The Interview: Steve Burke of GamersNexus

27:54I know if you count my time, it was over 300 hours. Jesus. So cool. It might have been more like 400. And then the ASRock motherboard video we just did on CPU failures in ASRock boards. That one was like with editing and filming time, I think that was 240 hours. So that's an example of a content piece that we will lose money on, but it's subsidized. First of all, I don't care because I want to do it. Secondly, you do have to pay for it somehow. Right. And so for us, we basically, we raised so much money from the black market video, I'm able to go, okay, that's paid for. Walk me through that situation.

28:34Yeah. The ASRock. The ASRock thing. So the ASRock thing is they have some kind of yet unknown issue that is resulting in the death of CPUs, expensive ones. And people don't know exactly what it is. They haven't been entirely forthcoming about it. It seems like they don't know what the fuck's going on. And so we got a viewer's motherboard that had killed the CPU and did a bunch of diagnostics. This was one of the instances where we couldn't come to a conclusion and we decided, let's just publish everything and maybe someone can use it. Has the company been communicative? Have they been trying to fix things?

29:10They appear to be trying to fix things, just not very successfully. I would not say they've been communicative. I don't think they've done a good job at telling their customers what's going on. Right. So how is your relationship in general with the hardware manufacturers? You mentioned the Intel. It sounds like you have some people who are friendly and then others. Yeah, it depends. I'm sure you've worked with enough people where the people are often different from the company in terms of the stance. And it really depends person to person. But generally speaking, the companies are able to maintain a fairly open line of communication and be relatively mature about even criticisms because normally the people actually in between us and their bosses are pretty good at their job.

30:01Right. So there's a guy at AMD who he's incredible at what he does. And I really don't think consumers, I think a lot of people don't know this job role exists, but it's really important. And the role is effectively to be the translator between outside criticism and internal action. Right. So not quite a PR role, but like a developer, not quite developer role. It's almost like tech marketing maybe. But they're not really marketing in the traditional sense. So the guy at AMD, he does a really good job because he's told me how if we have a criticism, might ask him, you know, what happens internally?

30:41And he said, well, normally marketing might go to him and kind of be like, well, what the fuck? Like, why did Steve say this? Or Hardware Unboxed or whoever, which is covered by Steve, I guess. But they might ask, why did the Steve say this? And it's his job to figure that out. And he was telling me, he normally just asked them, well, is it true? And if they say it's true, then he says, well, then make it not true by fixing it. See, this is the thing I run a PR firm and it's like, when clients come to, why'd they say that? I'm like, and many times I said, why did you do that? Right. And they say, well, it's not a fair, I'm like, how is it unfair?

31:16Because if you can explain to me, I can go and get this fixed. Right. But you have to explain to me for, and it is interesting that that role has to exist, but - Yeah, I mean, if it's just a communication problem, right? If they're like, well, it's true, but we didn't - We don't like it? Yeah. It's icky. Right. So there's got to be a real reason. But yeah, most of the companies, the relationship is fine, I would say. And they generally take criticism well? The people who interface with us take the criticism well because it's just a job. The companies don't always. Do you have any executive exposure?

31:49Do you know if any executives watch? I know that Jensen Juan once watched at least part of one of our videos. How did you? At least. Because it was communicated to me by someone who works with him. All bold, all caps. Yeah, I was told he was not thrilled. Oh, that doesn't sound like Jensen. He's usually such a cool head. But do you know if you... I don't even need names, but do you know if there's like a good amount of them? Sometimes, yeah. I mean, AMD, we had a video where we were basically begging them to not fuck up the launch of their 9000 series GPUs. Because their competition, like, no one had showed up for the consumer.

32:33Intel, they were kind of there, but they're like not super viable yet. Anyway, I know after that video, they had emailed us, and this wasn't a thread I told them was on record, but they'd emailed us and said, you know, basically their sort of executive marketing team had watched it. And they did talk about the problems we raised. That's cool. It seemed like they addressed some of them. Yeah. Do you ever try and get interviews with them? Yeah, occasionally. I mean, especially if there's like the ASUS situation with their warranty. ASUS Context for People has had an ongoing problem with customer support, where people who need a warranty filled often end up posting online saying they got screwed.

33:17Is this across the board or with specific things? Definitely motherboard. I'm not sure about other categories. Because I really like the ROGX Ally, but have had a few listeners say, yeah, we've got some warranty issues. And it's actually, I kind of wanted to address that with you in the know. Well, that one I know a lot about, the Ally specifically. Yeah. So to close the loop on the executive question, the ASUS thing, we published a series about the warranty problems. We proposed a number of fixes and eventually I really pushed them to let us speak to an executive and customer support. They put a director of marketing in front of us, very nice guy.

33:56Yeah, but... Not his job, right? And so I kept pushing back on him where I was like, look, man, nothing against you. You're not the guy. And so they eventually got us to the right guy, which is something I try to remember to... We really try to go to executive levels if possible because if it's just some dude who was told to do a thing, I can't really press him on the decision. You can't punish him. It's not really his decision-making. It's not his company. He doesn't know. Yeah, and he's not paid enough to deal with it. So we try to go above that person. And we did the same with Newegg. They sat a room full of four, I think, three or four executives with us.

34:40That's great. A couple years ago. Yeah. So a lot of times they'll play ball, which credit to them. Yeah. But the Asus Ally thing, the long story short on that is we had a defect. I want to say it was like the joystick or something. We had some kind of defect. We sent it in for actual repair on our unit anonymously or, you know, as a pseudonym. And they sent us a photo of the exterior of the chassis where there was a tiny nick, like a tiny, tiny crater that's basically the size of a pinpoint. in the end, the edge of the chassis that is purely cosmetic. And this is something that we literally put it under a microscope to see what they were talking about.

35:27And they said it wasn't covered? And they said that they would have to charge us, I forget how much it was, it was like$90 or$180 or something dollars. Oh my goodness. To repair a problem that was unrelated to this cosmetic thing and was their fault. And they were trying to use it to charge us for the repair. Very silly. Yeah. So we ran that as a story. And, you know, I mean, eventually it was handled, but I don't count it as being done correctly if they find out who we are and then they fix it. That was the thing, because you said it was anonymous, like a dummy thing. Right. And I assume you bought it with a different card.

36:06I think I bought it from a retail physical store. Right. So there's no trace. Because I like that thing, but now I'm regretting. That's a good device. But it's like, hopefully it doesn't break. Yeah, it's a great device as long as it never has a problem.

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39:02So, okay, let's change tag to the industry at large. And I want to talk to you about electronic arts. This EA thing. Because I know you just did a video. My whole thing was, how does EA get worse? Because as a company, they've been dog shit for a while. And that's a personal opinion. I don't know. I think that's an objective fact. Yeah. I mean, look at the Madden franchise. I think, I don't know. EA is like bizarre to me. I don't get it. I know you can look at their financial reports and whatever. But the powers at play in the EA acquisition, it's multiple governments through one connection or another.

