Welcome to the WAN Show where nothing, and I say nothing, can kill the streak.
It's been two years, and whether it's distance or COVID, nothing can keep this man from appearing on the show.
Correct.
We've got a lot of great topics for you guys today, including that Twitch banned, then unbanned, multiple things that we would have been guilty of violating.
Except, I don't know, I actually haven't checked the latest update, so I'm going to read the notes and hope that they're perfect, and we're all going to learn together what the current state of things is.
Also, okay, I'm not going to talk about Apple studies thousands of heads. That's not going to be a main topic, I don't think, but how about Apple quietly releases their own proton compatibility layer?
Which, guess what, Luke? I tried, I was going to say an hour ago, but then you were really late for WAN Show.
No, I'm going after you for it because it's usually me who's late, he's late this time, I get to get after him for it, I tried it two hours ago, and let's just say, why don't you pick a couple of topics to headline the show?
A massive percentage of subreddits are having a, I don't even know what you call it, they're like blocking themselves for going to be interesting.
And wow, there really isn't a lot of other topics to pick.
Really? You don't like Intel has a powerful backside?
Sure.
We could go with that according to Wikipedia, I am dead, or that Linus Torvalds is based.
Really?
I mean, it doesn't really matter.
Not even being actually based according to Wikipedia, that's fantastic.
No, no, no, those are two separate things, but let's roll that intro.
The show was brought to you this week by Zoho One, MSI, and Corsair.
Jumping into our first headline topic, come at me Twitch.
I have violated your terms of service for years and I shall continue to do so until such time as you kick me off your platform and I give exactly this many cares.
Twitch updated its terms of service with new rules on sponsorships and multi streaming on Tuesday.
And that, my friends, was when all hell broke loose.
Luke, were you following this in real time?
Yeah, actually, the amount of streamers that had already abandoned ship was amazing.
Yeah, and not just that, but just all you had to do was tweet, I am angry about Twitch right now, and you could immediately get 10,000 upvotes on whatever social media platform is the flavor of the week these days.
The new branded content policy guidelines prohibited all burned in or pre-edited videos, banners, and audio ads, and limited the size of advertiser logos to 3% of the screen.
Twitch also prohibited the promotion of a bunch of products ranging from vape pens to mail enhancement products.
Let me tell you guys that this is not the first time that a platform has either changed or made the decision to suddenly start enforcing their policies when it comes to content creators promoting brands in a given way.
I don't know if you remember this very well, Luke, but it was back in, I think about 2015, I want to say, that YouTube sent out, or rather, I think it was leaked.
But YouTube sent out or created this deck that had some changes to the way that they were handling third party logos and branded content embedded in videos.
And that was actually a huge part of what made us go on to Vessel, I was about to say Vessi, it's been a very long week.
That was a big part of what made us join Vessel, the early access video platform that was, in a way, the predecessor to flowplane.com.
Do you remember that?
Okay, I'm a little rusty on the details, but I think it was something along the lines of you were no longer allowed to have a brand logo in your content unless that brand also bought out all of YouTube's own advertising options.
So that would have included the little pop-up things that came up at the bottom back then, that would have included banners on the side.
Remember, this was a long time ago, this was like eight years ago.
And then I think there was some other weird stuff too.
Right, right, right. It couldn't be pre-recorded, it had to be integral to the content.
Now, making your sponsor reads integral to the content is still recommended by YouTube personnel.
But at that time, they said basically that it would result in some kind of punitive action against your channel.
So that was when we started recording our sponsor spots ourselves rather than just doing, or live, like as part of our A-roll, rather than just doing them as voiceovers with animations.
So I think it was that you couldn't have pre-baked anything, even if it was something created for yourself.
Now, what happened with YouTube was there was not the same kind of community backlash.
I gotta say, it's pretty cool to see the community going to bat for Twitch creators and standing up for their favorite millionaire underdogs here.
Say, obviously I'm being a little facetious here, I do think it's pretty crap for a platform to basically say,
yeah, here's the terms of engagement, go ahead and build your business on our platform and then go, ah ha ha, rug pull, just kidding.
We're going to change how this works. That sucks.
I do think it's cool that the community stood up for creators, but that wasn't present back then.
And so you're probably wondering, OK, why did all of that disappear?
And I think a big part of it was just pushback from creators themselves, because YouTube never formally changed any of that.
But they just quietly never enforced it at all, which I don't know, maybe was what Twitch was planning here.
Anyway, coming back to the changes on Tuesday.
Additionally, a previous policy that banned Twitch partners and affiliates from simultaneously streaming on other Twitch-like platforms was expanded to all users.
That's a big one, basically telling people who aren't even your favorite underdog millionaire yet that you better put all your eggs in this basket or you're done.
You're out. Forget it.
That is interesting timing, considering the amount of alternative streaming platforms that there are now.
There's actually a lot, and I don't just mean like...
I get a kick out of the timing.
This delay is going to kill us today, I think. Anyway...
It's going to be really rough.
Many popular streamers...
This says select out.
Riley is actually updating this topic in real time.
Riley, it's the end of the day. Go home.
He's probably already gone home. Anyway, the point is, many popular streamers...
Something out of the affiliate program for this reason.
Yeah, so the most followed Twitch streamer, Richard Blevins, aka Ninja, is not an affiliate.
Twitch has likewise struggled with the longstanding issue of popular streamers focusing more and more on YouTube as a more reliable revenue source.
Yeah, so you can see why they might want to crack down on this, but being a more restrictive platform is not how you get new people.
That's not how you get the next Ninja or the next Shroud or the next Dr. Disrespect.
Did I intentionally choose people who have had complicated relationships with Twitch over the years?
Yes, I did. But that's not how you get the next big streamer to start on your platform.
By being restrictive and saying, yeah, while you're making literally zero dollars, you need to stream exclusively to Twitch.
That's kind of ridiculous.
Twitch claimed.
It feels very much like a move that a company might do when they're in their death throes.
You're seeing a lot of people leave the platform, whether it's because of big money from Kik or if it's because of just potential opportunity on YouTube or something like that.
And being very greedy and restrictive about their creators is not surprising when they're the losing team currently.
I was thinking a couple of days ago about how interesting it is that Twitch used to have, in my opinion, one of the most hardcore, dedicated fan bases of any of the creator websites.
If you remember back with the bleed purple campaign, they had an extremely strong following back then, and they have just completely lost it over the course of like six years.
And it's funny because I don't think that Twitch's culture has gotten more toxic, if anything.
I think it's just that more things have come to light and they've pivoted to being, I guess, a little more.
Yeah, I'm trying to think. I was about to say they've pivoted to being a little bit more structured in terms of enforcement.
But if anything, that would be that would be a good thing.
I mean, Twitch was all over the place when it came to creator bans, when it came to community moderation, they kind of always sucked.
How is it that we're just kind of figuring it out now?
It feels like they care less now. I don't know if that's actually true or not.
I do know that a lot of the original people that were around when the Amazon buyout happened are now gone because their shares finished vesting and then they just took off.
So I feel I strongly feel like that's part of it, but I don't actually know.
I don't have communication with anyone internally. So, yeah.
So the new guidelines then. Oh, Twitch claimed that the new policy was consistent with other services.
That's only partially true. YouTube does restrict embedded third party sponsored content, but it doesn't limit the size of sponsor logos and doesn't limit multi streaming.
It also allows limited monetization for adult themed or sensitive sponsor products.
The new policy likewise threatened the viability of charity streams and esports events, which is hilarious on a platform like Twitch.
The new guidelines were met with immediate backlash and threats of a streamer boycott to which Twitch quickly folded apologizing for.
And this is great. The policy being overly broad and promising to rewrite the guidelines to be clearer.
So then the next day, it's actually kind of amazing how quickly they turned this around and really speaks to how loud the backlash was on Wednesday.
Twitch released new branded content policy guidelines, which removed the controversial changes, at least the ones concerning burned in content.
The ban on simulcasting and prohibited products, though, are unchanged, which is why Ninja is now streaming on Kik, not Twitch.
Wait, really? I actually, I'm going to admit that I have no idea how big Ninja is these days, but apparently this is big enough news that Jake Lucky here tweeted this.
It's got 1.1 million views, whatever that means, but 6600 likes.
I don't think things need to be super big news for him to do that.
Wow. Okay. Started streaming on Kik. Man, Kik is a weird one, hey?
The fact that they just blatantly ripped off the Twitch source code leak and then are just kind of throwing crypto money at streamers to move to this platform.
I mean, I would have thought that Twitch was not unassailable, but not assailable by anyone other than maybe YouTube.
I mean, I even mocked YouTube's efforts back in the day, just because, like you said, Twitch had that mindshare.
They had that community sentiment and they've just thrown it away.
Can you think? Yeah, if you were a streamer, if you were a streamer, you streamed on Twitch.
It was an absolute, for a very, very long time there.
Well, you streamed on Twitch and you were huge on Twitch or you were a nobody on Twitch or a nobody somewhere else.
That was basically it. I mean, can you think of a platform that has thrown away the same amount of goodwill as Twitch has over the last few years and Twitter doesn't count?
Too obvious. Too obvious.
I don't even know if, I honestly don't even know if Twitter would be as big because the users on Twitter are probably just as mad or even more mad.
Well, they hated Twitter already.
Yeah, exactly. A lot of them hated Twitter already.
And a lot of these Twitch streamers are actually going somewhere else and finding success right now.
In my opinion, a lot of the people that have left Twitter, these other services aren't really matching up.
So it just doesn't really matter.
Yeah, but again, people aren't offboarding anywhere else.
They're just mad at it.
No, I meant throwing away goodwill though.
Facebook's thrown away a lot of goodwill, but I feel like Facebook only had a very narrow window of goodwill there.
And that was a long time ago. That certainly hasn't happened in the last few years. It's been ages.
I mean, I'd say Instagram has thrown away a lot of goodwill.
People loved Instagram and now it's basically like Instagram ick, forget about it.
It's too many ads. Right.
Pretty much ever since the Facebook acquisition.
I was going to say that is also Facebook.
So, yeah. OK. Tumblr. Tumblr would be a good example.
Netflix. Man.
OK. Netflix is a good one.
Props to Top Gear 1224 on the floatplane chat.
Netflix through hiking rates, through cracking down on password sharing.
And this one's a bit of a slower burn, but I feel like it's all kind of come to a head as users have felt more and more just disposable and disrespected by Netflix.
But the way that they release a season or a couple of seasons of a show, leave it on a cliffhanger and then just cancel it.
That sucks. That makes me feel so uninvested in anything that they do that serialized content movies.
Fine. It's a one and done. It's throwaway. But TV shows.
I just feel like I might as well not even bother watching anything because you're not going to finish telling the story.
You're never going to finish telling the story. And I'm going to be left with a blue remote.
I don't even like watching TV all that much, but there was the Daredevil show on Netflix, Daredevil and the Punisher, and I actually really liked that.
And then it just never came back. I've heard rumors that it might be coming back again now.
But like, it's just such a common theme that you hear people are like really excited, really enthused about a particular Netflix show.
And then it just disappears. I mean, that one I can kind of see because it's probably reliant on streaming rights and IP rights with Disney,
who, you know, low key has their own streaming platform now that they've been competing with Netflix.
Way before that, though. But but it is far from isolated.
And so if that's the straw that broke your back, then I totally get it,
because it's not like they haven't canceled a hundred other shows without tying them up in a nice little bow.
Back to the Twitch thing, though.
Given the suddenness and confusion of the situation, it's unclear who, if anyone, has actually left or still plans to leave.
Twitch's partnership program charges a twenty five dollar fee for affiliates that leave the program.
And I had a lot of people asking us, you know, what are we going to do?
Particularly on Tuesday before Twitch had backpedaled.
And the answer, if I wasn't clear earlier on in the show, is that we're going to keep doing what we do and we're not going to care at all.
If Twitch decides at some point to issue some kind of strike to our channel or kick us out of the partner program or whatever the case may be.
The first thing I'm going to do is figure out if we even have a Twitch contact, because I don't think we do at this point.
Then if I find a Twitch contact, I'm going to see if I can find our contract with Twitch,
which is a special, awesome contract that I don't think literally anyone else on earth actually has,
that gives us the right to simultaneously stream to other platforms, because I was like, no.
And they were like, OK. When I when I said, look, we're not going to agree to exclusively stream to Twitch, that's just actually not how this is going to work.
We're YouTube first and you guys want to be our MCN on YouTube or whatever.
Well, you can't come in, be our MCN on YouTube and then tell us we can't stream to YouTube anymore.
It's ridiculous. What are you trying to do? Hurt our business? And they're like, OK.
So as far as I can tell, that whole that whole endeavor where Twitch wanted to be a YouTube MCN was spun up and sunsetted within a span of like three to six months.
So I don't think they ever actually signed anyone else.
So what I'll do is I will send our contract that entitles us to stream to multiple platforms, including Twitch at the same time.
And then if they refuse to honor that contract, realistically, look, guys, you heard it here first.
I'm not going to involve a lawyer. It's not worth my time. It's not worth the money we make.
Like, I mean, I don't even know. How do you how do I find out how much money we make on Twitch?
I don't even know. Here. Revenue earnings. Here we go.
In the last month, since May 11th, we made eight hundred dollars on Twitch, which is like fine, you know, for a big company like that.
I mean, look, hey, eight hundred bucks is eight hundred bucks.
Shout out our dedicated viewers over on Twitch scumbags that they are for sending bits or subscribe gifting subscriptions or whatever the crap it is that however people make money on Twitch.
I have no idea. I don't even care because that is it's eight hundred bucks, which is awesome.
Thank you. But also that is not even around. It's not even a rounding error.
It doesn't even make it into to be rounded for us. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way.
I just mean that we have one hundred and twenty employees. So eight hundred dollars a month would be about would be less than ten grand a year.
That would not even pay. OK, this is U.S. dollars. Hold on. I don't want to screw up this math here.
That would be at best a third of a person's salary here in Canada, assuming that we were paying just marginally above minimum wage.
Would that cover the snacks? I don't we you know what?
That is a terrific question to which I do not know the answer, but I suspect you are right.
We probably spend more on office snacks than we make on it.
Amazing. In a month. Eight hundred dollars. Yeah. We almost certainly spend more on snacks.
So there you go. You Twitch viewers, but you don't matter. That's why I make fun of you all the time.
Love you guys, though. Love you guys. But you don't matter.
So, yeah, if we no longer stream on Twitch, then that doesn't matter. We'll just we'll stream on YouTube.
We'll stream on Floatplane and we're not going to worry about it anymore. I just got signed out of the dock because, hey, I love the way this works.
You know, Google, they sign you out once a month. So once every four WAN shows, I get signed out in the middle of the WAN show, which is super cool.
You'll have to give me a minute here, Luke. Maybe you want to walk us through the next topic?
I can start going through it. Yeah. Do you want to do the Proton thing?
We can do whatever you want.
Apple quietly releases their own Proton, which this is this is actually absolutely amazing.
I'm very excited about this. Apple announced a new game porting toolkit, which simplifies porting games by quickly translating Intel-based x86 instructions to Apple silicon instructions and Windows API.
The kit uses source code from Crossover, a WAN-based open source solution for running Windows games on Mac OS, first published in 2007.
Developers will also be able to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game, which is cool.
The kit also allows DX12 Windows games to run on Mac devices.
Diablo 4 and Elden Ring seem to run decently using this method, but other games like Cyberpunk 2077, which shouldn't be too surprising, ran slowly and with, again, unsurprisingly, a lot of bugs.
Mac gaming has started a collective effort to test an extensive list of popular titles and document how well they run using the new software.
And the sheet is very easy to use and read, I will also say.
According to GitHub senior dev advocate Christina Warren, this is essentially Proton, but for Mac OS, this is massive.
Apple has likewise announced its newest version of Mac OS, Mac OS 14 Sonoma, which has a game mode that prioritizes game performance.
Which is very, even considering the DX12 layer stuff, that part was very surprising to me because Apple has often been very weird about gaming.
I'd say ignorant. Like, do you remember when they did that AR demo with, I think it was, oh man, what was the first iPhone with the 3D camera?
But they had this game running on a tabletop and the developer was there.
And it kind of felt like the I'm a Mac guy from the old commercials explaining video games to his grandpa.
I was watching this and I'm like, they have no idea what's going on right now, do they?
Yeah, it hasn't even been an afterthought. It's often felt like they approach it with disdain.
I don't know. This was very, very surprising to me. Honestly, when I saw the first article on this, I thought it was like a joke.
Well, guess what? You were right. I used it today.
Oh, is it that bad? Really?
Okay, it's complicated. On the surface, it's really cool. But I think there's a reason.
And guys, you're going to want to check out the video. Emily got it working on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, I think it was.
Yeah, I think it's an M1 Ultra Mac Studio, like a pretty a pretty kitted out Mac.
And I got a chance to experience multiple games, both ones that worked, ones that didn't work, ones that were running natively on Mac.
And then the same game using this translation layer.
And what I can say more than anything else is that I understand why Apple is messaging this the way that they are,
where they're saying this is not a tool for gamers to play video games.
This is a tool for game developers to use to develop their games.
But even then, it's kind of it's kind of complicated because think about the issues.
I mean, you did the Linux challenge with me. Think about the kinds of issues that you had running games.
What percentage of the time was it actually just the fault of the proton translation layer versus what percentage of the time was the problem?
Some kind of redistributable dependency or anti-cheat or
or some some difference in the expected even folder structure compared to the actual folder structure of the device that you're trying to run it on.
You know, when it looks for, you know, some a DLL or something like that, that it goes looking for.
Right. So even if this proton compatibility layer worked perfectly, how many games would actually be usable?
Yeah, honestly, I'm mostly excited about this just because people that were going to just have a Mac anyways now have a more accessible way to approach a certain level of gaming.
Something that I immediately saw was that people were playing Diablo 4. Now Diablo 4 is not exactly the hardest game to run ever.
But if you have a MacBook, you have a way to play some games with your friends.
I'm not expecting this to be amazing. I wasn't immediately expecting a bunch of games to have incredible performance or there to even necessarily be this huge expansive library of games.
But it does give them access to more than what they had.
Sort of. I mean, there are things that are...
You said you tried it on an M1 Mac.
M1 Ultra.
Is that...
Top tier.
M1 Ultra.
Yeah. And it's, man, this is tough.
Coming back to the way that Apple's messaging it.
So first of all, like I said, if your experience with Proton, with Linux, with Wine is anything to go by, what do you think compatibility is going to look like?
Probably not too great. Now that has improved a lot, but we have to give credit to who for that.
If you had to name one name, who do we give credit to for the improvements that we've seen over the last couple of years in Proton compatibility or in Windows games on Linux?
And I guess I kind of spoiled the answer when I said Proton.
Yeah, Valve.
It's got to be Valve.
So wait, hold on a second.
If it's Valve sitting there going, oh my God, developers are just not going to do this.
I guess we better go in and create hacky workarounds in order to get these games running on Proton.
