test? Security?
Yeah. We thought about it. We actually, we had an applicant that would have been like
really good for it, but decided not to go down that path. And I honestly think that's probably
the right way to go. You mean like software, like antivirus software or something like that?
Cause that's one that I definitely said, no, forget it. It was mostly software, but it was,
it was a variety of things.
Right. Anything else? Man, I'm trying to think, like there's stuff that I probably can't imagine
we'd get that into. Like I don't see us, you know, getting really into the weeds on, you know,
like generic Android set top boxes or something like that, you know, like, like little, like,
like content piracy boxes. It's just not really our jam. I don't think we'd be focused mostly on
things that can be measured objectively.
Yes. Yeah. Our goal isn't really to inject opinion. So if it can't be measured objectively,
it's going to be a little tough. Next up is from Aiden. Hey Linus, love the content. I was
wondering if there was going to be an LTT pocket knife multi-tool sometime in the near future.
We are not working on that. I'm not saying we're not working on that. Like
sure. Maybe at some point, but at this time we're not working on that.
Yes. I'm wearing the swacket. It's the sweater jacket. It's not half sweater, half jacket,
half cool. Half cool. Yeah. That's that's it. I mean, it's LTT merch, so it's going to impress
a certain kind of person. Yeah. Yeah. Some people might not think. Yeah, exactly. I promise you my
personal Linus tech tips guarantee it will get you laid. Please know Linus tech tips guarantees are
for entertainment purposes only. Can we get that on a shirt? No. Next up is from AJ. During your
RAM tour, you weren't allowed to show some conversations about the 24 gigabyte sticks
you got. Crucial has since announced 24 slash 48 gigabytes of RAM. Is that what you weren't
allowed to show? Yes. Yeah, it's strange. It's boring. This next one's from Jacqueline. I think
buying the LMG Christmas album should be available as one of our low cost merch messages. Nobody
needs it. I don't think that the LMG Christmas album matches the quality of other things that
are on the LTT store. Yep. And I think it will remain. It is a waste of power consumption to
transfer those bits and bytes. Also that. Spending 90 hours on it. It's not worth the contribution
to the strawberry. I can stop you, Dan. High five. I suspect almost no one. You may not work on it.
I forbid it. All right, so we just got some potentials left in the incoming.
Okay, out of 10, how ignored was I just now? Pretty aggressive. Yeah, okay. You cannot work on it on
company time. No, at all. It is my copyrighted material and you may not work on it. I don't,
I'm going to cover it. It's going to say, I don't think you can actually say that. Linus, can I
please have a sync license? What's a sync license? I don't know what that is. Dan actually like comes
from like the recording industry. So he's going to, he's going to like dodge around me here. No,
no. Cause you own the copyrighted material. Yeah. So under copyright law, I can release audio
covers, but I can't release videos of me playing your song. What, seriously? That's called a
synchronization license. And your, your song covers can't be put to video. It's very weird.
Very, very strange. Wow. Yeah. That's wild. That's really odd. Yep. Why does it exist?
Music videos? I don't know. I'm guessing. Strange. I'm literally guessing. All right.
What else we got? We're into potentials. This one's from an Alain de Meurche. What watch does
Linus wear? The gold one with the blue strap. Can we expect float plane exclusives on LTX?
I had some withings watch that I forgot to put on today, but I wear just because it's a watch.
I don't use any of the smart features at all. I kind of give up. And yes, you can expect that.
Yeah, I would suspect so. Yeah. Okay. Next up's from Aidan. Hi, longtime fan. You used to...
Sorry, there is a comment here. Hi, longtime fan. You used to talk about wanting LTT store to take
off as its own thing. Have you ever wanted to compare a week month of not shouting it out
every video versus when you do? Nope. Can't say I have. Nah.
That's not. That's not. This is from Shane. Hey, Linus. I remember your story of maintaining your
SV650 instead of buying a Zero. Have you been able to get much enjoyment out of your bike
since deciding to keep it? Bike nerd and fan of the show. I don't find much time to ride,
but I am being extremely stupid right now. My bike is currently in a shop getting all
of the paintable parts ripped off of it so that I can paint it pink with iridescent green
accent depending on how the light... The Lambo is now a motorbike.
