What's up everyone, and welcome to the WAN Show.
We have a fantastic show lined up for you guys today.
What is up with game mods getting DRM?
Okay, we're gonna be talking about that.
The Starfield DLSS3 mod has reignited controversy
over paid mods.
Also, Mozilla has found that cars are a privacy nightmare
watching you sleep and not sleep, as it were.
What else we got?
The Nintendo Switch 2, or whatever it might be named,
has been demoed behind closed doors,
and we'll talk about what we would want from it.
Yeah, I mean, nobody knows anything,
but I know what I wanna see.
Yeah, yeah.
And Rockstar, they just use pirated copies
of their own games to sell.
Yeah.
What a hack.
Right?
What a cheat code.
Can you steal pirated code?
I think so.
I think so.
I think so.
I think there are guidelines about that.
Yeah.
That's a dated reference.
I liked it.
I liked it.
The show is brought to you today by The Ridge,
Secret Lab, and wow, those go really fast.
Red magic, thank you, Dan.
Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today?
Paid mods.
Starfield's DLSS3 mod has reignited
controversy over paid mods.
Modder Pure Dark released a DLSS2 slash XeSS mod
for Starfield for free on Nexus mods,
but, which is really great, by the way,
because the fact that the game did not support
DLSS out of the box, as Luke and I observed
when we did our early access play time with it,
that unfortunately is not going to be a YouTube video,
but will be available on Floatplane.
It just, yeah, I can talk a little bit more
about that later, but it's not coming to YouTube ultimately,
but we definitely noticed that it would have been nice
to have DLSS.
But here's the thing.
In addition to the free mod on Nexus mods,
they also posted an early build of the same mod
that included DLSS3,
including Nvidia's frame generation feature
that is only supported on RTX 4000 series cards,
and they released this on their Patreon page,
requiring a $5 monthly sub to access it.
Users reported that a single payment though,
so subscribing for just one month,
appears to unlock the mod perpetually,
which, honestly, I'm okay with.
Like if you have a subscription,
but people are allowed to have all you can eat
while they have the subscription.
I mean, it's basically the same way
that we did all of the behind the scenes content from LTX.
You upgrade your subscription to enjoy the LTX content.
If you still like having 4K on Floatplane, then great,
you can keep it, and otherwise,
well, you watched it and you can download it even,
like Floatplane doesn't have DRM, actually,
but this mod does.
Users reported that the mod requires a login
to authenticate that you have paid for it
before it will work.
Pure Dark also added the same digital rights management
to their DLSS3 mod for Red Dead Redemption 2.
This is in bold.
I wonder if, hold on,
I wonder if that means that it's an always online thing.
No, I don't think so,
because I think it's just an unlocker thing,
kind of like- It authenticates once,
you get a check mark and then you're good to go.
Yeah, like WinRar style.
DRM though, and this is bold in our notes,
is virtually unheard of for mods,
but it seems to have worked in Pure Dark's favor.
By some accounts, they appear to have made
over $40,000 this month,
which is, last time I checked, a flipping lot of money,
which goes to show you how much gamers value
having access to these features
and how baffling it is that Bethesda,
there's been some kind of- Whatever it was, yeah.
Tinfoil hat, conspiracy theory stuff
that AMD might've put pressure on Bethesda to not have it,
but then AMD said they were super chill
with it having DLSS, but then-
But then Bethesda's basically refused to comment on it,
really? It didn't have it,
and now a single modder in like seven, eight days.
I'm pretty sure this was out before the game was out.
Well, no, I'm doing the math from early access.
Oh, okay, I understand. Yeah, yeah.
Eight or nine days, or whatever it works out to,
has managed to hack it into the game.
Obviously, QC takes time.
In some cases, QC can take more time
than the actual development,
but it's pretty clear to me that this is something
that if they'd had the will, they could have done it.
I do wonder if it's not contractual,
but if it's just kind of like, you know-
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, yeah.
A little under the table.
Yeah, yeah, right? Like, hey, it'd be-
So I just checked, the original mod,
the free mod on Nexus mods, was uploaded on September 1st.
Wow.
Now, unsurprisingly, you've got to love modders
and game crackers and hackers and whatnot.
The mods DRM was cracked and pirated in a matter of days,
and a free alternative was uploaded to Nexus mods
by LukeFZ, relation of yours?
Not my alias.
Which ignited a debate over Pure Dark's approach.
But why?
This is cool.
So we had the news team reach out to a developer
who explained that there are essentially two main ways
in which the mod community views itself,
coined by legendary Morrowind modder, Ry.
The cathedral view and the parlor view
are sort of diametrically opposed,
sort of incompatible with each other in a sense.
The cathedral view sees modders participating
in a joint effort to build something amazing.
So to those folks,
the idea of locking a single stained glass window
behind a paywall seems ridiculous and counterproductive.
I would, I haven't asked them
if they see themselves this way,
but I would look at the Skyblivion project in that light.
It's a huge team of modders.
Enormous undertaking.
Collaboratively working on something for years
to make this incredible project.
Look into it.
It's actually stunning.
Basically, they take the whole Oblivion game
and just into the Skyrim engine.
But then with like amazing assets to it and everything,
like it's, I'm gonna be so stoked when that comes out.
And it is not just Oblivion, but prettier.
It is basically rebuilt.
Yeah. So cool.
And it looks a lot better than like Skyrim did at launch.
It looks like heavily modded,
like beautiful perfection Skyrim, but it's Oblivion.
Like it's incredible.
It's fantastic.
On the other side of things,
the parlor view sees individual mods as art pieces
that are displayed in the modders parlor
and the modder can choose to close the parlor doors
anytime they choose.
In addition to modders of the cathedral school here,
much of the backlash to the mods paywall plus DRM
seems to be coming from young gamers
with little or no disposable income.
Riley's note here is who seemingly possess
RTX 40 series cards and a $70 game.
I actually am very strongly in Riley's camp here.
I think that a lot of the outrage over $5 items
is probably manufactured as opposed to,
or I think people have at least a feeling
of being principled on it.
Like I don't think it's about the money
as I guess what I'm trying to say.
The debate over paid mods is nothing new.
In 2015, Steam added then removed paid mod functionality
from the Steam Workshop.
In 2017, Bethesda launched the Creation Club,
a service hosting user-generated content
that Bethesda explicitly described as not paid mods
since existing mods were not allowed.
Only new content that was developed
with Bethesda's approval was allowed,
but many other user-generated content marketplaces do exist
like Minecraft Marketplace,
or I mean the entire game of Roblox.
That's the point of Roblox.
So I guess at risk of us angering 50% of the internet,
no matter which stance we take here,
what's your take on this?
I don't know, I think it's complicated.
Well, yeah, it's definitely complicated.
Thank you for that.
I very much-
Professor Obvious.
I like the approach that a group like Sky Oblivion takes.
Sure, but can you demand that?
I don't think so.
I think if someone wants to do a whole bunch of work
and they wanna get paid for their work,
it is their right to put their work up for sale effectively.
But I just, yeah, I don't know.
Why do I even read Twitch chat?
Linus, you're disregarding the precedent this might set.
I haven't taken a stance!
Well, that's I think one of my biggest concerns
is that it could really change the community very heavily.
Now tell me this.
Let's take a big picture,
sort of 10-year outlook approach here.
Do you think that in the grand scheme of things,
it will ultimately be a net benefit
to the modding community in terms of,
and I don't mean a net benefit in terms of money,
because obviously if they make money,
that is a net benefit.
I mean in terms of the quality and the diversity
of the mods that gamers get to enjoy.
Do you think it will be a net benefit to modding?
I honestly think it would be a negative.
Okay, but I haven't even finished asking the question.
I know that you and I mind meld,
but I do need to ask the question for their benefit.
Okay, is it a net benefit to have this source of income
going into the modding community in general
that either doesn't exist or exists
only in certain marketplaces like Roblox, for example,
where it's very prevalent,
or is it a net negative outcome that,
now that he's taken some of the wind out of my sales,
I'm going to take some of the wind out of his,
that could actually hurt the passionate roots
of modding in general in the first place
and take some of the just because I can spirit out of it
and potentially hurt modding.
Yeah, so yeah, that's everything I was going to say.
Got it.
I don't know.
It's like, if someone wants to work on something,
they completely deserve the right to be able to sell it.
But I do think that some other things
come into question at that point,
because if you are doing this for profit,
here's going to be a hyper controversial take
that people are not going to like.
Why shouldn't Bethesda get some of that money?
Ooh, see, you know what?
Hey, look at my screen.
Look at what I put in notepad.
I specifically, I wrote down deserve to sell it
because he did say that.
They are relying on somebody else's IP,
someone else's blood, sweat, and beers.
I don't know.
Someone else's blood, sweat, and tears
to provide a platform for them to sell their service.
If I were-
Not only that, but what isn't out right now,
but will be coming is the creation kit,
which is a series of modding tools.
If you look at something like game engines,
if you make a game using a game engine that is free,
they will then take money from the sales of your game.
This is a very normal thing.
So if people are going to stand
and say that they want to sell mods,
which again, if they want to,
I think they should be able to,
if they're going to use tools like the creation kit
or potentially even if they're just going to mod
the game at all,
it doesn't make sense at that point
for the company that released the game
to make some of the money from it, I think maybe.
And I think one of the beautiful parts
of the modding community
and something that I've really enjoyed about it,
and before people jump on me,
I am a Nexus mods subscriber
and I have donated to multiple modding projects
because I have thought it's decently important in the past
because I am gaining a massive amount of enjoyment
from these mods.
There's games that I will play with mods on them.
I would not play without it.
So like at that point in time-
Okay, now that's where we get
into a really interesting counterpoint here
because you just said,
modders should be giving Bethesda a cut of their revenues.
But then you also just said,
there's games that I wouldn't play.
And I think for a lot of gamers,
Nevermind wouldn't play, wouldn't buy in the first place
if it wasn't for the rich, vibrant modding communities
that are around them.
So who should be paying who?
Or is this just a purely symbiotic relationship
where both parties should tolerate
or even respect each other and try to cooperate?
But then if someone in bad faith creates a mod
that damages the brand of the company
that created the original game-
Which has happened.
Which has happened.
I mean, rule 34.
A number of times.
Well, no, with Bethesda actually,
with I think it was Oblivion,
modders found that you could take the underwear-
Is this gonna be that?
You could take the underwear model,
you could take the underwear texture
off of the character models.
And when you did that,
there was graphical things under them.
And they were like, whoa, what the heck?
This is already in the game.
And then that reached out to, I believe, ESRB
and they wanted to change the rating on the game.
And all these things happened.
So this has happened to literally Bethesda.
And okay, so I'm seeing some people in chat being like,
no, Jayden actually brings up a really good point.
I think you don't have to pay a car manufacturer
if you mod your car.
I think my point here would be the tools
that are being released by these companies
in order to allow people to mod it.
I think most games,
a lot of games have modding happen to them
that don't try to make that happen,
if you know what I mean.
Whereas I think if a car manufacturer
were to provide a tuning shop with resources
that enable them to tune the cars better,
I think that that's something
that they could reasonably charge for.
I think it would be, yeah, I guess what I would say is
I don't think there should be like a requirement,
but I think at that point that would also,
that should also be seen as a reasonable approach.
And another game could take an approach of going,
look, we're gonna provide these modding tools
and not charge for them
to try to be the more hyper mod friendly game.
But I think the anger that would traditionally go towards
a game developer for trying to skim some mod money,
if we're also cool with modders charging for it,
I think both of those things should probably be okay.
But if the mods are free traditionally,
and then the game company is like,
hey, we're gonna skim some money
and you have to pay for these now.
That's a little weird.
And same vice versa I think.
Then they're imposing their will, right?
Yeah, that's where I think I'm at.
I'm not really sure.
Now, back to that point,
that was basically think about the precedent this sets.
Let's talk about that for a little bit.
If you run a modded game, maybe this deserves a pull.
I think this deserves a pull.
Do you wanna set up the pull?
Okay, if you run a modded game,
I would posit, I would guess
that you probably don't run one mod.
So let's, I'm only really speaking to the people
who like to mod games here.
So if you don't want any games and the answer is zero,
you don't need to participate in the pull.
Let's say one to two, three to five,
six to 10 or 11 plus or something like that.
How many mods would you expect to be running
on a game that you like to play?
Because there's everything,
everything from texture packs to face replacements
to sound effect replacement.
Like basically the sky is the limit
when it comes to modding.
New gameplay modes, different difficulties.
You can add new spells.
There's all kinds of things.
How many mods would you typically apply to a game?
So I'm asking.
This is gonna range an incredible amount
depending on what game they play.
So is this how many mods you actually do typically run?
Yeah.
Like, okay.
Yeah, yeah.
One to two, three to five, six to 10, 11 plus.
One to two, 11 plus, okay.
Well, yeah, because honestly, I mean, for Beat Saber,
I will easily be running over 10 mods at a given time.
And I don't always, because there's-
Oh no, I think you're not understanding my laughter,
is there's people that are gonna be at like 900.
Yeah, I believe you.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah.
But I just wanna get a rough idea
because I'm coming to something with this.
I'll be making a point with this at some point.
Is the poll up?
Okay, let's have a look.
Let's have a look at the results here.
So this is exactly what I was expecting.
We've got handfuls of people around 10 to 15% each
that are saying, you know,
one to two, three to five, six to 10.
Guys, hold on, sorry, sorry, sorry.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of comments right now
that I think are, right now we're talking about games
that you mod.
We're not talking about games you don't mod.
Not all games that you play.
Yes, yes, it's okay.
Okay.
Okay, but over half are saying 11 plus.
Yeah.
And here's the point that I'm coming to,
and here's where I think the slippery slope argument
starts to gain some momentum for me.
This is what, a $70 game, $80 game, right?
Like depending on your currency, right?
It's gonna be somewhere between 50 to $120.
Yeah, I think it's 79 up in Canada or something.
Yeah, something like that.
By the time you pay $5,
which was the price of this particular mod for 10 mods,
you are dang close to doubling the cost of the game.
What if you're running 900?
What if you're running 900 mods?
Now you're playing a train simulator.
Now, unless you're basically
like a mobile gaming microtransaction whale,
you don't get to play the game that you wanna play.
Also, if the DRM, if the DRM scheme
is such that you have to pay for the mod
before you can even try it,
I think what's gonna happen is you're gonna see
a lot less momentum for these modding communities,
for these modders,
because people aren't just gonna throw it on
and see what happens and see if it's any good,
because the only way for them to monetize that model
would be always online.
They would have to check if you're running it
so that you could have a one hour free demo
of a texture upgrade mod or something like that.
Now I'm not opposed to that money getting spread around.
Right?
Like compared to the predatory whale model
that mobile gaming uses,
where all the money is going to the developers,
I don't mind the passionate, enthusiastic individuals
or small groups in the community making some money.
That's not a problem to me.
But I am not a huge fan of a single player game
going from $60, $80 to, I don't know, 400 bucks
by the time you have all the quality of life,
by the time you have enough freaking slots in your belt
so that you can actually gobble down enough potions and food
to survive some stupid boss fight or something.
That's the kind of crap that, yeah,
probably should be solvable
without having to pay a ton of money,
at least in my monkey caveman, early gamer brain.
But then somebody did that work,
so why aren't they compensated?
I can't.
Is this one of those rare times that I'm just like,
no, I actually cannot take a stance on this.
I just want to talk through all the different perspectives
and then fold my hands like this and go, well.
Maybe, yeah.
This is effectively what you're talking about right now
is why my first initial thing was like,
yeah, it's going to completely change the whole landscape
if it goes this way.
Because you look at some of the games
that are most well-known.
Oh yeah.
Avon Fox in a full-plane chat said,
people copying other people's mods a thousand times over
and renaming them to sell will also be rife.
Yeah, it's interesting because if you're selling something,
you probably should also be able to handle
customer support and refunds.
And what if there's compatibility issues
with other people's mods?
How do you deal with who has to deal with that problem
and the like drama and issues that that's going to cause?
There's lots of issues.
I just, basically my, I don't know.
Yeah, there's a big difference between
the level of polish that something needs
to kind of huck it out there for free.
Versus be a product.
Versus be a product.
Like I think a perfect-
And that is, to be clear,
there are plenty of free mods that are absolutely,
astonishingly good and deserve to effectively
equate to products.
This is a perfect example of that kind of thing.
Merch messages is a super cool product
and really, really useful for us.
What are we saying here?
No, what we're saying is you and I have talked about this.
We're saying that if we were to roll this out
for other creators, the amount of documentation,
the amount of polish, the amount of,
mostly documentation really like just-
Retooling in a bunch of different ways.
Yeah, the amount of work that it would take
to get it just-
And then we would basically need people on call
like all the time.
Yeah, the support.
Because what if there's an issue?
And so you look at a product like this and you go,
wow, holy smokes, any creator with a Shopify store
could be benefiting from merch messages
the same way that we are.
Their communities could be benefiting from,
instead of throwing money at the screen,
ordering products that support the creator.
The creator is probably getting a very similar cut,
assuming their platform takes 50 to 30% or whatever it is.
And you actually get a product in the mail.
Like it's just better.
This isn't to say we will never do that.
No, no.
There's just reasons why we haven't done it yet.
But there's been a lot of work that's gone into it
to get it to the point that it is.
And to get it that like 8% more,
I don't know, double, triple the amount of work?
Like I don't even know how to quantify that.
Conrad, M-M-A-A-S, merch messages as a service.
I honestly-
Conrad works on merch messages.
Conrad would know better than me,
but it's a very, very significant amount more work,
especially to make it scalable.
Like there's, yeah.
Cause we're not just making another version for someone.
We're making a version that can be used
by X amount of people, not one more person.
So that in itself is like a huge issue.
Here's a question you might know the answer to.
How much more work was FlowPlane
to make it so that other person-
Oh God, yeah. Astronomical.
It was like, honestly, not really that bad
to make it just for us.
Like near the end of the forum version,
it was pretty good.
Like it was fine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then we tried to scale.
Yeah, Forge Alliance forever is talking about this.
The default Supreme Commander community is virtually dead.
The vast majority of Supreme Commander sales,
however small that may be, are for using a modded client.
And my understanding is that they are not allowed
to directly monetize,
like they're not allowed to profit from it.
I think it's a not-for-profit.
Don't quote me on that.
Not sure.
I don't have a ton of detail about that,
but they definitely do run it
as a very donation only kind of deal.
So maybe someone who knows a bit more
can post in the FlowPlane chat or whatever else.
I don't know.
I think this is extremely complicated.
And at the end of the day,
it's gonna come down to the community,
not the collective to decide.
It's gonna come down to the individual members
of the community, because that's the thing.
We talk about the community as this singular entity a lot,
but that's simply not the case.
And so even if, let's say, hypothetical numbers,
let's say 99% of the community opposed modding
or opposed paid mods and especially DRM mods,
how many copies of Starfield have they sold so far?
Do we know that?
Have they announced anything?
I know they had over a million players
at one time or whatever.
Yeah, over a million players
were playing the premium edition on both Steam and Xbox,
putting premium edition sales
well above two million copies.
Okay, so what's the cost?
Okay, you know what?
That doesn't matter.
The point is, the revenue doesn't matter in this
for what I'm trying to explain right now
or what I'm trying to demonstrate right now.
The point I'm trying to make
is that at two million copies of this game,
and it's a lot more than that,
10% of that would be 200,000, right?
And 1% of that would be 20,000.
20,000 people, if only 1% of people are okay with it,
that's a hundred grand that a modder could make
selling their mod for five bucks.
So even if the community hates paid mods,
the vast majority are just unanimous about this.
Well, that's not unanimous enough.
Interesting.
Sorry?
Sorry, you're saying?
If only 1% is okay and buys the mod,
that's a hundred grand in revenue for that mod.
I think it would end up being
the 1% conversion rate is like-
Yes, I know.
Okay.
Yeah, 1% is optimistic for basically just at all.
Maybe it would be more like 1% of that 1%
that is okay with it, which would still be $1,000.
Which is-
Which is still money.
Which is a lot more than zero.
Yeah, and I think that if you have a mod
that has mainstream enough appeal,
you might be able to convert it greater than 1%.
That, and I think we know from the DLSS3 mod sales
that that conversion rate is probably pretty good.
The number of gamers that are willing to accept paid mods
seems to be higher than 1%.
6 million, okay, there you go.
Biggest Bethesda game launch of all time.
Yeah, so-
And it's on PlayStation.
So 6, 6, so that would be 6,000 now.
Even if you only convert 1% of your 1%
of total possible customers.
That is an enormous pool to tap into,
even if it's a tiny fraction of the total gamers
that play Starfield.
So I think the community is just gonna decide
and I think that if we're being honest,
we know what the answer is.
Some people are gonna be doing paid mods now.
Paid mods are here to stay.
If I have to make a prediction,
what I would say is it's just gonna split into two camps.
Okay.
I think there's gonna be a paid modding camp
and I think there's gonna be a free modding camp
because I think there's a very significant community
of people who learn digital art or digital audio
or development or whatever else through modding games
and they're still gonna have a lot of fun with it.
I think a lot of people still view these things
as passion projects or will be creating a mod
that they don't necessarily think they could sell.
Maybe it's too minor, maybe it's one of those things
that's gonna end up in the list of 900 mods, whatever.
But I do think you'll get some major mods
that will cost money.
Now, shit's about to get real, Luke.
