What is up, everyone? Welcome to the WAN show! Oh, sorry, I should be quiet. Luke's not feeling well.
Yeah, so you have to whisper around me.
Intel's branding got even dumber. It's sort of amazing. We'll be talking about that.
It's been a heck of a week in AI. We're going to be talking about that as well.
Luke's going to get all caught up because he has spent the week sleeping.
What else are we going to talk about today, Luke?
The escapist. They all escaped. They're gone.
I don't know all the details behind it, but I know that it happened.
Also, I don't know, Bored Ape people? They're all blind now. That's not true.
That's not actually true, but there was a pretty...
It's like some crazy level of UV lights were used at an event and it gave some people some temporary eye issues or something.
Yeah, NFTs. They're the future.
So funny.
This show is brought to you today by SignalWire, Grammarly, and UPDF.
I want to jump right into Intel's branding getting dumber than ever.
Yeah, how's that even possible?
I know, right? First of all, I mean, okay. Let's go way back. Remember when they launched Core 2 Duo?
Yeah.
Okay. What was up with that? You had to say, I bought a Core 2 Duo Dual Core.
If you wanted to describe the processor you got, like, the whole thing, the whole branding of Core.
I bought a 2-2-2-2.
Especially in the context of how recognizable their Pentium brand was at the time.
Yeah.
How strong that brand was at the time.
It just made no sense.
Okay, then the brand had weakened a little bit, but I never felt any of this was really necessary.
I still thought it was really strong.
I don't think just about anything could have been dumber than Core.
Core 2.
And then instead of Core 3, we get second-gen Core?
The f*** are you talking about?
Like, the whole thing.
Anyway, we've all kind of accepted it now, right?
So, you got your i7 and your i5 and your i3.
They eventually added i9s, which were rumored at the very beginning.
It was supposed to be, this is my understanding, it was supposed to be that on the consumer side of things,
you had your Core i3, which was your very basic, like, low-end,
but then also you had Pentiums down there for some reason, I don't know, whatever.
And then, like, Celeron still exists.
Do you really need six tiers?
Okay, it doesn't matter.
The point is, you had your Core i3, that's your low-end.
You had your Core i5, that's your mainstream gamer.
You had your Core i7, that's your, like, premium enthusiast gamer, overclocker, whatever else.
And then that was on the consumer side.
Then you had high-end desktop.
And it was, as far as I knew, supposed to be that those were Core i9s.
I'm talking way back, I'm talking, like, 12, 13 years ago or whenever this was.
And then they just didn't.
They were just all Core i7s.
And the whole thing made no sense because you had this product stratification
that was, like, basic, mid-tier, high-end consumer,
and then, like, high-end, like, workstation slash enthusiast gamer, whatever.
What?
And they were so much more expensive.
So you could have two different Core i7s from the same generation,
and one of them is quad-core, and one of them has, like, 10 cores in it or whatever.
Yeah, it was wacky.
And then, so, and then, instead of Core 3, Core 4, Core 5, we went with 2nd Gen Core,
3rd Generation Core, 4th Generation Core, and then so on and so forth.
So, anyway, they've done away with this i3, i5, i7 thing, supposedly, for the upcoming Meteor Lake refresh generation.
And, instead, what we're getting is Core Ultra 5, Core Ultra 9, Core Ultra 7,
which is, like, honestly, kind of better than the whole i thing, in my opinion.
But here's where things get really stupid.
These are going to be 1st Gen Core or 1st Gen Core Ultra.
What?
So, what would have been called a 14th Gen Intel Core i9-14900K?
Or, so, not what would have been called.
That's previous naming scheme.
New naming scheme is Intel 1st Gen Core Ultra 9-185H.
What a name.
It's so long.
Is it a competition, at this point, in the industry, to make your products as unsearchable and undecipherable as possible?
We already have a 1st Gen Core.
It was stupid the first time.
We don't need another one.
Anyway.
Also, like, if you're going to say 1st Gen, like, they said, like, the old naming scheme, even, this is weird.
Like, 14th Gen Intel Core, you don't have to put 14 anymore.
Really.
If you put 14th at the beginning.
You know what I think it is?
It's because they're going to shorten the product names.
But if that's going to happen, then just don't make it long in the first place.
I think Intel just has a really high sensitivity around the number 14.
I think that's a traumatic number for them.
Why?
Because they were stuck on 14 nanometer for, like, a zillion years, and it cost them their business with Apple.
Yep.
So that's what I actually think this is about, because this is too dumb to be a rational decision.
This is obviously an emotional decision.
We refuse to do it again.
Current benchmarks are not great for 14th Gen Meteor Lake, but that doesn't necessarily tell us anything that...
Wait a minute.
Current benchmarks are poor.
Did I say 14th Gen Meteor?
No, okay, no, sorry, not 14th Gen.
Whatever it is.
Core Ultra...
Who cares?
Meteor Lake.
Current benchmarks are apparently poor, but these could be very early samples.
They're not optimized for the particular benchmark that was running.
This is a leak.
And in other news, Intel has discontinued their cryo-cooling technology after four generations,
with 13th Gen Raptor Lake chips being the last ones supported.
Can we, can we pour one out, can we pour one out here for, for Intel's cryo-cooling technology?
There.
It's just, well, I don't know.
I don't have a glass, so I, this is my only, this is my only fluid vessel right now.
The point is...
What about yourself?
Do you, do you, are you familiar with Intel, with Intel cryo, cryo-cooling?
Uh, not really.
Okay.
But I am a fluid vessel.
Super cool.
I think the neatest thing about Intel's cryo-cooling initiative is that a company as corporate and
boring as Intel ever got to get a project like this out of the test lab.
Basically, what it was, was a Peltier-assisted water-cooling setup that had a whole software
component that monitored the temperatures both of the CPU and also the surrounding area so
that it could chill the CPU as cold as it could go without crossing over the dew point
threshold and causing condensation.
That sounds sick.
Cool.
Would have been absolutely amazing on AMD where the chip power consumption wasn't so
high that it overwhelmed the tech.
The, sorry, when I say tech, I don't mean the technology, the thermoelectric cooling Peltier
effect module.
So, the way that a, the way that a Peltier works in this context, or, okay, first let's
start with how a Peltier works if you're not familiar with them.
Basically, you power them and then through some kind of wizardry, I forget, it's the kind
of thing that at some point I knew, but I have to look it up every time I make a video about
it because I forget.
Because, believe it or not, I can't remember everything.
So, the point is, it's a powered module, you feed it DC power, and then you have a cold
side and a hot side.
And the hot side would go to a water cooling system that pumps fluid through a block and
then over to a radiator.
And then the cold side would sit right onto the CPU integrated heat spreader, pulling that
heat and then getting rid of it on the hot side.
Here's the problem, though.
Peltier will typically draw anywhere from, I mean, if you were to try to cool a modern
CPU with it, anywhere from 150 to, I mean, you'd have to...
Yeah, they're really brutal.
Yeah, you'd have to be in excess of, you know, 300, 400 watts in some cases.
And I don't even think Peltier modules, the size of a CPU, even go that high.
I think they max out in the 250 range.
So, that's problem number one, is that we're somewhat limited by the size of these Peltier
modules.
Problem number two is that when I talk about them being rated for 150 watts or 250 watts or
whatever, that is the power they are sucking.
So, if you are running that Peltier at full tilt, if it is actually powerful enough to
cool, like, a high-end gaming processor today, you are adding, like, hundreds of watts to
your CPU, or to your CPU, to your system power draw.
Oh, yeah.
And it gets even better.
Remember how I said that we've got that water cooling loop with the radiator to dissipate
the heat from the CPU?
Well, what happens to all the heat that's generated on the hot side of that Peltier from the Peltier
effect?
Well, you've got to dissipate that, too.
So, Peltiers are the kind of thing that have been done time and time again in the enthusiast
space.
So, this was like, in standard Intel fashion, other brands made it, but their tech was on
it?
Yeah, and it was their software that ran it.
Yeah.
Yeah, super, super cool.
Oh, so they're abandoning the software, too?
So, they're abandoning the whole shebang.
That's unfortunate.
Here we go.
Here we go.
So, going all the way back to 2000.
Oh, wow.
That's a very early Swift tech water block.
I love it.
This is not a Peltier one.
Shoot.
I was trying to find...
They had an old block from way back in the day.
I have a blown apart picture on my screen right now that shows the...
Here it is.
MCW6500-T for tech.
Peltier-assisted water block.
This is so cool.
You can tell Swift tech had glown up a little bit by that point.
Yeah.
226 watts.
Dang.
Dang.
So, this has been tried many times over the years.
I forget.
Someone did a Peltier-assisted CPU heatsink.
While you look that up, I'm going to show my screen because I actually like this little
model that they did.
I didn't realize our camera was going to be covering it, but you can see this white panel
in here.
That would be the tech or the Peltier if you're wire running out of it.
So, it's like...
It's a little layer.
It's a fairly small...
Like, they're actually very...
Yeah.
Small.
But they...
You can pack a punch if you're willing to power them.
I'm trying to find...
I'm trying to find the awful heatsink that basically, as far as I can tell, didn't really
make it out of sort of first initial small production run.
Yeah.
I just...
I can't find this one right now.
Maybe someone can link it to me in the chat.
The point is, it's been tried a lot of times, and every time, we come up against the same
barriers, which is finding Peltiers that are performant enough to remove the heat from
modern processors, which just run so, so hot.
Oh, also, that Peltier effect takes place over the entire thermoelectric cooling module.
So, if you have a super, super hot spot, like on Intel CPU, and then mostly less heat around
the outsides, you're going to need a spreader in between, which adds some inefficiency, like,
in addition to the actual CPU's spreader.
So, you have to spread it out so you can actually make use of that whole surface area.
And the higher the wattage, typically, the larger the Peltier module.
So, you've got these size limitations, you've got these performance limitations, and then
you've got these...
How do I remove all of this bloody heat limitations?
Like, if you actually had a 400-watt Peltier that could actually cool a turbo-wing, modern,
like, 14th core, 13, like, 13900KS or something like that, when it's running an all-core load,
you would be crapping out 800 watts of heat into your room.
Literally double, and that assumes perfect efficiency.
Well, no, it doesn't, because any inefficiency loses heat.
The point is, you would be just cooking yourself, or paying more for, you know, air conditioning
or whatever else to cool down your stupid furnace of a computer.
However, what I liked about this, and I genuinely did like this product, even if I would never
use it, was that it was cool.
They had these, they had these, like, boots that sat over the blocks that they worked with
their partners on to keep condensation off of them, these, like, foam-insulated backplates
and stuff, and what they could do well, even with these modern chips being, generating so
much heat that they would overwhelm the Peltier.
Oh, yeah, that's a big thing.
If you don't spec it high enough, it actually turns into an insulator, because it's not metal.
Yeah.
Right?
So, if it's not actively moving the heat, then it isn't moving the heat, and the heat
is staying where it is.
That makes sense.
That's a big problem, right?
That's not good.
So, there was some practical use for them.
If you knew that you were never going to apply an all-core load to your computer, like, literally
never, within the range of the Peltier's effective, sort of, within the Peltier's effective cooling
range, you could achieve very low temperatures.
And you could achieve slightly better overclocks on, you know, the one or two cores, or even
four cores that you might need for gaming.
It's just that, I think the timing is just bad.
Intel's chips have been functionally not overclockable, at least at the high end, where people might
consider buying a, you know, $600 water cooling setup, or whatever else it is.
Yeah.
They've been not overclockable for so long.
They've been so power-hungry for so long that it's just, right products may be completely
wrong timing, and unfortunately, it's going away now.
And I'm just, I'm a little sad, because it's the kind of thing that, as an enthusiast, I
just, I kind of love, because it's just really cool.
What, I just power this thing, and then it just moves the heat from one spot to another?
And there are times when it makes sense.
Okay, Luke and I were comparing our eight sleep tracking before the show.
So, the cooling and heating module for the two sides of the bed uses a Peltier.
Yeah.
And the reason it does is because if it used phase change, then it would be really loud.
It would need a compressor.
A Peltier doesn't need a compressor, just silent DC current is all it needs to heat or chill
something.
That, oh, that's so cool.
My water-cooled chair project that we did a while back, that also uses a Peltier with an
air heat sink on it.
So, if you're not, if you're trying to cool a human body, which is about 100 watts, right,
or just like part of a human body, it's pretty reasonable.
Yeah.
But as soon as you're trying to cool a computer or something like that, it just, it just doesn't,
it doesn't make any sense.
Kind of an issue.
So, I'm sad.
I'm sad.
What do you want to talk about next?
You missed everything this week.
Do you want to jump straight into this week in AI?
Sure.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sure.
Let's talk about the escapist employees escaping.
Can you, can you read the article?
Is your brain fast enough?
We'll see.
He was talking about this before the show.
He was like, uh, I got some brain lag.
My, uh, um, what?
We had a few of those moments.
Um, the escapist has seen mass resignations following the firing of editor, uh, editor-in-chief
Nick Calandra, hopefully I said that right, among others.
Resignees include most of the escapist video team, including game reviewer Ben Yahtzee-Croshaw,
the primary creator behind Zero Punctuation, which is a series that, at least on and off,
I believe we've both been watching for an extremely long time.
Yeah.
Like over 10 years.
Oh, it launched in 2008.
Yeah, it launched in 2008.
I've been probably watching it since around then.
That's wild.
Yeah.
Uh, Yahtzee's contributions were by far the most popular content on the site, uh, to
the point that many commenters have speculated that the escapist may not survive this loss.
I don't see how they could.
Honestly, when I heard that Yahtzee was gone, I assumed escapist was just literally done
automatically.
I haven't seen any of their other content perform particularly well.
Then again, I only pay attention to the video side of things.
Me too.
Like, I don't really, um, every once in a while an escapist article will end up in my
Google News feed or whatever else, but I don't.
I didn't know that the escapists had written articles for like many years.
I don't end up there as a destination.
Um, the only thing I ever really cared about from them was zero punctuation.
So good luck with that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm, I'm looking at their video library and zero punctuation.
Zero punctuation spikes up.
Out performed everything else by like an order of magnitude, basically to the point where
if I was them and if I was advising them on their video strategy, I would just stop publishing
a lot of this other stuff.
I wouldn't even bother.
Well, they should have done that a long time ago, probably.
But anyways, um, Yahtzee, Calandra, and other members of the former video team have started
a new channel called Second Wind, which already has over 130,000 subscribers.
They will be hosting short form reviews under the title fully ramblamatic.
Oh, that's his old, uh, that's like his old name for something.
Oh, I didn't actually know that.
Yeah.
I think he had like a blog or something called fully ramblamatic.
Because they are saying that apparently zero punctuation branding still is owned and belongs
to the escapist, which makes sense.
So using something that he used to have would line up, uh, the current owners of the escapist
gamers group, G A M U R S, um, acquired the site alongside several other popular online
gaming outlets last year.
They received negative media, uh, attention earlier this year when they fired around 40% of
their staff then attempted to replace said staff, the writing team with a single AI copy editor
handling 250 articles a week, uh, which I believe we even talked about on this show, um, and went
very poorly.
According to Calandra, he was fired by gamers for not achieving goals that demonstrated a
poor, that, uh, I, I think this is trying to say that, that he believes, uh, demonstrated
a poor understanding of the escapist audience.
Sheesh.
Um, yeah.
Try to imagine if we lost like our, our top performing host and most of our other staff,
what would be left here as a, as a, as a media organization?
Like imagining first, I, I just, I don't know how to wrap my brain around organizations
like a gamers group here that I hate the name by the way, but I say gamers group and
they just spelt it G M U R S like, well, okay.
I mean, yeah, they've done a lot more than just the name to make us think that they're idiots,
but fair enough.
Can somebody please explain this to me?
Like, I, I understand the strategy in some cases.
Okay.
Like I, one, one of my friends is a vet, um, who runs a practice.
Um, she's great.
And she was talking to me about how there is either one or two like veterinary, um, conglomerates,
like animal hospital groups that are going around, buying up all of the independent veterinarian
clinics.
And the reason that they're doing it is because they're playing an extremely long game here
where the goal is complete consolidation.
Um, so that they can control pricing across all animal hospitals in a given region.
And, and, and, and it, and it makes sense that they would pay sometimes double what a, you
know, business valuation advisor might come in and tell you your practice is worth because
they're playing a long game here.
So if, if they don't get a complete return on that investment for 10 years, rather than,
you know, five, which might be a more normal target, then they're comfortable with that because
they've got plenty of cash coming in from everything that they've acquired already over the years.
They've got investment and there's a clear path to not just profitability, but market control.
What could possibly make you think that that playbook would work with game review websites?
So yeah, the, the, the, these, these, these veterinary acquisition people, like they, yeah,
they'll go in and they'll like lay off staff and they'll, they'll, they'll cut equipment
budgets or, you know, whatever else, like the quality of care might fall.
Um, but at the end of the day, these are physical locations.
What, what are, what are people going to do?
Just click a few buttons on their keyboard and navigate to a different competitor.
It's not always that simple.
There is a value to the branding.
There's a value to the location.
Especially when like, I don't think like if you, I don't know, I can't speak for them,
but if you want more zero punctuation, it's not like Yahtzee's gone.
As far as I can tell, the steam, the, the team's effectively staying together and going,
Hey, you want more of that stuff?
We're going to make it.
We're just going to have a different name.
So like, so I don't know.
What can you possibly be thinking, acquiring something like this, thinking, Oh yeah, you
know what would be a good idea?
Taking this thing that we bought that is obviously working to a degree that we thought it was a
good idea to buy it, completely breaking it so that it is not functional at all.
And then profit, I don't understand it.
Can, can somebody help me understand what the thought process could possibly be here?
Yeah, I don't know.
And like, if it was a bet on AI, I feel like they should have, uh, you know, vetted that
a little bit more first.
If it's a bet on AI, then just have your AI crap out 300 gaming review websites and start
publishing garbage AI articles and try and gain some momentum that way.
Honestly though, like that's not even me.
No, that, I mean, that's a strategy people have literally done already.
So like, it's not, it's not, it makes sense.
Get good at that.
And then, you know, buy a recognized name or something like that.
Don't just, don't just walk in.
We're already seeing that with, um, we've talked about this on, on Wancho before, but the
whole Reddit search term thing, searching on Google, but appending Reddit to the end of it,
because you're hoping to get Reddit results instead of these like trash random, uh, like
SEO optimized suggestion sites.
And then those SEO optimized suggestion people are just making Reddit posts and trying to
get those Reddit posts to the top of those searches as well, which is rough.
Um, so like that, that type of stuff is already happening.
With all of that said, with all of that said, I, it is pretty clear to me that if the escapist
employed more than like two or three people, um, they were probably in serious trouble in
terms of the sustainability of that business.
So, you know, if the current ownership thought that, you know, a change in leadership was needed in
order to make the business more sustainable, then, um, you know, I guess they made the move that they
thought was best, but what they perhaps didn't anticipate was the level of loyalty that the
staff would have to the former editor in chief.
And when I say sustainable, um, I'll run you guys through some, some basic numbers here.
So here you can pull up these stats for any YouTube channel on this great site called social
blade, uh, used to be better.
They used to a lot better.
Yeah.
They used to log more than just two years of monthly viewership.
And YouTube was like, no, the subscriber counts used to be super granular.
And then YouTube threatened to cut off their API access if they didn't comply.
And so now the site's not as good.
So, um, I don't know, go yourself YouTube, but whatever the point is that, um, in the last
four months, you know what, let's say the last quarter in the last three months, they averaged
six and a half million views a month.
So what, what does that work out to?
Let's pull out ye olde calculatrice here.
What just happened to my cow?
Oh, there it is.
Man, it was hiding.
It was camouflaged.
Look at that.
It was like, whoa, you'll never see me here, Linus.
Okay.
So let's, let's pull out the old calculatrice.
We'll replace the least important thing on my screen with it.
Um, that works out to probably about, about it's, I would say a rough guideline is about
a thousand dollars for every half a million views.
So if we were to say 6.5 million divided by 0.5 equals times $1,000.
Now, uh, hold on.
That was times 10,000.
One moment, please.
Uh, oh my gosh.
How did I even undo?
You know what?
The point is $13,000.
Okay.
One, two, three.
There we go.
We got $13,000, which sounds like a lot of money in a month.
I'm sure.
Pay taxes on that first?
I'm sure lots of people would.
Well, no, no, no, no, no, not necessarily.
We'll get to that.
I'm sure lots of people would love to make $13,000 a month.
The problem is that that's $13,000 a month at all.
Well, yeah, that's, um, pretty rough when you consider that, yeah, you might have maybe
more than one person to pay.
Now, the parent company is going to want to make money there.