And then Apple is coming in saying, hey, game porting toolkit is a tool for developers to port their games.
How involved do we really expect Apple to be?
Are they making a real investment here or are they basically just ripping some open source tools, adding a little bit of their own stuff?
And the open source community is kind of not impressed with how little Apple has contributed back to open source software in all of this.
Apparently it's about 20 kilobytes of code, which is like bang.
That's not always how things work, but I am assuming their contribution is bad.
Yeah.
I just wanted to say that's not like that alone is not indicative of little contribution, but I'm sure the contribution is little in this case.
The contribution is bad and they should feel bad.
And so Apple's not going to be making the investments for game developers.
They're expecting game developers to do the work.
They're not making the investments in the underlying tech.
As far as I can tell, they haven't contributed any kind of significant.
They haven't contributed significantly to the open source projects that have made Proton possible.
I am open to being corrected here, though, of course, guys, let me know in the chat if that if that is a misconception on my part.
And the fact that they're sitting there going, OK, yeah, this is a toolkit.
OK, so what is this exactly? Basically, Apple is what putting their shiny logo on open source tools that already existed.
They have they have created the translation layer for DirectX 12 to metal.
That is an actual Apple thing. But DirectX nine to DirectX 11 is pretty much piggybacking off of existing projects.
And then they're basically going, OK, now go port your games.
Now, obviously, between Rosetta and between the game porting toolkit, you know, developers have more than they had before.
But if they're basically going, yeah, game porting toolkit is a way to what?
See your game running on a Mac and then what? Be inspired to create a native port of the like.
I'm skeptical. I actually was not aware that it was called game porting toolkit or that their approach was that they expected developers to use it as a way to make official ports of their game.
All I knew was that you could run Windows games on Mac, which I was all excited about.
And I originally took this as a similar thing to how they launched the original watch and how I believe they're treating their headset, which I'm sure we'll talk about later.
Which is where it's like it's like a demo of something that will hopefully be better later.
But now I'm kind of after this conversation, I'm losing hope.
Yeah, I mean, specific quote, developers will also be able to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game.
That's rough. I don't think very many people are going to fully port games.
That's also just not true because the vast majority of games that you buy these days are for better or for worse from game marketplaces.
And we couldn't even get the Windows version of Steam running without some command line nonsense.
So Apple clearly has not even gone as far as, yo, Gabe, we need to make sure the Windows version of Steam runs on the upcoming Mac OS for stuff and things.
Can you leave your bunker in New Zealand to maybe help us out with this?
Type some codes, give us some hacker codes.
They didn't even go as far as to have a conversation with Valve, as far as I can tell, because if they had, this should be a more seamless experience.
So I think Apple is basically going, yeah, gaming, gaming.
OK, go for it. See you later.
And you know what? I don't know. Maybe it's maybe it's not true.
But given where Apple given what motivates Apple. Right. What motivates Apple?
Let's let's think about that. 30 percent cut on everything.
That is a strong motivator for Apple. And if you if you think about that, all of a sudden, a lot of their decisions become really crystal clear.
Right. Why is it that they provide software support to the iPhone and iPad for six, seven, eight years sometimes?
Well, because every time you buy something on it, they get 30 percent.
And if you aren't using that thing anymore, then there's a chance that you will use something else where they don't get 30 percent anymore.
And to be clear, that's a good thing that has that has positive results for the world.
People people throwing their phones away less often is a good thing.
And I have repeatedly applauded Apple's long term software support for their products, especially compared to their competitors.
Right. But that doesn't mean that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.
And so if we if we look at Apple's actions through that lens that what actually motivates Apple lens, all of a sudden, all of this makes sense.
Why is this a half hearted effort? And what's really interesting is if we look at Valve and we look at their actions through that, hey, what do we actually care about?
Right. Getting 30 percent of our revenue cut on all transactions, all of a sudden their actions make sense, too.
So why is Apple heavily invested in mobile devices and mobile gaming in the App Store? Because they get 30 percent.
Why is their motivation or why is that? Why is their motivation so much lower on the Mac? Because they don't get 30 percent.
Simple. Why is Valve highly motivated when it comes to Steam?
30 percent. Why is Valve's support for Mac OS kind of like, well, we tried, but overall pretty half hearted because the game library just isn't there.
So you're getting 30 percent of basically nothing. So it's like, yeah, OK, we'll do it. But they're not pushing it anymore.
Not like they did back when they launched it. Like they seem to be pretty bullish at the time.
And since then, I haven't heard boo from Valve about gaming on Mac, Steam on Mac.
It's been it's been pretty quiet. So I this was another one.
This was one of those ones where I, like you, heard about it through the grapevine because I was busy doing something else when the keynote was going on.
I didn't watch it personally. I read the comments, though. So I was busy doing something else.
So I heard about it and I went, oh, yeah, that sounds freaking awesome. Let's start gaming on Mac.
Only to be ultimately disappointed when I realized, no, this is this is them, you know, giving you kind of a shovel and going, OK, you know, dig to the center of the earth.
Like, yeah, sure. With the way that, man, with the with the motivation that you see from developers to even port their game properly to freakin windows.
Right. Yeah. And we're talking porting from the Xbox in some cases.
Over the years, man, which was like basically running windows. Yeah, actually, to a certain degree.
Yeah. And when you so when you see that, how unmotivated where they'll they'll go and they'll hire a third party to go and do it.
And that third party will ship some piece of garbage and they'll be like, God, seems good enough. Ship it.
Obviously, that's not every game developer and that's not every porting process.
Sometimes they are porting from a more complicated architecture like PlayStation three or something like that.
Or even PlayStation five to a degree. Though in that case, the hardware is pretty similar.
It's not every time, but it happens often enough that I think if we're looking at Apple's moves here and going, yeah,
we're going to see, you know, a full scale like migration to game developers taking the Mac seriously.
I think we've got another thing coming. I just don't think it's realistic. Yeah, I seriously doubt it.
All right. Pick us a new topic, Mr. La Freniere. Or wait, Dan, is that what we're supposed to do?
Dan's got paper things, but he's just he's hiding them from me. I am. I am. Yeah.
I mean, you still got to got what, 20 minutes left if you want to do another topic or we can move right on to merch messages.
Why don't we do some merch messages? OK, sure. OK, we'll start by talking about what the heck merch messages are.
Hey, Angus B is a perfect example of a merch message. All you got to do is don't send Twitch bits.
Don't send super chats on YouTube. You want to send merch messages because that way,
aside from just feeling good and sending into the show and, you know, in a way that actually matters, unlike Twitch.
Ha ha. Got him. So supporting the show. In addition to that, you will also get your order in the mail.
So you might get a response from Dan in the form of one of these text messages down here.
You might just get your message flashing up on the screen.
If you want to do a shout out for, you know, your mom or your S.O. who watches the WAN show or whatever else the case may be.
Dan also curates some merch messages for us to talk about during WAN show after dark.
How are we going to do that? Luke, are you just going to close your blinds there or what? Like, is that the plan?
I can. There are there are like blackout blind things or I could just turn the lights off or something.
Heck yeah. I'm stoked. I'm stoked. So we'll address some of your merch messages during WAN show after dark.
And we'll also do a couple now. All you got to do to send a merch message is go to LTT store dot com.
Check out any of our new products, which I guess I will talk about shortly. Why don't I just do it now?
I think we also have a deal this week. Nick didn't clear it with me.
So I have absolutely no idea what is going on.
But anyway, we've got a couple of new product launches. We have our new button up shirt.
Want to look and feel like 100 bucks. It doesn't cost 100 bucks,
but we're we're branching out into just professional attire that totally makes sense in the office.
This is from our nine to five line. So hence the cute little, you know, clock thing that's on it.
It's soft. It's comfortable. It's it's designed so that it can be ironed.
But if you don't iron it, it'll look OK because, you know, we we get our demographic.
It's available in two different colors. Yeah. It's made of the same material as our polo buttons up all the way.
Look at this. We've got some super, super nice looking, you know, LTT employees who are showing off the goods here.
Yeah, that's right. We have oh, we don't have an extra small this one.
We're moving towards extra smalls of all of our designs to accommodate.
I mean, that looks pretty good on Yvonne, considering that it's just the small showing off all the different ways you can wear it and everything.
Anyway, cool. So that's our that's our button up shirt. Long sleeve. Pretty nice.
And look at that. We've got a nice long description for it as well. I don't remember where I was going with this anyway.
The point is in the checkout. No, the cart. Luke, help me out. Which one is it?
The cart in the cart. There will be a box to leave a merch message.
And if you don't happen to need anything from the store right now, you can always just send it.
Just buy a gift card. And then instead of just throwing money at the screen, you'll have the gift card.
And then when we come up with something that's more to your liking in the future, then you can order it then.
So if we don't get to your message, at least, hey, you get your order in the mail.
Also, this is the last chance to grab the labs first series of T-shirts and hoodies.
So you guys are going to want to check those out.
This is our non-zippy just regular kangaroo top and our own blanks available in a wide variety of different colors with the labs logo and hashtag first on the back.
Sick. Oh, right. And we have a deal. What's the deal? Oh, spend 100 bucks on the store and you get the meme face sequin pillow for free.
Just add the pillow to your cart. And then if you also have $100 of other stuff, the discount will be applied automatically.
All right, Dan, you want to hit us with a couple of merch messages? Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, LDL, any idea what's happening with the new Intel workstation CPUs?
That's a really good question. I mean, we knew that Sapphire Rapids workstation was coming.
I mean, aren't there aren't there just motherboards on on Newegg?
Hold on a second. Trying to think. Yeah, we covered it from a from a server standpoint.
Wait, no, we even did. We even did a workstation one. Wait, what do you mean? Hold on. Yeah, they're here.
Oh, wait. No, these are Xeon W. Wait, Xeon W. Yeah, those are those are the workstation ones.
Yeah, you can just buy them. What about motherboards?
OK, those look pretty server oriented. OK, you know what? I'm sorry.
I'm not actually sure what your question is, because I believe they exist.
They don't make a ton of sense. So I don't think a lot of people are buying them.
But as far as I can tell, yeah, they they exist.
So when a full plane chat said the Intel chips are out, not overly impressive.
Impressive. And Wendell has one. So you can check out level one text. I'm sure he has some content on it.
OK, nice. Next up. After Computex, the techtuber community has had some of the most interesting conversations I have heard in years.
Do you have thoughts on Jim Keller's RISC-V project or OpenPLEB?
I mean, anything Jim Keller's working on is probably going to be absolutely killer, but I have to confess, I haven't I haven't looked at what he's said about it publicly.
I know that Jim Keller has given some just hilarious talks recently.
He had that really good one where he basically outlined the progression of the Zen architecture, like way past what AMD had announced publicly.
And it all looked pretty feasible. And given that it's Jim Keller who designed Zen in the first place or was the chief architect for Zen, obviously it's a team effort.
But given that it was Jim Keller, you know, it's pretty credible compared to the typical rumors or leaks that you'll hear about that kind of stuff.
All I can all I can say is that if Jim Keller is involved, I will be absolutely floored if it's not amazing.
And I'm a lot more bullish on alternative architectures than I was in the past. And I have Apple to thank for that.
The fact that they came in and made the transition again, like, man, Apple does this, man.
So they went from PowerPC to Intel and then they went from Intel over to ARM.
They're just like, yo, this is how we do.
And Rosetta 2 is kind of amazing. The fact that you can run old x86 applications on these M1 and M2 Macs, it's mind blowing.
So if we see a RISC-V design that has that kind of incredible translation capability in hardware, I don't know.
The sky's the limit. I mean, I think for high performance gaming, it's going to be a long time before you're going to be able to run on anything other than native.
But for almost anything else, given how much of what we do on a computer runs in a web browser these days, I don't know.
I've given up predicting it, to be perfectly honest with you.
Ever since I said crypto will never be actually used for anything.
When that story came out about someone buying a house with it like nine years ago, I feel like I'm better off not predicting anything about the future and just being, you know, cautiously optimistic about everything.
Yeah, sounds good. I love Web 3.0. Sure thing. NFTs love it.
Kidding. Yeah, I think there's limits to all things. Everything with moderation, Linus.
Yeah, I'm really glad we didn't do anything with NFTs. What do you mean, the potatoes?
That wasn't an NFT. That was just a PNG. It's shocking how many people bought them. I mean, thank you for your support.
Uncle Linus farms all sorts. Doesn't discriminate. Real potatoes, picture potatoes. Hey, love it.
And massive shout out to the Floatplane team for turning that around so quickly. The fact that you guys managed to generate those potato images and figure out how to dole them out when people ordered them.
How long did you have? Like 36 hours total to create that entire system for it to happen automatically?
That was like, to be fair, it was just Dolly outputting images.
Yeah, but getting it integrated with the store.
Yes, that was cool.
That's the part that made me very happy.
And having all the dropdown options and stuff. Yeah, that was pretty sweet.
Potato network graphics. Love it. Thanks, Twitch channel.
You mentioned us generating them, and that's sort of true. It wasn't our tool. We didn't use a tool. We did generate it.
No, I meant more the workflow. The fact that it was automated, that people could just add it to their cart on the store and they would get their potato.
And it actually worked.
Alright, want to hit me with one more, Dan?
Sure thing.
Hello, LLD and future me. Linus, with the new software coming to Mac to maybe enable gaming, do you think they could compete with Valve and Proton since Mac OS is more adopted than Linux?
Can anyone tell that Dan has been busy replying to merch messages and hasn't been listening to the show?
No, I think it's more like, you know, as a platform for gaming just through adoption, like removing Linux, right?
I think we've addressed it pretty well.
Okay, moving on.
Yeah, give me one more.
I don't listen to you.
Hi, LLD. No, it's okay. I forgive you.
Yeah, I already removed one of those, actually.
Hi, LLD. I recently got into a FANG company through my college, hoping to get an internship in the future.
Any advice on securing an IT job in the long run? Currently in customer support.
You know what? I mean, I'd say the biggest thing is, ah man, I don't know.
See, I was about to give you, you know, some of the advice that's worked for me over the years.
Make yourself indispensable. You know, talk about your accomplishments, but don't brag.
Like, you know, making sure people know what you do, you know, being cheerful, you know, setting boundaries,
but also, you know, going the extra mile when it's necessary to make sure that the team succeeds as a whole.
You know, all that stuff that should guarantee success in the workplace,
but then you've got companies like Meta and Google and I was about to say Facebook because like whatever.
You know, you've got companies like Meta and Google, Microsoft just sort of slashing job, Twitter, you know,
just slashing jobs seemingly with very little rhyme or reason in some cases.
And I don't know, it feels like what you're asking me is, you know, how do I walk through a minefield without getting hit?
And I'm like, yeah, well, you know, avoid the signs that say mine. And it's like, yeah, but it's a minefield.
You could just get your leg blown off anyway. And nothing that I say in the minefield.
Yeah, nothing that I could say. Say you could make a difference. Like I understand where communities like, you know,
our slash anti work are coming from. I don't agree with everything that they say.
And I don't think that if I had had that attitude, I would have had the same success in my career that I have.
But the other side of that is, well, if you're just going to get canned anyway, regardless of how good a job you do,
then what loyalty do you owe the company anyway? And like, I get it.
Did you hear about the person who saved Toy Story 2 getting laid off?
Wait, you know that story? Is this also the person who was responsible for Lightyear because that was a piece of garbage?
I know Pixar let go of a few very, very long time team members.
I have no idea if that's related. I just know someone ran some command that deleted all of their local corporate files for Toy Story 2.
I think it's Toy Story 1.
Was it? It was one of them. I don't know. And then this person happens to have a backup at their home.
So they saved the entire project.
You're right. It is 2.
Okay, yeah. It's just amazing that one of the biggest movies of all time was saved by a singular person.
And then that person was... The fact that it was possible to lay that person off is just kind of amazing.
Well, yes and no. I mean, okay. I'm going to be unpopular here. But that was 20 years ago.
Yeah, it does help that they're probably paid in like... Some amount of their compensation is probably shares.
So she produced Lightyear, which was a piece of s***.
And, you know, if I... Okay, you know what? Let's bring it close to home.
Okay, Luke. Luke Lafreniere was single-handedly responsible for getting the floatplane platform off the ground.
Okay, 10 years later...
I wasn't, but all right.
Well, getting it off the ground initially. I mean, I think you actually... Oh, was AJ in from day zero?
Not technically, but I think it was like day eight or something.
Okay, because I thought we had... You could download the file from the forum before anyone else touched it.
Okay, so then sure. Because remember, time was of the essence.
Okay, I'm going to do a short history lesson here just to give you guys context for why I think it's actually appropriate for me to say that Luke single-handedly got floatplane off the ground.
Well, it wasn't vessel then, though. Or it wasn't a floatplane then, though. It was called Rip Vessel.
It doesn't matter.
And it was terrible.
It doesn't...
Like, this isn't an amazing accomplishment.
Luke, I love your team. You love your team. You're doing the right thing, you know, making sure that we are respecting the contributions of your team.
But just bear with me for a second here, okay?
When Vessel shut down... So that was the early access video platform that people subscribed to for $3 a month that we actually had a fair degree of success with.
When they shut down, they gave us something in the neighborhood of, what was it, like a week or two of notice before the site was just going to go dark.
We got basically no notice whatsoever.
That meant that we had days to come up with some kind of strategy and communicate that strategy to our viewers on the Vessel platform to try to somehow migrate them.
Because Vessel wasn't going to be making life easier for us.
That meant that we had to use what we had.
And what we had was a kind of okay forum and the ability to make a video and upload it to Vessel, right?
And so Luke, before anyone else came on board, got us to a point where we could point people at the forum and say, okay, go sign up here.
We're going to keep you your early access.
You're going to be able to just download the video and you can send payment through our crappy, janky payment system on the forum that's very broken.
And let's try to have some kind of continuity here.
Now, Luke didn't do everything in the same way that Galen didn't do everything on Toy Story 2.
But Luke was instrumental in us getting that audience migrated.
And that audience being migrated was a big part of why we were able to put funding into the platform.
The platform essentially funded itself.
And if we hadn't had the opportunity to migrate that audience over, we may have never made the investment and Floatplane never would have become what it is today.
I think that's actually a fairly reasonable prediction of how things would have gone if we had not managed to move thousands of users off of Vessel onto pre-Floatplane.
Vessel, RIP Vessel was, I think it was just a sub forum on the forum.
Now, let's fast forward 20 years later and you're not working on Floatplane anymore because Floatplane is shipped or whatever.
You work on, you know, ButtBoat and...
Oh my god, I hope this ends up being true.
Is ButtBoat.com taken? Because I'd love for this to be a product.
Anyway, the point is, you know, you work on FailBoat. I don't care. It doesn't matter.
It's like, it's a pool floaty. It's a pool floaty and we call it ButtBoat.
ButtNoodleBoat. Okay, so you're working on ButtNoodleBoat.com.
And it sucks. Everyone hates it. It loses a bunch of money. I personally think it's pretty crap.
