What is up, ladies and gentlepersons? It's time for the Wan Show again! That's right, I am a short king!
Yeah, I still don't get it.
As crowned by Smosh!
What?
I know. I actually am hearing about this for the first time now as well, here in the Wan Show document,
but I figured, hey, it's a good title for the video.
So, let's lean into it, and hopefully a short king is not something really insulting.
I don't think it is.
In other news this week, Microsoft and Google have laid off thousands of workers again, which is kind of terrifying.
It's like 5% of Microsoft's workforce or something. Big deal, big deal.
AI art generators face first two major copyright lawsuits, and from a party that you might not be too surprised to be involved.
Also, U.S. farmers win right to repair farm equipment, while Samsung undermines independent screen repair at the same time.
Oh, and there's one more thing before I roll the intro.
We have actually got a, not just producer like Dan the producer, there he is, for the Wan Show,
but we've got someone whose entire full-time job is to make the Wan Show better.
And this may be, yeah, I know, right? I was gonna say this may be the first you're hearing of it.
Yeah.
But she just started, and so she's still on her probation,
so I guess I should not have disclosed anything about this individual, because you never know how things will go.
But at any rate, it means we are going to have things like fun new segments.
Meet the Wheel of Pain.
Okay, so, yeah, I can't read it.
Don't worry too much about it for now. We will deal with the Wheel of Pain later. For now.
Alright, so at this point in time, I literally know less about that than any of you do,
because I couldn't read that, and I have no idea what it is.
I've been told I'm not allowed to read a certain part of the doc. All I know is there's a wheel, and it's of pain.
It's of pain.
Yeah.
No, no. Okay, try again.
The Wheel of Pain.
No, no, no, no. The Wheel of Pain.
Of Pain.
Much better.
Got it.
Alright.
Oh, wow, that was weird.
The show is brought to you today by Vessi, Audible, and one that kind of glitched out a little bit there.
The Forum. The Forum. Oh, yeah, that's going to be an interesting one to talk about, and show you.
Why don't we jump right into our first topic of the week.
I know this is not exactly a tech topic, but it piqued my curiosity.
Smosh, the once popular. Oh, that's editorializing a little bit. Oh, that's not what it said.
Once the most popular channel on YouTube.
Okay, yeah.
Made a video called.
They're doing really well.
Short Kings rank Short Kings on their sister channel, Smosh Pit.
Spencer, one of the rankers, called Linus the gold standard for tech YouTubers.
Oh.
Okay, so here, hold on a second.
So, I'm going to bring this up. Am I able to screen share with the stream?
Is that a thing that it works now?
Okay, let's go. Here we go. I think it's clean.
This is Spencer Agnew, right? I think, I believe.
Okay, here we go.
I was going to kick there for a long time while I was watching a bunch of Smosh content.
Here we go.
Hey, Linus Tech Tips.
Yeah.
Hey, here we go.
Five, six. Yes, that is true.
Is it?
Uh, yes. Yes, that is true.
Come on, I'm not going to lie about it.
Are you, do you get asked here?
Does he give you an S tier?
I think he's great. He's funny.
Oh, that's not, he's niche.
That's true.
He's niche.
No, that's true. That's true.
No, you're niche.
Okay.
They'd be like, what the, stop. Let's, let's put him in.
B?
Let's put him in.
Let's throw him a B.
I don't know if B makes you a king.
Well, hold on a second. Hold on a second.
Wait a second. Wait a second.
Was that Tom Holland next to me on, in, on B shelf though?
Oh, wow. Okay.
Because I don't even, I don't even feel bad at that point.
Hold on.
Let's see. Let's see.
Hold on. Who else are we looking at here?
Hold on.
Whoa.
That's Markiplier.
Whoa. Okay.
That's Tom Holland.
All right. All right.
Okay.
You're doing pretty good.
All right.
So that's a, that's a strong B.
That's a strong B.
That's a strong B.
What the hell makes you an A on this list?
It's got to be pretty intense, I think.
What's an, what's an A?
Who's an A tier king?
Hold on a second here.
Okay.
Let's just wait until they zoom in on the thing.
Jump to the end.
Yeah. Yeah.
I want, I want, I just want to see the board.
Show me the board.
I want to see the board.
Where's the board at?
Oh my God.
It is hard to find because it's quite short.
You piece of shit.
You're not allowed to make those jokes.
You know, that's how that works, right?
Got him.
Oh, see, that's real insecure.
Spencer here with the half inch.
Okay.
For my metric friends out there,
a half inch is not a lot.
It's not worth it.
It's not, it's not worth it.
It makes you seem insecure.
If you have to put the half inch in,
I wouldn't recommend it.
Okay.
Can they, can they show the board?
Oh my God.
There's a tier above A though.
There's S tier.
They don't zoom into the board.
I can zoom myself.
Danny DeVito.
Danny DeVito.
Wait, fucking little?
That's a fictional character.
Okay.
I don't recognize any of these other people.
It's a little blurry.
Okay.
Who's my A tier?
Some soccer player.
Mega man's in there.
Okay.
What is this?
Jesus with a trimmed beard.
Okay.
I don't know.
I don't know who any of these people are.
You know what?
I am.
I'm pretty happy.
I got Elmer Fudd up in here.
B tier looks strong.
B tier legitimately looks strong.
B tier seems like a, honestly,
I feel like the A and the S tier,
they were mostly just memeing except Danny DeVito,
who is amazing.
Yes.
And B tier is kind of where the solid,
short kings go.
Apparently Jack Black was an S tier.
Oh, Jack Black was an S tier.
I mean, all right.
Messi is up there.
Someone said loss to Messi,
but they didn't say if it was A or S,
but either way.
All right.
Yeah, that's fine.
I'm happy with it.
Lord Farquaad.
Apparently you beat Tom Cruise.
I beat Tom Cruise.
That's pretty good.
I mean, well.
That's pretty good.
Sort of.
That's a strong B.
It really depends on how you're ranking Tom Cruise.
That's true.
If you rank Tom Cruise as a successful movie producer,
then he probably belongs in S tier.
If you rank Tom Cruise as-
As a runner?
Also S tier.
As a runner.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I've seen him run on a broken ankle.
For real though,
like he like broke his ankle doing a stunt and then just kept running,
which is like.
He's actually extremely good at running like genuinely.
Yeah.
But if you rank Tom Cruise as an individual with both hinges attached to the
wall.
Sometimes when you're extremely excessively good at something,
other things kind of fall off a little bit.
I mean, that's one way of talking about it.
Either way, I'm,
I'm happy with my B tier ranking and we can move on.
Maybe we'll get on the spaceship.
In worse news,
Microsoft and Google have laid off thousands of workers.
And this is not,
no,
this is not deja vu.
You are not watching an old land show from a few weeks ago.
This is like,
this is like,
again,
this is still happening.
The tech sector is shedding workers.
Like there is absolutely no tomorrow.
Microsoft announced it is cutting 10,000 jobs.
That's nearly 5% of its workers.
These stated reasons include changes in consumer preferences and
macroeconomic conditions.
While Microsoft is cutting jobs in some areas though,
they are actually still hiring in others,
notably in the AI department.
I mean,
we've talked about this a fair bit over the last couple of months,
but GPT-3,
the upcoming GPT-4,
Microsoft's major investment in open AI seems to indicate that they are
laser focused on what chat bots mean for their future business,
whether it's Azure,
whether it's Bing,
whether it's windows.
I think we're going to see extremely deep integration.
A lot of the stuff that,
that Microsoft has openly shown that they care about on the consumer side
of things for the last very long time,
Cortana,
Bing,
other things like that would be aided very heavily by the
popular thing in AI right now,
which is large language models.
So improve versions of that would be extremely valuable to Microsoft.
So it makes sense.
Interestingly,
Microsoft announced the layoffs on January 18th,
one year to the day after they announced their plans to acquire Activision
Blizzard for $69 billion.
And one week after reports indicated the company plans to invest 10 billion
in open AI.
So they have money.
Interesting.
They have just chosen not to spend it on retaining
workers.
So I don't have notes for this.
So I'm going to say things that are wrong.
I'm just prefacing it.
Nice.
Like that.
It was better last week.
I just couldn't talk.
At least you didn't say anything inaccurate.
As far as I know,
once open AI makes enough money that they can pay back,
whatever.
Like Microsoft's investment,
you mean?
Yeah.
The like shares are gone and everything kind of reverts back to being owned
and operated under open AI.
So I wonder if this $10 billion investment is to try to stave that off.
Oh,
I actually, I w I w I have no way of knowing the terms of no clue.
I don't remember what the terms were, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But I feel like this might be kind of like a defensive maneuver because they
see them potentially doing too well, too fast.
So they need to up their investment potentially.
I don't know.
Maybe I know nothing moving on.
Meanwhile,
Google is cutting 12,000 employees or around 6% of its workforce.
Google's CEO stated that following two years of dramatic growth,
Google hired for a different economic reality than the one they are currently
facing over the course of the pandemic.
Google's workforce increased by 78,000 jobs.
I mean,
that's so much.
I don't know, man.
See, this is the thing that's so frustrating to me is when management gets it
right management benefits.
And when management gets it wrong.
At most companies, the employees get hit.
Yeah. So, I mean, we've talked a lot about sustainable hiring.
I think I've talked about this on WAN Show before, but basically though,
the way that Yvonne and I forecast when we sit down and we set a budget for
hiring is we look at the previous year and basically go,
okay, assuming no growth whatsoever next year,
based on that year.
So we basically build in that we could revert back to last year's performance
and not grow at all.
Can we afford whatever it is that we're hiring for this year?
Was that clear?
So our hiring budget for this year is affected by how we performed last year
and assuming that the following year will be like that.
What has actually happened is for eight out of our 10 years,
we have experienced significant growth.
For two out of our 10 years, we've had what we've kind of called
reinvestment years.
And that's a big part of the reason that we take that approach is because it
gives us the flexibility to have a reinvestment year where we can make
long-term investments that might not pay off for two years or three years.
I'm expecting this year that we're in right now to be what we would call
a reinvestment year.
I'm not expecting – well, actually, we're forecasting less profit this year
than last year.
For any Linus Media Group, Floatplane, or Creator Warehouse employees who are
watching, that's okay.
It will pay off in 2024.
It'll be fine.
Everything's good.
And if it didn't, we'd still be able to afford it because it's all kind of
based on how last year went.
Anywho, I don't know.
It's frustrating to me because this feels like such a management failure,
and yet I pretty much promise that Google's stock went up this week.
Like, here, I don't actually know.
I don't actually know.
Oftentimes a response stock does go up in these situations.
Do I have Google on my thing?
Oh, no.
Oh, wait, yes.
Google's stock is up like 5% today.
Genius.
Investors like it when a bunch of people get fired.
Yeah, which I don't know.
Here's an alternate way of looking at it.
Should investors like it when management is so incompetent that they
accidentally hire 12,000 too many people that they then can't afford to pay
and presumably whose projects, whatever it is that they're working on,
are now stalled?
Like, I don't understand this way of thinking, and it's frustrating.
Yeah, Ben Mitchell in Floatplane Chat says Google's stock went up 5%
when they fired 5% of their employees.
Maybe if they want the stock to go up 100%...
Just fire everybody, including Cook.
Okay, I'm going to buy some Google real quick here.
On that subject, I actually have some more details to share on my next
investment that is now final.
The wire has gone through.
They have effectively deposited the funds.
They've cashed the check.
I'll tell you guys a little bit more about it.
But first, let's talk through the rest of this Google stuff.
So affected employees from Google will receive 60 days of pay,
followed by at least 16 weeks of severance.
I mean, you got to at least give them credit there.
That is a pretty decent severance package.
Like, if I had...
16 weeks of severance is, like...
Yeah, if I had six months to kind of figure out what I'm going to do next...
Affected employees will receive 60 days pay,
followed by at least 16 weeks severance.
What's the difference here?
I'm not sure.
I'm sure there's some distinction, like, legally.
But, like Microsoft, Google's AI department is unaffected,
and the speculation here is likely because of the threat that
ChatGPT poses to Google's dominance.
Like, asking ChatGPT things is so much better than Googling them.
You do have to...
I know you know this.
I know it's an old data set, old data set.
It's an old data set, and you have to remember that it will confidently be wrong.
So you have to keep your mind about you.
But it is...
Oh, yeah.
Google search results can be confidently wrong, too.
Absolutely.
That's the thing.
Yeah.
Here's the challenge, though.
I read a really interesting article a while back.
I wish I had it in front of me so I could give you guys a more accurate summary of it.
But essentially, it made the argument that voice assistants, as we know them, are doomed.
They're going away.
The model was supposed to be that by collecting all of this information,
building these natural language models, and making these voice assistants
ubiquitous in our lives, either in the phones in our pockets
or in the smart speakers in our kitchens or wherever else they happen to be found.
In our TVs.
They would somehow start to sell us things and therefore generate a value to advertisers,
generating a value to the companies who have built them.
As far as anyone can tell, Cortana's gone.
Alexa seems to be losing copious amounts of money.
The whole experiment has fundamentally failed.
And what I wonder is, was the problem that they weren't good enough?
Yes.
That was part of it.
At least part of it, yeah.
They are fairly crap.
Or was the problem that people will simply not interact
with someone who is constantly trying to sell them something?
So what I'm trying to say is, is ChatGPT going to only be a viable alternative
to Google searching until it starts trying to sell us crap?
Unless it's a paid service.
If it can't successfully sell us crap, then will it ultimately just not find a way
of being commercialized?
If you think about it, I don't mind looking up information by myself
and being bombarded with ads.
It's just kind of part of the process, whether I am seeking out information
in a newspaper or TV or on a web page.
But, and maybe I'm outing myself as a bit of an introvert here,
if I have to communicate with someone and be sold something,
I would rather just buy nothing and walk away.
There's certain types of purchase experiences that I just, I dread them.
I was thinking, hey, I have not adorned my wife with any precious metals
or jewels in a solid seven to eight years.
Maybe we're due.
I should probably take her jewelry shopping.
And I just, man, you ever go in jewelry shopping at the mall?
They're like hyenas.
I hate it.
They're so aggressive.
You tell them, no, I'm just browsing for now.
My body language is completely closed.
I will preemptively, before they even get a chance to inhale,
to open their mouths and start talking to me, I'll say,
I'm just browsing for now, thank you.
And they hover.
They hover.
They're practically breathing down your neck.
And it drives me crazy because maybe I'm about to prove myself wrong.
It drives me crazy because they wouldn't do it if it didn't work on somebody.
But if the more natural you make the interaction for me with this chat bot
or with this voice assistant or whatever it is,
I feel like the more personally offended or bothered or attacked
or whatever the word is, the more personally anxious I'm going to be
when they try to sell me something ultimately.
Does that make sense?
Or am I way off base here?
No, that makes sense.
I just, I think, and I'm probably going to be wrong
and they're probably going to go with a different model
and that will be super bad.
But I'm really hoping they go for a prosumer type of approach
and charge for it.
Not if it's Microsoft.
I mean, Microsoft doesn't even charge for Windows anymore, essentially.
Like what even is Microsoft's business?
It's pretty clear they're chasing that.
I mean, why else would they have kept beating this dead bing horse?
It's got to be an advertising model.
I mean, obviously, they're certainly open to software as a service.
I mean, we see that with Game Pass,
but again, back to what the best way to monetize something
that interacts with you.
If there was like a YouTube Premium chat GPT
or a YouTube Premium Bing powered by chat GPT, whatever,
I would pay for that.
Like Bing Premium.
It won't be, though,
because you don't want your brand to be sullied
by the crappy version.
I mean, Microsoft learned this back in the day
with Windows 2000 and Windows ME.
I mean, why are we maintaining a good kernel?
**** it, kernel.
Why don't we just have one good kernel?
Yeah.
There was a thread on Twitter where people were talking about
what they would pay for chat GPT powered by GPT 4.0, whatever.
Sure.
And you and I both know that that type of interaction
is always useless trash
because all the people talking are like,
oh, I'll pay whatever,
and then it comes time to do it, and they don't.
Pulling your actual credit card out of your actual wallet
is much higher friction than talking about
how you're going to spend money on the Internet.
Yeah.
It, like, never means anything.
It's a completely useless conversation.
But I was a little bit surprised, knowing all of that,
how many people were enthusiastically wanting
to line up to pay for it.
And I think if they made it a,
I don't even know if it's prosumer,
potentially just straight-up professional application,
I think they could make a lot of money from businesses
because businesses, I think, would like powerful 4.0-powered
chat GPT-reinforced employees.
And you look at how much these platforms
are charging companies for such basic crap.
Yeah.
But it's worth it for the company,
so they just pay it anyways.
Yeah.
Like, the bill for teams.
Yeah.
Enormous.
Yeah.
But it's like...
Well, what?
Are we going to not have, like...
Guess we'll pay for it, like...
Intra-company communication?
Are we just going to not have that, I guess?
It's text chat, when text chat was free,
like, 20 years ago.
I know.
But we pay out the nose.
Like, it's really expensive.
Yes, I know how much it is.
It just drives me nuts.
Thank you.
It's crazy to me.
Don't forget, we also pay for G Suite.
And then it's so bad.
And Adobe Suite.
And Slack, and everything else.
Yeah, and they're really expensive.
Yes, I know.
So if you offered something that was actually
powerful and wasn't literally a text chat
that barely works, I think people would
pay a lot for it as a company.
Maybe not so much as a person.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, because it's all...
It's kind of like how we talked about the
issue with real estate, where when people
are buying it to live in it, the calculus
is very different compared to when people
are buying it based on, and pricing it
based on how much money they can make from it.
Like, from my point of view, when I look at
the cost of something, I'm looking at it in
terms of how much time, which equals money,
it saves.
So I was talking to Dan, actually, before
the show, and I was saying,
Hey, Dan, merch messages.
Like, wouldn't it be cool if when merch
messages come in, okay, so when people ask
a question or something like that down here,
when you guys see a response that is almost
always from Dan.
Occasionally I reply to them.
Do you ever reply to them?
To what, sorry?
Merch messages.
Like the text replies?
Okay, so occasionally I'll reply to them.
I didn't know you did.
Yeah, here's a reply.
There's a reply right there.
Usually that's handled by Dan.
And he replies to people just from hearing
us talk on the WAN Show, because he's like
always here, or just from things he knows
internally.
He'll try to answer your questions as best
he can.
And I was telling Dan, I was like,
Hey, A, it would save you a ton of time.
And B, I think it would help you filter
which ones have been addressed before versus
which ones we've talked about or which ones
we haven't talked about.
If you could just take the transcript of
every WAN Show, dump it into a chat GPT prompt,
and then say, based on this library of
information, what's the answer to this?
You do a quick sanity check and then you
just paste it in.
It's like, oh.
You can do that.
I know.
Well, I know you can.
But how much will it cost?
Right?
Yeah, right now.
We don't know.
Right now, nothing, but it's in a testing
phase.
They've been very open about the fact that
it's just in a testing phase.
Yeah.
And what will the tools look like for that
integration?
Will there be API access so that the
merch messages dashboard will properly
integrate with that?
So people's questions could come in,
automagically run through this process,
and then our dashboard could be updated so
that Dan only has to see their original
message and the suggested output.
So there's two things.
One of them, a bunch of people in chat
were like, why don't you guys just run
IRC?
It's not the point.
It's not the point.
It's not the point.
It's not the point.
I'm not even going to explain the point.
It's just not the point.
And two, something that I think is going
to be a really interesting reckoning is
whenever ChatGPT's model changes and these
tools that people are building that are
based on it now have to react to the
model change.