Now, obviously, uh, you're going to have, you know, equipment and business operating expenses
and all that kind of stuff.
I will also point out that they, they have their own website.
They do.
I was getting to that.
And they have a Patreon.
Yes.
So, uh, what, what, what's the Patreon at?
How's it?
Well, okay.
It's going to be hard to, oh, no, we can use Patreon stats.
Is slightly obfuscated.
Oh, is it?
Um, because it doesn't tell you how many people per tier and they have a ton of tiers.
They have a lot of tiers.
They have got a lot of tiers right now.
Mail.
They have a God tier mailbag communities choice credit sponsor, free and bonus content, early
access and tip jar.
Those are all different tiers they have on Patreon.
Okay.
Paid members.
Actually, not bad.
They have a decent amount of paid members.
Right now they're sitting at $1,949.
Okay.
If you had to make a wild guess, uh, based on having absolutely nothing to do with this
industry at all, uh, what would you say is probably a pretty typical monthly contribution?
Uh, well, okay.
The, the problem with that.
So they're, they're, it says their most popular tier is their $3 tier.
Okay.
So let's be optimistic and let's say $5.
Yeah.
I'm going to say, I'm going to say it's more than that.
They do have a tier that's lower than that, but the thing that you, the stuff that you
get on that tier is not that crazy.
So I suspect it's going to be close to four or five months.
Let's say they're making another 10 grand a month.
Okay.
I don't know if they do in video sponsorships, but I'm going to say maybe they do.
I've never seen one on a zero punctuation video, but who knows?
I'm going to say they do in video sponsorships and I'm going to take a totally ignorant
stab at this.
And I'm going to say, uh, they can probably double their AdSense with that.
So we're up to the point where, oh, okay, hold on.
We're looking at some pretty respectable revenue.
Let's say they can do, let's say they can triple their Patreon number.
Crazy.
It helps to have external funding.
Uh, other creators, if you want to join Flowplane, by the way.
With their ads on their website.
Okay.
So let's put these two together and let's say they can do about $55,000 a month in, uh,
in revenue or yeah.
Okay.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
Let's say they can do $55,000 a month in revenue.
Again, that sounds like a lot.
Especially when we multiply it by 12 and we look for the year, you know, wow, that's
like well over half a million dollars.
That's, that's a freaking ton of money.
You could actually pay a team of people out of that.
The problem is that as far as I can tell, the Escapist team was a lot more than, you
know, five or six people.
Um, yeah.
And like that Patreon isn't just the video team, right?
They, they release a lot of articles looking at their website, like literally just for November
10th, which is, uh, today, yesterday, something today.
November 10th.
There's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, seven different articles released today.
Um, and I, uh, we did mention like, yeah, they have this external website.
Um, this is an area where I have very little experience and has always confused me.
So I'm just putting that out there first.
Sure.
But basically none of these have any comments, which is weird.
Can I go to your screen?
Yep.
So this is the Escapist magazine's website.
Uh, first one, this, uh, 824, Darren, whatever, Elon Musk biopic, zero comments.
Maybe pick one from before the, uh, before the whole thing.
Stardew Valley has two comments.
Um.
Cause this is like all from the last two days still.
How do I even view more on just the articles?
I don't know.
Um.
News?
There was view more for podcasts.
There we go.
Wow.
Um.
Yeah, they published a few articles.
Why would it go one, two, three, 1,000?
That seems like quite the jump.
I mean, these are all zeros.
Oh, here's a few.
Yeah, there's some comments on some of these.
I mean.
I mean, one to three is like, I think my point is still standing.
Oh yeah, your point's very valid.
I don't know how much traction there is on these articles.
Um.
Maybe there's a bit, but I do know that, yes, they have quite a few of them.
Um, but web page ads don't bring in a ton of money.
So, here's the problem.
Um.
I obviously don't see the point of buying something and then proceeding to,
trash it.
Um, however.
What do you mean?
X is a great name.
However, however, it is also possible that the escapist was simply a completely unsustainable
machine the way that it was running and was only managing to pay salaries based on, you
know, VC money or something like that, which was ultimately why the previous ownership seeked
an exit.
Even if that's the case, it might make, it might just mean that this move, uh, makes
even more sense for the video team because they were clearly able to release some bangers
for a lot of years.
Like, zero punctuation hasn't just been, like, successful.
It's, it's been, uh, prolific.
The problem is that it doesn't have the same momentum that it used to.
And I don't, I couldn't really answer why.
I mean, that's fair enough.
But it still does, like, video gaming content in general, I would actually argue, doesn't
have the momentum that it used to.
Um, like.
Oh, I would like to hear this argument more.
I, I think in years past, I, I'd wager, honestly, probably around, like, 20, 13, 14, maybe.
Mm-hmm.
Gaming content on YouTube was actually really big.
And I don't just mean Let's Plays and stuff.
Are you, is it possible you have aged out of it?
I was more into it.
It is, it is possible.
Uh, but I, I think so.
Because, like, Game Ranks is the biggest one that I know of right now.
Um, and, and to be very clear, I think Game Ranks is fantastic.
Um, but for, like, the biggest of a segment, and maybe I'm just wrong, and maybe we should
just, like, social blade the category and see if I'm wrong.
Um, but yeah, Game Ranks, going through their average views of the last little bit, they
do have some stuff that hits really well.
Like, they did 10, 10 game features that are evolving backwards, and that did 780,000
views.
Really nice.
So when you say gaming content, you specifically don't mean Let's Plays.
I don't mean Let's Plays.
Or Twitch streamers who are reacting to stuff or whatever.
Okay, I see.
News, uh, like, like, my favorite thing that Game Ranks does is called Before You Buy.
Got it.
So it's like a relatively early on review.
So you're talking like video journalism.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
Video game journalism was, like, pretty poppin' a while ago.
Right.
Um...
Well, I mean, you know what happened, right?
There's no money.
Yeah.
How are you supposed to...
It's not, it's not sustainable.
Sponsors, for some reason, aren't a huge fan of gaming content.
Well, I can think of a lot of reasons why that would be.
The, the purchase intent is...
Can't even make that noise right now.
The purchase intent is relatively low.
Yeah.
The audience skews relatively young.
They're also extremely volatile.
Yep.
Um, it's, it's a really, um, don't take this the wrong way, gamers.
It's a pretty toxic culture.
Oh, absolutely.
Overall.
Like, I think if we're honest with ourselves, the, the, the, the...
The brand association with, uh, you know, a lot of video gaming content and a lot of video
gaming communities is not necessarily the, gonna be, uh, super attractive to your big
brands.
You know, your safe brands.
Um.
Oh, no.
Are people hating me now?
No, Suba and Philip Plain Chat is just like, we know.
Okay.
Cool.
Breaking news.
Linus says games are a fickle market.
Yeah.
Okay.
Right.
Okay.
And I, I, I'd say that it's fair to say that there's very low loyalty.
Um.
Oh, yeah.
And so it's, it's really tough.
Oh, also, this is another really challenging thing is in order to break out in gaming, you
have to, I don't even know.
I could, if someone said, look, I want to break out in gaming content.
Um, how do I do it?
You know, as, as someone who has experience building a, a, a, a, a, a six, I would say
pretty successful YouTube business, online video business.
The first thing I would tell you is I have no idea.
Um, I, I wouldn't even know where to begin to break out in, in YouTube, um, in, in gaming
on YouTube.
So.
There's, there's, there's a few channels, um, like Ahoy.
I don't actually know how to pronounce it.
Ahoy?
Ahoy?
I don't know.
A-H-O-Y.
Um, and, and there's, I think there's one called Arch as well.
Um, and there's a, there's a few others that have like a, a kind of particular like history,
interesting documentary kind of take on, on gaming content that I, I find like super, super
interesting.
Um, and they do really well.
And like this, this Ahoy that I just mentioned, their biggest problem is their, their content
release schedule is like actually insane.
Like if you look at their last eight videos, um, the last one was three years ago, but they
are continually releasing content.
Wow.
Okay.
Like, I don't know.
Like they've never stopped in that three years.
Um, they've actually been releasing content.
If I, if I keep scrolling, yeah, nine years, 10 years.
Yeah.
They, 11 years, they keep going back, but they have, they have all this really interesting
stuff.
Like the, what made me search them up was, uh, this video.
It's just called big boxes.
It has 760,000 views.
It's like a mini doc on boxes in games.
You know how like gaming boxes used to be huge and they got smaller and there was different
like formats.
And it's like actually surprisingly very interesting.
Wow.
Okay.
It's like why, like, like EA brought like some standardization to boxes and like all this.
I don't know.
I watched it a while ago, maybe up to three years ago.
I remember when the battle chest was like in the shape of a chest.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like he talks about all this different type of stuff and like why different things changed
and like how it's like kind of sad that now there's like basically no box and the boxers
no purpose because back in the day without the internet and all this kind of stuff you
had, you're like your books and stuff in there and your maps and they like actually mattered
and yada, yada, yada.
So it's actually, it's, it's, it's a surprisingly good, even like he has a video on the chicken
o' meter and like there was so much stuff about games and like the idea of the chicken
o' meter where this like, uh, the, the, the quality of the picture of this chicken indicated
how much health you had and how that turned into like different forms of modern health
bars and all this kind of stuff is super interesting.
Anyways, there it's, but that's like, I mean, you look at the upload schedule, that's really
hard content to make.
Yeah.
It takes a crazy amount of research.
And what's the hell?
Actually, that's another really good point is gaming is something that people are really
passionate about.
It's something that people would do in their free time, whether they were paid or not.
And so anytime you work in an industry where somebody else would do it for free, that's
what you're up against.
You're up against what someone else would do for free with money as no object, right?
Like that was, that was a big challenge for us moving into the tech spaces, the, is tech
coverage.
I mean, actually, I think you're probably seeing this more now, now that video production equipment
has gotten so accessible and so affordable is that there are tech channels springing up
everywhere that make no sense from a financial standpoint.
Like you look at how many videos they upload, you look at their viewership, you can, you can
reverse calculate how much revenue they're making and how many hours it takes to do all
this.
And you're like, oh, okay, you're making less than minimum wage.
Right.
And that's not a bad thing.
People should absolutely, you know, want to try to build something, right?
Like they should do a side hustle or, you know, whatever, right?
Like I'm not, I'm not criticizing this.
I'm just saying that whenever you work in an industry where people would do it out of
sheer passion, you are going to be up against people who are just doing stuff with no sort
of thought to the financial sensibility of the approach that they're taking.
Um, so gaming is a space that really, I think suffers from that.
If you're trying to put together, uh, like a content, uh, strategy with, you know, paid
professionals who expect vacation time and, you know, regular working hours, career progression,
promotions, exactly.
Cost of living wage increases.
Um, is it on?
All right.
Okay.
Well, please back.
Cool.
Um, trying to run that up against just like some dude bros hanging out in their basement,
like running a gaming podcast, playing video games and running a podcast or something in
their free time.
Doing it because I think it's entertaining.
It's, it's, it's really, it's really, really tough.
Um, so, you know, I, I wish the team luck.
Oh, you look at the most desirable career path in North America right now, which is YouTube.
You look at what, like, uh, basically everyone likes doing, which is playing video games.
And like, what is it?
Every high school not going to have like their own aspirational gaming YouTubers.
Yeah.
It's going to be everywhere that like when I worked at Best Buy back in the day, my like
group of friends at Best Buy tried to start a gaming news website.
Yeah.
And so did, oh, I don't know everyone else.
Like it was, it was crazy back then.
A guy I knew at NCIX did like some contract work for a friend of his who, uh, I wonder
if it's still around.
Uh, I think it's called Game Explain.
I was going to say, I even know what you're talking about, but I didn't remember the name.
Game Explain.
Here, let's see.
Let's see if, I look at that.
Game Explain totally still exists.
And does little videos about stuff.
We know who developed Super Mario RPG remake, apparently.
So there's that.
Okay.
Yeah.
There you go.
Game Explain still exists.
Yeah.
Uh, Tom.
Uh, Tom from NCIX.
When's the game coming out?
Oh, Super Mario RPG.
Have, you've never played it, right?
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Not that.
Tom's game.
Uh, oh, I don't know when Carpoon is coming out.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Uh, one of my ex-colleagues from NCIX.
Whoa, these guys are pumping content.
Oh, Game Explain?
Oh, yeah.
Three videos a day?
Carpoon!
Chill, bro.
Uh, we played this at Whale Land.
It was actually really fun.
Oh, nice.
Yeah, developer.
Tom Arnold.
Yeah.
Love it.
Really?
This guy?
Yep.
No, just kidding.
Not him.
Different.
No, that's him.
Totally different Tom Arnold.
So basically, you, um, you harpoon.
You harpoon cars and you, you tow them to the crusher.
Uh, there's multiplayer.
Um, yeah, it's, you can do like time trials.
It's fun.
Okay.
I just want to set this straight because at least one person in flow plane chat is, is commenting
about it.
Uh, we're not saying that people shouldn't aspirationally do things.
We're saying if you're trying to run one of these things as a, as a company, that it's
a difficult spot to try to hold because of the amount of people coming for your throat
because they want to do it.
Yeah.
Which is, which is fine.
It just means you're in a highly competitive space and you're competing against people
that are just in often cases happy to not receive a salary because they want to do
this out of just passion, which again is fine.
It's fine.
It just means you have to be really good because you need to be able to give your people career,
both growth, promotions, all this other type of stuff.
Um, and.
Make enough money.
Be able to survive.
And make enough money to go up against people who might not care about making any money.
And make enough money to be able to have a war chest just in case things go poorly, all
this other type of stuff, like run like a real company.
So people might see your content that has, you know, a whole bunch of, let's say hypothetically,
that has more sponsorships in it than someone else's.
Um, and people might go, well, I'm not going to watch that.
I just got sponsorships all over.
I'm going to watch this other thing.
And it's like, well, right, but they'll have them eventually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When they, when they need to take a break to, you know, shower and brush their teeth
once in a while.
And they're not in just like grind it startup mode, right?
Like it's, it's a natural evolution.
And so, uh, we did it, right?
Like, I'm not, I'm not saying you shouldn't try.
I think people are taking some of the wrong, like someone, someone said competition breeds
quality.
Yeah.
We're also not saying that competition is bad.
Like it just, we're not saying any of that stuff.
Holy guys, please get it together.
I said, I like hamburgers.
I didn't say I hate hot dogs.
Exactly.
Yes.
We're just saying it's very, it's a very competitive space to be in.
That's all.
Yes.
Not saying it's bad, all that kind of stuff.
Clearly.
I, I, I mean, I've called out multiple creators already in the show.
They're all doing great.
Um, yeah, I don't know.
I just think to bring it all the way back around, like if you're going to come in and
buy one of these companies and then acts their editor in chief and then see an exodus of like
all the talent.
Maybe you should have done some due diligence.
Yeah.
Like that's not going to work, dude.
Escapist is like super dead now.
Um, at least their video side, but then the other side looks like that already.
Yeah.
And, and to be clear, I don't know a lot about like externally evaluating performance of
static news websites, but when I see the zero comments on most posts and like less than
five on all the ones that do have comments, I get concerned.
I saw someone ask like, Oh, but it doesn't create and making it, do you have to have an
account to be able to comment?
It's like, does that matter?
Like if enough people are frequenting this website, you'd think a handful of them would
have accounts.
Like I have seen sites, news sites that require an account that have a bunch of comments on
it.
Like this is a thing.
People will do it.
Um, if it's not even worth botting the comments on your site, like yikes, I don't know.
You know what I do know is what merch messages are.
Hey, it's time to explain how to, uh, how to support our, you know, awful.
What were we, what were we, what made us bad people?
I forget.
Because we don't think other people should do something, whatever.
The point is, you know, our, our awful, you know, people who have vacation time and, you
know, snacks in office and all the other, you know, things that we have that, uh, that
you should hate us for.
Um, Hey, merch messages.
Woo.
The way to interact with the show is not to send a super chat, not to send a Twitch bit
or whatever.
I don't know even how those work.
I still don't.
I do that like spiel every time I talk about merch messages.
And every time I think, maybe at some point I should look it up so that I don't just
sound like, you know, I think you shouldn't an out of, an out of touch boomer, boom, boom
tuber.
It's just junkie game microtransactions.
So you buy bits and you give them out.
Oh, that's stupid.
Instead of giving money directly, you just buy bits and give them out.
You should just use real currency so that you aren't obfuscating how much you're spending.
Yeah.
Oh, cool.
Well, Twitch bits are stupid then don't buy them.
Uh, what you should do is buy merch messages, which you buy by just going to ltdstore.com,
finding something cool that you like that you actually want.
So you're not just wasting your money by hucking it at the screen, throwing that in your cart
and then filling out a merch message.
A little box will pop up when we're live and it'll either go to producer Dan.
Well, it'll always go to producer Dan and then he will either pop it down there or forward
it to someone who can help you out or send it to us to address on the show.
It'll be awesome.
Oh yeah.
Sometimes he also replies.
He's about to say something.
Go ahead, Dan.
Hi.
Got him.
The point is that, um, when you check out your message will come to us and we're going
to sometimes read them.
And Dan picked a few for us to read and he's going to go ahead and hit us with those.
Sure.
Let's, uh, let's start off with this one here.
Hi Linus.
We have seen a bit more of your kids in the home videos.
Curious as they get older, have they expressed any interest in joining the LTT team in any
capacity, be it a co-host or anything else?
I mean, they're kids, right?
So they'll, they'll talk about like inheriting mom and dad's company, not really like understanding
what that means, you know, that we'd be dead and stuff like that, you know, right?
Like they're little kids.
Um, I, my eldest has, you know, asked, you know, Oh, okay.
So like, am I going to run the company at some point?
And, uh, my answer has always been, I don't know, are you going to get good at it at some
point?
Right?
Like, uh, I, I don't really believe in nepotism.
Um, and just because you might be a primary shareholder someday, it doesn't necessarily
mean that you have any business whatsoever interfering with the day-to-day operations.
Uh, I, I mean, I don't even know by the time I, by the time I, you know, died, right?
Would I have just aged out of this to the point where I were completely stepped back and would
have no kind of business interfering in the day-to-day operations.
And it's just a team that, um, builds a sustainable model here that is separate from me.
Like, I, I don't know what an exit strategy looks like for me.
If I wanted an exit strategy, we had a big offer a while back.
I would have just taken it.
Yeah.
We're also in, we don't know what it's going to look like.
Like, what the heck is this going to look like?
It's only been 11 years.
We want to ask you what it's going to look like when you're talking about when you're
dead, like.
It's changed so much.
Yeah.
Like what the heck?
I mean, Nintendo used to make playing cards.
Yeah.
Like if we have, you know, real legs, right?
Like if this company can build a culture and build processes and, and, and build a business
model that is sustainable for the longterm, like, do we even make videos anymore in 10
years?
There's some quote about five years about how, uh, do we just make water bottles?
A lot of big companies, um, they end up dying because they, they do really well and then
they stagnate and they don't want to, they don't want to pursue change or evolution because,
uh, what's been working has been working.
And then they end up just falling amongst their own weight.
Um, and there's, there's a quote about that.
That's like, if you're going to be cannibalized, it's best to cannibalize yourself.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's, it's the innovator's dilemma.
Yeah.
Um, which it, it's better for me to not try to summarize it because I'm a little rusty
on exactly the wording, but basically, uh, the innovator's dilemma is, um, sort of a
business principle or guideline, or, um, I don't know what the right word for it would
be right now, but it's, it's a, it's a challenge that you face where it's almost never the best,
uh, most sensible use of your investment resources to cannibalize your own business because it
would cost so much of your existing business for so little gain that it could never be worth
it.
Um, so you end up with smaller competitors who do chase that innovation and who scale past
you in a way that is difficult for you to respond to because you didn't make those early investments
because you got comfortable just doing your, your regular thing.
That's a terrible, terrible summary, but sort of fundamentally kind of what it is.
Yeah.
So essentially if we're still doing the exact same thing we're doing now in 20 years, like
we messed up big time.
This is, uh, this is something, uh, while Linus is a dick to his kids, I hope they end up
working for NVIDIA to spite him.
I hope you're joking because for me to be nice to my kids by just like putting them in
charge of this company would be being a complete dick to all the people who worked hard to build
expertise and make their way.
If you were just like, you don't have to learn anything, Gratz, you graduated high school,
I guess you're running the whole company.
I'd just be like, all right, Linus went insane.
I'm out.
Right.
Like I, yeah, like that's, that's so stupid.
Um, yes, I was joking.
Okay, cool.
Sounds good.
The problem with that type of joking on the internet is like some people won't be.
Yeah.
So you, you like actually, I know it sucks, but like you actually have to be careful about
certain comments like this.