And I basically go, hey Luke, it's been 20 years since that pivotal moment when you did a great job.
I really don't know if you've got what it takes anymore. I think it's time for you to hit the bricks and enjoy your silver parachute or golden parachute, whatever your parachute is made of.
There's probably going to be some kind of parachute involved. Hopefully we can still be friends.
Just because you did something 20 years ago, does that somehow entitle you to be employed there forever? I actually don't think so.
No, and I think in this case, part of their compensation package was probably stocks. So that kind of makes it a lot easier.
And I think there's a lot to be said too, because like in your story, and I understand you have to distill it down to this or else we would sit here for an hour describing the scenario.
But in your story, there's nothing that they did between those two points. There's Toy Story 2 and then there's Lightyear.
I wouldn't like it to be, this is the only thing that they did bad. If they did Toy Story 2 and then they did good work for however many years, then Lightyear kind of stuck.
But here's the challenge. What if they did good work for all those years or at worst mediocre work for all those years and then Lightyear sucked?
Well, now what are my options? Because demoting someone from a producer role, that's tough.
What am I supposed to do? Do I publicly humiliate you by demoting you, by putting you back, obviously not to this degree, but do I put you back on fetching juice box duty from a producer role?
Or is it better at that point to go, okay, I guess you're Peter Principled. Maybe it's time for a fresh start somewhere else.
Is it actually more humane to tell someone, hey, you actually are not as good as we thought you were. I guess you're going to do a lower tier duty now.
I think this would come down to stuff that we wouldn't be able to have visibility on. And maybe these things happened, I don't know.
But I would like to assume at a good company that there would be a conversation about these types of things.
And how bad was Lightyear? I never watched it.
Filan in floatplane chat says Lightyear wasn't anything special, but I thought it was okay. Sucks seems a little harsh, but here's my rebuttal to that.
Pixar is a studio that prides itself on shooting for the moon.
And Lightyear was the it's more that the errors in Lightyear were so preventable.
And look, I'm not even talking about any of the culture war crap that took place over the same sex kiss that was in the movie.
In fact, I thought it was pretty inconsequential. I'm talking about the fact that it just.
It was just stupid. Like it opens spoiler alert.
And I actually participated in the they're just movies podcast episode on Lightyear.
So I, I like really watched it with a critical eye and then I've already recorded a lot of my thoughts.
So this will be repetitive to any of you who watched that episode, but there frankly aren't that many of you, which is why the podcast doesn't exist anymore.
Anyway, the point is the movie opens with when Andy went to the theater before the events of Toy Story one.
This is the movie he saw. And then I sat and watched an hour and a half of definitely not the movie that Andy watched.
Yes, they set the stage completely wrong. Buzz is a little bit.
Emperor Zerg turns out to be him self.
And it's like.
What that makes absolutely no sense for that to be what what he watched, like the they've got these weird kind of, you know, comedic relief characters that are kind of OK,
I guess, but just but just the actions that the characters take often make no sense whatsoever.
Like it's just it's fine for kids. You know, my kids said it was good, but my kids will say the emoji movie is good.
That doesn't mean that it's up to Pixar's standard. And if all I wanted to do was eat some popcorn or whatever,
then, you know, sure, if I if it's on out of the corner of my eye and I'm not thinking critically about it, then it's fine.
It's fine. But there were major structural issues with the movie and with its role in the entire cinematic universe that for better or for worse, it is part of.
That just were so easy to just not do it just Buzz just could have gone on a on an ass kicking adventure where he fights Emperor Zerg.
That was all you had to do. And instead, you chose to just completely fucked up for no apparent reason.
So like that is the kind of egregious. Error in judgment that I would look at and I go, yeah, I just don't know if your head's in the game.
That's my just. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I like I looked up the Rotten Tomatoes and I was surprised because it shows audience score.
Eighty four percent. Tomatoes, 74 percent. But I think it it's it's just immediately comes back to what you were talking about earlier,
where like Pixar has to release bangers every time you think about the investment period that they have for these movies,
like they'll work on one of these things for such a ridiculously long time. Like I remember hearing just about how they rendered the water.
Was this Pixar Finding Nemo? Was that Pixar? I think it was. Yeah. Finding Nemo is Pixar.
Yeah. I remember reading articles on just just purely how they rendered the water for Finding Nemo.
And it was like amazing. Like the work and time investment back then to be able to do something at that level was incredible.
And I'm sure if I look up Rotten Tomatoes. Finding Nemo is like ninety nine percent or something stupid like that. Ninety nine percent.
Yeah, exactly. It's like this is what you're aiming for. And the gap when you when you look at performance metrics for things or really almost any measurement.
If you're if you're looking at something. Yeah. Performance metrics for practically anything.
If you look at it, the gap between ninety nine and ninety nine point nine and basically everything before ninety nine is such a huge difference
because those those extreme top performers at the very, very, very top end are going to do so incredibly, vastly better than everything that's like ninety eight and below.
So you hitting like 80 something. It's not really acceptable for a studio at that size.
People are talking about a lot of stuff in the chat. I feel like I should address some of these. One, people are saying that it made two hundred and twenty four worldwide on two hundred million.
That means it lost money. That production budget does not include marketing budget, which in the case of a major, hopeful blockbuster like this is going to be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
There's it is not by accident that everywhere you turn, you see marketing for, you know, latest Pixar fest, whatever, whatever the case may be.
So, no, it didn't only make a little bit of money. It lost a ton of money.
And that's that's a lot worse than is that is that total box office as well, because the theaters take a very significant portion of that.
No, I think that's their take. Don't quote me on that. I'm actually not 100 percent sure about the math.
But what I know is that if you see production budget, one hundred million box office, one hundred million, that movie lost a ton of money.
Yeah. And there was another one here, like, hey, you can't just fire one person over or something like that. And it's like, yeah, or maybe you can.
Maybe it was their call. Maybe the maybe the buck did stop with them. And also they fired a bunch of people. Wasn't just her.
Yeah. So there's that. There's people talking about how, hey, maybe it didn't make money on the box office, but hey, maybe it made money on toys.
Not every one of Pixar's films does really well on toys. I have this conspiracy theory that that's why it took so long to do an Incredibles sequel, because I don't see nearly the same kind of merchandising on Incredibles compared to some of their more cutesy stuff.
You know, something like Cars. Why did they make three of those in rapid succession? Because they sell a lot of freakin' Cars merchandise.
Little boys, little four year old boys love Cars. And honestly, those aren't my favorite movies either. I absolutely hate the Cars universe.
I think they're relatively garbage compared to a lot of what Pixar has done. But there's there's no doubt that they're going to keep keep pumping out cars because, boy, does it ever do well in terms of toys.
I'm not convinced that Lightyear, the fact that they went animated live action, I'm not convinced that Lightyear would have really moved the needle for them.
Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm making people mad. This 23 year old boy likes cars. I love cars. Could be worse. Could be planes. Yeah, that's true.
Wait, they made something called Planes? Is that real?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's one of those like direct-to-DVD garbage, like Lion King one and a half, that kind of thing.
Topic change? Yeah, yeah. Let's move on. I don't even remember how we got to what we're talking about right now.
You know what? Should we talk about the review of the stick locks? Yeah, let's talk about Jake Simmons' review of our stick locks.
I have to confess, I had never heard of Jake Simmons before. 57,000 subscribers. All right. I tried stick locks on every controller.
Okay, this is freaking awesome. That's more controllers than we tried it on, so you guys are going to want to go check that out.
But in the meantime, I have a summary of some of the findings. Works on OG Xbox, Atari VCS, Razer Kishi V1, Dreamcast with some wiggle, N64. I wasn't expecting N64 to work.
GameCube slash Wavebird, but not the C-Stick, Wii Nunchuck, did not think to try that, Wii U controller and gamepad, and Switch with a custom grip case.
Doesn't work on PS2, PS3, modded PS5 with swappable stick covers. The sticks are too tall. PS Vita, the sticks are too short, and Atari Joystick.
It goes on but doesn't prevent movement. And look at this! A little tier list and everything for us! That's amazing! Hey, thank you so much for taking the time.
Okay. All right. Now you're just, now you're just memeing. Now you're just trolling. Love it though. All right, Luke, do you want to pick us a topic?
Sure, yeah. Let's talk about Louisiana age verification laws. Utah and Louisiana have passed recent laws requiring pornographic websites to verify user age via government ID.
Okay, I'm gonna let you finish, but that sounds like a terrible idea. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let's keep going. Government ID age verification. Let's go.
Pornhub complied with the Louisiana law, which uses a state-run system, oh boy, for digitized identity confirmation, but blocked the entire state of Utah because Utah has no such system.
Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas are all considering similar laws. According to Pornhub, it was one of the few adult sites in Louisiana, well, okay, on the internet, I guess, that complied with the law.
Consequently, it saw an 80% drop in traffic in the state, while some of this loss is driven by increased VPN usage, which we know for a fact, because right around when this happened, there was a chart of popular Google searches by geography, and the state of Louisiana was by far the biggest spike was for VPN.
So that's definitely a thing that happened. It is also saying that it is likely that a large percentage of users simply switched to sites that haven't complied. And I also agree that that is true, because you're going to have a bunch of people that aren't really that into tech that probably have no idea what a VPN is, and that also don't want to like hand over their government ID, which both of those things sound very likely and very true.
Earlier this week, Louisiana passed additional penalties for websites out of compliance, including up to $5,000 every day in potential fines. In quotes, this makes the internet more unsafe, Pornhub argues, by shuffling users away from sites that safely measures its place.
With safety measures.
Cool. Pornhub reported that Louisiana users have already experienced identity theft as a result of the age verification law there. Also not surprised, because there's probably honeypot sites.
Now, hold on. Before you say the last part, let's talk about what Pornhub is right about. And they are definitely right that submitting your government ID online to some random patchwork of verification systems, because, man, let me tell you, if US tax code is anything to go by, this is going to be an absolute s*** show.
It's going to be a disaster. Also, hey, Luke, do you remember that time? I forget what state it was, but didn't they basically just have some kind of credentials available on the site or something like that? Or like the roster of all of their workers in inspect element or something like that?
It was like the password to be able to access the user database for a government website was stored in HTML or something. It was something crazy like that. And then when a reporter talked about it, they brought him to court for hacking because he pressed F12 and read something.
That was amazing. There's also, if I remember correctly, in Australia, their passport database or something leaked. Just because it's like, oh, there's a government system that verifies the ID, that's not better.
It was social security numbers for teachers. And it was censored visually, but if you did inspect element, it was totally visible.
How would you even censor it? Why would it even be there? It's so stupid.
But these are the kinds of people that you are going to be entrusting your government issued ID to. They're right. They're right that submitting your ID.
And I mean, oh man, that is even aside from just the ideological angle that you can attack this from. So A, no, you shouldn't be submitting your government ID online to a database where it probably will be leaked. That's number one.
And I'm not saying the solution is to have websites maintain this because that's even worse. I'm going to send my ID to every random pornography site? Sure. Because the porn industry has a really great reputation for only engaging in business in the most up and up way.
So sure, that sounds like a great idea. But regardless of where I'm sending it, that is an awful, awful idea. And they're right that this actually does make internet users largely less safe.
Yes.
You know what? I am. I am going to go at it from the ideological standpoint as well. I couldn't help noticing that these are mostly right-leaning states. Is this a small government thing to do? Is that not part of this conversation?
I was going to say, what do you think an alternative solution could be that still approaches... Because it doesn't seem like they're trying to...
Yeah, no, I guess they sort of are. Like if there's laws already in place that you aren't supposed to be able to access this stuff unless you're a certain age, I'm going to put in quotes here, improving their ability to enforce those laws kind of potentially might make sense.
But this is just a terrible way of going about it. What do you think about... I've been sitting here trying to think about alternative ideas. What do you think about if they had like a block list that parents could...
If they had a block list and instructions on how to set it up, that parents could run at home or something like that? Do you think that would...
Providing resources is fine.
Yeah, yeah.
But the whole idea with small government is that you're not supposed to just step in and make decisions on behalf of people. That's like the whole idea. It's not supposed to be a nanny state. And this is 1000% nanny state.
This is modern nanny.
This is net nanny state.
Literally, if they gave residents a resource that was like, hey, all you have to do is contact your ISP and you can request to piehole every possible source of pornography and you can report a new one here.
Even that is a lot more regulation than some people would want. That's a lot more interference in a free and open marketplace or whatever it is. But it's certainly a lighter touch.
This is heavy handed. This is, here's how we're doing it. And if you don't comply, we're going to fine you $5,000 a day. Also, our system is stupid.
And it's just, it's one of those things where I don't think it's exclusive to right-leaning or left-leaning politicians. I think that every politician almost across the board seems to fundamentally understand how or misunderstand how tech works.
This is not...
The vast majority of them are natural dinosaurs.
This is not how tech works. You can't just... Some rando website based in China or based somewhere in Eastern Europe or whatever, what, you're going to send them a bill for $5,000 a day? They're just going to not pay it. And then that's it.
That's actually the end of that entire interaction. So all you're doing, and this is a valid argument from Pornhub, all you're doing is you are penalizing, you're putting at a disadvantage the websites that are willing to work with you on regulation by enforcing regulation that is stupid and doesn't make any sense.
So great. You have successfully even further deregulated the pornographic material that your citizens still definitely have access to. Absolutely wild.
And the thing that's crazy to me is it's not like they're imposing this on Twitter.
Yeah.
It's not like they're imposing this on Reddit.
It is...
It's not like they're imposing this on anything else.
Twitter has gotten, I swear to you, I know this is anecdotal, but Twitter has gotten even worse to the point where I can't click on anything that's trending and scroll more than maybe like five or six tweets before I will almost certainly find hardcore pornography. It's unbelievable.
Yeah. So like, what, do you need that age verification for Twitter now? I don't know. Seems weird.
I don't know, man.
Oh, man. There's some shockingly bad takes in the chat.
Oh, man. Oh, wow. Okay. Anyway, yeah.
However, I had cut you off before you finished going through the notes on this.
And the reason for that was that I wanted to talk about what I agree with Pornhub about first.
But it's also necessary for us to talk about the ways that I don't agree with Pornhub.
Their solution is device-based age verification rather than requiring users to submit their ID when they access an adult site.
That is stupid and obviously not going to work.
Device-based age verification would be.
Oh, man.
Possible. It would be possible.
But they would need major buy in from I mean, who? Apple.
Google. Microsoft. We would have to we would have to move into a world where I mean,
I guess they probably need Firefox on board brave while we're at it.
There's no way Braves going to support any kind of anything to do with any of this, I suspect.
They would need so many entities on board because they're proposing device-based,
which is obviously asinine because the second I hand my kids my phone to follow some origami tutorial.
Oh, good. They're now verified for Pornhub. That was definitely that good system, right?
But I could see if it was actually built into something like biometric verification.
So you go to this website and you just tap your fingerprint sensor or something like that.
I could see that working. That's a little that's not device-based, though.
That's biometric authentication. And then all of a sudden, OK, who's responsible for storing those credentials and validating them in the first place?
OK, well, now we're back to the same bloody problem because it all has to be in a central database.
So their device-based authentication is what's the word for that? A red herring?
I'm going to have a straw man. I can't remember. It's a something.
Not a straw man. No, it's a red herring. Something that misleads or distracts from the relevant or important question, I guess.
That's not quite a red herring either, actually. Basically, it's a distraction.
It's a smokescreen there. That's what I was looking for.
They're basically going, don't do this because it negatively impacts our business.
It comes back to what we were talking about earlier, where, you know what, maybe they do actually care about a safer Internet.
Realistically, what they probably care about is running their businesses in a competitive manner.
And the fact that because they are not based in the Middle East somewhere, actually,
Middle East would probably not be a good place to be based if you're running a porn site.
But Eastern Europe somewhere, because they're not based in Eastern Europe somewhere,
they actually may be subject to paying these fines, which is the real reason that they're complying with these new standards and these new verification policies.
And they just don't want to do it because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage.
That's the real reason. And then they're proposing solutions that I think they ultimately know aren't going to work to just delay the implementation of anything.
Because at the end of the day, nothing is going to work in the same way that they were never able to keep Playboy magazines out of the hands of horny teenagers in the woods or whatever.
That's what I was just going to say.
If you are someone who is very much in support of restricting access to these types of things,
I think the thing that you need to understand about this particular situation is that it didn't even sort of work.
Users either just VPNed or they just used a different website and that is always going to be a thing.
So it's just a bad solution because it leaves the people that are using it in a very sketchy situation of having their government IDs leaked.
Not to mention that, but remember, if this user list leaks, you're going to be verified as someone who visited a pornographic website.
Which, you know what? I don't care. Your SO might. Maybe your employer is like hardcore anti-pornography. Maybe they fire you.
Should that be any of their business?
It might be a conversation you want to have with your SO if that's something you're hiding from your SO.
But your employer, yeah, I don't know. That's probably not a conversation you want to have with your boss.
There's no reason why they should ever need to know.
I just mean in general. Okay, Luke, I think you and I both are pretty open in terms of communication with our SOs,
but even you and I, I don't think agree on everything. I'm not going to get into details,
but there are lots of things that for some couples are totally normal and something that they talk about very openly,
and for other couples are things that they simply don't talk about.
For some people, the idea of spending any money or having a savings account that their SO doesn't know about is ridiculous,
to the point where that would be essentially financial cheating.
Whereas other couples literally have a relationship policy where they don't talk about finances with each other.
There's a broad spectrum, and I'm not judging right now. That's not the point of any of this.
The point of this is that a database of people who accessed porn leaking could have serious negative ramifications for people
that are avoidable and unnecessary and that are people's personal choice,
sort of how they want to manage their communication around it. That's all I'm trying to say.
Especially because the hub is quite general, but there's a lot of sites that aren't general.
What if something about certain preferences that you may have comes out that you aren't exactly ready to publicly communicate?
Say you're in the closet and you're not ready to talk about that yet. We might as well just say it, Luke.
I don't know if this episode even necessarily qualifies as appropriate for general audiences anymore with how much we're talking about this stuff.
I've got to be honest with you. I have pretty much just accepted that when and if my kids get curious about this stuff,
there's nothing I can do to prevent them from accessing it. We're just going to have to have frank conversations about it.
That's not real. That's not how that actually works. These are actors.
This is no longer really a tech conversation, but I think that point right there is the most important part of the whole thing.
Please, God, do not go into any of this stuff in real life with an expectation that it should be anything even remotely like what you just viewed.
But anyways, let's maybe topic change.
Speaking of Reddit and how I'm sure Reddit isn't going to require this type of age verification, but it sure has a lot of that stuff on it.
Wow, great segue.
Sub-Reddit's protest API costs. Over 2,000 Reddit communities, and as far as I know, including the Linus Tech Tips one, which is not run by us.
Over 2,000 Reddit communities are planning to go dark for 48 hours on June 12th in protest of Reddit's proposed API costs due to the likelihood of pricing out third-party app developers.
