Welcome to the WAN show, which is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster today based on
how the setup has gone and the fact that there is, uh, I mean, we can't deny what's here
in between us today.
Didn't notice that, but we're starting the show anyway.
We have got a great show lined up for you guys.
The big topics are, I have finally been convinced to name and shame, uh, the pool company landscaping
company that I've been using.
And I'm going to be talking about, you know, why whole room water cooling the second has
been delayed.
And it's, uh, it basically comes down to, I don't want to end up slandering anyone.
So it basically comes down to, in my opinion, the way that they've handled the job.
I also want to talk about why there's been almost no gaming hardware news in our LTT
coverage of Computex.
That was not an accident, but it also wasn't something I can avoid.
And so I'll, I'll explain that in a little bit more detail later.
What else we got today?
The dolphin steam launch has been postponed probably indefinitely, but we'll, we'll dive
into that later.
But also speaking of no gaming news, Nvidia maybe temporarily joined the $1 trillion club
$1 trillion.
And they definitely did not get there through gaming GPUs.
Take that gamers.
I just realized I have absolutely no way of rolling the intro.
Yeah.
Dan's going to have to hit it.
Hey,
Oh my God.
The show is brought to you today by something, presumably I wasn't able to see it, but maybe
you guys were.
I'm getting there.
Backblaze Squarespace and Black Point Cyber.
It's been so long since we've done a WAN show on site like this.
It's the Thai WAN show guys and I'm absolutely here for it.
Someone pointed out in the floatplane chat that this is actually just a star forge logo.
Yes.
So it's okay.
It's a hammer.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a hammer.
It's a hammer.
It's right between our heads.
I am so sore right now.
And so tired guys, as tired as I look, that's how tired I am.
I've actually spent more time playing badminton than actually like,
I think we got if we if we collected the amount of hours we slept last night, we had one full
night of sleep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was pretty it was pretty rough.
I played for like five hours yesterday.
This is really bad.
I realized when I got a group chat this morning from the center back home, that I'm actually
signed up to play badminton on Saturday, again, which is which is tonight, which is tonight,
but also I go back in time when I go home.
So it's like, far from now tonight, but I have played every day.
Do you think you're gonna crush when you go home even though you're sore because you're
like so warmed up against good players?
Um, you saw me try to go downstairs last.
Yeah, but I saw you try to go downstairs the night before as well.
Yeah.
And then you found a way to play.
Yeah.
So I got injured on the first day.
If you see played through it, I still played every day.
So what would happen was I would heal a little bit at night, and then I would spend the day
walking around the show floor, like hobbling around the show floor, you know, like, I fake
it pretty well on camera.
So anything other than the gigabyte booth coverage and the, what was it for systems?
I'm like, uh, and so if you look at if you look closely at the montage of me running
when we did the video in the super micro booth where we had to like, go on a fetch
quest to get a replacement CPU and RAM for this blade server.
If you look closely, I'm like, heavily limping in that video.
So I would hobble around the show floor, and then I would go play badminton injure myself
to the point of barely being able to lift my leg out of an Uber to get out of it.
And then I would do rinse and repeat the entire trip here.
I've actually had a lot of fun.
It's been really great.
It's been so long since I've been in the thick of things.
And you know what, it's funny because I've been seeing a lot of comments from people
that are like, yeah, Linus seems better.
He seems like he's having fun or he seems like he's, he's chilled out or he seems like
whatever, you know, if the content is going to be like this when the new CEO comes in,
I'm here for it.
And at first I was like, that seems stupid.
No offense, because you know, one of the videos that had a lot of comments like that was actually
the $100,000 Minecraft PC build for Carl Jacobs.
We shot that video like three months ago.
Yeah, yeah.
I saw a bunch of videos about that on our cleaning video as well.
I was like, hmm, comments about that, but yeah, he said he saw a lot of videos about
it.
Yeah, he's tired too.
We both went out for beef noodle soup at like 230 in the morning last night, because that's
a smart thing to do.
Whose word?
That is good soup.
It was really good soup.
Yeah.
Anyway, at first I was thinking to myself, okay, these guys are just looking for something.
But I gotta say, I, I felt creatively liberated at the show this year.
Cool.
I didn't feel like I had to just do traditional booth coverage.
And honestly, I didn't want to, because I could have uploaded the same thing we would
have uploaded at Computex four years ago, but I feel like the channels come a long way
since then.
I feel like the community expectations have come a long way since then.
And I feel like the industry has changed a lot since then.
I will talk about the pool thing.
I know that's our headline topic, but I actually want to talk about this other topic first.
And this was almost going to be a rainwalk video.
I might still write it up and shoot it before we leave, but I want to talk through some
of the thoughts that I had just here on the WAN show, because you guys probably noticed,
right?
We shot almost nothing this year in terms of PC gaming, like for the LTT channel.
I mean, Noctua has that really cool offset mounting bar thing.
So you can drop your temperatures a little bit on AM5 CPUs by actually moving the cooler
down to where the CCDs are under the IHS.
And other than that, our first video was NVIDIA's Grace Superchip and Grace Hopper Data Center.
Our second video is Frohr Systems Cooling, which, okay, if this matures the way that
they think they can, wow, it's going to be an absolute game changer for gaming laptops.
But if the view rates on laptop videos are anything to go by from you guys, I'm thinking
you mostly care about desktops and I just, I don't see this technology making its way
into the desktop in any realistic amount of time.
Just from a cost perspective, it won't make sense because you don't need the benefits.
You don't need the size benefit, so why are you paying for it, right?
The Noctua cooler.
Oh, right.
Then Supermicro.
Supermicro was one of the other really interesting things at the show.
These microblade servers.
Did you watch this video?
No.
Okay.
These are super cool because instead of using server CPUs, they're just risons.
And so instead of going multi-socket, they're just blades with full Ryzen PCs.
So it's a 3U rack with eight full computers in it and you can put up to Ryzen 7950X3Ds.
So if you wanted to do like a high performance game server, like top tier single threaded
performance, this is it.
And you can still slice them up and virtualize them because it just occurred to me.
I don't think we're grateful enough that virtualization for, this would be a really
interesting thing to dig into in a tech quickie or something like that.
How did we end up with proper virtualization support on the desktop?
It is kind of surprised that hasn't been a gated feature at some point.
Well, I think it was at some point.
I think in the early days it was like, I'm trying to think like SRIOV, I don't think
it was something that, even if it was supported by the CPUs, I think motherboard manufacturers
weren't implementing it into their biases.
I know ILMMU is something that has matured a lot over the last 10 years.
Oh, okay.
So it's been a minute, but yeah, like Intel Core 2 Duo apparently had some issues with
virtualization being locked off.
Yeah.
So there you go.
The fact that we ended up with that is kind of a miracle when you look at the way that
it didn't happen with GPUs.
And to be clear, there has been stuff at the show this year that is gamer focused.
I mean, we've got a short that I shot for Short Circuit on Asus's concept GPU that moves
the 12 volt power off of the top.
So there's no cable and it's just got a finger on the bottom.
But I feel like a lot of noise was made about how innovative that was from people who don't
cover Mac.
Because when Apple launched the latest cheese grater Mac Pro, that's exactly how they did
the power for the GPUs in it.
And it supported cables.
So it had female connectors on the motherboard and you could buy a cable kit so you could
plug like a non first party GPU into it and you could power it that way.
But it just had an extended slot at the back and you plugged it in like that and that was
how it was powered.
I'm sitting here going like, I mean, is that really gaming news then?
A couple brands showed off even bigger 4090s.
Sweet.
That's what we need.
Nice.
So Cooler Master did and then this wasn't in our Computex round up here.
It's not in our notes, but Asus also did when I popped by.
We have a mock up of a Noctua edition cooler that has 140 millimeter fans on Noctua's new
140 millimeter fans.
So it probably performs like a hot damn.
But it is absolutely colossal.
We're gonna have a tweet going up with just like your classic.
I'm holding a regular sized GPU and I'm holding that when you versus the guy she tells you
not to worry about, you know, that sort of thing.
But really the big news, the big innovations were in the data center, were in mobile.
Intel showed nothing for consumer desktop.
Yeah.
AMD showed nothing for consumer desktop.
Nvidia showed nothing for consumer desktop.
When was the last time that that happened at Computex?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's rough.
And not even consumer desktop.
I mean, we're not even seeing we're not even seeing.
There's hints.
There's hints that there's a new Threadripper coming.
But is it going to be a Threadripper for enthusiasts or is it going to be Threadripper Pro, which
is priced for professionals and is not really going to be applicable to gamers at all anyway,
because the motherboards are going to cost $1300 like we've seen with the current Threadripper
Pros.
Yeah.
I'm curious, Brad says, I'm so sick of Nvidia, this Nvidia that I want to see the competition
rise up.
You got to give you got to give credit to Nvidia, though they, they just keep kind of
they keep kind of killing it.
I guess I'll also throw a shout out to Intel.
They're trying.
Yeah, yeah, they're trying on it.
Those price cuts recently are actually like really compelling.
Yeah.
199 for an A750.
Yeah.
Like that's actually crazy.
I know it only has eight gigs of VRAM guys, but like, it's $200.
Yeah.
Like that.
That's freaking awesome.
It's actually why competitions back, but it seems to be between Intel and AMD.
Yeah, at the low end.
Yeah.
Because I mean, Nvidia comes in with the 4060.
Okay, we're gonna talk about Nvidia in more detail later.
But you know, first, I want to I want to talk about, you know, this, this, this kind of
this topic that I wanted to discuss, which is like PC gaming's kind of in trouble.
Um, yeah, PC gaming, or is it PC gaming hardware enthusiasts?
Well, I think it's a little bit of, I think it's a little bit of both, right?
Because there's a lot of excitement for, you know, higher fidelity graphics, for example,
and for, you know, game design that pushes the envelope, and you know, whether that's
in game physics, or whether it's, you know, much larger scale multiplayer, or whether
it's like, there's lots of different things that are not just more eye candy.
Yeah, faster GPU, right.
And one of the observations that I made at the show is that a lot of the really exciting
stuff that's happening right now is in the data center.
And more worrying, that data center tech is not the kind of thing that I'm expecting to
trickle down to gamers in a meaningful way.
And so I want to kind of explain what I mean by that.
In the past, we saw innovation, like, there's always been this, I shouldn't say always been,
but there has traditionally been this trickle down.
So when multi core was a big push in the data center, you know, back, especially when software
was licensed per socket, right, all of a sudden, there was this push to have more and more
cores per socket, right.
And then when performance per watt was a big push in the data center, all of a sudden,
we saw efficiency gaming brands talking about how important efficiency was for your new
gaming CPU has been great, because power prices and a lot of places around the world are like
through the absolute roof right now.
But right now, what we're talking about is accelerators.
We're talking about I mean, AMD launched that really cool looking video encoding accelerator.
Yeah, yeah.
Right.
So we're talking about things like AI accelerators and whatnot, though, I do think that's actually
going to trickle down.
Because we're talking about we're talking about things like, okay, not in the gaming
space.
But there's that talk recently about the generative AI that's in Photoshop.
Yes, that's actually pretty big.
And then I do believe there's going to be games that like, you know, procedurally generated
game styles, where it's procedurally generated through AI accelerated tasks.
But tell me this, will that AI make its way to your local processing in a meaningful way?
Or will that generative AI be done in on a in a cloud server somewhere?
I actually genuinely think it's going to be both.
You think it will be both?
Because I think there's going to be single player games that have procedural generation
built into it.
And they can use your local processing to do it.
How are the games rating organizations going to rate a game that has real time generated
content in it,
especially with AI's ability to just like, screw up?
Yeah, hallucinate, just do the wrong thing.
Because you can you can put like bumpers, but it can also just go around it or find
alternatives.
So that's going to be interesting.
All right.
Well, you're getting ahead of me a little bit here.
But I was going to point out that some of the things that we're seeing in the data center
space right now, are just plain not beneficial to consumers.
Yes.
PCIe Gen five, this is going to be kind of an unpopular take, I think.
But I fully support that both Nvidia and AMD and actually, I guess Intel for that matter,
all delivered their latest Gen GPUs with PCIe Gen four.
We clearly, obviously, just like don't need it do not need double the PCIe bandwidth for
our gaming GPUs.
And then, you know, storage, storage is another area where brands are pushing PCIe Gen five
really hard.
But we've shown and other publications have shown time and time again, that the benefit
to PCIe Gen five to faster storage in general for gamers is basically nothing.
Now, could that change?
And then right, the last point I was going to make is that it's all about accelerators
now.
Whether it's video encoding accelerators from AMD, or whether it's AI accelerators, or whether
it's, you know, oh, like network accelerators, Nvidia was really excited about this, this
network accelerator, they were showing off that has a 16 core CPU on it or something
like that.
Yeah, there were comments on the video, like, Nvidia's new network card has more compute
cores on it than my entire household, you know.
And it's really cool technology.
But we look at how long gigabit was the standard for consumers.
And I'm sitting here going, is encrypting your network is offloading network traffic
encryption really going to be something we're going to see on a desktop computer in the
next 10 years?
1520.
It's hard to look that far ahead.
Yeah, but I kind of doubt it.
And so I'm looking at all these innovations.
So PCIe Gen five, even in the data center, a big part of it is simplifying board layouts,
and making them more economical.
So you know, taking an SSD and giving it two lanes of Gen five, instead of four lanes of
Gen four and getting that same bandwidth, and I think we're going to continue to see
that moving into into Gen six.
And so we may not even see consumer platforms adopt Gen six just over the over the power
consumption limitations, or we might see it them use Gen six, but just use fewer lanes
for everything as opposed to actually making things faster.
Now where I wanted to kind of pivot the conversation is to talk about and speculate how we could
see these technologies being beneficial to consumers.
I mean, one area where faster storage is supposed to help, right, is direct storage.
Yeah.
I've seen a couple of direct storage games, and it hasn't really made a difference.
So what's what's the deal with that?
Is it just that these games were not developed, start to finish enough around fast storage
hardware?
Yeah, I think there's also the like early adopter thing, like, you know, when a console
first comes out, look at Tears of the Kingdom versus the first one Breath of the Wild.
There was pretty significant improvements that happened there, as far as my understanding
goes, if you actually happen to play it on a Switch instead of emulating it.
But like, they're going to get better at using it over time.
But there also needs to be incentives for these devs to have to like work harder to
actually do that.
There's conversations going around recently about how like developing for the Switch is
where you're seeing pretty much all of the effort going into being efficient with things.
You can see PC games coming out there like one hundred and forty gigs.
Yeah.
It's just like, oh, yeah, OK.
So they did.
Yeah.
I don't know.
We'll see it happen.
OK.
What else could we use faster storage for?
I mean, that's always been something that's been kind of baffling to me.
You know, when I'm performing some some simple operation, my CPU is sitting at four percent
usage.
My RAM's barely touched.
And my supposedly seven gigabyte a second SSD is pinned at a hundred percent.
And like, I'm not even doing I'm not even doing that much.
You know, it realistically is the limitation always just going to be the controllers in
the NAND flash as opposed to the pipes to them.
But let's say let's say they can build faster flash and we reduce that bottleneck.
You know, what would we do with faster storage?
So direct storage theoretically would allow us to do PS5 type things where you're streaming
game data directly off of the SSD, like streaming textures.
I'd like to see I'd like to see an Xbox like resume, but not just from suspend, from like
hibernate.
Is there any reason God is?
Well, no.
Think about it.
No, I love the concept.
I just windows and sleeping.
But look, great concept, though.
Yeah.
We're we're having we're we're thinking optimistic.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know.
It's great.
Turn off that pessimistic, cynical brain of yours and think of what we could do with faster
storage.
Hit me, guys.
I do like that a lot.
Being able to sleep your computer in the middle of heavy tasks like gaming or potentially
whatever else and come back to it and have it actually resume in the middle of it would
be would be cool.
Fire simulations, guys.
I mean, I guess.
Yeah, there's not there's not a Oh, this is good store things faster.
What a what a comment.
Amazing.
Oh, discussion question.
Handy man over on floatplane chat asks, Have I buried the hatchet with Jensen from Nvidia?
I actually do have an update on that.
So I can I can talk about that a little bit.
But I'm worried.
I think you're right.
I think AI, AI games are going to be they're going to have a moment.
And then they're going to go away, because they kind of sucked.
Oh, yeah, they're all going to be really bad.
And then we're going to find ways to implement it into handcrafted games.
And it's going to end up being I suspect that early ones, it's going to be like a selling
feature of the game.
Yes, it's going to be like CGI and movies.
Yeah, right.
Where it starts out as doing CGI for the sake of doing CGI.
And then it turns into, you know, Wolf of Wall Street.
Have you ever seen the side by side of Wolf of Wall Street shots before and after CGI
watching the movie?
You wouldn't even know.
Yeah, I wouldn't have thought there was any CGI heavy this film is.
But there's like this, there's this helicopter shot of his beach house.
And other than the house itself, like the surrounding area looks nothing like the original
shot.
They just and there's this doorway that he walks through.
And it's on a basically completely different building.
And I'm just looking at it going, was that necessarily really necessary?
But it was integrated in such a way that I didn't notice I wouldn't have noticed at all.
And so if that was the director's vision, then great.
Yeah, like I suspect there's going to be some AI procedurally generated dungeon crawler,
which exists purely because it is what I just said.
Well, what's funny, it's funny that you say that because the procedurally generated levels
were a major selling point of Diablo one.
Yeah.
And so we might see better that but it's going to be worse in certain ways.
Oh, yeah.
Almost certainly it will be worse in certain ways because it's going to generate something
that like the word for it is similar to something else.
So it ends up spitting out the wrong thing and all this other problems are going to happen.
But yeah, I think we're gonna go too far at first, and then it'll fall back.
And then when it starts to come back, and properly, I think it'll be in ways that you
don't necessarily notice a ton.
But yeah, so honestly, with that timeline, I think we're like pretty significantly far
out.
And I guess that transitions us pretty perfectly to talking a little bit more in detail about
Nvidia and what's been going on with them lately.
Nvidia joined the $1 trillion valuation big boys club.
Sorry, gamers, and I alluded to this earlier, right on the heels of their launch of the
RTX 4060, where gamers were up in arms, gaming media is up in arms over how, you know, awful
the 4060 is from a competitive standpoint, how awful it is from a last gen to current
gen upgrade standpoint.
And then their stock jumps, you know, 25% the following day, they briefly hit a $1 trillion
valuation.
This is alongside Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Saudi Aramco, which I don't know
how to pronounce, but there you go oil company.
They're the first chip maker to touch the $1 trillion mark, thanks to massive demand
for AI processors.
That is what it is all about.
I think you nailed it.
I think it was last WAN show, when you were saying like, I think they're not being priced
competitive on this GPU, because they just didn't dedicate a lot of like manufacturing
to it.
I think that's it.
I think, why be price competitive when we don't even like, we don't even have a ton
of them, because we want those lines to be dedicated towards other things.
Here's the thing.
I don't know if I was right anymore.
I think it's a combination of things.
They went to an aggressive new process node that is more expensive and does have lower
yields compared to what AMD is able to do with their lower end cards.
The 7600 was the most recent one.
And I had a meeting with Nvidia at the show that I guess I should talk about, right?
I don't know if any of it was on the record.
So hopefully this is all kosher, but anywho, basically, here's what I think.
And this is not anything that anyone at Nvidia said.
This is just what I think from talking to some of the Nvidia folks, from seeing what's
going on with them on a business level.
I think they should split up.
I think they should spin off GeForce.
Interesting.
Because talking to the folks at Nvidia who do work on the GeForce team, looking at the
kinds of unnecessary innovations that they are still bringing to gaming.
So they announced a new ultra-low motion blur technology that they claim gets to something
I think is like 1600 hertz motion clarity or something like that.
It feels very...
Because we can make it a little bit better, you know?
And that's especially true to me because we have display technologies coming down the
pipe that are going to make that level of better image persistence on LCD totally unnecessary.
And so I'm looking at it going, yeah, these guys in the lab are really trying to crush
it here for gamers.
And in some ways I feel like they're kind of getting held back by the expectations that
Nvidia, the organization's shareholders have for profitability.
Because GeForce is always going to be a consumer brand with consumer margins.
Whereas Nvidia's data center business or their AI business for automotive or their embedded
products business, like all of these, anything that's B2B is inherently going to have more
margin because your customer is making money on it.