Look no, look no further than, you know, just some of the, some of the dumb comments we've
had to read lately.
Yeah.
All right, Dan.
Look no further than any form of political discourse on the internet at all.
I'm amazed you have any brain power left.
Yeah, I know.
Can you please explain P and E cores on Intel?
Not convinced they work as Plex's transcoder kept only using the efficiency cores.
Or, yeah.
Is it up to the program or Windows scheduler to properly manage when a P core is used?
Uh, my understanding is that's down to CPU microcode and the Windows scheduler.
I don't believe a program would decide what cores it would use.
What you might want to do is, I forget what it's, shoot, I forget what it's called.
Uh, but there's an application that you can use for manually, uh, manually altering processor
affinity or, or, uh, setting core pinning.
So you can pin processors to a particular core, uh, but the core pinning Windows, can you just
do it from within Windows?
Overall?
I, I haven't tried to do it in a very, very, very long time just because, um, there were
some cases where, oh man, at some point I think you could like manually set frequencies
per core, uh, but they weren't dynamic boosting yet.
And so you could like set your game to run on a particular, like the core that overclocks
the best or whatever.
Like, I don't know.
At some point I cared about that.
Yeah.
I did a lot of that with a tool when I had a Threadripper.
It was very critical.
Pretty sure you've been able to do that in task manager for years, maybe affinity, but
not like individual core process lasso.
That's the one.
Yeah.
Process lasso.
That's the one you want.
And yeah, with Threadripper, that could be very necessary, not for gaming, but just because,
uh, you might end up with a situation where if you have a process that's running across
two CCDs, you can end up with, um, inter die communication, really slowing it down compared
to if you have the whole thing running on a single CCD.
So there, there are reasons to do it.
Uh, process lasso apparently is the way to do it.
Dan, do you want to hit us with one more before we move on?
Process lasso used to be a pretty big deal for certain games.
Yeah, it would, it did help with some games for me at least.
I mean, oh God, I hate that CPU.
Um, let's see what else we got there.
Hi, WAN.dll.
I'm a computer assisted design instructor at a public university.
What do you think about the fact that 80% of my students can't tell the difference between
a zip file and a folder and don't know how to unzip?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Time moves on.
Here's a question for you.
Okay.
Now I know you're a CAD instructor.
And so if we were to specifically talk about a CAD course 20 years ago, probably everybody
in it would know how to unzip a folder.
But if we consider how much more broadly people use computers and how much more of a normie
you might find in a CAD course, not because they are into computers, but because they are
into design is the percentage of the population that would understand the difference between
a folder and a zip file and know how to unzip files any different today than it was then,
I would say probably it's higher today.
And I have nothing to back this up other than just that it's a much more normal thing for
you to have possibly encountered.
Like my mother has encountered a zip file in her life at this point.
Whereas back then I did like, I don't, I don't necessarily think she would have.
I just think like, like you've talked on the show before about how typing speeds of some
of the, the young people these days is kind of slow.
Um, and, uh, Gero Ninja in flow plane chat said, bring back computer literacy courses.
I think there's maybe a sweet spot there.
Um, if we're assuming that keyboards are keyboards that you use this way, not keyboards on a phone,
um, are going to be a thing for the next while, I do think we should probably teach people how
to type because the amount of efficiency loss is like insane.
It's actually kind of mind blowing to me.
Like maybe I feel like this is one of those things where people are going to just think
that I'm a complete a**hole or something because I can't help it.
I watch an employee working.
Oh yeah.
That drives me nuts.
Like this.
And I kind of go, I am actually, you are actually completing 20% as much work as someone who knows
how to do this.
Um, and yet you make the same.
How does that make any sense?
Like I just, I think it sort of depends on what they do.
Yeah.
I understand why it bothers you though.
Should I just start doing like hunt and peck for merch messages?
Anytime Linus comes around to start typing that way, just drive him nuts.
I don't know.
But I think having some amount of that type of stuff still be in schools and whatnot makes
sense.
Doesn't it bother them to be going so slow?
How could you, how can you get anything done?
And to be clear, we have people here who do a great job actually in spite of that, because
most of what they do at their computer isn't typing.
Yeah.
It's highly creative or whatever else.
Or clicking on things.
It's just that for me, like my, we can't help it.
Right?
Like we, we see the world through our own biases, through our own lens.
Right.
And for me, the main work that I do at a computer is emails or writing.
If I typed at that rate, the lights wouldn't be on in this building.
This company wouldn't exist.
It's not possible.
Like it.
I do also think there are people that do surprisingly technical things at the computer that type
very infrequently though.
Um, yeah.
So I agree with you.
If I typed that slowly, similarly to you, a lot of my work is emails and stuff.
If I typed that slowly, I'd be screwed.
Yeah.
Like it wouldn't work.
I could not do what I do at all.
So I don't know.
Yeah.
Teaching stuff like typing, I think would still be good.
Honestly, if, if I had a kid and they were in school and they had to learn like what zip
files were, I would just think that's stupid.
Really?
Most people, it's never going to matter.
Interesting.
Who cares?
Yeah.
But it does matter.
Like, okay.
To who?
Okay.
And when and why?
Oh, look.
Okay.
I ran into-
And how long does it take to learn and how Google-able is that?
I ran into this situation-
This isn't a skill.
You don't have to practice it.
No, it matters.
Okay.
You can Google one time what the heck a zip file is.
What do I need to open this?
Now I know what it's like to be Luke on Wancho.
Right click and extract it.
Just not allowed to talk.
I'm just lagging, so I can't tell that you're-
Yeah.
No, why don't you just, you know what?
Why don't you just do the rest of the show?
No problem.
Um, okay.
I did run into a situation recently where it mattered to understand, and having an understanding
would help to troubleshoot a problem.
Okay, but you can't cover every single aspect of life that way, so you have to pick and choose
your battles, and I don't think this is a battle to pick.
Someone was trying to execute a setup file of some sort, and it wouldn't run because it
was inside a compressed folder.
Yeah.
I don't know if it was .zip or .rar, I don't care.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, whatever.
It was inside a compressed folder, and the reason it wouldn't run was because one of the
dependencies was in the compressed folder and was not decompressed.
Then, shortly afterward, I watched someone unzip a single file from a compressed folder so that
they could execute it, and I told them, I was like, hey, you don't need to do that.
Yeah.
If there's more than one file in the .zip folder, you must decompress it first.
Because it can't reference the other ones.
Then execute it.
If there's only one, then you can just execute it, and it will decompress and execute because
all the dependencies are contained, and they were like, whoa, and this is a pretty technical
person.
They're a pretty technical person, and it didn't matter to them up to that point.
That's an interesting point.
Think about how much time.
That's a very interesting point.
Think about how much time they could save in their life if every time they had to execute
something from within a compressed folder, they could have known they don't have to decompress
it first.
They can just double-click it.
Yeah, like a couple minutes.
That'd be sick.
All that time back.
That'd be dope.
Yeah, so I don't think we should teach those types of things in schools anymore.
I think we should teach, genuinely, I think we should teach how to look up information and
avoid trash information on the internet.
That would be like a really useful thing to learn.
Man, you're basically asking for common sense class.
Who would you find to teach it?
Isn't that like supposed to be what...
That's what...
We had CAP.
Career and Personal Planning.
Yeah.
We had something similar.
I don't remember what it's called.
I'm not sure how it happened, but I'm pretty sure...
It was the easiest class.
I think in my entire time at my high school, I attended CAP class like less than 10 times.
And not because I skipped class.
Like we just never had it.
Like ours was just called Portfolio or something.
I don't even know what that means.
Yeah.
Oh, like career...
Like your personal portfolio?
You like actually made like a binder that was like a portfolio.
I think if someone came in for an interview...
They brought one of those?
...and brought one of those, I would...
I made this in my high school class.
Yeah, I, um...
You know what?
I'd look at it.
I'd look at it.
Would you be mean?
No, I'm not...
Would you be a mean person?
Would you go through and roast this person's effort?
What if they got...
Doesn't matter if it would be funny, Dan.
That is not a nice thing to do.
When someone doesn't have a real world experience...
I want to dig up my high school portfolio and I guarantee you it's gone.
This is not a dig-up-able thing.
We should dig up your resume.
That's dig-up-able.
That's...
Every once in a while I run into this.
It's so funny.
It's...
Have we ever gone through it on the show?
I don't know.
I'm kind of curious.
I'm like...
I'm getting secondhand cringe over here.
Are you sure about this, Luke?
I don't care.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm sure it's funny.
Have I ever, like, emailed it to you or something like that?
Oh, I have it.
It's in my email.
Oh, no way.
I emailed it to you.
Did you really?
Yeah.
Hold on.
Let's see.
How do you think I sent it to you?
Oh, man.
A keyword like resume is not going to be...
Tech Tips Assistant Application.
Shut up.
You've got it.
Okay.
Well, hold on.
Hold on.
Okay.
Send it to my...
Hi, Luke.
Thanks for sending your resume.
No, no, no.
Send it to the thing.
Send it to the thing.
Okay.
Hold on.
Potential for Employment.
Who is that?
Word.
Man, the keyword resume brings up a lot of stuff.
Yeah.
See, the thing that helps me is it's my personal email.
Oh, got it.
Yeah.
So, if I searched your name and resume, there's really only, like, one thing.
Got it.
Yeah, I don't...
Yeah, people are saying don't show on screen.
Yeah, don't show on screen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, wait.
Does it have, like, actual personal information in it?
I don't know.
It just might.
So, it's like...
Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it, got it.
And it would be from back then, so it might be, like, my parents' address and stuff.
Sure, sure, sure.
So, I just, like, yeah.
Okay, so, you're the other one, okay.
I'm the other one?
Well, okay, I'm trying to figure out what...
That's all I am to you?
The other one?
I've done a full blank, so it can't happen accidentally.
Hey, nice.
Good job, Dan.
Thank you.
Boom.
Okay, so...
Ha ha!
I wasn't lying!
God!
Hold on, let me turn it off.
Oh, no!
Yeah, we're fine.
Nice.
Oh, my God.
And in your email to me, it has the code of my original email, which has a Google Drive
link in it.
No way.
Unfortunately...
Is it your portfolio?
No, it's my resume.
Are you sure?
Yeah.
Does it still work?
It sounds like it could be.
It still works!
It's my actual resume.
It's not the application.
Okay, so Linus sent...
You'll see this in a second.
The application...
It has my WPM on it.
That's funny.
That's actually lower than I could type.
That's weird.
I don't know why I put that.
Wow, that's really funny.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, but Linus got so many applications that he had people fill it like a form.
But at first, you just had people send in resumes.
So I sent you a Google Drive link of my resume, and then I did a photo bucket link of pictures.
So those are definitely gone.
Okay, I'm bringing...
Yeah, those are gone.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, okay, Dan.
I actually do need my screen back.
Photo bucket.
See you later, buddy.
Yeah.
Yeah, those are gone.
Okay, what else we got here, though?
Can I just...
Like, can I edit this?
Can I just, like, delete things?
No?
Okay, that's not easy.
Okay, well, here.
Let's do highlights of qualifications.
Extensive experience building, repairing, and maintaining computers.
Wait, is this my resume?
Sorry?
Typing speed of 80 words per minute.
Experience with air, liquid, and oil-cooled computers.
That was a lie at the time.
I had literally never worked on a technically liquid-cooled.
I had worked on oil-cooled.
Yeah, I think we figured that out when we tried to do this video.
Here, hold on.
I'm going to find it because I was pretty annoyed because I left him just to, like, work on water...
Oh, Dan.
Wait, was this the water block thing?
Because you always misquote this.
I left him to just work on this, and then I came back, and he had gotten, like, butt-f*** all done.
And I was like, yo, why is this taking so long?
And he was just like, I don't remember what you said.
It doesn't matter.
The point is, it took a very long time, and it was very clear that I was going to be the one who was going to actually get this computer water-cooled, not you.
I, I, we've talked about this a few times, and it's been long enough now that I'm forgetting points, but you've, like, always said it wrong.
It's, like, not what happened.
I don't remember what it was.
I think you gave me, like, like, this ended up taking you actually a super long time, and you thought I was going to be done in, like, an hour.
And it took you, like, a day, and I, it never made any sense that you thought it was going to take me this short period of time.
I mean, that's possible.
I've never been good at estimating time, but what I do know is I definitely left you to do something, and I, it definitely seemed like not a lot of progress had been made.
Yeah, but then you didn't even remotely get it done in that amount of time either.
So, I'm just saying.
Remember water-cooled RAM?
Yes, I think this is literally the only time I've ever, like, seen it be done, I guess I should say, because I've seen it at, like, trade shows and stuff.
Yeah, so dumb.
The goal was that as many things as possible would be water-cooled in this.
I wish I had held on to these, these spreaders and this thing.
Not because I would ever use it for anything again, but it's just cool.
It's cool.
You just, like, you put thermal compound on the top of the heat spreader, and then you put this just block over top of the whole thing.
You cool all the RAM like that.
It's sick.
It's awesome.
Where's part three, man?
How many, remember when we did multi-part videos?
That sure made things easier.
We should do more multi-part videos.
Why do we not do that anymore?
That's genius.
Look how long this video is.
It's like 23-minute video on plugging in tubing.
Heck yeah.
That's crazy.
Man, do we ever get higher information density these days?
Why am I wearing a headset?
What a f***ing loser.
It's amazing, all the little things that I'll see when I look back at an old video.
I'm just like, ah, yeah, I didn't know what I was doing, but hey, cool, I tried.
It's good.
Anyway, what are we talking about?
Oh, we need to do two more topics.
Okay.
We're on like my resume and stuff.
Oh, right.
Your resume.
No, I want to talk about Luke's resume more.
Um, okay.
Uh, Geek Squad Task Force, Langley, BC.
Let's go.
Worked with other agents to repair infected, broken, and DOA computers.
Let's go.
Compiled a freeware software package for diagnostics.
I did actually do that.
Um.
It was better than the one that they had.
And we actually used it in our entire department.
Canada Bread.
Load trucks for distribution.
Yep.
Troubleshoot and maintain machines when required.
Did you ever actually do any?
I did actually do that.
Any IT maintenance for Canada Bread?
Uh, it was more than IT maintenance.
It was like, like production line machines.
I'm not even kidding.
That's kind of sad.
Why?
That you needed to be the one to do that.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I would get, like, annoyed.
Because they would be like, oh, we'll, like, fix it tomorrow.
And I'm like, what?
Like, what?
What am I supposed to do?
So I feel like it's very obvious what's wrong.
This, like, does not require a millwright.
Because we had millwrights that would do, like, actual complicated things.
Right.
Like, what I would be doing is very not, like, I'm not some.
Yeah.
I don't know.
But, like, there was, like, this thing is clearly broken.
It just needs to be, like, removed or bolt needs tightened or, like, something, like, very, very straightforward things.
And everyone would just be like, nope, no one's going to do it.
This is a very short resume.
Yeah.
I mean.
Oh, it's the assistant application that has a whole bunch more on it.
Yeah.
Do you have that one?
It's in the thing.
No, this is the blank one.
What?
So I created this, I created the.
No, look at the attached document.
Yeah, I am.
It's blank.
Look.
Are you sure?
Yeah, it's completely blank.
Trust me, Dan.
It's fine.
So here's the, here's the form.
Job description.
You'll, video editing may be required to be completed at home.
No, it's not blank.
You just opened the wrong one.
Oh, well, then maybe you should.
You should get better at reading emails.
Maybe they should teach a class about that in high school.
Maybe they should.
It'd save a lot of time.
Maybe they should teach a class on not including blank versions of documents and replies to people.
I didn't, I didn't look at the attachment from me.
Sheesh.
What a guy.
Doesn't even know how to read the emails.
Look, you clicked on this one, which was attached from you.
If you click on this one, which is attached from me and I open it here, there's information in the dock.
You just opened the wrong one.
I only have one.
Look, maybe you should learn to send emails.
Maybe I did do that run.
The best part is how hard you roasted me.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
Look, guys, he's a little slow this week.
He's like actually kind of fucking stupid today.
It's great because I was like this when I got COVID last time.
Like I could, I could tell I was still smart enough to recognize that I was not very smart.
Yeah, it's like kind of really frustrating.
Yeah, I was like, oh man, this must be what it's like to be kind of a dull tool.
God, that's so annoying.
Like I'd just be like looking at something going, I should be able to figure this out.
Why didn't it send you the whole chain?
I don't know.
It's actually really weird.
Like I should be able to figure out this thing, but I can't.
Okay, there, there.
You know, and I was just struggling so much with things, it sucked.
Whoa.
Okay, so we had a landline.
Yeah, yeah.
This is how long ago that was.
My parents' house had a landline.
Nice.
Nice.
Hold on.
Oh, the photo bucket's listed again.
That's unfortunate.
Transportation.
Bus slash car.
Car broken.
And I will be getting a new one in December.
Car broken.
Bus slash broken car.
Car broke.
Oh, man.
I will be getting a new one in December.
How did I think I was going to do that?
Well, you probably lied.
That's probably a lie.
Just like all the other things you lied about.
Video editing skills.
Please explain your relevant experience.
Oh, boy.
I have helped my brother create some StarCraft 2 casting video apostrophe S for YouTube.
Yeah.
Hey, I think that was actually true.
I helped him create these in Sony Vegas Movie Studio.
I think that was also true.
I wouldn't say I have mastered the program by any means.
Hey, I'm not lying yet.
Although, anytime we have had a problem, I have been able to figure it out or use Google
to find a simple solution.
What a chat.
A link to my brother's YouTube channel is linked below.
We should hire him.
So, you didn't technically lie, other than by omission.
Not lied yet.
When you described your video editing skills.
However, we're about to get into camera skills.
All my photo taking has been strictly for personal use.
And some things to post on Facebook slash Google+.
I don't believe you ever posted f***ing anything on Facebook.
Nope, definitely didn't.
Or Google+.
Did not.
The cameras I have used for this.
Oh, man.
That's a lie.
Are a Canon EOS Rebel T3i.
Definitely not.
And some miscellaneous digital cameras.
That, I believe.
Nope.
That's honestly also not true.
Your family didn't own a single miscellaneous digital camera.
I don't think so.
Brilliant.
Linked below is some samples of my work.
Let's go.
The only pictures taken with the Canon were at PAX 2011.
The rest were just with miscellaneous digital cameras.
Thank you, Johnny.
This should have been such a red flag, man.
Thank you, Johnny.
Why did you only have that camera at PAX?
That's crazy.
I don't know.
Yeah, it's weird, huh?
It's weird.
To be fair, I think PAX was very recent.
Like, when was this email?
Well, based on that you're saying, I'll have a car in December.
It sounds like it was right after PAX.
Yeah, so maybe I just got the camera.
Yeah, maybe you couldn't snap a single additional picture.
Nah.
Yeah, for...
That'd be nuts.
You know what's really funny is these days...
There's so many things that would be red flags about this if I was reading this now.
These days, no offense.
But when people...
Oh, okay.
I do actually need my thing.
What?
When people send me their spec list, like, I'm just like, why?
Like, what?
But this is hilarious.
Not only did Luke send the spec list for his computer in his job application,
he actually copy-pasted the descriptions from NCIX.com, which could be for one of two reasons.
Either one, it was more convenient, or two, he didn't own any of this stuff and was just
browsing the site and copy-pasting things into a list.
Yes.
Which one was it, Luke?
I'm looking through this right now, and I'm really wondering.
I don't think there's any way you ever bought a Maximus Xtreme.
What is this computer?
I don't know.
Wait.
No.
You are talking about one you built for a customer.
Okay, never mind.
This was Harrison's computer.
No way.
A hundred percent.
No way.
Why did you put in two 560 Ti's in SLI?
It was dumb.
I don't know.
I shouldn't have included this.
I didn't want to even do certain things in this build, but he wanted to, like, spend more money.
Oh, man.
Huh.
Yeah, this is not an amazing build.
Yeah, because I didn't talk about the specs of my computer.
Yeah, because you were more focused on the fact that it was submerged in oil.
Yeah.
But the specs of my computer actually made, like, a lot more sense.
I see.
I see.
I see.
I see.
Yeah.
What interests you about the job?
This is great.
Let's see how it turned out for him.
Working with an industry leader in new computer hardware pretty much says it all.
That's not working out anymore.
Being exposed to new hardware.
He likes to be exposed to hardware.
Wow.
And being encouraged to research and test is nothing less than a dream.
Wow.
To be completely honest.
So cute.
I have no idea if this position is paid and don't really care.
At the time, that was honestly true.
That's what established tech media was up against.
That's what I was talking about earlier.
This is literally the conversation we were having.
Yeah.
Because, yeah, I would have done this regardless.