39:44And I think for a lot of people, regardless of what they think about social issues, it is just, if you really think about it, weird for government or government-connected entities to start acquiring video game companies. Right. And I personally am very skeptical of it because the US government in particular has dragged video games at every opportunity they get for decades. It's always like the video games cause violence, and it's from people who've probably never played an actual game in their lives. And from what I understand of this deal, it's like Saudi money and PE money. Yes. So there's private equity, as you said.

40:26There's Saudi money through the PIF. And then on the US side, Affinity Partners, which is helmed by Jared Kushner, who is a former senior advisor to the president, and I think who he just sent over to some kind of peace discussion or something. So he's still involved somehow. But anyway, so that's the US side where you've got PE money. You have somehow indirectly the US government, but through a former US government official. And then his firm, the Affinity Partners, has received somewhere around$2 billion of initial investment from the Saudi PIF. That was a New York Times report previously. So his fund is funded by the other people invested.

41:09Yeah. And I think, if I remember the numbers correctly, it was close to$90 million out of their$160 or so million in management fees for the last filing was from managing Saudi money. And then you've got the PIF from Saudi Arabia working with this firm to buy EA Games. Right. One of the things we didn't talk about in the video that I just, I hadn't really thought too much about it. And I saw some excellent comments that made me think more about it. But is that companies like EA Games control a huge amount of data that seems inconsequential on the surface. It's video game data. Right. What is, okay, so what?

41:51Let's just pretend there's a clean path for the data to exit EA games and go to the US government or go to the Chinese or the Saudi Arabia, whatever. Let's just pretend there's a path there. They can't really do anything useful with your save game file. But one of the things that does interest me, and I just want to maybe caution here that this isn't, I don't think there's anything going on here right now. But I think there is the opportunity to abuse anti-cheat systems, which are like kernel-level software in most cases that run on the computer. So if you wanted to deploy some kind of root kit with very low-level access to computers, you could do it through anti-cheat solutions.

42:41Now, I don't think this is happening. Right. Right. And so I want to make sure people know that because you don't want it to sound like some crazy wild conspiracy theory. I'm just saying it's possible for it to happen. But I mean, there's probably a trove of data with EA Play or whatever horrible cloud services that bolt onto everything. Maybe they have chat logs that could be useful to governments, right? The US government has talked about wanting to bring Gabe Newell in for a testimony of some kind to talk about radicalization of teens who play video games. Right. And they're doing that with the Discord CEO, I think.

43:15They are. They already did that. Yeah. And I mean, if you want to go way back, right, the circus has been had before. It was just last time it was with rock music. Right. God. As I said, it's like, I don't know how EA gets worse though, because I don't know if you're a sports fan or anything. I'm aware of sports. Yeah. I said this is one of the pay pigs that buys Madden every year. It has got worse while also staying the same. And I don't know. I mean, the only way for them to make it worse is to just have it steal your money. At this point, just actually go through your wallet. Have they spoken of their plans for the company other than using the revenue?

43:55Great. This is why you should film these too, because your expression wasn't. Yeah, just the revulsion on my face. It was like you melted. And most of the revenue is going into the debt as well. Yeah, I think it was like a$20 billion debt or something that they have to pay down relatively fast. I don't remember how much per year off the top of my head, but it's enough where I'm not sure exactly what the game plan is. But the current CEO who's remaining the CEO, at least right now, I think his name is Andrew Wilson, I want to say, has stated that they have plans for use of AI, EA, and I think the PIF as a whole have stated use plans for agents, AI agents.

44:43The very real thing that exists. Great stuff. Oh, fucking EA. So that's how they do it. They become EAI and it sucks even harder. But let's change topics to another weird acquisition investment, Intel. Yes. How do you feel about this NVIDIA Intel situation? I think the NVIDIA Intel US government situation, it's really weird. I am not, I mean, I don't like it. I think, I understand the US government's interest. I'm sure they look at it as absolutely a national security asset. Right. It's our only way we can even dream of making relevant competitive chips in America. Right. And so if for some reason you needed a local resource to do that, Intel is it.

45:33So I get it. But at the same time, the way it came about is kind of bizarre to me where the timeline of events was Trump says Intel CEO Liputan is, quote, highly conflicted, end of quote, and that the only resolution to this problem of being highly conflicted would be for him to resign. The reasoning, it seems, for that belief of being highly conflicted is past or current investments by Intel's current CEO in Chinese companies, including some which have Chinese military ties. Right. So that's my understanding of that event. Immediately following that, within days, well, within one day, Intel responds publicly.

46:20Intel CEO, within days, gets on a plane, meets Trump. Now they're friends. Trump calls him a success. And then shortly after this, you're on this roller coaster. Intel stock the whole time plunges when he says he needs to resign. It skyrockets. And then shortly after all that, the US government is effectively acquiring 10 % of Intel. Right. And then on the Nvidia side, a couple of weeks after this stuff, Nvidia is acquiring$5 billion worth of Intel, which I think is around 4 % or something according to Reuters. So I don't really know. I guess my answer is, Ed, I don't know what's happening anymore.

47:08And that's kind of where I've come down on it as well, because it's not clear what happens next. They're going to do something together. Do you think they're going to keep making the Arc GPUs? Because they haven't said they're going to stop making them. I think they're at risk. That was an unintentional pun. Very few people will get. There we are. No, I loved it. Nice, thanks. I think there is some risk there. So the stated plan is that they're going to work together on x86, which is an instruction set of architecture that is used in CPUs. And they want to work together on x86 solutions, which there's not a ton of.

47:45There's a lot of ARM, there's Intel, and there's AMD for x86. For the most part, some VIA. They also are planning to work together on NVLink integration, which was NVIDIA's actually effective solution. Was that they got through Mellanox, that acquisition? Mellanox is their networking infrastructure and NVLink is their sort of onboard, although now it's expanded, but basically PCIe alternative. Oh, okay. So PCI Express wasn't doing it for NVIDIA. This is actually one of the areas where it's not just all marketing bullshit. NVLink serves a real purpose. It does a real thing and they need it. And so they are going to work with Intel to integrate this protocol into other products, which will make NVIDIA's GPUs more deployable on CPUs like x86 CPUs.

48:41Right. Do you think there could be a good thing about this? Could there actually be a positive? It'll definitely be better for NVIDIA's solutions. I mean, if you want to look at it purely in a vacuum of ignore literally all business and all competition aspects and look at only the product level, their product should be better as a result of it, in theory. I think there's risk to both AMD and to Intel here. So in particular, something that's interesting that a lot of people don't know is the mobile, the laptop side of the business, where this is another stated goal of NVIDIA and Intel is they want to make laptop hardware.

