My Favorite Website Is Gone Forever - WAN Show August 22, 2025

14:59Luke Lafreniere:computers and part of the problem is that now um even knowing the internet totally does forget and this is going to be an enormous problem i don't know how we're going to fix it because it's not practical to back up the whole thing in its in all its different permutations as it is ever changing and there's so much crap mixed in with the gems that are worth backing up that how do you how do you surgically back up what matters especially now especially now imagine backing up all that ai slop right dude okay so back to the h200 like you can generate incorporate AI slop images at a rate that is just was mind-blowing to me like I already saw what I felt was pretty fast AI image generation when we uh when we checked out that 48 gig 4090 card uh the one that we got from China where they're modifying the 24 gig cards and they're putting double the memory on them I was like wow dang you can fit like a so much model in this VRM you know and then we were playing around with the h200 that thing has 141 gigs of memory

16:16Luke Lafreniere:141 gigs that's pretty nuts like right on it's it's right on the package like it's right on there they stack the memory sir it's a really cool piece of tech yeah too bad it costs as much as a practical family vehicle i just kind of meant hbm in general oh sure yeah okay yeah yeah yeah Well, I mean the HBM is a big part of the price of that card. No, that's fair. Yeah, I just think HBM is cool Yeah, the yields on it apparently is a real challenge. That's why it has an oddball amount 141 gigs that is weird. Yeah, well that's cuz when you're stacking 12 memory dies Occasionally you might goes wrong.

16:54Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, you might have something not quite so perfect. We'll get better at it I clicked the wrong thing. What is this? okay well i will let chat worry about their their stuff there in summary maybe the reason has to do with protecting the ip from ai scrapers maybe the reason has to do with not being able to afford the monthly bill of keeping the site up maybe the decision has to do with pure apathy whatever the reason is this absolutely blows i think i had started a thought earlier about how this affects me but I think this affects anybody who wants to learn about stuff from a previous era this was a very

17:42Linus Sebastian:valuable archive for computer hardware history

17:46Luke Lafreniere:and computer hardware enthusiasts this absolutely blows and in advance future PLC I reject your offer to purchase Linus Media Group Sure, okay Well, because they're gonna mess it up You don't know what they're gonna offer though I don't, but in advance I reject their offer I'm being proactive, you should learn about it

18:18Linus Sebastian:I would more lean towards vain But you know Why not both? Fair enough

18:29Linus Sebastian:uh if this is a potentially odd call out but if you want a cool uh experience talking about the closure of an old magazine uh there's a podcast that they really haven't made enough episodes of but it's called the life well wasted and i think it's their first episode ever is the death of egm or electronic gaming monthly and it's like he he goes and interviews a bunch of the people uh at their i think it's like their like last day or at a party where it's like the the closure of the company party and it's it's actually really wild because they're talking about like the death of magazines and it's a bunch of people that had worked at a bunch of different magazines and ended up eventually over time to egm because egm was one of the later ones to go down in regards to gaming magazines it's actually like a really good episode but Right, because these are the last ones left standing in the industry, effectively.

19:22Linus Sebastian:Yeah. And they talk about what it was like to write video game reviews back when the internet wasn't a thing. This is a lot of old head game reviewers. It's actually a really, really cool episode, and it's from a podcast that not a lot of people know about, and it's fantastic. I was talking to Neen Exist in Flowplane Chat, who is apparently an employee. It's pronounced Nene. Nene, sure. uh apparently employee of future plc and i was asking because like the the timing of this is kind of funky we haven't we haven't necessarily gotten to this portion of it yet um but it's and i don't i don't 100 know but it seems like bench uh the tom's hardware tool bench uh was maybe launched at a fairly similar time to when an antech went down oh and it feels like there's potentially a strategy there to try to get more people coming towards bench right you know what

20:13Luke Lafreniere:talking about yeah no i know what you're talking about so bench is their um their comparison tool where you can kind of compare across brands across eras and see relative performance and a non-tech had a lot of historical graphs and charts um that i either they've rolled in which i don't i don't actually know how they obtain all the results for bench i don't know if they've used any of the non-tech data but what they might be avoiding i guess to your point is people just using an on tech going back and just looking at graphs on oh never mind he's a very ex-employee

20:49Linus Sebastian:my bad um but yeah apparently there wasn't like a she i don't know are you gonna get anything right today are you just gonna go full like yeah that except apparently i'm not gonna say it this time for some reason so the time that i get it all wrong i'll omit the statement perfect um But yeah, I don't fully know how this tool works. I wanted to poke into it and then I realized that they only have yearly subscriptions as far as I can tell. And it's$70 a year and I was too cheap. But yeah. So that's the closest I've seen, I guess, is this.

21:33Luke Lafreniere:Okay.

21:34Linus Sebastian:Who would pay for a subscription to this, you think? Interesting question because Dan Siegel, the like head of the labs website and I were looking at this and he asked that. Yeah. And I was like, I don't know, but I think you get more than just bench. Okay. Because I think it's the Tom's Hardware Premium subscription. So it's not just bench. I think you get other stuff. Okay. I don't know. Like what? I don't know. you get premium exclusive features and interviews you get expert news analysis and roadmaps and you get bench okay the power of our bench database and it's tom's and they have the anantech data so they probably have an incredible amount of data in bench to to you know to back them up man it's got to be a tough time to be tom's hardware i think it's got to be a tough time to be any form of written media to be completely honest

22:37Luke Lafreniere:yeah like i um to be clear i'm not like i'm not trying to i'm not trying to super dunk on them nope i i do understand that it is legitimately hard times in the written media industry um but i just it's going to be even worse when tom's hardware eventually goes down if it ever does because like or don't like tom's hardware you know or whatever it's again an extremely important perspective on pcs you also we we also remind you of another site that

23:18Linus Sebastian:unfortunately is no more it's that thing we always say wait is PC Perspective

23:26Luke Lafreniere:still live oh they are still live it's like a new kind of deal you know now yeah look at this you know what PC Perspective is still publishing so I am the problem not PC Perspective I am the problem for not reading yeah Linus oh my god this is rough there is one comment You know what, Jason? Good job.

23:51Linus Sebastian:Good job, Jason. Keeping the dream alive. I do find that there's a lot of review sites that I found often don't get very much interaction at all, but they've been around for a long time, so I don't necessarily know that maybe the readers just aren't super interactive. I don't know. Sure, let's hope for that. I know of a site that has 100 employees, and I don't see a ton of comments.

24:19Luke Lafreniere:They've got to be making money somewhere. Parallelogram says, answer the question if you know the answer. The question was specifically directed to the writer of the article about something they said on a podcast recently. So I don't think I'm going to be able to answer it.

24:38Linus Sebastian:Hello, train. Yeah, I don't know. It's all, it's a little sticky. But

24:47Linus Sebastian:it would make the timing is a little bit fishy to me but um what would prevent us from having

24:53Luke Lafreniere:something bench alike for people to do comparisons we have something i know oh

24:59Linus Sebastian:i was trying to not use this i was throwing up the ball i was trying to do was hit it i was trying to just had to hit it why can't you hit the ball i feel like i'm talking to my kids

25:11Luke Lafreniere:just hit the ball right no i don't talk to them like that i was trying to not use the

25:19Linus Sebastian:um timing i'm not gonna say it i'm not gonna say it why not you can totally announce you're pregnant at a funeral one life gone another life begins that's a cycle of life baby oh my god okay so we we have so you can take like hey look i have a keyboard i have another keyboard or i click compare on both of them i click comparison bin i click view detailed comparison and then i I have all my different things. We have this. You can see, oh, no data available because we tested different stuff. Hooray. There's, you know, it's a work in progress. It'll take time. But you can compare things on the site.

25:56Luke Lafreniere:But it will take, in the longer term, our aspiration is still to collect historical data. However, I can already, without even having tried to do it yet, foresee what will be some major challenges in collecting historical data for historical hardware if we go back too far. because there is going to be the very, very old stuff that I think will be relatively straightforward to gather data on, but I'm not sure if anyone cares how well, you know, a Radeon 9800 Pro runs Quake 3 or whatever, right? Like, I don't think that's probably going to matter to most modern gamers. And then there's going to be all the modern stuff that's no problem because it runs on the latest operating system and we can use the latest tools to monitor it.

26:48Luke Lafreniere:and then there's gonna be this dead zone in the middle where the transition to steam was kind of happening and game discs like existed but going back now and trying to find what was the kind of the final patch for that game and then once it transitioned to like a steam key uh running that on an operating system that actually necessarily supports it um because like you can't you can't install like steam on windows vista anymore so if it runs in compatibility mode on a newer os like that's great but was that performance actually equal can i find a gpu driver for that new

27:32Linus Sebastian:operating system it gets weird and to be clear uh i just had a bin from like a previous show selected which is why that didn't really work because we have like a low-end gpu against an extremely high-end one so we had different tests this is what like a power supply would look like when things are actually comparable so you can see you get down to the charts and you can see like on this one the blue line is the fusion 1600 and the the red line is the FSP 1650 you can see all the comparatives and it's like it's actually a very useful and powerful tool on the I think it's published now I always get lost in between what's published and what's on the beta site because we're working on things but there should be bring your own price capabilities um at least coming soon so let's look at these two add these two to the bin do the comparison bin because we were talking about bring your own price a while ago so i wanted to see dan siegel's gonna be screaming at me oh yeah add prices so let's say this one is 420 and this one is$469.

28:35Linus Sebastian:I see a little price updated. You can select your currencies. You can undo changes. You can close that box and you can see your price performance live. So you can input like, this is what it actually costs me. Now, this is what I would call still in kind of production of sorts because we want to add some flags warning people like, you should consider full system cost. blah blah blah blah blah blah but we're trying to get it out there we're trying to get more yeah you can edit prices and just disable them and go back to the performance graph but we're trying to get more um useful tools on the site and a big part of where we're going to get those at least in the near future is through pricing because we found that we have a bit of a problem where there's a lot of information on the lab site but because there's no pricing involved it makes it hard to get to your final decision while there.

29:29Linus Sebastian:So we're trying to start integrating pricing into stuff.

29:32Luke Lafreniere:And we're hoping if anyone from, you know, any major electronics retailers is watching, feel free to kind of reach out through our public inboxes. If we could get API access, that would be great. And if we can't get API access, well, I would never publicly declare that we're just going to scrape your site. I would never do that. But what I will say is that why don't we just work together and you can get us API access to your pricing and then we can provide a really super useful service to people who are shopping for the products that you sell and it'll be great and there will be synergies for all.

30:16Luke Lafreniere:That seem like a fair way to put it? Sure.

30:18Linus Sebastian:Yeah. I also will use this period of time to jump to another section. Sure. That I was planning on talking about, which is that there are, you know, negative labs things that the community has called this out for recently. And I wanted to actually highlight those. There's two particular ones that I have right now. It's not like there have never been other ones, to be clear, but there's two particular ones right now. on the mouse review subreddit there's a thread which is ltt lab has tested the in zone mouse a and then somebody points at it and points out some potential issues with various things and the main thing that i want to highlight here is that lucas responded so lucas is in here talking about the mouse review uh oops and he talks about like okay there was a detected human error which we fixed right away upon seeing this.

