Gamers Overwhelmingly Prefer Fake Resolution - WAN Show February 20, 2026

34:33I can't believe that just happened. I thought this was Chinese New Year. That's good. That's good. Was that the scam? I don't think so. Like, was that what people... Because when is Chinese New Year? It's soon, right? I think it was this week. Hold on. what is Chinese New Year oh yeah yeah it was it was three days ago it's it's right now perfect like it's totally it's totally Chinese New Year right now I think right uh blah blah blah Tuesday February 17th 2026 and that's the beginning of the year of the fire horse which lasts until February 5th 2027 um celebrations including lantern festival typically run for 16 days ending on march 3rd 2026 so i was like yeah this this totally checked out i just didn't understand so this is why you guys are memeing earlier because i was all like something so you you said something to sammy about how like yeah didn't you set it up and i was like yo he's korean what the heck anyway um so does that i actually didn't know that it was chinese new year i just assumed that we just had these.

35:44I know the red and white was intentional, but the rest of it, like, I don't know. Well, I thought the red was because it's Chinese New Year. Like, that's the thing. That's probably both, yeah. I think that's very funny. So did Thoram sponsor the wedding? Yeah. Yes. That's cool. Yeah. That's why it's a full takeover. That's why they said your business team did a good job. Yeah. Because there's actually been, like, a bunch of people in the loop on this for, like, a while. what

36:17Taryn knows I think probably like the whole business team knows not everybody at the company yeah uh Chewy says this may actually be the most genuine that Linus has been pranked on camera every prank on me on camera was genuine so it's just whether um you know it came across in the in the edit or not is basically what it comes down to like when Dennis was living in my house multiple times I did not know I would never fake a prank that is that is that should be a crime that you should go to YouTube jail for faking a prank except it's like most pranks yeah that's not okay alright so he's still there I couldn't find him alright if you guys want to do another topic I'll go have a look listen I will never deny getting teary-eyed at a wedding it's uh it's a very emotional time and I I cannot help but be happy for super cool people starting a life together that's it's it's exciting and it's happy and uh anyone who thinks men shouldn't cry at weddings can go f**k themselves yeah I don't know how much we we can or should say but I'm I'm I'm very happy for them I think it's their story.

37:34We'll let them tell the story in the way that they deem best once they have figured out, you know, whatever it is that, you know, they're doing for right now that is not in the public eye. No, that's not. Stop it. No, no, no. You immediately smiled and looked at me. No, because I realized. You immediately smiled and looked at me. realized. I just meant whatever they can talk publicly about their personal lives when they're good and ready. That's what I'm trying to say. Stop it. Yeah, sure, man. That's why they left so fast. They're just really excited to go talk about the rest of their personal lives.

38:22Anyway. For a clean exclusive.

38:26I mean it wouldn't violate any rules of the platform technically no why do you have to think about it? they'd have to make it artistic no why are we talking about this? because the payment processors oh that's right so that's why lore for some people that's why for a long time adult content creators on Patreon would do cosplay that's why that was so popular for a really long time was because it was considered art if they could put it under the cosplay category oh there he is I have things for you I'm gonna come and see you guys congrats dude surprise yeah no kidding definitely a surprise here give me okay they're off doing stuff over there while they're doing that why don't I talk through the cat patch hoodie or something or what should i do did we do the gamers dlss topic yet we did not did we do anything yet uh just the xbox okay why don't i do like a couple rapid fire things while they while they chit chat um steam deck is getting pretty hard to get right now valve has added a note to the steam deck page saying that the handheld will be intermittently available in some regions due to memory and storage shortages i knew that memory shortages were already having a significant impact on pricing and i knew that storage shortages were coming but i didn't know how hard the storage shortages were going to hit and how suddenly they were going to hit yeah uh we're working on a thousand dollar build video uh and ploof ploof did something that made me very upset that you know i worked with him and tried to resolve and couldn't resolve he used a sata ssd in a build i think that's the first time we've recommended a sata ssd for any reason that in in five years maybe because there's no reason why it should be cheaper even because the part that costs more is the the nand flash but just i guess because the demand is a little lower and the stock is lagging the increases in price or whatever right now sata ssds are anywhere from like 15 to like 35 cheaper than i absolutely see it making sense and for gaming it doesn't really matter so our thousand dollar build that's coming soon is going to use a sata ssd and to be clear when i say that it made me upset i don't mean like ploof made me upset i mean he did something of the situation made me upset because we shouldn't be in that position and yet here we are crazy yeah for a boot drive yes scrappy dp for a boot drive and i looked at the config with him and i was like you nailed everything else and we've got a budget that's the reality in a perfect world would i love to spend another$35 and have an NVMe drive.

41:42Yeah, but, and I've talked about this before, that's a slippery slope logic that takes your$1 ,000 computer and makes it$1 ,200. If you spend another$30 on every single component, you're not adhering to a budget. And when does that stop? And real people have budgets, and that's just the way it is. So we have to act like we have a fixed budget. So that's what we're going to do. It's still not quite$1 ,000. It's like$1 ,012 dollars or something like that but a thousand twelve is a thousand dollars a thousand forty yeah not really yeah it doesn't feel that's a thousand fifty that's not yeah that's not a thousand dollars yeah yeah yeah yeah uh i think if it was over 15 it starts to feel a little weird oh yeah i think 15 is probably the line i think you could get away with 15 i think you get away with it but it starts to feel weird 18 i think 12 is like an automatic yeah when you hit to when you hit 20 it's like come on man yeah it starts to get rough because that's like that's like a real bill you know like a 20 bill is like no no i'm not gonna put that in my pocket that one goes in my wallet you know what i mean like five dollar bill like yeah that could be in my pocket i might even put that in with the change drawer you know ten dollar bill we're getting sketchy 20 right in the wallet no question no question um yeah 20 bucks is lunch for sure is this financial device no not financial five goes in the car 20 goes in the wallet i mean yeah sure maybe in the 90s five does nothing for the car now no i think they mean like oh i thought like to fill your gas tank I read that comment for one, but for two, I think they mean like in the, in the like, you know, I get it in the change pouch.

43:33Yeah. No, I thought like, I remember when money was tight, my dad putting five bucks in the gas tank and I was like, dude, that was in like 1993, not so much anymore. Yeah. Sure. On a motorcycle Chewy, but that's not what we're talking about. Our discussion question for this is, do you think the steam machine and or the frame could be delayed beyond valve's current target of the first half of the year i heard the steam machine was uh no no it was still so it was supposed to be early in the first half of the year but they never actually promised anything other than first half of the year and yeah i i do think that's possible if they can't even get enough stock to make steam deck right now like how are they supposed to launch a new product because you're kind of damned if you do and you're damned if you don't if you delay it people are going to be upset because you delayed it but if you launch it and there's no stock and it's a whole scalping situation where let's say the launch price is 9.99 and they're going for 2 ,500 dollars on ebay because you know at the beginning they will because to someone for whom money is no object there is nothing exactly like the steam machine tell me something that completely fulfills the function of the steam machine go i'll wait not that i'm aware of you could you could do it you could make it yourself sure you're gonna go get you're gonna go get an ir receiver and you're gonna go get like some relay system that's gonna turn on your tv and your pc and everything all at the same time you're gonna go you're gonna make your own uh steam controller with the touch pads with uh controller yeah what's uh what was buddy's name we did that collab with recently he i mean he made his own steam controller alike with touch pads he made his own touch pads is the controller tied to the con yeah i guess the launch of that probably is are you gonna are you gonna work out a way to remotely power on and power off uh all of the stuff from the controller like there's a bunch of work that valve did on the integration side of things that is completely separate from just how many fps does it get and sure you could you could just roll an xbox or a playstation instead but then you don't have steam you don't have no offense microsoft and sony but you don't have good pricing on games so to me no there is absolutely nothing that is what the steam machine is it's it's completely unique in the market and i think that regardless of the performance there are people who are not going to be playing the most demanding games that just plain want one and just have more money than cents and are just like whatever it doesn't matter or i shouldn't even say more money than cents they might just have more money than they care about they're just like forget it i don't care i will just buy it i mean i've bought stuff that's a bad value before the work that i'm doing on my motorbike it's a terrible value yeah i could have bought a brand new motorbike and instead i'm going to be riding around on a 2003 with a paint job that's insane it is objectively it's crazy yeah kind of but i love the look of it i have a lot of memories on that bike it's my first bike it's still enough for me it's 650 cc it's really comfortable and i did the paint job myself which i think is super cool so i'll be like ripping around on my own paint job tommy b it's tommy b who did that steam control super cool so

47:00sucks all right you want to talk about next should we do the other big headline topic yeah Let's do it. Let's do it. You guys might not like to hear this. Okay, but I need you for one moment to just just here just Just grab that and just

47:21Chill pill just take it and calm down Go ahead Gamers over well see I don't even We'll get into it. We'll get into it, but didn't listen to the title gamers overwhelmingly prefer DLSS over FSR In a three-way blind test over six games, German tech publication computer base's readers overwhelmingly found DLSS 4.5 Upscaling to have the best picture quality over FSR or native rendering. And that last one, that's the bombshell. The native rendering is the oof. The games used for this test was Anno 117, Ark Raiders, Cyberpunk 2077, Horizon Forbidden West, Satisfactory, and The Last of Us Part 2. Now that is also another huge bombshell.

48:06These are not just like Ashes of the Benchmark or like, or even Cyberpunk, like games that are just overwhelmingly optimized for because they're the traditional showcase games. And these are showcase-y games, beautiful games, pretty much across the board, other than maybe Satisfactory. But these are real games that people are playing. This is not like contrived. Yeah, and all those real games were ran at 4K resolution with upscaling set to quality. Videos were played to readers in NVIDIA's iCat player, showing game clips rendered in DLSS 4.5 FSR and natively side by side. This is the... it's a video.

48:53It is, but if anything, to me, that is a disadvantage to DLSS. It could be. Because DLSS, when you're actually using it, remember, we're talking DLSS upscaling, not DLSS frame gen, right? So there's no latency drawback of DLSS upscaling. If anything, the latency will be better because you will be running at more FPS because you're rendering at a lower resolution than upscaling it through machine learning. It's just a weird note. It is. Respondents could indicate whether they preferred or answer equivalent. So they could be like, ah, they're all the same. DLSS won in every game with an overall result of 48 % of votes from a pool of 6 ,747.

49:48Native rendering was also preferred over FSR in every game with 24 % of the overall vote to FSR's 15. That doesn't... so 15 % of people preferred fsr or 15 % of votes were for fsr 24 % of votes were for native and 48 % oh there it is 12.8 % of the responses were equivalent between the three categories so just done care one out of eight gamers was like whatever whatever dude responses weren't ranked respondents only voted on what they thought was the best video now if these were closer okay if it was like you know 20 yeah the 48 24 gap 25 and 25 like i'm looking at it going like okay well you've obviously got a bunch of normies who literally can't tell the difference and then a bunch of other normies who literally can't tell that fsr doesn't look as good as native right i'd be i'd be ready to be pretty dismissive of it but the sheer volume of voting and the overwhelming preference for DLSS is kind of mind-fucking right now.

51:04Like, seriously. There is a lot of variables that hold. It was a video that was played. All that kind of stuff. But are you surprised by the results? No. Yeah, that's the spicy part of this I was waiting for. We can nitpick how the like you know how the how the thing was done we can nitpick the science um and i'm sure there's lots to be done there as there is with everything ever um but i'm not particularly surprised by the result have you tried it yet is your gaming machine up and running it is up and running but i've not tried for you're on 4000 series right yes yeah so you can run it i think you have a 4080 yes yeah okay you should try it like immediately are you afraid to like it

52:01a little bit i was too but not not because of like external perceptions like it's kind of like the the first time that you you know try it with no how no i don't i don't think at all my my thing is that i'm worried about you i guess you knew you'd like that yeah uh my my thing that i'm worried about is what this will do to multiple industries oh which industries more when i'm hit me hit me i'm ready gaming and hardware i'm ready I mean the hardware it's already happened like NVIDIA set this course years ago not just when they launched the 20 series they set this course when they started developing the 20 series so this is like 8 years ago or like 9 years ago or something NVIDIA that's really fast for this level of impact it is?

