I don't know about you, but I'm having basically kind of the roughest week ever.
We killed the dual socket board, Anthony...yeah, you killed the dual socket board, Alex killed
the dual socket board.
Anthony got pulled out of the office on a particularly busy week for an event that ended
up being a complete and utter waste of time.
Thank you, Intel.
I just, you know, it's funny, to the average viewer out there, there seems to be this perception
that when a company, like, invites you to a product event, that it's like free travel.
You just got free travel and hotel, and you guys are so, you guys sold out so hard.
Like, there's this perception, but what they don't seem to realize is that it costs me
money to have myself or someone else out of the office.
Not just money, but time.
Time that I might have spent with my family, spent clipping one of my toenails that's a
little long right now and is kind of catching on the inside of my sock and is a little uncomfortable.
You know, things that we might have wanted to, that I might have wanted to do.
And in this case, like, I would actually prefer, not just in this case, but in most cases,
I would strongly prefer having a company get on the phone with me so I don't have to sit
in an airport for three hours, sit on a plane for anywhere from, you know, two to five hours,
sit in an airport for another half an hour waiting for my baggage, and then do the whole
thing all over again.
I would strongly prefer if they just got on a phone, gave me a PowerPoint presentation
where I can understand the product, and just sent one over so that we can test it in the
comfort of our lab with all of our equipment and all of our staff that we can mount ideas
off of, all of that good stuff, and...
You haven't even mentioned the opportunity cost of Anthony not being here, Anthony being
in an airport instead of being at his desk being productive.
Exactly.
So...
The audio issues persist.
Is that why you're laughing, slash dying?
If you think the audio is bad, read my lips.
Apparently it's very quiet.
Because that's all you're getting.
But we are getting all the way into the yellow territory, so I don't know what to tell you
now.
Thank you.
I can't turn it up, because it's gonna clip.
I can't do anything.
We're just gonna have to live with it.
This is your problem, man.
Turn it up.
And when the ad comes on and blasts you, and you get a noise complaint, and a strata bill
slash condo fee bill.
All right.
So anyway, it has just been a rough week, having people out, Ivan's sick this week,
Alex is gonna be out next week, so one of the videos that he was supposed to get done
this week, but he was busy breaking a motherboard, didn't get done this week, so it means we
have to do more next week.
Next week I'm gonna be out of the office two days, actually we've got some really cool
videos that we're gonna be shooting next week.
I love it when you're out of the office.
Don't...
Okay, well, on one of the days, I am actually gonna be in the building, I'm just gonna be
really busy.
So I don't know if you guys remember the murder box.
Yeah, it was sort of an unfortunately named, like, boutique system integrator that existed
around eight, nine years ago.
Anyway, Charles, the guy who was running it, eventually decided to do just a case, the
MDPCX, no, X-Forma, okay, whatever, I can't remember what it's called, it's freaking awesome
though, it looks incredible.
So he's got a full system built up in it, including metal hard line tubing, metal hard
line tubing, with like these gorgeous bends and stuff.
And what we're gonna be doing is we're gonna have him come into the studio and do like
a teardown of it.
So it's gonna be kind of like disassembling a supercar on camera.
It's gonna be badass.
But like a supercomputer, but not a supercomputer, because that's a specific thing and it isn't
that.
When I first saw that system, I was like, I didn't even know such things were possible.
Like in Gladiator, when he sees the Colosseum, I didn't know men could build such things.
They weren't PC in Gladiator times.
Okay.
So let's jump into our first topic of the day.
This one is, we talked about it a fair bit last week.
Apparently my explanation of it was very confusing, because a lot of the comments on the windshield
last week were just saying that people were having a really hard time understanding what
the crap it was that I was talking about exactly.
But the GeForce Partner Program, NVIDIA is claiming that this is all about reducing confusion
for the consumer, but according to an article written by, yeah, I know, according to an
article written by HardOCP, it appears to be a means for NVIDIA, using its stranglehold
over the supply of the GPU chips that its partners need to survive, using that to basically
force them to favor NVIDIA products over AMD products in their marketing, specifically
in their marketing that talks directly about gaming.
So our source here is, this was originally posted by Kladsen on the forum, and the original
article is from Reddit, seems to suggest, although this is of course in R slash AMD,
so take it for what it is, but seems to suggest that the first victim of the GeForce Partner
Program may have already been unveiled.
So Gigabyte just introduced a new AMD-oriented external GPU box, and the branding is different
from their other external GPU box.
So we've actually got one of the GTX 1080-based ones, and it uses the AORUS branding, while
these new AMD-based ones, wow, this is like a, how deep do I have to go in these links
to find the actual, where is the...
There you go.