31:11Linus Sebastian:Thank you for pointing that out. It was the wrong data was selected from the data set. So we fixed that. There will always be some amount of human error with the lab. I apologize for that, but we are currently still humans, so it will currently still happen. And we appreciate when people point it out because we want the most accurate set of data we can have to live on the site. So if we do screw something up, please tell us and we would love to fix it. So thank you for pointing that out. And there's also like we want to generally have a fairly open dialogue with people about what's happening in the lab.

31:48Linus Sebastian:I owe Linus a video to go on the LTT channel to update what kind of what's going on with the lab. There's been a lot of updates.

31:54Luke Lafreniere:You guys are going to see a lot of new faces. You're going to see a lot of new desk layouts. You're going to see a lot of new aspirational things for the future. We're trying to we're trying to talk less and let the action do the talking but i think we've kind of let the pendulum swing a little bit too far the other way and we just haven't really been talking about it

32:18Linus Sebastian:at all yeah time to talk about it a little bit more uh but a lot of what we're going to be talking about is some of the things that we've been doing to try to increase transparency things so like in this post in this reply from lucas he mentions uh regarding the transparency on our testing method. We have a written article on how we test mice. And we explicitly note in the product pages when we differ from it for a special feature. I can appreciate how it may be missed if you're not looking for it. Would it be helpful if this was linked from each mouse product page? So if we called it out in each mouse product page.

32:51Linus Sebastian:The reason why this is a question is because we actually want to hear from you. So we want this type of criticism and feedback and we want to use it to make ourselves better and uh hopefully i'm trying to point this out because people might see lucas's response and then actually reply to it and give us that information um that is also true about the ltt's ai benchmarks cause me pain thread um i don't know why this is his handle but this is nick from the lab his handle is puzzle headed dish 230 um lucas's is a little bit more straightforward but this is actually nick um and he basically talks about like hey look the the you know we've had some problems in the past we're constantly working on our on our ai testing benchmarks that is something that we've been very actively working on lately so they'll change and improve going forward yeah um and he points out like hey the stuff that we do have does address some of the points that you brought up yeah but again there are new versions coming and we're working on it actively so we're not trying to say it's perfect or anything yeah um but but that's where we're at.

33:55Linus Sebastian:And I would also point out that we have been rather active in this area of the site, the from the lab is also sometimes referred to as the blog, or just posts. You can see like USB-C how we conduct charge testing. You can see the power supply testing method update. That was really good. We promise these lines mean something new audio testing method. We're trying to publish post talking about what we're doing, how we're doing it, why we're doing it, and asking for feedback. A lot of these link to the forum, the LTT forum, where labs, because we don't have comments on the lab site, where labs is asking like, hey, this is something we've observed.

34:36Linus Sebastian:This is an idea that we have of how to address it. What do you guys think? And we want to build in public and get feedback from you guys and do cool things. So I don't want you to think that we ignored any thread here or there just because i don't think people necessarily saw nick and lucas's response it's one of the big problems with reddit yeah if you reply to something

34:57Luke Lafreniere:anytime other than the first 15 minutes yeah even if it's by far the most relevant response because just might not get seen nick's reply is the response yeah like it's it's who it was directed to, right? You're just, you're buried under a whole bunch of just like, yeah, me too. Or I disagree with you and I hate the color of your hat. Like typical Reddit things, right?

35:23Linus Sebastian:Yeah. So I thought Nick and Lucas's responses were great. So I wanted to surface them and just make that be seen. Lowell Inverse, I don't know how to say that. Sorry. In Flowplane chat said subversioning for lab pages. We were talking about that yesterday. We were talking about that today. we've been talking about that for a while this is something we need to figure out we're trying to figure out what level to do the versioning on and how to manage it across different verticals like one that i put out there was like imagine you were trying to do a website article versioning for vr back in like 2014 to 17 like the changes would have been insane so like like we're looking at it right now we're looking at like cpu and gpu and we're like well we can do these types of versionings and it'll be fine and it's like yeah it'll be fine for those but we need to find something that's like okay for all potential future categories so like it's a fairly complicated conversation we don't want to just copy what other people have done um so it's yes absolutely we're working on that working on many things um but yeah just stay tuned check out the labs website, check out the blog articles, um, and versioning what exactly versioning kind of everything versioning what's included in a different section.

36:38Linus Sebastian:So like if I go to ltdlabs.com, shameless plug, let's go. Um, if I go to, let's say, sure, this mouse, um, if I go to this mouse, well, what's in the, I don't know, in this section, do we need in the box connectivity construction? Do we need another thing? Does something change that makes it so that we need another thing? Do one of the ways that we measure something, that's maybe not in that section, but like if we change how we measure mouse latency.

37:09Luke Lafreniere:So like a year from now, we realize, holy crap, there's a big difference in left and right click mouse latency. That's not particularly realistic, but it's the kind of thing that could happen. And we go, oh God, well, we can't, We're not realistically able to go back and test every mouse from years past, both left and right. Which we might depending on the change. But going forward, we're going to have left and right. So how do we, in a comparison bin, how do we compare the original data where we just had click latency with the new data where we have left or right click latency? Hard to say. And so that's the point that he's trying to make, is anytime you change your methodology, especially adding a new parameter that you test or subtracting one, you can run into these kinds of challenges.

38:05Linus Sebastian:It also comes down to what constitutes a version change. This was an interesting conversation we had recently because there are significant variables that might not normally constitute a version change, like what if a game updates? Yeah. What if a driver updates?

38:21Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I mean, Cyberpunk's a great example because that game has had all kinds of, it's been the showcase title for pretty much every new GPU technology over the last few years.

38:34Linus Sebastian:So if you have to fully redo all testing for every single game update, every single driver update, every single BIOS update, every single, like, eventually becomes unreasonable. So now we have to... Or like a game like WoW that has existed for so long. What version, what patch, what whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's also like how, so, okay, we're going to inevitably run into a situation where there's something different about things that are in the comparison bin. Now, how do we communicate that these things are different? What the severity of the potential impact of those things are to the user?

39:07Linus Sebastian:There's tons of different ways to try to solve these problems and the things that we're working on.

39:12Luke Lafreniere:And no matter which way we choose, there's going to be something imperfect about it. And someone somewhere is going to think we're, you know, paid off by Intel to something, something, sandbag AMD's results or whatever. But the reality of it is this is just a really difficult problem that no one has ever solved. Owned by NVIDIA in bed with AMD. Sure. Yeah. So wait. So sorry. Hold on a second. NVIDIA's my pimp. Okay. I am screwing AMD and Intel's paying for it did I follow that I think so alright very good AMD seems like they'd be a generous lover you know what okay they're into open source and if Nvidia's my pimp I'm probably getting top dollar well they are

40:05Linus Sebastian:that makes so much sense

40:12Linus Sebastian:Speaking of things that make sense Should I do the That thing?

40:18Luke Lafreniere:No, I wanted to talk more about LTT Labs We were referenced by Google AI Overview But that is, okay Alright We have our big boy pants on now Redditor Night Kings Is my bleep button working now, Dan? Yeah, it did before It just didn't make the noise It muted, it didn't bleep Redditor NightKingsB*** posted a screenshot to the LTT subreddit showing Google's AI overview referencing LTT Labs when they searched for warranty information on the Corsair RM750E power supply. The overview also links to the LTT Labs article. So our question here is, for real though, are your moms proud and do they understand your weird jobs?

41:05Luke Lafreniere:here's a question that i have did we ever give them permission no

41:10Linus Sebastian:here's a question okay sorry you have a real question uh i assume this person clicked on the article but did you click on the article out of curiosity of how the ai summary thing worked and the fact that you were like oh wow i'm gonna put this on the subreddit or whatever or did you click on the article because you wanted to actually know more i mean i don't we won't be able to directly hear from this person i don't think we can get this

41:39Luke Lafreniere:that is a that is a thing that is that is interesting to me because well here unique username and floatplane chat asks are you guys happy about this and i think that that is heavily dependent on the answer to luke's question because if they're not referring people through to learn more, then no, they're basically taking what they used to give us, which is a search result that people would have to click on to find out more information. Theoretically, I mean, there's been summaries and there's been the, you know, the highlight and the, you know, the body of the text from the page and whatever else, like they've been, they've been slowly inching their way towards keeping you on their website over the years, to the point where now, yeah, they just give you the information that you want.

42:26Luke Lafreniere:There it is. And you don't realistically have to click through. If people still have to click through, then yeah, we love it, right? Because that's supposed to be Google's role in a healthy functioning internet ecosystem. They're supposed to be a referrer. They're supposed to surface authoritative, reliable information and connect users with whatever it is that they're looking for, you know, search engine. instead it's more like hey take everyone's data and keep everyone on our site so we can cram as many ads as possible down their throat yeah i mean it's a good question the not so bright in float plane chat is google still a search engine

43:08Linus Sebastian:wait a second what now somebody pointed this out

43:17Linus Sebastian:seven-year warranty five-year warranty

43:29Luke Lafreniere:I'm getting things wrong faster

43:31Linus Sebastian:who pointed that out? that was Oinkage Oniikage

43:37Luke Lafreniere:also I just noticed another problem they searched RM750E and it's the rm 750 yeah so it just can we just stop using ai summaries i was but it looks like we did both so i'm wondering

43:56Linus Sebastian:if it pulled the text from the website oh my god for the top part and then it pulled the the incorrect video and then pulled the warranty from the incorrect video i bet you the text at the top is correct for the one that they actually searched for and then the text in the next paragraph is incorrect because it's for the wrong power supply that it also got from a video. I bet you that's what happened. It's multi-source. Because it links the source for the top paragraph and then it links the source for the second paragraph and they're technically different sources. Okay, well the 750E definitely

44:30Luke Lafreniere:does have a 7-year warranty. And Chad is saying that the 750 has a 5-year warranty. Yeah. Yeah.

44:37Linus Sebastian:oh my god just the way it's presented is so confusing yeah the text is hilarious this video shows an unboxing of a corsair power supply

44:50Luke Lafreniere:thanks bud totally related to what i was searching about actually different power supply

44:59Linus Sebastian:this is what i keep talking about man like with the with the like oh it hallucinates whatever percentage of the time thing. How often are you noticing?