49:22So they want to make silicon with RTX chiplets, which is a tiny piece of silicon for the SOC or the CPU. And on the laptop side of the business, the entire industry aligns to NVIDIA's schedule. So if NVIDIA and Intel previously were both launching a CPU and this just happened at about the same time, they launched a CPU and a GPU between the two of them, the vendors will align to NVIDIA's GPU, meaning all the marketing effort, the money, the sampling, the review guidance where they will get in touch with reviewers and educate them on the new architecture. All of that basically happens around NVIDIA's timing because NVIDIA sells units.

50:04Right. And so because of that, if NVIDIA is suddenly, you know, if they launch a new GPU for mobile right now, Intel and AMD, it doesn't matter which CPU is in it. MSI or Asus or HP or Lenovo or Dell, they'll launch their notebook with whatever CPU. It doesn't matter. The NVIDIA GPU is the part that matters to them. Right. If NVIDIA is working with Intel, then suddenly it would seem that there's motive for them to leverage allocation of GPU silicon with the intent being to get more Intel NVIDIA co-branded CPUs deployed in notebooks. You see where I'm going with this? Yeah, this is kind of a long tail thing, but it's like the old MS-DOS situation where OEMs just automatically went with.

50:56Because could Nvidia push down prices, I assume? Well, I mean, they historically have been, I don't know, I guess you'd say maybe revolted against an EVGA situation, but we've covered plenty of vendors in the past. I'll just name them now because it's been long enough. But like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, and EVGA have all told us about times where allocation, which is the pot of gold, right? It's how many chips they get, is withheld or is modulated based on their willingness to comply with whatever the current sort of requirements are. And what would those requirements be? In the past, it's been stuff like, well, I mean, on an EVGA side of things, they had always told us about being restricted in their ability to design certain high-end boards that might have overclocking solutions, engineering solutions.

51:55And so there was kind of like a trade behind the scenes. And how do those restrictions happen? Do they need something of an NVIDIA side? Well, sometimes, yeah. But it can be like, we need you to not do that. or we need you to sell a certain amount of this price class of card. So as an example, there was a time where we'd reported when multiple sources at EVGA informed us that the MSRP cards were not actually real. They were going to exist for a short period for launch to comply with NVIDIA's requirement. And as soon as it was no longer a hard requirement to get the allocation, they were going to kill the product because they didn't have enough margin.

52:38So they effectively had to release something that made them no money? Yeah, basically. Yeah, there was one I think we reported on where they were making like four bucks or something. Jesus. And that's on a, what, 500? I think that was like a$300 or something board. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So this is fairly typical for NVIDIA, this kind of... Allocation is their leverage, yeah. It's also how they create internal competition between the board partners. Now AMD does this too. and so does Intel. I think with Intel, the difference is they don't really have anything that... Not got a ton of leverage at the moment.

53:11Not really, yeah. And AMD, they also play games with allocation. I think the difference is NVIDIA is just... The difference is if you make NVIDIA products and you make AMD products like GPUs, you can lose the AMD ones or 10 % of the supply or whatever and still be in business. But if you lose the NVIDIA ones, you're fucked. Business is over. So they could use this with CPUs. That could be a scenario. That is my concern. My concern is if they're in mobile with CPU and GPU, now it's not just they're aligning to NVIDIA's GPUs. There's, again, there's no evidence they're planning to do this. But I think I've seen enough historical context to be concerned about a possibility where they say, Hey, we'd really love it if you would put more of the Intel RTX CPUs in your notebooks so that you can get enough 5090 GPUs or whatever.

54:10So they will use one. So okay, now I understand. So it's the leverage with other cards that they'll use to force other things to happen. Potentially. Potentially, yeah. And they've done this for years? Yeah. Yeah. Allocation is a big lever. Do you think they do similar things with the AI GPUs? I don't know. No, I don't really talk to, because that would be probably more like Dell, HP, like those big enterprise deployers. I don't really talk to people there. I mean, to me, it just seems like this is kind of a company culture thing. And this is all me speaking from what we've reported on. You know, we have some facts for some of the stuff where we've covered it, like with the EVJ situation.

54:54But yeah, enterprise, I'm not sure how exactly that side works. So when it comes to AI GPUs, is it a limitation of your testing as to why you don't look into them? Because it felt like it's the one thing I'm surprised that you haven't dug into more with A100s, H100s and the like. Yeah, so there's two sides to it. There's testing and then there's just reporting on whatever the news is. And so the reporting part, we did that with the black market video. So the testing side, I guess there's a couple things that are nested within testing. So we've done a little bit of quote-unquote AI testing, and that was on the RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell GPU.

55:39This is something that is still new. It's not 100 % clear to me what is a reproducible, reliable test. Right. It's part of the problem is if you're testing LLMs or generative AI or whatever, something that makes images, By nature of the application, it's almost semi, it's different every time. Well, you'd also need a massive cluster to really emulate what it is, because 1A100 or H100 isn't really going to. Yeah, and that's kind of like, you can run those tests, but, and this would be a valid request from the audience. I think an audience that really cares about it would be like, okay, cool. So like, what about if you have, you know, 10 of them or whatever?

56:23And even then, how do you even practically? Yeah, and I just, I think we can do it. And I do think we'll probably integrate some kind of long-term testing for single GPU boards or dual GPU single boards. But it's, right now, it's so new that to test it properly requires a lot of research and a lot of sort of trial and error. Also, how would you even, because with something like GB200s or GB300s, they've got their own distinct cooling, you're not going to get a giant rack in wherever you are. Yeah, there's definitely a limit. And what are you testing for? It's just, I have spoke to a few listeners and like, oh, what about AI?

57:10And it's kind of on some level, what would you even be testing? Yeah, I think that's a big question for us. And I think that's where the most immediate thing that would maybe make sense for us would be some kind of consumer level. I really hate to call things AI, but AI application. So maybe that's someone wants to just buy a 5090 or whatever, use it for gaming, and then at night they're training something on it or they're running some kind of system. I think that's the most sensible thing we could test. Anything where you're getting into actual data center workloads, it seems like the only real source for that stuff is basically first party at this point.

57:52And semi-analysis to an extent. Yeah, right. Have you spoken with them at all? they've reached out? Not some analysis, but I know the work. Yeah. I mean, it's a good newsletter. I'm just curious. Surprised they haven't, the depth they go into. But let's talk about AI actually. How do you feel about AI? You don't do a ton about it, which is fine. It's just how do you feel about it? And why haven't you done more? And I mean that not as a negative. Yeah. Most of the coverage we've done has been It's news based. So it might be reports. It might be like an investigation or whatever, but not a lot of, I don't know, like testing like we were talking about.

