What's up everyone?
Welcome to the WAN Show.
We've got a fantastic show lined up for you today.
First and foremost, as you guys can see from the title, we've got to talk about what shameless
shills we are.
Calling for a Seuss and sponsored by them and not addressing the big controversy, which
obviously we'll be talking about on the WAN Show.
Why would we?
We usually talk about such things.
We're also going to be talking about Google I.O.
Man it was an AI extravaganza this year.
What else we got this week?
YouTube blocks ad block.
What?
Counter block.
No.
I'm going to block their block of my block.
I don't know how to follow that out.
Because you got blocked.
Oh man.
We already talked about the former Uber CSO being found guilty for concealing a data breach.
So maybe we should talk about how a Chinese company released a new CPU.
Okay.
We could also talk about smartwatches that you can no longer set the time on.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
What?
I wrote the intro.
Let's see because we don't have to preview that.
Yeah.
The show is brought to you today by a Seuss, oh sorry I wasn't supposed to say that part.
Squarespace, Seasonic and JumpCloud.
All right guys.
Without all seriousness, we've got to talk about the big controversy that has been making
big waves in the tech-osphere over the last, I mean realistically the whole thing started
a few weeks ago when we saw that CPU that got popped and burned on the bottom.
We talked about that on WAN Show.
We did talk about that on WAN Show.
Some people have said, hey what's up with you guys not talking about this at all?
We actually did.
And then we've been kind of waiting to learn more and learn more we have.
RumorsNexus has completed their series of videos about what's been going on with Ryzen
X3D chips that have been, well I think blowing up is probably a little bit melodramatic,
but burning up is certainly a way that we could describe them due to higher than anticipated
voltages being applied by particularly some motherboard manufacturers, Bioses and Asus
seems to be at the center of this controversy.
Now there's been a lot of questions under our review of the ROG Ally that went up yesterday
asking why that, you know I didn't even say the word because I couldn't find my swear
button.
The point is why haven't we addressed this and why are we shilling for Asus when everyone
else is mad trying to, okay.
You wouldn't like him when he's angry.
It was a review of a handheld.
That was the embargo lift day.
There was no coordinated anything.
If it was sponsored you'd know because it would have said, it was sponsored by dbrand
for crying out loud.
It's a showcase or something.
Look I've had enough, I've had my fair share of controversies over the last couple of years
and in some cases, man, I had it coming.
But this is one of those ones that I'm looking at going, hey, hold on, wait a minute.
What?
We don't even review motherboards.
We haven't for like a really long time.
The one motherboard video that we've uploaded in the last year was on some weird one that
we got off Reddit that had an AMD CPU socket but was a Z490 chipset.
It was some chipset that never got released and we were like, hey, cool, I want to play
with that.
Yeah, that's a little different.
We don't review motherboards.
So the reason that we haven't covered it yet is because there hasn't been WAN show yet.
That's why we didn't cover it.
Also, man, the conspiracy theories about how paid off that ROG Ally video was, I don't
even know what to tell you guys.
We opened the video criticizing ASUS for their shady marketing of the thing because I was
pissed.
I got brought in to do this preview where they go, okay, yeah, blah, blah, blah, up
to two times faster.
And then I'm sitting here going, okay, now that we've tested this more extensively, these
up twos are not great.
So the first thing we did was go after them for shady marketing.
Do you honestly search your soul?
Do you honestly believe that anyone at ASUS marketing approved us criticizing their shady
marketing anyway?
The truth is almost a week before Jay posted his video, we had already informed ASUS that
if they didn't deal with some unrelated issues related to customer service that had popped
up on our forum, we were going to be putting all of our sponsor deals with them on pause.
The good news is that we can kind of get through everything that they have said in
response to that, as well as the update that we've gotten from them today about what they're
doing regarding the whole beta bio situation.
But before we do that, we need to catch you guys up if you're not sure what the heck has
been going on.
So ASUS responded to the overheating slash burning up, I think is really a better way
to put it, overheating issue with Ryzen 7000 X3D chips with a rapid beta BIOS update, which
was supposed to cap SOC voltage to 1.3 volts.
That beta BIOS was, and still is on some pages at least, labeled with a disclaimer indicating
that installing it would void the user's warranty.
So the perception was, I'm sorry, I bought your product, okay?
And my options are either I have it die, or I maybe still have it die, but I can apply
the fix, but then I get no warranty?
Are you for real?
Now ASUS claims that this is standard boilerplate legalese that is attached to all of their
beta BIOSes.
And that seems true.
That actually, we did actually check that.
So we used an archived version of ASUS's site from last year that actually does appear to
be attached to all of their beta BIOSes.
They told us that they did not intend to communicate that they wouldn't respect users' warranties,
and that they will honor the warranty of any user affected by the beta BIOS, Expo-enabled
or not.
This is really good news, and is something that quite frankly I would have expected from
them anyway.
ASUS is, here, hold on, we've got, this is great.
I've got a quote in here from, I think Riley was actually working on this topic in the
doc.
Yeah, here we go.
Some more takeaways from our calls with ASUS that Riley was involved in.
They say they were more focused on fixing the issue and making sure customers weren't
continuing to damage their boards than they were focused on PR.
Yeah, that's pretty obvious, because the PR job that they've done here is atrocious.
I wish I could say that this was an isolated incident, but they are spectacularly bad at
communication and they are spectacularly bad at creating action plans sometimes.
This is the kind of thing that you see often when you've got a company where there's a
regional branch that is engaging directly with consumers, in this case, ASUS USA or
North America really, they cover the whole region, and then you've got a Taiwanese head
office branch that makes all the actual decisions.
The opportunity for the left hand to have absolutely no idea what the right hand is
doing is, well, this.
Constant.
Yeah.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that they are doing the right thing.
I fully expected them to do the right thing.
We had already gotten in touch with them over a couple of customer support issues that were
posted in our sponsor.
It's either sponsor concerns or sponsor complaints thread over on the forum.
That's one of the ways that we ensure that our community is being taken care of by our
sponsors and my understanding is at least one of those was actually a complete miscommunication.
It was someone who was mad on behalf of someone else who already had a replacement board nearly
a month ago, but they were mad about the way ASUS handled it, which is justifiable, but
at a certain point you kind of have to ask, well, what do you want other than a replacement
motherboard?
Because stuff's going to break.
Stuff happens from time to time, and I can't say I have all the details of that one.
All I know is I sent an email 10 days ago that said this needs to go away or everything's
on pause, and now I have heard back that it is gone.
At a certain point I can't get into the nitty gritty details of everything.
Anywho, ASUS says they have already changed the disclaimer, so it doesn't make it sound
like updating to the beta BIOS will void your warranty, but the change may take some
time to propagate across all of their sites.
Complicating matters in all of this.
Gamers Nexus tested motherboards after the beta update and found they were still exceeding
safe voltages of 1.4 volts.
So yeah, that would have been a big problem if people actually weren't getting their boards
covered under warranty, but the thing is realistically, regardless of the pressure from users and
from media, this is not the sort of thing that AMD would have allowed anyway.
If it was causing their chips to die, it's something that they would have been working
closely with ASUS to remediate and ensure that their collective, their shared customers
were not going to have an extremely sour taste in their mouth, because you got to understand
that not everyone who is going to encounter this issue is highly technical, is watching
channels like LTT or Gamers Nexus or Jay's Two Cents or whatever else.
There's people out there that buy a motherboard the same way that I would buy, man, what would
be a comparison?
A tire.
RC car.
Sure.
Yeah.
Okay.
Sure.
We both went with things that roll, so same wavelength.
This is how we work, ladies and gentlemen.
I know enough to know that, okay, I need an ESC, I need a battery, I need either like
an RTR, ready to roll, I think it is, is what that stands for.
I know I need a transmitter, or maybe I don't if I get one that includes one.
I have some idea of everything, but other than, oh yeah, I think Traxxas is pretty good
but overpriced, and Arma used to be pretty budget friendly, but then they got bought
by someone.
I kind of know a little bit about it, but not enough to make a truly informed decision.
A lot of people going into this would be like that, and so if all they know is, yeah, AMD
good, AMD CPU fry, that reflects really poorly on everyone involved, and it's in everyone's
best interest to get this fixed, because believe it or not, nobody likes issuing warranty replacements,
and if they can get them fixed in the field, that's absolutely what they're going to be
doing.
While Asus has absolutely been involved in some pretty frustrating warranty drama over
the years, I've got to say that every time something's been flagged to me, it's either
been resolved before I got a chance to really look into it, or it's been resolved with me
sending a quiet ping, and it's gone away.
It shouldn't have to get to that point.
It should never get to that point, but in some cases, like I'm trying, the most recent
one.
There's always going to be something.
The most recent one was someone mad, because they were arming a laptop, and that laptop
model was no longer produced.
So they were offered a much, much higher spec laptop that had a GPU that was wildly
faster and a CPU that was either one or two generations newer.
Then Asus went, wait, sorry, we actually can't get that one either, but we've got this, and
they were offered one that was still markedly better, but AMD, which I perceived as better,
but with a slightly lesser GPU, which, yeah, sucks from a gaming standpoint, but is also
good from a power consumption standpoint, and was still way better than what they were
originally offered.
So they were offered one, and then they were like, oh crap, no, I actually don't have that,
but I'll give you this one that is better-er in this way and un-better-er in this other
way, and they wanted me to do a whole expose about it, and they sent me a whole thing on
the forum, and I'm looking at it going, I would take the laptop.
I think you should take the laptop.
It's still significantly better than the one that you had, like I don't know.
But that was still a crappy customer experience, because nobody likes to be offered something
and then rug-pulled, right?
If they had something that they were happy with, then that sucks.
I mean, it's like rug-pulled, but then they also put a really nice pillow under you before
you fall.
It's still better than what you were, better than you had, which is more than I would expect.
Honestly, I think the underlying issue here is that there's this attitude in the IT industry
that customer service after the fact is an afterthought.
It's not something that very many companies make a core part of their brand, which is
why it makes me so unhappy that EVGA pulled out of GPUs.
But you can see that for them to maintain that level of service and that reputation,
you need margin, and there just obviously wasn't enough margin left in GPUs for them
to continue to do that.
All right, let's get back to ASUS not being perfect for a long, long spell here.
Man, you guys.
Another complication.
ASUS changed the CPU support table for some motherboards, indicating that X3D CPUs have
only been validated since the most recent non-beta BIOS release, 1303, yet the list
of BIOS updates still says the older 1202 releases recommended for optimum performance
with the X3D processors.
Some users suggested this was done to suggest that X3D wasn't supported on 1202.
According to ASUS, this was done to ensure that users only download the most safe BIOS
going forward.
Yeah.
Okay.
Some more takeaways.
Yeah, we've got the thing about how they suck at PR, so at least they know.
I guess that's good.
We asked them if they would consider putting up notices slash updates on their support
pages to prevent people from getting the wrong idea.
They said they couldn't comment on that, and again mentioned there would be an FAQ next
week, and Riley put in italics just in time, yeah.
That's the biggest thing.
Like, if they're going to comment to you, oh, well, like, people actually have this
whatever, that needs to be on their site.
You know what happened, though?
I wasn't on the call.
I don't have any kind of ... Riley came in asking, hey, we can't get a proper response
from ASUS, clearly did after, but he came in and talked to me, and he was like, hey,
we're having trouble getting in touch with someone, do you have anyone there you can
talk to?
I'm like, no, I hired my ASUS contact.
No, I actually don't really know anybody there anymore.
I mean, I would be pissed.
If I was an ASUS customer, and I ran through this scenario, I would be royally pissed off.
But you know what?
I'll tell you what happened, is the technical people know exactly what's going on, and are
working on it.
The PR people are sitting there trying to understand what the technical people are telling
them, and then the legal department is getting in here saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, we don't
want to commit to anything.
Don't say anything.
Everything boilerplate, everything CYA, and then we can always make exceptions case by
case by case by case by case, and do all of them, I don't care, but don't put anything
out there.
Yeah, but they already did put out there that they were going to screw everyone, so they
got to do something.
That's the problem.
At a certain point, you have to tell your legal team to kind of screw off and just deal
with it.
Well, the thing that happens when you tell your legal team to screw off and deal with
it is that-
You end up with trust me bro t-shirts?
Hey, in fairness to me, okay, did we take care of everyone?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Were we going to anyway?
Yeah.
Okay, trust me, bro.
So you're saying that they're pulling a trust me bro, is that it?
Yeah, but then we're talking about bad communication, all this other kind of stuff in the past,
so like it's-
I mean, okay, then it's a full trust me bro, because that's part of it.
That's a key element of the trust me bro trifecta, okay?
You've got the overconfidence in your own image, you've got the sort of appearance of
sketchy behavior, or maybe even downright sketchy behavior, and then you've got the,
what was the last one?
The crappy communication.
You got all three.
It's perfect.
Yeah, I don't know, you should license it to them or something.
Yeah, you know what?
You know what would be amazing?
Asus, we can handle this.
We create our own Better Business Bureau clone, okay, but it's just TMB, and accredited businesses
can display the trust me bro seal on their website.
Oh, so it's like Secret Shopper, and you get a TMB seal, and you get a different grade
based on how well you did in Secret Shopper.
I'm so excited.
Now, actually, on that subject, oh, that didn't make it into the notes, I had fired that,
you know what, it doesn't matter, this is a very dense topic.
So on that subject, we have our own ways of holding folks accountable.
We don't review motherboards, right?
So it's not the kind of thing that we deep dive into day in, day out, at least not now.
As the lab gets up and running, you can fully expect to see more coverage of things like
individual models of graphics cards, and motherboards, and power supplies, and things like that.
In fact, we're shooting a lab update early next week that is gonna show you guys the
power supply tester is finally fully configured.
We had Chroma out here earlier this week to get us the training on it.
Really excited to show you guys that we're gonna blow up a power supply, it's gonna be
awesome.
What was I saying?
Right, so you can expect to see more of that from us in the future, but that doesn't mean
that we don't have other things that are in the works in order to keep not just the industry
accountable but actually our sponsors specifically.
So I can finally announce this, but because it's been in the works for I think a couple
of months now, we are going to be doing round one of secret shopping, our sponsors.
We anonymously-
So it's done already, right?
Yeah, it's done now.
Yeah, because we don't talk about doing it unless it's done.
I always like to keep my cards pretty close to my chest when it comes to sponsorships,
or excuse me, when it comes to secret shopper.
We're very transparent about our sponsorships.
But this one has progressed to the point where we have collected a lot of interesting information,
and this is gonna be one of the ways that we continue to evaluate ongoing sponsor relationships
going forward.
That's something we're gonna talk about in more detail once we actually come out with
the video.
But we had one of our probationary employees who's not listed anywhere publicly just buy
things completely anonymously and then in some cases fabricate issues so that they could
get in touch with their support and just documented the entire process.
I'm really excited.
I haven't seen any of the results.
In fact, I didn't even pick which sponsors we were gonna do.
Is ASUS in it?
I actually don't know.
Oh, man.
That would have been really interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder if I could find out for you guys.
You know what?
No.
Cards to my chest.
We're gonna blindside everybody with it.
One thing that I'm unsure of right now, just reading this ASUS topic, because I saw some
of it, but not a ton up until when I read the doc.
In the private communication that we theoretically have, they're talking about how they're gonna
deal with it and everybody's gonna be fine.
Yes.
What public communication has there been at all?
Other than these postings, it doesn't seem like they have done a particularly good job
of publicly communicating.
So as of right now, if someone didn't watch this, they would still think that their warranty
was void if they ran the thing, is that correct?
I actually don't know.
I think they said that they are updating the messaging, but it hasn't fully propagated.
It's still not done yet.
Yeah.
That's just them removing the disclaimer, right?
Let me have a look here.
Hold on.
I've actually got a screen capture that I can show you guys here in my notes.
Except as provided in the product warranty and to the maximum extent permitted by law,
ASUS is not responsible for the incidental or consequential damages resulting from using...
Yeah.
So this is the original wording.
I believe that original wording is still there on some pages and will continue to be until
it actually propagates.
Now here's the thing.
It was worded as rollout.
So it's actually potential that those pages haven't even started.
Now here's the thing with trust me, bro, right?
Remember where I got into trouble was because I knew in my head that if there was ever any
kind of issue, we would deal with it.
Maybe they know in their heads that if there's ever any kind of issue, they will deal with
it.
But because of their somewhat spotty history with customer service, I don't know if they've
actually earned that for one thing.
And for another, if they have communicated that warranty is not going to cover this,
unless someone gets mad and messages support, they might not realize and they might just
go buy another board thinking that their warranty is invalid.
And that would really suck.
Now I would bet you money that has already happened.
Now a piece like probably a bunch.
Now a piece that I do not know is how many actual affected users, how many actual CPUs
have burned.
Does anyone have any kind of idea of that?
Anyone?
Here's the thing.
Even if it's only one or five or 50, whatever that number is, that doesn't necessarily mean
that everyone's out of the woods.
If you've been accidentally applying a higher than expected voltage to a CPU, it could cause
its lifespan to decrease in a way that is not obvious immediately.
This is pretty terribly handled.
Yeah, we've got some people that are like really confused.
Olive processor over on Floatplane says, this isn't how anything works, Linus.
There's no such thing as brand trust unless you've drank the Kool-Aid.
There is such a thing as reputation though.
Like this is the kind of argument that sort of ended up creating, I think, a lot of the
negative sort of circular arguments that existed back during the trust me, bro controversy
is like once we had the limited lifetime warranty up, the people who were still mad,
so people would point out, hey, they've got their limited lifetime warranty up.
Everything is fine and everyone is completely covered.
People would say, oh, and by the way, this is like the same as these other brands that
have a great reputation for covering their customers.
And people would respond and say, yeah, but those guys have a great reputation.
So obviously like their word is better.
And then it's like, are you even listening to yourself?
Because you can't apply that logic to one and not to another.
Like I said, Asus's reputation is not one that I would look at and go, yeah, obviously
they're just 100% going to deal with this.
It's not the worst, but it isn't that either.
But that doesn't mean that no company can have a reputation for customer service.
I mean, by that logic, why don't you just buy everything from some brand you've never
heard of on AliExpress?
I wouldn't.
I would rather have some idea that I'm probably going to get taken care of, right?
Apparently I'm supposed to tell Ryan from customer service.
They're great.
Okay.
Shout out Ryan from customer service.
I wouldn't even if I had, so I have never dealt with Asus customer service.
I've had a bunch of Asus things and none of their stuff has ever died on me that I didn't
just straight up kill or it was like a decade old already.
So that's good, but it's not a reflection of their customer service at all.
The only customer service that I've really dealt with in this realm is EVJ.
I've told that story a bunch of times.
I don't need to tell it again.
It was very, very good.
EVJ's customer support was the best customer support I've ever dealt with in any realm
ever.
But like if I saw this, I wouldn't believe that they're going to handle it.
And if they've had no communication that they're going to handle it, like, yeah, I don't know.
I'm not willing to necessarily condemn until we like see what they actually do.
But like, yeah, if I was a user and this happened to me right now, I would be royally pissed
off.
And I think, I think they have a right to be there.
They're told that they're screwed and there was no follow up communication like that.
That can't happen.
This, this has gotta be, this has gotta be resolved.
At least during the trust me bro thing you were saying, trust me bro, we're going to
handle it.
They aren't saying anything as far as my understanding goes.
So like what are, what are people supposed to take from this?
Like that was the trust me bro thing.
There was some form of quote saying that you're going to be handled.
The thing wasn't done.
They wanted a warranty.
That type of stuff wasn't handled yet, but you're like, it's coming.
We're figuring it out.
Trust me.
This one, there is none of that.
I'm not saying that that is if they come out and just go like, LOL TMB, we licensed it
from Linus, whatever.
I'm not saying that that would like be good.
But like, they're not even at least doing that.
You know what I mean?
Like, I don't know.
This is, this is rough.
This is very rough.
Yeah.
I mean, I do think they deserve some heat for this.
Yeah, they do.
The problem for me is I don't like getting dragged into their drama and I'm looking at
it this morning.
I'm reading, I'm reading comments on the video from yesterday.
Why isn't Linus talking about this?
And I'm looking, I'm looking at this going like, Holy **** you guys.
How have you not dealt with this?
Make this go away.
Yeah.
What, what, what do you, what do you have to send out a motherboard?
10 motherboards, a hundred, but I don't ****ing care.
Put them in the ****ing mail.
What's wrong with you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we hadn't, we hadn't, there wasn't even enough time for us to have a wan show yet and
we don't cover motherboards.
So everyone needs to relax when it comes to us.
There's a bunch of people saying that we're like covering Asus's butt.
So I just wanted to be clear that we're not, we don't think that they did a good job.
And I specifically said, I don't think they've earned a trust me bro guarantee.
Yes.
So if it wasn't clear, hopefully it is now clear.
Yeah.