Like a new GPU is a burden because all of a sudden there's all these new games that
you couldn't play before that now it's time to buy and play.
And I don't mean a burden personally, I mean a financial burden, right?
You're not outside of mining, you're not making money on it.
But that's a really important point to make because mining is such a great example of
how when something makes you money, all of a sudden, even if you are an actual gamer,
you're willing to pay so much more for it because it helps offset the cost, right?
So the kinds of margins that Nvidia can make on something like a gray super chip are going
to look really attractive to their shareholders and the kinds of margins they can make on
some RTX 4060, even if it seems completely unreasonable to you and to me, are going to
look really unattractive.
And as the proportion of this business shrinks on the gaming side and grows on the data center
side, their shareholders are going to look at them and go, hey guys, what are you doing?
Should you even be making consumer GPUs anymore or shipping all the silicon, all the wafers
you can get from TSMC or Intel for that matter, that's going to be interesting, Jensen said
their next gen manufacturing node is looking good.
Should you just be booking all of it for AI and completely ignoring gaming?
And I don't think Nvidia wants to.
That's what I wanted to say is I think the GeForce team really wants to build great gaming
experiences and I feel like they're a little bit hamstrung right now.
I have for quite a while now.
I assume you've kind of felt the same thing.
You know when you used to go to nvidia.com and the main thing was drivers?
GeForce drivers specifically.
Now even if you go to gforce.com, which just redirects to nvidia.com slash gforce, there's
like the GeForce section, but then there's another banner above that, just like making
sure that you don't forget that there's a separation between GeForce and Nvidia and
you can go to the main menu for that, which has nothing to do with GeForce.
Even when you're on the specific gforce page, they're like, just in case you didn't mean
to be here, we've got you products, solutions, industries for you, whatever that means.
Yeah.
Like it's, I have always felt kind of weird about the Nvidia site for a while now.
And that reason, and this really ties into what I was talking about before where it used
to be that the innovations that Nvidia would build for their data center products would
benefit gamers, would make their way down to gamers.
But we've actually seen over actually, wow, I guess the last couple of generations Volta
was an example of an Nvidia chip that was built specifically not for gamers.
And then hopper, I, as far as I can tell, is simply not for gamers at all.
It just, it just doesn't have, it just doesn't have functional units you need for gaming
because it's laser focused on AI, right?
And so we're not gonna, we're not gonna necessarily benefit from that, that R and D money that
comes from enterprise customers and goes towards building a bigger, better GPU that ultimately
gamers also get to kind of tag along with.
Right.
And so I, yeah, I, I would, I don't know if I would like to see it, but I think it, I
think it could make sense for Nvidia to just say, yeah, this is a spinoff business.
It's G force.
They, they sort of, they, they, they buy innovation from Nvidia.
Obviously they're, they're a customer of Nvidia in the same way that a Nintendo would be a
customer of Nvidia for the processor and the switch.
And the G force team is laser focused on building, you know, great drivers building great technologies
to leverage the hardware from Nvidia.
Obviously they'd work very close together, but then they wouldn't have the burden of
needing to make those same margins and they could get scrappier.
And they could, they could take the fight to AMD and as Intel ramps up with Battlemage
and celestial, their upcoming architectures, I think they could be more competitive because
at the end of the day, right.
Every fan boy has got to understand you don't want one to win ever.
That's not good.
Here we're talking the big three Intel, AMD, Nvidia, every single one of them has shown
again and again and again, that in the absence of compa of compa very tired in the absence
of competition stagnation, the first thing they'll do is stop refreshing products and
ramp up the price.
Let's look for recent examples from each one.
Shall we play a game?
Sure.
Do you want to go first or shall I go first?
Intel pre AMD's resurgence in the like, what would that have been like five, 6,000 series.
This number, this number is key for, for, okay.
How many cores did you get?
Oh yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Four cores forever was, was, that was a very long term.
That ought to be all anyone needs.
Yeah.
That's good enough.
Yeah.
That's a perfect example.
And then if we look to AMD, the second Intel didn't have an HEDT, a high end desktop competitor,
AMD simply stopped bothering releasing new threadrippers regardless of the commitments
that they had already made, not just to their enthusiast and gamer customers, but to buyers
of the S TRX 40 or whatever it was called their, their last socket, their Ryzen 3000
threadripper socket.
They were just like, Hey, it was basically done.
There were samples out there.
They just decided.
Yeah.
And this is why, this is why for years, as we've been rooting for AMD to push really
hard, we've also been pointing out that they're not like, you know, the like magically benevolent
good guys.
There was that campaign that they ran a while ago where they had people with like a protest
signs at packs and stuff.
Do you remember that?
No.
Oh man.
I don't think I saw that.
It sounds range.
I don't remember the name of the campaign.
It was cringe.
It was like resist, like resist AMDs or resist Intel's whatever I wonder if I can find it.
I think it's probably been like too long and looking up anything that has to do with protest
is just going to come up with a lot of news articles.
So I think, I don't think I'm going to find it, but yeah, at, at like PAX West back in
the day, I remember there being like genuine paid actors with protest signs that had like,
like resist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it was all AMD branding and it was all about like, buy AMD to resist Intel.
It's like, yeah, you guys would do the same thing.
Yup.
I do want you to do better because competition is good, but yeah, it doesn't.
Okay.
So then the last one is Nvidia.
Nvidia, I honestly feel like hasn't sat on their laurels as much in a technological sense
as the other brands, but they have definitely taken advantage of what they can extract cost-wise
as much as possible.
Yup.
I mean, with them in some ways, they're just kind of smarter about it because they're definitely
doing it.
And we talked about this when we did our tier list for the best GeForce GPUs, which by the
way, I know I often ask you, have you watched the video?
I know the answer is no.
You should watch this one.
I skipped through and watched the 8,000 series because I like cared about that.
You know how many people did that?
Was it a lot?
The well, not the 8,000 series specifically, but the, the, the retention chart on that
video is super weird.
We actually had a debate internally before we started working on it for when we should
start, because we didn't start at the beginning and we could have because there were only
a few generations of GeForce GPUs before the starting point and we didn't start later.
So it was actually pitched to me that we start more like, like way, way more recently.
I forget, I forget what the, what the push was, but way more recently and, and do, do
far fewer of them.
And I picked FX and I forget why.
I think the rationale that I provided was it was right.
It was the first DirectX 9 GPU.
And I think this is just my own personal biases because for me, PC gaming really started to
get, you know, visually really good looking with DirectX 9.
And looking back at it, I think it was just my own personal.
That's when I got into gaming.
And so we see that in the retention graph for this video, how many people got into gaming
with 900 series and 10 series.
Yeah.
Basically everything earlier is like, eh, skip, skip, skip, skip, Oh, what about this
one that I bought that I'm really passionate about, or that's still in my gaming rig right
now.
And I love this thing.
I've been using it for years.
Isn't that hilarious?
Just how few people cared.
These spikes are so, wow.
Yeah.
Really extreme.
I've never seen anything quite like this.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
It's really cool.
Anywho, what was I talking about again?
Right.
So with Nvidia, it's been more of a slow boil and we talked about it a fair bit here where
starting with the 600 series, this history is really important to understand when you
look at Nvidia's pricing strategy and you want to kind of get a better idea of where
they're going in the future.
So starting with 600 series and okay, Nvidia has code names for their GPU's and I hate
that the word GPU has come to mean graphics card because they are not the same thing.
A GPU is a graphics processing unit and it's a chip.
A graphics card is a board that contains a GPU, VRAM, power delivery, display outputs.
So the GPU's, they have code names for these and typically they will have a letter to indicate
the architecture like GK would be G-Force Kepler or GA would be G-Force Ampere.
So they have a letter and then they have a number and that number, the final digit,
the lower that digit is.
So if it's a zero, that is going to be the largest chip for that series.
If it's a two, that's going to be a smaller one.
If it's a four, smaller, six, smaller, trying to remember how high they've gone in the past.
But the point is the higher that number goes, the smaller the actual die is.
So sometimes you'll see two G-Force GPUs that have, let's say one has 5,000 CUDA cores and
one has 4,000.
But if you dig into, you know, the tech power up GPU database or something like that, you'll
find that they're both using the same chip.
Well, some of those functional units might have been, some of those CUDA cores might
have been damaged in manufacturing or they might've just been turned off to hit a lower
power profile or to create segmentation between two products so that, you know, this one doesn't
perform too close to the other one.
But other times you'll see that two products are using completely different dies because
there's only so many CUDA cores on a die, even if it's perfect, and it only makes so
much sense to cut them down before that's just a broken product and the power profile
wouldn't make any sense for this, you know, more budget oriented product.
So that's why you design these different sizes of dies.
Finally getting there, with Kepler, that was the first time we saw NVIDIA launch a flagship
80 series GTX, you know, product, a top tier product with not the top tier die.
Now we had seen before a top tier die, but with, no, it wasn't the first time.
Okay.
I'll tell you a little bit about that other one later.
We had seen not a top tier die or we had seen a top tier die, but not all of it.
So a slightly cut down one and that would, that would be due to yields, right?
They just couldn't get enough fully working ones to make it economic revival, but we hadn't
seen them launch a flagship GPU with a cut down with a not top tier die.
And then we didn't get big Kepler until 700 series.
So we got Kepler and then we got Kepler again, something we, again, I don't think had actually
seen in the past, but that's with an asterisk because the 9,000 series was a little bit
more complicated where 8,000 series was awesome G80.
So that was a big die was the 8,800 GTX and the 8,800 ultra was kind of usurped by G92,
which was a shrunk and just like way more efficient, even though it was smaller die.
So the 8,800 GT came out and kind of made the GTX look pointless from a cost perspective.
And then they tweaked that and released the 9,800 GTX, which was not a big die, but there
wasn't a big diversion.
It was just a, it was just a really weird time for, for Nvidia because they couldn't
innovate as easily as they had been able to before that because they couldn't just keep
shrinking the manufacturing process.
That was kind of where we started to ask the question is Moore's law dead?
You know, is GPU innovation going to slow down in a big way?
And it has.
And that's the same thing where I'm talking about them boiling the frog in terms of slowing
things down.
There were definitely times when they could have probably pushed harder, but started stretching,
you know, how long a GPU generation should stick around for from, you know, I mean, they
were, they were launching new stuff like eight, 10 months after the previous generation sub
one year window for a bit there.
And then it went to a year early cadence and then it went to, I mean, 18 months is fine,
right?
Two years, two years seems okay.
By the way, I found it, it was called the AMD uprising campaign.
The whole thing was like joining the rebellion and hashtag better red and stuff.
It was, it was a weird campaign.
I did not like it, but it is what it is.
Not the first odd marketing we've seen and not the last.
Moving on next topic.
Oh, should we do three merge messages?
We never did breakfast.
There was one of these for you.
Ooh.
Yeah.
Let's do a few merge messages.
Dan.
Are you, can you hear us?
Oh yeah.
Of course.
Oh, it's Daniel Besser.
Hi.
Oh wait.
I'm supposed to explain merge messages.
That's right.
Merge messages.
They're these things.
They're how you interact with the show.
We launched a new product on the store.
Hey Dan, do you have the capability of showing people the new product?
Technically?
Yes.
Oh, can we use AJ for this?
Oh, this is going to be embarrassing.
I mean, I guess we could show it on the website.
Yeah.
This might take a minute though.
I have a couple on the table.
We could just show them with a camera.
That it, you know what?
I'm going to propose something even jankier.
Oh, I love it.
It's the fleece lined shacket.
It's a sweater.
It's a jacket.
It's launching in June because we just love our Australian community so much.
Actually, it's because we only launch things when they're ready and this is when it happens
to be ready.
Well, you know, it's a shirt or a jacket.
Oh, shirt meets jacket.
Excuse me.
Yeah.
I could show it with the producer cam.
It's pretty cool.
It's very warm, but it still looks, you know, just kind of like a shirt.
You know, it's nice for going out.
I would say on a fall day going for a walk in the park, you're not going to reach for
anything else once you have one of these.
It looks sharp.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Looks, looks really sharp.
We tried to make this reversible.
Fun story.
It did not work.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
We thought it would be really cool if this kind of like camo, camo stripey inner material
was actually wearable on the outside and it was not, yeah, we, we do have a reversible
garment coming soon, but it is, it is not this day, any who, if you want to pick up
one of these or anything else, you know, water bottle, screwdriver, stick locks have been
really popular as well.
Then head over to lttstore.com and in the checkout, right in the cart, dang it in the
cart, a box will appear giving you the option to write a merge message.
You can send a shout out for one of your friends or your mom who happens to watch the WAN show
because she's Luke's mom.
You can ask our producer a question.
You can also post a question in hopes that Dan will choose your question to be addressed
later on WAN show after dark, which there may not be any after dark because it is the
morning where we are.
Anyway, the point is don't do super chats, you know, don't do Twitch bits or whatever
else do merge messages because then even in the event that we don't get to your message,
you get your order in the mail and it's going to be quality that we do not talk nearly enough
about how well reviewed her products are like just about every product on LTT store, four
and a half stars and up.
And we don't, we don't curate this stuff yet.
We believe in transparency.
Like you go on the, you go on the screwdriver page, there's, yeah, it's, it's, it really
is like very funny to me when haters talk about what a failure the, you know, backpack
or screwdriver were or whatever that you see 6,900 reviews on screwdriver.
Yeah.
Nice.
And you know, backpack, no one would be stupid enough to buy this backpack.
It has almost 2,500 reviews.
They didn't, they didn't come from nowhere.
They weren't there.
They're not generative AI reviews, guys.
These are, these are real reviews from real people that are thrilled with it cause it's
a fricking awesome backpack.
All right, Dan, want to hit us with some merge messages?
Yeah, sure thing.
Let's see.
First one here.
Hey LLD, would you ever want to fly to space how for how long and where would you like
to go?
The international space station, the moon, maybe Mars.
What was the question?
Do you want to go to space?
Yeah, definitely.
Is it wondering where in space you want to go?
Okay.
Would you ever want to fly to space?
Yes.
For sure.
How long?
I don't know ever.
Where would you like to go?
Forever.
Yeah.
Why not?
Come on.
You're not going to go to space forever.
I'd be down.
No.
Would you vacation to earth?
I'd be sad.
Give a better answer.
I don't know.
I would, I would love to do a one year stint.
Obviously this is never going to happen.
A year?
Yeah.
Because then you get the, you get a special thing.
I don't remember what it's called.
It'd be sweet.
Destroy bone density.
It's an achievement.
You get a one year achievement.
It's basically that.
I know.
I think you get some special badge or something.
I never thought about it that way.
Oh my.
Oh my.
There we go.
My laugh is very obnoxious.
It's called muscle atrophy.
There's ways to stave that off.
The scarier thing is your bones.
But you address both in the same way you do it by working out.
It's not going to happen.
Well, yeah, but answer the question proper.
Okay.
Where would you go?
You just would want to orbit or what?
I think whatever gets you the most patches.
Yeah, probably.
Uh, I think, I think if, I mean, okay, if we want to think about it that way, if you
could be the first, if you could be the first to step foot on Mars, that'd be sick.
That'd be sweet.
But if we're assuming that isn't so much of a thing, yeah, I don't think I'd want to do
the whole Mars thing.
It's really far.
I think I'd be far more likely to go to a moon base and then come back because it's
been more time.
Yeah.
It is actually like wild how much closer it is and it's kind of wild how much closer the
ISS is compared to the moon.
I think a lot of people don't consider that as well.
Yeah.
Moon is like a lot further.
Not that close.
Yeah.
Genuinely not.
But yeah, I think some, I think like an actual lunar base would be pretty sweet because honestly
I don't see the difference between the ISS and a lunar base being all that much in terms
of cost or in terms of no, like the experience.
Really?
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
I don't.
You're high.
No, no, no, no.
Wait, wait, wait.
I don't see that.
Wait, wait, wait.
I said it wrong.
I don't see the benefits.
You're higher than that building.
I don't see the benefits of being on the ISS or another orbiting station being much higher
than being on a station that is on the surface.
And then I see probably being able to exit the station and go wander around the moon
being much more likely than spacewalks because spacewalks are like super, super coveted.
Right.
And even a bunch of astronauts that don't go up are never allowed to do spacewalks.
Yeah.
So like, I think it's much more likely if you're actually on.
I would, I would 100% want to just like, I mean not golf because you'd never find the
ball, but like I would, I would want a sports ball on the moon.
Putting a little tracker in a golf ball and then just whacking it would actually be pretty
cool.
You'd never like, I'd want to get it back though.
Like I'd want to see it go and you wouldn't like, it would just, I assume anyway, I don't
know.
I've never been to the moon.
It would depend how hard you hit it because I mean the moon has grad, like it's going
to theoretically, unless you can get like escape velocity from the moon.
Yeah, no, I'd want to like, no, I just, I just would it go around the horizon?
Potentially.
Like, I don't know.
I mean, you wouldn't be able to see it anymore.
Yeah, definitely.
Almost certainly.
That's, that's the bigger concern I think.
But like, no, I'd want to throw like a football.
The ISIS has no gravity that can affect experiments.
Yeah.
But like, I'm a big dummy.
I don't think I'm doing experiments.
Yeah, no, I mean, yeah, no, I would just, I would want to help.
I would want to play sports ball.
Like I would just, I'd want to see how fast I could whip a baseball in like almost no
atmosphere.
Because there's also no wind resistance, essentially, compared to Earth anyway.
Jake mentioned playing badminton on the moon.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
That'd be pretty sick.
Yeah.
Actually very fun.
Or not fun.
Yeah, I mean, not fun at all.
Because it would be really slow.
No, it would be fast.
What slows down the shuttle is air resistance.
Like it.
Okay.
There's only certain shots where it falls down.
Yeah.
If you were, the smashes would be terrible.
Yeah.
If you hit a smash, no one would be able to stop it.
That's pretty great.
That'd be fricking fun.
Anyway.
Okay.
Hit me again, Dan.
Sure thing.
Hello, Luke and Linus.
How do you think AI will affect gaming in the near future?
Do you think it will be, do you think it will make them lazy and slap it everywhere instead
of polishing the games or will it be more conservatively used?
I think I curated this for a specific reason and it was the word lazy.
Because AI is not lazy.
What it is is a tool.
And I think that we're going to see very lazy implementations of AI.
And Luke and I talked about this actually a little bit earlier on the show where, yeah,
I think developers are going to look at this AI buzz and go, okay, how can we cram AI into
our game now so that we can put it on the box and hopefully sell a few more units to
nerds who want to try out AI conversations with their waifus or whatever.
I think that's going to be a genre that's going to lean heavily into AI and be an innovator
in the space, better or for worse.
But in much the same way that, you know, we could look at, man, what would it, what would
be a, what would be a comparable, comparable feature?
Now, I can't come up with anything right now because my brain is bad, but AI is a tool.
So the fact that someone uses a hammer, that doesn't make them lazy.
But the fact that they use a hammer instead of putting the nails in by pushing them with
their thumbs, that's not laziness.
So as long as they're still working hard, there's nothing inherently lazy about using
a better tool.
Now their AI has some ethical questions around it that need to be answered.
And some genuine, like something that could be interpreted as lazy because, I mean, you've
talked about this too, right?
If you were going to play a single player game, you wouldn't want all the dialogue to
be written by AI.
Yeah.
Because you'd want it to be more focused and like efficient almost, not a hundred percent,
but like every word should have a reason for being there, those types of things.
So I don't know.
I think you're going to see a huge range of this, which shouldn't be too surprising if
you've experienced much of the gaming industry.
I'm sure we'll see some like battlefield game or something that just has absolutely atrocious
dialogue because it's all just AI generated or something.
And we are going to see maybe not laziness.
This is the other reason I really didn't like this word because lazy seems to apply it to
the actual devs themselves.
Whereas I think it's more likely to be a cost cutting measure from management.
Yeah.
Right.
So what was, shoot, I've forgotten, I forgotten, but there was some game where the box art
was apparently almost certainly procedurally generated.
Did you see this?
There has also been games where their box art was just stolen from people.
But yeah.
Yeah.
In this case, it looked like it was procedurally generated because like the guy had like six
fingers and there were little details and some artists kind of broke down what's going
on here and what makes it obvious.
Duke Nukem.
The Duke Nukem remaster.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Pull it up, pull it up, have a look.
That's a good way of screen sharing right now.
So please pull this up for yourself.
Yeah, here we go.
