What is up guys? Welcome to the WAN Show!
We're remote again! Luke, we're remote again!
I'm so sorry. What is going on? We're gonna do in person-
I'm sick this time. We're gonna do in person WAN Show. We wanted this week to be the week back. Eventually.
I'm under the weather. Eventually, but we're keeping the streak alive. It's been Linus
and Luke hosting the WAN Show for over two years running now. Haven't missed a
Friday. Let's go. Cause, the truth is, we make fun of you guys for having
nothing better to do on a Friday than watch WAN Show, but like...
The reality is, we don't have anything better to do either. We're all here!
We're all here! We've got
a lot of great topics for you guys today. At least
half of them are about mistakes we've made. I want to talk a little bit
about what went on with our RTX 4080 coverage. Also
there's been some complaints about service from the
LTT store. We've got some updates for you guys there. The other bad
news you guys might not care about, it might actually be funny to you if Alex's
reaction is anything to go by, but Luke and I have officially gone
ARK. And you know what they say, once you go ARK, you never
go back to ARK again.
Yeah, that's pretty good. Do you want to do a headline topic
too? I kind of took most of it. Yeah, I mean that
is legitimately most things. Pokemon Scarlet
and Violet plagued by performance issues. It's actually crazy. I don't know if you've seen
this, but it's wild and I have some takes. Also, the
Doom Eternal soundtrack allegations are
crazy. Like, really wild. And
Bethesda slash IDSoft's response to it is also wild.
The whole thing is wild. We'll talk about that later. Yeah, let's roll that intro.
The show is brought to you by OVH Cloud, Vessi Footwear, and
45 Drives. Why don't we jump right into our first
topic of the day. The RTX 4080
launch. So, the 4080 is one and a half times
faster than the 3080 10GB for a 71.42%
price increase. So, $700 to $1200.
Meanwhile, the 4090 is 1.6 to 1.7 times
faster than the 3090, sometimes more, for a
1.7% price increase. $1500 to $1600.
The issue
with this is that the 4080 still sold out on
day one, though we don't know how many Nvidia shipped.
And I think that where there's a bit of a disconnect between
us and the community on the coverage of this card is
that a lot of people feel that we didn't go after Nvidia
hard enough for the pricing of the RTX
4080. I think that's a valid criticism. I think that
we could have made more noise about it, but having
debriefed with the team after the fact, like, you know, obviously after we
released the video, after we saw the comments from people, there's a few things
I definitely want to address. So, first of all, the idea that we
are paid Nvidia shills is just f***ing
stupid. That's all I can really say about it.
Not only has Nvidia not sponsored us to do anything
ever since the controversy with Hardware Unboxed,
they have not so much as said a
word to me personally. If you think for a second that
with the way that we call out Nvidia when they do something wrong, that
we are somehow in their back pocket, I have no idea what
to tell you. I just can't anymore. That's it. That's my final word
on the subject. I don't know what to tell you.
You're confused. You hurt yourself and you're confusion.
That's not what happened. What happened was
a couple of things. A, we did call
out the pricing, but it was towards the end of the video.
That's our bad, because we should know better.
We know that by the end of the video, even a really good,
really engaging video, lots of great comments, really good
like-dislike ratio, every indicator we possibly have, people are tweeting
out, I love that video. Even a really good video is
lucky to have 60-70% of the viewers who
started watching it still watching by the
conclusionary statement. Part of it is just an attention
span thing, and part of it is that Austin
Evans actually described it to me the best way that I think I've ever heard
anyone describe it. He said, you want to make sure that no part
of your video allows the viewer to smell blood in the water. And by blood
in the water, he means that it's wrapping up. That the video
is essentially over and there's no more pertinent information to convey.
I get that reaction. If I'm like,
oh it's over now, I'll just leave. So that totally makes sense to me.
So if you were to say something like, in conclusion, the performance
is great, but the pricing is a real problem here.
So many people are just going to bail, right? As soon as you
say, and in summary, in conclusion. With all of that out of the way,
the bottom line is, as soon as you say those words, we try to avoid them. Sometimes we do
it anyway though, because we really do have an important point to make
that makes the most sense in the conclusion. Because from our point of view,
our role when we're evaluating a piece of technology is to evaluate it as a
piece of technology. This video will go up today, but it will still be there a year,
two years, five years from now. When the RTX 4080
might be one of the cards
in just like a bargain bin of used cards at a local computer
store. We don't know what's coming down the line, especially with regards to pricing.
And it's one of the reasons that we don't talk about it as much.
Somewhere that we made a bad call was, we're just kind of
fatigued on complaining, whining about pricing.
The bottom line is that, don't tune out, don't tune out, this is an important point.
The bottom line is that it doesn't make a difference. And I've seen
a lot of people kind of pushing back on that from me, or pushing back
on me about that. No Linus, it does make a difference. You have to use your position
to advocate for lower pricing.
But the thing is, guys, I've been doing this a long time, it doesn't work.
You can absolutely advocate for change. And we do.
And we will. An example of a time... Especially when there's an actual
flaw with the product itself. That can often be quite effective.
Yes, one of the things someone brought up to me was that I absolutely
complained about the TeamViewer issue. But the
issue there was that they were violating CanSpam. They were actually breaking the law
by contacting me. That's a separate problem. I have
leverage, okay? And so, some people pointed out
the seemingly contradictory stance. Where we reviewed the card as
the performance it was. We did comment on the pricing. We said
it sucked. But we reviewed it as it was.
And then I was turning around making memes about overpriced 40 series cards. And they're like,
well, that's contradictory. And I'm sitting here going, no, you gotta look at what I said.
What I said was, until gamers stop
buying Nvidia cards at inflated prices, there is nothing I
can do. And just like with many other GPU launches,
there was lineups outside the door for people waiting to buy
this insanely overpriced product. And people bought it out and it sold out.
Yep. And the counterargument to that. Like, I'm trying to play
devil's advocate against myself here, right? Because I did read through a lot of your
comments. And I get it. This situation
sucks. But the counterargument to that, guys, is that we spent
the entirety of the pandemic silicon shortage
complaining about pricing. And people kept buying stuff anyway.
So people would say, well, Linus, if you complained about the pricing, if you said it was bad, people might
not buy it. And like, I wish I had that kind of power.
I clearly don't. Because the gaming industry would probably be in a significantly
better space with a lot less loot boxes and pay-to-win mechanics
and other various junk. The final argument
that people made was, well, what about the 4080 12 gig?
Media and consumers made a lot of noise about that.
And Nvidia did reverse course. To which I would say,
guys, do you really think that was a W?
What did they do? What did Nvidia actually do?
Renamed it? Yeah.
They f***ing renamed it. That's not a win.
We didn't win. It's a bit of a win. It's a
super, it's a very small W. That's not a win. It's like lower than
a lowercase W. It's like a fine print W. That's not a win.
That's like them putting it in our mouth instead of all over our face.
Like, nah.
That's not a win.
Now, it is
still possible. It is still possible that Nvidia will
alter the pricing of the 4070 12 gig
or whatever the devil they're going to end up calling it. That's possible. But if that happens,
that is not in response to people complaining
about it. That is in response to AMD's competitive
pricing. The only thing, the only thing that matters
is are the cards sitting on shelves? Actually, I lied.
There was one more argument people made. They were saying that I was defending the higher pricing
because Nvidia has a lot of 30 series that they need to move. No. No, no. You're
halfway there. You're halfway there. The higher pricing is because
Nvidia has a lot of 30 series they need to move. At least, allegedly.
But that has
nothing to do with me. Nvidia is beholden to their shareholders.
They need to drive as much profit as possible in order
to appease their shareholders. They want their stock to go from doing this,
which is what it's been doing lately, to doing this. And the way to do that is
to make more profit. They don't make more profit by
making me happy, by making me not complain. That's just not how it works, and I'm
sorry. I wish it was. I do think all these arguments are legit. I've
had a big frustration for quite a while now with consumers buying stuff.
It's like where everyone knows the whole vote with your wallet thing,
but instead of not buying things that they shouldn't,
people are voting with their wallet in the wrong way. It's like they walked into the wrong
booth or something. I don't get it. Everyone's super mad about microtransactions
and pay-to-win stuff, but then people buy it to insane degrees. Like Diablo
Immortal. People were spending
as much money as they could in the game to be like, when does
it break the game? It's like, just don't.
Just don't spend excessive money in the game. But we still
should have brought it up a little bit earlier and a little bit harder.
Okay, PhotonPixie and FlowPlaneChat. I want to hear your argument for this. You say
the naming was a huge part of the problem, so them changing the name is important.
Why? How does that matter?
No, I do agree because it was misleading.
Misleading in what way? FPS per dollar is all that matters.
We're not getting any more FPS per dollar if they just call
it something else. Yeah, but if you expect
same performance but different RAM capacity, memory capacity,
that isn't what you were getting. You're right. And based on the naming scheme, that's what it...
That aspect of changing the name, absolutely. And that is something that we would have called out.
And that's why it's a little w. It's still a w. It's true. I mean, that's not a w.
That's a thing that should have never happened. Okay, so I want to clarify.
When I said, when I was talking like, when I was saying
whether it's a w or not, I meant in terms of what we are
talking about, which is price to performance.
So you're right. From a different point of view, from a consumer confusion
point of view, absolutely that card should have been renamed. But we said that.
We did say that. We never took up a contrary position.
And that card, the 4080 12GB, never was released. So
we never got a chance to review it and say, wow, this is awful and
misleading. So all we have now is we have the 4080 16GB
which we said, okay, here's what it is.
It's not a great value. And
then we've got this 4080 12GB 4070 card
that is exactly the same value that it was before. It just has a different name.
Now, there was some, there was some, I think, very valid
criticism of our 4080 coverage. And that's that perhaps we
emphasized too much the performance of NVIDIA's
top tier last generation cards, which are also not a great
value. And that's very fair. That's totally
fair. But let me at least provide a
an alternate perspective on that. The customer for a
4090, the customer for a 4080 12GB at
$1200, okay, is not the same customer
for a 3060 Ti. So while you
are absolutely going to care, you know, what card provides the
best bang for the buck, that customer for that card doesn't care about
it as much as you might probably think. That
is one thing to consider. So when you're reviewing a product, you're not
reviewing it in a vacuum. You're reviewing it in the context of what it's actually
competing against. And a 4080 12 or 16GB
at $1200 is not competing against a card
that was 400 bucks in the last generation.
Another criticism was that we're not talking about AMD enough.
Okay, we're going to get a chance. And
I think that was an oversight on our part. We could have talked about AMD more
and that's going to happen. I'm personally super excited for the
launch of the 7000, well, okay, this 7000 series
from AMD. Not the HD 7000, the RX
7000 series. I'm very excited. They're going to have to release their
stuff for you to be able to talk about it more. Yes.
I don't know. But yeah, could have
been said a little bit earlier, could have been said a little bit stronger, but yeah.
I think all the other points still stand. So
the bottom line here is, hey, don't tune out. The bottom line here is
you know what, I'm sorry. We want to make sure that we're
covering products in the way that you guys want to see. But I hope you understand
why we did things the way that they did. And I hope you also understand how
it's not constructive to launch into
a conspiracy theory about how Nvidia paid us to cover the card in a particular
way. Because that's not helpful.
It doesn't serve any positive purpose to just make assumptions that have
no basis in reality and start talking about that instead of trying to figure out what
was actually going on. Because if we want to understand each other, then we all got to be
speaking the same language. So if you guys are saying, look, here's why I'm upset, then I can go,
okay, I can fix that. Whereas if you say Linus, you need to stop taking money from
Nvidia to give them a positive review, I'm kind of going, well, I can't fix that because it didn't happen in the first place.
So we're not able to get aligned here. It's like walking into
a car dealership and saying, I'll give you $10. And they're just going to...
They're not even going to engage in conversation. You're not having a real discussion at that point, right?
You know what's something that I feel like we haven't talked about enough?
Luke? What? The fact that
AMD's cards being priced at $900 to $1,000
is not great either. Oh yeah, no.
I think we talked about that on Wham! Show when the pricing got leaked, about how
this is going to be seen as a win. But just
like we've always said, just being an underdog doesn't mean you're the good guy.
And AMD is 100% taking advantage
of the pricing hellscape that Nvidia
has set up to also increase theirs and move their top-end pricing
and everything else along with it up quite a bit.
$900 on the top end is a lot. It's a ton of money.
And I hope AMD can compete there because
I want there to be competition even regardless of the pricing increases.
And it looks like AMD's new, just to go with the
Nintendo naming, is putting new with like RGB lines all around it.
AMD's new $7,000 series will do well
but it still doesn't mean that it's not priced really highly.
Is performance really good? Theoretically, hopefully, sure.
I mean, we're optimistic.
Against my
better judgement, we gave AMD every possible benefit
of the doubt after the RX 7000 series announcement stream.
Like, this is interesting. I just don't know what to do, right? Holgar69
in Twitch chat goes, you do not sound enthusiastic about RDNA 3 like actual
gamers are. You are purposely avoiding and acting like it isn't coming.
Did you watch the video?
We took what AMD said at face value. We dug
into their seemingly intentionally vague data,
extracted as much useful information as we could, took it completely at face
value, and then compared it against Nvidia's best, and we were jacked
about it. What can I possibly do
other than that? How can you possibly
come to that conclusion? I don't know what to do.
That's just a fanboy problem. There's nothing you can do about that. I don't know, man.
I am excited. You're limited there. I'm always excited for competition.
Which doesn't mean that every new entrant is necessarily
going to be a valid option. Why don't we get into our next topic here.
Luke and I have officially, officially
started the 30 day Intel Arc challenge. That's
right. It's happening.
Started late last night. I currently have two power supplies under my desk.
Things are going.
