And welcome to The WAN Show. We've got a lot of great topics today.
Ubisoft says,
Gaming subscription success requires gamers to be comfortable not owning games.
I mean, I for one am comfortable not owning their games.
Yeah, I think that's what this means.
In all seriousness though, they're probably going to win this, but anywho.
I don't know about that.
It has been officially confirmed now, search engines are in fact getting worse.
A recent study revealed that, yeah, it's not just Google.
It's across the board pretty much.
What else we got today? Did I manage to steal your two?
You sure did.
And then I found a makeup one and I lost it.
Fujitsu agrees it is morally culpable in 700 plus wrongful convictions.
Which is a rough thing to agree.
Also, everyone's been raging at YouTube for going after their computer performance and it was an ad blog bug.
Whoops.
We'll talk about that.
The show is brought to you today by Divoom AG1 and, oh no, I missed it.
I missed the last one.
Odd pieces.
Tremendous.
Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today?
And that is that Ubisoft, during an interview about the launch of the new Ubisoft Plus Premium and Classic subscription.
Okay, hold on actually.
We're going to get into this in a second.
And shout out Ubisoft.
Okay?
I don't think anyone puts more work into rebranding their bullshit than Ubisoft.
Ubisoft.
Okay.
Okay, you got...
How many names has their stupid launcher ever had?
Guys, hit us in the chat.
Okay?
I think it was Uplay at the start.
The look on your face, by the way.
It's amazing.
Ubisoft Connect is one of them.
No, I don't...
So, I think it's Ubisoft Connect now.
I am Bear goes, it's not Uplay anymore?
No, no, no.
Formerly Ubisoft Game Launcher.
Yeah, I think that's what it started as.
Yeah, okay.
Okay.
Yeah, that's according to TonyB486 in the floatplane chat.
It's Ubisoft Plus now.
It's not even Ubisoft Connect anymore?
Ubisoft Plus.
Okay, hold on.
I think the Game Launcher is still called Ubisoft Connect.
I don't think we can take everything floatplane chat is saying is gospel truth.
Skate Rubin says, was it Origin at one point?
No, that was EA.
Yeah, it's not Ubisoft Plus.
It's Ubisoft Connect.
Ubisoft Plus is their subscription service.
We're talking about the launcher right now.
The launcher was originally called Ubisoft Game Launcher.
And then Uplay.
Uplay was actually a good name, in my opinion.
They had an online pass called Uplay Passport.
Okay.
This was back in like 2012 or 2013.
Uplay Plus, a monthly subscription service that gave you access to over 100 games in the
Ubisoft catalog, was introduced at E3 2019.
Cool.
And then...
Hope you like Far Cry and Far Cry derivatives.
In October 2020, this is all from Wikipedia, so take it for what it is.
Probably fine.
In October 2020, apparently Uplay and Ubisoft Club were merged into Ubisoft Connect.
That makes sense.
And then...
Has part of the...
Ubisoft Plus...
What?
Wow.
So, anywho, let's get back to the launch of the new Ubisoft Plus Premium and Classic subscriptions.
What the f*** these things are?
I don't know without looking them up.
I assume they are some kind of subscription service that may or may not have anything to
do with their launcher.
Cool.
Their Director of Subscriptions...
Oh my god.
They have a Director of Subscriptions because of course they do.
I've got it.
I've got the difference between Classic and Premium.
All right.
Help me out.
So, Classic in Canadian dollars is 10 bucks a month and Premium is 20 bucks a month.
In Classic, you get a selection of 50 plus, whatever that means.
Hold on.
Can you help me out with something really quick here?
Sure.
How many games does Ubisoft actually launch every year?
That's why I said Far Cry and Far Cry derivatives.
One thing to note though is that they are a publisher.
Don't forget about Assassin's Creed and Assassin's Creed derivatives.
Assassin's Creed at this point is basically a Far Cry derivative.
Hot take.
Here we go.
This is coming from someone who likes Assassin's Creed.
Okay.
That's...
But they all just follow the go to the tower, reveal the map, continue forward model.
I see.
Yeah.
Anyways.
No, I haven't forgotten about Anno.
I haven't played the most recent one.
I haven't forgotten about Anno.
That's actually just published by Ubisoft though.
So, that's...
They are a publisher and they do publish a decent amount of games.
Yes.
People like Trackmania.
Yep.
True.
All right.
Some content creators keeping that alive.
But now, hold on just a gosh darn second here because $20 a month, last time I checked,
is over $200 a year.
Yeah.
It's a lot of money actually.
So, given that PC games only cost, you know, full price if you are buying Nintendo games
or you can't wait like two weeks, you could buy like most of the games that Ubisoft releases
that year and just...
Doing a premium subscription would cost me more than I spend on Ubisoft games a year.
And I buy the games that I want to play.
Like, I'm not...
I don't...
I don't cheap out on games.
So, I guess what you're trying to say is that a better value for people's money would
be a Floatplane subscription.
Yeah.
We finally did it, guys.
We finally interviewed the new CEO.
Yeah.
He's six months into the job now.
It took a little bit.
New?
Okay.
Maybe not so much.
But definitely...
In the grand scheme of things.
Grand scheme of things.
Definitely new.
It's up on Floatplane.
It's over an hour long.
It ended up running a lot longer than we had sort of...
Yeah.
Than we'd sort of planned to.
We took questions from the community.
I also came up with some on my own, and we kind of riffed a little bit.
Riffed.
Yeah.
It was fun.
It was good.
That's cool.
So, that's up on Floatplane, along with a whole bunch of other great exclusives.
So, they're director of subscriptions.
I'm trying a new thing.
I...
Ah, man.
I actually feel really bad, because I told Riley and Jessica, okay, I want to help you
guys make clips better.
So, I want to try and keep the topics...
Stop.
Stop with that face.
I'm going to...
Stop.
Okay, I'm going to stop.
I'm going to try and make the topics as clean as I can, without random digressions and
tensions.
That's never going to happen.
You just have to cap it off well, I think.
I have made it...
No, that's not going to work either.
Uh...
19 words into this topic, and have already gone on two major digressions.
I'm very sorry.
Um...
I will do better.
Ubisoft's director of subscriptions, Philippe Tremblay, observed that in order for video
game subscriptions to really take off, a consumer shift needs to happen, where gamers get more
comfortable not owning their games.
Just like other consumers got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection.
Now, in fairness to Mr. Tremblay, that's a good point.
So, I am perfectly comfortable at this point not owning a CD collection.
I do not need a CD collection.
What would I need it for?
So that I can have a bunch of random plastic in my house?
So that I can get up like a caveman when I want to listen to a different track on a different
plastic disc?
Do you archive music that's important to you?
Because you archive movies that are important to you.
I only archive movies on a central server.
Could I wager that you're not so much of a music guy?
I mean, I listen to music every day.
Yeah.
For probably...
But are you like that into it?
Over an hour a day?
Yeah.
I wouldn't describe myself as into it.
I spend far more time listening to music than I do watching movies.
Yeah.
But I think that's much more casually.
For me, it's less about the casualness or not casualness or honestly even the time spent
doing it.
And it's more about the convenience.
If I could stream Blu-rays with the touch of my finger the way that I can stream an MP3,
then I wouldn't bother to have those on a server in my house either.
I wouldn't care.
Are you not concerned about any of it going away?
I think that's less of a risk with music.
It's more of a risk with movies.
I think that my immediate reaction, and this is going to be probably a little unpopular
with someone, is that if a streaming service, and I believe YouTube Music, I know Google
Play Music had this, where if you had something in your likes or in your playlist or whatever
else, and it was removed from the platform, it would leave a ghost.
Like, it would leave a stub that it was there.
So you would never lose that, oh yeah, that was a song I like to listen to that had some
significance or whatever.
And then what I would do immediately, if a song was pulled off of the service that I
use, because I'm not going to subscribe to more than one, is I would just go pirate it,
upload it to the service, which Google Play supported, and I believe YouTube Music may
also support.
I can't remember.
Local.
Haven't had to do it in a long time.
I know YouTube Music can do local play.
Sure.
Well, I wouldn't bother with that.
That would be too much work.
But Google Play Music, you could upload it to your own private cloud.
I don't know if that works anymore, but yeah, I remember that.
So I had like two songs that weren't available on Google Play Music, one of which I actually
bought on iTunes, because it was the only place I could find it.
And the other one, I think I ended up finding a download for it on a pirate site, because it
wasn't available on any streaming service.
So I was just like, well, okay, then.
This is the only actual way I can get it.
That's how it's, well, I could have bought the CD, and I could have ripped, I could have
ripped the file, but I was not going to buy a whole album for one song.
And I believe all of the, I believe those songs are now on YouTube Music, and so I no
longer actively do that.
But I can tell you, if something disappeared from my playlist, that would be the first thing
I would do, because I'm just, I'm not interested.
Um, as for, as for movies, I think I just, I kind of recognize the data delivery challenges
with having an on-demand, just like instant Blu-ray stream.
Doing the same quality as a Blu-ray.
Yep.
Very expensive.
And you know what's really interesting is we've talked about this already on the show,
but I'm seeing that discourse start to gain traction.
People are putting the hats on, dude.
Like, hey, oh no, I don't mean that.
Oh, I mean that.
I mean, I'm seeing people start to recognize how crappy Netflix looks.
Oh, yeah.
And like, as Blu-ray.
There was a whole thread I saw recently of somebody who bought a Blu-ray as like almost
a joke, and then they watched it at home, and they were like, uh, I'm going back.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it looks like garbage.
Yeah.
Well, no, it looks amazing.
No, I mean, Netflix looks like garbage by comparison.
And nothing against Netflix.
They are, it's a technological marvel.
Honestly.
For sure.
I mean that.
Yeah.
But it's, there's, there's just limitations.
4K is not 4K in all situations.
1080p is not 1080p.
Yeah.
There's more factors than that.
Yeah.
And Blu-ray looks really, really good, especially with like 4K UHD Blu-rays.
Man, I watched Alien for the first time.
Uh, I have, did I talk about this on WAN show before?
I'm not sure.
I, I finally watched it right before CES.
I had never seen Alien before.
And I watched it on that TCL TV.
I watched a Blu-ray.
It was incredible.
It looked so good.
I, I just, I don't think I could watch, I don't think I would even want to watch a
movie like that streamed from Netflix.
Like the, the, the ambience of it.
It's gorgeous.
It's, yeah, it's, it's amazing.
Spectacularly.
I had managed to avoid almost all spoilers for it too.
Like I just, I got to watch it with fresh eyes.
It's kind of fun.
I don't think this increases convenience at all though.
Like this, this isn't.
Oh, coming back to you.
No.
This isn't gamers going from discs to, to streaming services.
This is completely different.
No.
And hold on a second.
Because there is more that Mr. Tremblay said.
He said, part of that is gamers feeling secure in the knowledge that they won't lose their
progress, that their files won't be deleted and that they won't lose what they've built
in the game.
And there's the problem.
They will.
Yeah.
They do.
Yeah.
Uh, here, hold on.
From Ubisoft.
This has happened.
Hold on.
Servers shut.
Let's look.
Okay.
Here it is.
Ubisoft shutting down.
Uh, hold on.
Decommissioning of online services for older games.
Okay.
Here, here, here, here, here.
Here's a, here's a post from, uh, Ubisoft.
Da, da, da, da, da, da, da.
Okay.
So Assassin's Creed 2 is no longer available.
Let's find something.
Okay.
Anno 1404.
Wait, hold on.
If you've, you will see.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
What am I looking at?
Online services for older.
Yeah.
Okay.
So online services are closed for these games.
Anno 1404, America's Army.
Uh, that was only on Xbox.
That one.
A bunch of Assassin's Creed games, uh, were retired between 2014 and 2022.
Beyond Good and Evil.
Um, Far Cry 2 shut down.
Man, actually a lot of Far Cry's, uh, Far Cry 3, the 2012 release.
So for 10 years, for 10 years.
10 years is a long time.
10 years is long enough that you could be 16 when you play this game and you could be
26 by the time they shut it down.
But here's the problem with that.
What if you're 26, 27, and you're like, oh yeah, I want to like go experience that the
way that I originally experienced it.
Well, good luck with that.
That game might have aged kind of rough, but lots of games don't, to be honest.
Yeah.
Like, what about...
When did Civ 5 come out?
What about Just Dance 3 Kids?
Okay.
Probably not a good example.
Civ 5 came out in 2010.
So it's over a decade old.
Yep.
But I play it every once in a while still.
Yep.
That's not even nostalgia glasses.
And you know what?
I mean, when I was talking about how I was comfortable with this whole, uh, subscription
service thing for music, yeah, that is a big part of why I'm comfortable with it.
Because over time, the quality of the library has improved, not gotten worse.
Although I have a lot that I could say about the YouTube music app versus Google Play Music.
I was just going to say, the app got a lot worse.
The app got...
YouTube music is...
Spectacularly worse.
...trash compared to Google Play Music.
If they just brought back the Google Play Music app...
So much better.
I would just, I would...
I used to be, like, evangelical about it.
Like, people would talk about how Shopify was so great, and I'd be like, you have not...
Shopify?
I think you mean Spotify.
Spotify, sorry.
You have not heard of the Google Play Music.
Let me show you the ways.
Yeah.
Did I mention it comes with YouTube Premium?
Yeah.
And then they trashed it, and I was like, well, I'm never showing this off again, because
I'm happy it comes for free with Premium.
I will not pay for two, just like you said.
Yep.
But it's a lot worse than Spotify, so it is what it is.
So, yeah, a big part of why I'm comfortable with it is that convenience and trusting that
the service is going to continue to exist, and also that if it doesn't, then I could
just jump ship to Spotify.
Yeah.
Or, I don't know, Tidal?
Tidal, something.
There's a few.
Apple, Apple Music.
Sure.
I could just jump to something else.
Whereas, with Ubisoft, well, okay, A, these games are their own games on their own platform,
so if for whatever reason I don't like what they're doing with the platform, there is no
competition that I could jump to, whether it's price increases or cutting the library
or whatever else it is, and I don't trust that those things are going to be maintained.
There's no reason to trust that.
All of the precedent has been that they won't be.
So, like, very extensive precedent from a huge multitude of companies has been that it
won't be.
Our discussion question is, what would it take for you to trust a company that has this
kind of power over your gaming library?
And I think we both know the answer.
Yeah.
No?
Oh, okay.
Well, I know the answer.
I want a commitment in writing that if any online services are to be terminated, that
they will be either open-sourced or there will be a good-faith effort to negotiate with
the gaming community to hand over the tools to continue that service uninterrupted.
I just don't think it's ever going to happen.
Well, I didn't say it was realistic.
I just said...
Yeah.
That is right, though.
I do agree.
That's what it would take.
Yeah.
For me to trust them to just be like, yeah, it's all subscription now.
You own nothing.
With that said, it's not like it's really any different.
If you buy it, you're still just renting it.
Not always.
Less than the online services you are, because they can just shut them down at their discretion.
Yeah.
But if they did sign that thing...
Well, then I'd be fine with that, too.
But I just mean it's not an option in either case.
Our options right now are to give them all our money up front or to give them our money over
time...
To not give them all our money ever.
Is that today?
That's this month.
Oh, that's a month.
Wow.
You know what?
I will say, though...
If you want to see...
It does...
Oops.
Oh.
I really...
Oh, wow.
Oh.
Oh.
Wow.
Hold on.
Can you go back to that for a sec?
This really bothers me.
So, from here, look at the y-axis on this chart.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so that's good.
Go to the one-month one.
I hate that.
Yeah, this should be one.
Is that what we're saying?
Zero?
Should be zero.
Yeah.
There's an app that I use for monitoring stock prices.
Not because I own stocks, but just because it's...
I follow the tech industry, and if I'm not paying attention to, you know, who's...
Wow.
AMD is...
Remember that Computex video I made where I was like...
You should invest in AMD, by the way.
This is not financial advice or whatever.
Anyone who invested in AMD at that point, I think it's like a four-bagger now or something
like that.
Anyway, the point is, I do pay attention to it.
And one of the things that I...
I don't do this very often, but I noticed that I didn't like about the app, and I actually
went out of my way to message the developer of the app and ask, you know, hey, I don't
happen to be a paying customer of yours because I don't need any of your premium features
because I'm just a looky-loo, but I would love to be able to fix the bottom of the y-axis
at zero, because otherwise it makes the swings in value look enormous, when in some cases
they actually aren't that large.
Because some investors, they might want to see that view, though, because it might be
trading on that level.
So that's valuable.
Sure.
Fair enough.
But on that level...
You also need to be able to see that.
...can still be distorted.
Yeah.
Because the thing is that not all stocks have a price that is directly comparable, like
depending on how many times it's been split, for example.
Totally.
So you could have a stock that's priced at $600, and it could have fluctuated from $580
to $610, and it could look like this giant line, and then you could have another stock
that's priced at around $70 and went from $30 to $70, and it looks like that same line.
But that's actually a really big difference!
Yeah.
And they were like, nah.
My big thing here is actually this.
That's what I was looking at.
Negative 15.72% year-to-date.
Yikes.
That's the like, ooh.
Did anyone buy AMD when I made that video?
Someone in Flowplane chat said they made a killing on AMD and NVIDIA.
Eric R underscore C says, it's more like 10 times when you made that video.
Worksmann O2 said, my NVIDIA stock purchase is up 13,000%.
Oh, 1300%.
He corrected it.
That's crazy.
Bean 710, I did.
Just checked.
Jonas, yes.
Mad Powder, I'm up over 100%.
I wanted to, but can't because work and stuff.
Oh, man.
But I was, yeah.
Oh, man.
All right.
Yeah.
I was, look, I think I made it clear at the time, and I've made it clear since then, I am
not a financial advisor.
I am not an analyst or whatever.
But I was looking at it back then going, dang.
It's not so much that AMD's roadmap looks great.
It does look great.
It's more that Intel's roadmap looks like absolute doggy poop.
Yeah.
And it's a duopoly.
People are going to need processors.
People are going to need computers.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, man.
J529 says, which stock should I buy right now?
Brother, I want, no.
No financial advice.
No, I'm not giving any financial advice.
I, man, I can't believe what's been going on with NVIDIA lately.
It's crazy.