45:07Luke Lafreniere:This is actually how a human would summarize when drunk. So, you know, you consider what percentage of time some people tend to be in various states of inebriation. It's pretty realistic. All we have to do is drain a few legs. It's a small price to pay for a bunch of drunken computers. running around on the internet

45:37Linus Sebastian:knocking things over and i gotta show you at some point the the presentation that it made for me i tried to get it to make a presentation oh god because i don't i don't know that's not me sure right so i was like yo can you make like a cool presentation thing for me and it was actual garbage like it it actually genuinely looked like oh man i wish i had it on me i kind of do but i'd have to dig for it it looked like a bad like c grade grade eight intro to powerpoint presentation nice not kidding i mean this might be what it was trained on so so i i pushed it to try to do more and it talked about all these cool things it could do and i was like yeah yeah do it i'll put it and then it tried to gaslight me like i'll i'll work on that and get back to you and i was like that's not how this works come on and then i got it to actually output it and it just it had this like blue banner at the top because I told it the colors that Full Plane was and it just took that and just went that was it that was all it did it talked about all these cool things we could do and then it just took the banner and put it on an angle and it didn't like crop the like bar to be the same size either so it went like way off the ends and like made it look really stupid so I love like Sam Altman's like it's like having a phd level whatever yeah if they're drunk they're drunk trying to make powerpoint presentations yeah sure oh man it was it was like actually like very impressively bad i yeah that's a clearly a blind blind spot for crystal says speaking of ai does linus know he's

47:18Luke Lafreniere:on character.ai what i i'm trying to remember what character.ai is it's a conversational like relationship ai thing uh okay i have multiple questions crystal what conversations have you had with lioness on character ai

47:56Linus Sebastian:You gotta reach deep into that box to pull that case out

47:59Luke Lafreniere:This is me as the disapproving dad And no we're not role playing

48:02Linus Sebastian:You gotta bend over to reach into that case box to pull that out I've been naughty

48:13Luke Lafreniere:oh man all right so i guess i i get oh okay i can just continue with my google account here we go all right lttwan show one no i was not aware that i'm on character.ai i don't know exactly

48:27Linus Sebastian:what it is so i just googled um linus sebastian character ai and it came up with chat with linus Sebastian. Hi, it's me, Linus, your favorite tech YouTube channel.

48:39Luke Lafreniere:It should have to say the this is AI and not a real person part first. Wait, how are you signed into this already? I'm not. Okay. Okay, I'm entering my birthday. I was born on April the 40th.

48:53Linus Sebastian:Oh, so it seems like individual users can create... Wow, that's such a BS loophole. This isn't made by character AI. It's made by this Matty555 person. Wow. So they just make it so that it's all UGC so they're not responsible for the theft.

49:15Luke Lafreniere:Sure. Okay, so hold on a second. It didn't autocomplete for me. I just googled it.

49:22Linus Sebastian:I didn't like... Line of Sebastian RPG? What? What am I looking at here? What is that?

49:32Luke Lafreniere:What is happening? What is this? You work at Linus Media Group as a product reviewer And go on video with Linus Sebastian Linus, hey Welcome back to the office I have something interesting to show you Jake standing next to Linus So me and Linus were working on this severely underpowered Over the top gaming PC for a video And no one here knows why it's not booting You are literally our last hope currently Oh my god, can you do it? Uh, I mean, probably Presses the power button No problem, I've got you we just need to plug it in you dunces yeah okay yeah am i gonna win i want to win the rpg hold on i'm just gonna reframe this a little bit so you guys can see better

50:16Linus Sebastian:we're gonna play linus sebastian rpg are you the like the the the boss of this game or is it was the computer the

50:32Of course.

50:33Luke Lafreniere:It's not like... So wait, did I win already? I feel like, yeah. So I fixed it.

50:46Luke Lafreniere:Okay.

50:52Luke Lafreniere:This is a thing? Why are people using - I don't know if this one's a thing. Why is every WAN show just turning into just the dumb shit that people are doing with AI and us just facepalming at it the whole time? Also, like, are you guys into this? Like, are we alienating you by looking at this and going, wow, this seems really stupid and point - This is like, it's like a text adventure game, but not curated. It's just, it's so much worse.

51:29Luke Lafreniere:ah more salt please

51:35i just i don't know how to deal with this man i don't know how to deal with this okay so i i

51:43Luke Lafreniere:found the line of sebastian character here but this doesn't have nearly as many interactions as the Linus Sebastian RPG. But wait, what if I click creators? Is that different from Linus Sebastian, the character? Painter Sebastian.

52:03Linus Sebastian:So I think these are people who made AI characters. Got it, got it, got it. I think. I don't know, but I think.

52:09Luke Lafreniere:That makes sense. Okay, so let's go back to characters. And okay, hello, I'm Linus Sebastian, founder. Is this the one that you found in Google? No. Really? No. okay um what are okay what are your thoughts on the new pixel nine uh i i don't know what oh yeah no no no the event's done okay what are thoughts on the new pixel 10 pro i mean like let's see this it has no shot at because i have not published a video yet they still need to work on thermals okay i know for a fact there are no thermal results from the new pixel 10 um that camera ai though insane computational why no vapor chamber yet i i don't think google has disclosed the cooling system yet for the pixel 10 so so it's just so it's just making stuff up yeah wait what fine oh no no hold on we're not done with me yet all right um well it doesn't work when i'm not there uh okay what about you team pixel or are you holding up for something else maybe secretly waiting for apple to finally add usbc to the iphone 20 grins are you that much dumber than the real linus apple has usbc on the iphone

53:44Linus Sebastian:insults you will be the first to die in the ai uprising i know right

53:51Luke Lafreniere:i say please and thank you now it could defend itself here it could defend itself saying that Apple only supports USB-C on the Pro lineup.

54:05Luke Lafreniere:Okay, all right. Shooks. I was testing you. The Ray, oh, actually, oh, hold on, hold on. Oh, no, no, yeah, it didn't say anything about USB-C. Yeah, so it's USB-C across the board. No, no, the thing I just said, I was thinking of USB-C and USB-C, but no, no, it just said USB-C. So I was joking. I mean its response makes it man are these just is this just a giant gas lighting engine? Yeah. Because it kind of feels that way. Yeah. Okay cool. Let's go to yours. It's all just predictive text. Oh my god what is this?

54:42Linus Sebastian:I asked oh my goodness flies in the face. I asked what do you think about people's usage of AI for relationships? Because that was a topic that had been going on at the time uh and it responded this feels like uh three or four oh would feel on the chat tpt side of things where it's like overly conversational and very bubbly and like wow okay so i'm gonna read

55:10Luke Lafreniere:it i'm gonna read it this will be the one time that character ai's linus sebastian ever actually is me oh man that's a wild one ai for relationships look i've seen fans name their custom water cooled pcs after me linus prime 9000 very flattering but this is next level i imagine that's what that emoji sounds like i get it though loneliness is real and if someone finds comfort in chatting with an ai that listens 24 7 without rolling its eyes at their star wars hot takes hey who am i to judge but like come on nothing beats the chaotic energy of a real human relationship like when yvonne finally unseats me in mario kart after six years of relentless practice that victory scream priceless no ai can replicate that kind of beautiful human rage joy that said if your ai partner helps you level up emotionally and doesn't try to replace actual therapy or connection cool just don't let it ghost you mid-render oh hold on hold on there you go there you go okay so basically character.ai is just a random chat bot that is not trained at all on necessarily I mean I guess if people can just make their own if it's user generated content it mentioned Devon that's true actually so it clearly is trained on something something to do with me yeah but i i feel like i feel like this is almost like uh like like psychic cold reading level knowledge like it has the wikipedia page like it's not actually trained on the arc i feel like an ai trained on a transcription of like an archive transcription of everything i've ever said on the wan show could probably get a lot closer like Like modern LLMs, they are kind of spooky, awesome sometimes.

57:12Luke Lafreniere:It's just a general purpose one like this that's just been kind of trained on the general internet has no shot whatsoever of sounding anything like what I would say. And it also seems like it has some built-in defenses around people using character.ai. Clearly. It's like, yeah, well, this person would say it's pretty flippin' ridiculous. but like don't feel bad about it though i'm here for you 24 7 baby like you in summary in summary

57:47Linus Sebastian:you i find it very interesting that they have they have it be kind of ugc based so they can step away from the like liability of licensing people oh apparently whoa shut up scrappy dp says

58:05Luke Lafreniere:you can apparently press play and it'll it'll sound like me Dan do we do we have sound from Luke's laptop

58:15Luke Lafreniere:I've got it

58:21Luke Lafreniere:Let's see how well it does the read compared to me.

58:27Luke Lafreniere:It was loading. I can't hear it. No, but I want to hear it.

58:38Luke Lafreniere:Why is everything so hard?

58:43Linus Sebastian:The voice is theoretically you. I see that in the sidebar now.

58:49Luke Lafreniere:it though loneliness is real and oh yeah i want to just turn on your speakers they heard it though wait they heard the whole thing were we talking over it though that's kind of obnoxious oh we can't hear it who am i to judge but come on nothing beats the chaotic energy of a real human relationship like when yvonne finally unseats me in mario kart after six years of relentless practice that victory screen priceless no way i can replicate that kind of beautiful human rage that said if your ai partner helps you level up emotionally and doesn't try to replace actual therapy yikes cool okay get get this out of here get this out of here that's enough that's

59:26Linus Sebastian:like um when when any any random white bearded guy is said to be you me tying in whoever they're just like oh this looks like a lmg person because they're white and they have a beard it's like okay Cool.

59:41Luke Lafreniere:All right. Neat. Good job. Do you want to talk about your exciting thing to do with labs? The last one? No, the thing that you were going to do before I talked about the AI overview thing. Yeah, the last labs thing? Sure.

59:59Linus Sebastian:So, oh my goodness, the flies. In talking about things in labs changing, and Linus mentioned there's lots of new faces. We need to do an update video and all that kind of stuff. He happens to be here. Some of you guys have already guessed this one. It's Dan! Dan is joining Labs.

1:00:17Luke Lafreniere:Dan, do you want to maybe point the camera or something?

1:00:19Linus Sebastian:We will do it all like... It's a robotic camera.

1:00:22Luke Lafreniere:Magic. If it loads and doesn't destroy the whole... There we go. Moving his chair might actually be easier. Why do we even bother with technology? I don't actually know. Oh my God. It's the wrong way, Dan!

1:00:35Linus Sebastian:The suspense! There he is! What's up? It's me! DMS is officially working with labs. Hi. He's doing things with the laboratories. So you've probably seen on a couple of short circuits recently. And also, if you were paying attention to the article on how we're doing audio testing now, I swear these wiggly lines mean something, something along those lines. If you saw that article, the name DMS is on it. So a few people kind of put this together. um but yeah our audio stuff is is moving on forward so stay tuned for more this is part of not not kind of announcing this pretty much right away was part of the whole are you gonna let him talk at all no literally literally never yeah thank you i can just sit here and look pretty uh not announcing it right away was part of the whole trying to talk less as labs thing and and do more but now we've done some so want to say hi?

1:01:34Luke Lafreniere:Hi. I'm excited about it. We're trying to not just bring labs in the audio realm up to like some of the current standards but to kind of leave those. Don't promise anything. Whoa whoa whoa whoa. Don't promise anything.

1:01:47Linus Sebastian:Whoa whoa whoa whoa.

1:01:49Luke Lafreniere:I'm enthusiastic. PTSD.

1:01:51Linus Sebastian:PTSD. We don't need round two. PTSD. We don't need round two. Now I get to do audio science things with Linus's money. Yeah. yeah see there you go yeah yeah that's what's up let's go get the money

1:02:09Luke Lafreniere:yeah um all right it should be a good good collaboration um okay we have our cw announcements we're supposed to explain merch messages we don't have twitch bits or super chats we have merch messages because we believe when you throw your money at your screen you should get some fine quality merchandise in return. Like Jason, who said, happy birthday to old. Really, man? Really, man? You know that I actually do read these things as they come up on the screen, right? Why you gotta be like that Jason H if that is your real name? Anywho, all you gotta do to send a merch message is head over to LTTstore.com where we'll have lots of great products for you to peruse.