You know what's the funny thing about it is five years ago that wouldn't have even been a problem
but Luke and I both ran into physical installation issues with our cards
because I couldn't find the modular cable bags for my
power supplies for the two machines that I moved to Intel Arc
and the A750 and A770 both use an
eight and six pin power adapter and both
of us in all the rigs we upgraded were using dual
eight pin and not six plus two like dual eight pin connectors
and I was not going to go out and get a dremel and freaking
cut off two pins for a temporary ass
GPU install. That was not going to happen.
So thankfully I actually always carry an ATX
depinning tool with me. It is literally always in my backpack.
So I was like I have the solution. That was the time. My emergency
tech drawer had a dual molex to six pin PCIE adapter
so I deepened that took the sacrificial connector
deepened my power supply put all the pins in and I'm ready to go
I just got the extra two just hanging out in their eight pin for when I put it back
together and hopefully don't destroy it. And then Luke I strongly I love
the solution the dremel option. I very strongly considered it. I was
literally staring at my cable and being like I could do this. This would be fine.
But then I was like nah because it's going to permanently scar it. I don't have the other
cables for this. So yeah I went down to the garage
found this like ancient but awesome power supply. Antec signature
yeah definitely stolen from work. Oh yeah
100% actually though. A long time ago.
It's probably one of my like oldest stolen from work things that I have.
Dusted it off because that was actually a problem
because it's been sitting in a garage for many years. But yeah jumper the
24 pin put it in the four put it in the five and now I
have to turn my computer on like a plane because I have to turn the power supply on for the graphics
card that gets going and then I have to turn the computer on
so I have like a starter motor and then I actually turn the computer
on which I find genuinely entertaining so I think I'm just going to leave it this way
for like the whole month. Oh no you're going to kick it
at some point. 100% I have it
so the 24 pin with the bridging connector is just resting
in the arc box right now.
But I'm going to like tape it in there and then
like manage the power supply back there but I think I'm actually going to leave it because at
some point when we did the last upgrade to this system
the extra cables went missing in some part of that process
so I don't have a six pin for it I could go find it's just a
Csonic power supply. Yeah and it's a cable mod. I could find yeah. They'd send you one.
Buy one sure but like do I need them to
send me a single cable so I can run it for like by the time it gets here like two
weeks like I don't know probably not. So yeah
as long as I can make it manageable so my girlfriend won't kill me
I'll probably just leave it as is.
Oh it'll be in the video you'll see it. Oh it'll be in the video there's going to be
a lot of stuff in the video I am not going to lie
it was one disappointment after another for me like I
I will accept my portion of the blame here okay.
Oh man. I should have had my modular cables
all right. I should have those insulation problems are honestly not on
our yeah those are that is entirely on us those are not on Intel I should
have checked the product page to see if they made any mention of VR
before I put one in my VR gaming PC.
They don't.
Those of you who watched the WAN show
where we came up with the idea of the Intel Arc challenge will remember
that I got called out okay during the Linux challenge
I only switched my daily driver gaming PC over to Linux
I left the VR gaming rig that I have in my living room on
Windows because VR on Linux is pretty much not a thing
and I use my VR rig for exercise like I play Beat Saber
for cardio and don't laugh it is good it's actually
really good exercise and so this time around
I got specifically called out by many members of our community and I think
Luke as well for doing that last time and they basically said look it's
not the Arc challenge unless you go Arc all the way so the
living room PC and your gaming rig they have to be Arc and I go
sure. So after fighting with BIOS updates
getting resizable bar enabled switching my boot partition from
MBR to GPT so that I could UEFI boot and finally
finally loading up SteamVR well I don't want to
spoil anything but let's just say I sent a little DM
over to one of my contacts at Intel and I went
if you guys want part two of this video to include
but hey don't worry they fixed it you got 30
days to fix it
Such a spooky message I got a reach out from someone on that team being like is
there anything else? Did you really?
I'm not going to say who they're a good person though
but yeah so I think
I actually might have a solution for your VR thing. Really?
Yeah so because the problem with the Linux challenge was that you
sort of in a way used your VR rig as a way
to not engage with the Linux system pretty much at all
until the last week. I just didn't feel like gaming it was such
a chore. Except
when I was playing Beat Saber. Just grab and go.
How about, I don't think completely
cutting you off of VR for the month is honestly part of the
VR challenge. But it seems
a little unreasonable. So I think not being able to do it for like
a week or two so you can feel the pain a little bit because that's part of it makes sense
but then after that I think you should be able to switch back but the
amount of time that you spend playing VR has to be mirrored
with playing games on your Arc system.
You know what? If you spend an hour playing Beat Saber you have to spend an hour on your Arc system.
No. I'm going full in. I'm going full in. I want
Intel to fix Arc. So that's it.
I will not use VR during this 30 days unless Intel
fixes it. It's just man I'm frustrated.
Yeah. And then Luke, okay so right
as a follow up Luke and I both did our installs yesterday
and the stream, I think the stream archive is actually, if it's not up on Floatplane then
we'll get that fixed. We'll get it published on Floatplane.
But Luke and I actually streamed for about an hour and a half
trying to play games and we played I think 5 or 6 games
and we had, not going to lie, we had some challenges with all of them.
Day 1 did not go well and I don't know how hopeful I am
for how much it's going to improve over the next 30 days.
You guys are going to want to watch the videos though because it's
there's a lot more detail. I'm actually pretty hopeful.
I think it's going to improve. I'm saying that seriously. There's only one direction it can go Luke.
That's part of the reason why.
I know. I know. But no
a lot of what we were doing had to do with streaming. We were trying to do remote play together.
Yes. You were trying to stream off of the card.
Yes. But when I was playing... I'm working on a review of the Logitech G-Cloud
so video encoding is actually as important
as gaming performance for me right now.
So encoding was a problem. It was a big problem.
Consistent big problem. But when I was
streaming off of my CPU and we were playing Halo, it was fine.
When you were not encoding
Untitled Goose Game and we were playing with your
ARC and we were playing remote play, it was fine.
So for like super normie level gaming, no VR
no encoding, etc. etc. I think it's going to be fine.
And I think that's probably going to be a pretty significant amount of the month.
I think the hill is up from here.
It's an uphill battle, that's for sure. Not sure if that's what you meant
there, but I like it.
We've got a comment in Floatplane. I actually missed who it was, but basically asked
what the LTT store deals of the week are. Guys, if you want to leave a merch message
remember, don't leave super chats or twitch bits or highlighted chats or whatever else.
It's all about the merch messages. Over on LTT store, you can
in the checkout see a little box that says merch messages, you can fill that out.
Luke, there's a stipulation if you use, what is it? Autocomplete?
If you use Shop Pay, it won't show up. So you've got to watch out for that. That's not our fault.
There's nothing we can do about that. But anything other than Shop Pay will work.
However, we don't really have any deals to call out this week because
this is sort of related to our next topic. You guys probably noticed we've had
some challenges with respect to customer support response times.
Again, we've gotten a huge influx of tickets as screwdriver
shipments have started going out and it's a combination of things. One
is that the more orders you are generating and
we're coming into the holiday season so there's a lot of orders coming in, the more
customer support tickets you get and it's just a numbers game. It's not necessarily
because you're doing anything wrong, it just happens. Oh, I'm
moving or I'm unexpectedly not going to be home. Can you delay my shipment
or ship it here instead? Just little things like that, right? The other thing is
the more shipments you're shipping out, the more customer support
tickets you are going to get. Oh, hey, it
got held by customs. Can you help me? Just all those kinds of things. It's nobody's fault.
It just happens. And the third thing is that sometimes
when you have a really
enthusiastic community that is posting on Reddit and posting on the forum
when their stuff arrives like, I got my black shaft screwdriver!
That generates a lot of, hey, someone else got it,
where's mine? So we are getting a lot of tickets right now. We've
also done a few things wrong and I want to acknowledge that. So in order to
optimize our sorting and shipping,
the team has apparently been pre-printing labels too far out
ahead. So they're thinking that they could get things shipped quite quickly. They've
been pre-printing some labels that have sat for, in some cases, a few days,
like three or four days or even up to a week. And when someone gets a notification
that the label's created, their assumption is it's moving. And that hasn't always
been the case. So we've asked them to not, even if it does cost them
some... I mean, right? It's a balancing act, right? On the one hand,
you want to optimize your output. You want to ship as many things
as possible because that's ultimately the best way to not have people yelling
at you. But on the other hand, you don't want to create the wrong expectations from
people where they think something's shipped and it's not.
So that's right. You're just going to have to find the right balancing point. The other issue
is that... I have an idea for that, but we'll deal with it offline. The other issue is it's mid-November.
So shipping volumes are going way up. The
shipping industry has been notoriously understaffed this year already as it was.
And so, partners. So we use Wismo, which
is a consolidation service that allows us to make our shipping rates as competitive
as they are. There have been some delays in breaking down pallets. And to
be clear, I'm not blaming them. It just is what happens when volumes go up.
And then that combined with just generally shipping
volumes being really high, I think has created a perfect storm of
longer responses. So my answer to your question, do we have any deals
on the store this week, is no. We do not have any deals on the store because
what we want to do is give our freshly beefed up customer support team, which
now has twice as many members, and we're hiring another 50%
more. So by the time we're done, we'll have triple the customer support team.
Want to give them a little bit of time to catch up. We want to give the shipping team
a little bit of time to catch up. Let's get all of those labels that they've already printed going out
the door. And if you guys want to send in a merch message, what I'm going to recommend is
go ahead and pick up a gift card or something like that. So you can get a merch message on a gift
card, and who knows, with Black Friday
coming up, maybe you'll have an opportunity to use it.
On something that's on sale. Yeah. One thing
that won't be on sale is the retro polar fleece that we just launched today. Did you see this thing?
Looks awesome. Yeah, I'm totally down. It's delightfully
90s. It's a little too warm in here for me to wear it, but
like, how fun is that design? I absolutely love it.
The Brandon picture. Oh.
I'm going to have to find the Brandon picture. I have seen him with his tiny baby,
but this picture was the thing that convinced me
most that he's a dad. I know, right? Got the coffee cup?
Like, wow. Yeah, these pictures
are great. It looks comfy. It looks classic. Makes sense.
Going for a very 90s inspired, 90s
inspired look. I'm super happy with how this one turned out.
Yeah. Alright.
Yes, it screams 90s. Thank you, chat. 100%.
Alright, so that's it for all the things that I have to talk about, about
bad news. Why don't we talk about some good news?
Is there any good news in here this week? Oh, crap.
There's no good news?
Yep, it's all bad news. Alright, Luke, want to pick some bad news?
I think your Twitter stuff is good news. It's good news. Okay. I think so.
I'll allow it. Defend yourself.
Defend your stance here. I think entertainment's good. What do you mean?
It's been so
fun. You can't say it hasn't been fun. No one can say it hasn't been fun.
It's been so entertaining. I think some of Twitter's staff could probably argue that
this hasn't been fun. Okay. That's probably fair.
That's probably fair. I think they're going to be fine. I've taken this case before. I know
it's a lot. A lot of companies
are firing right now. I also know that a lot of companies are hiring right now. And I know
that scouting is still active. So
I know this doesn't solve the problem. Losing your job freaking sucks even if
lots of people are offering you one. But
I do hope that people don't get too discouraged by it
and don't lose hope. And honestly, it doesn't look like they really are.
I don't think they seem to mind too much. They seem to be memeing right back
to the meme king of Twitter. Yeah.
A lot of them are resigning more than anything. And taking that
severance, if I remember correctly, it's three months or something. Pretty good.
I'm rather certain that skilled developers and other staff
at Twitter are going to be able to land fantastic jobs. I mean,
nobody's hiring. But then again, periods like this tend to be
periods of startup explosion. Because all of a sudden
startups can afford talent again for a change.
People that worked at this company that know the people that they liked working with
and were good at their jobs, whatever it was. They're going to go start stuff up.
And they're going to start stuff up. And they've got some severance
to do it with. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't hurt.
A lot of people at Twitter had really fantastic
total compensation packages and are probably doing pretty well.
You might want to move out of the Bay Area to make that money go a little bit further.
But yeah, I think people are pretty well set up
to have some time to find somewhere new to work
or to start something up with some friends or do whatever they need.
Also, the no one's hiring thing is not true.
I mean, we're hiring. We're hiring. Other places are hiring.
The Twitters
of the world are not hiring right now. And your total top might go down.
What? Have you seen how many positions we're hiring?
I was like, memeing a little bit. But we are hiring.
We're hiring. Okay. We'll have to talk about that in a minute. Sorry, Luke. Go on.
But yeah, your total comp might
go down. You're going to be okay. And you might be able to work on something less soul-sucking.
Maybe that'll be good. Or if you're
just totally c**t, your total comp isn't
going to go down. And you'll just go somewhere and be awesome anyways. I don't know. But I think people are going to be okay.
And I am enjoying the entertainment.
Often served up by now ex-Twitter employees because
man, they have been spicy.
Ready to go to town. It's been really
entertaining. I'm not surprised. Every time that Elon tweets out
total active users is higher than ever. I'm like, yeah, this makes sense. Because I've honestly
never been on Twitter more than I am right now. Because watching the world burn
is just so great. It's nice and warm. It's cozy. Grab some popcorn. Have a good time.
So, do you want to walk us kind of through it? This week in Twitter?
Oh, wait. I think Twit is already taken. There's a different tech show
that calls themselves that. Okay, we're going to have to go with something else.
This last 7 days in Twitter. T-L-S-D-I-T.
I think doing a summary of this that isn't
like half a day long is going to be ineffective.
We'll do what we can. But yeah, it's been wild.
Sunday. Twitter employees corrects
Elon on Twitter. Which one was this? Because there was multiple of these. This is what I'm talking about.
Eric Fromhofer. Forgive my pronunciation.
This was the most talked about one
as far as I know. He was corrected by this guy.
And then someone's like, this person should be fired.
And then Elon responded with, they have been let go. That tweet
is gone. Shut up.
I wonder if it was, you know, maybe legal
exposure to fire people for tweeting.
I wouldn't be surprised.