Nearly 40 of the Sub-Reddits have over 5 million subscribers each.
The block that they're planning on doing will last at least 48 hours, but some of the Sub-Reddits may not come back at all.
Wow, I didn't know that part.
Some people are mad, and rightly so.
Yeah, following concerns raised by disabled moderators.
I genuinely don't know what that means.
Reddit has said that it will make an exception to the API prices for non-commercial accessibility focused third-party apps.
The third-party apps Apollo, Sync, and Reddit is Fun have already announced that they will be shutting down when the new API rules come into effect.
Reddit, meanwhile, is reportedly laying off around 5% of its current employees. What's going on?
Something that's not in our notes, but I wanted to talk about a little bit is the developer of the Apollo app, who I didn't realize is Canadian.
Yo, shout out fellow Canadian.
The developer of the Apollo app posted a really, really good rundown of why this is a problem, like why what Reddit is doing is so unfair,
the ways that Reddit has misrepresented or even outright lied about what's going on,
and a really sort of solid breakdown of why they basically were given no choice but to shut down their app.
It's a completely untenable situation, and they also did a really good job of outlining the hypocrisy of Reddit throughout all of this,
where they even provided assurances that they're not going to pull a Twitter and basically just turn off third-party apps.
And yet have essentially done so. He's got receipts, which is really cool.
Most parts of Canada, as far as I'm aware, are single-consent recording...
When I say states, I just mean places. I don't mean like United States, but single-consent recording places.
So that means that as long as one party gives consent, you can record an interaction with someone.
So he actually recorded his calls with Reddit and posted the audio so people can see where Reddit lied.
Basically just in the conversation said one thing, fully understood what he was saying,
and then turned around and completely misrepresented it to the community in an effort to turn it into like a he-said-she-said situation.
It's not. It's very black and white. Reddit went full scumbag on this, and it sucks.
Yeah, that's really rough.
I don't like that part.
There's some other really good comments in the chat talking about how it's not just shutting down as a form of protest.
It's also shutting down because the moderation tools that they use rely on the API, and they're not going to start paying Reddit to moderate Reddit.
Now, my understanding is that this isn't in our notes either.
So guys, you're going to have to correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that Reddit has said that they're not going to charge moderation tools.
But don't quote me on that because I'm not necessarily sure that they would 100% be able to differentiate.
I mean, they literally just got caught lying, right?
Yeah, and they're also big liars. So yeah, what does their word mean at all?
My understanding is that, oh, oh, oh, right, this was yesterday that I was reading that there was going to be an AMA, and so the AMA was today.
Oh man, I haven't even, oh wow, this is, oh wow, oh wow, this is as bad as it could be.
So yeah, they did an AMA, and this is wild.
Uh, oh wow, so you got called out for being a two-faced piece of shit, and your best response is to attack the integrity of someone for recording and leaking a private phone call.
Wow. Wow.
You want to read some of it out? I'm trying to find it right now.
Oh, sorry. His joke is the least of our issues. His behaviour and communications with us has been all over the place.
Saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally.
Recording and leaking a private phone call to the point where I don't know how we could do business with him.
And so this is talking about the developer of Apollo, Christian.
Hmm.
Wow. This is unreal. Christian literally has tapes, and you're going to double down on this. Like, what is actually happening right now?
How are they, how is this, how is this a serious company run by serious people?
Now you asked before, Luke, you know, why they're making these changes, and it's supposed to be because they're aiming to go IPO.
So they're looking to boost revenue, you know, do all those things that look good to, for an initial public offering, which sort of reinforces...
Fire a bunch of people. I wish, I wish firing a bunch of people isn't something that looked good for a public offering.
It is, apparently, but I just hate that that's true. That's really frustrating.
Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things where I feel like we, we've experienced a period of shocking stability in internet services.
Do you kind of get what I mean? Like for, for 20 years, basically everyone has used Gmail.
You know, for a solid, what, 15 years, pretty much everyone used Facebook.
And then recently, you know, over the last two, three years, it's like, oh, okay, yeah, no idea. I message on, you know, Facebook's not cool.
My Nan uses Facebook. But like, even then, most people I know still have a Facebook account so that their Nan can message them, right?
Like it's, it's, it's sort of, it's sort of ubiquitous, right? For, for, I mean, yeah.
I'm trying to think, like, you have to go back maybe what, 12, 13 years to when Digg was a thing.
And then Reddit took over. Absolutely took over. There hasn't been a Reddit competitor.
Things like Reddit and YouTube, in my opinion, have been like these incredible, unassailable mainstays for a very, very long time.
Yeah. And so I feel like it lasted so long that we started to take it for granted.
But it used to be that this kind of stuff happened all the time.
You know, eBay's world showed up and disappeared over a span of a few years.
You know, Newgrounds went from being huge to being utterly irrelevant over a span of a few years.
Like this kind of stuff happened a lot.
But we've just experienced this unprecedented period of stability in the online services that we use that I feel like is being disrupted right now in a way that we're just not used to.
Reddit is not unassailable. Guys, we don't actually have to accept this.
And I feel like that I feel like that this period has resulted in complacency from these platforms as well,
where they're just they're just being blatantly anti-user to the point where they must just think you have no other choice.
Guess what? LinusTechTips.com still exists.
If you want to go to a private forum and talk about stuff, you can do it.
We have been told a ton of times by a huge variety of people to just stop having the forum exist.
No.
Because like they're like, oh, I mean, you guys have a subreddit and like there's there's hardware subreddits and PCM are subreddits and all these other different things.
So like you don't really need to have your own forum in 2023.
Yeah, we do.
For a lot of reasons, they're right. But then for a lot of reasons, they're also wrong.
And this is this is the reason why they're wrong. We like having our own stuff.
It's why we have the forum. It's why we have FlowPlane, because it makes our things a little bit more unassailable.
And we come from an era of the Internet where things were not stable at all.
And we have not forgotten, apparently, which is probably good.
Well, yeah, I mean, especially because we've experienced it, too. I mean, what happened to Vessel?
We talked about that earlier on the show. Just disappeared like that.
And we're going, OK, well, I guess we need to build our own Vessel because we can't rely on anything.
And we've seen...
If I remember correctly, the notice we got from Vessel was immediate, wasn't it?
No, it wasn't quite immediate.
Or it was like Friday to Monday or something?
Yeah, we had not a very not a very long period of time.
It was basically at the end of the month, it's over was was what we got. We're just shutting it off.
That was after the Verizon acquisition.
And another yeah, another example that, you know, I'm glad we didn't just move to Patreon
because there was that thing a couple of years ago where Patreon stopped
or the deal that they had with Vimeo just got sunsetted and everyone's rates got jacked up.
And we're sitting here going, ours didn't. You could have been on full plane, but whatever.
But then, you know, that's that's people putting their destiny in our hands, too.
And we like to think, you know, trust me, bro, we got you. Don't worry about it.
But like you and I could be on the same plane and it could crash.
You know, at which point, you know, maybe maybe things do change.
I mean, I'd like to think that we're setting things up between you building out your team,
me hiring a new executive to keep this thing running, not just a new executive,
but having the executive team here to keep things to keep things running smoothly,
even if something did happen to me. But, you know, that takes time.
And those things definitely didn't exist three, four, five years ago, right?
Yeah. Yeah, this is great.
I should never be on the same flight.
There was one there was one point in time where the entire executive team,
including one that at the time was not announced, but is now, which is parent,
the entire executive team was all on a ferry together.
Yeah. And I remember thinking while we're on there, like, you know,
with how reliable VC has been lately.
Yeah. Really interesting.
So everyone just shows up on Monday. I mean, their key cards would still work.
But like, yeah. Then what?
What do we do? Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. Yeah.
So, okay. Shares in the company.
People can still get paid.
Yeah. Shares in the company would pass to our kids,
but they'd be held in trust by the executor of our executor of our will.
They would probably be subject to inheritance tax.
So the kids would basically have to sell the company.
Yeah. Um,
and you just have to hope that whatever shark that smells blood in the water
ends up being a friendly shark.
Which I mean, statistically unlikely.
Yeah. Well, you know.
Oh, okay. Anyways.
What's up? Oh, just people are talking about how, uh,
what kind of trouble read it appears to be in, uh, financially as well.
Uh, fidelity,
which led Reddit $700 million funding round in 2021 at evaluation of 10
billion has marked down the value of its Reddit stock. Again,
reports tech crunch. Um, okay.
They marked it down by over 40% as of the end of April insider previously
reported that they'd already marked it down in January in their January
disclosures. Of course, like a private stakeholder, I guess,
I, um, they're kind of,
there's going to be fuzzy math there. Fuzzy math.
People seem to like hate it when I talk about this, uh,
because I think reality just sucks and they find that very frustrating.
I genuinely think that's what it is,
but a massive percentage of stuff on the internet is not financially viable.
Like this whole Twitch thing happened, right?
And all these people are super pissed off and they're pointing at different
creators and they're like, Hey, you should make a Twitch competitor.
I had a few people tag me on Twitter being like, Oh, just, just open,
just open a float plane up and then bring a bunch of creators on.
It's like actually making a Twitch creator is actually just a terrible idea
unless you're like whole goal is to market gambling to children like kick or
whatever else. Like I don't, I don't, they're, they're like there,
there's, it's such an incredibly,
deeply bad business model.
Just having like open free streaming to infinite people is incredibly rough.
There's a lot of stuff that makes sense. As annoying as it is,
it makes sense that Twitch has been trying to do.
Like I've looked at some of Twitch's actions where they're trying to like the
most recent one is, is just stupid in my opinion.
But some of their other ones where they're like trying to get more percentages
on things that they're trying to charge more for things. And I'm like, yeah,
that sucks. In a lot of cases for creators,
this is like bad and the approach is bad and all those different types of
things.
But I understand where it's coming from because they're just hemorrhaging money
all the time. And Amazon is sitting there being like,
what are you even for? Like what is your value?
We give all these people free Prime subscriptions and that just pours money
into creators pockets. What is, what is the point of this platform?
It doesn't make any money. Like why do we have this thing?
Maybe they should have thought of that before they spent a billion dollars on
it like a bunch of idiots.
But that's how a lot of these internet companies work. They just like,
they have no potential of ever making any money and companies are just like,
oh, that looks sweet.
Let's buy it for a billion dollars because that makes sense.
Like just such a massive loss leader for what? Okay.
Oh no. Oh no. Luke is going after the Twitch chat now.
I thought that was my thing.
There's just, there's so many different examples of this.
It's not just Twitch, but there's so many other examples of this too.
And I know a huge percentage of the internet for a very long time there was
pounding this drum of watch time.
Like the only thing that matters at all on the internet for a huge portion there
was watch time. Even Microsoft was like, Oh man, we need to make mixer.
Oh geez. Like it, it was so, it's such a frenzy there.
That seems to be over now. But like what,
what was the actual value of watch time?
The only actual value of watch time was getting users to either normalize on
that particular website to spend more money there or to be able to sell those
users more ads.
And just having banner ads does not pay for a live streaming service.
It's not enough. Are you sure more money?
What would you know about that?
There's also this is the whole thing.
Itchy halls in Twitch chat has another bad take. Amazon has plenty of money.
Well yeah,
but you don't get plenty of money by operating services that lose money.
Just burning it in a fire.
That's not, that's not good business.
Yeah. So like, I, I don't know.
Yeah. Like you, you look at the,
the business model for Reddit and it's like, yeah.
How does that make any sense? Like one of the ones that is wild.
Yeah. I mean there is, there is, yeah,
I guess the pictures are externally hosted, aren't they?
Maybe some of them aren't. I don't know.
Yeah. You can upload directly to Reddit,
but it's like pretty light compared to something like even Twitter where
there's video like directly embedded video.
Yeah. The whole, the whole thing is just so,
so many like Silicon Valley style companies, they're just wild to me.
It's just this weird shifting pool of investor money and everyone's hoping to
just like sell or buy at the right time.
That, that, that's, that's like the whole, the whole thing.
That's, that's the entire thing.
It's like this store of wealth that you're, you're gambling on.
And that's, that's pretty much it.
Oh guys. Okay. So apparently Reddit does have self-hosted pictures and video now,
but 16,000 DVI.
The video player is horrible.
The Reddit video player is like the worst thing.
It's so frustrating. It's so bad.
It's actually so like impressively bad and it's not, it's not even,
it's not even just their like content delivery,
which leaves a little bit to be desired sometimes,
but the like the controls are super broken.
It will fail the load extremely often. It's just, Oh my.
I love 16,000 DPI's comment here.
Twitch is making tons of money, millions upon millions,
just not for Amazon.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That's fair. That's, that's fair. Oh man.
And the bad thing, the bad thing with the,
with the agreements there is it's this whole concept of like,
once you give someone something, it's extremely hard to then take it back.
Yeah.
So some of these agreements that these platforms have established,
which are not sustainable,
once you try to claw that back, you look like a big,
I don't have a sensor button over here. You look like a big butthole.
And it's very understandable because creators are,
are sitting there every time you do that,
if you claw anything back from creators as a platform, I guess,
especially as a platform as big as Twitch,
I guarantee you just completely ruined someone because there will have been
someone who fairly recently decided to quit their job or
whatever and go full time.
And then you just took 25% back off them and now they can't afford to eat.
Yep.
That will happen with platforms that big, that will happen. So like you,
you actually can't really claw it back.
Speaking of affording to eat.
So they're just left in this weird position.
Can I tell you about our sponsors?
Amazing segue.
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Oh, he's ready. He's dialed in. He's in the zone.
He's in some kind of zone. Okay. All right. Just relax, Dan.
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All righty. Thank you for that, Dennis.
Amazing.
What do you want to talk about next, Luke?
Let me check the doc out.
Apple studies thousands of heads, invents ray traced audio.
Amazing.
All right, let's do it.
There was the six minute version.
Oh wait, I lied. No, I lied.
We're supposed to do three merge messages.
Ah.
Yeah, that's on me. Sorry.
I am a liar sometimes, like right now.
You do do that.
Let's see.
Hey, Dale.
I am curious as to what is going on behind the scenes for a new labs
website.
Can you give us any spoilers on the tech behind it or how many people are
working on it?
Oh, I mean, do we have, can we show anybody anything Luke?
He's thinking, I have to get permission because I don't know the URL.
Oh, you should.
You should. It's, it's, it's sent to you in an email almost every week.
But don't look it up.
Most of the work that's being done right now is not on the front live
site.
It is on tools in the backend because it's not ready for launch from the
content side. So we've been somewhat waiting.
There's also some minor redesign things changing and stuff like that,
but those aren't, those aren't a huge priority right now.
We're mostly working on some data gathering tools and stuff like that.
But yeah.
Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that data gathering tools?
That doesn't sound like anything cool, but what they're doing is super cool.
No, no, no, no, no. I wasn't saying it's not cool.
I'm saying it's not visible.
You can't see it right now because they're tools for, for us to use,
you know, but I can, I can explain what that is.
I can explain what that is. Yeah.
I believe it's four people that are working on it.
And it's what they have been working on is data aggregation.
So basically Linus put out some marching orders a while ago that we want to be
able to be a one-stop shop for like lookup information for different products.
So we've been looking into effectively scraping,
but we are interested in working directly with manufacturers to try to get
information that way.
But if it's,
it's highly likely that most of these manufacturers will not have a way for us
to just automatically gather info from them.
Like I, I,
I don't believe most manufacturers are going to have a product info API.
So what, what do you,
don't show the doc actually don't show the doc like actually close this.
I'm not showing much of the doc.
Dear God.
I just wanted to show you do not share externally.
Yeah. Thanks. Sick. Super cool. Very excited about that.
Also stoked that that URL is that you need to make sure that's not a share with
anyone URL.
How do I do that?
Oh my God, dude.
I don't think I showed the whole URL.
Okay. Oh boy. I'm in trouble now.
You actually are. That was actually stupid.
Remember that thing we talked about earlier about how someone who could work
for a company for 20 years could be fired over doing something really bad.
No, it doesn't ring a bell. I think it's time to get a new CEO.
That doc is restricted. So we're fine.
Nice.
What was I going to say? Wow. That totally derailed me. Right. Okay.
Data aggregation. So we, we picked some,
some product lines and some brands.
So not entire brands because if you think of someone like ASUS like scraping
every single product in every single product line that they have would actually
be
totally untenable and an incredible task in its own right.
Let alone gathering from anybody else.
So we decided like we would pick, I think it was like three motherboard brands,
two CPU brands. I wonder who they would be. Like a few GPU,
a few memory, a few storage, whatever, whatever.
Like a little spattering from, from some of the major categories.
And then we're working on scraping or otherwise gathering product information
from those as far back as we can from whatever public information there is.
And
being able to have that information in whatever form accessible on the website.
So if you wanted to compare, for example, two different products,
if you wanted to compare a 50,
90 GPU that comes out whenever the heck to a,
I don't know why, but an 8,800 GTX,
you would be able to look that up.
And maybe we don't have modern benchmarking information for an 8,800 GTX,
but you can see the spec comparison between them or whatever else.
Okay. Can I show them, can I show them one thing?
Just one thing.
Not on the dock.
No dock.
Not on the dock.
No dock.
That dock needs to be not open at all.
No dock open.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Amazing.
Amazing.
Do you like your little icon on the compare cart?
That's been updated.
And the Labs logo is there now.
There you go.
There's new things.
You can poke around the site.
Okay.
Like this is actually fine.
This is obviously very in development.
You know?
Yeah.
But you know, this is pretty cool, right?
Pretty cool.
Yeah.
Many of these things are changing.
Many of these things have already been discussed, the change, et cetera, et cetera.
But real progress is being made.
We are actually doing stuff and the team is working really hard,
both the Labs team and the Labs website team,
which are actually separate teams but that need to interface a lot,
are trying to like kick butt and make this a really just awesome site right out of the gate.
It's not going to be feature complete.
There's a lot of things that are on the roadmap for the next, I mean, realistically, like five years.
And some of them will never happen.
But we've got our site set really high and we're making real investments into making this just an awesome website.
We're going to bring back just good data and easy access to it, I hope.
I hope that AI scraping doesn't just sort of make us have to lock it down in ways that we didn't want to.
But that's something we're going to have to evaluate as we get closer to launch.
It's going to be a problem, but there are also like actually some surprisingly fast wheels turning in that realm
because some rather big companies are not stoked about the idea of their data getting scraped by AI scrapers.
So they're putting lots of legal money behind it, which actually does make the system turn.
So yeah, maybe other people will find solutions for us there.
More messages. Let's see. I see the lttstore.com war is on. My wallet continues.
Hi DLL, are there any products that are currently in development hell that you want to get out?
I'm trying to think. Extremely not happening.
I mean, as far as the update from over a year ago says, they're back and they're moving.
But who knows what happened in the last over a year. Site is definitely live. I can see the site.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, because he literally shared it, but it's not technically like a private thing.
So poke around, I guess. What was I going to say?