This job would enable me to do what I already do in my free time on a much larger scale.
Yep.
This job would also help me contribute to the online computer hardware scene, which is always good.
What a sentence.
Good writing.
What a sentence.
It would be awesome to participate in the development of a show that I have so actively watched over the past couple of years.
That was a bit of an exaggeration.
Thank you for your consideration.
Any further information will be supplied promptly upon request!
Exclamation point.
Yeah.
Feel free to contact me at any time for further questions or to set up, one word, an interview.
I think I still type that as one word.
Yeah, well, it isn't.
I'm just being honest.
Oh, the references are sick, though.
Yeah, good old Johnny.
Good old Johnny.
Good Johnny.
Johnny Chu.
Heck yeah.
All right.
Let's give this man a Pulitzer.
Thanks, Floatplane Chat.
So good.
They always got your back loose.
So good.
Don't worry.
Floatplane Chat blows.
You didn't want to hire me, right?
Something like that?
No.
But then you kept talking about my resume and Yvonne was just like, just talk to him.
And you were like, okay.
That I don't remember.
That's possible.
That's the story that I've heard.
Is you, if you were like, ah, like doesn't really have, because you were mostly looking
for videography.
No, because I still have your hard copy and it has an A on it.
It has an A in interview on it.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
Yeah.
Or at least I did have your hard copy at some point.
The story that I'm remembering, I don't remember the exact details, but.
Why did I print all the resumes?
You're at the very least on the fence.
You were sitting at your kitchen table talking to Yvonne about it.
I think you were going through them.
It might've just been easier to do that way because you were working with her collaboratively.
Or maybe like NCIX printed them for me or something.
I can't imagine I would've printed resumes.
Anyway.
Yeah.
No, I had like a pile of them.
I just always thought it was funny.
Poor trees.
Because in the early days, Yvonne and I clashed a lot.
Yes.
We're homies now.
But in the early days, we clashed a lot.
Yeah.
You guys made things difficult for me.
She was like the one that pushed you to actually bring me in for the interview.
And then we just butted heads for.
Yeah.
Well, it didn't help that someone, one of them was a butt head.
Yeah.
About some things that the other one takes no shit from anyone and was not into.
It was a good combination.
Yeah.
With me in between it all.
Well, it does work well that way.
Yeah.
Someone's got to be in between.
Yeah.
Um.
F***ing really?
I heard that.
I looked up at my monitor and Linus just slow turns and looks me dead in the eyes.
Ugh.
Ow.
Mm.
Oh, you got some time until sponsors?
Maybe don't go immediately to them right now.
Uh, my brother's old Starcraft channel is still up.
Oh, yeah?
Yeah.
It's been nine years since the last update and he had like a two year gap between updates
before that.
Oh.
Hopefully he gets these ads.
Yeah.
I don't think so.
Yeah, probably not.
Yeah, probably not.
So what he did.
Oh, let's go.
He did casting, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good old Starcraft.
Fire Zerg.
This guy was dope.
I like this guy.
Starcraft won.
And I remember both.
Oh, yeah.
The West Canadian finals.
I was at this, I think.
I was hosted at UBC.
Nice.
But yeah, I wouldn't have like audio or anything, but that was a fun era.
So who's winning?
Oh, got to get that harassment going.
Come on.
Come on.
Take out their production.
Oh, no.
No, you're going to get got.
You're going to get got, brother.
You're going to get got?
Well, the one I would be cheering for in this scenario would probably be fire Zerg, and
he's clearly playing Zerg.
So.
Oh, okay.
So then we want them to get got.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Oh, oh.
What just happened?
He got got.
Nice.
Nice.
Okay.
Nice.
Good job, everyone.
Moving on.
But yeah, cold Starcraft, dude.
I liked that area.
It was fun.
And then Starcraft sort of died.
Yeah.
Hey, speaking of things sort of dying.
Okay.
Not things dying.
It doesn't matter.
The point is I have in addition to our regular topics this week, I created a little section
of the doc called random extra thing.
And then I put three things into it.
One was from the pre-show.
We talked to, we compared eight sleep stats and I don't sleep at all, which is interesting.
But the next thing I wanted to talk to you about is something you probably don't know
about yet, but you will probably have strong feelings about, and it's the Mario Kart balance
changes.
I looked it up in the pre-show.
Is that wild or what?
Sandbagging is dead?
I hate it.
I, okay.
Sandbagging is dead.
I don't even know what you're talking about.
Like sandbagging, like staying way behind.
Yeah.
And then getting great items and using them to like rubber band to the front.
I didn't read that part.
You didn't?
No.
Okay, hold on, hold on.
Then, then I want to guess, I want to guess how you feel about it.
Okay.
So they've changed it.
How does it work?
They've changed it so that when you are in last place, you're not just going to like
automatically get a bullet bill that you can gain some ground with and then time
it so that you can be the first one through the wickets at the end.
Um, I still don't like that.
So I told you not to tell me so that I could guess.
Oh, okay.
Okay.
Well, whatever.
Okay.
My, my, my inclination was that as a Mario cart enthusiast, you would consider rubber
bending to be part of the game.
I do believe it's part of the game.
I don't think it's, uh, I don't think it's worse with it gone.
I don't think it's going to make a huge difference because at the level I was playing it when I
actually played it a lot, like that wasn't a thing people did very often.
Uh, sandbagging.
People are asking deliberately underperform in a race or competition to gain an unfair
advantage.
So an example of something like this might be in a bracketed tournament, um, seeing that
if you get more points in the round Robin portion, that's going to land you in a less
favorable bracket where you're going to have to play the first seed first throwing a match
or something like that, uh, to try to make it farther.
So you at least get, you know, in your groove before you have to play the first seed or something
like that.
So that'd be an example of, uh, sandbagging.
Um, if you're like, okay, I definitely can't win this tournament, but I want to land in
the money and there's like a way to guarantee landing in the money, something like that,
whatever.
Um, in Mario cart, it's highly effective because like if you, if you know you're better than
like the, uh, the last four players, um, and you know, you're competitive maybe with
the first four, but not certain you can just ride back slightly, get really good power
ups and right before the end, just slam it through.
Uh, because like the bullet bill, like Linus just described, the bullet bill is insane.
Like, yeah, it's kind of stupid.
Yeah.
And there's lightning.
There's, yeah, there's multiple ones that are just kind of stupid to be honest.
Um, even superstars can be dumb depending on the map.
Yes.
Like having that, uh, that invulnerability or that's that slight edge in speed.
Um, the ability to drive on any terrain at full speed, like some, some of these things
can hold two at a time.
Um, there's certain ones where you, when you combo them, you, they can just be ridiculously
devastating.
Also like knowing where certain players are at, like having the lightning and then using
it when someone's going over a jump will make it so they don't make it the whole way across
the jump and then they fall off the map and then they have to get fucking toad back on
and like all this stuff.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, it can be really brutal.
So it's just, it's more something that I see at like a land level.
It's not something that I would see online as much when I was trying to play like really
hardcore.
So what would you prefer?
So, so you would, it's been a long time since I was doing that.
So I don't know.
So you would prefer sandbagging be left in like the, like the extreme rubber banding
because I'm not, I'm, I'm, I don't think anyone would say there should be no rubber banding
in a game like Mario Kart.
I think it's too much of like a family friendly fun game.
There needs to be some amount of, yeah, I, there should be some, I don't think it should
be as extreme.
Yeah.
Like maybe, maybe only being able to have one powerful power up.
Uh, there's even an argument I could potentially make for like, maybe if you, if you advance in
rank enough and you have a certain level of power up, it like re-rolls it for you or something.
Um, cause like, yeah, if you're in last place and you get a bullet bill and you like manually
drive yourself up to like fourth, you probably shouldn't still be holding on to that.
I mean, I feel like in some of the older Mario Karts, they had counters for that.
Maybe, I'm not sure.
I know.
Okay.
I haven't played all of them.
Mario Kart 64, you lose your item whenever anyone hits a lightning.
I think that's right.
So like you, so that strategy of like, I didn't even play 64 much.
Yeah.
Hanging back, grabbing a really good item, uh, like a, like, okay.
Like a super mushroom, which is really OP in Mario Kart 64.
Uh, cause you can use it if you time it correctly, you can use it, not an, I forget how many times
it feels infinite.
It's a lot.
Um, and I think you might be able to just use it an infinite number of times if you use
it correctly.
So you can go from last place to first place, like, um, but you, but you can't just hoard
them because someone will probably hit a lightning bolt at some point and you will drop it.
People are saying this happens in Mario Kart 8 too.
Oh, okay.
That helps it a lot.
Is lightning just less common now?
Cause it was pretty common.
I'm just going to be on it.
Like when I was doing that big push where I played online like crazy, this was not a
common issue.
So like, I don't know.
I do know that this would like, whenever you'd play like on LAN, like a bunch of people are
just hanging out and having fun.
Like this is the thing that people would try to do to like have fun.
So Luna says begging it higher ranking in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe Online is very common for
certain tracks at least.
So it might be that you were leaning more toward tracks that were, where it was less
advantageous.
This is also a long time ago.
When, when I was like, so I played on Mario Kart 8 non-deluxe because I played on Wii U and
this would have been in like 2014.
It's been like nine years.
Mystical says Luke was in bronze where no one strategized.
That's incorrect.
I also don't think that's how the ranking works.
You see how salty he was?
So you don't even know.
Man, the salt.
Get out of here.
I could feel the salt from here.
Hilarious.
Yeah.
I used to talk to Linus about this a decent amount.
I knew I started getting good when all the lobbies that I would get into were just, because
it would show the flags of where people were from, which was really cool.
Nerd.
And, and all the flags would just be Japanese flags.
Nerd.
And I'd be like, yes.
I'm making it.
Speaking of making it.
Uh, we have made a pretty stupid deal for this week.
Uh, we've got a couple LTT store updates for you guys.
Uh, mystery color screwdrivers are back in limited quantities.
I, uh, I walked past people building them.
Apparently we're doing them here.
Okay.
Okay.
Anyway.
So yeah, they're, they're actually built in the 105 workshop.
Heck yeah.
Um, oh, these are so cute.
Oh, do we, do we not have them?
What?
That's the, that's something else.
The post-it notes.
No.
Oh, I was not given any post-it notes.
Dang it.
Okay.
Well, I'm screen sharing now.
Oh yeah.
He told us about them.
These are so cute.
Oh, wow.
Window post-it notes.
They're post-it notes, but they look like a little window and you can write on them just
like a post-it note.
Isn't that adorable?
I wish windows still looked that way.
I mean, it sort of can, if you turn on that mode.
It's very windows 3.1 inspired.
Um, anyway, uh, these are, they're six bucks.
Um, the color is just the border around them, by the way.
So they're six bucks or, or these are in the bonus bin.
So if you buy anything else, you can add a little pack, uh, at the different sizes in
your order and you will get it for free.
Well, for bonus, it's not free.
You placed an order.
Um, yeah, really excited about these.
All I see is 10% of the note being unusable.
You must be fun at parties.
Jeez.
Uh, they are real 3M adhesive, by the way.
We, we got samples from a couple of suppliers that claimed that they used adhesive that was
as good as 3M.
And I said, right, okay, let's see them.
And they like immediately fell off the wall when I put them on.
And there was, it was a whole debate internally.
There was someone who was advocating for those ones.
And I was like, please.
Yeah.
I know they're cheaper.
I fully, I fully understand number, number up, number down.
But right now the problem is not numbered up, number down.
The problem is post-it note down.
How big are these post-it notes?
Uh, some of them are quite big.
Like, yeah, I just saw one of the examples and it's like, that's huge.
Yeah.
The big one is six by eight.
Yeah.
That's, that's large.
Uh, six by eight of what?
I can't remember, but six by eight is something.
Um, also we have, oh, this is big.
Um, we have an email signup link guys.
We don't, we don't want to spam you guys.
We know that you don't want to get random emails when, you know, whatever stuff you don't care
about.
You should sign up for this.
It's the black Friday and cyber Monday.
Um, Oh wow.
What is this?
This needs to not be cut off.
Um, okay.
We need to, uh, can, okay.
Well, nice.
Okay.
We, we need to fix that.
Anyway, the point is you are signing up for a temporary newsletter, not the full newsletter,
which you should definitely subscribe to.
Um, but you're signing up to get information about black Friday and cyber Monday deals,
uh, up to 75% off.
Uh, just go to ltdstore.com slash pages slash BFCM.
It's going to be nuts.
You are going to want to be on the newsletter because if you are not on the newsletter, you
will almost certainly miss out on something that would be super cool.
Oh, people are saying the form doesn't work for me on Firefox.
Um.
Define doesn't work.
Also message support.
Oh, someone said that, um, works fine for me.
Try disabling ad blocker.
Oh.
That's not something that we would intentionally implement, but you never know.
Ad blockers do all kinds of funky things to websites.
That's not something we would have intentionally implemented, but, but yeah.
Yeah.
Um.
It doesn't verify that it adds you to a newsletter.
I, I know.
And I think that's what people might be saying when they say it doesn't work.
Uh, labs, Jake, we are using 3M like stuff.
I think it's fine, but, um, the better person to check with would be Nick.
Also, there's one more thing.
This is pretty crazy.
We are running a promo on our 3D Down jacket.
Super nice, super nice jacket.
Perfect for the Pacific Northwest.
And one in, one in 25 people who buy it over the next some period.
Uh, I don't see it here.
So, let's assume not for very long.
One in 25 people who buy it will get a chance to experience their jacket in the Pacific Northwest.
Oh.
That's right.
You could win a trip to LTT headquarters here in Vancouver.
However, because of the costs of plane tickets, this is only available to customers in North America, excluding Quebec.
But, we have a special note for our live WAN show viewers.
Not ones watching the archive because this is sort of crazy.
The standard chances to win, which we publish, um, which we adhere to, are one in 25.
There is a one in 25 die roll if you pick up a 3D Down jacket that you will be getting on a plane and coming for a tour of LTT headquarters.
What the heck?
But, if you buy during the show, now, we will double your odds.
You will have a 2 in 25 chance of winning a trip to Vancouver and a tour of LMG HQ.
Uh, the full details are, oh, wow, where are the details?
Oh, boy.
Well, hopefully somewhere.
Let me check the homepage.
Oh, man.
Here it is.
Okay, good.
Buy a jacket, win a trip.
Oh.
Uh, oh, yeah.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Here we go.
Round trip flight.
One person.
Two nights in a hotel.
Private tour of LMG offices.
Valuated up to $2,000 with the purchase of their jacket based on random draw.
Uh, blah, blah.
They will use a 100 number randomizer.
Okay, so we've got the whole methodology and the T's and C's there.
Yay!
It's on the website.
Ha ha.
Cool.
So, there it is, guys.
Absolutely crazy promo.
Uh, we're just kind of getting into the Black Friday season.
Getting into the mood.
Gonna be some crazy stuff going on.
And then we're starting with that.
It's a really, really well-reviewed product.
Good for most weather jacket.
Surprisingly warm from Florian.
Mostly good.
Pretty nice.
Oh, questionable design decisions.
Well, you guys can read it.
Um, see what you think of that one.
But overall, very, very well-reviewed product.
Doop-doop-doop-doop-doop.
I know Luke really likes his.
Yeah, I was gonna, like, I genuinely can't even think of what that would even be.
I mean, you never know.
People can, people can read the reviews.
People can have their own.
Yeah, they can make their own decisions.
Opinions and stuff.
Yep.
All right.
Why don't we jump into a topic?
Oh, why don't we jump right into, oh, no.
It's sponsor time.
All right.
What now?
No, just do it.
All right.
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All righty.
I have a post-sponsors question for you before the merch messages.
Okay.
Do you think it is a better marketing angle to say that your thing is AI-powered or no?
Because like Grammarly, for instance, was already doing a lot of this stuff before they
have any infused AI-powered stuff.
Yeah, I think it's better to say it's AI-powered.
Yeah.
So I think that's one of the angles that a lot of these companies are taking.
For the next four months, and then it'll become gauche.
And then nobody wants AI anymore.
I actually don't think so.
Really?
Yeah.
Well, we've got this week in AI.
Why don't we do a topic before merch messages?
Sure.
Let's talk about this week in AI.
Luke's going to be finding out about all of this.
Some of it.
I heard some of it just because.
Okay.
Well, do you want to walk us through it?
Sure.
OpenAI held their first Dev Day event on Monday where they announced GPTs, custom versions
of ChatGPT that can be built, shared, and sold on the GPT store.
These GPTs can apparently be built without coding knowledge using the GPT LLM.
Yeah, it's like you definitely don't need any.
Um, OpenAI also announced GPT for Turbo, which has a 128k token context window.
Uh, and from what I've heard so far, it's just like, you should use it if you just need
really fast responses that are a little bit worse, which is like, okay.
Well, it allows prompts up to 300 pages long, says Riley.
That part's pretty crazy.
That's wild.
It used to be 2,000 tokens, and I thought, what did this say?
192?
128,000.
That is nuts.
That is nuts.
That is absolutely insane.
That's the crazy part.
That made me pause.
Like, that is...
I've had a lot of people commenting about how it's not as good, though.
Yeah, but the token length.
Yeah, man, the token length is insane.
Context length is everything.
Uh, well, it depends.
It's 40% of everything.
Okay.
There you go.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, if only you'd had more tokens to give us that additional context for what you were saying.
Yeah.
It is crazy, though.
Like, it's a cool development.
It's just...
They're all flavors.
Like, you shouldn't just automatically use it because you think it's automatically better.
Anyways, OpenAI paired these new features with an across-the-board price decrease and
a commitment to pay the legal costs of OpenAI customers who get sued for copyright infringement
over AI-generated works.
Wow.
That had been leaked.
Can I just say that the major takeaway here for me is that we're bringing back Turbo?
Yeah, that's kind of cool.
Yeah.
Like...
I like that word.
Turbo.
I always like Turbo.
Like, let's get...
Forget X, you know?
Yeah.
Forget, you know, GTX, you know, things with just, like, X in them for no reason.
Yeah.
That's passe.
Yeah.
Let's bring back Turbo.
Turbo.
Remember when computers had a Turbo button?
Yeah.
That was sweet.
Yeah, man.
I like Turbo better than Extreme.
You know, Extreme is like...
Extreme was...
It's try-hard.
It's try-hard.
Turbo.
Yeah.
Turbo.
Yeah.
Slow down there, Turbo.
Turbo nerd.
Yeah.
I've always liked Turbo nerd.
Yeah.
I've tried to keep that one alive.
No one cared.
It's fine.
Anyways, the next one, this one, I've been all over.
I messaged Linus this one.
Humane, a startup founded by former Apple execs, has launched the AI Pin, a $700 lapel pin
where the users can talk to a virtual assistant powered by technologies from OpenAI and cloud
computing from Microsoft.
The pin has a $24 a month subscription that includes unlimited data and phone calls via
T-Mobile.
It's screenless and appless, sort of.
We could go into that if you want.
But it has a built-in laser projector to display text and monochrome images on the user's hand.
It also has a camera that can take pictures and scan to interpret objects that you hold
in front of it.
Humane has raised $241 million from Microsoft and OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, and others.
Okay.
Can we talk about this?
You've got to get it at this point.
What is it about being ex-Apple that makes you so cynical that you think people will just
buy anything and create stuff like this?
I thought it was kind of interesting that the image that the laser projector puts on
his hand is kind of blurry and not that easy to read.
And they show that in a video.
That and you have to hold it somewhere that's not that easy to see or interact with.
That's not that bad.
You have to have it in a specific spot.
Like, that's just ridiculous.
So I'm checking the time on my phone.
It's anywhere.
When you inevitably get this and you guys inevitably make a video about it, you've got to do like
a speed race.
Just like, is there...
Doing different tasks.
Is there literally anything that's faster with this thing?
Yeah, because there might be.
Maybe.
I don't know.
Okay, hold on.
Hold on.
Like, this is just becoming a bit of a pattern here.
Where's that super expensive speaker that was from ex-Apple people?
We did a video about it.
Former Apple...
Yeah, here it is.
Look at this thing.
It sounded great, but it was like wildly, wildly expensive.
Super cool design.
Wildly expensive.
Are these guys still around?
I have no idea.
Holy crap.
These guys still exist.
Here we go.
Hold on.
100 best inventions.
Yeah, that's really challenging.
How much is it?
Oh.
There's a set of three there.
How much...
If I want three of them.
Oh!
But hey, it's $1,000 off, Luke.
So you can...
Oh my...
You can sit on the top of this building and listen to music.
What a building.
That's what you would do.
Yeah.
I don't know how many like, you know...
That makes perfect sense.
I don't know how many graphics you've obliterated to be able to afford that building, but it's
pretty cool.