The branding isn't just different, it's just way, way, way more basic.
Yeah.
So AORUS and just RX 580.
With that said, it does have gaming in the title, which hopefully is an indication that
contrary to the rumor, partners will at least be able to use like game or gaming in the
branding for their AMD products.
That's a descriptive word, and isn't it MSI that gaming is actually their line of gaming?
Yeah.
So they won't be able to do that, or they'll have to take a little TM off the top of it.
Yeah, so the rumor was, though, that NVIDIA would be forcing their partners to actually
rename product lines that had gaming in them for products that were not GeForce.
It's still a work in progress, though, because if you look at some of the Amazon links to
these products that have been otherwise de-branded in physical form, the Amazon titles still
have those monikers in there, like I'm assuming they're going to be taken away eventually,
so maybe it's still, it's like a roll out here that we're witnessing.
Yeah, so it looks like there's some things that still haven't been updated.
So some Amazon product names apparently have been updated.
Now not for insignias like ROG Strix and MSI Gaming, but for the actual product names themselves,
some have been updated and some of them haven't.
Do you have any examples of that?
If you go to the forum thread, there's a bunch of examples now, not just the AORUS one.
Alright, let's go ahead and pull that up here.
So update number two, yes, MSI seems to have removed all their gaming from AMD graphics
cards.
The Nvidia ones have the gaming branding on them now.
Let's see if we can find, yeah, this, wow, this thread is like really going.
Here we go.
Check this out.
No, so this is an example of one that has not been changed yet.
So Asus ROG Strix Radeon RX 560.
Now with that said, one of the things that I would have to wonder is that given the complicated
nature of updating the name of a product that's out there in the wild already, is it possible
we're not seeing the full effect yet?
Is it possible that Nvidia would be waiting for the next roll out of products like a 600
series graphics card from AMD?
Oh, probably.
How could you possibly retroactively like, hey Best Buy, hey Walmart, update your product
names on your websites?
I mean, you could ask for it, but I mean, But there's so many channels.
Yeah, there's, I mean, there's the websites, there's the little like tag on the actual
shelf.
There's flyers that they would be working out on.
There's all kinds of promotional materials that would be very difficult to change.
And there's multiple marketplaces like Amazon isn't even in Australia.
Presumably Australia has some other e-tailer that's big that they'd have to communicate
with.
PC case geared, Amazon PC online retailer.
I'm trying to remember who the big ones are down there.
Wait, why did I search for Amazon?
Australia.
It has just been such a week, man.
Like such a week.
ScorpTech is one of them.
That's one of our mods on the forum used to work at ScorpTech, but doesn't anymore.
So that's, that's really all I know about them.
Did he used to be Australian and it isn't anymore?
No, no, no.
It's still Australian.
Oh, it's still super Australian.
That can happen.
All right, this was originally posted on the forum.
Wait, wait, wait.
I have one question.
Yes.
I saw some fear.
You talked about the supply that Nvidia has on the market being a bit of a stranglehold.
Do you think that applies to people like us, influencers and media who don't want to speak
out or disparage this move by Nvidia because they're afraid that they're not going to be
sourced the GPUs that they rely on to make reviews and editorial content?
Okay.
So that is a good question.
Here's the thing.
Nvidia has to, if they're trying to create a competitive advantage for themselves, they
have to do so without creating a bunch of negative sentiment amongst the consumer base.
Sort of.
I'm not actually convinced.
Like Nvidia, I would describe as sort of, not the individuals that I know there.
Some that I know that works at Nvidia I really like on a personal level.
But to describe them corporately, I would say they are a little bit arrogant.
But I'm not necessarily saying that they haven't earned it in a sense.
Comes with a market share?
Yeah.
It comes with having what I think it's like 75% market share or something like that in
discrete graphics.
And that's in terms of unit sales, not in terms of dollars, which given that they have
much higher end products than AMD has at this time, are pretty significantly different.
So I'm not saying that they haven't kind of earned it.
But we are the stewards of that sentiment.
Right.
So here's the thing.
You really have to care about the sentiment now because at the end of the day, what else
are you going to buy?
You know, you can't find stock of anything.
So people are basically buying whatever they can get for one thing.
And for two, Nvidia is in a position where in certain segments, they really are the only
product that makes any sense, especially at the high end.
So but with that said, Nvidia still seems to somewhat care about their public image
because you never know when AMD might turn around and release something that turns the
market on its head.
And if people had like this pent up negative sentiment towards Nvidia, it could backfire
on them then.
When you say at the high end, what are you talking about?
Are you talking about HEDT?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm talking about, well, that's the term only Intel uses that terminology.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
So if you're talking about other stuff, then I don't.