Yeah, the coal bar hammer, I'm certain will never happen, but they haven't publicly given up yet.
As far as like physical products, I can't really think of anything.
I don't personally believe that the Apple solution to VR AR goggles,
which we'll talk about very soon, is going to solve all the problems.
I'm mostly, the main thing that comes to mind for me is a game.
I've talked about this a bunch on one show, but Skull and Bones that's been in developer hell for like what I feel like is
actually genuinely getting close to a decade at this point.
And I'm not even excited for it anymore. When it was first announced, I was super excited for it.
But ever since then, it's gone through a bunch of different producers and changes to what the game actually is
and what it is going to be now, which I have stopped keeping up with it.
So this could be incorrect information. So if it's wrong, I apologize.
But what it is now is this like PvP arena shooter, but with boats, which is so incredibly uninteresting to me.
Like if I wanted to play that, I would just play World of Warships or something.
I don't know. But yeah, it just keeps perpetually staying in development and not getting finished. So whatever.
Floatplane.
Yay!
Got him.
Floatplane's in a pretty good state right now.
No, Floatplane's in a pretty good state right now.
Okay, hit me with one more.
Sure.
Hey DLL, love the show. I'm curious if when you were creating the backpack, did y'all do any crazy things to test it out?
And if not, have y'all done anything crazy to test your products?
We've gotten kind of boring about it, to be perfectly honest with you.
Ever since we hired, I'd say it started right around the time we hired Bridget and Kyle.
We kind of do things properly now.
So there's a third-party fabric testing company, for example, that we use called Chima.
And so when we want to evaluate, say for example, the water resistance of a fabric, we send it to them.
And then they send us back like a two-page report on how it performed on all of their testing equipment.
And it's all very by-the-book and pretty boring.
I'd say the closest thing to a rugged, real-world, wild test of anything lately has probably been this Apple leather version, the Luxe edition of the LTT backpack,
where I've just kind of been using it as my daily driver and going out of my way to beat the absolute stuffing out of it
because I just can't believe that it's holding up this well. It just doesn't compute for me.
Yeah, it actually tosses it around.
Oh, yeah. Oh, that's far from the worst. I stuffed it under the seat when I went to Taiwan.
And then whenever I thought of it, I kicked it and mushed it with my feet, just trying to beat the crap out of it.
And it just won't have a problem. So I guess we're going to have to go to production soon.
Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's really kind of gone through hell in terms of benchmarking it in a creative way.
Not really. I mean, the shape sorter toy was a fun one.
Like, Tynan really tried, like pressed as hard as he could to try to get them in the wrong hole.
So I'm yeah, I'm just I'm looking at the site right now. I'm trying to think.
We do a lot of kind of real world testing, like with the tech sack.
We took the early versions and we gave them to people and basically said, OK, load this up with what you would keep in it
and tried to make sure that the pockets would make sense to them.
Remember the lanyards? Didn't you like tow a car with the lanyard?
No, we might have talked about it at some point. I mean, you probably could with that thing.
I don't recommend it. Don't do that. But it's it's very strong.
Yeah.
Next up, you want another one? Sure.
There is a plethora of optical cables on the market.
USB one to three DisplayPort and certified HDMI 2.1.
Any insights into why USB 20 gigabits per second or DisplayPort two are missing?
Well, DisplayPort two is just super new.
It takes time. I mean, we didn't see optical HDMI 2.1 until quite some time after first the standard was ratified.
And then second, once products actually started making their way into the market where you could test these things in the real world,
I would expect it to take anywhere from six to 12 months and in some cases more like 24 to 36,
because it all depends on what the user adoption of these is.
It's not just a matter of does the standard exist so that I can develop my product.
But it also matters, like I said before, if there are real world products that I can test my compatibility with.
And furthermore, it matters if anybody is actually using these products and if there's an install base using these products,
that's large enough to justify the development costs that it's going to that I'm that I'm going to need to invest in order to bring this product to market and produce it.
I can tell you right now, DisplayPort 2.0, what cards even support it?
NVIDIA doesn't even support it on their latest generation GPUs.
So in terms of relevant cards, and I'm not counting Arc here, in terms of relevant cards that support it,
you've basically got the 7900 XT and the 7900 XTX. Those aren't going to move the needle.
How many how many optical DisplayPort? Right.
And of course, there's the other end of the chain. What display requires it?
Literally nothing actually requires UHBR whatever it is, DisplayPort 2.0.
So why are you producing this cable that no display requires and almost no GPUs are capable of supporting the maximum speed of?
And then I would say it's probably a pretty similar situation when it comes to USB 20 gigabit per second.
Show me a peripheral that actually needs 20 gigabit per second.
And I'll show you a dock that should probably be a Thunderbolt dock.
So why do you need this optical cable? We already have optical Thunderbolt cables.
Mind you, I've been told that they don't work perfectly with every dock.
My experience with them has been pretty good,
but I believe it was CalDigit that messaged me on Twitter saying that theirs has been a little bit spotty.
Yeah, I think I got time for one more. Sure. Let's see here.
Hey yo, DLL. Any more news to share on virtual LTX for floatplane subscribers?
I'm stoked that we can still participate.
P.S. Thanks for cotton elastane only clothing options like the polos.
Poly equals sweaty.
Yeah, it's a good question. We haven't finalized our oh, you know what?
I think that we have a I think we have a topic in the dock here that's related to that.
Yes. OK. We want to start getting our panels locked in, but we haven't done that yet.
And we wanted to get some some feedback from you guys.
So the LTX team is going to be watching this segment of the show.
They're going to be looking at your comments. Floatplane.
I don't know if they have a way to watch back floatplane chat.
Luke is no. OK, so cool.
So what you might want to do is hold your thoughts and throw them in the comments section under the VOD.
If there's any topics that jump out to you as being particularly bad, if there's topics that jump out to you as being particularly good YouTube chat.
I mean, it moves at a million miles a minute, so I don't know how useful posting in there is going to be.
But maybe same thing in the comments under the VOD would be the best place to post something.
But here are some of our ideas. One of them is price talks.
So talking about price to performance, the best way to figure out bang for the buck.
Talking about the affordability of parts and inflation.
Talking about, you know, where do you start buying if you're just starting now?
You know, how do you familiarize yourself with this stuff?
Talking about, you know, predictions of future trends.
So just to be clear, these are these are panel ideas where we would get creators to come up on stage and just discuss these topics.
Another good one that I kind of like is handheld gaming.
Where's this trend going? Is there room to grow?
You know, what do we think a flagship handheld for twenty twenty five might look like?
Handheld versus home console. The line's already blurry.
Thanks to the Nintendo switch. Are we going to see this blur more?
Another another concept. Oh, I don't know about this one. Making products for real people.
LTT store dot com learning experiences. What do we want to do in the future?
Product release cycle products that will never see the light of day.
I feel like I talk about this so much on WAN Show. There won't be much to say.
But hey, let us know if you disagree. This is one that I suggested. Sponsored reviews.
Where are these coming from? You know, where are brands getting the idea that they can sponsor reviews?
Where are where are viewers getting the idea that a sponsored video can be a review?
Why is it that this line is blurry and what has happened to the word review?
You know, what does sponsored content look like given the rise of vertical video and other formats and platforms?
Why would a brand sponsor a review anyway,
given that the value of a review is that it's an independent opinion or at least it's supposed to be?
Some other ideas. Our phones peak boring now.
This just says GPU specs. I don't know what that means. Discussions on benchmarking best practices.
That could be kind of a fun one. Console versus PC gaming 2023 edition.
If you guys have any other ideas, that sounds super cool.
Luke is going to talk about Logitech killing the blue brand while I run to the washroom.
OK, I'm jumping to where that is.
I get to use the loop cam that I made.
Oh, my, I won't see it because I got to look at the dock, but I trust it's amazing considering the bad quality of my webcam.
Let me fix this.
The blown out lighting in the room. But anyways, Logitech kills blue brand and Astro, I believe, and maybe some other stuff.
But Logitech will be ending the blue brand, which it acquired in 2018.
Its popular Sona, Yeti and Snowball microphones will instead be sold under Logitech's gaming brand, Logitech G.
However, the vast majority of blues music and audio recording mics are absent from Logitech's site.
Only the baby bottle SL. Wow, I didn't know that was the name of it.
Bluebird SL remain, and when clicked on, they redirect to the main page of Logitech's gaming mics, which does not include entries for either microphone.
There's a discussion question here that says,
Why would any company choose to disband a well-known brand with great deal of customer cache in favor of a more generic brand without the same prestige?
Yeah, I don't know. It's weird to me. It's also not just blue. This writing makes it sound like it's just blue.
I'm pretty sure it's blue, Astro and potentially one other brand that all got kind of merged in.
I want to try to find this. Logitech G. I know they had some Twitter post about it, talking about all this type of stuff.
But yeah, it's pretty interesting. Some really major brands getting kind of somewhat deleted overnight.
Yeah, so brand merge FAQ. It looks like Logitech for creators, Astro and blue seem to be all merging into Logitech G.
So I didn't actually know that Logitech for creators was like a thing that existed, so I guess that is.
But I knew Astro and blue were, and those are getting kind of deleted.
Astro, I honestly don't hear a lot about these days. I know back like roughly 10 years ago at PAX, they were a pretty big deal.
And I know back then especially, they were a pretty big deal with the console people.
So maybe the only reason why I'm not super aware of them in the modern age is because I'm not so into the consoles these days.
But blue has had a really major name in the creator space for a long time.
I know like when I first got into streaming, you were either using this one particular, I don't remember what brand it was from,
but this one particular mixer and an XLR mic, or you were using like a Snowball or a Yeti.
There was almost no other options.
So yeah, to throw that brand away seems a little bit surprising.
And I don't know, I don't really have a ton else to say other than that. I don't really care.
It doesn't make a difference to me personally.
But Astro had a big name a really long time ago. I don't know anymore.
And blue has had a big name this entire time. So to get rid of that branding is pretty surprising.
I also think there's a lot of like super iconic, like the blue logo being on your mic is like quite iconic.
And to replace that with a Logitech G is kind of interesting.
I think a lot of people that were in the market for blue products as well weren't necessarily looking for like gaming branding on their products.
Like blue's whole design aesthetic was very creator focused.
I don't know what it was. Yeah, I guess so.
I don't know how to define it. Yeah, creator focused, I guess I would say.
Really does raise the question. Why do you acquire these companies?
And if you just want the IP, why not acquire them, take the IP and then just not keep releasing products under that brand at all?
Like, I don't know. Maybe I just am dumb.
Well, that's the strategy now. So maybe they're adopting that now. Like maybe we'll do that moving forward.
The Astro gaming one is confusing to me because I actually don't.
The products are so garbage.
But yeah, exactly. Like what would you want?
Like coming from what Logitech already had, what would you want?
Other than just the market share, which you would have to keep the name for.
For blue, I'm sure there was some amount of market share stuff as well.
But I do suspect that that was definitely mostly like the tech behind the microphones.
Because blue did have a very good name for like quality, especially on the USB side microphones.
Do you know the background of Astro?
No, I know they were like console gaming headphones. That's it.
No, they were just an industrial design and like branding firm.
And they were like, oh, why do we just do this for other people?
Let's just do industrial design and branding for like gaming headphones.
And then they killed it and got acquired. I was like, OK.
They looked cool. They always looked really cool. The Astro headphones looked sick.
I remember one of my the first shirt that I got from PAX that was actually kind of cool.
It wasn't just like plain T-shirt brand name and block font.
That's it. The first one ever was an Astro shirt and it like actually looked really sick.
I never owned Astro headphones, but I had a really cool Astro shirt.
Yeah. My relationship with Astro was fraught at best. We reviewed one of their products once.
I was shocked at how bad it was and basically said, I can't understand why anybody is buying any of these ever.
And then they never talked to me again. Something along those lines.
Yeah, like this is what I mean. I can't possibly imagine Logitech bought them for their tech.
No, I really don't think so. Yeah.
So I don't know. Yeah, this doesn't really matter to me personally, but it's just it's interesting.
It seems like a big move to just like nuke a ton of the brand IP that you have and put it all under Logitech G.
But especially with how much of blue is not really G. Not gaming.
Yeah. The G part is weird to me. Astro, sure, whatever. That part doesn't really matter to me so much.
And also, as I was talking before you got here, Logitech creators.
That's another brand that they're kind of merging under Logitech G.
I just don't really get the point, I guess. But it doesn't matter. Like, I'm also not upset about it.
I just actually don't care. I don't know. I don't think it matters.
I don't think it's going to hurt them. I don't necessarily particularly see the benefit either.
Oh, but I just noticed this. We're apparently on Blue Sky.
Yeah, I can't find it. And searching for the handle and Blue Sky doesn't bring it up, which sort of.
Makes me question Blue Sky's SEO a little bit. I got to confess, I don't know a ton about Blue Sky other than that Jack Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon.
And then it turns out he had been working on a competitor to Twitter for a long time or something.
I mean, it's not hard.
Okay.
Just sand.
We got an invitation from Josh K, who is a fan, apparently.
So Blue Sky, I mean, is it mobile?
What is Blue Sky? It's Twitter, as far as I know.
But like a different color of blue.
I mean, I could be wrong, but I think that's it. I mean, there's no.
It shouldn't be surprising to people that when when when people started getting spicy about Twitter a while back, there was like a billion clones that all showed up all at the exact same time.
Yeah, it's not. It is what it is. Are you just being kind of a hater, though?
It's actually just not a complicated site. We just had this conversation where you're like, yeah, you know, you can't just spin up a Twitch competitor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, yeah, but that's Twitch. That's Twitch. That's a totally different thing.
Anything like market share at scale.
Yes. I also complicated. I also think that Twitter has tried to be okay.
Maybe I'm being a hater here. I feel like they've tried to be cooler than they are.
So they've tried to like go out of their way to do more complicated things than just text tweets.
And it has always just kind of sucked.
And re-spinning up a just text tweets Twitter clone is like actually not difficult.
At the scale that Twitter is at, sure, that's like a little harder, I guess.
But Twitter itself is not a complicated site.
And scale is getting a lot easier to deal with these days.
Are you ready to talk about the Apple Vision Pro?
Should we talk about some of our announcements first?
Are we done all the announcements?
We have announcements?
We do. I think we're done all of them, though.
The blue sky thing was the last one. We're good. Yeah, let's talk about the Vision Pro.
Is this the thousands of heads topic?
Okay, sure.
Apple studies thousands of heads, invents audio ray tracing, EAX question mark.
There's a six minute version of the Vision Pro announcement.
Okay.
There's also like a bunch of videos on it already, including some people that have used it.
But as far as my understanding goes, no one was able to capture footage of themselves using it.
So you just have like them talking about it.
Reactions.
They have finally announced said headset, the Vision Pro.
It costs 3500 US dollars.
Oh, boy.
Its interior screen is a pair of micro OLED screens with 90 hertz refresh rates.
They're 4K, right? Okay, yeah, that comes way later.
They have 90 hertz refresh rates and over 23 million pixels combined.
That's pretty wild.
For each eye. Oh, yeah, that's actually like super wild.
Something we've, I believe, all been asking for for a long time.
So it makes sense. It also kind of makes sense that it comes at a high price point.
But yeah, the headset has 12 cameras and five sensors which monitor the user's hand movements
and map the environment using TrueDepth camera and LIDAR.
The cameras can be used to take 3D pictures and video.
The user can overlay AR images and apps over their environment
or close themselves off completely in a virtual space.
The audio system also uses that 3D map to create spatial audio.
What Apple calls audio ray tracing.
I will be very interested to see how completely you can actually isolate yourself.
It doesn't look to be sealed particularly well.
It kind of reminds me more of like the MetaQuest Pro where it's VR.
There's like brain gaps.
Yeah, but there's a ton of gaps where light can get in.
Yeah, definitely.
The Vision Pro can be controlled with eye motion which, from what I've heard,
it's actually surprisingly good.
Voice commands and gestures.
When interacting with people in the immediate environment,
there is an external panel that shows the user's eyes.
That part's pretty interesting to me.
The device has an onboard M2 chip running Vision OS and handling computation tasks,
while a dedicated R1 chip deals with input from the various sensors and cameras.
Community response has been conflicted, viewing the device as impressive,
but really only for enthusiasts with a lot of disposable income given the price.
Snow goggle aesthetic and two-hour battery life.
Others felt that the Vision Pro needed a clearer business use case
and the ability to replace a traditional laptop in order to justify its price.
Mark Zuckerberg addressed Apple's new headset during a company-wide meeting yesterday
where he said that Apple didn't demonstrate any major technical breakthroughs
that meta hasn't already explored.
In quotes, there's a real philosophical difference in terms of how we're approaching this.
In quotes again, our vision for the metaverse is fundamentally social.
It's about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways.
Our device is also about being active and doing things.
By contrast, every demo they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves,
which I don't think is actually true.
No, they did have the one demo where someone walks up to someone who's in a Vision Pro
and they start talking, so we see the eyes feature.
Yeah, the sentiment is fair. It didn't show a huge range of scenarios.
No, it didn't. It mostly showed sitting and enjoying personal entertainment.
I have a lot of questions about Vision Pro.
Are we ready to start the discussion portion of this?
First of all, I got to say, I love the tech.
They've gone 90 hertz, which is fine, probably good enough,
but my God, the resolution of these displays.
I'm so excited to put one of these on.
There's no way to slice it other than that 23 million pixels is a lot of frigging pixels.
At that kind of density, I actually do wonder, could I use a virtual desktop?
However, there are a lot of things about this that feel very developer kit.
Two hours of battery life, I can't even necessarily watch a movie on the plane without being plugged in.
Yeah, two hours of battery life is pretty rough.
It has that external battery pack, though.
I wonder if there's any amount of onboard battery.
I wonder if you could hotswap those battery packs.
That's a good question. It's one I had that I haven't seen answered yet.
If there's a super capacitor on board or something, honestly, I doubt it.
I really doubt it.
Do you think you'd have to shut down to swap?
Is that battery pack, I know it's tethered, but is it tethered just for weight and that cable is hard plugged in?
Do you know if you can unplug from the battery pack to swap them out?
That's a good question.
You can plug the battery in while the headset is plugged in.
There's USB-C on the battery pack.
It looks like swapping the battery pack is going to be pretty much a non-issue.
Yeah, so that's good.
Yeah, it's good.
It feels like a bit of a cheat.
Yeah, but in your scenario that you just described, watching a movie on a plane, that does mean you can do it now.
For your entire flight, you could have this thing on it.
It's magnetic to the headset.
Why did they have to go proprietary for the connection?
I mean, I love magnetic connections. I really do.
But this is just another opportunity for Apple to collect licensing fees on third-party accessories.
And I feel like for a product that's $3,500 already, that's pretty rough.
What are your thoughts on the price point?
I don't know. I expected them to kind of loss lead on it.
I expected it to be affordable, like a consumer-priced dev kit.
And instead, I just don't really understand what I was looking at during the presentation.
It's priced like a professional VR or AR product.