You saw Nvidia's tech demo where they added
ray traced lighting to Morrowind
with a bunch of replaced assets and stuff like that.
I mean, on a scale, hold on, hold on, just stop it.
You're doing the thing again.
We're even now.
Okay, let me set this up.
Okay, okay, okay.
If it looked pretty cool, right?
Out of 10, how cool would you say that that looked?
To me, like 10.
Yeah, I mean, I know.
Because I'm a hyper Morrowind mod.
Big Morrowind guy. Or fan, yeah.
Yeah, okay.
That mod comes out.
It looks just like that.
The whole flippin' game looks like that.
It costs $50.
Do you buy, yeah, he's already nodding.
So that's the thing, right?
Is that it's not only just your principled stance on it.
It's also how bad do you want it?
Well, no, I don't think that's it.
Because my principled stance isn't that someone
doing work to develop something that's super cool
should be not paid for it.
But this is not donation.
That's not my stance.
No, I understand.
Okay, what if, here, okay, let's sicken the deal.
The mod has Denuvo.
Okay, I might actually not do it then.
It has Denuvo, it's 20 bucks.
I am particularly against Denuvo.
I just wanna, you know, it's 20 bucks.
It looks like that.
It runs great.
It's 20 bucks, it has Denuvo.
I don't, I am-
Look at him, he's thinking about it.
Well, I am thinking because there are games
that looked really cool
that I have specifically not purchased
because I hate Denuvo.
Were they Morrowind?
No.
This is not a very fair example, jerk.
Oh, I know, I know, but that's the thing, right?
No, I know, I get it, I get it.
That's the point I'm trying to make
is gamers are passionate.
And sometimes the passion of gamers
separates their money from their wallets
at times when they know, like, cognitively,
logically, that they shouldn't be doing it.
We know we shouldn't pre-order.
And yet, two million concurrence,
we're playing Starfield
with the premium pre-order edition.
Yeah.
I think Denuvo would be a no for me.
So I'd wait till I can crack Denuvo out.
I'm not gonna say I've never done that.
So maybe there's what I'll call an alternative route.
But yeah, I don't know.
The point I was trying to make
was just that this is not as cut and dried as,
yes, always this way, no, never that way.
Everyone's gonna have their own, like, okay.
I kinda hate the way Nintendo behaves as a company.
Yeah.
But you still own a Switch
and you still buy the new games.
I keep giving them money.
Yeah.
Because I love video games.
Like, I'm sorry.
So the...
They make fun video games.
They also make, like, really stupid bad ones,
but they make really fun ones too.
But Dan Vail said gamers are not passionate.
We're stupid.
It's like, okay, those aren't mutually exclusive.
Yeah, they could be, why not both?
We can be both.
Yeah.
We are both, okay?
We can be stupidly passionate.
Yeah.
We can be passionately stupid.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
Why don't we jump into our next topic?
But yeah, I don't know.
Before we manage to insult everyone.
I think pretty much everyone's mad,
but I think this is just...
I think that's less to do with what we said,
because I don't think either of us
ever really took a firm stance on any of this.
And more to do with...
People are mad about my,
I think the companies should be able to take some of the cut
if they release mod tools thing.
Oh, really?
Some people are mad about that.
But I think, okay, so here's my point there.
But it's what the market will bear.
Yeah.
It's whether modders choose to mod for that game,
knowing that that's the deal.
If they change the deal, I strongly oppose that.
If it starts out as these tools were free and,
oh, a lot of people are using this.
This has added a lot of value to our game.
New rules, new rules.
Yeah.
That's not cool.
What if the modders using those tools
start charging though?
Start, oh.
Because the scenario that I was talking about was...
Yeah.
Mods made through...
Let's say creation kit comes out,
because it's not out for Starfield yet.
So this applies to none of the mods that are out currently.
It's free and everyone releases mods for free,
but then all of a sudden modders start charging
and Bethesda sitting there going,
excuse me, pardon?
And I don't know.
I think Jayden's point about the modding cars thing
is pretty valid.
But then I think the counterpoint is that
Bethesda put work into making the creation kit specifically.
They did, four mods.
Knowing that they're going to sell
a lot more copies of their game with the longevity
that the value that modders create is going to add to it.
So this is why I don't think,
I think another way that I think this might be
getting misconstrued is I'm not saying that they should.
What I'm more saying is that they could,
and I would understand why.
Right.
Yeah.
I think it would often, for something like Skyfield,
I think it would be a deeply unintelligent move.
Starfield, but yes.
Yeah, sorry.
What did I say?
Skyfield is really close.
Sick.
Yeah, Morrowfield, more Oblivion.
But yeah, I think it would be stupid because honestly,
in the state that they released the games,
like for a PC, it like needs mods.
You'd like need UI mods.
You'd need all this other stuff.
And I think the reason why Skyrim had the legs on it
that it did was the modding community.
So I think if they,
if they screw up and they're like, no,
we're you like can't release free mods
and we're taking kind of all the paid mods,
something like that.
I think that would be just an incredibly stupid move.
There's also degrees of taking a cut.
If Bethesda came out and said, look, you know,
we're, we've got this marketplace
and we've got to cover transaction fees
and make it like worthwhile to maintain this darn thing.
We need like 10 to 15% or something like that.
I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.
Whereas if they come in and they say, yeah, it's 50, 50.
Then that's a lot, right?
So, and, and there's games like, I think it's,
it doesn't Roblox take like 90% or some insanity.
Yeah. It's, it's always, it's always shades of gray.
What would you think about a slider system?
Oh, like Humble Bundle?
Yeah.
I think this percentage goes to the,
and you can go to zero percentage of the payment
goes towards creation kit.
This percentage of the payment.
I think if you have that,
you might as well just put a hundred percent
towards the modder because even the most ardent fans
of Bethesda games hate Bethesda.
So, so they're all just going to zero you out.
Yeah. I really think that that is not even a possibility.
People going, you know what?
A hundred percent of Bethesda, let's go.
How many people do you think would skip changing
the sliders though?
Like if they put it like 80, 20,
20% goes to creation kit, 80% goes to the mod creator.
It depends on how many dark patterns are involved
in the creation of this slider because Humble Bundle,
for example, at least the last time I bought one,
was like very front and center.
Hey, this is a slider. This is what it does.
You must interact with this button before you can proceed
and buy this bundle of games.
So it's really going to depend on how,
how skeezy they are about the positioning of the slider.
And I think, I think that's something
they could influence a lot.
Another thing that I would say is,
and we're going to move on from this topic.
I tried, I tried.
I have one last bit.
Another thing that I would say is that if you're,
if you're mad about my, like,
I think it could make sense for developers to take care of,
if they make the modding tools.
There's this stuff that's already out there.
And if you're not mad, now's probably the time.
If this is something that you want to stop.
Yep. You pay for it.
Wow.
Wow.
Minecraft marketplace.
It's interesting too, because I noticed this,
but rare loot, who I guess made sky block.
I haven't heard of these other ones, but sky block.
It has three out of four on the what's popular.
Wow.
I don't know what the splits are here.
I know nothing about this at all.
It might only work with one type of Minecraft.
Cause I know there's a bunch of different types of Minecraft.
I'm not a Minecraft person. I don't know.
The way the pricing is done should be illegal.
How it's obfuscated by coins.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's stupid. I hate it.
The fact that this is marketed at kids.
And the fact that the pricing is hidden
is extremely problematic.
Yeah.
And Conrad saying, to be fair,
marketplace has some pretty great stuff.
Yeah.
And there's already amazing mods for Starfield.
And there's a mind blowing,
incredible whole game quality mods for Skyrim
and like skyblivion's coming out.
There's there's amazing things.
I'm catching up bits 24, 35 in the float plane chat.
That's his whole point.
He goes, are they just now complaining
about this after years?
No, no, that's his whole point is that
if you're mad about this now,
you kind of missed the boat a little bit.
We missed the boat a bit.
And you need to go back and be mad about,
it's kind of like,
if you're mad about microtransactions and mobile gaming,
you need to go back in time and be mad about horse armor.
And some people were.
And some people, I was.
Because people were mad about horse armor,
people were also mad about how Roblox
has been around at all.
Yep.
But I think like,
if this is something that the community
wants to stand up against,
you got to do it loud and now.
Yeah.
Yeah. It feels like we've, honestly,
it seems to me like we may have already reached
a point of no return here.
Like I don't think.
With that person who made the DLSS mod
making 40 grand in a month,
I guarantee you.
It's a gold rush essentially at that point.
As soon as one person makes a year's worth of income
in a month.
Whoa.
You're going to have other,
you're going to have people looking.
There's going to be parents whose kids have fun
modding games that are now pushing them
to try to make it a career instead of a passion,
which is straight up going to make a bunch of things worse
in a bunch of different ways.
Why do I read Twitch chat?
Beating that horse armor to death at this point.
But that's the point.
It's the same company that we're centering
this entire conversation around.
And that was the start of microtransactions in gaming.
That was that turning point when we had an opportunity
to buy microtransaction crap after the fact,
or not buy it.
And enough of the community back to my point about,
you know, whether it's 1% or more,
enough of the community was willing to do that,
that Bethesda made enough money
that other gaming companies stood up and took notice
and went, this is the future of monetization in gaming.
And that's what got us where we are today.
And there was probably stuff that went on behind the scenes.
And there were things that other companies were working on
at the same time.
Just that it was one of the highest profile,
most obviously successful in spite of how mad everybody was
moments for microtransactions.
And yeah, we keep talking about that one.
Why? Because that was the one.
So we could talk about other ones, but then we'd be wrong.
All right, why don't we jump into,
oh shoot, no, there was a thing that I had wanted to add.
Doesn't matter.
What do you want to jump into next?
Nintendo demos, the Switch 2?
Sure.
Or whatever it is, according to multiple sources,
Nintendo held a closed door demonstration
of the successor to the Switch
for developers at Gamescom last month.
The demonstration used to target specs of the new console
to run both, the demonstration used,
oh, the demo used the target specs of the console.
I just got a like, oh no moment.
What?
$40,000 for a graphical feature
that could be a microtransaction
from the company itself.
Yeah.
Yeah, that sucks.
I didn't think about that until right now.
Yeah.
That was sort of, oh, sorry.
That was what I was getting at with like
doubling the cost of the game
and like $300 for the game and stuff like that.
I know, I know.
And the company could ship it without DLSS3
and be like, yeah, it's another five bucks
or without ultra textures.
I mean, it's basically just a first party texture mod.
Yeah, do you want, oh my God, yeah.
Yeah, I know.
Do you want the low tier version of this game?
I know, this is a cool game that has six different endings
or you can get up to 12 different endings
for another 10 bucks.
That's already sort of a thing, yeah.
I, the thing that's blowing my mind, I guess,
is the settings behind a microtransaction
because there's already been content for sure,
but I don't think I've seen settings.
Whoa, okay.
Is a texture pack not a setting?
It's kind of content, it's kind of a setting.
Which one is it?
I don't know, it's riding the line.
Yeah, yeah.
It's right there.
Could be sort of.
It's right there, it could fall on this side.
It could fall on this side.
I don't know which side it's gonna fall on.
I hate it.
Okay, switch to run away.
We gotta talk about this thing.
Sorry, go.
Okay, all right.
Occasionally it's okay to look at Twitch chat.
Dark matter synthesis.
Yes, I was mad over horse armor.
The problem is we already know gamers
don't have any willpower to say no.
We are fucked.
Yep, yep, that's 100% true.
All right, Nintendo demos the Switch too.
Speaking of having no willpower,
I'm probably gonna buy it.
The demonstration used the whatever it was,
whether it was a developer kit or whether it was a prototype
you know, we don't know what it is,
to run both at higher frame rates and higher resolution
in Breath of the Wild and the Matrix Awakens
Unreal Engine 5 tech demo that was originally created
in 2021 to show off the capabilities of the PlayStation 5
and the Xbox Series X.
It apparently is capable of both ray tracing
and current gen HD visuals using NVIDIA's DLSS AI upscaling
which can I just say, called it.
I called this hard.
I was like, man, Switch 2 should just use DLSS
to have like a way better like TV gaming experience
without necessarily needing to move past
mobile capable hardware.
What does current gen HD mean?
I don't know.
I was actually, I was, yes, I was going to come back to that.
Okay, sorry, you can keep going.
Nope, you can keep going
because I just got signed out of my Google account.
Oh boy, other reports have corroborated
that a Switch sequel is in the works
and that key partners already have dev kits in hand.
It's possible that a launch could come as early
as the final quarter of 2024.
Really, you think so?
But Nintendo has made no public commitments at this point.
Well, it depends what it is.
If it's a completely new gaming experience,
a la Nintendo Wii, then yeah,
it's probably going to be a minute
because if developers are just getting dev kits now,
unless they're going to rush these games out in a year,
I mean, good flipping luck, right?
Then again, it wouldn't be the first time
that Nintendo gave their own internal teams
lots of time to work on something
and external teams less time.
Where was I going with this?
Right, but if it's more of a Wii U
where it's like kind of that thing,
but with a gimmick or more different,
then no, I mean, I think it could be realistic.
Like if you just plug in Breath of the Wild
and since everything's online anyway,
it just downloads new text,
new higher resolution textures or something to your console
and then you just run the game from your internal storage
or something like that.
Yeah, I don't see why a new console
that takes the same basic game cartridges,
but then just runs them at higher resolution
and higher frame rate couldn't come out soon.
And it might launch
without any particular blockbuster game available for it.
I don't know, I have kind of a conspiracy theory here
that Tears of the Kingdom was supposed to be
a next-gen Switch title.
That that would have been what they did and then-
Honestly, it would have made a lot of sense.
It would have made a ton of sense,
but I wonder if it was just a matter of,
the timing not being quite right,
maybe Ada Lovelace came too late
and Nintendo really wanted the improvement, man.
Give Nvidia Flak all you want.
Go for it, do it.
Give Nvidia some Flak.
They're big mean jerks.
That was-
They don't care about gamers anymore.
Truly powerful words, thank you, Luke.
Give them Flak all you want.
40 series is flippin' efficient.
Yes.
Really efficient.
Also very expensive.
And very efficient.
And I find has a lot of issues.
Expensive efficient, mobile Nintendo handheld,
match made in heaven.
So I had kind of this theory around the time
that Tears of the Kingdom was coming out
that it seemed kind of overdue.
It kind of seemed like this should have been
the launch title for the next big Nintendo console,
if it was going to be a Switch successor,
which at the time it was rumored to be.
But what I kind of wonder is if it matters.
I wonder if Nintendo looked at it and went,
holy smokes, the Switch and the Switch OLED
are still selling, not as well as they used to,
but they are still selling.
Do we need a launch title?
Or do we just have better hardware?
And you can plug in all the same games
and we're going to continue making games.
And those games will continue selling consoles
the same way that they always do,
because we're flipping Nintendo
and we make great games that people want to play.
And honestly, I talked about this
back when the Xbox series came out.
My theory was that the series S and the series X
were just the tip of the iceberg.
As it turns out, I haven't been correct, at least not yet.
But what I thought was that the series name,
which otherwise seemed phenomenally stupid to me,
like I couldn't come up with any other reason for it.
I thought the series name meant
that it was kind of the last generation of Xbox.
And from then on, we were just going to get
essentially PCs and Xbox clothing,
and they would just get upgrades.
That's what was like vaguely communicated at the time.
And the games would just kind of run better,
depending on which one it is.
And I thought that the whole point of series S, series X
was that they were priming game developers
and the community for just Xboxes
that are just gaming boxes
that can be less powerful or more powerful.
And it was already kind of happening
in the previous generation.
So I don't know, I haven't been right about that yet,
but who knows?
Maybe Nintendo will be the one to do it
and just kind of go, okay, yeah,
we'll just upgrade the hardware once in a while
and keep building gaming experiences for this platform.
It'll run at 720p, 30 FPS on this one, or 60,
and then it'll run at 1080p, 60, or 120 on this one,
and we'll do another one a few years later,
and it'll run at 4K or whatever the case may be, 1440p.
I don't know.
Avon Fox says, upgradeable Xbox, let's go.
Okay, that I'm not expecting.
I'm not expecting to happen anytime soon.
So with all of that in mind, the real discussion here,
even though we managed to talk about this
for a lot longer than I expected,
was what is your dream?
Now, you bought a Switch at some point
and then returned it, if I recall correctly?
No, I still have my Switch.
You do still have the Switch, okay.
I played it quite well.
Technically, so I had a Switch and then I modded it.
So I replaced the backing with that translucent purple
retro Nintendo style stuff.
I actually used it quite a bit.
How dare you call the N64 retro, I hate you.
It just makes me feel really old.
I had one too, man, when it was current.
Or did we get it?
I think we got it the generation after,
but whatever, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, but then my parents stopped working,
so I was like, I'll fix it.
You can take mine while I do that,
and then I brought it home and I turned it on,
and it's never had a problem since.
So I'm technically using my parents,
and they're technically using mine.
They function, so whatever.
But yes, I still have a Switch, long story short.
Yeah, okay, cool.
So then, the whole idea here behind this topic
was laying out what we think will happen
and what we want to happen.
First of all, why don't we take turns?
My wish list, easily back-up-able save games.
No cloud subscription required.
I want it, I think it is not going to happen.
What do you want?
What do you think will happen?
I want a bit of a return to more fun local party games.
Okay, that's content, that's not the console.
Yeah, but in my opinion,
that's a lot of what Nintendo stuff has been forever.
I don't think the actual quality of the console
has almost ever been a real selling point.
N64?
Like, the quality of the Wii
was not really the selling point of the Wii.
No, no, you have to go back farther than that.
It was the content.
N64, it's right in the name.
It's like, it's 64, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It was a huge push.
They actually had the...
I did that unboxing on Short Circuit recently.
You had your RAM upgrade or whatever that was?
They had the frequency of the chip on the box.
That is such a not-Nintendo thing to do these days.
That really is.
They don't tell you how many gigahertz the Switch runs at.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, I think that's it.
Because honestly, I enjoyed the...
Oh, this is gonna be...
Time for a spicy take.
I enjoyed my Wii.
The Wii U.
I know, I know.
More than I enjoyed the Switch.
Because the Wii U is more fun
to have people over and play games on.
Yeah, that's fair.
There was like...
Not that anyone played it,
because no one bought a Wii U,
but that Super Mario Bros. game that came out for Wii U
that had the fifth player,
and the fifth player had their own screen
on the built-in screen handheld
that had its own gameplay style and stuff,
that was really fun.
Really fun and not doable on any console
that wasn't a Wii U.
Because you had to have that handheld screen
on that extra controller, all that kind of stuff.
So I don't know.
I don't know necessarily
how the console would do it itself,
but I feel like the Wii U and the Wii itself
both invited development of that style,
and the Switch invited single-player experiences.
Yeah, I think that's really fair.
I mean, obviously neither you nor I
has access to Nintendo's telemetry data
for what percentage of playtime on the Switch
is in handheld mode versus docked mode,
but I would guess...
I'm gonna argue most of it's in handheld.
I would guess the same thing.
With no, like you're saying, data behind it.
I just would argue that that's true.
Well, with that in mind,
I would like to see a higher refresh rate screen.
I love...
I don't need to see 120 hertz.
I'd settle for 90, even 75, anything higher than 60.
I would be stoked on 90.
I'd be very happy with 90,
because the thing is the difference between 60 and 90
is way nicer than the difference
between 90 and 120,
and it just has to do with how much
the reduction in frame time is between the two.
I'm even gonna go on a limb and say
I would prefer 60 to 90 versus 90 to 150.
Yes.
I think...
I'm not sure if mathematically
it quite works out to being better,
but it's very noticeable.
I just care so much more about...
Once you get to 90,
I'm like pretty stoked on the experience, you know?
Game grime in floatplane chat.
How about just 60 that's actually playable
on hardware and handheld?
How about just that even?
Okay.
The point of this is that it's a wishlist.
It's not a realism list,
because I don't think we're gonna get it.
I think we're gonna get 60.
This is something that I wanted.
I don't know how they would do it,
but I wanted some form of accelerator
when you put it in a dock.
I mean, that could be done USB4.
There's no way that Nvidia couldn't build a chip
with some kind of USB4 Thunderbolt
implementation at this point.
But I want it to...
I want there to be a reason to dock it
other than it goes on a TV screen
and you can see all them pixels.
Interesting.
Oh man, everything seems so unlikely somehow,
and yet obviously they have to upgrade it.
Here's what I wanna know.
Right, back to my conspiracy theory.
That's where I was going with this.
My conspiracy theory that they just were gonna have
Switch 2 for Tears of the Kingdom and then just didn't.
I think that Steam Deck has put a lot of pressure
on Nintendo to bother to update this thing.
And if you look at the timing
for when they might've kind of gone,
okay, no, we actually seriously do need
to actually freaking develop this thing.
It's not that unbelievable.
Because it doesn't necessarily have to be
right when Steam Deck launches.
It could be that it's been like a slow pressure build
as the Steam Deck launched and then gamers really liked it.
And then emulators not only existed,
but got super easy to use.
And oh my goodness, our games run better on it.
There might've just been like a wake up,
a slow wake up process at Nintendo to the fact
that they have competition in handheld gaming again.
Because that's the biggest reason that I can think of
that Nintendo needs a sequel for the Switch,
is that they own handheld gaming.
They have tons of competition
when it comes to living room gaming,
and they have basically forever.
But they have owned handheld gaming basically forever.