I mean, I shouldn't say I can't believe it.
I do believe it.
It makes sense because they are a money printing machine.
Basically, every wafer that they can possibly get from TSMC.
What was it rumored?
Facebook was buying billions, billions of GPUs for their AI endeavors.
If I remember correctly, Google passed their salary expenditure on hardware.
Really?
I remember.
Let me try to find this.
That's insane.
Meanwhile, Twitch chat.
Would you recommend I invest my money in CS2 weapon skins?
Yeah.
I mean, honestly, maybe.
I don't know.
I don't know anything about that.
Yeah.
November 24th.
Google reportedly now spending more on computer power than people.
Yeah.
Expect that to be a trend that continues.
Yeah.
It's kind of scary.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
Hold on.
I was going to say something.
Oh, shoot.
No.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I left it.
Hey, do you remember when we had that private conversation where I was like, I really like
the direction Intel's going?
If I was a stock buying person, I would buy Intel.
And I think it was with you.
You told me, hey, I know someone who knows something about something.
And they're like, no, no, no, no, man.
Until it's like way up since then.
When would this have been?
Like over a year ago.
It was a while back.
Basically, it was around the time that Pat Gelsinger took over.
Oh, I don't remember this at all.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, that's fine.
Yeah.
The point is, they are on a very different trajectory than they were.
And I think the argument of that person was something, something, ARM, something, something,
data center, something, something.
And I was like, yeah, but I don't think you've really understood his vision for the company.
His vision for the company is to continue to be Intel and also to be TSMC.
Which is a pretty big deal.
Which is a kind of a big deal.
So in the last.
Because like if NVIDIA is making big fat stacks, so is TSMC.
Yep.
And then by Intel's logic, so should they.
Yeah.
To be clear, I'm not saying to do that today.
I have no idea, you know, if it will continue on the trajectory that it's on.
And that would be a much longer term play.
I think a lot of people, um, stock more like gambling, like they're expecting a payoff in
six months or three months or a month or a day.
There's this whole thing where like current generation, uh, sees effective forms of gambling
is the only way to make it.
So like, yeah.
That kind of checks out.
Man, I was, I read this interesting article about how there's pretty much a generation
of people now for whom competing and winning in a Mr. Beast challenge seems like a more
realistic way to change their situation in life than hard work because hard work is just
not effective.
Yeah.
And it's like, this is why I said what I said, um, back when Jimmy was facing a bunch of backlash
for something stupid.
I can't remember what it was where I was just like, yeah, he's young.
He's like, he's going to make mistakes.
Like I, I told him beast burger was a mistake flat out.
I was like, dude, no.
Um, and he figured it out eventually.
So good on him for that.
Like he, he, he makes mistakes, but I think I said, I think his heart's in the right place.
I think, I think Jimmy Donaldson for president, I think he, no, stop.
I think he cares about helping people.
And I think that, I think that he's the kind of person who looks at a resource like money
and goes, well, yeah, but like, couldn't we just use this really effectively to make
people's lives better?
And he's doing it on a really, really small scale that, you know, you can, you can talk
all day about, you know, um, uh, image, uh, sanitization with philanthropy or like, you
know, the, uh, the, the, the corruptness of donations and blah, blah, blah.
Like you can kind of, you can kind of attack from any different, I don't, I don't know
him at all.
I think he would struggle really hard with the overpowering amount of corruption that
there is in governmental systems.
I won't even say American governmental systems.
I'm just going to say governmental systems in general.
Yeah.
I think that's very fair.
Like, let's use our money in this way.
Yeah.
And then you have to go through the armies of people that are in between you and that actual
spend that are going to try to take all their own cuts that are going to try to scam
it in whatever various way.
Like all these, there's a lot more war right now than there has been over the last while
in general, just all around the world.
Um, and something that keeps cropping up every time one of these countries gets into a war
like situation is like, wow, the generals for all these various companies were really
scamming the whole country really hard this whole time.
Um, for the generals for the companies, countries, countries.
Yeah.
Like if I remember correctly, it was like, uh, I don't actually want to get into details,
but like, yeah, it's this, it's this whole billions and billions of dollars from multiple
different countries.
Not, not just like it's, it's, yeah, it's really bad.
Yeah.
I think you're referring to a situation where there was some country whose military on paper
was a lot better than it ended up being based on how much money they were spending
on it.
Because there was a lot of misappropriation of funds.
But there's also multiple countries that this has happened to.
And it's like, oh yeah.
Turns out it's like pretty much all of them.
Was it you who was telling me that like the, the U.S. military pays hundreds of dollars
for garbage cans or something like that?
Oh no, it was, it was way more than hundreds of dollars.
Um.
Is it, was it garbage cans?
It was a garbage can.
Yeah.
Okay.
I thought it was 30 grand.
Shut up.
No.
Trash can.
Hold on.
No, stop.
The Pentagon's $52,000 trash can.
Okay, here we go.
I'm going to your laptop.
Uh, sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
It's on Y Combinator.
Where does this?
Responsible statecraft.
Hold on.
I think that was the top link.
Yeah.
Military spending record highs and contractors have hiked up the cost of relatively simple
items.
I love that cute little dollar tank.
Oh man.
Um.
So.
In 2020, the Pentagon paid Boeing over $200,000 for four trash cans.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
This is it.
When the 707 fell out of use in the United States, the trash can was no longer a commercial
item, meaning Boeing was not obligated to keep its price at previous levels, according
to the weapons industry.
So the trash cans became roughly $51,606 per unit.
The company charged $36,640 each for 11 trash containers, resulting in a total cost of more
than $400,000.
And how much is a Band-Aid at a hospital?
Yeah.
That stuff is rough too.
I don't know.
Okay.
Okay.
Hear me out.
Jimmy Donaldson running mate, the ghost of Bernie Sanders.
Because he'll probably be dead by the time Jimmy's alive.
Oh!
Fuck.
I was like, what's happened?
No, did that happen?
No, no, no, not yet.
I just, I think the biggest like reform that could happen in a lot of countries right now
is like getting scams like this out of government spending.
Because you look around and you're like, there's a lot of taxes all the time, you know?
It's just everything gets taxed a lot all the time.
What does that go into?
And it's like genuinely hard to figure out.
And then you read stuff like this and it's like, oh!
Cool!
I mean, that Boeing executive has to wipe his ass with money somehow.
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess.
Right?
Yeah.
Meanwhile, Twitch chat's takeaway here is, I'm hearing invest in Mr. Beast.
Never change, Twitch chat.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Love you guys.
Yeah, so things are frustrating and stuff.
Okay.
And you don't own games anymore.
Well, got them.
Yeah.
Second topic.
Did you want to pick one?
Yeah, I hate to bring them up.
Actually, I don't at all.
I love it.
But I'm going to do it anyways.
BG3 has spoken out against this.
Boulder's Gate 3?
I mean, Larry and Studios.
Oh, okay.
Sven himself specifically.
I hope I'm saying that right.
Sven's a pretty common name.
Let me try to find the tweet.
I'm hearing invest in trash can manufacturing.
It's doing that thing where it's serving me all the tweets out of order because I'm not logged in.
Nice.
Unlogged in.
I think.
Ubisoft subscription.
Okay.
To its credit, typing x.com legitimately is faster than typing twitter.com.
Oh, cool.
I'm never going to remember that.
I can't find it.
I can't find it.
I think I can find it through my phone.
Hold on.
Is this Brian Adams and Taylor Swift?
No way.
Yeah.
So Sven said, whatever the future of games looks like, content will always be king.
It's going to be a lot harder to get good content if subscription becomes the dominant model and a select group gets to decide what goes to market and what does not.
Direct from developer to players is the way.
Getting a board to okay a project fueled by idealism is almost impossible and idealism needs room to exist, even if it can lead to disaster.
Subscription models will always end up being a cost-benefit analysis exercise intended to maximize profit.
There's nothing wrong with that, but it may not become a monopoly of subscription services.
We are already all dependent on a select group of digital distribution platforms, and discoverability is brutal.
Should these platforms all switch to subscription, it'll become savage.
In such a world, by definition, the preference of the subscription service will determine what games get made.
Trust me, you really don't want that.
TLDR, you won't find our games on a subscription service, even if I respect that for many developers, it presents an opportunity to make their game.
I don't have an issue with that.
I just want to make sure the other ecosystems don't die because it's valuable.
What a Chad move.
We will not do this.
This thing sucks.
We want to build our games in the idealized way that we want to build them.
Sick.
They just keep doing cool stuff, man.
Ah, so cool.
I don't know.
I just wish they made games other than that.
Yeah.
Because I kind of couldn't get into it.
I can understand that.
But they're, yeah, I mean, that's fair.
It's just not really your style of game, which is fair, but it's still a fantastic game.
I'm going to take another run at it.
I'll take another run at it.
Play it with yourself or, like, with me or something.
It's a huge time commitment.
It is huge.
And, like, it's a big deal.
And, like, if you really want to enjoy it, a lot of it's, like.
Okay, even the game that shall not be named.
Yeah.
The amount of, like, places and mechanics and the controls and stuff.
If you play a game for one hour and then, like, I mean a new game, like a modern game where it's not just, like, the tutorial is here's how to WASD, control for crouch, mouse to look.
Like, play a modern game in a genre that you don't normally play.
Okay?
Play it for one hour.
You won't even probably.
Might be hard for some of these nerds.
You won't probably even be through the tutorial.
Go away.
Don't touch it for two weeks.
Yeah.
Come back.
Play another hour.
There can be some learning curve.
Go away.
Don't touch it for two weeks.
I kind of.
And come back and play another hour.
How do you.
It's so hard to get into it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't want them to.
To, like, weaken it, though, to be completely honest.
No, I get it.
Yeah.
I get it.
It's a hardcore game for hardcore gamers.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
I get it.
It's really, really deep.
And they have a lot of systems going on.
So there's going to be some level of complexity.
I don't think it's too bad, though.
And I'm actually kind of, like, wondering what you got hung up on.
Because, like, there wasn't a large learning curve for Original Sin for me.
Or Divinity.
And you played Divinity and had no problems with it.
So, like, I.
Well, I mean, I was just kind of tagging along with you.
Like, it was.
That was the.
That was the tutorial.
We were just talking to people.
And, like, I played Dragon Age.
Yeah, I don't know.
I think a big part of it might have been because I was playing with a non-gamer.
This is what I'm saying.
No, I get it.
I get it.
I get it.
I get it.
So, on the one hand, we were going extremely slow sometimes.
And on the other hand, we were, like, blitzing through areas that are just, like, you know,
you're, like, my gamer sense is tingling.
I should be doing this thing.
Why are we not doing this thing?
We need to talk to these people.
Yeah.
Wow, this is a really non-methodical way of going through this settlement that is clearly
designed to be walked through this way.
You know, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's part of it.
But also, I just, I look at that game, I see it in my library, and it looks like I am going
to spend at least 30% of this gaming session googling controls, trying to remember what
was happening last time, trying to figure out where the crap I am, and honestly, I'd
rather just shoot some heads in Halo.
See, like, yeah, I can't, like, tell you you're wrong, but I feel like something's...
Because of the power dynamic in our relationship?
No.
Because that's what people will assume.
No.
Because you're afraid to speak truth to power?
Oh my god.
No, it's just like, you can't...
You can tell from his body language.
You can't tell someone who's like, I'm having a hard time with this, that they're wrong.
It actually fears me.
I just, I, we spent, like, the entire video we were filming before this just trashing on
each other.
So yeah, you, you can't, like, tell someone who's like, this is difficult for me, that
they're wrong.
But I do, I'm wondering if there's, like, something in particular that you're hitching
on that I could just solve for you, and then it would be over.
They said to blink if you need help.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, it's nothing in particular.
I, you know what?
Okay, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right.
I'll play it.
You don't have, you don't, like...
Ah, look, I, I'm a man of my word.
I, I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I watched that other stupid crappy movie.
What was the third thing that I said I would do?
I played through the campaign of Titanfall 2.
That was good.
I committed, I committed, and I did them.
And I mean, you know, you don't seem to feel the same way about your commitments.
Oh my goodness.
You know, my computer cannot run the game.
Stalling out.
I will, I will play it soon.
Sure, I mean...
Theoretically, I'm getting that other one.
Yeah, that Esper can save itself.
Oh my goodness.
Oh my goodness.
I actually really want to play it.
I have the, you, you lent me that controller.
It's sitting right next to my mouse pad.
Because I, like, want to play it.
But I just, I can't.
I found out he was playing on a keyboard.
And I was like, brother.
I got really good at the, whatever, um...
Yeah.
I got actually very good at the combo.
Yeah, well...
Like, I, Emma asked me what I was doing one time, because I was playing it.
I was like, going so fast?
And she's like, what's happening?
I was like, I just memorized all the inputs.
Don't tell him it's a lot easier on a keyboard.
It is actually way easier on a keyboard.
So it's time to actually have to deal with occasionally inputting a combo incorrectly.
Which I feel like is actually correct.
Because the reason why it's easier on a keyboard is because it's, like, broken.
And the reason he's so powerful is because there's a chance you'll enter the combo wrong.
Yeah.
And you're trying to go quickly because you have to get to the next action input.
Like, I want to play it properly.
Like, when you're doing it on a keyboard, it's like, okay, you go left and then angled left and then down.
You actually just go left, down, down.
Because there's no angled left.
So, I don't know if it takes left or down.
You can also just roll them.
Or at least that was true in emulators.
My first time beating that game was not on my SNES with my cartridge.
Because I lost my Super Nintendo when I moved to my mom's house.
I never got it back.
I have no idea whatever happened to that Super Nintendo.
So, as a kid, I got stuck on the floating continent every time.
And I...
Stop.
No, this won't be a spoiler.
Okay.
And I didn't know that you can cast magic outside of battle.
Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, there's a particular dungeon...
That's rough.
At a particular stage in the game when potions are like...
A little bit of health.
A little bit of health.
And you could only hold 99 of any particular item in your inventory.
So, I would make it halfway through this stupid dungeon and run out of potions.
Because I didn't know I could just cast cure outside of battle.
And I eventually had the older sibling of one of my friends, like, help me with it.
Like, can you pass this for me?
And my jaw just about hit the floor.
The second he cast out of battle?
The second they open up the skills menu.
Because then you're like, oh, I could have obviously done this.
Yes.
I haven't found it, like, particular...
The town I'm in right now is the hardest by a massive amount.
Oh, yeah.
Zozo's a bitch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everything else has been, honestly, pretty easy.
Um, what are we talking about right now?
Not a clue.
Boulder's Gate 3.
Oh, because they...
Fordian Slip, Boulder's Gate 3.
It is.
Yeah.
Only water can get through.
They were looked at a little bit weird for not, like, joining Game Pass and doing...
Oh, great.
Oh, my gosh.
That was really good.
It took me a second.
I was trying to continue the topics.
I didn't, like, try to even bother to understand what it was.
They were questioned a little bit, as far as my understanding goes, for not joining, like,
Game Pass and stuff like that.
So, I already knew they kind of had this stance, but to reaffirm the stance in the light of
this, I think, is very cool, because I think it's pretty important.
And I think, in my opinion, the quality of shows and TV and movies and stuff has maybe
been dampened a little bit by the subscription model.
And I strongly agree with what he was saying about how that would happen to gaming.
Because what's going to get funding...
Is whatever can sell predictably.
Yeah.
Or whatever will be able to be played for many hours.
Retain subscribers on the subscription model.
Yep.
So, things like daily login rewards and stuff that keep people wanting to stay subscribed
is going to be the things that get, you know, allowed to be made.
So, that's not fun.
I don't like that.
Cool.
All right.
Dan, did we ever do a second topic?
What was it?
That was Ubisoft says gaming subscriptions require gamers to not own games.
No, that was the first topic.
Wasn't your second topic the BG3 one?
No, that's not a...
That's not a topic.
So, no, we never did a second topic.
Okay, well, let's talk about the SSD shortage that's expected.
This is not financial advice, but buy lots of SSDs.
There's your next investment.
Don't.
Don't.
Actually, don't.
That's a...
Sell them on the street corner.
I know they say it's non-volatile.
Where's my ding?
But don't do that.
Prices of high-capacity SSDs are projected to spike by 15 to 20% due to a shortage of four
and eight Dynand packages.
While some of this price increase is already hitting retail, it may be two to three months
before the impact of these supply shortages hit consumers fully.
It is possible that this is a downline consequence of makers of 3D NAND cutting production due
to previously low demand.
Notably, 2023 was a no good, very bad year for sales of electronics.
However, some OEMs have significantly scaled up their purchases of SSDs as of this quarter,
meaning that, well, low supply, high demand.
What happened to pricey?
He go up.
Our discussion question.
How should users looking for an SSD deal with these kinds of shortages?
I would say that if you're on the fence, I would probably pick up an SSD now, but understand
that overall, price for...
In general, price goes down.
Price for...
Price per capacity.
Price for NAND storage, yeah.
Generally, go down.
So I would not actually recommend it as an investment.
Yeah.
But if you're like, I've been thinking about getting one, and you feel like you probably
will within the next X amount of months, maybe do it sooner than later.
Speaking of investments, it's time to find out how much I made on my Lego roller coaster.
What?
Oh, nothing.
What?
Okay.
It's apparently still worth exactly what it was when I bought it.
I don't understand what's happening.
Well, Lego, retired sets, can do really well.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So you bought one right before it retired or something?
Well, I bought one of these like three years ago.
We only just finally finished building it because we lost a couple of pieces in the move.
Well, we lost a couple of pieces before the move, and then it was exacerbated by the move.
Anyway, we finally...
It's so cool.
This thing is so cool.
The cats love it.
Like, he's just...
Do things actually like roll on?
Yeah, it has two trains or cars or whatever they're called.
It goes...
Do the cats just like watch it?
They watch it.
Sometimes they bat at it.
Brownie in particular freaking loves it.
You just sit there, and it's so fun.
I'm watching him.
He's watching the coaster, and I'm just turning the crank, like, bringing the cars up to the
top, and he's just like...
Like, watch.
He's like so into it.
Sometimes he like goes at the mechanism for the track that drags the trains, I guess.
What the heck are they...
What's the word for that?
Carts?
Trains?
Whatever.
Trains.
Drags the trains up the hill, and then sometimes he like...