Hopefully basically the only, the only thing that I think people could look at from what
we talked about and say, you know, well that sounds like butt covering is when I mentioned
that I don't think that AMD would be very happy with this situation if it was actually
killing their chips.
But really that having, having been on the other side, there are absolutely fires and
there are people working on putting out those fires and you are not privy to a lot of it.
That's just, that's just not how this works.
Not everyone at a company is authorized to speak publicly.
Sometimes the people who are authorized to speak publicly probably shouldn't.
This stuff is very real and definitely happens.
And I'm sure that they were dealing with this.
They clearly did an extraordinarily poor job, but no, I'm not in a position where I'm never
going to work with them again or anything like that because from my point of view, it's
much more effective for me to just say, if you don't deal with this, I will never work
with you again.
And then they will deal with it and then we will continue to work with them.
I mean, that's, that's my style of leverage.
So you know, I guess it's, I guess it's not really that different from Jay's.
Like if we, if we look at, if we look at a sponsor relationship, like a romantic relationship,
you know, I'm basically saying privately, I'm withholding sex until you change your
behavior.
And then Jay is posting on Facebook, I'm withholding sex from my spouse.
That's what we, oh man.
So what we did with Eufy is I'm, I'm never giving you this ever again.
Yeah.
And what we did that one publicly.
Well that's different though.
That's different.
No I agree.
That was users private video data.
And they continued to systematically lie about it over time.
I'm not equating the two situations.
I'm just saying our response to it wasn't, I'm withholding temporarily.
It was like, we done.
I want a poll.
A poll.
Yeah.
I want to, I want to hear what people, how people would rate ASUS's customer service
out of five.
So five options?
Yeah.
Like I would do like one to five and then like NA or something like that.
I want to hear from the float plane audience cause I've got AJ tech saying it's a long
block of text.
I'm not going to read the whole thing, but basically that they were pretty happy.
Yeah.
No one else is really, no one else is really talking about it yet.
But man, the reality of it is I've had really, I've had really awful experiences with most
of the Taiwanese tech companies at some point or another.
And a lot of that was not obviously as a tech reviewer where, you know, I get the white
glove treatment, right?
A lot of that is when I was working at NCIX and seeing the kind of the way that they would
treat their partners.
Right.
Because have you guys ever, ever heard the, the saying a man who is kind to you and rude
to a waiter is not a kind man.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is, those are, those are words to live by right there.
And seeing the way that a company treats their partners is, is one of the ways that I evaluate
the integrity of a company and the number of times, the way that most computer hardware
manufacturers will go, will, will go to any lengths to try to deny a warranty claim is
frankly kind of gross.
It sucks.
There are some standout non like that behaviors, behaviors.
There are some standout companies that don't behave like that.
Ones that come to mind, EVGA, although they were much more challenging to deal with as
a retailer than as a consumer, I will tell you guys that much, Coursera, Coursera basically
had a blanket policy with us, put it on a pallet, send it back to us.
My understand, I've heard just small rumblings.
It started very small.
I've heard rumblings that it might not be that easy with them anymore, but overall they've
had a really pro consumer approach to, to taking care of warranty issues and support
issues in during the time that I've worked with them, which is a long time.
Logitech, Logitech has basically a legendary reputation when it comes to replacements.
My understanding again is more recently they've had some quality issues and people have had
to do more RMA's, but they've still been really good about communication, getting stuff back
to you.
Are there any that, that you know of that just have spotless reputations?
Noctua.
Yeah.
Noctua's one.
Floatplane chat.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
I would only want to speak from my own experience.
Yeah, for sure.
And it's just EVGA.
That EVGA call was one of the most insane things.
That level of customer support was so insanely above and beyond.
I just, I don't know.
I will always be friendly towards their customer support unless it's like drastically changed,
which from what I've heard from the community, it hasn't.
Every time I talk about EVGA customer support, everybody's like, yeah, they're great.
So like, sounds good to me.
Yeah.
A lot of really good feedback for the, I mean, the ones I mentioned mostly, I'm kind of looking
for other ones.
Some good feedback for HyperX.
Okay.
That's good to know.
We haven't actually worked with HyperX in a long time.
No, all the time.
We used to all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder if Brian's still there.
I should email him.
Be like, hey, are you like tired of sponsoring esports teams?
Maybe we want to come back to like tech media.
That was basically the whole thing.
We were still chill, but they were just like, yeah, we're like spending all our money on
esports.
Doing esports teams now.
Fair enough.
Don't think it went super well.
So almost everybody, 70% are saying NA or never dealt with.
Then it goes 7% did like one as in low.
I've got it up now.
Okay.
Yeah, you can see it.
Yeah.
The majority of it's never dealt with.
And then it's like pretty even distribution except for five.
Very few people said it was like five.
Like outstanding.
Yeah.
Very, very few.
The rest of it is pretty even all the way through.
I think this needs to be a big wake up call for them.
Yeah, that's not great.
I wonder.
Ooh, no, I don't actually want to pit them against each other, but like I bet you there's
a few companies we could throw in there with the exact same poll that would score a lot
better.
Yeah.
I mean, I think if we threw like a Logitech or an EVGA in there, they'd probably score
a lot better, but here's an interesting one, and this is something that's frustrated me
for years.
And in fact, I think I've even talked about on WAN Show, if I put any other motherboard
manufacturer in there, would the story be any different?
No, that's interesting.
That's actually very interesting.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Literally universally, I've had and seen anecdotally very mediocre at best experiences with literally
all of them.
And I can see some of the factors that might contribute to that.
They have so many SKUs, sometimes with very little variation, but so many SKUs across
all these different regions, they are actually very complicated products.
Yes.
And they deal with a lot of users that are not necessarily particularly experienced.
So the volume of support.
Genuinely poke at or prod or crank things on motherboards all the time.
Yeah, that's tough.
I wonder if needing to unscrew things and screw things back in for M.2 drives has increased
failure rates.
That's a good question.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I can see people cranking an M.2 too tight.
The thing is that wouldn't go back to the motherboard maker.
That would probably go back to the SSD manufacturer though, because they'd be sitting there going
like, why is it that every time someone installs, well, no, because every board was using metal
screws for the longest time.
Yeah, this is tough.
Yeah, full plane chat now lighting up with people just saying, yeah, you know, the one
positive one.
Oh, this is great.
I'm Victor says, haven't seen any complaints about ECS or Foxconn motherboards in a while.
Yeah, I get it.
Haven't seen an ECS or a Foxconn motherboard in a while.
Let me, let me, let me tell you though, when they were around, they were not perfect.
Oh man.
Um, yeah, so tough situation, but here's what I will, here's my final, here's my final word
on the subject.
Asus, in good faith, we still want to continue to work with you.
We need to see you improve this here.
This is, this is rough.
Yeah.
Fix.
You know what's not rough.
If you guys want to interact with the show, you know what the way to do it is leave a
merch message.
Just like down here, you don't want to send a super chat.
You don't want to send Twitch bits.
Why are you just throwing money at the screen when you could be throwing money at sick new
merch from LTT store.com to send a merch message.
All you got to do is fill up that cart, head to the checkout and you're going to see a
box called merch messages.
Um, I mean you should put some texts in the box.
That would be a good idea.
When you do, you'll get a little shout out down here.
You might get a response from producer Dan.
You might get a response from someone else after.
Is that workflow implemented?
Yeah.
That flow is implemented?
Apparently.
Yeah.
We can create a support ticket directly and a support will get back to you.
Sick.
Okay.
So it's possible if we can't answer your question or your questions like about an order or something
like that, that especially has to do with the LTT store support.
We can forward that onto them and they can deal with it next week when they come into
the office, which is cool because instead of just giving you like a garbage, like, well,
I don't know, sorry, we can actually get some, some action on it.
Wow.
Shots fired.
What do you call Dan's?
I don't know.
Sorry.
Response is garbage.
Oh yeah.
I mean, I've done them too.
If we can do better, like appropriately address your problem, then it's, it's not good.
So now we can appropriately address your problem, which is good.
The final option is that if you send something particularly interesting that we have never
covered before, then we might address it later on the show and when show after dark.
Now you're probably wondering LTT store.com what could they possibly carry that I would
be interested in and let me tell you, I'm so excited because we haven't really hyped
this up that much in the lead up to our launch.
This has been relatively quiet, but they're finally here.
Producer Dan, do you want to man the camera?
Oh boy.
Okay.
They're finally here.
Silicone joystick covers cool.
There you go.
Stick locks.
Are they universal?
Uh, yes.
Wow.
Stick locks are designed to reduce the horizontal force applied to your joysticks when traveling
with a controller or console.
They are small, convenient, and can be installed and removed in seconds.
We spent a ton of time on the geometry for these, getting it absolutely nailed so that
it fits on everything from the Nintendo switch all the way to the steam deck and full sized
desktop class controllers.
It's super flexible, but hard enough that it's not going to kind of pull on things when
you are, uh, you know, sliding a controller or sliding a console in or out of your bag.
I am so, so excited to launch these.
Um, and Luke, have you ever touched them?
Have you touched sticks?
Lots yet.
Okay, cool.
Here is a box of stick locks.
Here is a Nintendo switch, steam deck, Nintendo pro controller, Xbox controller, dual sensor.
Dual sense.
Okay.
Pick, I don't know, two or three.
I don't care.
Pick however many you want and let's get you to install some stick locks.
Okay.
Now you guys, I'm going to brief you once.
Just at the very beginning, Dan is not going to try to follow Luke around.
He's just going to aim there.
Luke, keep the thing there.
Oops.
That's not what I meant to click.
Okay.
There we go.
I like that.
It's cheeky.
It's good.
You might have to read it for the people.
You look really smart, but here's an installation guide if you need it.
Cool.
And then it shows all the things it's like compatible with, I guess.
PlayStation two controller, PlayStation, dual shock, three controller, PlayStation, dual
shock four controller, PlayStation, dual sense controller, Xbox controller, Nintendo game
cube controller, and then valve steam deck, Nintendo switch and Nintendo switch pro controller.
Now there is one asterisk there.
The PlayStation two controller we actually found is a little bit more hit or miss.
So the site has been updated in advance of the launch, but you'll have seen the site
before you see the packaging.
So I think it's fine.
Okay.
Let's see if you can handle it.
These are going to end up being fidget toys.
I know they're fun.
Just making sure you guys are aware.
I would recommend, you know what, I'm going to let you try and figure it out because this
is no offense.
This is an average user here that I'm okay.
Hold that up for that.
Hold that up for the camera.
Oh, geez.
Like I said, you can see it on here and I can like do that, but more pressure on it.
Come on.
It's a stick lock.
That's the whole point.
And it, Oh, that's kind of cool.
So if I do get it to move by putting like, you can see my finger, I'm putting quite a
bit of pressure on there.
It goes back.
Cool.
Right.
Kind of pushes itself back a little bit.
Yeah.
That's sweet.
Yeah.
Is this how you're supposed to do it?
No, not really.
It is a two hand operation.
There's got to that.
That is a thing like we really did.
We really did try to make it something that you could one hand.
It did end up being a two hand thing.
I personally find that the fastest way, I'm just going to come back out to the wide cam
for a second here.
You just squish it over top.
I've got my own pack of sticks without inverting.
So the way that, the way that I like to do it here, I'll take it.
Yeah, sure.
Is, Oh, we're somewhere that you guys can actually see.
Oh, good, good gravy.
Well, okay.
The way that I like to do it is I do the two thumb method, put it on the stick.
This is really hard to do while I'm also hosting.
And then I'd put it on like that.
So I'll get the two thumbs in there to kind of spread it open and then get it over the,
uh, really what's wrong with you?
I'll get it over the joystick.
Uh, why don't you actually, instead of doing the steam deck, which is basically like the
same as the, Oh, Oh, actually, yeah.
Leave those installed.
Leave those installed.
So here's the, uh, Nintendo switch pro controller.
Okay.
See if you can do the switch.
No, no, the switch.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Let's get, okay.
Finding something that was possible to install on everything from low profile to full-sized
joysticks was really challenging.
This is one of those prod products that we conceived a very, very, very, very, very,
very, very long time ago and then took forever to actually get right.
But we're really, really proud of the result.
So it is a little bit more challenging to get onto the switch, but it totally goes on
there.
I found it easier.
Really?
All right.
Well, those were both like instant.
The first way I was doing it was also like really bad.
I don't think I'm doing it the same way you do cause I couldn't see your demonstration,
but the new way I'm doing it is way better.
You're also more practiced at it now.
So that's probably a factor too.
Yeah.
So do you want to just show, okay.
The last thing I want to show is how it sits more proud on the steam deck compared to on
the switch controller.
There you go.
So you can see how the way the geometry is designed.
It can flatten out more or it can stand more tent-like and either way it prevents the stick
from moving.
Can you give the sticks a little wiggle or try?
You can try.
I'm moving the hole.
That's clearly in place.
And then this one is also in place.
It is slick too.
I was doing this earlier.
Whoop.
I pulled that one off.
But it is that they make sure it was on there.
I don't want, if it's bad, we got to pull it.
We got to pull the product.
Mr. I found it so much easier to put on the switch.
It is a little, okay.
I find it a little more challenging to put on the switch personally.
I thought I had it.
It might have been how I pushed at it.
There we go.
But yeah, they're slick.
So like you were mentioning, you put it in your bag and it should actually be fine because
it'll slide along materials, especially if you have an LTT bag that has like the, like,
I don't know what it is, but the like soft touch material.
It'll slide right along.
Screen safe material.
I think we call it on the product page.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm so excited.
So stick locks are finally here.
We're absolutely jazzed for them.
So we've got some really great questions.
I had someone asking, Hey, does this help with stick drift?
You know what, unfortunately it's not something that we can scientifically test with the equipment
that we have today.
But what we do know is that if something is moving around in your bag or getting caught
on anything that is probably not good for it.
And we know that people have been looking for a way to keep their sticks in place, whether
it's a case, whether it's some kind of lock.
And now there is a thing.
People ask for removal the way I would do it.
I don't know if you're supposed to, but I would like to Luke's camera and just hold
it up.
Yeah.
We don't need to end.
I would brace it on one side and then peel up the opposite side.
Is that what you would do?
No, I actually two handed again.
So going back to the wide.
So I would typically just put my thumb in the middle.
Uh, hold on just a sec.
Wow.
It's actually really hard to get off this.
So what I write, write, write, write, write.
What I would typically do is get under it like this to get under one of the legs and
then put my finger on the joystick down straight down and then pull it up.
So that way you can get it off without moving the stick around and putting a ton of pressure
on it.
Yeah.
So I will typically go thumbs to invert it, stick it on like that.
Get under one of the legs, press it down in the middle and pull it off like that.
Good to go.
Freaking excited.
Cool.
Yeah.
It took a long time.
Oh yeah.
$14.99 and that comes, uh, that gives you a pack of four.
Uh, Hey Dan, can I trouble you?
I forgot water today.
Oh no.
Yeah, absolutely.
I need some water.
Thank you.
You can pick your own merch messages to read.
Oh, okay.
Oh, we're supposed to do three merch messages.
I'll read.
Two.
We're supposed to do two merch messages.
I got to scroll all the way down to the curateds.
Okay.
I use the WAN desk pad at my repair shop counter and I'm always getting asked, where can I
get one?
Would you consider slash would you sell to small businesses for retail release?
This is from Robert H.
I mean, yeah, no one's ever asked like you'd be, you would, I shouldn't even say no one's
ever asked.
I mean, we've tried with some of our products.
Um, like I, I joked in that micro center sponsored video when we were down there fixing XQC's
computer, I was, I was joking with the rep.
I was like, why don't you guys carry the LTT screwdriver?
Because we've actually, like, we've reached out to them.
We've been like, Hey, you guys should carry the LTT screwdriver when they're, I don't
know what exactly is going on.
I don't know if they're just dragging bad or whatever else, but not nothing's ever happened.
Seems like a good idea.
I know that we've reached out to more than one retailer about carrying the ABCs of gaming
and just hasn't really worked out.
I don't know.
It's confusing to me.
Sure.
Let me know.
Sliding to my DMS.
I mean, obviously I think it's going to be, I think there's going to be some challenges
for extremely small resellers.
Like if you're asking, can you, can you order two mouse pads?
That's, that's honestly not much higher order volume than a user.
Um, so I could, I could see us having some kind of like minimum order quantity or something
to set it.
I guess we don't really have any infrastructure for reseller accounts.
Well, we're working on, we're working on quantity discounts, right?
For the, um, for the bit selector.
Ah, yep.
So maybe we could reuse some of that logic.
Baked into the normal store though?
Is that normal?
Is that, I don't think that's...
Well, some stores do, like McMaster Car has that.
Yeah, that's a very industrial thing though.
That's like an industrial thing that happens to also sell to individuals.
You can do the whole thing?
She just sent it.
Whole bottle.
No.
Would you like another?
If only we sold, if only we sold larger water bottles.
I carry my 64 ounce literally everywhere.
Um, but anyways, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah.
Hit me with another please.
One more.
Oh, I meant more water.
But yeah, sure.
Uh, let's see.
Which one did you read?
Let's pick just one at random.
What challenges have the Floatplane dev team overcome this week?
This week?
This week?
How about what challenges have they overcome today?
That's a shorter list, but still probably too long for WAN Show.
We're back to six hour WAN Show.
Yeah, I could, I could, I could send it.
Um, yeah, so I think this week was largely, we got all of the features that we want to
have, uh, on the beta site onto the beta site last week.
Um, so now we're going through and doing like cleanup.
Um, so there was bug fixes to have, to have, there was, there was a couple of hot fixes
that were pushed this week.
Um, there was also some, some things pushed from, from Jayden and another person that
I haven't actually asked if he's cool with me saying his name on stream yet.
So I will not say his name, but from another person, uh, kind of cleaning up some of the
payments, upgrade, downgrade stuff that we pushed last week.
Um, so it's a, it's a little bit more bug free now.
There are still some problems with it, um, including some of the logic for upgrading
and downgrading, which we're going to be changing a little bit, um, and increasing transparency
of the user on, on when and why and how they can or cannot do that.
Um, just cause we don't want any confusion there.
We want it to be very obvious what limitations there are.
Uh, so some changes there, but once those changes are done, uh, we're basically done
with that big push.
So the beta will stop being a beta and it will just be the main site that the original
aim for that was, was this week.
But then there was some additional work that I wanted to get done in relation to payment,
upgrade, downgrade.
Um, so we're going to finish those off and then, and then we'll try to send it, but yeah.
Okay.
Let's uh, let's see if we can knock out a couple of rapid fires here.
We've got a, about a minute left or so in this segment.
Um, let's see, uh, Oh, this is going to be a spicy one.
If Asus doesn't fix things to satisfaction, does pulling sponsorship deals include the
LTX 2023 headline sponsorship?
Yeah, of course.
I've already talked to Colton about it.
Got them.
Yeah.
Rapid fire.
You guys are getting better at this.
Uh, let's see.
Hey, LLD for Linus.
Wondering if basketball shorts are a thing.
Actually, you know what?
No, I'm not done talking about that.
Crap.
Yeah.
Okay.
Praise rescinded.
What have I, what have I ever done in the past to make people doubt that?
For real though, you do have to wonder, like you don't necessarily know how long this person
has been watching.
I guess they've, they've, they've viewed, this could be a new viewer.
Yeah, I guess they might just be someone who doesn't watch WAN social, so it doesn't go
flat.
If you don't watch WAN show and you don't go on Reddit, nothing really happens.
Yeah, I guess that's fine.
We do keep the, the mainline content pretty clean.
Evergreen is, is, is the word that we try not to, we try not to have too many, you know,
wink winks, current controversy because we want our videos to be still, even if the part
numbers of everything involved aren't that relevant, we want the learning outcomes and
we want the overall vibe to be just as fun two years, three years, five years down the
road as they are the day that they're released.
So yeah, we do tend to keep current events out of them to a degree anyway.
And so yeah, okay, I guess you're right, but we have, we have publicly dunked on our sponsors
over, and over, and over, and over again.
And we have publicly broken up with sponsors who have not done right by our community.
Just trying to think of some, some of the most, the most notable ones.
Well, we dumped tunnel bear when they got acquired by someone shady.
We, there was some clothing brand.
We didn't publicly dump five four.
Okay.
We quietly dumped five four.
Again, that was related to customer service issues.
I don't even know if they're around anymore, but it was hard to basically, there were two
main issues.
I think the one that, that broke the camel's back was, so there are two things.
One was we had, we got some complaints from viewers that didn't get dealt with in a timely
manner.
And then the second one, the one that actually caused us to go, okay, this, this has to end
because they could have still just made it right by those customers and that would have
been fixed.
But the one that ultimately killed it was that it was kind of hard to cancel your subscription
or something.
And we were like, Hey, you need to fix this.
And then they didn't.
Yeah.
So then we didn't work with them anymore.
Five four still exists.
They're a holding co of other intermittent shipping fashion brands.
All right.
Good for them.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah.