Like, I want to make it really clear.
It does sound great, but it's clear that things probably aren't going particularly well.
But yeah, it's $2,500.
It's an...
Like, I don't really know...
I don't really know how to deal with that, you know?
Anyway, sorry, what are we talking about?
Oh, right, right, right.
Yeah, okay.
So this AI pin thing.
If it wasn't...
What is it?
$700?
$600 or something like that?
$700.
Yeah.
US, I think.
Because it's only available in the US.
How does that make...
And a $24 a month subscription, which comes with unlimited data.
Well, that's fine.
That's fine.
I don't mind a $24 a month...
Okay, when I found out the product had a subscription, I, like, lost it.
I was like, that's ridiculous.
It's just a ChatGPT premium subscription plus $4.
Right.
So I don't even mind that.
Just having a data plan on something.
It's like, yeah, okay, this is something that doesn't function without a data plan.
So I guess realistically, I need a data plan.
Fine.
Um, I thought it was just, hey, you just need a subscription to keep using your product.
Um.
Am I losing my passion here?
When Google Glass came out, I didn't care how useless it was.
I wanted to try it.
And obviously, I wasn't the kind of person that...
I want to try this.
Insisted...
You don't want to try this at all?
Hold on.
Can I just...
Can I...
Can I pour my heart out here for a minute?
Yeah.
Okay.
I wanted to try it.
I wasn't one of those people who insisted on continuing to use it once it became evident
that it was not useful and never going anywhere.
Like, I wasn't one of those people who was like, yeah, this is like the immediate future.
Let's go.
But I wanted to try it.
I look at this thing and I just see a complete and utter waste of my time.
I don't want to use it.
I don't want to...
I don't even want to invest the time to learn how to use it.
And I feel like that's bad.
I'm going to force myself to use it so that I can participate in all the memes about how,
you know, dumb and shit it is or whatever, right?
But it makes me feel like...
Is any amount of you open to being wrong?
Well, I have to be open to being wrong.
I consider that a life skill.
I consider it a professional skill.
I recently started working on a review of a laptop.
Like, here's the thing.
I think...
I hate to bring this up, but we had a recent situation where I had made up my mind about
a product to a significant degree before I ultimately made a video about it.
And I think that a lot of people interpreted that as me not being open to my mind being
made up being wrong.
But that's not what I mean by made up my mind.
What I mean is I have assessed it.
I'm pretty experienced.
I've seen a lot of stuff over the years.
And I usually have a pretty good read on it.
But in that case, I was right about it.
And so, yeah, the conclusion that I had already drawn was right.
In the case of this more recent product...
In fact, here, I'll pull it out on the show.
Because...
This is a laptop?
Yeah.
I was...
Oh, yeah.
Very surprised.
Yeah.
Okay, the first thing, the first thing I thought when I saw this laptop was, wow, it's so thick,
it looks like it's from 10 years ago.
Yeah.
The second thing I thought when I saw this laptop was, IMAX enhanced?
Are you f***ing kidding me?
IMAX enhanced on a laptop?
What does that even mean?
What does that mean?
So, we got off on the wrong foot.
Yeah.
Okay, me and this laptop.
Actually, though, what does that mean?
I have no idea.
I'm not worried about that, because I'm reviewing a laptop, not an IMAX theater.
That might be part of it.
Yeah.
So, anyway.
Then, I started using it and realized that the touchpad is extremely laggy, because it
always uses a Bluetooth connection, because it does not attach in a permanent way to the
laptop.
Does it slide when you use it?
No.
Okay, that's good.
No.
Okay.
Mostly.
I tried to interact with the touchscreen and realized that there's a gap here because of
the curved screen that makes it hard to touch the taskbar and, like, you know, connect
a Bluetooth device.
Okay?
This is all sounding like things that I probably could have figured out ahead of time, kind
of drawn an approximate conclusion about, and would have had reinforced by my time with
the product.
But I know that's not true.
And then I rolled into a meeting.
Yeah.
And I took off the keyboard.
And I opened up the gigantic foldable display.
Okay?
Oh, hold on.
That pen came off.
I whipped out the kickstand.
And I blew my own mind.
Yeah.
I f***ing love it.
Um, and so I forget what I'm actually responding to.
It feels like it's kind of stepping almost away from the laptop and it's stepping more
into portable computer.
It's an AIO.
Yeah.
That I can carry with me and is battery powered.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
Um, I, there's drawbacks.
Sure.
I've got, I'm going to have a detailed video about it because I've actually spent a fair
bit of time with it.
I've put away my framework and I've been daily driving this.
Um, and I, I was daily, I daily drove it because we were saying it's the aspect ratio
in picture format.
What about it?
IMAX.
Oh, all right.
Whatever.
Um, yeah, I'm not, I'm not getting into that.
Uh, the point is there's, there's, there's still things that are going to be gripes about
it.
There's problems.
It has some first gen things.
But honestly, when I saw you using it in a meeting for the first time, my brain explode.
I couldn't, I couldn't even understand what was happening at first.
It's like, what is this thing?
I've never seen this before.
It, I love about it exactly the things that I love about a foldable phone.
Yeah.
It's like, yeah, nice laptop.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This sucks now.
Like it's seeing, I'm like, okay, his keyboard looks honestly just easier to use.
It's fine.
I can move it around anywhere I want.
Yeah.
Which is why it's easier to use.
It's super convenient.
You could literally lounge back and have this really light keyboard thing in your lap.
Yeah.
And you have this enormous screen.
Huge.
Yeah.
Huge.
And it folds up into a 13 inch form factor.
Which just in case you want to, you could still use.
You could totally still use.
And I often do.
Or when I'm like, settling in.
Which is not great, but it's fine.
It works.
It's fine.
Yeah.
And when I'm settled in and I'm like doing real work.
It's tiny.
It's huge.
It just transforms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, um, so I guess, uh, what, what was the point?
What was I, uh, what was I, what was I?
You're definitely, as cynical as you can be, you're definitely still open to mind being changed.
Of course.
And here's an example of where.
Right.
Yeah.
That was the point of this.
Because I had, I had, oh, right, right, right.
The original video concept was, uh, this thing.
How do we get views on this product?
I kind of feel like we should cover it, but like, what's the angle for this video?
And I volunteered.
Nobody else wanted to do it.
I volunteered as tribute to daily drive it for a significant period of time.
I'm very happy.
So that that would be the title so that I could be like.
So the title could be, I daily drove this horrible laptop for a month because I thought
that would be very clickable.
It's like your life has changed and you'll never go back.
And now it's like, holy crap.
This is actually really awesome.
This format of computer.
Um, and I'm happy you didn't get that because I don't know.
I'm just, yeah.
Um, careful because I don't know how many other people on the team are going to spend that
much time in meetings.
So they might not have ran into that use case.
Yeah, that's true.
Yeah.
It's good that you did it.
So my, my thing about the humane AI pin is to me, it seems like a, I don't know anything
about him.
I could be totally wrong here.
It's monochrome.
And honestly, the lines look pretty blurry in the video.
Yeah.
It seems like a, not all that high quality laser projector, a speaker that might be good
or not.
I don't really care.
It's a small speaker.
We've been doing this for decades at this point.
Um, a microphone, an led light, and a subscription to chat GPT.
Yeah.
Oh, and some way to access the internet.
And it costs $700 and is for 24 bucks.
Now, like I just, all the feature, all of the features that they displayed.
This feels like vine.
It feels like something that I don't have to actually invest my own time in.
And I can just read someone else's summary a few years later when it fails and I can
just keep doing my own thing.
No, you got to try this.
No, I will.
You already, you already convinced me.
I will.
I just, I don't want to, I guess is, is the, is.
Because, okay.
Maybe I can hype you up a little bit because I don't necessarily know if this is it either.
Sure.
But this might be the first step.
Because we, we've been talking for a long time and I'm honestly like frustrated that
this hasn't happened yet.
Yeah.
But we've been talking for a long time about the like compute puck.
Remember that conversation?
Like 2013.
Compute puck.
Like the wearable thing?
Yeah.
Where we were like, eventually you're going to have like battery and compute in your pocket.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then you'll have like display and other stuff.
And we talked about this with VR as well.
Like building like a, like a, like, uh, I think the concept we had after we did that
one where you built a VR rig into like a hiking backpack frame.
Yeah.
Um, we talked about doing one where we actually like strapped all the components to the person
and used like, uh, like ribbon cables and extensions.
So you could wear the VR setup, including like batteries and everything in a more balanced
way.
And just like, yeah, carry the compute with you.
I, Google clips.
That's the one.
Okay.
It's like, yeah, I, I see where you're going with this, how this could kind of be an evolution
toward that.
So I don't, I don't think it's the thing in my opinion, but I do think it's a group of,
if I can give them as much credit as I possibly could, and I've dunked on this thing.
So like, I just want to be very clear.
Yeah.
But if I can give them any credit, yeah, it feels like a group of people that are trying
to usher in the next thing.
Okay.
I don't know if this is necessarily it, but they've taken a lot of risks.
This is a weird product.
Microsoft and Sam Altman and other investors have certainly taken a lot of risks.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
Why can't it just be like a Bluetooth thing that you pair with your phone and stick on
your shoulder?
Why does it have to be a self-contained item?
You?
VC investor jail.
Go.
Oh, no.
You're out.
You're, you're, you're done, bud.
You're done.
No, I'm going to go and create my own AI pocket protector.
I could do it cheaper.
Pocket protector is fantastic.
Okay.
We'll give you $220 billion.
Yeah.
Or a million, excuse me, not billions.
That'll help me embezzle it even faster.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's interesting.
I, I'm very surprised that, um, if I remember correctly, there's like, there's a line in their
announcement video that sounds like hyper anti-right to repair.
Um.
Nice.
And like, did you, did you listen to it?
Yeah.
I noticed that because I liked their part.
No one's commenting on this.
So they were saying, no, I think it's, it's, it's a difficult emotion for me to have with
that because it has a, it has a safety light, right?
Which, cause this was some of the problem with Google Glasses.
If that actually works.
If it's actually like, that's going to get bypassed immediately.
Okay.
So, okay.
So here's the problem with safety lights and Dan knows more about this stuff than me.
So he might probably jump in here, but safety lights.
Like if you have a webcam at home on your desktop, what you really want is a webcam where
the LED recording light is you, you, you cannot, uh, software bypass it because to be able
to turn the camera on, the power has to go through that LED.
So that is your own webcam and you shouldn't be bypassable through software.
It's pointing at you, right?
Yeah.
And you want to make sure that you're not being spied on.
You own this camera and you're pointing it at other people.
So now there's an incentive for you to turn off the camera so you don't, so they don't
know that you're recording.
Oh yeah.
This is absolutely, um, right.
Glass.
It's Google Glass.
And hey, it's not Google Glass.
It's all normal.
Everything's okay.
Yeah.
And then they're saying that if you try to disable the light, like you just cut the front
of it off and cut out the light, uh, it'll know.
And then it can only be repaired by them.
Like it has some sort of safety trigger.
And I don't know how I feel about that.
Yeah.
I'm very mixed because one, that's probably a really good feature to have.
But like, if they really cared.
Yeah.
As lame as this might be.
Yeah.
Bro, if you think this pin I'm going to wear is the only way I can record you, you're nuts.
I like that argument.
Like, that's a, that's a dumb, just to be like, oh yeah.
So we're going to use this argument of like, we don't want people accidentally recording
people, which is fair.
Uh, but we're going to use that argument to make it so that you just never get to repair
this thing.
Probably ever.
I suspect where that's where this is going to go.
I like, I like LDD logic paint, paint works.
Yeah.
Uh.
Yeah.
Like, uh, I don't know, dude.
Snail polish.
There's also been like tiny little micro cameras that you can fit into like dress shirt buttons
for years.
I think so obviously like those are very silent.
This is a very overt camera that's pointing at people's faces.
Yeah.
I think we had a major pushback with Google glass because you're literally just like camera
in your face.
Yeah.
You don't know what's happening.
Uh, it's, it makes it awkward.
I think we're seeing that as well.
I don't know.
I don't know where I am with this.
It's definitely interesting in a land of devices that have not been interesting for a long time.
I'm, I'm into it from like a philosophical.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like I would love to just have a thing on my shoulder and that would be my thing.
And then maybe it connects to a screen that I reference occasionally, but I just talk to
it.
I mean, you've seen the movie Her, they're basically talking to their computer all the time and
then, oh, you want to see this thing?
You put out your little screen instead of the other way around.
So Dan wants an AI girlfriend, basically.
Well, no, I want more.
That can perch on his shoulder.
Yeah.
It's like a, it's like a bird.
Hey.
Yeah.
I, I'd love, I'd love a, a, a little bird AI that sits on my shoulder.
That's just like, what is this?
Google clips?
Oh, wow.
It's the same thing.
I don't remember this at all.
When is this from?
Exactly.
Uh, this is from, this is from 2018.
What the heck?
How did this, how did I, we didn't talk about this on Wanch?
Oh yeah, we did.
Oh.
You just don't remember because it was f***ing stupid.
I feel like I have a pretty good memory for that.
It's an AI camera that you wear that takes pictures when it sees something that, you know,
might be noteworthy.
Oh, I do remember this.
So basically.
Wow.
This was in, in six years, five, in five years, we've gotten what?
A $450 price bump.
You got a chat GPT subscription.
A microphone and a chat GPT subscription.
Why?
Yeah.
It's literally already my phone.
My phone does all of this.
Let's go.
Like a, just give me a lapel pin and one AirPod.
That is, that is, I'm going to go get VC.
I'm quitting.
I quit.
I'm going to go invent the single AirPod.
You can't quit.
You're fired.
Oh, by the way, here's a bushel of money.
Do it.
Okay.
I'm like, my Christ.
Silicon Valley must be wild, man.
It's almost like I should watch like a movie that was all about like, you know, how it,
you know, happened and stuff.
He's so upset right now.
Okay.
So what's the progress on that?
Have you played Titanfall?
I haven't played any more Titanfall.
No.
Okay.
I mean, you were there for all the gaming that I did in the last week.
We had the, we had the LAN last week and I was playing multiplayer games because I am
a good LAN party citizen and I don't sit and play single player games at a LAN party.
What?
I didn't.
Is this, are you chirping me?
No.
Okay.
That's just a statement.
Okay.
Oh, no, no, no.
If I was chirping you, you'd know because I'd be talking about how ridiculous it is to
go to a social f***ing LAN party and just sit and play Counter-Strike the whole time.
We were being social.
You could play Counter-Strike any time.
We were being social.
You could play Counter-Strike any time.
You can't play like, you know, Halo CE or like Midtown Madness or Worms Armageddon.
Also, when I was playing Counter-Strike, you were like, hey, what games are you playing?
Do you want to play Left 4 Dead?
And I was like, yes.
And you're like, okay, cool.
And I was like, yeah, send me an invite.
And then you played Left 4 Dead without me and didn't send me an invite.
No, there was a reason for that.
And I got invited by my friends to play Counter-Strike.
So I played Counter-Strike.
And I had fun.
And this guy never stops with the, I have friends.
And we were cheering in the LAN.
Absolute show off.
You had 80 people at your house for a LAN over the weekend.
Get over it.
Trying to think what percentage of them whose names I knew.
Not all of them were staff.
There were a lot of plus ones and stuff.
Like, that's, I'm not saying I actually don't know any of the staff's names.
I'm just saying.
We played, we played Pico Park.
Oh.
I didn't know.
I didn't know.
All I, all I had ever seen were like little short clips.
Yeah, that was very frustrating.
What a brain-destroying game.
He was legitimately angry.
Like, not like, guys.
Yeah, at least at one point in time.
Guys.
Seriously, this is not that hard.
Just, if it's not your turn, don't go.
Yeah.
Just like, like, mad.
We were playing with eight people in the, in the theater room.
It was, it was rough.
I gotta admit, by the time Luke started getting legitimately angry, I, I, I, it wasn't even
intentional, but I just naturally followed an inverse function for my unhelpfulness or
my helpfulness went down inversely with his anger.
No, but you, okay.
I, I, I want to give you this though.
You actually did fine because I know I, so there's, we've had, we've had this conversation
before.
I don't, I'm not going to go too into it, but it was a conversation about like the concept
of trust and adult relationships and all this kind of stuff.
Um, and I was talking about how like one form of trust is, is kind of like just knowledge
of a person.
So you like know what they're going to do.
You like trust that, you know what they're going to do in different scenarios.
Um, so I like, I knew where this was headed for your brain.
So I'm like, he's not going to be able to just sit in here and like, keep like focus
on the mission.
Yeah.
Like I knew that was going to happen.
So I don't know if you even noticed this, but partway through one of the matches, I noticed
that you went away from everything dangerous and just started messing around in the background.
And I just went back there and was like jumping around with you.
Yeah.
Cause I was like, he's playing ball.
He's not messing around near the dangerous stuff.
He's not screwing anyone up, but he's like bored and frustrated and wants to mess with
things, but he's doing it away from the danger.
And I'm like, you know what?
I was being a good boy.
That's cool.
I'm going to go like support this and go hang out too.
And it was like kind of fun.
And I was like, all right, this is cool.
I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't think that part of your brain actually torpedoed any of the
attempts.
I don't think.
So you know what?
I would have torpedoed the last level if your dad hadn't ruined it before I got
a chance.
I feel bad that he was the last one, but every single one of us screwed up at least
one of them.
So it was like, I don't know.
We didn't complete the game because we spent like a long time on one half an hour, 20 minutes
at least.
I don't even know.
On the last level where you have to get over all the do not touch buttons.
And there was one more leapfrog that had to happen.
And it like, we were part of it was we were all a little low blood sugar because the food
had arrived and we were like, no, we're going to complete this level before we eat.
Um, and right when we were at the exit door, like we made it, all we had to do was like
walk through the door or something or like make like one more jump or something.
It was a total of three jumps.
And I, yeah, I had, I had decided already that if his dad made it, I was just going
to hit the button.
You were going to run back and touch a button.
But I was through already.
You can come back out though.
So like, yeah, it would have worked.
Yeah.
Pico Park.
Yeah.
That game.
Pretty fun though.
It was pretty fun until that level.
That level was a little much, I think.
Um, all the other ones.
Depends who you're playing with.
I think if you're playing with 100% sweaty gamers, it would be no problem.
And if you had less potential total people.
No, I think even with eight sweaty gamers, it'd be fine.
Yep.
Um, this is great.
Uh, we, we do have a quick question, uh, from RCM24 in floatplane chat.
They want to know how super checks went after the WAN show last week.
So something happened with super checks.
I don't know.
Like, so we, we were playing for a while and Linus was wrecking me and I had this like
slow and decent progression.
And then I got to a point where I, he leapfrogged me.
I leapfrogged him pretty good for a couple of weeks, two weeks in a row.
He crushed me.
Yeah.
Like it wasn't even that close.
And I was like, all right, I'm like good now.
Linus will do well, but like, I'm good now.
We're good.
And then he, I don't know.
He spent a week.
Uh, you know how like in Dragon Ball Z they'll have an episode where he just like
screams the whole time.
I feel like he spent a week just like doing that.
Yeah.
He like repair, he came in with his son and repaired the board.
He like, that's the only thing we talked about for a week.
Like he was just like, this, this is my whole life for a week.
And then just crushed.
And ever since that week, meditation, and it has nothing to do with the board repair.
I'm not trying to, that's just, I'm just saying that he was like dialed in.
That's all I'm saying by that comment.
But I, I, I haven't been able to get it back since.
And I don't think I'm playing worse.
I think I'm playing at the same level I did when I crushed you those two weeks.
You just went nuts.
I don't like, I don't, oh man.
Well, you know what part of it was.
Some of the shots are absurd.
Like the, the final shot in the like, in the 4v4 game that we did.
Oh, that was fun.
That was nuts though.
The last shot.
Do you even remember it?
It was your, your back right guy, short stick.
Um, there was like three blocks and you just, bam.
And it landed like top corner of the net.
I was just like, you didn't even like slide up.
Just one really quick shot and you were totally confident.
Wasn't even phased.
Like, what?
I, I don't know, man.
It's getting to the point where people don't want to play with me.
It's nuts.
There's no chance.
It's like, oh man, I don't know.
Luke's the only one who has beaten me.
That's still cool.
So you at least, you at least get to home.
And I can usually get like a game.
Yeah.
Yep.
I can still often get a game, but we'll play like five and I only get one.
Yes, man.
I don't know.
You know what it is though?
You pushed me.
Like, this is the thing.
Like, I, there's an, there's an old expression.
Like you can't sharpen a blade against dirt or something.
I don't remember, but you need, you need two sharp things to make two sharp things.
You know what I mean?