That's going to be interesting.
I know people that have sold tools built
on ChatGPT for 10K plus.
Really?
To companies that are trying to buy these
tools that are ChatGPT powered and they
don't seem to understand that it's just
in a testing phase.
And it's going to change a lot.
Something's going to happen eventually.
They're going to commercialize it some
way eventually.
Like soon.
Yeah.
It seems to me.
There are people making customer support
bots for commercial pages right now based
on ChatGPT.
Huh.
Which like, yeah, right now, honestly,
it probably works pretty good.
Yeah.
But when it costs you 10 cents a message
or whatever that.
Well, you just have no idea.
Yeah.
We have no clue.
No clue.
They might just yoink it.
Right.
Yeah.
They might just say, hey, testing phase
is over.
Yeah.
That's too many calls.
Yeah.
I get it.
Like, I don't know.
I wouldn't want to do that right now.
That's all I'm saying.
But there's some pretty big core feature
infrastructure that is being put on ChatGPT,
which is interesting.
Okay.
Speaking of people missing the point
sometimes, I have an update on that thing
that I said and then reversed course on.
And now I'm just like, I don't know what to do.
Okay.
You know how I said I was just going to start.
Oh, the comment blocking.
I was going to just start shadow banning
people who were just, like, made my brain hurt.
And then the next week I was like,
you know what, I shadow banned like five people.
And then I was like, no, this is not,
this isn't helping anything anyway.
It's going to do nothing for improving the
quality of discourse because it's an endless
sea of bad takes or whatever else.
And I don't want to create an environment
where people feel like by expressing their thoughts,
they could, you know, end up shadow banned,
which is, like, sucky, right?
Like, that's never really been our approach
to community feedback.
Never been the goal.
Yeah.
You can find a nugget of gold in a mountain of poo.
And that's always kind of been my philosophy about it.
So I guess I better keep all the poo
so that there's a chance I'll find some gold.
Then the next day I read this.
So this is on our 4070 TI review.
Linus, Dyson made everyone post a review at the same time.
We don't work with them anymore
and we don't condone this behavior.
Also Linus, when a new computer part launches.
Yes, corporate daddy,
we'll post at the same time as everyone.
Why don't I just shadow ban that person?
Why not?
A, that first thing never happened.
We worked with Dyson after that.
The part that was bad...
Yeah, we just thought it was kind of stupid.
Yeah, the part that was bad
was that without telling everybody
that everyone else would be posting
these vacuum cleaner videos at exactly the same time,
they had, like, an embargo lift
on sponsored vacuum cleaner videos
and it was a fiasco.
A bloodbath.
Yeah, it was...
But I never said we wouldn't work with them anymore
and I never said we don't condone
a coordinated product launch.
Also Linus, when a new computer part launches.
No, it's not yes, corporate daddy,
we'll post at the same time as everyone.
It's yes, viewer,
we understand that once the news cycle is over,
you're not going to watch it.
Like, a perfect example of this is
we pushed back on separate NDA lifts for unboxings.
Yeah.
Hard.
When that started to materialize,
I think one of the first to do it
in the IT space was NVIDIA.
I'm so surprised, I already knew that,
but, like, it shouldn't be surprising to anybody.
Yeah, you were there.
You were literally there
when there was, like, this separate unboxing embargo
that, who was it?
Paul, I think, technically didn't break
because the card was just there and open
and not in a box or whatever.
Was that how it went down?
I remember something about that.
It was either Paul or Kyle.
It was one of them.
I don't know.
But the point is that we pushed back hard
on these separate NDAs and separate embargo dates
for unboxings compared to full reviews.
Now, I still don't mind that as much
as long as the embargo lift for the full review
is at the same time as sales availability.
That's fine because that means
before you're taking people's money,
they will have an opportunity
to see the product properly evaluated.
But I do think that a separate NDA lift
for unboxings, so, I mean, we're up to, like,
three NDAs for our product launch at this point.
There's the announcement embargo.
There's the unboxing embargo.
And then there's the review embargo.
And then sometimes they'll try and sneak
another one in there, like a preview embargo
where you can run specific titles or whatever else.
And it's gotten kind of ridiculous,
but you guys have to understand why they're doing it.
It's because they are leveraging the short attention span
or really the shortness of the news cycle to great effect.
And this is one of those things that I just,
I don't know what you guys want me to do
because I don't like it, but you guys are ultimately
the ones who create this game that I'm playing.
I see a lot of people blame the algorithm, okay,
for clickable titles and thumbnails, right?
Or for the-
The algorithm just reacts to people.
Or the proliferation of garbage content on YouTube.
We the people are the reason why microtransactions
are so incredibly smart to put in your game.
All the algorithm is, and this was such a great conversation.
Well, multiple conversations,
because I was very resistant to it at first.
But one of my favorite contacts at YouTube,
Head of Search and Discovery, basically has drilled into me
and he's right.
Every time you open your mouth to say something, something,
algorithm, something, something, something,
try replacing algorithm with the word audience.
And you will find a much more,
you will find a much more accurate understanding
of what exactly is going on.
So this is what ultimately bothered me.
For the launch of the 7900XT and 7900XTX,
AMD played the game.
They had two separate embargoes,
one for unboxing, well, three, right?
Announcement, unboxing, and then the full review.
The unboxing video, which I'm not gonna pretend
that it's anything other than what it is.
It's low effort content, right?
I've got this box, I open it.
There's some specs, right?
I give some thoughts on it,
but if I have measured the performance of it,
I'm not allowed to tell you, right?
We can extrapolate.
I feel like we added a little bit of value
to some of our pre-review coverage of the 7900 series
by taking what AMD had provided,
recreating that bench as closely as we could,
and then extrapolating how we would expect it
to perform against the competition
when AMD wasn't disclosing that.
We did everything we could with it,
but at the end of the day, that's pretty shallow content.
That video ended up with 1.9 million views,
took a grand total of about an hour of prep time
for someone to just kind of put together a spec list
and grab some cards,
some relevant comparison cards off the shelf for me,
then about another 40 minutes
of me sitting down in front of a camera.
That's it.
That is the grand total time we spent on it.
Okay, then our full review,
and we got to remember too that both of these
are with us throwing the full power
of our wonderful thumbnail artist Maria
and all the expertise we have internally
in terms of titling videos
and trying to create catchy intros
and all that kind of stuff.
Our full review ended up with a whopping 1.9 million views.
Now, that doesn't sound like a problem, right?
Yeah, okay, so the unboxing and the review
ended up with similar view counts,
except for a couple of things.
Number one is that that review is, in my humble opinion,
the second best GPU review we've ever done,
followed only by the 4070 Ti,
and that's only because it came a little bit later
once we got our workflow settled in a little bit better.
And number two, it's on a way bigger channel,
like way bigger.
And I'm just, I don't know, man,
I feel like I'm rambling a little bit now at this point.
I'm kind of bothered by how many people
look at that short circuit video,
which we never call a review.
We never put a review in the description.
I never say review in the video.
The number of people that think it's a review
and just the appetite for deeper,
more analytical content is just not there
compared to just this surface level content.
So how did I arrive here?
I don't remember anymore.
We were talking about the comment
and how you wanted to remove it because it's annoying.
Yeah. Okay.
It's just bad faith arguments like that.
It's really frustrating.
Yeah. There you go.
Well, I mean...
I don't know.
I think it's like you're screwed if you do
and you're screwed if you don't.
Yeah, because, I mean, there's no...
Unless I were to publish some kind of official policy,
like a code of conduct by which I decide
if someone is shadowbanned or not.
Like, I read a particularly frustrating thread
on the forum either today or yesterday
where there were a number of people making,
again, these just extraordinarily bad faith arguments.
In this case, it was about the screwdriver in the backpack.
And one in particular wrote this wall of text
about this long after someone challenged them
because what they said before was,
I could go on AliExpress and get that screwdriver
in that backpack for a fraction of the price.
The cost on that screwdriver is, like, this low.
And someone was like, okay, then do it.
Show me.
And they wrote this wall of text.
I'm not going to bother because it's not worth my time,
but here's all the, like, knowledge I have about how that...
So I replied.
I was just like, I will give you 10 grand.
I will give you $10,000 if you can do that.
It's worth your time now.
It's worth your time now.
It's just on AliExpress.
Where's your excuse?
Yeah.
And it's just like,
I don't know how to have a conversation
when the person on the other side of the table
is not capable of existing in the same plane of reality that I'm in.
You know, they say, I can get that screwdriver for $10.
And I say, you cannot.
Would you like to reevaluate your position?
No, thank you.
And I don't know how to deal with that.
You know?
Yeah.
It's like, what do you want from me?
Do you need my invoices from MegaPro,
from PH Molds, from ITD Tool and Die?
Do you...
Like, we're pretty transparent, actually.
Someone's asking if they can enter the contest.
You can't do it.
Go for it. You can't.
That's the whole point.
There is no AliExpress vendor.
Those handles are injection molded in pit meadows,
or excuse me, Maple Ridge, British Columbia.
Like, you can't.
It just doesn't work that way.
It's not a thing.
You're missing the point, my dude.
And it's like, it's one of those things where,
you know, if you were willing to open your eyes
and open your mind, you would know.
I mean, we have footage of me in the injection molding facility
hand-building screwdrivers here, you know?
I just... I can't.
So...
Yeah, go ahead.
No, keep going.
I was trying to derail us, so if you have more to say, keep going.
No, I mean, no, it's great.
Obviously, you guys are the Wancho audience.
You guys get it, and you've got my best interests at heart, I think,
and you're sitting here going, Linus, don't engage.
And you're right, but the thing that you haven't experienced,
and one of the reasons that, honestly,
Luke or the other people internally here
or my fellow YouTubers or some of the only people
that I feel like I can really talk to about these things,
is that you've never experienced these thousands or hundreds
or even dozens of attacks that come...
And you're not allowed to defend, generally.
And you guys are basically saying, don't defend yourself.
But the thing is that it doesn't go away.
And in some cases, what can happen is it can even grow.
And so I'm kind of looking at it going,
okay, a perfect example is when we had that sexual assault accusation.
And I basically took the very controversial, internally, move
of kind of going, okay, here is my entire relationship history,
start to finish.
The only part that was controversial with me was the details.
I didn't need to know it tasted like smoke.
I will never forget that.
I just thought it was kind of funny for that one.
It was the most memorable thing about it.
Sorry, keep going.
So I took the controversial move of basically going,
okay, fine, then full transparency.
Here's everything.
So anything that doesn't match that,
I will not be acknowledging because that didn't happen.
So now I don't have to talk about it anymore.
But there's kind of this contingent that refuses to acknowledge
any sort of fact or reality and is always just kind of,
I mean, haters going to hate, I guess is the bottom line.
And it wears on you.
Yeah.
It really does.
And you want to do something about it.
This happened, this happened on my, on my tour of, of OVH,
but there was the, let me see.
Yeah. The RTX 6,000.
And like,
whose fault is it that there's a card called the RTX 6,000?
It's Nvidia's fault.
But I had to say it in the video.
And I knew when I said it that people are going to go, huh?
And there's all the, and this is so light and who cares,
but there's all these comments everywhere on Floatplane,
on, on YouTube, on everything.
What an idiot.
That card doesn't exist.
What a dummy.
And the whole time, every single,
and this is so light compared to what he's talking about.
But every single time I read that, I'm just like, man, like you,
there's a bunch of parts of the video that are not that great.
Like you could call me out on that,
but why are you calling me out on this?
And then I want to respond to every single one of them.
And then it's just like, okay, no, I need to not do this.
Yeah.
And it's just not reasonable.
And it bothers you, right?
Because like, especially in cases where you, you know,
it was, you know, you were right.
You just kind of go, well, now,
now you're going to sit and think that forever.
And given that our entire job is trying to inform people about technology,
I just like, I could sit at my keyboard all day,
correcting misconceptions,
literally all day and do absolutely nothing else.
That'd be a funny video.
I mean, we've done Linus responds to haters, I guess,
or no, we've done Linus responds to mean comments.
You should do like the thumbnails,
like you pointing at the screen,
it just says you're wrong is the thumbnail.
But here's the problem.
So we, I guess about, about six months ago, we created,
well, I shouldn't say we, James created,
it doesn't matter.
Timeline doesn't matter.
Sometime in the last little while,
James created a document called how to make good videos.
And in how to make good videos,
he created a section based on a conversation that we had had called the
laws of Linus.
And there's a bunch of really interesting stuff in here that I have,
even though not all of it is actually from me, it was a,
it was a team effort building, building it.
And I probably wouldn't have called it that just because it's sort of a
silly thing, but it's got, he put a flex on acronym, right? Yeah,
I guess so. Sure. Yeah.
So the laws, the laws got them really did like you better when you
couldn't talk. It's a better show that way.
It was a little disheartening how many people were like,
this was the best show. I was like, all right.
Speaking of haters. Okay. I have to tell you though,
and this is the first time I'm telling him on air,
but I told you after the show last week as well,
it is actually far more helpful than you and you guys probably realize to
have a friendly presence, like essentially a living,
breathing laugh track slash supporter,
just sitting next to you while you ramble on and on about things,
kind of nodding or raising an eyebrow when you say something stupid.
Like I could imagine at the height of the pandemic, you know,
being an athlete performing in an empty stadium, you know, I don't know.
Did I play that shot good? There's no feedback whatsoever.
And it really does. It really does get you going. Anyway,
back to the laws of Linus. One of the laws is never insult the audience.
It doesn't go well. Yeah. And I do it from time to time.
I break the rules. You know, someone on,
I honestly feel more liberated with the floatplane audience because
realistically they pay for the subscription. They're probably hardcore.
They can probably handle it. And, you know, every once in a while,
you know, there'll be a brain dead enough take that I'm just like,
you know what? No, we're going to,
we're going to talk about this cause that's, that's pretty bad.
But I shouldn't, I shouldn't because hold on.
I'm trying to find the bloody part of it. This is driving me absolutely crazy.
Okay, fine. I will resort to find and replace. Is it insult or no,
it must be attack guys. I'm fine. You don't have to. Yeah, here it is.
Do not personally attack the viewer no matter how wrong or stupid their
beliefs are. Not even an implied attack.
And this has actually helped us a lot over the last little while because
there have been a few videos where we, you know,
we'd make an offhand joke, say for example,
about like DDR2 memory, you know,
being old and it's like, well,
hold on a second in a lot of parts of the world,
DDR2 is like still expensive and still current and it's easy to live in our,
in our North American bubble and to,
and it's not even necessarily wrong to live in our North American bubble
because that's where solid,
like almost 60% of our viewership comes from with probably another 30% from,
you know, Western, Western Europe.
So like your Germany's and UK's and France's of the world,
places like that.
But you've got to understand that when you are broadcasting to literally
millions of people,
if only 1% of them are personally attacked by what you say,
then you just upset a thousand,
10,000 people for what?
Yeah.
Why? To what end?
Like why?
So one of the things that I'll do during script review with people now is I'll
say like, Hey,
why are we poking fun at people who liked windows Vista?
That's just, just an example.
Why are we doing that? And they're like, cause it's funny. Cause they're dumb.
I'm like, well, a I like windows Vista.
Not so funny now, is it?
But that's not even the point because B who cares?
Is there a benefit? Yeah.
And honestly this is something where Yvonne has been a really good influence on
me because she has basically said, Hey, look,
I think that you're too agro and I think that you're going to catch a lot more
flies with honey than with vinegar. And she's, she's right.
I have basically never one.
I shouldn't say I have never,
I have rarely witnessed like an
aggressive approach winning an argument on the internet.
Think about it.
I, so I, I agree with the statement in general.
I think sometimes it is not.
Okay. So this is, this is a tech channel. We're talking about tech topics.
So it should basically always be honey because who cares?
Sure. But I don't think this applies to all arguments one could have,
if that makes sense.
We've talked about this before. I don't remember how I phrased it,
but I think it was like sometimes you want to catch them with the vinegar or
whatever. Like I, there's certain times where like I'm not willing to
acknowledge any potential benefits of the argument on the other side.
So I'm not going to approach it.
But you don't have to acknowledge merit that you don't have to acknowledge any
merit of their argument when there isn't any,
but you could acknowledge maybe how they feel.
No.
Okay.
There's certain, there are certain arguments where I, I think no.
There is not like a ton of them necessarily,
but there are certain arguments where I think no.
That's fair.
I don't know.
Intolerance will not be tolerated.
Yeah.
Yes. I mean, that's fair enough.
What we will also not tolerate is AI art generators
blatantly ripping off the source material on which they
were trained. That's right.
I called this.
There is already a two major copyright lawsuits
against AI art generators.
Getty images claims that stability AI scraped the Getty images site using it
as a database to train its own AI art generator.
These claims are corroborated by an independent study that found that stable
diffusion was trained on hundreds of thousands of images sourced from stock
image sites.
Notably stable diffusion has a funny habit of recreating the Getty images
watermark in the images that it produces.
And this is a figure two down below.
This is hilarious.
That's really funny.
Whoops.
This is a super weird image.
Is this supposed to be like a baseball catcher?
It looks like baseball mixed with football.
It really does.
I do have to wonder what the prompt was.
Also, I kind of have to wonder what kind of roids this guy's got going on here.
Though if you take steroids, that is your own life choice.
Don't be upset.
Not insulting the audience.
I like it.
Yeah.
I actually just don't care.
Like if that's what you want to do to your testicles, then like.
Mine are bigger.
Okay, I break my rules sometimes.
He might be short, but he's got them big ones.
A study from the University of Maryland found that stable diffusion can
sometimes end up closely replicating images from its training database.
These aren't pixel perfect copies, but the derivation is pretty blatant.
That is figure one over here where.
Yep.
I don't think it takes a genius to see that there's a relationship here.
Yeah.
I mean, you can't even move the wolves around a little bit.
Where's the moon?
Give me three wolves and a moon, you know?
Give me something to work with here.
Make it defensible.
The second major lawsuit is a class action against stability AI,
DeviantArt and MidJourney claiming that their art generators are simply
remixing the copyrighted works of millions of artists.
The lawsuit's website calls such AI generators,
21st century collage tools.
And it's an interesting thing because like the, like the bloodborne one,
for instance, if the lower image, which I believe is the AI generated image,
I think I actually don't know.
I actually don't know.
It kind of doesn't matter because they're similar enough to each other that
it's irrelevant.
And that's sort of the point.
So say the AI generated image is used for, let's say a mobile game, right?
If it was called white blood cell birth and it was on the Apple store,
they would probably be gone after because their bloodborne would say that's
too close to our logo because you just clearly ripped off our logo, right?
Yeah.
So it's the same thing.
And then like, I've been caught in this argument a little bit because I went
anti AI art and I went pro AI, the large language model.
And people didn't like that I was kind of on each side of the fence,
but this is kind of the example.
And I don't know a hundred percent really where it ends up being okay because
it's still a hundred percent true that the large language model is trained off
of other people's stuff.
It's not true that that is a thing, but it's a lot less apparent.
It's way less apparent.
You don't have it do this.
You can get chat GPT to spit out things that other people have written.
It's happened, but it's not as egregious.
It doesn't seem as common, stuff like that.
It seems like it's done better,
but it also seems like it was easier to do it better because it's a large
language model and the way that works is easier.
But when it comes to art, we're seeing a lot of this.
I had the example that I gave in the previous way and showing these three
examples are just as blatant.
I mean, here's the thing though.
Are people there?
Okay. I'm going to ask, I'm going to ask a spicy question.
Does it matter what the law is if the overall social benefit outweighs the
drawback to, to those few who are affected by it?