Does this really apply?
Because this is isn't this about consumer grade?
Yeah.
No, no.
I'm talking about high end consumer.
I mean, AMD doesn't have anything competitive with the 1080 TI.
Not even close.
That's it.
Yeah.
All right.
And I mean, as as for Vega, Vega 56 and Vega 64, I mean, even before the mining craze,
they they weren't they weren't that competitive.
Like they were OK.
Vega 64 wasn't.
Vega 56 was.
But you haven't been able to buy a Vega 56.
Like what?
Where?
Where are you supposed to get a Vega 56?
And you really think that when they were deciding whether or not to to make this move and how
to spin it and whether or not it would give them bad press, they thought, you know what?
Right now, nobody can buy anything because of crypto.
They really considered the crypto mania and the availability of GPUs.
And they're like, oh, we can probably get away with this.
I think so.
So.
So I think that the timing is a big part of it.
And then I think the other thing is like, why not try to get the press to buckle?
Well, it's because they have far less of an impact on our livelihood than they do on their
partners who rely on them for chips.
Like if so, we I would be more worried about YouTube than I would about Nvidia if YouTube
were the kind of company where I didn't feel like, you know, they could accept criticism
as it is.
You know, I can I can I can tell our YouTube rep stuff that I hate about the platform to
his face.
And his job anyway is to take that feedback and actually try and make it actionable and
try and try and improve things.
Believe it or not, YouTube does actually care where his client.
Yeah, it's it's where his client.
But he's also our you know, that's that's actually an interesting way of looking at
it.
So we're his client, but we're his client in a way where Nvidia's clients are not as
much because Nvidia could just find someone else, whereas once you reach a certain point
as a creator in much the same way that YouTube doesn't really focus much attention on the
small creators that that are replaceable, they do focus attention on the big ones that
are difficult to replace.
Well, I think from Nvidia's perspective, pretty much everyone can be replaced at this point.
Like they've literally done it.
XFX used to be a major Nvidia partner, especially in North America back in the day.
It was like one, two EVGA XFX.
Now ever since XFX defected to AMD back in, I think it was the 4000 series days.
Don't quote me on that.
Might have been 3000 series.
Anyway, back then, ever since then, Nvidia basically went, well, OK.
You know where if you're going to defect, if you're going to go from being exclusive
Nvidia.
Remember, this was at a time when Nvidia was in pretty rough shape with some hot running
cards that didn't perform that well.
If you guys are going to turn tail and run into the arms of AMD, good luck with that.
We'll just find someone else to replace you.
And they did.
When BFG disappeared, so BFG was another sort of top tier partner for Nvidia in North America.
One of their big things was that they offered a lifetime warranty.
When BFG disappeared, Nvidia didn't, you know, they didn't run out and try and find, try
and like quietly fund through, you know, venture capital, someone to take over the brand and
continue it.
They just kind of went, eh, then's the breaks.
And if you think about it, that has been the strategy with board partners since the dawn
of time.
Like I could probably name half a dozen board partners off the top of my head who existed
at one point, at least in North America and don't anymore.
Let's try.
Well, there's BFG.
So I already got that one.
There is Chain Tech.
There's another one.
There is, let me think, Gainword.
There's another one.
Gainword used to be like kind of like Halo, Halo tier products.
Abit I think dabbled in GPUs at one point.
They're gone entirely now from the motherboard business too.
Dang, is that all I got?
That's pretty good.
Shoot, I think that's all I've got.
I mean, and then there's like, there's like the really old stuff like, like back when
like 3D Labs I think used to do graphics cards.
But I don't think they ever did Nvidia ones.
3D Labs, Creative, did Creative do them?
Before ATI acquired FireGL, Diamond, oh yeah, Diamond multimedia.
Sorry, that's the one that I was thinking, not 3D Labs.
Diamond, okay, whatever.
That's five.
That's five.
And I did have to Google one of them, so it's kind of cheating.
But that's not really the point.
The point is, I think Nvidia is in a position where they feel like they need their partners
a lot less than someone like YouTube apparently does with us.
So let's see how this continues to play out.
So they still have that power and they don't really care, it doesn't matter.
The sentiment is a drop in the bucket compared to the power of their market position, so
it doesn't matter.
But I think that they are, I think that they wouldn't also risk going to press directly
with some kind of a, with some kind of an agreement that you can only mention gaming
with Nvidia products and then a gag order if you talk about it.
Because if they ever showed something like that to anyone in the press, it would be out
there.
Yeah, let's remember that it was AMD who originally kind of leaked this or let it be known.
Because the press has so much less to lose with Nvidia.
Worst case scenario, I've got to buy a half a dozen graphics cards a year.