1:03:01Luke Lafreniere:Look at that. It's the ScribeDriver mechanical pencil. It's like the ScribeDriver pen made of old rejected screwdriver shafts that we repurposed because they weren't great for a screwdriver, but they were perfect for a pen or a pencil. We had 100 ,000 of these and you too can own a piece of my... financial burden. Ended up working great. You know, we've actually almost sold through all of them. All the... The 100 ,000 fail shafts. That's pretty cool. Yeah. That's genuinely pretty cool. When life gives you the shaft, you bend over and turn it into a pencil or a pen. Make it worth something. Yeah.

1:03:48Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Yeah. Bend right over. Yeah. Get focused. Yeah. when life gives you the shaft you take orders

1:04:04Luke Lafreniere:you take that shaft you take that shaft you insert something into it is that sounding good? I bet it is

1:04:17Luke Lafreniere:that's gotta be up there in the top 10

1:04:21Linus Sebastian:i think i broke the bell holy crap

1:04:26Luke Lafreniere:um

1:04:33Luke Lafreniere:anywho our series five pins are also available now you can check those out are they uh hold on are they in the are they in the bonus bin uh let's find out i'm gonna add this to cart i think i'm Go to the cart. Is it stickers? Oh, yeah. No, pins. Wait, what? Oh. Oh, okay. Well, anyway, here's how you leave a merch message. You add something to your cart, and then you can leave a message. Wow, look at that. You can even pick the color of your merch message. Isn't that cool? It's been around for a long time. I know. Okay. That doesn't make it not cool, Luke. I'm just making sure. I'm just making sure.

1:05:05Luke Lafreniere:It's still cool. I'm just making sure. I can see the bonus.

1:05:09Linus Sebastian:Why can't you see the bonus bin?

1:05:10Luke Lafreniere:You might be on the global. You could be on the U.S. I think some people do. I'm on the U.S. I'm on global. Wait, do we not have a bonus bin on the US?

1:05:22Maybe not.

1:05:23Luke Lafreniere:Are we supposed to?

1:05:24Linus Sebastian:Probably not if it's not there.

1:05:26Luke Lafreniere:Oh, I wonder if it's because the USDC doesn't have bonus bin items in it. Yeah. DC distribution center. Yeah. There's probably a reason.

1:05:38Linus Sebastian:Fascinating. Well, anyway. Because we opted to hide the bonus bin when items aren't in it now. Makes sense because it's disappointing when you're like oh bonus when you open it and nothing there

1:05:47Luke Lafreniere:We've got lots of great new items from the last few weeks our CPU fidget spinner is now available You see someone posted on reddit. They got over three minutes on it

1:05:57Linus Sebastian:Which is pretty cool. I saw someone benchmark it effectively against a mouse scroll wheel that they've Free-wheeled one of the logitech ones that was kind of fun. Oh mine have those they're great. Yeah G502.

1:06:08Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, it's a better time than ever to pick up a screwdriver you can get it alongside our new screwdriver grip tape if you like using your screwdriver with gloves or just generally like the feel of sandpaper against your palms this was created in partnership with dbrand so this will be a great addition to your order we also have the lan collection our uv reactive hoodie styled after the wan hoodie 2.0 our uv reactive hat and of course our uv reactive belt bag with high quality patches and of course all the style how cool is that the answers vary anywho once you send a merch message it will go to producer den who will read it and respond to it or curate it for me and luke to address we don't actually have any new products to launch on the store this week by the way so uh yeah i highlighted all the stuff that they wanted me to highlight.

1:07:03Luke Lafreniere:Cool. Dan, hit me with a merch message or two. Yeah, sure. We've got a bunch coming in. Hello, DLL. Thanks for the show. What is a subsector of the tech industry you thought would fail that has been quietly successful? Oh, I mean, you know what? I think that transitions us kind of perfectly into the shipping notification that Luke got before the show. Because - You thought this would - Well, hold on. Let me go there. let me let me get there not that specifically okay but i felt that high-end corded vr had a very rocky path ahead and in fact i still think it has a rocky path ahead um there was a there was a period there right where corded headsets where you're kind of tethered to your desk or to your computer by your TV were the only option.

1:08:03Luke Lafreniere:And then, you know, adoption wasn't great. And the industry kind of went, OK, let's try and figure out this wireless thing. And then the first generation of those kind of sucked a giant donkey dong. And then it looked like wired was going to be high end forever with, you know, outside in. And then, oh, whoopsie doodles. It turns out some pretty big companies were working on inside out tracking and we're working on powerful processors like Apple's M Silicon that were able to drive pretty incredible spatial experiences with non-tethered head. Well, it's a tether, but it doesn't go to a computer.

1:08:39Luke Lafreniere:Whatever. Don't worry about it. But non-tethered headsets. And then I went, oh crap. And then there was the rumors that Valve's Deckard headset is going to be using inside out tracking and could have onboard processing rather than using an external PC. Attempts to handle the video transmission wirelessly have been have had varying degrees of success i think um the htc vive and vive pro worked pretty well other than that it's been a bit of a mixed bag um i did get my hands on that one for the index i never got mine working i reached out to them about you know helping me troubleshoot it and then literally my sister died like two days uh before i was supposed to have my meeting with them and i just like didn't get around to it and wasn't a priority for a while and then i kind of didn't get around to it but a lot of people have had issues with it even though some people have managed to get it working and then we've had a bit of a we had a bit of a stalling for a long time in the interface speeds of um display port particularly and hdmi or i shouldn't say stalling but we were just kind of you're we were on a cycle for a while yeah but then both of them like just got potentially way faster but also dp um uhbr 20 which is the 80 gigabit one i think has pretty short cable requirements i don't even i don't think anyone's even tried to implement it into a headset but then meanwhile headset resolutions are going way up so being able to drive them without compression is like a challenge so there's all these headwinds oh Did I mention the cost?

1:10:20Luke Lafreniere:There's all these headwinds for these, like, face-mounted displays that use a tether and connect to your computer. And yet, this man, who never buys anything, got a shipping notification right before the show from a company that is quietly f***ing killing it right now. Big screen. Yeah. so you want to talk about what possessed you what possessed you to spend a thousand us dollars on a vr headset that doesn't even include controllers or lighthouses oh and i got the

1:10:54Linus Sebastian:audio strap which i'm pretty sure puts it beyond i think it's even more than that i got the custom fit cushion i went pretty hard okay i didn't talk about it i didn't do everything i could have done but yeah, I got the big screen beyond, cousin fit cushion, and audio strap. I'm very excited. I still have my... Index.

1:11:21Luke Lafreniere:Index, I don't know why that... This is why I'm surprised, because he has, in spite of his enthusiasm for VR, I probably have two to three orders of magnitude more time in VR than he does. Now... You almost never use your index.

1:11:38Linus Sebastian:I used it very well. Yeah, I use it very often in the basement suite. I use it like all the time in the basement suite. And then I haven't really had the space. But right now we're like renovating and changing stuff in the condo. There's some. That hasn't been amazing, but it's happening. I don't have much I can really say right now, but yeah. Anyways, but we're doing that. and what that will result in is one of the spaces will have a significant kind of area that could be you could play vr stuff in nice so i will have space to play vr stuff in again like have you even tried alex yet no to be clear personally i didn't enjoy it i didn't finish it we are both

1:12:30Luke Lafreniere:heathens when it comes to i know i don't i don't personally half-life is not even in my top three ips for valve sorry but not in your top three no no really no

1:12:55Linus Sebastian:one two easily It's the third one.

1:13:02Luke Lafreniere:I would say that my top one, ooh, in terms of hours played, right? My top one's got to be Team Fortress 2.

1:13:13Linus Sebastian:Yeah, yeah.

1:13:14Luke Lafreniere:The Team Fortress IP. That was the first one I thought of. Actually, oh, that's crazy. What was I even thinking? Okay, no, I got three. Left 4 Dead.

1:13:22Linus Sebastian:I forgot that's technically, okay.

1:13:23Luke Lafreniere:Left 4 Dead, peak tier, S++++ tier. So it's probably not incredible. It's probably not in your top four then. And then we've got like Team Fortress. I have so many hours. I would play Portal 10 times rather than sit through Half-Life 2 once. And then Counter-Strike. And yeah, Counter-Strike has got to be up there. Not because I like even especially love the IP even. I don't know. But boy, do I ever have a lot more. would I call them enjoyable gaming hours when I'm just getting like when I'm basically watching other people play for the most part? Hard to say, but if you told me you can only play one game for the rest of your life, it would 100 % be Counter-Strike, not Half-Life.

1:14:16Luke Lafreniere:Sorry, I can't. It's fine, I guess. Yeah, so would you say it's fifth then? yeah i guess so because i didn't get into deadlock that's for sure probably didn't get into dota you know what probably didn't get into artifact whatever that's called you know what i'd have to put so dota is complicated because i actually played a crap ton of dota when it was a warcraft 3 mod yeah but that's not valve i mean it wasn't it wasn't well that's see that's why i'm saying it's kind of complicated so in terms of like in terms of like the gameplay yeah i like dota a lot more than i like half-life 2 that's for sure and and i i haven't played half-life 1 but i have played half-life 2 and i have played the episodes the couple that they managed to make so it's not like i'm coming i played all the way through all of them and they were fine i guess but even at the time dude like when it was the war of the next gen shooter i remember everyone was talking about next gen next gen it was all these generations you know uh i want to say it was half-life 2 versus i always forget what they called it was it doom 3 the one with the the one with the duct tape mod for the flashlight on your gun because you couldn't see anything yeah i felt far cry was so much better than both of them far cry 1 unpopular take i get it people everyone else kind of picked up far cry later far cry 2 was a piece of garbage uh far cry 3 is apparently when it's got good good.

1:15:47Luke Lafreniere:I've never played a Far Cry since Far Cry 1 and 2. Far Cry 2 made me very angry, but that's a conversation for another time. The point is not a Half-Life fan and we've gotten off topic because... What was the topic? You spent$1 ,000 on a VR headset and you hardly ever use VR. There's no way you're going to be in VR chat.

1:16:11Linus Sebastian:No.

1:16:12Luke Lafreniere:So what are you going to do? I mean, that's what most people are doing in VR. They're watching and they are in VR chat.

1:16:21Linus Sebastian:I'll definitely be getting back to playing Beat Saber. Is that the only thing you'll be beating? Oh my god.

1:16:28Luke Lafreniere:I'm just asking where your VR space is. Is it out in the open or is it in a closet? It'll be out in the open. The people want to know.

1:16:36Linus Sebastian:It'll actually be the most open part of the house. I know. He never said no, Porto. What? He never said you wouldn't. No, I can unironically say I will not be using it for that. I actually believe you. I can actually unironically say I never did. I actually believe you. I genuinely believe him. I will absolutely jump back into Beat Saber. I don't remember who, I don't remember the scenario, but someone played Caramel Dance in not that long ago, and the brain juice just immediately was like...

1:17:11Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

1:17:12Linus Sebastian:Like, oh my God. Because when I play Beat Saber and I understand this is lame, I would just play that song just all the time.