And, um, the reason that I like elevated it was because you started shutting me down because
I was just, I was just playing intuitively before.
I wasn't really thinking about it.
It's the kind of thing that comes really naturally to me.
There's this other hockey game we played at the land, uh, called a slap shot rebound.
Yeah.
Really fun, by the way, just utter chaos, great land game.
I would highly recommend playing with friends.
I don't necessarily know if I'd recommend online play because there is some hyper sweaty
people in online play.
Uh, they have pretty okay matchmaking.
I enjoyed online play.
Yeah.
Okay.
Okay.
Um, anyway, so slap shot rebound, lots of fun.
I don't know what it is about my brain, but slap shot rebound, the way you control your
character, it's a, like a physics based hockey game.
We had played some really fun six V six total chaos because it's completely physics based.
And the way you control your character is W A S D.
I was losing the plot on those games near the end.
Yeah.
I know you were really mad.
Um, he got pretty mad at the one.
Did you even have fun?
I did.
I actually had a great time.
Okay.
Good.
Um, but you, you control your stick by moving your mouse left and right and your character
rotates and that translation of a linear movement to a rotational action, I can't, it completely
breaks my brain.
Watching Ariel from the lab from having barely touched the game to like top shelf backhand
crazy shots.
I can't even, I can't even fathom it.
I have probably three or four times as many hours in the game as he does.
And he walks circles around out of nowhere too.
Cause like I, I, I, the 66 games were so chaotic that he just might not have been able
to flourish there at all.
No, no, no, he was like practicing a bit.
He was playing in the practice mode after that.
So what I'm saying, but so we played in the 66 and he seemed fine.
I remember his name.
He was one of the better players, but like it wasn't insane or anything.
And then we ended up playing a, was it three V three as like one of the last things we
did at the whole event.
And he crushed, he was very clearly the strongest player.
It was just like, what the, yeah, it was, it was madness.
Um, and then for me, I managed to degrade in the first six V six game.
I scored three goals, like completely dominated the game.
I didn't score another goal in any of the rest of the games, the entire rest of the land event.
Yeah.
And that was like six or seven or eight games.
The entire rest of the land event?
Yeah.
I never scored another goal.
Oh wow.
Yeah.
I don't know.
My brain broke.
Not in the three V threes at all?
Super checks though.
Oh yeah.
That game, I just get, it clicks, I get it.
And, um, so I wasn't really thinking when I was winning before.
I was just like, he, he, fun.
You made me think.
Yeah.
And I was like, okay.
Now he's terrifying.
Ah man, I love it.
It's such, it's such a good game.
It's such a good game.
The thing that drives me a little bit nuts is I've always been extremely defensive minded
in like every game, every sport, everything that I do.
So anytime that I'm in a one-on-one scenario, it takes a lot of energy to score points.
It comes very natural to defend and stop points, if that makes sense.
But you can't just win that way because they're probably going to get at least some amount through.
So you have to counter with some amount of actual scoring.
So I always struggle with the scoring side.
And, um, so I only had like when I, when I was, when I did do really well, those two
weeks, I really only had like two or three shots that I was getting in.
Um, but it was the defense.
I was shutting down a lot of your goals.
I would, I would end a significant amount of games with like one, one against, and then
I'd have however many I got.
That was really frustrating.
But that, that's what I'm normally pretty good at.
And then he learned how to shut down my shots.
All of them.
And also, and also learned how to score more.
And then the score, and did that at the same time.
And the score just went like, just completely.
Over two games, you got like two goals and I got 11 or something like that.
Like that's so rough.
That, that's back to like the first time I ever played.
Like that, I don't know.
That's kind of ridiculous.
You'll get it back.
You'll get it back.
Hopefully.
See, we have this thing where any new game, I will beat Luke out of the gate if neither
of us have touched it.
And then within usually about half an hour, he is absolutely destroying me at it.
Probably, I think the best example of this, like a pure gamer example of this is, um,
Disc Jam.
Yeah.
It's kind of like volleyball.
It's like somewhere in between volleyball and disc golf.
I don't even think you can play it anymore.
I think it's dead now.
Yeah, I think it's completely dead.
Actually really fun.
Surprise it died.
Sort of poorly balanced, which is why, maybe part of why it died or maybe, I don't know.
There could be any number of reasons why it died.
It's a free to play game, I think.
It's still, it costs money, but, and you can buy it?
Maybe you can play single player?
I don't know.
Anyway, Disc Jam.
Um, what makes this such a, such a, a perfect example is that neither of us had ever played
a game anything like it.
I'd say about the only things we could have both had experience with is controlling a
third person character model and.
Yeah, there's, there's weird mechanics and stuff.
Super weird mechanics with like curving the disc and lobbing it and firing it hard and
all, all this, all this crazy stuff.
And so we both used a controller before and we both moved the character around on a screen.
We both fundamentally understand, well, my goal's on my side.
You need to score on it and vice versa.
I annihilated him out of the gate, like easy money within probably what?
Our third game?
Somewhere around there.
I think you beat me.
I might have won one more after that and then I just never won again.
Yeah.
And we, we played probably 20 games.
Like, like we played it over a couple of nights.
Like this was.
And then he never wanted to play again.
And then the game shut down.
And then they did do that.
I, so I looked it up.
It is still purchasable, but all the recent reviews are telling people not to buy it because
all of the multiplayer functionality is off.
They turned off the multiplayer servers.
They're still advertising as if they have multiplayer.
Um, and you might be able to do, um, like Hamachi style or like VPN style networking.
Next plan, disc jam tournament.
Let's go.
So yeah, maybe it could work for like a couch co-op setting.
Um, but yeah.
But the thing is, you never really cared about disc jam.
I thought it was really fun.
I liked it.
Yeah, but you didn't care about it in the way that you care about super checks.
Oh, I love super checks.
Yeah.
See, it's a different, it's a different thing.
Super checks.
I, I also would argue, I, I said dexterous and you, you didn't like that.
Um, should I say, should I say, should I say deft?
He called me a thief.
Should I say, and anytime there's like agility tasks, like if you look back at channel super
fun competitions, like what ones is Linus going to win versus what ones, or is Luke going
to win?
Like there was, it was usually somewhat predictable.
Yeah.
If it's a, if it's a strength challenge, Luke will win.
If it's a dexterity challenge, I will probably win.
Yeah.
So like, yeah.
And it's, it's a lot of like this stuff.
So it makes sense to me, but it doesn't mean.
So how are you so good at.
It doesn't mean I'm just going to roll over.
Operating a game controller.
See, that doesn't make any sense.
I think I have an opinion that it's a, I think somewhat of it is you have it built into
your brain that that's how this works.
I think, I think, dude, I try hard.
Hmm.
I try hard.
So I learned, I had a buddy that I grew up with that we were the opposite.
I would, I would beat him at the beginning.
Really?
Okay.
And, and I, I picked up that in the, in the first, in the first matches that we'd play
against each other in, he like, wouldn't care at all, but he would like learn different
controls or combos and stuff.
So he'd be like trying things.
And then he wouldn't tell me what they were.
What a dick.
That part was like, okay.
I don't know about that.
Um, and then, and then, yeah, he would like leapfrog me because in those first three rounds
where I was trying to play, he was just practicing and learning.
He wasn't trying to play at all.
Got it.
So I don't quite do that.
I'm definitely trying to win.
No, but you are, you are a methodical.
I'm also, yeah.
Whereas I do think I have a bit of a tendency to just play.
Yeah.
I don't have that kind of focus.
I think you care more about that, winning that individual match.
I think.
Oh, I definitely always care about winning the individual match.
That's an interesting assessment because I, I think that in a game where I do have that
kind of focus, I probably can compete with you.
I think that if you put 50 hours into a Supreme Commander or something like that, I'd probably
still beat you.
Um, whereas depending on what it was, I, I think that if you put in 50 minutes, I would
never be able to touch you again.
Like, it's just, I don't know.
It just, it just depends.
A lot of that.
That's what I was trying to say with the, like, we're slightly different types though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
Like, yeah, I don't know.
It's funny.
Cause I like, I can't get good at every, every RTS or anything like that.
Like I, man, I, I can't handle the pace of like Warcraft.
I think you like the mass management because you also really like Anno.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
I love Anno, Supcom, stuff like that.
Yep.
Um, okay.
Are we supposed to be doing WAN Show After Dark?
Like what even?
To come all the way back to it.
Oh, wait.
We only got halfway through this article and then didn't care about AI anymore and started
talking about video games.
You're supposed to do three merch messages after sponsors, which was four segments ago.
And now it's time for WAN After Dark.
Don't forget about physical games.
Physical games.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Any form of gaming or competition, really.
It's an all gaming.
Physical games.
So just to finish this topic off.
New high profile LLMs.
Elon Musk's AI company, XAI unveiled Grok, a chat GPT competitor with real time access to
all Twitter posts.
According to Musk, it's based and loves sarcasm and its mission is to help understand the universe.
XAI says that despite being trained in a couple months on only 33 billion parameters, Grok performs
better than Meta's Lama 2 and OpenAI's GPT 3.5 and a number of benchmarks.
I said that really poorly, but you know what I mean.
You're doing great.
However, these benchmarks can only be checked by people verified on Twitter who get into
the early access program.
Then, I'm surprised it's not in here, but Sam Altman on Twitter, which I'm probably not
going to be able to find on my laptop now because I'm not signed in, so I suspect it's just not
going to go well.
But can I find it?
He threw so much shade.
Like, incredible amounts of shade.
Oh, did he delete it?
No way, dude.
Wait, it shows that he has no tweets since...
Oh, is it doing that thing because I'm not signed in, so it's just giving me random tweets?
Oh, that's so annoying.
Anyways, he had a screenshot.
I'm not going to be able to find it right now, so I'm going to quote it improperly because
Twitter just doesn't work properly unless you're signed in, so I don't know if I could
even find this at all.
But he had a tweet where he said, like, you know how you can make GPTs now?
So he went through the process of making a GPT, and he was like,
make it use, like, cringy shock value boomer humor.
Oh my god, you got him!
Yeah, and even, like, me too.
I've never seen that happen before.
I can't believe I got you before you got me.
Oh my gosh.
That's incredible.
Dang it.
Anyway, cringy boomer.
For sure.
We know what gets him now.
Okay, yeah.
Okay, so people found it for me anyways.
So, yeah, GPTs can save a lot of effort.
And then this.
So GPT Builder says, hi, I'll help you build a GPT, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Sam says, be a chatbot that answers questions with cringy boomer humor in a short of, in
a sort of awkward, shock to get laughs sort of way.
And he said, great, the chatbot is set up.
Its name is Grok.
And then Grok, and then it's subtext is, I tell jokes like your dad's dad.
Oh no.
And then the optional prompts are, why did the, what's the deal with, how many, and tell
me a joke about.
Absolutely destroyed.
I've heard it's really bad.
I don't know if this is real, but people are claiming that Grok, that Grok, if you ask it
who the best meme creator is, it'll tell you Elon Musk.
Guys, can you, can you tell me if that's true?
Because that could easily be photoshopped.
Doesn't he just steal memes?
Like this isn't even like.
I don't know.
I'm not even trying to throw it at him.
I just, I think that's like literally a thing.
I have no idea.
Apparently, apparently Musk replied to that.
Oh really?
It was probably funny.
It probably had a meme.
Maybe it was written by Grok.
I can't see it because I'm not signed in, so it doesn't show me any comments.
So, it is what it is.
Someone can post if they feel like it, I guess.
In other AI news, which we are almost done, Amazon is reportedly investing millions into
training one of the largest LLMs yet with two trillion parameters, codenamed Olympus.
And Samsung has hinted at a pivot to AI for the Galaxy S24 with their own AI, Gauss.
Gauss.
Oh, that makes sense.
Which can supposedly translate audio and text in real time and run a significant number of
AI features locally.
Local.
Local running.
That part is cool.
Pretty cool.
Because like mine, oh, we have AI stuff in the new phone, the Pixel, you care about this,
right?
Ha ha ha.
It just offloads it.
So, that's unfortunate.
But yeah, anyways, honestly, out of all of that, the Humane AI pin is the most interesting
one.
Do I think it's going to be a smash hit, super ultra viable product?
No, not personally.
But we'll see.
I'd love to be wrong.
That'd be fantastic.
Holy crap.
We have so many more topics to talk about.
Ha ha ha.
Let's go.
How do I always look at the doc and go, oh my goodness, how are we going to fill two
hours of show?
And then four hours later, I'm like, holy crap, we've barely scratched the surface of
this document.
Too much.
You said you wanted to do one more topic and then you talked about it for like an hour
and a half.
Right.
Okay.
So, we should probably talk about merch messages a little bit.
We need to do three merch messages.
We need to do three merch messages because we need to get through some because you guys
keep buying 3D Down jackets because you apparently want a trip to Vancouver.
Oh, wow.
They really do.
They're great jackets.
Yep.
So, we sold a few of those, which is neutral.
I'm not going to say it's good based on the promotion we're running, but it's neutral.
I hope.
Ooh, hold on.
I don't know.
I think it depends.
It's something.
Yeah.
It's something.
It's jackets.
Anyway, Dan hit me.
Hi, Linus.
I know that you loved your pebble.
Do you think that LMG will grow to a point where you'll be comfortable asking creator
warehouse engineers, design me a new one?
No, I think the wearable space is pretty much unassailable right now to anyone who's
not raising gigantic VC money or whose name isn't Apple or Google or similar.
Yeah.
You're either raising gigantic VC money or you are the gigantic VC money.
Yeah.
That's a lot of money in pocket protectors right now.
Yeah.
Hey, DLL, love the new sticky notes.
How was the progress on labs?
Are there any new testing stations since labs testing floatplane exclusive video?
Oh, absolutely.
They showed me something really cool that I was annoyed that I had no idea they were
working on because it'd be nice to have some idea what the crap goes on down there.
But I was really impressed by, um, they, they set up this case with all these like
magnetic, um, suspension points for temperature probes.
There's nine of them.
Um, and they set up this, uh, we apparently created a hardware product.
It's a PCB with a little, um, little spots for all the different probes.
And it's like a, it's a logging board and it pulls, uh, from these, um, from these probes
and outputs to a PC and basically allows you to measure the impact of a changing out a
component on overall system temperatures in the intake, exhaust, GPU intake, GPU exhaust,
CPU fan intake, CPU fan exhaust, blah, blah, blah, like all these different points.
And it's going to be part of our approach to like real world testing, uh, for coolers
moving forward.
Super, super awesome.
Um, so that's something, but man, I feel like labs is in this really difficult position
right now where they have so much to do that it's very challenging to, and it's so broad
that it's very challenging for them to get anything done.
And I don't mean that as a criticism of the team.
I think I mean that as a criticism of the, um, the, the direction, uh, and maybe just
not even a criticism, but maybe an assessment of the difficulty of the project that they're
undertaking right now.
Like you got to understand that it's, um, it's easy on the outside, I think to say, oh,
well, why don't you just focus?
Just make this thing.
And the reality of it is that you can't just, you can't just throw more monkeys and typewriters
at the same problem.
You can't just go, okay, well, okay, let's just focus on power supplies.
Well, well, what are we going to do about the three month lead time on that thing?
Hiring more engineers to learn about power supplies.
That's not actually going to, that's not actually going to make it go faster.
So parallelization is not an invalid approach.
It's just that, um, it's really challenging to manage.
It's a new team.
We're learning a lot.
Uh, we're, we're making some, we're breaking some eggs.
We're making some omelets.
Um, you know, one of, one of the other big challenges is, um, shoot, what was I going
to say?
Well, I forget because my, my brain is tired, but oh yeah, right, right, right, right, right.
Uh, some of the categories that are really, really important for us to cover like phones,
for example, I mean, laptops, right?
You can't just say, okay, well, let's just focus on laptops.
Let's get laptops across the line.
Because if you want to test a laptop, all of a sudden you need to test display, thermals,
batteries, um, keyboards, trackpad, like you kind of have to test everything.
So we're, we're doing a little bit of everything.
We're learning a lot.
We're building processes.
We're building expertise in house and it's going to take some time.
Um, and it's going to be awesome.
But, uh, you know, maybe we, maybe we should have just been like in complete stealth mode.
Maybe that would have been the right answer.
I'm just not talked about it at all.
I'm not, I'm not sure.
I mean, we've never been, we've never been that closed door, but maybe that would have
been a smarter way to go about it.
Either way, we're going to keep, we're going to keep at it.
Yeah.
And I guess the last one here is also back on the AI thing.
Oh, good.
Nice.
This question is for Luke.
With a flurry of AI development that seems to be getting exponentially faster by the week,
how long could we get, uh, how long until we get an actual AGI and could it be by next year?
I would ask you to define what that even is.
Yeah.
That's the new debate, isn't it?
Yeah.
Um, so yeah, what is that?
And then I would honestly say that most people's genuine definitions of what that is.
Um, no, I, I, I don't know when it's going to come and I would definitely not say next year.
Uh, while we're still struggling with LLM hallucinations, I don't think we're close to AGI.
That's my argument.
Do you want to define AGI for the people who are not familiar?
Uh, artificial general intelligence.
It's like when, when a lot of people say AI, um, they're using it incorrectly.
So people have tried to start saying AGI when they're talking about AI.
A sentient.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One that actually thinks rather than just taking an enormous amount of input and generating
an output.
Yeah.
Um, cause like LLMs are like a speech predictor, like an insane speech predictor.
Um, but that's an interesting way of defining it.
I, I, yeah, sorry.
I just haven't heard that before.
Speech predictor.
Yeah.
Kind of.
Um, so like if you want to be able to do more stuff, you want to be more general, if
you want it to be able to, you know, have a feeling maybe like maybe that's the way you're
defining it.
I don't know.
A lot of people debate on that.
Uh, I think we're pretty far from that.
Um, all right.
I want to talk about the OLED Steam Deck.
Yeah.
You've been tuned out, but have you seen anything about it?
Um, no.
It is incredible.
Are you ready to buy a Steam Deck, sir?
Is that the only change?
No.
Okay.
Tell me about it.
So that's the one that Valve is talking about.
Okay.
So first of all, it's not just an OLED display.
It is an HDR OLED display.
Oh.
1000 nits peak brightness.
Oh.
Valve did a ton of work.
Wow.
On Linux to make this color pipeline work.
Not just work, but they're, they're extremely proud of the way that you can just launch an
HDR game and it'll just be an HDR.
Very, very incredible.
Really?
Like it's, it's outstanding.
Um, it's bigger.
It's 7.4 instead of seven inches.
So that's without changing the body.
It just has a slightly slimmer bezel frame, a slightly bigger screen.
Oh, so it is not bigger.
Just the screen's bigger.
Just the screen's bigger.
Cool.
So the, um, the refresh rate is now 90 Hertz.
That's actually enormous.
Like freaking awesome.
Yeah.
Like obviously 30 to 60 is like the one that like matters.
Going from 60 to 90 is still huge.
Yep.
Um, let me try and think, man, this thing is just kind of freaking awesome.
Um, they didn't increase the price.
The price is the same at the three tiers, except the middle tier went up 20 bucks.
Uh, but the storage is way higher.
So they don't even have that 64 gig option anymore with like EMMC or whatever.
It's all real SSDs across the board.
Um, they slightly revised a couple of things like the, the buttons for the shoulders are
on the same PCB as the joystick buttons now.
So the parts aren't interchangeable.
Uh, they changed the cooler though.
The cooler is more efficient, quieter.
Um, the big, Oh yeah.
The battery life is up.
We measured about 45%, but they claim anywhere from 30 to 50%.
So it's a bigger battery and get this new silicon.
They went from seven nanometer to six nanometer.
It's just a die shrink.
So the performance target is the same, but it does perform better.
Yeah.
Okay.
Cause it just like turbo is a bit higher and is, and that's part of where that, that battery
life gain, uh, comes from.
It has a new wifi chip that downloads games three times faster.
That's what they said.
We validated that.
So they'll download games that up to 650 megabit per second on a wifi 60 network.
It's kind of fricking awesome.
Oh, Oh, Oh, where'd that go?
Well, why is there a limited edition?
What does that even mean?
It's just a colorway.
Don't worry about it.
Oh, okay.
Uh, this is, uh, Oh, Brandon from the lab sent me this, uh, this cool capture.
We did some pursuit camera stuff showing the increasing clarity on the OLED display.
Nevermind the increase in refresh rate.
And it is amazing compared to the original one.
I said, we should add it to the Wancho doc for like, uh, wasn't a video segment, but,
um, I don't know, maybe it got lost somewhere along the line, but the display is flipping
cool.
They apparently revised the haptics and speakers and a couple of other things a bit.
We didn't notice as big of a difference with that though.