So, so I mean, those are, those are a couple of couple of notable examples.
I mean, obviously there was the the anchor thing recently with the Eufy security cameras
that were more like Eufy and security cameras, an insecurity camera.
My goodness.
What would that be?
So it has an automatic filter that adds 25 pounds or what like
It specifically starts automatic recording when you're like heart rate jumps.
Do you want memories of when you were like distressed?
Uh,
Oh, oh yeah.
Plex is on pause right now.
Still love Plex.
Still love the product.
Still want to use it.
Still want to resume the relationship, but there are some key things that I need to see
fixed before, before we're able to, to move forward.
Um, yeah, I mean, that's the way that we can put pressure, right?
That's kind of, that's, that's the way we do it because we think that there is a huge
benefit to, to a relationship with us, to marketing with us.
But there's a certain bar you have to meet and that bar is only going to continue to
get higher as we rely on the lab to evaluate our sponsors more and more.
It's something that is not in full swing yet, but as we continue to build up the team there,
it's going to happen.
All right.
Two more topics.
Oh yeah.
What do you want to talk about?
Google IO.
Sure.
Google held their IO developer conference this week.
The presentation primarily focused on Google's ethical approach in quotes, and integration
of AI into its entire workspace suite, a composition assistance in Gmail, Google docs, et cetera,
ability to use text prompts to create draft spreadsheets and images and slides.
Bard can handle 20 programming languages and will likewise use docs, maps, lens, et cetera,
as tools similar to chat GPTs plugins, which I'm not going to make a whole topic about
it, but they announced will be usable by anyone who subscribes next week, including
chat GPT to be able to search the web and all this other kind of stuff.
So cool.
Google also demoed Google search with an AI snapshot included at the top of search results,
which could serve as a jumping off point for further AI powered actions on a Bing.
There's a wait list to access this feature unsurprisingly, because that's how everything's
working right now, which is part of search labs.
Google introduced the future project tailwind, not to be confused with tailwind, which will
be a personalized private AI model that learns from your documents and acts as a tutor and
research assistant.
This is similar to their Vertex AI division, which will let businesses build custom AI
tools with their choice of model like Palm two, Imogen, et cetera.
Working with character AI, a service that creates custom chat bots with different personalities,
even ones based off celebrities, there's a chick on TikTok or something that is selling
access to her AI, which pretends to be your girlfriend for $1 a minute.
Yeah.
I saw that.
Crazy.
Google is supporting their rhetoric about ethical AI development with concrete features,
meta tagging for AI images.
That's a concrete feature, assuming that they actually do it and assuming that it's
actually accurate.
The second one, pretty big, ability to spot and highlight potential malicious code.
You can say what Linus just said yet again, additional context to allow users to spot
misinformation such as notes on an image that show where and when it was posted on the internet.
A universal translator who's dubbing and lip syncing are available only to authorize partners
to prevent defects.
That will definitely work and never have any problems.
Hardware announcements were relatively unsurprising.
The pixel fold was exactly as leaked.
Surprise, surprise.
The pixel tablet supports multiple users and can double as a nest hub.
That's actually kind of neat.
The pixel seven a is very similar to the six a with modest improvements in most areas.
Notably, it's refresh rate has gone from 60 to 90.
That's actually pretty nice.
Its main camera has a 72% bigger sensor and has a significant jump in resolution, 12.2
megapixels to 64 megapixels.
Discussion question, what is the value of a company like Google emphasizing thoughtful
ethical approach to AI?
I mean, it's only as good as their commitment.
Yeah.
It means nothing right now.
And Google's commitment to anything is very questionable.
Very questionable.
I talked about this on that stream that we pulled down earlier this week.
Oh, I guess I should probably explain that at some point.
I talked about this on the stream, but you know, the biggest, the, the, the biggest issue
for me with Google's tablets and it was tablets that I was focused on when I was talking about
it on the stream is that I just, what do you need to do on a tablet?
Right?
What?
No, really.
Like what?
I never use them.
So I don't know.
Watch YouTube or something.
Yeah.
I mean, that was, that was the number one response.
Yeah.
Like watching YouTube, Netflix, something like that.
Respond to email, browse the web.
Sure.
I find responding to email on a tablet very annoying, but like, yeah, some people, some
people do it.
Well, remember like, I don't know the way some people reply to emails like, okay, like
they use email as, you know, instant messaging.
Right?
So yeah.
But browse the web and watch video were the number one and number two responses.
Is there any reason that you couldn't do that on an Android tablet?
Nope.
No, of course not.
So then why does everyone buy iPads?
Because there's continuity in the ecosystem because you know that when your iPad cracks
the screen or gets old, there's a new one that will work just like the old one and all
your stuff works and you're good to go immediately.
In my experience, a lot of apps on Android tablets are super janky and terrible.
The experience is just kind of rough.
Like everyone I know that buys one is like, yeah, this thing sucks.
Well, that's because Google's, again, because Google's commitment to Android tablets has
been lackluster.
So they're not creating, they're not signaling the importance of the category by supporting
it properly.
They're not encouraging developers.
They're not getting hardware out there at an affordable price in a way that will incentivize
developers for the platform.
And for consumers, they're not giving them the trust that if they buy an Android tablet,
it will be supported for a reasonable amount of time.
And once it reaches a reasonable end of life, there'll be a new one for them to transition
to.
And so I think for me, the biggest question is what's the follow through going to be?
And back to the whole metadata tagging on AI generated images and all that sort of thing.
What about when AI is not the Silicon Valley word du jour?
What if we go back to internet of things?
Yeah.
Oof.
Remember internet of things?
Yeah.
I mean, what are some other, what are some other stupid cringe, I mean, obviously metaverse
was the most recent one before AI web 3.0.
What happens when we move on to the next trendy thing that everyone wants in their, in their
quarterly, in their quarterly earnings calls and in their new product announcements, right?
Do they just kind of say, well, I don't know, everyone seems to be kind of over this AI
thing and move on.
I don't, I just don't know what product has Google successfully launched in the last five
years.
No, really though, guys, for real, if I'm way off base here, you got to let me know.
So I'm trying to think of like what I use.
Meat isn't new.
I use meat all the time.
They like change the name a billion times, but it's still just meat.
Google workspace, Google search, pixel phone, dude, no, the original five years.
He's also, he's talking about new verticals, not individual product.
He's not saying like releasing the eighth pixel doesn't count.
Yeah.
Like an update to Android auto is not releasing a product.
Yeah.
Although shout out, Android auto.
It sort of is, but he means, he means new verticals.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But the pixel also hasn't been in the last five years, guys, Stadia, Stadia is not a
successful launch.
I mean, what, what, what, what is it?
It's a successful launch.
Chromecast is very old guys, simultaneous, rapid deconstruction, but what's the, what's
the term for it when you launch something and it blows up?
Is it spud?
I think so.
Sorry?
Spud, I think.
No, no.
I'm talking about the rocket that blew up.
Uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't remember what the actual acronym is.
Yeah.
It's not an actual acronym.
It's just like a silly thing they were saying.
No, it's a thing.
Oh, it's a thing.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, there you go.
Shows you what I know.
Rudd, rapid unscheduled disassembly.
There we go.
There we go.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cool.
So, I mean, yeah, sure.
Pixel fold.
Okay.
That is unproven, unproven, and you can't even buy it yet.
Wireless Android Auto.
No, that's iterative.
That's a new feature on an existing product.
See, this is what I'm talking about with the R and D budget that Google has.
Still watching.
Pixel watch is, is that not like 90% dead in the water?
And didn't they just buy Fitbit?
Like, it doesn't count if you just buy something and then, I don't know, I just don't get it.
It's a whole thing.
What is it?
The innovator's dilemma or whatever it is that explains why big companies can't invent
anything anymore because it's just, it's impossible because it's like not worth their time to
invent things.
Yeah.
But then if it's not worth your time to invent things, why do you employ so many inventors?
Yeah.
Why don't you just all wear suits?
I don't know, man.
More advertisements.
I mean, yeah, certainly that.
People asking, why was the stream taken down?
The stream was taken down because the video did not meet our standards for quality and
because it was an archived VOD of a live stream, there was no way to really fix it and make
it meet our standards for quality.
It was definitely a team effort, why it kind of sucked.
I want to shout out everyone who was involved in it because we all did our best to kind
of turn this thing around extremely quickly when there were other distractions unrelated
to the stream, unrelated to the video that were going on.
I want to thank YouTube for their patience with the whole, with the way the whole thing
went down because we pulled the video after because I was like, okay guys, here's what
happened.
The first couple minutes of the stream, what was it Dan?
Like three or four minutes for the stream earlier this week that went to the wrong stream
key.
Oh yeah, it was about two and a half minutes, something like that before we could figure
out why.
So the first couple minutes of it went to the wrong stream key, which was a whole thing
because we had to have it scheduled because the feature that we were supposed to be showcasing
YouTube shopping was beta.
So it had to be activated on a specific scheduled event and we don't normally do scheduled events.
You go live kind of like you go live on Twitch where you just start streaming in your, well
in our case, in your encoding software and in our restreamer.
So it just goes when it goes.
There is no schedule, but we had to set up a schedule because they had to activate that
feature.
So we didn't go live to the scheduled one.
We went live to our normal one that we use for WAN show.
So the title and thumbnail was wrong.
And then for the VOD, once we actually got it switched over to the scheduled one, the
first two and a half minutes where I even explained what the crap was going on is all
gone.
We're missing.
And so all we see is me sitting there confused because I'm trying to figure, I'm trying to
process, am I supposed to be, sorry, am I supposed to back up and we start again?
What do you mean we streamed to the wrong key?
What does that even mean?
Because I haven't used the scheduled thing since YouTube fixed their live streaming,
so I don't have to use it anymore.
So I haven't touched it in like two or three years.
What does that even mean?
Do I start at the beginning?
They're like, no, no, don't start at the beginning.
I'm sitting here going, right, but what about the VOD?
But I can't ask these questions because I am alive on stream right now having just sent
a no to go live notification to thousands of people.
And the problem with that is you don't, you don't get another one.
So like, it seems like it did send out a second one because it's technically a different stream
destination.
So we did get two notifications, which is even worse.
Okay.
But now he doesn't get another one of the right one.
I think your daily limit is four or five.
Yeah, but you can't burst them, right?
I don't think so.
Can you?
I'm not sure.
What I do know is that the reason that you have a notification limit per day, the reason
they're gated is because they should viewer fatigue.
They're trying to protect you from yourself.
People don't want their phone blinds to laugh and I'm busy right now, but what is this?
You don't need something like that for flow playing, but you definitely need something
like that for if you're like a YouTube or a Twitch.
Absolutely.
Definitely.
So pretty much I was looking at it going, all right, what is the net benefit of leaving
this up?
The whole point of this, the sponsored aspect of this stream, cause we're going to talk
about Google IO on WAN Show anyway.
So the whole point of this sponsored stream is for them to showcase this feature that
is only applicable to live, pull the video, go find something else, upload that today.
And so that's what we did.
Sorry guys, I didn't mean to kind of leave people in the dark, but also people seemed
to mostly not care.
It didn't even manage to generate an outrage threat over on Reddit.
Impressive.
Yeah.
It's actually quite impressive.
Oh, okay.
We got people asking, did YouTube still pay you?
Yes.
Apparently the deal is not dead.
We do have some more stuff coming.
We've got some shorts on the three new hardware devices, and then we've also got a second
stream coming, but the second stream is going to have a far more structured format and there'll
be a clear thing for us to talk about is the goal, I think.
That's good.
Yeah.
Frickin' A. I mean, oh, go ahead.
I was just going to topic transition us.
So if you have more to say, go for it.
Well, speaking of the devices, I wanted to kind of talk about those a little bit.
Pixel 7A looks killer.
Would you ever go pixel again after the experiences you've had?
Actually, yes.
Probably.
Really?
Because there's one killer feature.
You are basically like in an abusive relationship at this point though.
Yes.
Yep.
Okay.
But if someone else releases this feature, I will very likely be gone.
All right.
What is your-
Screen call.
It's actually amazing.
And I use it all the time.
I have not picked up a call from a scammer in like years.
All right.
All right.
Chat's hilarious.
It's like actually fantastic.
They always come crawling back.
Yeah.
Okay.
I even had Riley called me, but I didn't have his like caller ID in my phone.
And it showed up as, it showed up in a way that looked super scammy because there was
like, it just said like British Columbia, but there's a bunch of spaces in the middle
of it.
So I was like, oh, this is definitely a scam.
So I screened it.
But then it says on the thing, like very clearly, he's like, ah, there's something going on
with flow play and I need to, and I'm like, okay, sweet.
By the way, I just want to make it very clear.
Some people seem to think that the issue with the stream was Google's fault.
It was not, um, okay.
Follow up question.
You've been looking kind of enviously over my shoulder at the big screen full device.
No.
For a while.
Really?
Nope.
Oh, okay.
I thought you were pretty into like the spreadsheets and stuff.
Uh, yeah.
I'm not spending $2,000 on a phone.
Oh, I thought.
Okay.
Okay.
Well you jumped ahead.
Okay.
So yes, it looks cool.
And then it looks interesting.
Follow up question.
I would really like to be able to like test drive one, man.
I had a whole, I had a whole thing I was going to jump right to the end.
What do you think this is?
Dennis's French fry thing.
Okay.
Sorry.
Go for it.
Okay.
So you've been looking over my shoulder at the big screen on the fold.
Yeah.
Okay.
Oh, see now you've ruined it.
My bad.
Sorry.
I was pretty confident.
I knew where you were going.
Oh man.
Now I don't even remember what I was going to say.
Um, right, right.
I was going to say you're fairly wealthy.
Would you, would you spend the $1,700?
Yeah.
I still have a house to save up for.
Yeah.
That's true.
All right.
So dropping two grand on a phone doesn't feel fun.
I am probably planning like this, this, you know, September's release of phones.
Yeah.
To look into something.
Cause it's been.
So you want an iPhone.
Don't, don't they release other ones at that time too?
Um.
Mine is out of the loop.
It's been a long time.
I think the, I think the new Qualcomm chipset cycle is a little bit off of Apple's cycle
right now.
Okay.
So it's more like, it's more like spring cause we just got the brand new S23.
I think pixel like eight is kind of where I'd be aiming.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
One more cycle.
Cause I'm, I'm four a five G at this point.
So I'm a little, I'm a little far back.
Yep.
But you're still getting support.
So.
Yep.
So it's still fine for now, but like it's time to start considering, you know?
Yep.
That's fair.
Yeah.
Yep.
That's fair.
Um, I hope the tablet goes well.
I mean, it's got a good processor.
It's 500 bucks.
It comes with a little dock.
And then the last one is of course the pixel fold that I will have a lot to say once I
actually get hands on with it.
Very excited, but I need to really use it and you know, try out some of the apps that
I've had trouble with on my Samsung folding devices and see if they're any better.
So there's a comment on full pinch out.
So Luke doesn't seem like the kind of person who's getting an iPhone.
You might actually be kind of surprised.
Um, you'd be surprised about both of us.
I daily drove the iPhone for years.
Yep.
And I have nothing really against iPhones.
My biggest issue with an iPhone is because I don't generally use them.
The needing to learn the platform doesn't sound interesting to me, but I'm not against
an iPhone necessarily.
There's honestly not a lot to learn.
Like it's, I don't know it, but yeah, I don't really know what to tell you.
Like there's, there's stuff like weird things.
Like I'm, my phone's down there cause it'll buzz the mics, but um, I'm a big fan of like
very, very clear homepages.
Yeah.
I only have things on my homepage like like float plane calling email, like very, like
if I'm opening my phone, it is probably for one of these types of applications.
I don't like the whole screen being full.
I'd love to, I'd love someone to just like corner Tim Cook and ask how is it actually
possible on this green and blue marble that you guys do not allow me to put my icons wherever
I want on my home screen.
That one's actually crazy.
It's, it's just, it's one of those things that's just so obvious that you just obviously
need to obviously fix this and it'll take like 20 minutes because you've obviously already
done the dev work.
You just haven't rolled it for whatever reason.
It's like actually embarrassing how much that would influence my decision to get an iPhone.
It's not even, it's not even possible that some iOS engineer didn't just stay late one
day and fix that for lulls on a creative day.
That is actually not possible.
It has happened.
I guarantee it.
Just the way developers work, you know how developers work.
In fact, I want to be like this, this annoys me and then just, and they would just fix
it because it's really stupid and really just needs to be fixed.
But okay.
This is something that really annoys me.
Like you'll find little annoyances on both.
This is something that's been driving me absolutely crazy on Android and I don't know if it's
just Android or if it's the Google app.
You know how Google kept telling us, okay, hangouts is going away, G chat is going away,
blah, blah, blah.
And it just like never goes away and it's just, it's still there.
So now whenever I share, I just took a screenshot and I clicked share.
If I, if I go to, I hate this menu, this absolutely hate this menu instead of, instead of being
just Gmail because I clicked, I clicked Gmail.
There's now a second click.
No.
Do you want to do chat or do you want to do email?
No, I don't want to do chat.
I actually hate that menu so much that I will always go out of my way to not use it.
The share menu?
Yeah.
I'll just download things or copy links and then manually go to the messaging app and
do it that way.
It's just like full of random things instead of the most recent people I talked to.
And I'm like, how, like how does it think I'm going to share this to someone that I
haven't talked to in like five years when the like three people in my life that I share
things to off my phone are never here?
Like what the heck?
So it literally doesn't save me time.
And then the amount of times that it's like I have to scroll so much to find the right
app or like the right person or whatever that is just, I don't know.
I find it very annoying.
Okay.
This is great.
So my top one is myself, my personal Gmail account, which I have probably never shared
anything to because why would I?
And my second one is my work account, which I would never share anything to from my, oh,
actually that's not true.
I would email things to myself from time to time just because embarrassingly it's easier
than just, you know, um, then I've got my son, my wife, my aunt, maybe a, okay, oh,
here we go.
Then I've got some random discord server that I have literally never shared anything to
you on discord.
And I actually do share things to you.
Another random discord server that I have literally never shared anything to.
And then two completely random teams message channels.
One is Dan.
Dan, when's the last time I shared anything to you over teams?
Oh, I mean you messaged me earlier, so maybe that's why I'm there first.
Literally never, literally never, literally never, literally never.
I don't use this application literally never, sometimes never.
Wow.
Fantastic.
What's the point?
Like I just.
My problem is that every single icon in my share menu, all of them are blue.
They're all blue and white.
I can't tell what any app is.
Teams is blue and white.
Facebook is blue and white.
Twitter is blue and white.
They're all blue and white.
Share with.
I can't.
Oh, shoot, shoot, shoot.
No.
Not that mom.
I'm sorry that float plane has contributed to your problem.
Why is everything blue?
It's a very neutral, like things are fine color.
Yeah, anyways, should I topic pivot us?
Sure.
Should we move on?
YouTube, another YouTube thing.
YouTube has confirmed that it is experimenting with blocking some users with ad blockers
enabled from watching videos on the platform.
Spicy.
YouTube has previously addressed this issue, but it has been a few years since the last
time.
There's a screenshot of a YouTube notice to users with an ad block enabled that was posted
to Reddit.
That's just the YouTube logo.
It says ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube.
It looks like you may be using an ad blocker.
Ads allow YouTube to stay free for billions of users worldwide.
You can go ad free with YouTube Premium and creators can still get paid from your subscription.
And then there's a button that says allow YouTube ads.
And then there's another button that says try YouTube Premium.
I don't know what allow YouTube ads would do.
Oh, maybe it maybe what have they like scripted a way for your to disable the extension on
that?
That must only work through Chrome or something.
I don't know.
I mean, most people are using Chrome, so maybe it works.
Yeah, I don't know.
And the more legitimate criticisms include that YouTube's ads have increased a great
deal over time and that YouTube Premium is relatively expensive from the perspective
of occasional viewers.
Discussion question.
Is there any better way to convince people to pay for content?
No.
That's my response.
I don't think like I'm not saying this is necessarily a good way, but I don't think
there's a different way.
Like how do I, how do I, how do I even talk about this without starting some kind of firestorm?
Oh yeah, you're just going to get wrecked because I think the entire, I wish I was wearing
my ad block privateering shirt because the entire counter argument to me last time around
was that if consuming the ads was the form of payment for consuming content on the platform,
then Google would block ad blockers.
So okay, here we are.
I don't know what else to tell you guys.
And I believe the main defense at that time was, well, it's like not actually like in
the terms or something.
I guess it is now.
I guess so.
Is that better?
I mean, yeah.
Are you happy about this?
Yeah.
It's one, it's one of those things where.
People were saying like flow plan.
I'm like, yeah, I think if people weren't subscribed on flow plane and they had ad block
on YouTube and then this happens, I don't necessarily know that they're going to subscribe
on full play.
Like these options have existed already.
So if they weren't already subscribed to it, then that option is not the better way to
convince people.