A lot of people don't realize this, but HoloLens, for example, is in use.
It's a real product that is really deployed in real workplaces.
Like I saw it when I was at Intel's fab.
I could perform maintenance on chip fab machinery with a HoloLens, with someone just coaching me,
and with guides that will just show up in augmented reality, and I can do it.
It'll be like, yeah, go pick up this screwdriver. It looks exactly like this.
Pull out this tray. Do this. It's kind of cool.
Serious investments are being made into deploying this technology.
But the difference is that while HoloLens is also expensive, just like the Vision Pro,
HoloLens is marketed for professional applications,
whereas Apple came out with this professionally-priced product, this enterprise-priced product,
and then wouldn't shut up about consumer applications for it.
Is it enterprise-priced, though?
$3,500, yeah.
Okay, hold on. Hold on. Wait, wait, wait.
For the VR industry right now, yes, but if you compare it to Apple products, I don't know.
If you look at the displays that it has, if you look at the chips that are in it, I don't know.
I mean, the HoloLens 2 is literally launched at $3,500.
So it doesn't matter what hardware is in it. I see your point.
The hardware, sure, the hardware, it's got a computer in it.
And at the price of an Apple computer, yeah, fine.
If you look at – exactly, yes.
But that doesn't change the fact that that's not a consumer electronics price point.
Like, it doesn't matter what's in it.
The HoloLens could have really great hardware in it that justifies the price,
but that doesn't change the fact that it is not a consumer price.
Like, the average Joe buys an Xbox –
Are Macbooks not consumer products?
Yes and no. I mean, the MacBook Air is, but the MacBook Air starts at $1,200 or whatever.
It doesn't start at $3,500.
I think Apple's whole thing is, like, selling to people who think they're pros, right?
Like, I don't know. I don't necessarily disagree, but I also don't necessarily think that it's a misstep.
Like, this feels very Apple to me.
But what use case did they show that hasn't had –
Okay, I know what your counterpoint is going to be.
Apple doesn't invent anything. They refine, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But what use case did they show that we haven't had an opportunity for people to say,
oh, yeah, I'm interested in that?
Like, I was reminded, watching it, of this company, Vuzix.
We used to carry their personal cinema glasses back when I was at NCIX,
and I don't know if they're smart glasses or whatever.
Like, I don't even know what their product stack is now.
But they're basically just little – no, they're not that.
Oh, look, it's Google Glass.
Okay, do they just have – okay, I don't even know if they have these ones anymore.
But they're basically just, like, a little personal theater that you just –
yeah, they don't seem to have them anymore.
But you just sit and flip it down, and it used lenses and built-in displays,
and you could watch movies on a 150-inch display from the comfort of your airline seat.
Vuzix apparently doesn't even make that anymore because nobody cared.
So what is it that Apple is going to be adding with motion control and –
man, I got to really wonder about voice control.
Just with how bad voice control is for everything and with how far behind the curve Siri is,
am I going to want to voice control anything?
I do have some faith that Apple could do gesture control well,
but I have serious doubts – pun intended – about what their capabilities are in terms of voice control.
And so I'm sitting here going, what are these use cases that will be unlocked for me?
Okay, I could have my battle station be my headset instead of a bunch of monitors.
Part of their justification for it was, well, you're not going to need a TV or monitors or a sound system anymore.
As long as nobody else needs to look at my TV or my monitors,
which kind of comes back to what the Zuck was saying,
where this thing is designed for people to use it forever alone.
I don't know. It's a weird product. I don't understand what the sales pitch is, and I still don't.
You can have your eyes on it so you can interact with people.
Again, that's a workplace feature.
Why is it that if I'm at home and my kids are badgering me,
well, I guess I better just get out of my mixed reality thing and do something with my kids.
What is the use case where I need to quickly talk to someone,
but I'm not going to get out of my virtual environment?
Work!
Yeah, the main one that I can think of is the airplane discussion, actually.
And this is not going to sell to a ton of people with just this argument,
but it's like, oh, you're sitting on an airplane and the stewardess comes by to give you a snack
and they address you. You have that weird graphic on the screen because you don't have pass-through,
and then you look up at them and your eyes show up on the screen and you can talk to them.
Okay, Mark has tried it, said web surfing is good. Here's my problem with that.
It's the same reason that I don't own a tablet.
Web surfing on a tablet is objectively better than on a phone.
It's just a bigger screen. You can see more, you can read more.
Consumption of content on a tablet, it helps a lot, right?
But I have to go get it. I don't have it on me.
And maybe this is just a me thing, but the times that I surf the web,
because web surfing has a really specific meaning to me.
It's like, hmm, yeah, I wonder what leopards eat, right?
It's this kind of just idle doomscrolling, R slash watch people fail at things.
I don't even know if that's a thing. It doesn't matter.
Because it's like that sort of idle surfing.
Yeah, that's totally something that you could probably do from within a headset.
But man, for me to set aside time to do that, but I'm not at my computer.
I'm not at my computer, which would probably be better.
And I'm not on the can where realistically I don't have my AR headset.
I'm probably just on my phone. It's this tweener. It's this in between device.
I'm going to take my AR headset to the can.
Okay.
People will 100% do that.
I will say that the web browsing comment is actually very interesting to me
because web browsing, anything with text really has been bad for a long time
because the screens have honestly not been good enough.
At the price point that headsets have been being sold at,
the screens have not been good enough
and there wasn't really a great trajectory for them to become good enough
because the price points have been kind of too low.
We haven't seen an index two.
If we had seen an index two, I feel like this would be a bit of a harder sell.
But because we've been in low-end headsets for a long time.
I mean, okay, there's use cases I could imagine for it.
I remember, man, who is it?
Someone I know knows someone.
Oh, yeah, the SO of a friend of Yvonne's has a friend
who does just deranged high-end AV installations for very, very wealthy people.
I remember him telling me about this one that his buddy was telling him about
where the TV pulls into a thing and then a thing slides down
and when it's out, it can be controlled so it can point this way
or it can come out this way so you can watch TV when you're in the kitchen or whatever.
So, okay, I could see wearing your headset.
Assuming the pass-through, they claim 12 milliseconds, which is really impressive.
Assuming the pass-through is good enough that you could conceivably cook with your headset on.
If your TV show dynamically positioned itself somewhere where it was in the corner of your eye
but not interfering with what you're doing.
And with eye tracking, with machine learning, they could conceivably do something like that.
And if someone comes into the room, it automatically makes sure that you can hear them
so you don't trip over your kids or whatever else.
I could see something like that being a valid use case for this thing.
Entertainment while I'm cooking.
The battery life sucks.
Every other sort of category-defining product that I can think of from Apple
takes off when it boasts all-day battery life.
MacBook, all-day battery life. iPhone, all-day battery life.
AirPods, as long as you put them in the case a couple times.
Apple Watch, all-day battery life.
If it doesn't last all day, it doesn't exist.
And that's another big problem for me.
Not only is it this tweener product that I have to go get when I want to use,
but I have to manage charging it.
I hate managing charging things.
Anything that runs out of battery before I'm done with it for the day,
this kind of automatically sucks.
Am I off base here though?
I think partially.
But the reason why I think partially...
So yeah, if it doesn't last all day, it's kind of dead. I agree.
But a lot of the use cases that they're trying to sell this one on
are like normie stuff.
Productivity, creativity, those types of things, right?
A lot of situations where you could just be plugged in.
Yeah, someone in the chat is saying just plug it into your desk.
I can't imagine using it to walk around.
I absolutely can.
But what I think...
Well, a lot of what they're saying is you can get rid of your monitors, right?
So I think their use case is literally that.
I can't get rid of my monitor as long as it has a two-hour battery.
I'm still going to need my monitor.
I might not need five of them.
Yeah, but then I'm tethered to my desk again.
What year is it?
You're tethered to your desk for a while.
It doesn't mean permanently.
You could literally, especially using pass-through,
you could literally get up and go get a water
and go to the washroom and come back and not take it off
because you just unplug, have your battery bank with you,
go do your things, come back, plug back in.
I mean, by that logic, why do I need Bluetooth headphones then?
I'll just unplug my wired headphones, go get something,
and then come back and plug it in.
What I'm saying is that this is being...
No, it is completely different.
What this is being marketed as is a screen replacement,
a monitor replacement.
You're not carrying your monitors around outside.
The replacement is not the same thing.
I'm wearing wired AirPod things right now, right?
Yeah, they just destroyed everyone's ears touching the microphone, by the way.
Oh, I apologize. Sorry.
I actually thought I was on my laptop, Mike, but I guess not.
These are things that we carried around all over the place.
Yeah, we did.
So having it without the wire makes a ton of sense.
The use case that they're trying to replace
or the main one that they seem to be targeting
is not walking around outside.
So I don't think comparing it to AirPods is fair.
No, but it's being tethered again.
I don't want to be always tethered either. I agree.
Because you have the tugging cord
and you have all this other super annoying stuff.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's doomed or anything like that.
I'm not hating on this thing.
I haven't tried it personally yet.
And I told you guys, I can think of use cases for this
that are consumer use cases.
I feel like it's one of those products where the price is enterprise,
the marketing is average consumer,
the real use case is pro slash enthusiast, somewhere in between.
And everybody's going to have to kind of get aligned on this at some point
and it doesn't feel like we're there.
And no, this is not the same as an electric car.
Someone said this coming from the guy with the electric car.
I don't take it on road trips.
It's horses for courses, right?
And I'm just trying to figure out what course this horse is for.
And I don't think Apple seems to know.
That's my main issue.
And I think if they knew, they would have waited to just announce it and launch it and do it.
They didn't have to announce this.
And usually they don't.
Usually they announce and launch.
I think they're trying to figure out what the f*** this thing is.
Honestly.
I feel like the...
What is it someone was talking about?
I don't know if this is official or not,
but someone was saying it's like a $100 billion investment or something.
A hundred billion?
There's no way that's right.
Someone in FlowPlane chat said that.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, if they never used micro OLED technology for anything else ever again,
and if they, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
but they'll reuse a lot of this, I suspect.
Yeah, whatever they invested.
I have genuinely no idea.
I think they're trying to figure out how to get their money back.
Jax Wong says, Linus, that's not true.
Apple also announced the first gen iPhone.
That was like 15 years ago.
16, whatever it was.
Sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, I think they're just trying to poop it out.
It was referenced.
You mentioned in, I believe it was last WAN show,
the Apple Watch Zero, maybe 10 billion.
Yeah, I don't remember what it was.
Whatever their investment was, it was super high.
The Apple Watch Zero or whatever it was called, the first version,
they like retconned.
It feels very much like that.
They got to a point where you can use it, technically.
It does stuff.
It probably looks quite good.
The screens probably look great.
The eye pass through is something that Palmer Lucky was talking about years ago,
two or three years ago, talking about how that was probably going to be the future.
That's not super surprising that someone on that team probably listens to him.
I don't know.
Yeah, and they just need to get it out now.
And they're Apple, so they're going to charge $3,500 for this thing
that they just need to get out.
And it's time to move on from there, I guess.
I don't know. I'm not surprised that they don't have an amazing use case for it.
It is what it is.
Speaking of things that I talked about last week on WAN show,
I would never encourage our community to engage in any kind of brigading.
I did publicly talk about my experience with our landscaping and pool company,
but guys, if you don't have a personal experience, don't leave a Google review.
I will say, though, that after talking about the experience that we've had,
they have really changed their tune.
We have pool equipment as of this morning installed on our property.
So if they continue making progress, maybe we'll actually swim this year,
which would be pretty cool.
That would put us at two years and two months or something like that
to finish the project, which is not great,
but I'll be happy if we actually have anything at the end of it.
In other news, Linus is dead, according to Wikipedia.
That's unfortunate. I'm sorry to hear that.
I guess the flight back from Taiwan didn't go very well.
Yeah, it front-paged the LTT subreddit today
that apparently someone updated Wikipedia to say that I was dead as of today,
but I am, in fact, still alive.
In fact, I can prove to you that this was not prerecorded.
Oh, how am I going to do that?
Dan, Dan, say something unexpected.
Wait, this could be prerecorded.
I don't know. I'm sitting here alone, so I don't know what's really going on.
Oh, my God, Dan.
I don't know. I get it.
Luke, help.
Let's switch over to Wan Show After Dark.
Yeah, sure.
Yeah, sure.
How should I do that?
Yeah, we're going to have to figure this out.
I have Dan to do lights for me.
Nice.
Yeah, give me a sec.
Thanks, Dan. Super professional.
Just walk in front of the camera. Don't worry about it.
I can't do this anymore.
Let's see what Luke comes up with. I'm legitimately very curious.
I can make him look ridiculous as well.
No, no, no, no, no. I want to see what he comes up with.
Yeah.
Let's let Luke do that.
We'll let him do that first.
He's a big boy.
Oh, I think he's closing some blinds.
Oh, we can see him.
Does that change anything?
I mean...
There's less blinds?
Yeah, there's fewer blinds open.
Is it darker?
I mean, I don't know. It's weird.
You're darker, but the room is brighter.
I think I'm going to get involved here.
That makes sense.
No, no, no, Dan, you're not allowed to fix it for him.
Let Luke do it.
Okay.
I'm going to turn off my correction then.
He's a big boy.
There we go.
Oh, well, no, I think you can leave your existing correction on.
Does that change change at all?
Oh my god, it's green.
This is awful.
Everything about this is awful.
The people deserve better.
Hold on, what about these?
What is he even doing?
I mean, okay.
Yeah, that might help.
Oh, whoops.
That kind of works, actually.
I mean, I guess.
How dark is that?
Is that too dark?
Unfortunately.
That's probably okay.
I mean, he can't even hear me, so that's cool.
Oh yeah, of course.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, it's darkish.
Your webcam is definitely...
I literally can't make it darker.
Every light is off.
It's definitely boosting the ISO.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is it too dark?
Nah, it seems fine.
I say go for it.
All right, Dan, hit me.
There you go.
Now you're a little bit darker.
Let's see here.
Hey, DLL, love your content.
You mentioned that you mainly produce things you personally are interested or invested
in.
Will this change with the new CEO?
Kudos to all the screen, all off the screen, making this work.
Cheers.
I mean, no, that's kind of the idea behind the whole chief vision officer thing is that
I'm still supposed to be heavily involved in the content, but just only the content.
I don't know.
Let me just look at my email today and just find stupid stuff that I shouldn't have to
deal with.
I didn't realize how bad it was until I came back and started doing more Linus Media Group
things.
But the amount of things that Linus does, and Avant for that matter, to be honest, that
they just definitely should not be spending their time on is wild.
Okay, we're apparently changing our standardized editing rigs because one of our editors was
having some kind of instability and someone came to the conclusion that that's because
AMD is not stable in Premiere.
I inserted myself going, actually, that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Can you please investigate properly and get back to me?
Why am I dealing with that?
But if I don't, apparently we will just throw away all our AMD Threadripper editing stations
and replace them with Intel ones.
Will that actually fix the problem?
I doubt it because that's probably not the problem.
So, that's today.
Is that the memory leak thing?
I don't know.
I've been dealing with that the last few days, actually.
Premiere, I swear to God.
I don't know.
I mean, is that...
Yeah, like it's a Premiere issue and if all the other editors aren't having the same problem,
then this sounds like it's OS or hardware specific.
Yeah, I don't know.
Anyways.
I mean, actually, I had a lot of stuff on Teams today.
I mean, you know what?
I don't want to do pricing for stuff on lttstore.com.
So, you know, here's our cost for the button-up shirt.
Here's my proposed cost.
I don't know.
Just like you guys figure it out.
I don't care.
Oh, man.
Oh, God.
Here's one that I had to get involved in.
I was sitting trying to use Wi-Fi at the office yesterday
and it wouldn't stay connected for more than about two minutes at a time.
So I messaged our new Infra guy and I was like,
okay, I assume someone's brought this up already,
but there are Wi-Fi connectivity issues in the studio that have been ongoing for some time now.
Do we have a roadmap to having this resolved?
And they're like, yeah, it's been an ongoing issue.
I'm like, okay, but it's not usable and it's interfering with production.
Like at this...
It's been like two weeks and I'm sitting here going,
is there a reason we haven't just taken some random AP that is not Ubiquiti
because apparently it's like a particular model
and some early access firmware we installed, whatever.
It doesn't matter.
The point is go get another fucking AP and plug it in to the server room
and set the SSID the same or something and then just...
So we have something.
We can't have nothing.
We can't have Wi-Fi dropping out every two minutes for people.
This is interfering with our work.
And so I basically went like there needs to be...
We have like an army of APs sitting in inventory.
We need a solution by the end of the day.
And they're like, oh, okay.
The issue was that we turned back on some of the ones
that were running the weird beta firmware and we left them on
and they were interfering with the ones that do work.
And I'm sitting here going, okay, well then the bigger problem
is that we need a process for people to report issues
because if I'm the first person bringing this up
and these have been broken for seven hours today,
then that means that either people don't know how to report these things
or they don't know that they're supposed to
or they didn't notice there was a problem,
which I find difficult to believe,
or nobody is acting on these reports
because maybe they're going to the wrong place.
Why am I dealing with this?
I shouldn't be dealing with this.
This is ridiculous and someone else should deal with this.
So anyway, in the next Monday morning meeting,
there is already, to the credit of the new team member,
there's already a process in place where we're going to inform people
of how to report issues with the infrastructure or Wi-Fi
and they'll be ticketed and actioned on and...
A temporary process?
Sure, that's fine, but we need something.
We can't just have broken Wi-Fi for two weeks.
Yeah.
That's not acceptable.
So...
Yeah.
Fine, something temporary.
Something temporary that works is better than something permanent
that doesn't work.
Sometimes and sort of.
So one interesting thing that I've been dealing with
with some of my new roles that I have to jump into at LMG
is that tons of things are bad
and everything is expected to be not bad immediately.
And one of the problems with that is a lot of the solutions that come up
are also bad, like the solution that we're putting in place.
We have to have some way for people to report an infrastructure issue.
We had a plan that we were literally currently rolling out,
but now we don't have enough time to do it.
So now we have to divert off of doing the actually good thing
and do a bad thing so that we can temporarily have a solution
for an angry CVO guy, which is fine.
And sometimes that's going to be worth it.
Sometimes you have to do that.
I'm not wrong, sir.
Because you can't wait for the perfect solutions all the time.
If you knew how much time...
If I thought you were wrong,
I would have vetoed it and said, no, we're waiting.
Okay, well then all right then.
I don't entirely disagree.
I'm just saying your tone here, it's been quite interesting
because we've had far too much to do, not even remotely.
For months, we had no resources.
We actually had less resources than we had in the past.
And now we have some resources, but there's way too much on the plate.
And it's like trying to juggle, like figuring out what's important.
For a while there, it was like, okay, the absolute peak of importance
is security stuff because of the like last pass problems
and then the breach happening and all that kind of stuff.
Now the iron on that seems to be relatively cold
despite there still being a ton of work to do.