I mean, at the rate that we're going lately, with them releasing two, three graphics cards
every year, it's not even that bad.
It's like, yeah, sure, whatever, I'll go buy a video card.
Yeah, but on the flip side.
I used to buy video cards.
But the price of those video cards.
Okay, that's true.
And Linus Media Group's bankrupt.
Had to buy three graphics cards.
Colton's on fire, he's laid off.
Yeah, budget cuts, man.
All right, why don't we jump into one of our quick ones here.
I want to talk about this one.
You want to talk about the first, oh, the self-doubt cooking.
I've been following this since it broke.
All right, hold on, we'll talk about that in a minute.
First, we've got to talk about our sponsors for the day.
Where's all our sponsor stuff?
I think they might be behind us.
You're a vegetarian, right?
Yeah.
So I'm the only one eating Savage Jerky today?
Yeah.
That's a real shame, because it's pretty delicious.
Yeah.
So I'm going to jump right into the Savage Jerky spot, just because that's the, that's,
like I'm actually not as hungry as I normally am on the WAN Show, because I was eating.
Because you spent half of the WAN Show eating in people's ears in 7.1.
Oh, they sent so many packs of maple buffalo bacon.
This is like the highlight of my week.
Oh yeah, they have other flavors as well, including some super spicy ones.
And that's good.
Let's get, let's get through the talking points so I can, like, I'm drooling already.
You're salivating?
Yeah, not drooling, sorry, salivating.
Savage Jerky's Jerky is made with high quality ingredients without nitrates or preservatives.
The goal was to create a snack that's full of flavor and not bad for you.
They've got 13 different flavors of jerky, including maple buffalo bacon, the mojo is
really good, the traditional is really good, the, what are some of the other really good
ones?
Hold on.
Oh, the cracked pepper and sea salt is really good.
And then they've also got super spicy ones, like the ghost pepper one, the reaper one.
I'm also salivating for the record.
They also make barbecue sauce, hot sauce, and a spice rub, their Carolina reaper hot
sauce uses one of the hottest peppers in the world.
I can attest to that.
The ghost pepper, just kidding, it's the Carolina reaper, duh, it's called the Carolina reaper
hot sauce.
Um, and you can use offer code LTT to save 10% on all of their products.
That legitimately looks like a piece of bacon.
It is a piece of bacon, what do you think it was?
Oh.
Well, what's it, oh, bacon jerky?
It's bacon jerky.
Oh, I didn't know that was a thing.
It's a good thing.
Alright, jumping into our next topic, or into our next sponsor, this is also a good thing.
So EK has introduced the Phoenix, and um, if you had noticed that their previous modular
water cooling system sort of went away, Phoenix, that name, what does that mean?
It kind of makes sense.
Reborn, right?
So this is their next generation improved AIO water cooling solution.
It's designed around quick disconnect couplings, bringing a modular approach to connecting
and expanding your lube.
So it gives you the freedom to decide which components you want to cool down with water,
and all the products not only come with the blocks and tubing all pre-assembled, they
actually come pre-filled with water and really high quality quick disconnects.
I believe these are from Colder.
Yeah I think that's what the company is called, the special connector, they don't actually
say on it, but I'm pretty sure, when I looked into the best quick connects way back when
I was doing system development back at NCIX, I came across these, they're super expensive,
but they're like, they lose like.1 or.01 mils or something like that, like when you
take them apart, basically just the surfaces are damp to the touch and that's it.
And the flow drop is measurable, sure, it's significant, but it's not that bad compared
to other designs.
It's really cool, it bridges the gap between the super simple AIO to the more intense enthusiast
ones.
I like it.
So it's enthusiast performance, but with AIO simplicity.
So they come pre-filled, so you can just clip them together, and the CPU cooling module
and GPU cooling module can be connected to the radiator core module in any order separately
or together.
So you can check them out at ekwb.com or through the link in the video description.
Bringing us to our last sponsor, wait where did this thing go?
It's behind you.
It is?
Yes.
Oh.
And behind me as well.
Are you going to do the demo?
Is this set up?
I think the plan is to do a demo.
Oh, okay.
Oh, well, is this spoiling the video?
All right, no, fine, do it, do it, do it, do it, okay.
So our third sponsor for today is Sewell Direct.
Their HDLink HL24 HDMI over any two conductor's product allows you to use whatever cable you've
already got somewhere, like maybe you've already got wires running through a wall or whatever.
You can use any two cables to send an HDMI signal.
It's got up to a two mile range with a good conductor and it can work on literally anything
that is conductive.
So James is about to demo it, we hope, in water.
So we've got a laptop behind me.
James is in the way of it, so it's kind of hard for you guys to see.