And to be clear, I'm not taking the position that, you know,
the ends justify the means here.
I'm just asking if we all collectively kind of decide this is okay because it
has to be okay because this is really convenient for our lives that we can,
you know,
create a children's book from scratch in a weekend without needing an
illustrator because we never learned to draw.
Is this ultimately going to fizzle out and are these lawsuits going to just
eventually go away?
I don't think that's the average stance though.
So I don't think it would.
Well, it's not the average stance now,
but most people have not used an AI image generator yet.
Once people get used to the convenience of an AI image generator,
will they be willing to let it go?
Ooh. Yeah. My pessimism would say no.
Right? Like, I mean, okay. Another,
another perfect example of, of sometimes the,
the Gulf that exists between what is ethical and, and legally acceptable
versus what is socially acceptable would be something like the way that some
creators approach react content. And I know this is going to,
this is going to be a hot spicy potato. There's going to be a hot take.
Oh, I can't believe he's talking about this, but it's like, it's,
it's actually pretty cut and dried, right? Like I, I'm not gonna,
I'm not gonna, there's no point,
not being transparent about it because the internet never forgets anything.
So I might as well just tell you guys, we're working on a react channel.
Like it's, it, it is effort,
easy content. And it is like obscenely,
obscenely profitable.
If you can generate a bunch of views on content that takes almost literally
no time. That's what it is. That's what react content is. And.
What's your approach to the, I'm very intrigued.
What is the approach to the react content channel?
Well, first I'm going to talk about, you know, what are the,
what are the obvious problems with some of the react content that's out there?
The defense that is used by,
and I'm not going to name anyone cause I just don't,
I don't need any beef in my life. I just like,
it's a waste of brain energy for me. But the,
the argument that is often used to defend it is fair use.
Fair use is a gray area.
For one thing, it actually has to be,
it actually has to be defended in court. It is, it is,
is not as simple as, well, it's fair use therefore it's fine.
The only reason that you might get away with saying it's fair
use is if nobody chooses to challenge you on it.
So in a way you could look at that fair use argument for react content
as basically just a way that large creators can
turn their nose up at small creators who can't afford to defend
their work by saying essentially because you can't afford to sue me,
it's fair use. That's a pretty shitty stance.
Yeah.
And a lot of what gets defended
as fair use is clearly not, you know, Google has a,
has a support doc for this because they run a little site you might've heard
of before called YouTube.
And so they have a lot of kind of like legal, legal Q and A on there.
And the four factors of fair use are laid out or pillars,
if you want to call them that are laid out pretty clearly.
So there's the purpose and character of the use,
including whether such use is commercial or is for nonprofit educational
purposes. If it's commercial, that's a big strike against you.
And the second you hit monetization or pimp t-shirts or screwdrivers
or whatever else, that's, that's very,
that's very commercial use, right?
Courts typically focus on whether the use is transformative.
That is whether it adds new expression or meaning to the original,
or whether it merely copies from the original. And this is a spectrum, right?
This is not just black and white. It,
it adds new expression or it doesn't.
It's up to the interpretation and it's up to the arguments that get made.
Number two is the,
the nature of the copyrighted work, right?
So using material from a factual work is more likely to be fair than from
a fictional work. Number three,
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the
copyrighted work as a whole. And this is where a lot of react content,
as it is right now, is in deep doo-doo.
A lot of people in the chat are talking about the H3 ruling. Yes,
that did go in favor of Ethan,
but you've also got to remember and understand that fair use is
something that is tackled on a case by case basis by the courts.
And in the case of H3 productions versus that guy,
I can't remember his name, Ethan, to his credit,
did not use the entire original source and
the, the,
the bulk of the video was for better or for worse,
H3's commentary, right?
As opposed to just the original work being consumed in a
way that is not benefiting the original rights holder in any way.
Number four,
and this is another huge one that is highly problematic with a lot of react
content right now,
the effect on the potential market for or the
value of the copyrighted work.
If you play the entire video as part of the video,
the impact is enormous.
Like if, like, let's say for example,
someone did a react video to one of ours where they pulled a few key
things, but largely transformed it,
largely contributed their own thoughts and their own expression.
That is pretty obviously fair use, even though it is commercial.
So usually I wouldn't consider our,
I wouldn't consider our content to be primarily purely fictional.
I'd say that we, we strive to create factual works.
So it is more likely to be covered by fair use.
The character of the use while it is commercial,
it would be highly transformative.
And the amount of that is used in relation to the copyrighted work as a
whole could be quite low.
There also is potentially a positive effect on the potential market for the
copyrighted work.
So in the case of something like, let's say a,
let's stick with the example that we're using just for the sake of ease of
following along.
So if you only provide snippets of the original video,
but explicitly in your content, you say,
but there's some key parts of it that you should go check out.
I've got it linked down below.
There's a much stronger argument for fair use as it is right now.
If you upload a video that is essentially the entire
original work for profit for yourself with some chunks
where you respond to or react to or talk over
the original work,
there is no reason whatsoever to go watch the original work.
And so you'll see these large creators that are getting in some cases,
many times the viewership of the original
work at the cost of the original work. And I honestly don't have,
I don't have the solution to this right now.
Cause like it's pretty clear that YouTube's copyright claim system is pretty
broken. Like even if something was clearly not fair use,
you know, a,
I don't necessarily think that I would be entitled to 100% of the revenue,
which to my knowledge is the only way you can copyright claim something.
You basically just say, I think that's all mine.
Or you can say, I think I deserve nothing there.
There there's no middle ground whatsoever.
And two the community backlash is just not worth it because there's this
perception that, um, I don't, I,
I don't know. I actually, I actually just don't really understand why,
because sitting as someone who is relatively speaking on the top of the online
creator pyramid,
I can tell you right now that the community backlash that follows any smaller
creator who's trying to enforce copyright is wrong.
It's wrong. It's just plain wrong.
It benefits the people who are at the top who don't need it.
They actually have money. They could hire staff,
create something original, get equipment, whatever.
Whereas the people who are at the bottom actually need it.
They can't build a screwdriver from scratch and sell a hundred thousand
units, right? Like they don't, they don't have the same tools.
And so to, to ignore,
to ignore these arguments just because, you know,
we don't like what people being mean to people we formed a parasocial
relationship with. It's messed up, man.
Okay. So all of that being said, how's yours going to work?
So what I've got in the,
I'm not signed into that account on here in one sec.
Good.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
So basically I, oh shoot, it's in the comments.
General reaction channel guidelines. Timeliness is hugely important.
Blah, blah, blah. No, no. Where is it?
Oh shoot. Okay.
At that time someone reacted to one of our things.
Yeah, it was a really, really interesting. So again, as a,
as a content creator, I have, you know,
actual numbers for how beneficial reaction content is to the original
creator. The answer is much in case you guys are wondering,
and that's even as someone with a substantial following already
and whose content might already have significant momentum on,
on a channel from someone who's only ever upload or on a channel that's
only ever uploaded one video or something like that where they don't have
that, that critical mass. I do,
I do think there's multiple arguments here. Sure.
And it depends on the nature of the inclusion. Yes.
If you include, so this is okay. I'm getting to it. Okay.
Okay. I'm getting to it. Unfortunately, I just don't have the,
basically I lay, I don't know. I can't find it. I laid out,
I've seen it work. I've laid out some guidelines for what I would consider
to be like, like ethical reaction content where the goal,
the stated purpose and not just the stated purpose,
but the actual goal of the content needs to be to uplift the original
creator, as opposed to coming back to the pillars of fair use,
harm the value or potential market for the original work.
And I think that's something that has just been
completely lost. I think there's, I think there's been,
I think there is, and there has been reaction content that is like,
clearly exploitative, exploitative. Exploitative, yes.
He hasn't been practicing talking for a week. It's actually true.
That's probably not the reason why that just happened, but it is true.
But I have also seen reaction content that has like made channels,
basically. For sure. For sure. It totally happens.
And I think a lot of it we were talking about earlier,
but like how instead of the algorithm, you should say community.
I think a lot of it has to do with the community that follows that person.
Are they only ever going to watch this person's content because of the host
and they have no real cares about the source and they're never going to
follow through. They're never going to go to that channel.
They're never going to check it out, whatever.
Or is it a community of people that are going to follow through
and are going to give support when they watch,
when the creator watches different videos or whatever.
The problem with that argument is it's not up to you.
Yeah. It's up to the original copyright holder.
Well, for sure. Yeah. So it doesn't matter what you think.
No, I, well, that's not a good take.
Well, it doesn't though. Well, it doesn't matter.
That's not my statement.
Oh, I thought you were saying that I as the reactor can just decide,
well, no, my audience isn't really going to follow through on this.
So I should just show it to them. Oh, okay. I misunderstood you.
Cause I was like, really? What I'm saying is that in,
I think especially the current era, there's a big mix of ones that are good
and aren't good. And obviously even within individuals,
there's a mix of doing the right thing and being extremely lazy.
I've seen example clips of someone who will go from really good reactionary
content to a piece of content that probably wants you to,
that probably makes you want to go follow through and see the original creator,
all that kind of stuff. And then the next clip they're like eating.
So it just plays the video and they literally never say a whole thing other
than just like, Hmm. Yeah. They're chewing. And it's like, wow. All right.
Well, I don't really know what to say about this, but I know what to say,
but I'm bad. They might watch LTT and I'm not supposed to insult the audience.
Got them. But, but yeah, I don't know. It's, it's,
I know of channels that exist that basically only exist because reaction
channels blew them up. But then I also know of channels that hate it
and have openly tried to get people to stop and people just keep doing it.
And it's like, okay, well, it's rough.
Well, the answer is really simple. The answer is reach out and ask.
And that I do also know people that do that right now.
And that's the worst part.
Like I, I have personally had content used in montages or,
or, or, or like mashups or reaction videos or whatever.
Yeah. Like someone brought up in floatplane chat,
a gardener Bryant was a Linux creator that reacted to some of our Linux
challenge videos. I watched them. I thought they were really good. Yep. Yeah.
But hold on. Okay. I'll get to that in a second. But I, I have,
I have personally known of huge creators,
like enormous creators that did not,
did not have a valid fair use argument for their use of our content. Gotcha.
And could have reached out like, like,
like absolutely could have reached out or had their staff reach out.
Like I'm talking creators with a staff, you know,
like star Wars kid.
That's an old reference anyway. I just didn't. And that's just,
that's just pure laziness. Yeah. Even people, even people I know. So there's,
there's a handful of creators that I have like a standing agreement with like
Austin, a Marquez, for example, it's like, Hey,
can we just have a mutual,
like if I need to use a clip from you and I'm like, sure I'd like say it from
you or whatever. And if you use a clip from me and make sure that you do the same,
can we just like not email every time? Sure.
But that's, that's a positive,
that's a constructive way to build community.
Just taking stuff and being like, Oh, it'll probably benefit them. I don't know.
Maybe that's not cool and it should never be acceptable.
And you know,
you have to ask yourself one of the pillars of your reaction channel are going
to be that you reach out every time for every video. I think we should. Yeah.
I think that you're speaking out against it. So I think it would have to be right.
Well, it depends. Right. So if you are reacting to some, okay.
So a perfect example of this would be the recent coffee Zilla,
Logan Paul controversy.
Logan Paul's not going to give coffee Zilla permission to,
to utilize portions of his video. But in that case,
coffee Zilla is clearly transforming the original work.
That is not sitting and eating while the Logan Paul
video plays as like a weird spectacle or whatever else.
So in the case of, of a,
of a clear and obvious fair use argument, I don't think we have to.
So we just have to, sorry.
Is that reaction channel going to cover divisive things like that?
I don't know. We're, we're not sure yet.
What is it? Is it a tech reaction channel? Is it?
So let's go. Let's, let's talk about some of the things we have in here.
So you know,
one of the things we could do is like we've done a few of these on the main
channel, like reacting to community submissions,
like best and worst builds and stuff like that.
Reacting to.
Those are community submissions. That's a totally different thing.
But it's still, it's, it's reaction content.
But it's not. It's ethical reaction content.
It's not reaction content in the way that the internet would,
would interpret the term reaction content.
Really internet. Would you consider that to be reaction content?
I don't think they would because if you say react.
Let's pull it.
Okay. Let's pull it.
I'm going to do my pull dance.
Oh my God.
You're going to get some reaction content from that.
They're going to side with you.
They're going to side with you even if I'm right.
Cause you're wrong.
No, it's reaction content.
Anyway.
It is reaction content by definition of the term.
It is not reaction content by how the internet interprets that.
If you say react channel.
Yeah.
People are going to think that you're reacting to videos because
that's how that works right now.
If it's user submitted videos that is seen as a different thing.
All right.
Let's see the poll results.
If you're so confident, why don't you put up a poll smart guy?
Cause I'm typing it out. Come on.
Okay. So some other ideas, you know,
I really love what corridor crew does,
where they will bring on experts to react to, you know,
so that's actually,
that's such a good example of how you can take very obviously
copyrighted work from very aggressive IP companies,
like, like a Disney, for example,
and confidently include stills or even motion from their content in your
video. Because if you are, for example,
doing a detailed breakdown of how the CGI was done for a particular scene,
you're sitting there,
you're talking about how much work it was and how cool it was.
You are not using a substantial amount.
The effect on the original work is obviously positive.
The nature of your, your own work is,
is clearly more informative and or educational slash factual.
And even though the nature of the copyrighted work is,
is purely fictional,
the way it is being transformed into something that is educational is very,
very cut and dried. Right.
So anyway, bringing in experts, you know,
something that I've wanted to do for a long time on the LTT channel,
we just haven't gotten around to it.
Might've even gotten as far as an email to Wendell, sup Wendell,
is I want to do LTT reacts to like bad hacking scenes in movies.
That'd be amazing. Is that react enough for you?
That fits my term.
Right. That's what I'm saying. Is that?
So yes.
Okay. Is that acceptable?
Maybe not.
Is that under the umbrella of reaction content?
I don't know if it is.
Okay. What is common? Oh, your poll is bad.
Cause it makes it seem like a binary choice.
Cause I didn't include a both.
Oh yeah. Floatplane chat does not like it.
Yeah. Cause they want a both.
Okay.
But that's completely, that defeats the whole point.
All right.
And they don't get that and you don't get that,
but it defeats the whole point.
We want to do reacting to like bad product listings.
So like going through like, you know, Facebook marketplace, you know,
people who think their computers worth way too much.
We actually did one of those before.
Tech memes.
Don't lead the question. I didn't lead the question.
Reacting to old videos of ours.
We've actually found that more people will click the top option.
I put the top option is not the one that I was saying.
Screw off.
They're right. They don't like your poll and they're right.
No, they're wrong. They're all wrong.
The whole, the whole audience is wrong.
We've got reacting to old videos of ours.
So one of the suggestions was Linus finally watches what it's like to work
for Linus and reacts to it, which I commented on. I said, I won't do it.
You said you never would. Yeah.
I was like, no, we can't do that one. That one's off limits.
But like overall, that's not a bad idea.
Yeah. Best and worst of TikTok, stuff like that.
But again,
that's getting into the gray area unless we're doing a really good job of
reaching out to people, which I will,
I will tell you right now for our for our trying TikTok hacks videos in the
past, I don't think we've reached out to people. However,
what we've done has been highly transformative. We are,
we are actually doing things. We're actually trying them.
I'm not eating a box of noodles while I watch other people's content.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
So I think what it basically comes down to is just being ethical about it and
adhering to the four pillars of fair use and making sure that regardless of who
it is and whether they could afford to take us to court over it,
making sure that we would have a strong fair use argument that we believe with
certainty that we would win. That's,
I think the bottom line and or just getting permission from the original
creator. Right. That's where we're,
that's where we're at on it because at this point, like you're kind of stupid,
not to have a react channel. It's kind of like a clips channel, man.
Do you guys have any idea how long they pushed me around here to do a clips
channel for the WAN show? Do you know how successful the clips channel is?
I think it makes more money than the actual WAN show. Probably.
Which is like, how does that even make any sense? It's just like must actually.
Yeah. Because you're dividing it up into a bunch of content and each one of
those content pieces is doing well. LMG clips gets 10 million views a month.
Yeah. It is actually in terms of just overall viewership,
it is on par with like what I would consider to be like,
like B tier tech channels. And I'm sitting here going,
how is that even, how's it even possible? They know they can just,
they know they could just link to a timestamp in the WAN show. Right.
But that's not how people, that's not how people engage with content.
They want it to be digestible.
And there's a huge contingent of our viewers that is
absolutely just militantly opposed to watching long format
content like the WAN show,
but does want to hear about what we talk about on the WAN show.
And I've said this before,
like I'm not going to sit down and watch the whole WAN show.
Oh yeah. Yvonne's the same way. Yeah. She is.
She never looks at WAN show, but she's like,
she'll devour clips. She's like, yeah,
what are Linus and Luke talking about this week?
And I've always understood why people like the, uh, the, the, the,
the timestamp guy in the description or in a pinned comment. Sorry.
Because like, yeah, it's a really, especially lately, man,
we've had some like three hour, three and a half hour shows.
Based on how many of our topics we've hit so far today,
this is going to be a marathon.
You down Dan?
They get pretty intense. So being able to sit down and watch the whole thing,
especially in one sitting, it's like, it's like half a, half a work day.
And you know what the reality of it is that a good title and thumbnail works.
Like this is a great, this is great. Uh,
A prime in the float plane chat, who is Alex, Alex P, one of our,
one of our editors, uh, he goes, I watch WAN. I edit tech tips.
I'm going to add something here. I, uh,
am really good at like creating YouTube thumbnails. I am,
I am literally like a, like a, uh, a creator of the, of the drug, right?
I'm a, I'm a dealer. Yeah.
I still end up being click baited into WAN clips.
It is literally content he has seen before from people he can talk
time he wants who he works in the same building as at least some of them.
Yeah. And he still manages to click on it.
That's so funny. I don't make the rules, right? Like I don't,
it comes back to that conversation about,
is it the algorithm or is it the audience? I don't determine what works.
Yeah. You just have to kind of go with the flow.
You have to go with the flow. You gotta go with the flow.
So we're going to make a reacts channel.
We're also going to tell you about our sponsors.
Also names of things matter. I, I, I was, I dove into this recently.
I was playing Tarkov with a Tarkov creator and he made a clip.
I killed a cheater in a game that we were playing in and he made a like
YouTube short thing of it, but he called it.
First of all, his name is goat moth, but the goat,
the O in goat is a zero. Okay. Just like, yeah,
if you never want to be searchable ever, that's probably good.
And then he named the short how to kill a gaming chair,
assuming that people would understand the meme of like,
they're not cheating. They must just have a really good gaming chair.
I'm like, man, man, like, man, I'm not really in the game anymore, but,
but, but come on brother.
Boom roasted. Anyways. Yeah. Okay.
Sponsors. Oh, and then we're going to do the evil wheel or whatever.
This thing is called the wheel of pain of pain. I still don't know what it is.
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Audible. That's a blast from the past.
Yeah. I remember the last time we worked with audible. It's good service.
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All right. What do you want to talk about next, Mr. Luke?
What's the wheel? Tell me about the wheel.
Let's do the wheel of pain.
I don't know if this is going to be a regular segment.
I don't know if we're going to come up with like different segments or whatever else.
But basically, I asked for a wheel and I pitched kind of a fun idea for the show today.
We're going to play a game called Devil's Advocate.
OK, I feel like that's just how the show works.
No, but this this way is a little different. OK, so you are going to spin the wheel.
OK. And I'm already excited. Whatever boneheaded thing that happened in the world of tech this week.