Cause it already existed.
And I actually didn't say you may not use ad blockers.
We've even talked about it in the past.
We showed people how to set up a fricking pie hole.
Yeah.
We've shown multiple times how to set up these types of services.
All I said was you've got to consider the consequences of your actions.
The consequences are real.
The more people block ads, the more a platform will become actually not sustainable and they
will introduce more draconian anti ad blocking measures.
That's just how it works.
That's I don't make these rules.
I'm just, I am the messenger.
Please, please, no, raise your weapons, not shoot, not shoot the messenger.
I don't think they'll ever do anything about sponsor block though.
Um, that's not there.
That's not their thing though.
Yeah, I guess so.
There's no actual financial incentive for them trying to block sponsor block.
Yeah, that's true.
It's hard to say.
I wouldn't even put it past them to just say, look, we don't allow any extensions that interfere
with the functionality of youtube.
Will that, will that make youtube a worse experience for some users?
I mean, I don't think there's any, I don't think it technically does though.
It just gets you forward in the video, right?
Um, I genuinely haven't used it.
I don't know what it does.
Yeah.
It skips around in the video.
Yeah.
Um, but I just using timestamp functionality.
It just wouldn't surprise me.
Yeah, no, for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's uh,
that is what it is.
I'm not surprised every once in a while I'll, I'll get like, I'll be in my Google news thing
and I'll jump to a webpage and it's like, no, you can't watch this cause I have it export
to my browser and it blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You can't view this page unless you subscribe.
It's not an ad blocking thing, but it's just like a, some news page that requires pay game
or paywall.
Yeah.
And I'm like, okay, well I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to leave.
And the argument is like, Oh, well you lost their traffic, whatever.
And it's like, yeah, but I'm also not taxing their service.
And if I didn't pay and they didn't have ads and I did view it, how am I benefiting them?
So like, I don't know.
I don't know that that's necessarily the wrong call for them.
That might be the right call for them.
Maybe this newspaper makes a bunch of money through subscriptions and they just, it's
better for them to operate that way.
It's not my decision.
Yep.
It is my decision to just not pay it.
Well, this is another like big controversy that I started when I said, look, the provider
of the service or the product is the one who sets the price.
And if you don't like it, you don't pay it, but just taking it is actually not, um, how
that works.
Yeah.
So like, I don't find some way to like break around that limitation.
I just don't read the article, just go find something else.
There is an incredible amount of stuff on the internet.
You really don't actually need to access that one thing.
Truer words never spoken.
It's like actually okay.
There really is an incredible amount of stuff on the internet.
Your life will go on if you can't access that one video or article or whatever it is, you'll,
you'll be fine.
So I don't know.
I don't have a lot to say about this.
I am a YouTube premium subscriber, so like this won't affect me.
I watch a bunch of YouTube, so it's like, and I use YouTube music.
I don't believe YouTube music is the best, but it comes with YouTube premium and I'm
not going to pay for anything else.
Great value.
So it is what it is.
And when like I look at the bundle and I do consider that I do actually use YouTube music
all the time, like I run it for basically at least eight hours a day because I use it
for just background noise when I'm working.
Yeah, I get, I get the value out of my YouTube premium subscription for sure.
Yeah, I don't know what to tell you guys.
Don't know what to tell you guys other than this is, this is what happens.
And this is okay.
This is fair.
Uh, someone in full plane chat said, if you give someone something or a service that will
become an expectation, uh, when it changes, people feel wronged.
Um, and, and that, yeah, that's legit.
So I could, I could understand people that have used ad blockers on YouTube for like
a decade that it's now being blocked being like, well, that's annoying.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
Yeah.
But like YouTube's response to that may end up rightly being you mad bro.
Yeah.
Like realistically, I mean, you can say you're going to go somewhere else, but when you're
trying to figure out how to fix your dishwasher, you won't, you'll go to YouTube.
I, you can, you can, some people will kind of will sputter and angrily say, no, I will.
Yes you will.
Yes, you will because that's the fastest because your time is worth money, which is exactly
how the ads work.
Your time is worth money and that will be the fastest way to get that dishwasher repaired.
You'd be silly not to.
Right.
It's, it's tough.
You just watch the ads.
You can, you can literally, you can load it up, have the ads play, put it down, gather
your tools.
And then when the ads are done playing, pick it back up again.
People are talking a lot about how much the, how much the prevalence of ads has increased
on the platform lately.
And honestly that is, that is a big challenge.
I do find it pretty obnoxious whenever I'm accidentally on an account that doesn't have
a YouTube premium.
To me, it's, it's always, it's felt like the, the gas price problem where like it feels
like, Oh, like tons of people are blocking ads or whatever other reason.
So we need to increase ads and then, Oh, we blocked ad blockers, but they're not going
to pull the ads back probably because they're like, well, we can serve you this many already.
And there's a lot of pressure on creators to increase the frequency of ads.
I mean here, um, I got this report from Colton earlier that, uh, apparently is from Patty
Galloway's latest newsletter, something, something.
I hope this isn't like a paid newsletter or something that I am not supposed to talk about.
I just want to address this quickly.
Crusty trombone and full plane chat said, nah, it's principle ads are toxic.
I don't disagree, which is why I have premium and run flow plane and do stuff like that.
I don't like ads.
I avoid them as much as I can, but like I don't do that with an ad blocker.
Yeah, that's, that's not actually your call to make.
If the, if the service says the, the payment is ads, then your options are consume the
service and pay with ads.
Don't consume the service or privateer and just know what you're doing.
That's what you're doing.
So I have my, like the level that I'm happy with.
Um, and you can have your own and that's why it's great.
I love anger, Mon or agar Mon over on Twitch chat.
I don't understand who the F is buying crap out of ads.
Me either.
And yet here we are.
They're clearly, they're clearly working pretty good.
Um, yeah, so, okay, this is, this is really interesting.
It's an evaluation of RPM, so revenue per mil, which does not mean million.
It means thousand, uh, by average view duration.
And the, um, the argument made to me by our business team is, you know, Hey, um, with
how long when show runs the AdSense numbers for it would be insane.
Like potentially three times what we're making, um, which is thousands of us dollars
per episode.
Additionally, for when show, um, got to check and get approval from Linus.
Can you loop me in?
Um, and basically, yeah, our, our RPMs are substantially lower than what they should
be based on this like average RPM per video length, you know, chart here.
And basically my, my response is the part we're missing here in our calculations is
the RPM of our baked in stuff.
Maybe for something like when show, we should cut our rates, cut the sponsors out
and do mid rolls.
I just don't want to overdo it, right?
Because that's the problem that I see on the platform is that you've got, you've got
people trying to triple dip, right?
They've got the pre-roll ad and then they've got the mid roll ad and then they've got
the shout out for their Patrion and then they've got the shout out for their sponsor
and then they've got the shout out for their merch.
And so I think we were overdoing it for a while and in each video we had a merch shout
out plus a float plane shout out.
We've dialed that back.
So we are at, um, no mid.
So our, our typical load out on LTT anyway is that we have pre-rolls enabled, no mid
rolls.
Uh, we do have our own baked in sponsorship spots and we will call out either float
plane or, um, the LTT store in a way that is organically integrated into the content.
That's sort of our, our load out right now and seems to be about as high as you can go
without it being obnoxious.
And there's been a lot of arguments internally pushing me to turn mid roll ads on and every
time I kind of come back and I say, okay, sure.
What are we getting rid of?
And the answer is always, I don't know.
I think we have a pretty, I think we have a pretty optimal configuration right now and
I don't, I don't think we're going to change it anytime soon, especially when they're
Dennis ads.
We'll see.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think if anything, what we need to do is just make our baked in stuff more engaging
and convert better and then we can increase our rates for that if we really want more
money.
Like let's just work for it.
I guess is my response.
Make the ads content.
I know there's a few other creators in the space doing that type of thing too, where
it's like you actually want to watch the ads because they're just funny.
Yeah.
And it's like, okay, cool.
You want to win me over that way?
Like fair enough.
In my opinion, uh, last week was not Dennis spots on WAN show.
That's why it wasn't as entertaining a full plane chat at Dennis is on vacation.
So Oh yeah.
We had the thorium proposal, but that wasn't, I guess that was a sponsor spot, right?
I forgot.
That's how, that's how organically integrated it was.
I forgot it was a sponsor spot.
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The show is also brought to you by JumpCloud.
Tried to mix them up.
Oh yeah, I did.
I mixed them up.
Ha got him.
Got Dan.
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All right, Dan, you got a couple of merch messages.
I suspect you do because you made me use the camera.
I couldn't help noticing that a few people might've bought some stick locks.
Oh, just a couple, just a couple, a couple people bought them.
I will also say, I just noticed you are too.
I've been messing with these like the whole show.
I think they're legitimately just as good as a fidget toy as they are a stick lock.
Oh boy, dual purpose.
Anything we sell turns into a fidget toy.
The screwdriver, this, yeah, I think that says more about us than maybe, okay, let's
uh, let's see.
Let's see.
Uh, first one here.
Hey, lld.
A long time watcher since my formative tween years prior to getting more into tech.
I am ashamed to admit that I attempted to download more ram.
What has been your most dumb tech mistake?
Oh, it was definitely the time that I plugged the floppy power connector into a header on
an adding card fried that bad boy fried it good.
I've only ever, I was very young, accidentally murdered one piece of hardware that I can
remember and it was really early on at the company and I just roasted a motherboard.
Do you remember that?
Just flash the wrong bios onto it and it just never came back.
Nice.
I was like really early on, I was really embarrassed.
I think it was my personal board, but that computer was a computer that I got from you.
Right.
Okay.
And I needed it for work cause I was doing forum stuff.
So it was like, uh, yeah.
And then you gave me like, if I remember correctly, you gave me what was technically an upgraded
board, but it was like, uh, you know, when you, you go high enough that like the support
for it is bad and it's like actually worse experience because you're not going to use
the features and like, yeah, it was one of those situations.
Nice.
Yeah.
So that was, that was really unfortunate, but yeah, I can still hear them popping on
the table there.
Um, all right.
Next up, wondering if you've ever considered exploring the technology behind power generation
plants.
I mean, sounds super cool.
Sounds like the kind of place that would be a little tough to get a tour of.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
On that second point.
Yeah.
I mean, is anyone going to show us, you know, the nitty gritty of a nuclear power plant?
Would I be interested in anything that isn't a nuclear power plant?
I mean, what am I going to go look at like a coal fired yesterday's technology today?
The furnace.
It's real big.
Wow.
That's hot.
Okay.
Okay.
We're joking.
Like, obviously there's more interesting than that and it gets more advanced.
A lot of technology, but, um, yeah, no, I can't say that that's my most, that that's
the most up my alley that something could be.
Yeah.
Okay.
And last one we're going to have a look at here.
I've worked in both banking and engineering and in both we solely use virtual machines
for their increased security and work from home.
As LMG grows, do you think you will switch to some, if not all employees to virtual machines?
Um, definitely not all.
I think for high performance applications like video editing, it's just, it's a, not
a clear enough benefit for security to outweigh the improved performance.
And B my understanding is it's not a supported use case for any of the major video editing
software users and working within a VM theoretically is completely transparent to the software,
but in practice is not always completely bug free.
And I Adobe creative suite does not need enough bugs.
Yeah.
It doesn't need more problems.
So I think we're going to use it in, in, in, in a best case scenario on a bare metal workstation
basically forever.
I could see some kind of thin client or some kind of VDI thing for just general workstations.
In fact, I think we're going to do a video in the next little bit, just kind of exploring
VDI cause we've never really dug into it, but I don't see us just rolling that out wholesale
anytime soon.
But yeah, I can't, I can't think of any reason that like a sales person or someone in accounting
couldn't just be working off a thin client or we're going to have to, right now we have
one standard and it's not good.
Like it's not good to have one standard, I should say the standard that was made might've
been very good for an important subset of people, which would be high performance users
like editors, but we have so many different types of people at the company now in regards
to what they do that just having one doesn't make a ton of sense.
So yeah, we might have a variety of different options down the line, but it will vary quite
a bit.
Pat Zillin for Plain Chat says having to use thin clients at work makes me want to bash
my head against my desk.
It's God awful slow, right?
But that depends.
Yeah.
Right.
That depends on what the hardware behind the thin client is.
The thin client doesn't affect the performance.
It's the actual VM that it's tapped into and there are high performance thin clients.
My understanding is they're very common in the like CAD and design industry and I think
that's to do with that it's cheaper from a software licensing standpoint or something
like that because the software is so expensive that you're basically an idiot to be buying
one seat for every person who might use it and you're far better off buying many licenses
and then sharing them or something.
Don't quote me on that.
It's just something that I heard at some point maybe nice.
But yeah, well, well things will, things will change.
Okay.
So let's get a couple of potentials out here if you want.
Hey, L.L.D. for Linus wondering if basketball shorts are a thing that's on the menu.
Will we eventually do that?
No.
No.
He's saying it's not on the menu.
Not that we'll never do it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The first thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think it's pretty unlikely though.
Are there not enough brands that make basketball shorts?
Like basketball shorts are one of those things where it's just what would we be adding to
the conversation?
Hey, DLL.
Steve or Austin going to LTX, neither has been confirmed or denied.
Then I guess I can neither confirm nor deny.
Oh, exciting.
Well, no, I mean, it's just, the thing is like, it's not, it's not up to me to, to announce
things like that for people.
Okay, fine.
I'll tell you what, I'll say this.
They've both been invited, but life happens, right?
It's people aren't always available.
Even if creators are very busy people, even if we were actually BFFs, right?
That doesn't mean they can necessarily make it.
It's LTX.
I'm not sweating.
I'm not going to be mad.
Right.
If they can make it, that's awesome.
I think it's going to be a great event.
And if they can't make it well, then, Hey, that I'll see you next year.
That's awesome.
That'll be a great event too.
It's all good.
And put some more LTX ones.
Hello, me audio only me tomorrow, DLL.
How do we buy products and have them waiting for pickup at LTX also a rest in peace hotel
prices over the last two years.
Oh, I don't know.
It's not a thing yet.
What a Oh, okay.
Is that the answer?
I believe, um, I think, okay, somebody's going to scream at me.
I'm trying to remember.
Oh, you're going to pull it.
No answer yet.
I'll say that much.
There we go.
All right.
Cause I know if you're, if you're here locally, you can buy stuff here locally, but there's
going to be a, well, you can buy stuff.
Oh, you mean if you come to the show, yes.
You can buy stuff.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But I don't mean right now, if you're in BC, you can buy stuff locally.
I mean, if you're, if you're at LTX, there's going to be like a store and you can buy stuff.
Um, there is also the, the remote bridge thing that we're planning where float plane and
LTX store are going to have a login authentication thingy to see if you are currently subscribed
at whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, so that you can buy stuff.
Um, and that's not done yet.
So we don't know exactly when it will be ready.
Got it more LTX.
Oh, I do have a bit of an update on LTT store, not calm though.
Okay.
I think we've settled on a location for it.
Sorry.
That's me.
Uh, I think it's going to, Oh, Oh, Oh, Oh, did I say something wrong?
You must've said something wrong because the one and only Nick light has made a call to
me.
What'd I do wrong?
I have two things.
One, one from this and one from earlier.
So got two things, one right here, one right here.
Yeah.
Um, if you have an LTX ticket, you should be able to pre-purchase your merch.
Already on the LTX site.
Oh, cool.
You just have to use the same email to log in on the site as you bought the ticket with
neat.
Yeah.
And then the other thing was when you're talking about retailers earlier, um, we are figuring
out our retail strategy.
I can't really say more than that right now, um, on live, but, um, that's why we don't
have like updates on micro center and stuff.
It's not on their side.
It's on our side.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
So if you want, you can call me after the show.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Sure.
So all right.
Later.
We summoned Nick.
We said too many things wrong.
Let's see if we can do it again.
Twice in the same show would be pretty great.
We should see how many different people we can summit on one show.
Oh, Tynan's already been blown up my phone.
So that's two.
Is he upset about stick locks?
Cause he worked on stick locks.
He asked me to message him and I ghosted him.
Nice.
Well, that's just rude.
He will watch it back later.
I don't know why he wants, I think he just excited.
Who knows?
Um, it's all merch by the way, not just LTX merch.
The idea is that you can place your order and then just like pick it up when you're
there, which will make more sense the closer to the event we get.
Yeah.
Not really.
Yeah.
Right.
So we have not come, uh, we have not decided to proceed with the retail space that we found
that was pretty cool because I think what we're going to do is more of like a warehouse
style thing where you can, you can pick up, but also it'll be like a operating as a warehouse
and it'll be in more of like an industrial area.
I think it's going to be where the little gym is now.
And so that'll become LTT store and not calm.
So this is, this is how you're going to tell me that I'm not getting my wish.
Oh, you're getting your wish.
So I have other big news.
Our financing got approved for a second, what about second badminton unit?
Oh, um, so the badminton center is going to be substantially larger.
Yeah.
It will be 14 courts now, uh, and there will be a pretty decent, like 1600, 1800 square
foot gym.
Of badminton courts?
No.
Of like 1600, not 16,000.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What's going to be there?
I don't know.
I was going to ask you like, what's good.
Like it's an actual like gym, like a workout gym.
Yeah.
Like for members.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
So I'm suddenly like way more excited.
Yeah, I know.
Cause you're serious.
Yeah.
Oh, that's sick.
That's sick.
I've been trying to convince him to have the current one turned into a gym for a long time
and there's all these like liability problems, which are legit.
So I understand, but it would just be sweet if it was like a thing.
Wow.
That's cool.
Yeah.
It's going to be awesome.
So, uh, obviously everyone who works at Yvonne umbrella corporation, uh, any of the companies
under there will, we'll be able to get access to the gym with YBC.
I don't, I don't know.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
I don't know if I'll be able to just be like, yeah, you get it for free because that could
hurt the KPIs of the operations manager who we have, uh, actually hired now, uh, who's
going to be running that.
That's a lot of people to give access to that for free.
Yeah.
So they'll have similar working schedules and yeah.
So I don't want to screw anyone over.
Just go like, Hey, yeah, you know, your KPIs that you have to be profitable.
Oh, by the way, you have a hundred free users in your gym.
Good luck.
That's pretty funny.
Uh, Sultan of Slack asks, so when's the pickleball tournament?
Yeah, probably when I turn about 55 we'll convert it to pickleball.
That's that's, that's what I kind of have in mind.
It's gonna be like, Hey, everyone who has played ever shut it down.
Shut it down.
Okay.
We're moving the nets down, moving the nets down.
Okay.
We're pickleball facility.
The sign.
Wooden paddles now or whatever it is.
I think it's wooden panels.
I don't remember.
Yeah.
I'm excited.
It's going to be awesome.
Yeah.
I'm super excited.
Okay.
What were you saying Dan?
When can we be expected to be notified if we are selected to volunteer at LTX?
Oh, I don't think either of us are going to know.
I have no idea.
Yep.
I would hope pretty soon.
Yep.
Like if we haven't told people pretty soon, then it's going to be pretty tough for them
to schedule.
Um, you know what I would do is post on the forum because I know that Chase is monitoring
the LTX thread there.
Yeah.
Post on the LTT forum.
This might be a question for Tynan, but has there been any testing to see if the stick
locks fit on the steam deck inside the OEM case?
That's a good question.
Tynan would probably know that.
Um, it used to be that our inventory was right on the other side of this wall here and I
could just run and grab a steam deck case, but it's not.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
We'd have to figure that out.
And let's see.
Does the bag you are developing for consoles like the steam deck have some kind of stick
protection built in the steam decks original case has some cutouts to give the stick space
for example.
Yeah, it doesn't, but it's also very, very early in development right now and that's
not impossible, but it could be very challenging.
So depending on the route we go, if we go switch specific, then it could.
But if we go universal, then it wouldn't be able to, then you should bundle it with some
stick locks.
There we go.
Sick.
I think we should, yeah, we can move on here if you guys like.
Yeah.
Sure.
Two to three more topics, please.
Let's talk about this watch thing.
Yeah.
Let's talk about this watch thing because I am ticked.
Oh boy.
Fossil who acquired Misfit in 2015 has discontinued support from Misfit watches, the companion
app and website.
What this means, get this, is that users will no longer be able to adjust some settings
including changing the time.
And am I right, they still sell them?
The most recent models of Misfit watches were launched in 2018 and only stopped production
in late 2019 and early 2020.
Fossil still sells smartwatches based on Misfit's hybrid watch technology.
Fossil doesn't appear to have made any announcement.
Misfit simply dropped Misfit from its brand page and users found themselves unable to
log in.
Are you kidding me?
Fossil confirmed, oh, okay.
When we, oh, we apparently contacted them.
Oh, good job, Wansho Team.
Fossil confirmed it was indeed dropping support for Misfit when contacted by Linus Media Group.
Hm.
You know, I never really got it before.
The whole expensive watch thing, you know, like big, like mechanical watches, you know.