52:59yeah 8 or 9 years for this level of impact is wild like it's actually very wild you look at look at almost any other comparative industry however it's also like damn near clairvoyant when it comes to seeing where the where the winds are blowing within the tech industry and getting it this right when when it was in such early stages of development at that time when the hardware didn't exist when the software tools didn't exist when it hadn't been embraced by game developers. You gotta give them credit. They nailed it. And now everyone else is playing catch-up. Whether you like fake frames, whether you don't like fake frames, AMD and Intel are all in on upscaling and frame gen now.

53:50The warden is kind of getting to my point. How are you fellas going to pivot when consumer computing is completely gone in five years? um this is kind of what i'm talking about is like the and it's not even just the work right we can actually do a lot of different things um oh yeah where's a lot of the revenue coming from these days that stuff uh so like you know that's of course that's a little bit of it but i'm worried about the hobby i've had for literally my entire the the memories that i have of my entire life is being interested in this hobby. From before I was interested in this hobby, I don't remember anything.

54:31Like it's been forever. And then there's what this will continue to do to the gaming industry. Gaming industry is in a really weird spot right now and I think this doesn't necessarily help. So hear me out. We've had this conversation before, but it always felt kind of like, eh, sci-fi and maybe someday and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it always seemed kind of easy to dismiss. But I feel like it's time to have it again. If someone, say Microsoft, built a gaming experience that simply wasn't possible with many clients all over the world connecting to a central server to exchange game data.

55:16If they built a gaming experience that could only run on the big iron and that you remote into and it beams frames to you. Like, I know we've had massively multiplayer worlds, right? But I'm talking like a massively multiplayer world where it's just not even possible to run it on the client side anymore. Could you be convinced in this hypothetical universe scale game where everything is physics based and everything's persistent? What happened to physics in video games? Anyways, that's a different topic, but keep going. But let's say that by having enormous banks of AI servers and crap, they could model and simulate the world in a way that just wasn't possible to render locally.

56:09I mean, the more interesting part to me is the anti-cheating that comes with that. Yeah. Could you be convinced to cloud game to play that? like let's say it was it was a game that had a moment like arc raiders is having right now would you just be like let's go so would you be sad like tell me walk me through so far i've resisted i haven't joined any of the subscription things i haven't joined oh because you know it'd be a subscription oh yeah because you're running on their hardware at that point yeah i'd like have to be yep um So I haven't joined Xbox Game Pass or the Ubisoft service or EA's thing or anything like that.

56:51Even when it probably made sense. And I'd be like, okay, there's some new shooter coming out. Maybe it doesn't even have a single player or I don't really care about the single player for this one. And I know my friends are only going to play for like two weeks. So like, really, every single time if I'm going to play that game, I've bought it. I have not joined the subscription services. I don't know at a certain point when there is no longer an option, which is the reality you're describing. Yeah. I don't know necessarily what I do there. I think there's definitely a lot of interesting aspects.

57:24The anti-cheat is very interesting. Would you still be able to cheat? Yes. But the level of cheating would decrease. And at least at the beginning, the barrier of entry would increase. like using using machine vision to read a screen and literally a robot arm to move a mouse and operate a keyboard oh you can still digitally send inputs there's nothing i just mean that that's sort of the that's sort of the the ridiculous lengths to which we could go and people have and people have gone yeah to make something that is completely undetectable by software but you Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you can still read a screen and then snap to a head.

58:05But exactly said still detectable by things, etc. Yeah, so like you will never be able to completely eliminate people who are determined not to play the video games that they pay for. But I think it would make it so that it's not like one per freaking lobby like some games are right now. Yeah. So like that's that is kind of exciting, but I.

58:29I don't think I'm romanticizing this I think I'm always gonna have a computer there's like i i spent the lot it's kind of funny during the reno i spent the longest period of time in my life since i touched a desktop without touching a desktop because at work i had a laptop yep and i would take that laptop home to i mean most of the time continue working but also like if i play games or whatever anything i did on a computer was on a laptop for a while yeah and then i got my desktop back and it like shouldn't matter when you're connected to a dock like it does and i don't know why it does they're just not that fast i don't know like what it is i like i daily a laptop right now for work i don't have a work desktop right now and i haven't for like six months and there's just there's just something about it like i went to be in a big box on a desk and i don't know why no they're just they're just i don't know they just yvonne that stuff just feel like they work better yvonne always uh would talk to me about this like and i kept telling her it was her imagination because it doesn't make any sense but she'd be like yeah no laptops wear out they just like don't work as good after a while i'm like that doesn't make any sense because anecdotally it's like it just kind of seems to it just kind of seems to happen whether it's the way that these mobile chips have a tendency to to be very bursty in their performance or whatever it is like they just ah man i don't get it i don't get it um right now it's an elite book x yeah an elite book x g1 a it's a strix halo so it's uh it's like a four thousand dollar laptop that i would never buy because there's like things about it that are like like broken level of stupid like it has by default the screen ships at 40 hertz i know right you can turn it up to 60 what is it an engineering laptop or something or like what like an engineering sample you mean no why would it have a strix halo in a 40 hertz screen is it it's a it's a work it's considered like a workstation yeah okay because it can be configured with up to 128 gigs of ram like strix halo you know tends to do yeah um i was trying to figure out like what what what configuration ever would someone buy that thing in when it's 40 hertz and then i was like okay maybe it's just for cat or something and maybe they don't care i'm not sure maybe they do care like i feel like if i was an engineer i'd be kind of annoyed that my screen's running at 40 It can do 60.

1:00:50It can do 60. But it's like super dim. Like it's not, like you compare this to like a, like a top, top end MacBook right now. And you're like, not good. Not good. But man, that strikes Halo. But yeah, I, I feel like I'm always going to have a desktop. And if I'm the dude running a desktop off, I can only keep it alive through secondhand hardware. Cause literally no one makes this stuff anymore. I feel like I'm going to be that guy. And does that mean I'm just aging poorly or whatever? Maybe. Maybe when I'm 70 and I'm still keeping my desktop alive, I will be seen as aging poorly. But I don't think I care.

1:01:31I like my spot. I like having a desktop. I like how it works. And if that's the equivalent of having a Windows 98 machine now, I think that's still fine. because I think having a Windows 98 machine now is pretty cool. Yeah, I don't think it's going to go away, go away because you're not going to be the only millennial left in 30 years from now. I won't be 70 30 years from now. Well, I will. Right there, buddy.

1:02:06Yeah, like I don't... I'm just saying, and I'm giving a theoretical scenario, right? Whether it happens or not. And I think that especially with how diverse the game development industry is even now, and I think will become, I mean, that's something you've talked about a fair bit, this splintering off that's happening right now from the big studios. you're gonna have a lot of people who in much the same way that game developers are spreading up who are nostalgic for the rich single player like pixel art um rpg experiences of their youth or whatever it is right and are are trying to make that but better and more modern i think you're gonna have people making games that are designed to be played from the client side there's always the indie space yeah but and and and by and always yeah sure always is a huge word very loaded maybe It won't always, but in our lifetimes, I don't see the desktop completely going away.

1:03:01It might take on a different form. The kind that we use now might not make sense anymore. We're already seeing soldered memory make its way to the desktop, not because it's being crammed down our throats, but because it runs faster. Like the fact that framework went that route was pretty mind blowing to me. And the first thing I told them was like, hey, like, this is not that modular. And they're like, look, AMD literally like worked with us on this. You cannot build Strix Halo with memory modules and maintain the performance. And it's not that it needs it for the CPU. It needs it for the GPU.

1:03:43And the GPU is becoming integrated the way they are. In a really weird way. that happened we went from that conversation right where intel started talking about you know the igpu on the cpu becoming like very powerful and an important part and amd with their fusion way back in the day and the cpu and the gpu becoming integrated and we all went yeah but igpus are so crap they're so bad i feel like it just kind of everyone was talking about it and it like definitely wasn't going to happen and then there was a period of kind of quiet and then it just happened happened here's a really how fine is the soldering on soldered ram that's not that bad bga bga ram can be upgraded a lot of the time the issue around both that and nand comes down to like like firmware handling the firmware but no one is going to build a motherboard that is designed to have the RAM desoldered and resoldered onto it willy-nilly.

1:04:46And so because of that, you're never going to get friendly firmware, even from companies that do have the best intentions. And you can make, there are boards that allow BGA chips to just be like bolted onto them, but they're for engineering. It's not practical. The interface is way too expensive and bulky. I was just trying to think like, is it possible that's the return of like repair shops basically? Oh yeah. Oh, 100%. It might not even be upgrading, but it might be replacing, fixing, stuff like that. Yep. Be kind of neat. Oh, 100%. Right. The other thing I was going to say is I think Strix Halo is just the beginning too.

1:05:25Because one of the things that was most exciting to me about Panther Lake was not, and this is why I think our Panther Lake coverage back at CES was so different from everyone else's because i was moderately excited to see intel return to competition in terms of battery life put out a really good igpu okay no i was more than moderately excited for the igpu moderately excited for the performance gains and they moved some caches around and all that kind of stuff that they tend to do as they make a new chip but what i was really excited about was the modularity of the underlying platform like they've got all of this stuff that they were talking about for years like foveros is like working it's in shipping silicon right now we can just like take out and they talked about using third-party vendor ip so the idea like holy crap of getting something like the soc on the nintendo switch right with like an nvidia gpu but like an x86 cpu and then like some custom you know ai tomfoolery over here and whatever they want over there and having like a like a mega chip on something like a framework desktop like a really compact desktop form factor that's that's exciting that's cool and if they're able to do that not on a monolithic die, right?

1:06:59But through packaging, then the yields might actually not suck. And the performance benefit of having it all tightly integrated might be worth the cost. Maybe. Here's an interesting comment from

1:07:17fartmuncher69420 in Floodplain Chat. fartmuncher69 underscore 420 says nice i think enthusiasts will change to running servers inside their house instead of desktops in my opinion this is a really interesting comment because we've talked about that before first of all we have second of all in my opinion if you look at like tech media what is the only thing that like really feels like it's growing right now building like local ai crap homebrew yeah or home lab yeah i don't know why i said homebrew but yeah home lab like and and doing things like that and that's a big part of the reason why i think it's growing but also people are looking at like oh man like i mean i've been mulling over this this this particular thought in my head for a while now it's it's this like you know i'm not trying to be i'm not trying to be a gray man i'm not trying to a gray man is that a thing gray man yeah where you like blend in with the crowd and like you're you're you're you're you can't like you're you're all tactical but people can't tell i'm not trying to do that i'm not trying to like hide from the government whatever but there's also like you know i don't take a picture of my junk every time i go to the washroom and send it to you so why should i share all my private things with google and everybody else right right so like there's people that are like all right there's a certain level of invasion of my privacy that is just like, dang, dude, maybe back off a little bit.

1:08:45So I think people are trying to split off from certain major services, not out of, again, like... Paranoia. Oh my God, I need to be ultra tactical. But it's just like, whoa, like this is actually too much. I should probably own a little bit more of my data. I think these two things are happening at the same time. We did an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade. I guess we shot it a couple of weeks ago for Nate, one of our guys at Creator Warehouse. Did I talk about this last week? i don't think so okay so so we shot an amd ultimate tech upgrade and one of the things that he wanted was a nas which is like yeah sure that's a thing that comes up on these amd ultimate tech upgrades but the difference is that nate doesn't really do any video editing doesn't really uh want a plex server he doesn't do the stuff that we typically think of people wanting nas is for and this was really cool and very exciting investment disclosure in eshtech but they have gotten to the point where what he was after was quite literally a matter of like maybe 10 clicks to get image set up on his remember hex os is based on true nas so the underlying the underlying system is true nas zfs good stuff and he was able to get it set up with their pretty dashboard get image installed and syncing from his phone in like i kid you not about 10 minutes nice with no trial and error and no bs and that was what he wanted it for he had a kid recently and he just doesn't want to upload to a cloud service yeah because there's just there's a freaking limit yeah like it's it's really not um it's not edgy like like you hear these stories it's oh man this is gonna make conspiracy theorists like so

1:10:54I'm not going to say the word for it, but yeah, I guess. Yeah. Did I help? It's, it's not, it's not, uh, why are they feeling like that? It's not fear of the unknown. It's knowledge. Did they see someone who's pro-consumer?