And so for Nintendo, I would see them losing
the living room race as a problem.
But I think to them losing the handheld race
is an existential threat, if that kind of makes sense.
And I could see that lighting a serious,
serious fire under their butts.
But we are supposed to now explain
and do a couple of merch messages.
So we already kind of covered this earlier in the show,
but for those of you who are just joining us,
merch messages are our alternative to Super Chat
to Twitch Bits or otherwise hucking money at the screen
and hoping that Senpai notices you.
What you do is you go on lttstore.com
and you check out any of the cool items we have there.
Like, whoa, we have a wristlet key chain now,
new series of pins and what is this?
A Luke Newcomb t-shirt design, what?
Hold on a second, wait, Dan's got a box,
he's gonna throw it at us.
Oh my, okay.
For Luke plus Linus, but mostly Luke, pslttstore.com.
What is this, what?
Your water bottle is right in the way
of the thing you're opening.
Of course it was.
You're doing great, Luke.
Yeah, sorry.
Well, it kind of matches the color
of the shirt a little bit.
So hold on, this one's gonna be yours for sure.
I actually don't even remember the full.
Are you gonna wear my face on your body?
Of course I am.
I don't even remember the full context for this.
I think it was like you trying to stop me
from destroying the channel or something like that.
That probably sounds about right.
Yeah, I don't remember.
I love this.
Twitch chat, always with the good takes.
Nobody will buy that.
Twitch chat, do you have any idea
how many of these we've sold already?
What, really?
Look at it.
It's fucking awesome.
I mean, I think it's cool, but I don't know.
I hazard to assume people would put my face on their body.
I mean, I'm gonna do it.
Hey, hey, let's go.
I give it like a couple months
before someone has a tattoo of this on their body.
That would be amazing.
Luke, nuke him.
I remember saying nuke a whole bunch of times on a stream,
but I don't remember why.
Like I said, I also do not remember
the full context for this.
All I know is that I think Sarah did a bang up job of this.
Oh, it looks great.
I appreciate how,
I appreciate the muscularity that she gave me.
That's pretty fantastic.
Yeah, I was gonna comment on that.
Be like, hey, we actually, oh,
I don't know if the other designers
passed their 90 day initial probation period,
but there was some help
from one of the other designers as well.
So Sarah and one of our other designers
worked together on it.
Oh, I can just switch to my cam
if you just want to stay there, boom.
Anyway, yep, freaking cool.
I love it.
You guys can check that out at LTT store.
We've also got, oh, how does this work?
Am I able to have Linus laptop and Linus cam
or are we gonna show nipples on Twitch?
You totally can.
That does work, super cool.
Right, so we've also got new versions of the lanyard
that are just more of like a bracelet.
They can clip onto a thing
or clip onto other more different thing.
Not everybody likes a huge long lanyard.
And then series two pins.
This is a really fun collection.
Sarah did a really great job.
The hard drive pin is mirrored.
So it's super, super shiny.
It's kind of hard to tell from that picture,
but there it is.
I would like to point out that this is not in fact
infringing and BMO, okay?
This is the little character from the ABCs of gaming.
Oh, sorry.
No, I'm just showing how it's shiny.
Oh, now it's harder to see.
Go back.
That is actually worse.
Good job, Linus.
Let me see how shiny it is.
Oh, that's the hard drive pin.
Give it a sec, Luke.
I can go to the big one.
We've got the short circuit blocks and then,
which by the way, if you look closely,
this is an S.
Okay, and this is a C.
Whoa.
Yeah, I know, right?
Anywho.
All right.
And a strawberry for no reason.
Wow, I've never, wow.
I don't know how to feel about this.
The art is fantastic.
Wearing my own face and name on my body is a little weird.
You get used to it.
But yeah, I was gonna ask you how you feel about that.
You actually don't, okay,
I think some people get used to it.
I actually,
I only notice it sometimes now.
Like I'll have moments where I'll find someone's hoodie
lying around and I'll be frustrated
because we issue people hoodies.
Like everyone gets like a merch budget
and they can just request stuff.
And so, it's frustrating to me
whenever I see waste anywhere.
And so if people don't label something
and they just leave it around,
I'll go like, I wish people would put their names on things
and it's like, yeah, for me, it's easy.
Cause like my name's on all of them, I guess.
Have you sharpied your name onto something
that has your name already on it?
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I never even like thought about that.
Yeah, I write LS on my merch items
because otherwise they get mixed up with other people's.
That's pretty funny.
It makes sense, but it's just pretty funny.
I love the design.
Thank you, I appreciate it.
I don't fully remember the context.
Someone said, yeah, nuke Mars, nuke the moon,
nuke everything.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
You were just like, you were just like, yeah, yeah.
Well, why was I doing that?
I don't remember.
I remember it, but I don't remember why I did it.
I don't remember.
I don't feel like it really matters that much.
It might have just like bothered you,
so I just did it for fun.
I don't know.
All I know at this point is that it's a really cool design.
Yeah, no, I love it.
It's great.
Anyway, I'm going to have to get like a bunch
for my family and stuff.
Oh yeah, that makes sense.
I hope you have enough merch budget left over.
Yeah, you'll make some sales off of me.
Hey, Luke buying Luke Nukem shirts
for all his friends in company.
Oh, there's something else coming.
Don't worry about it.
What?
What does that mean?
Is it the budgie sticker?
Look, what I said is obviously true.
There is something else coming.
I mean, it's factually accurate.
The something somewhere is coming, I'm sure.
Oh, apparently I wanted to nuke the moon
as a way to terraform it or something.
I thought, I think I was talking about Mars.
Yeah.
And I was talking about how Elon wanted to do that
or something.
I don't remember.
It doesn't matter either way.
Yeah, someone will find Luke Nukem plush.
Interesting.
I wonder at what point we like get in trouble
over infringement.
I mean, it's obviously Luke.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not.
It doesn't look like Duke Nukem.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
I mean, either.
Any similarity to whatever it is.
If they made one, it would take them 11 years
to release the shirt anyways.
Okay, don't poke the bear.
You killed him, dude.
Oh my gosh.
Absolutely murdered.
Luke Sickburn's gone nuclear.
Speaking of nuking things, I'm gonna bring us back.
I know, I'm sorry.
It's the new version of AI topics.
I'm gonna bring us back to that Bethesda topic for a second.
No, you're not.
You're gonna explain and do too much messages.
Oh, okay.
I'll save it.
I'll save it.
I'll save it.
I'm gonna lose the.
Okay, fine.
Just do it.
Let's talk about it.
We're going back to the Bethesda topic.
Let's go.
It has been brought to my attention by James Ryan
and with some help, Handyman and some other people
in the float plane chat
that there's some interesting things in the Starfield EULA.
One line specifically, I'm gonna do section three point E.
These are limitations and restrictions.
Exploit the game or any of its parts,
including with limitation,
the game client for any commercial purpose,
including without limitation,
renting, leasing, or licensing the game to others,
including without limitation,
for gathering virtual currency,
items or resources for sale outside the game
or for performing in-game services in exchange
for payment outside of the game.
In that case, it says EG power leveling,
which I think comes from their online services.
There's some really weird sections of this EULA
that people have pointed out to me before.
So these things are all forbidden.
Those things stated, which, why is there pizza here?
Oh, okay.
I don't know.
The gathering of virtual currency.
Well, it's gold farming.
Yeah, it's not like this.
This sounds like part that they took
from the Elder Scrolls Online.
And I don't think actually pertains
to this particular mod, in my opinion.
Got it.
But there are really, really weird sections
like this one that is talking about,
it specifically names power leveling,
which is a thing that happens in like MMOs.
There's other sections where it talks
about how you can't use mods
that would negatively impact other people's gameplay.
And it's like, this is a single player game.
So there's a ton of stuff in the EULA
that talks about multiplayer specific things.
So I wonder if there's like a DLC or something
or an expansion coming in the future
that allows you to have companions on your ship
that are your buddies.
Because why else would they have these limitations
in the EULA?
Well, that's basically just Star Citizen.
It pertains to Fallout 76.
That functionality would-
It's from Fallout 76, okay.
That functionality would take 10 years to build, obviously.
That's generous.
Yeah.
But yeah, okay, so they pulled it from Fallout 76, sure.
But either way, it came from a game
that is not a single player game.
Gabriel R. says, sorry to keep beating on this,
but it seems like an important question.
Do you think it makes a difference
if we complain at the start of a trend,
like with Horse Armor?
It seems to me that companies will push it
until they can, no matter what,
and it will only stop happening after it becomes so bad
people grab their pitchforks and go for the throat.
That's exactly the point, though,
is if you grab the pitchforks and go for the throat
right at the beginning when you see this behavior
that on a small scale might not be a big deal,
but on a large scale is going to completely change
the face of gaming, then that will be the point
where the pitchforks come out and you go for the throat
and they kind of go, ooh, maybe we shouldn't do this.
Or maybe they just will do it anyway
because that small percentage of people
will continue to buy it.
Okay, anyway, we never finished explaining merch messages.
So the point is that we don't do super chats
or Twitch bits or anything like that.
We do merch messages, so you guys just go on lttstore.com
and in the cart there will be a box when we're live
for a merch message and it'll get sent to producer Dan
who will either just pop it up there
or maybe curate it for us to talk about
or maybe give you a little reply with his burning fingies.
Look at them go, they were doing something, fine.
And we're gonna do a couple of them
just to kind of show you guys how that works.
Dan, do you have a couple of curated ones for us?
I do, I do.
Let's see.
I do saw a puddy cat.
I do.
Do you think traditional style forums
will ever make a comeback
or are hybrid social media forums like Reddit
the best we will get in the mainstream?
That ship sailed.
Reddit, the Reddit community, and again,
I'm speaking of it as though it's this monolithic thing
and it's not, but the Reddit community as a whole
had their shot and that was during the whole
spaz thing.
And I think that what Reddit learned from all of that
is that people are addicted to Reddit
and will never stop using Reddit.
And I learned the same thing.
There was an opportunity for people to go,
oh, this is bad.
Having all this power consolidated in the hands
of a company that clearly doesn't give a fuck.
And I haven't seen any kind of meaningful shift
to smaller community oriented forums.
Obviously we continue to maintain ours minimally,
but because we do think it's important
and there are other small forum communities that do exist,
but no, I don't think anything beats Reddit anymore.
I mean, during that whole debacle,
I was saying, I think this could be it.
Dig came and went, but I just,
I feel like the rate of change,
how we went from Zanga to people just having
like an MSN profile to like how quickly all this love,
live journals, like how quickly all my space,
like how quickly everything used to change.
There's a lot of inertia in the incumbent players now.
And it seems like Reddit has got it pretty much nailed down.
Yeah.
I'm not trying to be pessimistic.
I just, yeah, yeah.
I ripped new grounds, right?
And for the second one,
Hey Linus, what is the progress
on the smaller LTT store backpack?
Yeah, I'm glad you called it smaller and not small
because we kind of realized that in trying to keep a lot
of carrying capacity for laptops and tablets and devices,
it's not that much smaller.
Like it is smaller.
It has an external water bottle carrier.
So all of that like water bottle capacity is now shrunk
or well outside.
And it does have a smaller bag of holding.
It is more comfortable on smaller framed people,
but it's not small.
I would say it's more like a LTT backpack light
as opposed to a small LTT backpack.
I think we're getting pretty close to production for that.
Oh, I know what it is.
The holdup is zipper pulls.
So we want to make sure that our production is done
for the replacement zipper pulls
for all the people who bought the original bag.
But then we're going to production with the smaller bag
as well as to production with the Luxe bag.
Yes, priorities.
I have another update.
Sorry, gonna keep doing it,
but I think this one's pretty big.
James Ryan, again,
sent me a link to the creation kit for Skyrim
and the like one of the very first sections.
I'll share my, yeah, I'll share my screen.
This is the top of it.
The first actual section is restrictions on use.
The editor is and shall remain.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
I'm going to do that still.
Maybe even more.
Wow.
Yeah, wow.
Now you don't even have to read it.
They could just read it.
The editor is and shall remain the copyrighted property
of Bethesda Softworks and or its designees.
And you shall take no action inconsistent
with such title or ownership
except as set forth in section five below.
You may not cause or permit the sale
or any other commercial distribution
or commercial exploitation,
whether on a pay per play basis or otherwise
of any new materials
without the express prior written consent
of an authorized representative of Bethesda Softworks.
That's pretty clear.
This DLSS thing was not made using creation kit.
There is no creation kit.
Right.
For Starfield yet.
So I don't think that applies to this situation.
But it's very clear that Bethesda maintains the legal right
to control anything that happens with creation kit.
With creation kit specifically, yeah.
Okay.
Which again, I think maybe I worded it poorly
or something earlier, but people were like,
whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
These things weren't made with creation kit.
I understand that.
It's not out yet.
Every single Starfield mod currently out
was not made with creation kit
because creation kit is not out.
And we don't even have a release date for creation kit.
So like it might not even be soon.
Tim in float plane chat asks,
these are big important questions here.
I sent a merge message about this,
but I noticed the Luke Newcomb shirt is a pre-order.
I thought you said don't pre-order stuff anymore.
Do I pre-order it or not?
Okay.
It's just a shirt.
Our shirts are already a product that we already ship
and it's printed by our printer who does a great job
and prints lots of products that we already ship.
It's a pre-sale so that we don't overproduce it
because even though I personally love it
and have a high degree of confidence in the design.
It's pretty specific.
Not enough to print 10,000 of them
and just hope for the best.
So we just want to make exactly as many
as you people want to buy.
I think the design is great.
I appreciate the work put into it.
I don't know how many of these are going to move.
What if you cheap out on this one though?
I actually can't.
They are actually just shirts
that are actually just in our warehouse already.
And we just take to the printer and they print on them.
Oh man.
Yeah, it's not a pre-order.
It's a pre-sale.
It's an auction.
It's, anyway.
Do you want to hit us with one more, Dan?
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Hey, Dale, I was celebrating my birthday
watching the WAN show.
What is the absolute stupidest piece of tech
that you've ever bought that you found
you actually had a use for?
Oh man, it's going to have to be like some weird adapter
or something for me.
Yeah.
That I ever bought.
Boy, is that a tough one.
That I actually had use for?
Is that, hmm.
And what was it, a weird piece of tech?
Was that it?
I mean, it's not a weird piece of tech,
but it's a stupid.
Stupidest.
It's not a stupid piece of tech,
but it's a stupid implementation.
I did end up using that TV I put in the bathtub.
I think that's a fair answer.
More than a little bit.
It's like, who wouldn't?
And not just me.
Like when my kids were little, right?
So when the kids were having a bath, right?
We just, we put on Paw Patrol in the bathtub
and then they'd have a bath
and watch them Paw Patrol or whatever.
Like, yeah, cool.
You're going to enjoy this.
Zenthroxen in FlowPlane chat said,
anything Silverstone?
Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I have a key fob
that remotely starts my computer.
Sure. Why not?
Silverstone.
Silverstone makes some weird stuff.
Mine's going to be boring.
I bought a 10 key.
So it's, you know, you have 10 keyless keyboards.
Well, it's the bit that most people chop off.
I bought one of those in Taiwan
that has blue switches made by Leopold.
And I was like, you know, I understand the theory
of you have your 10 keyless keyboard
and then you have your mousing area.
I was going to say mouse pad,
but a lot of your mouse pads will go on your keyboard.
So just your mousing area
and then you have your 10 key on the other side.
And that actually like works out really well.
But like, I don't know if I'll ever actually use this.
And I still use that same 10 key now.
And that was like 10 years ago.
Oh, I love my stupid little keyboard air mouse thing.
Yeah. It's pretty good.
Use it all the time.
Love it so much that when I realized it was discontinued
I bought two more just so that I would have more to use
when it died.
Like I, and it's, you know,
it seems like a pretty superfluous thing.
Like you can, I don't know,
just grab a keyboard and mouse or whatever,
being able to just hold it, especially in VR.
So I use it, I use it for my VR, my VR system.
So I'll have my, like my headset on
and I'll be doing something that I don't know,
doesn't work in the virtual desktop.
Like anytime you, oh, I think it's task manager.
You can't interact with task manager
from inside the virtual desktop for some reason.
I think that's it.
Or is it controlled?
I don't know.
There's some things you can't interact with.
And so I'll grab my air mouse
and then I'll just be looking at the virtual screen
and I'll be able to use it.
Yeah. And like with my controller,
it's just hanging from my wrist.
It's, it's awesome.
Awesome.
Did you think of another one?
I thought of one and then I laughed at something in chat
and then it's completely gone from my mind.
I don't remember what it was at all.
Was it someone's concern
that they might pre-order the shirt,
but it ships with only one sleeve
and they have to wait for drivers to get the other one?
No.
Just wait for modders to charge for it.
I know the green is not glow in the dark,
although it like, it does have some kind of fluorescent ink,
but it is not glow in the dark.
We've experimented with glow in the dark ink
and unfortunately we haven't found one
that meets our quality standards.
They tend to fade and not work very well
after a pretty short period of time.
So that's why we haven't moved forward
with a glow in the dark shirt.
But yeah, I loved the idea when I heard it,
when we initially talked about it.
There's also like colour change ones and stuff like that,
but none of them have unfortunately held up.
The staying power is rough.
That's why we don't do the holofoil ones anymore.
I saw someone with a pristine GPU holofoil shirt at LTX.
They were like, yeah,
I know that these are not very resilient,
so I never wear it.
I may not even wash it after wearing it this time.
I might just sun it and get the smell out that way
because I love how this thing looks
and I know that it won't look the same
if I wash it a bunch.
Yeah.
Man, I can't remember what it was.
I don't think I'm gonna think of it.
I think we should just move on.
But yeah.
Okay.
So I think we need to do topics.
Yeah, let's do some topics.
Should we do this Google one?
I'm not gonna lie.
I don't even fully understand what's happening here
just because I don't fully know the controls on YouTube.
This is almost two separate things
that we've just kind of rolled into one discussion topic
because it's basically like Google going all spur change.
The original articles here from Ars Technica
and Google support actually,
Google is rolling out its new privacy sandbox for the web,
a user tracking ad platform that's baked into Chrome
that uses the information collected through the browser
to inform websites what topic the user is interested in
for the purpose of targeted ads.
The feature is apparently intended
to one day replace third-party cookies.
Wow, let's put more power in the Google monopoly.
What do you think?
It seems like a good idea?
It seems like a good idea to me.
Slash S.
I feel like I have to say that.
That's probably not a bad idea.
Users will now see a pop-up asking them
to turn on an ad privacy feature
that will give them more choice over the ads they see
while protecting their browser history and identity.
While the pop-up does note
that users can make changes in Chrome settings,
it doesn't clarify that the feature can be opted out of
and clicking that the highlighted got it
at the bottom of the page enables it by default.
Other users have reported, speaking of dark patterns,
other users have reported seeing a version
that makes the option to opt out explicit,
but it's unclear if this is in response
to criticism of the initial pop-up
or if it's a regional difference in areas
that have more stringent legal standards.
Got it?
Like this first one is extremely dark pattern.
Here, well here, we can actually show it.
This is what it looks like.
This one's rough.
Enhanced ad privacy in Chrome.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Got it.
I guarantee you the vast majority of people
are gonna go like, oh, some weird update.
Okay, got it.
I wanna go to my-
My Facebook or whatever it is, like, yeah.
This is the other version, by the way.
Which makes way more sense.
Yep.
Meanwhile, oh yeah, so I don't know.
There's not really much discussion here that bad.
Meanwhile, YouTube will be altering creators' ad controls
in November by removing individual ad controls
in YouTube Studio for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable,
and non-skippable ads on new videos,
and instead making them a single toggle on or off.
Interesting.
According to YouTube, oh man, I love it
when companies provide this rationale
for changing the granularity of your options as a user.
According to YouTube,
90% of creators already have these,
okay, this says off by default,
but I suspect that is not right.
I suspect they mean on by default.
90% of creators already have these set this way by default.
That's what I'm assuming this says.
And some found the options confusing.
You gotta love that sum.
Some creators didn't like the thumbs down feature.
So we can remove it.
We have basically infinite creators.
So there will always be some group of people
that think something,
and therefore we can do anything that we want.
All it takes is 0.000001% of creators
to find something confusing.
And some creators will find it confusing.
Mid-roll ads, however,
will still be fully controlled by creators for now.
I added for now, but honestly,
the way this slippery slope is sliding
really does feel like a for now.
Further, YouTube says creators will be able to choose
to have automated mid-roll ad breaks
or manually selected ones,
and manually selected ones
rather than choosing one or the other.
Okay, so some context for you guys.
The way that it works now,
you choose to just let YouTube pick where to put mid-rolls
based on where it doesn't disrupt user retention,
or more likely where it makes sense
for the amount of time it's been
since that individual user has seen a mid-roll.
Because they try to ride the exact line
between what you will tolerate
and what will make you exit the app, right?
So if someone goes from a video
where YouTube chose the mid-roll spots,
and there happened to be two in the latter half
or something like that,
and then they click on a video
where the user picked the mid-roll spots
and they happen to have a couple front-loaded,
they could end up accidentally overloading someone.
But in spite of that potential issue,
they are now giving better control over mid-rolls
so you can basically go,
well, I definitely want one here,
but also you can put them anywhere else you feel like.
My understanding is most creators
do use the automated mid-roll breaks
as opposed to the manually selected ones,
but I don't have any numbers to back that up.
