My Family Left Me - WAN Show August 7, 2026

20:37Luke Lafreniere:Why it looked like looking through a window instead of watching on a screen. And so I did. I grabbed a 4K Blu-ray Remux, like not a re-encoded one, and started switching back and forth between the inputs. And the difference is so subtle. But there's a little bit of banding in the 4K Blu-ray. Just a little bit. Not much. Just a little bit. but the effect is greater than the difference that I can, that I can pick out because it may, it takes light from looking like an encoded color to looking like window light. Yeah. And the other one is film grain. So this is something that I've really struggled with in the transition from analog to digital, right?

21:34Luke Lafreniere:In analog, we all agreed that things like CRT scan lines and film grain looked like it was supposed to look and looked natural. but as we've transitioned to watching that analog media through digital players over digital connections on digital screens what we've ended up with is that film grain in my opinion mostly just contributes to more garbage in to be misinterpreted by my encoder and my decoder as garbage out but by pushing the bit rate so high it's kind of like what I first observed when I used the first 5k LCD where I went oh I can just run this at a non-native resolution now and it actually doesn't really matter so this is the threshold for me where we're encoding at a high enough fidelity that film grain looks natural again instead of just looking like crappy encoding and decoding so those are the two big things now now now now now now hold on spoiler for the video so if you you know want to hear the conclusion when you watch the actual video then do this um is it worth it oh hell no no i mean there's like no way i wouldn't pay that kind of dude i found a movie on their service that was 45 fucking dollars to buy.

23:03Luke Lafreniere:Nice. Like,

23:06Linus Sebastian:how much, so Aladdin,

23:09Luke Lafreniere:1992's Aladdin was$30. U.S. Dollars. You can buy it on YouTube for five bucks. And that's not even the cinematic 4K format that has the like super high bit rate. Oh yeah, so for, Dan, just so you know, it's 444. Yeah, right? So that's the difference in like color banding that we're talking about. about you also said to buy so you can you can rent some films for as little as like seven bucks eight bucks no i was i was more interested that there was the option to even just buy them you

23:43Linus Sebastian:can't me too that's why it's not just subscription i thought it would be like 45 bucks to rent

23:47Luke Lafreniere:however you know i think there's a longer conversation to be had around this because it does use a proprietary drm that when you're buying it are you do are you buying it is it forever and kaleidoscape's been around a long enough time now that I you know I look at their model and I go okay well they haven't f***ed anybody over yet so they at least have some credibility there but I mean companies don't last forever companies that last for a hundred years are are so few and far between that they're a statistical anomaly you know what I just I thought you were disagreeing with that I was like sorry sorry sorry I don't think that's a controversial I'm poking through their website.

24:26Linus Sebastian:Oh dude this testimonials crazy. And there's Martin Scorsese. Yeah, and you keep scrolling

24:32Luke Lafreniere:Oh no no no look at this look at this quote. Frankly, I don't know what I would do without it says Martin Scorsese

24:40Linus Sebastian:Holy crap, what the heck the next one is Ben Affleck Who they put as filmmaker? Sure. I mean yes. Yeah, Good Will Hunting he wrote. No, I know it's just that he does everything

24:53Luke Lafreniere:Why is he getting a steady game? I think he's actually done basically every role. That's cool. Yeah.

25:00Linus Sebastian:No, as far as my understanding goes, that's true. Yeah, super multi-talented guy.

25:02Luke Lafreniere:Casual Josh Gad. My goodness. Yep. Pretty incredible. It goes downhill pretty fast from there.

25:12Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Random cinema enthusiast. Goes to someone's first name.

25:19Linus Sebastian:This guy. Rich dude.

25:23Luke Lafreniere:Those first two is wild, though. Crazy. Wait, the first three is pretty wild. You don't know who Josh Gad is? No. Oh, that's Olaf from Frozen. Oh, okay. And also the lead of Book of Mormon when it first hit Broadway, if I recall correctly, and just various other things. He's a super talented guy. So, yeah, I've been working on just kind of experiencing it. It's a loner. Nuts. I only have it for, I think, like three months or something like that, so I'm gonna get the most out of it while I got it. The interface is funky wonky. I'll wait to show that in the video, but it reminds me of Final Fantasy VI.

26:03Luke Lafreniere:Just to give you some idea. I'm talking bright blue text boxes, big old white text. Whoa. Very installer friendly. And it took me a while to realize that. I was like, this does not feel very premium. And then I went, the customer's never supposed to see this. Oh.

26:25Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Yeah. I see. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

26:30Luke Lafreniere:Wiley Giraffe, we're talking about the Strato K, not the E. That's the one for poor people, Wiley Giraffe. The K is the new one. He found the one for three grand.

26:41Linus Sebastian:Oh, yeah. I love as well when you go to their website under their more, they list marine first. Oh, yeah. Then home theater. Oh, yeah, buddy. My goodness.

26:51Luke Lafreniere:Gotta put one on the yacht. Oh my god. Yeah, buddy.

26:59Luke Lafreniere:This is classic if you have to ask. You know what I'm saying? Yep. It's actually great for marine use, though, because you don't stream it. You cache it locally. You've pre-downloaded. Yep, so when you're not going to have internet or whatever, especially in the pre-Starlink days, this would... How many movies could it store, though, you said? 7 to 10. Yeah, what? On the box. But remember, you got to get the server. You got to get the server. You got a yacht. You don't have a server on your yacht.

27:30Linus Sebastian:Your yatch has a server.

27:31Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, what are you even talking about? Ugh.

27:37Oh, man.

27:38Linus Sebastian:How much does their ultimate 4K system performance meets luxury Terra server thing cost? You can buy it at Best Buy. Oh, no, you can buy it online at Best Buy.

27:47Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, you can buy stuff on Best Buy. I have a feeling that most people are not. Okay, hold on a second. What is red carpet home cinema? Okay. Oh, my God. Apparently, there's another secret. Yeah. There's another secret Netflix for billionaires. Hey, look. It's our ad, too. Nice. Sure, whatever. Okay. They can rent current-run movies. Whoa. Holy crap. For$1 ,500 to$3 ,000 a pop. No, but Luke that no no no that's current run though. No, I know that's like stuff. I know I didn't know you could do that I can watch up. No, I'm no the odyssey on my phone before anybody else join now fifteen thousand dollars plus what are we oh wait hold on apparently these guys don't exist anymore Oh red carpet home cinema calm is look on So that was just like a referral link.

28:44Luke Lafreniere:Okay, maybe they're dead offers first run this is why I'm broke.com okay hold on what is this rubber band gatling gun mini retro external display TV I don't know nevermind okay check it out yeah nope they're gone they're gone sorry they're gone so I guess Kaleidoscape is the only game in town crazy anyway yeah I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I've really been doing on my week off playing lots of badminton and played the tournament that i was gonna miss i was gonna miss my own annual tournament at smash champs but instead i was able to play it so nice yeah won the first uh first match then crashed out in the next two so yeah i don't know if you want to talk about it how did the thing go i want to talk about it okay i don't know what you're talking about uh the the thing that other dan did oh uh good nice yeah oh dude oh man okay that's one of the things i was working on this afternoon that i'm really excited about so if you're on float plane there's a float plane exclusive that actually ended up being like a certified mega banger people freaking loved it um it was originally supposed to be a mainline video on ltt but it took so long to come out yeah that it just didn't make sense to release it publicly but we did still release it

30:02Linus Sebastian:on float plane it was me i think the non-float plane audience genuinely would have been very confused yeah but the flow plane audience is going to be a little bit more dialed in so it's okay

30:10Luke Lafreniere:yep so it was me vibe coding um basically if you're if you're into pickleball it's pretty much the um oh what what is this uh i think it's called duper yeah it's pretty much the duper system for pickleball which is pretty much the elo system uh that is used in chess so basically you've got a rating and they've kind of adapted it to a narrower band of number values i swear

30:40Linus Sebastian:every player rating system ever can ultimately be boiled down to elo with extra steps yeah starcraft freaking it's all it's all just chess rating with extra steps it's all just elo it's

30:51Luke Lafreniere:all the elo system so so anyway it's it's uh basically i vibe coded just to see what it would be like an elo rating system and like tournament management dashboard um that ended up the simplest way um to do it was just to use google sheets and then a bunch of scripting and automations and formulas in order to have like a check-in sheet and manage events uh print out little like match cards that people could report their scores on create like a dashboard for entering the scores and then it was able to track people's people's elo scores as part of that video the there was like a challenge component where a real developer in this case um sorry does he use his name publicly not his last one cool so a different dan not that dan totally different dan uh who works for the company uh would get the same ish number of hours to make something actually good like a developer would make it and then we would compare my solution to his the real reason we did any of this was because it's really hard for me to get dev time from this guy unless it's content yeah so it didn't even end up being content except it's on float plane the me vibe coding it saga including doing some review of my finished product and stuff to explain the reason why

32:14Linus Sebastian:it didn't end up launching is basically that uh this whole like you know clod code um running it locally looping type thing uh started happening in like the middle of that so this was purely an llm and it was purely before pre-agentic era pretty much yeah and pre pre-clawed clode and all that kind of stuff so it's like by the time the video would have launched every single freaking comment would have been what the heck is this why didn't you use this other thing yeah so it was

32:50Luke Lafreniere:like why didn't you use a good one because we recorded it a while ago deal with it um so so anyway dan's been working on that and uh we got a new version of it that he actually came out to see working in person last night which was pretty great and we found some bugs in like queuing for who goes on court but compared to my system which was only able to do like open doubles with fixed groups of four and you just play your six matches and we record the scores and that's it uh he's expanded it to be able to do elo ratings for open doubles women's doubles mixed doubles singles uh in addition to um like a really nice dashboard for tracking your progress over time uh way better setups for different formats so we don't have to do just like a pod based system he calls it where you play with the same people all night we'll also be able to do just like a ranked night so over time during the evening you can actually be like re-rated more like you would in like online matchmaking um he's working on an interface where we'll be able to have tablets beside every court so people can just like boop their wristbands and then start a match which is so freaking cool yeah um trying to think of like what else he's uh he's done basically just the admin and maintenance of it is going to be so much better and then i've without speaking with you also hinted to him that if this thing is good enough i see no reason why other clubs couldn't potentially use it there's a there's a few different things we've made um that we should

34:35Linus Sebastian:probably have conversations about like should we just productize them yeah the problem is that the rigor that has to go into it once you do that i know is very high there's also a lot of ways that something that might uh might be built that doesn't like it's not portable it works with the systems that we have that's not necessarily a system that everybody's going to have um etc etc etc but um a scrappy also asked who gets to be support it's like yeah there's like there's a lot more conversation that starts to come up um what i would like to see first i can tell you there's a lot of money in like do you have customers this would be what i would look for and who's gonna sell it linus not me who's gonna sure as heck not me we've seen that from float plane uh but yeah maybe there's there's a couple i mean there's there's things that other dan has built that i think there should be some pretty serious conversations about that around There's things from the lab that I think could have a discussion there.

35:39Linus Sebastian:But we need people to sell it. We need to figure out what the potential customer base would be because it would take upfront investment to move those things to something that could be a product instead of an internal tool. Ongoing support and maintenance budgeting, which is a much bigger commitment

35:58Luke Lafreniere:than just here's a tool we built. It works good enough for us. like okay i remember showing you the internal systems that we used at ncix right did you do you remember seeing that that interface it was like hairy sweaty like sloppy ass it was so bad but man i could do my job i could i could fly through that thing but if i ever had to show anybody else how to use it like it it would the onboarding curve for like a like a product manager like category manager type of position was crazy like i was years into my role and i would still have to go to someone like uh you know william the the ncix back-end whisperer if i wanted to figure out how to do something or i'd have to create like weird kludgy workarounds where it actually mattered like exactly what order you did all your stuff in and we were only able to achieve this stuff through trial and error like it was there was no documentation for basically any of it and so i would sometimes you'd have people uh you'd see like a like a feature request and it would make its way all the way to like even the verge of being developed and literally nobody remembered that we already had a feature that did the same thing but it was just called something else and there was no documentation for it anywhere like it was it was kind of crazy like in some ways i get it because you know you want to be agile and you want to you know execute on an idea so you like make a feature or whatever but the flip side of that is okay if you don't keep track of this stuff then at some point you're gonna have to pay the piper and the piper wants your tech debt dollars so it was uh it was a big challenge uh kirkland signature in float plane chat says the airline internal systems are crazy i'd believe that because like they've been running since the mid 19th century and in many cases like that if you if it ain't broke yeah some of them

38:06Linus Sebastian:are ancient yeah some of those things are very very old yeah i've never i've never like looked

38:11Luke Lafreniere:over an attendant's shoulder to you know see what it looks like because that would be a weird creepy thing to do but i don't know maybe i should just to kind of scope it out um i don't even know what

38:25Linus Sebastian:topic we're on we're on what you did this week oh okay and badminton was one of them which is why we're on that topic that's cool yeah we could talk about something else now sure that's all i have to say about that uh should we talk about the the main topic of samsung band smart tv apps or what was the first what is the yeah the title was based around that so should we talk about the samsung thing sure anything you like the move comes after okay samsung bans tv apps that share users internet

38:53Luke Lafreniere:connections with others which sounds like the kind of thing that just wouldn't be allowed in the first

38:58Linus Sebastian:place but do go on the move comes after a norwegian cyber security company mnemonic discovered that at least one app featured as editor's choice contained code that secretly allows the tv to be used as a residential proxy. Crazy. It allows strangers' internet traffic to be routed through the TV, making it appear to come from the user's network, which could be really bad, depending on what those people want to use it for, which is probably really bad things. Residential proxies are extremely valuable, the web scrapers and other bots, yeah, and malicious actors in general, as it can make network traffic appear to come from residential IPs rather than a known data center or VPN address, which can cause servers to let their guard down and allow traffic that they would normally try to block.

39:46Linus Sebastian:This is one of the reasons why if you try to do basically anything on a VPN, every single website is like, oh my God, are you a bot? Because they're seeing the same IP do a ton of different things. So you're avoiding that type of a problem.

40:00Luke Lafreniere:For your home personal connection.

40:03Linus Sebastian:Yeah. A number of well-known games and IPs ported by developer Playworks who reports installations in over 400 million homes include an SDK from a firm named Bright Data who specialize in online data collection. Impacted titles include Pac-Man, Tetris, and Space Invaders. Those are on... Wild. I don't spend any time on TV. By default, the SDK code is dormant, but on launch, the games reach out to a remote server for configuration, which can include enabling the code, which in this case offer the users ad-free gaming in exchange for using your device's free resources and IP address to download public data from the internet?

40:42Luke Lafreniere:This is like... Whoa. Dude, this whole thing is crazy. What? I know. This blew my mind when I was reading about it.

40:49Linus Sebastian:I thought it was going to be like ad-free because you bought the thing or paid a subscription or did whatever. Nope.

40:55Luke Lafreniere:These exit nodes are extremely valuable. What the hell? And then developing...

41:01Linus Sebastian:I can't even believe that's legal.

41:03Luke Lafreniere:Developing a stupid Pac-Man clone costs practically nothing. You don't even have to pay the hosting because the TV vendor store is going to host it for you. So you're just like, oh, okay, here's some absolute slop, like, you know, random coded by rando developers or realistically these days, AI slop developed game. In exchange, I get to download anything I like through your internet connection. and then upload it to wherever I want. This whole thing is so crazy. Yeah.

41:39Linus Sebastian:Okay. So Bright Data specializes in online data collection and offers customers nearly 800 different curated data sets. Things like LinkedIn data, product pricing, stock info, product reviews, etc. Bright Data is estimated to have more than 9 million of these residential proxies around the world. Bright Data was founded by Luminati Networks. Founded as. Founded as Luminati Networks, very close to a different word. What a name. As a division of Hola VPN. Oh, yeah. Hola VPN, which you may recall, made the news for turning client devices into a massive botnet back in 2015. Yeah, I remember that. I think they offered free VPN, which is why so many people used it.

42:21Linus Sebastian:And then, yeah, they just jacked people's devices like crazy. mnemonic also called the samsung app store an utter security nightmare and reported finding hard-coded api keys developer certificates and leftover ai coding agent notes in many apps yeah that should surprise no one earlier this summer spur.us reported that nearly half of lg smart tv apps had hidden proxies built in what's happening oh my god uh shortly after lg responded by banning residential proxies from their app store. The way games like this are shipped to app stores presents a significant challenge to security auditors.

43:03Luke Lafreniere:Okay, this one blew my mind because everything we've said so far makes it sound like complete and utter negligence on the part of Samsung and LG. And it is. But this changes the framing a little bit.

43:21Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I think someone thought I misquoted. No, this is LG. This part is LG. We started talking about Samsung. The last line that we're talking about was LG, not Samsung. Yeah, the reason why I gave the thumbs up thing is because of what we're going to say next, actually, because I knew this was coming. Like, cool, you banned it. Yeah, sounds good. The Play.Works? Or is that a thing on my screen? Play.Works Pac-Man game is presented to the store in just 20 lines of HTML. that create an empty frame with game logic and assets are loaded on the fly from a play.work server, meaning it can be completely changed at any time.

44:02Linus Sebastian:Is it also very common for apps to just load a base thing from the store and then really download most of the data from some other server? Because while the store will host your stuff, unlike, I think, Steam, Dan might know more about this, you get charged for your data flow. so they actually want it to come from some cheaper source you also get if your app is like huge you might get down ranked in the store so you generally want to hide the size of your app especially if it's like a big game or big assets in the game so you'll often have the initial download be small so it doesn't get flagged I actually didn't know this

44:41Luke Lafreniere:I thought that they would just cover the hosting costs like many other marketplaces but I guess they're just too cheap for that

44:47Linus Sebastian:that's old information it's possible it's changed um ours is not big enough because most of the big data for floatplane is the videos themselves right um not the actual initial app itself but i know some games that have really big like there was a game that was popular for a while which was the pokemon trading card game on mobile and the asset sizes for each card was like super high because you could like zoom in and do whatever and they They had hundreds and hundreds of cards. So the game was massive, but it would update to be massive. Got it. The initial download was not crazy high. And when they'd add different packs to the game and stuff, the download was enormous.

45:27Linus Sebastian:Got it. And this is like quite common, especially in the gaming side of app development. And I'm sure it'd be the same on TV, which is why I did the whole thumbs up thing, because it's like, they're probably going to get data in some other way, either this frame thing where it's streamed in or an update after the fact that isn't necessarily coming from your servers or whatever. And then like, are you really, do I really think the like Samsung or LG app security teams are going to be like super thoroughly going through every single thing? And every update. And every update.

45:55Luke Lafreniere:And watching everything that's streaming in.

45:57Linus Sebastian:I mean, we see this on, I have firsthand witnessed the amazing levels of security checking that happens on like iOS and Android. Yeah. And those are going to be way more advanced than whatever's going on in TV land. Probably orders of magnitude. Yeah. So anyways, we'll keep going.

46:19Luke Lafreniere:And sorry, the part that maybe was missed because we kind of glossed over it is if none of that network sharing code is actually in the download that is coming off of Samsung or LG's store, then it's not immediately obvious that it's there.

46:38Linus Sebastian:They might have manual reviews or whatever where someone actually does do the full download of the app.

46:43Luke Lafreniere:That's so optimistic of you. I love it.

46:44Linus Sebastian:It happens on Android and iOS. Yeah, I just mean, you have to give them the log and stuff. But again, we come back to the TV thing. Do I actually expect that to happen? It's like, not really. After TechCrunch contacted Samsung, we're back to Samsung again, with a request for comment about the research, the electronics giant said in an emailed statement that it was banning apps that share their users' internet connections and will remove apps that contain the functionality. um it's the follow through yeah it's the follow through that i'm i'm like can they actually stop

47:12Luke Lafreniere:guys um how much faith do we have given that they didn't stop it in the first place and there's a millions strong bot army thanks and tons of money behind making these things happen

47:25Linus Sebastian:this is the whole problem with all of this stuff like anti-cheat and video games there's way more money behind exploiting it than there is behind stopping it is very difficult to measure the amount of money that there is behind stopping it it is very easy to measure the vast amounts of money that there is around making the thing um i don't know if it's in the doc but there was i'm scrolling i don't know if i see it there was a a data breach at framework did you see that these types of things happen all the time yeah i'm not blaming framework here

48:04Luke Lafreniere:i didn't i didn't i haven't actually read the statement yet i don't know the details i know

48:08Linus Sebastian:none of the details behind it uh we should probably look that up now that i'm looking it up now um but it's just like oh man you do what you can and then things are going to break out from there like how much and i i can understand the like super pro consumer move is going to be like oh it should just you should there should just be no problems it's like okay sure but damn the best way to resolve this is just not have a smart tv that's pretty sick

48:44Luke Lafreniere:oh that is extremely inconvenient um we're seeing like the names email addresses phone numbers and physical addresses due to an incident at a company that provides business intelligence oh come on no payment information so that's a small is really saving grace but all of that other stuff is not good bottom line not good did they say who uh I all I have done is read this tech crunch article I

49:18Linus Sebastian:don't mean what users I mean what business were they partnered with doesn't say yeah that blows mta base cat os said mta base i don't know what that is

49:31Luke Lafreniere:all your mta base are belong to us open source ai analytics you can verify oh metabase oh okay oh okay okay that's less scary than what that sounded like initially you thought it was facebook No, no, no, no, no. I mean, sorry. Hold on. Let me go back like just a what was that?