There's got to be some form of problem with that. I mean, I can talk for
ages about the challenges
around dismissing employees. It is not
as simple as, especially if you're not in an at will
location. So I don't know if, our non-American friends might not be
familiar with the term at will. At will employment means that an employer can just
terminate you from your job. No notice. Nothing.
But that doesn't exist in most of the world as far as I can
tell. Actually, I shouldn't say most of the world because by population, most of the world probably
is an at will employment place. But certainly not most of the
Western world. So like in Canada, for example, you can't just
fire someone. You have to follow procedures. You have to
pay severance. You have to make sure that all the loose ends are tied up.
And if they believe that they have been wrongfully
dismissed, like for example, due to discrimination, then they can
absolutely turn around and litigate. And
if there is anywhere that wrongful termination
suits are going to happen, it is in the good old
U.S. of California, okay?
Or the United California of America. Whatever California's country is going to be
called when it eventually succeeds.
One of my favorite things to point out now that you said that, California has more people than all of Canada.
Boom, let's keep going. Yeah, I know, right? When I found that out, I was like,
what? I know, I know.
So that's hilarious. The amount
of legal jeopardy that Elon seems to be putting himself in
throughout this entire process. I was just going to say,
not just with firing employees. No, I know.
I know. And I've had multiple people tell me, no, no, this is a
4D chess game. It's 4D chess. He's tanking it for some reason.
There's like, there's a reason. And I'm sitting here going, I don't
know. I don't know.
I don't think it was 4D chess. I think the reason why he committed to buying
it was ego issues. I don't think that
was 4D chess.
I do think he has a plan.
I'm not necessarily saying it's a good one or it's
going to work or anything like that. But I think people going with the
angle of like, he knows absolutely nothing. He's just a complete idiot
and he has no plan. I don't think that's accurate. I think he has a plan.
Apparently, California is at will.
I did not know that. How do these things work then?
So I guess it's at will, but you can still, because absolutely
there are suits. We also don't even necessarily know where this
person was from. There's Twitter employees all over the world.
Last WAN show. Was it last WAN show? I think so.
I was in Serbia. When I got on that
plane after I hung up, there was a Twitter employee getting on the plane.
Oh, not going back to work, I don't think.
They were wearing a Twitter official backpack and I was like, whoa. And they were like,
yeah, I don't know if I'm going to have a job soon, so going home.
Oh, man. We didn't have a long conversation, but
I thought it was pretty interesting. But yeah, there's
problems because there's people all over the world. There's
huge termination issues with, remember correctly, it was Ireland.
How he terminated a bunch of people there was totally not okay.
I don't remember. This is not in our notes.
California is at will, but there are retaliation protections, layoff notifications,
discrimination protections, et cetera, that need to be followed.
I guess I misunderstood at will. I understood at will to
mean basically that you have no protection whatsoever.
You definitely, it
sounds like have at least some protection. You can't just be terminated
for having a particular color of skin then or whatever the
case may be. All right. There's technically
at will, but there's always exceptions. People are clarifying. That's the thing
about America. As far as I can tell, basically
over 50 little tiny countries all with their own special rules,
but then they're combined somehow and it's
not quite clear exactly how. Let me tell you guys, tax compliance in the US
as a foreign entity is a nightmare. As far as I can tell,
the way that other companies are doing it is they just aren't doing it at our scale.
They just aren't bothering. That's including American companies.
You said as a foreign company, it's still a nightmare for local
American companies. A lot of them just don't do it until
states or counties or whatever get mad at them about it and then they
...
Given the birds are talking too. Yeah, getting too into it. They enjoy
the conversation. Okay, we're still on Sunday.
Yeah, Sunday. We're still on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday, more Twitter
shenanigans. They delay blue until the end of the month. Yeah, the real lunch.
The whole thing just goes away. You can't do it anymore. The whole conversation
from the previous week, just gone. Completely gone.
Does someone have a live stream of a head of lettuce
that they started the day that Elon took over Twitter? Is that
happening? I'm going to find it. I'm going to find it.
It also happened with whoever the Prime Minister of the UK was and then the lettuce won, which was pretty epic.
But yeah, so blue's gone. The whole thing everyone was talking
about is over. I suspect that's probably because they cost multiple companies
billions of dollars. It's a minor issue.
There's a bunch of Slack channel problems. Apparently a bunch of the
engineers that came over from some of Elon's other companies are used to using
Teams. And I guess in Teams, newly created channels
are private by default. This whole thing, someone was writing
this and I was like, this is weird because it's very obvious when you're creating Slack channels if they're
public or not. Apparently they use Teams.
They're private by default. So they created Slack channels and they were public and other people
joined them and were able to see what they were talking about. And they were talking trash about
a bunch of employees and talking about who they were going to fire and stuff like that. That was apparently just
a huge nightmare. They privatized the channels afterwards. They did all
this stuff, but people had the transcripts of everything that was in there and it was rough.
And I only learned about the site Blind recently.
I didn't have any reason to... You don't know Blind? Okay,
it's actually a super cool concept. It's a social network
that's for professionals. It's kind of like
LinkedIn except they validate that you actually work
wherever you say that you work and only other people who work there
can contact you and the whole thing's anonymous. So it's an opportunity
for people to compare salaries or talk about workplace
discrimination or exchange information
like what you're talking about. So screenshots like this are going to be spreading
like absolute wildfire in Blind
completely behind the scenes inaccessible to
anyone who doesn't actually work at Twitter.
And they do periodic validation. So they'll send an email to your work email
hey, do you still actually work there? And then they'll cut you off of it if you don't actually work there.
So they discourage you from sharing any identifying
information. It's a super cool concept. And so as far as I can tell
Blind has been experiencing an absolute surge
in popularity and just has this enormous profile
compared to what it had before because of how public
and how explosive this meltdown has been.
Really funny that Twitter on Blind is rated more highly
currently than Amazon and Intel.
Well, there's still time for that.
I'm sure that's deteriorating.
So Twitter Blue goes down. Elon tells managers
to scrape Slack channels for criticism and then
I have heard that after
that people who criticized him were fired. One of the problems with
a lot of this stuff, a lot of it, including
this one, is there's hearsay all over the place. And what I have found
with a ton of this, and I want to add allegedlys to before
I started talking, add allegedlys to after and add them all the way through.
Because what I have found many, many, many times with stories coming out of Twitter
is that things are partially true. Things are only partially
true. Like a lot of the remote work stuff.
A lot of the remote work stuff, that
sort of happened. He did call people back into work, but it wasn't quite
exactly the way people were describing it. It wasn't everyone, no matter
what, always, blah, blah, blah. We especially heard this about, I think it was
Dublin, because people figured out that there literally was not enough
currently vacant housing in Dublin to fill the amount of people that he called in.
And it was clarified, like, that's not what happened.
It was like, if you have the ability to, you need to. But if
you don't have the ability to, then it's not expected. That's totally
different than you have to, no matter what. So it's like, I don't know. Things are still
happening. They're very drastic, but they're not potentially, sometimes they are
exactly as drastic as they seem. He publicly fired someone on Twitter.
That happened. We saw that happen. We have facts for that.
But not everything is quite that cut and dry. But yeah,
theoretically, allegedly, he told managers to scrape Slack channels for criticism
and to fire those people.
Elon may actually manage to improve Twitter in one way at least, end-to-end encryption.
Okay, I didn't actually know this.
End-to-end encryption.
For DMs. Yeah, apparently they're working on that. So that's cool. That's good.
Hey, we gotta talk about the good and the bad.
And this is a good source. Jane is a good source, I will say.
I didn't know that was from Jane. That's cool.
My favorite of the week, though, was the Thursday ultimatum.
Twitter 2.0. Asking Twitter staff to work long
hours at high intensity and be, and I quote,
extremely hardcore or leave. Apparently
this ultimatum was refused by hundreds of the remaining
2900 employees on Thursday.
If I remember correctly, the original number was 72.
7200. That's a lot less. That's a lot less.
Many employees told reporters that with so many people leaving, they expect the platform
to quote, start breaking soon and quote, leading to yet another round
of everyone on Twitter saying they're leaving Twitter and then staying.
That sounds about accurate. We also have a lot of stuff
we had people saying like, oh, Twitter is going to break in two days when Elon first
bought it and stuff like that. It's going to take a little bit longer because
the infrastructure systems are probably built decently well. Who knows
some improperly managed system is going to fill a hard drive
and things are going to break or something random is going to happen and it's not going to get managed properly.
Or it
might just not. I don't know. I've said
for a long time, well before we thought Elon might be buying Twitter, that they have
far too many people on staff. All things
can be true. He can be firing too many people.
And he could be firing the wrong people. Absolutely.
That could totally be a problem. The way he's lowering his staff
counts are far from perfect and I'm not defending those.
If I were a superstar developer, Luke, I would be out of there.
There's absolutely no way. There's two paths. There's either
you're gone or you take this opportunity to
vie for just extreme position and extreme total compensation.
You do one of the two. Because you either need your total compensation
to double in your position to just become something wild
that's going to be really insane on your resume or you need to get out of there
and get somewhere else. If you think that it can make it
taking this opportunity to vie for position could be good.
That's quite the bet. And you might kind of
not look that bright if you ride it all the way through to the end.
That's genuinely quite the bet.
But yeah, I don't know.
What I know is it's time to tell you about our sponsors for the WEN show.
We do have more Twitter stuff to go over. Should we finish that really quick?
He locked everyone out of the office by
completely getting rid of their whole badge system.
Everyone thought the website was going to disappear last night. It didn't.
It's going to be more fun. I'm excited.
The show is brought to you by OVH Cloud.
Ransomware and other cyber attacks are the enemy of today's data-driven organization.
An FBI center that collects cybercrime complaints said it received over
845,000 reports last year with estimated potential losses totaling
$7 billion. Strengthen your disaster recovery capabilities
with OVH Cloud built on a VMware vSphere environment to help
ensure your business critical data is available at all times and in multiple locations.
OVH Cloud owns its network so there are no
hidden fees, no ingress or egress fees, except for object storage, or charges
for API calls. Their proprietary networking technology, VRAC, enables networking of
multiple OVH Cloud servers from any OVH Cloud data center over private VLANs
allowing secure data transfers and an increase in speed compared to the public internet.
And your workloads are interoperable by design and give you the opportunity to move them
anywhere, either within OVH Cloud or to other locations or clouds.
Don't wait. Start your cloud journey today and get Zerto Disaster Recovery
by OVH Cloud for free for 30 days at the link down below.
We've used OVH Cloud quite, well I don't know about OVH Cloud, but we've certainly used OVH
quite extensively in the last 10 years.
Both OVH Cloud as well.
And we will continue to do so. So if you want
to use what we use, OVH is a good place to start.
The show is also brought to you by Vessi Footwear.
If you want to use what we use, it's a good place to start. Vessi Footwear
is known for offering lightweight, easy to pack sneakers, and they
use a... Okay, so we've had some discussions with Vessi about this
particular talking point. They say waterproof.
I say nothing is waterproof. They say
by the standards by which waterproof garments are measured, it's waterproof.
To which I say, okay, fair enough. So we've made a slight tweak to our wording
and that's going to be that Vessi says are waterproof
and which I say, water defeats all. Water literally cuts
canyons into the earth. Nothing is waterproof. It's not a word that I like.
But okay, Vessi, you say it's waterproof, fine.
The point is, it's a lightweight, breathable material that keeps
you warm in the winter and cool in the summer. And
with Vessi, you can simplify deciding which shoes to wear because it just doesn't
matter. Is it going to be rain or shine or hot or cold? Your Vessis are
good to go. They're also super easy to put on and take off, and they're made from
cruelty-free products right down to the glue. Vessi is currently giving away 100 pairs
of free socks to the first people to use code SOCKSWANSHOW
at the link down below. So check out their early Black Friday sale at Vessi.com
slash WANSHOW. I'm crying, this is hilarious.
Okay, look. Look, it's just, it's a thing.
We had a conversation about it, and we and Vessi were good.
Oh, no, no, sorry, I was just responding on Flowplay, not you.
Okay, all right. No, we're fine, we're fine. Okay, all right, all right. Everything's good.
One last thing I want to throw in about Twitter is
there's people working there that are on visas, and their visa requires them
to have employment, and they have been suddenly let go.
And the visa doesn't care that you have a three-month severage.
Severance. The visa starts ticking right away.
So if you are hiring in the tech industry,
there's some people that are going to be eager to fill positions, and
try to be quick, because their lives are going to be
very uprooted.
That is the main blow from all of this, in my opinion.
Oh, the bird was eating out of your mouth? I missed that.
No, I have literally no idea what that person is talking about. That has never happened. That is super weird.
That's not... I mean, okay. I'll agree that you
feel that that's weird. This is like the Vessi situation, okay?
I'll agree that Luke feels that it's weird, but I have personally watched my aunt...
Do you not find that weird? I've watched my aunt feed her bird out of her mouth like thousands of times
so it just doesn't phase me anymore. She would just like nibble a little piece
of fruit, and then just go like this, and her bird would be like, nope, and take it. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. I mean, that's not something I'm into. That's not as bad. Yeah.
Oh no, it's not like... That's better than I thought.
It's not like that. I thought it was like holding a seat in your mouth and being like, okay, ah, ah.
No, nobody's talking about that.
That's a lot better than I thought.
Finally, the show is brought to you by 45 Drives. 45 Drives is an open source,
open platform, fully supported storage solution.
Don't spend your entire budget on storage infrastructure. Their offerings won't just
store your data, but save you money and headache. You can scale one drive at a time
or add servers into your system as needed. They offer a by-the-minute
approach to technical support with no rounding up to the nearest hour if you only need, say,
37 minutes of assistance, and they're always there to help. To learn more about
45 Drives custom storage solutions, check out the link in the video description.
We're big fans of having our storage on-site in our own control
and 45 Drives is just a great way to do that. We're going to have them linked down below.
Now, I actually need to bail pretty quickly today because
I am heading off to a pretty fun little
event that I'm going to. I think I have to go very,
very shortly, but if there's maybe one more topic that we want to talk about. Man, there's
so much. We never talked about the FTX debacle. We haven't talked about that
on WAN Show. How's that even possible?