I'm sure there's some that have
very important content pacing,
which you might want to frame it.
Yeah, I think mostly though,
MrBeast uses automated ones the last time I heard about it,
and so basically whatever he does is kind of the meta.
Whatever one's gonna do.
Apparently he's trying thumbnails
where he doesn't have his mouth open or something,
and he saw some positive results from that.
So hey, maybe that's new meta as well,
is no more YouTuber face.
He's still got his lips open,
but if you look back,
the last six videos or something like that,
he's smiling like this in all of them instead of like that.
Sure.
It looks like almost like AI-generated face.
If MrBeast, here, can I switch over to your laptop?
Yeah.
If MrBeast jumped off a bridge,
I really do think that a lot of other people would do it.
Would just do it with him?
Yep.
Oh geez, what's happening?
Oh geez, oh geez.
The Zoom, the Zoom is not happy.
Wow, Luke. We're gonna end it.
Do you even compute?
Well, the touch screen is-
Luke, compute him.
The touch-
We won't be making that shirt anytime soon.
No.
But yeah, something about the thumbnails.
His face looks very edited.
This is great.
Ifin724 in Floatplane Chat says,
spoke too soon, that is not better.
So I didn't see their original comment,
but I guess they were saying,
oh, this will be a big improvement.
Yeah.
Okay, we're back to your laptop.
I don't know.
Okay, can anyone's teeth actually be that white?
That's kind of what I'm saying.
It almost looks like a really, really good Sims model.
Can't deny that it works.
Something is being edited there.
Literally anywhere from 100 to 200 million views per video.
I mean, who else can do that?
If that smile could get me 100 million views,
sure, I'll smile like that.
I mean, I tried, I didn't do as good of a job.
I'm not as young as him, unfortunately.
And now we need to photo edit you.
Looks AI generated?
Yeah, like almost does.
It has, I don't know what it is.
And like, I've obviously seen him.
So like, I'm not saying he looks like that.
I'm just like these.
No, he looks like a pretty, pretty normal dude.
Yeah, and then these, they just, something's different.
I don't know what it is.
Cargo asks, any rain cover updates?
Yeah, I had someone ask that on the forum
and I said, look, I'm sorry, we're not done yet,
but we sent them a prototype.
Rain cover?
Yeah, rain cover for the backpack.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, oh, I saw the design for it though.
Okay, you know how reflective stuff can be like silver
or it can be like kind of rainbow?
Okay.
Why not both?
So we're gonna have, it's kind of inspired
by the Northern Lights desk pad.
No, no, like both on the same design.
So it's kind of inspired by the Northern Lights desk pad
and it's gonna be like trees in the foreground
and they're gonna be like the rainbow one.
Oh, this is sick.
And then like mountains
and then like kind of constellations in the sky
and it'll be on the back of your backpack.
I'm not exactly a rain cover connoisseur,
but all the ones that I see are just black.
That's cool that it has a graphic on it.
Yeah, and it's reflective.
So the idea is that it'll be safer at night
because it's something we didn't think of
when we did the original design for the backpack.
And so, hey, at least if you're gonna be out riding with it,
well, hey, maybe you'll put a rain cover on
and then at least we'll have something reflective for it.
Yeah, cool.
I have no idea how much it'll cost.
Yeah, I don't know.
It'll cost however much it costs.
Realistically, most of our products
are just cost times some percentage
that kind of makes sense.
Like it's not, but we're not really,
yeah, we're not really like that.
We have some that we make
like an outsize margin percentage on,
but generally speaking,
that's just like the lower cost items
where a big part of the cost is not the cogs,
the cost of goods sold.
It's like the handling costs
and just the overhead involved in performing a transaction.
Like if we had something that cost 30 cents
and we marked it up 100 points,
I can't sell something for 60 cents
because I can't even cover what it costs
for someone to put it in a warehouse
and then go get it from a warehouse
and then put it in a box and then send it to you.
Like it just doesn't make any sense.
Whereas for something that costs $10,
yeah, we might charge 20 bucks for it
because we can absorb those costs much more easily.
So it varies a little bit depending
on the actual like base cost of the item.
But yeah, so it'll be-
I think some people are gonna misunderstand that
because you didn't specify cogs every time it was just cogs
and you said costs sometimes.
Oh, cost is cogs.
Yeah, cogs is cost.
So when he's talking about costs,
he just means of the components that go into the thing.
But then it has to be shipped.
The people that put it in the box,
there's a handling fee every single time they do that
for every single individual item.
Like that's a fee that is charged to us
by a third party company.
It's not just like a number I'd pulled out of my butt,
like it's a real fee.
And then there's other things the whole way along,
et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah.
All right.
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according to Red Magic Labs, during a two-hour game,
the frame rate remains stable at 59.9 FPS
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and become a pro gamer at work with Dennis.
What even is that?
What am I even looking at?
What is that hat?
He's laughing.
He's laughing.
I think that's why the head's shaking is he's laughing.
Okay, sure, why not?
I play video games.
Anywho, what do you want to talk?
Oh, we're supposed to do three merch messages.
Okay, thanks, Dan.
Welcome. Hit us.
Sure.
Cleo Abrams predicts tech advancements, if sustainable,
high-scale energy production
like nuclear power is widespread.
What do you think will be the biggest change
to our lives with unlimited power?
I won't feel bad for leaving my computer on all the time?
I don't know.
I mean, I got to say, I'm sorry,
people who live in places where power is very expensive
or environmentally impactful.
Here in BC-
Wait, you don't even sleep it?
No. Why?
Well, how will I remote into it?
You can wake it.
Yeah, but it's not reliable.
That's probably true.
Like, I don't know, man, it's, yeah.
Sleep isn't reliable in general.
My computer just doesn't sleep now.
I might as well call it restart.
We talked about this in the recent thing.
So you'll hear us talk about that soon.
But yeah, my computer just, it's like a delayed restart.
Yeah.
If I set it to sleep, it'll restart in two or three hours.
I don't know what to tell you.
So we live in British Columbia, Canada,
where all of our power comes from falling water.
And you can talk about the environmental impact
of hydroelectric power all you want.
But the reality of it is those dams are already there.
The power that they generate is just there
and you can either use it or you can lose it.
And so it's cheap.
It's cheap. It's plentiful.
We don't, I think for the most part,
really think about power consumption that much.
Honestly, not a ton. A little bit.
Now, there are energy costs here
that are higher than other parts of the world.
Whenever I hear Americans complaining
about their gas prices, I kind of go.
Hey, by the way, ours only look low
because they're in liters.
Yeah, which is one fourth of a gallon.
We pay a lot for fuel, which is one of the reasons.
I learned this recently, actually.
Apparently Vancouver is the Tesla ownership capital of,
if not the world, North America.
And I would have thought, California, right?
Trendy, blah, blah, blah.
Conscious or whatever.
Electricity is really expensive in California.
Electricity costs fricking nothing here.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that for me,
personally, it wouldn't change anything
because power literally runs out of the taps like water.
But in terms of globally,
I would expect to see more widespread use, for example,
of things like climate control.
I would expect that to become more affordable for people.
I would expect even more of a push towards the data center.
One of the biggest costs of running a data center is power.
So I would expect to see even more investments
in data centers.
I would expect to see more experiences
that are data center focused.
I mean, I've been talking about how I think the data center
could change gaming for a long time.
Like just massively, much more massively multiplayer worlds
could be achieved by having everything clustered
in one place and everybody else remoting into it
and just getting their video feeds.
Here's a weird negative take.
Yeah, sure.
I think light pollution would get really bad.
Oh, people just what?
Just like don't bother turning off.
LEDs last for fricking forever.
Sort of.
So there's a whole thing.
Man, okay, I'm gonna get a lot wrong
because this is a rabbit hole I went down a while ago.
But what my understanding is that
that was a big part of the sales pitch for LEDs.
And I don't mean LEDs in general.
What you said is not false,
but LED light bulbs like that screw into a socket.
What I've heard is that much like traditional light bulbs,
while the technology is inherently more reliable,
it's kind of been engineered to not be that reliable.
Yeah, cause like super, super OG light bulbs,
like filament light bulbs would also just last
for incredible amounts of time.
And then they were engineered to be worse.
Yeah.
So yeah, my understanding is LEDs
are not designed properly to last.
But in theory, yeah, what you're saying is correct.
You could have bulbs that are just, I don't know,
just like on all the time, who cares?
But then like people want to sleep, right?
Then again, you see a lot of-
And you want to be able to see the stars
and like go hiking and not be like, wow,
it's glowing.
Well, no, I just meant people are going to want to sleep.
So they might turn off the lights in their house.
But then it occurred to me that a lot of modern architecture
has a lot of lighting on the outside of buildings.
Like every new house listing you look at is like-
This is supposed to be a farm,
but they found some loophole to make it
so they can just build their giant mansion on it
and not farm at all.
All of those that have like 10 million lights
all along the roofing are in the entire perimeter
of the house.
It's like, oh my God, okay.
It's not like a spaceship taking off.
It's a house you can relax.
I don't know.
Okay, up next.
Would you go back to living without technology
if drivers became a monthly subscription
without a buy it for life option?
This is a weird question.
So basically-
Would you go back to living without technology?
Oh, I see.
Yeah, if your computer just stops working
if you don't pay for it.
You want to use USB?
No.
Subscription.
Yeah, no, I would probably pay.
What am I-
Ultimately, yeah.
Some people are going to pay
and then those people are just going to have
such a significant leg up.
Yeah, and the thing too is that you got to remember
for me, technology is not just recreational, right?
That's how I make my living.
Your job, me too.
And so it's kind of like the way that I complain about-
Yeah, Trent in float plane chat.
I would pirate the drivers.
Let's go.
Yeah.
Let's go.
Unless the inconvenience of pirating the drivers
and the reliability of pirating the drivers
makes it so much worse than, remember too,
Linux is not the problem here though.
Like we're not talking about Microsoft here.
We're talking about hardware manufacturers.
We're talking about hardware drivers.
So that's not even the solution unfortunately.
Linux has a lot of generic drivers for things.
That's true, but if all of a sudden
hardware manufacturers started charging,
what, I don't know, Linux Foundation, someone.
They find some way.
Yeah, if they find some way to DRM it,
then like, remember guys, this is a hypothetical scenario.
It's a scenario.
We also assume that piracy or Linux doesn't solve it.
Yeah, we're trying to in good faith
answer the actual question.
And the answer is, yeah, just like Adobe.
I'd complain about it.
I'd be upset.
But people keep using Premiere and Photoshop and everything.
I'd keep buying it.
But the second it touches work things,
stuff gets interesting.
Yeah, because for your mouse.
I do think that could be the thing, if that happened,
which I don't actually think it's going to,
but if that happened, I think that that would be the thing
that would finally usher in the year of the Linux desktop.
The year of the Linux desktop.
Can you name slightly harder?
I mean, you're already wearing that shirt
and you're going to hear of the Linux desktop meme on you.
I actually really like it.
I know, it's awesome.
It's pretty great.
You know what?
I'm not going to say which of the designers
who worked on it,
because I don't want to single anybody out,
but somebody expressed to me that they weren't
that confident in their work on it.
I don't know, I think the design is great.
I was basically like, nah, man, you good.
I don't know how well it's going to sell,
but I don't think that's because the design isn't,
I just, I don't know.
I mean, I can find out for you.
It doesn't take that long.
It's just, it's in reference to such a niche thing.
Okay, some people are buying them.
I don't make the rules, man.
Yeah.
I don't know, I think it looks cool.
Anyway, okay, Dan, hit us again.
Sure thing.
Hi, I always wanted to know how you decide
what tier of car to review.
For example, the difference between a Platinum F-150
Lightning and Standard is almost twice the price
and different specs.
You know what?
We run into the same challenge with just about everything.
Laptops are another perfect example of this.
You can configure the same laptop
and have completely different characteristics
for the final machine in terms of everything
from performance to battery life.
And of course, to price.
I mean, look at a MacBook.
It can be configured anywhere from, you know,
a couple grand to six grand,
depending on what kind of storage options you put in them.
And unlike a MacBook, a PC laptop can have a much more,
more bigger difference in terms of performance
at all of those different price tiers
because the configuration options are so much more granular.
I mean, on a MacBook,
a lot of that price at the top tier option is going to be
because you like stuffed it full of SSDs.
That's not something that impacts
the average user's daily experience.
It's just how much of a digital pack rat you can be, right?
It doesn't matter that much, but on a lot of machines,
yeah, it's extremely challenging.
Even stuff like Kingpin cards back in the day?
Yeah.
Stuff like that, it's like, oh, is this even the same thing?
Is this a 980?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah, who even draws the line at, you know,
what is one thing versus what is a completely
different thing?
So, you know, when it comes to things like cars,
a lot of the time, realistically,
we're kind of at the mercy of what the manufacturer has
in their demo, in their press car stable.
And so for something like the,
for something like the Taycan.
So that was, that was a car that,
no, that was, was that the first like car review that,
no, the first one was the Volt.
And that was just because that was the one I bought.
And the reason I bought that particular trim level
was because I bought it secondhand
and that was the one that was a good deal.
And then with the Taycan,
that blue one was the one that was in the Porsche,
like press, press car pool.
And then what's funny is I actually ended up having
the kind of problem that I guess you're sort of trying
to highlight here because I went and I purchased a Taycan
based on my experiences with it.
I didn't like bother to test drive exactly the model
that I was buying.
And I didn't realize,
just didn't really think about it.
I was like, oh yeah, it's like a Taycan,
but like more better.
It's one of the higher tier ones.
I didn't realize it weighs like another 600 pounds
or something because it's got more motors in it.
Yeah.
And I have like, obviously if I thought about it
for 20 seconds, I probably would have thought,
oh yeah, you know, maybe they didn't have anywhere else
that they could shed more weight
to put these extra motors in.
But then, you know, maybe I would have assumed,
oh, I don't know, maybe it's now has more carbon fiber
in it or whatever and they balance it out that way.
But no, it's just, it's just heavier.
And so what I realized is that while it's really quick
off the line and it really is, around corners,
it's a bit floatier.
And sometimes I actually like miss the regular,
like I think it was a 4S or the baseball.
I can't remember which exact one it was
that I did the review on,
but I actually missed that one
because it wasn't a light car by any stretch.
I mean, no electric car is going to be agile
the way that an ice car might be.
But sometimes I miss the,
at least somewhat agile or agility of that lighter car.
So no, yeah, it's a huge problem.
Same with the GR Corolla.
Like it was what Toyota had.
Now, a lot of the time,
those press cars are the one that sells.
Yeah, and that's for two reasons.
One is that's what they want reviewers looking at
because realistically,
like they've done all the market research.
They've done all the development.
They know what configuration of the car is a good one.
They know which one they're going to make a bunch of.
So that's what they want people looking at
so that it's representative except when they don't.
And then number two is a lot of the time, those press cars,
I mean, they don't get shredded
unless they go to Mr. Beast, I guess.
Shredded a Lamborghini, that doesn't matter.
The point is like they don't just get crushed, right?
So someone's going to buy it at some point.
So it might as well be something
that is easy to get rid of, something liquid.
But as I alluded to before,
that's not necessarily always the case.
Sometimes they might equip something
with really nice options.
In particular, you could see this
on things like sound systems
that might not change the handling of the car at all,
but do change the experience and comfort.
And because a car is so emotional,
it is such an emotional product
compared to something like a graphics card,
which you can objectively measure
the goodness of in every way.
A car is just so subjective.
And so, I could see that as a way that they could try to-
There's a ton of reasons why I really like my car.
And if you took it away and gave me an almost identical car,
even like same model and everything,
I would not like it as much.
And so that can introduce a lot of subjective bias
or a lot of like subconscious bias is what I meant to say.
If they make sure all the press cars
have the like $700 nicer seat option or something like that,
even though they know most people
aren't gonna spring for it.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's tough.
I think the answer is when we have a choice,
what we try to go for is the one that makes sense.
And this is actually part of what inspired that video
that we did on how starting at is the biggest lie in tech,
because the starting at configuration of a computer
is almost always a crappy configuration
that is intentionally one that is kneecapped in some way
so that people will buy the next one, right?
Like it's never the one they actually want you to buy.
And it was a conversation that we were having
around how challenging it is to talk about pricing
for laptops, because on the one hand, it is honest,
it is truthful, it is factual to say,
this machine starts at $1,199 or whatever the case may be,
but it is not representative if you know
that the configuration that makes any sense
is more like $1,500.
So generally speaking, what we would like to do
is we would like to review the configuration
that we think makes sense.
The problem is you can get it wrong.
What if the configuration that we think makes sense
because it's only another a hundred bucks for the Core i7
doesn't make any sense because the thermal solution
can't handle the extra heat output from the Core i7
and it ends up throttling to the performance
of the Core i5 anyway.
That's a very real problem in laptops.
So we don't have a perfect answer.
You know, in a perfect world,
we'd love to just test every single configuration
and then we can tell you which one's the best one.
We had the ambitious goal of doing that once
with the M1 MacBook.
We actually bought them all, we bought like 20 of them.
And then long story short,
we just didn't have the testing capacity
and they ended up getting distributed for internal use.
Thankfully, we have a lot of Mac users now,
so it wasn't a complete waste, but got them.
And I got one more for you here.
Yeah.
Hi, part of the 1% of the viewer audience here
got recommended to only WAN Show at first a few years ago
due to all the podcasts I watch.
What part of the YouTube algorithm keeps on surprising you?
Live VODs a hundred percent.
Yeah, not just WAN Show.
The way that just random, like three hour videos
of me building a computer will get three, four,
five million views.
Whereas if we had actually put in the work
to cut that down to a digestible length,
it would get a fraction of that.
I just, I can't fathom it.
And I can tell you guys,
I do know that the algorithmic system that recommends VODs
of previously live content is separate from regular VODs,
which is separate from shorts.
They are separate, but related.
So I can tell you that for sure.
And it never ceases to surprise me.
It seems weird to me because myself as a viewer,
the amount of times that I'm going to want to go watch
a VOD of a previously ran live stream is honestly very low.
No, but it just auto plays.
Like I've seen, it's anecdotal, right?
It's not perfect evidence, but I've seen lots of people.
And then the watch time is fat.
Who are like, yeah, I fell asleep watching LTT.
And like three times this week and every single time
when I woke up, it was that I love building computer stream.
That is a thing.
Interesting, okay.
Oh, and I missed.
Oh man, people are actually talking about it
in float plane chat right now, yes.
People leave VODs on while going to sleep.
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent.
I guess, do you guys want any pizza
or should we save it for later?
Oh, what kind of pizza is it?
I don't know, I'll look.
Why don't we save it for After Dark?
Save it for After Dark.
All right. Okay.
A couple more topics.
Luke, what do you want to talk about?
I kind of want to talk about Rockstar,
selling pirated copies of their own games.
I was going to say the same thing.
That's pretty funny.
Rockstar has been caught selling cracked versions
of their own games on Steam again.
Developer Silent found a tag for Razer 1911,
a Norwegian software cracking group,
while looking through the hex codes for Midnight Club 2,
which was delisted from Steam in 2018.
According to information by Vedim M and Firehead,
so hopefully I said those right.
Well, Firehead, I'm pretty sure, but yeah, anyways.
This isn't the first time that Rockstar has been caught
reselling pirated versions of their own games.
Manhunt was first released on Steam in 2008,
but for unclear reasons,
it was unable to run on Windows Vista,
despite the fact that the original disc copy could.
However, a fix could be implemented
by changing a single value in its code,
the same fix that would allow the cracked version
of the game created by Razer 1911 to work on Vista.
Oops, interesting.
In 2010, a user found that the Steam version
of Max Payne 2 contained the logo
of Where's Group Myth in its code,
which was removed a few days later, unsurprisingly.
This was followed by an update to Manhunt,
which utterly broke the game.
This is likely because Rockstar replaced the cracked file
with its own copy, which had been rendered unplayable
due to anti-piracy measures put in place
by Rockstar during development.
Very cool.
The games were originally sold with DRM copy protections
and required a matching disc in the drive in order to run.
That was up for the kids out there.
That was a common thing.
That was very common, yep.
But Rockstar also added additional booby traps
meant to make the experience
of playing a cracked copy miserable.
In Manhunt, these included locking nearly every door
in the game, crashing whenever the player
acquires a health pickup,
and disabling the mouse and keyboard
if a player manages to get five headshots.
These booby traps were quickly subverted.
That is pretty funny.
And the cracked version was released
only three days after the official launch.
I remember there was certain games
where you could load the game
with the game in your optical drive,
and then if you were out of land,
you could just eject it after the game was open
and pass it to your buddy.
Anyways, when Rockstar removed the copy protections,
they failed to remove the booby traps
that were set off, no way,
by the absence of these copy protections,
meaning that legitimate buyers over the last 13 years
have been sold a broken game.
However, the old executable remains in the Steam folder.
Really?
Simply renamed testapp.exe,
its hex codes also contain tags from Razer 1911.
Most community patches to allow the Steam version
of Manhunt to run still use this testapp executable
as a base, rather than try to fix Rockstar's own version.
I don't even think there's anything else to say here
other than-
That's hilarious.
LOL.
Okay.
Razer 1911 doing work,
allowing people to keep playing Rockstar games.
There is, there is something to talk about.
Okay, so clearly Razer 1911
is subverting, you know,
piracy protections on copyrighted software.