He goes and he like stops it on the track.
It's great.
I love it.
So much fun.
I don't know.
Maybe in another 10 years.
The vehicle is called a train.
All right.
Good.
But yeah, Lego.
Lego.
Retired kits can be a very strong investment.
I think that just collecting hobbyist crap would be a really fun hobby slash investment.
Do you think IP-based ones would probably do better than like roller coaster?
It depends.
Like there was like the office set.
I feel like that might do pretty well.
I don't know, man.
I don't know what...
I don't know if the office is going to be...
Or maybe not the office.
Maybe there's some like...
I would say the kid ones are the stronger ones.
Yeah.
So kid today, nostalgia tomorrow.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't think you're going to have the same kind of nostalgia for a Michael Scott Lego figurine
necessarily.
But then you never know because a big part of what makes something collectible is how many
they sold.
And maybe the office set was not particularly popular.
Or maybe it was.
I actually just don't know.
But no, I would say the big ones are going to be the ones that are the hotness for kids
right now.
There was a $3,500 Pokemon card for sale.
Like it was insane.
If you think that's insane, you should look up Pokemon cards for sale.
That doesn't even sound very high.
Z biggie.
You can't use it, Linus.
That completely destroys the value.
All right.
Well, I'm over it.
I am having my like $500 worth of fun with it for sure.
I hate that stuff.
My kids are enjoying it a ton.
I am very anti collect it and put it on a shelf and never look at it and make sure it
doesn't have too much light and never touch it and never do anything with it.
I'm not into that.
I don't like it.
Yeah.
All of Luke's collectibles are digital.
He's big into NFTs.
I was like, huh?
Remember NFTs?
Yeah.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Oh my.
I honestly.
Okay.
When I found out how much the value of the like first tweet NFT had gone down, it was
like a couple hundred dollars.
A part of me was like, yeah, sure.
You know, like I, like I, I, I, the, the idea of that it had been worth so much and that
I bought it for so little was kind of amusing to me.
Which is funny.
Yeah.
And I was like, I would consider buying a couple of NFTs for like $30 or whatever.
Like at, at this stage in the game.
I didn't end up buying any because it seemed like it's just a lot of work.
It's just dumb.
You're literally just like, I could burn a hundred dollars or a couple hundred dollars
or whatever.
Yeah.
There's no actual value.
I, I, you, you've heard me give my spiel to my kids now, right?
Multiple times.
Yeah.
Every single time we play Halo.
Really?
No.
Yeah.
I don't think so.
Uh, okay, fine.
Then you should probably be able to recite it.
Oh man.
I don't really pay attention.
Remember we don't do that.
We don't, if you, if you, if you can't earn it, whatever, something.
See, it clearly hasn't sunk in.
Okay.
I'll have to do it more often.
I don't need it.
It's always in the form of a question.
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
Do we spend money on things that we can't touch or even own?
No.
Nope.
Okay.
And then we're, is that a smart thing to do?
No.
Why not?
You know, like, yeah, like, like it's a whole, it's a whole, it's a whole thing.
It's good.
It's a whole thing.
Good.
I don't even, I think it gets in my personal opinion.
I think it gets a little bit nuanced sometimes because I look at like how much value I got out
of the thing.
Sure.
Like, I think I've talked about this before, but I bought some seasons passes for rocket
league and I think that was a good thing to do because I got the game on some insane
sale for like five bucks.
And then I played the heck out of that game.
So it like felt correct to contribute more to the thing.
Yeah.
That's totally, totally valid.
Because I was like, oh my God, I want my skins for my car.
And then Psyonix got bought by Epic Games.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I guess that worked out great for you.
Well, I mean, Psyonix got more money or the valuation was potentially worth more, whatever,
whatever.
Like I'm still fine with it.
Yeah.
Now you can't buy rocket league on steam.
So good job, Luke.
I still have it on steam though.
It's entirely your fault.
I didn't take it off of steam if you already had it.
Well, yeah, but like, okay, not my son wanted to get rocket league.
It's like, yo, how do I get rocket league?
I'm like, well.
Didn't you already have it?
Yeah.
But he doesn't use my account anymore.
Oh yeah.
He has his own account now.
And I was like, okay, we guess we could put Epic Games store on the computers.
And then I like explained how I didn't really want to have like a bazillion launchers on
these things.
And he was like, oh yeah, forget it then.
Good kid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, you do not have to have Epic installed to play rocket league on steam.
I didn't think so.
Not, not the last time I did it.
It's been quite a while.
I haven't played rocket league.
No, you do not.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, you don't.
Um, all right.
We're supposed to explain and do two merch messages.
But before we can do that, I finally have done it.
What?
Hold on.
I'm just heading to LinusTechTips.com.
Oh.
Oh, um, hold on a second.
See if I can, uh, see if I can find something.
Buh.
Uh, here we go.
Here we go.
Wait, LinusTechTips.com?
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Oh, I see.
I have changed.
Then you changed it everywhere.
My profile picture.
Big change, I know.
Revisionist history.
What?
No.
That's not revisionist history.
I'm being erased.
Would you like to know why I did such a thing?
Yes.
Thank you for playing along for a change.
You are such a butthead about this stuff sometimes.
Yeah.
I know the answer.
I know the answer.
I don't need the setup.
It's here, ladies and gentlemen.
We have named this latest garment that you, uh, were noticing earlier on in the show.
Oh, I've been, like, sweating in here wearing that stupid hoodie over top of this thing.
Yeah.
We're calling it the Steve.
It looks pretty good.
Of course it does.
It's a entity store.
Yeah.
What are you talking about?
Yeah.
Um, it's not just any turtleneck, okay?
The Steve is a mock neck with a seam up the middle, like the iconic mock neck that the
one and only Mr. Steve Jobs famously wore.
Oh.
Yeah.
It's a whole thing.
Some designer was like, oh, yeah, that's really important to have that seam up the middle.
Oh.
It has a little Mac address logo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I like that it's not, like, a crazy, it's not, like, super tall.
Yeah, it's a mock neck.
It's got a little bit, oh, I didn't know.
But look at this.
I mean, how cool.
It looks professional.
Ah!
Horse posing with the iMac.
Oh, I love it.
This is a great photo shoot.
Oh, no, Windows.
I enjoy that.
That's fun.
Yeah.
So, there it is.
Very subtle, but it's there.
This is great.
Man, everyone really got into the whole props thing with this shoot.
Yeah.
Ariana from HR.
Oh, wow.
We got a lot of people participating in the shoot this time.
That's the last one.
Nice.
Anyway, so I have finally updated my profile picture.
Maria took this for me today during the shoot.
I think I probably could have gotten the facial expression a little bit better.
You know, I think, like, I think I should have been down a little bit more.
I don't know.
But we did it pretty quick.
And realistically, it looks better than the old one.
So, I think that original picture that I took, that was a still from an old episode of Netlinked, which was the news, like, roundup that we did.
A still?
Are you sure?
NCIX Tech Tips.
Yeah.
It was a still from a video where I borrowed Billy from RMA's glasses.
And I forget why I was doing, like, a Steve Jobs pose.
But it had something to do probably with the news that week.
And the video started, zoomed in on me, and then zoomed all the way out.
And I, like, break character completely.
You know what's funny?
Is that picture has actually been a source of controversy over the years?
I have seen on not one, not two, but many occasions, people criticize me for having that, like, Steve Jobs pose profile picture because it illustrates that I have some kind of messiah complex and believe that I am an innovator on the level of Mr. Jobs.
What the f*** are you talking about?
It's just a funny picture.
It is meme.
It is meme.
It's okay.
Yeah.
Anyway, we...
But I thought I took the picture, but I guess it was just Netlinked.
So I was probably pressed record once.
Yeah, so we put probably way too much work into this garment.
It's been in development for over a year.
It's really nice.
It looks nice.
Yeah, it's like, it's super nice.
It feels nice.
It's a little on the heavier side.
You know, like, it's...
Isn't that usually what a shirt like that would be, though?
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
But it means it's a completely different garment.
Right.
Like, we couldn't just use...
Not the same material.
Nope.
We couldn't use previous materials.
We couldn't use our previous patterns because it has a very different neck.
So getting a stupid neck right without it, like, bunching up or whatever.
Like, we went through so many samples.
Getting the look right.
So we...
What we discovered is that the fit of the original was very boxy, not very modern.
So we moderned up the fit a little bit, but without losing too much of kind of the original look.
Like, yeah, it's...
I don't know.
It's a really cool shirt.
And as it turns out, it's really hard to obtain.
If you want to get one of the originals, it was like some Japanese designer of some sort.
The fashion team knows way more about it than I do.
And if you want one of these, they're like hundreds of dollars.
So ours is...
I don't remember how much ours is.
Yeah, you can see it.
I had no idea there was that middle seam.
Yeah, here's the laptop.
But it's hard to see in this format.
It's probably not even going to open.
Yeah.
It's there, though.
You can technically see it.
Yeah.
It's a fashion seam.
Sure.
It keeps all the fashion in.
Nice.
That's good.
It's very important.
So it's 25 bucks, apparently.
Oh, okay.
That seems pretty reasonable.
We also have tall sizes.
Really?
No way.
Yahweh.
Apparently I'm getting a mock neck.
Yahweh, brother.
So that's another thing is we finally did tall sizing.
I mean, how are we going to have Mr. Jonathan Horst promote this product being...
That makes sense.
...6'4".
That makes sense.
Unless we...
And we're not going to not make one that fits me, dang it, because I am an innovator on the
same level as Mr. Jobs.
Otherwise, why would I pose like this in a silly profile picture?
Because your profile picture on a forum is to be taken 100% seriously?
I don't think the size guide has tall.
Oh, really?
Oh.
Um.
Yeah, it does.
Where?
I don't know.
Maybe here?
Tall?
You good?
Oh, what is the...
Oh, the top category doesn't have a section title.
Okay.
I understand.
Cool.
See you later.
There's body length in the top one's width, I guess.
Anyway, the point is that we are about to talk to you about merch messages.
All you got to do to interact with the show is send a merch message.
In the checkout, there'll be a little box whenever we're live.
You can send a merch message.
It'll go to Producer Dan.
Oh, nice sweater, Dan.
It's not from LTT Store, though, so I'm sorry.
I'm going to have to cut your feed.
It'll go to Producer Dan, where he will either forward it to someone who can address it, answer
it himself, or curate it for me and Luke to address later on the show.
To show you guys how that works, he's going to give you a couple curated merch messages
right now.
Hit me, Dan.
Sure thing.
Hi, DLL.
Many of my peers are very pessimistic about the tech industry.
Many layoffs, too much AI, etc.
Where do you think the tech industry is going, and how do you deal with pessimism in general?
Layoffs and AI.
And then AI leading to more layoffs.
And layoffs necessitating more AI.
Okay, no, no, hold on, hold on.
How do I deal with pessimism?
Bad, Linus.
Bad.
I mean, we're still hiring.
I mean.
A lot of places that are doing these layoffs still have job postings.
A lot of the layoffs are not just in dev.
Yeah, that's true.
A pretty significant amount of the layoffs are not dev.
They're from tech industry, but tech industry has a very high population of sales and admin
staff.
Marketing.
Marketing and all this other stuff as well.
Community management.
Things that are not necessarily tech, even if they are necessary appendages of an organization.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There's still...
There was like this metric in a lot of like FAANG and Silicon Valley companies for a while
for a lot of managers where a key performance indicator of that manager was how much they
could swell their headcount, how much they could hire effectively.
And as far as my understanding goes, this is all just hearsay.
So I have no idea.
But as far as my understanding goes, that being a metric is not popular anymore because money
is not as easily accessible anymore.
So there was kind of a strategy where if you increase your headcount, that means it's going
to be harder for other companies to get that talent, however talented that talent is.
And the headcount strategy has stopped being a thing.
Money's harder to get, all that type of stuff.
So they're trying to reduce headcount.
But they're doing so by these like big cuts, which you know are not going to be able to
be 100% accurate.
So some great people are going to get cut out.
Some not great people are going to get cut out.
Who knows when you're cutting a thousand people at once, bad things are going to happen.
So it sucks.
It's bad.
But it's like the jobs are easy to get and you will have a job at whatever enormous company
forever era is probably kind of over.
But it doesn't mean there isn't a job market anymore.
AI is helping developers.
Sure.
It's also helping tons of other industries.
And it's not replacing developers, or at least it's not replacing like senior developers.
And they're going to need senior developers somehow.
So yeah.
Gregory H. asked a similar question.
First time rich message.
I'm studying comp sci with all the layoffs.
Do you think that the field is too inflated?
And I think you probably addressed that pretty well at this point.
I mean, yeah, there's still jobs out there.
If you're good, there's always a job.
If you are willing to learn and cross train, there's always a job for you.
It's not like these companies aren't still making a lot of money.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
In some cases, record profits.
Yeah.
Which is why I keep bringing it back to this strategy thing.
Um, and a lot of them are still hiring handyman in Philippine chat said, oh, Amazon used to
hire, um, SDEs in 2020 to 2021 with one 30 minute interview, which is like, whoa, interesting.
We're more thorough than that.
Go team.
Go team.
Yeah.
So it's just, it's not going to be like that anymore.
Um, but I mean, that's what a lot of industries are like, you know, not one 30 minute interview,
whatever else.
Um, it's going to get more competitive.
It doesn't mean it's not there though.
You still get a job.
All right, Dan.
Howdy DLL podcast listener here.
Enjoyed the call out to computer chronicles a few weeks back.
Which of your videos do you want to serve as a resource for future generations of techies?
Oh, I'd like to think that a lot of the archival content is going to unintentionally be a resource.
And in a, in a, what it was like back then kind of way.
I mean, obviously we don't think about things that way when we're, it's already like that when
we're making these videos, but, uh, we shot a video today, uh, reacting to our best builds
as voted by the community.
And there was a ton of stuff that I forgot.
Yeah.
A bunch of stuff that Luke and Jake had forgotten about.
Um, things I just kind of hadn't thought about in a long time.
Like what a great benchmark the Tomb Raider reboot games were.
Oh, dude.
They just, they scaled.
Used those for years.
They scaled with everything.
Yeah.
You know, add a better CPU, FPS go up.
Add a better GPU, FPS go up.
Add a second GPU, FPS go up.
Just like, yeah, sure.
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not.
Give me computer power.
But also running great.
Yeah.
On, you know, pretty pedestrian gaming grade hardware.
Man, great games.
Fantastically scaling.
Um, I'd like to think that how to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need is going
to continue to be an extremely strong point of entry for people into the PC building and
gaming, PC gaming hobby.
It's, uh, it's at 10 million views now and going strong.
Like every day it's on our top 10 viewed videos for that day, even though it was released like
a year, two years ago or something like that.
And I have a plan.
We are going to update it.
With like video replacement?
No.
Cause that's, you can't do that.
Oh.
That, that's too much of a change.
You can't have a flow plane.
Well, yeah, sure.
Got them.
Woo!
Let's go.
Yeah.
Super relevant video platform there.
Good job.
Hey man, you're supposed to do the business model in marketing.
So that's on you.
Yeah.
I just didn't have this mock neck yet.
Oh, there you go.
Now I could do it.
There you go.
There you go.
It gives, this gives me superpowers.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry.
You gotta channel it.
Yeah.
There you go.
Power level over 9,000.
Oh, thanks Dan.
Just in time.
Our producer, everyone.
Well, he's got the belittling down.
Okay, now I just need a completely curable cancer and then I need to treat it with vegetables.
You can cure it with grape welches if we could find any.
Oh, he got a few today.
Oh, that's right.
He separated them out.
I did get a few today.
Okay, yeah, too soon maybe.
Anywho, what am I supposed to be talking about?
Oh, yes.
So the plan, we're going to re-upload it.
Oh, right, the video.
Yes.
The How to Build a PC, The Last Guide You'll Ever Need.
Because it was aspirational, that title.
The Last Guide You'll Ever Need.
I mean, things are going to change.
It's a computer industry.
I mean, now we have motherboards with the connectors on the flipping back.
I was going to say, yeah, people are pushing for that.
Yeah, exactly.
So the plan is to leave that one up because it still has very good residual traffic.
Basically label it 2022, you know, replaced or, you know, put a link to the new one in the description.
And then we're going to take that project with all that super high quality footage and all the incredible amount of work that the team did.
We're going to watch it through, make notes.
Okay, here's what we need to update.
Here's what probably might not be as relevant anymore.
So here's what we can can.
Here's what we can add.
Because of the way we shot it, which was not intentional at the time, but is going to work out great with multiple hosts on multiple sets.
We can just shoot new sections, drop the old B-roll on top of the new A-roll, get any new B-roll we need.
And with, comparatively speaking, a relatively reasonable amount of work, update it so that the last guide you'll ever need becomes an evolving piece of content.
I am, yeah, I'm super excited.
One thing that we need to do more of, though, and that I realized how to build a PC, the last guide you'll ever need, doesn't address, is like the little picky parts.
And one of our other 10 million view videos is the POV build guide.
I need to just put a camera on my forehead again and do it again from time to time because that's a bit outdated now.
And there's a lot of things that are more easily understood from a first-person perspective compared to from a third-person perspective.
Oh, all right.
Can do, brother.
Can do, brother.
Do you want to jump into search engines are getting worse?
He does, but he needs a second.
Do I?
I think so.
Yeah, I do.
Seems like a passionate topic of yours.
Okay.
Refresh the page.
If you know, you know.
Cool.
All right.
A recent study from researchers in Germany have found that search results are getting worse across all search engines.
The study followed product reviews.
And this is something that I have noticed a lot.
The quality of the results that I get when I'm trying to find information on a product has been atrocious.
But that's just anecdotal, right?
It's sample size of one.
It's not a controlled experiment in any way.
Well, they controlled the experiment.
They followed product reviews on various search engines, including Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo, and found a consistent downward trend in the number and the quality of relevant search results.
And they say this is due primarily to massive amounts of SEO spam.
What's funny is that I thought that the issue was just advertising.
And to be clear, advertising is a barrier that sits in the way of finding the information that you're actually trying to get.
But I didn't consider that the SEO game is still very much alive and well.
And if anything, greatly empowered by AI.
Oh, yeah.