49:56Linus Sebastian:No free cloud. They leaked everyone's stuff is like the opposite of cloud So I said oh no free cloud. I'm like what we're not speaking positively of The reverse of an advertisement

50:13Luke Lafreniere:Anyways, what company that provides business intelligence.

50:16Linus Sebastian:Oh Sounded really, really spooky. That's why I wanted to figure out who it was. Analytics platform, they just jammed AI into it for marketing. Yeah, of course they did. Yeah. I mean, I even noticed that kaleidoscope thing we were talking about earlier. Escape, but yes. Kaleidoscape thing. Kaleidoscope's a totally different thing. No, yeah, for sure. They have some AI thing now. AI movie recommendations. Yeah, sure. Why not? Nice. Because if the answer is going to be wrong, it might as well be confident.

50:56Linus Sebastian:Yeah, so that blows. I don't even know really why I thought to bring that up. But just like security is rough. Security tends to get funded to a certain degree. But it's hard to just keep pouring more and more money into it. And I mean, this is a side topic.

51:15Luke Lafreniere:We're not saying just stop locking your doors because someone will break into it anyway.

51:19Linus Sebastian:Yeah, no, not at all.

51:20Luke Lafreniere:But also there is a degree to which the investment just doesn't make sense to keep going.

51:26Linus Sebastian:And that problem happens at basically every company. So we are going to constantly see these breaches. This one seems pretty brutal. Physical addresses is rough. Being able to tie names to physical addresses is not cool. But just do what you can. you know separate password on all the different websites etc etc parallelogram says i leave my door unlocked so santa can get in easier i clearly would not have saved you in this case um but but do what you can what leaving your door open for santa wouldn't have saved you no separate password

52:00Luke Lafreniere:yeah it wouldn't have made a difference no all right let's talk about rockstar yeah what grand Theft Auto 6, an extended look, will stream exclusively on Netflix on August 27th before being released, and this is the kicker, on Rockstar's YouTube channel and website six hours later. There are so many layers to unpack here, Luke.

52:32Linus Sebastian:I understand less now than before you started talking about it. I thought it was going to be exclusive at first, and I was like, ah, maybe.

52:42Luke Lafreniere:For six hours. I have no idea what money, if any, changed hands. But what I can tell you is that if there was any media property that existed in the entire world ever that could have a six-hour exclusive window that would generate real, meaningful FOMO, I cannot miss this, right now, immediately traffic, it would be GTA 6. I think that Netflix is going to be a huge winner for this.

53:21Linus Sebastian:So many ads had to load that it lagged the whole website out. But I am now down at the comments. People are definitely upset about this.

53:29Luke Lafreniere:I have to wait six hours to know about GTA 6

53:33Linus Sebastian:Which to me is kind of funny Because it is six hours It's six hours

53:38Luke Lafreniere:And it's a trailer Okay, the presentation is expected to offer A closer look at GTA 6 than fans have seen so far Rockstar and Netflix say it will dive deeper Into the game's world, characters, and story Ahead of its November 19th launch Naturally, GTA fans have criticized the decision to debut the extended look behind a Netflix subscription. It seems wicked smart. People will buy Netflix subscriptions in order to see this,

54:07Linus Sebastian:which is insane. You probably have more people talking about the fact that a trailer is coming than ever before.

54:13Luke Lafreniere:Can I get out? Can I, for a moment, can I talk to you guys for a second? Are you a GTA fan? Do you love GTA? Okay, don't fucking buy a Netflix subscription just to watch this. Please. you can speak with your wallet here you can just wait realistically six minutes because that's how long it's going to take for this to be on every piracy site on the entire earth don't do anything crazy here just appreciate a talented player playing the game and don't participate in the game just be like you know what good move you got they got us to talk about their stupid trailer so you know game appreciate game don't give them any money for it you don't have to okay and you don't even have to like the game okay you can hate the game and i don't mean the game gta i mean them playing this marketing game you can hate that either way just don't give them any money for it it's fine give them no money give them no attention and just watch it six hours later okay that's it yeah i i just i love this

55:25Linus Sebastian:this is great uh rocks after announcing announcement for an announcement and then it just does the money printer thing oh so good so good so good um love it yeah i wow honestly i probably won't even watch this on the day that it comes out and that's fine because who cares Who cares? I don't know that I'll watch it at all. Just in case it might have some spoiler. Because I actually like the GTA storyline. They're usually pretty fun. I'm also not going to play the game when it comes out on consoles. Are you a not-read-the-back-of-the-book guy? I'm not against it. But I usually just don't. Like, I don't actually care too much about spoilers.

56:06Linus Sebastian:But I also don't feel a need to go out of my way to find them. If that makes sense. Yeah, okay. Like, if I see a trailer, I'm like, okay, cool. If I don't see a trailer, it's also totally fine.

56:16Luke Lafreniere:I care like irrationally about spoilers. Like in the movie theater, I will put on my AirPods, crank music and close my eyes until the previews are done. Avoid the trailers? Yeah, I won't watch a trailer for a film that I want to see. If it's just like some crap slop thing that I don't care about and I'm not going to watch, then I'll watch the trailer because realistically it's probably got all the best parts in it anyway. And then I really don't have to see it. But if it's something that I know I want to watch, there's no way.

56:41Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've had stuff spoiled for me and I just didn't really care. I think usually.

56:47Luke Lafreniere:It's not so much that I've had stuff spoiled for me and I've cared so, so, so much as that I've had experiences where nothing was spoiled and it ended up being so much more magical because of it. So the best example I have is Thor Ragnarok. I didn't know that Bruce Banner, the Hulk, was in the film because I hadn't even seen a poster.

57:08Linus Sebastian:Was he in the posters and stuff?

57:10Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, but I hadn't seen one. Nice, that's cool. So I managed to make it all the way to the Coliseum scene. That seems... Going, who's going to come out? Who's going to come out? Who's going to come out? That seems like it might be a cool moment. And the film works you up to it for like minutes, which feels so stupid if you knew who it was going to be, because if I had even seen a poster, I would have known. But instead, I had no idea. That's pretty sweet. And Hulk comes out of there and I'm like, no way! It's amazing!

57:40Linus Sebastian:Tor Dirk said my former spouse spoiled Endgame for me. And I love that he included former.

57:48Linus Sebastian:What, did she tell you the good guys win? I like to imagine that's part of the reason why. I think the only time I can really think of where a spoiler actually kind of pissed me off was Hedwig Dies. Do you remember that whole thing? And I did hear about it before I read it. and I was like, bro, what?

58:11Luke Lafreniere:That just sucks. It's so unnecessary. Because that's not even like Dumbledore dies, like kind of, you know, we knew it was coming. Yeah, yeah. The old guard had to go so that Harry could complete his arc. Yeah. That was just like...

58:29Linus Sebastian:People yelling spoilers in chat.

58:31Luke Lafreniere:Like, you know, the beloved bird, which is going to hit this man so hard. A ton of bricks this man

58:40Linus Sebastian:I didn't have birds yet

58:41Luke Lafreniere:He doesn't give a fuck that the twins die That doesn't matter to him Only one does Whatever It doesn't matter The point is it's a meaningless human We're talking about a bird Animals in general yeah A beautiful white bird An owl bird

59:02Luke Lafreniere:The purest of creatures

59:08Luke Lafreniere:What are we talking about? Birds that die. And avoiding them. Fantastic birds and where to not kill them. Fantastic birds and where to bury them. Oh my god.

59:25Linus Sebastian:Hopefully all my chickens are alive right now. Spoiling movies while complaining about spoilers. First of all, book. Second of all, that movie came out ten years ago.

59:34Luke Lafreniere:more than that i think the uh the one where hedwig dies no that might have been 10 years ago when oh my god i'm pretty sure it was a lot more than was the first one 2001 i think i think we're a

59:45Linus Sebastian:lot closer to 20 years ago dude not 10 years ago no it was 10 years ago move on next move on uh

59:52Luke Lafreniere:when did don't google it which one uh which one does head uh which movie does hedwig die in

1:00:01Linus Sebastian:Seventh, Deathly Hallows.

1:00:02Luke Lafreniere:Part one. Okay, when did Deathly Hallows part one come out? You on it?

1:00:08Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:00:08Luke Lafreniere:Okay.

1:00:11Linus Sebastian:2010!

1:00:12Luke Lafreniere:F*** me. A lot clo - not a lot closer, but closer! I'm closer without going over. Price is right. Rules, I win. Wait. Yeah.

1:00:23Linus Sebastian:Yes! But that's Price is right. Rules, which is dumb. Them's fighting words.

1:00:28Luke Lafreniere:I think you've upset a lot of people just now

1:00:30Linus Sebastian:I think those people are fine to have been upset

1:00:34Luke Lafreniere:I don't think I think they're justified I think they're justified You didn't define the rules ahead of time which is why it's dumb It's always Price is Right rules Dan back me up on this Linus is right No no I'm the closest without going over You're the one that said the rules are dumb I'm gonna leave man

1:00:58Linus Sebastian:You can't round up 16 years I told you not to google it You didn't listen to me

1:01:02Luke Lafreniere:So now everyone's upset Way to go dude Wow this has really divided the community Hedwig's dead and Linus was right Friday's ruined

1:01:22Luke Lafreniere:Alright I think it's time for us to explain coms guys if you are new to the wan show welcome hey thanks for watching the wan show yeah here on the wan show we don't do like uh super chats or twitch bits or any of the kind of i'm gonna throw my money at the screen and then i'm gonna wait eagerly to see if senpai will notice me uh we believe instead that if you're gonna throw money at your screen you should get high quality merchandise in return. So we created what we call comms or checkout messages. All you got to do to send one is head on over to LTTstore.com. Oh, look at that. We're doing a notification list for the nuclear LTT ratcheting screwdriver.

1:02:04Luke Lafreniere:It's a cool new colorway. You'll be reactive. Anyway, the point is, all you got to do is head over to LTTstore.com. Find one of our wonderful products like the Percussive Maintenance Technician t-shirt. Head on over to your cart. And when we're live, you will see the checkout message interface. You can be anonymous or you can show your name and last initial and you can leave a little message. Ba-da-ba-da-ba-da-ba-ba-ba-ba. And go ahead and place your order. It will go to producer Dan who will either just pop it up like that, a little something like that. Or who, there it is. Or who will reply to it himself or he might curate your message for me and Luke to respond to.

1:02:45Luke Lafreniere:Dan, do you want to show the folks what curated messages look like? No, wait, no, I'm going to do the CW announcements first so they know what kind of cool things they're supposed to be ordering. This, oh yeah, look, we have one right here, is our limited edition nuclear LTT ratcheting screwdriver. Look at it go. This is celebrating a pretty big milestone for us, our newly approved U.S. patent.

1:03:16Linus Sebastian:Heck yeah.

1:03:17Luke Lafreniere:What? That's exciting.

1:03:18Linus Sebastian:Sorry, no, there was a weird problem with my computer, but I solved it. So, yeah. That's cool.

1:03:22Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, we co-own the patent for this ratchet with Megapro. Oh, cool. Which is finally formal acknowledgement that, no, we did not, in fact, rebrand Megapro's product. We worked with them, including on very real, patentable engineering, to make a better freaking ratchet that people, hundreds of thousands of people, are enjoying right now. It's a pretty freaking awesome product, and now it glows under UV light. UV light not included. Insider tip, by the way. If you sign up at lmg.gg slash nuclear signup, that is nuclear, not nuclear, you can get 10 % off instantly, or you can save your discount for when the nuclear screwdriver launches.

1:04:03Luke Lafreniere:You'll also be the first to know when it drops. And if you're looking for a deal right now, and you don't necessarily need the new nuclear colorway, the mystery screwdriver is$20 off this weekend only so right now is a great time to grab a mystery screwdriver on the u.s store that's$49.99 us dollars and on the global store that is$69.99 nice uh canadian dollars which is actually a pretty pretty good deal this is perfect if you've been wanting an ltt screwdriver and you don't mind a little bit of mystery in exchange for a great deal the pricing ends monday at 9 a.m i assume that's pacific time say oh oh look at that and order any ratcheting screwdriver and get free screwdriver grip tape when both are added to the cart so those are great when you're using gloves yeah so we've gotten a lot of feedback from technicians who use gloves especially like aircraft folks automotive folks um that they can find the the smooth outer body a little bit smooth with gloves and and especially if you get some oils going on and like a canvas glove so the grip tape is like it's like a skateboard grip tape it's very grippy um and it's now included free with your order of a mystery screwdriver so great time to go check that out dan do you want to show us a couple of comms that you curated yeah i've got a few here howdy dll with the ram cartel staying for a while forever do you think framework or valve plus other oems should form a co-op or buyer consortium or invest in fabless memory and open CXLLPCAMM2?

1:05:35Luke Lafreniere:Saving for socks.

1:05:40Luke Lafreniere:They're welcome to try. Yeah, I don't think it's... It's no amount of... So, okay. It's all about leverage. Okay? Let's talk about leverage. If Framework and Valve, and let's say a real player, like Dell, okay? all got together and went, we're not going to buy your memory, Micron, unless you give us a better price. Do you know what Micron would say? That's nice. Go f*** yourself. I'll sell it to someone else. Because right now, those companies have absolutely way too many buyers, no leverage. They have zero leverage against quite literally all of the DRAM players who have all of the leverage, making matters even more complicated in a situation where there is limited supply.

1:06:35Luke Lafreniere:An alliance, like the aforementioned idea with Framework, Valve, and Dell, and whoever, wouldn't last very long because the second that Micron came back and said, hey, hey, Dell, you're not really that good friends with these guys, are you? I mean, these Framework guys, they're trying to make you look bad. They're making their laptops all upgradable and shit. You don't want any part of that. You want people to buy a whole new XPS every time they get a new laptop. Tell you what. You just drop your friendship with them. You unfriend them on Facebook. Make me your new friend. And I have all the leverage.

1:07:15Luke Lafreniere:So you're just going to pay the normal price. But I'll give you some supply. That way you'll have some laptops to sell this quarter. Your shareholders like that, right? When you have laptops to sell. Cool. Cool. Cool. that's how it works and you can not like it you can be mad about it super legit be mad about it but it's not going to change anything so um you know i like the i always like the idea of like little guys banding together in fact our prime minister likes the idea of you know middle powers banding together for more leverage but it only works in situations where those middle powers can increase each other's strength by working together and trading with each other.

1:07:56Luke Lafreniere:In a case like this, where we're suggesting that competitors, like direct competitors band together to gain leverage against a much more powerful entity. Which can happen and does happen.

1:08:09Linus Sebastian:Isn't going to happen right now. Not going to happen right now, not in this arena. Yep. But is absolutely a thing because there are people that will not join that group, which are going to buy way dramatically more memory than the people that you just mentioned.

1:08:24Luke Lafreniere:And right now, it's less even about the price you're paying for it, and it's more about having product to sell at all. That's why the contract prices are getting bid up, because if you're Dell, it is not an option to get on your quarterly investor call and say, well, there was no memory, so I guess we didn't sell any laptops.

1:08:52Luke Lafreniere:Imagine it. So they just have to buy it.

1:08:59Luke Lafreniere:All right. Do you have a better news one, Dan? Yes. Nice. Solid. Well, that one isn't, but this one. Hello, Lanudanu. I'm loving my socks, and I'm happy to be picking up more. I do construction, and they've been excellent. Any plans for similar products like wrist warmers or fingerless gloves? Wrist warmers. I've never heard of wrist warmers. I have never heard of wrist warmers. What's a wrist warmer? We do sell jackets.

1:09:32Linus Sebastian:That warms too many things.

1:09:34Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

1:09:35Linus Sebastian:We could cut the arms off. Is it just such like a sweatband?

1:09:38Luke Lafreniere:I think so. I mean, we did do those once. We did. I still have at least one of them. I got a bunch of them yeah wrist warmers I'm looking this up I'm looking this up what are wrist warmers oh or are we talking like like pain relief they look like okay what are we talking we talking this oh

1:10:00Linus Sebastian:oh I always just thought of those as emo kid sleeves

1:10:07Luke Lafreniere:right yeah I love the knitted ones

1:10:11Linus Sebastian:those are sick those actually those look nice okay

1:10:17Luke Lafreniere:got it is it yeah merino wool wrist warmers interesting this seems like a really neat thing that probably is not going to be on our roadmap anytime soon I wonder if you can market it

1:10:35Linus Sebastian:as a way to avoid the like wrist rub point that gamers have

1:10:44Luke Lafreniere:Mmm. Yeah. I don't know if I would believe that that's the best solution for that, though. No, it's probably a... We could do a wrist warmer with a PTFE bottom so that it doesn't affect your mousing friction. Okay, we'll look into it. Pair them with the programmer socks. Interesting.

1:11:10Linus Sebastian:Do a bundle deal. Do a bundle deal with the programming socks.

1:11:14Luke Lafreniere:You said, please, for the love of God, everyone wants them.

1:11:25Linus Sebastian:Oh, my God.

1:11:27Luke Lafreniere:I mean, Elijah also mentioned them unprompted. Just to say there's a market. Well, Plane, do you want programmer socks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need to ask them. We already know the answer. Thank you, Dan. Okay, fine. Do you want your waist warmers to go along with your programmer socks? match. It will be so cute. Oh my goodness. Alright. We're not doing a pole float plane. Calm down. Crop top? We already know the answer. That's all I got. That's the next. More topics, please. Alright.

1:11:59Linus Sebastian:Multiple people in chat just start yelling Firefox. Firefox programming socks

1:12:04Luke Lafreniere:with wrist warmers and matching crop top. Oh my god. Linus, you like money, right?

1:12:16Luke Lafreniere:oh my god i mean i don't mind it hold on i've gotta i've gotta check something because i i don't think you've actually

1:12:27Linus Sebastian:seen this but we're working a lot of the product stuff until it like lands on set for wanshow okay i get questions all the time about like are you guys ever gonna make this are you guys currently making this thing and i'm like dude i don't know you'll know probably within an hour

1:12:43Luke Lafreniere:of me knowing that's why i have to curate so many of these because i don't know yeah who knows i know some of them but very few yeah okay i'm gonna see if i can get you a picture of a thing um it's borderline i think ashley might still be on today technically but if she's not then we're not gonna we're not gonna get this um but we might be working on a plushie that our audience might find extremely cute that's all i'll say for now is it a shark i'm not gonna just i just told you that's all i'm gonna say you're like my kids they're like where's mom i don't know is she upstairs i don't fucking know what part of i don't know was not clear why would you ask me further clarifying questions i get that's one of those things i get just irrationally triggered by it's like ask me something i say i don't know you ask me a follow-up question that is more specific but

1:13:46Linus Sebastian:the same damn thing that i just said i don't know if if you tend to give all the context you have or not and if you don't and if you just say that you don't know you might know that she's not upstairs because you might have recently come from upstairs so they could use that to narrow

1:14:03Luke Lafreniere:their search no i don't i tend to be an over communicator so there ain't no way that applies to me nope nope i reject it consider it rejected uh speaking of something that might get rejected

1:14:15Linus Sebastian:should we go to the next topic um yeah let's do it is nintendo a good company i mean they're good at making money so yes nintendo is offering free repairs on their consoles and accessories damaged in the 2026 kumamoto earthquake for people in kumamoto that makes more sense kumamoto earthquake for people in eligible areas that nope we're we're wrong now okay the company is also donating 50 million yen a roughly roughly around 340 000 usd to the japanese red cross to help with their relief efforts the discussion question is nintendo takes a ton of guff so how does this story change your image of them if at all i don't think it changes my image at all does not because like they've always they're doing it

1:15:07Luke Lafreniere:they've always done good guy being a good company at making lots of money stuff yeah and like corporate sort of stewardship of your community is part of that i do think this is very cool and that's a good thing but i've never not thought that nintendo is like that where where i really run into issues with them is around you know ip enforcement um rigidity and um just sort of anti-consumer behavior like to their to their credit they didn't lock multiplayer behind paywalls until many, many years after their competitors did. But I will die on this hill. Locking my ability to back up a save game behind a monthly subscription is f***ing evil.

1:15:59Luke Lafreniere:Is it still like that? As far as I know, yes, you still have to have a Nintendo Online subscription in order to back up your save game. And when I say back up, I don't mean migrate. You can migrate it from one Switch to another. That is currently supported without an online subscription. but you cannot back it up. Even though their last two consoles, again, to their credit, have supported industry standard micro SD or SD Express media formats, which is a good thing. There is no way to put your save games on them. Wild.