Yeah, like you can say what you want
about people enabling piracy stuff.
But. But.
That doesn't mean- Rockstar still
is stealing their copyrighted code.
Do two wrongs make a right?
No.
So what Rockstar's doing is still wrong.
Yeah.
I think it would be hilarious
if Rockstar had to pay Razer.
Well, Razer would have to reveal who they are.
Yeah, that would be kinda,
maybe they just have to send like Bitcoin
to some mysterious address or something.
It's kinda like how you assume that, you know,
your drug dealer's not gonna call the cops
when you don't pay them.
Right.
Yeah, they'll find a solution, but.
Yeah, very funny.
I doubt anything's gonna come of this
because of basically what we just said.
Yup.
But, yeah, that's brutal and they should stop doing that.
Ken K says, but two rights make an airplane.
That's pretty good.
I don't think I've heard that one before.
Yeah, Dan's not there to ding the thing.
Oh, in another small aside
before we move on to our next topic here,
or not another, in a small aside, we need some help.
We're working on a video on 3D movie projection,
passive 3D movie projection,
and we are hoping that someone in our audience
has some experience with passive 3D setups
and could maybe give us a hand.
We have a bald out Stewart 3D screen coming in,
but we've had some trouble acquiring appropriate filters,
glasses, and I think we could probably find a projector.
But if you have some recommendations,
it turns out that the LS12000
that I've been using in my theater now
because of something, something, laser,
something, something, it doesn't work for 3D.
So please get in touch via our website contact form,
which is at linusmediagroup.com slash contact dash us,
or email info at linusmediagroup.com.
If you work in that industry, what's left of it,
or if you have any old gear that you don't need anymore
that we could borrow from you or buy off you
or whatever the case may be.
We're particularly interested in a quality setup,
so not acrylic filters, glass filters, if possible.
I've got a kind of a whole series of videos
that I wanna do around it.
I wanna get some, I basically wanna get 3D movies running,
but I also found out that there are 2D
to stereo 3D converters that you can just
run modern games with.
And I wanna play around with that as well.
I also wanna set up like a retro setup.
So go back to like GTX 280 or 480,
whatever the last, no, 580 still did.
Whatever the last driver and last generation of hardware
that supported 3D vision was,
build like the bangingest.
The 580 still did?
I believe so.
The bangingest Nvidia 3D vision setup.
I know 480s did.
Hold on, last driver to support Nvidia 3D vision.
Yeah, so I had kind of like three video ideas in mind for it
Okay, here we go.
Yeah, Turing.
And with 580 did.
Turing supports it.
The last driver that got it was a Windows 10,
64 bit standard, 425.31.
Man, this is something that makes me really sad.
Okay, 3D vision is gonna be one of those forgotten
irretrievable gaming texts.
You know why?
Because by the time Windows 10 rolled around,
people weren't buying physical copies of games.
And if they were,
they were running through Steam or something.
So what's gonna happen is Valve is gonna drop support
for Windows 10 someday, not immediately, but someday.
And even if you have a machine,
even if you have the 3D hardware,
even if you have copies of the games
that technically do support it,
you won't be playing it unless you pirate.
I don't think that's a hot, I think we should care.
So I almost don't even want to make this point
because I've always been very rah rah physical games
for this exact reason, stuff like that.
But a lot of those games are able to be ran
through executables from the folder.
So if you had a backup, you're fine.
But what if it's a DRM issue?
Yeah.
You want to play Batman Arkham Asylum game of the year.
Then you're screwed.
It's a Steam game.
Yep.
That's it.
That's all.
In fact, I'm trying to think.
I had a copy of not game of the year
and there was a whole thing with games for Windows live.
So Batman Arkham Asylum was a games for Windows live thing.
So when games for Windows live went away,
everyone who had a copy on games for Windows live
got a Steam copy.
So it is possible that no, that game,
which was a 3D vision title,
simply doesn't exist outside of Steam.
Imagine trying to go back to this era
that we're in right now.
Say it's 20, say it's 25 years from now.
Yeah.
Try to go back and play Baldur's Gate 3.
I don't know.
Oh yeah.
I don't even know if that's a good example,
but some game that came out recently.
Sure.
Diablo 4.
The likeliness you won't, oh Diablo 4,
you definitely won't be able to play.
Cause it's effectively like a weird form of an MMO.
Like there's a lot of,
go back and try to play Fortnite in 25 years.
It's like, I probably I'd argue
that was the biggest game of the last like X amount of time.
Oh yeah.
And I mean, even today,
if you want to play Fortnite as it was five years ago,
you can't do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, this is great.
That last 3D vision supporting driver, RTX 2080 Ti.
I am going to play Arkham Asylum in stereo 3D.
Like I could have never imagined it when it came out.
Yeah, no, I'm like superstar.
Yeah. I'm really excited.
Wow.
Yeah.
All right.
I've got like a whole series of videos planned.
So if you, we have had some trouble though.
Is that a rare Nvidia W?
Like, do we have to give it to them on that?
That's a long support window
for something that people were not really using.
Yeah.
Nvidia's software support.
Love or hate Nvidia.
And they do make mistakes even on the software side.
They've got like outstanding bugs
that have been sitting there forever
that should have been dealt with like any company.
Their driver control panel
looks like it's from 15 years ago.
Like, yeah, they've got their issues.
But in terms of hardware product support,
man, how long has the Nvidia Shield had support?
I mean, it's still an active product.
Talk here mentioned PhysX is still supported.
Like for example, in Mafia 2.
Yep.
Yeah, a hundred percent.
We'll give them that.
Yep.
So you gotta give them credit where it's due
because otherwise when you criticize them,
people can't take it seriously, right?
Yeah, exactly.
The newsletter.
No, I haven't mentioned the newsletter.
We have an awesome,
we haven't really done many newsletter updates
for LTT store lately,
but we have a really cool one going out
that you guys are gonna wanna make sure
that you are signed up for.
Oh, really?
They don't give me any teasers in here or anything?
Well, whatever.
I read it.
It's all about what we've learned
about injection molding and plastics
as we've explored different colors for the screwdriver
and lead up to LTX and in some of the upcoming products.
So it gets into like the fine details
of how the coloring is done and what that affects
and hot pressing versus cold pressing,
the ratchet assemblies into the handles
and what we were, we've got like a, it's not, sorry,
I was gonna say like a blown up version,
but it's not blown up.
It's like a cross section.
So the team ripped one out, created a cross section of it,
and they show like a cold press versus a hot press
to show how our initial assumptions
about hot press being better were actually not correct.
It turns out that they both kind of eat into the handle
in the same way, it turns out.
Yeah, really, really cool update.
So you can sign up for the newsletter.
Sorry?
I'm over it.
Oh, okay, fine.
If it's on my WAN Show email, then I'll look at it.
But it's a newsletter, right?
Couldn't we just go look at it on the store?
I don't think it's up yet.
I think it's going out this weekend or something like that.
I'm pretty sure it's up.
Okay, yeah, here we go.
This laptop, tools, tools, tools.
Yeah, it's been a year since the screwdriver launched.
So yeah, you can kind of see all that stuff
and are we allowed to use that?
You know what, I'm not gonna overthink that.
This is a whole rabbit hole.
This like swirly thing here that's going on.
Yeah, anyway, this is the thing that happened.
Oh my.
Yep.
Anyway, wow, that hair, doesn't matter.
The point is, really cool newsletter.
You can sign up at lttstore.com.
And that newsletter is on the store.
Oh, is it?
Okay, yeah, you can also go check it out there then.
Mozilla Report finds that cars are a privacy nightmare.
Nobody saw this one coming.
This is wild.
Speaking of things, we should have flipped the desk over
when it initially started happening
and people have just accepted enough that it's happening.
According to a Mozilla Foundation report
on 25 car brands, which like how many car brands are there?
I was gonna say, that is actually
a very substantial amount of car brands.
Cars are the worst product category
they have ever reviewed for privacy.
Every single brand failed to meet Mozilla's
minimum privacy standards and collected excessive amounts
of personal information, including photos,
calendar information, location, driving speed,
musical tastes, race, immigration status,
and medical information.
Both Kia and Nissan permit the collection of data
regarding a user's sex life and six car companies
permit the collection of genetic information
or genetic characteristics.
84% of the car brands share personal user data
with service providers and data brokers.
76% claim the right to sell the information
and 56% are willing to share user information
with the government and or law enforcement if requested.
Tesla, surprise, surprise, was the worst ranked company
in the survey and failed every single one
of Mozilla's privacy criteria.
You know what's crazy?
You know what is squeaky clean on this list?
Acura?
My car.
Really?
Not the brand, but my car.
Yeah, it doesn't have like smart anything,
I don't think.
Nope.
You won't even pay for a map update.
Nope.
And rightly you shouldn't.
That is so stupid.
It is very dumb.
It's like hundreds of dollars, just in case anyone's wondering.
It's like $400.
It's really stupid.
Yeah, it's not like two hundreds of dollars, it's a lot.
I don't remember how much it is, but it's a lot.
Mozilla also says that it could not confirm
that any automaker met its minimum security standards
regarding data encryption and protection against theft
and that car companies provided less detailed
security information about their products
than most dating apps and sex toy manufacturers.
Mozilla said that it is typical advice
to help consumers protect their personal data.
Oh, that their tip, oh, it's up.
Yeah, it's the wrong, it doesn't matter.
Minor details.
Said that their typical advice to help consumers
protect their personal data feels inadequate
given the circumstances and that they have started
a petition demanding car companies halt
their current data protection programs.
Discussion question.
What should users do when there is no reasonable way
to opt out of a highly invasive product
within a given market?
How has the automotive industry become this kind
of a wild west with respect to privacy?
It's been pretty wild.
This is a very small but legitimate reason
why I haven't wanted to upgrade my car.
And I'm not kidding.
And I've mentioned this before.
I actually like that my car is dumb.
I don't know.
There's just, there's certain things about smartifying
a car that like bother me and always have.
DMAC asks, how does a car know about your sex life?
Well, let me tell you.
It knows where you're driving.
When you don't own a house yet.
It knows what time.
Well, that too, to be honest.
But it also knows where you're driving and at what time.
And for how long you're there.
Your car knows a lot, man.
Stuff like that.
Yeah, okay.
Is this, this is great from Trent R.
and Floatplane Chat.
Is it just a matter of like the first politician
like getting their mistress outed by a smart car
or something and then like all of a sudden
this starts changing or like what's gonna be,
what's gonna be the tipping point for this
where it goes the other way?
I don't know.
Oh man.
Yeah, XFN724.
This is a really good point.
I think the second comment I've had from you this show.
I drove a 91 car until 2021
when they wouldn't renew the inspection on it.
So that's less of an issue here
where you can not only drive ancient cars
but you even get cheaper insurance.
You get collector's plates and stuff.
They ditched it, yeah.
Yeah.
They had a, what was it?
Air care.
Yeah.
Even then there were like exemptions for like collectors.
And there was very easy ways to get around it.
Yeah, it was the whole thing, which is why they ditched it.
But in a lot of places, it's not even
how harmful the emissions are or anything like that.
In a lot of places it's as simple as,
oh, your car's older than that?
We will not even try to inspect it.
And basically that car just gets put on a ship
and sent somewhere else where it will continue to amish
and however it was here.
I don't really understand
what problem you think you're solving.
And then you just like have to buy a new one.
It's that simple.
Like I noticed this when I was in Germany.
I was like, there's no, and Singapore too.
Like there's no old cars on the road, what the heck?
In Singapore, it was explained to me
that the lottery system for even getting a license to drive
is so expensive to like corruptly bribe your way
to winning all the time, that basically the only people
who can afford to drive a car
are the ones who can afford to drive a nice car.
That was the way it was explained to me
by someone from Singapore.
I have no idea if it's still the case.
That was a long time ago.
And who knows, maybe they were misinformed.
But in Germany, my understanding is that they simply
do not allow you to drive a super old car.
So guys, please, please let me know.
If I am mistaken.
Oh, I thought you didn't tell people what car you drive.
No, I do.
It's been in Scraphead Wars and stuff, people know.
Oh, I've always avoided it.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
All right, cool.
It's been on camera like a bunch of times.
There's even, if you remember that I watched this recently
cause someone was asking who Nick Van Berkel was,
a random conversation.
But I brought up Channel Super Fun and saw when we pranked,
I think it was us pranking Berkel
that the office got broken into or whatever.
Nice.
Oh wait, no.
It was us pranking you for something
that your car didn't work.
Oh yeah, it was when you guys said
that my flight got moved, my flight time got moved.
Yeah, and I offered to drive you.
My car is like in that video and that was back then.
So it's been around forever.
Yeah, there are some questions
that I sort of have about this.
My understanding of Germany is wrong.
In fact, you don't pay taxes for your car
once it becomes an old timer.
Okay, then maybe it's just a cultural thing.
I do know that there are countries
where they basically just,
I mean, the person who left this comment
lives in one of them clearly,
where old cars, they simply won't renew your inspection
for the most part.
Maybe with Germany, it's just more of
just like a culture thing.
Oh, okay, no, hold on a second.
As a German, most cars are killed by T-U-V-F-U-R,
I don't know what that is,
safety roadworthiness, not general too old.
Ah, so it's that the regulations change
and that car is no longer considered roadworthy.
Okay, I knew there was something.
Okay, thank you for clarifying that.
Interesting.
Okay, yeah, very, very interesting.
What else have we got here?
Oh, the video game voice actors are considering a strike.
Yeah, the Actors' Union SAG-AFTRA
has decided to hold the general vote
on whether to authorize, that's pretty key here,
a strike against video game companies.
This doesn't necessarily mean that a strike will happen,
just that if the vote is successful,
they will have the authority to call a strike
when negotiations, when slash if negotiations fail.
The union is seeking similar terms
to what they asked of TV and film companies,
like an 11% wage increase and protections from AI.
The last time video game voice actors held a strike
was in October of 2016, which lasted 340 days.
The eventual agreement included a new bonus system
and increased transparency during the hiring process
so that actors would know at least the genre of the game
and whether their work would include profanity, slurs,
sexual or violent themes, or physical stunts.
What the heck?
What?
For a voice actor?
Okay, the agreement did not guarantee residuals,
a key point of contention.
Reportedly, a stalemate has already been reached
in negotiations with, surprisingly,
Activision and Take-Two.
Discussion question, what is the best way
to help voice actors?
What is the advantage slash disadvantage
of having multiple sectors striking at once?
Man.
It might bring more attention to it as an advantage.
I don't think there's a bunch other than that though,
to be honest.
And I don't think that for outside of a very vocal minority
of really supportive gaming fans,
I don't think that most will care.
I think that they will just want their games.
I mean, we've seen that.
I'd love to say otherwise,
but we just talked about horse armor earlier in the show.
This isn't just true for gamers,
if I'm being completely honest,
this feels true for basically everything.
Wait, what, really?
One sec, sorry.
No, it's still up.
Okay.
But people will have stances on things,
and then the second that those stances get challenged,
if it inconveniences them, is less entertaining,
or cost them any amount of money,
it's decently common that those stances
will then be ditched.
Apparently a lot of voice actors do mocap as well.
I just would have assumed someone else did the mocap.
I had no idea.
It kind of makes sense.
I mean, I could definitely see
if someone's multi-talented or whatever,
they might as well, but they don't necessarily-
They're tying together the emotion of what you're saying
with physical actions and your face and your,
oh, that's probably it.
I bet you it's a bunch of facial movement stuff.
Well, that wouldn't be a stunt,
but it could be tied into the whole capture.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes sense.
Hold on, one quick thing, someone in Twitch chat,
it's not changing regulations in Germany,
it's just not worth repairing a car if it fails the TV.
Okay, okay, all right.
Good to know. Or modifying
or updating or whatever else.
Thank you for the clarification, that's great.
It doesn't change the point
that some people will not have the option-
You're discussing policy with Germans.
They're going to be specific.
Also, apparently part of what I said was right,
and in some city centres, bands based on emissions do exist.
So I'm not completely wrong, I'm just German wrong.
Right, so back to the voice actor strike.
So here's my concern,
and we've talked about this a little bit.
Even though it's not really related to our industry
being in YouTube, we have talked a little bit about SAG-AFTRA
and about the Writers Guild strike,
and what I have expressed before
and what I'm going to express again is I think it's too late.
I think it's too late for them to stop the AI onslaught
because that's what all three of these have as one,
at least one of their central- Protections from AI.
... themes is protections against AI
and protection for that there will be,
I mean in particular, the Writers Guild
wants protections against just stuffing them in a room
to turn some AI horse plop into something palatable
with a tiny team and then never even be on set
so that there's no career advancement.
That's what they're trying to prevent,
and ultimately I don't think any of the studios
are interested in their career growth.
They see the whole thing as transactional,
and I think that now that the power of AI
has been demonstrated,
I think once Chat GPT-3 broke ground,
the horse was out of the barn.
I think they saw, oh, we are this close,
and maybe their perception is actually wrong.
I mean we've seen a lot of problems
with large language models in their current form.
They're not perfect, but I think to let's face it,
probably a pretty technologically normy person
who might work as an executive at a film studio,
it seems pretty great, and if they're looking at it going,
okay, well assuming explosive development in this area,
like we see in tech, if they're just extrapolating
based on what they've seen before,
then it seems like we're so close
that we can just twiddle our thumbs for a little bit here,
not negotiate anything,
and this problem will solve itself one way or the other,
either with these people starving themselves
to the point where they come crawling back for work
or to the point where we just replace them with machines.
Okay, I'll just wait.
If the latter happens, movies are gonna suck
even more than they do now.
I know, right?
I will say there was some recent good ones.
I haven't seen Oppenheimer, but I've heard it's good,
and Barbie was great, but for years now,
movies have been kind of not awesome in my opinion.
I am, yeah, I'm scared for the video game voice actors' chances here,
and just like I've said about the Writers Guild
and, to a lesser degree, the Actors Guild,
I think they have leverage.
They have the star power at least,
but I think that in the same way that I've expressed concern
about the Writers Guild,
I just feel like the video game voice actors
are gonna come in hot.
They're gonna maybe feel good about their chances,
and I think what they're gonna find out
is they have absolutely zero negotiating leverage.
I don't know, man.
I think that developers will just kind of go,
okay, forget it then,
and they will pivot to technological tools,
and gamers will be enraged,
and then they will buy the game anyway.
Would you wager that there are more gaming studios
than there are...
I'm gonna stop you here because I don't know.
There's so many indie for both
that I would have no idea how to compare the numbers.
Because I feel like people are talking in chat right now
about how I mentioned, oh, it's for facial animations,
and you're like, yeah, but they said stunts,
so it's more than that.
BG3, Baldur's Gate 3, someone mentioned that,
and this makes sense because they're really good,
but they mentioned that the voice actors did mocap
while they were talking,
and the facial animations while people are talking
are very good, so it makes sense.
So I wonder if a game like BG3
where all the lines are voice acted,
and they have this mocap on faces,
and it's like it's a really good immersion quality
beneficial part of the game.
I wonder if certain studios will just opt to work
with the new terms of the voice actors guild or alliance or...
I'm not sure which actual...
Oh, no, okay, apparently SAG-AFTRA
is also the union of the video game voice actors
based on what I'm hearing here.
I don't actually know.
I didn't know what union they were part of.
Yeah, sorry.
But yeah, I wonder if some studios will decide
to work with them anyways because they're like,
this is going to be a quality differentiator for us.
Maybe.
That's honestly going to take a very long time
for AI to catch up with properly.
Yeah, you're probably right,
but I also do wonder if in the same way
that television studios just pivoted to reality TV
and found out that people will just consume
whatever direct they give them,
I wonder if a lot of them will just not care.
Yeah.
As someone who actually doesn't really care
about voice acting in games, I prefer to read,
and I actually find it really distracting.
One of the things that I like to do
is I change the voice track to Japanese or something
because I find it way less distracting to have...
Because I'll advance the text as fast as I can read it,
which is at probably about six to eight times the speed
that they will read the lines,
and so I find it a lot less distracting
to have words cut off in the middle of them
when they're in a language I don't understand.
I don't care.
But I know a lot of people really like voice acting in games.
I very much appreciate it.
Not only do I find it's a big immersion bonus,
but also just with my troubles with reading, it's nice.
It feels a lot more relaxing to not have to read,
and it also just...
I can go so much faster
because I'm not getting lost in text or whatever else.
Minorly dyslexic.
Yeah. I don't know.
People do not like my skipping voice acting.
You're skipping? Oh.
I don't know. I don't like it. It's slow.
It's a personal preference thing.
Yeah, it's just slow.
I skip it sometimes
if I'm not as interested in the conversation.
Just spacebar, spacebar, spacebar, skip through it.
But usually I don't.
Oh, well, no. I don't skip reading it.
I want to know what's happening.
I just don't want to...
I don't want to hear people say it.
I forget which Final Fantasy game
switched to full voice acting.
Was it 9?
I'm not going to know.
10? Yeah, I can't remember,
but I hated it.
I was like, this sucks. Bring back text.
Let's go, text!
And oh, man, games that don't support tapping
to completely fill in a text box,
like when they're like...
and you can't speed it up.
I just want to throw my controller through the TV.
I can't.
It drives me absolutely crazy.
See, that's never a problem for me.
I can't keep up with it anyways.
Apparently it was 10.
Yeah, agreed, GrandWig.
9 was so good.
He has never played any of the good Final Fantasy games.