Oh, apparently I'm supposed to spin the wheel. OK, I will spin the wheel. I'm not excited.
Well, let's do let's take turns. OK. We each get to spin the wheel. Beautiful. All right.
So whatever boneheaded thing happened in the world of tech. OK. You have to defend it.
Oh, OK. OK. OK. So the topic list for this week. Oh, so are these topics? Yes. Ah.
Is Twitter's ban on third party apps. OK.
Apple TV's terms of service requiring a separate iOS device to accept them.
OK. Samsung's attempt to use patents to block refurbished screen imports.
AI art generators. I feel like we should rule out AI art generators just because we've already talked about it on the show.
So if it lands on that, we'll spin again. Yeah. And Wyoming's bill that was introduced to phase out EV sales by 2035.
OK. OK. OK. Do you want to go first or should I go first? What happens if the is the spinner defending it?
The spinner will defend whatever topic comes up on the wheel of pain.
I don't care who goes first. OK. Whatever works. Go for it. OK. Either way, right?
Yeah. I don't think. Wow. Really? That's your spin. That's weak. You can't spin it again. I didn't see what it was.
So it doesn't matter. Well, they did. You must. Oh, no. What is it? Oh, no.
You must defend Twitter banning third party apps.
I feel like I should run through. So here's how we'll do it. Sorry, guys. This is our first time doing it.
We should talk about the topic. I will run through the topic. OK. And then you will defend it.
Yeah, I like it. Last Thursday, all or nearly all third party Twitter apps broke the same day.
A clause was quietly added to its developer agreement banning the creation of a substitute or similar service to the Twitter application.
So in effect, I don't even remember some of the names of third party Twitter clients that I've used in the past, but I have used them.
Hootsuite. Yeah. Yeah, sure. OK. Yeah. In effect, tools like Hootsuite or no, there used to be like, OK, for example,
on Windows Phone, there wasn't a first party Twitter client. There was like a third party one that just hooked into the API and made it use.
It wasn't great, but it was usable. After a long silence,
Twitter has announced that it was simply enforcing its longstanding API rules,
which may result in some apps not working. Twitter has not responded to any questions about which longstanding rules were broken.
They don't have a PR department. Questions that were posed by prominent members of the tech community,
like our our friend over at MKBHD, one Marquez Keith Brownlee in high definition.
In 2021, Twitter had actually removed a clause discouraging but not banning third party apps as a way of building a warmer relationship with these developers.
In other news, Twitter is now being sued by a consulting firm claiming that it has not been paid for services rendered to Twitter during its lawsuit to force Musk to follow through on his purchase of the company.
That's really funny. OK, we'll talk about that more later. That's really, really funny. Anyway, OK.
I think I think you saw. Isn't there one more thing? No. Oh, that's just not very interesting.
OK. Twitter is going through a refacing right now.
It has a new CEO. It has a lot of new employees. It has a lot less total employees. Does it have a lot of new employees?
I believe so. Don't they? Didn't they? Aren't they hiring? Twitter? Yeah. Twitter? Yeah.
Didn't they let go like 75 percent of their workforce? I think they're also hiring. Oh, OK.
Yeah. OK, so they've got new employees. They have some new employees. Oh, yeah.
Did I mention that the other person is allowed to poke holes in your defense the whole time? Sure.
Yeah, I haven't made one yet. So maybe you can sit the F down.
This is going to be so hard. No, you have to be straight faced. You're not allowed to acknowledge it.
All right. Yeah, OK. So, yeah, they have a new face and they need to be able to control their image because their image matters.
Right. And having all these third party apps running around, making custom experiences that are different to what they are trying to tailor make for the audience could be bad for the platform.
And they should enforce various rules that they have. You shouldn't just set rules and then not enforce them.
It can be frustrating to be on a platform where the rules are really loosey goosey and they get applied to some people in a certain way and other people in a certain way.
It's a lot easier if it's very clear what you can and cannot do. So if rules exist, they should be enforced.
No, no, no. I have to stop you right there, because it's obviously not clear what rules, what the rules are.
So they're trying to make it clear. No, they're not trying to make it clear. They're not responding.
Oh, they don't have a PR department. But that's not part of the debate. So it's OK. No, that is not OK, because a key foundational piece of your argument is that they are trying to improve the clarity of their rules.
Yeah, by enforcing them. By enforcing them. But if no one can figure out what rules are being violated, then they obviously aren't clear enough.
Oh, just don't make third-party apps. Just don't make third-party apps. That's not a defense of it. That's the conclusion of it.
Yeah, but that's OK. So you're just saying it's OK? Yeah, just don't make third-party apps. Fundamentally, that's all you got?
Well, I think it's fine. Twitter doesn't want you to make third-party apps, so don't make third-party apps. It seems pretty clear to me.
I don't see why they would need a PR department, because the answer is very obvious. Don't make third-party apps.
I see. And just to kind of bring us back a little bit to your argument that Twitter is concerned about the image that it presents to the rest of the world.
Of course. And the damage that third-party apps could do to it. I mean, do I even have to explain how wrong that is?
They're trying to release new features. They're trying to release new functionality. And if these third-party apps don't support those features and functionality,
then those aren't going to get to the users. The image, the way that people interpret and use Twitter could be deeply affected by these third-party apps,
not responding and reflecting the experience that Twitter is trying to create for its users. So maybe they just shouldn't exist.
And if it follows the rules to get rid of them, well, they should get rid of them because they should enforce their rules.
I see. So if your goal in life is to have your product be as much of a dumpster fire as possible, then you are well within your rights
to ensure that every user who interacts with it experiences the full dumpster fire.
I wouldn't word it that way, but they are fully within their rights, correct?
Okay. Your argument boils down to legally they're within their rights.
That is a true state. I, again, wouldn't word it that way, but that is a true statement.
Again, they're creating new features. I'm not super familiar with Twitter features, but I believe there's new home feed.
I believe there's new feeds in your home. I don't know Twitter features very well.
But if the third-party apps don't reflect that, and that's a big thing that they want to push because they have this massive wave of new users,
so clearly they're doing something right, and their servers have not gone down despite everyone saying that they would,
they want to push Twitter in a new direction, and you don't want third-party people controlling what direction your platform is able to go in,
which they're able to do. Imagine you were releasing videos, and you started releasing a new type of video,
but some third-party thing was just like, we're just not going to release that type of video whenever they release it.
Would that annoy you as a video creator?
But what about user choice?
Would it annoy you as a video creator?
As a video creator, if someone created a curated feed of my videos...
If you started making a new type of content...
No! And that's the reason that Twitter has engaged with these third-party apps over the course of their entire history,
is because overall, they benefit from a broader ecosystem compared to a closed, more narrow one.
If you were using Twitch, and you make a fixed... Say Twitch does more things than it does.
Say Twitch actually was successful when they tried to do vods.
Sure.
Shots fired.
And you started releasing a new type of review content, and it's compatible with Twitch, but Twitch just decides to not upgrade.
I don't know, say it's like AV1 or something, and Twitch doesn't update.
So a bunch of users on Twitch are now unable to view those videos.
But you've curated a massive user base on Twitch that sees your standard content.
So now you have these weird segmented content feeds.
You have some stuff that's going on on YouTube, and other stuff that can't go on Twitch.
Because they're refusing to update their platform.
And if that third-party platform doesn't update, then obviously they're going to shed users through natural attrition.
You can't communicate to those users directly about this.
Communication to those users is controlled by that platform.
Why is this a good thing for you? There's no benefit.
The benefit is...
So kill all third-party apps.
Okay.
So you can actually control feature functionality.
Alright, so the last new rule I'm going to add to this segment is that we're going to have to add a time limit, because that took too long.
Okay, yeah, fair enough.
And two, our adjudicator will be Dan.
So Dan, can you give Luke a rating out of ten for his defense of Twitter just cutting off third-party apps?
I don't know. That did seem pretty weak.
I'm probably going to give you a three out of ten, because they're legally allowed to do it.
Like, no, that's kind of weak.
That wasn't my argument.
Well, if your argument wasn't clear, then it's still a three out of ten defense.
Okay, I need to make sure that I just completely...
Oh, you do the thing that you don't like.
What did I do?
I need to shadowban Linus.
What did I do?
It just wasn't my argument, and you said that it was.
No, I did say it was.
Yeah, you did.
When? Just now? Dan said it.
He regurgitated what you said.
Well, that was the argument you were making at the time.
No, it wasn't.
Fine, that was when I was paying attention.
I was saying if they're going to have rules, they should enforce them.
I wasn't saying that it's legally within their rights.
Yeah, but they haven't made these rules clear.
They don't seem to have them.
If they had these rules, then they should reply and say what the rules are.
But it's clear that they don't want anyone to know what the rules are,
because then they might be able to adjust their third-party apps to adhere to the rules.
I think they just don't want third-party apps.
And that's fair enough.
Yeah.
But to say that they want clarity in their rules, that's a bad argument.
You didn't say they want clarity.
You did say that.
I said they want to enforce them.
This is going to be a great segment.
It's already great. I'm already angry.
Yeah, I don't think I've seen him this fired up in forever.
I can talk again. I got a lot of pent-up energy.
Okay, so I mean, yeah, they don't want apps, right, Luke?
Yeah.
But why shouldn't they allow apps if it dilutes their brand?
Is it because they're worse than what Twitter's making?
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, come on.
I mean, that's...
Yeah.
Come on.
Okay, Dan, you still have to rate it.
We still have to move on.
I'm moving you up.
There's a poll who won the Twitter argument, and I'm winning.
Four out of ten.
Sixty-seven percent.
All right, you managed to get an extra point.
Are you happy?
I got an extra point.
Four out of ten.
I hate myself.
I'm going to burn this court to the ground.
All right.
Okay.
I'm going to put a timer, and I'll make some things for next time.
Okay, cool.
It'll be fancy.
The real main reason for it, yes, it boils down to they simply don't want third-party
apps.
It has nothing to do with the rules.
It has nothing to do with any kind of...
What if the rule is that there's no third-party apps?
It has nothing to do with any...
Well, that isn't, though.
It has nothing to do with any kind of benefit of having a smaller ecosystem other than that
many third-party apps do not display ads.
So Twitter is trying desperately, desperately to something.
I don't know.
Well, is that not defendable?
I feel like that would be easier to defend than what I just defended.
It could be.
It could be, but...
Because now you're fighting against your own argument.
Sure, but you're also fighting against your own partners and your own users.
Your users, your partners, you have...
You're defending ad block.
So no.
What you could do...
If it doesn't send ads and it uses Twitter's service...
There's a correct way to update your API rules.
The correct way is you give a time window for compliance and you create transparent,
well-communicated rules.
And those transparent, well-communicated rules include, hey, you have to display ads at the
same rate that the original Twitter app does, unless they just don't want third-party apps,
which is, I mean, ultimately what you said, which is right, but it's not a defense.
It's a statement of fact, but it's not a defense.
It's still crappy.
It's bad partnership.
It's bad management.
Now I get to play.
Sure.
All right.
I'm only familiar with some of these topics.
I don't get a final statement.
Is it this?
Oh, it's the AI art generators one.
Okay.
I'll try again.
Spin again.
Yeah.
This is hard to spin.
I shouldn't have made fun of your weak spin because mine...
Because the screens are in the way.
...wasn't any better.
Bloody hell.
Did I just get AI art generators again?
Yeah, I did.
Crying out loud.
I'll give it a process.
Just get away from the screens.
Yeah.
There you go.
There we go.
Let's go.
Okay.
Oh no.
What is it?
Samsung screen patent.
Okay.
Luke.
Tell us about it.
I got to find it.
One sec.
Doo, doo, doo, doo, doo.
Where is it?
I guess I can control it.
Yeah.
It's in the dock.
It's in the dock.
For next time in the section of Devil's Advocate, the topic list should be hyperlinked.
Yes.
There's, you know what?
There's a lot of things that we could do better.
We're just...
It's a small thing.
I wasn't really...
We're trying stuff, right?
Yeah.
We want to kind of try to...
We want to kind of try to, without losing track of what the WAN show is, we want to
kind of try and find some novel ways to engage with these topics is basically the goal here.
I hope you guys are enjoying it.
I am, actually.
Man, he's getting fired up.
I like it.
So this is...
The reason why I couldn't find it was this is the US farmers win right to repair argument
or right to repair farm equipment while Samsung undermines independent screen repair.
There's been a bunch of posts in Floatplane Chat that this isn't legit.
We'll see through how this is written, how legit that we say it is.
Okay.
Some people are saying that apparently this John Deere didn't actually do that, and Louis
Rossman has a video about it.
Then I guess we'll...
Okay, sure.
We'll see what the notes say, though.
Yeah, we'll see.
I guess it'll be good feedback for our new notes creator.
Yeah.
This month, John Deere signed a memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau,
an agricultural lobbyist.
Oh, great.
Acknowledging the American farmers' God-given right to fix their own equipment, including
bringing it to independent repair facilities.
The move follows years of efforts by John Deere to lock down its products, which make
up over 50% of the US tractors and combines market.
Farmers have long reported huge delays during planting and harvesting due to...
Planting and harvest due to repair times.
There is hope that this memorandum might act as a framework for future law, but similar
to New York's recent right to repair legislation, these kinds of agreements are often riddled
with caveats and loopholes.
I do believe that's the issue.
Voluntary standards are not enforceable, and the language of the memorandum is vague.
That's an issue.
Right, so...
Oh, I'm not allowed to say anything.
In 2018, John Deere signed a similar agreement with the California Farm Bureau to limited
effect, and John Deere has agreed to provide its repair tools for sale, as well as granting
access to manuals, product guides, and diagnostic codes.
Okay.
Meanwhile, and I think this is the actual part that we're talking about, because I think
this just said Samsung, right?
Yeah, it did.
Okay.
So meanwhile, Samsung is now attempting to use an old OLED patent to get certain aftermarket
and refurbished device screens banned from import into the United States.
Thanks to buy underscore mew, M-I-E-W, mew, who posted a link to this on the LCT forum.
This would restrict buyers from getting their phones repaired solely from the original vendor
or licensed partners, which means the company can simply refuse to fix it.
Samsung argues that this proposed ban is in part to protect consumers from inferior or
defective products.
Samsung has also added some tools and parts to its self-repair program with iFixit for
Galaxy S22 phones and some Galaxy laptops.
Some tools and parts, who knows if it's all of them.
There are still tons of devices that aren't covered and the program appears to focus primarily
on flagship products from the last three years, excluding easily broken foldables and popular
budget models.
The replacement screen for the Galaxy S22 lineup comes bundled with a replacement battery
and frame.
It is not available separately and tons of other parts just aren't available at all.
Do we do the discussion topics when we do these things?
I don't think so.
I don't think so either.
Okay.
I get to go now?
Yes.
I think this one is actually pretty simple to defend.
And the reason for that- Nice essay intro.
Is that, well, I'm buying time, obviously.
I know.
Okay.
The reason for that is that as you made an argument for very recently, actually, I am
Samsung, right?
So I'm taking on the role of Samsung.
So I am well within my right to defend my patent.
If someone has a problem with my patent and thinks that for whatever reason they should
be able to import their own inferior or knockoff products that violate it, well then the correct
legal process for them to go through- Is this defending a patent?
It didn't say anything about defending a patent.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're using their OLED patent to get aftermarket and refurbished device screens banned from
importing to the US.
And so if I hold a patent on these devices, well, at the end of the day, I have to defend
my patent.
And besides, there should be no reason that a user who purchased an authentic Samsung
device made up out of completely authentic Samsung parts should want an inferior part.
Why would they?
If they wanted an inferior part, well then they could-
It's irrelevant what they want, though.
Well then they could go buy something from some other vendor.
You shouldn't be deciding what the user wants.
Well, I know what they want because they bought a Samsung phone.
You still don't get to decide what they want, though.
But they didn't want to compromise on quality in the first place, so why would they want
to now?
Maybe their opinion has changed.
You don't get to decide that their opinion or stance on things changes.
Phones are also extremely- You don't own your users, you just own your
patent.
Phones are extremely intricate devices, they are complex, they are difficult to repair,
and here's the thing- I don't believe that the difficulty of repair
should actually judge anything.
Our entire lives are essentially tied to our phones.
We run off of our phones.
And so if there is a risk that the user could, thinking that they are getting a Samsung part,
not ultimately get a brand new, authentic, fully functioning Samsung part, they could
actually end up in a- Was that part of the argument either?
I don't think there's any duping the users about it being a Samsung part.
I would make the argument that the duping does not necessarily have to be done by the
manufacturer of the part.
I think that it's- So it'd be like repair shops selling it as
genuine?
As soon as you make these janky parts available to budget repair shops, I think it is as likely
that these repair shops will pass along the discount as it is that these repair shops
will misrepresent the product as a genuine Samsung product.
That creates a tarnish on the Samsung brand when users ultimately start to perceive Samsung
as less performant and less reliable.
The other bit, and this is really important, is that sure, you can attack the limited devices
that we're providing our self-service repair and our parts for, but I think it's pretty
clear that for these older devices, it probably doesn't make economic sense for people to
go and repair them anyway, given that we have great new phones available, like the A series,
where you can get- I don't think it's up to you to decide what
is worth repairing and not worth repairing the users.
But I get to make my argument, right?
I'm also allowed to make counterarguments.
Okay, we have a great- So I do believe that if you want to enforce
this level of patent, that you should make available all parts needed to repair said
phones, and I do believe that they should not have to be bundled.
I don't think you should have to buy a frame for a phone when you actually just need to
replace a screen.
Sure, but here's the issue with that.
For us to build these products to a standard of quality that our customers expect, it's
not economically viable, when the reality of it is, when we're mass producing them,
we can deliver a great quality product like the A series that is functionally not even
that much more expensive than if you were to just buy a display.
Now you've got a brand new device with a great camera, great display.
As a part of your mass manufacturing, you can just create additional screens.
Brand new battery.
Well, we don't have the line spun up for these old phones anymore.
Why would we?
We're not making them.
Create more in the first place.
But we didn't do that.
It is fairly- Well, you should-
You should commit to doing that in the future.
Well, we can talk about that in the future, but for now we haven't.
As for foldables- I think as a part, if you want to push this
bill through- Are you letting me finish?
No.
I'm allowed to make counter arguments.
I think if you want to push this through, we will have to make some form of agreement
that you would over manufacture parts in the future as would be expected from a company
that is going to service warranties anyways.
By saying that you can fix these phones like directly, you are saying that you have these
parts on hand.
I'm not saying you can fix the phones.
The average user is an idiot, and based on that, you don't seem to be understanding
my argument.
No.
You're saying that you can.
I think you might be one of them.
Don't even go there.
Finally.
You're saying that you can fix the phones, which means that you have the parts.
The argument of not having the part is completely useless.
But the costs are high.
Sure.
But you're saying that you can fix the phone.
But there's storage costs.
Meaning you have the part.
Right.
And there's training costs.
So charge the users then.
And we have to build the tools.
We have to build the program for this.
It's going to take time.
Finally.
Actually, none of that makes any sense.
There's no training cost to train users to fix their own phones.
Oh, you have to create the program where they are trained to do it.
Absolutely.
No, you don't.
Apple did it.
Oh, they charge people for it?
No, but you have to do it.
It's a fixed cost associated with running the program.
You absolutely have to do it.
What program?
A self-repair program.
Just sell it through iFixit.
Well, we are selling parts through iFixit.
Sell more and in individual components instead of packages.
It's going to take time.
Besides, you've got to understand, a lot of the sourcing for the components of a phone
is not done individually.
Even at the factory.
Okay.
Yeah, but you sell a screen as a component.