1:16:38Luke Lafreniere:Deep Blue says, well, having to pay for online backup seems reasonable. Yeah, that's not the problem. I should be able to do a local backup but you can not wild because like you can invest hundreds of hours in a save file like if you told some completionist on you know tears of the kingdom or something like that where they want to complete complete the game that oh yeah someone stole your switch guess what no save file You should have had a Nintendo online subscription Like bro I only play this game It's a single player game why do I need that You shouldn't you should not need that Yeah I agree Boom There But helping people impacted by earthquake Good Cool

1:17:34Luke Lafreniere:I had something That was only sort of Related uh oh okay i oh man whenever my notes thing does not make its way into the dock i get very confused um i had uh i had an interesting thought on sort of customer support and like what should or shouldn't be covered by a warranty so i reached out to ecobee recently with an issue that i've got with some of my smart thermostats that are spontaneously disconnecting from my wi-fi and i've tried basically everything under the sun i've tried uh reducing the number of 2.4 gigahertz transmitting aps that i have which did help a little bit but didn't make it go away completely ubiquity has some friendly like low power iot device specific modes that you can enable and some kind of features that you can activate to make a little simpler um i've tried binding specific thermostats to specific APs that I know are close to them to make sure that they won't accidentally roam to one that's too far away and then lose the connection completely.

1:18:44Luke Lafreniere:I've tried, oh, sorry, I'm going to digress my digression here really quick. Does anybody know how to lock a device through the Unify interface to a specific AP that it is not already connected to? I have been beating my head against my phone trying to figure that out i haven't actually looked at the desktop interface but on the mobile interface the only way that the the only way i've seen to do it is you can select lock to ap but it will lock to whatever it's connected to which i would say nine times out of ten when i'm going to try to lock something to a specific ap i'm doing that because it is roamed to the wrong one.

1:19:30Luke Lafreniere:So I would think that that would be something that I could do. Anyone? I have an IoT only AP, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, I tried that. I even tried having a separate ruckus one that was my IoT only AP.

1:19:43Linus Sebastian:There's some people saying it might be desktop appable.

1:19:45Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Yes, VLAN groups. No, I'm not setting up VLAN groups for that. That's crazy. They already have a feature to lock a device to a specific AP.

1:19:55Linus Sebastian:There's a person who said that you can do it. There's other people who say you might be able to do it on desktop. Yeah, you can do it on desktop. You can do it on desktop. There's a variety of people saying you can do it on desktop.

1:20:03Luke Lafreniere:Okay, all right. Hopefully that's good. No, someone else suggested using VLAN groups. Yeah, there's apparently a selector. I'm not doing that.

1:20:07Linus Sebastian:There's a selector for the AP using the desktop UI.

1:20:10Luke Lafreniere:Cool, okay. All right, I'll look into that. Anyway, what was I talking about? Right, so these Ecobee lights that I installed at my house ages ago. And so I reached out to Ecobee about it finally, because I was like, I'm at the end of my rope. And they're like, okay, yeah, that's a known issue. and i was like okay so what do we do and they're basically like okay well we'll send you all new ap's or not ap's excuse me thermostats and you can you can have like our art like new equivalent of the the ecobee3 light or whatever the one that i have is and i'm like okay but my first question in a situation like that is what if i wasn't me and they said that under warranty which is a three year period they would support the same swap for anyone but i guess my question is what is a warranty which is a dangerous topic of conversation on this show calm down um because to me a warranty means is this a warranty like free of like like premature failure that to me is a is warranty and if it is a if it's a fundamental design flaw that is in the very nature of the wi-fi chip that is integrated into a product and hasn't been fixed should that be covered for anyone outside of the three years if it was like broken from day one and will be broken it's maybe not forever because one of the things in this case like okay let's

1:21:48Linus Sebastian:It's a fundamentally flawed product. Let's be self-inflating here. Self-inflating. And look at the backpack. Sure. There was the zipper problem.

1:21:58Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

1:21:59Linus Sebastian:And you guys basically allowed anyone to claim their zippers, right?

1:22:04Luke Lafreniere:Well, I mean, that was... We issued a voluntary recall of the carabiner zipper pulls, is what we did.

1:22:14Linus Sebastian:We could have... So would you have wanted them to do a voluntary recall of their thing?

1:22:18Luke Lafreniere:that you bought thermostat um so from my understanding it's not an issue with every ap like with every wireless access point but it is an issue with mine so is that flawed enough to merit a recall i actually don't know i don't know if that's the right answer that's interesting but then if someone upgrades their ap to a new wi-fi 8 ap or something in the future and it does have that issue and they contact ecobee should that be covered i don't have a firm because stuff can't be covered forever right and it was free of material defects and and worked throughout the support period but if it only worked because someone got lucky and their other stuff happened to be compatible with it uh to be clear i'm not giving ecobee a hard time here necessarily and I think my hope because I also just asked hey it's actually kind of a hassle I actually don't want new thermostats what I want is for my thermostats to work so that I don't have to have a Saturday chore of going around and replacing all my thermostats like maybe that's a privileged thing or whatever to like not want new thermostats I have too many thermostats but I actually don't I don't want another chore to do I just want my thermostats to work and so what I asked them I was like look the solution is actually really simple I just have to pop it off the wall and put it back on but when I'm doing that for like half of my stupid thermostats every like week then it becomes a bit of a hassle it's not something I...

1:23:53Luke Lafreniere:Oh that's your individual it's having a problem diagnostic step and then it starts working within a minute so I asked them I was like could you just push a software update that has it like restart at 2am everyday because I'd be okay with that and they're like we're working on a fix but we don't have a date for it so here's new thermostats and i'm like okay i really don't want to go run around my house popping off and putting thermostats back on repair everything more often than i have to so that that's where i'm at um so but but i don't know it just it just raised this interesting question for me how defective is defective and at what point does something like a design flaw reach the point where it's just like yeah we're aware of that but like you're out of warranty anyway you should have said something about it sooner like what's your answer

1:24:47Linus Sebastian:for this I don't know the right answer because there's also certain products that are like my thermostats are too juicy

1:24:54Luke Lafreniere:okay stop

1:24:57Linus Sebastian:there's also some products that by design are very like you know cutting edge and not necessarily super reliable and you like know that when you're buying it um but a thermostat i don't know as a person who has genuinely never replaced a thermostat in my entire life in any context uh i don't expect

1:25:17Luke Lafreniere:them to stop working yeah like i was i was pretty annoyed when my nest thermostat at my that is now at my in-laws house because they're living in our old house um like like an end of life notice and And I was like, what are you talking about? It's a thermostat.

1:25:32Linus Sebastian:It should not happen. That's insane. House infrastructure stuff like that to me should just basically just work.

1:25:39Luke Lafreniere:Like the ones that I replaced them with literally had a little glass container full of mercury. Yeah. And the way that they worked was like according to where it tipped, the mercury would flow and bridge a contact and it would turn on or turn off that zone. Like it was, it would have worked for another 150 years if I had not replaced it with these stupid ones that disconnect.

1:26:03Linus Sebastian:Yeah. So. So like I have, I have a personal expectation that that thing keeps working and I would expect that company to replace that thing beyond three years personally. But I also don't know that that applies to everything, to something that is, like I said, when I look at, I don't know what you want to call it, house infrastructure things. i expect them to just kind of keep working unless there is a known situation where it's like uh i can't even necessarily think of one i don't know hot water tanks you're expected to replace them every yeah fixed amount of time yeah appliances usually that type of stuff even appliances like my god the rate at which we're expected to replace appliances these days is actually not okay i'm not down with that um and that's insane and a very modern thing but most things in your house like that are like house infrastructure like something like a hot water heater you have an expected replacement date you're not expecting it to fail before that date you're expecting to replace it before it is going to do so um and this is like a normal thing for homeowners okay sure um

1:27:10Luke Lafreniere:yeah yeah the uh the the repair tech for our um laundry like our washing machine basically was like never replace this yeah because it's like some old 90s just gonna work forever take through everything will work and is very repairable and stuff he was just like because i guess i asked i was like okay that's a pretty expensive repair bill like should i just get a new one he's like uh-uh duly noted sir thank you yeah thank you for your service yeah have a good one

1:27:46Linus Sebastian:um all right i sorry i i feel like i'm obligated to say this um amaria in full plane chat said all homeowners should be cat owners it's right there in the name home homeowner but capitalize the meoww in the middle home meowner i could get behind that i'm something of a cat enthusiast

1:28:11Luke Lafreniere:myself. It's pretty good. Pussy lover.

1:28:14Linus Sebastian:Oh my god. What? I'm not dinging it because it's not a joke. He's been alone.

1:28:20Luke Lafreniere:He's been alone for a week. Cat's out of the bag. I saw a hilarious tweet. It was just like men who do not enjoy satisfying a woman are objectively gay. And I was like because there's like a manosphere thing where it's like yeah it's all about me. I don't enjoy helping her. and this was like a response to it. I was like, honestly, can you get behind that?

1:28:48Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Wow, that's really interesting. I didn't know that was a thing. Yeah, I was sitting here being like, yeah, I think that makes sense. I didn't realize there was like a counter at all. Anyway. Moving on. Moving on. Speaking about progressing too fast, PS5 emulation is progressing faster than expected With the upcoming console-only release of GTA 6, programmers have been working overtime to make PS5 games playable on PC. And we're seeing big breakthroughs in the two biggest emulators. Kitey PS5, I think is how that's supposed to be said, and Sharp Emu, whatever, with multiple fairly primitive games finally being playable on Windows.

1:29:31Linus Sebastian:Although we're a long way from ripping around in Vice City on PC. Discussion question. Do you think you would run an emulator to play GTA 6 on launch? Yes. But I would not run out and buy a console for it. And I honestly... Play GTA? No, yeah. I don't think I'd want to play a console for it at all. Because I'm pretty sure I've always done GTA stuff with hybrid keyboard, mouse, and controller. Right. Wait, what? Yeah. So you switch to a controller when you're driving? Like in a car, yeah. And like plane or helicopter or whatever. Okay. So I literally have both plugged in. Because most modern games, the second you do any form of input on either one, it will switch to that input device.

1:30:23Linus Sebastian:So the second I press the button to get into the car, I just pick up the controller and go, and it's perfectly fine.

1:30:29Luke Lafreniere:Man, that's... Dude, I don't think I've ever taken a moment to appreciate the fact that modern games will change their on-screen prompts according to which control method you are currently using, like, immediately these days. Do you remember back when you had to care what controller scheme the game was designed for natively? Because you'd get, like, PlayStation prompts while you're playing with a keyboard and mouse. You'd be like, it'd be like, press whatever to perform a quick type. I have no idea what fucking button I'm supposed to press, and I'm dead. Do you know how many glyphs Steam has currently?

1:31:04Luke Lafreniere:It's over 500. No way. Oh, I guess that makes sense, because you'd have to have every possible language of possible keyboard input. And there's Xbox Pro Controller, which has grips. You could bind anything to anything. Switch Joy-Cons, Steam Controller.

1:31:24Linus Sebastian:Is there like, would one glyph be a combo key?

1:31:28Luke Lafreniere:No, it's one button. Or action. Swiping up on the touchpad of a PS5 controller has to go onto screen somewhere, because you could rebind it to something else. Oh, man. That's why not a lot of games allow you to do rebinds as well. 500. There's too many controllers. Stop making them.

1:31:50Linus Sebastian:That is wicked, though. But yeah, I would absolutely emulate GTA VI. That would be wicked, considering it's going to take freaking forever. It's probably going to be 2027. Oh, it will definitely be 2027? Because it's coming out in November, right? Tell me this. Yeah.

1:32:06Luke Lafreniere:Okay. I'm going to try to present as many angles of both sides of the argument as I can in one go here. Okay. Okay. So knowing that it took countless developer and artist hours to create it, but knowing that Rockstar and Take-Two have enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens, Knowing that a decision was made to make it console exclusive, but knowing that it's something that we still have the option to buy a perpetual license for at all, which is something that should be encouraged. if you emulated it before the pc launch would you also buy a disc or jewel case to put on a shelf such that you compensated who at whatever entity for that at this point in time in my life at this

1:33:08Linus Sebastian:point in my income yes i would absolutely and that would be like if gta over 100 canadian dollars yeah if i liked the game enough yeah so you wouldn't do it ahead of time no i would probably so you're a rent for free i would probably i'll buy it later if i feel like

1:33:26Luke Lafreniere:steam's terms steam's terms oh okay so i would play for like two hours okay all right and then

1:33:32Linus Sebastian:if i'm like this isn't worth me buying i'd probably stop uh because honestly that's a good indication that i should not waste my time with this anyways um and if i'm like this is awesome I really want to keep playing I would happily put a hundred dollars in the hundred dollar machine so I could play the game more then I'd be like okay cool and then I would buy it when it came out on PC okay interesting take that was all I really needed I had that so ready to go uh because this scenario has more or less happened before what was the most recent one I don't even remember I knew you're gonna ask I don't remember specifically but I know I've done that thing where I'm like, okay, I'm going to hold myself to Steam's terms on this, which is I'll give myself two hours.

1:34:17Linus Sebastian:I've done that before, but I don't remember the scenario. I don't remember the game. It hasn't been a long time because usually the thing is just on Steam.

1:34:25Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Yeah.

1:34:26Linus Sebastian:I wish it was just going to be on Steam. Yeah, that'd be a lot easier.

1:34:29Luke Lafreniere:Then we wouldn't have to have these conversations. We could just buy it on Steam.

1:34:32Linus Sebastian:Also probably not going to be emulatable on launch anyways. I don't know, man.

1:34:37Luke Lafreniere:The community is a little voracious for this one. And that and the community is a little bit mad at Sony right now. Yeah, that's true.

1:34:48Linus Sebastian:When we went over your thing about how it's going to be on Netflix, I looked on the tweet. The trailer, you mean? Yes. I looked at the tweeters and almost all the comments were about, oh, there's no physical editions. You guys suck. People seem genuinely very angry.

1:35:04Luke Lafreniere:However, we've seen people be pretty genuinely angry about things before and quite literally nothing changed Think back to the outrage over horse armor The the first mainstream PC micro transaction Most people don't even remember this, but it was a cosmetic Armor for your horse that you could buy in oblivion for I think it wasn't even that much was it five bucks? It was pretty low. It was less than ten dollars something like that

1:35:31Linus Sebastian:Which at the time was also laughed at for being so high. Yes, I would like to point that out these days that is that is like Decently low for a skin in a video game two dollars and fifty cents back then people were like How the heck could you pay two dollars and fifty cents for a stupid skin for your stupid horse?

1:35:48Luke Lafreniere:And it doesn't even make your horse less likely to die. This is outrageous. It's just cosmetic mm-hmm Yeah Scrappy DP says we made fun of that so much we did and then so many people bought it They did. So many people. They have so much horse armor. Piles of horse armor.

1:36:07Linus Sebastian:Tons and tons and tons of horse armor.

1:36:09Luke Lafreniere:Exodonut says looks cool as heck though. I don't even think it did. You looking it up? I am trying to find a picture but I hate it when this happens. So here's a link to r slash games on Reddit and I click it and where is that picture? that it previewed where's my darn picture i want this picture there you go killing me okay well there's your more so you've got the gold and the silver

1:36:42Linus Sebastian:yeah buddy here's the silver kind of that's an artistic rendition here's the gold

1:36:51Linus Sebastian:ridiculous

1:36:54Luke Lafreniere:does look pretty cool does it i wouldn't pay a dollar for it but you wouldn't pay anything for it i'd get i'd i'd want it for free i would do a quest for these i do a quest for it yeah 100

1:37:04Linus Sebastian:and then i'd use the silver one because the gold ones which ironically i would be contributing so

1:37:09Luke Lafreniere:much more of my time than two dollars and fifty cents but i but i'd get the sense of accomplishment i don't get a sense of accomplishment from i found a i found a toonie on the ground and i used it to buy this pixels do you get a sense of pride from completing quests yeah it's it's the it's not lion armor, so I don't think so.

1:37:28Linus Sebastian:It's the sense of pride and accomplishment quote from EA.

1:37:32Luke Lafreniere:Oh, for what? For buying a microtransaction? What? Yeah, wait, hold on. I haven't seen it. I don't know what you're talking about.

1:37:38Linus Sebastian:What? No, you have to.

1:37:40Luke Lafreniere:I

1:37:41Linus Sebastian:actually don't know what you're talking about. Once I bring it up, you'll recognize it. I guarantee it. Don't you have

1:37:45Luke Lafreniere:phones? I mean, this one I know. Not EA. Hey, isn't EA owned by the Saudi Investment Fund now? Did that close this week?

1:37:53Linus Sebastian:Something like that, yeah.

1:37:55Luke Lafreniere:neat i remember when ea used to be like kind of canadian or something oh yeah look at that saudi arabia's public investment fund alongside silver lake and jared kushner's affinity partners ah jared kushner nice 55 billion dollar leveraged buyout of electronic arts you know this the intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment minus 667 thousand votes that's crazy i actually don't i don't know if i remember this is oh is this fifa no what is this battlefront i think star wars i think it took like star wars battlefront 400 hours of in-game grinding to afford okay something that you could buy for a microtransaction okay i didn't remember the exact quote i do remember the battlefront vader unlock thing where it was like

1:38:48Linus Sebastian:literally impossible or something like that yeah hundreds of hours it wasn't impossible but it was absurd. Yeah, okay. It was very absurd. And I think that's the most downvoted comment on Reddit in history. There was a bunch of stuff around that era. I remember I was a huge fan of the Shadow of Mordor games. I don't know if they're done making those or not, but I really liked those.

1:39:06Luke Lafreniere:Monolith doesn't exist anymore, so I'm gonna go with the S.

1:39:08Linus Sebastian:Did the IP go somewhere, basically? Because they owned some form of patent or whatever for the... Nemesis system. Nemesis system. That was so sick. Bring back something that has that. an Assassin's Creed game with the nemesis system would be freaking wicked. Anyways, the last one, the last Shadow of Mordor, the last, like, I'm guessing quarter of the game, I think basically no one played. Because the campaign effectively wraps up. And you've been collecting these, like, premium currencies the entire time. And remember, I streamed my whole playthrough, and I refused to spend any of the premium currencies because I knew this endgame thing was coming when I knew a lot of the premium currencies would be used.

1:39:55Linus Sebastian:Oh. So I was like, I want to see if you wholeheartedly and like thoroughly play the game and never spend any of them if you can do it. Like play the whole game, essentially. And the answer was like effectively no. So you wrap up the campaign and then you go into this like post-campaign thing and they just wreck you. I can milk him. Yeah. Like he made it this far, let's go for it. And it was horrible. I remember it was a great game up until that point. And you can tell when the polish drops. That's one of my favorite things. Because the developers didn't care and they didn't want to do it. So you can tell the game ends and then they really make it feel like the game ends.

1:40:36Linus Sebastian:And then there's this whole other thing and it's like quality just boof.

1:40:44Linus Sebastian:Oh, man. Yeah. Dude, that's another. Oh, man. Oh, do I talk about Black Flag for the third time in a row? Nope.

1:40:54Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Fine. Let's talk about Xbox doubling down on backward compatibility. According to a leaked memo, Microsoft is working with developers to relist original Xbox and 360 games to reach the upcoming Helix Xbox PCs and Xbox handhelds through a Microsoft-built emulator that will run locally. Cool. Microsoft will, and this is a quote, manage all engineering, the bespoke emulator, title-by-title certification and testing, storefront merchandising, and player support, while developers will keep rights pricing and brand control. Sick. According to reports, this will work similarly to the current implementation of backwards compatibility on the Xbox One and Series consoles, where users will either buy a new digital copy or put in the disc to verify the license and allow them to download and run the digital version of the game.

1:41:46Luke Lafreniere:Wicked. discussion question why would a developer not opt into this program they might not be able to sell the game anymore yeah they might have music in the game that is too much work to replace and that they no longer own a license for that's one i could think of or other ip licensing speaking of lord of the rings and the mordor games and border brothers um other than that i mean they

1:42:10Linus Sebastian:might have got the right to distribute it on like a certain console like they might have gotten the right to distribute it on the original xbox but they might not have the right to distribute it on this emulator thingy majiggy uh yeah yeah very cool though um which og xbox and 360 games do you want to see on pc and then uh mr gotier said lost odyssey and blue dragon are my picks

1:42:36Luke Lafreniere:I have never owned an Xbox so my play time on Xbox exclusives includes like a couple hours of Dead Rising on the 360 and like a little bit of Halo like at a place where there happened to be an Xbox at one point I haven't this is crazy especially with the new one coming out soon. I've never actually played a Gears title. Really? I have played a grand total of like four minutes of Gears of War. Any Gears of War. Remember, Xbox basically existed inside the period where I like had a bunch of kids and was doing adulting things and starting a company and all of that. So I didn't have consoles at my mom's house.

1:43:32Luke Lafreniere:Like there were no consoles. Consoles were not a thing. and then I was a very busy adult so I just never really Xboxed. Super Nintendo Kid. I remember playing Bulletstorm. Oh yeah, we talked about that a little while ago, I think. Did we? It came up at some point.