I think you just can't see it.
It's way over there.
Oh.
Well, you can see the keyboard.
There, you got a laptop.
We've got a wire right here going into a tray of water and then we've got, is this just
on the wrong input?
It could be.
And then we've got James trying to do a live demo.
Any time you try and do a live demo, it doesn't work, it's like, it's gotta be like some kind
of law.
Colton, did you actually do this?
That's not Colton.
No, it was Taran.
Well, that might be your problem.
It wasn't even set to duplicate.
Oh.
Well, now I changed it.
It should be HDMI.
Moving on.
Well, we've got a video coming where we did have it working.
It's receiving signal.
The problem is the monitor.
That's weird.
Why?
See that?
See that beautiful green blinky light?
Yeah.
No, that's definitely working.
It's getting enough for sure.
Oh, here we go.
Yeah, no, no.
That's because I power cycled it.
Oh, I thought that was showing.
No, I don't know.
I don't know why it's not working.
Is it trying to run at not 1080p or something?
Like, I don't know.
I don't know what's going on here.
All right.
In the meantime, why don't I do another topic?
Do you want to try and fix it or?
Oh, oh, we've got the monitor we used yesterday right there.
Cool.
All right.
Next up, this is apparently old news, but the Xbox One is getting FreeSync.
The original article here is from Forbes.
Let's go ahead and pull that up.
And this is absolutely huge news from my perspective.
I'm so thrilled about this because on the PC side of things, if you're not able to hit
60 frames per second, then, okay, like, that sucks, but worst case scenario, there is a
solution.
You can spend more money, I guess.
And I know that's one of the criticisms of PC gaming is that it's kind of a sinkhole
when it comes to how much you can end up spending on it, but at least there is a solution.
With a console, if you want to play some kind of a console exclusive and it happens to have,
you know, hitches in the animations or it happens to not run completely smoothly at
60fps, some games are coming out that do actually allow you to alter the detail levels, but
not everything does.
So this is great.
The Xbox One S and the Xbox One X are both going to get FreeSync support, so on a supported
display with HDMI 2.1, you'll be able to use FreeSync 2, which means that if you get a
dip in your frame rate, the TV's refresh rate will actually drop to match it perfectly,
which has a real world, very significant benefit to the smoothness of the animations.
Now right now, James, when we recorded this initially, the first time, because we had
to restart the show a couple of times due to audio issues, James brought up that right
now there are no TVs on the market with support for the HDMI 2.1, but from my perspective,
you have to start somewhere and, I mean, I would, I, yeah, okay, so that is a bit of
a drag, I'll give you that, but you've got to start somewhere and at least this gives
us an opportunity to move towards that in the future, I mean, especially trying to run
like games at 4K on, you know, nothing against the Xbox One X.
Great console, got a really positive review here, but trying to run games at 4K on anything
is demanding right now and trying to run them on the Xbox One X is, well, particularly demanding.
This has the potential to be a real game changer in terms of animations smoothness on consoles.
That actually leads kind of nicely into another topic we have here, which is that the NVIDIA
G-Sync 4K 144Hz monitors that you may have seen at CES last year in 2017, but which were
subsequently delayed, are supposed to finally being released in April, but the question
why I think there was a good segue there is like, what the heck, what card are you going
to use to run something in 4K at 144Hz?
Right now, the only, oh, at 144Hz, oh, nothing.
Like you're not going to get anything frame rate that high to use that.
It's kind of a funny product because it's kind of like the product for no one, so it's
high refresh rate for like esports titles, but then no one playing League of Legends
is actually running at 4K, like you just wouldn't do that.
Why would you?
I would rather, if I was a pro gamer, if I was a pro gamer, I'm not, if I was, I would
rather have 240Hz at 1080p, and from my understanding, a lot of pros don't actually prefer these
gigantic large format displays because it actually makes it so that they can't see everything
that they need to see at once.
It seems to me like it's just the first product that has this suite of features that they're
all going to have eventually.
They're just first.
Yeah, and then sort of the flip side of that is if you're more into the sightseeing games.
You don't need the refresh rate.
You don't need that refresh rate because you're not going to be running those kinds of games
at more than like 60 frames per second.
With that said, though, we don't know how the upcoming GPUs, whether it be the Ampere
or Volta or whatever Nvidia ends up calling their GTX 2000 series, I guess, whatever they
end up calling them, we don't know how powerful they're going to be.
So that might be, even the maple buffalo bacon's got a little bit of spice and it kind of went
down my windpipe there.
I'm good.
I'm okay.
I'm not going to die on langell.
I don't know if you know anything about why these monitors were delayed, but could it
have been to do with the HDMI 2.1 spec?