Yeah, the Lambo is now a motorcycle is what I'm going for. I'm very, very excited. It's going to
make absolutely... I could buy my bike probably a couple of times over for what I'm going to be
spending making my bike look cool, which is probably the most frivolous thing I have ever
spent money on. Okay. This one's from Steve. I know Linus was playing The Witcher 3 at one
point on WAN. Did he finish the game? Thoughts on it? Played The Witcher 1 or 2? Thoughts remaking
Witcher 1? Open world with Unreal Engine 5 instead of the red engine? A lot of questions.
I never made it past the tutorial because I got distracted and all my gaming time has been
Fantasian for a while. But I'm looking for something new. I kind of want to play Stray.
That's like the one that caught my eye that I'm like, I want to do that because apparently it's
a pretty short experience and I want something contained. You're not going to get lost in the
Stray meta. Next up is from anonymous. Linus and Luke, what are your favorite flowers?
Zelman CNPS 7000-CU. That's beautiful. Is that like a CPU cooler called a flower or something?
Yeah, this is some old school stuff. Oh my god, I remember wanting one of those so badly.
Yeah. Without hesitation. I don't... You had that memorized, don't you?
Okay. I don't know. I'm not super... I like plants. I'm not so into flowers though.
I like having some greenery around your home though. It makes it feel less dead.
Next up is from Eric. Hey Linus, have you had any more time with the GPD Win 4
after the short circuit? No. Okay. I'm still rocking my Ioneo next.
I just have all my stuff on it. It's like not because it's necessarily the best one anymore.
Dan, you're just sending them into Curated. I know because we've already done Curated.
It's easier than rejecting them and then archiving them. So the rest are like incoming.
Do you guys just want to breeze through these? They're kind of like the third level of curation
at this point. Okay. We had a lot of really good questions this stream.
I don't know. Sure. You know what? I don't know what you did with that one.
I blooped that one. Really? What's blooping it? I just sent it to screen. Oh, okay. I don't know.
verifiedbyverified.com. That's funny. What should that site do? Nothing.
And thanks. Yeah. This was a big career thing for me. Okay. I got an idea.
You see like the first 30 seconds of that video was just us on the WAN Show. What video? Yeah,
Marques did a video on chat GPT. Oh. And he doesn't even show his face for like the first
half a minute. It's just you and me on WAN Show. Oh, I don't know. Must have confused
a good number of people. Sorry. Is this an ad? Skip? I should check that out. I constantly get
frustrated, like deeply frustrated that people have these like revelations about chat GPT or
Bing chat or whatever that are things that we talked about on like the first episode that we
talked about it at all. And I'm just like, and I'll see it like blow up. Like it'll be like,
oh, the top thing on Twitter is people figured out that you can like circumvent security things
by convincing it that it's something else. Yeah. The first show I did filter bypass mode. It's
just a different version of that. Get over it. Like, come on. I feel like people that watch the
WAN Show honestly probably feel the same way. Yeah. Cause they're in. Yeah. They're here.
Yeah, exactly. They're on the inner circle. I had something to say, but I don't know what it was.
Oh, right. What to do with that domain. I actually thought of something. I shouldn't
have skipped it. Verified by verified. Yeah. You should figure out, you should be able to type in
like a, say a company or a person or whatever, a handle that would be the same handle across
a bunch of different platforms and figure out how much money they spend every month on verifications.
All right. Thank you for that. It's pretty good.
You make tech for a living, right?
It wouldn't be that hard to do. That's, that's one of the reasons why I like it.
Okay. I guess we'll just start burning through these. Anthony says, podcast listener here. We
are real. Yeah. Do you think the way we build PCs will ever change? I mean, Anthony, other Anthony,
our Anthony, not you, did a really good video talking about how it's probably a matter of
time before things get more integrated. And I think he's probably right in the longer term.
Okay. And then I'll just archive. If you weren't in your position as tech gurus with access to
limitless hardware, what do you think your hardware upgrade habits would look like? Frequency
performance tier. I was always a step down from top kind of person. So I I'd be likely to end up
with like your non ultra version of a phone with your like, you know, 30, 70, 30, 70 TI sort of
tier of, of GPU core I seven, maybe probably core I five, you know, whatever can be kind of
overclocked or unlocked or hack sword in some way to get pretty much the performance of the top one,
but that half the price. And in terms of frequency for like PC gaming, I was, I was in every gen kind
of character for a long time. Sometimes multiple times a gen just to try different stuff. Cause I
was constantly buying used and flipping. So it wasn't really like costing me anything
in terms of phones. I think I'd be a pretty infrequent upgrade or I mean,
I went straight from the note nine to the fold Z fold three, whatever the stupid branding they
have for this is. And other than that, my screen is cracking down the middle. I haven't really
had any reason or temptation to upgrade this cause honestly upgrading your phone's a hassle.