1:43:50Linus Sebastian:I didn't realize this was on Steam, to be honest. I thought this was console only. I think I would have played this on console. I don't remember what console this was for. Maybe I played it on Steam? But this game was sweet. Oh, cool. Yeah, it was wicked. But it says it's on Steam, so I don't know. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly. The main thing that I would say, it was console only originally. Okay, yeah. Now that it's on Steam, I don't care about it being brought to emulation. But I guess I would have originally said Fusion Frenzy, which they're already doing. So, yeah, cool.

1:44:34Luke Lafreniere:How did I play Halo? No, that came out for PC. It did. Did I say Halo? Sorry, Fable. Oh. Yeah, I think that... How did I... Yeah, how did I play Fable? Was it on a PC? Did Fable... Was Fable for PC?

1:44:52Luke Lafreniere:It's gotta be. Eventually. Eventually. Okay, I played it eventually then. Yeah.

1:44:59Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Just like I'll eventually play GTA 6.

1:45:02Luke Lafreniere:Nice, cool.

1:45:03Linus Sebastian:Nice. Solid.

1:45:04Luke Lafreniere:All right. Speaking of consoles.

1:45:09Luke Lafreniere:Oh, uh, sponsors real quick here. Yeah. Oh, float plane first. Early access for this week's float plane is my favorite videos of all time. Linus didn't say it, but I'm convinced he will once he sees which videos they are. What are you talking about? Classic Sammy things. Nobody knows. Uh. words put in order uh this will be a fun video though i uh my my daughter's phone died so her options were to have a broken phone or fix it herself awesome um so we ended up getting into it and she she does all the work which is pretty cool that's sweet i helped her with a little bit of adhesive removal but i made her do all the surgery to do a uh to do a battery replacement and I like showed her things but nope she she does the work it was actually a lot of fun we basically just kind of hung out and repaired a phone together and you guys can uh come along for the ride we also discovered that that's the look you're seeing on my face here um that her phone was broken in more ways than one oh there was there was a flexible pcb that was severed inside it, which is not the problem we thought we had.

1:46:31Luke Lafreniere:It wasn't charging. It needed a new battery because it's like Note 10. How old is the Note 10? How old is Note 10? There you go. Ah, yes, seven years old. So it was time for a new battery. But yeah, there was a broken, like essentially board in it. And so I had to order a new one. I don't know how it was working. I don't know what that board did.

1:46:58Linus Sebastian:Did you break it when you were opening it up? Nope. Huh. Yeah.

1:47:04Luke Lafreniere:You guys will, I mean, you guys will be able to see it in the video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what's your, yeah, what's the favorite video? I don't know. I don't understand Sammy's notes, but that happens. And then, look at these notes, you guys. How am I supposed to work with this? That's only one of two, Linus says in his head. The second one is probably just as good to make it my favorite video ever. What is he? He says without... Favio... Favio, right? He says without the typos.

1:47:37Linus Sebastian:So he never fixed the typos. He just added he says without the typos.

1:47:40Luke Lafreniere:The second video is the definitive ranking of every Windows version ever. Ah, yes. This is out on float plane. Let's go. Oh, okay. So I can set that to public. Uh, boom. You don't need to change thumbnail. So you can watch this early. Sorry what? You kept mousing over change thumbnail. No, it was a big blue button. How am I supposed to not want to look at the big blue button, Luke?

1:48:04Linus Sebastian:Come on, man. Whenever we do any UI, UX things, we need to have someone with ADHD in the room. Yeah, you should.

1:48:11Luke Lafreniere:Click bright color. Bright color. Bright color click. I mean, it's right there. It's a big bright button. I don't make the rules. Button do thing, I wanted to do thing. I came to do things. Did I make it public? I think I made it public. Oh, it just takes a sec. Oh, okay. It's okay. Do better. Terrible UX. No. Do better. No. Do better. You know what else takes a sec? YouTube. Relax. That is true. He's not wrong. Chill. This is a lot better than YouTube. Just friggin' jail. There are going to be some controversial choices in this tier list. I pretty much promise you. We go all... I'm going to skip through it to see how pissed I need to be.

1:48:53Luke Lafreniere:Okay, that is not how to watch it. You have to watch all of them.

1:48:57Linus Sebastian:Where is it? Oh, no, you can't show me scrubbing it. Windows XP better be on there.

1:49:03Luke Lafreniere:You want to show everyone the answer? No, I don't want to show everyone the answer. All right. Exo Donut says, we only care about one thing. I am looking for... Digital Matrix.io says, I know Linus and I are both fans of Vista. Yeah, Jordan and I, we didn't get to the point of almost throwing hands, but we definitely didn't agree about some windowses and vista was one of them so there i will fight you in his stead if you like vista there's dude i don't like vista i love vista deal with it he just ran into his mic he didn't even make it around the corner

1:49:47Luke Lafreniere:Just wanted to disappear off camera Oh man This MRO nailed it Vista was fine lol People's PCs sucked 100 % So true If you had cutting edge hardware Vista was the bomb It was actually super stable And performed great Arrow was amazing Game changer There's only I would use Arrow today If I could I think there's only two changes I would make here Really? That's actually pretty surprising Because I think Jordan and I disagreed about more than just two I would

1:50:23Linus Sebastian:I would only up things I would up this personally to here And I would up that to there Because I think this one's problem As everybody is saying Having worked at Best Buy at the time Everyone was buying 512 meg RAM laptops that obviously were never going to be able to run it.

1:50:43Luke Lafreniere:I had to fight to get that elevated from like a C. Yeah. So Jordan and I, we compromised. We compromised. We worked together. I agree with most of this, though. I'm happy with that, too.

1:50:53Linus Sebastian:The two at the top was the two things that I was coming in worried about because if they weren't there, I was actually going to be very upset. And they're both there, so I'm okay. I'll give you a vista that you can have those. I'm happy. I was going to be not okay if those weren't there. Good job. All right. I am now fine. I can sleep properly. All right. Your face will remain unpunched.

1:51:18Luke Lafreniere:It's funny how much we care about other people agreeing with us.

1:51:22Linus Sebastian:Oh, I don't. You would just be wrong. That's the problem.

1:51:25Luke Lafreniere:But you're so angry about it. I'd go to prison. We're such pack creatures. It's so funny. Like we just, it would actually.

1:51:36Linus Sebastian:I think the reason is because it would feel like you were making fun of my friend. Yeah. I can make fun of those. Yeah. I don't like it when other people make fun of those. That's your tribe. It's tribal mentality, right?

1:51:49Luke Lafreniere:I think that's why Mac people hate it so much when I criticize what Apple does. Probably. Without realizing that I am an Apple user. I'm an Apple customer. And objectively correct about how crap their products are.

1:52:02Linus Sebastian:I'm so bad with this stuff. What's your watch? That's not an Apple watch? Okay. no I was holding up my airpods no I know I was wondering if you had even more

1:52:10Luke Lafreniere:stuff I'm trying to think is there any other Apple in my life right now I really liked the MacBook Neo but I have just had to move on so that I can like review other products and challenge yeah I can't think of anything else Apple in my life their monitors are just all far behind like just utterly irrelevant which is kind of funky there's they really weren't yeah they really set like the bar for quite a while their desktops are like really great for certain use cases that are not super relevant to me right now like if you're an ai guy uh mac studio is well at least was the bomb before they eol the top rem configuration and adjusted their pricing dramatically and then like the mac mini is one of the best values in tech even at a higher pricing um but i i have like a really nice desktop i don't really need the best value little tiny desktop i know there's a lot of really good things just uh mostly mostly doesn't really work for me that much uh what else am i supposed to be doing oh my god there's more um i personally wait what i personally love the bloat and inane ui decisions on windows 11 hashtag ad this isn't my notes what am i supposed to do with this i think he means insane if you want more vibes what about some board games with team boomer Reese and Riley versus Team Zoomers Peter and Ashley where they play wavelengths watch the early access first at lmg.gg slash fp that's fun alright good stuff now let's talk about some sponsors the show is brought to you today by Factor Meals throughout history things like a blue screen or a red ring have struck fear into the hearts of gamers but nothing scares everyone quite like the dreaded question what are we having for dinner?

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1:55:48Linus Sebastian:and that's squarespace uh-huh this could make sense is it it's a news article about meta using Which is three.

1:55:56Luke Lafreniere:Okay, good. I'm good.

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1:57:16Luke Lafreniere:the assets and the scripts are in the right order but the doc is is uh not let's blame sammy yeah yeah it's probably sammy's fault yeah let's go with that uh this is fun playstation 5 boxes now include a notice about games going digital after january 2028 at behind t games posted a picture of the notice over on twitter here's the text important notice from january 2028 newly released games on PlayStation will be available for purchase on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital format only. Discs for games released before January 2028 can continue to be played on this console. A similar notice appears on the PlayStation 5 disc drive and disc models of the PS5 from Sony's online store.

1:58:01Luke Lafreniere:So, it seems like this decision is very much not going to change, regardless of how much gamers are upset about it, and probably it will not affect Sony's business at all other than some snarky tweets. And...

1:58:20Linus Sebastian:Speaking of things that have affected businesses... Yeah, hit me. Halo Studios sees layoffs after shipping campaign evolved. Numerous employees that had been on the project have started posting on LinkedIn that they've been laid off. Reviews of the game have been generally favorable with Polygon calling it one of the best remakes of all time.

1:58:42Luke Lafreniere:That's like, that's like, that's like it being a Monday night and me telling Yvonne, these are some of the best reheated leftovers of all time. Like, that is such a, that is such a backhanded compliment.

1:58:56Linus Sebastian:I also just like really struggle to agree with that, to be completely honest. Sure. I mean, either way, I'm just... No, for sure.

1:59:03Luke Lafreniere:Can you imagine, can you imagine how easy it would be to make out all five of her finger marks on my face if I were to say something like that? Because I've talked before about how Yvonne and I have like a very honest relationship. Like if something, if she makes food or if I do a job around the house and it is not up to standard, we will tell each other. We'll just be like, yeah, it could be, it's a little too salty because without honest feedback, how do you improve? How do you do better for each other? But that is such a fucking passive aggressive bullshit thing to say that I just... I don't even think it's as good as they said.

1:59:41Luke Lafreniere:Ain't no way, man.

1:59:42Linus Sebastian:Sales have been somewhat mediocre with numbers at just 1.5 million copies sold. 900 ,000 on Xbox, 425 ,000 on PS5, 212 ,000 on Steam. The fact that it's on PS5 is really the interesting part of this because it's a Halo game that's on PlayStation. That, I think, didn't get talked about enough. Um, those numbers seem really high. Do they? And I think 1.5 million games sold for a remake. You didn't even have to. Yeah, but for a Halo game?

2:00:14Luke Lafreniere:No, for sure. I mean, there's definitely different perspectives on that number. That's either like. I'm not looking at it in the context of a Halo game. Depending on who you are, a million and a half copies is like completely life changing or absolute complete f***ing disaster close up shop.

2:00:29Linus Sebastian:I'm looking at a million and a half copies sold for something where you didn't have to come up with a story you didn't have to think of different mechanics it was all kind of there and honestly it was missing a lot of things from the original game which is one of the reasons why I've honestly a kind of a rough time accepting the one of the best remakes of all time of all time

2:00:50Luke Lafreniere:I mean look if the standards are like Warcraft 3 reforged like what are we what are we talking

2:00:54Linus Sebastian:about here it's but that's not one of apparently they fixed that by the way i haven't i haven't tried it interesting yeah apparently it's better now i'd be interested in someone actually trying to rank the best remakes because i have a hard time i have i don't think it's one of the worst at all but i have a hard time saying that it would be one of the best remakes that seems uh unlikely uh anyways xbox sales uh numbers include xbox game pass members who bought the premium edition upgrade.

2:01:26Luke Lafreniere:Okay.

2:01:27Linus Sebastian:And we do have to remember that there would be people who just had the Game Pass and did not buy the upgrade. So the numbers are actually a lot higher. But not in actual sales, because you made the whole thing. Anyways, GamesBeat reports that an Xbox source told them that no layoffs have occurred at Halo Studios, and there are often external contractor shifts that happen after a game shifts. This is what people are noticing. Okay.

2:01:54Luke Lafreniere:games games beat also stated this was not an official comment from microsoft that does make

2:01:59Linus Sebastian:sense so okay a lot of contractors also do call it a layoff when their contract ends even though

2:02:04Luke Lafreniere:it's not accurate i am i'm going to present a thing i read i'm not taking a position on it but i felt it was a very interesting thing that i read and i just want to talk about it basically i came across a post i think it was on reddit but it was from someone who allegedly claimed to be like a blue collar worker in the construction industry and had been their whole life and their perspective on the way that game studios will release an acclaimed money-making game and then lay off a bunch of the people who worked on it was, when me and my bros build a bridge, most of us don't hang around to maintain the bridge.

2:02:57Luke Lafreniere:And sometimes there's another bridge to work on immediately. And sometimes there ain't. And that's just the nature of the business. Why do these white collar workers expect a different standard than we get? and I didn't have an immediate gotcha response to that. I kind of do.

2:03:19Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I want to hear it. So my counter to that would be that you...

2:03:28Linus Sebastian:There might be a lot of ignorance in my statement. I feel like if you're building a bridge, you're hiring a bunch of trades. Yeah, you are. A lot of those trades will be people who are, like it's contractors and subcontractors and things like that. These are people working in the industry. I know it's a bridge. This doesn't directly apply. But you're hiring a journeyman plumber who knows how to do his thing. If you're applying him in a certain way, you're following the job, you're building to spec. when you're making a game the things that you're going to be doing is weirder and how that team works really well together is going to change i know i was watching like the rebuilding of the um the trade center in new york yeah and they had squads that were working on that that were like guys that did go job to job but they stayed together as a unit yeah and they had they had like the the iron workers at the top it was really actually really fantastic to watch it's really cool watching these guys work and seeing how like well executed the build was and and the trials and tribulations that they went through and stuff but this was a group of people that like these two dudes had been working together like basically their entire professional lives yeah they went from job to job to job yep but they were as a unit as they went through and i think there's a lot of that in the in the construction space where you'll have people who kind of float around together um in the software development space, that doesn't necessarily happen at all.

2:04:54Linus Sebastian:And if you have a team that you know can execute, especially at these bigger studios, there should be something else that they can go work on. If you're looking at Microsoft, they own so many IPs that if you know that you have a team that works well and executes well, why aren't you just floating them off to some other project?

2:05:12Luke Lafreniere:I don't know. Literally, I don't know. It was an interesting perspective. And I do see a lot of differences. And I think you've highlighted some of the ones that occurred to me. But I also see some more similarities. Just like in game development, where you'll have your parent company that owns multiple studios, that each manage multiple teams, and that are working on different IPs. In much the same way, you could, again, in the construction industry, You talk about how your subcontractors might actually be groups of people that work really well as a cohesive team, but in much the same way that a group of developers who are working on a particular project or IP at a studio that is under a major IP holder like a Microsoft or whoever, just like those guys might be scattered to the high winds if they run out of stuff that they're assigned to.

2:06:11Luke Lafreniere:the exact same thing can happen in trades as well, where people will regularly get laid off, like sometimes even seasonally, like on a cyclical basis from the company and the people that they work with very regularly. And then the next season comes around and Buddy who runs the company is like, hey, I know we laid you off in September for the winter, but guess what? The snow is a-fawing and we're getting back to work. Are you coming?

2:06:36Linus Sebastian:It's pretty common that you even know that contract is coming up because he'll be like, Like, well, I'll come back next summer or whatever. Yeah. Next spring.

2:06:43Luke Lafreniere:Or don't, and we'll figure it out. When the snow clears. Kind of thing.

2:06:46Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I think they're just very different. I think, like, if you look at how a pool of programmers might work, the different game engines and stuff, whatnot, usually if you're in, like, Canada, you're going to have building code for Canada. Yeah. If I'm building a game, if I worked on Battlefield and then I want to go work on Doom, it's different. They're both shooter games. Yeah, but it's not the same thing. It's so different. Yeah. So, like, I don't know. I do find it kind of weird. Yeah. I don't know.

2:07:30Luke Lafreniere:It was an interesting perspective.

2:07:34Linus Sebastian:It is an interesting perspective.

2:07:35Luke Lafreniere:That made me think about it in a potentially slightly different way because, you know, to me it was always very black and white, right? You're making so much money on this project. It was so successful and it was so good. It felt like punishing the people who contributed to the success. But also there are parallels in other industries where it isn't seen that way. and I just wanted to wrap my brain around why we see it that way here and we don't see it that way

2:08:07Linus Sebastian:here and we do here and we don't there. I genuinely do think it's actually a really good point to bring up. One of the big reasons why I don't think it applies is if the game does super well, make another one idiot is like the thing that I would say. And if you're going to make another one...

2:08:23Luke Lafreniere:I would say the same thing applies to bridges.

2:08:26Linus Sebastian:No.

2:08:27Luke Lafreniere:I mean the amount of economic activity that they can contribute to places that invest in infrastructure.

2:08:33Linus Sebastian:make bridges so now are you shipping around this like multi hundred person team and they can never have permanently rooted homes like i think a lot of times you're hiring local workers when you're building a massive sometimes you are sometimes you bring people from the outside sometimes you're

2:08:47Luke Lafreniere:not the guys the guys who did our flooring at smash champs they came in from the interior they actually were staying in airbnbs while they worked on the project which was very surprising to me and it's not super far away but like my um isn't that a super specialized thing so my my brother-in-law is another example um where they did like highly specialized uh bridge painting actually not bridge building um but like bridge paint treatments and they were all over the place

2:09:15Linus Sebastian:i would guess if you were building a bridge that you would have a specialized team who has gone around and built a bunch of bridges which is the smaller core team and then you would hire a bunch

2:09:26Luke Lafreniere:of local trades to support things i would it would almost certainly be a combination because especially on the design side like i would imagine there's like you could probably count the firms who are qualified to design gigantic large band bridges in the world on like your digits yeah um but then in terms of like you know who actually you know like i noticed this wow that was horrible

2:09:51Linus Sebastian:sorry sorry i know i was oh my god i was in japan and then for those just listening uh luke

2:09:59Luke Lafreniere:cracked his neck without even like using his hands he just like odd jobbed it like oh my god anyway

2:10:06Linus Sebastian:sorry carry on i was in japan and then immediately went to taiwan afterwards and i noticed that the train systems feel oddly similar oh yeah okay not exactly the same yeah but they're very similar to the point where i was like man i bet you the same they they share some amount of expertise here Maybe it wasn't the same company, but maybe some people who worked on one went and also worked on the other. There's clearly, they're clearly sharing some of the same ideas. But I bet you like someone mentioned, well, there's union as a thing. I don't remember who that was. I can pretty much guarantee that they're working with local expertise as well to flush it out.

2:10:44Linus Sebastian:Yeah. And you could compare that to the video game thing.

2:10:47Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. And I mean, again, we're not talking about that every single person who worked on the project that is successful just immediately gets laid off. In some cases, it does happen where the studio just gets closed and you look at it and you're just kind of, what was that? Microsoft is pretty well known for that. But in many cases, it's not actually like that. It is more like, yeah, some people we don't need anymore because the project is done are now gone. And should that be something that is expected? That when the project is complete, like QA testers are one that come up a lot. It's like, okay, the project's done.

2:11:21Luke Lafreniere:And they immediately laid off all the QA testers. What the f*** are the QA testers going to do for the next two years? While the next project is in the early stage of development.

2:11:29Linus Sebastian:But that's like at Microsoft. Yeah. I would kind of expect you to have a QA testing team that jumps from project to project. Would you though? Why? Why not?

2:11:38Luke Lafreniere:Because I don't necessarily want the same QA testers for a first person shooter that I do for a strategy game. I think you could. You could, but I don't necessarily want that. I don't even think it's a bad idea. Why wouldn't you want that? Because I might want someone who's more specialized and more experienced in QA testing a different type of game. I don't think that's crazy. I don't think that's needed. It might not be needed, but it also isn't crazy.

2:11:58Linus Sebastian:I think it could be either way. I think you could drop off some people, but I think that's a way to lose. I think those are not as specialized different. Like, I don't think those are as different specialties as you might think they are.

2:12:11Luke Lafreniere:It's not a matter of how much I do or don't think they are. If there is literally any optimization, if they are 10 % different.

2:12:17Linus Sebastian:So this is my argument, is I don't think it's optimization. And my reason for that is that I think you're losing a lot in the process of rehiring these groups. And that's why I said maybe you drop some, but I think losing your core team can be really brutal. I think this happens on the development side. I'm sure it happens on the QA side. I think it's basically all over the place. The thing that's most surprising to me is that if you had a team that you know can execute, maybe the window's too big. Maybe the window's years or whatever. But if you have a team that you know can execute, the gamble of them not doing that next time, which we have seen multiple times, and the gamble of, not the gamble, but the expense of need to go through hiring processes to rebuild this whole team, I think is sometimes not paid enough attention to.