1:11:10Jesus Christ. Uh, it's not, it's not fear of the unknown. It's knowledge of what's happening widely right like you this is an old story but you hear about the tesla stuff where they were like sharing videos from inside of people's cars for fun on their slack like yep this is happening we have accepted that even if a company is like morally perfect well they're gonna get hacked anyways like it's if your data is is is just publicly out there people are gonna get it people you don't want to have it will have it eventually and it's just like realistically most people probably not that important yeah but but it kind of doesn't matter maybe i still don't want someone seeing it maybe that just sucks yeah maybe that's actually an irrelevant part of this conversation maybe we could just not yeah that because i know that gets brought up too and it's just like dude whatever that doesn't mean i want yeah i don't know just owning your own stuff, I think is shifting from paranoid people and hyper enthusiast land to normies.

1:12:24This is actually just kind of normal now, dude. I think that as cool as it was investing in framework and as many good business decisions as I've made for LMG and mistakes, um, the investment in eshtech and the timing for hex os is going to end up seeming like clairvoyant when they get their product out of pre-release and like dude the timing like i think they're aiming for sorry i'm going to jump in while you find that uh dark guy said ai being trained on your junk for ai porn see this is part of my problem though is like you hear stuff like that and it's like okay maybe i think he's probably joking but i've i've heard more recently that apparently one of the ways that they prey on women is they look for when you delete a bunch of selfies because it shows like a low self-esteem moment and then they'll target you with ads for like makeup and cosmetic surgeries and stuff like that seriously seriously that is just like maybe I'm just gonna host my own photos and you can actually just off that is I just don't actually want you involved with this at all so there's a certain level where it's like uh yeah you're doing stuff with this information that is just not okay and like like that's a you know self-esteem issues in in men and women are a problem but I think it's pretty well known that like negative emotions and negative thoughts and self-esteem issues like that are much more heavily present on with women and it's just like i don't know get out of here so if i can help solve that by like hosting it myself yeah okay maybe i'm gonna do that now because i'm tired of this stuff and i think a lot of other people are tired of this too i think instagram was doing that too yeah i don't necessarily know.

1:14:20So here it is. Q1 of 2026. By March 31st, 2026, we will have 1.0 of HexOS, which will include the local UI that people were rightly upset wasn't initially planned for the launch Q1 of this year. Yeah, and like that's awesome, and if you don't want to go that route, there's tons of other routes as well yes lots of other options what i love about this one is the philosophy of making difficult and secure and robust simple but if you decide you're going down this route regardless you can go that route yeah and skip the steps or there's a massive extremely vibrant community around doing it for free as well yes um level one forums is really good for it yep uh there's stuff on i mean there's stuff on the linus tips forum lots uh there's stuff on reddit everywhere there's tons of youtube creators there's tons of people all over the place that would be more than happy to help you solve these things um the discord age verification thing people are posting about that as well like this is yeah this is just another example of like this to me is very clearly within the law mass data harvesting.

1:15:39And it's just everywhere now and it's just too much. Just tired of it. I think I don't have much more to say on top of that. I think having your own NAS is going to go from a thing that weird pirates do to a thing that just is like a normal thing that people should do if they care about their privacy at all i wouldn't be surprised maybe maybe i'm being too in our own bubble about this but i wouldn't be surprised if if in a certain amount of time it's like weird if you don't have some form of your own owned large storage i mean it's gonna get hard with what was it what was was it wd who said all of their hold on 26 yeah hard drive yeah okay you know what let's jump right into this topic then hard drive capacity for western digital is sold out for 2026 wd's ceo revealed during a company earnings call that they're pretty much sold out of hdd production capacity for all of this calendar year with firm purchase orders from their top seven customers wd has also signed long-term agreements ltas with two customers that extend into 2027 and one into 2028.

1:17:01This demand is driven almost entirely by AI data centers. Cloud revenue now accounts for 89 % of WD's total revenue, while consumer revenue has shrunk to just 5%. Let's take a moment and wrap our brains around that. And obviously, it doesn't quite work like this but at the western digital factory okay as the drives are rolling along the conveyor and dropping into the bucket at the end of the conveyor those drives they're all done now one out of 20 is destined for a consumer what 19 out of those 20 so for every hard drive you see in a consumer system shipping today 19 more are going elsewhere with 18 of them headed to the data center to the cloud hard drive prices have already surged nearly 50 in the last five months according to tom's hardware following a similar pattern to ram and nand which are also in shortage because of the current ai build out yeah i figured this out unintentionally i was trying to help someone configure a build and the performance like was not very important so i i actually recommended the core most important thing was hard drive.

1:18:44So I recommended to get a hard drive. We checked the used market because of course, and I was like, oh, everything's really high. I feel like these are just like people expecting too much value because like the used market around here is not. I know what I got. It's not, yeah. The used market around here is not always super vibrant for everything. So it's like, okay, let's jump on stores because I've seen literally during Scrapyard Wars where it's actually cheaper to just buy a new drive sometimes, which is whack. But that has happened. It's a thing. So I'm like, okay, let's just jump on the stories.

1:19:16Then I was like, what is going on? Why are the hard drives so expensive? And then I started diving into things, and I was like, oh, no, it's coming again, isn't it? I found 3WD Greens, two terabytes each, from just to give you some idea of how old they are. They have archived footage from when we were at the Langley house on them. They were the old cold storage drives. So each of them only has, I think, around a few dozen power on and off cycles and like a couple hundred power on hours. I bet those are worth close today to what they were worth then. Which is so messed up. Completely wackadoodle.

1:20:02Dan, chime up. Say it. Yeah, sure. I didn't want to interrupt. No, but... Yeah, my NAS is there nearing their five-year kind of scary age. No! And I have five 15 terabytes in there. Oof. I'm gonna be poor. How much is that gonna run you right now? Oh my god, Luke. Please check. Luke. I'm working on it. I have a... A WD Green is worth 80 bucks for a two terabyte. That's nuts. It's okay, so no, they're not as bad as they would have been like 12 years ago or whatever. But that's too much to be paying for a two terabyte drive. You said 15 terabytes, Dan? Seagate Barracuda is what I have in there right now.

1:20:46Or Exos, something like that. Oh, God. They might be the same. Exos were like kind of cheap for a bit. Okay, okay. In fairness, four terabyte drives are around the same price. Here's one from Seagate for 90 bucks. No, he needs 15s. No, no, I don't. Sorry, I'm just talking about those stupid greens. Is this a phase where you would expect to upgrade? Are you looking for 20s? If there's 20s, I didn't do the math recently because power on hours weren't getting too crazy. But like, I got to think about it. I was looking at SSDs and remortgaging my left kidney. Yeah, that's... So yeah, 18s for like a red Pro NAS drive is$400.

1:21:28That's probably cheaper than it used to be. i'm seeing i'm seeing four to four to seven hundred dollars depending on the models yeah that sounds about the same but i'm also not seeing 15s the sweet spot seems to be a little higher than 15 right now the 20 20 the 20 terabyte is 420 nice um okay so i'm fine then sick you're fine yeah oh really you're good you're buying 15 how many of them five five i mean that's still it's still two grand and this is us dollars sir oh okay that's because i remember paying about 400 bucks a drive five years ago yeah sorry Canadian I'm seeing on the Canadian site I'm seeing Iron Wolf Pro 20 terabytes for 600 bucks okay that's not that far off he's getting 30 % more capacity for about 30 % more it's not better it's not like it used to be it's not like it used to be the price was always the same where the price would always go down per gigabyte but we talked about this it keeps coming back to that bloody video i made where i was like youtube premium should cost more money or whatever what what what did i what was the premise of that but basically i was like hey look you got to understand moore's law is dead the law of storage being cheaper is dead this platform costs more and more and more and more to maintain the more people use it something's got to give well it looks like i'm not as um homeless as i thought it was going to be.

1:22:57Just a little bit. John McGee 1996 asks, Is this going to get worse or is there any indication of balancing out type of situation? Hold on. Just give me one second.

1:23:10You can't see it, but this is... I'm just going to polish my ball here. I'm going to gaze into it. Consult the orb. We're going full gaze here.

1:23:27I don't know.

1:23:34I thought you were going to give some whole impassioned speech about trying to tell the future and stuff. Nope. And then, I don't know. That was good. And the thing is, obviously, I was kicking myself for not just stockpiling a bunch of DRAM, right? But I've been in this industry for so long. Do you know how many times I've heard DRAM's going up? It's going up in like what? For a month or two, it'll trend up for a little bit, maybe for a quarter or two. But it always comes back down because at the end of the day, it's people who earn their money working on all the forecasting for all this crap years in advance that mostly have done a pretty good job over the years of predicting where demand and supply is going to go.

1:24:22and making sure that they're striking a balance between maintaining the profitability of their fabs and also not oversupplying or not undersupplying the market, making sure that they can supply all their big customers, including direct-to-consumers. And I don't think there is a precedent for them f***ing it up this badly. Nobody saw this boom coming and there is no quick fix. There's no like, oh, well, let's just, you know, I'm trying to think of a game where you were built yeah, Anno. There's no Anno just plopping down a new fab and then you just run a little road to it and now the supply chain is fixed.

1:25:01It just doesn't work like that. So, I don't know because the bubble could pop and if the bubble pops All these purchase orders just be sitting there. They, as far as I can tell, they, like, what are you what are you going to do like what's that um what's that famous saying if you owe the the bank a thousand dollars you have a problem if if you if you owe the bank if you if you have a loan from the bank for twenty thousand dollars that's a you problem if you have a loan from the bank for twenty billion dollars that's the bank's problem yeah and so the exact quote but something like something along those lines and in the same way like if if this whole thing just crashes there's literally going to be no one to you know fulfill this one trillion dollar ram order or you know whatever whatever magic on on paper money has been exchanged in advance or whatever commitments have been made so if anything there will be a huge crash in the pricing of this stuff and it'll be it'll be a free ram for all um but when that will happen i have no way of knowing if any like from my point of view and i'm just i'm not a finance guy right like i'm i'm a tech nuts and bolts guy from my point of view we should have all figured out that this is not going to result in the kind of uh the kind of revenue generation that would justify the investment that's going into it ages ago we should already be there so i'm just sitting here going well can i stay solvent longer than the market can stay irrational

1:26:52the answer is no yeah dan check your email full print chats cooking are they finding them deals

1:27:03or i think i might actually just need four which is kind of nice sick oh get shocked um sounds like a great idea mega kuel asks hey question are tariffs responsible for this consumer hardware shortage at all or is it really just because of stupid ai just say i um tariffs aren't helping uh yeah but it's a shortage globally yes so like tariffs are not helping no i can tell you that much but the shortage is uh is a much more macro problem that is not to do with a tantrum that a particular world leader is having at a particular moment does this affect you guys as a channel absolutely in like every day so many ways constantly and every day this hobby has never been more difficult to get into uh no i actually wouldn't say that ring true it's never been more frustrating to yes participate in yes i'll say that yeah it was definitely a lot more difficult to get into in the like much more further past in the 80 days yeah like where would you find resources to to learn to build i mean there was laptops that were three thousand dollars in like the early 90s yeah you go way back to like the hobbyist days yeah and i mean so never mind ignore that part even from a pricing standpoint but it sucks right now you can still buy a sick i mean i told you we've got that thousand dollar gaming pc video coming you can still buy a sick gaming pc for a thousand dollars we went to uh david and i this video is coming out really soon i talked about this one we went to costco and we brought a we bought a great computer for like 1250 us or something like that very capable little gaming machine am5 like like modern platform gaming machine with uh it was a 9 9600 i think it was the i think it was the xt 9600 xt perfectly cromulent gaming card i played some expedition 33 on it and i was like yep this is a gaming pc and and that's really great it's really amazing that you can you can get into it like that but it's also really frustrating um that we had it so good for so long and it's been it feels like it's been torn out of our fingers and the reason The reason is the hard part.