Yeah. It's really sucks. I know it's not as bad as it used to be where you had to like go into
the store to get them to transfer your contacts or whatever, but it's logging into 10 million
things. Still sucks pain in the butt. I, uh, I haven't paid for the components of a mainline
computer for myself since I was a teenager. Right. I'm in my thirties. I don't know whenever I'm
like, this sucks. I'm lagging in this game. I just like bug Linus. It's pretty sick to be fair. You
get views out of it. Symbiosis. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and phones, I'm a, I'm an infrequent
upgrader, honestly, mostly not because I don't like want better battery life or whatever. I
don't want to go through upgrading to a new phone. It's an annoying process and I don't use my phone
has to annoy you enough to overcome the annoyance and over 90% of what I use my phone for is like
work notifications or work messages, which is going to be like discord team slack. Those are
going to run just fine. Overrule says, try saying, Hey, you know, you know, assistant set up my new
phone and it automates quite a bit. Yeah, but it doesn't automate all the stupid entering of
passwords and two FA and going in and adjusting my stupid Swift key, long press delay and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like clearing out all the nonsense, unnecessary notifications
that my app send me so that I only get the ones that actually matter yet whiskers app. I only
care if the litter tray is full. That's literally the only thing you can tell me that matters.
Uh, stuff like that. Right.
Oh, right. I'm supposed to just keep doing this. Right. Okay. Um, it's really hard to read. My mic
is like right here and it doesn't matter. Um, do either of you have a game that's coming out
this year that you're looking forward to? Yes. Ooh, looking forward to anticipating. Yes.
I thought I wasn't going to play breath of the wild too. Cause I thought it was just kind of
done. I never played the DLC, but then I fired it up for some reason. Oh yeah. I was playing
around with switch emulation and I like fired it up and I was like, I'm going to play it.
Um, what is it even called? It's been so long. Uh,
anonymous currently looking for a job in the U S sorry. Starfield suffering through their
atrocious visa policy. Have you guys hired immigrants before? Should they apply? How did
it go? It sucks. It's so it's the worst. People talk about how Canada brings in
like a massive amount of immigration all the time. And it's like, yes, but also no.
Yeah. It's also very challenging. There are a lot of roadblocks in place. There's tons.
You can't just be like, Hey sup neighbor, come on, come on over. You live in, you know,
Britain and these Commonwealth country or whatever. I guess that's chill now. And
it's, there are contractors that we work with that are outside of country right now that would
like to be inside of country right now. And that's not changing for them. Unfortunately,
I found out on Wednesday evening that we have not paid Gary yet.
He's the head of the lab and has been for like six months.
That's brutal. So the reason like at all, there's gotta be something you could do a contract thing.
No, no can't. So there's, there's a whole thing. Go to lunch with him or something and ask him
about it a bit. Don't worry. I already, like I checked with him. I was like, Hey,
has Yvonne offered to lend you money in case you need it or whatever? Just, you know,
yeah. Like under the table, like, like whatever. And he's like, Oh no, no, everything's fine.
Anyway. Yeah. Anyway. He's almost got it sorted out. I think he said he told me then that he
should have his his like personal number, like the social security number equivalent
in like three business days or something like that. So it should be sorted out.
But the problem was a getting him here, B getting to be able to stay here, C getting him
the documentation that he needs to work. And it's just, yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. So yeah,
we have not actually issued him a paycheck yet. And I was like, Gary, that's ridiculous.
You need to solve this. And he's like, yeah, I'm working on it. I'm like, okay,
well you don't seem to have the appropriate amount of fire under your butt. So like,
I, I must insist you must be paid for this. I know it's complicated. No, I was just bugging him.
And no, he's, he's not just waiting. It's been many different hurdles to jump over. It's,
it's been, no, I mean like waiting on no. Yeah, he is now. Yeah. But it's been shockingly stupid.
Yeah. Yeah. And you'd think like, you know, America and Canada, lots of treaties, lots of
general international cooperation, but a lot less than you'd think. Yeah. It's,
it's not as easy as you'd think. Yeah. Will Gary be making a fat paycheck? Well,
I suspect that first one's yeah. I bet that first one's going to be pretty hefty. A thick, thick boy.