2:13:05Linus Sebastian:Oh, definitely. Takes a long time to build a team. Takes a long time to get that team working cohesively together. You're going to have a lot of duds. I think people look at the software development industry right now and go, oh my God, there's been so many layoffs there's so many people looking for jobs and go wow it must be extremely easy to hire really good people right now it's not actually really how that works yes

2:13:30Luke Lafreniere:just because there are good people looking for work doesn't mean that they're the right fit for a thousand reasons they might not be in the right region they might not have i i i'm i'm sorry i'm going to stand behind that i don't necessarily want the same people doing qa on a strategy game in a shooter game, just full stop. They might not have the right specialties. And if I'm hiring someone, I'm going to hire the most qualified candidate. And if someone has many years of experience working on the same genre that I actually want them testing, I'll take that one over the other one.

2:14:01Linus Sebastian:I don't think that's usually how division in testers works. I think you might not, and I don't either. I think you might know less about how QA testing for games works than I do, and I don't know a ton. Usually it's not based on, I don't think it's generally based on genre.

2:14:18Luke Lafreniere:I mean, it depends on what you're doing. I'm talking specifically about playtesting. And there are people whose job is to go around and try to find invisible walls and stuff that they can go through. And they have to be very methodical. They have to document everything. So there's definitely going to be aspects of the skill set that are going to be common across all of them. But if it's a puzzle game and someone's never done QA for a puzzle game before. Yeah, I'd rather have someone who has. Sorry. Okay, I said QA. Play testing is part of QA and that's specifically the part that I had in my brain, which I never communicated.

2:14:56Linus Sebastian:Okay. So that's a really good point.

2:14:58Luke Lafreniere:And I'm glad we bridged that gap.

2:15:00Linus Sebastian:I no longer care. Yeah. Because there's a big difference. Yes, I'm glad we bridged that gap. In QA, I don't give a **** if someone's played basketball games before or not. I care that they have experience with the engine. Sure. Sure. Communicate appropriately with the development team. Stuff like that. Sorry, I specifically meant the playtesting aspect of QA. Playtesting, you're going to want a range. You're going to want people that are super familiar. You're going to want people that have never played this type of game before. You're going to want a bunch of different stuff.

2:15:27Luke Lafreniere:So Crystal brings up, think about your own company. You wouldn't lay off your editors after a video comes out. And it's like, that's true, but also completely irrelevant. because our business model is built on a continuous pipeline that has many projects that are in various stages so that the second that a project is completed, a new project has progressed through the pipeline and is ready for that person to work on, which has its own issues because there can be burnout from that because there's always something to work on. There's always a queue of things that need to be worked on. So there's problems both ways.

2:16:05Luke Lafreniere:Whereas like the, we work on this for many years and then we have like a big launch and it's finally done is just such a completely different business model that I don't think you can compare them.

2:16:17Linus Sebastian:Here's a, here's a question for you. Yeah. I was trying to think like, well, how could we draw a parallel to here? And I was thinking, okay, if you did like a documentary or something, like a one-off documentary and you'd had to staff up for the documentary and the documentary was done, you might not be planning on doing another one. Not necessarily. So you might let those people go. Might let those people go. But I also thought in that case, you'd probably just contract them. We'd be upfront about it. Contracting is complicated though. It is. As you know. But I think the construction industry does a lot more of that, I think.

2:16:47Luke Lafreniere:Well, they do because a lot of it is about hiring a company to do something versus hiring a person to do something. so when you hire a company to do something you maintain a level of liability and hr and legal distance from it uh and pr distance from it as far as i can tell this is a huge part of the reason that a multinational like uh like a samsung or an lg like we're talking like huge companies Although, ignore the specific names. But most of the huge companies that I've worked with, instead of just having all of their internal PR and marketing strategy handled by name badges, right? They will hire external agencies.

2:17:40Luke Lafreniere:Because what that does is it makes it so that if something goes wrong, oh my God, they're not like an employee with all of the red tape and all of the hassle that goes along with that. We can just terminate our contract with the company that those people do work for, and then if ultimately they have to perform layoffs, well, that's not our problem. And if this marketing campaign, you know, works with like a known PDF file or something like that or whatever, we can basically go, oh, we didn't know that was our third party digital agency and we terminated our relationship with them. Like it creates that firewall.

2:18:19Linus Sebastian:which is often intended to be used in the in the way that you just described like they're planning that way ahead of time and they want to point that finger in much the same way a major construction

2:18:28Luke Lafreniere:project hires a company whose job it is to provide benefits and and gainful long-term employment for all the people who work for it and they go yeah this is our entire commitment to you you do this

2:18:39Linus Sebastian:we give you this money that's it it's interesting i've wondered before because i've noticed that there seems to be a pattern i don't think it happened this time but i or maybe they partnered with some i don't remember how the halo one went but i've noticed there seems to be a pattern that remakes are often made by outside studios like i'm pretty sure warcraft 3 reforged wasn't even blizzard no i don't think it was and this is like super common and i wonder if part of that reason is because of what you're talking about if you're making a remake you're probably not planning on

2:19:07Luke Lafreniere:making another one right afterwards no we're first was primarily blizzard entertainment you I thought it was an outside thing according to AI hold on hold on no developers blizzard entertainment lemon sky studios Oh hold on there was more than one guy studios the devil's a lemon sky studios

2:19:22Linus Sebastian:No idea.

2:19:23Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Well according to wikipedia, which I trust more than AI There were multiple developers Blizzard intended along with the desire from it to develop Starcraft remaster is a generally pure remake and contrast This was intended to be less pure. Okay, so it was like bad by design apparently lemon sky studios did most of the remastered 3d art assets so that's no no this is this one's on

2:19:47Linus Sebastian:blizzard sorry yep wild okay free pass well i had the wrong memory of that but i cool i think this is a pattern i've seen before maybe i'm just incorrectly remembering yes rando third parties totally but that's probably a one-off thing you don't necessarily want to train your staff up to learn how to port a game that you're going to do once real quick and then move on

2:20:12Linus Sebastian:yeah I don't know it's an interesting problem I can definitely understand a team reduction if you're not doing a Call of Duty or what they used to do with Assassin's Creed or whatever else it's basically like every year Assassin's Creed for a long time was every year Call of Duty still I'm pretty sure is every year I think so I know they rotate studios so per studio it's every two years but still that's a pretty quick i think it was up to three at one point was it really i think so don't quote me on i have no idea yeah um so like unless you have a model like that where like i don't i remember hearing i'm gonna get the the the years completely wrong so just insert any number here but i think it was like four or five years ahead of time they were planning the next assassin's creed for a little bit there i'm sure they're doing similar things with call of duty where they have teams working on things like starting to cook ideas designing planning story pipeline full and then once they're done that type of stuff then developers can start chewing on the problem um and and it's this like big cyclical machine unless you have something like that if you're launching a game you have no plans for a second one the game goes super hard and then you're like oh man we should do a second one the time gap between you can actually between when you can actually really start development might be really big might also be really short

2:21:32Luke Lafreniere:it depends on what type of game you're making and what teams are needed at every stage with that said i mean nintendo manages to make the model work where they just keep super talented people forever with that said i mean part of that just seems to be the very different culture around workplace loyalty both ways in japan compared to in the west or really anywhere else you've got you've got japan cat us keeps bringing up valve yeah i i really don't valve is such a weird outlier like they just don't hire in the first place so who is it they make infinite money they don't hire they barely even make games anymore yeah what are we even talking about um people work on self-assigned projects like it's just they're they're not a real company in in that sense like they don't have a corporate structure that would make sense or work almost literally anywhere else it's uh yeah they're they're the exception that proves any other rule pretty much

2:22:31Linus Sebastian:um carry on sorry uh sorry d hollinger which i often read as dr hollinger um i'll reiterate fine but giving the corporate ceo money bonus for the successful product they barely worked on while letting go of the we're not sitting here saying that it's a good thing no not at all we're trying to understand why it happens and what the mechanisms behind it might be.

2:22:56Luke Lafreniere:And I also think that while there are corporate leaders who do jack shit all, assuming that a CEO doesn't do anything or that their work did not contribute in any way to the game's success, I don't think is entirely fair either. With that said, I think that they were... Yeah, I saw their original comment earlier, and I think they were specifically talking about EA. or something so uh that particular example i think he took like a massive 30 million yeah i can't get behind that yeah but i wouldn't make a blanket statement here as someone who has been a ceo at some point and who has hired a ceo um there could be a situation where we executed a major project there were redundancies at the end of it and that was the plan the whole time and then the company made a butt ton of money and the leadership who guided that project through to completion could be deserving of a bonus yes i actually could see something like that in that particular case that you brought up it didn't the optics weren't great at the very i really think so the the

2:24:04Linus Sebastian:andrew wilson battlefield thing apparently his bonus was eight million dollars more largely because of the success of battlefield 6 it was a 38.7 million dollar bonus in general oh my god that's a lot of money for me if i'm looking at that i want to apply the i know it's six and battlefield's been coming out since i was a wee lad so it's not coming out exactly as fast as assassin's creed or call of duty but i'm looking at this thinking are you not gonna do a battlefield 7 if you're gonna do a battlefield 7 and it did super well i would really want to keep on a lot of the people and no maybe not every single person can directly contribute towards the release of a game right now, but you can have people working on improving systems, ideating things.

2:24:49Linus Sebastian:Oh, your art teams, you don't have specific things for them to draw yet. Just have them try to come up with cool ideas. Like there are things that you can do to try to help people brain reset anyways and just kind of get prepared for a Battlefield 7. And I don't think you have to drop everyone off. I think there are a lot of unnecessary layoffs in the gaming industry. I also think it is way more cutthroat of an industry than people that even think it's a cutthroat industry even realize. Oh, it's brutal. It's insane.

2:25:17Luke Lafreniere:Well, it's a passion industry. Yeah. Like, whenever there's an unlimited pipeline of new young recruits who want to get into it, that's what you're competing against. And you don't necessarily want to see it that way, or you might wish it wasn't that way, or however it is that you kind of feel about that won't change that there's a finite number of jobs at these companies and everyone who wants it is a potential candidate for them.

2:25:53Linus Sebastian:I genuinely think this is why a lot of the quality of AAA games seems to be kind of going down is because they keep cycling these teams, to be honest. I genuinely think it's a big part of the reason why because this was not as common in the past. in in in as far as i can tell obviously i don't work in this industry but in the past didn't have these like mega mega mega concord sized projects that's true mega projects back in the day were way smaller but you see like one of the things i've talked about in the in the like floating exclusive gaming industry videos that i've made for luke weeks um is that a lot of the really sick games that are coming out are teams that are splintering off from these companies but staying together yep like expedition 33 is a perfect example and uh arc raiders yep one of the biggest fps games right now is a split off from casually pretty successful game yeah and it's it's the these companies that are that are these groups of people that are kind of probably seeing the writing on the wall of all these layoffs and going well we can split off and do our own thing and stick together and like the arc raiders guys they released the finals didn't do a big layoff and then released Ark Raiders and the finals did pretty darn good and then Ark Raiders smashed uh and it's yeah I think the like the what what would you call it thesis statement I guess of those two videos that I did combined together is that we've seen this exchange in the past we saw it with Atari as Atari was kind of going under splinter teams from Atari formed Activision and now it's kind of activision's time where that age of company is getting to the point where people are splintering off and forming their own things and it's going well and it's it kind of sucks because of you know the ips that we grew up with are now in the hands of companies that are that are floundering in a lot of ways which is unfortunate but this is the time of the expedition 33s the balder's gates the arc raiders the all these other team all these other games that are coming from not the super big names they might be now but before they released those games that i just named were not super big names if i talked about larian before ballers gate 3 came out no

2:28:08Luke Lafreniere:nobody knows so here's a question is it inevitable the fact that the cycle has repeated so many times is it just is it just is it the nature of larger companies to become bloated and become bureaucratic and for quality to take a hit and for people to ultimately become human resources and for them to eventually split off? Is it the nature of the beast?

2:28:39Linus Sebastian:I think somewhat. I also do wonder if it has to be because if I try to look around for cases where that doesn't seem to have necessarily happened. They're always weird outliers. And not North American.

2:28:57Luke Lafreniere:I mean Valve.

2:28:59Linus Sebastian:Again, Valve doesn't count. Sorry, when's the last Portal that released? Alex, I think, was the last game from Valve.

2:29:08Luke Lafreniere:Well, they have that new Deadlock thing. Oh, that's right. Deadlock. Sorry, I forgot about Deadlock. Yeah. There's some people here on the team who are super into Deadlock. I think Reese is hardcore into Deadlock.

2:29:20Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

2:29:21Luke Lafreniere:I've got a buddy that plays all the time.

2:29:23Linus Sebastian:There you go. but no i think it comes back to one of your other examples which is nintendo yeah but they're also not doing this layoff wave thing um they're they're almost unfair in a valve way i don't think they're quite as unfair as valve is but they are almost unfair in a valve way where people will just buy nintendo stuff they have like basically guaranteed money speaking of just buying stuff um the uh nvidia rtx spark so those laptops and the

2:29:58Luke Lafreniere:desktops yeah uh the cpu remember i was all excited about the cpu so somehow in all of the news about this thing i missed that even though nvidia is using the exact same nomenclature like the exact same code names for their cpus the ones in the data center product are not the same cores at all somehow i missed this rtx spark is based on cortex x925s which are like used in some high-end smartphones which isn't to say they're bad there's very fast cores in smartphones they're just not what you thought but they are not the same neoverse cores like in the server processors and i missed that also their smt so they're hyper threading is not expected to be on the same level as Intel or AMD.

2:30:42Luke Lafreniere:So our discussion question is, does this dramatically change what you think of the SoC and what it could be capable of? Actually, it encourages me more than discourages me, if that doesn't sound totally crazy. Because it's still going to have 10 x925 cores, which are very fast cores. And I was mostly worried about the power efficiency of RTX 5. Oh, so this addresses that. So this addresses that in a very big way, because I just could not find a way to marry what I knew so far.

2:31:15Linus Sebastian:Because you're thinking about it in laptop format mostly, probably. Yeah.

2:31:18Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I'm not that interested in it as a compact desktop. I'm more interested in it as a laptop right now. Right now, although that may change. So remains to be seen how RTX Spark turns out. What I can say, I can't say much right now, but what I can say is that the buzz seems to be pretty good.

2:31:37Linus Sebastian:Okay.

2:31:38Luke Lafreniere:like the the behind the scenes sort of manufacturer buzz it seems like it seems like they think they're going to sell a lot of these things which they usually know a lot more than we do at this stage in the game like uh that's that's one of my hacky questions um you know because no one's going to tell you like uh like a gigabyte or asus or msi or whatever so some tier one manufacturer It's not going to tell you in the lead up to a new Radeon launch or GeForce launch, you know, how many FPS it's going to get in Cyberpunk. Like, that's not going to happen. Nobody breaks an NDA that overtly. But what you might be able to ask is, like, how excited is the sales team?

2:32:25You know? Right.

2:32:27Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Yeah. How many SKUs are you anticipating having of each stratum? Is that the singular of... I don't know. Strata, whatever, at each layer. I think stratum is correct, but I'm not sure. Whatever. Yeah, each GPU model, how many SKUs are you going to have? Because if the plan is one or two, that basically tells you it's a giant boatload of crap that wasn't worth devving multiple boards and coolers. because that's an investment that they have to make. Unless they're going to move volume of this thing, it's not going to be worth it. So there's certain questions you can kind of poke and prod at.

2:33:08Luke Lafreniere:And what I'm gathering for RTX Spark so far looks like people are bullish. But I don't know if they're just bullish because of all the AI messaging and the fact that everyone is super hard on AMD right now. AMD, on AI right now. So remains to be seen.

2:33:28Linus Sebastian:It might just be the latter, but yeah, we'll see. You want to get, in my opinion, sad for a second, but that might even be controversial? Nope, I want happy. Okay, let me dig for it. Those two both suck. We could talk about Valve. Sure, let's talk about Valve.

2:33:44Luke Lafreniere:We could talk about the Steam frame. You want to talk about the Steam frame?

2:33:49Linus Sebastian:Yeah, let's talk about the Steam frame.

2:33:51Luke Lafreniere:People love it when we talk about the Steam frame.

2:33:53Linus Sebastian:You got to go like that real quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give yourself a little red mark. Yeah, there you go.

2:33:59Luke Lafreniere:Hold on, hold on. Let me get ready. Okay. I just got it. Okay. Oh, it didn't really work. Didn't do much. All right. Valve has quietly published Lepton and Fex on Steam, the two pieces of software that make the ARM-based Steamframe headset possible. They're not games or anything that you would browse to on purpose. Lepton's store link literally bounces you back to the Steam front page because it's a background component. Lepton is what lets Android games run on Linux. And then Fex translates regular x86 PC games so they can run on ARM chips. If you add Proton on top of that for Windows games, you've got the frame's whole compatibility story there.

2:34:38Luke Lafreniere:The other launch signs are also stacking up. The frame got FCC certification on July 29th. Valve has been assigning great on-frame ratings to games. And a Steam frame compatibility list showed up as its own Steam app. the headset runs a snapdragon 8 gen 3 on steam os and it was delayed earlier this year over the memory shortage valve still hasn't given a date beyond sometime this year um but releasing these publicly instead of hiding them in the headsets firmware means that developers and tinkerers can start testing arm compatibility right now which is the same open approach that made proton the backbone of the steam deck and made it so successful um so i'm still able to talk about this because I still don't know anything but the signs are piling up to suggest that soon I will know more than I will be able to say and I'm I am I am very excited for this team using cover-up

2:35:38Linus Sebastian:makeup to cover up the the red marks on his face you notice he didn't he didn't rub them he just pressed in, which wouldn't really remove the makeup too much. Oh lordy. He might have needed help from Yvonne to do that. Oh, dang. Needed help? Ah! He might have needed help from Yvonne to do all the cover-up makeup, but her being away is actually just a cover-up because you guys might have figured that out. So she's actually, she's still here. She didn't go on that trip. 100%. Thank you for that, Luke.

2:36:13Luke Lafreniere:Some good conspiracy theory. Dan wants us to do the other sponsors. Man, we still got a lot of topics though. Good Lord. Fine, Dan. I don't even understand what we've talked about so far. The show is brought to you by Odoo. If your business is growing in size, you may find yourself constantly having new needs. So you end up subscribing to a dozen different services and it can start to feel like a too many cooks situation. Odoo is business management software that keeps all the important aspects of running a company in one place. They can help with things like project management with their CRM app, which lets you see where a job is in the pipeline, or use it for things like scheduling calls and meetings.

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2:38:05Luke Lafreniere:It's a great place to learn the basics of video editing as well with the built-in editing and audio mixing tools So go to lmg.gg slash xsplitwan We're gonna have that linked right here and down below Or use our link in the description to get 30 % off your first purchase or subscription with code WANSHOW30 All right, you want to pick one Luke? Sure

2:38:28Linus Sebastian:Oh man Oh man Oh man Yeah, this one. Google Assistant is shutting down on Android and Wear OS in September. Google emailed users this week confirming that Google Assistant is being discontinued on mobile with removal starting September 4th. Once it's gone from your device, there's no switching back and Gemini becomes the only Assistant option. The shutdown covers Android phones, tablets, Wear OS watches, headphones, and Android Auto when it's projected from your phone. Cars with Google built in keep Assistant for now, and Google Home Speakers and Google TV aren't part of the timeline yet. The transition was originally supposed to happen by the end of 2025, but it got pushed back because Gemini wasn't ready yet.

2:39:14Linus Sebastian:It handled questions and conversations fine, but struggled with the basic stuff Assistant nailed, like device controls and simple commands. The Assistant launched back in May of 2016, so this closes out a 10-year run, which is pretty good for Google.

2:39:27Luke Lafreniere:So far, the community response seems to be universally terrible. Good, because I hate this. I was wondering what other people's take on this is going to be. Carpentractor says, I think we may have witnessed one of the worst consumer-facing product transitions of all time. Still, says Annie, I feel Google Assistant is superior in many things. It is. Just a few days back, I was trying to play a particular song, and it couldn't. Yeah. Peter says Gemini was and continues to be a bad joke like I actually cannot find anyone who wants

2:40:06Linus Sebastian:to use Gemini under the nine to five Google article when I try to use Google Assistant on my phone and Gemini comes up I get so pissed off because it never does it right slower it can't it's way slower it can't even do simple crap like set alarms I asked it to set an alarm it said a timer oh i've actually had pretty okay success with it for alarms usually it does the alarm okay

2:40:28Luke Lafreniere:i've had it set timers though which is never correct i have had it do that and somehow i think i've talked to you about this before but somehow they still haven't resolved the natural

2:40:41Linus Sebastian:interaction problem i was off camera no one got to see that that was so close it was a very nice catch as well his laptop almost biffed off the table he caught it with his forearm was able to

2:40:56Luke Lafreniere:recover it was good it was good uh okay here it is here it is okay so i'm hanging out with my sister on the weekend so i set i actually set three different alarms for one of the days this weekend to make sure that i get up early because i got to go meet her because we're going to go somewhere and then we're going to go get lunch together okay so i back to back to back i did this the exact same way. I talked to Gemini all three times the exact same way. One of my alarms says, go see my sister's name. The other one says, go see my sister's name. The last one says, to go see my sister's name. This has driven me crazy for years.