Duke Nukem remaster AI box art is what Luke typed in.
And apparently the artist who was involved has used generative AI for artwork in the
past as well.
So in this case, was it laziness?
Was it an extremely tight budget?
Did they give the go ahead to use AI?
I haven't looked into this any further yet.
So take this for the, you know, ignorant speculation that it is.
But I don't think it's fair to assume that it's just laziness, but I also don't think
it's impossible.
Yeah.
This is pretty jank.
I see why people were kind of annoyed about this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's just like a hand, like floating under the firearm, but it's not even like in anything.
This that's like not, that's not a barrel.
It just actually isn't, I don't know.
That's weird.
Yeah.
Anyways.
Next up.
Can do.
And I guess this will be our last one for this section.
Hi, LLD.
I'm 16 and do more robotics techie videos on YouTube.
In the early days of LTT, how did you stay motivated and how long in the future would
you say YouTube would still be a feasible career?
Hmm.
Eating to eat is a pretty good motivator.
I think we're also all pretty determined to like make this thing work.
Yeah, I was, I mean, I've talked about this in the past before, but one of the major motivators
for me was just that I was tired of working with people that I didn't, um, I didn't enjoy
working with, whether it was reporting to people who I didn't think deserved their positions
who I didn't think were very smart or whether it was having to collaborate with people who
were obvious nepotism hires and had no valuable skills to bring to the table whatsoever.
You know, I wanted a company that was not built like that.
And the only way to get that is to start my own and the only way to get it and be sure
it won't go away is to start my own.
And so I just really needed this thing to work.
You know, Yvonne and I also just generally bet really heavily on it.
And so, you know, especially once we acquired the Langley house, I mean, it's funny to look
back at it now, but we thought we were buying at the peak at like the highest conceivable,
you know, housing pricing ends up, we got a stellar deal or whatever, but we didn't
know that at the time.
So we thought we were basically putting everything we had into this company.
Um, and we, and we just really needed it to succeed.
And then there were multiple phases where we kind of did the same thing again.
When we bought the office, we thought the same thing that we were buying at the peak
and it couldn't possibly go any higher.
So we, we thought we were completely betting the farm and we needed this to succeed or
like going back to our jobs, there was no possible way we were paying this office mortgage
that wasn't happening.
Right.
So yeah, eating major motivating factor, um, as for how long in the future did I think
YouTube would still be a feasible career?
I'll tell you this, we started Linus tech tips.com the forum before we actually launched
Linus media group, the company and Linus tech tips.com maybe not main reason, but at least
half of its main reason for existing is in case YouTube just decide, you know what, forget
about this channel anymore.
I mean, we didn't have a contact at YouTube at that time.
We didn't, we didn't know that they would continue to take the creator community seriously.
We didn't know if they would just, you know, cut your AdSense payment or, or maybe you
get three strikes out of nowhere or take it or take it away entirely.
Like we didn't know what the plan was for the platform, right?
We're just guessing.
Um, so at the time, no, I, I would, I would, I would take every deal.
I would make every video thinking this could be the last one.
And I don't think that really changed until three, four, five years in.
Really.
I mean, even now it still feels sketchy because of like just dealing with algorithmic throws
all the time.
Like, I don't know.
It's a, it's a very unsettling industry to work in.
It just is.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a good point.
Luke was telling me he had some meetings with some creators that, um, were, I dunno if bewildered
is the right word, but just, um, taken aback when he talked about how stressed we get about
algorithmic changes or about, um, you know, whether just the fear we have for our survival.
And they're like, well, I thought you're past that point.
And it's like, I don't think everybody, anybody ever gets past that point.
That's the thing about, um, like exponential decay, right.
Is no matter how high you start, everyone ends up at zero.
There's a near infinite graveyard of extremely massive, extremely successful, very talented
creators and channels and all that kind of stuff that were household names on YouTube
that are effectively just gone that are in a lot of cases still making content.
They won't see them in your recommendation.
It feels like it can really happen to anyone.
Really anyone.
I've seen channels with, with millions of subscribers that get hundreds of views.
It's like, Oh man.
In some cases, in some cases they changed the content and it's just not working anymore.
In some cases they didn't change the content and that's contributing to it not working
anymore.
And in other cases I'm looking at it going, I can't really tell the difference.
Um, you know, the point is not to name and shame, but this person in particular did like
a series.
Um, or wait, is this?
I think I know what one you're talking about.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
This one, this one.
Yeah.
Um, let me just make sure because I don't want to, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know, but basically I might not name it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
She was doing real amazing and then just kind of completely fell off the map.
I'm talking like her top video has over 50 million views 11 years ago.
And there's multiple videos here with 10 million views and more doing challenges and stuff.
And then just, you know, she's, she's talked about this.
I think if the, if I'm remembering correctly, she's talked about how it felt like she just
disappeared overnight algorithmically.
And again, this is a channel with millions of subscribers.
Nobody, nobody is, nobody is safe.
Yeah.
Um, let me just see.
Yeah.
Oh, okay.
Yes.
Okay.
It's GloZell.
Um, so she did an interview talking about how she went broke, uh, shared some advice
for young creators and um, yeah, being, yeah, this is, this is great.
Being broke with millions of subscribers.
She shares her story of hardship.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a really, it's a really interesting fall, right?
Because it's not the type of content that I consume.
So I'm not really qualified to evaluate whether, you know, she changed or, or didn't change
or what the problem was that caused this precipitous decline in viewership, but no one's, no one's
safe.
That's, that's the whole point.
Um, so we're, we just need to, we need to keep reinventing.
We need to keep pushing and we can never take our foot off the gas because if we do, we
die.
It's a, I, I often use shark analogies internally.
Stop swimming.
Die.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like actually the, okay.
So I think we go back to news.
Sure.
Why not?
Give me a couple additional topics.
All right.
Uh, secret gigabyte backdoor, uh, security researchers at Eclipsium release findings
showing millions of gigabyte motherboards were sold with a UEFI bootkit containing an
insecure back door.
Eclipsium says the hidden code is meant to be, uh, an innocuous tool to keep the motherboards
firmware updated, but it's been implemented insecurely, potentially allowing the mechanism
to be hijacked.
On windows machines, the program writes a windows dot exe embed into the firmware to
in the firmware to disc in the system 32 folder and runs it that exe sets itself up as a windows
service and attempts to fetch and an executable from one of the URLs.
That is the, that is brutal.
Uh, one URL uses HTTP, which is easily for an attacker to intercept and other links which
do use HTTPS are similarly vulnerable due to poorly implemented remote server certificate
validation routes.
Okay.
So let's, uh, let's, let's do a real quick summary here.
In the firmware on this motherboard, they have, they have a tool that allows them to
update and keep updated the UEFI files, which sounds cool, which is really cool, but the
firmware actually can just write an exe to the system 32 folder, which disguise I want
windows service.
I want to know how Microsoft allows random exes to be written to the system 32 folder
to be clear.
I'm not saying gigabyte is innocent here.
Yeah.
I'm just, I'm saying that this is clearly a breakdown that has multiple contributing
actors here.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
So one note, which is probably understood by most, but because this program is within
the firmware, it is difficult for consumers to remove.
Okay.
But the next note, at least 271 different models of motherboard are affected, including
the most recent Z790 and X670s fuse, holy crap.
There's no current evidence of the vulnerability being exploited.
This is a pretty niche thing.
I wouldn't be surprised if most places were unaware that it existed a day after the story
broke gigabyte has apparently rolled out updated firmware to mitigate the issue, including
updates for older motherboards that are affected.
The problem is that there's going to be literally tons of people that don't update because people
very, very rarely, if not hundreds of thousands of boards out there that will never get these
updates and never even know this is a problem.
I mean, I have to, well, wait, could they use their, could they use their updater tool
to like force an update?
That's a good question.
They might actually be able to kind of solve the problem.
That's a, that's a really good, that's a really good question.
Guys, that's not in our doc.
Let us know.
Floatplane chat.
In the meantime though, our discussion question here is how would you rate gigabytes handling
of the issue?
I mean, the issue has existed for years, but they probably didn't know they mitigated it
really quickly.
What I'm assuming happened is Eclipsium found it, told gigabyte, allowed gigabyte to fix
it, but then still wanted to break the news.
That makes sense.
So they launched the fix and the news at the same time, but they did fix it, which is,
which is good.
But they put in a back door, which is bad, but the back door was not for, you know, sending
your data to the CCP.
It was for helping keep your firmware up to date, which is good, but they didn't tell
us, which is bad.
Yeah, the good part is that they fixed it.
Stuff like this is going to happen.
I don't want to be the, that guy that's just like excusing it, but, um, I think we also
have to be somewhat realistic.
I feel like a lot of the time coverage of problems with products forgets the human element.
Did you kind of get what I mean by that?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like this seems like, I mean, it seems like a mistake.
It's not good.
I wouldn't be happy about it if I was a consumer of a gigabyte motherboard that this affected.
But like it's also fixed immediately.
So it's not like, it's not like gigabyte was like, yeah, that's 271 models of motherboard.
We don't feel like supporting some of these old motherboards.
As far as I can tell, at least from the notes in here, they updated everything.
And as long as you do your own due diligence or maybe this thing can auto update itself.
Yeah.
But I mean, huh, that's a really good point because that's one of those things that worked
out this time, but wouldn't necessarily have, I mean, look at Specter and Meltdown.
Yeah.
Intel was basically just like, eh, it's been a long time.
That stuff's legacy, forget it.
And that's not cool.
I get it, but that's not cool.
And if this, if we hadn't found this for another five years, would they have gotten updated?
Probably not.
Probably not.
And so, yeah, good, you know, good guy, gigabyte, you know, dealing with it, but also it's far
better to just not do that in the first place.
Yeah, for sure.
I just like, I don't know, it's good.
If a company exists for a long enough period of time, something like this is going to happen.
Yeah, we've, Uninfamous Alex says, we forget the human element because we're treated so
poorly, anti-consumer market it's become.
Yoda is writing into the show here and you know what, yeah, I, you know, I, I get it.
And I think that's, you know, I think that's pretty, I think that's pretty fair in a lot
of cases, but I also think that, you know what, maybe part of it is just that I, I get
to, I get to be face to face with the people who build these products sometimes and knowing
that they're trying really hard makes me more appreciative of the things that do go
well sometimes.
And it's not in like a, it's, it's not in like a, Oh, I'm compromised kind of way.
Like it's, it's not about money changing hands.
Like I remember getting a pretty different perspective on Intel when I went to the Optane
launch event, it was super data center focused, but some of the gaming folks who were involved
like directly involved in bringing skull trail to market, that was their super cool
dual socket enthusiast thing that was really expensive and like kind of dumb, but it was
awesome though, but very cool.
We're there and just talking about how hard they push internally for these cool skunk
works projects and stuff like that.
And it just, they didn't, they didn't pay me any money or anything like that.
It just, you know, you meet people and you get a better understanding of what they're
about and you learn that even these soulless companies and the shareholders, I, I've not
changed how I feel about shareholders at all.
Shareholders are, are, are, they're a necessary evil, I think is the nicest thing I can say
about shareholders, uh, for public companies in particular, where the only, the only outcome
they want typically speaking is more money, right?
Um, so I haven't changed how I feel about them, but the actual workers, the actual people,
the engineers, the designers, the janitors, it doesn't matter.
The people who are working on bringing us these products, a lot of the time they're
really passionate.
They actually love what they do.
Another really surprising moment for me was when I went to Micron and that was a sponsor
video, so you know, take this for whatever, whatever you can talk about what a shill
I am or whatever, but that's, it has nothing to do with it.
Um, I was just blown away by how excited these people were to make better memory and to get
a chance to talk about it.
Yeah.
That's the other thing, guys, these are not professional actors who are pretending to
be so happy dappy working at Micron so that I'll make a nice video about them.
It's not, it's not like that.
These were, these were like the people who actually work on this stuff.
And you can tell when someone's passionate because you ask a question and they talk for
10 minutes.
I was going to say they won't stop talking about it.
Finally.
Someone has asked me this.
Yeah.
Do you know how long I toiled on this particular problem?
And you know, other than my direct manager, everyone else in my life, I'm bound by NDA,
right?
I'm just so thrilled to be talking to somebody about this, you know, and it's, it's so cool.
Right.
And like, it was the same at the Intel design lab, um, that I visited in, um, in Tel Aviv,
right?
Like it, these people were just, you know, in some cases the products were honestly not
ones that I personally enjoyed.
Sure.
Yeah.
I'm proud of how they, you know, set a target and, you know, in collaboration with management
who is beholden to shareholders, but this team, you know, damn it, they couldn't control
that, but they set a target and dang it, they hit it, you know, time and time again.
And this, this isn't a fab team.
So Intel has had a lot of challenges shrinking their process nodes, but this was like a chip
design team and they were just proud.
They were just proud of the work they were doing.
I'm like, that's cool.
You know, that's really cool.
And I want to, I want to support that and I've got to understand that there's a lot
of people watching when we make a video and some of them are the consumers and we need
to talk to them about whether you should or shouldn't actually buy this thing.
And some of them are the shareholders.
Um, and some of them are the people who actually designed these products.
And you know, I just, I want to show respect and I think we've taken some criticism recently
for how we, how we show both sides of a product, but I think that's really important.
We should appreciate what's good.
I mean, do we, do we want to get so jaded and cynical that we, that we just can't appreciate
the good of the tech that we can't just take joy in how cool this stuff is anymore.
There's also, and I've talked to you about this, but this is actually something that
has consumed a surprisingly large amount of my thoughts lately, which is I've noticed
this, I feel like it's surprisingly recent, but maybe I just haven't been super tuned
in.
Uh, but I've noticed a trend where a lot of the audience is very intent on all of the
reviewers, whether written or, or video or whatever, all saying the same thing.
They want everyone to say the exact same thing.
I think that's super bad and very dangerous.
Interesting.
So you think there's too much groupthink going on right now?
I think there is definitely too much groupthink going on right now.
My reason for that is I think it's beneficial not only to the audience, but to all the reviewers
as well, regardless of what medium they have, to have reviewers taking different approaches,
trying different things, coming to slightly different conclusions, and then you as the
audience check out a bunch of different pieces of content and make up your own mind based
on these different approaches.
That is how I think it should work.
That is how I think it has worked for a really long time.
So when you absorb some piece of content, whether you're reading it or watching or listening
to it or whatever, and then go to a different one and see a slightly different take.
And all of a sudden one of them has to be right.
Yeah.
And one of them has to be wrong.
Yeah.
I don't think that's good.
Right.
I think that's bad.
Um, so just want to throw that out there.
I think that's like actually extremely bad.
And I think this is one of those situations and I hazard to say this type of stuff, but
like you don't want that.
Yeah.
Like I think you're, you're, you're chasing the wrong thing.
I think that if you get to the result of what this thing is, it's going to be just bad for
everybody because you're going to get crazy consolidation.
There will be less reviewers, there will be, and then that will result in less things being
found.
And it's just bad.
I mean, I think it's a pretty clear.
I think I've always been consistent.
More competition is more better and we can't say that about hardware manufacturers and
then, and then go, Oh, but, but, but, but, but we need to be the only reviewer that you
listen to.
Yeah.
No one voice should ever, ever be the only one in your ear.
That's always bad.
Every single time it will get, we'll never work out well.
And that's one of the reasons that we have tried to be so collaborative with the rest
of the tech community.
I mean, I think recently we've talked about how obviously, you know, we're trying to build
our organization to build the best possible content we can and, you know, if, if people
are finding it hard to deliver the same quality of content, then like, sorry, you know, find
a different angle.
Right.
You know, and you know, let's go.
But we've also tried to work hard to build a spirit of collaboration in the tech community
as well.
I mean, you name a tech creator and we've probably collaborated with them at some point,
or if we haven't, we've probably invited them to LTX this year.
There's actually a lot of creators that I have never even met that are coming to LTX
this year.
And I'm super excited.
We want to bring people together.
We want to, I want to see collabs.
I think it's going to be really exciting.
It's going to be really fun.
And that's because we're putting our money where our mouth is.
We're literally spending six figures on creator travel and hotels for LTX.
We're spending a fricking lot of money to put our money where our mouth is and, and
show that we actually do care about this.
You guys should have as many voices as possible when you're trying to evaluate what to spend
your hard earned money on because nobody is going to see things exactly the way you do.
And if they do, you got to kind of look in the mirror and go, are these actually my thoughts
or are these just someone else's thoughts?
And I'm just parroting them.
Am I actually doing any critical thinking here?
That's something.
Never stop critically thinking for yourself.
I realized I never kind of came back to, have I buried the hatchet with Nvidia?
Someone asked, have I, have I resolved things with Jensen?
I haven't talked to Jensen in many years.
I think the last time I talked to Jensen was just to like introduce myself at an event
or something like that.
Like I've never really spoken with him at length or anything.
But I definitely had some issues with our previous Nvidia rep who simply revealed to
me, regardless of the apology that went out to Hardware Unboxed afterward, revealed to
me through his actions that he didn't respect media, didn't properly understand our role
in keeping Nvidia accountable, felt that we were simply part of Nvidia's marketing apparatus.
And at that point, I just, you know, I never apologized for anything that I said.
I think maybe an apology was expected, but I wasn't going to apologize because at the
end of the day, I didn't say anything that was wrong.
And, you know, it was it was my team, my group, my my media community that was disrespected.
You know, I don't owe you an apology for calling you out for being disrespectful.
Like that's actually not how that works.
And that particular rep is no longer with the company so that they are retired now.
And I met my new rep.
So they started just a few weeks ago, I think.
So before you before you jump in with conspiracy theories about how we're, you know, that's
all that's why our video was, you know, more balanced for the 4060 or whatever.
No, that's just how we're going to make videos where we want to look at everything we want
to look at it from shine a light on it from every angle.
So this is my first time meeting them.
But they basically came in and were like, hey, I want to I want to have a fresh start
here.
And I kind of went, that's nice.
It was it was a tough meeting.
It wasn't, you know, all sunshine and rainbows.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there's some there's some there's some some old wounds to deal with there.
Yeah, there's been this is why it's always so funny to me.
To be told that I'm some kind of Nvidia show.
I like good products.
And so that's not a bias.
That's not being a fanboy.
That's just evaluating things.
And then seeing how they are and forming an opinion.
That's not that's not bias.
If something is good, and you think it's good, that's, that's just fact, right?
Like that's it.
And and and again, though, back to what we said before, my fact is not necessarily your
fact.
Right?
If I love this product for gaming, and you use some kind of professional software, and
it's been they've had this bug for three years that completely ruins your life, and you need
to use something else.
That's your life, right?
Like that's, that's your perspective.
And that's totally valid, right?
But for me, it doesn't, it doesn't make me a fan, to say this is a good product that
works really well.
It's expensive, but you got to give it to them.
It works really well.
Where was I going with this?
I totally can't remember because my brain is bad.
Right?
Yeah, I always get a kick out of it when people think I'm some kind of Nvidia shill.
Nvidia has done so little sponsored and paid work with us over the years, that I don't
even think they would register as like a, like how many decimal places would we have
to get to?
So you've got percentages of our total, total overall income, and then you've got like a
decimal of a percentage.
I don't even think they'd be at one decimal.
I think they'd be at two.
Like they are functionally most years.
There's nothing.
Yeah.
They've only worked with us like twice.
Yeah.
Functionally negligible.
Which made it particularly funny to me when I heard through the grapevine back after the
hardware unboxed thing that Nvidia was putting pressure on their partners that they give
marketing funds to, to not spend those funds with us.
Because even accounting for pass-through, it's like negligible, like a non-factor.
So they, they tried to put this, allegedly tried to put this, I heard from two, two sources
though.
They tried to put this financial pressure on us after the hardware unboxed thing.
That's another thing is like, they apologize to hardware unboxed.
I never got an apology for that.
So there's been some, I am not a fan of Nvidia and the way that they do business.
And so I made that very clear.
I made that extremely clear to our new rep that this relationship is not going to be
repaired by coming in and saying, you know, it'd be great, a fresh start.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
I guess that would be great.
But you're going to have to figure this out because as far as I can tell, a lot of Nvidia's
behaviors are not as simple as one rep going rogue, disrespecting the media and engaging
in these mafia thug business tactics.
I've seen Nvidia engage with their manufacturing partners in the same way, their board partners.
I've seen Nvidia engage with their retail partners in the same way.
Nvidia is a cutthroat company.