1:29:20Like if, if Moore's law was just dead and everyone was doing their earnest best to overcome it. And the answer was fake frames. I think everyone would go, okay, sure. But not everyone, but I, yeah, not everyone, but I think you get what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. But if the reason that this stuff is not affordable and the reason that we're going the direction that we're going is because you know I don't know Sam Altman needs more RAM then I think that's a lot harder to swallow it's a lot harder to be passionate about to get excited about I also think that I mean if you know if companies like WD are having 5 % of their revenue be consumer and you see more patterns like what Micron did happening where these uh

1:30:18where these traditionally known in the Western market brands, that's how I'll say it, start kind of exiting. I'm not saying Western Digital is exiting, but Micron did for reasons that Western Digital is experiencing. So it wouldn't be unreasonable to see other brands do a similar thing. I think maybe in a really weird way, one of the saviors of the desktop PC market might be, China oh because there is a consumer market yeah oh yeah definitely so like if certain brands are just going well all the money's in data center well that's not true it's just there's a crazy amount of money in data center so like uh I don't know somebody's gonna step in and there's a lot of very hungry Chinese companies trying to get into computer components.

1:31:17I think it was Hardware Unboxed that made a video on one of the Chinese DRAM companies.

1:31:29Hardware Unboxed CM or CX rather, hold on, CXMT XMT YMT I think one of them did a yeah 32 gig King Bank KFRW DDR5 6000 CL36 Soar Blade CXMT review hardware unboxed and it was like fine I guess that could help but I don't think they have a ton of capacity at least not right now not right now not right now i'm not talking about right now but that's the thing about china is how how long did it take them to build hospitals during covid like days or something um china builds hospital in 10 days that was nuts that is nuts that is nuts and this is a different type of scaling and a different type of building and all that kind of stuff but like if there's opportunity there somebody's going to chase it and if the traditional brands are going data center i that doesn't mean consumers are out of the market right like it's we're still here there's still a big market we're still hungry we're interested in things there's still billions of dollars to be made selling to consumers and i think consumers are probably less loyal than data center is if data center uses something and it works oh dude that's where you have all those quotes of like nobody was fired for buying ibm Yeah, dude, AMD has been, well, okay, it's not as cut and dried as AMD has been better than Intel in server for years.

1:33:15But they've been a very compelling option compared to Intel for years and years now. And how slowly that market share shifts compared to consumers who seem to be able to, are willing to pivot a lot faster. It's less relationship and contract forecasting driven. and it's more like I go and I see what's good right now. It's like recommended by my enthusiast buddy. I want more FPS, you know? Like it's a very different decision-making process. Superwisk says, how long until NVIDIA just gives up on GeForce? I don't think they will. And my reason for that is largely geopolitical. Really? I think they are much more geopolitical than a lot of the other brands.

1:34:02I think, in my opinion, NVIDIA is extremely invested in Taiwan's market dominance and wants to hold themselves there. But why do they need gaming for that? Because I think they would take anything they can. And if they can take data center and gaming and anything else, I think they'll grab it and hold on to it. i think they will continue to make gaming gpus but for a different reason i think that for many years the gaming r &d fueled the data center products and now we're seeing that kind of flip around where the data center r &d on things like machine learning is fueling advancements on the gaming side um but i i i think it's less about geopolitics and i think it's less about taiwan and for me i think it's more about tradition i think there's at least as long as nvidia's leadership remains as it is i think there's a lot of ego and a lot of pride and I don't necessarily even mean those in really negative ways.

1:35:18I think that GeForce dominates gaming is a point of personal pride. Oh, absolutely. And part of the origin story of NVIDIA such that if - This is definitely part, if not the majority of it, for sure. If anyone were to challenge NVIDIA in what has been traditionally for the longest period, their stomping ground, I think NVIDIA sees game the gaming market as essentially their birthright at this point and fuck anyone who tries to take it from them I think they would I think they would cut open their money bags and bleed it rather than lose their dominant market share in gaming quite frankly Because we've seen them do it when AMD was competitive.

1:36:01They were willing to do anything Sometimes it wasn't even just to sell more g-force. It was to just over anyone who tries to dare sell a graphics card and and and i don't even necessarily again i don't even necessarily mean that in like a negative way i mean that in a highly competitive way they've done stuff that i would describe as anti-competitive but what i'm talking about right now is the competitive spirit of nvidia and sometimes that competitive spirit can lead them to do things that are anti-competitive but it's not what i'm talking about right now It also feels like... Yeah, I mean, I think this is fair.

1:36:40It feels like they have more of that than a lot of companies. NVIDIA feels very rah-rah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think Jensen takes it personally when he loses market share. Yeah. Like, actually. And that kind of passion is important from a leader. It's probably not a small part of NVIDIA's ongoing success. I mean, point at a company that has executed so consistently for 20 plus years. When was NVIDIA founded? It was like 1996. People also like notoriously don't quit. And like they have this internal culture of like re-education and internal classes that you can take and stuff because they feel, yeah, it's all very interesting.

1:37:26I don't want to glaze NVIDIA too much when they do a lot of things I don't like. Um, but yeah. I mean, you can't deny that they're winners. Yeah.

1:37:40Speaking of winners, um, you can be a winner by, um, learning about checkout messages or comms. Sorry. It took me a second to remember what they're called now. The way to interact with the mark of a great name, the way to interact with the WAN show is of course not through super chats, not through Twitch bits, but through checkout messages. We believe that when you throw money at your screen, you should get something in return. And in our case, it's high quality merchandise from lttstore.com. And the product we're launching this week is kind of a funny story. Do you want to bring up the page on the site?

1:38:24This is called the Schrodinger's Cat Patch Hoodie. Shout out to Matthew on the fashion team for coming up with the name because it's kind of genius um there may or there may not be an ltx logo under the cat patch you can't see it which means it's in a state of superposition until someone does something to test that theory which we would strongly advise against because it would mean that your cat patch is no longer on your hoodie if you've been around since the ltx days you will recognize the tie-dye base of this particular hoodie. This is officially the last of those. Finally, we're done. And for anyone newer, it's our 100 % French Terry cotton hoodie, soft, breathable, structured, and now featuring this Schrodinger's Cat Patch on top.

1:39:14You can find it live now at lmg.gg slash cat patch hoodie. So the reason for these is that our first batch of LTX 23 hoodies had the LTX logo crooked. It was aligned to, and you know what? Seriously, our printer has done so many perfect prints for us over the years that I don't even blame him because it was aligned to something, but then something about the way the garment fit meant that when you wore it, it was like - Angled. It was angled off the relative to the floor. and so we had to reprint all of the hoodies for the show like i think it was like three or five days before or something like that i can't remember the exact timeline but we had to reprint the hoodies and then we spent years trying to figure out what the heck to do with those hoodies no the logo was not sewn on it was silkscreened so the cat patch being sewn on is is new it's an upgrade look at this quality cat patch i think this was lisa's handiwork isn't it adorable anyway um it took us until now to figure out what to do with them so this is your last chance to get the tie dye hoodie and it has a cute little cat patch on it and luke showed you guys uh how to find it on the site and next he's going to show you guys how to send a merch message all you he won't he won't do that i'm sorry he will not do that oh crap he will show you how to send a com a checkout message bloody hell uh okay all you got to do is add anything to your cart say for example the off-site laptop bag in a small size cool neat view cart and there it is the checkout message interface that will go to producer dan who will uh put it up on stream or he will respond to it or he will uh curate it for me and luke to respond to dan should we show them a couple checkout messages and show them how it works yeah i've got a couple here let's have a look hey dll question for linus do you guys have a product list from oldest to newest would be useful for my project we are launching a new version of the site i believe in q2 i think that's the current roadmap and then once that's done we're going to be working on a product archive and once that's done we're going to be working on a way to allow people to kind of vote maybe once a quarter or a couple times a year on the top products they'd like to see us bring back because i know it's been an ongoing problem with ltt store that we're always moving forward never restocking things that are gone and i think that's something that would be a way for us to kind of meet in the middle because we can't carry every product that we ever made that's not really realistic but we can bring back some if there's enough demand for them luke nukem that's a is that the whole the shirt oh that one's not coming back no you should have gotten one when you had the chance i i wear mine actually quite regularly on weekends so like uh Not every product will be available to vote on then.

1:42:34Like your super special ones. It would be there, but that's never going to win. It's not going to get enough votes. Yeah, we did not. Rig it. Rig it. We saw the sales numbers. We did not sell many of those. Yeah. Hey, Luke, Linus, and Dan. Hello from Adelaide, Australia. What do you think of the new Pokemon Fire Red Leaf Green release for Switch and Switch 2 news that dropped in the last 24-ers? did they seriously not put a space between two different words fred so this is the colton edition and that's that's just a good joke and leaf green yeah uh i don't know what are they are they games are they the same game again pokemon fire red version capture wild pokemon and recapture the nostalgic feel of the game boy advanced system when the pokemon fire red version and leaf green version games returned for the first time in over 20 years on the nintendo switch also playable on switch 2 just in time for pokemon day uh there's a lot to unpack here in these nintendo switch versions of the 2004 remakes of the first pokemon games red and green so this is sorry sorry these are just halfway to skyrim right now for your toaster these are remakes of remakes it's a$20 GBA game and every language is a unique listing on the eShop

1:44:04so you really do have to catch them all emulators win again I guess there's like no way this is not one of the most easily emulatable games ever um

1:44:18I don't know man I've never done it but I have to imagine and it's like brain dead easy. Pokemon Blue Master Race. That's all I have to say about that. Never cared about red or green. Sorry. There's another Pokemon comment here somewhere. Green wasn't like you're talking about the previous era. Oh I'm talking about like original Game Boy. Yeah yeah yeah. Wasn't green like not a North American thing? I thought it was like Japan only or something. Maybe. All I know is Pokemon Blue is the only Pokemon game I ever played. And from every conversation that I've had with a Pokemon fan about it, they were like, yep, you had the experience.

1:44:58Yep. Good job. And I played it on a Game Boy Color emulator. So I like got to see it in color, I think. Or was it? I don't know. It doesn't really matter. You don't even need... My nostalgia glasses say it was in color. Sure. It might not have been. You're right. Green was Japan only. Yeah. Okay. Cool. so for us it was it was just it was just red and blue and then yellow came out and that was like weird and yeah growling says real chads played yellow but like yellow wasn't out yet so i was just too og for yellow so that's why i said it was weird red and blue were first whatever i still have my cartridges blue nice solid blue homies yeah i gotta follow a pokemon question for you both seriously i think yeah well i mean might as well have two.

1:45:48Everybody seems to be careful about Pokemon today. Luke, do you like Pokemon? I think you like Pokemon. Yeah. Okay. Hi, Wancho. Question for Luke. What is your favorite Pokemon? Are you looking forward to any potential announcements for the series' 30th anniversary? No, I'm not looking forward to any potential announcements. I know that might suck, but like I don't tend to like the mainline games anymore. I actually don't even like the game that I play. I think Pokemon Go is just like objectively a pretty bad game other than the fact that it tends to usually incentivize going outside. And there's so few things that do that on your phone.

1:46:31And I think that is super, super cool. Gamifying going outside is fantastic. While you finish this up, I got to go use Water Gun. Sounds good. but the concepts around how the PvP works I think are terrible I think the rating system is in a lot of ways really bad I think the max battle system is terrible I think how they deal with catching especially things that you technically paid money for in some way is horrible I think their event management is just trash like in so many ways it's a terrible terrible game that sucks it's one of the reasons why when people are like oh you have to have remote rating because of like uh people who are immobilized it's like okay i would highly recommend playing anything else because it's a terrible game i guess i'm supposed to look over here sorry um if you're stuck at home there's like near infinite other things you could play that are just better.

1:47:35Like, you don't need to spend money, an extra amount of money to be able to play from your couch, to be able to play a bad game from your couch. The only good thing about Pokemon Go is that it gets you outside and then it gets you moving. So if you can't do one or either of those things, just play a better game. I'd highly recommend playing just a definitely better game. That's my main stance there. The mainline Pokemon games, I bought whatever it's called, Scarlet or something. Oh, man. Because I bought it, I've been kind of like forcing myself to play when I play on my Switch. It's starting to get better.

1:48:17The beginning was really, really slow. And it's starting to get a little bit better. But still, it's like... I don't know. It is different. It's an open world game in a more real way than the original Pokemon was.