It's going to have the connector cable.
It's going to have everything else in mind.
Sure.
You work for this channel, Linus Tech Tips, or something like that, right?
Technically, no.
Okay.
So they did...
Maybe not anymore.
I haven't fired Luke in a while.
They did a video where they toured the factory of one of our competitors, where you could
plainly see that on the factory floor, components are actually coming in as assemblies.
We're not going to take finished assemblies and then break them apart into their constituent
components for these repair programs.
At the very most, you could possibly expect, we would provide the same assemblies that
we use...
Right now, we're currently talking about a screen, correct?
Yeah.
But a screen...
So a screen would be one unit at one point in time in that process, correct?
Not necessarily.
Because, I mean, you've got to understand, with global manufacturing, that screen factory
that is creating the assemblies, that is not a shipping endpoint for the supply chain.
That goes to a factory as an assembly.
You can repair a phone.
Yes.
If I send you one of my Samsung phones...
We will use an assembly.
Okay.
We will use an assembly.
So sell an assembly.
Right.
But I'm only talking about this because you told me not to sell assemblies.
I don't think I said anything about an assembly.
We'll let the audience be the judge of that.
The package that includes a frame and whatnot else, I don't think is the assembly that you're
describing.
Well, it depends.
That assembly may be very fragile, and there could be a high chance that the user would
damage it.
It's going to have to be handled on a case-by-case basis.
No.
Anyway, my final point, if I can finally make it...
No.
We're going to have to handle these things case-by-case, and as for foldables...
I don't believe you have to handle them case-by-case because you're offering...
Okay.
I really do need to get this last point out so that we can get through the segment.
Okay.
As for foldables, we don't need replacement screens, A, because they are basically functionally
impossible to replace, and B, they're flexible displays.
How could you possibly break it?
There.
I rest my case.
There's a manufacturing defect.
Can you fix a folding phone if a user has an issue with it and sends you a folding phone?
I'm talking to you as Samsung.
I'm Samsung the character right now.
I legitimately don't know.
Okay.
I actually don't know if they'd be able to.
They're quite fused.
No, I know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, great points for playing the character of Samsung.
I was shaking and angry that whole time.
I hate you so much.
Yes.
Yes.
You did an excellent job embodying Samsung and all of the talking points that I can see
them making, which are all disgusting and goddammit.
Oh, my cheeks hurt.
Yeah.
So you certainly get a bunch more points for-
Wow.
Rude.
Yeah.
Well, I didn't feel like you were Twitter.
You didn't make me feel like you were Twitter, do you know what I mean?
But yeah, I don't know.
My arguments are weak and I think I would have preferred to have a take that was why
Linus would want to protect his phones.
Like if Creator Warehouse made a phone, why you would lock them down with a serial number
and ID in the screen.
I see.
Okay.
Well, you got to give me a score.
You're getting a six.
I got a six.
I win.
You got a six because I almost cried.
Oh, I would just like to fix things.
All right.
Thanks, Dan.
What would it take?
What would it take to get like a nine?
Well, let's see.
A nine to me would be your points are-
Because that was pretty- I felt like he had me on the ropes for a little while there.
Oh, yeah.
No, absolutely.
And then I had some ways to throw back, but like what would he have to do?
Like what would that argument need to look like to be a nine?
I think you would probably have to make a good case for it.
I think it might be impossible inherently because the segment is called... Actually,
I don't know if I ever told you guys what it's called.
It's called Defend the Indefensible.
That's what the version of the Wheel of Pain is.
So you would have to actually win Dan over.
Yeah.
I mean, not necessarily as well because I have my own biases.
I can extremely biased against that entire topic, right?
So for you, there is no nine basically is what I'm trying to get to.
I don't think there should be.
If there was a way- And that's fine, I just-
I mean, if there was a reason for Linus to come up with that would make sense, like,
I don't know, even locking down the batteries, you're not allowed to open your phone because
you're going to destroy the battery and- Cause of fire.
You're going to blow up your house, liability issues, that sort of thing.
There's no eventual argument I think you could find for these topics.
And that's, yeah, I love the segment.
I think that a well-designed Defend the Indefensible should never have a nine out of ten or a ten
out of ten.
So basically it comes down to how well you can play the part.
I think we absolutely need to set a time limit for next time or we need to set like a speaker's
baton or whatever.
So we can't talk over each other, but there's like a clear, I state my case, you offer your
rebuttal, I get to kind of close out my argument, and then the judge decides.
And I think it should take place over a span of like three to four minutes, I think is
a pretty good time.
I think that's a good idea.
Ferna182 in the Floatplane chat says, a nine should be being so convincing you actually
need to punch the other person in the face.
I mean, I was getting there.
The pure patent argument was actually pretty good.
I think it was, and I think you had to, because you have to follow the points that are being
made in the article or whatever.
But once you veered off the purely talking about patents, then it started getting poke-able.
But when it's just a patent, it's like, oh yeah, they do actually have to.
Well, yeah, it's like, that's your patent, so like, no, no.
And I mean, okay, I think you could probably poke holes in that anyway.
You could attack the broken patent system.
Oh yeah.
I mean, it's atrocious.
Yeah, I mean, uh, we, we became aware of a patent that is basically just like attaching
RGB LEDs to a particular, like, uh, like product.
You want to know something?
And I'm sitting here going, well, come on.
Right.
And the legal process for it is either you just make your product, wait for them to sue
you and then counter sue, or you have to like go and try and get their patent invalidated.
It's like, okay.
Brutal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sorry.
What were you gonna say?
The, so I don't know if you remember this, but really long time ago, there was a game.
I don't remember what game it was.
But during loading screens, minor VGA during loading screens, there's like a little mini
game that you could play.
You know about this?
Yes, I do.
And there was a patent on mini games during loading screens, which like, isn't that important
these days?
Cause most loading screens are pretty short now.
Right.
But back in the day, there was some loading screens that were pretty chungus.
If you were playing like Morrowind on the original Xbox, it was long.
That loading screen took forever.
Loading back off of like DVDs and CDs and stuff like that used to take a really long
time.
Painful.
So at that point in time, if you could just play like pong.
Yeah.
Like if you're playing a multiplayer game and there's a huge loading screen, you and
your buddy can like fight each other in pong or like some other like who cares little game
that'll just keep you interested.
That would have been way better.
But some jerkwad.
Bandai Namco.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Why?
They panned it and then they were just like, nope, nobody can do it.
You don't have to pay us.
And then it's not going to be worth it to pay them for anybody because it's just a minor
inconvenience.
So it's going to buy the game.
And then suddenly decades of people's lives were spent just sitting at loading bar staring
at loading bars.
Why?
What was the point?
Ah, money.
Please react to sky.
Oblivion.
Yeah.
I don't.
Oh, I mean, you were talking about it before the show started.
It's not in the doc.
I'm personally extremely excited.
Um, why don't you tell the people what it is?
So sky.
Oblivion.
And let me look it up just to make sure that I say it in the way that they say it.
Uh, sky, oblivion is a volunteer based project by the test renewal, modding group, test renewal.
Sure.
Yeah.
Test renewal, as far as my understanding goes, includes, uh, sky, oblivion and, um, sky wind.
Is it sky wind?
I think it's sky wind, which is the, uh, more wind in, in Skyrim engine.
Uh, we aim to bring the elder scrolls for oblivion to a new generation of gamers and
reintroduce it to long time fans of the series.
They're currently in the process of remaking Cyrodiil along with all of its quests, locations
and characters into Skyrim and Skyrim special edition.
So they built oblivion into the Skyrim engine is wild.
And they, when they make like textures and, and everything else that goes into making
a game visually, auditorially, everything else, they made really good quality ones.
So it looks better than Skyrim did when it launched.
Wow.
And Skyrim, like vanilla Skyrim is.
It's okay.
It's dated.
Sure.
It feels old, but it doesn't feel old, like, uh, like original runescape or Morrowind for
example.
Like it doesn't feel old like that.
Yeah.
Oblivion.
Like, I can't tell what that is.
It's not that kind of old.
Yeah.
Like, is that supposed to be leather or stone?
Yeah.
You know?
So it's, it's Skyrim was like, it's kind of okay.
It doesn't age as bad as a lot of old games, even though it's from over a decade ago.
Um, but the, the models and stuff that they, that they've made, um, let's talk about fair
use for a second.
I can show part of the trailer here.
Can I mean this player, like you can try, let me bring it up on YouTube.
It's going to show an ad.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
Skip.
There we go.
Let's jump into it.
Like it looks really good.
It looks great.
This is in the Skyrim engine, so the controls are going to be pretty good.
It supports these like high resolution textures because the Skyrim engine does, um, the marble
jobs with moving.
I'm super excited about this.
The announcement is like 2025 or something, but they've been working on this for a really
long time.
So the fact that it has a date at all is fantastic.
And what I've heard from at least one member of the team is that they think that the date
is very safe, right?
They think they're going to be done ahead of the date that they placed, but they put
it there because they're like, we can definitely make this and that's the right way to approach
it.
Does that horse have armor though?
There's some armor sitting on top of the horse and yeah, you can see like, no, no, it doesn't
look like a release today.
New triple a absolute.
That's not the point.
Not the point.
It looks amazing for the fact that it's oblivion.
It looks amazing even for like really high quality Skyrim mods because this is a really
high quality Skyrim mod, which is just the entirety of oblivion.
And the thing is like, the bar isn't as high for an older game.
You're just trying to make it digestible for a modern gamer.
Like I tried to play Morrowind when you talked about how much you loved it and this is even
like 10 years ago.
I just couldn't.
It's brutal.
I couldn't get into it.
Yeah.
And like for my kids, for example, you know, like I might love Final Fantasy six, but between
the janky translation and lack of creature comforts like auto save and stuff like, like,
like it's just, it's hard for them to get into it.
Whereas like I'm sitting here going, Oh yeah, pixel remaster.
Even if it's just to kind of share something that I love with my kids, it's probably worth
the 25 bucks or whatever it is versus just like, you know, blowing out a cart and sticking
it into a, into a SNES and you know, it's just, yeah, just not worth it.
Apparently someone in a full plane chat said they, they did add horse armor.
She's genuinely hilarious.
But yeah, Skywind is the other one.
I'm obviously like more excited about Skywind because Morrowind is my favorite game, but
oblivion's a, I loved oblivion.
It's the one elder scrolls game I've actually played.
Yeah.
Like all the way through tons of side quests, like I played the crap out of oblivion.
It's a really good game.
I wasn't, I didn't have a good computer for Morrowind and then I had a lot on my plate
for Skyrim.
That makes sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oblivion was a massive step in like visual fidelity and game mechanics that were approachable
for people.
Sure.
A lot of what I don't like about the step from Morrowind to oblivion is like Morrowind
had more different weapon categories and deeper systems in certain ways and like, but you
play Tarkov.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, Oh, I'm sorry.
You want to put that bullet in that gun and that weather at that time of day, three, six,
six ammo fits in a seven, six, two Meg, but it doesn't fit into a seven, six, two rifle.
Anywho.
Yeah.
So like I, I understand, but yeah, I'm really, really excited about this.
I'm absolutely going to play it the day it launches.
Really cool project.
I do believe they're looking for volunteers.
So if you're, if you're into whatever they're looking for, probably development, but I know
they, they often look, it might be done now.
I don't know, but they often look for like voice actors and whatever else.
Cause they're redoing like a lot of the, the voice lines and stuff.
And as far as I know, they're adding more than what the base game had.
That's pretty cool.
So I don't know.
Hopefully I didn't say anything wrong there, but very exciting.
Why don't we do a couple of merch messages for those of you wondering the way to have
your message come across the bottom of the screen here.
Maybe get an answer from Dan.
Maybe we'll talk about it on the show is you head over to lttstore.com and we've got a
new product announcement this week.
Yeah.
There's more, wait, what the crap?
Where's the, where's the link to this?
Ah, yes.
Here it is.
We have a new color of underwear now with this cool like circuit design in yellow, black
and purple slash white and blue.
Here's all the different styles that we have.
Thank you to our wonderful underwear models who helped us model all the new stuff.
Is he dancing with the skeleton?
I love it.
Thanks Tynan.
That's truly wonderful.
I'm having a lively conversation with my mannequin.
About our matching underwear by the way.
Any who, we've got lots of stock of these.
They just came in and I mean the reviews are, the reviews are in on the LTT underwear.
It's four and a, what is it?
I think four and a half stars or whatever it works out to with over 400 reviews.
This has been one of our most successful longterm products.
Guys check them out.
Anyway, the reason that I'm mentioning this is because lots of people throw money at like,
well, people who are quite wealthy on the internet and get basically nothing in return
other than maybe being noticed by Senpai, which I've always found kind of ridiculous.
So we created a better system.
You can send a merch message and that way Senpai might notice you, Senpai might not,
but either way you will get some quality merchandise in the mail.
Just check out the merch messages box in the cart and your merch message will go through
to producer Dan who will funnel it into the appropriate place where it might go.
Dan, do you want to feed us a couple of merch messages?
Sure.
I've got one here from James.
Question for Luke and Linus.
Either one of you ever played RuneScape back in the day?
Seems like a lot of people have forgotten about it.
I never tried it.
I definitely did play.
I was very into games like that.
What are the other games like that?
Well, back then it was, I mean not back then.
It was an MMO.
Different format.
It was in your browser, all this kind of stuff, but it was still an MMO.
I was a little small child when RuneScape was first kind of coming around.
So I have two stories that I think are funny from back in the RuneScape days.
We had Net Nanny and Dial-Up, also known as the internet, is probably slower than most
people watching this could actually understand to the point where I tell this story and people
think I'm exaggerating, and I'm not.
I used to load up RuneScape and then, I think I've told you this before, I used to load
up RuneScape and then go downstairs, make a sandwich, make some juice, eat the sandwich,
drink the juice, go back upstairs, and it was usually almost done loading.
And I am not exaggerating.
And I eat really slowly.
And this is something that I could do consistently.
It was impressive to me, even when I was a kid, that it would complete loading.
Yeah.
But it would.
And then I could actually play the game, which was great.
And then the other one is that it's an MMO.
People talk to each other.
And in that game, speech bubbles, right?
Sure.
So I would walk by and I would see someone with a speech bubble over their head, and
I would automatically think they were talking to me.
So I used to just run up to anyone that was talking and just respond to anything that
they were saying.
And one of my friends watched me play once and then was like, what are you doing?
And I was like, what do you mean?
And they're like, they're not talking to you.
They're talking to the person that's standing in front of them or whatever.
And I'm like, oh, okay.
I mean, we've all had our idiotic gaming moments.
I have some far more recent ones than that.
Oh?
There's this VR game that was like an arena, like a three-dimensional arena space shooter
thing.
Sure.
The way that I could best describe it is there's this showdown scene where the dark Jedi student
fights one of the good ones in the young Jedi knight series of expanded universe novels.
It's basically like this dome cage match zero gravity thing.
So anyway, it was kind of like that, which is going to be a pretty obscure way of describing
it.
I actually can picture it perfectly, though.
But for most...
The scene with Zek and he has to fight Jaina or whatever it is.
I don't remember.
Anyway, the point is a lot better than the sequel trilogy.
Anyway.
It was basically that, and I didn't realize as I was sitting there just talking to myself
about my frustrations and chatting with people that the mic in this game is just automatically
open and I've got these 11-year-olds screeching in my ear.
I can't figure out how to turn it off.
I'm sitting there going, how do I turn this off?
How do I turn this off?
It was definitely an old man moment for me.
That's pretty funny.
Yep.
All right.
Dan, hit me.
Okay.
This one's from Nathan.
Thoughts on account-locked phones becoming largely e-waste.
Fell into the trap of unknowingly buying a locked phone on eBay and Apple would not take
the phone or assist in any way.
They can be used for parts, but it would be nice if they were reusable.
Account-locked phones?
What do you mean?
Yeah.
iCloud-locked phones, that sort of thing.
They're basically...
I don't use Apple.
Yeah.
They're basically internet factory hardware locked and you can't get past them very easily
at all.
Honestly, I fully support it.
I know.
Controversial take, but hardware encrypted devices with the NAND, with the storage, whether
through the NAND or through the controller, with the storage essentially permanently bound
to the board, basically eliminated phone theft.
I was just going to say, wouldn't this dissuade phone theft?
Yeah.
It's pretty clear phone theft is not eliminated and there are workarounds.
You can desolder components, but it significantly de-incentivized phone theft and phone theft
was a huge problem in the early to mid-noughts.
If you were able to get into the phone, could you release your account from it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Then I don't think that's a problem.
Yeah.
That is a problem because we run into careless users donating phones and not unlocking them
or even careless organizations basically saying, yeah, these are all managed by our organization.
We wish for these to be destroyed because we have whatever irrational concerns about
data theft or whatever from our school or whatever stupid thing.
Okay.
I shouldn't say that.
There are valid reasons why a school might blah, blah, blah, student grades, et cetera,
et cetera.
But the point is they can be wiped, it's fine, chill.
So where they basically dictate, no, these iPads need to be destroyed because someone
might find out our typing tutor scores or whatever.
You can't take away, I don't think they should take that feature away just because there's
like negligent use.
No, but we do need a solution though, right?
And the only really viable solution is a back door and a back door is automatically, a back
door is a door.
If you have the key, someone else has the key.
Exactly.
And so yeah, it's one of those really tough ones, right?
Like I've said before on this show, anyone who claims that the solution is simple to
a problem that has not been solved yet is either a liar or an idiot, right?
All I'm saying here is that I think the solution is worth it.
Like I think phones should be hard locked.
Yeah.
Oh no, no.
I meant the solution to the C waste problem.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
And I just, yeah, no, I fully support working device encryption.
Whether it's phones or laptops, computers, portable ones, not portable ones are no longer
such a huge target for theft and it's, it's in my, my take whether I can defend it or
not is I think it's better this way.
Yeah.
Me too.
Yeah, me too.
And you know what?
Me too.
That's one thing that I do agree with, but let me into the bootloader when I own the
phone.
Yeah.
You want another one?
You're going to move on.
You won't get any argument from us there.
No.
I want to do a, I want to do a not merge message.
One real quick here.
This is from dark 24 over in the float plane chat.
Uh, I don't like merge messages to me.
It's too convoluted to try and get a message to wan show.
It needs to be as easy as it is on YouTube.
Plus I get you think it's better for the user, but users don't necessarily care that YouTube
gets a split where our LTT does not want YouTube to get that cut.
So it's a couple of things.
Um, number one is, yeah, yeah, it's more convoluted.
We had to build the tool ourselves because merge messages wasn't working properly.
Still isn't working properly.
Super chats wasn't working properly.
Uh, back to my screen sharing still isn't working properly.
Literally none.
The entire show.
I doubt it.
Oh my God.
Stop.
Uh, usually when I show you guys this, there's like one here because people don't get the
message and they send it through here and I'm like, okay, I mean, if you really want
to, by all means, I'm not going to turn it off.
Like if you just want to throw money at the screen, that, that's, I mean, that's your
right.
I guess.
Um, so yeah, it's convoluted.
We had to, we had to build it, but it's also not about being, um, it's a part of it is,
yeah, I don't think you should, YouTube should get a split for building features that don't
work properly.
No, no, I actually don't think they do and we can disagree on that.
Um, we've, we've had a lot of cases where you need to refresh the page or something,
whatever happens, you lose that tab and they go away.
Now historically all of them are gone and that's a huge friction point.
That's a bad user experience.
I don't really think that's debatable.
Um, and then as for, as for I get you think it is better for the user again, I don't really,
I don't really think that's debatable.