It'll still work.
At least it'll still work.
What the heck?
And this is Fossil, I thought this was like a premium brand.
Someone can't remotely take it from you.
I think it is.
I don't actually know, but I'm pretty sure it is.
Fossil...
How is it even possible that there is no obligation, if you drop support for a product you sold,
to open source it?
How is that even possible in the year 2023?
Oh, Star Wars collaboration with Fossil so I can get...
Hold on, hold on.
Luke laptop, let's go.
They have, they have Luke Skywalker leather watch.
Okay, hold on.
No, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Stop looking at that.
Okay.
Okay.
Luke.
Yes.
You have my super power too.
I saw you do it.
I actually, I remember it was like yellowy or gold or something and nothing, I knew nothing
else about it.
That's all just the color that I might even, I might be right about that, but I might be
conflating it with this golden watch that's on the screen.
Okay.
So we're back to Luke's laptop here.
Yeah.
I just found that they did the Star Wars collaboration.
I thought it was funny because Linus is not into high end fashion particularly and also
isn't into modern Star Wars.
So that would be funny.
Yeah, that would be the not Linus watch right there.
Especially this one because it's so gaudy.
Wow.
That would not suit you at all.
Thanks.
No problem.
I don't think any of these would suit me if that helps.
Are those dog tags cringe?
Are those actual dog tags?
Literally.
For 120 bucks and it says 3C3PO on it.
Do people buy this?
We need to just have more products.
There's zero reviews.
No, no.
Luke, we need to just have more products because people are obviously just looking for something
to throw money at at this point.
Yeah.
Really?
Okay.
Okay, the earrings are cute.
The earrings are pretty cute.
The charm bracelets, like that's probably all right.
Oh, so fossil's like not premium then.
Like these are, okay, to be clear, 500, $600 for a while.
Obviously that's like a lot of money, but watches.
Yeah.
So they're not, as far as I can tell, they're not like insane, but they're not cheap either.
Yeah.
Okay.
$250 purses.
That's not, I don't know.
I don't know anything to be honest.
Yeah.
About that stuff.
No, no idea.
Got it.
Anyways, that's some BS.
You should not be able to just like turn off someone's ability to change the time on their
watch.
Yeah.
This whole thing, this whole thing is just, okay, fine.
Here, let's talk about the badminton center some more.
Because I think that it's a waste of life to just mop a giant floor, I wanted to look
into getting a robot sweeper and vacuum and mop like thing.
I assume that has to be a thing these days, given that I don't think anyone is manually
mopping airports.
Yeah.
But you have like a consumer grade one.
Yep.
So I want a commercial grade one that could do, you know, 30,000 square feet or whatever.
Really, really big.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
So I rightly assumed that this is an actual product category that does exist.
Naturally, if I remembered the brand, I would name them because it's kind of hilarious and
stupid, and they deserve to be called hilarious and stupid.
But naturally, you go on their site and there's no information whatsoever about pricing because
why would there be?
You have to contact someone.
This is great.
You contact someone so that you can get on a call with them.
That person cannot tell you anything.
Their entire job is to set up an appointment for you with someone from the sales team.
I was like, okay, well, this was a giant f***ing waste of time.
Thank you very much.
Oh, man.
Sure.
Fine.
Schedule me another call because if you can't tell me how much it costs, then I guess we're
not having a conversation right now.
So what's the point of talking about anything?
Is that better than a robocaller?
Would you prefer robocaller in that situation?
I mean, it might as well, but if you already have the online scheduling thing that I use
to set up the first call, then it's just online scheduling with extra steps, right?
So anyway, they set up the second call with me, and we got as far as price, and the price
is about to outright buy because they offer a subscription service or an outright buy
price.
The price to buy is about like a mid-range car, which honestly could make sense compared
to paying a person for five years or whatever.
What you just said is exactly how it's priced.
Of course.
It's not priced based on the actual hardware.
It's a f***ing mop, right?
It's priced based on the value that it provides, which is not a wrong way to price something,
right?
It's a little frustrating that was so high, but that doesn't mean that I wasn't considering
it.
I was considering it.
And then I asked what the process is like, okay?
So how does it handle vision?
How does it navigate the facility?
And they go, okay, well, we come out and we help you set it up.
We get the mapping configured and the routing configured and everything, and then it runs
on your schedule and it goes and it does the thing.
And I'm like, okay, super cool.
What if I need to update the map for whatever reason?
We reconfigure it.
How is that done?
And they're like, oh, we can help you with that remotely.
You log into our cloud thing and I go, okay, hold on a second.
Can I just clarify something?
Does this run onsite or does it run in the cloud?
Where's the processing actually handled?
And they're like, that all runs onsite.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
So the thing is actually, it has the processing built in.
They're like, yeah, yeah.
It uses the X sensor and Y sensor and whatever else.
I'm like, okay, great.
But you said that the reconfiguring was done through the cloud and they're like, yes.
And I'm like, okay.
So in the event that you guys were to disappear for whatever reason, would I be able to reconfigure
it without your cloud service?
Well, we're not going to disappear and I go, right, but that isn't what I asked.
If you were to disappear, would there be any way for me to reconfigure this myself?
Is there a web portal built into this unit that I can access through an ethernet jack
or something?
And they basically were like, let me get back to you.
And I got an email back that was like, based on your requirements, I don't think we'll
be able to move forward.
And I'm like, based on my requirements, I think you guys are idiots because you are
selling what will effectively become a 60, $70,000 paperweight in the event that, yeah,
maybe you won't go out of business.
Yeah.
They kept assuring me that their business was growing really well.
I'm like, that's not my concern.
I'm concerned about this tens of thousands of dollars investment that is just junk if
you just arbitrarily decide at some point that you don't feel like supporting it anymore.
Just unbelievable.
And it doesn't matter if they plan to be around.
What if they get acquired and whoever the new owner is wants to extract more value?
What if they decide to just brick them?
I just can't.
I just can't, man.
Yup.
Yup.
That's pretty brutal.
Yup.
Just frustrated.
We're not going to disappear.
A company doomed to fail.
Andrew Noin, yeah.
In full plain chat.
Yeah, exactly.
Cause this is the kind of thing that it's, it's industrial equipment.
This is not something I expect to run for three or five years.
So someone in full plain chat said 20 years down the road, you could still be using it.
That's a long time.
Yeah.
That's a fricking long time.
And you're not Boeing.
No offense.
Yeah.
Right.
You're not GE.
No offense.
When you are GE, I will still tell you to f*** off because that is still stupid.
I just, I can't, I can't, I can't handle it.
So like, honestly, and, and that, this is another crazy thing for $70,000.
I mean, could we make our own?
Maybe actually.
There's yeah.
I mean, cause someone, someone linked in float plane chat, apparently there's this scrubber
that's made by a YouTuber.
And it's a scrubber that looks to be marketed towards people that have aircraft hangers.
Best scrubbers because your hanger deserves it is the tagline.
Okay.
Hold on.
Just a second here.
It looks like it's manually operated.
Oh yeah, no.
But like, if you took one of these things, I'm sure you could convert it to not be manually
operated.
Well, how much are these?
I have no idea.
There's a contact us button.
Get good scrub.
Yeah.
I think it's like, give us a call type of situation.
Yeah.
Figures.
Quick release squeegee.
Vacuum protection and easy fill.
Yeah.
It looks like, like maintenance would probably have to be manual and like, uh, I am assuming
like draining the tank and whatnot would have to be manual where I bet you with the other
solution, it would be automated and automating that part of this thing would probably not
be very feasible.
Yeah.
Um, so I don't know.
You're probably not going to be able to get the whole way there, but yeah.
Okay.
Army of Roombas.
I was thinking like my, my thing that does floor scrubbing, if you just had like, I don't
know, 12 of them or something and you just zoned them all out.
So they just at a certain point in night, they just all at the same time, just maybe,
I mean, they, they cycle their own water.
They do mopping, like they do all this type of stuff, exterminate you could at the price
difference between the 70 K for that and whatever you'd have to pay for these things.
You could just have like three of them in the back just in case one dies.
Um, I don't know.
Someone linked an auto scrubber, Pacific floor care, S 28 disc, 28 inch auto scrubber, $15,000.
I mean that seems pretty reasonable.
This looks like someone's pushing it.
Yeah.
That's not the point.
Yeah.
I wanted an autonomous one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It looks like a handle.
It's definitely a handle, almost certainly a handle.
So anyway, you know what, I, I guess we might just have to have mops or something, but we'll
figure it out.
Walmart has automated versions.
I don't know.
If we decide to do an automated one, then it'll definitely be a video.
So remember how I said, Hey, forget about the automatic score keeping with the machine
vision team.
We might need a machine vision team anyway for a floor scrubber.
For one floor scrubber.
That sounds so much less worth it.
Like, wow, it sounds a lot easier, like way easier.
Can't you just put Roomba brains in it?
Like just rip the like motors out of a Roomba and just glue it to the top of it.
It's way heavier.
Yeah, but it doesn't matter.
It's the same control system.
No, I, no, no, I see what Luke's doing.
No, we couldn't do that, but that would be such a cool business for like Roomba to expand
into.
So you've got like, you've got the dumb thing, but then you just facility, but you just get
brains.
Oh, I see what you mean.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So they just, so cause yeah, I might want new sensors and a new brain, but it's a fricking
mop.
I don't need, I, I, I don't need a whole new body that would actually be like a modular
approach to this could be kind of cool legitimately.
There's a spot to do it.
It just walks here with an actual mop and bucket.
That would be amazing.
Yeah.
We, instead of an arm on the top, it's, it's a mop.
Yeah.
How much is this thing?
Great idea.
Oh man.
People are just linking me like random, just like every push pusher scrubber.
This one looks to be actually automated.
Oh, okay.
Wow.
It's from Karcher.
I had a pressure washer from them from Costco.
That's all I know about them.
Literally all.
Oh, it looks like you could push it, I guess, which is fine.
That's whatever.
This device requires instruction.
Sure does.
Request quote.
All of these things are request quote, which means like it's a lot.
I want to see the video.
Oh, right.
I scroll through it the exact same time.
Nice.
We can just skip it as a three minute video.
Docking station.
Wait.
Wow.
No way.
No way.
What?
Oh, that's battery charging.
I thought that was like replacing fluid.
Oh, I'm sure it will.
Oh, shut up.
Yeah.
No way.
Okay.
That's awesome.
My little Roomba thing does that.
Well, yeah, but this goes right into the wall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That'd be sick.
That would be kind of sick.
Does it refill it?
Tell me it refills it.
I hope so.
Yeah.
Wait.
It cleans the tank.
That's pretty cool.
Okay.
Because it's request quo.
And do I need a subscription service for it?
Do I have to configure it with their cloud?
There we go.
It fills with fresh water.
Oh, this is kind of awesome.
I love the hydro physics they got going on.
All right.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
Boom.
Takes off on its own.
I'll get in touch with these guys and figure out if they have a, if this will be suitable
for my needs.
You're going to turn this channel into an automated cleaning channel.
I know, right?
What's the thing I love about LTT is you can kind of do, you know, whatever.
Interesting things are interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
Interesting tech.
Right?
Yeah.
Pre sweep function.
Pick up course dirt while scrubbing.
Thank you.
Little robot.
Yeah.
I just hope it's actually any good.
It does detergent dosing.
That seems neat.
It has a warning beacon just in case it's going to roll over someone playing badminton.
Wow.
And it dries.
Yep.
Okay.
There are options.
All right.
Another thing, if people want to just throw links at me like they currently are, another
thing that we're trying to figure out is how we want to do like memberships and court rentals
and stuff like that.
And there's been a few, there's been a few things that I've kind of found, but I haven't
found one that I think really fits perfectly yet.
So if you, if you go to like a local court gym, because I have found stuff for like weightlifting
gyms, but I guess we're going to need both at this point.
But being able to rent specific courts and being able to rent like multiple courts at
the same time and also having your membership potentially play into that.
We don't know how that might work yet.
Maybe you get a discount on court rental, maybe something else.
I don't know.
Being able to have a membership on this other platform, all of those types of things.
We want to ideally not make this stuff.
Court reserve for tennis.
Boom.
This is why, this is why court reserve, court reserve, court reservation software.
Amazing.
I will look into this.
Thank you people.
This is kind of cool.
Apparently you teach it by just manually driving around the perimeter of the area.
You want it to clean, but it has to be free of obstacles.
So I don't know how nets would factor into that.
Well, we'll, we'll figure this out.
Yeah.
All right.
What else do you want to talk about anyway?
In conclusion, fossil bad.
Oh my God.
You're talking about watches.
Yeah.
Yep.
Oh, the tangents.
Amazing.
A Chinese company releases new CPU pictures courtesy of Tom's hardware here.
Chinese company Power Leader has announced they will be entering the CPU market and unveiled
their new chip, the Powerstar P3-01105, an obvious rebranding of the i3-10105.
Power Leader claims the CPU uses storm core architecture and made no mention of Intel
whatsoever.
The company claims the CPU will be launching soon with an annual target of 1.5 million
units sold.
We don't actually know anything more about it than this.
And our hope was that we could generate a bit of discussion with you guys about how
the heck Power Leader might be getting a hold of one and a half million chips to rebrand.
And what exactly it is that they're trying to achieve here.
What is going on?
Oh, hello, my wife.
Do you want to come say hi to Wansho?
You never say hi to Wansho.
How come, how come you're so, how come you're so shy?
No, I'm going to make you come say hi to Wansho to get the key.
If you want the key, you have to come say hi to Wansho.
Yeah, you can go home.
You can go home after you say hi to Wansho.
I'm going to hold it over here.
Wow.
All right.
What else do we want to talk about?
Oh, yeah, yeah, right, right, right.
Oh, you guys, do they have one and a half million compatible motherboards and RAM sticks?
I don't know.
Okay, you guys haven't really given us anything here.
Man, it would be really funny if they were just like,
oh, yeah, it just works with these boards, just the pre-existing Intel chipset.
I don't know, people are speculating like factory defect CPUs,
but those would never leave Intel's factory, which isn't in China.
So it's not like, oh, yeah, it's like a third shift thing or fourth shift
or whatever it's called when the factory runs an additional shift
and just puts it into a truck and you can buy literally the exact same product
that came out of the same factory, but at a tenth of the price or whatever.
This is obviously not that.
Some people are saying from the e-waste bin, well, right,
but people would get wise and stop buying them before they manage to sell a million and a half.
Like, come on, guys, give me something here.
Did they take over a boat?
Like, if so, Intel would have reported a million and a half CPUs missing.
Like, that would show up on their balance sheet.
That would be on a quarterly earnings call.
Like, where are these coming from?
Yeah, that's not the question, Sec IT guy.
It's where is it coming from?
My guess is closed factory, revoked factory contract, kept it running.
No, that's not how Intel works.
Intel's a first-party manufacturer.
They make their CPUs.
There's no third-party contractor that is just, you know, quietly moving CPUs out the door.
People do steal CPUs off the line.
You do see that from time to time, especially with qualifying samples, engineering samples.
You'll see a lot of that stuff show up.
But in terms of retail chips, that's not really a thing.
Linus, didn't you know Intel has a franchise program?
Okay, all right, you guys are just teasing now.
I mean, we've got some people sort of speculating that it could be political.
I mean, there has been the whole back and forth
over just the semiconductor industry in general between the US and China.
There was that whole thing earlier this week where, like, there was speculation
that the US would rather blow up TSMC than let China have it, which is bad.
By the way, just sort of want to make my position clear on that.
Simple answer, they're lying.
But, like, to what end?
What's the point of lying about this?
Like, it just looks...
Yeah, I don't...
I just don't get this.
Image is a hoax.
Yeah, okay, well, we don't know.
Nobody seems to have a clear idea of what exactly the crap is going on here.
I thought maybe someone knew.
Okay, all right, cool.
What else do you want to talk about?
I need to do this really quick.
Oh, all right.
Oh.
And then I'm down to talk about whatever.
I want to talk about the $615,000 in penalties
for companies that faked anti-net neutrality comments.
Yeah, what's going on with that?
Okay, this is wild.
This is, like, some next level BS.
This explains not all, but at least some of how obviously beneficial things,
like net neutrality, like right to repair, don't just immediately happen
where everyone just goes, oh, yeah, that would be good.
Let's do that.
Let's talk about this.
Three companies, LCX Digital Media, LeadID, and Efficient, IFFICINT, Inc.,
were hired by the broadband industry to enroll consumers in a campaign
to repeal net neutrality rules in 2017.
Instead, these companies submitted a combined 3.8 million fake responses
to the FCC using the identities and personal information of real people
without their knowledge or consent.
So basically, if you were actually a real person who got convinced somehow
that net neutrality was a bad idea and was bad, congratulations.
You played yourself.
You are as clever as a bot.
Like, net neutrality is obvious.
It is obvious that it needs to be a thing.
And because it's so obvious, these companies clearly thought, you know what?
We are never going to convince enough people of this.
Yeah, so we just need to fake it.
So we just need to fake it.
These companies have agreed to pay a total of $615,000 worth of penalties.
So this is just over $6 per false representation.
Wait, no, that doesn't seem right.
3.8 million fake responses.
Okay, forget that math.
They were not the only companies involved, and this is actually the second batch
of penalty agreements secured by the New York Attorney General.
These allegations first came to light in 2021, but the head of the FCC at the time,
Ajit Pai, was anti-net neutrality and fought attempts to investigate.
He was awful.
Like, the worst.
Yep.
Like, actually just paid shill.
Yep.
Authorities were unable to substantiate that the big ISPs who paid for these fake
comments had direct knowledge of the fraud, and thus they have not been held liable.
$615,000?
Feels very low.
That's like cost of doing business.
Yep.
This is disgusting.
These companies shouldn't be allowed to exist anymore, in my opinion.
Force closed.
What's that?
I don't think these companies should be allowed to exist anymore.
Yeah.
I mean, I just don't understand why you can have, like, however many grams of weed
or whatever, and you can go to jail.
Yeah.
Like...
Just fraud.
That's not a big deal.
Yeah.
Like, what?
Yeah.
Like, the amount of money that was at stake in this net neutrality...
Oh, yeah.
In this net neutrality argument.
And, like, what?
Are they going to overturn it now?
Yeah, this is hilarious.
Lapsed memory goes, the worst part is that this was known while it was happening, and
he specifically blocked any investigation.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, we got people talking about, like, 650 grand is less than what some companies
will pay for, like, a TV advertising spot.
Yeah, 100%.
Think about Super Bowl spots.
Yeah.
Like, man.
Yeah, and 600K between three companies, like, okay.
Yeah, Hunter Leier is saying, in my state, anything overannounced is punishable by up
to 20 years, and it's disgusting.
Yeah, 100%, like, why is white-collar crime just fine?
It's okay.
Isn't Elizabeth Holmes, like, still not in jail?
Who's that?
The, um, Theranos.
Oh, really?
She's not?
I thought she was.
Has avoided starting her more than 11-year prison sentence on Thursday by deploying the
same legal manoeuvre that enabled her co-conspirator in the blood-testing hoax to remain free for
an additional month.
Jeez.
Okay.
Because that would be an option if you had, you know, an ounce of weed in your bag.
Anyways, let's move on.
I want to talk about the Boink update.
LTT, currently in second place.
Doing good.
But, but, but we will likely lose that spot when the next two projects come online.
So if you guys want to join our Boink team, we are currently behind a non-tech.
Sign-ups are open for prizes, more people would be appreciated.
We need people running Number Fields at home and Einstein at home.
So go, go, go check it out, guys.
You can get more information, hopefully, at the link below.
Do we have a link below to that, Dan?
Hopefully we do.
Otherwise, check it out on the forum.
You guys can learn more there.
And I think that's pretty much it for the topics.
Should we switch over to When Show After Dark?
Yeah.
Dropped my fidget toy.
How are your fingers doing over there, Dan?
Oh, they're painful.
Painful fingers.
My, my fingers are painful.
My fingers hurt.
Well, now your back's going to hurt because you just pulled landscaping duty.
It's a line from Happy Gilmore's.
I can't take credit for that.
Okay.
Ben Stiller in that movie is fricking hilarious.
It's pretty great.
Okay.
Let's go.
Let's go.
Okay, first up here.
When you were leading a team of house painters, how did you wow?
I'm muted.
When you were leading a team of house painters, how did you wow customers and manage quality?
Any stories from that era?
He's starting his own painting franchise six months ago with five painters.
How did you wow customers?
I mean, really, I don't know that I ever wowed anyone.
We obviously did our best and, you know, cared about quality.
I didn't have a huge team.
The biggest my team ever was, was me plus two.
So I ended up doing a lot more of the painting myself than I was supposed to.
I wasn't a particularly good manager.
So I was there on site most of the time, unless I was doing quotes.
So managing quality was fairly easy in terms of how to wow people.
I mean, honestly, speaking from both sides, I'd say that if you're a contractor who shows up
within an hour of when you say you will, you're going to wow the customer.