1:48:37I don't think they're that great Hot Take I Love ZA I haven't played those ones I haven't played a ton of them I don't have really great takes on it but anyways in terms of announcements I'm not particularly excited I think people in the indie scene that are making semi ripoff things are doing a much better job with the Pokemon IP than Pokemon is i think that game poke poke mmo or whatever that was a long time ago where you could play in your browser and it was like an mmo of fire red or something and you could see all these trainers around on the map um i'm wondering if if full plane chat is going to correct me on the name but there was a there was a pixel art game of pokemon that was an mmo that i believe was in your browser um and it was that was like super cool and really fun and really hype and then pokemon killed it um pal world was like a really interesting take on pokemon that was actually really fun um multiplayer in the same world wow how has that not really been a thing um having your pokemon be able to like work with you to build things like super cool um i think an actually official one for pokemon would have been way better and not having the guns and stuff i think have actually would have legitimately been better i think pal world needed to do stuff like that in order to not infringe too much so hooray that was definitely the right choice but i would prefer to just play a first party one that was actually well made but none of them exist um but yeah people are saying polka mmo so yeah apparently that uh let me see if i can find it polka mmo what if there's still more oh they have a website still what the heck are they still alive wild i thought they got like banned off of the everything um but yeah like these these experiences made by others um have been better so no i'm not particularly interested about uh announcements favorite pokemon kadabra uh my reason for that was i never traded back in the day when i had my my Pokemon blue.

1:50:57Um, I think I like, we didn't have a link cable or something. I don't remember. Uh, but never really traded. And I remember above Misty's gym, you cross the bridge, you go to the left and then you come back down. There's this patch of grass. And if you go up and up and up and up, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, my brother told me you could catch an Abra in there. So I would go do that and I would finally catch an Abra and then if you do the the old brutal EXP trick where you have to send the Abra out first and then swap out to something that can tank it and you eventually get a Kadabra that Kadabra will just hard carry you for like the entire game.

1:51:35Kadabra is sick in those old games. I found a lot of the Pokemon that you either needed to trade to evolve or that you had to get in weird ways were some of my favorite ones like Gyarados getting that Magikarp from the guy who thinks he's scamming you and then you turn into a Magikarp fantastic Pokemon. Kadabra Machoke

1:52:00Graveler. Why do you keep going for mid-tier evolutions of these? I was just explaining because I think we didn't have a link cable or something so we couldn't trade to those ones required a trade to evolve it was the only way to do it Well you could get a Machamp No. I don't think so No you could I'm pretty sure. I thought you had to trade it. By the way, weren't you gonna ask me if it was very effective? Was it very effective? It was very effective. Super effective even. Very good, very good. Am I wrong that they were trade only? Trade only, yeah. Really? Yeah. Oh, I must just remember fighting them or something.

1:52:38In fairness to me, this was like 25 years ago or something. You would have fought them. I think there's a gym leader that has them or something. Yeah, okay. Um, but yeah, Machoke, you needed to trade in order to get him a champ, but then it would just give them a champ to the other person. Yeah. You could trade it back, but like, I don't know. Um, uh, Kadabra in order to get Alakazam, you had to trade, uh, in order to get Golem, you had to trade a Graveler. Um, those are the three that I really remember. Um, yeah. The other really cool one. Oh yeah. Gengar. that's why Haunter is my favorite one out of that chain is because to get Gengar you had to trade so I always really liked Haunter that's why my one laptop was called Haunter and not Gengar because Haunter is my favorite one because I was never able to trade up and Haunter is also incredibly powerful in those games because Ghost is just like immune to a ton of attacks which is crazy it wasn't a particularly balanced game it was more about selling toys yeah yeah but yeah Kadabra has always been my favorite one he's my hard carry yeah Sammy's favorite Pokemon is Gengar which is pretty sick solid it's so it's so common for people to be like Charizard or whatever it's like okay Pikachu that's cool yeah Pikachu Eevee whatever it's like alright okay hold on what's your favorite Pokemon when did the Eevee obsession show up because like when I it's more modern is it okay Does Eevee feature really prominently in like modern shows and stuff or something or like I don't know But I know they pushed it a lot more like there's a ton more Eevee evolutions now.

1:54:17Oh, dude, and like when I Like I got this like Pokemon find and seek like book for my kids some I don't know some relative gave it to us or something. It was all like Eevee. I was like Eevee who cares about Eevee? I thought it's all it's all Pikachu and like Charmander and Charizard and whatnot There's also like communities that kind of form behind different Eevees. Tumblr, says Crystal. Well, Tumblr I think was largely because Sylveon is a lot of people in the trans community because Sylveon has the trans colors have bannered behind Sylveon. Oh. But then like similarly, there's like other Pokemon.

1:54:55For reasons, people like Vaporeon. um there's there's there's other stuff going on uh yeah but evie got more popular like way later on okay i would i would need to be reminded right let's go i need to be reminded of all the original pokemon before i could pick a favorite i also really really like uh pidgeotto pidgeot i was about to say i low-key loved my uh pidgeot they're actually awesome Yeah, by late game Pidgeot is actually pretty solid. I actually kind of loved my Raticate. I like that. I don't like Raticate, but I like that you like Raticate. I think that's cool. The Nittos are pretty sweet.

1:55:41Kadabra! Let's go! I was a huge fan of Geodude. Did not love this. Catching early Geodudes? Yeah, me neither. Not really. Didn't care about that. But Geodude is sick when you first recruit him. Yeah, exactly. Like he just will one hit basically anything. Just dunks. Just hits so hard. And he'll take so little damage from so many things. Okay. It's fantastic. I love horses. So therefore I immediately love Punita. But I just didn't really need it because by the time you get this, I think you have like a pretty solid. Is that even in blue? I thought we had Growlithe. Maybe not. I don't remember which one.

1:56:22don't remember which one there's some pokemon that aren't you have to trade for them i think you can do maybe you might fight a trainer or something that has you definitely do there's the gamblers that have them there's the old guys they like their pony does um that's why man well man there's there's more than i remember there being there's a ryehorn enjoyer in chat that's based that's a that's a based favorite pokemon on these fighting guys are pretty cool but i never really bothered with them

1:57:03I just really liked the design for this one. I don't think I ever had one They're cool Man I wish they did more with Ditto over the years And you'd have to be like You'd have to have a heart of stone To not love Snorlax Very true You know what I really dislike a lot of the modern systems I've often talked about how A lot of the modern Pokemon systems Just make it feel like Digimon To me I don't even know what Digimon is Go Mega Mode EX I don't like it Um But But I do think Gigantamax Norlax is awesome The fact that he just He's just still sleeping on the road And just stuff grew on him Hilarious

1:57:59But then they do stuff that's like You might actually like this Jakandamack's Meowth is just he's just like buildings tall it's all very Power Rangers-y to me I think that was probably my first exposure to like Japanese style fighting media where the fight has three stages every time you fight the putties and then you fight the boss and then you both level up and you fight again and all of the foreplay was completely unnecessary yeah that's totally yeah now there's megas and and all this other junk it gets a little ridiculous and like okay i know anytime anytime you make a compare like you look at new pokemon and you're like why is there keys why is a set of keys a pokemon and people go yeah well you can look at gen one and there's like some silly garbage as well um is there though porygon what's porygon he's he's yeah i don't sorry what's it called porygon i don't know what you're talking about i don't think that's gen one uh yeah yes how do i spell it p-o-r-y-g-o-n 100 oh this what is this this is my point he's just like oh he's a duck he's just a duck some shapes no he's a duck um he's a racist what are some other silly gen one pokemon

1:59:41there aren't really that many i mean i think my thing is like for the most part it was like this is a mouse except it's electric hooray yeah I mean yeah Machoke is just like a jacked guy he's a jacked like kind of well okay Mr. Mime is just a creepy guy yeah like the gas one is like so that we could have like a gaseous thing obviously I have no problem with ghastly personally I thought ditto was kind of like random magnemite is just magnets uh what's the one that's just a lot of magnets yeah yeah but but i i i think like i'm very cool with things like onyx it's a bunch of rocks in a row neat geo dude it's a single rock it has arms for some reason i don't care neat i like stuff like that i don't like this is a space demon like i i don't want that i'm just glad we're all passionate about it.

2:00:44Yeah. I'm glad people have things to be excited about. Like, what is that? Why is that a Pokemon? I think it's a lobster

2:00:57lobster eagle scorpion. Does that, as a Gen 1 only, does that feel like it belongs in Pokemon? No. Yeah, exactly. That's my problem with some of the new stuff. and i will always be a gen one only because i'm sorry but i just cannot be arsed to collect them all more than 151 things so many more nope how many pokemon are there total they just don't exist to me there's 151 pokemon you're welcome so the for the delusional people that think there's more than 151 yeah there's apparently 100 1025 that's crazy it makes no sense that is crazy There's 121. 51. 151. No, you know what? Forget it. There's 121.

2:01:41We're chopping 30 of them off. Anything I had to trade for doesn't count.

2:01:49Oh, man. Okay, how many people did we just bother? 152 Missigno. I like that. Oh, that's... No. I like that. No, the glitch doesn't count. I like that. Glitch, please. My delusion is that there's 152. all righty then what's next first we had a wedding we fought about pokemon first apple adopts rcs now it tests end-to-end encryption in the latest ios 26.4 beta build apple explains that it is now rolling out testing end-to-end encryption in rcs messaging on iphone currently not shipping on certain devices and carriers but the big news about this was that that it is only testing the RCS encryption between iPhones, not between Androids.

2:02:36They're not saying that they will never support it on Android, but while other people are super negative about this, saying, well, isn't the point of RCS end-to-end encryption so that you can have encryption when you're texting with an Android acquaintance, I personally am choosing to believe that this is just the start and they will roll end-to-end encryption to Android friends at some point and so that's why i cared to talk about it i'm i'm i'm i'm in good faith believing that apple is going to continue to do the right thing and continue to move rcs forward uh oh speaking of good things that i'm super excited about android finally after all these years finally did it

2:03:30whoa really finally android not like samsung or something apparently r slash pixel phones android 17 by the way whoa works for me pixel 10 pro android 17 if it's in mainline android because i don't care about running a pixel but what i do care about is i want a sony I want an Xperia.

2:04:01I expect it won't have it yet. It's probably going to take a little bit. But when that propagates, I am like first in line. I'm going to import an Xperia from Japan and I'm so ready. I'm so excited. They're so good. Yes, I know Samsung had this for so many years, but what if I wanted something other than Samsung? oneplus also supports it i believe nothing supports it there are there are vendors that support it but google themselves hasn't supported it and uh samsung or excuse me samsung and sony to my knowledge just kind of sticks as close to stock android as as possible and has not supported it so i am super super excited i'm on 16 right now and it's not here so if it's 17 then i'll be getting it soon and i'll let you know and then you can buy one too yeah there was commenters on the reddit thread that was saying it's specifically android 17 and i still haven't wiped my old one for you to play with luke that's okay yovo as ito asks remind me which side is the right sideline is now you can always tell because the left hand makes an l so this is the right but if you meant correct side the answer is that there is no correct side which is why we need a choice depending on whether you're left or right-handed depending on whether you prefer the task switching button being closer when you're holding in your right hand or being closer when you're holding it in your left hand that is completely personal preference and there should never have been any reason that you should have had to choose this is good this is a win for for user choice.

2:05:44All right. What else we got? Let's see here. What is this? Do you want more good news? Why charge when you can use Y Charge? Yeah. Y Charge, a company that has been pioneering wireless charging, has announced their second batch for their wireless power kit. Huh. So I did a short circuit on this thing a little while ago and the difference and the reason i wanted to highlight it again is that it's way cheaper now it was like a commercial only solution not that long ago and now they have support for the schlage encode which is from my understanding a much more popular smart lock so you just take out the battery cover put on the receiver module boom you never ever charge your smart lock again.