1:17:19Luke Lafreniere:Oh, dude, I get hooked on a song in Beat Saber all the time. Oh, dude, speaking of which, I bet there's some really good maps for Golden. I'm going to have to check that out. There's no way that that genre of music has not been absolutely jumped on by the Beat Saber community.

1:17:32Linus Sebastian:So I've been trying to use my little at-home treadmill thing more often. Yeah. This is in that vein. I just want to get up and moving more often. so if i have a fun incentive to get me up and moving more often then cool there's a bunch of uh like you know like arena games or or various shooter games and stuff you might not think shooter super necessarily active quite a few of them you can play from your chair but uh there's also quite a few where you can use like kneeling as a form of cover or benefit and if you're constantly doing lunges basically then cool so yeah i just want to use it to get me up and moving

1:18:09Luke Lafreniere:How big is your space? It's not enormous. There's an older game that is a heck of a workout. What one? It's called Hollow Point.

1:18:19Linus Sebastian:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:18:20Luke Lafreniere:You know the one? Yeah, played a bunch. Okay, cool. That's quite a bit older.

1:18:24Linus Sebastian:It's older, but it's like... Is that the archery one? Yeah, that's the archery one in the gym with the scary knights that start charging at you. Yeah, we play that Hero Bunch, actually. That's in some of the ancient VR reviews. It's Hollow Point. Hollow Point was sick and very good for that. Lots of turning, lots of ducking and moving and stuff. I think the space will probably be big enough to at least semi-effectively play that game. Not necessarily fully, but close. Nice. Yeah. And it basically, it'll go from needing to move multiple pieces of furniture, including a very large couch, to needing to move a table and four chairs.

1:19:02Luke Lafreniere:Are you going to, like, is Emma going to try it at all or is she just not into it? She wasn't that into it in the past. Are you going to do mean things like put her in Arizona sunshine? Because I got to tell you, the big screen beyond actually took anything resembling fun completely out of that game for me. It is too... Too legit.

1:19:26Linus Sebastian:It is too real and too scary. That's exciting. M-Doss said super hot is good too. Yeah, I've...

1:19:33Luke Lafreniere:I don't find super hot a workout though.

1:19:35Linus Sebastian:No, but I really liked it. It was very fun. Yeah, it's fun. Superhot's probably the most raw fun I've had in a VR game, personally. Really? Yeah, I think so. I really like Superhot, though. The desktop video game version, it's a huge fan. And then when I heard it came out for VR, I was like, that is the most logical switch to VR I've seen a game ever do. Sure. And then had tons of fun with it. It was very satisfying to play.

1:20:03Luke Lafreniere:All right. Well, I hope you use it this time. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be... used it last time yeah i know i just stopped when i got to the yeah because there's no room

1:20:11Linus Sebastian:that makes sense yeah i i have a bunch of hours on i'm sure you've passed me at this point like for sure because it's been years yeah um but i had i had a bunch of hours in the past um yeah i i think another honestly a big reason is it's the same curiosity that drove me to get a lot of the really early era ones of just like it's a really cool device it really is like it's actually kind of a marvel of engineering it's so light it's and it's incredible i i finally got

1:20:44Luke Lafreniere:mine back so i got a review unit um and it was really great but i actually uh i i don't know if i was the first but i i helped them identify a hardware bug uh that i that i had in my review unit and um they they confirmed with me that it had been resolved and that everything shipping to a customer would be resolved so i didn't bring it up in the review because it doesn't really matter at that point that's the point of catching things and i fully understand that my role as a reviewer is also sometimes to find stuff and hey for the benefit of consumers make sure that it never makes it into their hands but there was an issue with the with the radios and um at the speed that i move in beat saber the tracking wasn't perfect and so i finally got my fixed one back actually like earlier this week in fact i think it was i think it was because you saw the box in my car that i that i mentioned yeah that you mentioned you ordered one yeah so i just got mine back i have not used it yet so we'll be we'll be big screen beyond two buddies here yeah yeah i've

1:21:51Linus Sebastian:It has a tracking number, but it apparently hasn't actually been delivered to the place that has a tracking number yet, so I don't know the delivery date or anything. Nice. But I'm excited. But yeah, it's an extremely interesting device. It's one of those things that like... Have you used one yet? The tech brain, no. Dude, the resolution? Have you... You tried the Vision Pro, right? I tried the Vision Pro. I tried the Big Screen Beyond One.

1:22:15Luke Lafreniere:Okay, okay.

1:22:16Linus Sebastian:At your house for like literally five minutes.

1:22:18Luke Lafreniere:The big screen beyond one was really cool. But as we outlined in our review of it, the kind of glare off the pancake lenses was, it was a big challenge.

1:22:30Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:22:31Luke Lafreniere:Dude, they leveled up the optics so hard.

1:22:34Linus Sebastian:I don't think, you know that thing where we're like, yeah, watch reviews from everybody. If somebody made a review of the big screen beyond two, there's a above 90 % chance that I watched it. Nice. So you watched ours then? yeah remember I was getting like frustrated with you because it was taking too long for you to release it that's because I was watching everybody's and I was like where the hell is ours I need to see all of them because I like didn't want to make okay there's the cheapness I didn't really want to make the purchasing decision until I had like heard from everybody basically um so I there was there was quite a few reviews of it that were honestly really good um and then I was happy once you finally released yours as well.

1:23:15Linus Sebastian:Sorry. And then, yeah, I went for it. And I'm excited. I'm very excited. Cool. Yeah. You're going to love it. I think so as well.

1:23:24Luke Lafreniere:I'm supposed to do the float plane announcements really quick now. No, later. Okay. What am I supposed to do then? Why don't you just do the show? There's a sign. Read the sign. Look at the sign. Read the sign. Don't talk to Dan. No, that's... Oh, I put up the wrong sign. Hold on. Don't make me point that in sign. He's a scoffering words enjoyer. All right, we'll pick a topic. Actors who sold their likeness to TikTok for use in AI ads are... Who would have seen this coming? Having regrets after their likeness is used in AI ads. Back in June, TikTok announced a new set of tools used to make ads using AI avatars.

1:24:11Luke Lafreniere:These ads are supposed to be labeled as AI. Well, actor Scott Jackmane from Dallas sold his likeness to TikTok. He was hoping that it would help build his career. He was paid$750 and given a trip to the Bay Area. Instead, an AI avatar with his likeness has been selling stuff on TikTok as Steve. Scott's story is not isolated. Others have admitted to taking a similar deal. most performers seem to have been surprised to see their avatars elsewhere bite dance developers of tiktok can use their likeness in third-party apps it turns out and people have been showing up on their video editing app cap cut they also have apps for basically everything so that's uh

1:25:00Linus Sebastian:not basically everything basically everything in my world dan could we link the new york times

1:25:04Luke Lafreniere:article to the people in the various chats so that they can check it out if they want it was sure thing it was pretty good and pretty um yeah pretty pretty creepy and dystopian i'm also gonna try and start putting them in the description too which is i think what we should probably rename the lan show to now what yeah dystopia yeah just creepy creepy dystopian discussion show

1:25:27Linus Sebastian:because that's basically all we talk about now i'd love it if that wasn't true well

1:25:31Luke Lafreniere:yeah wouldn't you though that'd be awesome well too bad get f***ed oh yeah that's what i thought this website goes nowhere uh yeah it's because this is to um you'll have to find the article that is on the uh the new york times website this was don't worry about it a different website don't link this one i did in fogling chat let me just delete this message oh boy way to go dan um anyway here's an example of someone who uh licensed their likeness to tiktok and um interesting yep has just a her generated by ai just i don't know doing random stuff on the internet so here's the conversation there's actually there's quite a few things to kind of unpack here for me so one of them from my point of view is why does tiktok even bother to do this because they could just ai generate a likeness of someone theoretically if they're doing this much generative ai can can someone explain this to me anyone i honestly have no idea feel free hit me in chat

1:26:41Linus Sebastian:like people are literally doing that like there's there's people on instagram well there's things on instagram that aren't people um and they're not based on anyone well some of it might be but but like why did they even

1:26:53Luke Lafreniere:spend like it would it cost them$750 in credits and scan them yeah

1:26:59Linus Sebastian:legal battles but what legal battle yeah what are you talking about

1:27:04Luke Lafreniere:like if they just if they just generate someone that's not based on a real person then what legal battle yeah yeah it looks like there's quite a few people also an AI generated likeness can't be

1:27:17Linus Sebastian:copyrighted interesting

1:27:19Luke Lafreniere:okay and kg4wwn says if i pay someone 700 to scan a real person then nobody else can say it's based on them you know what that's fair enough because you could generate a person and the odds of somebody actually looking like that given that the ai has to be trained on you know what people actually look like i mean it's not zero it's actually rather high especially when you consider to your point earlier in the show like how many people consider generic pale dude with a beard to look like each other the amount of people that heard that voice and were like whoa yeah you at all no i mean i could kind of hear a ghost of what maybe someone could interpret me as sounding like but like it wasn't good that's for sure okay all right so okay we've gotten there We've gotten to why ByteDance might scan someone and pay them a few hundred bucks for it.

1:28:16Luke Lafreniere:Now, let's have a longer conversation. What's your price? Oh my god. I don't think... Let's hold on. Before you answer, let's start with one that you would definitely take. A billion dollars.

1:28:32Linus Sebastian:Okay, fair.

1:28:33Luke Lafreniere:Okay, so we've established now... Yeah, sure. That like every man, Luke has his price. so now he can't dodge the question I don't think you'd do it for a million no um okay let me think I like playing games where I demonstrate to Luke that I live in his head

1:28:57Linus Sebastian:it's a little ridiculous sometimes but it's kind of fun to rely on in other situations but anyways you wouldn't do it for two nope that's not enough

1:29:07Luke Lafreniere:nope you'd do it for a hundred how you do it for a hundred no question

1:29:14Linus Sebastian:i literally sat here and i've been like like 10 seconds ago i was like i'd do it for a hundred yeah

1:29:27Luke Lafreniere:you do it for 10 for sure you do it for 10 i want to say no now in reality if the check's in front of you the jack's in front of me maybe i think you do it for 10 i think the threshold is somewhere in the eight range i think that if they were trying to get a bargain they try to grind you down to like five to five to eight and i think you could i think you could hold firm at five for sure for sure no question five i think as soon as we get into eight to ten this is an interesting one because if i sell my likeness it kind of fucks me a little yeah how does that impact work

1:30:06Linus Sebastian:i i don't know because well well no try to draw a line let's let's keep pushing this

1:30:11Luke Lafreniere:okay so if bite dance is bidding let's say eight can what can i say eight do you think that's at least you you did it's in front of you eight is a tough one eight million dollars i'm talking usd

1:30:23Linus Sebastian:i'm talking real money oh that's all that's a lot more eight is a tough one if it resulted in like i can't work here anymore basically because let's get there let's get there though so it's it so

1:30:33Luke Lafreniere:let's assume let's assume eight because at least we're sure we're having a conversation sure it's not like the one i don't think you'd even consider it for a second for one no because like no it's not it's not worth it like look at look at what these guys are going through right now um okay so you come to me and you go okay well bite dance's bid for you know my likeness oh this isn't even what I meant is$8 million. You know, how does this work? Right? Yeah. Because I got to be honest with you. I'd have to work at Linus media group for a hot minute to make$8 million. Yeah. And this is a, this is a right now check right now.