That's nuts. We didn't talk about Pokemon, which I actually have completely
regardless of it being Pokemon, strong opinions on. We didn't talk about do maternal soundtrack
allegations. We didn't talk about that we're hiring like 15 positions.
You know, I'm going to run through that really quick. You can check out LinusMediaGroup.com
for more details, but for Linus Media Group, we're hiring
a social media manager, a video editor slash camera operator, a production
assistant, a writer slash video producer,
this just moved, an affiliate and sales coordinator, a bookkeeper,
and a writer slash video producer focused on Apple. So that would be for
MAC address. For Creator Warehouse, we are hiring a customer service supervisor,
a customer service representative, this is a three month contract, this one, everything else is full
time, permanent position, an electronics engineer slash product designer,
a fit technician, and then for FlowPlane, we're hiring a junior backend
developer. These are paused. Oh, they're paused. Oh, okay. The FlowPlane ones are paused. We're still
collecting resumes and they're going to resume sometime in the new year.
They're paused right now because we just onboarded like
seven people? Okay, cool.
So we want to get the team good. What about the FlowPlane
slash labs one? Those are
the same thing. Okay, same thing. Okay, I won't say any of that then. Okay, cool.
Oh no, someone's filling out
Riley is filling out the FTX debacle in real time.
Oh, is he here? Does Riley want to just come join the show
with you maybe? Because I think he actually prepped almost all of the topics this week.
He says if you ignore the rest, just
open this one. Oh no. People who
are still holding digital assets on centralized exchanges right now, why?
Even if Bitcoin moons to a million dollars or something, it means nothing
if the exchange you're using goes belly up and your funds get hacked overnight.
That happened to me. That happened to me many years ago. I was on
Quadriga CX. Yeah, this wasn't as big of a thing yet, but
what'd you lose? This was a long time ago. Yeah, and
Quadriga CX, the founder mysteriously died
in an Indian town famous for faking people's deaths.
That's weird. Wonder why he was there. And the entire exchanges
funds just vanished. And that was my like, you know what?
I'm done. I'm out. I had purchased hardware wallets. I was even
going the right safe way. They had very
very recently shown up and I hadn't moved it over yet. And then it was just gone.
And that was my exit. I was done with crypto
at that point. I had a bunch of people in the crypto space. When they heard
about that, I'd be like, yeah, you're just dumb. And I was like, alright, sounds good. I'm out.
Sorry. Fair enough. You're not wrong, but I will
leave. Yeah.
Hold on, let me just see if there's a
Oh man, there's so much. You know what? I think I just have to go. I'm going
to like this exhibition and I'll wait until- You want me to try to tackle
some of these topics or do you want me to do merch messages or do you want the show to just end?
That's what I'll do. I'll do a couple of merch messages now before I go. And then I think
I'm trying to get in touch with Riley. Dan, actually, do you want to see if you can
get Riley down here? Maybe he and Luke can close out the show. I shot him a message, but I can
go grab him. Give him a call. I'll just read through some of the
curated merch messages. Mitchell O says, hey Luke, a few weeks ago on
WAN Show, you said you were into scuba diving. Do you use a dive computer? If so, which one?
There's no way he uses a dive computer. Dive computers cost money.
I actually tend to use
dive computers, but I don't own one. When I go diving,
I usually ask the shop if I can borrow one and usually they're down.
Which is nice.
It's smart. I was diving extremely recently.
I got two certifications. I got my advanced and I got my rec diver certification.
And the guy that I did it with would not
stop talking about how I needed to buy a diving computer.
I do not want to, but we'll see. It depends how much you dive.
If you only dive when you vacation and you always have a certified dive master with you
who knows the location really well, what are you using
your dive computer for? If you're lost, you surface. It's that simple.
Patty Education would tell you that you should have them anyways and stuff.
Right now, my pattern
COVID did cause a lot of this, but my pattern is like once every two to three years.
So at that rate, it's like meh. Even if they made me
pay for it, which no one has so far, I can usually just borrow one
from the shop that I'm diving with. I'm never just going by myself at home.
Diving in the Lower Mainland sucks.
It's cold and you can't really see anything.
We brought someone on. I won't say exactly where they're from, but
their local is in there from this province.
And they are super, super into diving. They're on the Labs web dev team.
I won't say their name either just because they're very new.
But they're like really, really into diving. And they have some cool spots
that are local-ish. But I don't think it's Lower Mainland.
I don't think he's diving in the Fraser River or anything. That'd be gross.
Got a good question from Jonas. No, I don't think this is a dumb question, Jonas.
With graphics cards getting bigger and physically taking up two PCIe slots,
could there be any advantage to building a graphics card with two PCIe
connections to the motherboard? Greetings from Germany. Couple reasons
that you wouldn't want to do that is, one, you would
double the bandwidth to the GPU, but you would also dramatically
increase the complexity of the PCI Express interface that you have to
build into the GPU. That's why they keep doubling
the bandwidth of PCIe. That's why each generation
we're trying to push the signals faster
rather than just going wider. Because every pin
on the slot, you gotta think about it this way, every signal pin on the slot
has to have a corresponding signal pin somewhere on whatever
processor it will ultimately connect to, right? So, if you had
32 lanes of PCIe, and to be clear, longer
slots actually do exist. PCIe 16 is not the
widest PCIe connection that you can get.
Yeah, I don't know if there's a spec limit.
Anyway, the point is 16 is not the maximum. But for
every one of those connections, it has to terminate somewhere, right? These are
essentially wires that have to go somewhere. So, you're adding a lot of
just even physical complexity
to whatever die is on the other side. So, if you had a PCIe
by 32 connection, man, would that ever be a complex chip.
Wouldn't it be better to just go Gen 5 if you needed to double your bandwidth?
So, that's what we've done. We've gone from Gen 1, 2, 3, 4 to 5
which has resulted in a 32X
increase in overall bandwidth to the slot
which has been fine.
Okay, I'll do just a couple more and then I guess Yvonne and I need to head out.
Yes, she hasn't messaged me yet.
Anonymous asks, can we get a banana for scale with catnip?
I don't think we have plans to do that anytime soon, but you could always stuff catnip inside
your banana for scale and your cat would probably love that. Okay,
I think Riley's going to take over for me at this point.
Riley, you haven't been on WAN Show set in, I think, a minute.
Can I just orient you real quick here?
Yeah, but I haven't shown him how merch messages work and stuff like that.
How do you go to warp speed? To warp speed? Well, no, no, it's ludicrous
speed than plaid, I think, is how everything works. I didn't know we had upgraded to that.
Okay, so I've got the dock over here, got the
chats that matter over here, don't worry about YouTube chat, nobody looks at that.
This tab is the merch messages, so if Dan has one that's
not, that's a potential, then you can check it and see if you guys want to do it.
I guess that's pretty much it. Alright, see you later!
See you later! Good luck at your event, Linus.
Yeah, thank you. It's going to be fun. It better be.
Or else, what am I here for?
Hi, Luke!
Wait, why can't I hear Luke? Am I not supposed to hear Luke?
I'm just supposed to talk over him the whole time.
I don't think he's talking. He was talking, I saw his lips moving.
Luke, stop it. Your lips are moving, is this the wrong headset? No, it's warm.
I feel Linus' sweat on my head. Is he trolling?
Am I trolling? I'm not trolling!
Luke, stop it. You're so mean to us. Your mic is muted.
We're a professional company that does shows just like this one.
Do you see the mute button?
Wait, oh yeah, he's unmuted in ping.
Yeah, Luke, you are muted for real.
No, no, you are. I can see the icon in the chat app.
Why has this gone wrong?
As soon as I heard Linus say, oh, Riley could come
and be on the WAN show, I'm like, you don't want that. You do not want this.
Something will break.
You don't want me reviewing graphics cards, and you don't want me
stepping in. I'm trying to see if my... Testing.
Hey, there he is. Hi, Luke.
I think a magical little pixie in the internet just came and fixed that
for us. So you run a video platform?
I did not mute myself, to be clear.
There was something wrong. I was trying to talk to you guys in the
chat, and as per usual with WAN show, whenever there's a technical
issue where we can't hear each other, no one tries to read anything that's typed anywhere,
which caused some pretty serious problems.
You have bars above you now, which is very strange.
Oh, cinematic mode.
Something happened. Around the time of the Linus and Riley change,
the bars came in and other problems came in.
Yeah, I don't know. Were you the one that spam-muted
me, by the way? Spam me? Did I spam-mute you?
Dan, what did you do, Dan? I tried to mute you
and then unmute you, and it just said mute twice.
That made it so that I was muted, so I was able to unmute myself.
Yeah, I figured I would try something like that.
It's Dan's fault. No, I don't know what happened to you. Either way, it's working now.
Welcome to the show, Riley. Hey, thanks. Why did he want
me to come? I mean, I know I was editing the doc in real time.
We've got more stuff to talk about.
It seems like you had unresolved feelings about Twitter.
But we don't have to go back to that. We can go back to that.
Honestly, I wrote for the discussion question for that one. I have nothing more to say,
because after covering it for two weeks or more,
before that, before he actually took control two weeks ago,
I was tired of covering it, and then the last two weeks have just been...
I'm honestly not that interested in
talking about it, for whatever reason. People just need to
see it for themselves, and then that's it. Because there's too much going on.
If you actually want coverage of this whole thing, it's going to
take you a whole day, because too much is going on. By the hour,
there's crazy things happening. He's tweeting at two in the morning.
He's
tweeting two in the morning, and instead of being anything serious about the fact that
the platform that you bought for $44 billion is in chaos, he's just
posting memes.
It's especially hard because
it's about this platform that is all about immediate
reactions. It's about short, quick takes, and so people feel
the need to post news immediately.
There's one reporter...
I'm pretty sure I linked her in here somewhere, but she works for the platformer, and she's been
doing a lot of the on-the-ground reporting, talking to Twitter employees
and stuff, and even she tweeted something. I feel bad if I don't find
her account now, but I'm not in my accounts here, so I don't know how to find it.
Even she tweeted this morning, just seeing this email
that says this, and then she tweeted a couple more times about it, and she's like,
actually, I'm not sure whether this is real. Hold on.
That's another huge problem, because there's genuinely fabricated stuff going around, but there's
also genuine crazy things happening, and how you
differentiate between fabricated things and crazy things is just like...
Zoe Shiffer, the chat, is helping me out.
Zoe Shiffer, yeah, she works for platformer. A lot of good reporting on
it, but no one's perfect. But yeah,
I didn't really have anything else to say about it. At this point, it's just
kind of like, we'll see what happens. Maybe Twitter will die. Even if Twitter
dies, though, it'll come back. I feel like whatever
happens, Twitter as an entity...
It may be something completely different to what Twitter is now, but Twitter itself
will be around. It's a big brand. Someone's going to do something with it,
you know? That being said, MySpace went down. I guess
someone did do something with it, right? It's being used right now.
That's true. But I feel like... Okay, let's not talk a long time
about Twitter, but I've heard you talk on Wancho a number of times about how you hate Twitter.
And every time you said that, I'm like,
it kind of hurts, because I love Twitter, because it's
different from the other platforms.
You don't have to post an image like Instagram. It's not
made up of all these discrete groups and a million
different components like Facebook. If you want to just post
a couple of words, you can just do it, and it's fine.
I don't want to do that. Well, if you don't want to do that, that's fine. But I like it, because
it's like, especially for people who appreciate... I used to tell
people to not use Twitter. I used to be like, you should get off Twitter. You should go outside and touch grass.
I don't really do that anymore, because I had some feedback similar to
kind of what you're saying, and I'm like, you know what? That has value. I just don't personally
see a lot of value in it, but that doesn't mean that the value isn't there.
I don't tell other people not to use it anymore.
And I think this whole thing going on right now is a perfect example of
how good it is at this. I think its whole power
is in spreading negativity. It's really good at amplifying
negative messages. That's the main thing that it's good at.
And I've heard you say that, yeah. Twitter being saved by the 2016
election totally makes sense, because we've never had as much negativity around
an election as we did around that one for America, whatever.
I feel like I agree with you, but I would also say that it probably
excels as well at amplifying extremely
positive and heartwarming stuff. It's like, it won't
and I think this is kind of any social media platform, extreme
sentiments, whether they're negative or positive, will
always do well. If you put something out there and be like, I'm watching this show
right now, it's pretty good. Like, no one cares.
As I've discovered trying to tweet about Andor, which is an amazing
show, but it's still a Star Wars Disney show.
Let's not get into that, but I'm just saying that... I'm going to watch it because of you.
Dude! I haven't talked to you about this. I am only going to watch it
because of you, by the way. Oh my gosh, I'm so frustrated why
more people aren't... I understand why they're not watching it, because the other shows were
complete, I mean, I don't want to say they're complete garbage, but they made me angry. They're not good.
And Andor is like,
somebody made a good show for, like, HBO
Lite, and it happens to be a Star Wars
show, and it's faithful to lore, and
is actually made by people who know how to make a TV show. It's just...
Watch Andor. That's mind-boggling for a Star Wars fan. So yeah, I'll check it out.
As someone who absolutely hates what Disney has done with them, I was surprised to like
it, but I love it, because it's good.
Twitter, you know, it'll go away.
I just hope that there is another... If Twitter dies, or if Twitter
is unable to be revived in its current form,
I wish that there... I hope that another social media platform will arise
with the same kind of like
lack of care for posting. Like on Instagram, people try
too hard. Facebook, I don't even know what's going on there, it's taken over by moms.
TikTok is like ADHD, too much stimulation,
I can't handle it. Twitter is like more chill, and it's just like we're posting
jokes because we thought of a funny joke, and you just write it down. Twitter is very much
the social media platform that you use while you're getting coffee. Like it's...
Yeah, yeah, for sure. Someone's like, dude, they're just movies with Luke. We did.