2:06:38You don't, you don't put a battery in, you don't like have it just randomly die at an inopportune time and you have to use a key. It just has power forever. I've been using my like commercial one with the Alfred smart lock at my house. It just is always charged and will always be charged forever. It's super cool. We first covered these guys at Computex like 10 years ago and it took them five ever to whether it was funding or partnerships or development to get this technology rolling and it's finally it's finally happening so they just seem like cool people who are finally catching a break and i just wanted to highlight that good stuff

2:07:22oh this one's less fun the registry from save the life a pet microchip company became inaccessible when the company went out of business in january 2024 for those unfamiliar pet microchips are simple rfid chips that produce a unique string of numbers when scanned databases like save the life link that identifier to pet information that vets can access. There was apparently very little notice of the shutdown, leaving many pets unknowingly unidentifiable to vets and shelters. Cincinnati Animal Care says it's found 65 dogs with useless chips. Only about half of their owners were found. Pets registered to save the life should re-register their chips number with another microchip company which is usually free this whole thing raised a whole bunch of questions for me namely what was the f***ing point of putting a microchip in my pets um I've microchipped every one of my pets that I've ever had thinking that like the idea was that they scanned it and the information was just there readable in plain text which I don't actually mind if somebody has my cat because I want it back.

2:08:35I thought it was too. So this was insane to me. I kind of understand the privacy potentially of an animal is roadkill and you go and you scan the microchip and you get a girl's phone number that way. Come on, man. If it's an alternative to a collar or a tattoo, probably plain text would have been fine. What was the point of this? yikes so frustrating i hate that on like multiple levels like i i had i had hope you know that when i when the bengal cats escaped that someone would find them and they would eventually even if someone stole them they would eventually make their way to a vet eventually get scanned and i would eventually be contacted but this whole ecosystem is just more stupid and fragmented than i could have then i realized i guess i could have looked it up i could have found this out but i mean nowadays we we tattoo and microchip our animals and we don't let them outside under any circumstances so it hasn't been as much of a problem the bangles were also just escape artists they just really wanted to get out rumble was able to jump up and hang off of the door handle to open the door which is like really and when you we had little kids we had people like coming in and out and then yeah anyway that's that's history at this point um and it's a lot easier now uh all of our cats that we have right now started their lives outdoors and they are like don't want in stoked to be inside none of them try to get out we accidentally one of the kids left the door open for half an hour like a few weekends ago and we were like ah panic cat check everyone find all the cats no one went anywhere near it especially the boys uh brownie and noodle are like they they lived outside until they were like old enough that i was worried that they would be difficult to socialize um and didn't the vet even have a concern about that i thought there was something No, our vet was pretty chill about it.

2:10:53No, that was to do with whether they had feline HIV. We had to... I knew there was some concern. Yeah, we had to isolate them from the other cats for quite a while before we could be sure that they didn't have like a dormant infection that could get the other cats or whatever. Got it. But yeah, they were outdoor cats for quite a while and we caught them with like a live trap and brought them in and tried to socialize them. I shouldn't say tried. um socialized with brownie especially very much socialized noodles still a little bit skitterish he's he was you know he was a wild thing at some point and um those guys especially are just like nope they hunted they hunted for their food when they were just little boys and they are not into it or did they go particularly away from it um from the door yeah no but they they do they're like not interested I meant when it was left open whereas like some of the other ones the two newer ones they were just like little they were born in like a shed so they've never really been they've never really had to hunt for anything because the family found them and fed them and took care of them and everything so they'll like they'll like they'll sniff the outside and they'll be like kind of interested in it or had the concern of being hunted no they've never had to deal with that

2:12:21cory is the name of full plane chat said my cat is terrified of the concept of an outside existing nice it's a lot easier to take care of them that way hey do you want to talk about zillow yeah uh yeah uh zillow launches a wow themed micro site as a marketing okay as a marketing stunt i saw this in my google news and went hmm and then kept scrolling because i was like there's There's no way that's actually real. The experience coincides with WoW introducing player housing for the first time tied to the upcoming Midnight expansion. The microsite features both player-created homes and Blizzard-built homes, some with 3D tours.

2:13:01In a move that can only be described as savagely realistic, you can't actually buy the houses, but users can hilariously claim a free in-game Zillow-inspired doormat. The listings are written in character with fictional Zillow real estate agents.

2:13:28Given the current affordability and housing crisis, does this seem tone deaf on the part of Zillow and Blizzard? Is it just fun? It's definitely just fun. I mean, I don't care about it at all, but I'm sure it's fun for someone. But I don't think they're being tone deaf, dude. People are buying houses. It's just not most people. And like, no, I don't think they're just going to give you an entire house in the game for free. So a doormat is a collectible item that's still neat as a free thing. Part of just a fun, random promotional campaign. I think just don't think about it too much.

2:14:14okay the site's responsive again for me now oh dang it stopped working again what the heck okay well whatever that's kind of what it looks like good enough the site's working fine for me that's weird oh here i'll go to luke's laptop sure there you go rugged rustic these are actually like shores it's funny because the the photos and the videos that i'm seeing for these are actually a lot better than most of the photos and videos that I see from realtors of actual homes. So that's kind of funny and kind of sad. Where's the HDR? Yeah, really.

2:14:52Bektar Donhamar. That's actually awesome. Wow. Wow. This is so much. There's a floor plan. We are destroying most realtor posted homes. Oh my goodness. Anything that lacks a floor plan is so annoying to me. All right. Meet the owner. That's not very normal. Neat. Fun. Oh, speaking of neat and fun, we should talk about what's neat and fun on Flowplane. Yes. FB announcement. Please read all the way through before going off topic. What? What? I don't think. What? Let's specifically go off topic. What? That's not. That wasn't the problem last time. The problem last time was that they put information that you needed at the beginning at the end.

2:15:43Yeah. This week's theme is, how many resources can Sammy steal from the company before being fired? We got a deep look inside what a week at LMG looks like with some LTT leaks. Sorry, not sorry. Sammy vlogged his entire week showcasing things like how production shoots are scheduled, the behind the scenes on set our camera setups uh merging our videos which is what we call it when we like um do packaging so title thumbnail that kind of thing it also includes a ton of insider info including leaking an entire month of ltt content in the first minute

2:16:28okay so that's this video oh wow people are loving this video all right well i'm glad that it was for something uh we also have a refreshed meet the team with mr david pancratz the technical production assistant sammy made pancratz fixes pc in this video because if it's for content you're allowed to make not it fix your things okay that's good to know as well i think he means his personal computer what Sammy I think that's what he means yeah that is not a workstation that we yeah provide to our employees it doesn't look like he just fixed it it looks like he upgraded it oh yeah that's the case that's from inventory right

2:17:24okay where are the lines here oh I see it's signed out to lost we also took in viewer questions which um we're looking for more questions featuring our new writer sean fray we took in viewer questions which we are looking for i have no idea what he's talking about and we're looking for more sure finally we also have an early ltd video that went up a few days ago showcasing the fluke ii915 and you would have known this if you were a float plane subscriber uh keep an eye out for more early releases like this one which will release right now oh is oh we're releasing the costco video oh that's not david's best thumbnail oh you know what i guess it's too late now cool um linus and david buy a pc from costco to answer one question is it the answer to rising pc prices or is it bait i'm gonna take the a out there alright save boop subscribe now at lmg.gg slash fp when to fill your weekend with fun content also we'll have a behind the scenes of DMS's wedding sometime next week seriously alright Sammy is like the embodiment of anything for the content seriously good stuff want to pick a topic uh do we talk about dlss again there's two dlss topics it sounds similar dlss is too good now youtuber two we've talked about this guy before yeah two clicks philip posted a video seeing how far they could push dlss while still having a oh i've seen this for sure uh quick recap for those who don't know dlss really we're going into that uh dlss or deep learning super sampling is NVIDIA's...

2:19:18Okay, yeah. NVIDIA's image generation algorithm that allows gamers to render their games at lower resolutions, which are then upscaled to a more playable resolution while maintaining high frame rates. The YouTuber tested Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 at 20 % render for 4K, meaning 764x430 all the way down to 1 % scale or 38x22. Just 38. by 22 pixels that's it and it's impressive how well dlss works now uh and we have a maybe a short yeah thing but you should go watch the video this is mind-blowing the fact that that you can kind of you could totally play that is nuts you could not well no but you could here is 136 by 76 so this is what like three percent or something or no because it's probably it's probably not linear because that's actually a much larger it's like three percent in each dimension but you guys should definitely check out this video it's got like half a million views because it's awesome here hold on i'm just gonna when did this come out because i feel like i saw this a bit ago yeah here you go so this is this is showing the difference between this is three weeks old yeah so this is original versus the upscaled one it's genuinely pretty fascinating how it can take that and turn it into that this and turn it into this

2:20:59genuinely incredible like there's a lot going on over here where i would have a hard time telling if this is a like my human eyes if this is a path leading off this way or if it's a shadow of this tree or like what the crap this is supposed to be how it managed to resolve any additional detail in the grass over here mind-blowing the way it kind of reconstructed the shadows and the lighting and the bark here based on this again mind blowing pretty impressive that was it just wanted to highlight that go watch two clicks phillips uh super cool video i just i knew i was like man i thought this was from a bit ago but yeah three weeks ago yep i watched that a while ago yeah we never we never kind of talked about it so guys go go check it out really really really cool nokie just uh threw the link in the chat so did dan nice bookmark that for later because you're not done watching i wouldn't have thought to put that in the doc but that was awesome.

2:22:00There's been a new world record set for the tiniest QR code. This source, this time, is Tom's Hardware. This is kind of incredible. You want to do the story? Sure. With a pixel size of 49 nanometers, the smaller than a bacteria QR codes were created as a collaboration between Vienna University of Technology and data storage company Cerebi. Cerebi? Cerebi? Sure. The codes are less than half the size of the previous record and require an electron microscope to read. The achievement will enable greater densities in Cerebytes. Yeah, Cerebyte makes more sense. I've heard of Cerebyte before. Cerebytes ceramic storage, which they claim could enable very long-term storage with capacities up to 100 petabytes by 2030.

2:22:50And no, I actually didn't dyslexia that. There's just a typo. Discussion question. How much storage do you really need at home? You know, for all those Linux ISOs. Well, there's been a lot of very musically focused Linux distros recently. How big is that even though? Not 100 petabytes. Yeah, like the Spotify rip was, I thought it was like, a petabyte. Yeah. A hundred petabytes. I mean, recalling this data is extremely challenging. This is meant for like, my understanding is like a very long-term resilient storage like mass amounts of storage and for that we need a lot but only if we care to preserve everything that's being created right now but so much of it is slop that i kind of so much of it i i don't i don't want wonder if we don't really need to archive it forgotten oh really i thought it was a petabyte 300 terabytes that sounds right to me i had in my brain 30 terabytes and i was like yeah it can't be enough but i i thought there was a three in it

2:24:09anyway i thought this was cool that's all no notes for this one well they put a few notes unreal engine tournament unreal tournament 2004 that okay who's responsible for calling it unreal engine tournament you know what it doesn't matter we're not going to name and shame the point is it was not called that it was called unreal tournament unreal tournament 2004 is now available for free thanks to community collaboration ut 2004 one of the greatest shooters of all time just received its first public patch in over 20 years this was made possible by old unreal a community support project dedicated to keeping early epic titles alive this patch includes support for windows linux and mac os along with various quality of life updates epic has given permission for them to host the original files so they have an easy to use installer available super cool shout out epic love to see it that's all i have to say about that yeah i found just for people wondering it's definitely 300 terabytes i I found some very early articles that seem to just be kind of making up part of the story that said a petabyte, but it was confirmed for sure a lot of times that it's 300 terabytes.

2:25:25All right. Meta wants to, oh yeah. Meta wants to make your grandma immortal. A patent granted late in December outlines the use of an LLM to simulate a person's social media activity when the user takes a long break or is deceased. The document states that the impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the platform. No s***! Your new AI Nana could like, comment, and respond to DMs from beyond the grave, potentially even joining audio and video calls. meta says the technology would be great for influencers who want to take a break from social media without giving up income get rid of it dan thank you one of the crazy things is i saw this in my google news feed probably 10 minutes after seeing somebody on facebook so let's jump on facebook go to marketplace there's also somebody on facebook who's definitely passed away, that you know, worked here.

2:26:40And that was like, you know, a sad moment to see them. I'm pretty happy that I didn't have a new message from them.