So now the priority has shifted to other things
despite the security stuff not being done.
And it's like, all right, we got to figure out like where the priorities are going to be.
Luckily in this case, spinning up a solution
was more of a manner of like minutes or hour instead of hours or days.
And in fairness to me, I made it clear that that was all I expected.
But the issue we had before was as far as I could tell
based on how long we had had a Wi-Fi outage
and how much it was interfering with people's work,
people didn't know how to report an issue.
They actually just had no idea.
And so...
Part of that is like my unfamiliarity with the team
because there is a tech support channel.
So like I just assumed people would use that.
All right.
Well then, I mean, that could have been the solution.
I'm sure I'm in it, but that doesn't mean that I know.
I'm in every channel.
That's part of the problem for me is like, okay, sure.
I'm not in very many.
I guess I don't know how many channels there are.
I think to be fair to everybody,
it's in the logistics and warehouse tag, not LMG.
Right.
So anyway, the point was not to attack anyone.
The point was that I identified a process issue.
And if my job is to focus on creative,
I can't be chasing down process issues.
That has to be someone else.
That's my entire point.
I'm not blaming any individual person
because I actually understand every breakdown that occurred.
I don't want to.
I don't want my brain space filled up
with every breakdown that occurred
and evaluating the solution to it.
That's supposed to be the job of the rest of the executive team
so I can focus on content.
That's my entire point here.
Chief process officer.
No, no, that's not what I want.
I can do it.
I don't want to do it.
Especially when I have so many processes
to fix on the content side.
We've had a lot of content challenges
over the last couple of years as the team has grown
and we've introduced all these new channels and stuff, right?
Like introduced the lab.
I mean, remember the first couple of lab affiliated
or lab collaborative videos, they sucked.
And I don't blame anyone individually
because it was a team effort.
But we ran into something today
where I was meeting with James and Gary
because I'm like,
hey, what the heck happened with this AMD,
what's it called?
Quad effects.
So we have a video coming on quad effects
which was AMD's crap-tastic dual socket,
dual core response to Intel
absolutely kicking their butt back in 2006.
And I'm like,
what the heck happened with this AMD quad effects?
Taking their butt back in 2006.
We got our hands on a board.
We got our hands on chips
that I thought were AMD FX series
but they were actually quad core operons.
So for a total of eight cores that came out later
but then the script was written around the FX 70 series
which came out before with the platform.
And at no point in this process, did anyone ask,
hey, what's going on here?
Why did we write a video about FX 70
that actually contains operons that came out later
that have twice the core count
and have nothing to do with the entire quad FX platform
and branding in the first place?
And so it was like,
okay, what happened with the writing team
in between me saying,
hey, we should do a video on this platform.
Can we source this motherboard?
And what happened with the labs team
where they got their hands on the motherboard
and tested it with these operon chips
and didn't realize that we were supposed to be talking
about a completely different thing.
And I realized I'm not making a ton of sense now.
And when the video comes out
it's gonna seem like the whole thing
was ideated correctly in the first place.
And we executed perfectly because that's what we do.
We turn it into lemonade.
But what happened was we bought the wrong chips
or rather borrowed the wrong chips.
And then labs didn't think to be like,
hey, these are the wrong chips.
And the writing team didn't think to be like,
hey, it needs to be these chips.
And so we just went whoosh and missed each other.
And I ended up with a script today
that was supposed to be for
how bad is this $5,000 computer from 10 years ago,
part two, the sequel, right?
Cause it's kind of a sequel to that skull trail video
that got like almost 10 million views.
We're like, okay, can we make that lightning strike twice?
Okay, let's try.
Quad effects, let's go.
And nobody actually added up the prices of the components
to make sure they actually cost $5,000.
And we have no way of adding up the prices
if they're not even the right fucking chips, right?
So, and I don't blame anybody
because I totally understand
how from my content idea to this finished script,
all of these breakdowns occurred, but we have to fix it.
And so that involves getting people together in a room.
And basically what I'm saying is
I still have to be a process officer or whatever.
I just really want to focus on the content side
because that's our core business.
And that's what I'm good at.
And what I suck at is communicating all these little things
cause I'm looking at this going, okay,
it should have taken no more than the three minutes
that I took to realize that this
is not a coherent piece of content.
Why is that not obvious to other people?
Oh, right, because they don't have the information
that's in my brain about
what I expected this content piece to be.
So I need to actually have more meetings,
but they need to be about content.
They need to not be about wifi infrastructure.
And meetings are scary
because meetings are an extremely efficient way
to waste as much time as possible.
So you have to be careful
because some meetings can be quite necessary,
but you end up putting yourself in meeting hell
where all you end up doing is discussing things
instead of doing things, which is not great either.
One of the things that came out of the meeting today
is that we're going to completely reconfigure
the writer's meeting.
So instead of having 20 people sit in there
while we come up with ideas for videos,
we're going to have people submit their video ideas
ahead of time.
Jake, James, and I are going to go through and say,
no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no.
We'll probably bring Gary in as well.
So that he has the context for why we're saying yes, no, no,
yes, no, yes, no.
And then when we do the writer's meeting,
we're actually going to treat it more like the skeleton scrum,
which is what we call the quick sort of exchange of ideas
where we come up with what all the major beats
for the video will be.
So that way we're all present for that process,
both writing team and labs.
And instead of just kind of having people pitch video ideas,
we're actually going through and talking about
what this video is supposed to be,
what the finished product is supposed to be
so that we can get aligned on that.
And I think it's going to be a lot more productive,
but maybe it'll suck and maybe we'll have to
reconfigure it from there,
but at least we're trying things because I'd rather try things,
break them, unbreak them, re-break them than do nothing.
I mean, that's how you die.
Stop swimming and die.
Yeah.
Big agree.
Big agree.
Next up, Dan.
Sure thing.
Hey Linus, you've mentioned you're still using a Galaxy Fold 3,
which I also have.
What would get you to upgrade your phone?
S Pen integrated, even bigger unfoldable screen
or the return of the SD slot, et cetera?
Yeah, I mean, S Pen would be pretty cool.
Better, much better camera.
They like really made the camera on this thing
totally kick butt.
Way better battery life.
I'd be super into that.
I mean, yeah, really iterative is fine.
I just didn't see enough iteration on the Fold 4
to be worth bothering to migrate all my stuff.
Speaking of which, how is it even possible
that in the year 2023,
it's not one single account validation
to actually migrate everything?
Why am I entering like 50 login credentials?
It's ridiculous.
And I know the answer.
I understand the answer, but I hate it.
Continuing.
What piece of merch from other people
made you want to start LTT store?
Seems like the drive for quality merch
had to come from some bad guy.
T-shirts, crappy T-shirts.
We kept saying, look, I want American Apparel T-shirts
with proper screen printing,
and they would send us samples and they were good.
And then I would run into people at like packs or whatever,
and they'd be wearing LTT shirts that looked like crap.
I hated it.
Sucked.
Just pre-ordered the ROG Ally.
Should the LTT stick locks be able to fit the joysticks?
Yeah, should be fine.
Hey, DLL.
I love seeing the progress of labs
and the updates on all the serious science
y'all will be able to do.
Any upcoming lab test apparati
that you are psyched to get running?
Ooh, I mean,
I'm personally super psyched for the theater room
just because it's going to be kind of awesome
to just hang in there and check out amazing displays
and, you know, surround sound setups.
I mean, obviously I have the one at home,
but the one here is going to be way better.
Mine's very home-enthusiast grade,
and this one is going to have all kinds of wild stuff
going in and out of it,
so I'm really looking forward to experiencing, like,
micro LED displays and stuff like that.
It's going to be super cool.
By this time next week, I'll be a dad to twins.
Nice.
Luke is AI...
Twins.
Luke, is AI far enough along to help me with raising them?
How long until I can get my own Rosie like the Jetsons?
I think I'm going to need one.
Something that I'm going to say is please don't set your kids up
to interact with it in any way.
Can it help with raising them?
I'm sure it can.
You can ask questions.
I don't know.
I'm sure there's questions you can ask it.
Yeah, exactly.
I would just verify things if it tells you something,
especially if you're asking about something
that might be important.
Like, if you're wondering how to do a certain particular thing,
it might be useful for that.
If you're wondering what to feed a baby or something in that realm,
it might be a little bit more dangerous.
Check the citations.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But yeah, I'm sure it could be useful.
Has there been another time in graphics cards
when a completely new entrant to the market had great tech
and a great deal, but the drivers left a lot to be desired?
For example, the Intel A750 and 770.
I'm going to cheat and totally give you an answer
that you weren't looking for,
and I'm going to bring up that Chinese GPU company.
What are they called?
Moore Threads.
There.
They've got hardware that shows some potential,
but the drivers are atrocious.
Moore Threads.
I'm actually surprised our video on them
didn't get a little bit more traction.
I thought people were going to be all over, you know,
like, oh, what, this weird homegrown Chinese GPU?
What is this thing?
I mean, it does run games, which is more than I expected.
Hi, LLND.
My day job is, hey, we don't know what blank is,
and we want you to find out and replace it.
I am constantly a newbie in complex systems and programs.
Is info gatekeeping a problem at your scale too?
I actually don't think so.
Oh.
Oh, my gosh, yes.
It is for us.
We work on different things, so, like, that's not too surprising.
Oh, okay.
But, like, there's a lot of things not being open source, right?
Oh.
In, like, video delivery and whatnot.
Okay, I was responding internally,
but your answer, I think, is definitely more in line
with the spirit of the question.
Absolutely, there's info gatekeeping.
I mean, even something as simple as figuring out
what a fair rate to charge for sponsorships is,
a closely guarded secret by most creators.
Like, yeah, there's a ton of info gatekeeping, of course.
Well, isn't it, if I remember correctly,
I had a conversation with someone recently about how even
if you work with a brand partner,
they might hide how much, like, click-through you drive
and stuff like that.
Yeah, they don't want you to know.
They don't want you to be able to sell your abilities
as well to other platforms.
Yeah, and they don't want you to come back to them and say,
hey, we know we're performing great for you.
We're raising our rates.
Yeah, that's super frustrating.
Hi, Luke.
Also Linus, Dan, and future me.
I'm 22 and finding myself struggling with growing up.
Time keeps moving forward, but I still feel like I'm 16.
I'd love some advice.
I still feel like I'm probably about 23 as well.
I'm definitely not.
Me too.
I feel it in my bones.
I'm definitely not.
I don't think it changes.
I think when I was a kid, adults were just adults
and they just knew everything or something.
And I still walk around a bus station
and there's, like, children and there's me
and people like me and then there's adults.
And that's kind of still the way I see it.
I don't know.
I'm going to be, like, 85 years old.
I'm going to be like, man, that 95-year-old,
he really has a lot to teach me.
I don't know, man.
Yeah.
What was your first experience hacking,
editing configs, pulling pranks, et cetera?
Yeah, do tell, Luke.
I'm trying to think what the first one was.
You left it as easy as editing configs.
So, like, I don't know because that actually used to just be,
like, a fairly normal way to interact with computers.
You got to remember Linus and I are actually decently old
at this point in time.
So, like, editing config files was just extremely normal.
Yeah, literally, like, this is just something that everyone did.
So I don't know if that would necessarily count for me.
The biggest thing that I think would actually count properly
for what you're talking about would have been messing around in high school.
I used to be friends with this guy.
I don't know if he would want his name to be public,
but I don't name him.
But I was friends with him from elementary school
all the way through high school.
And we used to mess around and, like, he figured out how to send messages,
like, pop-up screen messages from one computer to another computer
in the school.
I used to distribute this screen-melter program,
which you can see if you check out Channel Superfund.
If you look up Channel Superfund screen-melter, you can find it.
That was something I did around that era.
There was a lot of, like, prank shenanigans that happened around that time.
I would consider probably that to be the main intro.
Anything for you, Linus?
Running Quake 3 in widescreen, going in and configuring the, like,
.ini file so that you could run it any way you wanted,
regardless of what was configured in the, like, graphics menu.
I think that was when I got my first widescreen monitor.
I felt like an Uber hacker at the LAN parties with everyone
with their 4x3 Quake 3 and me with my, like, 16x10 giant,
like, Quake 3 monitor.
Obviously, that's really basic, but you asked for the first one,
so I guess that would be it.
Love it.
Hello, LLD Michael, one of the LTX whales here.
Super excited for the event.
Anything you guys can share that you are excited about
that hasn't been talked about yet?
He wants leaks.
Hmm.
I mean, I could talk a little bit about the DIY screwdriver booth.
I guess that's something people are going to be pretty stoked on.
Yeah, DIY screwdriver booth's going to be sick.
We're going to be able to go in, make it yourself.
We're going to have three different stations where you're going to use
an arbor press, which ended up costing us, like, a lot of money
to get all the arbor presses, whatever, I guess.
Who needs to make money?
So you'll press fit together your screwdriver.
We're going to have, I think, a total of six or seven different colors.
I think we're completely on track for that, so that's pretty cool.
What else is shaking?
Oh, we're going to be playing a game from one of my former friends
back at NCIX.
He developed an indie game.
We're going to be playing that at the LAN.
I'm not going to say the name because I don't want people practicing.
I want it to be, like, very organic and everyone having no idea
what's going on because it's a lot more fun that way.
I don't even know what it is, and that's, like, awesome.
Yeah, it's going to be great.
I think we're going to have three lanes for case toss this time,
so we are dramatically scaling up the case toss competition.
Oh, man.
Oh, the creator list on ltxexpo.com is way more complete now.
There's, like, 40 creators on it, so you're going to want to check that out.
I mean, even if you're not into me, you're going to want to be there
because everyone and their dog is going to be there.
It's freaking exciting.
All right, yeah, I think that's enough for now.
That's all I can think of off the top of my head.
I'm sorry.
It's been a very long week.
Oh, we'll get through it.
Would you lose money if everyone got the largest-sized desk pad?
No.
See, that's what drives me crazy about it.
That's what drives me absolutely nuts about other companies' pricing on this stuff.
So much of the cost, whether it's a water bottle or a desk pad or a cable,
is fixed costs.
Like, the machine time to create this is the same,
regardless of whether it's 20-ounce, 40-ounce, 64-ounce, doesn't matter.
The lid is the same, regardless of the capacity of the water bottle.
The finishing of these threads is the same,
regardless of the capacity of the water bottle.
The glass bead that goes in the bottom to create the vacuum seal is the same.
The QC is the same.
The box, I mean, it's the same printing time.
It's the same folding time.
It's the same packing time.
It's the same handling time, putting it on the skid, handling it, shipping it out.
Most of the costs of this are the same, regardless of the size.
So why is it that when I buy something like this from somewhere other than LTT Store,
the one that's twice the internal capacity costs like twice as much?
That's not actually how that works.
It is marginally more material,
but material is a small part of the cost of the actual finished good.
And so whether it's desk pads or water bottles or whatever else,
this has always driven me crazy,
because the pricing is just completely divorced from the reality of the costs.
Yes, we do pay more for the largest desk pads compared to the smallest ones,
and we have to kind of set our pricing based on what we anticipate the most popular SKUs will be
and to ensure that we're making a reasonable margin.
And yeah, if all of them were the biggest one, that wouldn't hit our margin targets,
and it might not be sustainable, but we wouldn't be losing money either.
So I just, yeah, just, is it irritating?
I guess that's the short version.
No, and when other companies price things like that,
they are just charging you a lot more because they can,
which is not a crime.
It's not wrong.
It just doesn't make sense to me.
Hey, Luke and Linus.
I was very excited to see the anechoic chamber in use.
Which upcoming labs test are you guys most excited to see?
I think we kind of answered this one already.
Okay.
Good evening, DLL.
Luke, as a fellow bearded individual,
I would like to know what, if any, beard facial care you do.
Conditioner.
None, and I'm going to be cutting it off when I get home, so.
You should.
It looks awful.
Yeah.
It looks like.
It's too far.
It looks like ball hair on your chin.
I think that's, I mean, technically it's, it's, it's huge, right?
Like I think that's literally somewhat accurate.
I'm going home to shave immediately.
We knew you were going to say that, and you had to say it.
Oh man.
Smaller creators like Fran Blanche have said their communities have ceased growing and YouTube is pushing them to buy ads in order to grow.
How does this reconcile with your prediction that niche channels are unable to grow?
I don't know the question cut off.
Sorry, what?
Apparently YouTube is pushing smaller creators to buy advertisements in order to grow.
I have never heard of that before.
Fake?
Well, I'm not going to say fake.
I'm just saying I have, YouTube has never encouraged me to, to, to buy.
That's a Facebook play.
Yeah.
And I could definitely see YouTube doing it if it thinks that you're a business that is trying to like advertise things.
I'm surprised that they would market it towards creators wanting to grow.
But I mean them not showing it to you Linus, but them actually showing it to a small creator.
There being a difference there does kind of make sense.
So I don't know.
I could see it.
I'm just surprised.
I'm just looking at some of Fran's more recent content.
It looks like Social Blade.
It looks like she's succumbed to the curve as I call it, at least to an extent.
There was a big peak in May of 2021.
And since then, it's been kind of an inconsistent ride here.
It's tough.
I mean, it's fickle.
We talked about this a couple of weeks ago.
I think when, or maybe it was last week when you were saying, you know, that other creators expressed to you that they don't really understand why I worry about this stuff.
And I had to actually tell someone internally who works on one of our other channels.
I was, or no, I didn't say it yet, but I came up with a really cool way of explaining this.
And I had meant to say it.
I think I still have their message marked unread.
But basically, you should always be terrified that this month's decline is just the first month of your descent into a crater in the ground, right?
Like every time you're not growing or at least holding steady, you are on your way into oblivion.
And it doesn't matter how big your channel is.
If you drop by 20% month over month, you will end up in a crater in the ground.
That's just how it works.
And the bigger you, the higher you fly, the harder you fall, right?
Like it's a really unforgiving game.
It's really challenging.
And small creators, you know, it's easier for them to break out these days between shorts, between the algorithm being stronger when it comes to serving attractive content to people.
But I think that there's also less security in subscriber numbers.
Having a quarter million subscribers doesn't mean that a quarter million people get a notification when you upload anymore.
So it's scary.
So you can rise faster, but you can also fall faster than you ever used to be able to.
It used to be a really long tail on channels that, you know, weren't really hitting on all, firing on all cylinders anymore.
But now it doesn't really seem that way, no matter how big you are.
That's very unlikely.
I don't know if we're going to have all the manufacturing done for the new carabiner poles by then.
Part of the reason it's taking so long is just the volume that we have to produce.
We have to make like 170,000 zipper poles or something like that.
Like I remember having this conversation with Kyle when I was like, hey, what the heck?
We don't have, we don't have enough extra screwdriver bits for the screwdriver.
And he's like, well, you just increased your order of screwdrivers by, you know, 20,000 or whatever it was at the time.
Each of those contains eight bits.
That's, what does that work out to?
160,000 bits.
Did you ever think of that?
I'm like, oh, that's a lot.