They are competitive, they compete.
And maybe that's a big part of the reason they win so much.
But that doesn't mean that they can't be respectful while they're, while they're competing.
That doesn't mean they can't share some of the spoils of war.
You know, we saw the way that they've squeezed margins for their for their board partners,
for example, over the years.
And so I basically said, look, I think that realistically, a lot of the problems I had
with Nvidia are not as simple as a fresh start.
I appreciate anything that you think that you can do.
And what I can tell you is I will, I will have an open mind.
You know, I will, I will try to have a fresh start.
But you're going to have to understand that there's going to be more to this than just
the way that you treat me, right?
I just I love this.
I love this saying or expression or whatever it is where, you know, a man that's kind to
you and rude to a waiter is a rude man, right?
And I experienced that a lot being being a prominent creator in the tech community.
It is pretty easy for me to get prompt service on something, which is a big part of the reason
that we do secret shopper, which is a big part of the reason that we are introducing
our secret shopping, our sponsors series, which is going to be kicking off very soon.
I believe all of the background has been done, but the person who is working on that has
other projects.
So it's taking some time to get everything compiled and turn it into a script.
But I'm I'm really, really excited to bring that series to you guys, because we want to
we want to know, like, are we just getting good treatment because Nvidia wants to project
being a nice guy through their treatment of us and turn us into fans.
It's something we've always got to watch out for.
And you know, maybe this is maybe I'm jaded and cynical.
Maybe maybe I'm just experienced.
Sometimes I can't tell the difference, but it's the kind of thing that brands do.
They do it all the time.
And that's not being that's just being realistic.
And it was it was funny because there was another classic brand move that got pulled
on this trip that I was a little frustrated with one of our team members for not being
aware of.
And then I kind of you know, I kind of went I talked to them yesterday and basically like
I had said some some pretty direct words previously.
And I don't take any of them back.
You know, you know who you are.
It had you had to hear it.
I want you to I want you to learn.
I want you to get more experienced.
I want you to to do better because like sandwiched a little better, though.
Yeah.
But I could have I could have done a better job of the poop sandwich.
But you know, these are important life skills, regardless of whether you're going to work
here forever or you're going to work somewhere else.
You got it.
You got to learn these things.
You got to take these with you.
So I'm glad I told you, but I could have been a bit nicer about it.
But basically, what I said is like, look, brands have their agenda.
You have your agenda and you've got to keep these things separate.
You've got to understand you don't work for them and they are going to use every possible
trick in the book to manipulate you into doing what they want.
And in this case, it was a sponsored project that was supposed to happen while we were
here.
Actually, it was a couple of things, but the one that started it was the sponsored project
that was supposed to happen here with a big board maker where I wanted to see a GPU manufacturing
line and I basically said sponsorship deal or no sponsorship deal.
I'm not going unless we're seeing a GPU manufacturing line.
I want to see a GPU go start to finish and then I want to power it on, kind of like what
we did at the Micron factory.
In the lead up to the show, I kept being told, okay, yeah, we haven't confirmed exactly what
it's going to be.
We haven't confirmed.
We haven't confirmed yet and I'm like, you need to get this confirmed.
You have to get this confirmed.
We are flying 11 hours around the world or whatever it is and you got to get this confirmed
before we go.
And I can see why it might not have seemed that urgent because we were going to Computex
anyway.
Yeah.
Right.
When you're negotiating something, the more things you leave until the moment when you
arrive, the more potential there is for what happens next, which is that on the day we
were supposed to go and shoot this video.
We were contacted in the morning and told, hey, we can't make the GPU manufacturing line
work, but what we do have is a new model of GPU that you can show and some cases and some
upcoming
extremely basic level boring Computex content.
Yeah.
The like normal Computex content.
So yeah, the sponsor deal is still on, but it's going to be this.
And I kind of went, okay, I made this really clear when I said before the show that the
sponsorship deal is not on unless we are bringing content about GPU manufacturing to the people.
I meant it.
That's not, it's not negotiable.
It's not a conversation.
I don't want to be talking about this right now because I already told you.
And the thing is like, I'm not trying to be, I'm not trying to be a jerk about it, but
I am beholden to my boss.
And I don't mean our incoming CEO.
I mean you guys.
You guys are the boss.
If I upload crap, you guys are going to download it or worse.
You're going to not watch it.
And then we talked about, you know, exponential channel decay that's going to happen.
It's a fight for survival every day.
If I bring you guys regardless of sponsorship dollars, right?
Like that's what I'm, you know, that's what ultimately I have to do.
If I want to get sponsorship dollars, I have to find a way to cram those into a project
that is entertaining enough for you guys that you want to watch it regardless of that.
Right?
So, you know, I will, I will sometimes take a project that I would just love to do.
I would just, I would just love to see the Micron factory tour.
That's actually a great example.
I would have wanted to go regardless of the money, but I'll hold out.
I'll basically go, no, it's gotta be paid.
Because realistically for something like that, they're gonna, they're gonna need a whole
bunch of, uh, like NDA, like type of privacy, privacy control over it anyway.
So if they're going to expect all of that, then I'm sitting here going, well, then yeah,
then you pay the sponsorship dollar or I'm not going, even though I'm sitting there going,
please, please do it.
Right.
Um, so, so that's what happened with this board maker is I basically went, look, I told
you we're not going because my boss says, that's not interesting enough.
So we aren't going unless this is happening.
And I think everyone was sort of taken aback, including the person on my team who kind of
went, Oh, when I said, okay, well, we're not going then we're going to go shoot something
else.
And we ended up going to the gigabyte booth where we shot that cool, uh, gray super chip
video.
That was actually, that was a lot of fun.
And uh, later on in the week we made another attempt at it and whether it was a miscommunication
or whether it was another effort to just get us on site so they could get us to talk about
something else again.
Um, we arrived and it wasn't a manufacturing line, uh, or even a prototyping line, which
is what I thought we were going to see.
I thought we were going to see a prototyping line.
It was just like some PCBs and some finished GPUs and soldering iron, which is not how
they do it, which is not how they build GPUs at all.
Um, and so we, we shot a quick, um, short for one of the channels and we just like left
and you know, maybe it was a miscommunication.
Maybe it was, um, you know, maybe they just wanted to get us in there to talk about this
other stuff they wanted to talk about.
I'm not sure, but it was a, it was a really valuable learning experience, I think, for
the way that the way that brands will, will try to get you close or get you in the door.
And then once you're already there, kind of go, Oh, well some cost fallacy, you might
as well talk about this other thing because you know, it'd be a shame.
Even when you do have a really solid agreement, it's often attempted.
Yep.
Yeah.
We had, we had an issue with a case manufacturer this year where we wanted to do something
cool with one of their products.
Um, and they were showing it at this one location, but we wanted to do something at the other
location and they didn't want to give us the one that was at the one location for some
reason.
And they basically made us borrowing it contingent on going to their party, their, their event.
And I was like, okay, I'll go, but I can't stay long because I have a commitment.
I'm playing badminton tonight and I'm only going to go if there's food because, and I'm
not trying to, I'm not trying to be a diva about it, but I am on my way.
Out the door to get food before I go exercise.
I cannot go to exercise before I've eaten.
So I can't go to your event unless there's food there.
I arrived, there was no food.
There was like, like a dozen of the last order that nobody wanted left.
And there was, um, and immediately they started trying to brief me on their like products
that I didn't come there to talk about.
Um, and then what's even worse is before we got a chance to do anything with the thing
we borrowed, they asked for it back.
And um, one of our team members, uh, went full, just like errand person for them and
like brought it back to them when we would have been going the next morning anyway.
And I was like, so that was again, you know, like, Hey, these are the moves brands pull.
They try it, they try and make you their beta and you can't, you can't be there for that.
That's the answer is the answer is no.
And it's not about being a jerk.
It's about standing your ground.
Right.
And I don't know, maybe it's just like, is it like a, like a Canadian cultural thing?
Just like wanting to be a people pleaser?
Did I, did I used to be more like that?
Have I just, have I just gotten, Oh, well, okay then.
I think, I think back in the day the video would have been made, but I think for different
reasons, I think back in the day we, we valued volume very highly.
Yeah.
So we would just get a lot of content out all the time.
So like,
it's always, it's always kind of funny to me when people talk about how much better
our content used to be when we used to focus on quality videos from a show, what are you
talking about?
Sure.
Dude.
We upload less now than ever.
Um, we used to have a thing at CES where you had 30 minutes per appointment and that included
travel time.
Yeah.
Which could be switching hotels.
Yeah.
Like there was not time for, for quality my dude.
Yeah.
Man.
Looking back at old videos, like there were certainly some fun and funny, just dragon
energy things that happened, but I don't know about, I don't know if quality is the right
word to describe anything that we used to do compared to what we do today.
Yeah.
This is an impromptu topic.
Sorry.
I'm blindsiding you with this, but I wanted to talk about why we didn't cover one of the
big pieces of news at the show this year.
This was another sort of having to having to draw a line in the sand.
We were supposed to get seven videos this week and we ultimately didn't end up making
one of them because partly through my own error, we arrived at a booth and realized
that the people that we were about to cover had ripped off the community in the past.
Yeah.
And I had you know, not intentionally, but I had been complicit and
that was not about to happen again.
Yeah.
And that, that's not going to happen again.
So one of the, one of the big things that the show was this super cool and I saw it,
I was briefed on it.
It's super cool, but this collaborative case between StreeCom and Callios that's capable
of dissipating, they say 600, but actually it's more like 700 Watts passively depending
on the thermal output of your CPU and GPU.
So it has two loops and they're identical, but they rate, I think the CPU one slightly
lower just because most CPUs are not going to hit that level anyway or something like
that.
I forget.
There's some, there's some reason that one of them is like rated a little bit lower when
they talk about the product overall.
But actually if you had a differently balanced system, it could, it could even dissipate
a little bit more heat.
So I arrived.
Oh, right.
So first let's talk about who these folks are.
So StreeCom, tons of respect.
I love those guys.
They do just a great, great job of manufacturing, super sleek aluminum cases and accessories
and stuff like that.
In fact, they make the test benches that we use for lab, a really cool modular test benches
that like pack flat, like awesome.
Actually, hold on.
Yeah.
That is StreeCom, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
The open bench table.
Yeah.
That thing is sick.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's true.
Cool.
So StreeCom makes that love those guys.
Now let's talk about Callios.
Do you guys remember the passive, like 300 watt or 350 watt case from like six years
ago, Kickstarter campaign, do you remember this thing?
It was pumpless, which was super cool.
So it's full of refrigerant and then the heat from the CPU or, well, I mean, or GPU and
GPU, whatever would force would cause the refrigerant to evaporate and then it would
start moving and then it would condense and then it would, it would actually start flowing
on its own without any kind of pumping system.
So the whole thing was completely silent, super cool tech.
They raised a quarter million dollars on Kickstarter, give or take, and then ghosted.
Nobody who bought one of those original cases ever got anything for their money as far as
I can tell.
And this was a significant amount of money.
This case was over $500 on average, right?
Cause remember Kickstarter, there's the different tiers depending on how early you how early
you fund it.
And I covered the case.
In fact, I covered them twice.
This, I covered the case, actually it might've been three times.
I don't, I don't remember anymore, but I definitely covered it at least twice.
I covered the case in our studio and tested it and it was amazing and super cool.
And then I covered another collaborative project they were doing on like a smaller cube passive
system later on at a trade show at CES or something like that.
And I took a lot of, so, okay, yeah, people are, people are in the chat here.
I thought they, I thought they collapsed.
Well, no, they didn't.
Callios did, existed before and still exists now.
I mean, their main business is, is B2B cooling solutions, like silent passive cooling solutions.
And they, they work in all kinds of different industries, including like they have some
history in the aerospace industry, for example.
And so they, they, they had the experience with cooling and they had the, the backing,
they had the reputation as a real company that made me comfortable promoting this as
a product that genuinely would exist, where they would overcome the challenges and actually
deliver these to people.
And they just didn't, they just didn't deliver them.
And I want to tell both sides of the story here because I actually had the Callios founder
and I also had the new CEO of Callios there in the booth with me.
And they basically went like, look, we spent three times the amount of the Kickstarter
backers trying to make this thing happen.
There were challenges we didn't foresee.
We were naive.
It was a smaller team and I'm sorry, we didn't deliver anything, but it was Kickstarter.
And I kind of went, okay, that's not really how that works, but what about people's money?
And they're like, okay, we have a solution for that.
And I go, okay, I would like to hear your solution because I basically got the briefing
and I told them, we have two paths here.
Either you tell me how you're going to make this right and I make a video about this or
you don't tell me how you're going to make this right and I walk away and I'm not acknowledging
your company here.
And they go, okay, no, no, we have a solution for this.
For everyone who backed the original case, they will get a voucher for the full amount
of their backing toward the new case.
And I went on the surface, that sounds possibly pretty OK to note that it's not a whole new
case, though, is the delta here.
Well, the new case can dissipate about double the heat.
It's and it's a much nicer looking design, it's lighter, however, however, the new case is
priced according to its heat dissipation capabilities.
So they were offering a credit of 500 and change five hundred dollars, essentially, let's
say let's say five seventy five.
Towards a one thousand dollar case, I'm sitting here going.
This is interesting, shot key and Twitch chat has a has an uncharacteristically terrible
take for Twitch chat, and that's really something.
So you blackmailed them.
No, I didn't blackmail them.
That's not what blackmail is.
You should go look up a sort of anyway, it's amazing how confused people get sometimes.
So sorry, they offered so they're offering let's say six hundred.
Let's round up. They're offering a six hundred dollar voucher for a thousand dollar
product. And I kind of went, so are you serious right now?
You took my money, let's say hypothetically, I'm one of these buyers, you took my money,
my significant amount of money six years ago, and you're coming back to me now saying no,
but we're really going to ship you something this time.
All we need is double your money, more money.
Needless to say, I wasn't happy with that, I didn't consider that acceptable.
I said I said that's a good option that people should have, but at the end of the day,
they need to also have the option to have their money back, because the way that it
works is if you're a real company that behaves like a real company, when you take
someone's money and you don't ship them a product, then you should give them their
money back. And they kind of went, yeah, but it was Kickstarter.
It was it was a small team.
It was a, you know, offshoot skunkworks project.
I go, OK, but like this is your integrity we're talking about.
I'm not talking about your legal obligations here.
I'm talking about your integrity as as a company, as a person.
The right thing to do if you take someone's money and don't deliver it and don't deliver
the product is to give them their money back.
And they basically this is when I was talking to the founder and they basically went, look,
I have to discuss this with the new CEO.
Let me get back to you. I said, OK, well, I'm going to go, you know, check out the rest
of the show floor, see if there's anything else cool to cover and we'll we'll go from
there. And you just here's my cell.
Just give me a call when you guys have had a chance to talk about it and we'll go from
there. So I get a call a few hours later and classic brand tactics.
They go, OK, we've we've talked about it.
We've come to a solution. I'm like, OK, cool.
What is it? They're like, why don't you swing by the booth?
And I go, why don't we just talk about it on the phone?
Because it should be a simple answer if the news was good.
Yeah, they would just tell me.
Yeah, but I was like, realistically, you know what?
Andy and Jake are about to order food.
Get me one of whatever Jake's having and I'm going to hobble over to the booth and I
will I will tell them no in their faces because whatever, I'm not I'm not afraid of
that. If they think that bringing me there is going to somehow make me change my line
in the sand that I've drawn, then I've got something else coming.
So sure, I'll play your game.
So I get there and they tell me, OK, you know, what if it was you know, what if it was
some kind of. You know, share in the what what if they got what if in addition to the
discount, they got some kind of share in the profits of the new product, I'm sitting
here going. What are you even talking about?
Yeah, I know that I had discussed how Kickstarter is sort of dumb because it's
basically, you know, investment where you don't get any equity, right?
Because it's it's it's either buying a product or it's kind of that.
Right. And you can't both of them are sort of.
Well, buying a product is fine unless the product doesn't get delivered, in which case
it's basically just taking people's money, right, and I kind of went.
Yeah, I mean, hey, thanks for playing, but that's actually not how this works.
If you guys are a real company with integrity, then what you do is you give them back
their money. I also run a physical goods business.
We also make mistakes from time to time.
And when we do, we eat it and you can always offer like, oh, if you don't
take a refund and you take a credit towards the next thing, we'll like bump up its
value by a small amount or not.
Even if you're happy with the credit, take the credit to.
But getting a refund needs to be an option.
Yeah. And I understand what they're saying.
They made a car comparison.
They were like, you know, we originally sold a Citroen and now we're shipping a BMW.
We can't just like ship everyone who paid for a Citroen and BMW.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, 100 percent.
So refund them. So refund because you didn't ship the Citroen.
You never shipped it. Yeah.
And so.
The really baffling thing about this to me is that Callius is a real company and they
really do have any integrity whatsoever.
This is such a small price to pay.
The total backing.
Was about a quarter million dollars, which is a lot of money, which is a lot of money
on like big manufacturing business scale.
But if you're looking to just.
Put this in the past for real, do it properly, and if you want a PR win, you basically
say, look, yeah, we'll offer you a refund, but we actually think it's a better play if
you take the credit and get this much better case.
They'd probably convert a lot of people to the new case.
But they're trying to they're trying to eat the cake and have it, too.
They're trying to just keep money from people who are not going to use the credit for
the case, seem like they're looking like good guys and launch this new case and kind of
go, well, we tried.
Because no, none of those people are unless they actually offer a refund, are going to
be interested in their new promises.
And you know what? It might be different this time.
Streetcom assures me it'll be different.
I trust them still because they're the manufacturing partner helping bring this thing
to life. And I feel bad for Streetcom because it seems like they came into this having
done nothing wrong, ultimately just recognizing this is a super cool technology and
wanting to bring it to gamers.
So I feel bad for them. Right.
But. No, at the end of the day.
This is not a Kickstarter, there's a big difference for me between a Kickstarter from
like. A dude in a basement trying to build a hammer.
That turns into a crowbar and just ultimately not being able to figure it out and a
company launching a product on Kickstarter or launching a new product category on
Kickstarter in terms of the trust that I have and my expectation that this company will
behave in a way that is.
That protects their reputation, right, because at the end of the day, it's all trust me,
bro. So with with a company that has some kind of established reputation, I look at it
and I go, well, you probably want to maintain that so I can probably safely hand you my
money. And in this case, that was not the case at all.
And that's kind of a funny pun because there was no case at all.
They never shipped one. And I basically said, look, we're not we're not going to do it.
So that's that's my.
There is still there is still no update on the hammer, by the way, I just checked the
last update says we're back June 4th, 2022.
We're almost at the one year anniversary of that.
We're going to get there. It's too bad because I really.
Yeah, yeah, here's here's a much better twitch take from Tom Smith, if you see an ad for
a six hundred dollar case and you go to the store and they say instead you have to buy a
thousand dollar case that's called bait and switch and that's even without collecting any
money. Yes. And yes, I know Kickstarter's terms do shield them from any kind of legal
liability here.
But why would you trust that company?
The law is not.
The be all and end all of how we should treat each other.
Yeah, like by law, you know, I'm allowed to.
You can you can you can be kind of a dick bag and still not break the law.
You know, that doesn't make it right.
Yeah, like I mean, if you ever.
Yeah, hopefully Chad is like laws are not morality, legal does not equal ethical.
Yes. Yes.
Law is the bare minimum.
Yes. Yeah.
Yeah. So we didn't cover it.
And, you know, it's too bad.
But I just think at the end of the day, they had they had an opportunity to relatively
cheaply actually put this behind them.
I really wanted to cover the product, not just today, but going forward, I want I want
one, you know, I actually want one and I wanted the views on it.
Even if I was certain it would show up at this point, I would not personally buy one.
I wanted the views. Yeah.
Yeah. But would you buy one if they offered a refund to everyone who didn't get one?
OK, well, see, that's what I'm talking about.
Well, OK. I'm not like guaranteeing I would go purchase one immediately, but I would
definitely consider it because it is super cool.
It's a very cool product.
It's sweet. So like, yeah.
It's very possible.
What's also possible is for us to tell you about our sponsors.
Oh, Dan, hello, Dan, Daniel Besser, are you set up for this?
Yeah. Mr.
Mr. Besser. Hello.
Hello, Daniel. Can you actually not hear me?
Can you hear me? No, we can hear you.
But I wasn't going to tell you.
I refuse. We can hear you.