2:26:52I have some relatives that are getting pretty close to the end. And the last thing that I want is fake, real conversations with them. I'm instead taking time now to talk to them while I still can. And that's what we should do, if possible. And if it's not possible, this is not the answer. Cool. Hey, but in other news. the netherlands defense secretary said on a podcast that the f-35 like the warplane can be jailbroken just like an iphone implying that european forces could maintain the aircraft software without us and lockheed martin support currently the f-35 software is managed through lockheed martin's autonomic logistics information system which pushes updates to the fleet every year or two european countries own the physical planes but the u.s controls the software and update pipeline israel is currently the only country that has negotiated a deal with lockheed martin allowing it to run its own software on the f-35 fleet the comments came amid broader european fears that the u.s could remotely disable f-35 fleets oh boy gonna butcher this Joachim Schraenshofer, head of comms at German defense contractor Hensult, previously said the idea of a remote kill switch was more than just a rumor.

2:28:29I gotta say, the main reason that I flagged this for the WAN show was that while I realized that this was a problem on a telephone and I realized that it was a problem on a tractor, I did not realize that this was a problem on a military jet Oh yeah For how much you pay for them you've got to be f***ing kidding me that you can't just Oh I thought you meant the remote kill switch Oh yeah that too Yeah that part yeah That's insane Yeah How did we all like even at that level accept that this is okay Can you make an F-35? No That's why There are alternatives There's not a ton and they would all have probably a similar problem That's insane I mean yes and no I bet if everyone got together and boycott Basically just said no we will literally not buy any If you don't deal with this How long do you think Lockheed would hold out?

2:29:28I feel like they'd just try to hide it Ugh I mean that's a very military thing to do In other German news Acer and Asus have been blocked from selling PCs in Germany They could also just say, no, have fun being not superior. Right. Another angle they could take. A German court has granted Nokia an injunction against the two firms selling desktops and laptops. Stock that's already in the country can still be sold. Nokia claims Acer, Asus, and TV maker Hisense are infringing on three patents related to the high-efficiency video codec HEVC, aka H265. Hisense decided to enter a licensing agreement with Nokia in January, but Acer and Asus continue to fight the allegations in court.

2:30:17HEVC is considered a standard essential patent due to its widespread use, which means special rules apply to ensure the technology is broadly available while the patent holder is still fairly compensated. And that's it. That's why HEVC never really took off because of stuff like this, which blows. In other news, Google suddenly cares about IP theft. This is hilarious. is yeah um where are we at where is that one top yeah i think we've kind of talked about this one before i don't know how old this is but google is accusing commercially motivated actors of trying to clone the proprietary logic behind gemini ai um in other news the entire world is accusing Google of slurping up a proprietary...

2:31:03Yeah. Yeah. Google says distillation attacks have agents querying Gemini up to 100 ,000 times to try to extract the underlying model. That's hilarious. This is also a thing that has been happening for a long time and has happened to other people as well, most notably OpenAI. Model distillation... Ah, hey! Okay. Model distillation attacks aren't a new thing. In early 2025, OpenAI suggested that Chinese startup DeepSeek had distilled OpenAI's models to create their own cheaper, more efficient model, which as far as my understanding goes is effectively confirmed. But I don't actually know that. Where's the boop, boop, boop, boop, boop?

2:31:44Nice. Yeah, where's the line? How much does your company need to be worth to ignore the law? I just think this is hilarious because IP theft matters immediately when it's their IP theft, and it doesn't matter that what underpins it was mass theft on a scale that i don't think the world has ever seen before yeah yeah crazy last topic harmful chemicals may be in your headphones an eu environmental advocacy group called talks free life for all released a study that tested 81 pairs of headphones and supposedly found hazardous substances in all of them gotta be careful the substances included known endocrine disruptors which led to some highly sensationalized pieces suggesting that speakers would be better for your health compared to headphones if you are trying to avoid cancer the study actually does seem to have some validity to it but it mainly aimed to address companies that circumvent regulations with equally bad alternatives since these chemicals are handled on a substance by substance basis not to mention that these chemicals are only an issue from cumulative long-term exposure across many kinds of plastics products like apple airpods pro twos and sony wh1000xm5s were rated safe the real problems were knockoffs from marketplaces like temu um that's it's not surprising but it's also like dang the ones that are safe are really expensive um also okay riley sent me another kind of summary of this that i had sort of expected to be in the summary that was in the uh the wanshow doc um but basically he was kind of saying that a lot of this is sort of extrapolating what may be a concern so commenters have connected the headlines of that they might be using alternative chemicals that are less regulated and um that some of these chemicals still need to be like studied and turned it into connected these dots and um gone like oh no all headphones are poisonous and then meanwhile the other side has gone completely other side of the pendulum swing and gone that's such an overreaction that it must be completely safe and there is no problem but as usual the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

2:34:15Dan, I think it's time for After Dark. I've got one more. Chat really wants me to talk about this one, or us, really. We've really kind of two more, I guess. YouTube went down. People wanted our comments on this. Oh, that's bad. I think we're both like, dang. Whoops. They should not do that. Yeah. For me, it was really interesting for some people to see how compartmentalized certain systems are because people were like, oh, like with direct links, I can still play videos, but like the homepage is down and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, yeah, these systems are really fascinating. But anyways, moving on from that, there's also this, we talked about a little bit in the pre-show, hackers exposed Discord age verification system issue after Persona front-end code was left wide open.

2:35:01We don't have topic notes on this, but this is, I think what I said in the pre-show was like whoever did this i want to shake your hand um great work congratulations you made your point and that's such a good point to make and such important timing that you nailed it so fast this is why this is a problem way to go thank you um but yeah this just goes to show that we need them to not collect data like this because it's just gonna go out there

2:35:41yeah and again just like we were talking last week try some alternatives have a like fun random day with your friends where you're like let's play three different games and each time let's try a different voice chat service just for fun um and and see how it goes and even if you end up having both or something like that at least start legitimizing alternatives um what are the biggest issues when you have markets like the voice chat market is there is only one thing that matters right now and that sucks and if we can even make it so that there's two that is such a massive gain if there's if we start legitimizing make it normalized that there's other ones that people use then discord's market show will fall quickly uh and that's a good idea the whole 3d printed guns thing is continuing to evolve california bill would restrict 3d printer sales to state approved models to prevent printing gun parts joins washington and new york on legal offensive yeah that's not going to work so first of all it won't work second of all rough because now there's now there's all this insider collusion of of companies bribing people to be on the approved list and there's already an incredible amount of corruption in every single government everywhere so that's definitely going to happen i'm not even calling out america that's just the world if this was in Canada the same thing would be a problem especially BC hey

2:37:13yeah yeah after dark? yes after dark button button button there we go alright up first hey LLD and future me Always watch VOD on Saturday mornings. What's the scariest thing about starting your own business? And how did you deal with that fear? The scariest thing is not having money to eat and to pay the people who work for you and your mortgage. And how did you deal with that fear? Work harder so that that doesn't happen. And I mean, it's just it's a tale as old as time, right? There are advantages to entrepreneurship and there are advantages to employment. Hitching your cart to a horse that has been walking for a long time and seems to have a lot of road out ahead of it offers security while entrepreneurship can offer incredible opportunity.

2:38:21but I forget what percentage of businesses that fail in the first five years, but it's a lot. So it's not a guarantee and it's not right for everyone, but it was right for me and I'm glad it worked out the way that it did. Oh, I accidentally just archived the site. No, I didn't. Nope, that was me. Nice. Hi, Linus and Luke. My grade school kids love gaming and learning about PC parts thanks to Astro Bot. but windows feels complex versus consoles slash tablets slash chromebooks any tips for teaching them a quote unquote real operating system you said they love learning just maybe try to make it fun yeah and i mean realistically my i was kind of blown away by some of the stuff that my son was doing so that he could um mod minecraft and stuff they just have to they have to have a reason to learn it otherwise they're not going to bother windows is not that complicated these days if you are sufficiently motivated yeah to do it and kids brains are so malleable i was seeing do you see the do you see that kid that like destroyed the sub three second solve on a three by three rubik's cube recently kids like seven or something i don't i don't know how old he is seven year olds with chess or rubik's cubes are terrifying yeah hold on what's this kid's name uh theodore zad zad zad zad 2.76 seconds 2.76 seconds that's absurd seven years ago this was a question will there ever be a sub three sub three i could see as the very edge of possibility with an absurd solve.

2:40:12Well, 2.76. Like, obliterated. Obliterated the record. That's a, yeah, when you're getting down into that such a small amount of total time, that's an insane amount of time to chop off. Uh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This isn't it, is it? Yeah, there we go. It would have to be like at an event. so he gets 15 seconds to look at it

2:40:52is that wild or what like wow I'm not a moron but you'll never do that I will never do that, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how long I worked at it. Doesn't matter. Yep. I saw a video age ago, which was like a six-sided CNC machine attached to a Rubik's Cube, and it did it in like one second. It was like twice as fast as a computer-controlled robot. Mind-blowing. Katoa says, I can solve in five minutes. Yeah, exactly. Scrappy TP, you'll also never kickflip. 100%. uh so so so give your kids credit don't baby them they can figure it out they just have to be sufficiently motivated my project it's like uh people say learn programming by making a calculator no find a problem do something do something more interesting yeah my gang thinking about automate something around your house yeah thinking about age verification who do you think would be able to reliably figure out and implement safe age verification.

2:42:00Maybe Steam, maybe DEFCON. Well, that's the whole point, is that you can't. It's not going to happen. And we need to stop, like, chasing this weird dragon. I don't, uh... The only solution is for someone who already is tracking all of this, like the government, except I don't trust them to keep it safe. No. Well, that's what I'm saying, though. No, I'm agreeing with you by saying no. Except I don't trust them to keep it safe any more than I would, even less, I'd say, than I would trust a corporate entity. So, since we can't do it safely, we need to just not do it. It's like asking, like... And what's it all for?

2:42:46Like, who could figure out how to reliably make it so that I can enjoy my crystal meth? How about we just don't crystal meth? Yeah. It's the thing is like, it's going to be circumvented anyways. Obviously. Okay. This is pretty funny. Um, McBain says leisure suit. Larry solved that 35 years ago. Do you know what the age check was for leisure suit? Larry just asked you questions that only older people would know the answer to. It wouldn't work in the age of Google and, um, and like chat GPT or whatever but here here here here here here um maybe you have to like um

2:43:31control plain and simple there's yeah I mean we've been controlling data collection but my my thing is like if you try to think of it positively what is what is the gain and the gain effectively doesn't exist because it's it's so la la land it's like okay we can keep the kids from doing these bad things. If they care, they're going to go around it. Like, it's... You have... Let's play a game. Tiptoe Through the Tulips was recorded by... It plays a ukulele. Very tall, very high voice. I wouldn't be able to play this game. I'm looking at some of the questions. I would not be able to play this game.

2:44:14I mean, you would know probably this one. Yeah. a kid probably wouldn't care at that time. Do you know what a neighbor jacket is? Nope. Where's the beef? Where's the beef? Okay, I wouldn't have got that. Tiny Tim. I'm upset about myself. Does a pair of queens beat three deuces? I don't think so. Three twos? Yeah. I assume this is poker yes in oh in blackjack yes in blackjack good gravy three pair of two pair I don't know this is multiple choice so they're rather oh you just have to what jokers do you have type them in yeah it is my banana still there or not have I upgraded my card which is non-alcoholic see Perrier like this was their solution to age verification which is pretty based actually that's so cool that's so smart uh the result of watergate was you know back when scandals actually had consequences yeah oh yeah any kid these days would just say nothing

2:45:34sorry that was all too real we we paid them more money for some reason

2:45:41all right dad moving on hi dll the result of watergate was someone made a watergate coin oh watergate nfts oh my god this is a real world that we live in hi dll would you rather lose five percent of your personal data at a at random every year no backups are allowed or have 100 percent of your data perfectly preserved forever but completely unencrypted and publicly accessible five percent gone see ya

2:46:23he's trying to calculate how much of it's leaked anyways

2:46:31a hundred percent of your data when you say data you get here help me help me out a little bit are we talking digital files i kind of took this as like your nasa at home that's how i took it as okay but do i have a chance to scrub it first oh it's not like today it's like if you want to store stuff in the future so i could go through and i could like remove any pictures of my passport that i took at some point to like send to yeah so you could book a flight but they would have to be deleted you couldn't have them anywhere else yeah yeah i think you could never store them ever either i don't think you could take a picture of it i'd accept that going forward i just have to have like perfect digital hygiene but that would mean you could never take a picture under any circumstance of your of your passport that's how i'm interpreting i could message it to someone because it's it's the picture is only for convenience my convenience not the recipient too so like honestly it would make me more considerate i I think that's not in the spirit of the question.