So, attempts to address this problem by Google and others did have a measurable impact on the amount of spam.
And Google's tactics outperformed its competitors.
But that effect was both minor and temporary.
According to Lily Ray, a senior executive at digital marketing agency MSIV Digital,
we are currently experiencing some of the worst results he's seen in his entire career,
in part because of an increased emphasis on user-generated content and away from authoritative sources.
Well, that's because, as Handyman and a couple other people have been saying in chat,
for a long time, the best way to get results was to append Reddit.
And I don't know why SEO optimization took so long to figure this out.
To be honest, it was kind of weird.
But they have since hijacked that as well or attempted to.
It still works pretty well.
But this has created a major opening for scammers and spammers.
Yeah.
And our discussion question is, is there a way to fix this?
Yeah.
I don't think so.
Because the only way to fix the quality of information in the written web
is for there to be any money in creating quality content for the written web.
Yeah.
And there isn't.
No.
The money is in just crapping out AI-generated listicles of just s*** you should buy.
Doing all the same amount of work that you would have to do for something like a video,
potentially even more, and making it written.
No.
There's no written article that is more work than a video form of the same written article.
Strong disagree.
I don't agree.
This will be an interesting conversation.
Yeah.
What I'm trying to get at is that sometimes written articles will go deeper.
Sure.
There was actually a long period of time where to go deeper on a subject,
you would go to the linked written article.
Ah.
Okay.
So I should clarify.
I did specifically say, then a video form of the same thing.
If it's the exact same content, sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Then we don't disagree then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very nice.
Very good.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
I'm just saying that I find written articles will go further into things.
Sure.
Yeah.
That's fair.
Yeah.
So their format differences do sometimes facilitate or do sometimes enable a deeper dive.
Sure.
Yeah.
But you're never going to make the same amount of money that you could with video because
on-page ads just are worth like almost nothing.
And to make it worth your time, you have to like do really anti-consumer, very annoying
web things like refreshing the ads as you scroll and like inserting things and having
things slide over the writing and all this crazy stuff, which is going to drive people
ultimately away from your site or to ad blocking everything.
So you're just going to make actually negative money because it costs you money for them to
be on your site and you made nothing off the ads.
So it's just like, well, I don't know.
Some sites seem to be somewhat transitioning to a subscription model.
I've noticed a lot more paywalls and they wouldn't be popping up if they weren't working.
However, I think that there's only really room for a very small number of sites to succeed
with a subscription model.
The donation model seems to be keeping Wikipedia afloat, but I think given the percentage of
overall web traffic that is Wikipedia, you can't just look at, you know, what's working
for Wikipedia and say, oh, okay, well, why doesn't somebody else just do that?
And I don't know if this is right or not, but Wikipedia seems to be just kind of holding
on, not thriving.
I mean, are they, I don't think they report their financials unless they do.
I think they talk about like how much run rate they have left and stuff every once in
a while when they ask for funding, don't they?
Uh, they do report their financials, full year financial statements audited by KPMG,
Wikimedia Foundation.
Here we go, boys.
Uh, it's a lot of pages.
It's like 20 pages.
Let me see if I can just find the bottom line part.
Um, they have $75 million in cash and cash equivalents.
So I think they're doing okay.
You don't know how much it costs.
Um, for a website that like basically everyone on the planet uses.
I mean, it is just text, but it's a lot.
Financial, it's not just text.
Their financial assets at the end of 2023 are $5 million greater than 2022.
Okay.
And that number is $196 million.
So I see, they seem to be doing okay.
Why do they ask for so much all the time then?
Well, I mean.
Come on, Wikipedia.
They only made $5 million.
Hmm.
But they do seem to have a fair bit of cash.
Is that just profit or is that their revenue?
Um, that's.
I don't know if you call it revenue.
This seems to be.
No, this is liquidity and availability of financial assets.
So I'm not looking at revenue or profit or anything like that.
They spent.
Is this right?
$69 million on salaries and benefits.
Like, am I reading this wrong?
Help me out, guys.
Is that, is that what I'm looking at?
Salaries and benefits.
That is $69 million, right?
Like, I'm not, I'm not.
Developers do be expensive.
I mean, yeah, fair enough.
Awards and grants.
Donation processing expenses.
$6 million.
Yeah, that's what, that's what a bunch of $3 donations will do for you.
Yeah.
Um, travel and conferences, they spent $800 grand on that.
Whoa.
I don't know how many people work there, though.
So it's possible these numbers aren't as outlandish as they might sound.
What travel and conferences?
Well, I mean, travel to conferences, right?
Put like $800 grand on that.
I mean.
I wonder how many, like, how many people work at Wikipedia?
Depends how many people they're saying.
Yeah, I have no idea.
Truthfully, for a site that I use as much as I do, and for a tech, you know.
Hold on.
They have 282 staff members, and they're spending $70 million a year on salaries?
Sounds like I should get a job at Wikipedia.
No, that's a wrong number.
In 2016, there was 280 employees.
In 2020, there was approximately 450.
Okay, so it's going up a fair bit.
And that was four years ago.
They hold conferences for their community.
Oh.
Oh, okay.
Well, that'll cost you.
Yeah.
We know a thing or two about that.
Yeah, that's real expensive.
Yep.
I'm surprised it only cost that much.
Oh, man.
Check out Handyman.
He's a good link.
He always has good links.
What is this?
Fundraising statistics.
Oh.
Oh, look at that.
Okay.
So they're trying to stay out ahead of what their costs will be.
Black is their net assets.
Green is their revenue.
Red is their expenses.
They do beat their expenses, but it do be close sometimes.
It's pretty close.
Yeah.
As you can see, they had a really good year in 2021.
There's where that profit made its way into cash and cash equivalents.
So they're basically like, okay, we got this war chest and we're going to hold on to that.
But these years, they didn't beat it by much.
No.
But this black number.
You want them to hold on to the war chest if you want Wikipedia to stay existing.
I mean, who knows when it's coming?
Yeah.
You know, when someone tries to go after them, I fully support Wikimedia sitting on, you know, a couple hundred million just in case.
Isn't it like Apple's trying to sue Epic for $97 million for legal fees or something?
Is that right?
Like it's Apple sues Epic for legal fees.
I know Epic Apple's trying to $73 million trying to go hard after that medical device company that is going after them and has an injunction on like Apple watch sales or whatever.
Yeah.
Like, oh, yeah.
They've spent a fortune taking it to Apple on that.
And other smaller companies have come out and been like, thank you.
You know, someone finally having the resources and the stones to just go toe to toe with Apple and say, hey, you actually cannot fucking do this.
This is not OK to just like set up an office down the street from someone.
You poach employees and not care about patents and IP.
And I'm not allegedly allegedly allegedly.
And I'm not saying even that Apple is alleged to have done that particular thing in this particular case.
But it's a common strategy that these giant tech companies do employ.
So that the people at that company don't even have to move.
You know, they just go to the office of, you know, Google or Apple or Facebook or whoever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Apple had required the lower courts.
Don't know what that means to order Epic Games to pay 90% of Apple's legal fees estimated at $73 million.
I spent $73 million in legal fee.
Actually, no, it kind of makes sense.
Yeah.
It adds up really fast.
It turns out.
Yeah.
Not a fan.
Yeah.
All right, Dan, hit me.
Haha, just kidding.
He's not there.
Kidding, Dan, you're good.
Do we have another topic we want to talk about?
Oh, how about the ad block bug that was blamed on?
You know, I was ready to like go to war with YouTube.
So was I.
Over them throttling the experience for.
I basically I sent them an email before I was aware of the full context for this that was basically like, look, guys, you know, as a as a YouTube creator, I am as supportive as anyone.
When it comes to, you know, when it comes to, you know, monetizing the platform effectively, as long as you guys continue to share with creators.
I mean, I have some very different thoughts about the ads that they run on non partner channels and then just keep 100 percent of the revenue from because that whole thing doesn't make a ton of sense to me.
But when it comes to monetizing the platform and sharing revenue with creators, obviously, I have a vested interest in that being successful.
However, as I said, as I laid out in my email, this is clearly a step too far.
You can't interfere with the basic functionality of the platform for users who happen to have a particular extension installed in their browser.
Like that is not.
It's not even just the platform.
Are you talking about the platform as the computing device?
Yeah, it was increasing CPU usage.
Well, when loading YouTube videos.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure.
So they were like hitting the computer.
Yeah, sure.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
So either way, I was like, look, I plan to talk about this this week.
I hope.
Oh, sorry.
It's fine.
I'm playing footsie.
Yeah.
I hope you have a very compelling statement.
And then shortly after that, it came out that, well.
Shwoops.
Whoops.
Last weekend, users noticed an extreme slowdown for YouTube videos whenever Adblock was enabled.
Oddly, even YouTube premium users who happened to have Adblock installed were also affected.
A test by PC Gamer found that CPU usage increased by 17% when loading YouTube videos with Adblock.
While the slowdown was initially blamed on Google, so this is why I sent my original email, it turned out that users of other Adblocking services weren't affected.
And the slowdown was also noticeable when loading videos on other websites.
Adblock has since confirmed that this buffering problem was caused by a bug in its most recent update.
Our discussion questions are twofold.
One, should we be slower to assume malice in these kinds of cases?
Man, I don't know.
I just don't think, I don't think Google has earned the benefit of the doubt lately.
I mean, there was the incognito mode thing.
There's the general war against Adblock and how that's...
I do think in general, though, people jump on things too fast.
Sure, I just...
So, I think you're right.
I think that is correct.
And I think that...
But I think the second...
I think that Luke's take is bad here and we should hate him.
Yeah.
We should all hate him.
Yeah.
Go after me.
Get them pitchforks.
Yeah, let's go...
I think sometimes people...
It's the like...
Do a bit of evil.
That's their new company motto.
Just don't make it too much.
Just do a little bit evil.
But yeah, I think sometimes it's the problem, you know, where people read a headline without
reading the article and then now they're at war and they don't even know what they're
at war about, but they know they're supposed to hate somebody or something and it's just
like, oh my goodness.
So, to be clear, Adblock is fixed now.
So, they have since issued a patch.
But no, the issue was not, in fact, YouTube.
However, I don't know.
It wouldn't surprise me if some of the ongoing development...
I'm sure Adblock would be happy to, you know, update their extension once every six months.
What I suspect is that they are so frequently updating their extension because of mitigations
that YouTube or Google is attempting to put in place to prevent the service from working
on the site.
So, is it still Google's fault?
Or is Google well within their rights to try to prevent the Adblock extension from working
on their platform?
Yeah.
Okay.
I don't know.
And like, you can be mad about that.
You can pitchfork that, for sure.
You can do whatever you want.
But let's...
They're still allowed to do that.
I don't know.
By the way, apparently, I read the headline only today.
So, I haven't looked at it yet.
This is my first time looking at it.
Apparently, they have updated this.
And other people who use this device won't see your activity.
However, downloads bookmarks and reading list.
Your activity might still be visible, too.
Okay.
No, it still doesn't say us.
Okay.
Maybe you don't have the...
Yeah.
Maybe it hasn't been rolled out or maybe I don't have the latest update.
Yeah.
It's probably a rolling thing.
But I heard...
I heard that they are updating that message.
D-Doc in full-point shot said,
the Canary warning replaces browse privately with browse more privately.
Oh.
Hold on.
Oh, well, was that what that said?
Let's try it again.
New incognito window.
Hello.
No.
Mine still says, now you can browse privately.
Oh, is one of their builds called Canary?
Is there Google Chrome Canary?
Oh, that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
So that's...
Okay.
Yeah.
So is that like a nightly?
I forgot about that.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Makes sense.
See, I'm more familiar with the Firefox one, so...
Archangel of Death points out that Firefox got slowed down on YouTube.
A popular fix was using an agent switcher.
Um, that wasn't a bug in an ad blocker.
Yeah, fair enough.
Um, did we, did we manage to prove that that was malicious?
I, I, I heard about that one, but didn't dig into that one.
But this is my thing.
If you prove that it is, go after them.
I'm not saying don't go after them.
All right, I see.
I'm saying maybe, maybe look for three seconds before, before you do so.
Um, I don't know.
I just, I think sometimes with, with no actual real knowledge, people will dive head first
into hatred on something.
Um, never experienced that.
Well, uh, I don't know what you're talking about.
And I think, I think there is plenty things that deserve the, the full dive of hatred and
you should go after them.
I think you've imagined this whole thing.
Uh, um, but I just, yeah, I don't know.
I think people should be a little bit more careful.
What are you even talking about?
I don't even know how to respond to this.
Um, Fujitsu.
Oh, wait, we should probably do our sponsors.
Uh, Dan, are we, uh, is it sponsor time?
Is that what we're supposed to do?
Yeah.
Uh, there's a little complication with this one.
So, uh.
Oh, should we do the other two first?
Should we wait?
Should we do something else?
Start with this one and then we'll go to your cam and we'll.
What do you mean by this one?
What?
Sorry, the first one.
The first one.
Okay.
Do the first one and I'll go to your cam.
The show is brought to you by Devoom.
Thank you for sponsoring today's Wednesday.
That is the cutest thing ever.
Uh, Devoom offers pixel displays.
It's our guy.
That add flair to your desk or office.
Dan to show Devoom to Linus.
Oh, I see.
So, I should not keep talking?
No, just have a look at it.
Oh, well, that's cute.
We have two, uh.
Oh, okay.
Hey, there's a 69 in the middle.
Oh, my God.
Grow up.
Um, the Pixio 64 display allows you to create, oh, okay.
Your very own pixel image, animation, or scrolling message.
Or you can choose from many designs uploaded by the community.
You can keep visual track of your subscriber.
Oh, that's cool.
Uh, you can keep visual track of your subscribers, your stocks, your gaming KDA, the weather, and
more.
Check out Devoom.
We have the link down below.
Bitcoin.
Nice.
Um, yeah.
Is there, is there kind of anything else?
No, it's, you can, you can do all kinds of cool stuff with this.
Yeah, thank you for that.
That's, uh, that's tremendous.
Does that just stay there for the rest of the show now?
Is that the deal?
I'm just leaving it here for the rest of the show.
Okay, perfect.
Thanks, Dan.
Let's just replace Luke with that.
Uh, I'm done.
The show is also brought to you by AG1.
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Oh, okay.
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Is that exclusive?
I doubt that's exclusive.
But anyway, at drinkag1.com slash wanshow.
Go check it out.
We're going to have it linked down below.
The show is also brought to you by Odd Pieces.
Wait.
You must have played puzzle before.
Really?
Who wrote this?
Played puzzle?
Okay.
Doesn't matter.
The point is, you must have done a puzzle before.
But our sponsor, Odd Pieces, is taking puzzles to another level.
What?
Odd Pieces is a type of puzzle not quite like the ones you may have put together in your grandmother's den.
Linus, to quickly show what's inside the box.
Okay.
This one?
Yeah.
Okay.
I guess I'll...
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
Thanks, Luke.
Okay.
There's a...
Here, I'll hold it.
You can pick things up.
There's two puzzle maps.
Okay.
Do you want to...
Oh, okay.
Oh.
Right.
So these are what the puzzle is.
Cute.
Hey, look.
It's an MSI lucky dragon.
Okay.
It's not the MSI one, but it's definitely a dragon.
I'm feeling pretty lucky.
Hello!
Hello, open me.
Your adventure starts now.
Warning.
Don't open until after you complete the puzzle.
If you open it too soon, you might ruin the surprise.
Okay.
So two storytelling comics.
That's cute.
Hello.
Read me.
Discover the world of Glitch.
How it works.
Read the comic.
Build the puzzle.
Uncover the mystery.
Open the secret envelope.
Oh, you get a sticker pack.
That's cute.
Oh, sorry.
I'm really not showing this to you guys very well.
And then you have, oh, a little find the hidden stories checklist.
So it's like a storyline puzzle.
That's cool.
Very cute.
Then there's also a puzzle.
That makes sense.
The fun part, and this kind of fun is subjective, is that the pictures on the box don't match up
exactly with the puzzle you're putting together.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Interesting.
So you build, like, the next frame?
Oh.
So, okay.
Help you piece it together.
Keep your brain engaged.
You'll get the full narrative experience rather than just finding pieces and putting them together.
Plus, Odd Pieces works with independent artists who can bring their flair and personality to each puzzle.
Which means if you want to gift a puzzle to someone, you can match their personality.
And a part of every sale goes back into finding more undiscovered artists.
So check out Odd Pieces and get 15% off your purchase at the link down below.
All right.
Merch messages.
How many, Dan?
All right.
Hit me.
Hi, DLL.
As someone who primarily works online, how do you feel about the impact of screen time and social media on mental health?
Oh, it's huge and extremely negative.
Social media is terrible for me.
It's really, really bad for everyone.
I'm just really glad I don't have it on my phone anymore.
Yeah.
Occasionally, I'll still, like, doomscroll on Twitter or Facebook or whatever else.
But now that it's not on my phone, it's so much, so much better.
Going and touching grass is unironically an extremely good idea, and you should do it.
Sounds fake, but okay.
It's not.
We, man, we need to do a chia pet.
We talked about this on our previous WAN show.
We need to do the touch grass chia pet.
I genuinely think it would be cool.
Just like a little square you can have on your desk.
Yeah.
Grass, that would actually be great.
I would take that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We could make it, like, kind of, like, you know, techie.
Like, it could have Orbeez in it, so you only have to water it, like, once in a while, you know?
It's a water retention and release.
Yeah, yeah.
Just like, you know, like, super low-maintenance.
Gamer grass.
Gamer grass.
Wow.
Yeah, that really does.
That probably already exists, and it's probably a really different product.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
I was wondering what Linus's favorite or top motorcycling tech gadgets or mods are besides the backpack.
I've been looking for cool things to bring along with me while I'm out riding during the summer.
I am the basicest bitch.
Um, I, uh, my bike barely even has a digital speedometer on it.
It's a 2003.
Um, I, I do have an old pebble, a pebble time that I, that I hot glued a magnet onto the back of.
And then I have a magnet that I, um, that I also hot glued onto my motorbike so I can put it on there.
And then I have tactile buttons for changing, uh, changing media tracks.
And then I have speakers embedded in my headphones with just like a wire coming out.
And then I use my old Note 9, or at least I used to, I mangled my headphone jack.