We did Hackers. Good. Go watch it. It's actually really fun. I wish
I cared more about movies and TV
shows. I should go on it more, but I don't. I figured out a TV
show that I watch, actually. But I do watch very infrequently.
If you guys told me to... But it's not going to be interesting to talk about on the show.
Well, just say what it is. Taskmaster.
What is that? It's like a British
game show. I've heard the name, I just completely forget what the subject matter is.
Oh, is it like a comedy thing? I rediscover it every once in a while.
Yeah, they usually have comedians on, and then they have them
do various tasks, and then they're graded on how well they do the tasks.
And because it's comedians, and for the most part, it seems
like they are trying to make an entertaining thing to watch instead of necessarily
competing against each other. They're still trying to win, but you can tell that they're going for the
entertainment value. It's really funny. It's sort of like different ways that they come up
with being able to play and stuff. But yeah, I enjoy Taskmaster. I
will usually binge watch it a little bit, and then forget about it for a year
or more, and then binge watch it a little bit again. But they have full episodes
on YouTube, and it's not country locked.
I feel like I've definitely seen clips of this show. It's kind of like whose line
is it anyway, but less like we're doing a skit with a bunch of people, and
more like one person has to kind of go off for a while, and then other people rate them.
No? Isn't it kind of like improv comedy? Like you give a
prompt, and then they kind of... Or is it like they're actually doing physical tasks?
They're doing physical tasks. Absolutely, yeah. Oh, I'm thinking of the show. I feel
like there's other shows where someone gives a prompt, and then you have to
come up with something. No, they'll film all of the
task challenges before they film the show, and then the show is actually them
watching the task back, and the Taskmaster giving them... This is
a really weird way to show this. Well, you brought me on. I mean, what do you expect?
No, this is fair. This is fair. But we should jump into the FTX
thing. I feel like you have probably tracked this significantly better than I have. Well, sort of.
So like what I wanted to say about the FTX thing is
that... Before you go into it, just for people that have no idea
what they even are. Oh, yeah. Oh, FTX.
So FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange
owned by, or started by a guy named Sam
Bankman Fried? I don't know how to say his name. Fried.
And he was like viewed as sort of a prodigy, became a huge
billionaire, very rich.
Loves League of Legends, so that should tell you something about
where this is going. Degenerate.
If you play League of Legends. Everything else is fine. You can't call anything
else degenerate nowadays, but League of Legends, that's the thing. You can say it's
degenerate. It's fine. Oh, okay. Yeah, in case you didn't know.
What I do know is that he's really bad at League of Legends. This was honestly,
I think, the most disappointing part of this whole story to me. Because we're going to talk about how
this guy screwed people over millions and billions of dollars, and that's really obviously
disappointing. But the thing that impacted me the most is that this person
apparently has hundreds of games, potentially over a thousand hours
like lots and lots of time in League of Legends, and is stuck, hard stuck in
bronze. I was trying... Yeah, I saw that. Which is just so cringe, dude.
I saw, I just read an article, I just read an article
that was saying, well I didn't read it, but like, as I was about to come on
set here, I was like, oh my gosh, I don't know enough about this to talk about it, so that I was
like trying to look stuff up real quick, and I found an article about how when he was on business meetings
people would hear clicks in the background, and he had a reputation for playing
League of Legends while on conference calls for business.
Wow, that's uh, that's actually amazing.
APM was huge. Still hard stuck in bronze, though.
So basically, so basically with the FTX thing
what I understand about it, I didn't follow absolutely everything
every development, because honestly, since the crypto crash earlier this year
I have not paid attention as much to crypto stuff
because I think that it has largely kind of passed out
of the mainstream view. I mean, I don't want to say that
because, yeah, there are still like... FTX had their name on a sports arena
I don't know for sure, but you know, we're probably not going to be seeing
Super Bowl ads for crypto coins anytime soon again, or maybe we
will, I don't even know when the Super Bowl is. Is it in April?
It's around there, I should know this.
I expected you to know, but what am I thinking? I actually don't know. All I know is
I get a notification from my brother and my dad every year, and they're like, hey, we're watching the Super Bowl, it's on
this day, and I show up. That's it.
My mom makes chili, and it's a family thing.
But nobody watches it before the Super Bowl. Anyways,
apparently as far as I can tell, this is like the TLDR
Sam Bankman-Fried, he started FTX, the exchange
he was using funds from that exchange
as collateral on another one of his companies called Alameda
Research. He made some
wrong decisions, it caused the collapse
of the exchange. Binance, one of the other huge
crypto exchanges in the world,
at first they were like arguing about it, at first they were like
they had animosity, and then Binance was like, okay,
we'll bail you out, because the two founders of these exchanges actually do know
each other, and they're both in the same sphere. And Binance said we'd bail you
out, but then they backed out, leaving
Sam Bankman-Fried in dire straits, and many coins
many crypto coins lost a huge amount of value, including Solana.
And that's basically like the
super, super TLDR of the situation, as far as I understand it.
As far as my understanding, a couple just little juicy details, and this is
allegedly on this, but as far as my understanding goes, he said that he was not
leveraging or gambling with users' funds
that were inputting stuff into the FTX exchange. The problem is
that FTX was loaning out money to Alameda Research,
and then Alameda Research was leveraging and gambling with that money.
But he was like, FTX is not going to do this.
They just lended the money to another group that was doing it.
They're not doing it, but they're doing it.
There's some degrees of separation that somehow makes it okay.
There's a lot of things that you would expect a League of Legends player to do in this story.
Yeah. I guess the main question
one of the, yeah, get him, drag him!
One of the questions that this kind of brought up
for me, I guess, was like, people have been talking
about cryptocurrency and regulating it for so long, and obviously
that kind of goes against, I mean, you guys brought up the tweet earlier that
I thought was hilarious from Jeff Geerling, just being like, it has never made sense.
The whole idea, the whole point you would get into cryptocurrency is to have a decentralized
currency, and then when you put it in an exchange, it's just
like, what's the benefit? Now it's just centralized. Now it's just
different money. I think I can kind of answer that, actually. Please.
People that don't care about that aspect, they want it as a monetary vehicle.
They want something that they can effectively gamble with. It's an investment.
They don't care about the fact that it's decentralized. They don't care about any of the
features of the different coins. They're not into the technical aspect of it
at all. They just go, okay, well, the line has gone up for a
while, and then it went down, and I'm going to buy the dip, and then it's
going to go up, and I'll sell it again. So they're not worried about taking it off
the exchange or the decentralized aspect. And then, obviously, there are tons of people
that do care about those, but I think a lot of the people on exchanges are
people that see the Super Bowl ads and whatever else, and they see the line
going up, and they hear about billionaires that are made off of crypto, and they're like, okay, I'll buy some.
And then they leave it on the exchange, because they're not technical, and they don't care about those.
Yeah. And to me, that's the main... Because
every time we talk about cryptocurrency, I feel a bit bad, because
really back in the early 2000s, and people were talking about,
or before then, I forget, I thought it was early 2000s when this stuff
really, or 2011 or something, it wasn't
a scam really back then. People actually were trying
to... They had some libertarian ideas about finance and... It was like the whole
goal was the technical stuff. Yeah, about government control of things. Because people weren't speculating.
Yeah, which is like, I'm not a libertarian, but I can understand that as a political
ideology. You're like, hey, we think the government should have less say in what we do
with our money and what we're allowed to do, and so
let's make these cryptocurrencies and we'll free people, especially in
areas of the world where there are really oppressive governments that would
give some sort of freedom to people to do the things that they want. Or destabilization. Yeah.
So when you go all the way back, the idea of cryptocurrency
was... I'm sure some people were in it just because
they thought they could get rich, but for some of them, no doubt, it was like a noble goal. Could be.
And for a considerable amount of people, it still is. I just don't
think those are the people that largely got screwed over by this. Oh, for sure.
I think a lot of people got screwed over by this are speculators and people that are in it to
make that money. Yeah, and some people are pointing
out in the chat that those people do still exist, and
that's true. Of course there are people who are still involved in it
because they have a hope that it could improve society in some way, but I think that
the funny thing with these centralized exchanges
it allowed the
bad actors who are in on
things early to leave normies holding the bag. It's like,
oh, we got you all hyped up for this stuff, and then we got your investment
and now we're going to get out while the getting's good and
you're screwed. That's one of the roughest things about crypto
is there's been so many bodies on the path.
This is just another one of those scenarios where
the people that I know that are really into
it and they're doing it properly, I'm certain they weren't touched by this
other than the fact that a lot of different cryptos took a hit.
But they didn't lose
their coins. Their coins may have lost USD value, but they didn't
lose their coins.
You're saying with the
collapse of this exchange? Oh, right, because they didn't get hacked or anything. It was just
the value tanked.
Well, okay, no. People that were on FTX, I think they lost
their coins. What I'm saying is people that don't deal with exchanges, because they're like, no, I'm into
the decentralized aspects, have it on cold wallets, stuff like that. Those people didn't lose
their coins physically, but they might have lost some
value or not. I don't know, it depends on what coins they're in.
But it makes the whole space look gross
when this type of stuff happens. And I think that's something that a lot of crypto
people have had a bit of a hard time either accepting or understanding
or I don't know, this whole time is
I think the reaction by a lot of the hard cores when stuff like this happens is
you don't know, you should have been on a cold wallet, which
is fair to a certain degree. But
as much as you want to react that way,
as long as this type of stuff happens, I don't think it's going to
hit the type of market adoption that they want it to.
Well, it was nice to talk about FTX.
It was the topic from today I was least prepared to discuss
because I kind of am way more familiar with the rest of it.
Well, what do you want to talk about? You wanted to talk about Pokémon, I know for sure.
I do want to talk about Pokémon. But maybe no one cares about that.
It seems like people are upset that you get choppy frame rates.
Well, it's kind of ridiculous. Oh, there's a source that is from me?
That's right, I put you in there because I saw that you tweeted about it.
I put this in there because I knew that you would probably have an opinion.
Yeah, this is ruining my reputation of not tweeting. People are going to figure out that I
only do replies. The best Pokémon in any of them.
I have unironically heard that take.
Unironically. Wait, which one?
I didn't give a take. This game, Violet or whatever it's called,
Scarlet, I don't know, is the best Pokémon of all. Oh, sorry, no, I meant
which Pokémon, which, which, oh, which individual Pokémon. Yeah, that's what my favorite
Pokémon is. Yeah. Personally, Kadabra.
Really? Yeah, because. Wait, Kadabra.
There's Abra, Kadabra, and then Alakazam, right? Yeah.
Because back in Red and Blue, the old school
Game Boy cartridge games, my
brother, I think it was, figured out that you could catch an Abra just
north and west of Misty's gym, the second gym that you
run into. There's this little thin patch of grass and you can catch an Abra. My brother
figured it out. I don't know how he figured it out. He might have spent a while in there. I don't know.
I mean, there are secrets. He figured out you could get an Abra there. And we were both like, that's crazy.
An Abra? Because the internet's not like so much of a thing yet.
But it was magical. Yeah, we figured out you can get Abras in there. We figured out that they're
useless. Abra, what do you mean? All they can do is teleport.
They can't learn any other moves?
If you put them out in battle and you use teleport, you just go back to the
pokestop or whatever, the medical
center. I don't remember what it's called. Wait, was that the, yeah, because Abra, so I guess Abra was kind of like the
well, not Metapod, because Metapod could still have
the sting, the whatever, the one attack instead of just
Harden. No, I mean, if you, I think if you find a Metapod in the
wild, it might just have Harden. But if you evolve a Caterpie into a Metapod,
it was a Caterpie? I think it was. They could have String Shot.
So you could Harden and String Shot together, which is
kind of a weird, like, it seems weird together
now to me. You gotta Harden first, potentially multiple times.
And then you can String Shot. Yeah, that's the combo. That's how you finish
the battle. This is, we would never do this on Tech Linked. This is
a Wancho level of maturity. Yeah.
Yeah, but so you would put Abra out first, and then you'd immediately swap
him with your strong Pokemon, so he got shared experience for the fight. Your strong Pokemon would
take a hit, but then it would beat whatever you're fighting. Abra would get experience. You eventually get
Kadabra. You fight with Kadabra for a little bit. You eventually get Psybeam, and then you just
one shot everything in the game. He's so overpowered. Psybeam. It's actually crazy.
It's so nuts. Don't sleep on Psybeam.
It's crazy. And I never, we didn't have Link Cables.
So we couldn't trade, so we couldn't get Alakazam.
Oh, right, yeah. That almost seems so rude.
It's like, we're watching the show, we're excited, we want to get the
Pokemon, and then if I don't have any friends, then I can't
get Alakazam. I'm being discriminated against. You can't get Alakazam, you can't get Gengar. And Haunter
is my second favorite Pokemon. You can't get freaking Gengar, everybody.
Yeah. So it was so frustrating, because both my
my two favorite Pokemon, I couldn't get to their third evolution, but they were sick anyways
because Haunter was also overpowered as hell back in those games, because all the normal
type attacks couldn't hit them at all. And a huge percentage
of Pokemon back then just have, like, tackle, so you can't touch them.
It was amazing. I have been frustrated in the past with the fact that
I spend a lot of time on WAN topics, and then you guys just, like,
do whatever we're doing right now. You want me to get back on the topic? Sounds good.
But I'm realizing how difficult it is, so I don't feel angry anymore.
That's good. I just want to talk about Pokemon.
Yeah, things just happen. But this is a topic, so let's get back on to the actual
Pokemon topic. What do you know about it? Because you know more than me, probably, honestly.
Yeah, there's Pokemon Scarlet, Pokemon Violet, new games that came out,
and there's clips. If you go to the Mutahara, Ordinary Gamers,
fantastic YouTube channel, if you go to his tweet, and you watch
this video, you can see it chug like crazy.
The performance problems in this game are actually wild.
What do I press? Do I press Linus? Do I press the Linus button? What do you want to do?
I want to show my screen. I'm on Twitter.
I'm just on Twitter. Oh, gosh, okay. There's no bad things.