2:41:38Luke Lafreniere:And it's one of my like litmus tests for when they figured out natural language interaction, because the way that I said it was, set an alarm for this time on this day to go see my sister. why did one of them include the two yeah obviously that's not how i wanted it to be obviously it's also like i so i am cheesed that literally the two things that i ever ask it to do

2:42:05Linus Sebastian:it is worse at in both cases and slow the biggest probably problem is that it's so so so slow how

2:42:14Luke Lafreniere:is it that we aren't just moving to like I thought the whole point of having all these NPUs on our devices Was that when we just want to do something simple like set a fucking alarm Change the song happen

2:42:30Linus Sebastian:Immediately it's the only two things I ever ask it is to change the song or set an alarm That's all I ever want.

2:42:37Luke Lafreniere:I'm hearing that it doesn't do automations well. Like I've got my morning alarm that runs a whole bunch of Google automations and I always say like, I'm getting into bed and then it does a whole bunch of stuff and I'm not entirely sure it'll still do that. Look how sad he looks. I'm going to get an iPhone. He's adorable when he's sad. Actually, I'm going to the forest. I'm just going to run away. Okay. Because I can't automate my lights with my phone.

2:43:03Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I guess you can't. If you can't do that, you might as well just live in the forest. Walk into the ocean.

2:43:12Luke Lafreniere:Unique username says at Linus, Google demoed this at IO years ago, which means it will never happen

2:43:21No!

2:43:22Luke Lafreniere:Come on! It can't be that complicated It can, but I feel like if it was made a priority to have quick, on-device processing of the most basics because you gotta imagine Luke that like the vast majority of Google Assistant interactions are tell me about some tell me about the weather or some basic thing my kid asked me about black bears I don't know anything about them tell me about black bears so just that setting alarms

2:44:03Linus Sebastian:you know like yeah that's an interesting thing Assistant should just offload to gemini when it makes sense in the same way that assistant used to offload to google search when it made sense just like that's the way siri works how about just something like i don't know

2:44:15Luke Lafreniere:what you mean do you want me to try gemini for sure yeah just ask and i can say yes and then it turns into gemini i would have been happy oh i would enable that yesterday yeah me too why not in other ai news i can just say no reddit is introducing a new moderator ai reddit announced Rules Hub on August 5th, an AI-powered moderation suite that uses LLMs to judge whether posts and comments violate the intent of a subreddit's rules, rather than just matching keywords like the 13-year-old auto mod does. Reddit's pitch here is that an LLM can tell the difference between an insult and a movie quote, and mods choose which rules will get auto-enforced and what happens when they're triggered.

2:44:57Luke Lafreniere:They can flag it for review, filter, or remove it outright. There's a sandbox to test rules against old posts, plus logs showing why the AI acted. It's been tested in over 700 communities, opens to all new subreddits now, and rolls out to everyone later this year. Reddit has said Rules Hub and its newer systems can eventually... Okay, see, this is the funny part. It's always funny with AI, right? Because that actually sounds pretty good. Okay, here comes the other shoe. Reddit has said Rules Hub and its newer systems can eventually replace many of the enforcement workflows that automod handles and that's what has veteran mods pushing back since many have spent years building elaborate automod setups that they don't want swapped out from under them reddit also says better abuse prevention could let communities right rely less on karma and account age gates making it easier for genuine new users to actually post uh yeah but also i'd be very suspect of new users quite frankly and the better the llms get especially local like cheap to run ones the more suspicious I would be of brand new users and actually the more I would rely on account age and karma buried in the same announcement old reddit is now restricted to logged in users which reddit frames as an anti-scraping protection

2:46:20Luke Lafreniere:cool yeah initially it sounded kind of neat yeah well because I the vibe that I got from the initial

2:46:26Linus Sebastian:with all the logging and everything and the sandbox i thought it could run alongside or be an option yeah if i can choose between this or automod as someone who's running a subreddit i feel like that's fine that'd be cool yeah maybe i run both but i run the this new thing whatever they're calling it rules hub maybe i run that in a way that it doesn't actually take any action so i can see how it acts and i do that while i'm running automod and if i like it i run it if i don't like it i don't run it and it is fine um yeah i don't know maybe don't just keep ripping out all these things that definitely work and putting in stuff that probably doesn't hey but here's something

2:47:10Luke Lafreniere:speaking of not putting in stuff that maybe doesn't work texas has paused new data center grid connections and ordered audits as ai driven power demand surges texas is dealing with a huge wave of new ai data centers and the demand for electricity is skyrocketing regulators are looking at hundreds of gigawatts of proposed power needs mostly from these data centers which is way more than the grid currently handles at its busiest times it's fine texas's grid is like rock solid never has any problems it apparently has been a little bit better lately thanks to the boogeyman known as renewable energy, but hey, don't talk about that.

2:47:50Luke Lafreniere:This is way more than the grid currently handles at its busiest times, raising concerns about power reliability, water use, and the impact on local communities. Our discussion question here, oh man, I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole. Hold on, another one. Oh, interesting. Okay, I like this one. If an AI company offered you a lifetime supply of free AI in exchange for building a data center right next to your house, would you be willing to accept that deal? No. What would you ask? What more would you ask? To leave. So just straight up NIMBY. Okay, no. One of the problems is that I can't make that decision for everyone else that lives near me.

2:48:31Luke Lafreniere:Let's say it's just you. Let's say this is a rural area. For whatever reason, you can't move. This is your family's homestead. Has been since the dawn of time. Whatever, whatever, whatever. Your house is here. the data center is going to go right there. I'm still saying no. It's just you. I'm still saying no. My reason. Yeah, no, no. I want to have a conversation though. I need the answer.

2:48:51Linus Sebastian:My reason is because that would make general day-to-day life a lot worse. And I don't want to use theirs anyways.

2:48:59Luke Lafreniere:What if it was the best one? What if it was, okay, yeah, I'm not going to win this one. I'm just trying to come up with a hypothetical situation.

2:49:07Linus Sebastian:No, it's totally fair. Where you'd consider it. I am still going to want to run local. I find running local stuff to be very interesting, very engaging. Lots of opportunity there. Oh, how's your build going? I have CPU, GPU, and I'm, oh, I have CPU, motherboard, GPU. I'm working on RAM. Oh, that's tough. Yep. And I'm working on the GPU thing. Do we want to talk about that?

2:49:32Luke Lafreniere:Knowing you, let's start with CPU, motherboard,

2:49:35Linus Sebastian:because knowing you, you got a deal. Yeah, I got a pretty wicked deal. Okay. It took me over three months of shopping. Okay. Because, you know, prices have been going up and stuff. Yeah, they have. And waiting doesn't seem like the play when prices are going like this. But I was trying to basically figure out if there even is a used market for Threadripper Pros in Canada at all. and it just seems like no. Got it. Is the answer, unfortunately. You can get them from the States. You can get them from a little bit in Europe. A lot in China. China. There's a medium amount in the States. There's a ton in China.

2:50:18Linus Sebastian:Okay. China seems to ship them chip in board. That actually makes a lot of sense. It totally does. Yeah. Because you might be concerned about them being locked or whatever. And also just damaged in those sockets. Some, for reference, yes, completely. for reference on why i said locked some of the i don't know exactly what delineates the skews i don't know if it's all thread rippers i don't know if it's just thread over pros whatever yeah but some of them are actually locked to a vendor of motherboard yeah i know i don't remember which ones but some of them released early just with some companies yeah and those are locked to those boards and the fuse actually blows and it will only work with that one and stuff yeah it's like actually super bad um so ideally they send it to you they send it to you chip in board known working and then that can help get away from the pin issues and also the kind of stuff anyways i went for a super reputable seller um i there was a crazy price like literally over a grand off of everywhere else more than that even on a 59 95 wx that's a nice chip yeah i did some diving into

2:51:29Luke Lafreniere:it and decided 64 cores yeah i did some diving into it not only was there pretty much no chance

2:51:38Linus Sebastian:that i was going to use it yeah but the additional complications of heat and the i believe channel

2:51:45Luke Lafreniere:Oh, DDR4!

2:51:47Linus Sebastian:Sorry. I believe it's... Someone pointed out DDR4. Yeah, I wanted DDR4. I'm going for 5000 series because I wanted DDR4. Yeah, that makes sense. But there's just some complications that came with that chip where I was like, okay, no, this is an insane deal. I could literally flip it and probably make money, but I don't really want to deal with that.

2:52:08Luke Lafreniere:You don't need all those CPU cores necessarily.

2:52:09Linus Sebastian:I don't need all the CPU cores. I don't want to deal with the heat. There's a few other things going on there that I just didn't want to do.

2:52:15Luke Lafreniere:Right. The wife approval factor of this build

2:52:17Linus Sebastian:is going to be a thing. It matters. Okay. Carry on. Yep. So I kept watching and I kept watching that store on eBay.

2:52:25Luke Lafreniere:Oh, okay.

2:52:25Linus Sebastian:Because of really high reputation. Yeah. And they let this one$59.95 rip. And I also, I technically bought it and then had immediate buyer's remorse and spent the next three hours researching and then was like, no, I don't want it. And I put in a cancel request and they were immediately like, yep, no problem. That's cool. So I was like, okay, they seem kind of cool. They have a really good reputation. And they posted one way cheap. I'm just going to watch. The one that I really want is a 5975. Yeah. They don't have any up. I'm just going to watch. I'm just going to sit and watch. Sit and watch.

2:52:59Linus Sebastian:Right. And they didn't have any for a super, super long time. And then they posted a 5975 WX and a Sage 2 for the same price that I was finding Sage 2s. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm pretty sure I bought it in like 40 minutes from posting and I have it now. It's all good

2:53:16Luke Lafreniere:Okay, have you tested it with just some some random random?

2:53:20Linus Sebastian:No, no real load?

2:53:21Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, but I've turned it on and it works Hathos says bad advice But buying a gun is actually cheaper than buying RAM I

2:53:31Linus Sebastian:See where they're going with that technically if you're getting like high points or something buying a gun is cheaper than a lot of things

2:53:41This is not an endorsement of that strategy.

2:53:45Linus Sebastian:Yeah, especially that particular thing. It might blow up in your hand. But anyways.

2:53:51Linus Sebastian:Yeah, so I have some parts of it now. Do you want me to talk about the GPU plan or do I hold that?

2:53:55Luke Lafreniere:Let's hold that. Okay. Yeah, because it's going to be a thing.

2:53:58Linus Sebastian:There's a plan with the GPUs.

2:53:59Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, but TBD. Yeah. Oh, man. Okay. Let's go into talking about the IC shortage. so you know how during COVID it wasn't just GPUs that were in short supply it was like any integrated circuit in general dude I remember USB cables being a problem because the demand for anything that needed a wafer got so high because all of it was being allocated to very lucrative things well guess what I had a conversation with the creator warehouse team oh actually

2:54:41Luke Lafreniere:oh i haven't seen this version our power bank is uh that's a that's a dev connector there you go that's a dev connector ignore that but um our power bank is in a very very close to mostly completed physically and actually very close to completed firmware state uh nate told me that I'm allowed to, that's for simple disassembly and swapping of battery megs. So it's like one screw kind of deal? Better believe it. Other thing. It's very close. Is this venting? That is, oh, here, I can hold that up. That is what we're calling the hat interface internally for now. We'll come up with branding for it.

2:55:32Luke Lafreniere:But it's a clip-on interface that will allow people to mount accessories to the top of it, and we're going to open up the mechanical files for that. So anything that would accept a USB PD could be adapted to live semi-permanently on one of these power cells, which I thought would be a pretty cool use case. Because we've implemented some kind of optional aspects of USB PD that are not necessarily that common, but could be very helpful for enthusiasts and hobbyists.

2:56:00Linus Sebastian:I have a question for you. I see battery banks in basically two general formats. there's like the wide and flat yep and there's the basically that yep um why why this one yeah

2:56:15Luke Lafreniere:uh this one is because uh we wanted the flexibility of cells or okay yeah so we wanted the flexibility to support multiple cell types in the future and 18650 is the one where we're most likely to get future development of cells got it um and this made the power routing back when we were actually this decision was made back when we were hoping to allow cells to be replaced yeah but we were not able to find a battery partner that was willing to sign off on that at least not at this stage um it made the routing of the power easier um so it's a single board design everything's up here and it's a whole thing.

2:56:56Linus Sebastian:Yeah, okay. Do you want to talk about some of the hats? I guess this isn't really a product showcase. Nope.

2:57:02Luke Lafreniere:What I want to talk about is the fact that this isn't coming out for at least a year. Oh. In spite of the fact that you guys can see it. Watch. Okay, watch this. I'm going to do this. This is how working it is. I'm going to plug in an LTT TrueSpec cable. I'm going to plug it into my phone Boink And my phone is now charging That's how working it is It will not come out for at least a year Because we were just quoted 44 weeks To get the ICs that we need to go to mass production That's if we place the order today Okay So remember how like We had a GPU price thing during the second great crypto winter and like cars got more expensive it's happening so those because we're using a similar enough I think it's the buck booster that we're using or something we're using a similar enough process node on that particular chip that because every power I see on the face of the bloody f***ing earth is being allocated to data center stuff.

2:58:21Luke Lafreniere:There's no fab time.

2:58:27So, um, see ya in a year!

2:58:34Luke Lafreniere:Damn, bro. Yeah. Did you guys put the order in? I don't know if we've actually placed the order yet, because we're still working, because the worst thing that could happen... You place that order, you change something about it. Would be if we knew we were working on, say, for example, a gaming mouse. And we were to order thousands upon thousands of mouse processors. for people that don't understand that happened yeah they did during the the second great crypto winter uh if anyone wants to buy some some mouse processors by the way in the uh we actually did a video where we get into the specific ones it was um it was like the products i couldn't release or products that failed or something like that on on ltt uh and we talk about it i wasn't joking if you want to buy those processors they're brand new in box i'd be happy to sell them to you i'll give you a great price.

2:59:25Luke Lafreniere:Although, maybe I should hold them. Because things are going to get pretty rough.

2:59:35Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Mouse processor cat toy. That's my alarm too. Oh, I can't go super late today. I have to put my chickens away. They get scared when it's dark. I love this, Linus. This is my favorite Linus.

2:59:52Linus Sebastian:Now we're both bird dads, dude. I know, it's crazy I'm so glad it's chickens You know they hide when they're sick, right? Chickens do that too

3:00:01Luke Lafreniere:Basically every bird does

3:00:02Linus Sebastian:Terrible

3:00:03Luke Lafreniere:And they coddle you Terrible They're so cute Have you experienced the pecking order yet? Do you have enough for a pecking order? We definitely have bully ones and less bully ones There's someone who's at the bottom I can tell you which one's the bottom of the group Yeah, but it changes every day normally There's one that's significantly smaller than the rest so she gets bullied pretty bad I hit a silky that was like that but it was like a couple days a year where she was top bird it was really funny it changes around the more you have the more it shifts around so one thing we did notice I loaded up a bunch of chicken coop building videos before a flight on my phone and I watched a bunch of them and there was one in particular that suggested only having one perch in your coop and just having it be wide enough that everyone goes on it so that they're not allowed to establish dominance by sitting up higher than the other ones.

3:01:01Luke Lafreniere:So we made ours removable. Right now we have two. They all sit on the top one together, but if that changes, then we can actually remove one of them and then they'll just have to deal with that. But apparently it causes less fighting if they only have one perch. Charged Nucleus says no one wants to be shit on. So you would never put them directly above. Yeah, you stay. Because the ergonomics of that would be terrible. How would they get from this one to that one? They're flightless birds. You would put them like this.

3:01:32Luke Lafreniere:Anyway. Booping order.

3:01:34Linus Sebastian:BMW. Wait, wait, wait, wait, question. How can someone buy? Are you piecing out them, the mouse processors? Do they all have to be bought at once? Oh, I thought you meant the chickens. Yeah, you could buy just a wing, I guess.

3:01:48Luke Lafreniere:We're not eating them. That would be so sad. Poor chicken. Sorry, what was your question? Oh, the processors. Someone wants to buy two. No, we're not going to sell two processors. Are you high? So do they have to buy the whole thing? Well, that I don't know. But I'd say at least a hundred. I don't know what they're worth.

3:02:07Linus Sebastian:I was going to say, how much is a hundred? I don't know. I'll take the lot. Do I look like an expert? I've got a makerspace with a decent electronics lab. How much for the lot? And how do I get in touch?

3:02:16Luke Lafreniere:Info at linusmediagroup.com. is like our general purpose inbox. Don't waste their time, but if you have a real genuine inquiry, then that would be the place to go. But they are legitimately probably a pretty good thing for someone to pick up right now because 44 weeks, baby.

3:02:38Linus Sebastian:Some genius needs to redesign the Powerbank controller to use most processors.

3:02:45Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I'll talk to Nate about it. blue mark said that it's pretty good. Anyways, alright. BMW is a trailblazer of ens***ification. They sure are, man. From July 27th to August 10th, BMW owners of select models were shown Spider-Man banner ads that could be tapped to display a full-screen commercial with audio. Obviously, there has been a huge backlash because, one, this is pretty brazenly, a pretty crappy thing to do. And two, a BMW executive in 2023, we're not talking 10, 20, 50 years ago when they couldn't have known what the world will be like. Three years ago, publicly rejected the idea of selling ads on dashboard displays.

3:03:36Luke Lafreniere:BMW responded by saying the ad was intended to celebrate the film which also features bmw vehicles and is a one-time promotion and probably also relax buddy

3:03:50Linus Sebastian:come on guy um i don't think there's been a topic on wanshow about cars in years that has not made me appreciate my car even more you would think a show that covers like the news and cool stuff in tech and is really trying to lean towards good news you would talk about vehicles every once in a while that would include like oh that's really

3:04:16Luke Lafreniere:cool comma ai cool open source hardware that can be bolted onto your old car to help with

3:04:21Linus Sebastian:better lane keep assist that just makes me appreciate my car even more really because

3:04:25Luke Lafreniere:i could just use it on my old car no yours isn't new enough it's too old so comma ai you it doesn't necessarily work on the newest stuff because why is that that requires development you need to have some lane keep assist already because it's got to have the motors.

3:04:45Linus Sebastian:Oh, that makes sense.

3:04:46Luke Lafreniere:That makes total sense. Yeah, my car would not do that. It has to have the motors and the sensors. So that was something that I thought was pretty cool. That gives me a little bit.

3:04:55Linus Sebastian:Not enough to care.

3:04:56Luke Lafreniere:But that is fair, though. That's one. You asked me to come up with one. But Kama AI, when did that launch? 1 ,000 years ago. They have new hardware, though. I want to try it out. But first, I'm actually finally doing a hardware for Tesla. long-term tryout. I'm going to buy a subscription. Colton and I are car swapping for a month. You're going to buy a subscription to what? Full self-driving. Oh! Yeah. So, Colton has a hardware for Tesla. I think it's a Model 3. Yeah, dude, 11 years ago, by the way. And then I'm trading with him. Kama AI was 11 years ago. It wasn't good for a lot of that 11 years, though.

3:05:33Linus Sebastian:I think it's good more recently, right? Yeah.

3:05:38Luke Lafreniere:What bet did you lose? It says Wiley Giraffe. It's not so much a bet that I lost and more that in the... I think it's a good thing for you to try. Yeah, in the video on the... I've wanted to try it forever. I just wasn't going to, like, buy a fucking car to do it. Yeah, screw that. Right? Like, so I'm... So I'm actually genuinely pretty excited to try it because... So wait, what car... Oh, I might have missed this.

3:05:57Linus Sebastian:What car is Colton going to drive? My car. Your Porsche? Yeah. Damn, okay. I don't know.

3:06:05Luke Lafreniere:What? He's a good driver, isn't he? Nah, probably. I don't know. Seems fine. I don't know if I've ever... He asked me if it'll fit car seats in it. I was like, yeah. Yeah, no problem. Sweet. Yeah, it should be fine. That's pretty cool. Yeah. He told me he's scared to drive it. I'm like, what are you scared of? This pedal make it go forward. This pedal make it not go forward so fast. It should be fine. Not that worried about it. Because I think we just have to do something with our insurance just to make sure that we're covered and everything. Yeah, you just add the person as a driver. Yeah, it should be fine.

3:06:33Luke Lafreniere:It should be fine. Anyway, our discussion questions. Is this a bridge too far? The on dash? Yeah.

3:06:42Linus Sebastian:Yeah, but it's like you know, the 28th bridge in a row that is too far.

3:06:50Luke Lafreniere:Virtual Sedai says you'll buy a fire truck but not a cyber truck. Seems sus. Okay, my fire truck cost way less than a cyber truck though. And we made money on it. Less glue too. You have fewer panels glued on.