He's played like 8.
Yeah!
8 was great.
I really liked it.
And then I never played another one.
I made it like 45 minutes into 8,
and I was like, this is stupid.
And I just, I couldn't.
Sorry, I just couldn't.
People do like 8.
I just, yeah.
It's not that I don't have patience.
I just don't have time.
There's a big difference.
Well, there isn't a big difference.
They're kind of the same thing.
Yeah, I tell people that I liked 8,
and they get so offended
because they're like,
oh, like 6 or 7 or whatever was so much better,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I can't believe you liked that one.
I was like, it's the only one I played.
I thought it was good.
Like, I don't know.
What do you want from me?
Come on.
Someday.
Squall was awesome.
I had the necklace.
I had the necklace with the lion
with the sword through the top.
I had that for a while.
Was it a sword gun or a gun sword?
A gun sword.
Gun blade.
I don't care.
To be more specific.
Yeah, that sounds stupid.
Yeah, it was sick.
If you have a gun, why do you need a blade on it?
It was awesome.
What is this, like the year 1850?
Get your musket.
Maybe.
In other AI news, Gizmodo replaced
Spanish languages editor with machine.
G.O. Media, owners of Gizmodo,
have laid off the editorial team
of the site's Spanish equivalent,
and write their own original content.
The site is not shutting down.
Instead, it will be populated with machine-translated articles
from the English site.
During the transition,
I'm sure you guys know that hilarity will ensue.
This is very sad for the people who lost their jobs,
but it's funny that G.O. Media is basically having this
turn into a PR disaster immediately.
That's the funny part.
During the transition, some readers have complained
of reading articles that start in Spanish,
then switch to English partway through.
Here's an example, and I'm about to butcher this,
so get ready.
Oh, no.
Um...
Oh, no.
La empresa no respondio de...
Okay, it doesn't matter.
The point is, that's probably why the form
asks you to give your country of residence.
It seems that NEDA is granting some people limited rights to...
What is this?
What the heck?
What the heck?
I really...
I don't know.
I understand that GPT-4 and some of these other things
are surprisingly good at translation,
but I really think there's...
Oh, no. Spanish would like a word with you.
I don't speak Spanish.
I think especially once you get into the nuances of language
and when you get into advanced levels of writing
and people trying to get something across
through indirectly referencing something
and all these little subtleties that happen in natural language,
I find it really hard to believe that AI translation
is going to be able to keep up with this super well,
especially over time,
like if models are not being retrained and updated
with current events.
Yeah, and you're still going to need people.
Like, we talked about using AI translation
for dubbing for our videos,
and even then, like even at our scale,
there was no possibility of us not having a human check them.
Of course you're going to have to do that,
because otherwise you end up with this.
In fairness to me, okay,
my accent probably wasn't much worse than this translation.
I was just reading...
I mean, the translation just quits and starts reading English,
so realistically they were pretty similar.
That's what I did.
GeoMedia has been experimenting with AI-generated articles
since at least July,
which initially ran without oversight or input
from Gizmodo's own writing staff.
It is unclear if these algorithmically produced articles
will then be subject to machine translation
and republish, oh my goodness,
the dog's breakfast you would end up with
if you have an AI-generated article
that then gets AI-translated into Spanish.
Oh, no.
Oh, no.
All right.
Linus with big translated by AI Spanish energy.
Heck, yeah.
Ah.
Next topic.
Yeah.
Um, nah.
Do we even want to talk about that?
Oh, yeah.
This is cool, though.
Framework...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Investor Disclosure found some old mainboards.
How does this happen?
Well, see...
Can you explain?
That's the reason this is in here,
because on the one hand, I think this is super cool.
Framework apparently found a load
of old completed laptop mainboards
while they were shutting down the original factory
that was producing the Framework 13 in China.
If you guys watched our recent factory tour,
you'll know that Framework
is now producing their laptops in Taiwan.
Framework has decided to process these boards,
update their firmware,
and make them available to customers.
The boards come with Intel Tiger Lake-based
Core i5-1135G7 processors
and will be available for 200 bucks,
less than half the original price.
And reminder, for those of you who don't know,
Framework laptops have motherboards
that can easily be run outside of the laptop,
which is super cool.
These CPUs are based on Gen 12.
They have Xe graphics.
No, Gen 12.
No, they're Gen 11.
I don't know what this means,
but they have Xe graphics apparently,
and they come with four CPU cores, eight threads,
and no performance or efficiency cores.
They're just cores.
So on the one hand, yeah, that's super cool,
and actually, if you just needed, like,
a decently powerful and efficient single-board computer,
essentially, seems like a not terrible idea.
On the other hand, again, as an investor,
I have some concerns.
Framework, what the heck?
How do you just...
How did you lose a bunch of motherboards?
Guys!
Here's the maybe silver lining.
They seem to have been doing fine.
Yeah, without them.
Without them.
Maybe you wouldn't have needed my money.
How does this happen?
I mean, okay, look.
You ask how this happens,
but you literally work at the company
that recently experienced some colossal communication issues.
So on the one hand, yeah.
All right, framework, you're forgiven.
I fully understand.
I've experienced a lot worse.
Good job.
Whoo!
With that, should we after dark?
I think it's time for a plan show after dark.
Maybe some pizza.
Oh, man.
It's a good thing we're only talking to the people
who watch Wan's show for...
Hours?
Yeah, I was going to check how long it would be.
Two and a half hours?
Yeah, two and a half hours.
You guys get us.
Luke with the immediate 180.
I did kind of set you up for it, though.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was pretty good.
Oh, boy.
All right.
Dan's getting his pizza, so he can't pick...
We've temporarily lost a member of the show.
I don't actually want any pizza.
That's fine.
Hold on, hold on.
I'll replace him one sec.
I'll replace him?
Oh, wow.
Oh.
There we go.
I'll probably do a better job on that thing.
Oh.
Oh.
That was my big effort.
That was as much time as that gag was worth.
Yeah, that's fair.
Ooh, pizza.
Do you want some, Luke, or are you still off pizza?
I'm off.
Yeah, I figured.
I wouldn't.
If I know the day before or something, I can adjust things.
I'm just a pinch check.
I'm just a pinch check away from pizza.
My pinch check is currently default failing, so that's okay.
I'm doing pretty good, though.
I'm happy with how things are going.
I'm happy with how things are going.
You look good.
Yeah, thank you.
Dan's been coming to the gym with me.
What?
Oh, that's awesome.
Yeah, it's been awesome.
It came all three days this week.
I'm probably going to be adding a fourth day to the rotation starting this week, but no
one wants to do that with me, which is fine.
I'm already losing three days of my week.
Yeah.
I have to do some work at some point.
Yeah.
You know, I don't usually do dominoes.
I'm kind of like a Panago or smaller pizza place guy.
You should try.
I'm going to shout out a local place, and hopefully I don't ruin it that way.
But Clayton Gate pizza is amazing.
What is garlic flavored sauce?
Anything called just flavored?
There's no ingredients on it.
Oh, anything just called sauce?
Like, is it a mayo?
Is it a, you know, am I am I overthinking this?
Coagulated garlic flavored liquid.
People say probably garlic butter, but I don't think so because garlic butter has garlic
in it.
It's probably oil and xanthan gum.
Yeah, they wouldn't.
Thanks, Dan.
I'm looking.
He's probably right.
I'm looking up the ingredients.
I'm going to eat it.
Oh, man.
All right.
Oh, it does, ah, kind of, I don't know.
My other options are marinara and ranch, though, so I'm sorry.
I can't eat ranch.
Ever since I.
You're a no ranch kind of person?
Yeah, well, I'm not a no ranch kind of person.
I'm an I ate nothing but ranch dressing on every vegetable or salad for like the first
15 years of my life person.
And now I can't even look at it.
I'm one of those.
So that's why I say my like I'm allergic to eggs line because I don't want to have a conversation
about it.
So I just say I'm allergic, even though I'm not.
I just can't eat them anymore.
That's me and seafood.
Yeah, because the second you say you don't like seafood.
Seafood people will try to get you to try a seafood that they're sure that you'll like.
Yeah.
And I'm just like, I don't feel like talking about it.
Exactly.
I don't like seafood.
And then what's really funny is people will catch me eating scallops.
And they'll be like, I thought you don't eat.
I thought you're allergic to seafood.
Then I'll have to explain.
Actually, I lied to you.
I am not allergic to seafood.
I'm just allergic to seafood that tastes like shit.
Oh, I like seafood.
The problem for me is that I don't like the super oceany taste.
And I also don't like playing Russian roulette with my food.
So for something like for something like prawns, good prawns that don't have that super like
seafood flavor are delicious.
Oh, yeah.
Like so good.
But then if I get one that has that like hyper oceany taste and do you know what I'm talking
about?
The fish taste?
But I don't actually mind it.
I am exactly the same way as you, Linus.
I tell people I don't like fish.
It's just the fish taste.
For me, for me, that oceany taste is an immediate turnoff.
And for me, I definitely like playing like maybe this will be delicious or maybe this
will make me want to gag.
It's not worth it.
It's like, it's not worth it.
See, I don't get that.
When I was growing up for about two weeks out of most, for probably about four or five
years there, for two weeks out of every one of those years, I would go on a camping trip
with my best friend's family.
And we would have probably more than half of the food that we had during that camping
trip would be pulled from the ocean in some way.
Crab traps, shrimping nets or whatever they were, standard fishing off the back of a boat,
whatever.
We'd eat what we caught, basically.
And that sort of temporarily ruined me on seafood because then any other less fresh
seafood was now bad because I had experienced that.
But then that faded over time and now it's fine.
But I've never minded the oceany taste at all.
We did one family trip down to Port Townsend.
I think on that trip alone, I probably ate more mass of seafood than I have in probably
the rest of my adult life.
Because it hits a little different.
All we did was put down crab traps, pull up crabs, dip them in butter and eat them like
for a week.
And when it's good, it's so good.
So at a restaurant like Banana Leaf, I'll order the abundance of seafood dish.
And I'll eat basically everything in it.
You won't get me to eat a mussel with a gun to my head.
But there's pretty much everything else in it.
I'll eat because I know that it's going to be really good quality.
Mussels are like, yeah, I had to Google it because I had to see if they were different
than clams and oysters.
But those are still super seafoody, yeah?
Yeah, I actually like those.
It's also a texture thing for me.
It's like eating a slug.
To be clear, I knew they were different.
But I wanted to see the picture of it to see exactly which one it was because I didn't
fully remember.
I'm also super texture sensitive.
So there's fruits that I won't eat because the texture bothers me.
Or they're a big gamble.
So I like fruits that I can tell from the outside what they're going to taste like.
So I love apples.
Grapes, you can tell just by touching them if they're going to be good.
Whereas fruits that you can't tell, so like a pomelo or pomelo or however you pronounce
it.
Those ones, I like them enough that I'll try a little taste.
But in general, I won't go out of my way to go peel one because there's a strong probability
that it will be bitter or something like that.
How many have ever had one of these?
When they're good, man, are they ever good.
Yeah, they're really delicious.
But I don't like stuff that's a gamble.
I'm not a huge fan of mush or slimy.
Either of those textures will throw me off like hard.
I'll buy grapes at TNT.
The crunchy ones?
Oh, they're so good.
Those are so good.
They're so good.
Autumn crisp.
Autumn crisp grape.
Get some Concord grapes.
I gotta tell you guys.
Now, I've had ones that are like, they feel like hand fruit.
Like, you put one grape in your mouth and you're like, oh, so good.
Yeah.
Yeah, very good.
Okay.
Anyways, should we start the messages of merch?
Sure.
Yeah, we've got lots of potential.
So if you guys want to hop them down, go for it.
Yeah.
First off here.
Hey DLL, first LTC store buy plus first merch message.
Thanks for inspiring my interest in tech.
Hey.
Do you have any advice for working through decision paralysis?
Any breakthrough aha moments you personally had?
Thanks.
I wanted advice.
I like lists.
Yeah.
Like, remember I was telling, but this is going to get worse before it gets better.
Remember when I read out my list of games that I have on my to play list last week and
then remember how my brilliant idea for deciding which one to play was to have the community
just pick them for me because I don't have a solution.
I'm sorry.
Dang it.
I was hoping he would have a solution.
Yeah.
Sometimes when I'm working on housework and stuff like that, I will just start walking
and then the first thing that I see that kind of looks amiss, I will fix it.
I don't commonly employ this, but there's two things.
One of them is a calculation that you can kind of do that you have to add some weights
to it, which is like what is the timeliness of this thing?
How do I rank the importance of this to myself?
What is the time investment?
Yeah, it's like importance, urgency, whatever.
I use it for work, but you can also use it for personal stuff.
Another way to do it is the first time I ever heard of a pros and cons list, I like immediately
hated it and I was like eight because even then I was like, this has flaws because a
lot of people are going to look at this and equate these and they don't have the same
weight and you might have like-
It has 10 pros and one con and the con is you die.
Yeah, like, there's too many pros, I've got to do it.
That's just so dumb.
Yes, I'm dead now.
Yeah, like, oh my God.
So it's always bothered me.
So something that I prefer to do, I rarely do this, but something that I do prefer to
do is you do one of those four cell grid systems with-
Urgent versus not urgent, important versus not important, and then you just do whatever's
urgent and important.
And timeliness and all that kind of stuff, yeah.
But no, no, no, you do the four cell grid system and then you do the pros and cons.
Like, you know how sometimes you'll see those like political leaning ones?
Oh sure, yeah.
And you put different groups on there so you can understand because sometimes I'm like,
I don't know where this newspaper lands or whatever and then I want to know and you see
those grids.
I do one of those.
Then you do another one for whoever assigned that newspaper a spot on the grid and then
you do another one for whoever assigned them a thing.
It's like impossible.
Good luck.
But, but you could use that to show a visual level of importance.
If you, if you're like having a hard time putting number values to things, you can effectively
do that on a visual grid by having importance below and then something else be left to right
and then visually see how things can come up.
But I don't know.
I don't suffer from this as much unless it's purchasing decisions and then I suffer from
it brutally.
This is amazing.
VNG Supernova and Floatplane Chat just flagged this for me.
The backloggery, you have the games, play them.
See, every game you own in one place, customized, custom entries support every game, retro to
modern, famous to obscure, customize the look of your profile, track your progress and beat
your backlog.
So you just enter a list of, according to VNG Supernova, you can use it to pick a random
game from your backlog based on criteria you set.
Huh.
Yeah.
That's pretty sweet.
I've never heard of this before.
That seems cool.
Oh yeah.
I could see how this would be great for streaming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sure if I was into Twitch or something, I might've seen it before, but I never have.
Seems.
That's pretty cool.
Seems smart.
You have said in the past, you don't like it when people talk to you about your YouTube
career when at personal gatherings, but do you like it when people discuss tech with
you in the wild?
Thanks for everything.
I think it depends.
I mean, at a gathering, it's less that I don't like talking about my career.
I'll talk about work the same way anyone will, and I'll ask people questions about their
work.
What I don't like is people fawning over it.
Yes.
I would just like to be there.
I would just like to be there as-
Just have a conversation.
Another parent of one of the children at this party.
It makes me really uncomfortable when I feel like I am not just with other parents.
I'm not in YouTuber mode.
I'm not at LTX.
I'm not signing things.
I would just like to be able to turn that part of my brain off and just have a conversation
with another person.
Just be normal, right?
That was going to effectively be my answer for the second part as well.
When having conversations about random tech stuff, just talk to me like you would anyone
else and we'll have a good conversation.
Yeah.
But when suddenly you're effectively trying to watch Wan Show and you're the only commenter,
it's like, yeah, this is not great.
I'm down to have a conversation with you.
That's totally cool, but I don't want to present.
I don't know.
It's fairly subtle, but it's important in my opinion.
The other thing is just read the room, right?
It's not like I haven't seen some of the recent criticism that's come out around me.
I've seen some people say that I was very aloof or dismissive at an event or something
like that.
The only real feedback I have for that is, was I working?
Were you interrupting?
Was I literally in the middle of a take or something like that?
Because, yeah, I will tell people, I'm sorry, I can't talk right now when I am sitting in
a booth writing a script.
I'm sorry.
I can't have a 10-minute conversation with you right now because at pretty much every
point in my career, I have been either fighting for survival or fighting to grow the company
and support the team or whatever else it is.
When you're trying to go into particularly an event, because that's some of the feedback
that I saw, if you want to have any hope of extracting the kind of value that you need
for the cost that is associated with attending these things, you're going pretty hard.
And there's so much stuff there in some cases that it's intense to try to cover it all.
And then, honestly, the worst problem is when there's nothing and you're trying to create
something out of nothing.
And I feel like over the years, I've had a lot of encounters with people where they are
sort of oblivious to that and don't realize that I am not there to socialize.
And maybe part of it is just that, yeah, I tend to be a very work-focused person.
I don't have much of a social life.
I don't necessarily always pick up on obvious social cues.
You guys may be able to relate.
It's pretty common.
No, I don't have time to have a long conversation when I'm working, especially when I'm
somewhere where what you might not understand is that three steps ago, somebody else
interrupted me.
And five steps before that, somebody interrupted me.
And three steps before that, somebody interrupted me.
And I'm trying to be nice, but I also have a job to do because if I don't do it, then I'm
just going to walk out of here having done absolutely nothing.
And so, yeah, it's tough.
I don't really know what to say about that other than sorry.
Maybe catch me at a party next time, although that'll be tough.
I used to try to make appearances, but then I just really don't like them.
I go to a maximum of one per show these days.
And even then, that's rare, and I will usually leave early.
I don't like them.
You know what's really the most frustrating part of them is for me?
The music's too loud.
Okay.
The reason why I leave early is because I will usually try to collect some people that
I want to talk to and then ask everyone if we can all leave so we can actually have a
conversation.
Because if I'm there for an hour or more, I will lose my voice 100%, trying to yell
over the stupid music.
And the best venues, the only ones that I've stayed at are when if there's music, it's
really quiet, and it's just like a hangout space.
Those are awesome.
It almost never happens.
But it's always like a bar or a club or something, and they have music slamming, and it's so
annoying.
Which I don't understand, because particularly in the tech industry, the first thing everybody
says, the second they walk up to you is like, man, the music is way too loud.
I can't hear you.
And then you complain, and you say, hey, turn it down, and then they do for like, they turn
it down like a fraction of a thing, and then you can tell they turn it back up after a
couple minutes.
It's like, can you stop?
Can you just actually not do that?
This is a professional function, and I'm trying to talk to people.
And we're all trying to not get sick.
Meanwhile, I'm like leaning into people like this while they're trying to talk so I can hear
them, and they're doing the same thing for me.
And it's like, man, this is just, it's so dumb.
I hate that stuff so much.
Yeah, night pause and float plane chat says, yeah, I don't know anyone that likes it.
It's bizarre to me.
We had a pool party at my place a little while ago, and I was playing around with the levels on
everything, and basically what I aimed for was I can tell there's music on.
Yeah.
The idea was that if there's an awkward pause, there's music.
And if people are talking, you don't really notice it anymore.
Yeah, yeah.
That sounds perfect.
I was like, yes, go Linus.
And I never had an issue talking to anyone, so that was great.
So frustrating.
Yeah.
What was even the merch message that started this?
Should we stay on topic?
I don't know.
I don't remember.
Up next.
DLL, back in the olden days, goods and services were paid for with the trading of goats.
How many goats would you say you are each worth and why?
Thank you for feeding my pin obsession.
Oh, wow.
We're getting into the worth of a person now.
How many goats am I worth?
I mean, I would.
How many goats per hour?
I was about to say, I think any human is worth almost a limitless number of goats.
But then if you were to tell me, look, I'm going to slaughter 10 million goats for this
one person, I'd be like, wow, that does really seem like a lot of goats.
You know what?
I'm going to fall back on one of my classics.
I define the value of pretty much anything in terms of human life.
So we can actually do the math on this because to raise a goat, to care for it and feed it
and give it water does cost some human life.
So I would say that the worth of one person is how much reasonable remaining life expectancy
they have divided by the number of hours of care required to raise the number of goats.
You guys get what I'm saying, right?
The equivalent amount of goat raising time for someone else, right?
Like to me, the problem with stealing from someone is that you are stealing their money,
which equals time, which equals their life.
You're stealing someone's life by taking something that they worked and they earned.
And so in the same way, by slaughtering a goat, you are slaughtering the effort of that
person who raised it.
And that's what I'm going with.
I'm stealing a comment from flow, plain chat and reworking it a little bit,
but I'm going to say you're worth one goat.
One goat because, because, because you're the goat.
That's stupid.
I like, I knew you were going there, but it's one of those things that I can't even,
I can't even beat you to the punchline because I don't want to be the one to say that.
I knew that too.
He looked at me in a certain way and then looked down because he knew what I was going
to say, but he was stuck because if he guesses that and then it's something else,
you guys are on your own.
Goodbye.
Okay.
That was great.
I'm sure that was much more fun for me than anyone else.
I really enjoyed that.
Awful man.
Oh man.
What's the process like for designing and choosing new pins to put out?
Oh man.
Usually it's me, Sarah and Nick kind of brainstorming stuff we think is cool,
stuff we think is memeable, stuff we think is pretty.
We have, okay, I'm going to spoil it.
We have a really cool series coming out called dead pixel.
Oh.
It's just a monitor.
It just like has a dead pixel on it.
Oh my God.
It's going to be like a whole collection.
Wow.