There's a Linus laptop. There it is. Oh, gosh. Wait, they can see the
chat. Yeah, that's okay. Now they know what everyone else is saying, too. They're going to argue
with each other. Oh, no. Sometimes they're really nice. Sometimes they point
out and they say nice things. Witness the chop. But yeah. When has that ever happened?
Yeah, the chop is really bad. And you can see things popping in and
popping out, and it's just horrible.
I mean, okay,
so we saw it. Now I can go back. Cam only.
I can do this. You're an expert. I can do the Wan show.
Give me one quick second. I have not
played a Pokémon game since
oh, what was it? What was
the second one? I played Pokémon Yellow. Little
tidbit. I was the first kid in my grade six class
to bring my Game Boy Color and Pokémon Yellow game
to school. Everyone wanted to play. People came up to me
and they said, hey, I'm a pretty good Pokémon trainer. Let me train your Pokémon.
And I would give it to them, and then they'd play and give it back to me
and I'd be up a few levels. I was king of the castle.
For real? That's kind of cool.
I think that's still in the Red and Blue era.
You just had Pikachu. It was Red and Blue. Yellow was basically Red and Blue, but you had
Pikachu and there were a couple other subtle things too, but it was the same game basically.
And then I played the next one, which is the, I forget what it's called,
but the one after that. And then that's the last one I played.
So I don't have any context. The problem here lies with Game Freak.
It's development problems.
There are like, sure, okay, the performance on the Switch is anemic. That is totally
absolutely legit. The Switch at this point is quite old.
I was still making review videos for Linus Tech Tips when the Switch came out
in a hot minute. Yeah, what is it running?
Like from the Shield tablet?
Yeah, it's a problem. We need an
updated Switch for sure. 100% agree with that. It was so crazy
when they released the OLED version and it just had the, it was the same
internals. It's like, what? Yeah, yeah.
Because it wouldn't be that hard either. It's just like it's an ARM processor.
Call it the new Switch or whatever. Do your crappy Nintendo
naming. No one cares. Just make it a little bit better. But I completely agree
with Munar's take of emulating it and running it with a 60 FPS patch
because it is despicable the state that this game was released in.
Because it looks not good.
Even when it's not lagging. Some games look good. It looks like junk.
And then it also lags like crazy. Like what?
What is this? Oh yeah, someone points out the Tegra X1 chip is the chip
and it was running at half the clock speed of the Shield apparently. I can't verify
that. I mean they had to make some concessions, right?
Because it's like, you know. Mobile. It was so frustrating
to me too, man. I got a taste of like the Steam Deck
and stuff before all of these handhelds came out because
I did the video on LTT about running Android on the Switch before they
modded out the exploit with
the patch. And that was awesome, man. Like streaming
cloud games and stuff on the Switch. PC games. Anyways.
Yeah, like Conrad says in Philip Link's chat, the best way to play the Switch
is to not. And honestly at this point that's true because the best way to play Switch
is to emulate it. Which is wild.
So Game Freak, figure it out. A lot of people pointed out that the release
cadence might be too aggressive. I don't care.
Either start releasing games less frequently.
Stop cash-cowing Pokemon so hard. Or hire more people and start
doing a rotating thing where one team works on a game for like three years
and you have two other teams. So they're dropping games
in series or whatever. But like this is
ridiculous and people should not financially reward
this level of effort. Yeah, I heard people saying that, you know, it's like, okay
you can't blame them. They only have a year to do it. So then it's like, okay.
If we say that that's the cause, then it's
either the fact that like, I don't know who makes the final decision. It's probably
higher ups at Nintendo wanting to like pump out Pokemon games. So
you know, Pokemon's a bad guy. Game Freak can
I wouldn't blame Game Freak. They need to figure it out, basically, yeah. I'm not being like,
hey you individual developer that worked on the
popping in of the graphics, you're a bad person. That's what I thought you were saying to me.
They need to come up with a solution.
A business solution to this. They need to release less games so they have more time to work on them.
Or they need to hire more people, expand the teams and make it dedicated teams
per game and then make it so they're rolling. So you have one team release
a game every like three years, have three different teams, blah blah blah blah blah, do something like that.
I don't prefer that system, but if they're really dedicating to this level of release
cadence, then they need to do something like that. But anyways, let's move on.
I don't know
what the, should we do another topic? Is that what you do? You've already done sponsors.
So from here it's just, it's whatever we, we're free.
Did you cover, oh sure. That's it. Sorry, and we got
topics. Linus showed me where the merch messages are, but now they've escaped
me. Oh, there they are. Hello. We're letting those. We're letting them
chill. They have to, they have to steep. They have to,
what do you call it? Marinating. No, ferment.
They have to ferment a little bit. And then the final,
you send in a merch message and you think it's pretty good, but you don't even
know how good it's going to be by the time we get to it. It'll be even better.
These are properly aged merch messages. Okay, which one of these did you have thoughts
about? Linus, I don't think you guys talked about the Doom Eternal
soundtrack thing, right? Because Linus asked me to put that in there, but I,
Anthony filled it out, so I don't, I still don't know what's going on with that.
So I think, I think it's probably best to leave that to next week if Linus still wants to talk about it.
Unless you know everything about it. I know some things about it. This
amount of notes is actually crazy. I have a large monitor. It does not
fit on the monitor. Anthony does not screw around. He doesn't.
He dives in. I like it. But yeah, I think, I'm just going to
start reading through this. I know some of this. I'm going to have opinions along the way, but
based on the amount of notes here, I honestly don't think I know all of this.
Anthony says, I did my best to cut this down, but this is a messy one. That's totally legit.
Honestly, this being this long very likely makes a lot of sense. And he
intros it with bolded letters, which we don't normally do. That's important.
Don't go after anyone. This is not an encouragement to harass
anyone or anything. Don't do it. Please.
Every single time that people say this, and then people are like, oh, it's a coded message to do it, and then they
do it anyways, they screw with everything and they make it worse. And it's really freaking annoying.
So stop. Don't go after anyone. Seriously.
Let, there is proper, well, I believe there's, we'll see. I think there's
legal process happening with this right now.
Yeah, I mean. Let that go its course. Yeah, we'll see.
Anyways. You go ahead. Doom Eternal's much-anticipated soundtrack was released
to little acclaim in 2020 when it was discovered that the quality
of the mixes were incredibly subpar. Some of the many
issues include cuts between songs and sections, sometimes with overlap,
but no fade causing clicks and pops, tempo changes,
and just various gaps. Outcries surrounding this led to
Nick disowning the OST, according to Doom Eternal executive producer
Marty Stratton on the r slash doom subreddit, shortly after
release. I will add some context here. The soundtrack for
Doom not Eternal, like the previous one, was amazing.
Fantastic. And I believe it was made by the same person. Interesting. Moving
forward. In his lengthy post, this being Marty Stratton,
he defended id, or id software, id software,
and sound designer Chad Mossholder. The main issue
with the OST itself, according to Stratton, was that id didn't
have the original files to mix with, leaving only the in-game files to splice
together. It's further claimed that Mick delivered less music than
expected in time for the OST's release, necessitating these splices.
Mick was said to have supervised Chad on a backup OST
and signed off on a combined work. Marty says that id
did absolutely nothing to prevent Mick from delivering on his
commitments within the timeframe he asked for. The harassment faced
by id, he said, was a result of comments made by Mick,
who had since done, quote unquote, nothing
to change the conversation. This is a lot of names. Good luck following it.
The ultimate ending of this is going to be, if you're interested, you're going to have to dive into it yourself.
Yeah. Mick and Nick. There's a Mick
and a Nick. Oh my gosh. I think so. Am I wrong? An id?
No, it's Mick and Marty. Oh, Marty. Yeah, yeah. We'll start with M, which I think is going to get
Mick and Marty. But anyways. At the end of all this, maybe they'll still
open up a pasta shop together. A pasta shop.
You don't eat there. You just go and buy pasta and take it home.
Okay. Continue. No sauce.
Very recently, Mick Gordon posted a very long, very
detailed rebuttal. In the post, prompted by damage
to his professional reputation, Mick provides evidence that highlights
the extreme crunch he was expected to work through. Being asked to write music
before areas of the game was created, often resulting in music that did not fit
and had to be remade. Having the OST announced while no
contract was in place to produce it. Expectation of a new track
every two weeks, regardless of whether previous tracks had been rejected or had to
be redone due to changes in design. That's a huge issue. An extreme
push to meet the original November 2022-2019 release
date. Threats of lawsuits during arguments over contractual demands
and not being paid for eleven months.
While this was happening. Whoa. The heck? I didn't know that part.
For the OST, Mick says his
interaction with Chad was minimal and he never heard
the final product before release. Metadata provided by Chad
showed the OST was being made without him for six months
before he was contracted to do it after it was delayed,
but without him
as in, I think, Mick?
I don't know. According to Mick, it definitely did
have the original source files, but they didn't mix them properly. When it
did release, meaning the
game, I think, several demo tracks were rejected and thus not
paid for. Several demo tracks
that were rejected and thus were not paid for because they were rejected
were included in the OST, which is not cool. Bad.
No. Mick says that if he had acted the way Marty says
Bethesda would have had the right to not pay him,
what they did, including an on-time bonus.
Okay. Mick suggests that the real reason the OST was rushed
was because of legal issues surrounding pre-order bonuses and consumer protection
laws. Prior to Marty's post, Mick says that Marty
had instructed him to not, holy crap.
Hello? I can't follow this.
There's too many names. I don't know if I'm just like brainfrogged from being
sick, but I'm reading this out myself and this is crazy. Marty Mick Marty
Chad Marty Mick. Mark?
Twitter? Okay.
Anyways, there's a lot of, he said, she said,
moral of the story is don't do or request contract work without a rock-solid
contract. Contracts aren't employees and always keep receipts.
These are good points. Discussion question.
We've heard of crunch in the games industry before. We were literally talking about it before the stream,
but mostly in respect to employees, not contractors. How much of this
is a, I don't know if that's true. It's definitely both always. How much of this
is a systemic problem and how much of this is due to the
dynamic of management versus contractor? I think it's absolutely both.
How many interactions like this happen that aren't high profile and never
get properly resolved and who gets the short end of the stick?
That's a lot of discussion. I will say that like, you know, one of the only things that I think I can
say about this is I think in the games industry
particularly, there seems to be a problem with
having a lot of this type of conflict
happen in the background and it only really comes out
you know, when there's like a big giant online
fiasco about it. I feel like when it comes to other industries
maybe like movies, you know, this
stuff is more likely to emerge as people are kind of like talking about it
in the open a little bit more. But with this it's like, oh, we found out after the fact
that all of these employees from these game studios have been
completely, I mean I will say that when it comes to visual
effects and other things, there have been similar scandals
in other industries. It just seems that like, it seems that this is a gut feeling that
in the games industry it seems like this stuff seems to be swept under the rug a bit more
which is not good. Yeah, I think
a lot of people just swallow the pill that they're working in the games industry so they'll deal with it.
Right, because there's this belief in crunch, it's like a cultural thing almost
depending. Now it's changing but
It's also a very difficult
thing because games are often, not always
obviously, but games are often, especially this one I would include in there,
very complicated systems that have to be worked on by a
huge variety of teams and those teams are going to have different delays
and then the ability for other teams to be able to progress in their work is going to lean on
a different team achieving their goal.
So if team A has a delay, that delays team B's
ability to work on something. So a lot of these delays will cascade into even more
delays and it becomes, software development is already a situation
where it's nigh impossible to make accurate
timeline estimations of how long it's going to take you to do something. You can make
very educated guesses then you can run into problems that there was no way
you could have foreseen that can just wreck everything.
There's also
a huge chance for scope changes, this is a huge problem in the gaming
industry. Something will happen, like remember when Battle Royale
just blew up and every game in development was like, oh wait, we need a Battle Royale
oh my goodness. That's a pretty major scope change for example.
But yeah, it can be really rough. Also
gamers.
Not the greatest audience to have in this scenario.
They're going to be pissed about crunch, but then if your game is late, you're
the worst person on the planet. So it's like, ahh.
And I will say to validate what you were saying about Twitter earlier, it definitely seems like
gamers are online more
so than fans of other entertainment mediums.
I don't think that you're getting, you know
with movies and stuff you have people backlash, but with games it's like every
little game that is able to have a Twitter account and post updates
is liable to be swarmed by people who are unhappy with
decisions they make. Less so for smaller movies
and whatnot. Because they're very, very loud.
They will complain about things very quickly
and very intensely, but they absolutely
refuse to vote with their wallet. They will
review bomb things, they'll do all this other kind of stuff. One of my favorite things
to see is where people will catch people in screenshots where they have
review bombed something and then bought it afterwards.
More of like, people who will be like, I will never buy this thing and then you can see
it's like in their account, so they clearly did buy it. It's like, that's
gamers in my opinion. They will scream about something, they'll say it's the worst, most
vile thing ever and then they'll buy it and buy all the DLC and buy all the optional skins
and spend every dollar they possibly can on the game. I will say that like, you know
I'm on a movie podcast, so I feel the need
I get, I empathize with the need to kind of like play what other people
are playing and like, oh this game just came out, everyone's talking about it, I need to play it
because I need to have a take so that I can post about it or talk about it
on Discord or whatever and like, you know, I don't want to have to avoid spoilers, there's
all sorts of things. So I empathize with that thing because on a movie podcast you got to keep up with what's going on
you got to watch the new movie. But at the same time, after having
a kid, I have way less time
to keep up with things, so
I've never really been good at playing like the super new new game
but even less so now and I feel like if you allow
yourself to kind of get rid of that need to like
play every game when it comes out so that you can take part in the
whatever you call it, I mean dogpiling on people online
it's actually pretty cool if you just kind of
chill out and you're like, I can play some of these 300 games in my Steam library
I don't need to keep buying things, you know? Minimalism.