58:33The biggest problems I have with it right now are, first of all, I think if we go like really big picture, I don't know, to qualify everything, I think there are use cases for things like LLMs. The best use case I have that I've actually used is translation, where I speak other languages and I use Google Translate for most of that because Google Translate is a dumb translator. It translates the words you type into it. Right. Sometimes that doesn't work for a colloquial phrase. Right. So if you take any idiom, it's not really going to do that well through Google Translate. Something like ChatGPT makes it a little easier sometimes to search for really specific colloquial or idiomatic ways to express something.

59:23So I would say that's a real use case. That's pretty deep down there. Yeah. But it is the specific thing that they're kind of built around. So they do it well. I think with that qualifier out of the way, the big picture concerns I have with AI are weaponization of things like LLMs to propagandize. And so this could be for companies to market products. It could be for governments. It could be for unknown entities, whatever. But having seen the bot comments on videos every day - Is that a consistent problem? It is a very consistent problem and they're getting better. What are they doing? So originally it started as the really obvious ones.

1:00:11There were kind of two kinds. There's the bots that do financial scams where they basically post something about like some cryptocurrency. Right. Right. Some scam coin. The other one would be the bots that have a photo of someone's ass, you know, and then three emojis and some text about whatever. And that's the more traditional trying to scam someone into interacting with a fake user that presents themselves as an attractive person. So those are the two common types of bots. Historically, those have been really easy for a savvy user to identify because, yeah, it's always the same language. it's like the old, old, you know, Nigerian Prince email scam.

1:00:54Right. Right. You can read it and you're like, I know this is a scam. But where it's going now kind of concerns me because there have been times where I'm not sure if it's a bot or a real person. Right. And there was one recently I just banned from the channel that originally I thought it was a user because I forget what the message was, but it was like, I wonder what Steve and Wendell think about blah, blah, blah. and it was clearly pulling stuff from the title and or the transcript of the video. Right. And then creating a comment. And I left it alone for a minute to see where it would go. And there's like replies under the thread where it's a bot replying to itself through different accounts, I guess, and eventually just tries to send you off site to go, you know, get scammed.

1:01:40So I banned all those accounts. But the thing that was concerning was that it's pulling context from the video transcript and forming a sentence that makes sense. Right. And then creating the appearance of a real dialogue between the appearance of real users about the subject that made sense to then scam someone. I've seen these people in Blue Sky for sure. Yeah. Sorry, seen these bots on Blue Sky where it's just someone appearing to have a guy. It's like, wow, I read that from the thing. What do you think about this? Right. I've never seen them get to sending me to a website, but I imagine that's a few down the chain.

1:02:18The way it normally happens, if you go to CNBC or any finance channel, you'll see these on any new video they post. They'll talk. So CNBC is my favorite one to look at for this. Okay. You'll see, and it's not their fault. They're just the target of it. But you'll see a bot comment that'll say something like, I have hundreds of thousands of dollars and I don't know how to invest it. Right. Right. And it's always some ridiculous number. And then there's a reply to it. It's like, I had excellent luck with John Smith and John Smith. Is this the comments? Yeah, they're comments. I've seen these in Quora.

1:02:54Okay. Where it's like, how do I invest$150 ,000? It's like, well, I did it on Arscoin or whatever. Yeah. But these, they'll talk about the name of a person and have this fake conversation about some financial advisor who doesn't exist. And then you Google that name, which is fairly unique, right? So that's the only thing that comes up. And then it's a website that's a scam. And these - It's quite nuanced compared to the original one, the original scam. obvious than buy questionable cryptocurrency or NFT on website. Yeah. And I don't know how you even deal with this. I don't know what the solution is other than shutting them all down.

1:03:39Yeah. The channel owners have to ban them, but there's too many. You get a lot on Reddit too, I'm seeing. I don't know if you're active on your subreddit much. I haven't checked. Not too much. Yeah. I'm in mine too much, But I do catch someone occasionally who is just an obvious bot. Sickos. Disgusting. Yeah. But I just, I ignorantly just assumed that they were being annoying and they were there to sow discord rather than send me to something to buy. Right. I think that's a thing too. I forget who the report was from. There was a recent report about something close. Actually, I think I saw it re-reported and fact-checked by Kurzgesagt, the channel, where was close to like 50 % of internet traffic as bots at this point.

1:04:21Yes. Yeah. And that's going to fuck the ad industry. It's going to be bad for everything because like fuck the ad industry. It's going to be bad for humanity. Oh, to be clear. I don't care about the ad industry. I'm saying that that's how everything's paid for online. Yeah. It'll screw that. It'll screw. It's, this is like library of Alexandria is on fire. Yes. Problem. Yes. Like this is, this is like loss of, of knowledge issues. And I think it's because there's been a consolidation of sites into media, forms of media, or media for presentation like videos, Discord, things where it's not well preserved.

1:05:01And as those things collapse, because like you said, the ad industry collapses or whatever, there's going to be a loss of information and knowledge. The death of the internet, it's going to happen from the fact that you can no longer tell if you're the only real human in the thread or not for the conversation. Right. And so you're going to stop interacting at all because you don't know if they're bots or not. You think this is going to happen? I think it's happening. What I don't know is, are the companies that control the large platforms incentivized to stop it? I wonder, because there is a level of like any engagement is good engagement, but if people don't engage, what are they going to do?

1:05:47There might be a tipping point. Maybe right now it's something they don't really touch. It took YouTube an awfully long time to start effectively addressing the bot problem, and they still haven't really done it. And that was just bot commenters or so views? Yeah, well, there's that too. I don't know too much about the views side, but the bot commenters side, it's hard to know, are they dragging their feet on this as a counterintelligence operation? If the bots are intentionally really stupid, then they could be useful for trying to determine what are YouTube's countermeasures to get rid of those bots.

1:06:26So that they can circumvent them. Right. Right. So maybe if you're playing YouTube side of it, the thought is we don't want to just ban these because they're going to figure out our mechanisms we use for more important ones. You know what? I actually buy that theory because that's exactly what they did with SEO. With SEO, they're just like, well, we couldn't possibly tell you how this works because someone would just do it. Yeah. Yeah. With Google, right? With Google, yeah. They own YouTube. So it's like, Jesus fucking crap. And the other thing too, there's that, but there's also, if you want to take the more cynical side, the less YouTube side, it could be that they want to report high engagement numbers to shareholders.

1:07:00Yes. And bots do that. Well, I mean, they did that by combining Gemini with Google Assistant. Yeah. And they had 300 million, I think, weekly active users or something. Right. Yeah. But the end result is there may be a tipping point. Maybe at some point, human engagement that's somehow verified, which is scary for a different reason, but human engagement becomes almost artisanal. The reason you buy something from Etsy instead of Amazon, some guy made it in his garage. Yeah. And so - Etsy, full of bots now. That too. Full of just automated - Do you subscribe to the whole dead internet theory? Do you think that - I think parts of it are starting to look practical.