That's like, wow.
If you don't do like a terrible job.
Yeah, I had a guy, we just kind of gave up on ever getting around to moving the trampoline from the
old place to the new place.
And Yvonne found a guy on Facebook marketplace who does it for like 200 bucks or something like that.
And she was like, you know what, I'm just going to do this so that, you know, one of the kids has a
birthday party coming up so they can all jump.
And like, I was not going to have an opportunity to get it done.
And the guy showed up and did it at the agreed rate.
And I tipped him like 50 bucks or something like that because wow, I couldn't believe it.
You actually did it.
I still don't have a pool.
You're going to have us roll the trampoline down the street, weren't you?
Yeah, that was my plan.
I wasn't actually going to recruit you, but I was going to have Luke help me.
Yeah, I probably would have been there.
The return of Channel Super Fun, Elias and Luke try to roll a trampoline.
I wanted to do it in the snow because I figured when we're going down the hill, we could just kind of slide it.
That would have actually been so much fun.
Oh man.
Okay.
That's so good.
ILD recently started a new job with much more leeway for my own decision-making, leaving behind a job where I was micromanaged.
Any advice for adjusting to this change, finding myself struggling?
You have to make decisions.
You're going to make wrong decisions sometimes.
Have reasons for why you made your decision.
Like if someone's like, this went really poorly, why did you do this?
Be able to justify it and be like, yeah, I mean, now that we've seen it gone poorly, it makes sense.
But when I was originally making the decision, this is why I made it.
And you know, if, if I didn't have the information of this going poorly and I went back to it and I had this original information, I would still make that decision.
If you can defend it to that level, then like it is what it is.
You just got to keep moving.
But yeah, understand that you're going to make mistakes and now they're going to be on you and that's okay.
Hi Beeps, was looking for a video of yours from 2019.
Christmas Buyer's Guide, I believe, made my first computer with that.
Can't find it anywhere.
Is it common for you to delete old videos?
No, it's very uncommon for us to delete old videos.
I think only a handful of actually published videos have ever been deleted.
One of them included a detailed floor plan of my old house, for example, that just kind of seemed ill-advised.
What else?
Really not much.
Oh, we, we pulled that, see, I don't even remember that, that health monitoring ring.
Our aura aura aura.
We pulled the video when they were all miffed about it.
And we offered to make good and they weren't happy with it.
And we were like, Oh, okay.
So I think they wanted to pull.
I don't, I can't even remember exactly what happened.
But basically, I don't think it was really anyone's fault.
It just didn't work out.
So we pulled the video.
Really, really not many.
It's very uncommon.
Yeah, the title is something different or whatever.
There's like 4,000 videos on the LTT channel or something like that.
Like it's not, yeah, it's not a surprise that it's like hard to track down a particular one.
Okay, let's see.
Oh, I should have done that.
Hey Dale, long time watcher, first time caller.
I'm going to be wrapping up my first ever custom hardline water cooling build in the next couple of weeks.
Any chance of a new review my build soon?
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, I mean, we, we, we ask people to submit bad builds, but I guess we've never actually asked the communities to submit their best builds.
Maybe we should do that.
Well, no, we used to do that on Way of Show actually.
That's true.
Super long time ago.
Build of the week was a thing.
Huh.
Maybe it's a, maybe it's a potential idea for the reaction channel.
Yeah.
Hi, LLD.
I love listening to you guys on Saturdays when I'm out delivering mail.
My PC is 20 feet away from the TV in my living room.
What is the easiest option to use my PC on my TV?
20 foot HDMI cable?
Uh, yeah, pretty much.
You might need to go optical, especially if you're running HDMI 2.1 at that kind of a distance.
But I would, I would personally just go with an active USB cable.
You might be able to do 20 feet if you're just doing USB 2.
But I would, I would personally just go with an active USB cable.
You might be able to do 20 feet if you're just doing USB 2.
But I would, I would personally just go with an active USB cable.
You might be able to do 20 feet if you're just doing USB 2.
And then a powered hub so that you can run mouse and keyboard or, you know, a mouse and, uh, game controller, uh, receiver, you know, whatever.
And then I would, yeah, I would go with probably an optical HDMI 2.1 cable assuming you want to do, like, 4K 120 hertz or something like that.
Uh, by the way, we missed a topic that is actually kind of a big one.
The, we could just do this real quick here.
Yeah.
But the former Uber CSO was found guilty of concealing a data breach.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
I would say that Uber CSO was found guilty of concealing a data breach.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
And something, something, basically six years in prison, I think.
I thought we talked about this last week.
No, I don't think we did.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Um, yeah, but basically covered up a 2016 hack that compromised the data of 57 million users, including 600,000 driver's licenses.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
That's really rough.
They withheld information about the incident, and it was only investigated and disclosed in late 2017 when Uber became, came under new management.
He actually got another security chief position in Cloudflare in 2018, only stepping down in 2022 to prepare for his trial.
Yikes.
That's brutal.
Yeah, that's rough. I'm surprised nothing here is going towards the company, but it is what it is.
It is what it is?
Yeah.
All right, Dan, hit me.
Oh, apparently we just mentioned it last week. We didn't go into the topic.
Back to Curated.
Despite early excitement, I haven't seen much buzz around the WinGPD4 lately.
How do you think it compares to the ROG Ally as a portable Windows PC from your time with both, other than price?
Oh, man. Price matters a lot, and the hardware in the Ally is a lot faster.
The smaller brands, the GPDs, the Ioneos, the 1X players of the world, they're gonna have to have 7,000 series Ryzen in order to compete with what Asus is doing with the Ally and with what Valve is doing with the Steam Deck, quite frankly.
Even though that's even older hardware, as we found in our review of the Ally, it still performs surprisingly well, especially in lower power envelopes.
And you've got to imagine that a big part of that is thanks to the optimizations that Valve is able to make by just baking their own OS, taking their time, working through the problems, and really squeezing the most out of that hardware.
Something that we didn't touch on, like did not hit in our review and should have, is the differences between sleep on Windows and on the Steam Deck.
Just instant sleep, instant wake, it's a more console-like experience, is much more seamless on the Steam Deck, whereas on Windows, it's like...
Rough.
Yeah, exactly. You're not really able to suspend it in the same way.
With more employees in the labs building, how many times per hour are people and equipment moving back and forth? Are you going to have to hire someone just to drive a truck between the buildings?
Oh, you mean between buildings. I thought you just meant inside the lab. We work in a hallway.
Oh my god.
Boof! There's a lot of people that work there. You start to realize that when you work in a hallway.
Yeah, like 5% of the people you recognize.
And it's fantastic when people decide to have impromptu meetings in the middle of our hallway. It's not that bad. I'm just complaining.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't see it often personally, like needing to get things between the buildings. The only thing I normally need to get between the buildings is myself, so I'm not a very good person to answer this.
But from my observation point, it's really not that bad.
Was there any lifespan testing on the stick locks?
I mean, they're made of a very durable silicone rubber. Tell you what, if they fail, I got you. Sorry, that's not what it is.
Trust me, bro!
That's the one.
That would be good on a shirt.
I recently saw a video about linking JetGPT to Home Assistant. It can't control anything, yet, but it's only a matter of time.
Linus, would you trust an LLMAI with keys to your home automation?
Well, it depends, right? Because as long as it's... Ooh, yeah, so hold on a second. No, I don't want anything that is web-based.
You can self-host.
Oh, but you can self-host ChatGPT?
Not ChatGPT, but there are multiple forms of it that you can self-host.
I was specifically responding to ChatGPT, but if we're just talking about, in general, an LLM, yeah, I don't see why not.
As long as I'm self-hosting it, as long as I'm the one who controls who is allowed to interface with it, I mean, it's not actually sentient. It's not making decisions.
I was going to say, I think what the merch message is asking is, are you going to trust it to not, like, I can't let you do that, Dave, to your house?
Yeah, I'm not worried about that.
Yeah.
Linus, do you ever troll your family with automation? My wife will leave every light in the house on. When she does, every speaker plays a song every light in the house. She hates country.
I like staying in my marriage, for the most part.
I just head-butted the mic arm. That's actually hilarious. That's so funny. Oh, my goodness.
You say that, but then what was that like when she came to pick up the key?
Oh, yeah, I was just bugging her.
Oh, no, he trolls family.
Why not use your house?
All the time.
Yeah, I don't know if I've ever really done it. You know what? I would say that the very installation of smart switches is trolling my wife at this point.
The fact that they are still in the house and, you know, not all working properly because I think it's something to do with just how much communication those particular switches spam out onto the network.
The controller just gets overwhelmed. I think we've kind of narrowed down what the problem is. They just can't handle such a big install. She's not happy.
So you know what? Once I've got everything set up, if those new Inovelli ones work out, great. Yeah, maybe. But for now, no, I don't have a death wish. Or at least I don't wish to sleep in the guest room on the couch.
What is the next big step in the lab? What are you most excited about getting from the lab?
The most exciting thing for me that I expect to get from the lab is way more roundups.
Who wants a review of the EVGA B450 watt semi-modular? No! No, I want to know what the best power supply under $35 is. That's all I actually care about.
And so once we're testing in bulk, I want to do way more content like that. What is the best sounding true wireless earphone? Just everything else aside, we'll talk about that other stuff, but give me a headline and give me real data to back it up. I don't want just like BS listicles, you know?
Really excited about that. And the PSU tester being online is definitely something I'm super excited about. We're actually going to be shooting a lab update on Monday. We've actually printed things with the metal 3D printer now. So I'll be showing you guys some print results.
We've got the power supply tester, the RF chamber, the floor is in. So at the end of the RF chamber video, the floor wasn't actually in because we wanted to shoot while they were installing so we could give you guys a better look at how it was going together.
So you're going to see in the lab update, we've got the floor and now we're going to talk a little bit more about the cellular network testing gear that we're going to be putting in there. RF chamber is super cool, man. Want to know something wild?
You know how in science class you learn that just a metal enclosure is a Faraday cage? Yeah, well not all Faraday cages are created equal. You know how you can put your cell phone in the microwave and you'll still get a text?
Even though it's a Faraday cage. But that Faraday cage is designed for a particular, yeah I guess how would I even describe this, like particular type of radiation. And it's not perfect for everything.
And so what's really cool is the man, the precision with which they have to be built. Just mind blowing. There's this, there's this like baffle, this pass through that's designed for you to put your optical cables through so that you can actually get data inside.
And it's engineered so tightly that if you take just like a wire and just stick it through it, the background noise goes from like minus 150. Don't quote me on these numbers. You'll see it in the video. Like minus 150 DB to like set minus 70.
Like huge, huge difference just from putting a wire through a hole in this whole room that we're in. Absolutely mind blowing. So cool. Yeah. We are going to be able to test some cool stuff though.
I'm very excited to throw my phone at it. I already talked to them about it. Like the wifi, the wifi router market has had what for objective testing?
Yeah. What, what freaking wifi access point do you buy? Yeah. I don't know. Who knows? Just reading on a spec sheet and hoping.
Hey, L L D. I worked for Zeku, the in-house chip company for Oppo. Is it Zeku or Zeku? I'm not sure. I don't think it matters anymore. Let's do both. Zeku just closed yesterday without any warning. Why do you think Oppo chose now to leave the custom chip race? We have produced two working chips.
Honestly, for me, the bigger question is why they thought they should enter the custom chip race. It's really challenging. Um, and there's a reason that there's only, I mean, what, I guess we could say Apple, uh, Qualcomm, um, media tech actually has some decent designs these days, don't they?
But there's, there's only, there's only a handful of, you know, really successful arm integrators. And the ones that are successful these days are adding a lot of special sauce to their designs, making them very custom rather than just, you know, taking arm core IP and, you know, putting it onto a CPU. If you want to be competitive. Uh, yeah. Google, Google's another one.
It's really tough. And I don't, I don't see a company like Oppo even at their scale. I don't see it making sense for them to try to, to try to develop their own chip IP. I don't, I don't get it. It's just, it's so hard.
Okay. Last curated one I've got here. Hi, wan.dll. When looking at channel metrics, how do you take into account users that lie about their age? Old account created while underage, currently underage privacy or humor reasons.
We can't, we just assume that, well, okay. Well, we can't, uh, Google definitely has, uh, mechanisms in place to try to account for that. Uh, they will, they will profile you based on the kind of content that you look at and the kind of behavior that you exhibit.
Uh, but other than that, it's all just, you know, a best guess, right? It's a heck of a lot better than what we had before. That's what's turned Google into such an advertising juggernaut is, you know, newspapers and magazines were just guessing.
They don't actually know who's reading them. I mean, Cosmo, you know, made a pretty educated guess that it's probably mostly women reading it, but they couldn't actually verify that.
Well, in the same way, Google is making a pretty good guess that, you know, someone who self identifies as a 45 year old man is probably a 45 year old man because who would lie about that? Do you want to be a 45 year old man?
Not necessarily. I think there's probably also a lot of habits with like, if you're going to lie about your age, you're either going to pick like a hundred or just barely acceptable because why bother scroll further?
Yeah. So like, yeah, I don't know.
Okay. That's all we got for curated right now. Let's go through some of these potentials. That might be spicy.
Yeah. Good luck, everybody.
Have fun. Thanks for championing consumer rights, right to repair and calling up bad company behaviors. Why not call out valve more for doing some things like locking in proprietary modding and DRM? Wasn't even sure they did that, honestly.
Um, well DRM isn't bad. DRM, invasive DRM, or that compromises your privacy DRM.
We're always online.
Root kits are bad, right? But DRM is not inherently bad. DRM is like, like, should I also criticize Walmart for having a security guard standing at the exit to, you know, check your receipt or Costco? Sorry.
Costco, having someone standing at the exit to check your receipt. That's kind of DRM. It's like, it's anti theft, right? Like it's not, um, I think, I think valve does enough things, right.
That whether they deserve it or not, they get a lot of free passes. Um, the way that they turn a blind eye to skins, gambling is absolutely the most egregious thing that they're engaging in for profit and just, you know, ethics be damned.
Yeah. Well, that's also like that type of activity. I know this is not exactly the same thing, but that type of activity went from like, like you could never talk about gambling in relation to sports the whole time I was growing up.
And now the like main advertisers of all of them are gambling websites. Yeah. It's kind of wild right now. Like the, the world just like gave up on gambling, which is very interesting to me. It's kind of depressing.
Yeah. Uh, people are saying, yeah, DRM in theory isn't bad, but, um, it precludes people running stuff. Wait, it precludes people running stuff however they want. It's all bad.
No, I can't say that. I actually agree. Uh, someone said it's bad when it's no longer supported, but my understanding is valve came out and basically said, yeah, we'll turn it all off if we ever close steam.
I don't know that that's actually in their user agreement. I don't know how that works with third party developers. Clearly steam has grown beyond valves wildest dreams when they were first developing it.
I guess there's plenty of time for us to be outraged when that happens and it could happen. Like I have no idea what valves ownership structure is. Does anybody know they're privately held?
Presumably Mr. Newell still owns a significant amount of it. He's not getting any younger. Like when Gabe Newell dies, does steam shut down? I actually don't. It's not impossible.
I have no idea. It's improbable. Highly, but it is not impossible. Right? Like this is not a publicly held company. There's no guarantee of continuity here.
We can all hope it stands around for a little while, I guess. Let's see. I'll archive that one.
Watching since 2015 and LTT helped me feel comfy switching jobs into the tech sector from teaching. Still dealing with imposter syndrome, but curious what certifications or knowledge would LMG expect for a systems administrator?
You hired for it.
Yeah. I mean, we, we looked for like a bunch of different stuff. I don't know if the listing is still up. It's probably down now, but we looked for a bunch of different stuff, but kind of the main thing we were looking for, which is pretty normal for us was experience or portfolio.
Obviously you're not necessarily going to have an amazing portfolio for that position. You might, but I doubt it. I don't know how you'd like represent it very easily. You could, but yeah, it would be kind of tough.
But yeah, we mostly looked for experience. What have you worked with? We did consider a bunch of different certifications and stuff though, but there's like, there's so many that that specific space is just like absolutely covered with them.
And most jobs will, will list the ones they actually care about. So I don't know. I would just look into that.
Oops. We're all doing much messages. Hi, Linus and Luke, grateful for you. You have talked about missing features, but have you come across any apps or creative solutions that have been fundamentally changing your daily routine for the better?
Hmm. Um, any apps or creative solutions that have fundamentally changed your daily routine for the better? I mean, reminders were a big thing for me when those showed up on smartphones, the clock app.
Yeah. I mean, I like the clock app that starts Google routines at my alarm times, turns on all my lights. I have an app called food checklist. Um, that is if maintained well, which we do a pretty good job of kind of indispensable for shopping.
We don't track anything in our fridge on it. You can, but we don't just because the in and out is so fast. It's been, yeah, we'd spend more time on our phones than actually like, you know, cooking.
Uh, but for the freezer, it's great because before we were just awful about, you know, buying some like pre done meal thing, dumping it in there, not using it, buying another one.
Exactly, exactly. So our freezer would be full and we'd be like, Holy crap, we have like nine of those pizza making kits. Why, why have we not made pizza in the last six months? It's ridiculous, right?
Um, yeah, everyone should make pizza once a month. The thing that actually triggered it, I think is Yvonne came back from Costco with a two pack of cinnamon raisin bread while her parents also bought us a two pack of cinnamon raisin bread.
And I think there were already like five or six loads in the freezer and I was like, okay, this is, we need a solution. Continue. And it's partially my fault because I'm super bingey. So I once ate an entire loaf of that in one sitting, one sitting.
And so when I'm at like my peak consumption of something, you actually cannot keep it in stock in the house and then I'll just go cold on it and stop eating it.
And then if you just keep like dumbly buying one, and I don't mean dumbly like, like intelligence dumb, like just kind of like autopilot buying them every time you go shopping, which would have been a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
It's going to pile up. And if you have no way of knowing what's in the freezer, because, okay, you try having three kids and running a company and like every crap other thing that Yvonne does.
You'd forget to check the freezer before you go shopping too. It happens. So yeah, food checklist. It's kind of great. And I think it was a one time lifetime purchase. I don't think it's a subscription anymore.
They also have a subscription option, obviously, but I was like, nah, that's stupid. So I bought the one time thing.
Hey, L and L my wife and daughter are starting a YouTube channel, non-tech. At what point in their subscriber ramp should they start to work with FlowPlane? Zero subscribers, 1000, 10,000 more?
I'd say if it's any earlier than like a hundred or a couple hundred thousand, it's probably not going to be very effective. The thing is that you've got to build an audience before you can monetize an audience.
You actually cannot put the cart in front of the horse and you're only going to be able to monetize some percentage of that audience.
So you look at, obviously it's not apples to apples because there are some subscribers to LTT channel that subscribed 12 years ago and probably haven't looked at the content in over a decade, right?
So it's, if I say, okay, yeah, we have 15 million subscribers on YouTube and we've only converted 42,000 of them to FlowPlane. You can't look at that ratio and go, oh, well, I'll probably have a similar level of success, but you also can't ignore that, right?
Out of 15 million, we've converted 42,000. Now that's enough to really move the needle for us these days.
But at that ratio, if you had one and a half million, you might have 4,000. If you had half a million, you might have like 1200 subscribers on something like a Patreon or something like a FlowPlane.
If you had a hundred thousand, you might have, so what's the, what's the math here? Let's go down another fifth.
So you'll have like 230 people or whatever that works out to 230 people at $5 a month. Okay. So maybe you're getting about a thousand dollars a month.
That's $12,000 a year. If you were planning to live off of that, that's going to be fairly challenging unless you live in the middle of like nowhere.
And you know, you are on a farm where you can grow your own food or something like, I don't know, like, yeah, farming content. Sure. No problem. Let's go.
But the, but the math, right? Like it's in order for it to actually move the needle, you've got to have a significant subscriber base.
People have gotten really offended when they'll have like a hundred subscribers and they'll ask about external platform funding. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think it's a good idea right now.
And they won't, this won't even be in like relation to FlowPlane necessarily. They'll be like, should I start a Patreon? I'm like, probably not.
And they get pissed and I'm like, no, it's not, I'm not trying to belittle. You have, we've talked about this on my show before. Literally every single action you ever do has a, that means you're not doing some other form of action.
I'm like, no, you shouldn't just like drown under this thought process forever, but you should consider like, is it worth my time to start and maintain this other thing when I am at this stage of my growth as a channel or whatever it is?
No. Work on just hard focusing on your main channel. And there are inflection points, right? Once you get to a certain size, it might be like, man, this is like working pretty good or whatever.
But like, I could use a bit more cash because if I had a bit more cash, I could bring on like another editor or something. And by doing that, I could use my time in other ways to do other stuff.
It's like, okay, now is the time. It makes sense. Like, yeah, you, you might hit those certain points where it becomes more or more worth it depending on what size you're at or, or how hardcore your audience is.