The other thing that I wanted to
mention real quick is that people were posting in the chat, tech unions
are unions in games, it's starting to change
but there's not a whole lot of worker protections because there's so much contract
work and stuff and we kind of alluded to that earlier. Anyways, that's all I wanted to say about that.
That's what I was saying too, there was the discussion question, but we hear about it with employees but not contractors.
There's a huge amount of contractors in the game development space, you probably don't realize they're not
employees. But yeah, it's totally a thing.
Okay, let's move on.
You want to do your people make games topic? Yeah, so this was something that someone sent
to Linus and Linus didn't really know what
was going on with it so he asked me to take a look. And I am subscribed to people who make
games, I like them as a channel. They, you know, obviously tech longer
is kind of a similar thing I'm trying to do where I want to do this type of deep dive
investigation but they made this video, they posted about
a week ago, just over a week ago, and they're finding that
Valve's underage gambling problem, do you remember that from like 2015
2016? Absolutely, yeah. It's basically as bad as
it ever was. I mean, I don't want to say that because we don't have like exact
numbers, but it's still a huge thing. I mean, here I'll start reading
the stuff I guess. A recent investigation by YouTube gaming journalist People Make
Games has uncovered the fact that the CSGO skin gambling industry is continuing
to get minors hooked on gambling despite the issue dominating headlines
back in 2016. I'm just going to bring up their
video here just so you can see it, okay?
Real quick and then you can, you can go watch it because it's, you know,
it's 36 minutes long, it's a great video. Check it out.
And now to go back to the thing. Remember, so
streamers TomSyndicateCastle and TrevorTMartinMartin
back in 2016 received multiple civil lawsuits for
promoting the gambling site csgoLotto.com during their streams without
disclosing that they were the site's owners. They
rigged the site so they could win top tier loot while streaming to their millions of followers, many of which were children.
And similar cases happened with other streamers.
Valve eventually threatened skin gambling websites with legal action unless
they closed down and Twitch warned
streamers not to stream those websites,
which I thought was interesting because they didn't do it because of like the moral reason
or like the, you know, because it's bad for minors, but because doing so would be breaking
the terms of service of third parties, which is against Twitch's own
terms of service. And there was a whole, were you around?
Did you pay attention to the recent thing where Twitch
banned unregulated gaming, gambling, but not actual, gambling is still like
totally fine on Twitch? Which is like, you can have a position on that.
I'm not saying that like there should never, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to go hard on that.
But it was just interesting that they,
it seems like everyone's just kind of trying to pass the buck here.
So then as, so all these points are from
People Make Games video, just so you know, if you want more information, definitely watch it.
In 2017, Syndicate slash Team Martin got their lawsuits
dismissed, and this is an interesting point. Their lawyer made the argument that
using the site was basically just like using McDonald's Monopoly,
or like playing Monopoly at McDonald's,
where you can, because you can get a free lotto ticket if you ask.
So if you, is that a Canadian thing? I was asking somebody the other day,
is McDonald's Monopoly just in Canada? But they have, they have
promotions. I mean, regardless. There's an American McDonald's Monopoly.
Alright, sure. So you go to McDonald's, you can only buy, you can only
obtain tickets to play the game, you know, which is
essentially gambling, more or less, by buying McDonald's
products. And the way they get around it
being quote unquote gambling, I guess, is because you can actually go up to the counter and
say, I don't want to buy anything, but I want to play.
And they'll give you like two tickets or whatever, and you can rip them.
So you're not, I didn't know you could do that, but that makes sense. Yeah, because you don't have
to put money down, you could, like, it's a game,
and if you buy products, you'll get more tickets, but you could just get tickets by
not paying money. So that was, like, the legal, it was related to that argument,
which is the way that they got the lawsuits dismissed, which is kind of crazy.
So most people kind of forgot about this whole issue
and thought the issue had been resolved. I certainly did. I thought that, like,
oh yeah, the whole skin gambling thing, that was way back, they figured that out.
But People Make Games points out that skin gambling sites are still thriving.
Sites like CSGO Roll, CSGO Empire, CSGO Fast, CSGO
Polygon, and more, they have millions of users each. So their video
has a sobering section playing excerpts from a lot of interviews
with players who said they got into it at, like, 13 and 14 years old.
They bet and lost hundreds of dollars on skin betting, and many describe
the experience as a key reason for their gambling addiction. So I think that's
really where, you know, if you're coming into this and you're like, yeah, it's
just a game, like, you know, it's not that big of a deal.
Yes, if you have the, you know,
mental capability and emotional maturity to understand what you're
doing and how you're getting into it, right? But for 13 and 14 year olds
and whatever, they don't, like, it's setting up these habits
and then they stay. Like, they describe, these people describe
having modern day, they have issues with it now because
they got so into it back then and then, like, it forms
these dopamine pathways. Someone pointed out, sorry, just before we
keep going, apparently the US used to have Monopoly
but it was rigged by the promo runners. They haven't had it in years.
That's the only reason why I knew they had it because I watched this whole mini-documentary
and how the FBI was involved with McDonald's Monopoly because of all
the corruption involved with it, which is so interesting. And other people are pointing out
that gambling is already in-game, though. Like, in CSGO
you can pay money, get a loot box, you don't know what's in
the box. You know, there's loot boxes, like, it's a common
concept but, I mean, I guess, I'm not familiar enough
with the, like, long history of loot boxes in games to know whether CSGO
was, like, one of the first games with that. Would you, can you speak
to that? Luke?
You could say no. I suspect there was probably, I don't know.
But I suspect there was probably some form of gambling before loot boxes.
I know loot boxes was the first mainstream group. Sure. And the
accusation, one of the things they talk about in the video is the fact that when you open the loot
box, it's like a little slot machine graphic and there's all these skins and they
all go, and then slow down and you're, like, get the feeling
that, oh my gosh, I was so close to that high-end one. Oh, I gotta do it
again. I was so close that time. But really the result is
decided before you open the box.
So, yeah, that's basically where things are at. These sites
are thriving. They're being used by children and adults
which is whatever. But the question they ask is
why doesn't Valve do anything about this? PMG's case is essentially
that, like, they're saying that it's Valve's job to stop this
since it's their collectible system on Steam
that allows people to say, all right, you're gonna, you can earn
some of these things through the game, but a lot of people are just going and buying
them and then using that, you know, they're taking the
skin to the skin betting site and gambling with that.
Analysts told people make games that it's obvious how Valve profits
from allowing skin gambling sites to thrive. Like casino chips, every
skin is bought from the house. That's Valve. But the
only way to cash out is to sell your skins to third party sites
meaning Valve keeps every dime. In a casino, when you win a bunch of money, you take
the chips back to the house and you're like, hey, okay, let's exchange
this for money. So if you win a lot of stuff at a casino, the casino
loses money, or I mean, whatever, and they have to give you the money directly.
If you win a bunch of valuable skins
in skin gambling, Valve isn't losing money if you want to, like, cash
those out because you're going to go to a third party site and they're going to pay you for the skins
thinking that they can take those skins and put those back into the ecosystem and get money from that.
So Valve keeps all the money. So they have
an incentive to keep these going. I'm not saying
that they know this and that they're doing this on purpose, but
it doesn't look great. If they completely
shut down these sites tomorrow, analysts told people make games that the value of skins would
tank. So that's another reason for them not to do it.
And the popularity of the sites keeps people using Valve's products. People still
do like showing off their skins in game. So, you know,
it's tough because there's a clear incentive for Valve to not do anything
but at the same time, it's like the last time that this kind of
thing came to light, there was a huge backlash about it and made crazy headlines
and everyone was talking about it. And if people are like, ah,
skins can't be worth that much. I've seen how skins, how much skins cost in games.
Well, there is an AK, an
AK-47 case hardened pattern number 661
that apparently just sold for
over 400 grand USD.
Wow. One skin for one gun. And might I say
it looks ugly. Worth it. Because apparently there's
four stickers on it. It's not about how it looks, Luke. It's the Prestige.
It is. This has got to be the Prestige because it is a butt ugly
skin. It's like a fine skin, I guess.
Okay, well now wait. Does it have a name? Can I look it up? Four stupid stickers
on it. Just look up $400,000
CSGO AK. You'll find it. $400,000 CSGO AK.
Dexerto. Being sold by the Danish
Lector.
Is that it? Are we looking at it here? Yeah, that's it. All the stickers are on it.
It looks stupid. I mean,
I think it's kind of cute. Oh, man. I don't know.
I'm just kidding. I don't understand.
Well, I don't get it at all. But I guess the value in it
is the exclusivity. Because if I remember correctly, I think
someone said it's like stat tracked. I don't remember. It's also in
like the like new or whatever their naming is for
as good condition as it can be. And it's in a really rare pattern. And then the
four stickers, I believe, are rare or something.
But like, man. Wow. I don't know.
Wait, you can do that, can't you, Dan?
You're trusting me with the potential reveal of sense of information
and you have control, too? Yeah. I'm the dumb tech news man.
You can't give me control. This is a huge mistake. But you're Linus
now. I'm Linus now. Yeah, a lot of people are still confused about why I'm here and not Linus.
Quick update, Linus had to go to an event. He's
a high flying billionaire
doing cool things like Bruce Wayne all the time. So you can't stick around.
You know? He's going to see Luke.
So the, yeah, I already covered the slot machine
thing. So the discussion question I had for this was gaming started as a young person's
game, but is now enjoyed by all ages. Whose responsibility
is it to protect kids from gambling? Is it Valve? Is it their parents? Is it the
government? Like who should we really be looking at here and being like, ah, you're
at fault. Like obviously Valve should do something about it. Obviously Valve,
it would be nice if they did, but one of the points that they make in the video that I didn't really
cover in this one is how Valve kind of takes sort of a hands-off approach
with a lot of things when it comes to moderation. Like
we had that whole thing. We totally do. And I forget how long ago
that was now, but originally they didn't have any, or they did have
like porn games on Steam and then they were like
they banned them and then they're like, oh, okay, just kidding. They're back a year
later or something. Do you remember anything about that? Yeah, I don't remember all the details
exactly, but I do remember that was a thing that happened. I think that's how
tags came into existence, right? Oh, well there you go.
People could tag something as like not safe for work, essentially, and then you could
by default that tag is not shown to you. I think that's
came around at the same time. I could be wrong. People are pointing out that
there is porn on Steam now, yes, but like that was a reason
development because they were, for a while there they were like, it seemed like they
honestly flip-flopped a bunch of times because they were like, do we want to have heavy moderation? Should
this be like for a family friendly type of situation? Or do we just kind of, is it
just like a games platform and anyone can put what they want on there within reason, you know?
I think the main thing that they did was basically make it so that unless you're looking for it
you shouldn't find it. Right. And I think they largely succeeded.
Accomplished that, yeah. Because unless you tell the, like I
want to see these. Hello?
You tell that bird to shut the hell up.
I just whistle at them. Wait, where's the, I have a swear bleep. I won't use it. I won't
risk it. Linus is good at it, but I'm going to screw it up and then I'll get
our whole channel demonetized. It's sketchy, yeah, it's scary.
The way that I talk normally, the way I talk off camera, we're in trouble.
I do, if you ever played
Assassin's Creed or Black Flag, I do the whistles that he
does in that game to my birds. Oh, so you muted yourself. And they find it distracting
because it sounds like a bird chirp. So it's distracting. So they're like, huh?
Pirates? They'll often tell them off of what they're currently doing.
You should yell at them like, yeah. Yelling
at them will accomplish just like nothing because they like loud noises.
So if I yell at them, they'll be like, yeah, let's party.
They're not going to interpret it as anger.
Okay, so to come back to the topic, I guess.
Obviously, people have pointed out in the chat
like, oh, if parents are letting their kids
have access to funds and stuff, then that's like,
no one's to blame or whatever. And it's like, not everyone's
parents are great people.
Or they're busy or they don't know.
This is a huge reason why this is such an issue is because parents
kind of know about movie ratings
and other things that are designed to protect
children from experiences that they're not ready for.
Even after so many years,
games is still kind of like a black box to a lot of parents.
No matter what generation they're from. Obviously, things are
progressing there, but it's still like,
a lot of parents just don't know.
So you can't say, oh, it's up to the parents to do it because
someone think of the children, et cetera.
You know what I mean? I do think I would like to see more regulation from government about
things like loot boxes in games. I think promoting gambling
to a format that, as much as you
are saying it is definitely an all-ages thing now, is definitely
targeted straight in the kids direction.
With a lot of games. And then promoting gambling through the form of loot
boxes with those games. And a form of gambling that ropes you in, right? Because you're
always going to get at least one for free. And I think a lot of
those games will rig that first one that you get for free. So you win something kind of cool and then you want to do it more.
Yeah.
I'm just saying, like, I just think it's a **** and I would
like to see it not be that. What did you say there? What was that? See?
I don't know. Now I just want to know. Which one of the forbidden words?
BS. Avada Kedavra.
Oh, I was going to say something else about it, but I forgot.
Oh, at the end of the video, it's a great video.
You should definitely go watch it. They talked to the
video game attorney guy, actually. I forget what his name is, but I think he's on YouTube as video game attorney.
And he was talking about how some platforms,
I don't think he wanted to say specifically whether it was Valve or not, so don't,
I don't know if it's Valve. I think he was trying to refer to other platforms that
have these kind of mechanics and how they will
manipulate drops so that if you,
if they've detected through data collection that you're someone
who's more likely to spend money, they will limit
the amount of things that you can earn in game because they
know that you're going to pay for the good stuff. But if you are someone who won't
pay, who is less likely to pay, they'll give you better stuff.
Which is just... That's so rough.
Which is crazy. So again, I'm not saying that a specific platform does that, but this guy
was indicating that at least some platforms that he knows of through
does this and he knows this by talking to the people involved in that.
Yeah, it's a crazy time out there, and yeah, I think I agree that we need
some sort of, like I think that some jurisdictions, I think the
UK had some sort of legislation about loot boxes being officially gambling.