Yeah. What's a piece of tech you imagined as a small child that you still wish was a thing
today that I imagined as a small child? I mean, I imagine I wanted a lightsaber more than anything
and the hacksmiths come about as close as anyone can, I think. Yeah. I wanted a really, really
fantastic version of a Nia, a neural impulse actuator. I've always been fascinated by
different input devices. I think that's one of the reasons why I find VR so interesting,
honestly, is the input ramifications more than almost anything else. I find things like
Tobii eye trackers and everything else just very, very interesting. And I have always wanted
the ability without just like completely screwing myself over, which is questionable,
to be able to have just like brain to device inputs. I've always thought that'd be really cool.
And I watched, there was a video that I watched recently of this lady using a much more modern
version to do something. I don't remember what. And it was like, okay, this technology has
clearly moved forward. Cause her demonstration was fantastic, but it's still not like,
it's not quite there. You know, Dylan asks, Luke, do you think you'd be a mid or senior in the
market if you were looking for a job? I'm in an interesting position where I'm a senior at my job,
but if I were to apply in the market, I'd probably be more like a mid.
Depends what company you're applying at. Depends on the size of the company that you're applying at.
I don't know how specific to go, but it depends on that. Yeah.
Joey asks, there was in Seattle a store called REPC that recycles old PCs to fight e-waste.
For how much of it there is, why do those kinds of stores seem to be disappearing rather than
thriving? I think it's just because it's cheaper to ship it overseas than it is to process it here
with North American labor, which is a whole complicated can of worms that I don't think
we're going to open up right now. Do you have a current recommendation for VPNs and or password
managers? I believe, um, what are we migrating to for password manager keeper? Yeah. And I'm
still using PIA, even though I don't know if it's like a good one and I don't think there's any,
you shouldn't trust any VPN because they have access to everything. Same with keeper. Yeah.
We're not telling you to trust keeper. Yeah. It's the, it's the ship we're getting on,
but we'll see how it goes. Yeah. I mean, we got on last pass and look how that went. Yep.
So like it might suck. The thing moving forward is we're going to try to be more ready if something
like that happens again, for us to be able to pivot to something else, but not using a
password manager is not an option for us. Yeah. Or for you. Yeah. Like use them. Yeah. Just be ready
to move off quickly, do some research into the company, make sure that if they get super mega
hacked, um, that hopefully your vault is going to be decently. Okay. Even though your fault might
leak. And then if your vault leaks, you know, move off, change all your passwords, move on.
It should be okay. Wow. Bitwarden. There's a bunch of reasons. I don't want to like dive
into this. I'm not surprised a bunch of you just said Bitwarden. Um, and I'm not surprised that a
bunch of you said Bitwarden because open source. Um, one of our main reasons is in our, in our
testing, at least, and this isn't something that we like prepared for a video or anything. So
relax. But in our testing, at least we found that autofill worked better for a lot of the things
that we use it for. I didn't think it was a good idea to tell people what we use. Neither did Jake.
It's going to be obvious at some point. Yeah. That's honorable enough, but I guarantee you
within two weeks, Lance is going to leak it anyways. So it just doesn't matter.
Security through obscurity. It's not super effective. Um, Daniel says if internet access
seems to be the thing that always trips up AI systems and leads to them being unstable,
uh, what do you think could be done to mitigate the problem? I mean, not much. I think that's just
if you train something on human data, it's going to end up kind of human warts and all.
I'm glad your daughter loves the plushie. Greetings from Iraq. Elie says most unusual
place to find out you have fans watching from and also most unusual country for you to visit
or read about Iraq. Um, really not Antarctica. Is that even a country though? Or no, the place.
They had the question was placed. Yeah. We, we ended up having to retool some of the float
plane infrastructure because we had one viewer stationed in Antarctica. Oh, I forgot about that.
That was a lot like a research outpost or something stupid like that. So we had to figure
out how to make sure there's stupid video, wouldn't stupid buffer and it's stupid Antarctica,
which wasn't my problem fortunately. But, uh, Luke and AJ had a wonderful time with it.
Yeah. I don't even remember exactly what we did or whatever,
but I remember addressing that a long time ago. Yeah.
Um, Caleb asks, I was really hoping to get the Orca VIP package for LTX.