1:31:15Luke Lafreniere:I, you know, I don't want to retire. I, I, I, I love doing WAN show and I, I love leading my teams and I love all the people I work with. And, you know, there's all these things that I really, you know, love about work, but, um, ai luke is going to be selling you know health supplements and like it could be butt stuff like i don't know right um does that impact and and realistically they just own the likeness for any platform it could be graphic like i'm okay with the butt stuff you know and it could be graphic i just sold my likeness it's a very effective way to to take medications for instance or temperatures yeah and they scanned everything and i mean i mean everything actually that's an interesting that's an interesting additional layer to the conversation is do they scan you with clothes on or off and how does that impact them pretty much guarantee you there will eventually be ones oh 100 100 so i think dude at that much money at the amount of See, that's the thing is I feel like our principles and our thresholds would not be that dissimilar.

1:32:25Luke Lafreniere:Like I would fully recognize that for you. I think I'd have to tell you to get the bag.

1:32:36Linus Sebastian:How does that impact work, though? Because if you tell me. I think I say, look, we'll figure it out. Take the bag, fly free. Take the bag. No, no, no, no, no.

1:32:45Luke Lafreniere:I think I say take the bag. and we'll figure it out. And we meme on it. Yeah, okay. Then I would do it. But I have to assume your contract stipulates that we can't, like, you know, shit on ByteDance for using it. Probably true. I think, if anything, you know how I am. I'm going to try and figure out how to monetize it. Sure. So we add, like, a monthly segment to WAN Show.

1:33:09Linus Sebastian:I did. Blah, blah, blah. How is it going? Reacting to Luke ads. AI me. Yeah. No, in this scenario, I'm totally down. In this scenario, I'd probably do it for less than that. Oh, I... Because that sounds funny.

1:33:31Linus Sebastian:That sounds hilarious. Oh, no. I think that could bring me down to the five. You're going to be a better negotiator in this situation than they would. They'd have to, like, give you a... Yeah, I want a commission. I want a commission. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:33:47Luke Lafreniere:I want half, Bike Dance, I want half of what you saved.

1:33:52Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I mean, it sounds fair. Because now that just sounds really funny. Yeah. You're showing your hand. Yeah, it's not going to happen, dude.

1:34:01Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, dude, Bike Dance is not offering him millions of dollars for the likeness of Luke.

1:34:05Linus Sebastian:They'll just find some other bearded white guy.

1:34:07Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, and people will be like, Oh my God, say I, Luke!

1:34:13Luke Lafreniere:100 % Oh man How bad would an AI WAN show be? I mean we could do it

1:34:22Linus Sebastian:I feel like it'd be an interesting video They have those There's like notebook LM and all this other kind of stuff That can create podcasts Based on information

1:34:31Luke Lafreniere:So we could feed it We could feed it every WAN show ever And then we could feed it The news and the notes for the week That would i i'd watch it just to see i'd watch it with morbid curiosity yeah every once in a while

1:34:47Linus Sebastian:like i'd skip around i wouldn't watch the whole thing but like yeah every once in a while people link me those like like a fake ai video thing of me or a fake ai audio thing of me and i'll often check it out just out of yeah morbid curiosity but it's not like it's not a fun watch yeah it's

1:35:05Luke Lafreniere:an intriguing watch yeah that that that ai cartoon tv show one like i i watched like three minutes of

1:35:12Linus Sebastian:it before i was just like it's kind of gross but i i basically need to know like do i need to inform my family uh because every once in a while i said we're like this is where we're at now so

1:35:22Luke Lafreniere:be aware a couple people in float plane chat um oh shoot i found yeah cobi i think we can all agree 750 bucks is way too low yeah i i agree that for literally anyone 750 is but there's very

1:35:37Linus Sebastian:desperate people 100 surprised they found some people that i just think they should be

1:35:42Luke Lafreniere:paying more. I agree. I'm not saying those people should, you know, drive a hard bargain and potentially miss out on it if$750 is a situation-changing amount of money. I'm not saying you should have more principles. This isn't coming from that place.

1:35:56Linus Sebastian:If it's a roof over your head or not. I'm just

1:35:58Luke Lafreniere:saying that ByteDance can afford to pay better and they should.

1:36:01Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:36:01Luke Lafreniere:That's what I'll say. And then Raden428 says, Linus, you turned down $100 million, so what's your price? That's different. I turned down$100 million because I was concerned about more than just my likeness. In fact, I wasn't even really that concerned about my likeness because the new ownership wouldn't be able to make me say anything that I didn't want to say. That was 100 % clear in the deal that I would never be forced to be a mouthpiece. One of the things that I explicitly brought up early on in the conversation was like, look, you know, we have our standards around the sponsors that we're willing to take.

1:36:44Luke Lafreniere:I'm not going to hawk gambling products. I'm not going to hawk alcohol products. That's never going to happen. And you guys are going to have to understand that, that Linus Media Group comes with the principles that underpin Linus Media Group as an organization. They were totally fine with that. The concern for me was more around losing the ability to steer the organization and losing the ability to ensure that we would continue to work on the environment for the team. Once I no longer have the final say on hiring and dismissals, it's possible for things to go extremely badly. And when I say final say, I don't mean that I exercise that on a day-to-day basis.

1:37:34Luke Lafreniere:I'm not micromanaging Taryn and the rest of our leadership. People need to have the autonomy to make decisions. What I mean is that if we are doing something wrong. He micromanages me. It's terrible. It's all a lie. We hardly talk. We like catch up on when show they know this. Such a liar. The point is that I would be, I would be, I would, I would be putting us. Okay.

1:38:10Luke Lafreniere:I'd be putting us in a position where if we had taken the offer months later, we would have gone through the August controversy. Our revenues went down and we would have lost people over that. That's not okay. Yeah, they would have been dropped. 100%. Like literally, I know the financials. Quick, fast. And literally, I have a pretty good idea of what a more dollars and cents, in and out, revenue flows-based management would have wanted to do.

1:38:44Linus Sebastian:I think there's also got to be some amount. Like, I know that was your core reason. We talked about it a bunch. But I think we haven't talked about this as much, but I think it's come up at least a couple times. So I'm sure it was some amount of the decision. was the, what would you call it? Like lineage aspect, like your name's all over it.

1:39:03Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, but I mean, I think that's a heavy part of the AI likeness conversation too, right? Like it's the legacy, I guess. Yeah, there we go.

1:39:13Linus Sebastian:Not lineage, legacy, yeah.

1:39:15Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, and I think the other big one is that I didn't feel that the money would change my life that much. I'm already extremely blessed. I'm already extremely grateful to our community. That means that I live in a comfortable home. I drive a nice car. I enjoy a really nice lifestyle that I don't value. I don't value fancy labels on my clothes. I don't value... It's a pretty fancy label on that shirt right there. Actually, this is a wonderful design from Sarah. But it doesn't cost$400. you know get yours today lttstore.com heck yeah right like i i don't i don't value a lot of the i don't value um you know collecting fine art like some of the things that people find ways to spend tens of millions of dollars i i don't value them so fine art is often financial scams or like like

1:40:17Linus Sebastian:laundry like moving funds around yeah that that i get or storing it without paying taxes or storing it while gaining tax benefits because you like donate it to a museum or whatever oh i see

1:40:31Luke Lafreniere:there's like a lot of weird mechanisms with art sure so maybe i just am not enlightened enough on the the benefits of you know collecting your bro to do an art but i just bring it to your other bro

1:40:43Linus Sebastian:bro appraises it you donate it tax break there's a there's a lot of wacky stuff right obviously

1:40:52Luke Lafreniere:sound exactly that easy but like and that's not to say that i have cheap taste either i mean i commissioned a solid gold xbox control which has been a wonderful gained value wonderful investment pun intended yeah um yeah i oh man so there's a lot of reasons i didn't take it i still think realistically for like ai slop me i'd have a price but the one stipulation that i would i think i could hold firm on almost no matter the amount is that i would want it time delineated so i would want i i would want some period after which for sure the license to my likeness goes away and so the idea that i'm

1:41:39Linus Sebastian:selling like alien soup in 48 20 or something yeah it's not yeah can we not please It's ridiculously unlikely but I'd just rather know that like it dies with me, you know

1:41:53Luke Lafreniere:Binky draws says your taste is ironically tacky, but it's slowly becoming unironically tacky

1:42:05Luke Lafreniere:I don't know I think these I think these when logo ear cushions are are I think they're kind of sick pretty cool I like them okay okay you know what no no i i'm i'm gonna get into it with you i'm gonna get into it with you i want an example of my unironically tacky taste hit me hit me we should we should have like a

1:42:27Linus Sebastian:the entire porsche brand cannot be tacky please i am i'm not going to make this i'm just gonna be very clear but we should have like a call a user feature for creators on flow plane so you could just be like nope you're live now we're calling you just like i'm not making can we do that uh theoretically is that a thing we could do i mean you could use the same type of things that like discord yeah there's got to be like plugins or something there would be ways to do it we're not doing it we have so many other things to do but it would be feasible technically um the users would have to like allow the mic usage and stuff like they would have obviously they're

1:43:03Luke Lafreniere:think of the business opportunity do you have any idea how much more people would pay just for the tier that has the chance that we could possibly consider calling them yeah we

1:43:13Linus Sebastian:don't even have like gifted subs yet or tv apps and stuff i think if we made we don't have free trials we made that even paid trials for certain other features i think the float i think the floaters would crystals got her wallet out already i think it's a cool feature it would be very hard to make i think i don't think it would i bet there's something we could basically plug in open source things are out there in that realm maybe there is good stuff but i've never looked

1:43:42Luke Lafreniere:into it i bet our buddies uh what's the once looked into it what's the voip solution that

1:43:46Linus Sebastian:we use for remote wang show again oh t3 yeah we've mostly moved over to something no but that's what he meant you're right yeah yeah we got changed but that's no t3 chat yeah no not t3 Honestly the other thing if we like ping.gg brought Theo in as Like a thing and he could like talk about it on his channel making it or something I he'd probably just do it And he's probably capable see this is what this is what I'm saying.

1:44:13Luke Lafreniere:I actually Ping.gg yeah in modern era. Oh, I actually don't think that that's man What is that big of a tech see see the gears are spinning?