1:07:47Like Facebook. Yeah. That's my one where it's just like, this is like old people screaming at their TV at this point. Yeah, and it's filled with bots that either trick them or that enrage them into a response.

1:08:11This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight. Toyota is moving forward to a more sustainable future by giving you the freedom to choose from an incredible lineup of trucks now available in both gas and hybrid models, including the legendary Tacoma, the powerful Tundra, both available with the iForce Max Hybrid Powertrain and backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability. More choices, less compromise. Visit buyatoyota.com for a great deal on an efficient Toyota today. Toyota, let's go places. Morning people wake up for peace and quiet. McDonald's breakfast people, we wake up for the sweet rush of getting that warm, delicious breakfast right before it ends.

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1:10:51One of my favorite things to do is if you go on Facebook and you type in Facebook support into the chat box and you find the groups that are people thinking they're posting on Facebook. There was one of them that has like 10 ,000 people on it. And it's people like boomer ass. I hate to sound it, but it's like people in their 70s being like, I don't know how to compute work. And three guys from Indonesia responded like, I would love to help you. Here's a number from Indonesia, which is where Facebook support is. I mean, it's kind of, it is the, basically those investment comments, like on CNBC I was talking about where it looks like a real thing.

1:11:30In this case, it maybe looks like actual Facebook support. And the end result is maybe it's someone trying to help. Maybe they're enthusiasts. You really know Facebook? Oh, it is. It's all Indonesian scanners. Okay. I've looked through. I may have spent a few hours of what, like just, I could be doing literally anything else just looking at them. And it's entirely guys in the global South just defrauding people. Yes, and there's whole channels now that are built around scam busting, right? Like, I forget the names of some of them, but there's like YouTube channels where they'll walk through kind of the bot scam link.

1:12:08I think the AI stuff, the LLMs, you know, the core question of like, what do I think of AI? All of those can be tools for good things. I think the bad things right now are very profitable. The dumbest bad thing that's profitable is a scam. But even then, it's not profitable for the AI companies. It's profitable for the scammers. It's like the only people making money are Jensen Huang and scammers. Right, yeah. And maybe there's, I don't know, there's probably some Fortune 500 company that thinks they're making money on it. I don't know. Not that I've found, but no, maybe there's one. No, this is like my one hyper focus of like anyone who mentions their revenue with AI, I know.

1:12:53Well, there was one, wasn't there some report that said, what was it like over 90 %? 95 % no ROI. Okay. Amazing report. Yeah. Amazing report because you know it was good because immediately people said hit piece. The moment it says hit piece, you know that it's the truth. Right. Just people immediately saying it's a hit piece. Do you remember who the report was by? It was by the Nanda Lab at MIT. Oh, wow. And people got really arsey about it because they said, oh, it's just a bunch of interviews. That's how they did it. How the fuck do you think surveys work? Right. And so they spoke to? No, they spoke to a bunch of Fortune 100, I think, CEOs.

1:13:28And people really miss Redix. They said, oh, it's a learning gap between people using this and not understanding AI. No, the paper says it's a learning gap because the AIs don't learn. No one reads. Okay. But it's so strange as well because it's everywhere, but it's also nothing. And I mean, it feels like there is AI within the hardware world with like, I forget the term, the upscaling ones. Yes. Do those generally work? That's actually a really good point. Yeah. And that's different to large language models? Yes. Different to transformer-based models? No, that's a really good point. DLSS and such.

1:14:01DLSS is like a real thing that works and does stuff. And it's good? Broadly, it's effective. And that's when it fills in the frames, right? DLSS, so there's kind of like sub-technologies they have. But broadly speaking, DLSS originally started as just a, it stands for Deep Learn Super Sampling. And it started where they would take ground truth images, meaning like basically we're saying this is reality. Right. And I think there was 16K resolution, a ridiculously high resolution. They would train on all these images and then use that data game by game to be able to upscale from a lower native render resolution to a higher, I'll call it projected resolution to the viewer, to the user.

1:14:50Right. And that was the original implementation. And it is pretty good now. Like, it's actually, if you need to run at 1080p native so that your video card can handle the game at a good frame rate, but make it look higher resolution, a lot of times it works. And actually, to NVIDIA's credit, DLSS in some situations can be better than native, which shouldn't be possible in theory. but because of the way they've actually integrated the deep learning on it now, which has been rebranded these days to AI, of course, but was called deep learning because the way they've integrated it, it can sometimes reconstruct details that should be there, but are not.

1:15:29And we've done some videos on that. But yeah, that's a use case of deep learning. That's completely different to the world of laws language. Yeah, it's not an LLM. It has a singular purpose, right? Make the thing look better or generate frames to insert to smooth it over. And that's overall not bad also. There's places it's really useless. But I think also the difference is when that technology is useless, it's not really harmful. Whereas when an LLM is useless, it is harmful because it's putting bad information out. Or just even if it's not being used particularly well and someone's just fucking around with it, it's incredibly environmentally damaging.

1:16:05That is a great point as well. Has any of your stuff been plagiarized for the models? Do you know? For models, well, I know there was a great one where I did a Google search. And I searched for the release date of a product. And Gemini spat out a year, and it was wrong by two years. And I was like, what the fuck? And I clicked to see what its sources were. And its top source was us. And I was like, what the fuck? Did we screw that up? Yeah. And what ended up happening? So I went to our own article, and it was a revisit. We had published two years after the original product came out, and we made that clear in the article.

1:16:45But it's just looking at the published date and mapping it to the product name. And it decided this is the release date two years later. And so it learned or took from our content, misrepresented it, and then credited the incorrect information to us. So now it also makes it look like I got it wrong. Right. So everyone loses, including the customer. Yeah. It's a shame though. But I mean, I feel like in the whole AI generative world, your stuff is more valuable, the very hands-on, very specific work and the very hardcore testing you do. It's also, we're fortunate that it's kind of at the front end of like, if we're reviewing product, then someone who's an enthusiast trying to decide on a purchase is still coming to us before it's useful in training.

1:17:39And I imagine the generative content is kind of antithetical to the kind of testing you do as well, because you can't really fake. Not really. You can't really generate a review. It would be obvious. And also, you have these massive machines for testing stuff here, which are insanely cool. And actually, that's a good question. How do you source this kind of stuff? Do you buy from industrial because you have pressure tester? Well, actually, maybe you could speak to some of the machines. Run through it, yeah. So yeah, we have a hemianechoic chamber, which is a sound chamber, an acoustic test chamber.