Oh, no.
Yeah, I mean, I'm sure I can like fix it or whatever, but that would suck.
That phone has taken a serious beating.
Yeah, I, like, man, like three weeks ago, after I switched back to it, after, oh, no, in between Fairphone and Wing, I switched back to it temporarily.
And I was like, man, I haven't listened to real headphones in a while.
I grabbed my iE600s that I still keep in my backpack just in case.
Plugged them in.
Was like, I forgot what headphones are supposed to sound like, right?
Right, AirPods Pro.
They're good for wireless crappy headphones, but they sound like s***, right?
Um, immediately, like, got it snagged on something, because I'm just not used to it anymore.
Like, yeah, one side works, and it's not the headphones, it's the jack.
Anyway, where was I going with this?
Right, the point is, um, I'm gonna have to find a, I'm gonna have to grab another old phone or a new phone that has a headphone jack or something.
And then that goes in my, in my pocket, and I just run it up through my thing, and I got my speakers.
Not in-ears, speakers.
And that's it.
That's, that's all my motorcycle tech, just so I can get my turn-by-turn and my music, and so that I can change tracks and adjust volume.
So, uh, Gamer Grass, or Gamer's Grass.
Um, I, I, this is not an endorsement.
I don't know anything about this company.
Um, we sort of love-hugged their website without me even talking about it.
Um, it also, it almost, like, completely stopped functioning, but it seems to be working for you now.
This actually looks super cool.
So, if you're into, like, miniatures and stuff.
Oh, for that kind of gaming!
Yeah, yeah, if you're into miniatures and stuff, or, or I could, I could absolutely see D&D groups even.
Two millimeter tufts?
Oh, two millimeters tall.
Yeah.
That makes way more sense.
I thought it was two millimeters square, and I'm supposed to, like, assemble and, like, I mean.
You can also get bases.
So, you're, you're currently shopping for tufts.
So, if you, if you clicked on bases at the top.
I'm a tuft enthusiast.
You can, you can.
Don't shave that tuft.
Oh, my goodness.
Uh, anyways, I think this is actually super cool.
So, no, you probably can't call it Gamer's Grass.
Um, but, yeah, apparently there's other brands and stuff.
Yeah, sure.
I don't know.
What's a laser plant?
A laser plant?
I don't know, man.
Their site's, their site's real slow right now, man.
Yeah, we've got a lot of people on here right now, I think.
All right, cool.
It is not loading.
But, yeah, apparently that's already a thing.
All right, I'm sure Ploof knows about it.
Probably.
Yeah.
No, he's gotten super into miniatures.
What, Dan?
That's good for 40k as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You have miniatures and 40k.
Yeah.
What do you think I was talking about?
Yeah, Dan.
Yeah, Dan.
What the heck, Dan?
Dan.
Why are you not even in the center of your camera, Dan?
Oh, boy.
All right.
All right.
All right.
Hit me, Dan.
Sure.
Not physically.
You're too far away.
I'm not feeling it tonight.
Come over here and I'll beat you.
Hey, have you seen that a couple of small companies are making a 500-watt ATX GAN?
I think that, I can't remember what that stands for.
Some sort of nitride PSU.
Yeah, gallium nitride.
Gallium nitride?
Yeah.
When do you think we will see a GAN PSU in mainstream do-it-yourself builds?
Uh, hold on.
A 500-watt GAN power supply?
Why?
Oh, for ITX builds.
Uh, what, Luke?
Bob Light and Float Black Chat said, get off the Gamergrass website.
Mom said, it's my turn to look.
HD Plex.
These guys are awesome.
Their products are super cool.
It makes a ton of sense that they would be using GAN.
Um, GAN basically allows you to shrink, um, your power supply and it's super efficiency.
It's efficient.
Oh my God.
What am I even talking about?
It makes it so you can build smaller, more efficient power supplies.
Thank you.
Um, I, I have not personally looked into the electronics engineering reasons that that's
possible, but I do know that it's a, um, super cool tech and allows you to make a super
compact, um, very efficient power supplies.
So yeah, this is a tiny 500-watt power supply.
Look how small this is.
That's ridiculous.
Um, what?
It's not an AC power supply.
This is a DC to DC power supply is my understanding.
Oh, wait, no way.
Is this an AC power supply?
Yep.
Shut up.
Uh-huh.
That's pretty wild.
Wow.
There's more connectors.
What is this plug?
If you keep scrolling, there should be some.
Yeah, there you go.
No way.
Shut up.
There you go.
That is Bananase.
Okay.
That's super cool.
Um, yeah.
HD Plex, super cool company.
They make super cool, really compact, silent, sometimes power supplies.
They've, they've done some DC to DC designs in the past, which is what led me to believe
that this was a DC to DC.
No, this is a 500-watt AC to DC power supply.
That is Bananase.
Uh, anywho, the point is that I don't think we're going to see GAN in a full-sized ATX power
supply anytime soon because they can already build a full-sized ATX power supply that can
do 1,600 watts in North America, which is the maximum that we can draw off of a single
circuit.
And they can already do a full-sized ATX power supply that had, that'll do 2,000 watts on
240 volt, which is the maximum.
No, that's actually not the maximum you can do in Europe, but it's the maximum that you
could reasonably build a computer with, um, anytime in the near future.
Never is a strong word as the prices come down, you know, maybe it'll actually be more
efficient and more cost-effective to build a GAN power supply, but for now it's a premium
technology and not something that we're going to see anytime soon just because we don't
really need it.
Stop trying to make Bananase happen.
I will not.
I will not stop.
Dan, hit me.
Sure.
Any updates on the laptop or shoulder back?
Would really like it for school as the backpack, which is awesome, is a little bulky for my
load.
Let me check.
Uh...
This Gamers Cry stuff is really cool.
It took me about seven minutes to load the laser plants page.
Have you ever seen a static flocking machine?
Well, you, you put it in this charged chamber and it charges the base and you put your glue
on it and then you basically like explode, uh, like the grass flock and then it all sticks
in and points in one direction.
So it actually looks like grass instead of just like dabbing it on it.
It's like powder coating, but for...
Fake grass?
But for fake grass.
Wow.
No, I have not.
That's cool.
I just Googled it.
It looks like something else.
I used to, uh, I used to do 40k.
Expensive hobby.
Unbelievably.
Unless you go to England.
It was, I bought some stuff when I was in England and it was like, wow, this is extremely
affordable.
It's almost cheaper to fly to England, buy your models and then fly back.
Why is it so much cheaper?
Because they're made in England.
They're made there?
I believe so.
At least they used to be.
Oh.
Wow.
I don't have an update on the notebook bag, but I do have an update on carabiner replacements.
I was going to ask that too.
We're going to have 500 kits sent out within the next couple of weeks.
Oh, let's go.
We're doing it.
We have more.
Um...
No, I'm just happy things are starting.
Yeah, the first order is going to have more, but the reason we're doing 500 first is to
mixture.
Yeah.
So it's a rolling thing.
Cool.
Sweet.
Um, we got an update on some YKK pulls.
Those were pending for a couple of weeks.
Good job, CW team.
Yeah, so stuff's happening.
Um, magnetic cable management is pending a launch late this month, apparently.
Um, we have some packs.
Also very cool.
Feeling good for go live.
Uh, there's no update in my, in my CW update for the Jan 7th week, which is the most recent
one that I think I have for notebook bag.
And I'll check the previous one that I also hadn't read yet.
No, I don't see anything about it in there either.
So hopefully I'll get an update on that fairly soon and then I can, um, get you guys up to
speed.
Uh, as you might imagine, our relationship with our backpack, who is also our notebook bag
supplier, has been a little bit more complicated lately with the whole double layer thing.
So you sure want to make it, I hope the order's in.
I'm actually not sure though.
I'm sorry.
Um, did you mention the magnetic cable management?
I can't remember.
I did.
Okay, good.
Hopefully launching this month.
So if you were looking for, if you, uh, are one of the people who got a $25 credit for
your backpack and you're looking for something to, uh, try out, that's going to be a big
one show you guys, Dan, how are your fingers feeling?
Damn ready.
Nice.
Uh, all right.
What are we supposed to do?
Topics.
You got it.
Fujitsu agrees that it is morally culpable.
Don't know exactly what that means.
How does that translate to dollars?
I guess, um, that remains to be seen.
Yeah, we'll see.
Morally culpable in 700 plus wrongful convictions.
Paul Patterson, European head of Fujitsu, has publicly acknowledged that the company
has a moral obligation to help financially compensate hundreds of UK postal workers who
were wrongfully charged and convicted of theft and fraud.
Between 1999 and 2015, Fujitsu supported the post office in the prosecution of hundreds
of innocent sub-postmasters based on discrepancies found in Fujitsu's Horizon accounting software.
I didn't even know Fujitsu made accounting software.
They're one of those companies that just make all the things.
The company now admits that they knew the software was flawed, even at the time, and they took
part in an appalling miscarriage of justice.
However, Patterson says that Fujitsu will wait for a judge to determine the company's share
of the settlement.
You know, would I be trying to come up with something, hoping that if it was, like, in good faith, decent, that maybe I would get better, like, maybe I'd be looked at more favorably
in a situation like this?
Or would I just be like, but I'll just, I'm gonna let you, I'm gonna wait and see.
Like, what would be the play?
What would be your play?
I mean, obviously, we're not lawyers, we don't know the right way to do this, but we can kind of, this is, we're talking moral, we're talking moral culpability right now.
I think you'd have to try to do something.
I think I would, I'd, I'd want to try to do something.
Yeah, yeah.
Even if it's small, even if it's just like, you know, hey, how about like, like, I don't know, groceries stipend from now until this is all resolved and with the, with the understanding that it'll come out of the total payout or something.
You know, like, just make their lives a little easier for a bit.
Or something, like, I don't know.
I have no idea what exactly, but I'll try to do something.
I'm spitballing, Luke.
I'm spitballing.
You know, obviously not like, you know, a Tim Hortons gift card, but something, something meaningful that makes their, makes their lives a little better for a bit instead of way worse for a long period of time.
But you cost 700 plus people their jobs.
So what about like wage subsidy?
Like people went to jail.
This is bad.
So at least wage subsidy.
Um, the sub postmasters who are self-employed contractors started reporting errors in the horizon software only a few weeks after it had been installed.
The post office responded by denying there was any flaw in the system and forcing individual workers to pay out of pocket to make up the difference.
There's never been any bugs in flow plane.
The post, you're wrong.
The post office privately investigated over 900 contractors, then used horizon as evidence against them in criminal court, leading to imprisonment, bankruptcy, and four suicides.
Even after a 2012 independent forensic audit found that horizon had serious flaws that could explain these discrepancies, the post office stood by the software's reliability.
In 2019, the post office lost a class action lawsuit brought by over 500 sub postmasters leading to public inquiry or leading to a public inquiry.
The BBC recently aired a dramatization of the affair, which has drawn public outcry again.
In response, last week, the British prime minister announced legislation to exonerate the affected sub postmasters.
I'm wondering why this took so long.
Yeah.
Like that's just criminal.
I mean, there's no word for it other than criminal.
Um, yeah, I haven't watched the BBC program on this.
But, uh, people are adding additional details in the chat.
Apparently it's amazing.
Um, people are adding details in the chat that are just appalling.
Like, like this is f***ed up, man.
Yeah.
This, this is, this is, this is like.
So one thing that I'm, I'm getting a little bit lost here though.
Yeah.
Was it the post office that said there was no bugs or was it Fujitsu?
Um, the post office said there was no bugs, but we don't, I don't think we know.
Um, what Fujitsu's role is because we haven't watched the thing yet.
Right.
But like, yeah, I mean, is that, is that not at the very least manslaughter?
Like for the people responsible for.
Like can technically, I, yeah, I don't think you can be charged for someone else's.
No, you can be charged for someone else's suicide if you bully or goad them into it.
Yeah.
I don't know if.
This is going to get into legal stuff that we don't understand in a country that we're not in.
Yeah.
But like, it's going to be wild.
Whoa.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, um, so, uh, I am not a financial advisor, but maybe don't invest in Fujitsu.
If you've been watching the whole show, that'll make sense.
Oh, wild.
What's up?
Um, I guess it's a small amount, but like I, I would assumed, would have assumed this
would have done something.
Huh?
Lunch break.
Nice.
Well, this is the one day.
No, I just mean this, this, is this like the, uh, the Japanese stock market or something
bringing back over the last one day.
I mean, that can, that's, that's a thing though.
Cause people buy the dip.
Right.
Yeah.
Anywho, um, but this is like, I wonder when this news broke.
Cause they've been going down since what happened here.
Stocks are weird.
Anyways, that's horrible.
People are like, yeah, this won't matter to, uh, their stock because they're like as big
as general electric.
Speaking of general electric, they make like everything.
General electric appliances threatens legal action against open source dev.
And of course this was going to end up on the WAN show appliance manufacturer higher
who owns both general electric appliances and Hoover has issued a takedown order against
Andre Bosch.
I'm so sorry.
I butchered your name.
I'm sure a developer who maintains the open source home assistant integration plugins
for hires.
H on Han.
I don't know whatever this is.
It's their smart control app.
It's like home on, but shortened.
According to hires notice, the plugins use their services in an unauthorized manner, which
is causing significant economic harm to their company.
What the are you talking about higher?
What?
What economic harm?
People buy your product.
I wouldn't even begin to consider an appliance.
Wait, no, wait.
I wouldn't even begin to consider buying your appliance if it didn't have a plugin for home assistant.
And if I wasn't a home assistant user, then I would have no fucking idea what home assistant
is.
So what the f*** are you talking about?
Okay, I'm ready to listen.
Oh, I need to look into this more, but Mario P in full plain chat said the post office said
there was no bugs.
Fujitsu staff witness statements were edited by the post office to remove references to
there being bugs in the software.
Yeah, we don't know enough about that, but we need to look more into it.
Let's talk about higher.
This right now, I'm wondering if there is a software solution that General Electric has
that they're trying to sell that people are using home assistant for instead.
I wonder if that's what they're saying, because I agree.
You're buying the appliance thing, whatever.
I suspect people are buying this because it works with home assistant more than anything
else.
Probably not.
The home assistant community is pretty small.
Is it?
Oh, yeah.
It's just my circles, I guess.
Yeah, it seems like a big idea to us.
Everyone I talk to about home automation just talks about home assistant.
So, either way, either way, this is crap.
I don't want a billion different stupid apps with a billion different subscription services.
So, Hire tweeted out saying the Hire brand in the U.S. is independent of Hire Europe and
operates separately.
HON, or H-ON, or whatever, is the connected IoT platform for Hire Europe.
In the U.S., customers can use our open IoT platform.
Smart HQ does not prevent integrations with home assistant.
Okay, so, shout out Hire U.S. for doing things right, at least-ish.
And for saying this publicly today.
Yeah.
And for coming out and condemning their cousin company over in Europe.
It's time for their cousin company over in Europe to figure this out.
Because this is not cool.
This is not how it works.
Oh, IM Gimli says, Hire U.S. actually has an API that anyone can use to interact with
their gear.
That's super cool.
Cody 4K says, go, go, European commission.
Yeah, really?
Yeah.
I mean, hey, we've talked about it a fair bit.
Like, the EU being pretty cool and stuff.
This is something that needs to happen.
Yeah.
We cannot allow appliance companies.
Like, you're stuck with this s*** for, like, 20 years, right?
Like, these are not, this is not even a phone where it's, like, optimistically, you're going
to use it for five.
I think Samsung just committed to seven years with the Galaxy S24.
That's kind of a big deal.
That is cool.
I didn't have that on the dock.
I totally forgot to talk about that this week.
But, you know, optimistically, you're going to use this phone for, you know, seven years
or whatever.
We're talking stuff that you are maybe going to use for 20, 30 years.
Like, no, you don't get to just sell me something with the understanding that I can, you know,
access it through this plugin or whatever, and then just go, ah, ha, ha, ha, no, forget
it.
Now you need to pay our subscription fee for, for, like, the lifespan of, I don't know,
what kind of animal lives through?
A horse.
How long do horses live?
I think they live about that long.
25 to 30 years.
Nailed it.
Okay.
Anywho.
It is unclear at this time whether the plugins actually contain any proprietary code, but
Bosch has announced that he will be pulling the plugins in the next few days due to fear
of legal reprisal.
Yeah.
Under certain circumstances, I would, I would love to be like, yeah, I'm going to get together
a coalition of creators and we're going to like fund your defense or whatever.
But like, um, this is general electric.
We just talked on the show about how, you know, lawsuits can run.
Like I, I actually don't have the money.
Apple trying to sue for $73 million.
Like if they, if they decide to like go ham at this, um, and, and it sucks that the best
advice I can give is that, yeah, you probably should just pull the plugin.
I think you should pull the plugin and immediately, uh, send, I don't know how you do this contact
some form of representative in the European commission and try to get some stuff moving.
They seem to be aggressive about this stuff.
This might legitimately be something that they want to jump on and it might not be this
specifically.
They might not have to go after like general electric specifically, but they might solve
this problem for the industry as a whole, which is way better anyways.
And then you can release your plugin back again.
I think that's the way to go.
Not that they're watching or care, but yeah.
Um, open AI made two notable changes to their terms of service this week.
Yeah.
First, the company announced that they're adding new rules, prohibiting the use of their LLM
tools to create political misinformation or to impersonate a political candidate or
official.
Cool.
That's going to help a lot because it's not like there are any other similar tools that
could be used to do these things.
Zero.
I mean, in all seriousness though, we should be supportive.
This is good.
Yeah.
It is a good thing.
What's less good is that open AI quietly dropped language banning the military use of their tools.
What?
A company owned by Microsoft?
Huh?
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
What do you mean?
Yeah.
All right.
Cool.
So, um, according to leaked internal documents, one thing I'll say, Oh, sure.
Is if you didn't think other countries are doing this, you're nuts.
According to leaked internal documents, Amazon is preparing to launch a paid subscription for
an upgraded version of Alexa later this year, tentatively named Alexa plus.
Can you imagine yourself paying for Alexa?
No, I don't have any Alexa enabled devices at all.
So, definitely not.
The new Alexa has LLM chatbot like features.
I mean, it'll cost a lot for them to run.
So, there's that.