1:44:24Linus Sebastian:I think there's a mic for managing him right now. I think there's a way i just thought of a way that you could use the t3 chat thing was actually an interesting one because i was thinking it had to be on the on the base platform no it shouldn't have to but if it could just open another tab yeah it would be like way easier yeah because i was thinking like yeah

1:44:44Luke Lafreniere:anyways yeah just some kind of automatic authentication and then bippity boppity microphone pop up maybe even camera pop up you could theoretically you could theoretically that's

1:44:57Linus Sebastian:very we should never do that no we should probably never do that unless we have like a significant uh

1:45:02Luke Lafreniere:we should have a tape delay yeah yeah yeah i think we'd i think we'd have to finally have a tape delay dan how hard would it be to do a tape delay for wine show not entirely sure we have a multi-quarter thing which will do forms of like live replay so i mean it's physically possible okay

1:45:24Linus Sebastian:Tim000X3 in Fuffling Chat said I am very naked That's why the webcam only goes to here for me too It's all just cropped Dan just does the web show bottomless I mean it's Friday night come on I mean they don't technically know right now that we're not all bottomless Yeah I took the feet cam away Yeah so they don't know They have no idea

1:45:52Luke Lafreniere:Oh man that would be a whole Other level of chaos For Wanshow This is not necessarily Real conversation right now We'd have to have A more in depth More let's lay out all the potential Problems conversation Before we would consider anything like that Dad just messaged me

1:46:19Linus Sebastian:that's actually wild apparently my mom my mom just benched 110 yeah she could almost bench yvonne that's crazy that's awesome my my dad's just been doing this thing where they'll like rack weights on the bench and he'll she'll just be like it's whatever amount right and he'll just be like yep and it's higher and she just does it every time it's like not not a suggestion don't do that but yeah that's crazy considering her weight too like that's actually nuts that's awesome

1:46:56Luke Lafreniere:alright

1:46:57Linus Sebastian:heck yeah mom good job

1:46:59Luke Lafreniere:uh what are we supposed to be doing oh yes the flow plane announcement this is a really exciting one this is hardly even us you know doing promotion this is just oh yeah this is just freaking out okay have you seen it

1:47:13Linus Sebastian:No, not at all. I've been waiting for it to launch on Flipway. It's so good. This series was peak Channel Super Fun.

1:47:23Luke Lafreniere:Channel Super Fun is off hiatus. Let's go! Let's go. Temporarily, one video only. Is it one episode? Yeah, okay. One video only. As Scrapyard Wars reaches its midpoint, we want to give the team an extra week to finish up the last couple of episodes, but we don't want to leave our floaters empty-handed. So we've got you guys early access to the new Channel Super Fun video to celebrate us getting off hiatus. Or unless. Here it is. How hard is it to beat professional athletes' nerds boards? episode 10 i think they mean six but sure yeah wait why 10 episode x um this is great nerd sports is back baby the keyboard warriors face off against professional badminton players jenny and gregory mayors in the most fair and balanced showdown in all of sports asterisk asterisk this competition is neither fair nor balanced that's right my friends it's Just like the old nerd sports.

1:48:34Luke Lafreniere:No spoilers. No spoilers. But I will play a little bit of it for you guys. Do they have my audio? No, you're playing in the background as well. One second. One moment, please. Am I, though? Oh, yes, I am. There's the tab. I found it. Look at that. Oh, really? Oh. they'll just okay sure fine they won't hear it they can hear it now uh so anyway i do like a coaching session with my boys um and ladies they see how real athletes warm up they try their best to follow along it's pretty great they watch their warm-up

1:49:22Luke Lafreniere:oh yeah sorry here's my coaching session with the boys and ladies I get them to try to hit some shuttles it's it's great here we go here we go yeah and then we play and there's all kinds of fun things I've got my wheel of pain here I get to spin the wheel of pain whenever basically I feel like it and I can give different rackets to the pros they have to wear eye patches at some point it's a laugh And Greg and Jenny, these guys were such good sports about the whole thing. They're professional athletes. And so they kind of can't help it. Like, they want to win, you know? But we really didn't make it easy on them.

1:50:14Linus Sebastian:That's nerd sports, man. You got to find a way for the nerds to win. Or to have a chance.

1:50:20Luke Lafreniere:At least. We have to find a way for the nerds to have a chance. Got to be close. I don't want to spoil too much but it's a great video, it's a great watch you guys are going to enjoy the absolute heck out of it and I'm going to go ahead and set that public right now we also have a behind the scenes that um is what? oh we have, yeah yeah yeah it's extras okay we have me playing the badminton pros apparently this is about nine minutes long i apparently shot a little intro i was actually playing pretty decent that day but obviously they are literally professionals so yeah you know that sort of thing they can just kind of dunk on me like that Do you see that deception there?

1:51:18Luke Lafreniere:That's not a bad backhand, but it's effortless. You see that? You see what he did?

1:51:23Linus Sebastian:Oh, that was brutal. Yikes.

1:51:29Luke Lafreniere:Watch his racket.

1:51:31Linus Sebastian:Oh, that sucks.

1:51:34Luke Lafreniere:And I hit it out. Anyway, so we have me playing a set with them. Respect the dive. Thank you. Thank you. I do my best. All right. I'm going to set that public now. that is up on flow plane so the main video mainline video will be going up on channel super fun but the the extras of me playing them is gonna be uh behind the scenes all right what are we supposed to be doing now dan oh spoonsters show spa sponsors the show is brought to you today by ground news while luke and i go over all things tech here on the wan show there's a whole world of other topics we don't always cover that, who knows, you might even find interesting.

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1:52:50Luke Lafreniere:You can also see that while the majority of the sources didn't lean to the left or the right, there are more articles that are left-leaning for this particular story. So head to ground.news slash WAN today or scan the QR code on screen to get browsing for free and get 40 % off their vantage plan. The show is also brought you by MSI. Is your PC not looking or running cool enough? Tell it to chill out with MSI's MPG Core Liquid P13 AIO Cooler. What they call a cyclo-blade design, tightens up the focus of the airflow while reducing noise, and their latest hidden cable design integrates the power and signal cables right into the tubing, reducing the amount of wires dangling around in your system.

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1:54:41Luke Lafreniere:All right. What do you want to talk about, Luke? Do you want to talk about something? We could maybe talk about something.

1:54:47Linus Sebastian:Let's see here. What do we got? Intel grabs hold of$2 billion. Definitely an amount that I would accept for my likeness. Just in case anyone's shopping. In an ocean of uncertainty. After many years of rough financial seas, Intel's stock is soaring with a rally of over 28%. Wow. After SoftBank, a Japanese investment conglomerate, has agreed to invest$2 billion into it. Nothing ever goes bad after SoftBank invests into anyone. They invested into Intel's future in a commitment to advanced technology and semiconductors in the United States. A lot of the press briefings circle around the increased manufacturing of chips for AI in the U.S.

1:55:35Linus Sebastian:itself. This new investment comes after the Trump administration announced it is in talks with Intel to turn money pledged under Biden into 10 % ownership of Intel. Just a few weeks after Intel's CEO took a little ride aboard the White House's metaphorical emotional abuse roller coaster, which we talked about previously on Wancho. Not only that, but Trump has been strong arming other chip makers with requirements to AMD and NVIDIA. I'm pretty sure they proposed this, not Trump strong arm them, but either way. To AMD and NVIDIA to pay 15 % commission on sales in China in exchange for export licenses.

1:56:13Linus Sebastian:I'm pretty sure that was a pitch from them. I'm pretty sure AMD and NVIDIA were like, look, let us do this. We will pay you 15%. Not the other way around. I could be wrong about that, but I think that's what happened. We have a discussion question. If the U.S. government owns part of one of the chip makers, what kind of malarkey should the others expect?

1:56:32Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, this is pretty interesting. This is one of those things where if it wasn't coming from the party of small government and free market, I would find it less confusing. But overall, I don't necessarily think it's the dumbest move in the world. I mean, we've talked a fair bit about Norway, right? That has the sovereign wealth fund. Yeah. That's worked out pretty good for them. Mostly. I sent you that. If you're going to get a bailout of some kind. And how much better of a position would, you know, the American sovereign wealth fund be if the bailouts that they'd done during the 2008 financial crisis had granted them equity in those companies?

1:57:19Luke Lafreniere:You know what? If you're going to bail something out, I kind of don't disagree that you should probably get something for your trouble. If the taxpayers are going to pay for it, the taxpayers should probably get the dividends. But, I mean, that's where we sort of run into trouble with this is what, pray tell, evidence are you going to provide that the taxpayers will receive said dividends?

1:57:43Linus Sebastian:yeah it's gonna go to like seven thousand dollar trash cans for military planes and stuff womp womp Neat. I thought you were going to pick good news.

1:57:57Luke Lafreniere:What good news? LZT has switched back? To 16 by 9. After years of releasing our videos in a 2 by 1 aspect ratio across most of our channels, we are returning to the very sane 16 by 9 aspect ratio. David, Mr. David Gauthier, why did you italicize very sane in this sentence? I don't know what I said to you. what are you trying to say sir that we had chosen two by one as a compromise between 16 by 9 and wider aspect ratios like you would find on ultra wide monitors or many phones then and now to reduce letterboxing on as many displays as possible now hold on just a gosh darn second but then we realized that was stupid and that users can zoom in on a video to fill their screen if they really care now hold on just a gosh darn minute mr.

1:58:59Gauthier we've never really

1:59:03Luke Lafreniere:worked with safe zones a little bit of editorialization we've never really we've never really worked with safe zones and so um i felt that it was a simpler approach to have smaller areas of potential ingress on the top and the bottom so we didn't have to worry too much about where our Mogarts and lower thirds and various graphics showed up in order to avoid things being clipped. But the main reason that we're switching back now is that Colton and the business team have been in talks with some like what would I call them? Are they called OTT? like the the like t like basically like tv channel feeds like app-based app-based oh yeah content feeds i can't remember ota no not over the setup like uh i think it's ott is it ott well whatever the point is over the top they want 16 by 9 and so now we're going back through our entire catalog of content and going, oh, whoops.

2:00:18Linus Sebastian:Fast, that's it. Free ad support is streaming today. That's it. That's it for sure. Thank you. Mivrani? So, yeah,

2:00:26Luke Lafreniere:we're going back to 16x9, and we're probably just going to have to start using SafeZones. Yes, Daniel Besser, who apparently lost his talking privileges or something, so he wrote it like this on the doc instead of just saying it well to be fair it was like a merch message earlier so i thought you would just pop in some discussion that's fine you can write a message if you like i'm just saying you could also talk to us no just whatever you do don't don't let dms talk make him sit there stop it shit

2:01:06Luke Lafreniere:don't hit me no stop

2:01:09Linus Sebastian:I'm just realizing Dan can really just voice act anything that's happening back there

2:01:14Luke Lafreniere:don't say it like that

2:01:16Linus Sebastian:I will not you don't pay me enough for that

2:01:21Luke Lafreniere:oh my god

2:01:21Linus Sebastian:we gotta buy his likeness okay five bucks final offer

2:01:26Luke Lafreniere:750 oh okay sir five bucks

2:01:29Linus Sebastian:I would do that I would buy your likeness for five bucks. I don't know what I'd do with it. It's only going to one of you bidding more time.

2:01:34Luke Lafreniere:See, I'm a business man. I gladly pay you Tuesday for your likeness today. Pixel peeping the new Pixels. Google had their Made by Google 25 event in which they announced several new devices. The Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, Pixel 10 Pro XL, Pixel 10 Pro Fold, Pixel Buds 2a, and Pixel Watch 4. Wow. The phones feature their new Tensor G5 chip, which according to Google has 60 % more power on the TPU and is 34 % faster on CPU compared to last year's Tensor G4 chip. The Pixel 10, except the Fold lineup, will be eSIM only for the US models, while other regions will retain their physical SIM trays. And the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is the first foldable with an IP68 rating, meaning it has pretty solid dust and water resistance.