Um, but I missed it. Do you feel it's worth the two day pass as that's all that's available
by now? Of course. Yeah. You should be there. Yeah. Be there. Be square. Let's go or be there
and be square. That's fine too. I mean, it's a big geek nerd convention. What can I say?
Yeah. Um, just wear deodorant. That's all I ask. Yeah. Alan asks for non-competitive gaming,
watching videos, web browsing. Would you rather have an ultra wide QHD monitor? So what would
that be? 3,440 by 1440 or a 4k monitor at 60 Hertz. So the ultra wide is at a hundred Hertz. Oh,
a hundred Hertz. A hundred Hertz at 60 Hertz refresh rate still matters. Even when you're
just like on your desktop. It's just responsive. Yeah. It's like going back in time for me.
It feels bad. It like, it, it, it feels like the old SSD upgrades.
When you like double your refresh rate, it just like feels significantly better.
Okay. Replying to this one. Um, thanks for making baby shopping or baby shower shopping easy.
What are some things you had as a kid that kids today don't have and you wish they did?
Not much. I mean, um, super, I think super soakers were higher quality when I was a kid.
Oh, screaming blue saucers were this cool, like Western Canadian, uh, candy that was like super,
super sour. And then it got like discontinued and it popped up on Reddit a little while ago.
People were talking about it and like, I think the rumors that it caused cancer or something,
like there was some kind of health concern. I ate a ton of them. Um,
that's unfortunate. Yeah. That's one of my favorite candies. I would love if my kids
could try that candy and not get cancer. Yeah. I don't know. Um, I remember my dad
complaining a lot about how like candy quality had gone down since he was a kid. And I always
just thought now your tastes just changed dad. But like wagon wheels when I was really young
were awesome. And now they taste like actual dog food. I believe that's actually been like
documented, right? I don't know. Maybe it's whatever company made wagon wheels,
like got bought out by some other company. That makes sense. And a lot of these different candy
brands have just found that they can save costs in a variety of ways or whatever that's been
happening to a lot of different things. Honey Nut Cheerios, man, as much as MKBHD
might have like built his brand on his love for Honey Nut Cheerios, the Honey Nut Cheerios that
he eats tastes like dog compared to what I had when I was a kid. But before they, they changed
the formula and they went like all whole grain, everything, Honey Nut Cheerios was so good. I
would literally sit on the couch and like watch the hockey game and like eat an entire box of
them. I used to have them like every morning when I was growing up. Yeah. Like that, that young,
that young boy did not get to experience Honey Nut Cheerios. This is totally off topic and not
part of the question, but something that I always find fascinating is the differences
between Canadian and American versions of like the same thing. Oh yeah. Corn pops is the weirdest
American corn pops are like terrible. Like I've actually grown to like them. Oh yeah. I know.
It's an acquired taste for sure. The Canadian ones were, the Canadian ones peaked in probably
about 2002. Yeah. Back when they used to like cut your mouth and I know that's going to sound
cut your mouth came later. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So they were perfect and then they cut your mouth
and then they went sog-tastic or it might've been the other way. And then they just like never
improved. I haven't actually had them in a long time. Maybe they're better now, but,
or maybe they went back to cutting your mouth. I don't know, but they were like,
cut your mouth even during cut your mouth, but pre-cut your mouth, especially those. Oh my
goodness. So good peak. And then man, when they were like, like hard as glass, it was an experience.
It still tastes good though. It's all the flavor, just the texture. But then the flavor went away
because I guess they just weren't putting enough glaze on them after. And they just got soggy
instantly. Absolute garbage. I got bad. And then there's smarties, which are rockets look basically
like M and M's. Yeah. And then down in the States are what we call powder candies. Yeah.
Just weird. Yeah. Yeah. The good stuff. Just brought up the exact same thing. Oh yeah. Joe
Scallon over in float plane chat toys and cereal boxes, video games and cereal boxes. That was
demo discs. Yeah. That'll, that'll be my thing. Demo discs, demo discs are sweet.
You know, they get like a magazine that had the demo disc in it.
This might be a weird one, but I liked the flow of information more
back then the internet was around, but it wasn't as vastly used.