Intended to improve its reasoning and conversational abilities, including the ability to distinguish
between when a user finishes talking versus when they briefly pause.
Wow.
Progress.
However, it's apparently prone to rambling, factual errors, and hallucination.
The documents also reveal a degree of internal conflict within Amazon because some employees
felt the company shouldn't charge for the new features.
How are they going to pay for it?
Yeah, that sounds like people who would rather be laid off than deal with having a balance
sheet that is positive.
Yeah.
I love ideas, but that's...
Ultimately, you want to raise at the end of the year and everybody needs to eat.
If there's some massive new expense, someone has to pay for it.
Yeah.
Is it going to be you with your salary or is it going to be the customer?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Bezos isn't going to take less.
That's kind of silly.
Oh, right.
Sorry.
I keep saying A-L-E-X-A.
Sorry.
Sorry, guys.
I forgot.
Maybe soon you'll have A-L-E-X-A plus.
Hey, Alexa, play Despacito.
Oh, stop.
Stop.
Luke, you're going to make the two people that use Alexa upset.
What a f***ing asshole.
I hope I got somebody.
You probably got both of them.
You almost certainly did.
You got me?
Yes!
Oh, man.
Oh, that was worth it.
It's an older meme, but it checks out.
That was the song everyone used to do, right?
Yes.
Yeah, I thought so.
The Vision Pro has apparently no hot apps.
Pre-orders have started as of yesterday.
We've got our order in.
I think its delivery is scheduled for late March or April or something like that.
So that either means they're getting a lot of orders or it means they're not producing a lot of them.
Demand is reportedly high enough that it has exceeded available stock in several U.S. cities.
Strangely, attempting to pre-order it online seems to require an iPhone or an iPad with Face ID.
Really?
Huh.
You know, it doesn't surprise me that much.
I have a whole thing that I want to do on how impossible it is to cancel Apple Arcade from an Apple TV.
If I don't own an iPad or an iPhone, the only way to cancel a subscription, you cannot do it on the Apple TV.
There is no button.
That's got to be illegal.
It should be illegal.
That's got to be illegal already.
You cannot.
That like has to be illegal.
Also, this is a fun one.
I could not find any way to remove my payment information.
They scan your face for the cushion, people are saying.
But because I am the family plan owner.
So as a family plan owner, I must have a valid credit card unless it like expires.
I actually do not see how that could possibly be legal either.
They might be able to update your credit card if you get a new one if it expires as well.
Google can do that.
I'm pretty sure Apple can do that.
No, I just mean I couldn't remove it.
No, what I'm saying is even if the card expires, if you get issued a new one,
they might be able to get that number from your bank.
Google can do that.
Really?
Yeah.
Like Google Pay.
I'm fairly certain Apple Pay can do this as well.
Okay.
Well, Apple didn't when my card lapsed before.
Do you have Apple Pay like tap with your phone and pay?
No.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure that system can.
Yeah.
No, just my Apple Arcade subscription lapsed because my card expired and it did not automatically
go to my new one.
Apple has done that for me.
Yeah.
So Apple Pay and Google Pay will both update your card with information from your bank.
But like they'll have your new cards information in your phone before you even receive
your new card in the mail.
That's like use privacy.
One of your previous sponsors.
I want to.
It's not in Canada.
It's not in Canada.
I really wish it was.
Yeah, me too.
It's a super cool service.
Very cool.
I will shill for privacy anytime.
They're not even like have they even sponsored in a while?
Not in a while.
Yeah.
Still super cool.
Yeah.
I just wish they were in Canada.
Anyway.
Yeah.
So I want to do a whole thing on it where I like live.
I go through and I show you guys a how hard it was to subscribe to it in the first place
just on my Android phone through a browser.
It was like almost impossible.
And then unsubscribing was literally impossible.
It could not be done on the Apple TV, could not be done on my phone in a browser, could
not be done on my computer in a browser.
I had to download the desktop iTunes application.
If for whatever reason I did not own a desktop PC, if my only computing device was an Apple
TV, it would be completely impossible to cancel my subscription or because I'm a family manager, remove my credit card because I was like, okay, screw it.
I'll just remove my credit card.
I don't need to buy anything else from Apple and it wouldn't allow me to do it.
You actually cannot keep my credit card information against my will.
That cannot possibly be legal.
Anywho, the reason for them requiring an iPhone or an iPad with Face ID is that they scan your
face to make sure the cushion fits better, apparently.
Despite Apple's claim that most iPad apps can play on the Vision Pro without any changes,
it seems the device won't have access to most top apps from the app store at launch, including,
and this is, uh, these are some heavy hitters.
Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
According to Mac Stories, none of the top 46 apps on the app store will be available as a native app
and just above a third of them will be available in compatibility mode, meaning that nearly two-thirds of developers
explicitly opted out of making their iPad app compatible with the headset.
YouTube confirmed that it was not allowing its app to be used in compatibility mode,
did not clarify why, and instead suggested that Vision Pro users should access the site through a browser.
So, discussion question for you.
What is the most likely reason that so many companies would actively avoid allowing their apps to be used
on a hot new Prestige product?
I honestly don't know.
Like, would you allow floatplane in compatibility mode if people were like,
yeah, I want to try it?
Or would you be worried about a whole bunch of support calls if it doesn't work right?
Yeah, we are a statistically extremely small team for what we do, though.
Um, I feel like a team like Netflix would be able to handle that.
What if they just didn't give a shit about the 63 people that are going to be watching Netflix?
That's possible.
Yeah.
Maybe.
The, um...
I'm surprised they wouldn't try to buddy with Apple more and just do it to make Apple happy.
Uh, I don't think anything makes Apple happy other than money.
I don't, I don't, I'm not convinced that that's, like, really a thing.
Okay.
I, I don't know.
Have you seen any evidence of it?
No, I have no idea.
It seems like their, their relationship with app developers is pretty adversarial for the
most part.
I just, I find that, like, a lot of these companies will have apps for, like, everything you could
imagine because they just have, like, these monstrous dev teams and they're just like, yeah,
we're going to support every freaking TV in every way and all this other type of stuff.
I don't know.
Maybe we should try it when we get ours.
Try what?
Floatplane app.
Oh, wait, we don't have an iPad app.
We don't have it.
Okay, then forget it.
Yeah, there you go.
All right.
See you later.
Hey.
We could maybe get, oh, he's, like, far away now and stuff, but there, you know, I'm not
even going to talk about it because I, I learned my lesson of, of telling people what we're
working on for Floatplane because then they want it, like, tomorrow.
Oh, what is it?
I don't know.
I don't even think you know.
No, you have to tell me.
Nope.
I'll call your boss.
I'm not even on shift.
I've been working for 12 hours today.
Come at me, bro.
All right.
Google, more layoffs.
Google has laid off over a thousand staff across their business in the last nine days.
I made sure our YouTube rep was okay.
Hey, shout out.
Glad you're good.
Nice.
According to an internal memo from CEO Sundar Pichai, these layoffs will not be as severe.
Oh, there's more coming, they say.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Yeah, there's more.
Well, that sucks.
In other news, AMD's Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2 APUs are not twin cores.
This is a cute headline from, presumably, Jessica.
For some time, we've known that AMD would be using two different chips in its Ryzen 8000G APUs, Phoenix 1 and Phoenix 2.
Cool names.
With the biggest difference we were aware of being that Phoenix 2 uses some Zen 4C cores.
So these are these compact ones that, on the server side of things anyway, allow greater core density at the expense of higher clock speeds.
And I believe they also have less cache, but I'm not sure if that's anything to do with the cores themselves or if it's the bigger caches.
So don't quote me on that.
But full specs posted by Gigabyte show that Phoenix 2 APUs not only use Zen 4C cores, but they have fewer PCIe lanes, which will cap them to two PCIe Gen 4 lanes for the secondary NVMe slot.
Further, while Phoenix 1 has eight PCIe 4.0 lanes for add-in GPUs, Phoenix 2 has only four.
Currently, the Ryzen 5 8500G is the only retail design using Phoenix 2.
And I will be very interested to see if AMD even seeds these Phoenix 2 chips to reviewers, or if they are going to pull a quiet,
hmm, well, here's the SKUs you should review, and these ones will also be, like, on Newegg,
and maybe people will just, like, buy those ones because they're less expensive, and they'll assume it's that, but cheaper.
I am, I'm not liking this.
Um, that few PCIe lanes could be a major disadvantage for this chip, especially as it ages.
Yeah.
Four lanes for a GPU?
Do you find it's misleading that the two is worse?
Um, it's a codename, so I don't worry about that as much.
Got it, okay.
But the fact that they're all 8000G, just with, like, one number different, to me, indicates that they are feature-similar,
and I am not pleased with this.
Yeah.
I think that's it for topics this week, Dan.
I think it's time for After Dark.
Okay.
Isn't it?
I thought there was something you were supposed to talk about that wasn't in the list.
Oh, Radeon Challenge Update.
Yeah.
That can be After Dark.
Okay.
Oh.
Oh, After Dark is brought to you by dbrand again, because the sales team apparently, um, has found that only dbrand is interested in sponsoring After Dark.
Hey, dbrand, if you're watching this, which I know you almost certainly are.
Ooh.
Uh, oh, wow, got him.
Um, dbrand, if you're watching this, uh, you can probably negotiate with the, uh, biz team, because I don't think they have any other offers for WAN Show After Dark, so.
What, what, what, what are you doing?
Why am I helping them?
Yeah.
Uh, well, I've just, in good faith, I'm offering them.
It's more, why are you, why are you nerfing the business team?
No, I'm offering them, I'm offering them good advice.
Yeah, but they've got targets.
So that, so that dbrand will feel indebted to us and offer to pay more.
Oh.
It's, it's 4D chess.
I don't think it's gonna work.
Yeah, it's like next level emotional manipulation.
I think you just sacked your queen.
You just lost your queen in the fourth dimension.
Now it's time for the WAN Show After Dark, brought to you by dbrand.
Check out their new grip case, now available for the Samsung S24.
Okay, there's a whole thing.
Hold on, hold on a second.
Uh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh, buh.
Oh my God.
Okay, hold on.
We're gonna get to this in a second.
Okay.
Oh man, my phone's been blowing up.
I haven't been actually looking at any of this.
Okay.
Uh, Nick says, hoping for summer for the laptop bag.
Uh, waiting on a reply from our new CEO before we can move forward.
We'll follow up next week.
Oh, that's cool.
Okay, got it.
And, even better, the one and only Ms. Sarah Butt.
What?
Has forwarded our first samples for our Touchgrass product.
What?
Yeah, apparently we're already working on it.
So, it's just a cute little-
It looks great.
It's a cute little, um-
That's so cool.
It's a cute little bread-themed dinosaur standing-
Yeah, I don't know, you guys can't really see it.
But there's a little bread brontosaurus, uh, standing on a little pad of grass.
And there's a little cute little frame.
So, we're-
I need Creator Warehouse to, like, turn into, like, one of the Samsungs of the world where they just make everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Creator Warehouse insurance.
Yeah.
Why not?
Yeah, why not?
Yeah.
Okay, I think I also had a message from, uh, dbrand about the whole S24, like, stylus, something.
Yeah, okay, here we go.
So, they posted this on Reddit.
Um, they have not found any difference between the performance of an S23 Ultra S Pen versus an S24 Ultra S Pen while a mag save case is attached.
Uh, Samsung has acknowledged the interference between magnets and the S Pen going back as far as the Galaxy Note 8.
They advise those who encounter magnetic interference to use the S Pen with more force.
Of course, a lot has changed since then.
What can you expect when using a MagSafe-enabled case on your Galaxy Ultra?
Uh, okay, but this effects differs from accessory to accessory.
Nevertheless, logical conclusion.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Sometimes they write a lot.
Um.
Here's how the rollout will work.
Oh, they're going to have a non-MagSafe variant for all their Ultra Model Galaxy cases.
Okay, cool.
So, if you're worried about it, then you can just get one that doesn't have MagSafe and doesn't have magnets in it.
Okay.
Or you can get one that does, I guess, maybe?
I'm not sure.
Uh, check it out on Reddit.
The point is, uh, check out their new grip case, now available for the Samsung S24 series, linked down below.
So, Dan.
Yeah?
How you doing over there?
I'm okay.
How about you?
You had a nice day?
I, I've had a, I've had an okay day.
It sure looks nice.
Tiring.
Would you like a merch message?
Um, I mean, I guess it's an option.
Okay.
If we ever want to get out of here.
What do you guys do with Teams?
I've never been logged out across four different employers and multiple computers.
Do you use funky Windows login configurations?
Yeah, Luke.
We don't have-
Yeah, Dan.
Can you guys fix this?
No.
Eventually.
Oh.
You want to make it a, you want to make it a quarterly priority?
I mean, I don't set them anymore, but I would, yes.
I find it really annoying.
I'm pretty sure we can fix it if we get, um, I always forget the name of it.
A ad.
Jake told, oh, Active Directory?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Because Jake told me like a thousand years ago that there wasn't a way to configure it,
but that was literally a thousand years ago, so.
There is.
I, I, I threw some very light Googling.
I think we might need a D, um, Entra now?
Okay.
Yeah.
I don't know.
There is ways to, to deal with it.
Ugh.
Ugh.
Entra A.D.
Not looking forward to that.
Fine.
Hi, DLM.
Can you, is this really going to be that annoying the whole time?
I do not know that was not in my instruction.
Okay.
Nevermind.
I take it back.
D-Brand needs to pay extra if they're going to have this bullshit down here.
It's also like the opposite of dark.
Everything else is dark.
We have this like very bright daytime scene.
Rip OLED users.
Yeah.
Uh.
No, I know.
Oh, I know what.
We know there's like a lot of things that can be better.
I know what I can do.
I was delivered a thing that was on fire.
We're working on it.
It's not as on fire anymore.
It's getting better.
Okay.
You brought me into the fire.
I blame you as well.
That's fair.
Hold on.
I can, I can ruin some of D-Brand's money.
There we go.
Okay.
That's a little better.
Oh no.
It breaks the whole thing though.
Dang it.
I'll just white stretch it.
Just leave it.
Oh, no, we can black stretch it.
There we go.
Okay.
That helps maybe a little.
That's a little better.
Thanks, Dan.
Damn it.
Okay.
Hi, DLL.
Can you talk about the early days of the forum and how you ensured a positive
and safe community looking to start something similar to catalog and compile historical
info about a specific place?
Well, our mod team was and is awesome.
And part of it is that we just kind of have a pretty positive community.
So for the most part, I mean, I mean, part of it was the, you know, vision for the forum
was to not want to be like a toxic place where put downs are considered to be acceptable
between members.
There's obviously exceptions.
It's any, anywhere you put two people, someone's likely to just read with somebody about something
and get heated.
But there was also a way back, there was a mountain of work from the venerable Mr. Wizard
and these days Mortis.
Speaking of.
Speaking of.
These are our rules.
Ensure a friendly atmosphere to our visitors and forum members.
Ensure the freedom of expression and exchange of information in a mature and responsible manner.
Don't be a dick, Will Whedon.
Be excellent to each other.
Bill and Ted, remember your audience, both present and future.
That's it.
Yeah, pretty much.
I mean, we get more specific and all that, but.
Yeah, but honestly, that top bit is, should be all you really need.
It really should.
Yeah.
And yet it isn't.
Correct.
Yeah, the mods, the mods hold it together.
Yeah.
I mean, it basically operates as a completely independent thing these days.
We've taken more of the admin-y server management stuff in-house to try to free up Mortis as
much as possible.
So Jonathan and Tyler from the Fuller Plane team have been on top of that, but that's
not the community fostering.
The community fostering has been all the mods in the community itself.
Yeah, it's actually kind of hilarious how very independent from LTT it is these days.
Like, as far as I can tell, it's a hotbed for LTT haters at this point.
Yeah.
How ironic.
There's a bunch of that too.
Which we always committed to not clamping down on and we stay committed to.
We are, for all the criticism, it's all still there.
One of the spoken but not written original news.
Wow.
That was a really difficult sentence for me.
I'm not sure why.
One of the spoken but not written original rules of the site was that in regards to
going after people, you could go after us and nobody else was fair game.
Yeah.
That was kind of how it was supposed to be.
They really took that and ran with it.
They sure did.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hello, LDL.
With the snowy Canadian winters, how do the Linus socks and sandals combo work?
I'm actually wearing shoes today.
He is.
There's like slush puddles that are this deep.
The slush puddles are rough.
The snow you can do, but the slush puddles, it's a puddle.
It's a very cold puddle.
I have a whole technique for snow.
You like lift straight up and go straight down.
Yeah.
And you can kind of make your way through it a little bit.
Yeah.
But no, I got shoes on today.
Hi, WAN.DLL.
Have you done any more research into automated cleaning bots like the one Walmart has thinking
of the badminton center?
No, not yet.
I mean, we're so far away from completion on that.
I thought we were supposed to be done in March.
Yeah, it's already been pushed.
Remember how I said I had no confidence in it?
Nobody told me.
Yeah, you should probably tell-
I was not informed.
The people that are going to be building a bunch of stuff in the building.
I was not informed either, sir.
Oh, okay.
I was unequivocally told March.
And then I said bet.
And then you were like, no, absolutely March.
What?
Shut up.
That's not what happened.
That is on the WAN show.
No, it isn't.
You can find that clip.
Wait, what?
WAN show database.
He'll find it.
Please.
Well, there's no way.
I always say that construction is always delayed.
I specifically remember somebody telling me unequivocally that it was absolutely going
to be March.
Was I being verbally ironic?
Probably.
Did we ever figure out what sardonic meant?
I do not fully understand what sardonic means.
No.
No.
I think it's like a lighthearted kind of like insincerity of some sort, but it's not sarcasm.
Grimly mocking or cynical.
Okay, sure.
Yeah.
So then I clearly did not know.
Cynically humorous.
Okay.
Well, not being March makes things a little bit easier.
I don't have to lay awake at night stressing about it anymore.
Yeah.
Great.
There is absolutely.
I mean, come on.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
WAN database.
I'd love to know if I said that.
I find that very hard to believe.
Maybe I'm crazy.
I'll try to get that phone next week.
Not important.
Look, the reality of it is I do not.
They're on it.
They're on it?