The big one was the display, the improved performance and the improved battery life.
And the fact that they now have more storage without increasing the price.
I think it, it was already a great value and an awesome device.
I think now it is, I would hesitate to call anything perfect.
It's not perfect.
Uh, you know, it's not going to run games that don't work outside of windows.
It's, um, it's still big.
It's bulky, right?
Like, uh, not everyone's into that gigantic form factor.
It's one of the reasons that I daily drive an ally instead of the original steam deck.
Um, but I would say it is definitive.
It is, it addresses every problem that I had with the original steam deck that can be
addressed, um, other than just, you know, more performance.
A generational improvement on whatever.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Are you ready to get one?
I don't know.
I have a lot of like.
So you'd rather get an AI lapel pin?
No, I want you to get that.
Ah.
Yeah.
Wow.
I don't want one.
Ridiculous.
I don't want one of those, dude.
Come on.
It's, it's definitely interesting.
It looks really cool.
I do think you're, the 90 Hertz thing is honestly the biggest win for me.
I care a lot more about that than it being HDR or whatever else.
I think that stuff is cool.
Oh, the display looks so good though.
I mean, I'm sure that's valuable and good.
You've seen the switch OLED next to the regular switch, right?
Actually, no.
Oh, okay.
All right.
Nevermind.
I suspect it is the same display as the switch OLED and Nintendo just doesn't have an HDR pipeline.
That is my suspicion.
Based on the similarity of the pixel layout, based on the similarity of the pixel density, it may not be the same, same.
It may not actually come from the same mother glass, but it also might.
They're very similar.
Yeah.
They're very similar.
I, my, my only thing is, uh, yeah, I have a lot of potential pending expenses, so I'm not really in a spendy mode.
All right.
All right.
That's fair enough.
But this does sound great.
And maybe we'll see how I feel closer to actual launch.
When is actual launch?
The 17th or something.
Whoa, it's really close.
Yeah, it's in like a week.
The 16th.
Yeah.
Wow.
Wow, wow, wow.
I wonder how fast this one's going to sell out.
Do you think they're going to backlog immediately again?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
Yep.
I hate to give people ideas, but realistically, they already had the idea, so it's not like I'm changing anything.
But, uh, if I was a scalper, I'd be all over this one.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think this is going to be, I think this is going to be backlogged for months again.
But then again, you know, I don't know.
Maybe a big part of the reason the original deck was backlogged was not because of the volume of orders.
But rather because of the capacity that Valve had for manufacturing them.
Maybe that capacity is way higher.
Maybe they've been stockpiling these things for the last month.
I don't know.
Yeah, they might see it coming this time.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Don't know.
This is interesting.
Remember that Calios thing that we talked about during the Computex WAN show where I said I refused to cover their product?
Yes.
Because they refused to refund the backers who originally funded their project on Kickstarter.
Yeah.
Even though they were still a functioning company and they were releasing this new product that was a spiritual successor and then just offering people like a voucher to buy the new one, which was twice as expensive.
And I thought the whole thing was really stupid.
This is reported by Fanless Tech and Tom's Hardware.
But seven years after the failed Kickstarter campaign, a source for Fanless Tech says that original backers of the NSG S0 Fanless Chassis are finally being offered a refund around $500.
Or, alternatively, they can choose a voucher for the Streecom SG10 Fanless Gaming case reportedly worth $1,000.
Despite this reporting, however, their Kickstarter page has not been updated.
So, hold on, hold on.
So, where's the...
So, where's the...
Basically, the reason I'm bringing this up is because I want to know, is this actually happening?
Did anybody back this thing?
Once you get a voucher, I want to hear from you because I really want to cover this new case.
And so, I want to know when it's time to reach out to them and do a video about it.
And I can't do that because I said I wouldn't until...
And because I just don't think it's the right thing to do, which is why I said I wouldn't.
But anyway, I'm not able to do that until they refund or offer a refund.
The voucher is fine as long as there is also an option for a refund until they refund everyone who backed this thing.
So, please let us know.
Get in touch.
I don't know.
What's the best way to get in touch with me these days?
Contact us through our public emails and just say like, hey, I asked for people who backed this thing to let us know if they get a refund.
That would be good.
All right.
Oh, man.
You know how I've ranted about Chamberlain Group?
They make garage door openers.
Yeah, I think so.
And I was like hyper insistent on not getting a Chamberlain garage door opener at my new house and super angry about the way that they got rid of if this, then that integration or something like that.
And that was why initially I started having problems.
Oh, no.
That was if this, then that changed their API access thing.
Okay.
No, no, no.
Okay.
So, Chamberlain, the thing that really bothered me about them was they wanted to charge for API access, like you had to pay a subscription fee for your garage door opener to use it with things that needed API access.
And their justification was that they needed to pay the developers to maintain the API.
And I have said, no, that's how that's you pay for those out of selling garage door openers.
Like we need to be able to access the thing.
That's ridiculous.
So, you have to use, you had to use their integration with, I forget if it was Home Assistant or Alexa or something.
And honestly, the thing that bothered me most, and this is so stupid, but instead of just saying, open my garage door, you had to use their integration.
And it was, hey, Google.
Sorry.
Oh, shoot.
I shouldn't have done that.
Sorry.
Hey, G word.
Tell Chamberlain, my cue to open garage door identity, whatever.
Like you had to do this long convoluted string when it should be as simple as open left door, open right door, open both doors.
No, I'm not.
Allow me to set my, I couldn't set my own triggers, which triggered me.
Um, so that was why I put a bunch of work and there's multiple videos about this into bypassing their nonsense so that I can just create my own automations that I can, uh, that I can activate in any way that I want.
So anyway, long story short, these guys are being even on Mother's Day or Father's Day or something.
You should, you should just, if, if Wancho lands on one of those days, you should just drop a, like, hey, call mom or call dad.
Oh, that'd be hilarious.
I love it.
Um, oh man, I apparently did trigger some things.
Uh, my bad.
Which, I, which I'm surprised because, like, mine didn't go off because mine has voice detection.
Is that just a pixel thing?
Uh, no.
Because, like, my previous one had it as well.
Yeah, they're all supposed to.
Mine never goes off when anyone does that.
Yeah, no, they're all supposed, maybe your voice is just really distinctive.
Maybe.
So it could be that other people have a voice that sounds kind of like mine.
Sorry to hear that.
Uh, anyway, Chamberlain is back to being buttheads.
Over the last few months, um, they have repeatedly blocked access to their devices by unauthorized third-party platforms used to manage smart homes.
However, MyQ, which is their stupid thing, um, has very few authorized partners because they require them to pay for the right to interact with their devices.
Chamberlain appears to be trying to push customers to use the official MyQ app, which sucks.
Um, okay, and again, this is really shallow.
It actually, like, works fine.
But when you want to close the garage door, it, like, flashes the light and beeps for, like, 10 seconds before it starts to move.
And I don't have time for that.
It's annoying.
I'm leaving my house.
I can clearly see that there's nothing in the way.
Also, there's the beam.
Also, if it touches something, it goes back up.
How many safety features do we need to ensure that nobody is trapped under it?
Yeah.
It's fine.
The beam is, like, actually...
Close the f***ing door.
Pretty good.
Yeah, it's fine.
Also, touch detection.
It's fine.
Those two things combined.
They're fine.
It's a lot.
Yeah.
Anyway, so that, honestly, that's one of the big reasons I don't like using their app,
because I just want my door to close.
I said, close the door.
Don't wait.
Close the door.
Anywho.
So, yeah, they want to push people to use the official app.
The app, oh, wow, apparently added large persistent ads that occasionally push the open garage button off the screen recently.
Okay, anyway.
Wow, that's amazing.
So, the thing that made this catch my attention was that Home Assistant announced they will be removing their MyQ smart device integration,
which has been working only sporadically because, as an open source project, paying MyQ's fee is unsustainable and goes against their values as a company.
This is the quote.
MyQ users should be able to access the devices they paid for and the data they own in any way they want without a third party having to pay an additional fee.
Now, this is the reason this matters.
In addition to MyQ, Chamberlain owns several conventional garage door opener brands, such as Liftmaster, Raynor, Craftsman, and Clicker.
So, in North America, this might not be a problem outside, but in North America, they have colossal market share.
So, I just wanted to flag this for you guys.
They are a**holes, and you or anyone you know should not buy anything from them because they take an extremely anti-consumer approach to basically everything they do, as far as I can tell.
That's all I have to say about that.
Yeah.
Do you want to talk about the Bored Ape Yacht Club party, or should we just kind of gloss over this?
We can honestly gloss over it.
Yeah.
Some people were exposed to UV lights that were like disinfectant UV lights instead of regular black lights.
Yeah.
And some had their vision affected, which is a real bummer.
Sorry to hear that.
Yep.
Speaking of UV lights, I was looking into them for the LAN center, and you can get like industrial grade, like super narrow wavelength, but not like deep enough to be a problem.
And I was thinking it'd be cool to have like, it could be double purpose, right?
So, you could just have black lights at your LAN parties, or you could do UV like disco bowling, like disco badminton.
And we get shuttles, like plastic shuttles that are UV reactive, like try to play like that.
Oh my God.
That'd actually be kind of sick.
That'd actually be kind of cool.
AJ and I were talking about doing a full DMX setup, so we can go for full crazy lights.
You could have lasers.
Nobody has approved budget for a full DMX setup there.
Well, that's news to me.
We've already ordered all of it.
No, we haven't.
No, we're just talking about it.
It might be something that you would want.
Why is he nodding?
Yeah, it was just brain lag.
I wanted to convince you that we did order it, but you had already said it.
That was really slow.
You can't get anything past Linus.
Not right now.
You also know, I've like talked to him about how I have to show him the budget sheet.
He knows he hasn't seen it yet.
The infrastructure's there if you want it.
Yeah.
We asked the community to show us some 3D printing projects that they're working on right now.
Here's a few highlights.
James is working on these cute little 3D printed toy parrots for a toy drive.
Here's a replacement refrigerator door handle.
Definitely function over form.
A keyboard because ergo keyboards are too expensive.
Yeah.
This is super cool.
Custom front panel for a case.
Love it.
These are all sick.
GPU holder created with SOLIDWORKS.
Body for a drift car.
An RC drift.
That honestly makes sense.
And you probably go through them.
So make it your own.
Cinema style housings for a bunch of vintage lenses.
That's pretty cool.
Whoa.
And a lot of guns.
Apparently two thirds of the responses were guns of some sort.
So there's something.
I think that's it for our scheduled programming.
I think it's time to go to WAN show after dark.
Yeah.
Hey, Dan.
He's on it.
He's on it.
He'll figure it out.
Oh, yeah.
Oh.
Oh.
Wait, that's it?
That's all you changed?
You just put that there?
I just put that there.
Wow.
Good job.
All right.
We got some merch messages to go through here.
People are very into potentially winning trips here.
Maybe our odds of winning were too good.
I think so.
I wonder if we had to go quite that aggressive on it.
I don't think so.
Did you do a standard deviation model?
No.
Oh.
No, I just kind of.
You just YOLO'd it.
It's 25.
I wung it.
It seemed cool.
It's a good business sense right there.
Yeah.
Is it more cost effective to just buy 25 jackets?
No.
No.
All right.
You do well in Vegas.
Yeah.
Well, okay.
I wouldn't go to Vegas.
They're non-mutually exclusive, sir.
Can I just bet on red and black at the same time?
Then I win no matter what.
I know he's kidding, but there's a green, so you could still lose.
It's never 100%.
They didn't used to be.
Really?
Yeah.
They added green because f*** you.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, that's rude.
Old roulette was 50-50, and now it's like 49 and a half or whatever.
Yeah.
Terrible.
Yeah.
That's rude.
Okay.
First one here.
Saving up for those Black Friday sales.
Let's go.
Will they just be discounts or any shipping offers, do you reckon?
My lips are sealed.
All I know is that Nick and Linus are fighting.
He was very angry earlier.
Yeah.
Nick still wants there to be things to sell, and Linus is like, burn it all.
Burn it all.
Look.
Not with fire, but with sales.
Yeah, we, we, um, I want to create a splash.
I want our Black Friday.
He didn't like my fire analogy.
He's countering with water.
Splash.
Yes.
I want our, I want our.
It's a Pokemon battle.
Um, you know, I want us to look at our inventory and go, you know, your ass is grass.
Trying to work my way through all the elements.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's the last one.
We're going to blow them all away.
I just hit my head.
I think my head shot.
Our prices will hit rock bottom.
That's pretty good, actually.
Oh, that's, that's better than the grass thing.
Or are we trying to do all the, oh, goodness gracious, are we trying to do all the Pokemon?
You said grass, so I thought that.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
And then you did blow.
You could never predict these deals.
Got psychic type.
That's a tough one.
That's pretty good.
Oh, man.
You got to get them before they disappear.
Ghost type?
Mmm.
Not, not bad.
That's good.
Not bad.
That's good.
Not bad.
That's good.
Prices are, they're so great, they'll poison me.
But they're toxic to me.
They're really dragging down Linus's bottom line.
That was pretty good.
Yeah.
Okay.
I'm into this now.
We need electric.
I've been thinking on the word electrifying, but they all sound too late.
Shocking deals.
There we go.
So easy.
That was such a low hanging fruit.
I'm not, I'm not 100% here right now.
Okay.
What's the example of a blow type Pokemon?
We're talking about wind.
Okay.
Yeah, wind blow type Pokemon.
Alternatively.
That's a different show.
I'm sure they have that show in Japan, but.
Nah.
What, blow type?
Lick a tongue?
What?
That's not a blow type.
What are you even talking about?
I don't know.
I have no idea.
What was this merch message about?
I don't know.
Oh yeah, asking whether we'll have any shipping deals.
It's possible.
But what I suspect is that we will, for a lot of it, be, we'll be trickling out deals like
we've done in the past.
So yeah, you'll probably, you know, pay for shipping, you know, more than once if you're
into some of the deals and you'll be into them.
But shipping, if we can consolidate shipments on the back end might be one of the only ways
that we, like, make some okay margin on it.
So, um, that might just kind of be how that is.
So yeah.
Yeah.
If we, if we give it all, give it all away on shipping, that might be kind of difficult.
Linus has been wheedling down these deals.
Okay.
That's a specific Pokemon.
That's not a type.
It's so pretty funny.
People are saying like steel type and stuff, but I don't want to get into the newer.
Yeah.
There's like too many types.
Yeah.
I mean that it always bugs me.
Ah, great.
Let me make it too complicated.
Okay.
Anyway, I hit me.
Did you ever get any more info from Google as to why the Google workspace and business accounts
don't work with so many features that Gmail accounts do?
My understanding is that it has to do with data sharing.
So they have agreements in their business accounts that prevent, uh, data sharing across
services and across, um, devices.
And it's simpler for them to just disable it than to create a sandbox where only, um, where,
where your business accounts data gets isolated.
I would prefer if that was just on the workspace admins and it started off by default.
Me too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, did you see the telecoms outage in Australia?
The second largest mobile ISP went down for roughly 18 hours, shutting down pub, transport
and business interested in your thoughts on the independence of mobile ISPs on our dependence.
Sorry, our dependence.
That's good effort.
Um, we had a similar situation with Rogers up here actually a little while ago where I
think it was a payment terminals weren't working, uh, mobile customers were unable to
place calls, including emergency.
Don't quote me on that part.
It was, it was really bad though.
Um, and it sparked a very, very similar debate up here and I, I hate it, but I don't see a
way around it.
Like, what are we going to do?
Go back to landlines?
I don't think it's realistic at this point.
I mean, even landlines, yeah.
Landlines were incredibly robust, but anytime that you're reliant on one, it's, it's the
whole German Japanese engineering thing.
If you're relying on one thing, that one thing could fail.
Were there times the landlines were down?
Yeah.
Were they down very often?
No, they were almost never down, but they technically could.
So like, I don't know if you can try to have a backup.
Like if you're a business and you would completely cease to function, if your POS terminal went
down, if you could, even if it would be a little messy, if you could for a day, accept payments
through some other type of system, even if it's like PayPal on your phone or square.
That won't help you if your mobile network's down.
PayPal.
I think you mean paper pal.
Well, PayPal could be through land.
How funny would that be?
Paper pal?
At the badminton center, getting one of those old school credit card imprint machines and
just like pulling it out to charge people once in a while, just for lols, just to see the
look on their face.
You're the, you're the luckiest, uh, you're, you're the lucky 69th customer.
Yeah.
You're getting credit card imprinting instead of, I don't think I'd do it.
That would terrify some people.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
You're just taking a duplicate of my credit card?
No, that, that weirded people out back in the day.
Oh yeah.
That's the crazy thing about the States though.
When you go to like pay at a restaurant and they're like, I'm going to just disappear with
your credit card for a while.
You're not allowed to do that here.
What?
They bring the terminal to the table.
The fact that that's legal is crazy to me.
The fact that people, well, I don't know.
I don't know.
The fact that credit card numbers are, are so easy to obtain.
Oh yeah.
In, in day-to-day life is, is sort of wild to me.
The fact that they, the fact that our credit cards are a fixed number, the fact that social
security numbers and sin numbers are a fixed number is just bewildering to me at this point.
Like really 16 digits, 16 numeric digits.
That's your, that's your whole unique identifier scheme.
Are you kidding me?
Yeah.
I don't have a fix for it though.
Sorry.
Nope.
Was making your home smart worth it?
No.
Dude, the lights going off the land was insane.
I was trying to work in your office and it kept going dark every 35 seconds.
So that can be configured.
Part of it is just that I like haven't configured everything correctly, but that's a big part
of the worth it is how much time it takes to configure everything correctly.
And it's a, it's a hassle.
It's a hassle.
What's up boys.
I was recently thinking about how fun midnight releases were for games and consoles back in
the day.
Do you have any memorable midnight releases that you went to?
Bro.
Halo 2.
I went to a bunch, but Halo 2 was the sickest one.
I remember there was these dudes that, that backed up their, they had a truck and I think
they had a generator or something in the truck and they had an old CRT.
They had an original Xbox and Halo 1 and they ran like a little Halo 1 tournament in the
Halo 2 lineup, which was dope.
In that same lineup, the people that got there first brought like a camping table and Risk
and they just showed up like way earlier than you would expect to, but they just played
an entire game of Risk and then the game released because Risk takes so long.
So they were just like, whatever, we just play Risk at home or, you know, we just play it
here and we get Halo first.
It's like, ah, that's pretty cool.
Uh, there was like the Halo 2 lineup was legendary.
I remember I had gotten, um, whatever it was like Xbox magazine that, that had like, uh,
some Halo thing on the cover or whatever.
My, my mom got it for me.
Um, so I had read like all the articles in Xbox magazine about Halo and they had this like
contest in the line and an EB games employee, I don't even think it's called that anymore.
Is it GameStop up here now?
I think so.
No, it's still EB games.
Okay, cool.
Yeah.
Um, an EB games employee came out and was like asking quiz questions.
I needed the answers to everything because I just read, read the thing like a billion
times.
Cause what else am I going to do?
Um, and so I won something.
I don't even remember what it was and it was, it was great.
The dude ended up getting mad cause I was like the only one putting up my hand for a bunch
of the questions and he's like, no, it has to be someone else.
I was like, nope, it's only me.
Got him.
Um, you know what?
I'm going to give a different answer than you're probably expecting.
I could talk about my Nintendo Wii, uh, midnight launches.
Yeah.
I'm going to talk about the time that I was on the other side of one.
Oh, I got to participate in a number of NCIX grand openings.
Those are grand openings.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Those were, those are super wild.
Um, you did one when I worked with you at NCIX, but like this was really early on.
So I was not a part of it.
Yeah, it was, uh, the, the, the, the energy, uh, on the other side, I did a, I did a handful
of them.
I was there for Langley.
My very first day at NCIX was the grand opening of the Langley location.
Uh, I was just an assistant.
I was just like a runner.
Um, and the experienced salespeople that we pulled from other locations dealt with all
the actual customers and software and everything, which didn't make sense to me at the time.
I was like, I could handle it.
And then I saw how convoluted and awful their software was later and was like, oh yeah, it's
probably a good reason only experienced people want to touch this piece of garbage.
Um, and man, the, the, I, I flew out for one or two of the Toronto grand openings or like,
like Ontario grand openings in the Toronto area.
Sorry.
Sorry, Mississauga.
Um, no, it's a real city.
I know.
Sort of.
Uh, just, just like how Langley is a real city.
Sorry.
Sorry, Langley.
Um, it's Vancouver, man.
Get real.
Um, well, what else was it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was, it was really fun.
Just like, just, you know, going out, hyping up the crowd, you know, chucking stuff at people,
you know, doing like quizzes.