Like, is this thing going to use two cables or one?
No, these are DisplayPort, so as far as I know, and this is just based on rumours that
I read on the internet, as far as I know, it has to do with delays to Nvidia's latest
G-Sync module.
Oh, okay.
You know what?
I think a giveaway was 144 hertz.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think even HDMI 2.1 is maxed out at 120.
That might be right.
Fact check that.
I'm still alive.
I'm still alive.
Everyone's like rip LTT in the chat.
No, I'm still alive.
I'm okay.
Oh, man.
Alright.
In the meantime, why don't we go on to your big topic here.
Well, so this happened, this was posted by Delicias on the forum.
The original article here is from RT.com.
The first pedestrian death has been not just, like has not just happened, but has been recorded
from a self-driving car.
Well, naturally, the thing partially driving because of the cameras.
This is really sad.
So 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg was struck by a self-driving Uber last Sunday night at
10 p.m.
It was dark out.
She was crossing the street with her bike in Tempe, Arizona.
Naturally, a lot of these self-driving car testing projects are in Arizona.
They made some attractive terms to attract companies and they have pretty nice weather.
It's kind of easier.
The car was going 40 miles an hour, which is 65 kilometers, and this is an SUV.
It's a Volvo XC90 SUV.
So there was a backup safety net kind of driver, a human driver in the vehicle.
And when the story broke, we didn't have the footage of what the camera saw, the dashcam
footage, as it were.
So we didn't know why didn't the backup driver react, why didn't the human driver hit the
brakes.
How was it possible that this woman was struck?
The original details were just like irrelevant things like it was dark out and she wasn't
at a crosswalk.
Neither of those had any impact of whether or not the car should stop.
So Velodyne LIDAR said it won't be advising its customers to halt tests in the wake of
this death because they don't believe the accident was due to the LIDAR, which often
works even better at night due to less interference.
There's less noise.
They think it's possible, they don't design the software, Uber does, so it's possible
that it's how the data was handled in the software end.
It's still unknown why the car didn't stop.
When the dashcam footage was released, it became clear that there was...
If the dashcam footage looks like what it really looked like that night, there's no
way a human could have reacted.
She basically is not there and then there.
She is crossing the street like in a shadow or something like that.
And even though the driver, there's interior car footage and you can see that the driver
is looking down and not paying attention, even if they were paying attention, there's
nothing they could do.
And a lot of the media was focusing on the driver and how this person has a previous
criminal record and whether or not Uber's policies should have hired them.
It's completely irrelevant.
What we're wondering now is obviously this is a big setback for the self-driving car
community and industry and what's gonna happen in California.
California was about to initiate programs like this there, so it might take a little
longer.
So Uber has halted tests in San Francisco, Phoenix, Pittsburgh and Toronto.
So here's the thing, on the one hand, you're gonna have the...
And I forget the terms for them, but you're gonna have the pragmatists that are gonna
go, well, you know, what's one human life in the grand scheme of how many can be saved
in an autonomous future?
But on the other hand, thank you.
But on the other hand, if this was like my kid, like there's no amount of like other
people getting to survive in the future does anything to make this any better for me.
And from my perspective, I'm reading an article like this, and this is as someone who really
wants to see self-driving cars succeed and wants to buy one as soon as humanly possible.
I'm glad they're not allowing testing here in my neighborhood.
As soon as I read this, I go, well, I'm glad this is being...
I'm glad someone else is the guinea pig.
And maybe that's the wrong way to think about it, but...
Well, this is exactly why I said her name and age in the story here, because when I
posted this on my Twitter when it first broke, it was like I expected a lot more varied comments
than I got.
The only comments were like, you know, in the future it'll be good, but this is like
a real person.
So needless to say, the tests that occur without a driver present in the car, which are I believe
legally allowed in Arizona, but were on the cusp of being allowed in California, are gonna
be delayed.
Man, that's rough.
In other news, what else do we got?
Oh, Congress passes SESTA slash FOSTA, which sounds like kind of like a hip bill.
It's like FOSTA bill, you know, it's like pretty FOSTA-y, man.
Yeah, FOSTA.
Actually, we should start using it as like a cuss word.
Yo, that's pretty FOSTA.
It's on.
Okay, I'm down.
Yeah, I'm down.
I think FOSTA should mean good, and JIBO means bad.
Like, oh, that is some FOSTA, no, you think it's good?
FOSTA.
No.
SESTA, yeah, I could see SESTA.
SESTA.
Like, mmm, that's SESTA.
You're just saying it like zesty.
Yeah, but it's SESTA.
You know, SESTA.
Okay.
Yeah.
No, come on, man.