I'm not sure where that's at in North America, but
I... It's kind of crazy that this
video hasn't gotten more traction given how huge the issue was
back in 2016. It was like dominating headlines. I remember
I was making Net Linked Daily at that time at NCIX
and we talked about it a lot at that time.
Yeah, and this time, you know, these guys put out this video, and honestly
I watched, I saw it pop up and I was like, okay, yeah.
Because I thought the issue, I didn't watch it initially until Linus was like, oh, this might be something
for Wancho, and then I watched it. Because I didn't, I was like, I thought it was over. I thought this was just
going to be like a little update. I'm like, yeah, there's still people trading skins.
But I didn't realize... I'm going to watch it, because I haven't watched it yet, but I
love the People Make Games channels. They're fantastic.
But people might just be tired of this topic
and more busy watching the world burn in various ways. Indeed.
Next and last topic, should we go over
the disabling iOS anti-tracking thing, or should we just hit merge messages?
I'm going to leave this up to you. I can do the iOS anti-tracking
pretty quickly, I think. It's not as complicated as maybe
it looks... wait, where did it go?
Up. There it is. Yeah, yeah, Anthony filled this out.
Basically, so basically the Apple
released this anti-tracking, or app tracking transparency
feature in iOS 14.5. It's a prompt that asks if users would
like to allow apps, like individual apps, it pops
up. It asks you if you want to allow the app to track your activities across the internet
and other companies' apps. A massive 96% of US users
opted out in the earliest days of the features released, and
Facebook and Apple had a big fight about this. Facebook lost a bunch of money, and
Apple was like, screw you, because this is what we have to do to protect people's privacy.
And
it's becoming apparent that what Apple was doing was basically
kind of making a play to be Google, in the sense that they
want to supercharge their own ad services. Now, you guys have talked
about this, I think, a little bit before on the WAN Show with various topics that have come up,
but the key detail about this one is the fact that when you go
to disable the settings in
iOS that are meant to, where is it? I want to say the actual thing.
I think
one of them is personalized ads, and the other one is
do not track. Yeah,
Anthony said the, like, a lot more technical
way to describe it, but basically there are two
toggles on your iPhone that you can go and toggle
off. One says allow personalized ads, and you can say
no, I don't want personalized ads, which is ostensibly saying
that don't track me, and don't collect my data, just give me
the generic ads, which means you don't need my data. And then
there's another one that says do not track, and that's involving sending a do not track request in
various other situations. And you can turn both of those off
and these developers, app developers Tommy
Misk and Talal Haj Bakri, who work together
under the name Misk, that's their development team, revealed that
Apple's app tracking transparency, when you turn
these off, it still collects the data in Apple apps. So in non-Apple apps,
it will turn it, or it will stop them from collecting data on you, but in
Apple apps, and not every Apple app, but a good many of them,
including the App Store itself, collects all
kinds of information, profile IDs, hardware IDs,
and info, keyboard language, metrics about apps viewed with timestamps, and
durations for viewing, all actions taken within the apps, including like you tapping on
things and how long you're looking at things, a massive amount of data describing
subscription statuses and installed apps, this is all collected
and sent to Apple, and it's used to, well
I don't know if they found that it's used to personalize the ads, I don't know if they can
get that far, but they know that it's being collected and sent to Apple.
So like, I don't, honestly
there's a part of me that I'm like, is this as big of a deal? Because
it's not like, there's one part of me that's like, this is kind of crazy, Apple
is saying whatever happens on your iPhone stays in your iPhone, and at the same time,
it is a big deal, because they put
these buttons on your phone that don't do anything when it comes to Apple's own apps.
Aggressively misleading people about privacy is like, super not okay.
So I think it's a big deal. Yeah, so like, we made this the title story on TechLink the other
day, and the original title I put on there was, these buttons do nothing, or these buttons
don't work, because they don't do anything! You can swap that, it's like
you know, when you open Facebook or whatever, the prompt will come up being like, do you want
Facebook to track you, and you say no, and that works in that app, but in
an Apple app, it doesn't do anything!
So, I mean, I think you guys looked into this, and when you
open an Apple app, you don't get the prompt. You can set it at a system
level, but it doesn't do anything. Anyways,
discussion question, how can we trust anything any company says about respecting
your privacy? Yeah, so that's kind of, it's the same thing, you can't.
We live in the current year, and it's bad news for privacy.
Should companies making privacy claims be required to independently
audit their practices? Yes.
Yeah, but like... But they won't, we won't. If you look at the 2008
housing crisis, the independent auditing houses,
I shouldn't say houses in that context, the independent auditing
firms or whatever, were all just
playing the game. Right. So they would just get paid
by the companies that they were supposed to be auditing, and just put stamps on things
and be like, yep, looks good! Yeah. All the time, because they were just making tons
of money. That's just going to happen again. So like, yeah, that should probably happen, but
it's just going to have endless amounts of corruption anyways. Did you ever, I have a question
for you, Luke. Did you ever believe, because I know
that you care about stupid things like facts and
evidence, but on previous WAN shows, it seems
like you, you know, have wanted to kind of like
say, like, let's hold on, let's only say things that we're absolutely
confident of when it comes to Apple and privacy, when this topic has come up before.
Did you have an actual, did you have,
did any part of you actually believe that Apple actually
was talking, walking the walk a little bit
when it came to privacy? They say, we care about your privacy. Did you believe them a little bit?
Not that there's no reason to believe them on anything anymore, I'm just saying.
Yeah, pre all of this, I did to a certain degree, I thought an iOS
device was more secure, and I think it was at that time.
When this landed, I had concerns.
It didn't seem like they were 100% playing ball
in the way that they wanted people to think they were, but I didn't have a particular
reason to think that they weren't. Like, I'm
the opposite of shocked that this topic is in the dock and this is a thing.
But I didn't want to say it until it happens, right?
Because I think you, I think there's a lot of danger there
when you criticize things or people or corporations
or whatever for something that you don't know is legit
or potentially isn't legit, that makes it so that when you do want to criticize
them for something that is legit, it adds question to your criticism.
So I always want to be careful about that.
Yeah, no, and I mean, I completely agree. I will say that
in the absence of any hard evidence that Apple
did anything differently, it seemed like they did care
about privacy. And I think that it made sort of
business sense too, to have that as a differentiating factor
in a world where absolutely everyone is collecting everything about you that they can.
Apple comes out here and is like, guess what, we don't have a
huge ads business. We get all our money from hardware
and software to a certain degree, but it's mostly
iPhone sales, Mac sales, that's where they're making a lot of their money
and now it's services as well, they're selling subscription services and all this stuff.
And that's huge. But it hasn't been like
a data collection, we're serving you ads and that's how we make money.
That's been Google's thing. So I was willing to believe to a certain extent
in the absence of evidence that Apple did care about
or not, I don't want to say care about your privacy, but that they had chosen to
not do this type of collection. But I was hoping that was the case
I just, I wasn't 100% confident. I just, I feel like
the place that I find this to be the most egregious is in the
political realm. When you have people attacking
people that they don't agree with politically for like
physical features or aesthetic reasons
like I don't like this person's hair or
the way they dress or something like that, not only
does it usually just bolster and steal
the resolve of the other side because they're like that's a stupid reason
to attack my person, but it's not accomplishing
anything and it makes all your other accusations just seem lame.
So you're not helping anything
by throwing these criticisms out there that don't actually matter
so I try to keep it legit. But with that
speaking of legit, merch messages time.
You're going to read them? Do you want me to read them?
Why don't you read them, Luke? I can barely see them
so maybe it's better if you do read them. We'll start with this one for you though, Luke.
Hi, Luke. What's your opinion on external GPUs?
I personally use a MacStudio M1 Ultra for Blender with no
external GPU. Do you think they're worth it?
Using it for Blender. So it's very, very likely
a professional reason why you're doing it so it might be a good idea
to grab one. External GPUs are very neat
and very problem prone in my experience.
Their failure rates seem, they feel high to me.
So I don't know. I've tried
to stay away from them pretty much as much as I can and that's been pretty easy
because I haven't had a lot of use cases why I would
need one. I've used them multiple times and they've been kind of a pain
every time, but when I used to do that was in the
infancy of external GPUs so that kind of makes sense. One time
that I used one more recently was with an ASUS laptop
that Linus had at his house and it was flawless.
So I don't know. That was an external GPU that was made specifically
for that laptop, like a power upgrade kind of situation.
Maybe that helped it. Someone in
FlowPlane chat said you can't do eGPU on M1 so
maybe get wrecked?
Wow. Okay.
I've got another question here on a similar vein. This guy also uses
Blender Cycles. That work type is dominated by
NVIDIA. With NVIDIA prices climbing to the moon, do you think RDNA3 may be
price competitive in this work type? Will AMD ever catch NVIDIA?
I have no idea. Hopefully.
That's all I'd say. I can't say how it's going to perform before the thing comes out.
But hopefully labs test that type of use case.
A lot of it's the proprietary CUDA stuff that
NVIDIA just holds, right? That is a big problem.
This one's from Reece. Hey guys, do you have any takes on
ID security? Australia has gone through a load of hacks on big
businesses recently. Lots of data on the internet. Two out of five
of every Aussie personal data went online via health insurance.
Yeah.
I find it very entertaining that the places, the things that I
use that have the worst security
are government services and banking services.
Which is just crazy.
Yeah. I can attest to that as well.
It's wild to me that those
type of services, in my experience, don't have
like, if they do have two factor, it's just SMS.
Yeah. And I'm like, can we get this
together here? Like, come on guys. A lot of banks
and government services are often
gigantic, extremely, extremely slow
moving, super bureaucratic situations where it's very
hard to make those types of changes.
So like, I get it from the tech teams that work on those services.
I'm not blaming you. I understand you're dealing with muddy waters. But
it's just, it's very disappointing. And anytime I go to
do any banking stuff or any government services stuff, I'm just like, ooh
this is like rough. When like accounts that I have for like random
stupid games that I don't care about have like way better security
than my government identity. Exactly.
This is weird, right? Like, I don't know. Like, Steam's like, you're not
no one's stealing your skins, bro. We got you.
Meanwhile, your bank is like,
we sent you an email.
Are you who you say you are? Maybe? I don't know. You're not allowed to use
special characters in your password. We don't know how to sanitize our inputs.
Password character limits. Oh yeah. And no specials and
like, oh my gosh. You used, you used the symbol that is on
this key in the keyboard and we don't know how to say it. So you can't
You're just talking about Déjà Déjà. I don't know what accent I'm doing. You're doing Déjà Déjà.
That's what the banks, they all, they're all European, you know?
Yeah. Last merch message if you guys
want to deal with this. It's by Nathaniel. Long time warcher,
first time merch message. I got my skydiving license last year
and wanted to ask if either of you would ever do it. Thanks for the gear.
I'm assuming that he meant either of you by like Linus and Luke. Linus, you have to
answer this like Riley would. I'll channel him. You must, you must
channel him. Did you just switch our names? No, you're Linus now.
You have to impersonate Linus
impersonating Riley. Well, I don't
have a Linus impression. I wish I did. I just haven't worked on it at all.
I can work on it. You answer the question. You want to skydive, Luke?
You can answer the question too, just personally. You don't have to answer it for Linus. Answer it for yourself.
No, answer it personally. I think I would definitely do, now I feel way
less of a need or a desire to skydive. I've never
skydived. I feel, I think before I had a kid
it changes you. Before I had a kid, I'm like, heck yeah.
Like, let's go. I mean, the, the rate of accidents is so low.
I mean, like the, the, the probability of anything happening is like
so low. And so I'm like, yeah, maybe if I, you know, ever get the chance, I'll do it.
But now that I have a kid, it's like, if someone's like, yeah, you want to go skydiving?
I'm like, not really. I totally feel
why, why would I?
So my, my problem
with it is I actually looked into this like
within the month. Let me,
let me try to find it.
It's really expensive for one. Yes, very true.
It's like genuinely real big money.
And then I think they said they got like certified, right?
In the, in the merch messages? Oh, it's gone. It's gone!
Yeah, it got a license. Sorry. Yeah, let me pull it up. You got a license.
Licensing package. Best value licensing package.
Must complete all these different levels.
Basically, okay. PFF package deal.
$2,800. Jeez. Woo! Yeah, exactly.
It's a lot of money and it's a lot of time. Like if I remember correctly,
you have to do like 12 dives or something?
To answer a skill testing question? Which direction
is the ground? You have to receive a text message.
But yeah, it's a lot of money and it's a lot
of time. It's interesting to me. I would
want to do one just for fun before I
tried to dedicate to something that was so expensive and took so much time. I also
don't understand really the reason.
To go skydiving? To be certified.
Oh, okay. I believe that lets you go by yourself.
I want to skydive when I travel. I think he's saying that he probably, or they
got in the, they got their certification
because they're doing it, maybe they're an instructor. I don't know.
Okay. Don't you have to have like a certification or a license to be allowed to
do it by yourself without like being strapped to another person? Yeah, and if you want to do it regularly,
even if you don't want to be an instructor. Is it worth $2800 and
12 dives with other people anyways to be able to do it by yourself?
I think it's a small price to pay to feel alive.
I'd give anything for that. You fool!
No.
It's not off the docket for me, but yeah.
Not so sure. I'm enjoying diving for now. Maybe on my bucket list. Maybe when I'm
an old geezer and I'm like, I'm probably going to kick it soon.
Let's jump out of a plane! There was a movie. Didn't they do that in a movie?
The bucket list. The movie, I think.
Moving on. Wait, is there anything else? What do we do? We're moving on to the end of the show.
The end of the show! Just in time for me to leave.
Thank you, Riley, for joining me. Hey! No problem. It is six, so it's time to
let you go, I think. I think that's how employment law works. I was going to try and
come up with some way to extricate myself from this
situation. This is the best way.
I'm going to try to run the thing from here and we'll see how this goes.
It should work.
Thanks for watching, everyone. We'll see you next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.
Bad time?
Bat time or bad? I think he used to say bat and he says bad now.
I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. That's funny. I've detected a change. Anyways,
bye! See you later.