1:18:11We have a laser scanner that does 3D scans of products and converts them into 3D models. We have pressure testers, we have fan testers, cooler testing, and then more traditional power supply test or stuff like that. And so, yeah, generally the way we go about it is we identify a problem. Typically, this is kind of the part of the business I work on the most personally is like basically test engineering or design. Yeah. So we identify a shortcoming, which is like this product is claiming this thing. We are not able to validate or invalidate their claims because we don't have the tool to do it. Right.

1:18:53And then either I just do some research online and find the tool, or sometimes the real challenge is knowing the name of a thing and that it exists. Right. And so I went through this with current clamps, which is just a clamp you put on a wire to read the current going through it. A long time ago when I started this, I didn't know that was a tool that existed. And it's like magic because you put a wire through a plastic-looking clamp, And then through the magic of electromagnetics, it tells you what the amperage is. Right. And when I found that early, and it's not a new, it's been around forever.

1:19:30But when it was new to me, I was like, holy shit, if I only knew the name of this thing sooner, I could have bought it. And all of your testing is effectively new to you. You've had to build it and learn it yourself. Yeah. With help from various people. Right. With a lot of expert help outside. And yeah, I would say sourcing it mostly comes from either just doing research or we tour a lot of factories and engineering facilities and make videos on it. And normally when I'm there, I do my best to talk to the actual people who use that equipment. And that's kind of how we learn that it exists. You know, like I did a tour recently of a facility where they showed us something that they had built for a client for testing cooling products.

1:20:13And when they were done explaining it, so I could talk about it in a video, I said to them, can I buy one of those? Would they? Would they sell it to you? Yeah. Yeah. They sell it. That's so cool. Yeah. And do they come and train you to use it? Sometimes. You can either pay for training or they'll do it for free for up to whatever, four hours or something. And do you generally operate these machines or do they train the crew? Generally, either I'm the first one to learn how to use it or someone specific on the team might be one of the first ones to learn how to use it. So like we had for the laser scanner, it was Patrick on the team who ultimately, in that case, I had tasked him with learning how to use it.

1:20:59And he went through, he documented it, you know, and now anyone can use the SOP. And the laser scanner you were describing to me earlier, it's, you use that to see if there's divots in the cooling. You explain. I'm doing a terrible job. No, you're pretty much right on it. I mean, it's, yeah, a cooling product has a flat surface that needs to contact a piece of silicon. And what we're looking for is, okay, the performance is really good or really bad thermally. And we can't look at it and figure out why. Maybe if we scan this at a microscopic level, it'll reveal something. And so sometimes it'll reveal that there's these, like, deep pits in the surface of the metal that you can't necessarily see by eye.

1:21:41and can really affect the cooling performance. Other times you might see a curvature to it where maybe externally it's not obvious, but actually when you install it on the silicon product, say only two-thirds of it are contact in the metal. And so this laser scanner scans the surface with the laser and then makes a 3D model, and we can use that to inspect the problems. Do companies ever reach out for any consultancy things? They do that all the time. We reject all of it. So, because it's too much, there's a lot of reasons. The core of all of it is it's too much conflict of interest. Right. Where, let's just say it's possible to take a testing job, a private testing job, and do it with absolutely zero bias towards future reviews.

1:22:33We'll just accept that premise for a second. And even under those conditions, I still don't like it because now I'm put in a weird spot where when that product launches, it's going to be hard for me to review it. Because you've already seen it. I've seen it and I might have provided input on it that they paid for if I'm involved. So now let's say I'm not happy with their execution. Am I going to go say I told them so? Yeah, how much can you reveal? And even then, I imagine the trade secrets aren't brilliant. You probably end up under an NDA. The best approach to that would be to recuse yourself from reviewing it at all.

1:23:10But then the problem is now I can't do my job for consumers. Yeah, how good is the money on it? Yeah. And I also think it just cannibalizes the process where you're taking things that would make excellent public videos and public data, and you're presenting it privately to never be seen by anyone. Right. And by the nature of these agreements, I imagine they could obfuscate your coverage on some level. I would think so. And also, it's just, yeah, you're taking the thing that made you desirable to do the testing to begin with. You're doing it privately, so it's not public. So the desire to have you do the private testing reduces.

1:23:46Right. It seems like it's just sort of self-sabotage. How do the hardware companies feel about you having such high-level testing? Most of the people think it's cool. Right. You know, I think the, I'm sure a lot of them don't care. I know that some of the company representatives have told me how they'll be more careful with how they market certain things if they know we're going to inspect it. That rocks. I actually genuinely love that. Yeah. And that's not just us. There's other reviewers who also do an excellent job. And because the review community, people kind of specialize in different areas, I think it just sort of collectively keeps companies somewhat on their toes.

1:24:32But obviously, you know, the company is going to company. Yeah, they will shit about regardless.

1:24:44This is Jason Timp from Hoops Tonight. Toyota is moving toward a more sustainable future by giving you the freedom to choose from an incredible lineup of trucks now available in both gas and hybrid models, including the legendary Tacoma and powerful Tundra, Both available with the iForce Max Hybrid Powertrain and backed by Toyota's legendary reputation for reliability and value. In fact, for 2025, Toyota is the best resale value brand for the fifth year in a row, according to Kelly Blue Book's KBB.com. With Tacoma ranked number one, holding the highest projected retained value of any vehicle. Choosing Toyota means having more options and less compromise.

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1:27:04What is a kind of testing you can't do right now that you want to in the future? I would say probably the... Well, so there's one we can do, but it's not really practical. And that would be basically more frequent transients testing. So there's something with power delivery, which I know you've been studying lately, where there's transient spikes. And so on a GPU or a CPU, this would be basically a microscopic spike in the current or the power consumption for normally like 100 microseconds or something. We can test it. We've done it in the past. But because if you're capturing data for seconds at a time down to scales of 30 microsecond gaps or whatever, the amount of data is enormous.

1:27:58It's really hard to process it. So it's like a storage and processing problem. Yeah, it's a major processing problem. And what would you want to be... So is that... What would those spikes mean? It would help us to stay on top of especially GPU manufacturers but also CPU if there's sudden spikes that might take a system offline. So as an example, this happened with a previous generation of both Nvidia and AMD GPUs, but where they would have large spikes in power draw that deviated from the nominal draw. So if you're at 450 watts and there's a spike to 1100 watts for 100 microseconds or something, this might be enough to trip over current protection on the power supply and just shut the computer off.

1:28:44And then the end user is like, what the fuck? My power supply is enough to handle 450 watts. So I don't shut off. And this happened? Yeah. We saw this with, I want to say it was the 30 series, the RTX 30 series. And it was a problem that doesn't show up in normal power testing, but with an oscilloscope, you can see it. And again, credit to Nvidia for the problems we point out on the positive side, they did actually fix this problem in the 40 series. That's good. Yeah. So here's a weird one, but I know it's near and dear to your heart. Linux gaming. Yeah. Do you think this is a viable alternative to Windows with Windows 10 dying or being killed in the back?