2:47:32It just says personal data. I interpret it as like things I would store on a NAS, but I think taking a photo is personal data. It would be saved on your phone and then it would be publicly accessible. Yeah, so then I wouldn't take that picture anymore is what I'm saying. Like I could send them text, but I wouldn't count that as like, I wouldn't store that on a NAS. So does that count? Because I interpreted it as stored on a NAS and that's what I'm even remotely considering. if we're talking every message that i ever send to anyone ever forever that is personal data technically then okay so which one is it i leaned more to why it's the nas side i think that was maybe a little more easily conceptualizable otherwise everything else is just like oh well i just let's just not use the internet you have like your taxes and stuff i mean i don't think i keep that on my nas i don't do my taxes so that's gonna say does your is your wife yeah but that's not my personal data then like i don't have it so i'm just losing five percent but you might be able to do the hundo what about you dan i think it was on the nas i would man that's just personal data i don't think you can be like just only the things i put on my desk okay they said personal data then it's got to be the five percent and i'll just take five of every picture and hope that because for me it's all about just mathematically game it just buy a ton of extra hard drives that's what i would do there's like well no because i think 40 million pictures of one parking spot i don't know that's your naz if you think about don't look at my camera roll either um i think maybe more in the spirit of like five percent of like you know if you had 40 million of the same picture you would lose that picture yeah probably it's all hash so if it's the same picture disagree i would no i would take i would just like you would gamble with it i'd hit my shutter five times every time so they're all slightly different photos man i'd print photos i think that would actually be a huge part of my my countermeasures against this is i would actually print photos yeah just go back interesting interesting because for me anything else is like replaceable but photos are not i think i'm gonna do the 100 you're gonna do the 100 and just put it all out there because there's stuff that i would not want to lose like there's a lot of stuff that i cloud replicate nightly you know it's kind of my my super slide data um you can't pirate anything anymore ever again not that you do well you can you'll just people will just know yeah so then you can't.

2:50:11Why not? Because you get sued to oblivion. Oh, come on. Not in Canada. There's no obfuscation, though. I think you still would. I'll just slice in some zip bombs. It'll be fine. You can't be sued for pirating anything in Canada. That doesn't seem right. No, I really don't think so.

2:50:29Someone, not a lawyer, but like I... This would be like an insane haven.

2:50:37Online piracy is a criminal offense in Canada. yeah but what's the consequence for it like that someone would have to actually pursue it

2:50:51and is that for downloading or is that for sharing i'm trying to look through it i think i think just uh leeching you can't really uh get like hit too hard for in 2022 22.4 percent of canadians access pirate services That sounds about right. Let's go. All right. With all the tech prices, do you think Optane... Apparently thousands of Canadians every year are the targets of legal action based on piracy. Yeah, but is that for redistribution? Because that's my understanding. Doesn't seem too specific. Anyway, sorry, keep going. with all of the tech prices do you think optane or ready boost might make a return not optane because intel and uh micron yeah completely divorced over that whole thing uh man optane was so cool but the concept of an ssd cache i was actually thinking about that earlier as we were about hard drive and storage prices it works really well it does it's it's kind of a a very underrated solution to a problem that became not a problem but is becoming a problem again which is kind of neat because i thought it was a fun solution as well i use it on my nas it's fun it's cool it's interesting nifty it's neat i tried to buy an opt-in drive because linus was talking them up so much uh and they were like 250 bucks for a teeny tiny one when i was looking and then really yeah i think it was like right near the end or something and yeah i just got like 128 gig ssd for like a dollar at that that time back in my day you can still get the 16 gig ones for like 10 bucks 20 with delivery yeah i wasn't looking on ebay because i'm stupid all right here's 10 of the 16 gig ones for 53 stuff like this is always confusing to me because i really don't think a lot obviously people bought them right um but like they were never popular that i was aware of so like they clearly produced them at a volume that like people have this many of them you know it's like what who was buying these where where did they where did they come from where did they go server offloading i think but like 16 games for what i don't know what who put these in anything what are we even talking about here no idea yeah right wild anyway where do you see the line between a company's agency and the need to act upon the whims of a consumer base.

2:53:48I.e. why pressure Apple to support AirPods on Android if it's not the vision for the product? Because they're Bluetooth headphones that benefit from the industry-wide standard that is Bluetooth. And in my mind, a basic part of a product is providing ongoing support, which Apple clearly agrees with, given that they actually do a phenomenal job, generally speaking of providing ongoing software and firmware support for their products and i bought it that's why i bought it it's mine you have an obligation to warranty it and support it and the fact that i didn't buy another one of your products is just utter arrogance

2:54:37as for what their vision of the experience is that's nice but my vision of the experience is that when you provide a firmware update i have a way to apply it without buying another one of your products because i already bought one it's pretty simple to me and the fact that anyone will put Apple's dong so far down their throat to defend something like that is mind blowing. They don't know you. They don't know your name. They don't care about you. Stop defending bad behavior. If Google did the same thing or Samsung did the same thing, I would think it was ridiculous. If you buy the product, you are the customer and you should be supported.

2:55:28Full stop. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. I'm thinking about switching to SteamOS on my main PC, but I have different monitors. Should I get all the same monitors, or just wing it with the three I have now?

2:55:49Wing it. Wing it. Save that money, son. Yeah. does it not support mismatched monitors or something bezels i think they just want their bezels to match and like everything be even and the bases look the same don't worry about it yeah don't worry about it hey hey lld thinking of building a 10 gigabit nas if i am running zfs Z2 in TrueNAS, would I benefit from buying SAS drives with HPA? The XRX24 SAS drives are almost the same price with current pricing. I wouldn't get SAS drives just because then you're limited to using SAS HBAs forever. And for a home user, the benefit of SAS is just not going to materialize.

2:56:41i would i would go sata assuming that the cost is equal the only way that i would go sass as a home user is that is if for some reason there was like a lot like like not like a large quantity like like a like an auction lot like like a bunch of sass drives and they were an amazing deal like way cheaper so much cheaper that i could buy a sass hba and and the backup and that would be all my storage that I needed because I don't see that happening right now. Yeah, that's not going to happen right now. But that would be the only way that you would get me to go SaaS. If I was just buying new drives, I would go SATA for sure.

2:57:22Every time. This is like, man, if you don't know why you need SaaS, you don't need it. So someone was talking earlier. I don't remember why I had this thought, but somebody was talking earlier about like, oh yeah like buying new stuff right now sucks but like the use market's always there man the use market sucks right now yeah it does the use market is terrible right now Crystal's still talking about the Apple firmware update thing she goes if you pay for an escort you shouldn't be the one doing the deep throating basically

2:57:58you are the customer assert your rights well it kind of depends I guess I mean if you're into it I'm not gonna yuck your yum or whatever Some people might be into that with Apple There are people that are into financial

2:58:15Financial abuse kink? Like what? No that's a thing What? Yeah That's not like financial No it is What? Yeah it's a thing Shut up Yeah people might be that way with Apple

2:58:33yeah look at chat that's okay fin dom oh I thought you said fem dom no no no no no no you can have both I think usually it is both it usually is both yeah

2:58:51pay pig

2:59:01it involves a power dynamic where the sub would need to willingly relinquishes financial control often without any sexual contact, sometimes through online platforms.

2:59:21The sub will often be insulted using terms like tribute or draining.

2:59:37This is wild. so maybe people like that about apple

2:59:49avon fox's line is how are you so online and yet often so not why would i go looking for this how how could i possibly come across i didn't go looking for this he's already got a wife that does all his taxes and handles all his money you're gonna say are you sure to me you think i of all people would be into something like that are you kidding me here's all my money that you won't spend I don't mean looking for it to engage in it. That's like as far away from me as possible I could see you finding your way through a Wikipedia wormhole of like weird kinks or something I could see it. Oh okay yeah sure I'd say if you're looking at like a you know those like political spectrum grids yeah.

3:00:31If there's like my interests and this we're like. Oh 100 % opposite corners. 100 % this is so bizarre to me like i could like i i think i don't get it i think i've had a pretty clear stance that like sex work is work and i'm not like as long as everyone's adult and consenting and whatever i i think you know sex acts i'm like whatever being paid to go shopping which is also work whatever works for your relationship keep the stuff okay whatever works for your relationship you know what i i'm not gonna i'm not gonna judge i keep my nose out of your business you keep your nose out of mine everything's good everything's chill but this is fucked up i'm gonna try to not yuck your yum but i'm definitely gonna go hmm yeah okay let's yeah like like like i could i narrow my eyes enough to express my eye narrowness for this one what are you doing Like it's like it's like if you're gonna if you're going to If you're gonna hire a sex worker like it's right in the name in it.

3:01:36Yeah, you're missing part You might as well at least get laid But then it would be a glucose guardian situation what the hell's a glucose guardian gender neutral term for sugar daddy

3:01:53Shut up No! It's current year! What? It's current year! Is that real? Did you just come up with that? No. No, I did not. Oh my god!

3:02:09It's current year! You gotta be gender neutral! Come on, it's fine!

3:02:15Oh man. Them babies gotta, you know, have love too.

3:02:32I'm gonna turn into a Minecraft villager

3:02:42Alright I actually had a follow up question about sass drives Sure yeah maybe just get us out of here I have a I have like a bucket of SAS interposers at home. Is that also something that could be experimented with? This is you personally? Yeah, me personally. Because I bought one of those Facebook servers, I think, or something like that. So I've got like what the hell was it called? I can't remember. Those are those, they're port multipliers, right? Something like that. It kind of converts SATA drives into sass drives and vice versa oh it might only be one direction it might just be sata to sass oh yeah that makes sense so that again that would only be if you have sass hbas or like a sass um jbot or something but but if they were sata to sass drives would that be something to consider if you wanted to like flirt with the idea of sass drives i just i wouldn't flirt with sass drives i I don't care about them for home NAS use.

3:03:51What? What now?

3:03:57No husks and float plane shots. This is the stream DMS's kids will see when they watch when they see their parents wedding. They won't watch the whole thing. It'll be fine. We're talking about glucose guardians and fin dom. Hey, it's after dark.

3:04:21Oh, no. I'm sorry. This is also the first inoperable stream on LMG Clips. Yeah. I forgot about that. We never even mentioned that. We're migrating the WAN show to the LMG Clips channel over the next little while. so we're going to be simultaneously streaming on both channels for some amount of time and then eventually it's going to go lmg clips exclusive um as we migrate it off of the uh the main ltt channel i've been hanging out with them they're super chill oh yeah there's like 350 people watching over there yeah they're really cool yeah so you're gonna want to get in the habit of watching over on LMG Clips sometime over the next little bit.

3:05:10Yes, LMG Clips will be rebranded. In the future. Kevin says, oh, please, no. What difference would that make? Now, you're watching on Floatplane, Kevin. It's not gonna affect me. This is for YouTube, crying out loud. Yeah. Yeah, sorry, just to clarify, this only affects YouTube viewers. Yes, yes, Floatplane forever. Relax, everyone. Okay, well, my brain hurts.

3:05:35Final merch message. Sure. Ah! Calm. Damn it. Thanks for that. Are you going to read it, Dan? I was just letting a beat play out there. Thank you. I appreciate that. Greetings, all. Is there any update on the light switches in Linus's home? Did they get all of the kinks worked out yet? The new ones are here. I haven't installed them yet. I will. but there's just a lot of stuff going on yes this is an adequate media thing david easy uh we need to we need to get the show off of an lmg owned channel and migrate a channel that's like kind of worthless right now to um adequate media

3:06:23merch message you mean pay pig post send me your pps i don't think it can be because you get the product yeah if if you bought it and for some reason linus got it then i think that would make sense what if we just sent them nothing yeah can they just can they just like buy me screwdrivers is that like what do i have to do oh no that was just bits i think nothing in this scenario you sure you can do whatever you want i don't know though what if i want to do really weird stuff with it then I think you probably get more people we'll see you next week same bad time same bad channel bye

3:07:24You