3:07:09Luke Lafreniere:sorry oh this is cool how'd we skip this when we're looking for cool stuff to talk about the steam deck oled gains hdr streaming and experimental av1 support dude valve is still making the steam deck better all this time later very cool the latest beta client released july 29th adds hdr streaming to remote play on the steam deck oled so games stream from your pc can finally used the display's full dynamic range instead of being stuck in sdr the update also improves video color range across the board which should fix some of the washed out look that people have complained about lcd deck owners are out of luck on the hdr side though since the screen doesn't support it but that's that's a hardware thing you can't blame valve for that av1 streaming is in there too but it's experimental on two levels it requires the beta client plus the experimental steam rt3 build on top av1 delivers the same or better image quality than hevc and h264 at lower bandwidth which is exactly what you want for streaming over wi-fi users have been asking val for av1 and remote play since at least 2022 our discussion question here is is streaming from your own pc finally good enough to skip buying a more powerful handheld and this is this This is a question that I would have reflexively said no.

3:08:23Luke Lafreniere:And also you're stupid at some point in the past. But I think you probably remember this. My time with the Logitech G cloud changed my perspective. It doesn't happen that often. I'm pretty experienced reviewing tech. I usually have a pretty good idea of what I'm going to really like, what I'm going to not like, and what I'm going to be pretty tepid on. But that was one where I got it completely wrong. and it was a way better experience to use than I expected. It ended up being a commercial failure, which is sort of a bummer. It looks like, well, I don't know that for sure, but I know that Logitech just said they're not going to make another one.

3:08:59Luke Lafreniere:So make of that what you will. But it really validated the idea of a lightweight, super long battery life handheld that is mega focused on streaming in a way that I didn't think was going to happen. It made me way more open to the PS portal, which has been a success. But as for a Steam Deck OLED with the intention of predominantly using it for remote play, that's a bulkier, that's a heavier device. Although the battery life will be really good if you're just streaming.

3:09:34Luke Lafreniere:It's going to be very personal. If you mostly game around the house, which actually is most of what I do. It's also probably most of what most Steam Deck users do. The Steam Deck OLED is still pretty compelling, although not nearly as much as it used to be uh what's the price right now and are there even any in stock let's see how bad is it yeah yeah 1129 canadian uh also here we're gonna do the 512 because i'm streaming right oh okay they're in stock okay so oh man that price though remember when they were like somewhat attainable like half of that i remember uh not for the oled because remember this is Canadian dollars.

3:10:15Luke Lafreniere:I didn't notice that you looked OLED. Yep.

3:10:18Linus Sebastian:You want to talk about some...

3:10:22Luke Lafreniere:Wait, there was one more discussion question. Does HDR actually matter on a 7-inch screen? Yes. Yes, definitely. HDR looks fantastic even on a small screen. It's not like resolution where just... Yeah, I don't know how that applies at all. I don't know how that applies at all. I don't know if it was a question.

3:10:37Linus Sebastian:Fair enough question. Okay, so the thing that I... Yeah. BIOS upgrading your BIOS upgrading I'm just so pissed I can't even talk BIOS upgrade bricking Legion Go handhelds Lenovo quoting over$250 to fix it outside of warranty

3:10:57Luke Lafreniere:Oh this was the one that I meant to discuss the Ecobee one on It's in there Alright great job land show doc prep team you guys did put it where it was supposed to be That's my bad. Okay carry on

3:11:08Linus Sebastian:Owners of Lenovo Legion Go handhelds are reporting a recent BIOS update is bricking their handhelds. The BIOS update in question is version something for the Legion Go 8APU1. It's the original Legion Go. Go Z1 models running Ryzen 1 Z Extreme APUs. You doing okay?

3:11:30Luke Lafreniere:Ryzen Z1 Extreme APUs.

3:11:32Linus Sebastian:The reading is very challenging. Yeah, this BIOS update is not automatic. Most aren't? Some are, actually.

3:11:41Luke Lafreniere:A lot of pre-built these days A lot of pre-built do? Yep. Yeah. A lot of laptops will just like apply it through their like control center or whatever.

3:11:49Linus Sebastian:Of LONUS the Lenovo thing does. Yeah. It's applied manually via an EXE install file downloaded from Lenovo's technical support site. A redditor claims that when they tried to reach out to Lenovo directly, the company allegedly quoted them a little over, uh, what? Quoted them a little over, quoted them a little over. Woo! Uh, 237 pounds. Euro. Euro. euros, about 237 US dollars. 73. Holy crap. To repair their Lenovo Legion Go. I almost said region. You did say region. Hell yeah. I fixed it. The Redditor's device in question is out of warranty. Lenovo is otherwise still repairing or replacing handhelds free of charge for devices that are still with no warranty.

3:12:31Linus Sebastian:Thank God you didn't also say Lenovo. Another Redditor wrote, had the same issue, just paid around 120 euros to reactivate uh to reactivate the warranty i want them to repair it not at my cost this is insane um yeah anyways there's just more cases of this happening over and over again uh since the story broke on august 4th 2026 lenovo has completely removed any trace of the problematic update from their technical support page i mean i should hope so i hope so um one

3:13:04Luke Lafreniere:redditor did manage to recover their bricked legion go by soldering directly to the spi flash chip, reading and then writing a 1.8 volt BIOS ROM and modifying the image while preserving DMI data. That's paste. Pit Stop computers also reported on attempts to find a fix. They too went the route of external BIOS programming to recover the device. That really shouldn't be required and you know the funny thing about it is that Gigabyte's been doing this for many, many years with their dual BIOS concept. It actually doesn't cost that much to throw a second BIOS chip on there that you can recover from in the event that a BIOS update does go wrong.

3:13:39Luke Lafreniere:It just costs a little bit. And like so many things, at a scale of selling a million units, saving a dollar is a million dollars. It's pretty good.

3:13:51Linus Sebastian:And that's the way the wind blows. It's probably even cheaper than a dollar, but the math still, math's pretty hard. That's nuts. If your software update bricks my device, I don't think I care if I'm in warranty or not. that's going to piss me off.

3:14:09Luke Lafreniere:Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is when I had wanted to have that conversation about, like, what is a warranty? Yeah. You know, at a certain point, does it... But then it is through some action of my own, and almost every BIOS update file includes, like, a doing this may brick your device, but that disclaimer really... Hey, we got a mouse again. What?

3:14:31Linus Sebastian:Like a rodent? I don't see any... I saw something just... And there was one time we had two of them on set. Hey, I want them.

3:14:43Luke Lafreniere:I want them for cat TV. Oh, yeah. No, you want them for the chickens. No, I don't want them for the chickens. What the devil would a chicken do with a mouse? Horrible things.

3:14:52Linus Sebastian:Yeah, horrible things. What, really? They'll peck it.

3:14:55Luke Lafreniere:Oh, really? Yeah, probably. Oh, gross. They don't want little invaders. Okay. This is only sort of tech, but I just wanted to talk about it because I know Luke and I are both pretty passionate about gambling. Several senators have contacted the CFTC, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, asking about the agency's goals or plans to take on prediction markets, specifically around the contracts for individuals to bet on wildfires. Yeah, I knew this was going to make your brain break. Some of these contracts currently include areas wildfires will spread, total size of wildfires, new wildfire locations, and more.

3:15:37Luke Lafreniere:Prediction markets, if you're not familiar, work not by betting, and for those of you who are listening, not watching, I'm doing the gigantic-est finger quotes that you ever did see and making a really stupid face. Not by betting, but rather by having dynamic odds that can adjust to certain criteria. For example, will LA Lakers win the NBA championships? The chance of it being a yes could change based on how well they are playing that season. Ah, yes. Totally not betting. These have had multiple side effects. Like one story of somebody betting on the temperature of an airport sensor, then driving over there to hold a heat gun or it was like a hairdryer or something next to it.

3:16:22Luke Lafreniere:and then there was another example of um donald trump's teleprompter operator betting on what he

3:16:28Linus Sebastian:was going to say during a speech oh wow yeah i know there was somebody who took like listening devices of some kind i don't know what exactly uh to stadiums where the world cup was being played to figure out the like halftime show performances because they would show up during uh rehearsal times i don't remember they they said how they figured out when rehearsals were and they would bet on like the order that things would happen but they would know from the rehearsal

3:16:56Luke Lafreniere:there's some surprisingly clever stuff so these senators and many others have started to express concerns particularly around wildfires because if someone wanted to make a prediction on a wildfire and then have it match pun intended a real wildfire they could just go start fires which you know I don't know if you guys have seen the air quality in general this year in like North America. Maybe a lot of people were predicting on Northern Canada. Yeah, it'd be great if there was no financial incentive whatsoever for anyone to be doing anything to do with wildfires other than do their very best to prevent them.

3:17:37Luke Lafreniere:Our discussion question here with gambling, so ingrained in our society. Can you explain in further detail why LMG has decided against using them for sponsorships years ago? I don't think we've ever taken a gambling sponsorship. Did you and I talk about it at the time? I don't remember.

3:17:53Linus Sebastian:We probably did on WAN. We talked about a lot of things on WAN, but I don't think we've ever taken a gambling sponsor.

3:18:00Luke Lafreniere:I don't know. I just think it's pretty shit, pretty much. I don't really have too much to say about it other than that.

3:18:06Linus Sebastian:Is this a line that you could see shifting? Like, we've seen the very dramatic change in just the last 10 years. Just the last two years. honestly probably that's like it seems to be accelerating so let's say if it keeps going this path and it's just the mainstreamest thing in 10 20 years and i'm just like genuinely no one cares other than okay grandpa um no i don't i don't think so because i i think you could make a really

3:18:38Luke Lafreniere:similar argument around like cannabinoids because that's that's a generation earlier oh taboo no big deal like our i think our generation in general i i i don't consume but i don't judge people who do i don't really give a shit if you know you think it's cool or whatever that's fine um and so my my stance on it is it basically just comes down to that i don't want our sponsorships to be guided by what is legal i want our sponsorships and our involvement in industries through our content to be guided by what is not harmful for our viewers yeah i i personally think gambling is like

3:19:23Linus Sebastian:genuinely a form of like financial self-harm and uh i don't know i we we both know that the like one person in at least my life that gambles actively that i think does it in a healthy way

3:19:38Luke Lafreniere:one person cannabinoids apparently i pronounced it wrong i really don't give a shit about not

3:19:42Linus Sebastian:important. There's one person I know of and have ever known of and have ever heard of that deals with it in like a healthy way that I think is genuinely fine. And it's one. And they're an extreme outlier of a person. In so many ways.

3:19:58Luke Lafreniere:Love that guy.

3:19:59Linus Sebastian:So like it's this is not normal. I've told the story a bunch of times on WAN but I used to work at the bread factory and dudes at the bread factory would regularly get their paycheck, go to the casino, miss out on rent and not have a place to day for the next month this was like a normal thing that would happen all the time i've got

3:20:17Luke Lafreniere:some folks kind of mad at me including crystal cannabis isn't harmful it's like yeah you can like actually scan people's brains it definitely changes your brain as for you know whether you consider that to be harmful or not um we there could be some subjectivity there but in terms of like does it have a very measurable impact on the human body it's like yes once again like our junk food conversation last week it's not really like debatable there's also like i have i have a person

3:20:46Linus Sebastian:that's quite close to me that um had cancer six times there's people for whom the benefits can outweigh the harm so yeah in this case it's not even close like any medicine sleep properly without pain or for more than i think i think it was like two hours at a time for years and then they tried it and they were able to actually sleep which was like an obvious massive benefit um yeah so you

3:21:09Luke Lafreniere:You know, yeah, it's just, it's one of those things where, with that said, I mean, there are areas where I've been a little grayer. Personally, I think energy drinks are terrible. I think they're poison. We've worked with Red Bull. That's something that is so majorly, caffeine, it's something that I choose not to consume.

3:21:29Linus Sebastian:It's like with every conversation we seem to have on WAN Show, where you pick your own line. for them their line on uh cannabinoids hopefully i said it right uh is more on the okay and yours is not and for someone else i know there's the the drink water movement which is not okay with uh which we're both doing but is not okay with the energy drinks thing and you're like yeah whatever i don't know you don't like gambling everyone's gonna have their mix of what's okay

3:21:59Luke Lafreniere:and what isn't the one with red bull the thing with red bull for me is actually how much the team loves it red bull regularly sends us like a pallet of drinks oh they're gone immediately no dude no over at labs there's regularly like half pallets of red bull sitting there they put them

3:22:17Linus Sebastian:in the fridges and stuff no no what i'm saying is people consume them oh yeah like i'm agreeing with you oh yeah yeah yeah yeah and and they'll reach and they'll chug them and they'll restock

3:22:25Luke Lafreniere:us red bull restocks it often and it is it is it is a a meaningfully contributing to the happiness of the team thing that happens and i can sit and i can be appreciative of that red bull red bull does that in spite of me multiple times publicly saying that i don't consume energy drinks i wouldn't consume energy drinks i don't think they're good for us i i i i a personal it's my personal choice that I believe they're a poison and they do it anyway and I'm just like you know what I gotta kind of respect that the fact that they're just like yeah that's your opinion we've

3:23:05Linus Sebastian:talked about the same thing with other companies before where we should be able to be critical about a product and you should still work with us yeah and so the fact that they can deal with that

3:23:13Luke Lafreniere:and they will just still send us all the Red Bull that our staff can drink and they'll even work with us to do and again like it comes down to what we're doing like when we did those builds for alfonso davies and disguised toast right red bull didn't ask me to drink the drink they didn't ask me to talk about how much i love red bull so huggy muggy much they just they kept the drink out of it and i was like okay you know what i can do this i can build a pc for some cool people that you also sponsor and that's i'm i'm willing to do it i don't know what it is yeah i

3:23:48Linus Sebastian:detest the taste of beer for whatever reason. I really like the taste of energy drinks. Almost so many people think they taste like junk. I love them. I really like Red Bull. I really like a variety of other ones. Can't do it. It overpowers

3:24:04Luke Lafreniere:any other flavor in a drink for me. I didn't even know they were artificial sweeteners. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. Which one do they use? I have no idea.

3:24:12Linus Sebastian:What about wine? Hate it. Hate it. Hate it so much.

3:24:15Luke Lafreniere:It's fermented. I've never been able to really get over that. Although, I will sit and I will eat a jar of pickles this big in one sitting. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know if that's it.

3:24:23Linus Sebastian:I love kimchi. I love pickles. I'm pretty sure sauerkraut is fermented. I really like that. I don't know if that's true or not.

3:24:31Luke Lafreniere:Apparently, original Red Bull uses real sugars. It's the sugar-free and zero-calorie ones that use sucralose and acetylsulfame potassium.

3:24:40Linus Sebastian:But yeah, I don't drink them too often because, I mean, I'm trying to lose weight right now. I'm focused on, I'm on, I'm on the water game. But if there's like, I would rather have a Red Bull than like most pops. Not all. Give me, give me an orange crush or any Harito.

3:24:58Luke Lafreniere:You guys don't, you guys don't Red Bull, but I'm always surprised that people are like, Oh, I don't like the taste of this. There's got the sugar. Like it's not a, it's an energy drink. You're drinking it for the drugs that are in it.

3:25:09Linus Sebastian:Oh, it doesn't do anything for me.

3:25:10Luke Lafreniere:I call them drug water because that's what it is.

3:25:15Linus Sebastian:And, you know, it's not a, you're consuming it as a. I mean, coffee is just hot drug water. Coffee is also drug water, you know.

3:25:26Luke Lafreniere:Some people seem to really like the flavor. I can't say that I quite understand it. I like it.

3:25:31Linus Sebastian:I'm not like obsessed with it or anything, but I like it.

3:25:33Luke Lafreniere:I tried a fancy espresso when I was at Robert's AMD Upgrade. and I basically I think what I said ended up being like a highly quotable moment in the comments when I was like I'm so glad you like it

3:25:52Linus Sebastian:but yeah I like cold drug water and I don't like hot drug water the funny thing about that one is

3:25:59Luke Lafreniere:I love coffee flavored ice cream

3:26:02Linus Sebastian:oh interesting I know

3:26:05Luke Lafreniere:what the heck do you drink coffee with a bunch of milk yeah do you well i don't drink coffee at all

3:26:10Linus Sebastian:do you just need like sweeteners in your coffee yeah maybe i would just kind of what i explained

3:26:14Luke Lafreniere:to luke ages ago is that most people drink milk that has coffee in it i see uh espresso is pretty damn hardcore uh that's like most people don't drink espresso they can't handle that you're not alone in that got it yeah but it tastes nice tastes nice okay uh we should probably move to after dark. I do have to put my chickens away pretty relatively soonish. It's actually a concern. This has to go home to tend to his ****. Oh, adorable. He's got four.

3:26:48Linus Sebastian:I did bleep that. Oh. Just for you guys' context.

3:26:56Luke Lafreniere:Sure. There's so many things that I have to do. That one. And that one. There we go. Okie dokie. After Dark. Hell yeah. Hey, Burboners and Dan, in light of BMW car ads, do you think AIO screens will eventually have ad placements? If they had different plans, for example, ads or without ads, would you do it? What? Took me a minute to figure out what they meant, but like CPU screens. Why aren't I getting ads for like Cheerios on those? They're perfect. Here's the thing I hate thing. I hate you Philip if I was getting a good deal on it then that would be fine But everything's like skimplation shrink flation in Fication so I'm gonna end up paying the same But you're just gonna put ads on it like if I like that TV remember that TV that Had like the device to make sure you were actually watching the ads and everything, but the TV was free like fine if i'm gonna be the product i shouldn't be paying for it too it's got to be one or the other either i'm the customer or the product it can't be both there dll getting another screwdriver to have okay sorry i thought maybe someone else would say something no i just

3:28:18Linus Sebastian:completely agree all right and i would rather not be the product i'd rather buy it this is the same reason why I think local AI stuff is so important. I think AI is super interesting and honestly really fun to play with. I'm pretty not okay with the moral issues of it being entirely built on theft and all that kind of stuff. But my way of doing that is I don't want to share my usage information. I don't want to share all the information that I input into it, et cetera, with companies that did that problem in the first place. I don't want to support them. so I've run it locally it seems like the same kind of thing of like I would it's gonna be it the the very obvious financial problem with running it locally is looking at any of the costs of the hardware that would be required to run decently advanced models and then comparing that to a monthly subscription one of these things and just being like what like it is currently way more financially efficient if you need to run or want to run more advanced things to just join a subscription thing.

3:29:20Linus Sebastian:I just, I just, I don't want to. I'm in a financial position where I can make that decision so I'm going to do that. That's crazy. I thought you were poor. Doing this might make me poor. Nice. Yeah, we'll see how it goes. But, yeah.

3:29:38Luke Lafreniere:44 weeks. Sorry. I'm just mad. Dan, hit me. DLL, getting another screwdriver to have around my building maintenance job for the police department any advice for cleaning laminate floor that's been abused for 25 years i'll replace it hopefully it's not blood uh i don't think the floor bleeds also you're you're the person i would ask for that information um yeah cleaning laminate floor uh i don't i i don't think there's really anything you can do about beat up laminate floor i think i think that's like the whole idea behind it is that it's cheaper up front but then when it's done you just have to throw it away and replace it there's no refinishing a laminate floor unfortunately um all with that said mro mutt says i think it's an acid they use to clean them is that is this a thing guys help me out here is this a thing uh mind paradox says if it isn't actively worn out you can use tsp to clean it really well yeah tsp is a cool product uh but it's 25 years guys it's and it's in a commercial

3:30:44Linus Sebastian:environment like it's got to be i expect it's gonna be the genuine physical damage it's got to

3:30:51Luke Lafreniere:be yeah 25 years guys because we're talking this is laminate floor from 2001 it laminate floor wasn't good yet 25 years ago like it's probably the crappy stuff hmm

3:31:07Luke Lafreniere:let's see tsp if i study in phosphate no not tps testicular pain syndrome what are you talking about that for no what i tagged a specific person i was asking him tokens per second oh i thought you were talking about tps reports and then i i did the testicular pain syndrome no no they said uh it was an office space reference never

3:31:29Linus Sebastian:mind they they were responding to the previous thing that i said they said an m3 ultra with 512 gigabytes of unified memory was my best recent personal hardware investment and then i was asking them some questions about what model do you run how much did it cost what's your tps etc because you can you can fit a massive model on something like that oh yeah uh but your tps might be pretty slow um it sounds like tps is 8 to 11 which is pretty slow but depending on what you use cases being able to fit that massive model on there might be really freaking cool anyways

3:32:04Luke Lafreniere:uh so i think that's pretty sweet arnold palmer 69 asks i would love an unfiltered bad news when show you just go off about whatever you want maybe a float plane exclusive i think we've eased off on just the good news stuff but we're just trying to have more of an eye out for if there's anything cool trying to be balanced let that bubble to the surface a little bit better which i think is good Yeah. Yeah. All right. Hit me, Dan. Hey, Linus and Luke. Have you ever considered doing a video on the performance differences between standard monitor aspect ratios and ultra wide aspect ratios? 16 by 9 versus 21 by 9.