1:29:27Yeah, I think Microsoft is the best marketing that Linux has ever had. Go on. Yeah. My biggest concern with Windows is not the death of 10 ongoing security support. It is the slow intrusion of spyware. Go on. Well, like Recall. Oh, yes, of course. Yeah, where Recall is marketed as this secure, locally saved, encrypted reel of your information. But to me, like capturing screenshots of your desktop while you use it at all is problematic. Yes. And we've done some testing. It's not published yet, but it'll do some dumb filtering. So if it sees the word password on the screen, it won't take a screenshot.

1:30:16Right. But you're not always going to have one of those words on the screen when it shouldn't take a screenshot. Maybe you have some accounting documents open and it's information that's sensitive but Recall doesn't know it's sensitive. It's stuff like that that concerns me where it's breachable and exploitable because it exists not necessarily because there is an exploit. Right. And then Windows 11 is continuing to add telemetry and user data and engagement monitoring tools. And that's kind of a big feature of Home S, like all the horrible S operating systems, the cheap ones. Yeah, everything that – it's just there's so much data harvesting.

1:31:03You know, Microsoft – this is why I think Microsoft hasn't really cared too much in recent years. if you don't license Windows. They used to really care about that. Right, yes. Because now it's like, yeah, go ahead and steal it from us. We're going to just take all your data, and that's how we make the money anyway. Horrifying. But do you think Linux is viable as a gaming platform? I think as a gaming platform specifically, I think it's becoming a lot more viable. So thanks to Valve and the Steam Deck and SteamOS, and its push for Proton as a translation layer between the application and the operating system.

1:31:36And what is that just for? Yeah, so Proton is a translation layer, which means it's working to effectively interpret the code that the game is built with to run with better performance or at all on a different operating system, in this case Linux or SteamOS specifically. And so because of Valve's work on that to make games more compatible, run smoother, deliver consistent frame rate and pacing of the frames, because of their work there, in some instances, it actually has better performance than Windows. Right. The limiting factor is still sometimes it just simply doesn't work. But that has become a lot less the case than what it was, say, 10 years ago.

1:32:26it's not a fix for everybody. There's still times you're going to try and run a game and it's not going to work and that's going to suck. And how's the driver support, for example? Hit and miss. So we're really early in this testing. But as an example, I know Intel recently laid off a bunch of their teams that maintains various Linux drivers for hardware. And so it's kind of, you know, we don't really know what happens there. Maybe the community picks it up, I guess. I hope so. But yeah. Valve will? Yeah. It depends also. It really feels bad to just be like, who's going to take responsibility for this thing we need?

1:33:03Yeah. And if it's even an open source driver to begin with. So yeah, it's hit and miss. But I would say that the biggest limitation of my experience with Linux, and I'm not an expert in Linux, there's going to be people in your audience who know. Oh, they email me whenever I say alternative iOS. Well, that's why we better not even get into distributions of Linux. Oh, no, no, no. They will be up my ass. Arch, by the way. Oh, God. Yeah, I think the... I'll get emails. I think the biggest limiting factor is compatibility with things like daily applications. So the tools we use for video editing generally just don't work on Linux.

1:33:44We'd have to use something else. Yeah. And that's a problem. Well, adjacent to this Linux conversation, how are you feeling about handheld gaming? Handhelds are really cool. I think there's faster innovation happening in handhelds than most other places. Are there any you really like? Because I know Asus has been on the naughty list a bit, but I like the Steam Deck personally, but do you have a favorite brand? The Steam Deck and the Ally are both pretty cool devices, despite the Ally's warranty issues. It actually is a cool piece of hardware. I thought the Lenovo Legion Go, the original, was a really unique and innovative gimmick.

1:34:24I don't use that word to degrade it. What was the gimmick? The gimmick was the controller's detached. Oh, the Switch. Kind of like the Switch, yeah. And then the Steam Deck, it was just kind of the first in the new round of handhelds. GPD existed before them. And Ioneo and those guys. I respect GPD. They're weird, but they're trying something. Yeah. GPD and Ioneo both are weird, but trying something. I appreciate it. You don't have American manufacturers do it. Actually, that's good. Are there American manufacturers trying weird shit like that? Or is it predominantly overseas? I guess it depends how you define American here.

1:35:05Because, you know, design, yes. Like who? Depends on how you count Lenovo at this point. I don't know if you count them as American or not. Right, but they're trying weird shit. They are doing weird stuff, and they certainly have large U.S. headquarter offices. I don't know where their design happens. It's probably – they have a Beijing, I think, office. It's probably there. But Valve is definitely the coolest in terms of they set the tempo for this to reignite. Like they're the ones who made handhelds interesting again. And everyone else jumped in and started doing stuff. And that's pretty cool.

1:35:48And Valve also said, you know, we're going to make SteamOS available to other handheld manufacturers if they want to use it. I don't know if there's a license or not, but like it's available. And that's that being picked up. I know you can kind of side load it. Yeah, you can definitely side load it. I think officially, I want to say Lenovo might have been the first one to actually offer it. Right. It's either Lenovo or I don't think it was Asus, but yeah, someone's picked it up. How do you feel about the Xbox Rogue Ally? I think there's a lot of confusion around it in the more mainstream audience.

1:36:23I've noticed comment threads where people think it's going to be required to play what you would consider an Xbox game, but it's like basically a PC. It's just a ROGX ally with Xbox branding, right? Basically, yeah. And I'm sure there's some software gimmicks, you know? I wonder if it works because that's not big. I love my ROG ally, but the fucking software that pops up really gets in the way of gaming. Yeah, I don't really know what Microsoft is doing with Xbox. It just seems like they're not sure what to do with that brand right now. I was going to ask, what do you think Microsoft's deal with gaming is right now?

1:36:58They seem almost like they don't want to do it. It's weird because they were so committed to locking people into the Xbox for a generation or two. And then at some point, my memory of it is they kind of realized, wait a minute, as we move to x86 architectures for consoles, PC gaming kind of works on both these devices. so we don't really care if they buy it on PC or on Xbox as long as they use our device. And they raise the price on Game Pass as well. Yeah, and games. Oh, of course. And also the Xbox. Yeah. And then, you know, surprised Pikachu face when they raise the price on games and then they raise the price on Games Pass and then everybody cancels it.

1:37:44Well, they lost so much. I read something they lost like$100 million or something, even more because they put Call of Duty on Game Pass. Yeah, I'm sure it was a lot. Genius fucking move, lads. It's a shame as well, because when you get past all the horrible menus, it is kind of cool that you can just plug a game controller. I don't know. I've been playing PC games long enough that I was excited when you could just plug a controller in, and it wasn't some sort of nightmare. Yeah, yeah. Though PS5 controllers, you still have to do the weird DualShock emulator thingy. Yeah, it's gotten a lot more accessible.