And he's like, and you also ordered all these replacement bit sets.
That's like, and it was like another 500,000 bits.
He's like, do you have any idea, like what kind of volume that, do you have any idea how many bits 500,000 screwdriver bits is?
I'm like, oh, okay.
So it's the same thing.
Like these carabiners, you can't just, at the scale we're operating at, if we'd only sold 500 bags, it would be easy.
We would just order 2000 carabiner things and we would send them out, but we can't really start until we're ready to go.
And that means producing at scale.
So the ship is just slower to maneuver.
I don't make the rules, but we will get everyone taken care of.
I would have to find a way to keep myself in check, especially ethics wise.
I mean, I count on the team for that, right?
Like on the one hand, I feel like I still remember a lot of what it was like when I was not where I am today.
But on the other hand, I mean, yeah, I value creating an environment where people can challenge me, where people can tell me I'm being an idiot.
Or an asshole, right?
Like it's really important to me.
And so there's, I would like to think, I know Luke will say literally anything to me.
So Luke, have I ever retaliated, have I ever retaliated towards anyone for a legitimate criticism?
I don't always agree, obviously.
No, no.
Yeah, no.
Retaliation definitely would not be the right term.
Yeah.
I was going to say, like, you'll defend your position or you'll debate.
Sure.
Of course I will.
But I don't think retaliation would be fair to say.
I think there's probably been situations where someone does that repeatedly in an aggressive manner and are also wrong and stuff where it's like very negative and it's not constructive, etc.
But I think you framed this with it being constructive.
So maybe that's not valid.
I mean, obviously I'm not going to suffer fools, but like, I'll tell someone.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm sorry, the conversation's over and we aren't doing that.
I don't want to hear about it anymore.
But that's only after I've tried quite a few times to explain it.
But that's not a retaliation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hey, LDL.
With the clear prioritization of profits over everything, like AI safety, should job seekers start to question the morality of working for big tech or just build the basilisk for money?
Stop talking about the basilisk.
I mean, should we question the morality of working for anyone?
Like, what about the morality of working for me, Dan?
Hmm.
I mean, are we putting small content creators out of business?
Are you wasting people's lives?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the number of hours that are spent consuming LTT content, should they be out, you know, digging things instead?
Harvesting?
Should they be doing something more productive for society?
I don't know.
I kind of think you can attack the morality of just about anything.
I know this is kind of a straw man argument that I'm creating here, but I think it's also not completely invalid.
I think you absolutely should.
Like, unquestionably, for sure.
You can decide where that line is for yourself.
So like, you might align with the approach that Linus Media Group seems to be able to take as far as you can observe from the outside.
You might better align with something else.
You might not necessarily align with a company, but you might be okay with what they do.
That's also fine.
You can accept it, but not be enthusiastic about it.
That's okay.
But I think you should have, in my opinion, you can do whatever the hell you want.
In my opinion, you should have a line that you don't cross.
I personally have a line.
There have been offers for my employee that have come in that are highly lucrative, but I'll be working for companies that I have publicly condemned.
Aren't you glad you didn't go to Twitch?
There's an example.
Lead to that.
But it's just like, no, I'm not going to go do that.
Because I don't need certain things that certain amounts of money would get me.
I genuinely know that's not something that I'm going to care about at all.
And if you watch the Wham! show a lot, you probably also know that.
And I would find it not okay to work for a bunch of these companies.
I've had people apply to Floatplane from Fang style companies that are making monstrous amounts of money.
That complain about the morality of certain things that their companies have done and talked about how they're excited to work here.
Not necessarily that we're this shining beacon of perfect actions all the time.
But I guess in their minds, they align better with our approaches to things.
And then they figured out that they wouldn't necessarily make as much.
And they were like, well, that's a deal breaker.
And I'm like, yeah, well, why do you think some of these companies make a bunch of money?
I don't know, man.
That's up to the individual.
I can't tell you what to do.
You have to pick what's important to you and what isn't and act accordingly.
I think a lot of people's morality and stances on things completely stops the second any amount of convenience or any amount of financial benefit comes into play.
But it is what it is.
Hey, LLD.
Linus, have you thought about having a conversation with Framework to put the FROR systems air jet in the laptop?
I made that connection.
At this point, it's in their hands to figure out if there's any way for them to work together.
I do think that there'll be challenges.
I think that Framework is already a really small company that's not manufacturing at huge volumes.
And so integrating a very premium, expensive product like a FROR cooling system may not be in the cards for the time being.
But in the longer term, yeah, I'd love to see them work together.
This is one from Joseph. It doesn't seem to be a question.
Dan, if you curate this, I will buy more stuff.
I curated that. Go ahead and buy more stuff, please.
That's what I thought.
Hey, LLD.
Is Floatplane profitable enough for us to get an exclusive series, not behind the scenes, with LDT or MAC address style of editing of content that usually wouldn't work on YouTube?
No, because anything that we're going to put that kind of work into would work on YouTube.
I think that it's a really odd one to me.
I think there are certain verticals where, yeah, you create content that wouldn't work on YouTube and you could upload it to an alternate platform and you could kind of make it make sense.
I think something like firearms content would be an example of that.
But in most cases, if you're producing something that's really good, you should upload it to YouTube.
Where even more people will see it and then they will discover your content and then they will subscribe and then snowball effect.
That's a really good thing.
And if you're worried about what the impact will be on your primary channel, then you upload it to a secondary channel and then you still let the algorithm do its thing and hopefully you get some discoverability and you get some additional revenue out of it.
I don't know. It's not a strategy that I think personally makes a ton of sense.
Okay, we're just about at the end here. Luke, if you want to look through some of the potentials.
And this is coming from someone who executed a similar strategy.
When we created nerd sports, it was exclusive to vessel. The only reason we did it exclusive to vessel is because they paid us a giant bag of money to do it.
It's not because it's not because the economics actually made any sense, which is why they shut down the project.
And we ultimately got the rights back and posted it to YouTube.
Hey, Dan and the talent love you guys and the content for someone who's hoping to get a job with LMG or labs in a year or two.
What's your advice for building a portfolio and skill set? Thanks a ton.
I would focus more on doing something that you're going to be very driven to do than doing something that you think is going to particularly look great in a portfolio specifically for us.
Yeah, there's lots of other companies.
You mentioned recently about how you should, when you're doing something for your portfolio, you should solve your own problem.
So like find something in your life that you think you could do better and make a tool for that in order to do it better.
That's a really good way to do it, because if you're going to actually like deploy this thing and then continue to use it, you will probably maintain it, which will result in it being pretty good for your portfolio.
You would be very surprised the amount of people who apply and then have like a personal website linked as like, they'll be like, here's my portfolio and it's their personal website.
And they're like, I have other projects on that website that link out to you and you click on their personal website and it doesn't even load at all.
It's like, you should use the things so that you know that it's going to work. That would be very helpful.
Someone in the FlowPlane chat said, I have no portfolio but 10 plus years experience. Yeah, but this is not the scenario of the person that's asking the question.
So for the person who's asking the question, I would look to yourself for inspiration and try to find things that you can improve in your own world, just like Theo said.
Dear DLL, are there any news on a yearly payment option for the grandfather tier on FlowPlane? Without discount, of course.
I really would like to pay yearly. Thanks for all you do.
Not this second, but we there have been a lot of improvements to the payment system recently, so maybe that will come at some point.
Not getting things on transaction fees every time would be great. Sorry, Dan.
No, that's okay. Delay. In aerospace, we use V slash AR for human design studies to check install and repair methods of equipment.
Once the head of the lab flexed on me by pulling out a 4090. What's the best tech flex you've ever had?
Biggest tech flex? Okay, you know what? No, I do know the answer to this.
Way back in the day, once upon a time when I was working with Ivan, who you guys might remember from the fastest gaming PC ever video from Secret Shopper.
He worked here for a while, but we worked together back when we were at NCIX.
And when Nvidia launched the GTX 590, okay, so dual GPU, whatever architecture that was, Fermi, I guess. Yeah, Fermi card.
They shipped it in this Nvidia stenciled ammo box that had, it was a green ammo box that had Nvidia logo stenciled on the side in yellow.
And inside they had like packing peanuts and stuff, but they also had the card.
And then they had these dog tags with like the name of your media outlet on them. Super cool.
So when I unboxed it, I sent him a note. I said, hey, you got to come down to the studio right now.
And when he came down, I told him, this is my favorite cannot has.
And I would call cannot, I would basically tease him because he's such a collector.
Whereas like for me, like I've never really been as sentimental as him.
So I would always just kind of like bug him about anything that I got that was highly collectible.
It meant far more to me how much he coveted it than the actual item itself,
even though usually I would just end up forgetting about things and he would just take them.
But I was like, this is my favorite cannot has. I just wanted you to see it, but you cannot has.
And I showed him the ammo box. It wasn't even the card itself.
Like that's because that's not what's valuable to him.
Like he he would he would obviously, you know, love to have a fast GPU who wouldn't.
But it was the ammo box and the dog tags that were like cannot houses unique items.
And guys, if it sounds like I'm a complete, I mean, sure, maybe a little bit.
But also, you've got to understand. Just look at any of our interactions on camera.
He dished it to he had it coming. So, yes.
Did I take every opportunity to rub a cannot has in his face? One hundred percent.
Did he deserve it? One hundred percent.
So that I think that was my favorite tech flex was that GTX 590 ammo box and dog tags at the ammo box.
I actually do still have. And the only reason I cared about it was because of how much Ivan wanted it.
Love that guy. Actually, I haven't heard from him in like a couple of months.
I should probably ping him. But there you go.
That's my favorite cannot has all of the gold swift tech water block.
OK, I do like my gold swift tech water block. I held on to that. But that wasn't really a cannot has.
That was there's like 200 of them. The ammo box, though.
Is there anyone on the staff that completely changed your attitude or mindset about your job after interacting with them?
What was the change? Not currently on staff anymore.
For me, I don't know. I think this is just directed at all of us. But Brandon had me like approach video creation in a very different way.
I didn't care, like at all when we started. It's like stand behind desk talk.
That's probably fine. Right. And he inspired me to like try different things and.
And. Just not not settle for the exact same approach every time, I guess.
That was a good answer. He had a lot of influence here. He actually uploaded a new video yesterday or is either today or yesterday.
It's doing pretty well. So maybe go check it out. Cool. I haven't actually watched it yet.
A DLL. Greetings from Germany. We're having a seven day LAN party in August.
How can we get everyone to play together and stop subgroups from forming? Love the show.
It's hard, honestly. It's really hard. Like I I've struggled with it at pretty much every LAN.
You have to kind of like go around and corral people me like, OK, let's go.
I don't have the game. I don't have the patch. Ah, it doesn't matter. Come on. Come on. Install it. Install it. Let's go.
Come on, come on, come on, come on. And it's really tough because, you know, obviously I don't want to encourage you to just be like a pushy jackass.
Right. But the flip side is like if you've got seven players in a left for dead lobby and someone's being like, I'm just going to like browse Facebook right now.
No. Get in the lobby. I don't care if you're not the best at the game. We'll balance the teams. Don't worry about it. Participate. Drives me crazy.
And that's all I got for curated. So we're going to dive into potentials if you guys are OK with that.
I see you're doing the top. I'll start at the bottom if you want. Or just carry them.
MKBHD just had his second appearance on Hot Ones by First We Feast.
Has Linus ever been invited and should we be trying to make it happen? Would he go if he was invited?
I don't know if I've ever been invited. Hot Ones. I'm going to check my inbox.
If you have been invited and missed it, I will be very upset.
OK, we have the internal hot ones challenge we did on work occasion. That was fun.
I don't think so. I'm going to be it's going to be pretty embarrassing if they did invite me at some point and I and I didn't do it.
It really depends. Like if the location is really far and it's a time consuming production, the opportunity cost of having me out of office is really, really, really high.
So I can't promise that if they invited me that I would be able to, because it depends on scheduling.
Right. But I'm not opposed to it. Seems fine. I like spice.
My DLL with the price of Apple's new VR AR headset. Do you who do you think Apple is targeting or is the price just for the first gen headset?
I think we've talked about this a fair bit on the show today.
I was trying to text answer that before you carried it.
Hi, L.L.D. Are there any plans on releasing short length versions of the premium joggers pajama pants or other future releases?
Short length pajama pants, pajama shorts madness. But we do have a onesie coming.
Yes, a one piece. Oh, boy. With a hood. We didn't do the butt flap, though.
Bridgette forbade me. Really? She forbade it. Oh, Joseph has purchased more stuff.
Hey, thanks, Joseph. Thank you very much, Joseph. Hi, DLL.
Always curious if someone LMG had a side channel streams or tick tock blow up, go viral.
Would you support them as a partner under LMG? Rather, they split off like Tarzan and others in the past.
Tarzan, Taran. I think he means Taran.
OK, well, the reason Taran left is not because you like had a video that blew up or anything like that.
We just you know, we grew apart. It was time. And that happens, right?
Like you can't I'm not I'm not married to anyone who works here and they're not married to the company.
Right. Like life changes. Well, you. Yeah.
But anyone else like. And quite literally, Yvonne.
Yeah. Figuratively, figuratively. Got him. Got him. Oh, my gosh.
You're worse than Twitch. Really? OK. Any who.
The point is that, you know, I would like to think that we tried to part on good terms with people.
I mean, I am still, you know, occasionally in touch with Taran, occasionally in touch with Brandon.
You know, I, I'd love to be on friendly terms with people. I ran into I ran into a former employee, Jesse, when I witnessed an accident.
And so I had to like wait around and they were just like walking down the street.
I was like, yo, like, yo, like, you know, you know, obviously we don't want to part on bad terms, but it's not always possible.
Right. Like sometimes in any in any breakup, you know, sometimes one or both parties are are unhappy about some aspect of it.
And so, you know, it's just, you know, it can be it can be it can be challenging.
I forget what the question was. What was it again?
I think if somebody had a channel split off, would you support them?
Yeah. So we'd like to. I mean, you know, obviously I just talked about Brandon's video like minutes ago.
There was a little bit of a clarification. Support them as a partner under LMG.
What does that even mean?
I guess they're still employed.
Like, like we had an opportunity there with with they're just movies.
Yeah. And when people are driven like there was a lot of internal pressure as far as my understanding goes, but I don't have a lot of visibility on what happened here.
But I believe there's a lot of internal pressure to get game linked going.
So like that's why that's happening. And it sounds like.
Car linked or auto quickie or whatever it ends up being called.
I don't know what kind of channel it would be, but some type of car channel is like almost an inevitability at this point.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Hey, Linus and Luke. I recently watched the video explaining the problem with your Sony HT-A9 surround speakers.
Have Sony responded to your video? Has any company reacted negatively towards a video?
I don't think Sony has responded in any way, but definitely we've had companies react negatively to videos.
Don't don't imagine anything. But I mean, you think Intel was happy about the walk in the rain?
Oh, I probably I'd say probably the biggest like baby response to a video was Cooler Master over that mechanical keyboard that they released.
Remember the one, Luke, where they said it felt like a mechanical keyboard and you and I tried it and we were like, no, they called them like giant stupid liars.
Didn't we do that live? I don't remember.
They were so butthurt. I don't think they dealt with us for a long time after that.
I'm just like, OK, I'll see you when you're back.
I was good friends with a lot of people at Logitech.
And then I showed that their headphones will just fall off your head if you tilt your head back.
And they like. We were not good friends anymore.
Really? I was ready to keep being good friends. But yeah, yeah, that like stopped.
Oh, interesting. You know, it's one of those things where it's not the company, right?
It's the people. Companies are made of people. And so, you know, you could you could ask like, you know, have you ever had a negative interaction with a sword?
And it's like, well, no, but these steel molecules at the front of this blade definitely passed through my body.
Right. So I don't know. It's hard to say. That's a phenomenal analogy.
I just want to commend you for that. That's excellent. Oh, my gosh.
The Nvidia thing with the hardware unboxing, obviously there are some people at Nvidia that are not fans.
But I think Nvidia overall, you know, probably wants to work with us in a constructive way.
I don't know.
What is your favorite movie or TV show to watch after a new media center set up?
I love How to Train Your Dragon, The Hidden World. I actually think it's a much crappier movie than the other two, especially the first.
But it's beautiful. And Canto, too, I think is a mediocre movie that looks amazing.
I shouldn't say mediocre movie because the vast majority of it is pretty good, but I'm just kind of tired of Disney's sort of ambiguous villains.
Like, give me like a give me a baddie for a change, you know, like the the grandma is overbearing or something.
It's like, OK, so they like everyone just recently.
Like, I don't want you don't have to teach me things all the time.
Like, it's fine. Life and the world itself is as complicated and crazy and wild and weird as it needs to be.
What if there are as many lines of play as possible?
What if someone was like actually, you know, Paul Bernardo and just an evil, awful person?
I don't know who that is, but you're serious.
OK. Yeah, sounds sounds bad.
But yeah, like I, I kind of miss it being easy to consume content, like having stuff that's like deep.
It makes you think I like the stuff is fine, but not everything needs to be that way.
Sometimes I just want to go watch a movie or play a game that is about the good people.
Just like kicking the stuffing out of the bad guys, which is what should have been.
And I don't want it to be weird. I don't want it to be like, oh, I feel bad for the bad people.
I just want them to be bad people and I want them to lose. Like, yeah, that's it.
Yeah. And people are like Encanto's perfect. No, it's not perfect.
They chickened out at the end. They chickened out.
They should spoiler alert. They should not have gotten their special powers back.
That was the whole point. And you can always smell it.
You can smell it from a mile away when the movie makes its way completely through the arc.
It ends with such a perfect, beautiful message that it doesn't matter if you're magical.
What matters is that you build community.
And then it's like, oh, but we learned that. So now we get to be magical again.
No, that wasn't the point.
And you can tell a writer somewhere.
Their soul died when the committee that came in and wrote this movie and fixed it for them changed that.
Sucks. Really sucks.
Yuck.
OK, last couple here. Long time fans since LG three four U M nine five days.
Linus, do you plan on doing a short circuit on the RG ally showing SSD upgrade paths and to extender for full size SSD and a prerelease with updated firmware?
I'd love to do an ultimate ally.
I don't know exactly what that'll look like.
But I'd love for it to include, like, extended battery and, you know, 80 millimeter.
Yeah, 80 millimeter. Yeah, 80 millimeter. I'm not doing cool stuff like that.
Good morning, Ellen L from Germany. I preordered the ally but could not find a cool travel case.
Are you still working on the steam deck case or will it be too chunky for the ally?
It's on the back burner right now, I'm afraid.
But someday, yes, we do want to do a carrying case as for the gigabyte 30 series cards, Kevin.
The only thing I've heard about this is that I happened to cross a Lewis Rossman video where he talked about that it is apparently a thing that sounds bad.
I don't know anything about it other than that, though, I saw that like today.
And I think that's it.
I will see you again today. No, not today. Next week. Same bad time. Same bad channel.
Bye.
The.