Don't worry about it.
So it's like, it's like the, it's like the, I bought this product just to bother you collection.
Yeah.
I was just going to say for people that that doesn't bother, if they have friends that
that bothers, that's going to be such a way to troll.
That's really exciting.
I like that a lot.
We have one that's just a dead pixel so you can just put it on stuff.
Wow.
Hey, LLD.
I'm being called a psycho.
You know what?
I don't think it was actually my idea.
I think it might have been Sarah's idea.
We all knew this.
Hey, LLD, any updates on the Noctua edition screwdriver?
Also, any future plans to bundle the normal and stubby screwdrivers?
I got a lot of merch messages about this, so I thought I'd curate one of them.
A bundle?
It didn't even occur to me to be perfectly honest with you.
Yeah, I could see us doing something like that in the future, but maybe not for a while.
The thing with pricing is there's lots of different ways to do it.
You can do it by what the market will bear.
You can do it by cost plus percentage.
You can do it by, I mean, yeah, I guess those are kind of the biggest ways, but for a lot
of companies, one of the factors that they will consider is not with your customers.
Anyone who bought the stubby and the regular one at full price is going to expect that
the next day after the launch, there isn't a promo where they could have gotten a better deal on it.
So it'll be a little while.
Stubby is selling really well at the price that it's at, and we need to make sure that
we're keeping up with production and everything, but I could see something like that happening
at some point in the future.
That's a cool idea.
I'm not given a timeline for this at all, though.
As for the Noctua Edition, I don't know, sometime late this year, early next, I think?
I think retro driver is going to be the first sort of regular-priced new colorway that comes.
Actually, I don't know what the pricing is going to be yet.
I don't know what volumes we're producing, so that's a big impact on pricing.
No, that's not the one.
No, that's not the one.
Hold on, there's one in here that is definitely...
Seriously?
How many screwdrivers do I have in my backpack right now?
Nope.
Dang it.
This one.
There it is.
The retro driver is coming very soon.
I'm just going to switch to the Linus Cam.
Hopefully, sometime in the next...
You know what?
I'm not going to promise anything.
I don't want to get it wrong, but yeah, I freaking love this one.
As a kid who played retro games...
Yeah.
That's a SNES.
Stop!
No, it's not.
Sorry, there's one on the wall behind him.
There is one over there that he was talking about.
What in the world could that be?
Yeah, so this is a cool screwdriver.
It's the retro screwdriver.
Yeah.
Sorry, it was just in front of...
Yeah, anyways.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Someone in flowplane chat said, get dbrand to make a dead pixel screen protector.
You could put on other people's phones.
You're a bad man.
Now that it's been said, it's an inevitability.
Oh, man.
Okay, next.
Let's see.
Hey, LLD, how have the first few weeks under the slower video output workflow been?
PS, can't wait to get my hands on the stubby.
I'll take this one since Luke doesn't really work on that many videos.
It's been a bit of a mixed bag.
I think there's been some really sort of funny stuff, like times when I'm the one saying,
hey, this needs to be pushed, or hey, this needs to be cancelled, and other people are
just in old habits, which is like, really?
Okay.
Yeah.
It's been, in some cases, frustrating because, you know, on the one hand, yeah, we spent
a week sort of working on a lot of our communication, and I think we learned a lot, but on the other
hand, we're still finding a lot of challenges.
We're still finding a lot of problems.
Like, there's videos that, even though we are taking more time, we are still running
into, it's a lot of moving pieces.
Like, this is something I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand, is every video
has at least five people involved in it, and it's not always the same five people, and
so what works really well with one team might not work as well when one or two of those
team members are swapped out, and it's kind of constant, right?
And so we're still finding a lot of challenges that are nothing to do with time and just
everything to do with process and communication.
We're going to keep working on it, and I'm really, I'm actually really happy with the
videos that we have released post-break.
One thing that's new, effective, let me just have a look here.
I just want to see which video it started with.
Effective Radeon 7700, 7800 XT video.
I will be doing a brutal QC pass on every single LTT, which, I don't know, maybe I should
have been doing all along.
I haven't had time, so that's something that I'm going to have to figure out, and hopefully
it will be something that I can do in the long term with the time that I would have
been doing, like, executive management things that I don't really want to do anymore, and
I think Taran and the rest of the exec team should be doing, and, you know, so we can
get back to our daily upload cadence.
I think that is still a goal we'd like to achieve in the long term, so hopefully it's
something that I can continue to do or that I don't need to do at some point if we get
people kind of trained up, but one of the videos that is in the short term probably
coming up on Sunday, but if the ECC squad finds any severe problems with it, we'll be
pushed to next week, I went through and I did an absolutely savage pass of, and it went
from 24 minutes to 20 minutes, and so I think that's something you guys can look forward
to as I go through and just brutally axe things from videos is that you're going to see, A,
a lot less B material in the videos, and B, maybe a lot more, like, floatplane exclusives
and stuff, a lot more cutting room floor, that's, like, kind of fine and would have
been, you know, A material that ended up in a YouTube video before, but now is just cut,
gets the cut.
Good evening, LLD, those are my wife's initials.
Linus, what's your darn tough sock poison, cushioned or un-cushioned?
Ultra light, light, mid, heavy, and what height?
Well, I'm wearing them now, so that'll be easy.
This one.
Hold on, height, that one.
That's a surprisingly effective way to communicate that.
I wear these socks.
Love it.
Hello, LL&D, love the show, love the merch.
Linus, what happened with the stray cat you found in your yard?
You mean the stray cats that live with me now?
I curated this one for you.
Oh, yeah, their names are Brownie and Noodle.
So named because they are brown and a noodle.
So Noodle has the, he does this thing where, you know how cats, like, curl up their legs
under them?
Well, Noodle does that, but he also does a thing where he just splays out every single
leg, particularly when he's feeling shy, so he did that a lot when we first adopted him.
Yeah, they're doing great.
They are not as socialized as a cat that, as a very, very small kitten, had a ton of
human interaction, but they get better all the time, and they are at the point now where,
particularly at certain times of day, you know how cats are, they genuinely like and
seek out human interaction, so we're really glad we adopted them.
Cats, so, you know, they tear up the carpet and just do cat things because, you know,
f*** you, right, because they're cats, but we're happy, and Dash ultimately has gotten
to a point where she'll tolerate them.
She's not nearly, she's not as happy as she was when she was an only cat, but she's
not nearly as stressed as she was when she lived with her brother, actually, so they've
reached peace, at least.
She was super unimpressed at the start, but yeah, she was not into it, but now she's,
she would never like groom them or anything, but she doesn't hiss at them all the time
either, so yeah, we're good.
Hey, DLL, what would it take for all three of you to shave your beards, or just one of
you?
Hmm.
It'd have to be a lot.
I thought I could get you to do it.
What if I like, you know what, yeah, I could probably get you to do it.
I'd just, I'd like play on your feelings or something.
I would be like, yeah, I'm gonna shave mine and donate to something, and if you do yours
too, then I'll double it.
Oh, yeah, I thought you were talking, uh, just me.
I think just me would be pretty hard.
I think me joining the group would not be that hard.
Yeah, see, that's the thing, if I did it with you and it was for a good cause, like Luke's
in, it's easy, it's easy.
I was actually really close to doing it a couple weeks ago.
Yep, I remember that.
I actually thought it was happening.
No, yeah, I don't know, I think it would have, I thought about it as kind of like a new leaf
thing, you know, like new era, we're changing a lot of things up, so I'm just gonna shave
the beard, but then I thought about it some more and I was like, that doesn't actually
mean anything, and so to me it feels kind of cheap, even if other people thought it
was, you know, symbolic and cool, so I decided I just thought it was kind of a cheap stunt,
so forget it.
I just, I don't know.
If the wife tells me to shave it, it's gone, and if she tells me to keep it, it's here
to stay.
For me it's that simple.
That's kind of where I've been, and Emma likes the beard, so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And honestly I would not want to upkeep non-beard.
Yeah, not shaving every day is like kind of great.
It's nice.
I trim it like once a week and sometimes I forget and I do it in two weeks and it's like
okay.
It's fine.
It just covers the like, bare patches better, like okay.
Yeah, yeah, it's kind of whatever, right?
I don't know.
I think I've been watching you all for a decade, and I've seen myself going from a PC building
noob to wizard who advises friends on building.
When did you guys realize you had that expertise?
I think expertise is a strong word to describe building computers.
I don't know.
I've ended up in, I wouldn't say heated conversations, but certainly disagreements over this in
the past.
I remember talking to someone from a boutique system integrator who referred to the people
who, like the team that designed their systems as engineers, and I was like, you guys assemble
computers.
To be clear, I'm not dissing anyone who does actual engineering.
They weren't designing their own cases.
They were just picking off the shelf parts and building computers.
They were not happy that I told them I didn't agree with that, and that was kind of where
we left it, I guess, because I wasn't really going to back down on that.
That's not engineering.
Yeah, I don't think it was a major moment for me.
It was just something that I happened to be passionate about.
Like, a lot of my friends were into technology.
I just happened to be more focused on the PC side of things, so I would be happy to help.
It was a way to do odd jobs and make money to support my gaming habit, so that's something.
I just hate waste.
I hate seeing people waste money, so I would learn about it and advise.
I wanted to play cool games with my friends, and sometimes if it was PC games, that kind of required
them to have a cool PC, so I just tried to make sure they did, too.
I don't know.
Whatever.
Hey, DLL, now that both of the screwdrivers and backpack are released, with the cable
management coming soon, what's next?
Any teasers?
Can't wait for the cat bed.
Yeah, we have a precision driver coming.
We have...
Oh, have we talked about the fail pen?
Only a little.
On the WAN show?
Yes, a couple times.
Oh, all right.
Well, we have the fail pen coming.
It's really cool.
I haven't seen it ever.
Oh, it started out like, yep, that's made out of a screwdriver shaft, and now the fail
pen is like, wow, that's a really nice pen.
I can't believe this is made out of a screwdriver shaft.
Yeah, the team is doing a really, really good job of pushing that product along.
I'm pretty excited for it.
Did they tell you about the chess problem that they ran into with it?
The chess problem.
Yeah, engineering chess problems.
Like kings, queens, bishops, chess?
Yeah, but like a puzzle.
This drove me nuts.
I never knew this was called a chess problem, and I overheard Dan talking about it, and
I was like...
It's all...
I don't know if any of us can think about it.
So it has that J on the backside of it, right, where you kind of flick the locking mechanism?
Bolt action.
Yeah, bolt action.
Machining that in the real world, absolutely trivial.
Modeling that in SolidWorks has stumped your entire engineering team, myself, a friend
of mine who's a manufacturing engineer, and now his friends.
And so this little tiny problem of how to properly 3D model a J is going around our
engineering circles.
Can we just paint it with matte paint and then scan it?
No, no, no, no, no.
So making it super easy, programming it to be visually exact, how it comes across in
the real world is like...
No, but that's what I'm asking.
I'm asking, can we just manufacture it and then scan it?
No, no, no, no.
Why not?
Because we know how to do it.
That's why it's a chess problem.
It's like a theoretical problem.
Why does that make sense?
Why does that make sense?
Why is it called chess?
So chess problems are like, here is a board state, win in two moves.
You have to complete...
So what you're saying is that it's unnecessary to solve it because we can manufacture it
already?
You can do it, but it's like...
So why are we spending cycles on this?
Hold on a second.
No, no, no.
I mean, it's now wasting lots of people's free time because we want to know, because
it shouldn't be this difficult and it's this difficult.
Okay, but it's their free time.
Oh yeah, 100% free time.
Oh, okay.
Well then, sure.
Cool.
So making that...
I just want to understand why it's called the chess problem.
Yeah, you and I have very different concerns about this.
Yeah.
Ugh.
Whatever.
It's a pen.
It's a pen.
Yay!
It's a good pen.
Yeah, and it's made of what otherwise would have been wasted crappy failed screwdriver
shafts.
Which is great.
Woo!
Yeah.
Okay, next.
Hey, LLD.
I work with CFD at NASA.
A recurring problem is old SIMs that are lost because of software changes.
What is your most frustrating example of losing work from loss of backwards compatibility?
Computer fluid dynamics, by the way.
I don't know.
I think I find the most interesting example of this is when you go through certain manufacturing
shops or different places like that and they'll have some computer...
Windows 95.
Yeah.
And it's still chugging along and it's like, what would you do if this broke?
And they're just like, I don't even want to think about it.
Not make money.
Yep.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Most of what I do is text-based.
I think if you really boil it down, I'm a writer or a writing editor, right?
So, we've done a pretty good job, I think, as a computer industry, as humans, of making
text file formats pretty darn forward and backward compatible.
I have not really experienced a ton of lost work due to backwards compatibility.
I have experienced lost save games due to games I can no longer play because they're
not compatible with the current operating system.
So, if I ever wanted to go back and play them, that's definitely something that I've experienced,
but I think that's kind of the closest thing that I would have to that.
Oh, yeah.
D-Doc, a good full-plane comment.
Wow.
Microsoft's getting rid of WordPad.
Did you know that?
No.
Yeah.
WordPad is going away in, I think, the next major Windows update.
We're not even getting a five-year warning or anything like that.
Oh, WordPad is such a lifesaver when you just need to open a document on a brand new computer.
It otherwise serves absolutely no purpose for me because I pay for Office 365 and I
pay for Google Docs.
Go me.
I spend way too much on word processing software, but it means that I don't need it.
But, man, the people who do need it and the times that they do need it, boy, is it ever
handy.
That sucks.
You just, like, borked out my computer.
Oh, sorry.
It did not like bouncing.
It's okay.
It's solved now.
I'm surprised how much it didn't like that.
Like, Notepad++.
What if you don't have an internet connection?
You can't download it.
Notepad is the infrequently used, but when used, oh, man, I'm happy this happened to
be on my computer.
Yeah, because the alternative is Notepad.
Yeah.
Not Notepad++ because for whatever reason you don't have Notepad++ yet.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wait, you guys pay for Google Docs?
Yes.
Yep.
And teams.
And teams.
And Slack.
We know.
What?
Oh, for the dev team.
We don't pay for Slack for everybody.
That's true.
All three, don't we?
Well, the local ones, yeah.
Good gravy.
Yeah.
Sick.
Yeah, it's a lot.
I recently dropped the LTT screwdriver 130 feet off a small tower.
It survived short of losing all the bits on the way down.
Do you have any extra crazy stress testing on your products?
Okay.
Do you know about the keycap?
The keycap statue.
The keycap statue.
I totally forgot about the keycap.
Oh my gosh, no.
So the problem with the keycap statue, which is a solid aluminum keycap that is like this
big, is not producing the keycap or polishing the keycap or it being beautiful and something
people everywhere will need to own.
The problem is shipping the keycap because it weighs so much, even though it's made of
aluminum and is so small that you need to have a box that's like three times its size.
We also have yielded on our only paper packaging policy for the keycap and the keycap alone
because from my point of view, if we lose a bunch of these keycaps to damage and shipping,
we're actually not really doing ourselves any favors here by using paper packing material.
But getting the packaging right for that has been a real challenge and mostly just communication
with packaging manufacturers.
Like, no.
Okay, let's try this one more time.
I need like a solid inch of foam at every corner.
Nothing else is acceptable.
They're like, well, what if it was a solid inch on this side and then like a quarter
of an inch on that?
No.
Ah, okay.
No, it needs to be this much because this thing weighs a flipping ton.
So one of the things that we'll be doing is like hucking it off the roof of the building
to make sure that when that stupid final packaging arrives, this thing is going to arrive with
people in one piece.
But yeah, I'm really excited.
Don't worry for everyone who's like, oh my goodness, how much is that going to cost?
I could never afford it.
The answer is a lot and I know.
We're going to make a smaller one.
We'll have like a little cute, like pocketable sized one and then a medium one and then like
a ridiculous one.
Are you going to have a keycap keycap?
No.
Well, people can already buy those.
Only keycaps you can't use.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, I mean, well, no, no, no.
They're completely unusable.
They're solid.
The entire thing is one giant hunk of polished aluminum.
Wow.
Yeah, they're, they're, they're really cool.
Wow.
Yeah.
Like the first thing that Nicholas Plouffe said, keyboard enthusiast, like these, the
kind of person who buys a, like a wall mount to put his keyboards on you.
It's like, well, I'll need one.
Oh, that's great.
Uh, okay.
Up next.
Was there a point that videos weren't scripted?
If so, when did it feel like it was necessary to write every video?
Uh, it's been really gradual slash never happened.
Um, videos weren't scripted at all until, yeah, the first build guide was not scripted.
So if you go back and watch that, be impressed because I did that all from memory and that
was really hard.
Uh, I'm not that good anymore.
It's a, it's a, it's a practiced skill.
Like I, I can't ad lib as well as I used to be able to.
Yeah.
Um, like I watched that and I'm like, it was dang.
It's kind of similar though.
Uh, if you watch some of the early scripted videos, I bet you those kind of suck cause
you slash we are not used to being on teleprompter yet.
Yep.
Whereas now I'm pretty good at it.
Even you're pretty good at it in spite of the dyslexia, like it's, well, do you know
my whole trick?
I've talked to you about this before, right?
How I read prompters?
I think you have, but I think I forget.
It's like, it's very significantly memory.
This is why I'll get like, it even happened when we were filming the GPU video.
I think I said like four words in a row that were wrong and you were like, what?
It's like, yeah, cause I didn't read them.
I like thought that's what was there.
Uh, so I'll, I'll, I'll see like one or two words and then remember what's coming next
and then just say it.
And while I'm saying it, I'm trying to refocus on the next one.
And then I just like kind of crawl through the script from memory.
That's why like when game linked gets me to host, I asked them to send me the script
ahead of time.
I read through the whole script at my desk and then go and host it.
I could never possibly hope to do that.
It took me a long time.
You could tell me three numbers and then like play a sound and then ask me to repeat those
three numbers.
I wouldn't be able to tell you what they are.
Like I have absolutely no short term recall like that.
I don't know if you remember this, but back in the house, um, I resisted the teleprompter
change.
I just, I couldn't do it.
Uh, and then the early version of this style was, I just didn't, I would, I would move
the script to the fixed part, sit there and make Brandon at the time, probably wait, read
the whole thing just in my head and then present.
And then I would just do that over and over again.
And then eventually I just got a little bit better and a little bit better.
Then I started being able to do that and then move it to the next one and then read, read,
but say something else.
So I'd be like absorbing the information for the next section.
And then I kind of got from there and there and there and just slowly got a little bit
better over time.
See, I do kind of that, but in much smaller chunks.
So I'll do, I'll, I'll read ahead like at most a sentence, but I can't do paragraphs.
There's absolutely no way.
Yeah.
Um, back to, back to your question, like we never fully transitioned, right?
Like if we do a live stream when show a build, whatever, that's not scripted.
Um, I actually, the video that I'm in the middle of shooting right now that is on the
PC build corner at the moment and is maybe, I don't know, about 25% shot.
All I really have is like, um, for each, we're doing a build, we're doing compensator, compensators
coming back, a compensator for, let's go.
Um, and all I have for, you know, a script is just the price of each item, a couple of
PC specs, just, you know, to make sure that in case I've forgotten if it's 16 P cores
and 80 cores or eight P cores and 16 P cores, like there's a lot of stuff out there and
not all of this is hardware that I do know, like obviously I know what a 13, 900 KS is
or whatever.
Um, but you know, this capture card, you know, we'll have a couple of speeds and feeds that
matter for it.
And then a little bit of the rationale for why we chose it for compensator.
That's all I've got.
Um, and it's just, it's all point form.
So I'll just read through it and then I'll go host the section.
So we do still do stuff that is unscripted, um, or like one of the videos that's coming
out this weekend is me and Alex, um, basically like cable managing a wall.
It ends up being a lot more interesting than it sounds, I promise you.
It's like way more interesting than it sounds.
Um, but it's completely unscripted.
We have kind of some main story beats that we expect to hit, like we're going to talk
about wifi audio versus Bluetooth audio and we're going to talk about, you know, the,
the costs associated and how you could do this on a, on a tight budget and you know,
like we know approximately what we're going to talk about, but none of it's written out.
So it just, yeah, it depends.
Apparently there's a special font for dyslexics.
I was going to say there's a couple of people that mentioned this and I actually did want
to talk about that.
Um, someone mentioned Comic Sans.
I've heard that before.
I don't find it makes any difference at all.
I think personally.
Yeah, I don't know.
Um, what I have seen, uh, and I, I might say this wrong, but it blew my mind.
I think I even told you about it was if I remember correctly, it's, it's multicolored
text and like the root word is colored in one color and then the rest of the word is
colored in another color.
I think that's how it goes.
I don't think anyone linked it.
Um, but the second I read it, it felt like I was on like nitrous or something.
Like just like I was reading two or three times faster than I normally do and I wasn't
losing my spot.
That's my biggest problem is I lose my spot all the time.
Right.
Really hard.
I'll, I'll just, it just, I don't know.
If there's a superpower that I have, you can read, it's that I can, it's that I can, no,
I can skim wicked fast.
Okay.
I can't read wicked fast.
I actually skim sort of.
Okay.
So my superpower would be that if you hand me a book and let me read for as long as you
want and then rip it out of my hands, close it and give it back to me, I will be like
immediately back to where I left off.
Oh yeah.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I don't know why.
It's not usually a useful skill, but it is something that I can do crazy fast.