This is a bill that ostensibly curbs online sex trafficking, but there are some critics
that say it's going to increase online censorship, stifle innovation, and make everyone less
safe online.
So Congress passed it, they're just waiting for President Trump's signature for it to
become a law.
I can't imagine him not signing anything that he can list in, like, his accomplishments.
Like I actually think he would sign anything.
Mind you, with that said, I think the news that I looked at most recently said that he
might not sign the bill that funds the government for the next year or whatever.
The omnibus bill or whatever they're calling it.
Right.
Anyway, whole other conversation.
So here's the issue that, okay, so on the one hand, if we're actually preventing human
trafficking by creating what is in effect sort of a responsibility on these websites
for the content that is being posted by third parties, if we are actually helping people
by doing that, that's a good thing.
The problem is that what this creates is a burden on website owners and operators to
be responsible for everything that is posted on their sites.
Not just everything that is present on their sites on an ongoing basis, but everything
that is posted on their sites.
And as someone who hosts a user-submitted content forum, I can tell you right now, it
is basically freaking impossible to police every single thing that someone might post
on a website.
Craigslist has already removed its personal section for fear of a sestatransgression that
would affect the entire site.
Which demonstrates right there that the community is interpreting this as too heavy of a touch
to want to risk.
Yeah, to even want to have a chance of running afoul of.
That's a big part of their website.
The personals ad is not a trivial part of Craigslist.
Really?
Tell me more.
Oh, you know.
That's how we met.
No, I don't think we posted our job posting on Craigslist.
Job posting.
And it certainly wasn't impersonal.
Job posting.
Oh, boy.
And then, so, the argument, though, is that, well, you know, if you have a site, you should
be responsible for what's on it.
And so, you know, companies like Facebook or Twitter, for example, might be able to
build, you know, AI or algorithmic protection mechanisms to keep offensive content from
being posted.
But one of the arguments against Sestat that says it could stifle innovation is that small
companies like, say, for example, Flow Play Media, Inc., might not
What's that?
Might not have access to expert lawyers and the same kinds of monitoring algorithms that
a large company would and might just run the risk of having to say, you know what, look,
we can't afford to get buried in legal fees because we're, like, enabling online sex trafficking
because, like, something went up on our site and we didn't see it for 20 minutes.
And they might just shut down, which could hurt the ability of the next Facebook competitor
to spring up out of nowhere, which, I mean, you know, I don't think anyone sees anything
on the horizon like that, but putting more barriers in place is not the solution.
And I can tell you right now, like, it's already challenging.
So Flow Play had a heck of a time getting credit card payments approved.
First, the payment processor, and this is all because of their underwriting bank that
was requesting all this crap, and I'm kind of sitting here going, what do you guys care?
Anyway.
Blockchain.
So their payment processor wanted to see a finished site before they would give us access
to the actual API hooks to integrate into the site.
Bit of a chicken and egg thing, isn't it?
Bit of a chicken and egg thing.
Like, what, are you going to develop a whole site and then have a payment processor go
and say, you know, that blue, it's a little too blue.
You know what, we're going to pass.
We're just going to pass.
So they wanted that.
Then we had to get on this conference call with them where we had to explain a couple
of things.
Number one is how we were going to, right, how we were going to monitor user-posted content,
and we're kind of sitting here going, well, like, it's us, like our sister company and
like our friend Kyle that are uploading to it right now, like, I don't think this is
going to be an issue.
Would that count, like, comments are under that umbrella, are they not?
Yes, but comments are a little bit easier to moderate because you can, but again, though,
it comes down to imposing on websites the restriction that you'll just have to kind
of narrow down, like, you'll have to effectively make the comments a little less open and a
little less free because we could crack down on people being able to post GIFs, for example,
or we could crack down on people being able to post links.
Links.
Those are pretty easy ways to keep, you know, sex traffic.
And a spam filter for certain diction.
Yeah, but that will make and affect our comments more censored than we otherwise might have
preferred to have them.
So anyway, then the other thing we wanted to know is what our plan was to keep adult
content off the site.
And we're kind of sitting here going, look, I'm not going to name any names because I'm
just, it's just been, it has really been that kind of week.
My week's been fine.
I don't, great, good.
So I just don't, like, I don't want to get into it, but we're kind of going, okay, A,
there's nothing in your terms of service that says anything about adult content, for one
thing, to which their response was, well, we can't keep our terms of service updated
at all times.
And I kind of go, what are you talking about?
They're like, well, you know, that's why we have us to explain the internal terms of service
to people.
And I'm like, so you have internal terms of service and external terms of service.
Here's an idea.
Why don't you just have one terms of service?
Well, what else is on that internal terms of service?