We can't see anything.
So you kind of just got to tell us when to go.
Yeah, sorry. That's my favorite supervillain.
We don't actually have any Dennis integrations today, so it's just needs.
All right. Well, let's read them.
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It's pretty wild. Seriously, though, we use Backblaze.
Yeah. Is that a bunch of things at this point?
Yeah, we actually use Backblaze a lot. Backblaze is sick.
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I'm sure we must pay more than that for extra retention or do we even have extra
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I don't know if it's off my head, but we pay a lot more than that because we we use
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All right. Now, Dan, what are we supposed to do now?
We've got three more merch messages.
Is it weird just sitting in the studio by yourself?
No, I'm hanging out with AJ. AJ's here.
So I am. I don't look like a crazy person laughing to myself in an empty
warehouse.
Is AJ just sitting on the set?
Yeah, we're eating some sushi together.
It's really nice.
Are you both sitting on the set? Are you in my spot?
Absolutely not. No, sir.
I have a I have a backup technical difficulties line sitting in your spot.
I think he has a better I think he probably has a better spot than me anyway.
Yeah, his desk, like, actually fits legs under it.
So my spot is really uncomfortable.
I was I was mostly making a Big Bang Theory reference.
People are allowed to sit in my chair.
I feel like I have to explain that because a number of people that take what I say
seriously and then I pick up I pick it up, too.
I'm also not serious. Yeah, I sit in his chair all the time.
Maybe, but you do don't look at me like that, Dan, we've talked about the whole
company just to make sure there's like a certain level of equality, the whole
company after Monday morning meeting, actually, one by one, make sure that
everyone sits in life's chair for at least 15 seconds.
You're not far. You're not in on Monday.
Yeah. Yeah. What are we doing?
Where am I? Oh, yeah.
Merch messages. All right. So we got three to go.
Yeah. Hit me. Your thoughts.
You once had a video on object recognition in surveillance systems using
A.I. Neural Network Asics.
Do you see dedicated A.I.
chips being all over devices in the next decade?
Absolutely. 100 percent.
I mean, we're already seeing it until.
Oh, in fact, I think one of the topics in the dark is in our no, rather a topic we
decided not to talk about, but is pretty cool anyway, I guess, is that Intel showed
off stable diffusion running on their.
Their new A.I. accelerated meteor lake chip, and that's it's like what Luke said
about how like private, you know, private machine learning models are going to be
really important going forward.
So being able to just like generate an image, I mean, you might not even would you
would you still need an Internet connection?
Maybe, maybe not for what to just to just generate an image as long.
Yeah. I mean, as long as you have enough storage for the model.
Yeah. Right. Yeah. So, huh.
I mean, they'll probably make you go through the cloud anyway, when you can you could
retrain. So like you could looking at you, Google frickin voice assistant anyway.
Sorry. No, but like stable diffusion itself, you can download it offline entirely.
Oh, I've never tried. I didn't know that.
I've really done it. Yeah.
Cool. So, yeah, being able to do that faster.
I mean, yeah, we're going to see that in your laptop.
And we've been seeing we've been seeing like machine learning course built into
phones for quite some time, doing everything from, you know, trying to optimize
your battery life to optimizing your your photography.
Right. Like, yes, AI chips in all the things, whether you like it or not.
Oh, yeah, it's absolutely a little bit different here.
How did the short circuit channel get its name?
I want to say James is the one who came up with it, because I think I talked about
this once in the past and I thought it was me or something, and then I think he
corrected me, but I could have this memory completely wrong.
And Gmail search is useless now.
Oh, yeah, there's no way you're going to find it.
So if I were to try to find just the first reference to short circuit in my inbox, that
might just be impossible.
Oh, good, John, I used to have short circuit in his stupid email signature, so I have
every email I ever got from Jono here.
Perfect.
I don't think you're going to find it.
I mean, isn't it kind of worth a shot to see the conversation that we had around it?
Here we go. Top names for new channel.
Oh. Wait.
Whoa. So the name was Riley.
So this is when we were OK, OK, this is fun.
Top names for new channel is the subject line from Mr.
Nick Light, February twenty eighteen.
Technically, because apparently we might end up using these in the future.
We're not going to use any of these tech linked or clinked, pronounced clinked.
So it's like an abbreviated ch like tech link.
We didn't end up with clinked because that was dumb.
Tech brief, brief tech, brink of tech, tech point is kind of like a tip.
Best and latest in tech BLT.
We have always had the acronyms.
Quick news, quick news.
That cookie news held on for a little while.
Yeah, I remember that.
The cash. And then I reply, I actually like tech linked best out of them, adding Riley
for his thoughts. The three that I kind of liked were tech linked, tech point and
quick news. And then let's see, Riley pitched in with, I got to say, I find myself
gravitating toward tech linked as well.
We were trying not to do tech linked because it's just it's so close to net linked.
Well, but that was why.
Yeah, like that was just like, oh, what if instead of net linked, it was just tech
linked? Anyway, even though it was my suggestion, I was also kind of trying not to
do it. This one's good.
I wouldn't say that. So Riley pitches in.
He goes, yeah, I find myself gravitating towards it as well.
But I feel like there's so many shows and sites that have tech in the name, so I'd be
less inclined to want that.
I've got a couple more to throw in the pot.
And one of them is a really good idea that we might use someday.
So we're not going to say that one.
But he goes, what about short circuit?
That is the first reference to short circuit.
So I think it must have been Riley, we had some discussion, short circuit lost because
of the movie dot dot dot problem.
Kind of sounds like inside track, which is good, but the movie problems, there's a
movie called Short Circuit.
So we made our name ultimately when we launched Short Circuit totally different by
making it one word.
Got him. Searchability.
Let's go. Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's wild.
I did not know that it was Riley, but it appears that it was totally Riley, whether we
realized it or not.
Is it possible?
OK, hold on. Short circuit branding discussion.
What is this? This is a doc.
Meeting notes, this is amazing.
I love just like poking around at this old stuff, our objective for this meeting
attendance, Nick, Jono, James and Linus objective, establish a baseline for the new
channels logo and branding direction.
Meeting notes. Should the name be one word or two?
Linus wants it, wants it one word name and he likes it.
This is someone else's notes.
Nick, it should be in all caps if it's one word.
Linus wants one word.
Big ass, big C. Yes, I won that executive flex short circuit, big ass, big C.
The reason I care about that, I wasn't I wasn't just trying to be a jerk about it and
just be like, no, this way, because I like being able to abbreviate things.
SC is easier when you clearly see the SC next step.
Color than graphics, colors, pink and yellow, says Linus, baby blue and pink, says
Nick. Linus wants eye searing.
Nick says yellow is very aggressive and if you're looking at it on a screen, it can be
offensive. Linus wants to see options.
Yellow and pink, baby blue and pink.
What did we ultimately end up with?
I think so. Or baby blue, pink, orange and purple and white.
So that's yellow and yellow.
They're all in there. Every color, no green, no red, no navy.
And yeah, I think I think none of those ended up making it 80s styling, digital
branding. Both of those kind of stayed.
Yeah. This is so cool.
How did how did things come to be?
There you go. These are the kinds of meetings that we have that I never want to have
again. Like, oh, I shouldn't even say that because I do I do enjoy the creative
process. You like some of that stuff.
And that actually does fall under vision, officer, sir.
So good luck with that. I just I can't do all of it.
That's the thing. I can't be in every one of these meetings anymore.
Yeah, like it's exhausting.
I'd rather be on the camera on short circuit.
All right, Dan, hit me.
Sure, I think that's where you have like channel managers, like sorry.
Once again, that's where you have like channel managers, because like Riley is
working on game linked, right?
Yeah. So like he's the channel manager for linked in general, as far as my
understanding goes. So like, I'm sure he has more play into the
that type of like, were you involved in the picking of the primary colors for game
linked? No. Yeah.
So we've moved on.
I actually first saw the logo live on one show and I was like, oh, there's a channel
for it. By the way, it's driving Riley crazy how much I keep talking about game
linked on one show because, dang it, Linus, it's not ready for launch yet.
So if you want to if you want to bother him, go subscribe to game linked.
Because the more subscribers are on it, the more he's like, oh, Linus, you keep
talking about game linked.
I wanted to do a big a big surprise launch.
The surprise is over.
So you might as well get subscribed so that at least he can launch the first video
and it can get a ton of views because you guys will all get a notification and you can
watch it and it's going to be awesome because it's going to be tech linked.
But games, you guys are going to love it.
Oh, right, the pool.
OK, Dan, don't let me forget to talk about that after this one more message.
OK. Hey, LD, I love to see Luke back on camera and the two of you work, you two of
you really work well together.
What were some challenges with Luke returning and will we see more of him?
Perhaps a short circuit?
It was really hard to walk from the WAN set over.
That was very tough.
Especially because you were waiting for WAN to start anyway when we did that PC
cleaning products video.
And if we're going to be late for WAN, we might as well both be late for WAN.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what were the challenges with with you returning?
I genuinely don't know.
I think the biggest challenge with bringing Luke back on camera is that compared to
when he used to be on camera, he has a lot of work to do now.
Oh, yeah. I don't have the time to do it consistently.
There's no way. Yeah, I'm excited about game links because the prospect of being
able to just like and tech linked and stuff like that, where I can just show up on
set, do it really quickly and then leave and go back to what I'm doing is like a lot
more feasible than even go through the whole process for like an LCD video or
something. And that kind of worked in in this scenario that we're talking about with
the with the cleaning products video, because like you said, I was just waiting
for WAN anyways. So my my work was pretty ineffective.
So it was like I can wait over there and like clean some stuff.
So it just worked. I don't know.
But yeah, I got a lot of stuff to do. I can't do videos all the time.
I enjoy it. It's fun. But yeah.
All right. Pool.
So the pool company we contracted is GRN Pool and Landscape.
And it has been two years.
We checked. It has actually been two years since we got the original like
documentation and sent a deposit to begin work on our project.
At the time, they had pretty good reviews and seemed very knowledgeable and
professional. Things were moving along quite quickly when it came to selecting
materials and and design and and all of that kind of stuff.
And we actually ended up starting with pool and awarding them landscaping stuff as
well, which now we're not doing with them anymore.
They do any of that?
Yeah. Yeah. So all the stuff that changed in like the outside so far has been them.
So they do work.
And this is one of those cases where I want to I want to give mad props to the onsite
workers, like all the guys that I've had the pleasure of interacting with have been
just solid and they seem to care.
They seem to try. But I think they really you know, this is my own speculation.
I think they really struggle with communication.
And so when they do make mistakes, a lot of the time, it's because they just.
Didn't know, so this company has screwed up or just not shown up.
So many things and some of it's just like, you know, oh, that could have easily been a
misunderstanding, like, for example, the all the tiles
that this could have been a communication issue.
I don't know. But they were all supposed to go one way.
And instead it goes one way down the sides and it goes this way down.
So it looks stupid.
They used a different color of grout for like the sandy grout around the pool and the
ones on the deck. And it's like these are obviously like first world problems, but they.
Oh, my God.
Oh, oh, yeah, this was this was this was a this was a really good one.
Our interior contractor, who's a totally different contractor, we're really happy with
those guys, might as well shut them out to Shermar, showed up and was like, hey, I
couldn't help noticing they were digging really close to the house and they've done
nothing to support these these footings for the upper balcony.
Yeah, that can't be like that.
And they had to help us get that fixed, basically, like put these braces on it.
The the really the really bad part, the worst part has been the communication, though,
just yeah, we're coming this day and then they just don't show up and then we go, hey,
where the heck are you? And like, we're coming this other day.
Yeah, but that didn't answer my question.
Where were you? And looking at Google reviews, it looks like this has this has
this has become, if it wasn't always a problem.
And the way that they are conducting their business seems to me to be.
Extremely, extremely easy, where they they say they're going to do things, they don't
do things, they say they're they're taking deposits to acquire materials, those
materials take an extremely long time to show up and just and it's not it's just
endless. You know, we you know how we're neighbors of cover star.
Yeah. So when we were talking about pool covers, we were like, oh, hey, we're
neighbors of cover star. Why don't we go swing by and ask them if they want to do a
neighborly discount or if there's anything that we can we can do with them?
Because we're like literally almost next door neighbors.
You never know, right? Like it never hurts to ask if you ask for the friends and
neighbors discount as one of the local paint chains, they will literally just apply
discount to your order. Never hurts to ask.
And they're like, oh, yeah, well, we used to use cover star a lot, but these other
ones are better. And then all these like 18 months later or whatever, they're like,
hey, yeah, we're getting the sizing done cover stars coming out to measure it.
And I'm like, which is fine.
I had no problem using cover star, but you could have just told me that and then I
could have asked them if we can get a friends and neighbors discount.
Yeah.
And like, you know, in a very early version of the statement of work, it's very clear
that we wanted in wall stairs because I really like in wall stairs.
I don't like the ladder hanging in.
Yes. Like harder to clean, pain in the butt.
And like it wears out way more stable.
Yeah, I just I just wanted in wall stairs.
And so, you know, they sent us a bill for first of all, we noticed they weren't there
and then we're like, hey, they're not there.
And they sent us a bill for what it would cost to add in wall stairs.
And they send them the thing that's like, hey, this says in wall stairs.
And it's been a year and a half.
So there was some verbal communication in addition to it just being written on the
thing. And so it's not actually legally binding that they were definitely doing it.
But then there's one other Google review where the person also says they asked for in
wall stairs and then were billed for it later.
So maybe this is just a play.
I don't know. But long story short.
The challenges are and you're probably asking like you think you guys would have
learned, you know, why do you keep working with them?
And there's not a lot of pool contractors in the Vancouver area and particularly for
concrete pools, there are even fewer.
So you're you're sort of at the mercy.
They they take deposits, which, you know, yeah, you're right.
Maybe we should have stopped giving them deposits.
But we always kept being told, yeah, no, we're going to we're going to you know, we're
going to get it, you know, we're going to get it done soon.
We're so close. We're so close. We're actually extremely close right now.
All they have to do the slabs already outside.
All they have to do is put the pool equipment on the slab and cut in the stupid in
wall stairs that I asked for and do the install the cover and then put on the
whatever the material they put over the concrete on the on the inside of the pool.
Forget what it's called. It's like some plaster or something, something like that.
And it's like a couple of weeks of work.
And we've been sitting here with a couple of weeks of work left in the project since
like March or something like that.
And it's like constantly like this with these guys.
They finally acknowledge now.
So this is, I guess, an improvement since we gave them an ultimatum.
We were like, hey, you guys need to show up and start working continuously starting on
this day or we're going public with this.
Like, it's not the kind of thing we like to do, but this is ridiculous.
And you you basically.
Yeah, yeah, you earned it.
So they finally admitted to us that, yes, they're pulling people off our job and
putting them on other jobs and we're sitting here going, no, our project has been
pending for two years and the second summer it's going to miss.
And the delays have been from you guys, not from us.
These were not our fault. We've always we've always paid promptly.
As promptly as we can, given that Yvonne finds all kinds of billing
irregularities because she's Yvonne.
And so it takes a ton of time.
It has it has taken an inordinate amount of time for her because there'd be no
communication from HQ.
So she would have to go every morning until that she basically had to project manage
it when they were doing the landscaping because nobody told anybody anything.
So they ended up doing all kinds of dumb stuff like digging up a trench in the wrong
or like they dug up this drain thing that they ultimately had been covered and then
had to like dig again, retrench it and then put a new one in because it just like
didn't have a drain anymore, allegedly.
Yeah. So I'm extremely frustrated and that's why we haven't been able to do whole
room water cooling for the server room, because even though.
Shermar's plumbing guys did a great job of putting in all the all the piping and
everything that we needed before the concrete did finally or the shotcrete did
ultimately get put in.
There's nothing there's no pool to act as a thermal mess.
So, you know, again, I want to be very clear.
This is a first world problem.
I get it. But also when you pay for something, you should and you shake hands and you
have an agreement, then you should probably get that thing.
Is it is there like special liabilities with making pools or something like is there
some reason why you couldn't get a general contractor?
Yeah, it's just it's a really specialized type of work.
And we did find another pool contractor that's willing to take over the job, which is
part of why I'm able to talk about this, because like I was like at their mercy, basically
they had my money. And unless I want to take them to court, which I don't think I'm the
only person doing at this point, either I play ball and get a pool or I antagonize them
and they just pull everybody off my job and work on something else because they clearly
have other work to do. Right.
So I'm just sort of sitting here.
Stuck. Sorry, what was your question again, though?
No, I just I don't know.
Yeah. Yeah, we found another one that's willing to finish the job, so that's great.
But the referral we got for these guys was from like another mom at the school and she
was like, yeah, it took six months and it was pulling teeth, but they did get it done.
So it's not a perfect reference and they won't even look at it, let alone quote it until
we have formally dismissed Jaren from the job, which is, you know, going back to luring
you into the computer to get you to cover something different.
A classic contractor move.
Yeah, that's brutal.
Because, yeah, if their quote sucks, then, you know, obviously I don't want to go with
them. Would you consider if they charged you to come out and quote it?
That'd be better. They charge you like an hourly rate.
Just like, no, no, no, no. But I'm saying, like, sure.
Yeah, I guess so. Yeah, because I could I could understand like them being like, yeah, I
don't want to just help you like negotiate a better rate for somebody else.
Yeah. Yeah. Rough.
Well, at least I now know that there won't be swimming at Linus's place this summer.
Yeah, I've given up.
We were supposed to be swimming before the end of last summer.
Yeah. And I don't think we're going to swim in twenty twenty three.
Yeah. If you're searching contractors and stuff like that, yeah, I really don't see it
happening. There isn't that much to do.
There's like two weeks of work left to do, Luke.
Theoretically, I should be swimming in mid-June.
I wouldn't be surprised, though, because if this new contractor comes in, they might have
liability concerns about the previously existing.
They're going to have to go and check a whole bunch of stuff, which I'm sure I'm going to
pay for.
Yeah.
I'm really frustrated.
I think it's going to be rough.
OK. Are there other topics?
LTS twenty twenty three update.
We are under two months away from LTS twenty twenty three.
We have sold over thirty five hundred tickets so far.
There are an insane amount of creators.
Actually, just naming them all would take a significant period of time.
So I would suggest going to LTS expo dot com slash creators and checking out yourself.
Also, volunteer applications are live.
OK, there it is. It's not a link for some reason, but you can sign up to volunteer by
visiting LTS expo dot com slash volunteer.
Applicants will receive confirmation starting Monday.
Some things that you can do at LTS.
There's a PC building workshop sponsored by Asus where you can learn to build a PC from
start to finish. Great for those wanting to know where to start or potentially a fun
way to like show a partner or a friend how to do it.
There are 20 different stations with workshops happening all throughout the event.
There's a space cadet pinball sponsored by height, eight different stations of space
cadet pinball on custom LTS rigs, and there's a high score leaderboard with prizes for
the highest scores. There's racing sims sponsored by Black Point Cyber, seven awesome
racing sims with D-Box haptic systems, integrated leaderboard with best laps of the
day as well.
There are VR RC cars, again, take control with our modified cars equipped with an FPV
system and steering wheel slash pedal controls.
Is this the same setup as last time?
But way better. Nice.
Yeah, it's it's no.
OK, it's all new.
OK, way better.
There's a custom race course on the expo floor.
When he says that last time, it was sick.
So it was sick, but it was unreliable.
We couldn't keep the cars in operation.
So it's it's designed to be a lot more reliable this time.
Cool. And there's a one v one pyramid.
What? Win your way to the top of the variety of classic and modern games.
Oh, cool. So there's like a little one v one tournament.
All right. Best slash worst of SC short circuit.
Love it or hate it. Our short circuit hosts have picked the best and worst products seen
on the channel to look at and experience.
DIY ethernet cable.
Learn how to crimp and make your own cat six a ethernet cable.
Take it a step further and see if you have what it takes to build a cable as fast as
possible. Whaleland, sponsored by Ubiquiti, two full days of LAN games and
tournaments and water cooling workshops with epic games.
Oh, cool. Learn the ins and outs of water cooling from AIOs to custom hardline loops.
There's also PC building simulator two will be featured at the boost booth if you want
to create a virtual loop instead.
Get your tickets today at tickets dot ltx expo dot com.
I am pretty hyped.
I'm really excited.
That was a very consistent topic of conversation throughout Computech talking
to other creators. So I'll see you don't text me now.