And yet, you know, I was talking earlier about how I have basically no recall for exact numbers
or exact letters or words.
But in terms of like, um, like cues, like familiarity, I have no problem with it.
So I'll just open a page.
We'll be like, no, I haven't seen this.
I've seen this.
I haven't.
Boom.
I'm at the spot on the page.
And like when people would get mad at me for, you know, like I had four, I had four siblings,
you know, so someone would get mad at me for losing their spot in the book.
I'm like, whatever.
Just who cares about a bookmark?
Just just open it.
Yeah.
Just open it and get to the spot you were at.
But why does this matter?
Um, and, and like a lot of people are, I didn't even realize that other people don't skim
like that.
Um, I want to be able to do that with games.
Yeah.
That'd be kind of cool.
Just find your spot in a game.
Apparently there's tons of examples of this.
There's tons of different fonts.
There's tons of different attempts people have made.
We just need to find a prompter app that would support it.
I'm having a hard time finding, uh, the one that really worked for me and a lot of the
ones that people have linked are not it and they don't feel like they're working right
now.
At least for me.
Um, so I don't know one of the reasons I thought it was super interesting, but one of the reasons
why I didn't try to be like, let's find ways to like force my computer to load all texts
like this, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff is because, and this could be
flawed logic, but the way I'm thinking about it is I'm going to leave my computer at some
point and I find like my ability to read is almost like a forced skill that I have
to maintain.
So if I use this, uh, I don't know if people are not going to like this or not, but if
I use this, this crutch of this special font on my computer, I'm not going to have that
all the time.
And I feel like when I'm away from that system, I'm probably going to be worse off because
of it.
If that makes sense.
I don't know if that's actually true or not, but that's one of the reasons why it's kind
of like the same reason I was always interested in learning Dvorak as like a layout, but I'm
like, okay, but anytime I go to anyone else's computers, it's not going to be Dvorak.
So like, I don't want to train to learn that like, I don't know.
So it's super interesting.
I find it very interesting that it worked so well.
Just the kind of person who plays on hard mode.
I get it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't know.
That that's, you know, um, and you know, what's funny is
I was talking to, I forget it, optician or what's a optometrist, whatever.
I was talking to an eye doctor of some sort and apparently if you force yourself to see
clearly, like more clearly, like you, like you can, you can, you can, you can achieve
slightly better clarity by like, kind of like really trying really hard.
You can actually build up your eye muscles to the point where they will deform your eye
and they will make you less likely to need glasses as soon.
Whoa.
Whereas I was always communicated as the opposite.
That's crazy.
Well, I don't know.
Maybe he's wrong.
Oh yeah.
Fair enough.
And in extreme nonmedical advice, blah, blah, blah.
In extreme cases, maybe it would go the other way.
But um, but like I asked, I was like, cause I have a very mild subscription subscription
prescription.
I have a lot of subscriptions.
That's, that's, that's the age we live in.
I have a very, they're not mild.
Um, I have a very mild prescription and I asked, I was like, yeah, my eyes feel less
tired when I use them, but tell me this by not trying as hard all the time, am I potentially
going to, you know, need my glasses more?
And he's like, in some cases, like trying really hard can actually make a difference.
And I was like, oh, interesting.
Um, so in the same way, like trying really hard to get your brain to like, dang it, try
to do it.
That's, that's what I feel about the, the prompter stuff is like, uh, I was off video
for like years and now I do it infrequently, but do it sometimes by video.
I mean VODs, not Wayne's show, I was obviously still doing Wayne's show, um, but I was off
off VODs for a long time and my first few videos back were really hard because I hadn't
done prompters in a really long time.
And now it's, I'm kind of, you were great when we did the thing to learn, so yeah, I'm
a little bit more used to it again, a bit like kind of the whole riding a bike thing
where like I definitely didn't lose it entirely.
Um, but I was rusty, um, and now I feel like I'm kind of getting it back.
Um, but yeah, that's why I haven't like actually used it too much, but it's super cool that
it exists because, um, mine seems pretty mild all things considered.
And I know people that have it a lot worse, so if it's a lot worse and you like need something,
I think it's really cool that something does exist that you could use.
I think that's awesome.
This is interesting.
A lot of people are talking about, uh, just interesting eye stuff.
Someone said they got corrective lenses that helped alter the shape of their eye, um, so
that they didn't need them anymore.
Like I'm like, it's going to, it's going to depend what's wrong with your eye obviously,
right?
Like someone said, um, yeah, I can see perfectly, but I was getting headaches.
I went to the optometrist and found out I needed glasses because there I w I'm assuming
their eyes were straining so hard that the poor muscles were just in a constant state
of strain.
Uh, yeah, that's, that's wild.
Um, and yes, to be clear, I'm not talking about squinting.
Anyway.
Uh, Dan, hit me.
Uh, yeah, sure.
I got an interim message.
Uh, it's about the chess problems.
Going back to the pen.
Uh, they're called chess problems because players come up with challenging theoretical
puzzles that don't really matter.
Ah, okay.
That's kind of why I was saying it was on the free time and you're, and you, they were
not spending time on that.
I still disagree because that chess problem could come up in a real game, but the need
to model this thing will never be a need to model it is only for fun.
I think these chess problems, like the theoretical board state would not get there.
Oh, do you know what I mean?
Like it would be a really, really like you would never play chess and get into this board
state, but it is a, yeah, this is possible, right?
You have one pawn and your queen and your king and they're all in the wrong places.
Yeah.
Okay.
I understand.
Like we just modeled the J and then you make the machine do it and you're done.
You don't, you don't spend hours upon hours.
Uh, sorry, I got to jump back for a second.
This I've never seen this before.
This is not the one I was talking about, but someone linked this in flow plane chat.
I read this before I recognized that I was even like trying my, my brain registered all
of the words in this and then I was like, wait, I have to, I didn't go back to the first
word to read it.
And then I was like, hold on.
I already read all of this.
Like it was, it literally confusingly fast.
I've never even seen this font before.
It just like immediately absorbed.
No, probably not.
And like, I don't even think, I think my message is fine.
That's just a Gmail logo.
That's pretty much.
The bottom left really does look like that.
No, they're, they're too recognizable as different shapes.
Uh, but yeah, so like I, I don't know, I can't explain it.
A bunch of the ones that were linked today didn't work for me at all.
And then this one was like, whoa, yeah, definitely worked right away.
I have no idea.
It's weird.
Um, even if I like found something like that and I found a way to implement it across all
the things that I read on my own devices, I probably wouldn't do it because I want to
keep the learned skill up so that I can do it when that font isn't existing.
All that kind of stuff I said before is still the same.
Um, but yeah, I don't know for some reason that worked for me.
Made it easier.
Not a clue.
Why?
Okay.
If LMG grew to corporate size operating as a mid to large enterprise could or should
the wind show continue?
Would adding a disclaimer to the show avoid any potential issues?
I really appreciate you guys.
So we are a, well, we're not, we're not mid-sized really.
Not by the Canadian definition.
I think it's 200 plus or something like that.
I thought it was a hundred plus.
Yeah.
Or it might even be like 500 plus or something.
We're still a technically a small, small business.
Um, I'm going to say now I don't ever want to get big enough that the wind show can't
continue.
The land show is something I find genuinely enjoyable.
Um, it's something that I find helps keep us grounded.
Um, I, I, I think that being so, so disconnected from the community that I am not allowed or
feel like I can't talk to them anymore would be really isolating for me.
Um, and I think by the time I got to that point, I probably just wouldn't want to do
it anymore.
It is sort of where I'm at on that.
I think we're a mid-sized company.
Depends on the definition.
Not everyone defines it the same way.
Yeah.
Well, this is like, this is like defining generations of people is A.
Meaningless and B. Nobody agrees.
So I do agree that it's meaningless, but I did just find a stats Canada government of
Canada website that says that it's 100 to 499 employees is midsize.
Okay.
So we have several small companies.
Fair enough.
Got them.
Absolutely.
I came out of nowhere.
I love it.
I genuinely didn't see that coming.
Last one on my curated list here.
Hello, LLD.
Catching the show a bit late, but any update on float plane merge?
No, I don't think so.
Uh, oh no, we have, um, we have blue base shirts that I think we're, we're, we're working
on production or maybe I wasn't happy with the color, but let's see.
Here's the problem.
Uh, float plane float planes.
Branding was never professionally designed really.
So on a technical level it was, yeah, well the point is they don't have a Pantone.
Yeah.
Um, that's a problem when you want to make something that matches something.
So we got the shirt and we're like, well, this doesn't match the site.
It doesn't match the previous float plane shirts we made.
It is blue.
So I guess that's, I think it's straight up in my opinion.
If it's a shade of blue, it's probably just pick like 20 Pantone, like a lightish blue
is probably like the ocean.
It's most of the blue Pantone, even the float plane website has multiple shades of blue
on it.
There's a light blue on it.
Oh my.
I know.
I was wondering why I didn't have a Pantone at my docs, which is a problem.
Nuts.
Yeah.
So, uh, I don't know.
We're, we're as, we're as ready to go as we are ready to go and I don't really know the,
the answer.
The reason why I'm like is, I mean, if it isn't a Pantone now, it's not going to be
one later.
Like at a certain point, just, Oh, well.
And Facebook's 2FA is not working right now.
And I'll explain why that matters as soon as I can get logged into my account.
Okay.
Okay.
Is this right?
Don't save this browser.
Other people use this computer.
Wait, is my dad in chat?
Is your dad in chat?
What's your dad doing in chat?
Someone just added liquidus, which would be my dad, but I don't see where he said it.
Oh, he, he pasted micro-sized company, micro-sized business, less than 10 employees, small sized
business, 10 to 49.
Okay.
That's as defined by Wikipedia.
If I remember correctly, government of Canada just has small, medium, and large.
Okay.
I have it.
So hold on.
There was a message.
Um, okay.
So, uh, Brandon asks, Hey, uh, been looking in, been looking into getting into badminton,
but I have no idea what to look for for our first racket, uh, where somewhere to start.
So you are going to want to start, Oh, I wonder, I wonder what my most recent marketplace searches
are.
I guess we're going to see.
Here we go.
Air hockey.
I love air hockey.
Yeah.
I was looking for a vapor chill.
Do you remember those?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was hoping to get my hands on one.
I couldn't find one.
What's okay.
What is that?
That fan controller that you and I both had and cube T-balancer.
Yeah.
He knew like immediately.
I was trying to talk to you about the old German, uh, fan controller.
That's it.
My associative memory skills are very good.
If you team me up, I can knock it out of the park.
But if you ask me to just remember something that I don't care about or that I have no
familiarity with, that there's nothing to, to, to seed it, I got nothing.
I don't remember why we were talking about it, but I was talking about T-balancers with
Dan.
Okay.
I still have mine kicking around somewhere.
Me too.
Geez.
Linus, do you think that's like an ADHD thing?
Cause I find I'm almost identically exactly the same.
Um, it could be.
Yeah.
Could also just be like being a big dumb idiot.
That is so true.
You're calling him that?
But we're a kin.
Yeah.
No, I, it's a, it's a sense of surprise.
You got wrinkles in your brain, you know, you have bad thoughts.
No, no bad thoughts.
No good thoughts.
All right.
Okay.
Um, free PC.
So I was thinking that would be kind of a cool video.
Like what PC could you get for free for literal free?
I actually did find some.
There was one that was like free computer, but you have to take all 10 of them.
And I was like, I was very close to getting up from my desk and like going and getting
the wall.
Just doing it.
Yeah.
Just for fun.
A computer case.
I don't remember why I was searching for that.
You asked me this not that long ago.
A dollar?
No, that's gotta be fake, right?
That's probably just people put that and then they have pricing in their post for all the
individual items.
Got it.
Okay.
So here's the thing.
Never buy this.
Uh, this is like plastic wrapped.
Um, they, these have probably a T joint here, so they're, they're not a one piece, um, frame.
You shouldn't be spending like this kind of money.
This is like 60 us dollars.
That's, that's a little bit too much to get started.
Not by much.
I would say something like this is where you want to start.
Something that is, this is a two you, this is pretty heavy, so maybe not quite something
like this, but something that's a single piece frame.
And so you can check here as long as it doesn't have any like a T joint here, that's probably
fine.
If it's a carbon graphite body, uh, that's basically been the technology since kind of
the late eighties, early nineties, I guess.
So finding like an old racket, um, ideally instead of two you, you want a higher number,
like a three you racket or something like that.
So you get something that's just, yeah, see, this is probably fine.
And then you should spend another 20, 25 bucks, uh, Canadian.
So like 15 to $20 us and you should get it restrung.
The strings are going to make a way bigger difference than the actual racket itself.
Oh, do we have some more?
Uh, I don't have any more curated.
I can go straight into, uh, the potentials if you want.
Um, yeah, we can, we can read through them.
I mean, yeah, there's a, oh yeah.
Okay.
Yeah, sure.
Okay.
Uh, at Linus, do you think the boom and more powerful handheld gaming devices will cause
AR to gain popularity?
No, the Apple push into AR is going to cause AR to gain popularity like big time.
Um, imagine Pokemon on the Steam Deck 3 played on the go while wearing an AR headset.
Um, I don't, I don't see that being realistic.
I just don't think the market is big enough, especially when, um, what is it?
The Niantic or whatever their name is.
What's the, what's the Pokemon go?
That's about right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Yeah.
Um, especially when they're already so invested in like mobile OS development, I would, I
would expect that we will instead see it come, but maybe just a little bit later once
the hardware that's already in your pocket is capable of, uh, a more AR like experience.
Um, anonymous asks, you've mentioned your ADHD helps you come up with new ideas because
you get bored quickly, but what are some challenges and how do you overcome them?
Oh, lots of challenges.
I get bored really quickly and honestly it's, um, it's like a superpower, but it's also
kryptonite.
Like it's, uh, I, I, I, I just like don't know what to do with myself a lot of the time.
Like, you know, why, why do you work a holic?
I don't know what else to do.
I just need to like do stuff.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It's uh, it's tough.
Yeah.
You know, I'm obviously, you know, for me it's, uh, it's not debilitating, which is,
you know, really good.
I'm really, I'm really thankful for that, but it's, it can be a challenge sometimes.
Yeah.
We ordered a water bottle, says Jacob W. Such a wonderful upgrade.
Is there any product that the staff, no straw for the water bottle or a straw for the water
bottle?
Is there any product that the staff has upgraded with a third party item?
I'm sure people have upgraded basically everything with third party items.
Um, I mean we are working on a lid upgrade of our own, so that's something I guess I
can, I can leak one of the big things.
No, I will not leak it.
I, uh, I, I, because it's a water bottle lid.
You don't, it's pretty good.
Don't want it to leak.
It's pretty good.
But it'll have easily removable o-rings, little pull tabs on them so you can clean them better.
Cool.
Yeah.
That's like one of, that's like the big feature aside from just being a little bit more robust.
I asked for carabiners were on my Christmas list and my brother got me these like awesome,
like a rock climbing quality carabiners.
So I added those to the backpack.
I don't know if that would count as modding.
Yeah, sure.
Upgrading.
But I really liked the carabiner that was on there.
I thought it was cool that it came with one on that side bit.
Um, but I was like, I want more and ones that can carry your like heavier stuff because
those straps that the carabiners on are very strong.
You can hang some pretty serious things off there.
So it makes the backpack like extensible, which is pretty sick.
Okay.
Couple more curated here.
Oh, okay.
Hey, uh, Hey, wanda DLL first merch message.
I've been a systems administrator for Unix for over 25 years and recently had a heart
attack.
Any suggestions if I no longer want to manage million dollar plus projects and I think just
million plus projects and not be on call 24 seven.
If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't be here.
Please tell us.
Yeah.
If you figure it out, you don't even need to send a merch message.
Okay.
Just, just fire me an email and I will, I will be grateful to your sage wisdom sharing
that you've done with me.
Thank you.
I'm so sorry.
Hello.
Hello.
I hope for speedy recovery though, by the way.
Oh, um, Oh, that's why it's buzzing my phone and your phone.
Sorry.
I was, I was responding to something, so I missed that.
But uh, Oh no, no, no, no.
Not there.
Um, uh, but yeah, I don't know.
It's a tough one.
What I was thinking, and I'm sorry if you, you said this already, but what I was thinking,
uh, because I, it and systems administration is just kind of like that.
Uh, but you might be able to work with the organization that you're in and turn into
more of like a, a training and advisory role.
Um, you have some very serious experience, so you could be very effective in that, in
that way.
Um, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah.
Hello.
LLND.
I had to get a couple of screwdrivers to match my company's red dump trucks.
What videos do you wish you could get a do over or revisit with the resources you have
now?
I'd love to do whole room water cooling again, but like properly like bang in like awesome.
Um, and I'm like kind of doing it with the pool, but it was, it was super cool having
it like plumbed into the office.
Um, I, you know, I'd love to have, uh, you know, chilled water at a fixed temperature
on tap for the lab, for example, for testing, you know, if we ever tested water blocks or
something, not that anyone cares, like they all basically perform within a very narrow
band anyway.
So people went from caring a lot about water block performance back in like the mid two
thousands, maybe even late two thousands to now mostly mid two thousands to like large
the aesthetic.
Now I don't think, I don't think does EK even publish performance numbers on their site?
I think it's just aesthetic.
Um, and, and that's, to be clear, I'm not saying that's a huge problem.
Like it's, it's been a pretty much solved problem since about 2005 to 2008, uh, maybe
like maybe into 2010.
Um, but it's basically now it's just an optimization exercise for every given platform where you're
just playing around with your major variables, which are the restrictiveness of the design,
uh, how much impingement you want on the copper plate, the thickness of the plate and the
density of the pin or fin structure.
I think it's about it.
When, when, uh, Swiftac released the, uh, Apogee SKF, I think it is, but it's like sky,
it has skived copper, which basically means you take copper and you have a blade that
is so sharp and so thin that you shave the copper and then fold it up into a fin and
then you shave the copper and fold it up into a fin and then you create like a micro fin
structure like that.
That's it.
That's the end game.
There's no, there's no further, further thinness increase in, in, in surface area per, per
unit, uh, you know, CPU die area that you can possibly achieve at that point because
it becomes, uh, impractical to have the fins go any higher and it becomes impractical to
have them any closer together because you just wouldn't have enough room for water to
reach the very base where most of the thermal transfer is actually happening.
Like nothing's actually happening once you, once the fins are over, you know, a millimeter
or a couple of millimeters high.
So that's why all designs are like kind of the same.
Um, and because any modern microprocessor is going to be designed to be air cooled,
any modern water block design, not even a state of the art one is going to be fine as
long as you have adequate radiator capacity.
So, um, just, I don't know, it's just the kind of thing I don't think we would ever
get into reviewing because it frankly just doesn't matter anymore.
I am a Salesforce developer with an idea to create a business to business platform as
a service, but I have no minimal viable product.
What advice would you give to somebody starting out with no business management experience?
Any pitfalls to avoid?
All of them.
Um, just do your best, you know, try and do better every day.
That's uh, that's basically all I can tell you, right?
It's tough though.
Be ready.
And all that's left is one in incoming and that's all we got.
Oh, there's two now.
It's getting out of hand.
I got one.
I'm going to add a sorry, so it's nicer sounding.
Do you think there's a future where Nintendo bows out of the console space and we see Nintendo
IPs on Xbox, PlayStation, et cetera.
I mean, we already saw like a mobile Mario game at some point.
That was very surprising.
And then they like stopped as far as my understanding goes, are they still, they did Mario run or
jump or whatever it's called.
Um, they do anything after that.
Super Mario run was 2016.
The most recent one, as far as I can see in a rough Google search is 2021 with Pikmin
bloom.
Mario Kart world tour animal crossing pocket camp was apparently a huge success.
Pokemon sleep in 2023, but they've technically already done stuff cause Pokemon go.
I don't know.
I know, I know Nintendo owns a pretty significant amount of the Pokemon company, but they're
not the sole owner.
Marvin the robot says to Bauer talked about how that method of fin manufacturing made
thermal transfer worse.
It's like, like I said, it's, it's all trade-offs, right?
So you can machine it, but you can only get a bit so small you can skive it, but sure
it might harm thermal transfer.
The point is that without some kind of complete revolution in manufacturing techniques, we're
not going to see blocks with materially different performance anymore.
Mario Kart tour, which I've never personally heard of is a free, I'm sure there's micro
transactions mobile game, um, with a rating of 4.3 stars that has 2.1 and a half million
votes on Android alone.
There you go.
All right.
I don't think, I don't think Nintendo is going to get sick of selling their own hardware
anytime soon though.
I think they're a very traditional company and it's honestly been to their benefit in
a big way.
Like for all you, you can hit on Nintendo all you want.
I sure do.
The fact that you can't back up your save games on a mobile device without paying for
a monthly subscription is one of the most anti-consumer, just brazenly anti-consumer
things in gaming today, in my humble opinion.
Um, to me, the value of my save game is so much higher than the value of the cartridge
that I bought.
Like it's, it's, it's everything depending on the game that you're playing.
And um, but to their credit, they're one of the, they're one of the few companies that
has remained committed to just single player or multiplayer contained experiences that
you don't have to pay a whack ton of money for after you've already bought them.
They're, they're doing that apparently, but they're also delivering on those self-contained
traditional experiences.
And I think that's super cool.
And I think it's super cool that the WAN show is over.
We will see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye!
Man, you guys love pins.