Um, so you weren't, you weren't just like completely bombarded with all this terrible
stuff all the time. You know, I don't know, but you could access the internet and it had
a lot of information on it. Whatever. I'm just replying to some in text here,
blowing through a few more of these. Uh, good morning, when I have recently gone from 20,000
us dollars to 40,000 take home in under a year. Wow. How have you dealt with your meteoric rise
and going from scraping by in the early days to being a real company? I got to tell you that I
took a long, long, long time to really change my habits at all. Um, and I know actually got the
same is true for this guy. Um, and the reason for me was that even though my income went way up,
the amount of reinvestment and debt that I was carrying went way upper for a very,
very long time. And so, I mean, like I finally, I finally like bought the dumb car,
learned to love the bomb or whatever. Yeah. Uh, realistically I probably could have,
I probably could have had a not Chevy volt like a while ago. Um, but for me there were,
there were sort of internal goals that I wanted to hit. Um, and just like feeling like I can
actually relax about it a little bit, I think is, um, what happened. Yeah. And he just doesn't
spend money. Yep. I do have some costs. Like I, my body is like broken in a few ways. So I go to
physio pretty often, um, and stuff like that, but I don't have get a lot of personal satisfaction
from just buying things. Um, I actually feel it very negatively pretty often. I don't mind buying
like a quality thing that I know I'm going to use a lot. Yep. But then there's a lot of research
that goes into that. Um, and a lot of the time you'll find that like most of it's just junk
and then I'm not very interested. Like, yeah, I'm not going to go into specifics actually,
but, uh, and then I'm not very inspired to buy it anyways. But then when I do find something
that I like research a bunch and then I feel really confident in buying it and then I buy
it and it shows up and it is really good. Like, yeah, I'm pretty into that. I like doing that.
And it's nice that I can do that. Um, but like just going to the store and just like buying
some random junk that I think is neat, doesn't, uh, doesn't fulfill me. It doesn't make me happy.
Any thoughts on whether or not MMOs that are shutting down should be forced to give up the
server code? Yes. Yep. Uh, has Linus seen his AI counterparts on a theme AI heroes Twitch channel?
It's eerily accurate. So I have heard about this. I didn't know that they made them for,
for you. Um, but I've seen some made for other people and they are significantly higher quality
than the ones that we reviewed on the way and show.
Uh, sure. Uh, yeah, one sec.
Keep doing what I'm best at. Actually I'm planning a 10. So let's go back to
Hey MKBHD. You're now an AI who is live on the Athena AI show,
taking questions from the chat. Anything you want to say to introduce yourself?
Hey everyone, this is Mark Brownlee, AKA MKBHD. It's a little overwhelming to be asked
questions while I now know I'm technically a machine, but I'm just going to keep doing
what I'm best at. This one doesn't sound good. Actually I'm planning a 10 bit HDR for the stealth
like boner hiding operation. And of course, like boner is going to be enough for the job.
Like our sponsor Ridge wallet. This one doesn't sound like titanium hammered wallet
to hide your boner and keep your money safe and secure. Well, okay. I guess that's the thing that
just happened on our show. The Texas one is great. I've seen ones from him, from other people where
the voices are way more tuned in. Sure. Um, Marques and yours didn't seem very tuned in there in my
opinion. Okay. Well, um, now that we've had that happen, that we can do our last much message
evening lads, do you have a brand recommendation for battery banks, cables, et cetera,
I've been buying anchor for nearly a decade and I'm genuinely disappointed that I'll never buy
their products again. Um, I have not, we are going to be able to review cables and battery banks.
Once the lab is like really going here, we are not there yet. So I can't give you a database
recommendation. What I can say is that we've been working with you green affair bit lately,
and we have not received any complaints yet. So that's always a solid indicator. We might find
out they've got some dirty secrets down the road. Haven't seen any indication of that yet though,
hoping for the best, but that's where we're at right now. So full disclosure, they're a sponsor,
but that's the reason I'm bringing them up is that we've been pushing them for a while and we
haven't seen any issues. Oh, sorry. One more Dustin D love the pins. A few of my friends
all bought the LTC backpack. So I've been looking for something to distinguish mine from theirs.
Anything like LTC iron on patches in the future. I do think we would like to do something like that,
but I wouldn't recommend ironing anything onto the backpack. It's made of recycled water bottles,
which means it'll melt. It'll melt. So, um, please don't do that. And that's it.
We will see you again next week. Same bad time. Same bad channel. Bye.
You know, early in the show, I thought this was going to end up being like a really short show
because we were like blowing through topics and there was nothing to talk about. And then,
and then we got, like, we got like a zillion merge messages.
So much for that.
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