There's so many creators, tech tech potatoes coming.
So that's Dr. Ian Cutress, toasty bros, UFD tech, Stacy Roy.
Terrence apparently coming.
Karen Van Hummer is on the list.
That's funny.
I didn't negotiate all of these necessarily.
So some of these I'm finding out for the first time.
Snazzy Labs is coming, though.
Sort of the home's coming. Sara Dietschy, Christopher Ye.
Pedro from PCMR is coming.
Paul's Hardware, EposVox, ElectroBoom is going to drop by.
David Amell from Marquez's team.
Craft Computing, Coalition Gaming, Chris Titus Tech.
This is just Brandon Wiley is coming, too.
Oh, that's awesome. That makes sense.
AntVenom is coming. Man, there are so...
Derbauer is coming, Hardware Connects.
Iver from Hardware Connects is coming.
Greg Salazar, JayzTwoCents.
Actually too many to name them all.
So, again, I would suggest checking out the creators pages.
Yeah, because it's actually going to be nuts.
Yeah. Strange Parts.
Ah.
This is this is awesome.
Hey.
Oh, crap, I'm an idiot.
I always forget if his name is Cory or Kerry, but the fox
who really specializes in handhelds and has been just
killing it lately, killing it.
Like, look at this view to subscriber ratio.
Seventy six thousand subscribers, but regularly doing 20 to 80 thousand
views a video, getting more views than your subscriber count is pretty sick.
That always means you did it.
You did a banger. Yeah, you did a banger.
Theo Joe, Theo Joe making an appearance.
Love it. OK.
What are we supposed to do now, Dan?
I'm lost without our cue cards.
I feel like, yeah, I forgot to mail them to you.
Well, let's see, we technically have another 10 minutes
until when after dark, but we do have a hell of a lot of messages.
So when in the morning.
Really, I'm surprised there's that many merch messages.
We have a lot of really good questions today.
Oh.
There's not.
Way to go, Luke.
OK, well, I guess.
Wow, I mean, it's been a lot worse.
You're basically an abuser.
Oh, my goodness.
Oh, my gosh, Luke.
The doc wasn't done when we were looking at this.
There's like huge stuff in here that we haven't talked about yet.
Thanks, Riley, adding all this stuff that we absolutely have to talk about.
OK, where are we at, where are we at, where are we at?
Diablo four developers do a Q&A with fake
softball fan questions.
This is extremely not surprising.
This is amazing.
OK, GamesRadar's future games show
interviewed the art director and associate game director of Diablo four
asking fan questions like the cut scenes in D4 are gorgeous.
How important was it to get these as high quality as they are in the game?
Twitter user Phil Tackler looked up the
social handles of the fans who submitted the questions, and they were a mixture
of inactive accounts made years ago or extremely recently when.
OK, to be fair.
That might be fine.
Yeah, it might be people that just have throwaway Twitter accounts.
Yeah, because but also it wouldn't have been all of them for sure.
When asked for comment,
Blizzard said they were not involved in the process of gathering questions.
After much discourse,
the future game show posted an update via a comment on the original interview saying
we messed up in quotes.
Basically, they claim many of the questions were legit,
but the social handles were randomly generated to protect the original what?
Originally randomly generated, but they landed on actual handles.
Cool, what?
I'm sure that's against at least someone's terms of service, that's.
Weird.
OK, moving on, we got to talk about this one
because it was actually called out at the beginning, Dolphin Steam launch postponed.
The Dolphin emulator team has announced
that its planned steam release has been indefinitely postponed following a letter
written from Nintendo to Valve citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA,
which is kind of rough, making matters worse.
Valve confirmed that they reached out to Nintendo first, presumably because they
knew that as a platform hosting Dolphin, Valve would be that makes matters worse.
That's just not surprising at all.
Valve would be in the crosshairs of Nintendo's lawyers, obviously.
Yeah, that makes sense that they would have done that.
As Dolphin had not been released on Steam,
the letter is more of a shot across
the bow warning valve that the emulator's release would violate the DMCA.
Would it, though?
OK, well, here, sure, this is this is, I guess, the argument.
Dolphin's code contains the Wii common key.
Yeah, that sounds like a Nintendo's proprietary code for decrypting Wii games,
which is a thirty nine digit number that is well known.
So I won't paste it here, says our writer.
Oh, but having that in the thing like that does actually make sense to something
that you could go after, even if it is if it is commonly known or whatever.
Some of their emulators require the game
files to host such keys instead, which is arguably legally safer.
Not that we know anything allegedly legal advice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Several lawyers have confirmed to Ars Technica that Nintendo could have
a strong case should it come to a lawsuit because the inclusion of that key.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
A spokesperson for Nintendo said using illegal emulators or illegal copies
of games harms development and ultimately stifles innovation.
Discussion question.
Nintendo being an asshole is one thing,
but is there anything else Valve could have done other than poke the bear?
I don't think so. No, I mean, they were going to be
valid is no stranger to lawsuits at their scale.
I mean, we we talked about this recently.
What was it? The the the haptic or the rumble on the steam deck or
something like that has some patent troll coming after them right now.
Yeah.
I as much as I have pointed out in the past
and been not happy, this was very reasonable of them to do.
Yeah.
As for whether using emulators, which, by the way, are not illegal,
Nintendo, as for whether that ultimately stifles innovation,
I would say that playing Tears of the Kingdom at four K 60 FPS with improved
visual fidelity is innovation and your crappy hardware stifles innovation.
This can go both ways. Boom.
Got him. Yeah.
Got him.
Speaking of stifling innovation,
did you see the Reddit API pricing conversation?
Yeah. Can I help you with this?
What the hell, man? You not even do this, bro.
Oh, I actually like the separation. Oh, it helps my brain.
All right. Well, I'm sorry I broke your pain.
No, it's fine.
Not the first time.
Christian Selig, the developer of the popular Apollo iOS app for Reddit,
says that Reddit wants twelve thousand dollars per fifty million requests.
And this is a quote here.
Apollo made seven billion requests last
month, which would put it at about one point seven million dollars a month.
The average Apollo user uses three hundred and forty four requests per day.
Wow. Which would cost two dollars and fifty cents a month.
That means even with only subscription users, the app would be unable to break
even Imgur apparently charges Apollo one hundred sixty six dollars for the same
number of requests, that is literally almost an order of no.
Oh, wow. Almost two orders of magnitude less.
Twitter, of course, kicked off the trend
of expensive API access to social platforms, with its lowest tier offering
only ten thousand requests for one hundred dollars.
Twitter has subsequently been abandoned as a data source by many academics,
and the future of many long term projects is unclear, such as Boto,
which assesses how likely an account is to be a bot and whose work was actually
cited in Elon Musk's fight to not buy Twitter.
Yeah, this sucks.
People are asking who would pay that for Reddit's API, though,
I think that's I think that's the point.
The point is that these platforms are getting scraped by companies
and not getting any of the money that is getting dumped into AI right now.
And they're sitting there going, well, if we kill a bunch of research
projects and we kill a bunch of community favorite third party apps in the process,
I guess that's totally worth it because we'll definitely still be popular
platforms that will definitely still be valuable for these companies to scrape.
And we're not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, I don't I don't know what's going to happen in that regard,
but.
It's not surprising at all to me.
It sucks.
There's a there's a fair bit more information that I've been reading
about this that's not in our notes here necessarily.
But Christian, the Apollo developer sort
of broke down from from Reddit's public financial statements.
How much each of those calls has to cost them and.
Basically, they're so far beyond just, you know, well.
You know, the Reddit app has ads that help
support us and we're not getting that from your third party app and we need
to find a way to make this sustainable, like like they're so far beyond just
we need to be sustainable.
This is just a blatant cash grab according to his math.
Someone in the full claim chat said
the Google Maps API is less than nine hundred dollars for five hundred thousand
calls for comparison. Yeah, I I said this with the Twitter one, too.
The goal here is not to make it affordable or to make it make sense.
The goal here is to crush third party apps.
Yeah, like.
Yeah, and given how unpopular the first
party Reddit app is, I got to wonder what this means for Reddit.
Like, well, no one's safe.
Where's Slashdot today?
Where's Dig?
I do agree with that, but I feel like we've been in a actually
surprisingly long period of internet stagnation.
Yeah, but it's like that article I sent you before.
The intuitification of everything.
And I think the reason that everything is coming to a head right now is because we
also went through a period of basically unrestricted money hose
flowing into technology, into into Web, however many point companies.
Right. Yeah.
And so now that that now that that spigot is getting turned off and it's all going
into A.I. or it's going into, you know, finding new ways to make housing
unaffordable for regular people. Good.
I think we're seeing these companies pivot to, hey, we we just need to like
make money to please our shareholders. Right.
We can't just be in this in this growth phase.
We can't be in a pleasing the user phase anymore.
And even if because I know some people are going to sniff at that and be like, oh,
yeah, but no companies are going to pay this API fee.
That might be true.
I don't think they're necessarily expecting to make money off this.
But I do think a significant effort is
being put to hamper how much other people are able to make money off of your stuff.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just just putting up walls.
No, if someone is using Twitter, we want them using Twitter through our own means.
If someone is using Reddit, we want them using Reddit through our own means, etc.
Yeah. Yeah.
Someone at FullPlainChat Run John said, my Reddit account is 15 years old.
I'll be leaving once they kill third party apps.
To be completely honest, that'll probably be good for you anyways.
Hey, IOS says the first party Reddit app
makes thousands of tracking calls to the Web that my piehole went nuts blocking and
blew the log files out to gigabytes.
So, yeah, there are reasons there are
reasons they want you using the first party, the first party tools.
And they're not always user friendly reasons.
Oh, yeah, they really are.
Then just stop using it.
Like, is your life actually enriched by using Reddit?
Maybe, but probably not as much as it can be.
Reddit's a really good resource for like, how do I fix this problem?
Reddit, I don't know if I'm just being cynical here.
Maybe I am pessimistic or whatever, but I think most people
do scroll instead of gather information in that way.
I have found
that a more effective Google search for a while has been the same Google search
that you would normally do, and then you append Reddit on the end.
Yeah, that's kind of unfortunate.
It just shows Google going down the hole, to be honest.
But
if you use it in that way, that's kind of its own thing.
And if you use it in that way, you don't really need the app either.
If we're being honest.
Oh, I don't use the app. Yeah, I just
I actually have just like a muscle memory.
Like, there's no way to get rid of the
notification as far as I can tell on mobile when I'm just on the Web,
because I can't find for what I do on Reddit.
I can't find any reason to use an app instead of just using my browser.
I can't think of one.
All I want to do is read things from time to time and post even more occasionally.
And so it prompts me like every time I load the site.
That is better than the app. You want to use the app?
No, not really.
I don't even I don't it bothered me for a long time and it definitely hasn't gone
away, but it doesn't bother me anymore because I just.
No, no, no, no, I think I'm good, actually.
Yeah, someone in FlowPlane chat, my husband absolutely doom scrolls,
he doesn't learn anything useful 99 percent of the time.
Yeah, I think that is the standard
approach to using Reddit, to be completely honest.
Like, I think most people that use
Reddit could benefit very significantly from using it way less,
but that isn't saying that Reddit is useless.
I find it very, very useful for like information.
Yeah, a lot of times when I do that Google search and I append Reddit,
Reddit is like actually the best source and I do it because I have done it without
Reddit at the end and found nothing useful and then done it with Reddit at the end
and then finding very good answers from.
Guys, I don't know if you can hear me, I can't hear you at the moment.
Hello.
Oh, man.
Sorry, chat, hold on a second.
Tap, tap, tap.
I don't want to ad lib everything, not Mike and Jay.
Well, I guess it's just.
It's just me now.
Am I?
I'm not sure I'm sending to them either.
It's very strange.
Mute, unmute.
I'm
going to.
Go ahead.
And.
Restart.
This president.
I hope you enjoy seeing the thing that I put up.
And join hello, are you there?
Hello, hi, Dan. Hello.
Oh, he disconnected.
Oh, I did notice there was only one
person in call, but I thought it maybe didn't show yourself.
I was showing that I was still connected.
I could still see your camera feed
because your camera feed is fed directly from your call.
But I think we lost audio.
OK, cool.
We're back. Not my fault.
Goodbye.
Well, it's not my fault.
I think it might be must be Luke's fault.
Maybe my proxy is Luke's fault.
Yeah. Oh, that's true.
I mean, poo rolls down the hill, so.
Yep, up the hill, two rolls up the hill.
But management is to blame when someone does something wrong.
So does that mean who rolls up here but me?
So I'm not anymore.
Or wait, it's not July 1st yet.
Yeah, you know. OK.
Yeah, it's my fault. Yeah, it's his fault.
Got to
want to give you guys a little update on the eating disorder
helpline chat bot that we talked about previously.
They have paused their plan to switch
from human staff and volunteers to a chat bot.
That's probably good after users found that it was easy to prompt the bot
into recommending calorie restriction, food avoidance and frequent weigh ins.
Even after the user said the doctor
advised them against dieting due to their eating disorder.
I mean, the weight loss advice was broadly
accurate, but the bot lacked the ability of a human to guide the conversation
and simply reflected users preoccupations back at them,
potentially reinforcing anorexia and bulimia.
When posts about this issue drew attention
online, Nita's communications and marketing
vice president commented on at least one post, calling it a flat out lie.
But then the next day, the chat bot was taken down.
They described the issue as a bug
thanking the community members who brought this to their attention.
That's a bit of a pivot.
That's a flat out lie.
Thank you for bringing it to our attention.
I know that this wasn't an AI chat bot, so it's not really
on topic in terms of the revolution that we're undergoing right now or bubble or
whatever technology. Yeah.
However, it does raise some interesting questions about.
What it's going to look like when someone
inevitably does do this with an AI chat bot,
and so I'm glad we talked about it.
I'm glad we have an update for you guys.
And I'm glad that we can move on to talk
about the meta quest three coming this fall for ninety nine.
Have you seen pictures just in this doc?
Actually, it is 40 percent slimmer
with full color pass through higher resolution, better controllers.
And the quest two is getting a price drop to two ninety nine for one hundred
and twenty eight gigs on June four.
That's right. A price drop.
From so wait, is it
tell me something.
OK, hold on, let's just let's just play a little game.
Drop. OK, what about this?
Oh, oh, fake.
What about this?
Is that toss?
Is that a drop? A price toss?
A price? We start calling like Amazon sales price tosses.
Yeah, this is extremely loud.
Oh, sorry.
Sorry, Dan.
Sorry, everyone.
That's OK. But good.
Good. Right. Was it was it at least funny?
It's pretty good. OK, cool.
So it's back down to the regular price and just in time for Apple's headset
on Monday, let's go that I am much more interested in.
Just say I've had some interesting debates with people about this.
I had my first dinner with a billionaire.
I'm not going to name them, but very, very interesting person.
I wonder. Super smart.
But you wonder, yeah, there's only like a set amount of it was it at Computex.
Don't worry about it. OK.
Anyway, the point is super nice, super smart, shockingly engaged in like.
The business for someone who realistically doesn't have to do any more.
And we had a really cool conversation
about Apple where they basically were like, yeah, Apple's really great.
And I was like, yeah, Apple's really great until you get into their sort
of hypocrisy and the way they treat their users like, oh,
you want to update the firmware on that product you bought?
Oh, you haven't bought enough of our products.
Ooh, oh, that's too bad.
And, you know, go borrow someone else's.
Yeah, some of their business that they are quite invested in.
You know, I'm going to keep things very vague so that it's really difficult
to pin this down, but some of their business that they're
invested in has it takes a very principled
approach to to product development and and to billing for their customers.
And, you know, I really respect that.
And so,
you know, I I felt like I wasn't just talking to someone who's like,
well, of course, Apple should do that.
They should just make more money like it was.
It was really great conversation.
And we steered back towards Apple later on in the conversation because they sort
of asked me to to speculate on Apple's VR headset.
I kind of went, look,
I know that this sort of flies in the face of everything I just said about Apple
because I said a bunch of negative stuff.
But that doesn't mean that I don't acknowledge the positive that they do.
And that doesn't mean that I don't respect a lot of what they do in there
and their technological innovation and all that.
And I think if anyone's going to do this, I think it's Apple.
And I think they're going to I think they're going to follow a really similar
playbook to the one that I recognized with the Apple Watch.
And it wasn't the first time they'd done this,
but it was the first time that I was red pilled enough
to figure out what it was that they were doing.
Do you remember what went down with red pilled enough?
Yeah.
What just just like, you know, reality aware enough.
Whoa.
Why?
I know that it has like stupid, like negative connotations or whatever,
but I refuse to I refuse to see it that way.
You're going to like movie.
I'm going with movie reference.
The Matrix. Yeah.
So.
So do you remember what they did with the Apple Watch?
They didn't they just like, wait,
observe other people doing it wrong and then do it themselves?
Well, yeah, they did that to a degree,
but they released the Apple Watch, right?
As long as it's not the little blue pills, Linus.
What's wrong with that?
I mean, you know, things happen.
OK, you want to please your partner, right?
You need a little bit of help. Nothing wrong with that.
It's not life isn't about holding each other down.
OK, sometimes it's about lifting things up.
Anywho, what they did with the Apple Watch was they released it as the Apple Watch
and then when the next generation product came out,
all of a sudden it was like Apple Watch series one or something like that.
Like, remember, the branding was kind of funny around it.
And what they did is they retroactively like retconned the Apple Watch being
the Apple Watch, and they changed the name to series zero.
And then like really quickly,
software support for it like
kind of went like it wasn't getting the latest features.
And it got kind of new about that.
Yeah, it got kind of like B tier long term software support and was sort of was sort
of treated as was sort of treated as like a lesser product.
It kind of kind of went away.
And what I figured out at that time was, oh,
this is the Apple version of a dev kit.
They just it's like minimum viable product.
It's yeah, that makes sense.
It's acceptable enough.
And,
you know, as long as we and the hardware is like underpowered, it's slow and it's
crappy, but we're just going to kind of like support it for as long as we kind of
have to and the new ones are so much better that most people probably upgrade
anyway and hope they didn't buy the gold one.
And it just kind of quietly went away.
And it wasn't until later that I realized that.
Well, apparently series zero is an unofficial name,
they just called it Apple Watch first generation.
And they released a series one that was an upgraded version of the original.
OK, so there that that was the funky branding.
So that's why people called it the series zero, because the first one just like
sucked, it basically got treated like an experiment.
And it's not the first time they did that.
The iPad is actually another classic example.
The first generation iPad was so much worse than the next generation iPad.
It was way slower.
It was fatter.
The battery life sucked.
It was so much worse that I forget what the exact numbers are,
but I think it ended up getting software support for something like half the amount
of time compared to the iPad two, which was back when Apple had sensible
product naming schemes for at least some things.
I've had iPad two simple, right?
Anyway,
and so this is this is kind of a thing they do.
The first generation iPhone sucked.
It didn't even have 3G support.
Right. Like it sucked.
It was essentially a dev kit.
And you could I think you could make
that argument pretty solidly for all three of those products.
You could iterate off of that first one very quickly.
Exactly. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
So I so I was looking at this.
I'm looking at all the.
Oh, my.
Yeah, this is not a very good connector.
So I'm looking at all of the
the indications for the upcoming Apple, Apple VR, mixed reality,
whatever you want to call it, the upcoming Apple headset.
And it's like, yeah, it's probably basically not going to do anything out of the gate.
And this technology is super immature and it's probably going to kind of suck.
And my initial like knee jerk reaction is
it's not very Apple like to, you know, something that sucks.
Yeah, I hear you now. But it's actually very Apple like.
They just also replace it really quickly.
Exactly. So they released the first
generation product to the public as a dev kit.
But instead of charging dev kit like pricing, they charge retail like pricing.
And no, no, dev kits are typically more.
I mean, they charge like, OK, consumer pricing and consumers can buy
it if they want to be part of the experience and live on the bleeding edge.
But understand that this thing is probably
going to go away in terms of software support because devs are going to come up
with really amazing things that you can do with the Apple headset.
And Apple is going to build new capabilities into that next headset.
They're going to iterate fast and you're going to get left behind.
And as long as it doesn't cost too much money, I guess that's OK.
And maybe if it does cost too much money,
I guess that's OK, too, because you like giving Apple your money.
Like, I don't think the iPhone really got good until the iPhone 4.
And maybe that's partly just personal bias because that's when I bought an iPhone.
But that was the first time I felt compelled to own one.