Like you said, like I, I did a lot of that stuff.
So that being like, uh, genuinely miss midlight launch.
Yeah.
Being like a, like the hype master for, for the launch was, was really fun.
If there was still midnight launches now, I would go to them now.
Like a hundred percent.
Okay.
Okay.
We should do a midnight launch.
I'm down.
Uh, okay.
What should we do it for?
Do you mean like LTT store products?
Yeah.
Are we just doing mock?
No, like a product.
Okay.
Yeah.
Like we should launch something.
Sure.
Like we kind of did a pop-up for the backpack, but it'll, but it'll have to be at midnight.
Yeah.
Um, okay.
Well, you know what here, I'd rather than committing to something now, why don't I just.
We'd have to release it on the store at midnight too.
Yeah.
I'm just going to send a cryptic email to Nick light.
It just says a midnight launch in the subject line and then contains no other information.
Nice.
He likes it when I do that.
Good.
Yeah.
Okay.
What else we got?
Uh, Luke, what was the transition to a management type position?
Like I currently have two offers painful one for exciting technical work and another for
management, which is very financially enticing.
Take the exciting technical work.
Managing people sucks.
Yeah.
Kind of that.
Think about every like toll you've ever met in your life.
Now imagine that you're responsible for like dealing with their bullshit.
You also manage very nice people.
I do.
Yeah.
Like I am relatively sheltered.
Yeah.
Like we have an amazing company full of amazing people.
If I had to, if I had to manage general population, I'd quit.
Honestly.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Definitely.
Like full stop.
It also, it also like hyper depends on, I'm sure the company that you work at, like I don't
mind doing it here, there's places that I have worked where I would not be willing, you
know, like, uh, I don't know.
Um, the reason why I said painful was because for me, I had to realize like all the ways I
would have hated managing myself, um, which was a bit of a painful experience.
Yeah.
A little smug over there.
Um, cause he had to do it, get wrecked.
Nerd.
Um, so yeah, that kind of sucked a little bit, but it was probably good for me as like a
human to be honest.
Um, fair enough.
Um, but yeah, the actual aspect of managing there's, I don't know.
There's a lot of negatives.
You have to deal with everything.
If, if, if in my opinion, you're going to do it properly and not just be like dead weight
and yada, yada, yada, yada, then, uh, it should roll uphill, right?
So you're going to be dealing with a lot of bad and not really that much good because most
of the good is going to be claimed by your team.
Yeah.
You should be crediting your team and then you should be taking responsibility when
things go wrong.
Yeah.
So, so basically they do everything good.
You do everything bad.
And that's like, I like it.
Yeah.
Cause it means I only have to yell at one person.
Yeah.
Well, not I, Taryn, but whatever.
Yeah.
Um, and that's like, in my opinion, that is more or less how you should do it because
and like that, that doesn't mean you just do that infinitely.
Like if, if there's one person that just literally screws up 100% of the time, then
it's, it's on you.
You need to cycle that person out.
It doesn't necessarily mean that that person's like an idiot or a loser or something.
They just might not be in the correct role for them.
Um, and sometimes it does maybe, but you know, I'm trying to be nice.
Um, so part of it is like, if you keep them in a position where they are constantly failing,
you're not doing them a favor.
It's, it's actually bad for both sides and you need to help move this process along, which
can be very challenging.
It's brutal.
Sometimes the business and the individuals have conflicting needs and sometimes, um, people
don't realize what is best for them necessarily.
And that doesn't, again, that doesn't mean they're idiots.
It doesn't mean they're losers.
It just means sometimes your nose is too close to something to see the bigger picture.
Like it can be, people are messy, right?
Like, uh, you know, just managing AI LLMs would probably be easier even with all the hallucinations.
Um, life is challenging.
Like sometimes, sometimes people can, sometimes people can change really quickly for reasons
that have nothing to do with work and are not even their fault, right?
Life is messy.
So life is, life is messy.
And you spend like most of your life working or thinking about work as far as I can tell.
Um, with, within, within eight hours a week, five days a week set up with commute time and,
um, like prepping for work time, whatever you want to call that, um, all, all, all the other
things involved, uh, with it, such a huge percentage of your life is work.
And you, you see all this stuff going around these days that is like, um, oh, like everyone's
super anxious and the world's on fire and all this kind of stuff.
And it's like, okay, well, um, part of the, the hidden part of being a manager is you're
now like a, the support structure for everyone on this team.
Cause you're not just like the, the way that I, when, when people that aren't in our little
circle kind of asked me what I do, I, I try to just define it as like, I just, I basically,
I remove blocks.
I try to keep the team moving professional, uh, Jenga player.
Yeah.
Block mover.
Um, that can be distilled in a lot of ways though.
And sometimes that is not like, oh, you go on Trello, you see a task is blocked.
You follow it up.
You make sure these people are communicating.
You figure out how to do whatever.
That's ideal.
That is ideal.
Yeah.
That part's actually like kind of cool.
Yeah.
You know, it's not the most common version of it.
Um, and sometimes it can, it can be really taxing, um, to have your own stuff going on,
um, and then need to help manage other people's stuff as well.
I don't know.
So sometimes it's really rewarding.
Sometimes it's really taxing.
Sometimes it's really good.
Sometimes it's really bad.
It's, it's like, uh, I don't know.
It's, it's a very interesting position.
I think it's been good for me as a human, but I don't think it would be good for everyone.
I'll say this.
If you're still really young, maybe do the fun technical position.
Yeah.
I don't know that I would jump into managing people again.
Yeah.
There.
Yep.
That I can stand behind.
But, uh, there is a lot of career path to managing people because honestly, a not a
P of not a lot of people want to do it.
But if you're being offered that today, it is also possible that you will work your way
there again.
You'll very likely be.
And something that you could do if you want to stay on the technical side is become like
a technical lead for a small team.
And if you're doing something that's really fun.
Cause that still seems cool.
And you have an aptitude for it.
It's possible that you will end up kicking so much butt that you will not only get offered
some kind of supervisory or managerial position again, but maybe an even better one.
I don't know.
Like I'm not familiar with your exact situation.
You don't have to jump now.
And everything's, everything's a, everything's a gamble, right?
You can never go back and take a path that you, that you didn't take.
Um, so just, you know, do your best with it.
Have fun.
There is either way, a ton of bad managers, and there's a ton of companies that have a
really, really hard time filling managerial roles.
So those roles will be there.
Don't worry about it.
Linus, I have been sucked into Anno 1800.
I just added all the extra seasons.
Any tips for maintaining all the extra worlds?
Okay.
This is a bad tip because it's, you lose the ability to gain certain special items and stuff
like that because you can only get them from completing quests for NPCs, but I just kill
all the NPCs.
That helps a lot.
And then I also kill all the pirates, destroy their hideouts, and then I camp their bases
so that they can never rebuild.
That was really fun.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Luke, Luke was like, oh, playing co-op is also really good.
Uh, Luke was like my, my, my scourge of the seven seas, just like destroyer.
He was our military arm.
I actually got really into like the micromanaging of the ships to make them take less damage
and do more damage and all this kind of stuff.
Cause repairing them is like a pain in the butt and stuff.
Uh, which makes sense to be honest.
Yeah.
Which makes a ton of sense for a, for a game like Anno.
Um, and then I was all about, uh, you know, trade routes and stuff.
Use trade routes.
Trade routes are so, so, so, so important.
Um, and then, you know, there's a lot of little tips like setting up your trade routes so that,
um, you overproduce up the line and then have enough for everyone down the line and
then dump to one of the NPCs that will buy anything and then rinse and repeat.
Um, make sure you get lots of the, uh, like the gold and purple propellers so that your
ships go faster.
That is so much more cost effective in the very long term than just building more ships.
I mean, I could talk about Anno for like, as long as I could play Anno probably, which
is a lot.
So we're not going to do too much more of this, but, uh, yeah, what's next?
Did Luke ever beat Baldur's Gate 3?
What's his most recent opinion?
No, actually.
I've been a little bit more time.
I've, I've progressed.
I've been a little bit more time limited though.
And I've been trying to put the time that I have had, uh, into Final Fantasy 6.
It's because I'm trying to play that and it's been really fun.
Um, oh yeah, I guess I need an update.
No, I haven't progressed because this week I've just been like sleeping.
So I haven't progressed since like before the land.
Right.
So got it.
Yeah.
Yep.
Makes sense.
Um, but yeah, I, I'm also like, I'm not trying to rush through it because I'm just really
enjoying it and I don't, I have no desire looking at how much some of my friends on steam
play it.
Maybe I can't burn out on it.
I don't know.
But yeah, there's people that I see, they'll, they'll just like log in and play it and then
go to bed every day and they're still doing that.
And that's a little wild to me, but, um, I don't want to burn out on it because basically
anytime someone's like, Hey, we should play ball, there's skate.
I'm just like, yes, let's do it.
Usually that results in nothing, but I like that.
I'm very open to that.
So I have like actually 10 billion campaigns that are nice one.
Um, and then I have my, my own personal campaign, which has progressed further than that.
But yeah, uh, Hey LDL, what is a better way to play games on a TV in a different room?
HDMI and USB-C over Cat5, Nvidia Shield, Wi-Fi, Nvidia Shield Ethernet over power.
Also looking forward to pajama shorts.
I mean, definitely a hard line, like optical cable, if you can pull it off, uh, failing
that, I would say a thin client running Steam Link or Moonlight or something like that would
be my, my next preferred option.
Okay.
And I've got some more in potentials here.
If you want to have a look at those, Linus, this last one I have curated is for Luke.
Question for Luke.
What are your thoughts on 200 CC as an avid MK8 player?
Don't like it.
My friend and I absolutely loved that edition, but always felt in the minority.
Also cable management when?
Yeah, I, I feel like, so here's, here's my thoughts on that.
I, the reason why I like Mario Kart so much, um, is drifting.
And I really feel like the maps in Mario Kart 8 were designed for drifting at 150 CC.
Oh, so when you incorporate 200 CC, the drifting felt a little broken.
Um, now if I spent more time with it, can I maybe figure it out?
Maybe, I don't know.
But the natural lines where if you're, if you're going at like high maintained speed and you
drift into this corner, the natural lines at 150 CC just make a lot of sense to me.
There's certain maps where like, it doesn't feel like you should be able to do it, but
if you just commit and you hold the line, you're going to slide like bumper over the
grass, like just like really, really tight lines.
Like they, it feels really crafted for that exact experience.
And then you put it to 200 CC and those lines don't work.
Um, so I always preferred 150.
Um, and it makes sense to me that most competitive stuff and whatnot is all at 150 because it feels
like the game's made for it.
Um, but I mean, I never gave it too much time a day, so I could be wrong.
Hi, LLD.
Hope all is well.
Just wondering how come Lenovo is rarely covered.
They weren't in secret shopper, no review of the Legion go.
Is it a coincidence or have they, uh, fallen off the, uh, or are they on the LDD naughty
list?
Um, they're not on a naughty list of any sort.
I think that they're just in kind of a, like an awkward position sometimes.
Like I, I, I don't know what happened with the Legion go other than that we didn't get
seeded one.
And, um, so we didn't cover it.
Uh, we didn't, we, we've been really busy.
So it's, it's not like we were going, it's not like we were desperate for video topics.
So we weren't going to go and line up, queue up to buy one or whatever else we would have,
we would have needed to be, uh, seeded that.
And even then, like it would have been a decision for us to make whether we were going to do
a video about it or not.
Um, and a lot of the time I feel like their products are safe, I guess.
Uh, Lenovo does a lot of stuff that's, um, solid and not a ton to say about it.
It feels like the kind of product that might be easier for us to cover on labs, um, versus
on, um, you know, short circuit or LTT.
Um, I know that we have had some difficulty dealing with them at times in the past, but
I am so far removed from that at this point that I have no idea if that remains an issue
or not.
Linus, for Final Fantasy VI, do you prefer the name Tina, Tara, or does it even matter?
Tina?
Hashtag not my protagonist.
Pretty cut and dry.
Hi, LLD recently got engaged.
Would love any advice for the wedding day, either from your personal experience or advice
you've gotten from loved ones.
My fiance says, ask Yvonne.
Most important thing is remember it's not about you.
That's key.
This is a party for your parents and your loved ones.
You are the host.
You are not the, uh, the attendee.
So if you remember that, then all of a sudden other people's meddling becomes less upsetting.
Um, all of a sudden the busyness of the day becomes, uh, part of the journey and less,
um, an obstacle to enjoying it.
Um, that was a big sort of mentality shift that I think helped us actually enjoy it a lot
more was understanding that, no, we weren't going to have time to sit and eat.
Um, you know, we, um, you know, no, uh, we're, we're not going to be able to keep the guest
list just to the people we know personally.
Our, our parents are going to want to invite their friends and loved ones who we don't really
have relationships with.
Um, it helps a lot that in Chinese culture, it's a lot more normal to just bring cash to
these kinds of events.
Like it's, it's pretty, um, it's pretty typical unless you traveled like on a plane, uh, it's
pretty typical to cover your plate and some.
So inviting more people to the wedding is not a big deal.
Honestly, it seems like a really good system.
It makes a lot of sense.
Like I was looking at it going, this is genius.
How is this not the complete norm?
Absolutely.
It makes a ton of sense because for the individuals, like, like when I hear about people who spent
car money on their wedding, like money, they actually no longer had after the wedding, after
going through the process with my wife, I, I, I, I look at that and I go, well, that's insane.
People should pay their own way at the wedding.
And if they're not willing to pay, you know, 80 bucks a head or a hundred bucks a head or
whatever, you know, the banquet and, and, and all of that is, then they probably shouldn't
be there.
No offense.
And if everyone, you know, can't afford that and, and you're not a mega baller who can just
afford to cover everyone's way.
Well, you know, maybe a strategy shift would be in order.
Like, like when I hear about people going in debt, that's the big one for a wedding.
That is not the right foot to start your life off together on.
That's not something that I would have considered acceptable, um, back when we got started.
And like I said, we were lucky enough that I was introduced to this amazing, way better
way of doing things such that having more people at the wedding wasn't more costly.
Um, but yeah, that was, that was, that's, that's a big thing is just remember it's not
about you and just let go.
Have fun.
Um, last week you talked about, can I throw something in there as someone who has not
gone through this process and I am a thousand percent stealing this from Linus, but I don't
think he's said this publicly.
So it's mine now get owned.
This is my thing.
Okay.
It's not Linus's anymore.
Okay.
This is mine.
Wow.
He's so assertive today.
It's mine.
Okay.
It's yours.
What is it?
But when you're, when you're doing your, your vows, you can chill out.
Oh, he knows what I'm doing here.
Oh boy.
There's, there's been examples where people will kind of like lay into each other in a
negative way in their vows.
And it's just like, you guys can hash that out another time.
It doesn't need to happen right now.
I have actually witnessed this.
Yeah, me too.
So like when, when you're going up there and you're like, you know, talk about what you
bring to the table, not what you expect the other person to bring to the table.
That one too.
I haven't witnessed that one, but I have witnessed the like, very broken, had a lot of negative
times.
We've been through the ringer.
It's like, none of that matters right now.
Yeah.
Oh, so, so the context for what I was saying was, uh, it can be like very backhanded.
Oh yeah.
Like the, um, you know, I just think in general, like just, just have a positive moment.
It's okay.
Yeah.
Like, I, I don't know.
In my opinion, I mean, you can do whatever the heck you want.
You don't have to listen to anything that Lance and I just said, you could have a wedding
with one person in attendance and you don't care what they think and you don't give them
any food and none of it matters.
Um, or you can have one where you only say negative vows, literally nothing matters.
Who cares?
Do it your way.
Um, these are just suggestions, but I just find like when you're sitting there with like a
whole whack ton of people and the bride and groom are standing up there talking about
their vows and they just dog into each other.
And like, it's pretty uncomfortable for everyone.
We had a lot of hard times and you were really tough to deal with at the beginning.
And it was really, really hard to get here.
Like, what do they think they're doing?
The land show?
But we made it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really?
Yeah.
But we made it.
It's like, okay.
Uh, I don't know.
We don't have to do this right now.
Yeah.
Like, just talk about this.
Like in a lot of ways, it's supposed to be the start of something, right?
Like, yes, you've been together for a long time, but it's supposed to be the start
of something.
So like, you know, maybe leave that baggage.
Yep.
I don't know.
Last week, you talked about Final Fantasy VI with Luke.
Yeah.
I wonder what other Final Fantasy games you've played and if you still keep up with the modern
games at all.
I have not kept up with critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, I'm afraid.
The last one I played was, oh boy.
People like XIV, I think.
No, no.
I, it's, it's like a copy caster.
No, I know that's a meme, but yeah, yeah.
Uh, I did not play XII.
What the heck is XI?
Oh no, XI was an MMO.
Last one I played is X.
I'm a little behind.
Oh.
I haven't, I haven't seen or heard anything that would compel me to play any of the more
recent ones, except the most recent one.
Uh, David said I have to play it, but I don't have a PlayStation.
It's supposed to be super good.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm also waiting for the PC release.
That will be the, well, that's pretty given, I guess.
That'll be the newest one I've played once it actually comes to PC.
Um, the, the next one after that, in regards to newest version that I've played, not most
recent that I've played would be Final Fantasy VIII.
Yeah, someone said, uh, someone said 10 is a good one to go out on.
Yeah.
Uh, no, I've heard a ton of super positive stuff about the most recent one.
Yeah.
Like, actually, it's supposed to be amazing.
Yeah.
Linus, as a very busy man, how do you decide what media to consume in your limited downtime?
Choice paralysis, I have no idea.
Oh, I, I, I, I struggled.
I, I usually watch reruns because I just, I can't, I can't allocate enough of my brain
to deciding on and then being committed to new media.
It's a big problem for me.
Linus, what do you think about the OC remix versions of the Final Fantasy VI music?
I think it's fantastic.
Um, so I loaded this up here.
Someone on, uh, our Google, uh, someone on our YouTube account apparently already looked
at these, but it wasn't me.
Um.
Are you listening to the show at the same time?
Yeah.
Nice.
Oh yeah, there's your problem.
I don't know.
Sounds like they go pretty hard.
I'll have to check these out another time.
I wasn't familiar with them.
What do you want to see from the live action Legend of Zelda?
I want kind of a dark, serious tone.
I think that's a lot to ask for from Nintendo.
Yeah.
But I want it to be kind of gritty, not gritty, but, um, I don't want it to be for my six year
old.
I want it to be for like my preteen, if that makes sense.
I want Scarlett Johansson, like what they did with Ghost in the Shell.
That was a great choice.
What is it with you and Scarlett Johansson, by the way, not Johansson?
I'm doing a bit.
I'm doing a bit.
You're doing it poorly.
Ah, ah, I learned from you.
Uh, hey, LLD, I was recently shopping for some collab apparel and was wondering what tech
brand or other IP you would love to collaborate with for LTT gear.
Sky's the limit.
Purely hypothetical.
I think other creators would be more fun, or really fun.
I, um, I don't have like a ton of, ah, man, I don't know.
I mean, it'd be cool to do like a...
Ah, I don't know.
Maybe I'm, maybe I shouldn't have curated this.
I curated this and then I didn't even think about the answer.
Well, uh, what?
I assumed NASA.
Tech brand or other IP?
I mean, yeah, but their logo is so corporate and boring.
Like what would we even do with it?
No, it's sick.
It's sick.
It's awesome.
You don't have like a team of designers to do fun things with the NASA logo?
Yeah, I guess that's true.
But like, okay, sure.
NASA is a whole...
LTT brand.
...almost design language in itself.
Orange spacesuits.
Come on.
Tell me you're a fanboy without telling me you're a fanboy.
I think NASA punk is like a thing.
NASA punk.
Shut up.
Yeah, NASA punk.
NASA punk.
Okay, here.
Here we go.
So Starfield.
Okay.
Yeah, no, this is not a thing.
I'm sorry.
I think it is a thing though.
No, I don't buy this.
No, but like what's, what's that, um, Tom Sachs.
Tom Sachs, NASA.
Okay.
Like there's a famous artist dude.
That's just the lunar lander.
Oh my God.
Oh my goodness.
Oh my, I can't find like, uh, wow.
This is really compelling.
A toilet.
Brilliant.
Here, make this.
I don't even know what it is.
Sell that.
Looks like a pinball machine with one of the Super Chex hockey games under it.
I have no idea what I'm looking at.
Oh, then now you can play Super Chex at your own height.
All right.
Well, this has been a good show.
Thanks everybody for tuning in.
Uh, we will see you again next week.
Uh, same bad time, same bad channel.
Bye.
Oh, when the brain's lagging, you can go for the really junky jokes.
He's sick and I'm ill-equipped.
Oh, man.