There's channels that will perform extremely well on these types of platforms, whatever they are, because they have niche, heavily invested audiences.
So even though their channel is like in quotes, small, they have a really intense following that is going to follow them and is going to financially support them.
And then, but if you know that, then that's great. So your inflection point might be at a different spot than potentially someone else.
You will also see channels that are enormous.
And just cannot.
Can convert no one because all their followers are not going to put money behind their following no matter what happens.
Or they're located in regions where that kind of disposable income is not feasible.
Is not going to work. And that's fine. But then you should also understand that like maybe it's, it's still not worth it for you.
Even if you are a really large channel, if your audience is not going to be able to have that funding power, which is fine.
You just might want to do different things in order to, to grow. So, yeah, that's it.
It's not a slight is all I'm saying.
Hi Linus and welcome to the Dan show. I noticed you are a fan of Taylor Swift. Are you going for an era store concert?
I managed to get tickets on my girlfriend's birthday. She's a big Swifty.
I don't actually do too many concerts. I, um, I am super introverted.
I know you can't tell because I'm a YouTuber and I have kind of like a bombastic on camera personality, particularly for the prerecorded stuff.
But I, I don't, I don't, I don't like dancing in public. I don't like, uh, like my way of enjoying music is to put in headphones or put on headphones, something to do with headphones and, um, listen to it myself by myself.
Like honestly, the amount of social interaction that I have to do running a company and having a family is kind of all I can handle.
It's enough. Yeah. Yeah, it's more than enough.
Um, I think it'd be super cool to go to a Taylor Swift concert. Um, but I, yeah, I'm, oh man, it's also like, it's a lot of work. Like it takes hours.
I had someone, uh, we, we actually sponsored a small badminton tournament. It was like a thousand dollars or something like that. Like it wasn't, it wasn't a huge amount or anything.
But, um, what was stupid about it was that I had a ton of people notice that we sponsored it and asked me about it because I know a ton of badminton people locally.
And they were like, so you're playing right? And I'm like, no, like you sponsored it. I'm like, yeah, but it's like, it's a double knockout tournament.
I'm not, I'm not good enough to win it. It's like an hour for me to drive there. I'm going to play at most two sets or two matches.
So I will play for about, they're probably going to be two sets to complete. So I will play for at most about 30 minutes, 40 minutes, and then I will drive an hour home.
It's just, Oh, right. And making matters worse. If you lose your first, usually they run the winner bracket first and the consolation bracket after.
Oh, so you just have to wait.
So I'll be waiting. So I'll get there. I'll drive an hour. I'll get there. I'll play for like 30 minutes. I'll get cold, right?
I'll wait for three hours, then I'll play again cold and probably lose because I suck. And then I'll drive home for an hour.
It's like, I don't know. It's not, it's just not worth it. Like I have no problem supporting the event, but I only play waterfall tournaments now. Cause I just can't.
Do you know, do you know the waterfall format?
I believe so.
Yeah. So it guarantees at least three matches. So also called ABCD flight.
Um, and basically what it does is it takes the main draw. And as soon as you lose, you go to, I believe if you lose first, you go to, uh, C flight.
And then if you lose again, you go to D flight and you compete there in a knockout tournament. And then if you lose, if you win your first, but lose your second, you go to B I think.
And then if you lose again, you go to C I don't remember how it works, but basically it's, it's pretty cool.
And what it does is it makes it so that by the time you're in the right flight, your matches should be really close and should be winnable.
Uh, but it requires an enormous draw to a ton of participation. It requires way more court time because every player is guaranteed at least three matches.
And, um, it requires a huge facility because otherwise you can't run this enormous draw in parallel and people end up just like waiting around all day. So people don't run them very often.
Linus, you've mentioned in a few videos that it's important to never insult your fans. So what exactly was the trust me bro shirt then?
It felt very mocking. Love the show otherwise. Thanks.
Um, I don't know. I guess from my point of view, I, um, I didn't think too much of the WAN show audience would be that off put by it.
And you know, maybe I, maybe that was a swing and a miss for me, obviously. Right. Um, you know, I thought that I thought that my track record of taking care of things was pretty clear.
There were some things that I obviously didn't communicate very well. Like, uh, when I was talking about like the number, the, the way that people misinterpreted what I was talking about with respect to like the warranty liability for like my family.
If I passed away or something like that, I wasn't actually concerned about the warranty liability.
What I was concerned about was us coming up with a policy that made sense and was something that we could follow through on no matter, no matter what, and figuring out what mechanisms we needed in place.
So what would that look like? Well, planning for the worst case scenario, like in the event of my death or something like that, uh, would that look like some kind of cache of backpacks and screwdrivers held by a third party in escrow or something?
Like, I don't know. I just didn't know the solutions. Um, you know, as it was, all people wanted was a piece of paper that said this like standard boiler plate thing.
And then the whole thing went away and I'm looking at it going, that's meaningless. You know that, right? And so, yeah, I thought it was kind of funny and I did a trust me bro shirt.
Like at the end of the day, all it came down to was my word. That was all you have now. That's all you ever had. And that's all you're ever going to have because I'm the director and primary shareholder of this company.
So at the end of the day, if I decided to fold up shop and not honor anything, I could do that. And so you guys either do trust me or you don't. And it seems like for the most part you do. Thank you.
Um, but yeah, the whole thing in retrospect, I handled it extremely poorly and it just, it just felt kind of ridiculous to me the way that it, the way that it blew up when at the end of the day, nothing I ever said was actually incorrect.
It was just upsetting. Um, sorry. That's, that's my Canadian conclusion to the whole saga, I guess.
Okay, let's get some more recreated in here. Hello, LLD. Staying up late to watch you from the European Union. What's your take on user benchmark? People will sometimes quote, quote me, they're insanely wrong comparisons and anti AMD propaganda that they take at face value.
Yeah, the lab is basically the lab's job is to make it so that sites like that don't exist anymore. Uh, there's, there's another one that every time I try to compare like some laptop GPU to something, I always end up on this site and it's like worthless.
It actually has no useful information whatsoever. I don't care how many stream processors it has, how fast does it go? And so the labs is goal is going to be to make a database that you can actually trust database of real data, not just a base.
And that was based bonkers. Where's my bell? I've had at least a couple bells today. No, you don't have to do it.
I've been slacking on the bell. Yeah, it's fine. You've replied to a lot of merge messages. Hey Linus, Luke and Dan. Luke, I saw Theo thinking, uh, talking about how you're a great developer manager. This is, this is positive. Great. Stop, stop crying. Wow. I started my job.
I'm not crying, you're crying. I started my job as a junior developer four months ago and I was wondering if you have any advice for dev starting out.
Uh, whoa, that's really broad. Um, wow. I don't know. Wait, he started a job. Is that what he said? So he has a job. Yeah, they have a job. Yeah. He's been a junior developer for four months. Okay. Been working for four months.
Um, I would check in with your leadership. Um,
yeah, I would check in with your direct report and if there's a person above that, that you are able to comfortably talk to about this stuff, I would check in with them and just see what they think you could do better in order to advance, um,
to not being a junior anymore. And you've only been a junior for four months, so you're like, probably not that close. So don't expect like, well, it's going to happen right now.
Um, but expect maybe some feedback of like, basically ask them what it would take in their eyes for you to advance to the next level.
What you would need to be displaying consistently as a, as a skill or, or whatever else to be able to get there, um, and work with them to, to grow internally. That's what I would suggest.
Hold on. Tar thief. One Oh one is still not getting the point over in float plane chat.
If you got to close the company to not honor the warranty versus just decide not to, but stay open because there's no warranty, then that's not the same one is better.
That's not what I said. What I said was we would need systems in place to ensure that whatever we promised would be honored even if the company were closed.
That's what I said. It was always trust me, bro. It was always, we got this. We were always going to got this. We were never trying to get out of anything.
I remember that era very precisely because I remember a plan that I had to try to come up with some kill switch where I could close your chat boxes because I was so tired of you reading chat, just like getting in fights with chat for entire streams.
There was like at least a month there where that was like all that happened. I was like, this is so annoying. You're just getting baited into just everything.
But people still, they're still like, I, I, I'm not a perfect communicator. I don't claim to be. Yeah. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe I may, you know what, maybe we need to be under new management.
Maybe they would do a better job. Maybe they wouldn't be reckless and die and then you wouldn't have to worry about your warranty.
Badman related injury. Yeah. Whole company goes under. Yeah. I mean, look, you can't just eat an entire loaf of bread like that and then go exercise. You're going to keel over.
That's how you get cramps. That's what my stupid doctor said before I fired him.
It's raisins. It's frozen. It's fine. There should, there should be back and forth discourse.
So I want to, I want to say that before I get into this, I'm not saying people shouldn't be, shouldn't be critical or constructive.
But it ties somewhat into the same concept that I brought up a billion times about the Blizzard press conferences.
Yeah. Where like when people scream at the developers on stage because they say something that isn't PR great, that all that's going to lean into is them not putting devs on stage anymore.
Yeah. And also we would have never had to do any of that stuff because shadow Slayer puts this really well historically though, not Linus denying basically every warranty request is very viable as a scummy tactic.
We wouldn't have to do anything. We would just have to just deny warranty requests. It's that simple. And whether you have a written one or not, it doesn't really matter.
You could just deny it because pretty much every warranty has legalese cover your butt wording in it that allows you to just deny it at your sole discretion.
That's just, that's, that's, that's like no company is going to go under over a warranty issue. They will try to weasel out of it.
Fortunately, we're in a position where our primary business is not making products. Still our primary business is still creating content.
So we wouldn't go under. That's why I said at the time, if every single one of them got returned, it would suck, but it wouldn't kill us.
So we actually can afford like, this is like how I've talked about why the warranty and service situation is so bad in the tech industry because the margins suck.
It's actually not sustainable to offer the kind of service that some other industries do. Like when you buy a pair of, you know, let's just pick on someone that I consider to be kind of overpriced.
Let's just buy a pair of Lululemon pants. Okay. Lululemon yoga pants. Those fricking things cost.
Well, yeah, I expect a no questions asked warranty on this thing because you could have lit, you could literally give me six of them for what I paid you.
By the time you've given me three, you're still laughing all the way to the bank, right? Like, of course, they don't have that kind of margins in tech.
So they tend to behave very, very differently. So we're kind of more like a Lululemon where we don't actually make our money selling you backpacks.
We certainly make money, but that's not how we make our living, I guess is what I should have said. So we can afford to take back every backpack if we really needed to.
It's a very luxurious position because it allows us to behave in a way that's just not easy to compete with. The trust me bro guarantee is fricking awesome.
We got you. I mean, don't be a jerk about it, obviously, but we got you.
Yeah. Those customer support people are real people and they're nice people and they're cool people. Be nice to them.
I am never curating another merch message.
Thank you. Thank you.
I have learned my lesson.
Thank you.
We are moving on.
Appreciate it.
For Linus and Luke, what aspects of your job feel like work and when does it feel like you are being paid to have fun?
I mean, really, I think the most fun thing for me is talking about the trust me bro warranty.
I knew it. I knew that was going to happen.
I was going to slip one into the merch message just to screw with Luke.
It's Luke's face that really is the best part.
I don't know who I should give it to. Do I upset Luke or do I let Linus upset Luke? I can never pick.
Oh my God. I just like, oh man.
At this point, it wasn't even recent.
It's over.
Oh, now Luke is doing it.
What's fun about your job? Is it this? You don't seem to like this.
No, I actually really like this.
I barely consider WAN Show work.
The only portion of WAN Show that's work is I can't technically do other things because I do WAN Show.
But like, I enjoy doing WAN Show. I don't want to stop doing WAN Show.
We've had this conversation before.
There have been points in time in the company's history where WAN Show was an anchor.
A burden.
A huge waste of time.
These days, not so much. It's doing a lot better.
But there have been times where we're like, wow.
If we look at this logically, we should really not do this thing anymore.
And we've kept it going because it's just sort of cool. I don't know.
I don't think either of us have ever actually understood why people watch it, but we like hosting it.
Yeah, it's fun. I mean, maybe that's why they like watching it.
Maybe.
Because, okay. I figured it out.
I figured it out.
What?
Well, neither of us would watch WAN Show because we don't have to watch WAN Show to hang out.
I don't mind hanging out with you for three hours.
And you? No problem.
Yeah.
So that's it.
Okay. So it's just like a hangout.
Yeah. But we can do it anytime we want. We can just jump in Discord.
But they can't. So they watch WAN Show.
Fair enough. Okay. Yeah.
Okay. I think I finally get it.
That makes sense.
Nice.
Nice. But yeah, I don't know. That stuff.
There's a bunch of parts of my job that like, yeah, it obviously feels like a job, but I enjoy it.
I don't enjoy.
I enjoy making stuff.
Or like my team making stuff if I want to be more accurate.
I don't enjoy when those things.
Have like.
Hugely negative impacts on the company.
Like if something that we do like goes down in a really bad way.
That sucks.
If it like kind of goes up in flames, but we're still able to hold things together and we can push through and we make it.
Like the roast.
Super cool.
Yeah.
But when things.
Like actually just critical, brutal fail in a way that like wrecks other people's jobs or days or whatever.
That's like, yeah, that kind of blows.
But I mean.
I think there's a lot of that around here. I think by and large people care about the rest of the team.
So it's like, yeah, I don't think anyone wants to waste anybody else's day.
Yeah, I think that's pretty normal. Like, I don't know.
It's a joke that there was a bunch of this matter.
I don't think there's a big deal. There was a there was a decent amount of this in when people talked about like what it's like working here.
Right. They were like, yeah, I think from the outside, sometimes people forget that it's a job.
Like it's a job. You have to do job things.
You have to actually work.
Yeah.
Remember that Reddit post where the person was complaining about like having to work here, essentially?
Yeah. They're like, I didn't want to work when I showed up to work.
And it's like, well.
Like you have to work really hard.
Yeah. It's like, yeah. Yeah.
OK, well, if you can find someone who will pay you to hang out at a social club, then by all means, go do that.
Congratulations.
I can't compete with that.
This ain't it.
I got bills to pay.
Yeah. This is this is more like, I don't know, we're we're we're more like dogs chasing cars.
Like we're there's stuff to do.
I don't know.
It was always going to be like that.
Yeah.
Tyback says, I thought you guys weren't supposed to watch those videos.
That's me.
I can.
I'm not allowed to watch.
That's the only promise that I ever made is that I wouldn't watch it and I still haven't.
Yeah, I haven't.
And I don't think tons of people have said that all the time.
That isn't a spoiler.
I also didn't say who said it like it doesn't matter.
Yeah. Well, I never said I wouldn't incidentally come across information about it.
I just said that I will not watch it and he doesn't watch it.
I have still haven't watched the first one.
I think what I said with the first one is when and if I step out of the company, I'll watch it then.
So I'm going to watch it someday, but not while I'm still working here with the people who were interviewed.
I didn't want to I don't even remember what I should go back and watch it.
I didn't want to influence the process.
I wanted to be as light touch as humanly possible on it because I wanted it to be actually interesting.
If I if I'm standing over people while they're answering that, they're not going to behave naturally.
Right. I mean, even even as it is like, I'm sure you should hold their punches a little bit.
You should have seen this.
I hope not.
Should've seen the stuff Dan said about you, dude.
Oh, really?
It was brutal.
He just he laid into you.
How bad was it, Dan?
It was pretty tight.
I never said I wouldn't ask people about it after, I guess.
What's up, Dan?
You know, I mean, I had to go to the store and everything.
You had to go to the store?
Yeah.
Am I missing something?
I don't know who got the condoms.
What?
It's mostly about the end of my my interview.
I bought the cantaloupe for the prison phone video.
Oh.
Was that like on your first?
I had not been working here long.
Excuse me, Daniel.
We need you to go and purchase a cantaloupe.
Why is that, sir?
We're going to stick a phone in it for somebody's butt.
Yeah, already.
See you later, Dan.
Bye.
Anywho.
That was I had no idea at all what you were talking about.
Here's the latest float plane exclusives.
We've got Dan front and center on both of them.
So if you guys were hoping for more.
We also have a float plane exclusive coming to the WAN about the WAN show coming to float plane.
Oh, excellent.
Yeah, that's this is the place to get all the behind the scenes.
You can get extras from the interviews from what's it like working for LMG.
We've got a lot of those full interviews.
We've got cutting room floor from the build with my sister in law.
This is a cool series.
Their first time.
Yeah.
We've got Sarah, Nick and Colton up so far.
It's reacting to their first time on camera.
This is just a random behind the scenes compilation featuring I think Dan's in it.
A bunch of people are in it.
Take dates from the labs in it.
Yeah, don't miss it.
Float plane.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Float plane.
Hey, any new beta site stuff to talk about?
We mostly just like fix stuff this week.
That makes sense.
Yep.
That makes a lot of sense.
Cool.
But we pushed all the things we wanted to push.
Yeah.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm not in it.
But that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hey Linus, have you tried streaming your PC to your phone over 4G as an alternative to
buying an expensive handheld PC?
I've done it and it looks good at five megabits connection considering how low that is and
the screen size.
Looks good.
Latency sucks.
Man, we have a video on that.
Remember the...
The DIY thing?
Yeah.
Yeah, the DIY shield.
Yep.
Yep.
I don't think we did it over cellular data though.
I think that was over Wi-Fi.
Probably not.
Probably over Wi-Fi.
Over cellular data, I mean, if you're playing a very sight-see game, sure.
You're not going to be playing any Super Meat Boy though.
You can play like Vampire Survivors or something.
You're going to chew...
Boy, are you ever going to chew through your data cap though.
Wowie.
Dear LLD, since the thumbnail for today is about shilling, can we get some more merch
options that are just big logos, names, shilling?
I know you aren't a fan, but can you just take my money anyway?
Okay.
Wow.
You know what?
That actually ties into something we were talking about earlier.
The whole thing where I was saying that you have to reach a certain scale before a Patreon
or a float plane type of monetization makes sense because you'll only be able to convert
a certain percentage.
Let's take that and let's apply it another step down.
So float plane has a very clear value add where occasionally we'll upload videos early,
particularly before weekends.
We've got extra content.
Clearly, if you're into the content, you might be into the extra content.
And it's got, from my experience, just a much more positive, pleasant community vibe,
whether it's on the live chat during the WAN show or even in the comments under the video.
So there's this really clear value add, and it's not just tangentially related.
It's directly related to our main product, which is tech videos, right?
So then there's your merch.
You're only going to convert a certain percentage of people to your physical products.
That's also directly related to the main thing because we build computers.
We have a screwdriver.
We carry laptops around.
We've got a backpack, whatever.
Stuff that just has your logo on it that doesn't necessarily serve a clear function and isn't
necessarily directly related to the service that someone was already enjoying from you
is going to be a much lower conversion rate.
It's like a conversion rate on a conversion rate.
And so if we were to make, I don't know, an LTT or a WAN logo wall ornament or something like that,
first of all, I won't release anything that's crap because I hate that, right?
So it will have to be good, which means we have to invest significant development time in it.
After we've done that, we have to meet whatever bar there is for a minimum order quantity
from whatever manufacturer or manufacturers that we are contracting to produce this product.
So let's say a thousand units or 5,000 units.
I have no way of knowing exactly what that would be until we've made it significantly
deeply into the development process.
At that point, I've got to ask myself, you know, what price do I need to sell this at now,
knowing it's going to be relatively low volume in order for me to make back what I spent on product development.
Okay, because it's going to be low volume, that price is going to have to be higher.
Okay, where's the threshold where that high price goes from recouping cost to just like
creating a perception of exploitation and money grubbingness?
Will people see that nuance there where I kind of go, look, this isn't just money grubbing,
I actually do need my team to be paid for the development time.
So am I just hurting my own brand by selling branded stuff that we spent way too much time
working on for a very niche audience? Maybe.
Sometimes I can be really, sometimes I just overthink this stuff though.
Like when we did that short-term relaunch of just the classic Linus Tech Tips logo shirt,
it sold like crazy because people just wanted it, I guess.
This is actually like legitimately one of my favorite shirts.
That's LTX though, that's an event shirt. That's totally different.
Yeah, but- I'll do an event.
One of the big reasons why I like it is just because it's just a little logo in the corner.
It feels kind of professional.
We have a flag that's going to be there for LTX, just the LTX logo on a flag for 2023 here.
So I'm more willing to do that for a commemorative item versus just our brand, let's go.
I don't know, maybe we'll do more of it in the future, maybe not.
We have a really cool thing coming though.
Tell me something.
If you could own a solid aluminum keycap that is this big, what would you pay for it?
Solid aluminum, chrome plated.
What?
It's mirror finish.
Does it work?
No, of course not.
You can't plug it in?
What kind of stupid question is that?
What do you mean?
It's this big, do you know how much it freaking weighs?
Can I have like a bump?
No, you couldn't.
Yeah, you could.
It's solid aluminum.
It weighs so much.
There's no mechanism in it.