1:38:18But I think the handhelds are pretty cool. There's a lot of focus there. I'm not sure when Valve's going to do it. I really want them to bring SteamOS to desktop properly because it's not currently officially released for desktops. Right. But they've done so much optimization work there where, like, the coolest thing that gets probably the least coverage outside of our space is they've really tuned the pacing of delivery of frames. So if you have 60 FPS, 60 frames per second, and it's delivered at an inconsistent interval. So you have a frame delivered in 16 milliseconds and then the next frame is delivered in 100 milliseconds and that repeats.

1:39:02That's going to feel really bad despite being 60 FPS averaged over the period. You might have some that are 4 milliseconds, some that are 16, some that are 100. I never thought that FPS could be a marketing term. But now I finally, oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah, and so the work they've done to optimize for the frame delivery is great, where they sometimes have better frame time pacing than Windows. And I would like to see that come to desktop. So as we wrap up, what are you excited about? What in tech, in hardware and whatever is actually like kind of bringing you a cheer? Yeah, I think on the DIY enthusiast side, there's still a lot of really cool innovation happening, especially in cases right now, believe it or not, like computer cases.

1:39:46Yeah? How? You would think that it's like a pretty answered... I mean, it's all thermodynamics, which is well documented. Right. It's not like silicon engineering. But there's still... I don't know, there's just a lot of improvement in getting an affordable, like good-looking design that actually has a lot of function to it. So over the last six or seven years, they've really switched to focus on cooling performance and then cooling performance, that still looks good. And so it's exciting to see that. And what does that edit? Does the cases get smaller or are they just better thermal management?

1:40:24Better thermals. As a result of that, maybe lower noise. The computer just looks cooler. The smaller boxes have gotten a lot more viable. So if you want to build something that you take from, I don't know, like if there's a kid who travels between a college dorm and home in the summer, or having a small mini-ITX box is pretty appealing, and those have gotten really good. Yeah, the mini-ITXs are always so interesting to me. I love the idea of an Apple TV-sized one. That's a pipe dream, but still. It's not hard to do. Yeah, I mean, they've gotten easier. But the other thing, I think coolers are also pretty exciting right now.

1:41:03A lot of really neat technological development on cool end products. GPUs, I think are probably the biggest hang up for people where the pricing has just gotten kind of stupid for consumer market GPUs. And yeah, I think that's the one that's kind of a bummer, I guess. Yeah. And I mean, do you see any viable competitor to Nvidia and AMD at any point? Do you think that there's any chance of any smaller competitor? The only one is Intel, which I never really answered your question on ARC. I think right now ARC is going to stick around, but right now it only goes up to like$250. And after that, it's all AMD and NVIDIA.

1:41:47And AMD, you know, part of it's their fault. They need to really want it and compete, and they just aren't. Like, the products are okay, but they keep doing the stupidest things with their prices and their marketing. and I think part of it is they sell every Epic CPU they make, so they allocate all the wafer supply to that, and GPUs are kind of backburnered, but the end result is we just end up in this stalemate we've been in forever now. What about combined GPUs and CPUs? Is that something you're seeing much growth from? Do you think that that's going to be a focus, or is that kind of just a side quest?

1:42:23APUs, basically. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the entire handheld market is that, so there's a lot of success there. and they're clearly good devices now for that. They're not good enough for, like, high fidelity, high resolution, high graphics quality gaming on a desktop. But, yeah, mobile devices, they're great. For their faults, upscalers like DLSS and FSR do make it more viable to run an integrated graphics solution and actually have a decent experience. Can't get close to a dedicated GPU, But they're good. They're in the same spot they've been in for 15 years where it's not really a replacement for$100 GPU is going to be better probably.

1:43:10Probably doesn't make enough money as well for them to sink a bunch of R &D into it either. Or it becomes a problem of ballooning the dye area because you have to allocate some amount of your silicon to the GPU and the CPU. And so if you give more to the GPU to make more powerful, you're making your CPU weaker. And the only real way to solve that is to put more silicon on the product, which is expensive. So, yeah. So a couple of questions before we wrap up. Who are your favorite creators at the moment? Because there seems like a good kind of solidarity between them. But who do you watch? What do you...

1:43:47I think historically, like going back, the large influences were Tech Report, Scott Wasson specifically. If I remember correctly, he was involved in the early days of Ars Technica also. Like early, early days. I'm not sure. I'll have to look out. And so Scott Wasson did a lot of excellent like test design work. Ryan Shrout was part of his kind of era. and the two of them with Tom Peterson from Intel Now worked on frame time testing. So their publication set the framework for modern benchmarking with frame times. And I still reference those content pieces. Anantech, I think is well respected, but has been shut down by, I think it was Future bought them.

1:44:35Yeah. I mean, anyone who's worked at Future knows what happened, which is that Future bought them and then just didn't do shit with them. Yeah. But who do you watch right now? Now, I like the work that Jared's tech does on laptops. So he's an excellent laptop reviewer, does really good work there. We've helped Just Josh Tech, who's not a laptop reviewer with some of his testing methodology. And I think they've been doing good things to really try to advance on that. They're still relatively new to testing, but they're really trying. I think Jay's Two Cents, with his recent changes to testing, he's really kind of put in a lot of effort to overhaul it.

1:45:19And then the Hardware Unboxed guys are also awesome. But yeah, I hesitate to start naming channels because there's a lot of channels that I like or we talk to at shows and I hate to leave anyone out. No, I know what you mean. I wasn't trying to single anyone out. It's just I think that especially in my own work, I could be quite critical. so it's good to just focus on the things you actually like. Yeah. So as we wrap, what's next for Gamers Nexus? What do you want to do next beyond testing? Is there a vertical you want to move into? I know you've got the other channel going. Yeah. Yeah, I have to go to the UK for that.

1:45:55Oh, I'm sorry. I'll have to get recommendations from you. Leave. Okay. Don't go. Where the airport is. Got it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that we have a relatively large focus on that channel, which is looking at some more consumer advocacy topics. On the testing side, the biggest thing we're doing right now is overhauling our gaming benchmarks. So we're working to introduce some new types of charts and metrics that don't exist right now in reviews called animation error. and just trying to, basically, we're taking a moment right now to try and find, okay, we've been representing things a certain way in Charts forever as a review community.

1:46:43Is there anything new here we can do? And that's kind of what we're trying to research. So that's the immediate focus. Well, Steve, it's been such a pleasure to come out here. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks.

1:47:02Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I.com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit thank you so much for listening better offline is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

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