It is everything that, uh, you know, whatever bits or whatever other thing is, it is a way
of interacting with the show.
You know, you can have a little thing come up or whatever.
Um, and if you don't want the thing in the mail, you can just buy a gift card.
Like if you just want to throw money at the screen, then like, I guess you can do that.
We have gift cards.
Um, and I mean, I'm about to, I'm about to have a super hot take here.
Um, I had someone criticize us for the lowest, the lowest barrier of entry for merge messages
being the $10 gift card because that's the lowest value of gift card card on LTT store.
And I had typed up the thing, I decided not to send it, but I guess I'm going to say it
now live on the show is that $10 threshold shouldn't be a problem.
If you don't have $10 of disposable income, you should not be throwing it at me.
Don't do a merge message.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Plain and simple.
Uh, if you happen to need something and we have a high quality version of that thing,
you happen to need, by all means send in a merge message.
But if $10 is, if money is that tight for you, that, that you need it to be $5 instead
of $10.
We don't want it.
Yup.
All right.
Uh, Dan, hit me with one more and then we'll do a couple more topics and then we'll go
into more of the like merge message Q and a towards the end of the show.
Oh yeah, sure.
Um, on the same sort of vein of our high quality products, what is your process of selecting
a supplier for a new or existing LTT store.com merge?
Oh yeah, sure.
I mean, well, one of the, there's a lot of different ways you can kind of tackle it.
So, uh, with the backpack, for example, uh, we are not working, we are, okay, we are,
we can communicate directly with the actual manufacturer, but we are working through a
firm that facilitates these kinds of products.
Um, so they have their own kind of like factory network and they helped us out a lot with
the durability, uh, material selection.
Like we were not, um, I don't know, I don't know, whatever the, whatever the way of using
the word hubris is to, to describe this, we're, we're not egotistical enough to think that
somehow we can just walk into a completely new, uh, product category and imagine that
we're somehow going to absolutely nail it on the first try without some help.
So we, we worked through, um, a third party firm.
Um, so in that case it was, you know, we found someone who had the relationships and had
the capabilities to help us bring it to market.
Uh, in the case of the screwdriver, for example, it was, um, pretty similar, but then ended
up being different because of the way that the relationship between our partner and their
factory broke down during the process, which we outlined in more detail in the video on
the making of the screwdriver.
Um, in the case of something like water bottles, um, you know, we were, we kind of reached
out to pretty much every water bottle manufacturer we could find, uh, until we laid out our specs.
So it's kind of like an ODM job.
So do you know the difference between OEM and ODM?
No, I've actually never heard of ODM.
Oh, okay.
So, uh, OEM or original equipment manufacturer is basically where, um, a factory builds a
product for someone else to slap their label on and sell.
That is an OEM product.
An ODM product is where you go to the manufacturer who makes said products and you go, okay,
what you have is pretty okay, but here are my specs and we need you to build it to this
standard.
Um, so the vast, vast majority of what is on lttstore.com would be ODM, uh, work from
the manufacturer's product.
You wanted some changes to it.
Yeah.
So like plushies, for example, they make plushies, they don't make a Linus shaped one.
That makes sense.
Obviously.
Right.
Why would they?
Yeah.
Like you're not.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
So you didn't, you didn't just rebadge a product.
No.
But you also didn't make a new manufacturing facility for a product.
No.
You worked with manufacturing facility to make similar things and just got them to adapt
it to what you want.
And a lot of the times, um, you know, it's, it's not everything comes from under one roof,
right?
Right.
Like even something as simple as a pair of underwear, right?
There's, they're going to have to bring in elastics from somewhere else.
Uh, getting this, um, uh, this plastic free packaging, uh, involved finding a source for
plastic free packaging that will also keep it safe and shipping, et cetera, et cetera,
et cetera.
Like we're trying to move completely away from plastic in our packaging.
Um, so what I'm trying to say is that when everything you're building is custom, um,
you know, even down to the, even down to the composition of this, the, um, uh, the, I don't
want to get it wrong and our first generation labels are really bad.
Uh, that's something we're improving.
So I actually can't read it.
So you know what?
It doesn't matter.
Uh, the fiber blend of like our custom shirts was a painstaking process.
That's why it takes us so long.
All right.
Why don't we do a couple more topics here?
All right.
Oh, there's an LTX 2023 update.
Uh, we have an FAQ now.
We have safety policies.
Um, do we have, do we have a contact info?
We don't yet have a date that we're going to be reaching out to LTX 2020 VIP ticket
holders, but they are saying very soon.
Uh, ask us questions via the form on the FAQ page or by emailing info at ltxexpo.com.
There you go.
All right.
So we have, uh, we have support now, which is pretty cool.
Uh, maybe don't everyone message support your question at once.
Maybe assume someone else will do it and it'll be added to the FAQ sometime in the next week
or two.
We do not have a team of eight people working on support for LTX at this time, given that
the expo is still like almost six months out.
We do have expo sponsors and partners that we can share publicly.
So Corsair, the gaming stadium, Canto, memory express, MSI, NZXT, SeeSonic, and secret lab.
Those guys, cool.
If there are partners who want to exhibit or work with us, reach out to partner at ltx
expo.com.
Heck yeah.
All right.
Oh, I need to talk about the new angel investment disclosure.
So I had talked recently about how there was a NAS product that I was really excited about
the future of.
Um, I have a couple more things to share.
Uh, so first of all is that based on you guys being overwhelmingly supportive of it, I really
don't think that I've allowed the float plane sponsorship to affect our content in any meaningful
way.
Uh, I obviously daily drive a float plane laptop.
I obviously want them to succeed, but, um, okay.
I mean, hit me.
I just didn't know we were making laptops.
We are?
Hi, video players.
Video website is hard enough.
No, no, no, no, no.
I'm not making laptops.
No.
I invested in flow up.
Oh, it's a big endeavor.
If you want me to do it, man, I'll figure it out.
I'm just saying it's hard and we already do a lot of hard stuff.
Framework.
Apparently I can't even remember what company I'm invested in.
So I got my, I mean, I'm invested in that one too, so it's all kind of the same to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Anywho, yeah, I don't, I, I, I, I sincerely do not believe I have allowed it to affect
my laptop coverage, frankly, most days.
I don't think of it at all.
Even when I am sitting down, like evaluating a laptop, I don't, I don't necessarily remember
unless I look at the laptop and I go, wow, that seems like really anti consumer or really
anti right to repair.
I wish it was more like framework who I'm invested in.
Right.
Like that.
It's kind of an afterthought for me.
Yeah.
Um, but this one I think is even more cut and dried just because it's a category of
product that we don't really cover to the same degree.
So it's NAS software.
And um, the bottom line is that enterprise NAS solutions, yeah, they have their place.
Uh, but current operating systems tend to assume that the person managing and configuring
the server is an it expert and not like enthusiast who's like into it, but someone who actually
like has some training or has done extensive research.
Um, they can be frustrating and inaccessible to small creators, uh, consumers, prosumers
and enthusiasts.
So the goal with this project is to design an intuitive and accessible home server solution
for all users.
Uh, the new company has, they described themselves as an impressive team.
I love you guys.
They have a team for sure.
Um, I'll, I, I look forward to being impressed.
You call your team world class.
I do.
My team is world class.
Sometimes they even get the pee in the toilet without getting it on the seat.
I consider that to be quite world class, bit of an inside joke.
Um, any who, uh, you know what, fine, I'll bite.
The new company has an impressive team headed by two long time tech veterans who recently
completed an eight year stint at unraid where they were responsible for modernization in
the form of implementing Docker and virtual machines, GPU pass through, uh, and rebranding
and marketing respectively.
We're not going to get too far into the weeds for now, but I am officially their angel investor
and uh, you can expect some updates in the future.
I'm actually excited for this.
Yeah.
I'm really excited.
Have you ever met those guys?
No.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Cool.
Well, okay.
The video call.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like way back in the day there, they're cool enough that, um, I don't even have a proper
legal document for my shares and they already have the check.
So either I just got ripped super hard to be pretty epic or, um, or these guys are super
chill and, and I'm right about that and this is going to be awesome.
There really is no middle ground here.
I think.
Oh no.
Yeah.
Cool.
Uh, what else we got to talk about today?
Oh, Oh, Oh, thank goodness.
There's a new home pod now with temperature and humidity sensors for smart home.
I thought they were done with these.
I thought so too, but no, it's a second gen home pod.
It's $50 less than the first gen starting price at 300 us dollars.
Has fewer tweeters and fewer mics, which is cool, but it adds UWB and thread so you can,
so it has like that, um, that like location, low location chip, which could be actually
really neat.
Like if you had home pods all over your house because you're a mega baller and then you
have your iPhone, it could like know where you are and like play music.
You're farther away.
It could like make it louder or something.
I don't know that they'll ever implement anything like that, but theoretically they could.
Um, the home pod mini also secretly included the humidity and temperature sensors, so it
will be updated to activate them.
So that's cool.
Adding features to a smart home product instead of removing them.
I mean, I guess I support this.
I'm not that into, um, hidden sensors and things that are not disclosed.
I mean, you know, Dan just leaves.
He's gone.
He walked right off.
I mean, if he's anything like me, he probably has to go peepee at this point cause we've
been on the show for quite a while.
It has been a long time.
Anyway, there's some also other more different new Apple products.
Um, there's M2 Pro and Macs and they're faster and there's like some Mac books and some Mac
minis that have those in them.
I guess that's pretty cool.
This is a pretty quiet announcement.
I think we got our hands on a couple of them.
I don't even know if we're going to cover these things on LTT though.
We just, we tend to be so late on them that by the time we cover them, the conversation
sort of over.
So we'll probably just hit them on short circuit.
Yeah, sorry, it's lower quality content, but you guys don't want the in depth stuff apparently
cause you don't watch it.
So I guess whatever.
Um, and then, uh, we'll definitely cover them on Mac address eventually.
Um, you know, they'll, they'll get around to it.
And then in the future, once the lab is all set up, we'll be able to like really pump
this stuff out.
But in the meantime, I just don't think it's a feasible on LTT.
We've got too much else going on in other Apple news.
Apple TV requires a separate Apple device to accept the terms of service.
This week, Twitter user at huge LG up posted a picture of their Apple TV, which was in
operable because it required the user to accept the terms and conditions agreement on a separate
device using an up to date copy of iOS.
I have talked extensively about this kind of Eric from Apple.
Oh, I'm sorry.
You haven't purchased enough of our products.
Well I hope you don't expect the ones you did buy to function.
Haha.
Maybe next time you should be more rich.
I was, I was actually hoping this was going to come up from the wheel.
Um, cause I was really interested how this was going to go.
Everyone had to try to defend it.
Every time it was spanned by either of us, I was just going to go straight after poor
people.
That was my plan.
I was going to be like, well they should get more money then.
That's a 10.
That's a 10.
Boom.
Now we know.
I mean, I've talked about this whole much in the past as a daily driver user of one
and exactly one Apple product, the AirPods pro twos, or are they called protein?
I don't even remember.
Whatever the second gen AirPods pros, I can't keep track of their naming crap.
I am also a user of one and exactly one Apple product and it is the first gen just straight
up AirPods.
So as a user of one Apple product, I have found myself extremely frustrated at the way
that I am treated.
I am treated as a second class citizen.
There is no, there is literally.
No way for me to update the firmware of my product in the case of the first gen AirPods.
That was apparently a bit of a bullet Dodge given that they nerfed the active noise cancellation.
But in the case of the second gen AirPods, I haven't seen any reason to believe that
that would be a benefit.
And the fact that there is no way to plug that device because they don't explicitly
say that it is not supported on Android or windows devices.
And it does in fact work just fine.
Okay.
So then would you consider not providing firmware updates to be supported?
I don't know.
I don't know.
It seems pretty BS to me.
And the, so the only way to update your firmware is to be paired to an app, to an iPhone to
have it nearby and to have them both be charging and sleeping essentially.
And then it will just happen automatically.
That's not an acceptable answer.
And I mean, Apple knew that once upon a time back in the days of the iPod, they built iTunes
for windows because they understood when you bought an iPod, you expect an F***ing iPod.
Yep.
Someone in flow plane chat said that they're an Apple employee and that this is a bug,
but I don't believe them.
I believe them.
I just don't believe that it's a high priority bug.
I think that if there's no public confirmation, it's not a high priority bug.
Yeah.
No, man.
I think that this, this is one of those, this is also one of those bugs that comes about
from tunnel vision.
Like this, this, this is a bug that exists because a bug, there'll be a lack of a feature
because the, no, no, I mean the product is developed in an environment where there's
an assumption there's, it's kind of like, okay, I had a really awkward encounter in
a bathroom once.
Oh my.
Okay.
Wow.
I, I, I, this, this man was, um, at the sink to wash his hands in the bathroom and he got
all soaped up and put his hands under the sink and like it didn't come on and he was
like trying to figure out if there was like a manual button somewhere.
He's like getting right up to it and, um, he goes, yeah, he kind of turns to me, he
goes, bro, it must be broken or something along those lines.
And he kind of like is on his way walking out and I go, oh man, I went, I don't know.
I put my hands under the sink.
It immediately works.
Why?
It's skin color.
Yeah.
Yikes.
Cause he was black.
Yeah.
And I'm looking at it going, that's brutal.
That's a bug.
Oh yeah.
****ing bad bug.
Yep.
That's not like, oops.
It's like we literally only ever considered that white skin might go under this sensor.
That's brutal.
Big yikes.
Right.
And honestly I see a lot of this in Apple's product development is they just have these
complete and utter to the point where it has to be intentional blind spots.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm what?
Doesn't everyone have an iPhone?
So this, this, this screen would have come up and remember this is a big company, right?
Like it's not like one person, you know, worked on the updater or like the terms and conditions
update pro flow for this, right?
So this would have, this would have come up for, for many people at some point and they
all would have gone, oh, okay, so I can use my iPhone for this.
And no one at any point thought, what if I don't have an iPhone?
That's what happened.
So yeah, it's a bug.
That's probably an accident, but you still suck.
Yeah.
Like that doesn't, that doesn't make it better.
Obviously this is not as bad as that sensor, right?
But it also is really bad because what if your reason for not being able to have an
iPhone is your socioeconomic position?
What if you got an Apple TV as a gift and this is just a giant FU for not being able
to afford more?
That's not cool either, right?
So yeah, not cool.
Not cool.
Not even a little.
Yeah.
Maybe that's why Tim Cook's salary got cut.
Could be it.
Anywho, I think that was kind of all there was to say about that.
Oh, Alex has a note in here though.
I really hate that with Apple TV plus the service, not the device, the video quality
settings are horrific unless you're watching on an Apple device.
Yeah.
That's the kind of thing, man.
Like why is that necessary?
Yeah.
Back when Apple used to make their keynotes only watchable on Apple devices until after,
it's like what?
You don't want to sell to people who don't already have one.
What like what kind of next level living up inside your own rectum universe do you exist
in?
Like what is your problem?
You know, like it's not even, it's not even that they're outside of their, their rights
to do that, that they can, but they're, that's just s*** s*** s*** s*** s*** s*** whole thing
to do.
Like just why?
Ew.
Yeah.
Why would I, why would I buy anything from you?
Why would I even talk to you?
You know, anyway.
Speaking of crazy things to do or alternative things to do, Wyoming plans to phase out EVs.
Weird.
Lots of other places are planning to phase out gas powered vehicles.
The Wyoming legislature passed a resolution to eliminate all sales of new EVs by 2035.
Legislators justified this move based on potential pollution from battery waste ending
up in landfills and the importance of Wyoming's oil and gas sector.
Beyond that, they say that Wyoming is simply too empty and underpopulated to ever need
EVs because there is only limited EV infrastructure.
Consumers should be banned from buying them.
State Senator Brian Bonner, good, nice recovery, good save, Brian Bonner, the bill's sponsor
describes it as tongue in cheek, but a serious issue that deserves discussion.
Okay.
Well, it's still a bill.
The bill is purely symbolic and has no effect on the legal status of...
I'm genuinely confused.
It's pretty much just a way of...
If it bans...
It's a resolution though.
Okay.
Not a law.
So it's like something...
It's kind of like when a country creates a resolution that they will reduce climate change
by X amount.
So it's a goal.
It's a new year's resolution.
Yes.
Got it.
Nothing will happen.
Nothing will change.
Yeah.
Okay.
It was mostly included because it was one of our topics for defending the indefensible.
Got it.
I don't know.
This is another thing that I've had some really good sort of conversations with Yvonne about
where she kind of goes...
For her, I really like her sort of analysis of how polarization has gotten out of hand
because it's a behavior that she's noticed in herself and in me over the years when we'll
argue, when we are legitimately taking up two different sides of an issue.
And she says, yeah, what I have a tendency to do is when I feel like the other side of
the argument has gone so far away from the truth, which often lies somewhere in the middle,
is that I feel like I need to compensate.
It's kind of like how if you've got a parent who's super angry all the time and abusive,
the other one might feel pressure to try to make up for it.
Whereas if both took a more balanced approach, that might actually be healthier for the child.
And in the same way, if two sides of an issue were to attempt to see eye to eye on it rather
than be sort of lured into these farther and farther extreme positions, we might have a
chance of actually having a constructive conversation because the reality of it is that the upcoming
avalanche of battery e-waste is a legitimate problem.
And how we harvest the minerals required to manufacture them is also like-
And where they're coming from-
Yeah.
Is a-
It's like super not okay.
Is a legitimate problem.
Yeah.
The defense of the oil and gas sector is absolutely not a defensible reason for bringing it up.
Yeah.
They're deplorable too.
And like just because you don't like parts of one thing doesn't mean that you need to
be 100% aligned with everything on the other side and yada yada.
Yeah.
So that's-
Yeah, batteries are a huge problem.
We used to actually talk about this on WAN Show fairly often because I think probably
around two years ago, it felt like every few months we'd hear some rumor about a new battery
technology.
Do you remember this?
Yeah.
They're coming.
I mean, my Google News feed is full of them.
They're still theoretically coming.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All the time.
Yeah.
This one's gonna get a thousand miles and blah, blah, blah, and it'll be perfectly recyclable.
Yeah.
Where is it?
The main thing we need is just something that doesn't require the same materials.
Like that's the materials required for current high-end batteries is like very problematic.
I like it.
That's funny.
What?
Current high-end battery?
Okay.
Nevermind.
I know.
That's actually a pretty good account.
Okay.
But yeah, that's a huge problem.
I think part of the argument for hydrogen fuel cells, right, is that they're supposed
to be, well, essentially they're supposed to just run on, I get that energy, blah, blah,
et cetera.
I know.
I get it.
But we can't reach an optimal solution if we aren't willing to at least consider the
concerns of the other party.
Now that's not to say that every concern from the other party is valid.
Also fair.
And that makes it very challenging.
But some of them maybe.
That makes it very challenging, right?
Yeah.
What is valid is Google's move to make the Stadia controller usable.
Not so dead.
Yeah.
After Stadia goes the way of the dodo.
That's cool.
They released a self-service tool to enable Bluetooth on Stadia controllers.
Probably should have just supported it in the first place, but hey, cool.
Bluetooth must be enabled before December 31st, 2023.
That's weird.
Why?
Oh, okay.
While Stadia was compatible with most third-party controllers, the rationale for the Stadia
controller was that it could connect directly to Google servers via wifi, reducing latency.
Super cool.
But it won't do that anymore.
It'll just be Bluetooth, which is, I guess, also fine.
I think we can kind of switch over to some rich messages here.
Should we do that?
Yeah.
All right.
Let's get into it.
I've got one here.