3:32:37Luke Lafreniere:There's dozens of us. um i mean that's the kind of thing that if you are someone who has one of those monitors you can very easily explore for yourself so we tend to we tend to want to test tech tips that you can't tick tip yourself because you don't have the tech right like all you've got to do is just change your in-game resolution to a 16 by 9 aspect ratio resolution and then run the same benchmark and then that you've got the answer so that i i lean away from a little bit it's a it's a cool idea to just kind of like explore resolution scaling but um we tend to focus on 16 by 9 just because it is so ubiquitous and if you must know exactly how much of a difference then it's yeah it's something that you can tip yourself go tip yourself hello wanda that was i said it way nicer than that i did not hello wanda dll with physical games going out do you think we'll see a renaissance for pc gaming what's the point of consoles if they'll cut down pcs is xbox os psos a thing we'll see in the future i i would see xbox and pc merging before i would see like a separate xbox os like What are we going to have?

3:34:00Luke Lafreniere:Like NT kernel and freaking regular kernel again? Like, come on, man. Go back to Windows X. Yeah. Hmm. Renaissance for PC gaming. I mean, I think the Renaissance is happening. Luke has talked about this fairly extensively, but it's less to do with because of OS changes and it's more to do with... There's honestly a lot of really good, quite new games out. Like AA, single A. and it's just down to fragmentation from the major gaming companies that it's taking place right now.

3:34:34Linus Sebastian:The game of the years over the last little bit have been just wicked games. 007's really fantastic. That just came out. There's been some really bangers. We were in quite a rough area for a while but we seem to be out of it. Gaming seems like a pretty good pretty healthy space right now. Hit me, Dan. Oh, if I have to.

3:35:00Luke Lafreniere:Hey, Mommy Luke and R. Dan. What's the staggering quantity of gamers that absolutely despise skill-based matchmaking? You missed a word. Oh, there's not a lot in here. What's with the staggering quantity of gamers that absolutely despise skill-based matchmaking? Are there any other hobbies where people don't enjoy fair matches? Does this happen in badminton? i honestly don't get it either i always love to play the closest possible match oh no i completely get it i would rather lose by one than win by 10 the problem is that's not necessarily what's

3:35:40Linus Sebastian:happening skill-based matchmaking is often being misused in order to maximize engagement oh okay skill-based matchmaking the name makes you think that it works in one specific way but it doesn't work in one specific way um you're thinking okay obviously skill-based matchmaking we're going to match people with as close of skilled people as possible and balance the teams as well as we can so the game is as even as possible so people have as many good games as possible instead of washouts like not quite it's often used in a way oh right where you'll be like

3:36:16Luke Lafreniere:on the verge of being frustrated and wanting to give up and then it'll let you like roll a team

3:36:21Linus Sebastian:they'll give you a win yeah no we've talked about this actually it's uh so and you know not every company's doing that different companies do it to different degrees etc etc etc um and what the people that don't like that that situation is even possible um it's eomm not sbmm yeah cool except people call it sbmm anyway so it doesn't really matter um it's so like you run into this situation where you would rather they just don't have their grubby little fingers in it at all

3:36:52Luke Lafreniere:yeah but random is not good either what they're doing behind the scenes yeah random is trash i

3:36:56Linus Sebastian:agree i'm just saying i understand where the argument comes from i see um i think online matchmaking is just a horrific mess right now in general i don't think there's an answer for it there's way too many cheaters someone tagged me saying uh shoot where is it maybe they didn't tag me maybe they just said it uh but it was something along the lines of like there's there's so many cheaters that it's not balanced anyways um yeah in badminton i would say it had conrad said uh dota 2 had has uh yeah i don't know there's a conrad quoting dota 2 has 50 a forced 50 win rate some games are balanced sometimes it's completely unwinnable or unlosable it's just

3:37:40Luke Lafreniere:like why don't we not even bother playing the game like a moba yeah why don't we just why don't we just flip a coin and be excited when it lands heads like i yeah so then so then that comes back

3:37:53Linus Sebastian:to the like well you might as well just throw everybody in the pot and see how it goes but that's not how it has to be because it could actually just be skill-based matchmaking right like a lot of skill-based matchmaking systems were or some that still are lots probably majority that still are to be honest but i think in my perspective that's why people don't like it is because they've heard about the fact that these things happen and you can call it other acronyms all you want but the the gaming companies will often call it skill-based matchmaking even if that's not really what it is um

3:38:28Luke Lafreniere:as for whether it happens in badminton i would actually say more often it happens the other way where you'll have people that will prefer to uh take the worst partner on court so that they can hot dog and kind of ball hog against hot dog. Yeah, like hot dogging. Never heard of this term. Shut up. I've had this conversation. I've never heard of that term either. Yeah, but you're from Britain. Who cares what you think? Oh, you mean bangering. Bangering. This is the second time this week that I've run into something like this. I was at we were shooting an AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade earlier this week for Jordan.

3:39:14Luke Lafreniere:And I walk in, I'm like, hey, can I borrow your washroom? And they all start laughing at me. They go, what do you mean borrow it? You know, was there ever any possibility you weren't going to give it back? I was like, no, that's a thing. They're like, yeah, see? I'm right about hot-dogging too. Look at the chat. People know. What is hot-dogging? It's showing off. Sure. I'm not against it. I've just never heard of it. It's totally a thing. Jay Hirschman says 40s midwesterner here I know that term yeah people know what I'm talking about oh it's cause you're old look listen get out of here you get out of here too yeah but you're British god damn it so it's more often that this would happen where people would like want to show off like they can 1v2 the other two players versus like someone trying to stack a team with the two best players on the court just so that they can crush the other team however and however i do run into people occasionally where i'll go and i'll play somewhere that i'm not familiar or like a drop-in or something and i'll say you know hey what's what's a balanced match here and someone will intentionally grab a better player and and we'll do that but it's very rare and highly dishonorable so it really doesn't happen that often more often what will happen is if people aren't sure how to balance the teams uh we'll do something uh okay you can come back not you though um we'll do something called racket spinning so you you hold your racket neck here and then you spin the handle and then you stop it and then the logo on the bottom if it's up or down you just point in the direction of your logo and whoever matches the direction plays together yeah cool and if you have too many like if everyone

3:41:04Linus Sebastian:gets up then you just spin again badminton's a the type of game where you might not be able to find a perfect matchup anyways so you just do what you can yeah and i mean a lot of the time

3:41:13Luke Lafreniere:really strong players like i was playing with my buddy jayden last night and he's just an absolute god um so he was playing with me against two guys who are very strong like too good for me to play against normally so and then he just like adjusts he's like well i don't have to smash with my full power i could do 70 which is not enough to just they don't touch it at all but not enough for them to return comfortably so that gives linus an opportunity to like get practices net kills like he's one of those players that just like i will turn the dial dictate 30 down yeah unless you're also like a super high level player then and he has to try against you anyway discussion question relating to my job has it become too complicated at what point do layers of redundancy security virtualization and monitoring create more failure points than they prevent

3:42:14Luke Lafreniere:um i'll be honest with you i feel the same way sometimes like every time we have uh an issue with our VLANs, I'm just like, f*** it, get rid of them. Not really, but I have that thought.

3:42:28Linus Sebastian:I was going to say, we definitely want them. I know, I know. I understand, but we definitely do want them. I know we want them, but it's just like

3:42:36Luke Lafreniere:they configure them right.

3:42:37Linus Sebastian:I think this, so Rest Assured just said something that I think is a really important point here. I said, bruh, I'm getting into infra as code, effing kill me. And I think that's probably where your feeling is coming from. I think there's tons of benefits from this. virtualization monitoring etc is incredible the stuff that like jonathan's been up to yeah uh with with kubernetes has been just honestly wild and very interesting and entertaining to watch uh really awesome if you don't have a jonathan um that gets complicated and i think it's also kind of a little interesting because you're taking very traditional it people and mashing them into this infra as code thing.

3:43:22Linus Sebastian:And it's not always really mixing super great. And sometimes like one of the ways that we've kind of tried to set up our team is that we have people that are more on the infra as code thing and we have people that are less on the infra as code thing because you still need both. But if you're like an individual solo IT person, mastering both sides of that is yeah i mean i can understand too complicated it's basically two jobs

3:43:50Luke Lafreniere:um but at certain size of company there aren't two salary budgets totally so yeah um good luck

3:44:01Linus Sebastian:yeah is it becoming too complicated i think it's doing the thing that it should do i think a lot of the infras code stuff totally makes sense to be completely honest is that difficult and rough

3:44:13Luke Lafreniere:on a lot of people i'm 100 certain yeah papa pacman says as somebody in the hospital it environment vms can solve and cause a bunch of problems totally yeah there you go yep all right hit me dan what's up boys linus do you find your life to be busier when your kids are in or out of school every year we plan for how our life is going to be gloriously unbusy during the summer because we don't have to deal with school and every year we discover afresh that it's actually um there's no way i mean our kids are older now so it's they're pretty low maintenance if we don't sign them up for a bajillion summer camps yeah when world scholars cup and when are gonna not do that i don't know when we stop wanting to overachieve his parents i guess which i mean you've seen my wife you've met her you know what she's like yeah so never yeah i guess uh how long they're moved out i suspect we're still gonna like you know be doing the rounds

3:45:15Linus Sebastian:you know dinner delivery and whatnot i'm sure yeah uh this is somewhat rhetorical because i don't necessarily want you to give the answer away uh but how many years until little man can drive oh less than two on his own

3:45:29Luke Lafreniere:that I don't know I'd have to look that up

3:45:31Linus Sebastian:I'm not sure what the current rules are dude it's crazy

3:45:37Luke Lafreniere:it's two years dude I can't I can't believe how quickly everything's going by like I feel so old what is the new meme like getting into beekeeping or something like I'm reaching beekeeping age

3:45:54Linus Sebastian:is that a thing now

3:45:55Luke Lafreniere:Apparently it's a thing. Someone was saying it's like a midlife crisis thing. Beekeeping trend.

3:46:02Linus Sebastian:I like that one, actually. That seems pretty good. That's kind of cool. I dig that one. But nobody has enough property to get a beehive. Urban beekeeping.

3:46:11Luke Lafreniere:Urban beekeeping.

3:46:12Linus Sebastian:Well, it's also calling you old and rich, I guess. Which is what Boomer was. It wouldn't be now. Yeah, that's fair.

3:46:22Luke Lafreniere:Only they get to own a yard. The wellness trend, which has the social set all abuzz. How beekeeping became the hobby beloved by the A-list and royals alike for its meditative qualities. This is from Tattler. I have no idea what a Tattler is. But pictured, David Beckham with Romeo, Cruz, and Harper. Oh, so it's not for us. This isn't like... It's even beyond... Beyond. Prince and Princess of Wales just doing beekeeping, you know, royal people and whatnot. James Middleton.

3:47:00Linus Sebastian:I mean, somebody's got to keep the bees alive.

3:47:02Luke Lafreniere:I suppose so.

3:47:04Linus Sebastian:Maybe it'll be the ultra-rich.

3:47:05Luke Lafreniere:New Netflix series. What is he dinging? I don't know. Oh, he's dinging every time we use the word B-E. Stop. Dork. sorry thoughts on the mount pleasant data center data center bad but maybe it should affect people who use it not just small communities thanks for screwdrivers this is the third one i've bought they're great oh terrific i'm glad you like it what's mount pleasant it is a place where's this oh this is oh this is here oh we're having a mount pleasant data center oh it's like in your Science World. I didn't know we were building. Yeah, it's by like the Timmy's, just south of Science World.

3:47:51Linus Sebastian:That seems insane.

3:47:53Luke Lafreniere:I mean, that kind of makes sense. I mean, there's data centers in urban places.

3:47:59Linus Sebastian:This one doesn't...

3:48:03Luke Lafreniere:I mean, I put it there over East Hastings. If those were the only two options on Earth, I'd go Mount Pleasant. It's right down the name. It's pleasant. It might actually be a way

3:48:14Linus Sebastian:better idea to put it at East Hastings. Really? Do go on. Okay, so you can't keep stores open there. Right. Reasons. What if it just wasn't a storefront?

3:48:27Luke Lafreniere:I mean, yeah, any data center is going to have, like, security up the rectum. Yeah, and probably only one entrance anyways.

3:48:34Linus Sebastian:So instead of a bunch of closed storefronts, they could just have a wall.

3:48:40Luke Lafreniere:You're not really going to promote the idea of just building walls, are you?

3:48:45Linus Sebastian:Well, no, it's every every building has a wall. I don't mean that kind of a wall and we'll make it It's literally just the wall of a building. That's all that was my only point.

3:48:55Luke Lafreniere:Who's gonna pay for it? Maybe Mexico Uh,

3:49:01Luke Lafreniere:anyway, we can move on. I didn't know it was happening, so I don't really have any thoughts either Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it seems like everyone's getting data centered

3:49:10Linus Sebastian:so i guess we got data center i'm interested in ai stuff i'm not interested in the data center side of ai stuff i'm interested in the running it myself yeah side of ai stuff loud lanky and

3:49:20Luke Lafreniere:lurking considering making robotics or electronics content they're getting really weird with these uh do you find enough fulfillment in making content versus traditional work i think about the early days before you were making products and floatplane um yeah i mean it's uh it's one of those things where i think everyone needs occasional reminders but people go out of their way to do it often enough that i don't really struggle with it um like especially attending open sauce was really cool because like more than this many people were like yeah i started watching you when i was this high and now i have this degree or i'm working on this incredible job and i wouldn't have gotten started on it if it wasn't for ltt and thank you so much and i'm like bro you know stuff better than i do now don't thank me thank yourself but they're like no really like you ignited my passion for this and and i i think it's really awesome and that kind of stuff really just it makes my entire week met an engineer at google

3:50:26Linus Sebastian:who if i remember correctly started watching us in elementary school good lord i was like

3:50:35Luke Lafreniere:but super cool right because that's awesome that's our job that's what we do we don't make content we build community if we if we want to like really drill down to what we do that is actually meaningful yeah conrad just posted in float plane chat he's like ncix tech tips got me into tech and now i work for you like it's it's a thing and uh and it's really cool and so i i go out of my way once in a while to send it over to hr so they can include it in like the weekly emails or post it on a fridge here and there like these emails people send me or messages and this is why

3:51:13Linus Sebastian:i understand there's there's lots of reasons why we stopped doing it like many and good ones but this is why I mourn the loss of LTX is I think this was a really interesting thing for a ton of people at the company to experience because I get to experience it when I go to shows. You get to experience it all the time. Most people at the company are never going to experience that. That's true. The stuff that we do is actually very interesting.

3:51:40Linus Sebastian:On my side of things, I do miss content creation a little bit. There were also reasons why I was happy to leave it. Um...

3:51:49I don't know.

3:51:50Linus Sebastian:I think I do not envy the content creation teams at Linus Media Group right now. I don't think some of the guys that work here could even imagine what it was like when you and I first started. Oh, it was crazy. When stuff would just show up and it was like, hey, look, great content. It showed up at the door. I guess we'll make great content out of it. like it's such an insanely different game now it's hard and i i started getting kind of frustrated near the end of my tenure of being a writer uh with like man there's all this

3:52:28Luke Lafreniere:crap now you used to joke that you could just write a gpu review ahead of time with just looking at the price yeah so you would just be like yeah it'll perform this percent faster than this other card and this percent slower than this other card and that was very soul destroying and it's still

3:52:46Linus Sebastian:possible by the way uh but that was very soul destroying because when i got into computers it was like i remember when i like really got into it into into not just being like wow computers are cool i like using windows what can i do on windows but like actually building stuff and like the performance aspect was around like the 8 000 series 7 000 series and video gpus and that was not the case back then it was a wild landscape of of craziness and overclocking and and different binning stuff and i remember you go on forums and there's there's entire subsections just for people doing binning and firmware unlocks all this crazy it was a wild environment to be in and now it's

3:53:24Luke Lafreniere:like you know there's some cool stuff coming no i so you know about one of them but you don't know about another really cool that kind of wild westy thing that i've got in my office right now oh really yeah there's some cool stuff still it's we just gotta dig for it it's kind of sparking up

3:53:40Linus Sebastian:right now in a weird way? I feel like it is. I'm actually... The unfortunate part is no one can afford it. But there is very, very interesting things happening in the hardware space.

3:53:49Luke Lafreniere:The thing in my office is really cool and very affordable. Okay, sick. For now.

3:53:53Linus Sebastian:Sick.

3:53:54Luke Lafreniere:Sick, sick, sick.

3:53:55Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

3:53:56Luke Lafreniere:I don't know how it's going to go after we make our video. Right. Yeah. That's the LTT effect. Yeah.

3:54:02Linus Sebastian:But it's... I don't know. Yeah. Maybe... Linus and I have been talking. Maybe there will be stuff again. I think there will.

3:54:15Luke Lafreniere:And I've got ideas for, you know, what our future content is going to look like that will, I think, help rejuvenate things. I'm actually, I had a chat with the whole writing team, actually, one Friday ago, two Fridays ago. I forget what it was. But basically, I told them, I'm like, I'm more excited about the future of our content right now than I think I've been in years. and I think part of it is just sort of an attitude realignment on my side and part of it is that things are, there are some exciting things happening right now behind the, you know, RAM and storage price increases.

3:54:50Linus Sebastian:It's, people are getting scrappy again. Yeah. And it's kind of cool. Yeah. And like one of the, I used to say this and I know Linus hates it and I understand why he hates it and it's a valid opinion, but I will chirp negatively about computer building by saying that it's just electronic Legos.

3:55:04Luke Lafreniere:Oh, it is not. I know. It's so, that's such bullshit.

3:55:09Linus Sebastian:It's electronic Duplo.

3:55:11Luke Lafreniere:It is not. It's a skill issue.

3:55:14Linus Sebastian:But one of the reasons why I used to throw that, like, basically insult out was because it was getting boring. Not because it was actually electronic Legos, but because it was getting boring. And you just called them Legos. So anyone that you didn't upset by... Because it's just Lego, right? Lego's already plural or whatever? Whatever. Silly geese. Geeses. sorry i meant to say gooses um anyway it's it's fun for me when i have to mess with stuff yeah and we're getting kind of back into that realm yeah oh i agree which is kind of cool it's just really expensive yeah all right get ready to be as triggered as i was go ahead dan

3:55:58Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, last one I've got. Hi, Zev. Anyone read Dungeon Crawler Carl yet? Nope, sorry. Tons of fun. Great audiobook narration. Also, what category is water bottle under? I had to search. All right, let's play. Luke, go ahead. Contentious man show. What would you like to click on? No, no, over here. Okay.

3:56:23Linus Sebastian:Oh, man. Is it bags and accessories or home and decor? I'm going to go home and decor.

3:56:26Luke Lafreniere:Home and decor.

3:56:29Linus Sebastian:yeah there you go it's bad okay what's under bags and accessories though because bags and accessories has socks still yes so that i just have no idea then so the reason this has socks

3:56:40Luke Lafreniere:i did actually ask that is apparently that is industry standard categorization i googled it

3:56:45Linus Sebastian:well and they seem to be right yeah but it does depend on the type of brand you are no no i gotta

3:56:55Luke Lafreniere:interject why why can't we just have it multiple places i love goblin dan i have an opinion question why can't it be in multiple places so if something is obvious for one person then you could just click on it because they're both hypertext links that go to the same like i don't know page i do

3:57:14Linus Sebastian:wonder about that because the it seems like the standardization of socks being under accessories from my googling which might be inaccurate to be very clear but from my googling is more for like fashion brands, high fashion brands mostly. I don't know how many people shopping an LTT store based on our audience demographics spend a ton of time on like high fashion websites. So maybe they would look under apparel. Yeah. Especially because... Would it be a bottom? I thought that the high fashion brands also thought that underwear was an accessory. Maybe. I am extremely hyper the wrong person to talk to about any of that.

3:58:01Luke Lafreniere:Why don't we establish a committee? No. Okay. I'm just, I'm over it right now. Just temporarily. At some point, I will be ready for this crusade again, but right now I'm over it. I don't mind Dan's approach. Just put it in both places. Why don't we just put them under everything? Why doesn't it, no matter what you hover over, it just has one long list of everything you sell?

3:58:26Luke Lafreniere:It will infinitely increase discoverability on our site. In fact, why would you have to hover over anything? Why don't we just have a big long list of everything on our site? Just on the homepage.

3:58:38Linus Sebastian:You should just make it like an HTML directory. Just old school style. Just like that blank thing. Just a product list. White page. The old blue text.

3:58:49Luke Lafreniere:Oh, I would love that. All right. And on that note. Water bottle nightly. I got to go put my chickens away. So we'll see you again next week. Same bad time same bad channel play with them a little bit first. Okay. Bye You don't need to play with my cock. Yeah, no one's home. You're home alone with your four cocks

3:59:10Luke Lafreniere:Oh, and you got and you got some good I don't know if you're supposed to bleep that or not. Anyway, good night everyone

3:59:24you