I think I think the iPhone 3G was still a pretty massive paradigm shift.
That's fair.
It felt extremely like cheap.
I don't know. I don't know if I would say, yeah,
I don't know if it was good yet, but it was still like.
That was still the big moment, I think, in my opinion.
A 3GS wasn't bad, people are saying, because that one was a lot faster,
like a lot faster.
I never had any of them, so I don't know.
It's LMG invited to WWDC.
No,
Apple and I have no longer been friends on Facebook for a long time.
We were never friends on Facebook.
Friendship, friendship not ended with Apple.
Yeah, friendship never started.
Apple is one of those companies that you have to play the game.
You have to cover them the way they want to be covered.
And my understanding is Mac address actually has a relationship with Apple now.
But I
the second I found out about that, I went, cool, I'm not going to be involved at all.
Probably good. Which, yeah, is almost certainly for the best.
I think they need to just do their thing and not let me
talk to Apple at all, because I would almost certainly say something that's not
friendly.
OK, so, yes, but even outside of that, just like the association,
like if they if they just treat Mac address like its own encapsulated thing.
Well, they know that Mac address is under the LMG umbrella.
It's not a secret. No, for sure.
But we actually we talked about that when we were starting the channel.
Was we had like serious internal discussions.
Do we stealthily
make this thing completely separate,
knowing that that could facilitate building a relationship with Apple,
but could blow up in our face when people
figure out later that it was part of the LMG umbrella?
Or do we just own that as part of LMG upfront,
be transparent, even if it costs us every building that relationship.
So we just have to like buy samples and do videos later forever,
because we'll never get a reviewer relationship.
We'll never get our questions answered.
Knowing also, though, that the benefit will be that we can grow the channel faster.
There's all these pros and cons.
And ultimately, we went with we went with transparency.
I just don't like
I don't like drama.
I just don't need it in my life.
And it's a lot easier to just be upfront with people.
Yeah, which, again, like makes it that much more triggering for me when I see
conspiracy theories about how I'm accepting, you know, under the table
sponsorships from doing this, from doing that.
Now, if I was doing any of that stuff,
like look at the kind of turnover there is in the tech industry.
You think someone would have talked at some point
about how much under the table money I took?
Whatever.
I think we should hit up merch messages.
Let's hit up some merch messages.
We're at over three hours for the runtime.
What?
Yeah, I said you had 10 minutes left and then you did like 14 more topics.
I want to go to lunch with Dr.
Cutress after when? If I can bring Wendell.
Yeah, sure. Because I was planning on going with Wendell.
Meeting up with Dr.
Cutress would be fantastic.
I haven't seen him this whole show. Yeah, let's go.
Sweet.
Man, I'm looking forward to lunch.
OK, we're going to do these merch messages pretty fast here.
OK, Andy, should we should we turn off the light?
Are we turning off the light?
Merch messages after dark.
I mean, let's see how much of an effect it has.
I kind of feel like not much.
I could just take down the grade.
That's probably too dark.
Does that have a does that have a fade on it at all?
What is it like? Oh, oh, oh.
Don't step into that light.
That's how you know you're dead.
Sure. Yeah, we'll call that one show after dark.
One show after dim.
Yeah, it's noon.
It's pretty late for you guys in the afternoon now.
OK, let's get into it. Morning merch messages.
Morning merch messages.
Good morning, merch messages.
Hi, peeps. In retrospect to reviews like
the Ally one that come out way before the actual release date.
Would it be fair to make the review
closer to the release date as things may change?
That's a really good question,
and I think this was probably prompted by Dave 2D's video on the Ally
where the title was basically don't trust other reviews of the ROG Ally
and kind of talks about covering the product later.
And I, you know, I like Dave.
I've I've met Dave before.
And honestly, there's no real way for me to sugarcoat this, though.
I think that's a shockingly bad take.
You you you you cover a product when the manufacturer says it's done and to
to not cover it at that point, like you can make your decision
to to to to not cover it because you think it's not in a good enough state or
whatever else, but at the end of the day, to say that another
media publication did anything wrong
or that or that readers and viewers shouldn't trust another review because
it was it was done at an earlier stage in the products.
Lifetime is sort of puzzling to me.
Like, I think there is an absolute
benefit to covering products over their lifespan.
So I don't I don't disagree with that.
I think that's really good.
But at the end of the day, we can only cover what we're given.
And when the manufacturer says, hey, this is this is primetime.
We're not in a position to say, no, we disagree that it's primetime.
We're going to cover it when it's like more primetime or.
Our job is to say, hey, this is the day
that preorders are going up and this is the state of this product,
because I might fix it more or they might not.
And if they don't, you need to understand exactly what it is you're buying.
They said it was done.
And so if they think it's done,
then as far as I'm concerned, they could stop development tomorrow.
They probably won't.
But they could.
And so you have to you have to cover things.
As they are
rather rather than covering them as they
will be, you can acknowledge what they might be.
You can talk about what the brand says they might do.
But no, you've got a yeah, you've got a.
Next up.
I forget what the actual question was.
Why don't you review it?
Closer to these days? Yeah.
Yeah, no, no, we we we should review it
when Asus asks for ask for preorder money, they're asking for your money.
As far as I'm concerned, the second a brand is asking for your money,
we need to take a close look at exactly what you're getting for it.
And then if that changes over time, hey, that's great.
I mean, that's done a great job of that with the steam deck,
but we can't take it for granted.
And if other publications cover it
closer to the availability date,
a month after the availability date, six months after the availability date,
I hope check them out. Yeah, check it out.
We had this conversation earlier in the show.
We don't all have to say the same thing.
You don't like it's not of particular benefit to you for like every single
reviewer to release identical videos all at the exact same minute.
Like just whatever.
Yes, Game Linked is real.
The lake waves and floatplane chat.
Go subscribe.
OK, up next is from David.
What is the most interesting thing you saw
at Computex that you thought wouldn't make a good video?
Oh, that's a really good question.
I like this one a lot, yeah, because you got to you got two brains, don't you?
Wow, this thing's cool.
Nobody cares.
Yeah, that happens to me a lot at these
type of shows, but I wasn't on the show for this whole line.
Holy crap.
OK, yeah, I I swung by like the USB IF booth
and they had just like vendor showcases of of cool tech that's coming.
And they had I think it was either a live
demo or it was just some information on like USB 80 gig, like 80 gigabit.
And I was like, wow.
See you later. That booth is always fun to go by.
Yeah, and never worth making a video.
Yeah, but like, yeah, absolutely.
Every time it's here, it's cool and they're here every time.
So
and there's I love going through there's like I wasn't there this year.
So I'm going to describe it poorly.
But there's one side of the hall, which is like more consumer focused stuff.
Then there's the other side of the hall, which is like, you know,
the companies that actually make the things that a lot of the other brands are
branding going through that section is very interesting.
Yeah, I think we did a video on that one year.
Actually, MSI makes a car charger apparently in some markets.
That's right. And so I was like, OK.
And oh, I dropped by I dropped by this
company that makes switches with screens on them.
And it's for it's for like aviation consoles and stuff like that.
And so not like key switches, not for like a keyboard, well, they are
but not for a keyboard, but like for it for like a giant dashboard, you know,
I was like, wow, super cool.
See you later.
Yeah, what else, man?
That's.
Also, it's like not not not video worthy.
Supermicro had a really cool liquid cooled server.
In fact, there's a ton of immersion and conventional liquid cooling server stuff.
There's a lot of stuff that shows like this that like
seven to 10 years ago, we probably would have made a bunch of videos about.
But at this point.
Especially with how YouTube is doing things,
if those videos aren't just like bangers, it can hurt the channel.
So
you got to be careful. Yeah.
OK, hit me.
OK, speaking of hurting the channel, Linus, in the event of your death,
who would you want to sponsor your funeral and how would the Segway go?
I would expect it to be Debrand.
I would hope it was Debrand as well.
Yeah, that's my if my if my coffin didn't have like a Damascus vinyl skin on it,
I'd be extremely disappointed.
You're coughing in your car up the match.
Yeah,
I'm crying with tears of laughter.
You get driven to it in a hearse that is also wrapped.
Well, yeah, they could. Well, no, no, it would be it wouldn't need to be a hearse.
They could just get the longer I can
rip out the back seats and throw me in there.
I think you wouldn't even need to rip out the back seats.
I'm not that tall.
Stuff me in the trunk.
Oh, boy.
Yeah, so actually, you know,
Yvonne, do a speech.
It's just a Segway to a sponsor.
Yeah, I'm going to ask for a commitment right now, actually.
Oh, no message.
I'm live on the WAN show right now,
and I need you to commit to sponsoring my funeral if I die.
Period.
I expect the coffin to be wrapped in whatever your gaudiest, tackiest pattern is.
OK, I will I will literally just said that to do you read?
I will let you guys know
what I'll let you know what they say,
assuming they get back to me in a timely manner here.
I think you're crying.
Oh, fuck.
Oh, oh, OK.
Hey, LTT team, Linus, Luke, I have a question.
Rewatching the office moving vlogs in them, Linus keeps referring to having
to move and inspectors making sure you are moved out.
Did anyone kick you out?
Yes, yeah.
See, you see, we had a certain caretaker for the property.
That never did anything,
and so the neighbors got mad about the state of the property and started poking
around and realized we were running a commercial entity there.
The good news is by the time this whole thing came to a head,
we were already planning to move anyway.
So when the city came and said, hey,
you guys need to move or we're going to start finding you like thousands of dollars
a day, we were like, hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on, hold on, hold on.
The only reason that we haven't moved yet is because of like city permitting issues.
So like, can we chill?
Can we work together to get us out of here?
It was never supposed to grow this big.
It was supposed to be small and everything was fine.
Yeah, and they were like.
OK,
so we got that all we got that all sorted out, but it did mean that we had to get
in there a little bit sooner than the building was actually ready,
because our other contractor, who we've worked with a few times
and are mostly fairly pretty good, OK, pretty, OK, pretty good martini
construction, they were experiencing some delays at that time.
Overall, shout out, Shermar.
Pretty shout out martini, they're pretty OK.
Not shout out, GRN pool and landscape.
That's where I'm at.
Hey, guys, from recent coverage, you
clearly have a great relationship with reps from tech companies as previously
unshared stories of reps just coming through and helping you out big time.
Oh, I mean, it's endless, right?
How could we do anything that we do without help from these passionate people
at these companies that just want people to see and enjoy their products?
Right.
I know it sounds really cheesy when I say it like that.
But there is no there is no wizard hiding in the side room, there is no Scooby Doo.
Aha, that like really is it for a lot of people who work in the tech industry.
And it's one of the reasons that like
compensation in the tech industry kind of sucks because people are so passionate
about it, they just like really want to build cool tech products.
And that's.
A shame, but it's also really cool that everyone's so passionate, so I don't know
what to tell you, you know, I want everyone to be compensated
fairly, but I also want to work with people who are super passionate.
And I think there are some employers that will always try to leverage that.
Right.
Was there anything that made you personally
excited that won't make its way into a video?
And what was it?
I think we just did that.
Yeah, I think this is more excited.
I mean, I wasn't excited by the switch.
No, this I think this is more general than.
Then Computex and Computex, yeah, I think it was Computex.
OK, moving on then.
Well, I mean, I was still thinking.
Oh, OK, sorry.
Made me excited, but won't make its way into a video.
Never mind, I'm over it.
Do you see the opportunity for a physics
like add in card for A.I. with games moving forward?
No, no, I don't think no.
We're going to use our we're going to use our GPUs for A.I.
We've already the the the the time for more add in cards, I think is past.
And the time of of tightly integrated chips is now old man.
Yeah, hi, L.L.D., been watching since 2011.
What did you think about the modded 3070 with 60 gigs of 16 gigs of RAM?
And what do you guys think that Nvidia will do with the companies behind those mods?
Great job.
Nvidia will ignore it.
And what do I think about it?
I think it's super cool.
And I'm really frustrated because we actually had the idea of modding
additional VRAM on GPUs and testing them like years ago.
And I asked Gary, who now works for us,
but previously worked at Asus, if he could facilitate getting us access
to the gear that we would need to do something like that, or at the very least
recommending what gear we would need to do it.
And he was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Boom. Other people did it.
So thanks, Gary.
Love you. Now everyone's doing it.
Well, you still have to you still have a chance to miss it by another couple of years.
Love you all. First purchase buying ABC for a dear friend's new baby.
With Yvonne being the behind the scenes superstar she is,
what are some of the ways she enjoys feeling celebrated?
Your dynamic is inspiring.
She named companies after her.
She just really appreciates.
Now she doesn't like Yvonne Umbrella Corp.
The problem with the problem
for Yvonne, I think, is that I appreciate her.
I know what she does, but.
She feels and in some cases it's not accurate, but in other cases it is,
she feels like other people don't necessarily know or appreciate what she does.
And so she doesn't want to hear it from me.
Like, you know, good job, honey.
Here's your quarterly performance review.
A plus like that means nothing to her.
You know what she what she enjoys is
being appreciated by the people at work or by by partners or by like like I know
there there are at least one member of one of our families.
I'm keeping this as vague as I can.
Not that it'll make a difference because, you know, I guess you might know who you
are, that just doesn't seem to understand
that she doesn't just hang out at her husband's business all day.
You know, like I remember a comment was
made at some point, like three years after our last kid was born,
it was like, so are you ever going to go back to work?
And she's like.
What you mean in the pharmacy, you understand that I am at work, right,
that I never stopped working, really.
How many times do I have to tell you that I work for our company,
like just yeah, it's just it's just rude, right?
Like it's ridiculous.
You know, I think that, you know, for her, it's it's the there are things that I can
do, like she appreciates it when I notice just casual misogyny.
And that's not a word that I throw around.
Right.
Like, I think that misogyny has come to mean just anything at this point.
I think it's it's it's a lost a lot of its
original meaning because now all of a sudden everything is misogyny.
And it's not.
But there but there are things that are, you know, like the way that,
you know, a contractor will come to the door and I'll answer the door and they'll
ask a bunch of questions and I'll be like, yeah, I actually don't know.
My wife knows that.
Give me a second. I'll go get her and then I'll stand there and they'll keep
talking to me, even though she so she's talking to them.
But they're looking at me.
You. Yeah, my my my girlfriend is buying a car and she's in the car with me.
She's asking the questions and the dude is looking at her while she's asking
the question and then looks at me and answers the question like, what are you
doing? Yeah.
So she you know, she appreciates that when I when I notice and, you know, just
give her a little pat on the back after like, hey, I noticed and that wasn't cool.
You know, obviously we're not going to make a scene about something stupid like
that, but like.
Hey, I felt your pain there or I was aware of it,
and it's you know, it's similar with stuff with stuff to do with work as well, like
when you know, when someone walks up to me and thanks me for throwing a Christmas
party when I didn't touch it and Yvonne did all the work and she's standing right
there, I'll just be like, hey, they mean thanks to you, too.
You know, like it's it's tough, right?
I do sometimes refer to you two as a unit, I know.
Just which I try to I try to try to go the other way with it, I do, is all I'll say.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like to think that I do better these days than I used to, but
I'll catch myself sometimes and I contribute to the problem, too.
Like I went and named the stupid company
after myself, which in retrospect was absolutely a mistake.
I wish I called it something else.
It's a lot of paperwork to change it now.
Yeah,
really expensive.
Yeah.
Moving on. OK.
Hey, gang, what in your opinion is the thing?
Hold on, people are hold on one quick thing.
People are like, well, obviously you should just say it was all her.
Right.
But you got to understand that it's not that simple for people with that kind
of mindset or like only a man could have done anything.
And she would say this and I would I was like kind of dismissive of it.
I was like, no way.
But she'd say like, no, if you do that, if you defend me, people just assume
that it's fake, that it's because I told you to do it.
Yeah. And then I was like, no way.
And we did it for a bit.
And she was right.
People just have their minds made up.
They see whatever they want to see.
They hear whatever they want to hear.
And I don't mean that universally, but some people do.
And so you just have to kind of go, you know, yeah, I'm sorry that happened.
I'm not sucked.
I know what you did and.
Yeah.
OK, sorry, Dan, go ahead.
No, that's totally fine.
Hey, gang, what in your opinion is the thing the tech community strongly demands
or desires that, you know, will end up being something that everyone will regret
wanting?
Jeez, what is with these questions?
How am I supposed to?
How am I supposed to do that?
I mean, I think I think we could have called it on horse armor.
What else, though?
Do you think like,
do you think A.I. and gaming is going to be one of those things we regret,
regret, regret wanting?
No, I think that'll be really cool.
Yeah.
What are we going to regret wanting?
I mentioned earlier in the show people
wanting all the reviewers opinions to be the same.
I don't know if that really fits the yeah, the spirit of this question,
but I would say that I actually like I know I'm like making a big deal about it,
but I think that's extremely bad and like people need to really crush that
immediately, but you know what?
I like it. Good job.
Cool. Got him.
I agree with you.
I have exactly the same cake.
I do that to him all the time.
How is he so good at this?
Just in case people didn't get that.
Oh, it's maddening.
Hi Linus, Luke and Dan.
Love all the Computex covering from LZT and other outlets this year.
Has there been any tech trend good or
otherwise from the different vendors that surprised you this year?
I didn't expect behind the motherboard,
you know, hidden connectors to get so much attention.
It feels like the kind of thing we could have done forever ago and didn't.
So I I just not not the not the PC community,
but like connectors on the back of the motherboard is not a new thing.
No, no, not a new thing to like gaming PC.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I'm yeah, I'm I'm
I don't know if I'm excited for it, like we definitely need to see some new case
designs to really get the most out of it.
But I'm not not excited for it, it definitely it surprised me.
I yeah, I think it's pretty cool here.
OK, another tech trend.
I am amazed by the number of companies getting into like sim racing tech.
Cooler master showed off a chair that has been weird, hasn't it?
E.K. showed off this entire twenty five thousand dollar kit that was very
surprised, E.K. of all, yeah, I kept asking people like you're
sure it was E.K., it wasn't like someone else.
How many people are buying?
Like multi access, no, there's absolutely similar for it,
but like you think it would support like two brands total or something.
Yeah, not not the amount that are in it.
Like it's one of those things where like I know what tooling costs.
Yeah, it costs a lot.
You've got to be selling like
thousands of something to make it make sense to manufacture it.
Well, sort of depending on the price.
Gibram and full plate said it really took off with the pandemic.
So I agree, especially like F1 and stuff sim racing at home,
like the actual professional drivers were doing it on stream and stuff.
Oh my God, who is spending that kind of money on this sort of thing?
Also, it's sort of over.
And we're already seeing consumer trends setting back to what they were before.
I just I don't know.
I just don't get it like I'm like I'm thinking about the amount of.
The amount of money I would have to be earning
to spend twenty five thousand dollars on a toy and part of it.
Because you're going to end up investing more or spending, I should be saying,
you're going to end up spending more for sure, because that's like where you start.
Right.
Yeah, and no, the pro drivers are not
buying some kit from E.K. or some chair from Cooler Master.
Like I just crazy stuff.
Yeah, they are getting some consultant to come in and build them like
a very custom like deboxed set up or whatever else.
Right. Like I just people like it's a hobby.
Sure. What an insane hobby.
It takes up so much space, though, like, wow.
I just.
And yes, yes, I know they start at much, much lower prices for for DIY kits, I just
it's one of those things it's like it's like an Alienware laptop.
In theory, these things exist or in theory, people are buying them,
otherwise they wouldn't exist, never see, but I've never seen one.
And I have seen an Alienware laptop now.
I'm talking more like back when I was working at NCX 10 years ago,
you know, Alienware had five thousand six thousand dollar laptops back then.
And they were obviously I mean, even the desktops, you know, I would look at it
and I'd go, Alienware is a brand of computers, obviously.
Otherwise they wouldn't have a website.
But I've never seen one.
You know, I've never seen an actual game or gaming on one of these.
And so it's the same thing like the SIM, the SIM setups.
It's the kind of thing we build for spectacle or like deadmau5 had one.
But how many deadmau5's are there in the world?
People with the means, the space and the passion.
For gaming, they can't just can't be that many.
Shraff in Floatplane Chat says in all caps, it's cheaper than actually
hobby racing IRL. It's like, OK.
Well, I wouldn't do that either.
That sounds really expensive. Exactly.
I'm consuming. I mean,
yeah, I and I you know what?