Oh, no, that we've already done.
Okay.
This one's from Austin.
Hey, I just wanted to bring-
Wow, Austin, Texas?
The whole state.
Hey, I just wanted to bring up that I'm currently working at a fiber-to-home ISP that is bringing
10 gig to residential in California at a reasonable price.
Some of my coworkers claim that it's not necessary.
What are your thoughts?
It's not necessary.
Yeah.
Yeah, but I want it.
What the heck are you going to do with it?
Have it.
What are you going to connect to?
I just want it.
I actually, no, I actually think this should have been on the defend the indefensible wheel
because it is an indefensible position to say that you could need 10 gig internet at
home today.
So your poorly secured IoT device can just like DDoS the world?
I mean, honestly though, like you could, okay, let's go through the arguments, right?
So that you could have lots of people there.
Well, realistically, you probably live in a single family dwelling.
You said it's residential.
So no, no, actually the number-
It might be lots of people, but it's not going to be like an office building.
The vast majority of the services that you connect to, A, will not even have one gigabit
of available uplink bandwidth to you.
And B, especially for things like web browsing, are more likely to be limited by like DNS
lookups-
What for?
Than by the actual transfer speed.
Okay.
Number three, let's say you sail the high seas hard, okay?
At that speed-
Crashing waves.
You are going to be spending, you will not be able to work enough hours to afford the
hard drives that you are going to need to contain all this data.
Everyone so far that's saying that they want it says just because.
No one has a reason.
Well, I get it because when we got a 10 gig connection here, that was why I did it.
Yeah.
I mean, it's sick, but like, yes, it's completely okay, but-
We have a hundred people here now, so-
Yeah.
We might actually use a lot of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Finally.
Wasn't the question-
The question was claims that it's not necessary.
Of course it's not necessary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Just put it in anyway.
Sorry, Austin.
Are you guys actually opposed to being tech forward right now?
This is A prime, I'm sorry.
This is the, I like waffles, then you hate pancakes argument.
That is stupid.
That is not what we said.
We said it's not necessary.
Yes.
Luke and Linus hate the internet.
And I'm not saying don't lay the fiber.
All we were saying is it's not necessary.
By all means.
Let's, let's get ready.
Yeah.
Let's do it.
Yeah.
Eventually we'll be able to stream 3D model files into whatever, who knows?
I don't know.
Hot take.
Yeah.
Hot take.
We will never need a 10 gigabit home internet connection.
Yeah, that is a bad take.
Why would anybody need more?
I didn't say it was bad.
I said it was hot.
Okay.
It's hot because, okay.
Can I-
The amount of water needed to put it out is not very much.
Are you going to give me a chance here?
We need to have our time segments.
Can I talk?
Sure.
All right.
Okay.
What are the primary drivers of bandwidth consumption now?
Video?
Yeah.
I mean, yes.
Right?
This guy knows.
Look at his shirt.
Yeah.
Primary driver of bandwidth.
Okay.
It's like Netflix and stuff.
Right now we are at 4K, right?
3D.
Going back?
Probably not.
Okay.
We're at 4K.
We are at color depths that while not, we're at dynamic ranges and color depths that are
not maxing out the capabilities of the eye, but we're starting to talk about the capabilities
of the eye.
Fair enough?
Okay.
Sure.
Okay.
For resolution, right?
We could go further, but at what is considered to be, and even going back to the early days
of projection theaters, at what is a ratio of your field of vision that is considered
optimal to reduce motion sickness, okay?
There is a solid argument to be made that 8K is unnecessary and certainly anything beyond
it will be triply unnecessary.
Can I counterpoint?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Of course.
The type of data being consumed may change in the future.
You're saying we will never need it.
Well, no, no.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Hold on.
Is that what you said?
I am saying we will never need it, but what I'm trying to lay out is sort of the groundwork
for...
Sure, but you're only talking about video and you're talking about 2D frame video on
a screen.
So far.
Okay.
But I haven't gotten there yet.
All right.
Okay.
We need timers.
If 8K is realistically as far as we're going to get before we have filled up too much of
our field of vision and it is no longer discernible anyway, then my argument is that we are kind
of reaching a point where we can at least see the final destination.
Sort of.
Two 8K images in stereoscopic 3D through a VR headset or through some kind of holographic
projection system or whatever else it is.
You sure should know that it's not just resolution though.
No, no, absolutely.
That's part of it.
That's not really that strong of an argument.
However, however, I mean, we already, we already, again though, we know what that might look
like.
So, so we are, we are approaching the limits of what the eye can discern and we're sitting
at like the, the highest bit rate blue rays or something in the neighborhood of a hundred
megabit.
So if we say, okay, a hundred megabit times four is 400 megabit times two is 800 megabit
for a stream that is now stereoscopic and let's, let's throw, let's go to gigabit.
Okay.
To say, okay, we're going to need a, we'll need more color depth than we have today.
It might come in bursts when you're buffering and stuff like that, but even that isn't really
enough to fill that pipe.
Not even close.
Yeah.
Not even a significant fraction.
Not even a little.
Now you could make the argument for a five user household.
All consuming that at once.
All consuming that at once.
I would counter that point by saying, I pretty much promise you that that experience for
at least in our lifetimes is not going to be something that all five of those users
are consuming in much the same way that right now you might have five people watching Netflix
in the house.
I promise you they're not all at 4k there.
That's my argument.
Why are they not all at 4k?
You just think one of them is on like a year device was probably on the phone.
So not, not every person has like a TV basically has a top top of the line experience is kind
of, I'm saying that five theater rooms, the vast majority of households or whatever might
have at most one of these, this peak tier experience.
Yeah.
And they have phones or laptops or computers or whatever else.
That's my argument.
Yeah.
So my thing I think would be new alternate experiences.
So yes, I do think we would have a hard time getting there in, in like flat frame video
player type of content.
But I, I, I made like an offhand comment earlier, but like streaming 3d models where I wasn't
describing it very well, but that's sort of what I'm talking about.
Really, really high poly count, complicated things being live streamed instead of rendered
locally.
Um, game stream style to your house in, in more complex things that might not exist yet
in re in regards to how we consume content could start hitting bandwidth levels pretty
hard counter.
I think it's super likely, not really.
A lot of the market is going towards, uh, actually while we're increasing these, oh,
you can get 10 gig to your house.
A lot of the market is going towards making it so that less data is being sent out.
Yup.
That's exactly where I was going to go to because at the end of the day, the higher
the, the, the bigger the pipe between the service and the user, the more data was being
stored.
And as we talked about in the video, yeah, in the video we did recently, why YouTube
should charge for 4k, um, basically the, the trend that we were looking at was the way
that storage is not getting cheaper anymore.
And you don't just like plug ethernet cables into hard drives either.
You need systems to run this data transfer to put things in packages, send them out,
handle all that.
Now we will still get faster compute.
We will still get specialized encoders and decoders, but, and that, but those will exist
to minimize that data storage burden, to minimize that data transmission burden.
No service, no company anywhere is looking to just use up more infrastructure.
Let's go.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not happening.
Yeah.
So that's my argument.
I'm saying it now.
This might be one of those, I don't see Bitcoin going anywhere moments 10 years from now when
everyone needs 10 gig to have the best gaming experience.
Um, but you know, what's funny is I might've even made a stronger argument for 10 gig back
when, um, back when we were back when game streaming was in its infancy and we couldn't
really see the trajectory of it as it is now.
I just, it's pretty clear that to keep latency down, compute has to stay down.
Data rates have to stay down.
And we are not going to see like, like an uncompressed, you know, 4k game stream product,
not, not in any reasonable amount of time.
Yeah.
Uh, this is a tangent thing.
I just want to say it before I get mobile gnome on the forum and also in float plane
chat, uh, mentioned today is the fifth anniversary of the streak of wan.
So a wan show never being missed at all.
Oh really?
And it is.
And it is the 123rd episode in a row of Linus and Luke.
Nice.
Yeah.
I, we knew we had a streak.
We just weren't sure what it was.
Yeah.
We didn't know how long it was.
So it's over two years then.
Yeah.
Nice.
Yeah.
I'm not going to be the one to end it.
Me either.
I don't know.
Clearly.
Yeah.
He's on vacation right now.
No, not today.
Oh, not today.
Today I was on.
Oh, okay.
All right.
All right.
It was up until yesterday.
All right.
So it's technically back at work.
That's good.
Yeah.
All right.
Dan hit us.
Oh, okay.
This one is from anonymous in the future.
Would you create an ad on like honey, but warns us when we check out, trying to buy
an item that you have tested with labs to not live up to their claimed expectations.
That's a pretty cool idea.
Um, I could see, man, I could see a third party websites getting
super mad.
Like, especially if we got into the business of it, like selling those products or whatever
else like a competitor, basically like warning customers on your website that you shouldn't
buy something from them.
That seems maybe that's even, man, how would we do that?
We couldn't do it for segments that we, yeah, for that we participate in, but in ones that
we didn't, or maybe if we just never did that, then that could be a pretty cool alternative
business model for it where we basically just go, Hey, um, here's a link to add one with
our affiliate code, obviously from this very same site, um, that we, that we recommend.
That's pretty cool.
I don't know that labs is going to want to make such concrete individual product recommendations
though.
So that's a challenge.
We might be able to suggest possible alternatives, but, um, we could maybe use the commonly compared
against tool.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But like, Oh man, especially for so many products are down to personal taste, right?
Like I'm headphones are one of the classic ones because that's, uh, one of the, one of
the product categories that we're going to be best set up for very early on print on
a certain sound signature and then just like, or you might have a weird shape dome and you
just like, you know, that one's honestly better for you.
So we would always need to be really careful about making a solid recommendation on someone
else's website where the return is going to be their liability and not our own, right?
So there's like kind of ethical challenges there too.
I don't know.
We'd have to, we'd have to figure out the best way to deal with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hey guys, recently just started my first full-time job in networking for a very large group.
Kind of been chucked in the deep end.
Any advice for dealing with the incredible information overload that comes with starting
a new job in an unfamiliar field?
Read the docs, man.
Yeah.
Go for it.
Go for it.
Go hard.
Go hard.
That's all I can really say.
He said large organizations.
So hopefully there's docs.
If there aren't docs networking stuff, wow.
If there aren't docs stay there long enough to get good experience and look for a new
job long enough that it looks good on the resume and not bad.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Or just press a huge amount of importance that you need to make them and be the one
to champion the creation of them because you need that.
Creating systems is almost always a higher position in the org chart than just following
created systems.
Almost always.
I got a couple of messages in the chat here that I want to kind of highlight here.
Recon Messenger says, speaking of headphones.
What headphones are Linus and Luke using?
They're AT something M50Xs.
They suck.
They're uncomfortable.
There was this whole trendy thing for a while where everyone was super hard on for these
and at the time I didn't understand it.
I still don't understand it.
They were always commodity.
I think the argument was they're used in recording studios.
Yeah.
They're used in recording studios because they're basically disposable.
Yeah.
If you're going to break them, you don't get the good ones.
We had a box of these.
You got musicians.
You just throw them at them and they wear them and if you destroy them, then you just
give them another one.
Yeah.
So someone- They're also close back, so they're nice and
isolating.
Someone grabbed onto that little factoid that these are used in recording studios, completely
missed the context, had absolutely no idea what headphones are supposed to sound like
and was like, **** sick, sick, yeah.
Let's go.
Do they do the- No.
Yeah.
Yes, they do.
They do?
Yeah.
They're here because they are cheap and disposable and we needed four pairs for the They're Just
Movies podcast and stuff and they were cheap.
They're good enough.
Yeah.
And then in the float plane chat from Jake, Luke doesn't put his camera up during our
twice a week stand ups.
We can hear him chewing, but he blames the birds.
How would you like to respond to that?
I just- You've been outed, sir.
You've been called out.
Everything I do that's wrong is the bird's fault.
No, I don't know.
I can put it on, Jake.
Okay?
Jeez.
I don't have a dog that I can cuddle like you do in yours, all right?
I love it.
Okay.
All right, Dan, hit us.
Okay, this one's from Ari.
People who say your merch is overpriced have never worn it.
Thanks for making nice quality clothes.
For my question, what fictional technology do you wish you could review?
Oh, man.
Fictional technology.
This was a cool one.
How much fun would it be to review the Star Trek beam me up, whatever those are called,
teleporters or whatever, like, oh, no, no, no, the food fabricators.
Oh, yeah.
That's the kind of technology that is going to go through a period of being absolutely
horrible.
Atrocious.
Yeah, it'll have a short period of being horrible, a long period of being kind of acceptable,
and then they're going to get really good and things are going to get really interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You just grind up cockroaches into it and it spits out a burger and you're going to
be like, how did they do this?
It's going to be awesome.
My brain immediately went to lightsabers.
There's material stuff, because how does the grip feel?
And style.
Stuff like that.
There's a lot of style involved.
Craftsmanship.
But then there's also crystal choice and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada.
I don't know.
My brain immediately went to that.
All right.
Nerds.
The lot of ya.
This one's from James.
In the possible LMG branches, e.g. labs, would you consider creating a team to investigate
shady practices by tech companies?
For example, Activision's broken anti-cheat that bans innocent players and their lack
of response slash appeal process.
I mean, I think that in the longer term, we obviously, yeah, we want to cover the industry
from every direction that we can.
But I don't know that we would have a dedicated team just for shady practices.
I think that you can expect to see, especially if TalkLinked and TechLonger see some success,
I think you could expect to see us build out that team in order to do more content like
that.
TechLinked is our news, I was gonna say news group, but it's not a news group.
That's a different thing.
But that's kind of our news-focused group right now.
I don't know.
It's not a top priority on the roadmap.
I think the next thing you're gonna see from us is a reacts channel, and the next things
you're gonna see after that are going to be more product-focused stuff as we build out
the lab.
Okay, and now I have a bit of an interesting one here.
Can you explain the need behind improving Wancho?
One big draw for me was Wancho was the lack of gimmicky slapstick nonsense like the spinning
wheel.
I'd love to understand your thoughts driving it.
I thought this was pretty mean, but also probably quite an interesting discussion.
I spoke with a few of the other team members yesterday, and it's kind of nice.
What?
You spoke with a few of the other team members yesterday and it was kind of nice?
Yeah, hearing Linus's maybe thoughts behind improving the Wancho.
Stance for a long time has been don't touch it, including with the thumbnails for the
Wancho being kind of generally extremely old-age YouTube, and they've never grown or gotten
better.
And people have offered to like, hey, maybe we should make better thumbnails for it.
And it's always just been like, no.
So I'm a little bit surprised by the change.
I'm surprised that you're saying that you like that the show's never been like gimmicky
or jank, because I think that's all the show has ever been.
I guess not technically gimmicks in this form, but like, it's never been professional.
It's a little gimmicky, I guess.
It's not slapstick though, and it creates very interesting discussions.
Is the show in general not just kind of slapsticky?
We've made-
No, it's not slapstick.
That has a kind of specific definition.
Does it?
I genuinely don't know what it is, I guess.
I thought it was just like-
Like slapstick would be like visual gags and stuff like that.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
This would be a gimmick.
That is a bit.
For sure.
I'm just, I'm in listening mode right now though, I mean, I'll give my two cents, but-
I feel like we've been on a very good arc for a while.
I think the beginning of that arc was probably the beginning of merch messages.
I don't know how it happened, but the show as a whole changed, not just the inclusion
of merch messages.
It's really long now, so that's interesting.
There's no shortage of content.
I think that's a big part of it.
Because of merch messages, to be completely honest.
Yeah, that you guys make the show what it is.
Because the same thing happened to Wan's show that happened to LZT, where when Linus and
I first started way back in the day, there was too much stuff to cover, so we just covered
the things that showed up at the door, and there was always enough content.
And then over time, the amount of things that showed up at the door reduced, because the
frenzy of tech being in a relatively early stage kind of stopped.
And then it happened with phones, and then that fell off.
And then it started becoming a situation where like, okay, well, there isn't enough new stuff
to cover, so we have to create new content.
So we started creating shows, and we started creating different content types and experiments
and whatever else.
Building things that were more dependent on the personality rather than the product that
we were covering.
Yeah.
So that changed over time.
Similar thing happened to Wan's show, where there used to be just this infinite pool of
tech news that we could cover, and we would just grab the best parts of it.
And over time, it got to the point where it's like, wow, there's really not a lot to talk
about this week.
How do we make this interesting?
And we just started going off the rail more.
And then with merch messages, you guys kind of throw us off the rail, which I think is
even more interesting.
So I think we've been on a good track.
I don't see necessarily the need to change things when we've been on probably the best
track that we've been on for a while.
But I didn't mind the wheel.
I thought it was interesting.
I think the wheel can't be an every week thing.
Because it depends on there being topics that make sense to be on the wheel, and it depends
on there being enough of them.
But I don't see anything against it.
I don't think working to make something better is a bad thing.
So yeah.
Okay.
So I'll thank you for having my...
I've typed up some of my things.
That was sort of where I was going to land on.
But I'll tell you some of the other things.
So I can tell you right now, the reason we've not changed Wansho in the past is not because
we haven't had ideas for how to make it better.
It's because I'm cheap, and Wansho is the lowest possible priority thing to spend money
on in the entire company.
Wansho is literally at the very bottom of the totem pole.
I would rather pay for cleaning services for the year for every employee of the company
than hire someone who's dedicated to Wansho.
That has happened.
That's what happened traditionally.
I'm trying to explain what my position has been on Wansho.
Wansho came about as a necessary evil.
Like filler.
It killed two birds with one stone.
Bird number one was it gave us some kind of foothold into live, which at the time, it
wasn't clear to me how that was going to evolve and how meaningful it was going to be.
But it was a trend and it was something that was not going away and we needed some kind
of presence in live.
I was like, okay, well, the easiest, lowest hanging fruit at a time in my life when I
have an infant child and a fledgling company is Q&A.
So that's how it starts.
And then from Q&A, well, people just started asking about what's going on in the tech world.
So it's not that much of a leap to go from just trying to preemptively answer the questions
that you would have had, which is what's my take on X, Y, or Z in the tech world, right?
So Wansho serves that purpose.
And then the second purpose it served was it was killing us trying to upload seven LTTs
a week.
So we made Wansho to fill one of those upload slots and it was, because it was live and
because we branded it as a podcast, it was easy to sell to sponsors for, if not the same
rates, at least a close enough rate compared to what we could charge for LTT videos that
we could afford to not do an LTT video that day at only the cost of about an hour and
a half of each mine in Luke's time.
So it was a very calculated move, the creation of Wansho.
As for why it was a low priority to improve it, well, it's because Wansho morphed into
the one way that we can really engage with the community and kind of touch base with
you guys on a weekly basis.
And to serve that purpose, Wansho doesn't need a fancy set, it doesn't need better lights,
it doesn't need 4K cameras, it doesn't need really anything.
We are not going to be more professional on the show.
So making the show more professional doesn't necessarily make a lot of sense and could
even contribute to making it seem less genuine.
So I have this thing that has kind of this ceiling for how much we can charge for it
from a sponsorship standpoint.
So from like a business point of view, I can invest more in it.
I will not get a return on it.
And then from a personal point of view, I was just like, I don't know, Wansho is fun
and it's fun the way it is.
However, there are a few things that have prompted this recent change.
So first of all, I want to make it clear that our new Wansho writer, I guess I'll call it
a writing position, our new Wansho writer's primary raison d'etre is not to create gimmicky
nonsense.
Their primary purpose is to make sure that the stories we have for the week are better
fleshed out and more accurate.
I think we are reaching the point where there's just no excuse for us to get details wrong.