Great question.
What a tremendous question.
So glad you asked.
What a great audience.
Yeah.
And so we went, one, okay, you don't have that in your terms of service.
And two, we know for a fact that there's at least one major site that does offer adult
content that uses you as a payment processor and has for years.
Maybe that's why.
What is the deal?
And anyway, after the whole interview process, we did manage to get approved.
We're getting the code integrated.
Naturally, the sandbox APIs totally doesn't jive with the actual one.
So it wasn't just plug and play like it's supposed to be.
But that's why Luke's not here.
He's working on that right now.
But we're hoping to have credit card processing working pretty soon.
But anyway, coming back to SESTA-FOSTA, the issue here is that putting more barriers in
the way of small online companies has a real impact.
Like every week that we spend dicking around with some kind of regulatory thing is another
week that we can't be developing products and services that make creators and their
viewers happy.
And it's very frustrating.
With that said, the human trafficking is a travesty and a living nightmare for the people
that are involved in it.
Well, on the one end of it, not the other end, I don't think.
They probably sleep fine at night somehow.
And you want to see something done about it.
But it just doesn't really seem like this is it.
Here's another non-answer or a non-way to go.
This is kind of related.
Have you seen this?
This is state legislation pending in Rhode Island, which would force internet service
providers to block sexual content by default until the internet user does the following.
Requests in writing that the capability be disabled, presents identification to verify
that that particular user is 18 years old or older, acknowledges receiving, like you've
got to wait for something to mail, receive a written warning regarding the potential
danger of deactivating the digital blocking capability of this sexual content, and pays
20 bucks as a digital access fee.
I don't know about you, but if I really wanted to look at porn on the internet, A, I wouldn't
pay $20 for it, and B, I could not wait that long.
And yes, we did talk about this last week.
What?
All right.
Well, it still sucks.
For anyone in Rhode Island.
All right.
So this was posted by SC2Mitch on the forum.
Elon Musk has gotten involved in hashtag delete Facebook.
No way.
So the original article here is from The Guardian.
Hit us with the facts on this one, laser James.
This is the deep context source.
This is like if you don't know why Facebook's in trouble to begin with, we're going here.
So what happened was Facebook sees itself as a platform instead of just an ad company,
so they don't care about giving away tons of personal data, which would be very valuable
to an ad company like Google, they don't mind giving that away to developers who are going
to develop Facebook apps because they want to be a platform like Microsoft.
So what they did starting around 2010 was if you're building an app for Facebook, you
could get access to a ton of profile data, and not just data from the people who use
these apps, but data from their friends.
So what happened was a psychologist professor at Cambridge made an app, paid a couple hundred
thousand people to take a survey, which is what the app was for, thereby getting access
to all those users' data on Facebook and all their friends, which amounted to about 50
million different profiles worth of personal data.
That data then was against Facebook terms of service given to Cambridge Analytica, a
company.
It's against the terms of service because once you get this data, you're not allowed
to use it for any advertising purpose, which is what Cambridge Analytica ended up doing.
They used it to make highly targeted ads to target these people in a very specific way,
all these 50 million people, they served 10,000 different nuanced ads to kind of sway the
American election.
Well attempt to.
Attempt to sway it?
We can't prove it worked.
We don't know.
We're not experts.
So now this has all come to light.
Facebook's in trouble.
A famous hashtag, delete Facebook, has been started by one of the people who benefited
tremendously from Facebook, the founder, one of the co-founders of WhatsApp, Brian Acton.
He started delete Facebook hashtag, and then Elon Musk got called out about the delete
Facebook hashtag, and he said, oh, that exists?
Okay.
Let's just take down our SpaceX and Tesla Facebook pages, which they've done.
And we don't know if Musk is trolling because he kind of does that or if he believes in
the cause or what.
In other news, we got wrecked by Gamers Nexus.
What the heck?
What are you talking about?
Look at this.
We were number five.
Zerv, Gunslinger, and Gamers Nexus all knocked us off of the leaderboard for the NVIDIA
Titan V.
What leaderboard is this?
This is 3DMark Time Spy Extreme.
That rat bastard.
Well, no promises that we'll take another crack at it, but I don't like seeing that
Canadian flag all the way down there.
That's no fun.
That's weak.
Top seven, baby.
Yeah, top seven.
GSB.
So no comments on the Facebook thing, eh?
That was quite a segue you just handed me.
No, I don't really have anything to say on that one.
Apparently, the audio is a mess again.
I don't even know what to tell people.
You want to talk about ray tracing?
No.
I don't know.
What else is there?
You know what?
I'm done.
I've had enough of this week, so goodbye forever.
Until next week.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
Goodbye.