This is one of those things where I think I just have to acknowledge that as not a
car enthusiast, I will never be able to put myself into the headspace
of a car enthusiast. I mean, I know for a fact that
Jake has relatively limited space compared to someone like deadmau5.
And he still feels it's a high enough priority to have
a sim racing set up in his computer room.
Yes. Same for Ed.
We saw this in their extreme tech upgrades.
So clearly it's a thing
but like twenty five thousand dollar rig.
Yeah, that seems outlandish.
Yeah. Next up, we got to get through these.
We got we got stuff to get to. Sorry.
Sorry. As a gun collector, that's entry level.
I will never understand collecting.
I'm sorry. I just don't think I will.
My favorite comparison. You do some collecting.
Sorry, you do some collecting.
Sure. What do I collect? Controllers?
Sort of. I use them all.
My controller collection is like nine controllers.
Like they actually are all in my daily.
Yes, but you can't say that you didn't buy that like Xbox edition one.
The prototype one. Right.
Project Scarlett. Yeah, you do use it. Yeah.
But you still bought it.
And what I would see is like a collector approach.
Yeah, I guess that's true.
When I said collection, I meant more in terms of like when I OK,
when I heard gun collection, I was thinking like, OK, how many
how many guns can one person fire at once?
My collector, my collector, my controller collection
can all actually be used all at once, like playing Mage Quit.
I actually just need ten controllers.
So if I'm going to have to have ten controllers,
why would I buy all the same one?
I don't consider that a collection.
I have some very collector e unique item controllers.
You appreciate unobtainium in things I do,
which is not is not 100 percent the same either.
And like people are talking about my gold controller,
I knew you were going to go go there with this,
but I wouldn't have done that if it wasn't to make a video.
Yeah, I wasn't going to.
For that reason, I wasn't even. Yeah.
Yeah, people like to be frank, many collectors,
item guns you shouldn't fire for safety reasons.
Yes. Yeah, this is what I'm talking about.
Yeah, that I don't understand.
I also don't understand people that buy things
with the purpose of leaving them in the box.
I've never I've never understood that at all.
OK, Schrodinger's item.
I need to talk to the community about this.
Yeah, I know. Yeah.
We have a sponsor. I'm not going to name them.
You can guess. Are you able to create a poll?
We have a sponsor that wants to send us multiple,
not but multiple sealed.
Clear or like like color transparent edition
and sixty fours to unbox all of them on short circuit.
And I'm looking at it going.
Um. I think keep it simple, just should we is it cool or is it bad?
And I'm looking at this going, I think people are going to be really angry
about us breaking the seals on like.
Five. Transparent and sixty fours.
People are already on both sides of it.
See, this is what I don't I don't understand actually in this latest,
because like, what's the point?
What's the point in leaving in the box?
I almost think it's worse to leave in the box because then no one gets to enjoy it.
All you get to enjoy is the external cardboard.
And you could still enjoy that if you took it out of the box.
Yeah, but it's just it's one of those things like I just don't get it.
From my point of view, even though I'm not a collector and I frankly
just don't really get it, it's like it's like taking some hollow foiled
first print Chara Chara's.
And just like ripping them up.
Oh, or like folding the corner because you're not you're not ripping it out.
But you're like, ha ha, I made this worth less.
Watch me do it again. Ha ha. I did it again.
I don't think that works because you could still play the game
with it without doing that.
But you could still play the well, you can't play the N64,
but you could like treat it nicely.
No one's going to play.
TCG with a first edition
hollow foil Charizard.
I totally would.
You're an idiot.
But I wouldn't buy one.
But like and if I had, oh, OK, I don't see the value in it, right?
You know, I don't think you're an idiot.
Well, no, because I would never be in that scenario
because other people value it so much more that I would sell it immediately.
So you're saying if it is you're saying I should take the N64
and I should sell them, I mean, if it was absolutely.
Because if it's in my possession and I can't sell it like, sure,
I'm going to open it or if if I have this hollow Charizard.
But if I sell it, I go to jail.
I don't care. I'm not going to just leave it on a shelf
that has literally genuinely zero value to me.
I'm also probably not going to play the game with it
because I also don't care about that.
But I wouldn't mind, especially if it's in like a nice sleeve or whatever.
Why do I care?
dbrand responded, will send the bill to Yvonne.
I think they misunderstood.
I want them to pay to sponsor the funeral.
Can't tell with these guys sometimes.
All right. The poll seems pretty conclusive that it's cool.
You apparently have, but those bads are going to be real mad.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, like those are those are some I pretty much bet you
the intensity of voting here is not equal.
The people that are saying cool are like me.
They don't care. It doesn't matter.
They're not going to watch a video because you happened to open it.
You know what I mean?
The bads are going to be enraged because you happen to open it.
Like these are these are different things.
Like I just don't value something remaining in a box.
I don't value a car that doesn't get driven.
I don't value a console that doesn't get played.
Like I don't I don't care about those things.
So you're saying I'm allowed to buy an expensive car, he told me,
he's like worried about my my soul or something like that, like if I got to
like into, you know, just luxury stuff, which is fair.
So but but I'm allowed to buy an expensive car,
which you don't seem to have a problem with as long as you get to drive it.
You also didn't get the other one you were talking about.
But if I had to.
And I can only drive one at once.
Is that a problem now?
Well, no, it's not, because if you drove them at all,
because there's people that will will acquire a car or the firearm
in the previous conversation or a Pokemon card in the previous conversation
or a console in this conversation and never they will leave it in the box.
They'll never touch it.
They'll be in like a climate controlled glass thing.
And you're not even allowed within a foot of it.
All this type of stuff.
Well, what if it was a middle ground?
What if I had two cars,
a daily driver and one that I only drive on Sunday
so that I can keep it in good condition?
At least you drive it.
At least you drive it. OK.
What if I had seven cars, one for every day of the week?
At least that's literally not.
So for you, it's just black and white for you.
Pretty much. You should use the thing.
So I'm allowed to have a Toyota Corolla GR then.
Yes. Yeah, I love how excited
that's a sweet car.
And like really long, you'd have to actually drive it, though.
That would be my I would drive.
Yes, that thing looks freaking awesome.
Yeah, awesome. But you should enjoy it because it's cool to drive.
Like the firearm example.
Like if you had this firearm that you keep in a safe.
Well, you should never allowed out if you if you shoot it on like special occasions.
What I mean by the safe is like you never even get to see it like.
Yeah, but if it's like a special occasions thing, like.
Even once a year, as long as it's used, it's like, all right, I don't mind that.
But like it feels notably bad.
To me, to just be like, no, I'm going to keep this N64
and it's going to stay in a box forever and I don't want it to ever be used.
I don't want anyone to ever play a game on it.
I don't want anyone to ever touch it.
It's translucent, which is awesome, but it's going to stay in cardboard.
So no one will ever see through this translucent plastic like.
That seems that's rough to me.
I actively don't like that.
But the amount that I actively don't like that is very small.
And the amount that people don't like it
when you open those things is very big. Yeah.
Everyone wants me to get the G.R.
Yes, it's a sweet car.
I've been so close, like twice,
and it just feels really stupid because I can only drive one car at once.
I don't think you should actually.
But then my Taycan has been in the shop for like almost six weeks.
What if you sell a Taycan and get the G.R.?
I'm not going to go back to going to gas stations all the time.
Honestly, as stupid and trivial as it sounds.
That is a huge part of the reason that I like driving an electric car.
I hate refueling.
I don't know if you should get it, then.
Take the Taycan powertrain.
But my argument is maybe not the thing that you might think it would be.
Sorry. Sorry. Yeah, go for it.
We're going to have a massive delay, sorry.
And my reason is because of a comment that you made not even that long ago
when you had to drive your old volt.
Yeah, volt, right? Yeah, volt, volt.
You have to drive your old volt again.
And you're like, yeah, I mean, it's really not that different.
That's my reason why I don't think you should get it.
The G.R.? Oh, the G.R. would be different.
Is it would it be would you actively actually enjoy it as a manual transmission?
Oh, yeah. It's a three cylinder manual tranny,
like super lightweight, just that sounds fun.
Like stupid. Would you track it?
I mean, he would track it for me.
You track it for him?
Oh, I mean, oh, God, he'd probably be probably.
Can I go? Can I go? Can you drive me around?
Can I go with you? You should. You should buy it.
You're getting a type R.
Yeah, well, I have two deposits, two deposits.
Are you going to scalp one so you can afford the other?
Oh, yeah. OK, sure.
I've been waiting for a year and a half.
I don't I'm not going to judge you. I don't care. Yeah.
Well, Andy's going type R.
All right. Well, let's let's keep going, because we're actually late.
Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like a lot at lunch. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Like people are flying out and stuff,
and the show's been on for almost four hours.
We need to finish this. Yeah, let's go.
OK. If you guys want to go through potentials and respond to them,
I'll start reading you the rest of the curated.
I'll go from a lot of them are stuck for you. OK.
I'm sure with this Taiwan trip, you have gotten to eat some great food.
What are some standout foods or meals you have experienced in different countries?
By a long shot, the best food I ever ate anywhere was on the Intel trip.
I couldn't believe how good the food was there.
Taiwan is really great, too, though.
I just I just love like just like comfort food here, just like beef noodle soup.
We went for like really good beef noodle soup last night. So good.
Hi, Linus, Luke and Dan,
what has been the greatest challenge in your lifetimes to overcome and how did you overcome it?
Oh, I just replied to that one.
I think the obvious answer is kids, man. It's
raising kids is the most challenging and important thing I will ever do.
Are you doing curated or potential at the moment?
Potentials. I'm going to start at the top of potentials.
OK, I. OK, that one must have come down and pushed it.
I see. What a copy text do you wish you could make?
What the hell is going on?
There's duplicates.
Hi, L.L.D., with your ongoing goal of making a badminton court complex,
what other sports centers or storefronts would you like to try and open?
I would like to see you open a PC or mobile phone repair shop.
Oh, that's very unlikely to happen.
I could see us doing I could see us doing like a gaming Airbnb
or like a gaming hotel, but like in a more of like a Western style.
I could see I could see expanding the racket sport thing.
I could see adding like squash and racquetball, like tennis,
and like doing like like like a huge complex.
And I'm assuming I have unlimited money for this, which I don't.
It's just going to be badminton.
It's just going to be a small pro shop.
But hey, if I'm imagining things, then that's that's what I would imagine.
One of your rare 45 plus viewers, I retire in two and a half years
and wonder if you would recommend a new career in tech at 50.
And what would you point to?
Well, we have a lot more 45 plus viewers than you would think.
I can tell you that much already,
just based on people who walk up to me at trade shows and on the street.
As for a new career in tech, man, that's tough.
Tech is always moving so fast.
The best thing is to just, you know, keep your ear to the ground
and, you know, chase your passion.
Right. Like I the billionaire that I was meeting with,
I asked, you know, hey, well, you know, obviously I could probably look this up,
but, you know, I'd love to hear it from you instead.
You know, what's your story?
And I was just so impressed by how passionate he was about what he was doing.
And I just I loved that.
And it started with just trying to fix a simple problem,
just identifying something that was a problem
and and and building a solution for it that he was excited about.
I just I thought that was so cool.
And I think that's just a great approach for everybody,
whether you make a dollar or a billion dollars, if you can solve a problem,
you're going to get satisfaction from it.
And if you can solve a problem that a lot of people have, then
well, you're more likely to not make just a dollar.
Gentlemen and Linus,
I'm picking up the ABC book for my soon to be niece.
Looking forward to indoctrinating her.
Everyone asks about parenting tips.
But do you fellows have any uncle tips?
I don't know. I feel like it's pretty easy.
You're more of an uncle than me.
I literally am.
I actually actually had a nephew niece.
Oh, OK. Yeah.
I mean, you have the easy job, right?
You get to swoop in when it's fun and hang out.
And then when things suck, you get to leave.
So it's like, I don't know.
I haven't been one of kids that are old enough
to really do a lot of the things that I think uncles would be best at doing.
But the things that I'm prepared and excited to do is like be very present.
Like when when my brother's daughter grows up,
I'm sure she will be involved in some type of activity.
I don't know whether it's a sport or something else, but
I would like to to be there and support.
Yeah, I don't know.
Try to help with like
opportunity enablement as much as possible.
If my brother and his wife are busy, try to help stuff like that.
I just treat my nephew niece like I would my kids.
I firmly believe that, you know, kids need structure.
And I think just being the fun uncle is not necessarily a good play.
I want to be the the uncle that gave them good advice
and told them the right things and,
you know, checked them when they were
when they were doing something that was going to cause problems.
Yeah, I just uncle exactly the same as I parent.
That's true. I feel the same way about like dogs and stuff, too.
It's the same thing.
I just you're not going to be there all the time. So.
I think something that gets lost on a lot of people in that situation
is that the kids still value you being there,
even though you're not their direct parents.
So you shouldn't forget that you should actually be there.
And they like notice when you're not there. So, yeah.
Linus, you've mentioned your socks before.
What are your favorite configs for your daily socks?
I only wear one sock.
Well, unless I'm trialing
prototypes of the socks that we're trying to make.
And they're just darn tough.
Regular like crew sock.
I actually was on their site the other day because someone asked me about this.
And I didn't see the exact model that I have anymore.
But they're they're just so good.
Marina will they're the reason that we haven't made a sock yet,
because I can't beat them or match them.
If we can even get like 95 percent of the way there,
I'll consider that good enough, but we can't yet.
Last of mine curated.
Hey, DLL, how important is it for you to not be recognized in public
when you just want to enjoy something else?
Now you guys are famous.
Greetings from Germany.
I give up.
Just yeah, there's there was a video that came out
recently of some some dude streaming riding a bike
in Norway or something, and he he goes past
Magnus Carlsen, who's sitting on a bench watching something on his phone.
And the guy asked for a selfie from Magnus.
The Magnus is like, first of all, tell some like, sorry,
I don't want to be bothered right now.
And the guy talks to him anyways.
Then he goes, could I like get a selfie with you after I watch this thing?
And the guy's like, no, I'm in a hurry right now.
I need it right now and gets really pushy.
And then Magnus like goes to take the photo with them.
And then the guy asked for Magnus to stand up for the photo.
And you can tell that Magnus is like really annoyed, but just doing it
anyways, like the dude streaming this whole time.
So now this interaction is on camera and it's just like, oh, man,
stuff like that's really rough.
I I always prefer that people like say hi.
Because I would always rather know that you recognize me
than sit there and like wonder if people around me know who I am.
But I know that's not true for everyone.
It's going to be slightly different for everybody,
which is like annoying, but it is what it is.
So excited to get the 3D down jacket
just in time for 90 degree Fahrenheit.
Oh, crap. I know what that sound is.
Read this one. The alarm's going off.
As he's trying to get my attention, it is loud beeping.
Sorry, guys, I'm so excited for my 3D down jacket for 90 Fahrenheit weather.
That's hot for the Celsius folks out there.
Can't wait for the LTT bro tank in December.
Linus, what's the first home project you ever did and how did it go?
I assume you mean when I moved into my place
and I'm having a really hard time actually coming up with that.
I think I think one of the first kind of home
DIY things that I did was actually on video, though.
I ran an ethernet cable along the outside of the house
to where the media PC is, and I had a contractor help me,
but I actually did do some of the work myself as well.
And I made a video about it for me, like networking is.
The first thing that needs to be improved in a house because typically it sucks.
I didn't do that much handy stuff.
Yeah, I guess I started doing it a lot later, like I don't count,
you know, painting the nursery when we had kids.
Is that a is that a home project?
Yeah. Oh, how do they how do they define it?
What's the first home project you ever did?
Yeah, I think that went well.
I mean, I also painted the all the furniture for the nursery, painted it white.
So we had this kind of kind of pastel yellow and white color scheme in there.
Man, it's amazing the things you forget.
Yeah, I'm going to go with that.
I did that.
OK, the police aren't on their way, thankfully.
Let's see what we got here.
Linus, assuming in your new position, you will get a modicum of more free time.
What kind of things are you going to pick up in this free time?
More hosting, more coaching.
I want to do more coaching for our hosts and our shooters and, you know, help
make sure that our everything we upload is
is LMG E.
I hear that there are new firmware updates on the ally.
Have you noticed any improvements that others have not?
No, I oh, I can respond to this other one at the same time from Joshua
as responding to how Tears of the Kingdom has been on the allies so far.
It's been oh, I've got a couple of these.
Raven also asked how Tears of the Kingdom on the Ally.
The performance I'm getting is not great right now,
but I've got to be honest with you, the only time I had to play it was on the plane.
And other than loading all the files onto it ahead of time,
I didn't really research anything.
So I was kind of trying to figure it out on my own on the plane.
I tried to apply a 60 FPS mod and it seemed
to make performance worse, though I wasn't really sure.
Performance seemed lower than it should have been because Breath of the Wild
runs amazing on it, and I wasn't really expecting Tears of the Kingdom
performance to be that much lower than Breath of the Wild,
given that they don't seem to look that different to me.
I, you know, could have missed something, though,
and I'm not just talking like when it's compiling shade.
This is really not working very well.
I'm not just talking when it's compiling shaders.
I mean, just in general, performance seemed pretty, pretty rubbish, actually.
And it would kind of start lagging more sometimes, too,
so it hasn't been a great experience so far in Tears of the Kingdom.
But it ran Breath of the Wild great.
But I was using Sinew for Breath of the Wild,
and I'm using Yuzu for Tears of the Kingdom, and I'm new to Yuzu.
I have spent almost no time with it.
I don't really I don't really know the ins and outs.
So I forget what the original question was, but
no, I probably haven't noticed things that other people haven't yet,
because I haven't really I haven't really had much time
to game in the last couple of weeks.
Archive. Hi, Linus, do you carry any skills
from your product manager days into your day to day life?
Absolutely. I mean, every everything you do,
every person you meet is an opportunity to learn.
And I think that's something that I do a relatively good job of.
It's just keeping my eyes open and, you know, trying to understand better.
I actually got very some very high praise that that made me really happy
when we were working on our framework factory tour, which is coming.
The one of the higher ups at framework used to work in like supply chain for Apple
and said that when I did my original framework video
explaining why a company needs investment
and sort of explaining how the supply chain works,
that I got it like 85 to 90 percent right to the point.
And like the parts that were like not that were not wrong.
They were just like maybe not as thorough.
But she she's like super sharp.
And so, you know, whenever I whenever someone gives me praise,
I always consider the source.
So I appreciated her saying that because she seems like a shark.
And she said, yeah, you got it like 85, 90 percent right.
And I'm kind of sitting here going, how does anyone in the media have any business
like knowing this much about supply chain?
Because I've just never really seen that before.
And yeah, it's just stuff that I've that I picked up from my product management days
and from just kind of trying to pay attention, try to understand better.
The intro for that video is really funny.
I, I think I wrote it.
But basically, I'm walking down the streets in Taipei and I go,
you know, yeah, PlayStation fives, toilet paper, framework laptops.
I want to buy one, but if it's not in stock, what's the deal with that?
Why don't they just make more of them?
And I have ample reason to be angry about the six.
There's a six month wait right now for the AMD version of the framework.
Yeah, that's pretty rough.
And so so I have ample reason to be mad about this,
because aside from just waiting six months for my laptop,
I have a lot of money riding on them being able to deliver freaking product.
So why aren't they just making more?
Since I'm in Taiwan anyway, I thought I'm going to knock on some doors
and figure out what the heck's going on with my investment.
And then this is amazing, and I'm sorry to kind of ruin the joke for you guys,
because it'll be really funny if you don't have it ruined. But anyway,
it cuts straight from there to me in this like shanty
like back alley, because when you search for framework,
they have an office here.
But when you search for framework on Google Maps, it takes you to some.
It's labeled Bicycle Club, but it seems to be like a bus repair garage.
Oh, or something.
And so I'm just standing and we actually went to the trouble
to drive half an hour out of our way to go be at Framework Bicycle Club in Taiwan.
And I'm like, there's a bicycle club.
Did I just get played?
And then it hard cuts to the Compile factory where frameworks are made
and gets into the framework,
the framework tour, which is going to be really, really exciting.
I've never been in a laptop manufacturing facility.
I don't think Compile has ever done anything like that before.
It's going to be really cool.
And I think that's it for the WAN Show.
That is it. We'll see you again next week.
Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye.
Well, different times as an earlier time. Yeah.
All right.
It's fine, I'll be sure to.
Oh yeah, there's one.