And honestly, I think it's fair to say that the quality of, while the titles might still
be kind of inflammatory, the quality of the way the topics are written out is better than
what we've had in the past.
I think it's been pretty balanced.
I think there's some areas where there could be some improvement, but realistically this
is the first week of actually preparing the doc for us.
So a great job.
As for why I do want part of their job to be, you know, gimmicks and segments and stuff
like that.
Well, because I think they're fun.
There's nothing wrong with trying new things, like Luke said, and a big part of the inspiration
for these segments is the success of the merch messages segment.
You guys might not have realized it, but we totally created this gimmicky way to interact
with the show that has actually ended up making the show a more fun for us.
Like I never would have even wanted to do a three hour wind show before, but now I kind
of enjoy it.
Like at a certain point, I'm like, I'm hungry now and I kind of have to pee, but like, you
know, like there's a limit, right.
But I, but I enjoy it more and that's why the show is longer.
And I know you guys enjoy it more because I can see it in the analytics.
So it's working for both of us.
So let's do it.
Um, so we're going to try stuff and sometimes it'll land and sometimes it'll be crap and
we won't do it again.
Hit me, Dan.
Okay.
Excellent.
This is from Denver.
Uh, really?
Yeah.
The whole city.
There's another one.
It's the best city in Denver.
Uh, I need, I need 10 gig for three to one backups.
You don't need it.
I want 4k 3d and want to move past the draconian 30 and 60 Hertz paradigm.
That's not 4k 3d 4k 3d 120,000 Hertz, but you can want it, but that doesn't make it
exist.
If, if you're going to watch that one video, um, you could just download it.
My home internet is 40 gig.
Uh, and other than transceivers, fibrous fiber be at one gig, 10 gig, even a hundred gig.
Yes, but I never opposed building out fiber.
I said, you don't need a 10 gig.
I don't know why this is so hard for people, but the thing we were talking about was if
it was necessary for the user to have 10 gig in the home.
And I would also make the argument that if you are three to one backing up something
with that kind of, um, data requirements on a daily basis, that sounds like it is not
home use.
Yeah.
So while you are technically in a resident at a residential address, I would, I am going
to stand by my original statement.
I'm going to say you are not a home user there.
Yeah.
Yep.
We're talking about if it was necessary there, there's a bunch of, uh, which has to come
first type of questions with this type of stuff where like, if you wanted to build a
service that needs those types of bandwidth requirements, well, no company's going to
do that if no one is able to receive that type of data.
So like we would need home users to be able to have things like 10 gig in place.
The plans would need to be available, um, so that, uh, a company could make something
that actually uses that whole pipe.
Right.
So it's not a bad thing to do.
It's just for the user.
It's not necessary right now.
That's all.
Okay.
Here's one from James.
Hi Linus.
I would like to go to LTX, but my wife is giving birth to our firstborn.
My wife.
My wife.
I forgot he was going to do that to our firstborn in late March.
Do you have any tips for traveling with a newborn and should I take my four months son
to LTX?
No.
No.
You would have to drive 14 hours to get to LTX.
Just don't.
I traveled with a newborn a couple times and it sucked every time.
No one had fun.
Um.
Come, come later.
I'll see you next year.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, man.
Uh, I wish I did have some tips for you.
We're into potentials now.
Okay.
Right.
Um.
Sorry.
There's so many.
I might have to just do these then because if I have to read them anyway, then, um, okay.
Anonymous says, when you play Beat Saber, do you feel that external tracking like with
the Valve Index works better than internal tracking like with the Quest 2?
My sabers sometimes float away from my hand in the Quest 2.
So there are always going to be technical limitations when it comes to occlusion, which
is when your sensor and your object are occluded.
That is, there's an object between them of some sort.
You can make up a lot of ground with really accurate accelerometers and gyroscopes like
Valve, excuse me, um, Meta does build into their controllers, but those are inherently
going to drift.
They do.
They must.
They will.
Um, so there's that you're always going to need to kind of snap them back to reality.
There goes gravity, you know, um, every once in a while, like, like, like really a lot,
um, external trackers, especially for full body tracking.
I mean, I think they will always have an advantage whether that advantage is enough to justify
the additional cost and space and wiring requirements.
Maybe not.
Maybe the next Valve headset is going to make me regret drilling a bunch of holes in my
rec room, um, to put up lighthouses.
But um, yeah, so for full body tracking, it's not really an option for me to use inside
out for now because I have a sensor on my waist and sensors on my feet, sensors on my
hands and sensors on my head from a headset.
You're just not going to be able to see them all and, and maintain the natural movement
for my avatar.
But if I was not doing full body tracking, then yeah, I think an array could be built.
That's good enough.
Um, even if the current stuff is not quite there yet, especially at the consumer level.
Um, okay.
I got another one.
Hey Linus and Luke, I usually watch the man show on Saturday mornings and wanted to thank
you for the content.
Uh, what's your favorite dad joke?
I think the best dad jokes aren't like fixed.
I think they're just constant puns.
Yeah.
It's gotta be people.
Well, I mean actually the social team asked me to tell a dad joke for, for a float plane
exclusive and I was like, you don't, you don't come up with it on the spot.
Yeah.
Like I, I constantly am telling dad jokes, but it's because that's what like makes it
a dad joke.
Like the planes just actually wired that way.
I have heard people that have like recitable dad jokes, but I don't think that's very common.
I think most of them are just play on word.
Yeah.
And what's funny about them is the way that you've gone and interpreted something that
that person said 45 seconds ago and, and like the, ah, I knew it was going to be something
that just happened, but I would not have gone there with it.
You know?
Um, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I don't have something.
I got to, I got to address something in chat because people still don't understand and
that's okay, but I got to address it.
Uh, what about when a game is a one terabyte download?
What about when it is download it?
If the game server is still incapable of actually sending you what your pipe is capable of receiving,
then it's irrelevant.
And are they going to send you 10 gigs a second to just you?
Yeah, not just you to everyone who has a connection like that.
Good luck.
Ever maybe foreseeable future, near future, near future.
I seriously doubt it.
Yeah, but I want it.
Oh my gosh.
You can want it.
We're talking about, is it necessary?
Okay, cool.
Moving forward.
James asks Linus, do you code?
The answer is no.
Sorry.
I just never, I never learned and realistically I'm at a point in my life running the company
with the kids, blah, blah, blah.
Where if I was going to pick up something, it'd probably be like a musical instrument
or something at this point, like I just, I don't think that would be my next endeavor.
I think I would probably want to learn enough to be dangerous, like, uh, just, you know,
simple things like scripting.
But then with chat GPT being as powerful as it is, I mean, I, yeah, I guess I'd like to
know enough to be able to like proofread like a chat GPT script.
I think right now, well, okay, not right now.
I think in the near future, a more usable goal would be able to understand being able
to try to read it even if I can't write it and debug things or at least this is why I'm
I'm tripping right now is I don't necessarily think that you should be able to fix it, but
I think you should be able to understand why it's not working so that you can ask chat
GPT to fix it because I've had code outputs from chat GPT that I've been like, oh, it's
getting this error and I think it's because of this.
Can you fix that?
And it'll be like, yup.
And it'll actually do it.
So like that doesn't really require a lot.
Sure.
And as long as you are familiar with the tools and stuff and could get it to do that, then
you'd be fine.
And I think there's a certain amount of like human nature that leads us to kind of take
the easiest solution to a problem.
And for me, the easiest solution to a coding problem is to go to one of the over a dozen
professional capable programmers that I have at my disposal now and say, Hey, can you help
me with this?
Yeah.
Um, like learning, that's a dangerous thing.
And I think that's where a lot of the kind of the stereotypical dumb, no nothing executive
kind of comes from is that when it's so much faster and your time is so, so pressed, um,
when it's so much faster, easier and more efficient, not efficient for you to learn
things.
It's not efficient to learn.
Learning is super inefficient.
The good news for me is I get bored and I get frustrated and like depressed when I'm
not learning things.
So I'm just, I'm sort of self motivated to keep doing it.
But if I wasn't, if I didn't just have a joy of learning, I feel like I'd already just
be like kind of useless, you know, like I, like there is no reason for me to know anything
about how cameras operate.
There is always someone to do it for me.
However, when the pandemic shutdown came along, what I discovered was that just because I
tend to be naturally curious, I had actually absorbed enough that is it as good as our
people who do it every day all day.
No, of course not.
I'm not going to pretend it is, but it was, did the channel survive?
Did we miss an I think so.
All right.
So clearly I managed to, I managed to gain a serviceable enough knowledge that I was
able to set it up myself.
Um, and so I don't remember what the question was.
No, I'm not going to learn to code because that's, um, it's something that I have almost
no need to interact with on a daily basis.
Whereas like cameras, I really do, even if I'm usually on this side of them and they're
usually on the other side of them.
The next one is for me.
This is a question for Luke.
What is your biggest struggle as a new dev after graduation?
I'm coming up on two years after school and I'm struggling to find a motivation to pursue
learning slash projects on my own time due to life obligations.
Uh, well, interesting question for me cause a, I didn't graduate and b, um, uh, after
school I was immediately doing things that had nothing to do with software development
at all.
Um, and also while I was in school I was doing a lot of things that had nothing to do with
software development at all.
Um, so I don't know.
It doesn't sound like your problem is necessarily finding work or working.
It sounds like your problem is finding motivation to pursue, learn learning and projects on
your own time and or work life balance and or work life balance.
That is a totally separate question.
Motivation is an interesting thing in its own right.
Um, I don't find motivation to be in my own personal experience and you're asking me,
so I'm going to answer it this way.
Um, and I don't know if this is legit for everyone.
I don't know.
I don't find motivation in what most people see from that or take from that word to be
super useful to me personally.
I find dedication or discipline to be super useful to me personally.
Motivation seems like a cop out, a burst thing and something that's only useful for a short
period of time.
Like you can just hope that you'll have it.
Whereas if dedication is something you can control.
Yeah.
So like you need to employ like discipline or something to make yourself do those things.
If those are things that you need to do big, if you might not need to, you might just be
able to go to work, do your job, go home and not do these types of things.
Um, you don't have to, I know it's very popular in the space and I'm not saying it's a bad
thing to be super clear, but you don't have to do that stuff outside of work.
You don't need homework.
You're now graduated.
You could go to work, do your job, go home and not do it anymore.
Um, but if, if you feel like you should or if you want to for career advancement reasons
or whatever, I would use what motivation you do have to set up a situation, uh, where you're
able to use something, um, like determination, discipline, um, those types of things to actually
get that stuff done.
Um, that's it.
I've, I've kind of addressed this topic on WAN Show before and I hope I did it better
this time.
Um, but yeah, like if you need to get something done, motivation is not the right thing in
my opinion to look towards because it's, it's, uh, it's a resource that definitely depletes
and you need to find more rigid things to be able to lean on, or at least I do.
Again, they asked me.
Delta Bregman says, here's what chat GPT had to say regarding 10 gigabits per second internet.
I was hoping someone would do this.
First, it would enable multiple users in the household to engage in high bandwidth activities
simultaneously such as streaming, 4k video gaming and teleconferencing without any lag
or buffering.
Second, it would enable faster download and upload speeds, which would be beneficial for
tasks such as working from home, online learning and remote backups.
Therefore it would be necessary.
Therefore it would be necessary.
And chat GPT can be confidently wrong.
Yeah, that's, uh, that's all we managed to prove there.
I'm afraid.
That's a one out of 10 there.
Um, Nicholas B, I watched pure living for life's video on their horrifying cyber bullying
story.
How can you to be an engaging, relatable and successful YouTuber while keeping your life
private for, from your community?
I mean, I think that it wears on a lot of YouTubers.
Um, I think that it can kind of, that can kind of, that pressure can kind of manifest
in a lot of ways that you see ones that are like neurotic about maintaining their, their
privacy.
Like, I know, I know of one that either did or does keep their face private that literally
would not leave their house.
Like I spoke to this person and they had not left their house more than maybe twice in
the last six months because they had a highly recognizable voice and were so concerned about
maintaining that secrecy that they, they, they became essentially a shut in.
Um, and then you've got people that are, you know, put their entire lives online.
You know, they're themselves, they're parents, they're kids, they're, you know, they're,
they're pregnancies, they're births, they're deaths, they're, you know, whatever else.
Right.
And they just kind of, uh, they just kind of embrace it.
Um, I think that, I think that both ways eventually burn you out and everything in between eventually
burns you out and, um, you have to learn to kind of find a balance between sticking up
for yourself, um, letting things roll off your back.
Um, like being sad sometimes, getting mad, learning to kind of get over that.
Um, yeah, it's tough.
I don't know.
I mean, like to be clear, one of the things that I remind myself constantly is like I
chose this.
I could turn it off tomorrow.
I mean, how, how famous would I be in a year if I didn't upload a single video for a year?
Not very.
Like I, I'm not famous famous, I'm internet famous, niche famous, right?
Like it's, I went through this and I was still on Wancho every week.
Yeah.
The amount that I would get recognized walking around like plummeted really fast when I wasn't
just constantly in videos.
Yeah.
So like, that's the thing is, uh, there's that constant reminder that's, um, for me,
that's like, yeah, I could end this and that's encouraging.
Um, Alexander says, Hey, excited about the Henley shirt and screwdriver.
Thanks for being transparent about your products and how the company works.
How do you guys come up with new products to work towards slash develop to sell an LTT
store?
Sometimes it's just like I was looking through pictures of, um, like computer stuff in my,
in my gallery, uh, like in my, my photo archive for an upcoming, uh, Linus or Linus's team
reacts to Linus's old computers.
By the way, you should almost certainly be one of the reactors cause you haven't seen
most of the janky stuff I've done.
I'm super down.
Yeah.
Um, any who, I came across an image of, um, one of my daughters, uh, Oh, here, can I borrow
that for a sec?
Okay.
You know how these pillows often have a strap.
I came across an image of one of my daughters, uh, while people were playing VR in the background,
wearing one of these, like a VR headset.
And I was like, Oh my God, we should do a VR headset plushie.
So we're going to do that now.
That's funny.
So sometimes it's just like a flash of inspiration like that.
Sometimes it's my ongoing.
Yeah.
Right.
No, tell me something.
Should it have plushie wands or no?
I don't think so.
Oh, but it's kind of like that.
Yeah.
What if I kind of, what if you want to kind of pose it on a shelf?
Would you have the plushie wands next to it?
Yeah, actually I think so.
I was, when I said no, I was thinking about it more as a pillow.
Sure.
I was like, I feel like there'll be a no, it's not a pillow.
It's wearable.
Yeah.
It's like, it's a, it's kind of like, then I feel like, cause yeah, you'd hold the ones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then sometimes I'm just like really frustrated by the existing solution and I want a better
one.
Like I was so tired of the stupid snap on bit storage.
I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, there must be a better way, this is ridiculous.
I want a new backpack.
I did want a new backpack.
I know, I know.
I wanted a new backpack.
That one actually was really championed by Bridget though.
Cause like I wanted a new backpack and I was like willing to pay for a new backpack, like
the whole development of a new backpack.
But I didn't have the confidence that we could, that we could make it happen.
And she was like, look, let me try.
I'm like, okay, it's your funeral.
She was like super new at the time.
Like yeah, okay, you can waste your time, but like, I'd really rather you were working
on these things that have like a clear, a clear path to a great ROI and then backpack
has outperformed probably everything else she ever did combined, which is not, I'm not
saying that those other things were bad.
I'm just saying she was clear.
She made the right call.
Good.
Yeah.
Um, Christian says, Luke, since you play Tarkov in elder scrolls, have you looked at darkened
darker?
Yeah.
Uh, I haven't had enough time to jump into like the play tests and whatever else they've
done recently.
Um, but yeah, I mean you, you kind of nailed it.
The, the internet sphere of knowledge about me figured out that that would probably make
sense for me and has just sent a deluge of information about it at me, just various videos
and Google news things and whatever else have all hit my feeds.
Um, so I'm aware of it and uh, I'm sure I'll try it out at some point, but I haven't tried
it out yet.
Looks really interesting.
It's, it's, I suspect it's going to be one of those games that are just like perpetually
in, in beta.
Um, but I hope that it hits a stable release or a stable playable state at some point at
the very least because I know right now it's like kind of sometimes available and sometimes
not.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Gregory asks, Hey Linus, will the lab have an API with clear rules, uh, that will allow
us to make our own Chrome plugins?
Uh, I mean it really depends on what you would expect your Chrome plugins to do.
No third party, whatever.
Um, I, I, I'm, I'm reference to earlier in the show.
Yeah.
I'm legitimately just not exactly sure what a third party plugin would do.
Like I mean that shopping comparison one, I, yeah, it could be third party.
Um, I don't know, API access for like a data set is like a paid feature.
Yeah.
Um, from my point of view, like if you are an individual user interacting with a website
to learn about products or help you build a computer or whatever else, um, I'm of the
mind that that should, uh, should be basically free.
Um, we can give you a big solid maybe advertisements, uh, maybe, you know, affiliates almost certainly
like there are ways we're going to monetize that kind of interaction, but I don't, I don't
want us to basically just go, you know, Oh, you who needs to build a computer once every
five years, we expect you to pay a monthly subscription.
Like I, I, I just don't really, I, that doesn't seem like a viable, um, way of engaging with,
with users.
Um, whereas if you are, yeah, if you're, if you're building it like some kind of comparison
engine tool that integrates into Amazon, like, I mean, I don't think anyone would even expect
that kind of access to the database to be free.
So I, I don't know, I don't know what this is going to look like.
Yeah.
Solid.
Maybe.
Uh, last one.
Oh, there's two.
Um, Caleb asks, have you considered adding a gym for employees to use?
We technically have one.
It doesn't have equipment in it.
Uh, that could change.
That'd be great.
Um, basically what I was kind of thinking is when the real badminton center opens, there
would be no reason to have like a badminton court in the gym.
So I was kind of thinking of just like shoving some equipment in it.
I'm deeply concerned about liability though.
Liability is a big problem because I have no way of supervising and knowing if people
are using it properly and if someone like, like, you know, breaks their knee the wrong
way or whatever else in it, I, there's, there's no first aid attendant.
There's no, um, so it's possible it won't happen.
There are, there have to be ways because there are 24 hour fitness centers where you just
like badge into them and there's nobody working there at the time, but I don't know what the
way is.
The way might be that they're just rolling the dice.
Could be.
Sometimes that actually is the answer.
Could be.
Yeah.
I mean, this sounds amazing and I would personally love it and use it all the time.
Um, but like I use it as it is every week.
Liability is terrifying, but a lot of the stuff that I, I, yeah, not everyone could,
you'd need equipment.
I get it.
Yeah.
Um, and you would need equipment that would be sketchy from a liability standpoint.
And even if I went with someone, cause it's like something I would want to do with a spotter
or whatever, they're not in a, uh, they're not going to be like hired by your gym to
be responsible for whatever.
So like there's still liability.
It doesn't help the liability problems at all actually.
Yeah.
Um, so you know what?
I think I'm kind of talked out of it.
No, no, it's not happening.
Sorry.
We'll make that a, uh, uh, maybe.
So thanks for tuning into the WAN show.
We'll see you again next week.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
Bye.
I'm running to the bathroom.
How long was this show?
Four hours.
Four hours?
Four hours.
We're at okay.
All right.
Three hours.
52 minutes.
Uh, this show is brought to you by thorium, audible investing.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
In the bathroom.
Four hours.
52 minutes.
Thorium, not thorium.
Thorium.
I'm sorry.
Thorium.
Thorium.
Uh, 52 minutes, 15 seconds.
Beautiful ring.