It's going to probably take until next week, but they're on it.
Arthur's on it.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
Hilarious.
I'm going to get lambasted if I'm wrong.
Yeah.
So will I.
I have a feeling dug in pretty hard here.
I have a feeling what might have been said is that that's the date we currently have.
So we should be at a full preparedness level for that date.
I doubt I said anything that complex.
We should be planning for that date.
Maybe that's what I said.
That sounds like something you would say.
I would say something.
I don't know.
I think I would say something more along the lines of.
We'll figure it out.
Well, Arthur will figure it out.
Nice.
Thanks, Arthur.
Cool.
Hey, DLL.
Thinking about the.
Oh, do you want to know the new ETA?
That would be nice.
Yeah.
So, um.
Q2.
Q.
So, April.
Yeah.
Maybe.
Get it?
It's still March.
Where's my ding?
I'm going home.
Where the f*** is my ding?
That was pretty good.
Thank you.
Hey, DLL.
Thinking about the potential of future tech or mechanical augments, humans may potentially
be able to make their bodies in the near future.
How far would each of you be willing to go?
I think it would depend on how my body decayed.
Yeah.
Like when I'm, when I'm, when I'm young and functioning well, when I'm like, yeah, whatever.
But if you told me like, hey, you can have glasses hanging off your face for the rest of
your life.
Or you can have like this bionic thing that we like drill into the back of your eye and
put in there.
And then you like never need glasses anymore.
And your eyes are like better than they ever were.
I'm like, okay.
As long as the success rate is pretty high.
I think the thing that I have would have to be in a very bad spot.
And then if that's the case, yeah, I'm down.
Like if I'm like mostly blind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let's go.
But right now, do I want something drilled into the back of my eye?
Not really.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Cause like, they're still all right.
They're not great, but they're all right.
Yeah.
They're not great.
You should really wear your glasses.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
I forgot them for the curling tournament again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
How'd you try?
You never told me how the last day went.
They, they made the, they made the, uh, the, the finals of the consolation bracket.
Yeah.
That's a really nice way of saying the losers bracket.
No, it's a consolation bracket.
Is it actually?
Yeah.
Oh, I thought it was legitimately called a loser bracket.
No, that's standard terminology.
They call it group B.
Yeah.
Sure.
Group B consolation.
Yeah.
So I had a curling tournament, as I said on the show, and then someone tried to correct
me and they're right.
It's called a bond spiel.
But if I say bond spiel, no one's going to know what the heck I mean.
Um, so it's a tournament, whatever.
Uh, traditionally we were in the novice tournament, um, but we won like a bunch of times.
So I think that got annoying.
Uh, so they, they decided to give my, my uncle, my brother and I, who have never played a season
of curling, they gave each one of us a year of experience on paper, um, because we were
at zero years of experience cause we had no years of experience, but because we had played
in the novice tournament a decent amount of times, they said that we had a year of experience,
which isn't equivalent, but whatever.
Um, and then my dad's accumulated actually large amount of user experience cause he's
like, he like coaches the intermediate level or whatever, all this crazy stuff.
Um, that combined made it so that we had too many years of experience collectively on
the team of my dad, my brother, my uncle and I, um, to play in the novice tournament
anymore or the novice bonds bill.
Um, so we had to play in the like proper tournament against real teams that really play.
Yeah.
And if I remember correctly, the year cap for the novice term is like 15 or something.
Ah, yeah.
So the novice tournament had good players in it.
Right.
Yeah.
And the real tournament has really good players in it.
Everyone on that team has to have been playing for at least almost four years.
Yeah.
Like on average.
And a lot of people that go play at that club play like a lot.
Right.
So it's a curling club.
Nothing else happens there.
Yeah.
Which probably has some stupid name, like a foreign durf or something.
Like if a tournament's called a bond spiel.
I love the creativity by that name.
Um, but yeah, we, we were often like, you know, the team to beat at the novice tournament.
Um, and then we, we definitely got beaten this time.
Um, we beat one team.
Did your rocks get socked?
Um, they, they, they got bopped at the very least.
Yeah.
Okay.
Luke is a farndurfer confirmed.
Um, but yeah, the, the, one thing for me is I try really hard to be useful.
So, um, I, I'm trying to play really well and with my shots.
But when we go to sweep, I can generate a decent amount of power.
So I'm going for it, but I'm going for it hard every time.
So the next day I'm really sore.
Oh, I see.
My problem with that is.
Yeah.
You have a bit of a, like sprint and collapse sort of mindset.
Yeah.
In life.
Yep.
It's, um.
Interesting.
We'll call it that.
Sure.
Um.
I was going to go with flaw, but sure.
It works fine if you just never collapse.
Yeah.
Right.
But that's the thing.
So you're wrong, Linus.
Why don't you just continue?
Um, so the next day, the soreness kind of threw my shots off a little bit.
Right.
Okay.
And your shoulder's been not perfect over the last couple of years.
I held together for the tournament.
Really?
Oh, well, okay.
Everything physically was fine.
Just the soreness.
Like it's a lot of fine movements and stuff.
So when you're stiff, when certain muscles are tight, you're stiff, the fine movement is
going to change slightly.
So when there's no like practice shots and I haven't been doing this for a year, I had it
pretty dialed on the first day, but because of how we placed, we didn't, we could have
played all of our games on that one day.
And if we did, it would have been fine, but we played the next game the next morning or
midday really.
Yeah.
Um, and that meant that I, I was just a little bit thrown off.
So I didn't play that well.
I didn't play the worst on the team.
I think I would say, um, but I didn't play that well in the next day.
Um, and I was doing pretty good the day before.
And then didn't you mention that, uh, one of your family members had to go like save lives
or something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My brother kind of does that all the time.
So he wasn't able to show up.
So like, it was just, yeah, we didn't end up doing, is your brother's career a secret?
No, he's a firefighter.
Okay.
Yeah.
So that's what we mean.
Um, yeah.
So it, as the team that like tends to win these all the time, it's taken a long time for you
to arrive at you lost.
Yeah.
But we were still in the money.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, so you won more than you paid to enter the tournament.
Is that what you mean?
I don't know if that ended up being true.
We got money back.
We were in a money placement, but due to the, like part of your entry, you get like meals
and stuff.
Okay.
So I don't know if it actually ended up like making it positive.
Cool.
We did get money back.
Heck yeah.
Hey, shout out.
Good job.
Yeah.
So you, so you came in second in the consolation bracket.
Yes.
That's a pretty respectable result.
It was better than I thought.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I didn't think we'd end up in the finals.
Yeah.
I was pretty happy.
We did.
That was a really long story when he could have just said, yeah, we lost.
It's a lot of excuse making.
I mean, I already told you we lost.
I forgot.
You knew what position we were, it came in.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I forgot though.
Okay.
I knew after the first day, I remembered that part.
And then I didn't remember until halfway through your very long story that you had told
me about Rich not being able to be there and stuff.
Oh, I thought you wanted more information.
No, I'm not.
I forgot it.
Second place equals first loser.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
But didn't you come in second place in the loser bracket?
Yeah.
So he's like the eighth loser.
Or like, yeah, a lot further behind second loser.
Second loser twice removed.
Yeah.
Loser's cousin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hi, LLD.
You all seem good at researching products to make sure they are high quality.
Any tips on how to effectively research products before buying them to ensure it's a quality
product worth buying?
Customer reviews.
Trying to find customer reviews that look like they're written by real people.
Statistics.
Statistics.
Five five-star reviews is not as good as 1,000 4.3-star reviews.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
That's a good one.
You probably want a decent amount of reviews, but not everything's going to have it, depending
on what you're shopping for.
I always want to see a combination of professional reviewers who have spent, realistically, a limited
amount of time with it, but know what to look for, and real users who realistically aren't
as sure what to look for, but sure as shoot, know what's annoying.
I need both.
No, I actually do think he cares.
His memory is just...
I care about what?
It's a thing.
What are you talking about?
People are saying you didn't care about the curling tournament stuff.
What curling tournament stuff?
It's curling.
What more do you want, Luke?
Come on, Dan.
You didn't even win.
No, he could have just, like, not asked.
He's just not necessarily going to remember stuff like that.
That's okay.
Yeah, and I did remember.
It just took me a little while.
That's why I prompted him for his brother not being there.
Notice he didn't say that part.
Got him.
Maybe I just...
You know, the part I didn't remember was just that you lost, actually.
I remembered the rest of the stories.
So maybe he was droning for so long...
With all of his excuses that he never made it to that part.
That might be true.
That's...
Yeah.
Game might have started or something.
Yeah, the last big tip is actually a really good one.
Is make sure you also read the one-star reviews.
Mm-hmm.
Because if the one-star review is just like,
my shipment got lost.
It got here late.
Which is just like, both of those are probably outside of the company's hands.
That has nothing to do with the quality of the product.
So what are you even talking about?
So you've got to make sure that you're pinching whatever salt is necessary
on the pieces of information that might not be fully representative.
Yeah, you should jump around.
You should read the high ones, read the low ones, also read the middle ones.
Because sometimes I find the middle ones will also have alternative product suggestions.
Where they'll be like, oh, this was pretty good, but I prefer this other one.
It's like, oh, maybe...
Not necessarily you should just go buy that other one immediately,
but maybe you should go look at that.
Um, wrong tab.
Hi, like.
Have you considered making a public roadmap for Floatplane?
Would love to know if an Android TV app is on the horizon.
Uh...
I archived it.
Okay.
Hi, LTT.
I work at the Wikipedia Foundation as a FOSS developer on Wikipedia.
Are there any features you wish Wikipedia had?
I can try.
I can answer them slightly.
Luke, don't.
No, I can answer them slightly.
I don't really want to do a roadmap.
My reason for that is the team is extremely small.
So if we want someone to work on something new,
they have to stop working on something else.
So sometimes things get shelved for a certain period of time.
We also are very small.
So if someone, say, gets sick,
that thing will just be on pause until they're back.
There often isn't another person to work on it.
So people will get enraged when something gets delayed,
when sometimes it's just because, like,
we're trying to not be mean to the people that work with us.
And honestly, one of the best solutions to that
is just not really tell you guys what's coming
until it's, like, in beta and you can play with it.
So that's been somewhat of a new strategy.
And with everything that I just said in mind,
I will not comment on the Android TV apps.
I work at Wikipedia,
found Wikimedia Foundation as a faucet developer on Wikipedia.
Are there any features that you wish Wikipedia had?
Wikipedia is pretty good.
Yeah.
It does what I want.
No notes?
Yeah.
I don't know.
Keep it up.
It's kind of great.
Like, I actually found,
you know that the eBay stalking scandal thing we covered,
I think it was last week?
I found the best coverage for that
was just the Wikipedia page on it.
Yeah.
Cool.
I was like, wow, it's pretty good.
Chad has some thoughts.
Dark mode?
Does it not have a dark mode?
Wikipedia is such a simple site, though.
You could just use a dark reader or something, right?
I am certain there are third-party add-ons
to make Wikipedia a dark mode.
I'm surprised they don't have a dark mode,
but solidarity.
Let's go.
All right.
Hit me, Dan.
Why can't you emulate CUDA on other GPUs?
I know it's a dedicated hardware,
but emulators for consoles exist.
I'm not expecting 100% performance,
but 1% is still better than 0%.
You forgot the last part of that message.
Thanks for the butt cleaner.
I was pausing for dramatic effect.
Wait, what?
The point of CUDA is performance.
Oh, the bidet.
I forgot we have those.
I can't think of any compelling reason
to emulate CUDA on other hardware,
I guess would be the main thing.
I'm sure that there are developers
who might have more thoughts on this than I do,
but I'm not really...
Yeah, I just can't think of a good reason to do it.
Why would anyone create that emulator?
The hardware is readily available,
so you can get a cheap consumer card
and use that for testing.
Yeah, I just can't think of a good reason to do it.
You can even throw...
You can even throw an NVIDIA card
in a system that doesn't...
That already has another GPU
and just use it as a CUDA accelerator.
Like, it's...
Yeah.
Someone in Flowplane chat said...
I lost it, so I can't say their name,
but Wikipedia needs video content.
Oh, AeroDB.
There it is.
No.
Yeah, no.
Do you want to completely destroy their costs?
Yeah.
Add video.
Yeah.
And honestly,
I can't think of very many articles
that would need it.
No.
None of them.
Reading.
Yeah.
It's a trip.
Yep.
Sounds hard.
It can be.
Yeah.
There apparently are CUDA translation engines.
Quantum Jank says,
I was reading about one the other day.
Yeah, but that would be...
That's not emulation, though,
is my understanding.
My understanding is that would be tools
to allow you to recompile.
But, yeah, guys, for real,
I am not a developer,
so take that for what it is.
Last one of the curated that I have.
When you do decide to change
for the sake of change,
if you decide that at all,
what would it take
for a new WAN show intro or set?
A new WAN show intro
would require me to remember
to remind Ed to make one.
Go after Ed.
Yeah.
And it would require him
to have time to do it.
Ah, probably.
So, that's that.
As for the WAN show set,
we would have to want to spend money
on the WAN show set,
which I'm not feeling
especially motivated to do right now.
Yeah.
2023 has been a challenging year,
and I don't see 2024
not being a challenging year.
Yeah, I feel like unless it moves,
I wouldn't.
Yeah.
And even if it moves,
maybe you can just...
Seems fine.
Yeah.
It's in a state of flux.
You know what we could do
is we could, like,
we could just rotate
the whole thing 90 degrees.
We could have that in the back.
Like, we...
Hold on here.
This is interesting.
What, the coolest wall
of the set never gets shown?
What?
Why don't we just use that one?
What's going on?
Whoa.
Whoa.
There's something else
on the WAN set?
That's illegal.
How could this possibly be allowed?
Hey, that's a relic
in Slay the Spire
that gives you potions
after every battle.
No, that's a C200.
I meant the white elephant.
Rhyno, whatever.
Obviously.
Oh, you've played, I guess.
I don't know.
And...
Are you going to go
all the way over
to the other wall?
Oh, he's continuing.
I like this.
This is cool.
There's something stopping him.
It's the arm
on the stand.
Oh.
Oh.
Oh.
Cam reception.
Whoa.
Speed pan.
We're back.
What is that letter
on the shelf?
I think we can't tell you.
If I remember correctly
what that is,
we...
That's supposed to be private,
right?
I think so.
I think it...
I think there's a request
in it to, like,
not read it in a video
or something.
I don't know if that's
that one or not.
Sometimes people send mail
that they, like,
don't...
You know.
This is not supposed
to be a tweet.
This is supposed
to be mail.
It's fan mail
for the
They're Just Movies podcast.
Oh, never mind.
I thought it was
something else.
No.
Well, I guess
it'll keep living there.
All right, Dan.
Hit me.
Hi, WAN.dll.
Need a home security system.
Ubiquity is awesome,
but price is prohibitive.
Unraid falls down
on the
GF approval factor
needing
VPN to
local network.
Suggestions
on alternatives.
This is a really,
really good question,
and I think
will require
more investigation
and research
than what I have
available to me
right here,
right now on the show.
Maybe chat
will have some thoughts.
Yeah.
That might be
a forum one.
Yeah, forum post.
Good suggestion.
Yeah, there are
some good suggestions
for how to deal
with the VPN
situation,
like tail scale.
That's a very
complicated situation.
Yeah.
And if
Ubiquity is
price prohibitive,
then 100%,
this is a forum post
and like a community
has to figure out
what it works
exactly for your needs.
Yeah.
Because obviously
it's just about
Ubiquity is great.
You're done.
Okay, up next.
Hey, JPhil and Nick,
today I proved
that the RGB sweater
works with the
boss suit.
The JSU Sense podcast.
Tons of compliments
on the look.
If NVIDIA
ever manages
to buy ARM,
do you think
they could topple
Intel and AMD?
I don't think
that ARM
is the threat
to Intel and AMD
right now.
Okay.
I shouldn't say that.
Okay.
The latest
Snapdragon processors
are making
Windows on ARM
kind of look viable.
That's pretty cool.
However,
for a long time,
you know,
the conversation
around,
you know,
the big threat
to Intel and AMD
has been the data center
and the inroads
that ARM is making there.
But
Intel and AMD
are still kind of
kind of doing okay there
and RISC-V
is coming so fast.
Like,
I played
Euro Truck Simulator
on a RISC-V system.
That's actually
kind of nuts.
Yeah.
With 3D acceleration,
dude,
like,
it ran like crap,
but it ran.
The fact that it did
anything.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Risk is good.
Yeah,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I,
I don't think
they would want to.
I mean,
NVIDIA,
their,
their CEO has said publicly
that anytime Intel
is headed into a business,
they,
they would rather just not go
head to head.
Um,
I,
I don't,
I don't see them.
I,
I also don't see how they need to buy ARM
in order to threaten Intel and AMD's data center CPU business anyway.
Like,
we've already got their super chip and stuff like that.
Like,
I just,
I,
could they topple Intel and AMD?
No.
Yeah,
no,
I,
I don't think it's,
I don't think it's a topple so much as a,
as an option.
When do you decide?
Uh,
sorry.
No,
that's it.
That's all I've got for,
um,
the curated.
There we go.
Hey,
DLL,
what's your opinion on the community porting Spider-Man 2 to PC?
I know Linus's opinion on sailing the high seas,
but that's a different topic entirely.
Um,
I did not know about this,
to be perfectly honest with you.
So I'm going to have to,
I'm going to have to look this up.
Luke,
had you heard of this?
Have you seen this?
Oh,
the Spider-Man 2 thing?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I curated that because I was like,
schwatt.
Uh,
I think that's a current gen console only game.
Is that right?
Yes.
It's PS5.
An unofficial.
Oh,
it is not,
this is according to game ramp.
Uh,
it is not expected to be,
released after many of the people involved have withdrawn from the project.
An unofficial Marvel Spider-Man 2 PC port was derived from materials leaked in the recent Insomniac data breach,
and it has been scrapped.
Ah,
yes.
Um,
I think that,
I don't think that's different.
In the case of the Nintendo,
um,
breaches,
and all the kind of historical,
you know,
artwork,
and assets,
and,
uh,
developmental history that was unearthed,
I was,
I was pretty supportive,
because these were products that had already made their money.