And it's solid.
When I say solid, I don't mean concave, empty, hollowed out.
I mean it is solid.
It's a brick.
I have no idea at all.
I don't know.
It doesn't matter what you say because the people out there that want it, they're going
to pay any amount of money.
It doesn't matter what you say.
I don't know.
I'm just thinking about the shipping costs.
There's some meme about a Loch Ness monster.
You give it $4.69 or something.
I don't know.
I don't remember.
I have no idea.
No, you give him about $3.50.
Yeah, there you go.
That's it.
You get a double face palm.
There you go.
$3.50.
Yeah, there you go.
$3.50, there you go.
$3.50.
I wanted $3.50.
I wanted Linus to do the quote.
He still didn't.
There we go.
We got there.
Anyway.
I have no idea.
We're making this?
Oh, yeah.
Wow.
Because we're meme lards, apparently.
Apparently.
That's sweet.
I don't know, dude.
This isn't the type of thing that I buy.
If you could have a giant solid aluminum key cap, what would you pay for it?
I'm just curious.
I don't think I would buy this.
You wouldn't?
Okay, if you saw it in a gift shop for five bucks, you wouldn't be like, okay, that's
pretty cool.
Okay, I might buy that.
Okay.
So it's $3.50.
Oh, my God.
I mean, if it's going to be from billet aluminum and it's about that big, like...
It's going to be closer to $3.50 than $3.50.
Yeah, that's like $700 US dollars in just billet stock.
No, no, no, no.
It's not that much.
It's not that much.
It's big.
It's big.
It's substantial.
There's going to be three sizes.
How big is the big one?
The big one is like this, the medium one's like this, and the small one's like this.
And the cheapest one...
I don't want to quote this wrong, but they're going to be very expensive.
Not $700, but they're going to be...
All of them are going to be...
Okay, no, I just don't want to say it because I'm going to get it wrong, but the expensive
one's going to be pretty expensive.
Yeah, I don't know.
This is just one of those things that I have no idea what I was thinking.
I don't think you were.
Yeah, I don't know.
But it's awesome.
I was probably talking to Nicholas Plouffe or something.
Oh, this would be cool.
Yeah, yeah.
Big keycap.
Yeah, I don't know.
Big cap.
Yeah, do it, Linus.
Okay, let's move on.
We'll have to send one to Glarsys.
We'll have to engrave.
Dan, can you send a note to Nick?
Did you guys ever end up working with him?
I want to at some point, but we haven't yet.
It just hasn't lined up.
Sorry, what's his name?
Because he reached out to me a long time ago about doing that.
Yeah, I know.
Okay.
I just...
I'm busy.
I know.
How hard is it for you to get on my calendar?
Yeah, fair enough.
He's willing to fly out here.
I know, I know, I know.
I know, I know.
I just...
It's tough, okay?
Yep.
Okay, message is sent.
I have no idea how to spell any of that.
You can figure out what the gibberish means.
Okay, Luke and Linus, what's a decision that you initially regretted, but in hindsight
turned out to be a great idea?
Initially regretted?
Usually I don't get instant regret, because I usually make pretty okay decisions.
Instant regret turned out to be a great idea.
Gee, I don't know.
There's got to be some kind of...
See, most of the things I regret turn out to be bad ideas, like buying those stupid
Blackmagic 12K cameras.
That was instant regret and a bad idea.
It turned out to be a great idea, though.
I saw this one early and have been trying to think about it this whole time, and I'm
in the same spot.
Usually I've thought about it enough that once I purchase it, my opinion on it isn't
going to change.
I guess it's not just purchases, right?
But once I do the thing or whatever, my opinion on it isn't really going to change for
probably quite a while.
I'm trying to think if there's anyone I hired that was like, wow, what a disappointment,
but then they've turned out to be great.
You took a lot longer to disappoint me.
Did I?
I was sleeping on the job immediately.
Yeah, but I wasn't disappointed.
That was kind of my expectation for what you were being paid.
Fair enough.
Yeah, I don't know.
I have to regret it instantly, and then it has to turn out to be a great idea.
If I regret it instantly, why don't I get a refund?
Why don't I undo it?
Yeah, exactly.
I can't think of very many things that fit this.
Someone said it would be the crowbar hammer for Luke, and it's like, well, no, because
it turned out to not be a good idea.
So that doesn't fit this.
It's more like a cold feet thing, but I never regretted getting engaged.
So if I'd regretted that, then that would have turned out to be a great idea.
Or like having kids.
Maybe you instantly regretted it, but it turned out to be a great idea.
That's the kind of thing we're talking about here, but I didn't instantly regret having
kids.
I instantly hated it, but I knew I was going to hate it.
I can't stand babies.
Definitely things that I dreaded.
I did it, and I was like, this sucks.
I don't think this is great.
I don't really necessarily have another option, but I don't like this one.
And then in hindsight or down the line or whatever, it's like, actually, that was really
good for sure.
But there was no-
I instantly regretted allowing the crowd to decorate my car at LTX.
Oh, yeah.
But that did not turn out to be a great idea.
That was just bad.
Yeah.
In my defense, that year there was a significant lack of activities.
Oh, there was.
Definitely.
And I was trying to save it, okay?
I was sacrificing-
Do you remember our miscommunication during that show?
No.
You like-
It was probably epic though, because I was extremely-
You were kind of all over the place.
I was extremely upset when I arrived the night before it was starting and realized some of
the things that were going on, and that is not a knock against the team that was working
on it.
We were understaffed, underfunded.
We had kind of no idea what we were doing.
It was only our second attempt at this, and it was a much bigger space.
It was no one's fault, but I was like, holy shit.
We need to fix this.
What can we do?
I will sacrifice my car.
One of the things I thought of was decorate my car booth.
And so we put out pens and glue and glitter and googly eyes and-
It definitely, you know-
It was memorable.
Kept people busy.
Yeah, but that car was actually undriveable.
People covered the windshield, for crying out loud.
So you were up in some bleacher section thing, and no one could ever hear you.
Do you remember this?
Yes.
So if you were in whatever the thing was that you were talking to people in, people could
hear you.
Oh, like the little-
Yeah, there was a little stage area.
I remember what it was.
Yeah.
And it had bleachers around it.
So if you were specifically in those bleachers or that area, whatever, you could hear Linus.
But if you were outside of it, it didn't matter if he was leaning over the edge and yelling
at you, you could not hear him at all.
Just how the acoustics of the area worked or whatever.
Yeah, and so we got a really high ceiling.
So this and this, I think, cancel each other out effectively, the sound bouncing.
It was pretty wild.
Yeah.
Someone gave me these charpies or something, and they were very unsure about why they were
giving them to me.
But they made it very clear that there was not very many of these, and I should be very
careful with them.
And I was like, okay, this is really weird.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with these.
And then you yelled something over the thing, and I thought you said keep them away from
people or something.
I don't remember exactly what I thought you said, but I thought you were like, you can't
let the random attendees get your Sharpie, and if someone gets your Sharpie, they get
something or something.
So I was like, oh, so I have to run away with these.
Which is not at all what he said, but I thought it was what he said, so I just started running
around.
It was more of like a collect the Pokemon thing.
People were supposed to try to get signatures in all the colors or something like that.
What I thought was going on was they were supposed to collect the Sharpies, and I remember
being like, this is really stupid, but okay, and it makes sense because that wasn't what
was going on.
But yeah, communication during that event was a huge problem.
So we can do better.
We have done better.
It's been four years since we did better.
Hopefully we remember how to do better.
Hopefully we're not just like, yeah, I forget how to do this.
Let's start from scratch.
They assure me it's going to be really good.
I've been less involved in the lead up to it though, so I don't actually know that,
but I do trust the team that's working on it.
If it was as good as last time, would you be happy?
Honestly, yeah.
If you'd asked me that right after LTX 19, I'd have said, no, I expect it to be bigger
and better, but given the momentum that we lost in four years, if it's on par, then we'll
come back stronger 2024 and we can set our sights on that.
Yeah, it makes sense.
Okay.
We're nearing the end of the time here, but we've got a lot more to get through.
Companies are currently not liable for abandoning software support for physical items.
Oh God.
Sorry.
I just want to, I want to interject something.
I wasn't the only person that misinterpreted that way while you were talking, random fans
started trying to grab the Sharpies from my hands.
And then I remember being mad at you at the end.
I was like, why did you give away the Sharpies?
We don't have more of those.
If we want to continue to have people collect the thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I had, I had red marks all up and down my arms because people were like clawing at
me trying to get them and stuff.
It was, it was quite the racket.
Sorry.
Keep coming.
Oh, that's okay.
Here, we'll broadcast it.
Companies are currently not liable for abandoning software support for physical items.
Would you support legislation requiring manufacturers to state their best supported until date on
products?
No.
What I really want is for them to have to hand it over to some other steward if they're
not going to support it anymore.
That just needs to be how it works.
I don't think that's ever going to happen.
So I guess this would be a, I guess this would be something, but I just don't want stuff
to end up e-waste if it's still working.
That should be unacceptable to everyone involved.
Since you've dabbled in making tools like screwdrivers, have you considered making tools
for firefighters or paramedics?
I carry a screwdriver in my bunker gear pockets and I love it.
Larger tools are common.
Yeah, we'd consider making other tools.
We have a hundred thousand shafts from the original manufacturer for the screwdriver
that don't meet our screwdriver shaft quality standards.
So they are effectively garbage.
Metal tubes.
We have 100,000 of them.
So we are trying to find some use for them.
Without consulting me, they asked for them to be shipped to us.
So I paid freight over the ocean for a hundred thousand metal shafts is less than you would
think.
They weren't airshipped or anything.
It came on a boat.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very slow boat.
And we've got some ideas.
The idea that I pitched first was we make something called a fail wrench.
So if you can, if you can dodge a hundred thousand dollar loss, then you can dodge a
fail wrench.
So we just melt them and just make like a stupid crappy adjustable wrench.
And the team was like, no, we can't do that.
It'll be, it'll take forever to make it to your standard.
I'm like, no, it's a fail wrench.
Yeah.
It doesn't have to be to my standards.
Just make it like a bonus bin item.
Buy your shirt, get a wrench.
Not free shipping.
Shirt weighs 200 grams.
Wrench weighs five pounds.
One of the ideas we're working on, one of the ideas we're working on now is turning
them into a fail pen.
So like a bolt action style thing, we'd have to get the ergonomics right though.
And one of the reasons that they're not deemed acceptable is that the knurling kind of sucks.
But what sucks about it is that it's not deep enough.
So it might actually be okay for a pen.
Yeah.
There's some other ideas for things we could melt them down into, but like, I don't remember
what the question was.
Have we, oh yeah.
We thought of making more tools.
Yeah.
We're going to make more tools.
I'm not going to give you my guarantee, but we're probably going to be mostly focused
on tech tools just because that's where the bulk of our audience is.
Yep.
Linus, you mentioned you don't buy games day one, but did you pick up Tears of the Kingdom
and will you be playing it this weekend?
Side note, Luke needs to play Breath of the Wild already.
I don't think he does.
You don't think I do.
I mean, unless you really like to.
I had fun with it.
It was just, it was a playing game.
So I know when I'm going to play it next.
I know exactly when I'm going to play it next because I'm going on a plane soon.
It's not in my bag, but I do have it.
I thought so.
Yeah.
But I'm not going to play it on my Switch.
My copy that I bought is just because I know I'm going to pirate it.
I don't want my save data on a Switch.
That's not unreasonable and I'm not paying for Nintendo online forever just to be able
to back up my save game.
That's ridiculous.
I don't accept it.
I'm sorry.
I consider this to be ethical piracy.
So yeah, I've already downloaded it, but I haven't actually applied all the patches
and 60 FPS mod and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So I'm going to play it on the ROG Ally.
Yeah.
Breath of the Wild runs really good on the Ally.
That's pretty sweet.
And I'm expecting, because it's designed for the same hardware and Breath of the Wild was
already at the limits of what it could do, that Tears of the Kingdom probably isn't going
to be much more demanding than Breath of the Wild.
And what's great about all of this is I can take that same save game and I can play it
on my projector off of my PC, or I can play it on the Ally, or I can play it wherever
and I can keep my save game.
It's going to be awesome.
I won't get to keep my horses though, but I don't really care because it's been like
three years since I've touched Breath of the Wild, three or four.
So I don't even remember my horse's name or what it looks like.
So it makes no difference to me.
Shout out to the newlyweds, I and RC, his best man name dropped lttstore.com during
his speech and I just had to share the moment.
Happy Friday.
Heck yeah.
Thanks for letting us know.
Nice.
I don't think I have seen weekly floatplane exclusives on LMG clips in a while.
What happened to it?
Is that over?
Did not attract people to floatplane?
Oh, it's not over, but it was never intended to be weekly.
It was going to be sometimes, we'll try it and see how it works as a promotional mechanism
and it works great.
Okay, and we are now done with our curated, so let's go through some of these potentials.
Rapid fire if you can.
Would LTT be willing to release-
Would you want to go home or something?
No, I want you to be protected from the ire of Yvonne.
What, do you want to go home?
Is that-
We've had this discussion, Linus.
I will stay here till Monday.
Only Monday?
What, are you weak?
No, I have stuff to do for Luke on Monday.
That's true.
I have to go to the other building.
But Luke will be here.
Yep.
Other building.
No, but Wancho is here, so you'll be here.
Ah, understood.
I mean, if we're still doing Wancho, then it's fine.
Yeah.
I got enough monitors for the both of us.
What was the question?
I don't know.
Would LTT be willing to release the STL file for stick locks to the community so we can
print our own out of TPUs, support those gamers who cannot afford to pay for them?
Probably not, unfortunately, for this one.
I'm afraid that the individual people printing them are not the concern.
They could easily enough probably reverse engineer it and figure it out, but if we give
the exact files to an overseas manufacturer, inevitably they're going to be cloned anyway.
I get that, but I'm not going to go out of my way to make it easier, I guess is what
I'm trying to say.
Hi, DLL.
Actually Nick Light has told me I should be pronouncing this Dale.
Hi, Dale.
Questions for Linus about the Sony A95K TV.
Have you run in a blue tint problem due to fingerprints and has been, and you're unable
to clean them?
Sorry, let me parse this again.
Have you run into the issue with blue tint due to fingerprints and not being able to
clean them?
Tons of people have had this issue and zero acknowledgement from Sony.
I can't say I have because I'm not a caveman, I don't touch my TV screen.
I understand that a lot of people have kids, so it might not actually be avoidable.
I was being facetious, but no, I haven't run into it because there are no fingerprints
on my TV.
It's possible that it is an issue, but it's not one that I've encountered.
Really excited for the sticklocks, thanks for making them.
Linus, you've talked about your love for Final Fantasy Tactics in the past.
What's your favorite class and team style?
Oh man, I'm not even aware of team styles.
I like tanky casters.
Oh okay, if I had a team style, I guess I'm a big move plus two.
Like I will waste so much time with my guys, oh man, what's the class?
I haven't played it in a while.
Move plus two tactics, let's see.
What the heck is blink blade?
Okay, I have no idea what's even going on.
Final Fantasy Tactics, here we go.
Move step.
Man, why is this so hard to find?
Okay, I'm sure someone's telling me the thing.
But I will basically take every one of my party members and make sure they have move
plus two.
Come on guys, help me out here.
Nope, nothing yet.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
I'm just trying to think, like what are...
I use a lot of the special characters, I always love Agrias, Agrias, whatever her name is.
I hate anything that's kind of like probability based.
So you know, I know you can build like just super OP like ninjas and stuff like that because
they have like crazy high evade, but I would rather have super high defense and have like
a predictable amount of damage than super high evade.
And sometimes I dodge and sometimes I get absolutely bone crushed.
I don't like too much randomness, apparently move plus two is thief.
Yeah, thief sucks so much in Final Fantasy Tactics, but I will make everyone grind like
a thousand job points in thief to get move plus two because when you're mobile like that,
you are unstoppable because otherwise you get screwed.
Like I think the default move stat is like two or three rather and then some classes
are more and then you can add move plus two so you can move like six or no, there's items.
That's right.
There's items you can equip for like move plus one so you can put on boots and then
add move plus two and then you can go six so you can basically go in, hit retreat and
human characters that are fighting with you will not be able to catch up easily, but monsters
are super mobile and it can be a real problem because you can't get away from them.
They just close the distance so fast.
Anyway.
Hey Dale, oh no, they're moving.
Uh, well I'll try this one.
Hey there.
I've taken a liking to boxers with man pouches.
They feel comfy for my important parts during hot days at home.
Do you think LTT will one day offer boxers with man pouches?
Um, well congratulations.
I honestly was reading that whole time.
All I got from what you said was man pouches and then he just said congratulations.
So whatever happened was funny.
I almost said mouches at the last one.
Fumbled that.
Um, I don't know.
We get a lot of, we get a lot of really great feedback on the comfort of the boxer, boxer
briefs as they are.
I think we're more likely to do more styles and less likely to do, um, new, um, new bodies
for them.
Ergonomics.
Yeah.
For the time being.
I have a three, um, let's see, uh, yeah, this is kind of in the same 3d printer realm.
I have a 3d printer and would love to make use of it with all the products you're rolling
out.
Do you think there's a line of 3d downloadable models relating to electronics or cable management?
No, I don't think so.
Um, it's just one of those things where I think there's stuff that we've released in
the past or something.
I think our CPU holders are out there, but we're not going to charge for that.
Like if it's something that you can 3d print, then why don't you just 3d print it?
Um, and there's a huge community out there that's designing 3d printable stuff like go,
go do your thing.
Uh, the reason that, you know, you should buy stick locks instead of just 3d printing
them is because 3d printing is not the be all and end all of manufacturing.
And uh, in this case, these are, I forget if they're a pressure pressure mold or there's,
there's two different ways that you can do injection molding for a part like this.
And we did one of them, I can't remember which.
And the reason was that it gets the composition just right, um, allows you to customize the
material.
Like there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of, there's a whole science, you know, to
materials.
There's material science.
Oh wow.
Yeah, I know.
Right.
Um, so for us, you know, the products that we make and sell are going to be ones that
do require, um, more complex manufacturing, at least, you know, at scale.
Right.
And if you guys want to like make your own thing and 3d print them, then yeah, you should.
That's awesome.
It's freaking amazing, but it's a different thing and I, I don't think we would like sell
that.
Hi Dale.
I love my new LTT backpack compliments to Sarah and everyone in the creator warehouse.
Great job.
Will the LTT backpack hold the upcoming framework 16?
Um, yeah, yeah, it should be fine.
I'd have to double check for sure, but it should be fine.
A compression molded says Tynan who is apparently watching one show right now.
Yes.
These are compression molded, not injection molded.
Thank you.
Tynan.
Hi DLL.
I noticed in Linus media group.com the team doesn't show Luke there.
Is that because he is full of plane or has his change in role mean he is still separate
from the main company?
Also I'm not reading the rest of the night.
Yeah.
Continue.
Uh, just laziness I think.
Yeah.
Originally that was the reason, but then creator warehouse became a thing and people that work
under creator warehouse are on there.
Um, so like a bunch of years after that happened, someone pointed that out because I've never
really cared to be honest.
Um, and we were like, Oh, well, we'll fix that eventually.
And we will fix that eventually people keep on offering to take headshots of just me,
but my current thing is like, well, if I'm going on, all my people should probably go
on.
So what'll probably happen is, um, at one of the events, like either Christmas party
or LTX or something, when all of the remotes kind of come in and we'll probably do a bunch
of headshots and then do them all at the same time so that we all go up together or something
like that.
But yeah.
Hey, DLL love the content had been following since about 2011 out of curiosity.
How many of the flow plane users still have the, uh, OG $3 tier?
I could figure this out.
I don't know the number off the top of my head, but it's like quite a few, a lot of
people that subscribe back then are just still here.
It's pretty cool.
It's sick.
Yeah.
So the last one we have for tonight, hello, future me.
What interesting things have you experienced when supplying or acquiring different products?
Restock of pajama pants when I don't know about the restock, but, um, I mean, here was
an interesting thing.
Our t-shirts for LTX, our initial sample that I approved and the top of production sample
that we got very different materials.
Oh yeah.
So we think a supplier might've switched subcontractors on us.
So we are deeply worried about LTX t-shirts.
They're either going to be less comfortable than we expected.
To be clear, they're not awful, but they're not up to our usual shirt standard.
And part of that is because we couldn't just use our regular blanks because they're tie
dye and you can't have synthetic materials.
It's gotta be cotton.
Got it.
So they're either going to be less comfortable than our usual standard or they will not exist
at this point.
Cause I don't know if you noticed, but we're getting pretty close.
Yeah.
It's not that far away.
Yeah.
So I'm, um, very unhappy there.
That's the most recent me.
Very unhappy.
Big surprise merch moment.
I think that's it.
Hey, we'll see you again next week.
Same bad time.
Same bad channel.
Bye.
Bye.