In the case of a game that is going to come to PC probably at some point,
uh,
I'm not sure if they've officially announced it or not,
but,
like,
is probably going to come to PC at some point,
but hasn't yet because of their relationship with Sony.
And,
you know,
they're,
they're still very much actively monetizing this intellectual property.
I,
yeah,
I'm,
I don't know what to say other than that,
no,
um,
that's not really very cool.
You didn't,
you didn't make that game.
Um,
it's not really yours.
Also,
like,
Insomniac,
aren't they kind of cool?
I thought so.
Shouldn't we be cool to them?
Love the show?
Has there been any progress with the water-resistant,
ball cap?
I haven't seen or heard anything about it for a while.
Me neither.
Uh,
Dan,
do you want to just forward this one internally and maybe,
uh,
they can get an answer?
Sure.
I will send that to Nick.
Hello,
DLL.
Luke,
have you heard of SPT?
It has to do with Tarkov.
Yeah,
uh,
I,
I think it stands for single player Tarkov.
Um,
yeah,
I,
I,
not really my thing.
If I'm going to want to play Tarkov,
I'm probably going to want to play it with someone else.
Uh,
unless it,
if it supported co-op and the AI was good,
it could be a fun game.
Uh,
but without co-op,
it doesn't really mean much to me.
Um,
there's so many cheaters in standard Tarkov that it's actually insane.
So like,
it would be kind of nice to get away from that.
Um,
and they have a,
they have a bug right now where if you crouch walk at minimum speed,
you actually just make zero sound,
uh,
which in a game like Tarkov is like,
kind of a problem.
Um,
but there's always going to be problems with Tarkov.
So it just kind of is what it is.
I don't know.
I would enjoy a,
uh,
like co-op Tarkov.
I think that'd be really cool,
but single player Tarkov is not really my flavor,
but I can understand how it would be for some people.
Um,
any more in curated or should I just start going through the,
um,
potentials?
I'm looking at the potentials.
Uh,
yeah,
I was replying to potentials.
So Luke,
if you want to pick some potentials for us to do out loud,
I'll go through.
And I got a response back from Nick light about the ball caps.
Well,
that was fast.
Very soon.
The order is in.
Uh,
there's another one.
It's a quick and easy one.
Yeah.
The,
uh,
the order is on its way to us.
It is currently in shipping.
Thank you,
Nick.
Uh,
next question.
When will computer pet bed coming out?
Oh,
soon.
Yeah.
I think we just sorted out a packaging issue where the box was the wrong size.
It was too small and it was like crumpling it too much.
So we're going to have a bigger box for it,
but yeah,
I think we're placing our order.
So,
so soon,
soonish might like on the order of weeks,
but not three,
like,
like more than a month worth of weeks,
but not like many,
many months.
Right.
Um,
this is a,
this is a weird one.
What are your thoughts on algorithmically managed network switches?
Like what Niall is doing?
Have you ever heard of these?
No,
we did.
Uh,
we actually participated in a campaign that Cisco was doing.
Um,
do you remember,
man,
do you guys remember this?
Hold on.
Uh,
here we go.
Oh yeah.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Sounds dangerous.
Okay.
Do you guys remember this campaign from Cisco with Peter,
Peter Dinklage?
No,
he basically walks around.
What is this?
Like London or something?
I don't know.
He walks around some city for three minutes,
positing.
What if questions about,
you know,
a network that self manages.
And then I remember working with the agency and being like,
Hey,
okay,
so what exactly is it that you're promoting?
And they were like,
we're not sure.
We assumed you would know.
Let me get back to you.
So I,
so I,
yeah,
I ended up having to talk to engineers at Cisco to explain like what the
shit exactly it was that they were promoting,
but it was basically that what you're talking about,
like algorithmic monitoring and reacting to,
uh,
changes in,
uh,
network load or user behavior or whatever else.
Um,
I mean,
theoretically it sounds super cool,
but I would need to hear from people who actually admin these networks
before I was going to try to say anything intelligent about it on WAN show.
It sounds kind of like there was an onion article ages ago when the cloud
was a thing.
HP has the cloud.
We definitely do.
And you can do all the cloud things on it.
We have it.
Yeah,
pretty much.
And all of their marketing stuff was,
they had no idea.
It was great.
Uh,
onion HP didn't actually like think that,
uh,
of course.
Let's see.
Let's uncover that one.
Um,
question for Luke.
I'm a mechanical engineer,
but a lot of my job has turned into software development.
I enjoy it and I'm apparently good at it,
but I feel like I don't know what I'm doing.
Advice.
No one does.
Stay curious.
Enjoy your stay.
That's about it.
Hello,
Wangerines.
That's a new one.
That is a new one.
I like that.
I like this a lot.
Have you ever felt external validation of your career choice from an unexpected person or event?
Like some random person who thank you for a specific video.
I don't know.
If my mom ever told me she thought it was cool,
that would be unexpected.
It's funny because,
uh,
she's the one who got me into tech in a big way or in,
in at least some ways.
Um,
like we were the first people I knew with internet.
Yeah.
Like 14,
four K baby.
Um,
but then like at some point she just completely lost interest in it or something.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Um,
yeah.
Shoot.
Um,
it's always really random stuff.
You get recognized in,
in like,
you've mentioned this before,
but if you go into like a Best Buy,
it's like,
yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
But you expected that.
Yeah.
So that's an easy answer.
No,
no,
no,
that's not what I'm saying.
Um,
like those ones are easy expected,
et cetera.
Um,
there's been,
for me,
it's always like people that do stuff that I think is like,
like,
like when,
when,
when we figured out that like people from NASA watch our show,
I was just like,
yeah,
that's pretty cool.
What?
I don't know.
Like you're way smarter than us.
Yeah.
Like what,
what's going on?
How can like anything I say be beneficial or interesting to you?
But yeah,
I don't know.
Um,
it's cool.
Hey,
DLL,
Linus,
you often refer to Final Fantasy six as your favorite games.
Uh,
one of your favorite games.
If SE were to remake it,
would you prefer to have it done in triple A fashion,
i.e.
seven R or with 2.5 D visuals more akin to Octopath Traveler?
I think having played six so many times,
I would actually be pretty open to a re-imagining of the story more like seven remake.
I would be unhappy with how long that would take.
Like looking at how long all the parts of seven remake are taking to come out.
Like I,
I'd be old and gray by the time I could play it.
Um,
at this point,
especially because Final Fantasy six does not get enough love.
Like what they're going to remake set of like,
what,
what would you remake next after seven?
Probably not six.
It's not,
no one's going to remake eight.
Nobody cares about eight except you.
You're the one person.
And no,
you don't count.
The one other,
the one other person that was going to say,
yeah,
I could see them doing,
I would probably be 10.
I was going to say 10.
Yeah.
But with worse voice acting.
I don't think that would be possible.
The ones that I hear spoken about the most in order is seven,
then six,
then 10.
And I,
I'm not even including you.
Um,
yeah,
but the six community is really loud.
The 10 community is much bigger.
Got it.
I mean,
it's frustrating for me because nine is,
if I'm being honest,
probably better than any of them.
Nine is like never.
Nine is so good.
It's glorious.
It's,
it's a masterpiece.
Um,
people are saying,
yeah,
Chrono Trigger would probably get a remake before final fantasy six,
a hundred percent.
Uh,
I accidentally just archived one where someone was asking me if I've made a
burrito with my birds.
I don't know what that means.
You wrap it up in a little break.
In a,
in a,
in a,
and eat them.
No,
um,
no,
never,
never done that except for when you need to handle them and feed them
medicine and stuff,
but I've never done it for like fun.
They hate it.
Um,
some larger birds are more comfortable with it,
but they,
not a fan.
Linus is somebody who has successfully built and managed a tech focused
business.
Common misconception.
It is a media focused business,
but carry on.
It's Linus media group.
That's right.
What advice do you have for individuals looking to start their own business in
2024?
Good luck.
I know the news says economic recovery coming.
That means it's not going to happen.
It's kind of tough times right now.
I,
um,
I,
I,
I,
I'm trying to figure out,
and you know what?
Maybe there are places where,
you know,
things are different,
but I'm kind of trying to figure out what they're talking about.
I mean,
economists,
right?
They're experts.
They,
you know,
no,
or something maybe,
but there's a big difference between the stock market,
you know,
doing really good and what's happening to like real people.
Yeah.
And the earnings of the stock market doesn't reflect at all.
What happens to real people?
It doesn't care in the slightest.
Yeah.
Uh,
people are saying interest rates are coming down.
Yeah.
Well,
that's,
that's rumored.
Yeah.
Interest rates are supposed to be coming down.
That will only help in certain ways.
It won't hurt in,
you know,
in general,
but,
um,
um,
you know,
go hard,
but play it safe.
You know,
make sure you've got something that has a,
has a,
has a clear value,
you know,
regardless of,
of what kind of economic times we're heading into.
Yeah.
LLD,
but mostly Linus,
here in the year of our Lord,
talk it,
is it talking,
Toshay?
Talk it,
I don't,
I don't do the,
don't do the foreign words.
I only,
I only read,
I've never heard it said out loud,
so I'm not,
I'm not going to be able to help you.
Really?
Yeah.
Okay.
Uh,
are you watching Canucks games now that they're competitive or is it badminton hours till the end?
No.
Um,
I,
I,
I,
I'm Googling it.
I,
I stopped watching competitive.
I stopped watching NHL hockey after I think either the last lockout or the one before the lockout.
I was,
I've talked about this before,
but I was just kind of tired of,
um,
I got sort of disenchanted with the whole thing.
I stopped seeing teams as,
you know,
teams representing my city.
And I started seeing them for what,
honestly,
sorry to red pill you here,
but for what they are businesses,
they're businesses.
They build brands,
they extract money from customers.
You're not a fan,
you're a customer and they're not a team.
They're a business.
Um,
and so I just,
it just,
it made it really hard for me to cheer.
And since I don't bet all of a sudden the stakes were really low for me and it just kind of drained the fun out of it.
I still love hockey.
I'd still love to watch hockey.
I would play hockey if I had the physique for it.
Um,
it's,
it's just,
it's such an amazing sports.
It's,
it's great.
Um,
but I just,
I,
I also just don't have the kind of time that I used to back when I really followed it and watched every game.
Uh,
with that said,
I read,
um,
I do know how things are going and I,
I pay attention to the cast of characters.
Um,
they're having a heck of a season.
I mean,
I guess maybe this is,
maybe this is it.
We're due to,
uh,
to losing game seven in the finals.
It's been a while.
So for those wondering,
it's happened three times.
We've never actually brought home a Stanley cup,
but three connects teams,
82,
94,
and
2004,
2006.
No,
some,
some time,
some time around there.
Um,
all three times to,
I think it was the Islanders,
the Rangers,
and then the Bruins.
Uh,
they went to seven games and couldn't get her done.
So yeah.
Was it 2011?
Thanks guys.
2011.
Uh,
uh,
yeah,
it's,
uh,
it's,
it's,
it's,
I play badminton.
I don't play hockey and I,
I don't have time to watch games,
but I'm like,
I'll,
I'll just end up like slack jawed staring at the TV.
If there's a hockey game on in like a restaurant or something like that.
I don't have cable.
That was me too.
So I don't have an easy way to watch.
Uh,
the one time I subscribed for cable,
I got a free trial right as the playoff started so that I could watch the playoffs.
And then I canceled it after.
So yeah,
I do like hockey.
Just no,
but yeah,
the,
the,
the boys,
the boys are doing a bang up job this year.
Yeah.
Well,
I'm sure you have built out your home network.
I know.
I guess as,
um,
as you've already finished your home network,
are there any updates or changes you would have done?
I'm about to finish construction on a new home.
Oh,
looking to upgrade my current 60 to wifi to seven.
Oh,
wifi seven's amazing.
Uh,
the good news is that nothing will prevent me from just swapping out 60 access points for
seven.
Uh,
when the time comes,
I'm not going to bother until I have any seven devices in the house.
Um,
more conduit.
I,
Hey,
I replaced the display port cable to my land PC.
It was damaged.
I,
I'm,
I'm pretty sure a hundred percent now that it was damaged because now that I have a new
cable in it's working perfectly,
but I was getting blanking issues and it took about three hours to go from the mechanical
room through the theater over to the land center.
And then from the pole station in the land center over to PC one.
And we actually buried two extras in the wall,
but they were both just short of long enough for PC one.
Like it would have been fine for station two,
three,
four or five.
Um,
but the conduit was a lifesaver.
I mean,
it would have taken me forever.
It would have taken me tens of hours of ripping out drywall and putting it back on and mudding
and painting it.
Like,
like it just,
if I wanted it embedded in the wall,
yeah,
more conduit is more better.
How's this should just have conduit.
I probably would have run more fiber.
Fiber's cool.
It's not necessary,
not for home,
but it's really cool.
I didn't know I was going to do like land parties at my house though.
You know,
like 50 users,
you know,
we're doing another one,
right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
When can be good.
I don't know.
Chase is going to work.
March,
March.
Oh,
do we have a date?
No,
it'll probably get pushed.
We still don't know who's in the right on that one.
Yeah.
I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
We were going to get it done no matter what.
Yeah.
All right.
The time,
the time,
I'm a little bit actually worried about certain things because of that now,
but you know,
yeah.
Uh,
let's see.
Let's see.
As someone who's gearing up to start a company,
why are ethically run companies so rare nowadays?
How do you instill company ethics in your new hires?
I think we need to do a better job of integrating new hires.
We've grown really fast over the last couple of years.
And I think that culturally we've struggled a little bit.
That's totally not at all what the question was asking,
but yeah.
Like,
Oh,
Oh yeah.
I guess they were asking about ethics,
not culture.
I consider ethics like a pretty key part of your culture though.
No,
he was asking how you do it.
And you said,
I said,
we haven't done a great job,
but we have it points.
Okay.
I mean,
I guess,
but I mean,
well,
do you not at all know how to do it?
Well,
you just have to,
you have to just be a good example.
Trickle down ethics.
I,
I,
I unarchived it.
Well,
and it's not just that,
right?
Like you also have to be willing to listen.
Yeah.
Like we've,
we've had,
we've had times when there's a lot of times from your perspective,
you won't see it,
whatever it is.
And so,
and a lot of times I still won't see it the first time someone brings it up.
I mean,
people's minds are hard to change,
right?
Um,
including our own and I'm not perfect.
I won't be,
but,
um,
I think just trying matters a lot.
And I hate to be this guy,
but,
uh,
a lot of non-ethical practices lead to successful businesses.
So that's probably why you see less of them.
Yeah.
We've definitely created trouble for ourselves that we could have avoided by just
lying,
cheating,
or stealing.
Yep.
And one,
one negative thing,
and I've brought this up a bunch.
The example that I almost always use is the,
uh,
developers speaking on stage at blizzard thing,
but it extrapolates to like everything.
Uh,
but when a company does do something good,
uh,
by like admitting something or doing whatever else,
like anything on those realms.
And then the community just assumes it's the tip of the iceberg spearheads them
for it.
Yeah.
That can crush companies that are trying to do good things.
And just because the silent ones that are doing bad stuff,
you don't hear about because no one's bothering to investigate or do anything like that.
Um,
those companies end up living and it's like,
it's a problem.
I've brought this up a bunch of times on the show,
but I think sometimes,
uh,
certain communities don't understand.
Um,
like I see this in Pokemon go a lot.
I've started playing cause it gets me out walking and people scream so much in that game.
All the communities,
like I was all excited.
I was like,
this is really fun.
There's like events every weekend.
Like this weekend I'm planning on going out.
It's going to be snowy,
whatever.
I'll judge through it because there's some event.
Do I really care about the Pokemon?
No,
but it's some gamified thing that makes my brain want to go for a walk.
So I'm,
I'm diving in.
Um,
but the community is just so mad all the time.
I'm all happily playing this game and I look into like what's going on on Reddit or whatever else.
And the whole thing is just a dumpster fire.
And it's like,
Oh wow.
Okay.
You don't,
don't have to be so mad about everything all the time.
And I think sometimes people don't necessarily understand.
They like really like this thing.
So they're really passionate about it.
And then something about it bothers them.
So they just scream to the mountains and they don't necessarily understand that
newcomers to this thing,
also known as the thing that's going to help keep the thing that you like alive,
are going to be scared off by the amount of hate that's being spread all the time.
So like you kind of need to do the,
the compliment sandwich thing more often and in more realms,
uh,
because like if you only ever point out the bad,
you never point out the good,
then adoption is going to fall.
And then this thing that you like clearly considering you're still playing or enjoying
it or doing engaging with it or whatever it is,
um,
is going to just completely die and you won't have it anymore.
So try to remember that that applies to companies that applies to video games.
It applies to whatever.
All right.
I think we've just got one or two more.
Uh,
we had someone asking about,
Oh,
did that get archived or answered or something?
All right.
See you later.
Oh yeah,
no,
here it is.
Michael asks,
what game do you think was most overhyped than underperforming versus the most unanticipated
success?
So,
so underhyped and overperforming this year.
Also,
this was the one I was more interested in.
What game do you think killed a studio the hardest this year?
Cause there was that,
um,
the Gollum didn't kill the studio.
No,
but that was,
that was a big blow.
That was,
that was probably the overhyped underperforming one.
Yeah.
Um,
what was that one that,
that recent one where they launched the game and it like was completely not what they said
it was.
Oh,
it's just a scam though.
I think that studio was dead no matter what.
Okay.
Um,
it definitely got killed a really hard.
That's true.
I don't remember the name of it.
Um,
Oh,
Pal world looking hot.
Yeah.
That's that Pokemon with guns thing.
I kind of want to try it.
Um,
I don't remember the name of this game.
You know,
the day after it.
Yeah.
I don't remember what it was.
Something kind of like that.
Oh shoot.
I just accidentally archived one.
All right.
I don't remember what it's called,
but yeah,
it was basically a scam and then it got pulled cause it was basically a scam.
Something like that.
I think that is pretty much it.
Yeah.
Uh,
we will enjoy all of your,
the Steve mock necks.
Um,
it's been pretty popular.
Nice.
Um,
again,
we're still working on long t-shirt formats.
Don't worry.
It's happening.
Uh,
and we will see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Bye.
Bye.
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Bye.
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Bye.