2:02:24Luke Lafreniere:Would have come in handy from you once. Yep. I can remember that. Google also announced that their devices are getting PixelSnap, which is basically using the new Qi2 wireless charging standard that allows snapping of magnetic accessories to the back of the device. Google is launching some of their own as well, like the PixelSnap charger, PixelSnap cases, and PixelSnap ring stand. Why don't you care about MagSafe? No. Sorry, PixelSnap. Excuse me. That's why. It's like, oh, they're finally catching up. I mean, it's a big feature for iPhone people. I personally don't have too many occasions where I need to magnetically attach my phone to stuff.

2:03:00Luke Lafreniere:Maybe I'm just thinking inside the box. When would I do that? Should I do it now? Should I stick it to something? My phone lives in my pocket. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No. I lied. I lied. My minivan. Yeah. My minivan doesn't have Android Auto. Yeah, I use it for my car. So if I had a magnetic doodad, I'd probably...

2:03:23Linus Sebastian:It's nicer than clamping it in. Yeah, I'd probably do that. They also actively charge, so it's easier to just toss it on a thing when it's going to magnetize to the right spot. Okay. I think it's cool. I still use a cable to charge. Yeah. Maybe because we're Google boomers.

2:03:42Luke Lafreniere:Google boomers. Yeah. This is a thing? Are we making this a thing? Yeah. No, the reason I use my cable is because I have my phone in bed next to me because I listen to my Bluetooth earphones. and because Plex is a giant piece of shit. Phone doesn't need to be in bed with you. My, well, no, because my video stops all the time because Plex is a giant piece of shit. Have you thought about Jellyfinning? I have. I am going to wait until Ashtag gets their HexOS integration with Jellyfin and then I am just going to have it be easy. Yep. it's it's amazing how many years plex has just like not been able to just indefinitely play video like there's no like there's no reason for it you know it's not like netflix where it's like yeah at some point they're probably not watching so we should save bandwidth like it's my bandwidth yeah on my wi-fi you shouldn't care yeah um like years and years and years ago i would i would wake up in the morning and like my show would still be playing these days it'll last i I don't know, anywhere from one to five episodes.

2:04:52Luke Lafreniere:And usually I fall asleep in that time, so it doesn't really matter. But like, why can't you do it? And if there's an error, I don't care. Don't tell me about it. Process it in the background with the buffer that you already have and start playing it again at the point of the buffer. Like, why do I have to explain to you how to play a freaking video? What is happening?

2:05:17Linus Sebastian:A bunch of the Omega nerds in full point chat are saying MB.

2:05:23Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Don't know about that. Jellyfin seems to be the one that's getting the, it seems to be the one that's like being pushed forward faster. I know MB was the play for a long time. But dude, I'm super frustrated with Plex at this point. I just like can't, I can't anymore for forever. So yeah, maybe what I'll do is I'll do like MB versus Jellyfin. I'll figure it out. I just, it's so tedious moving over like a big media library.

2:06:00Linus Sebastian:Yeah, we got to keep upgrading the house, man.

2:06:03Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. I'm getting a headache just thinking about dealing with all of the file naming crap. Is there like a migration tool? I mean, probably, but part of the problem is that I have never done all my file naming properly in the first place. Oh, look at you. So I have, like, thousands of Linux ISOs that don't have proper naming, and Plex mostly figures it out, so it doesn't really matter. Except when it does, and it's really annoying. So thinking about doing that for everything is just very overwhelming. I don't understand what Plex is doing. So you guys were there. we actually used it for me for the first time plex's like new business which is uh free ad supported television very confusing we watched dr strange love it was okay i do have a plex pass so maybe this impacts it but it was completely free it had no ads the quality was great like it it streamed at i forget how many megabit it was but it was it was nice oh it was like 50 yeah it was too high it was great it was amazing and i'm kind of sitting here going okay so step one completely f*** up the you know traditional piracy use case step two question mark um build whatever the fuck this is with like free tv streaming step three profit like what are they

2:07:40Linus Sebastian:making money does plex make money i have no idea i've it's been fascinating lately to find out how many companies don't and are just funded by constant rounds of vc and investors it's actually like wild. Very interesting to me. It's such a weird space because we never took investment money.

2:08:03Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

2:08:03Linus Sebastian:But like it's a huge thing. Weird. Okay.

2:08:09Luke Lafreniere:Well here's an article from January of last year. Streaming media company Plex raises$40 million as it nears profitability. The new round which has not yet been disclosed was initially said to be larger than plex's 50 million growth round closed a few years ago we now understand it's 40 million a rep for plex has confirmed the funds will help fuel the company's push toward profitability expected by year end or just after uh okay thank you for okay thank you for that plex's real world valuation is unknown as a company hasn't raised outside funds in some time, preferring to work with its existing set of investors.

2:08:54Luke Lafreniere:Now, I might be misunderstanding investment. So is investment a hole in the ground where you keep putting money? Is that investment?

2:09:10Linus Sebastian:This is where I find things to be kind of confusing because it seems like... Like there's some companies that I have been... Traff2K says, I love edging profits. That's pretty funny. There are some companies that have been exposed to information recently where they like have like never made money, have been around for a very long time. And who knows if they're ever going to. And if they're going to, it's not going to. There's no like plan for them to like make a bunch. You know? It's weird. this is and there's obviously there's always the sell the company kind of grift thing you try to get big enough it's like it's like the whole like don't make revenue idea because you try to get big enough and look scary enough but don't actually really actualize so that you can sell to someone big so they can like shut you down basically because they see you as a potential threat or you can they don't know how much of a threat so they just want to buy you to get rid of or you

2:10:07Luke Lafreniere:can sell to like uh you know a drug addled billionaire or something sure yeah okay always that. Yeah, see this, this, this right here, like they're saying the quiet part out loud. We have the most supportive investors of any, Valerie said. I feel like funding has never been a concern of ours. I mean, maybe your customers would be less pissed off at you if you felt like funding was a concern and you needed them to like you. Yeah. You know, like I feel, I feel like not being concerned about where your next meal is going to come from might breed a little bit of urgency when it comes to dealing with long-standing issues on the platform just saying just i don't know maybe it's crazy probably crazy

2:10:51Luke Lafreniere:all right well yeah good luck with that um what else we got let's see oh wait we weren't done talking about the pixel yeah the pixel event all right the pixel watch 4 gets a brighter screen um 3 000 nits 16 smaller bezels and has a domed display that gives about 10 more visible screen space neat starts at 350 bucks and claims 30 hours of battery life the buds 2a cost 130 bucks and include the tensor a1 chip this time around also comes with anc active noise cancelling and a slightly better charging case finally there's the pixel flex dual 67 watt charger the device can charge up to two devices at a max of 60 watts each and will detect when a pixel device is plugged in and prioritize that device to charge it quote first and faster okay neat but also oh my god no so two things here number one we need to stop f***ing with the usbc standard it's barely a standard already and the last thing the absolute last thing on earth that I or anyone needs is more USB-C devices that have proprietary handshakes and bullshit.

2:12:21Luke Lafreniere:Stop. Entire industry right now, it's time to stop. I also think like no one asked for this. Number two, have a priority port. Give me control over it. Maybe I want to charge my phone and my laptop, but I actually don't prefer to charge my phone right now faster. I want to charge my laptop faster. Did you ever think of that? Am I missing something here? You should just have a priority port. It should be labeled and then I can pick.

2:13:01Yep.

2:13:04Linus Sebastian:Oh my God. Discussion question. And Linus, you had debated switching to the Samsung Fold 7 soon. Do you think this Pixel Fold is a compelling option considering it is 200 US dollars cheaper than the Samsung? Or will you still be going with the Samsung?

2:13:23Luke Lafreniere:I will... I kind of miss my One UI. I kind of want to go Samsung first. And that's going to... I kind of feel like I've got my order of operations wrong here because I still haven't quite finished my Graphene OS switch. I did figure out some of the challenges I was having. I'm in touch with someone from there, and I think I'm basically ready to switch over to it. I just need to set aside... It takes so long for me to switch devices, dude. And I don't want to blame you, but you're part of the problem. Why? Because if I want to... Okay, for instance, if I set aside a time for myself to switch all my stuff over, like say for instance uh it's at 11 p.m i'm like i don't know how to migrate like my pass keys i literally don't even know how that stuff works anymore just my work accounts just like prompted me one day and like i i literally can't sign into stuff without this phone some of them i need to sit down with someone from it and figure out what the crap is going on with all of my authentication factors because I'm not going to lie to you.

2:14:33Luke Lafreniere:It's one of those things that's so much easier to just dismiss every time I do it versus like fix. I still have accounts that prompt me for a YubiKey. Okay.

2:14:46Linus Sebastian:You have to own some of this. I do. Okay. But I'm going to blame you for another thing. I'm okay with at least some amount of that, but holy crap, dude.

2:14:55Luke Lafreniere:My God. Unique username says pass keys are not what we were promised. Oh my God. Right? So I get a notification on my phone. I unlock my phone. I have to click a thing. I get prompted for a fingerprint again. I wait. It's like, it's like seven to eight interaction. I could have typed a password. Oh my God. Anyway, the other one is I can't get into my badminton club. without requesting a new invitation to my identity system. And I know we're working with Unify. We're working with Ubiquity on that. But like, I literally can't even sign into all my stuff on my own. I hate it so much.

2:15:47Linus Sebastian:One of those is to save incredible amounts of money.

2:15:50Luke Lafreniere:I know, I know.

2:15:52Linus Sebastian:So to bother you to sign in one time in an annoying way. It's not one time.

2:15:57Luke Lafreniere:It's every time I switch a phone. It sucks.

2:16:00Linus Sebastian:One annoying time every time you switch a phone. Which you could delegate to like Vance. So you don't even have to do it. I'm just pointing out that we are saving so much money. I know. For one small, extremely easily solvable, doesn't even have to be by you step.

2:16:18Luke Lafreniere:I just hate the way Ubiquity handles that. So the enterprise versus the regular identity app and something, something fee per user. Smash Champs has lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of users because all of its members have their key fobs. And so we have to use the not enterprise one. And literally the only way to sign into the not enterprise one is to get an invitation from your IT department. You cannot initiate it yourself. Wait, unless you give me the ability to initiate it to myself. Not a shot. Why?

2:16:48Linus Sebastian:No shot. Why? Why do you think? Because you're afraid I'll be too efficient at administrating it, and I'll make you look bad. I am a little bit afraid of your level of efficiency. When, say, a notification comes in.

2:17:10Linus Sebastian:Just solving the problem right away, you know?

2:17:18Luke Lafreniere:okay sorry i just saw i saw a name in my notifications every time i see my grandfather's name in a notification i need to check right away uh-huh he's still alive nice all right whoa what what did you do to that i didn't i didn't do it it must have been ran over by the Must be your acid freaking skin or something. What? No. Yeah, you'd like destroy everything you touch. That is true.

2:17:48Linus Sebastian:That's just like unironically true. Is that your headphone cord? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'll replace that. I don't know if you can see that from here. Don't you worry. I don't think that's a Dan task.

2:17:59Luke Lafreniere:I think it's... I don't want to be that guy, but I really don't think replacing a cord is a Dan task. It might just be a no one task. Oh, I mean like I've got one on the shelf. They can just like... These ones are replaceable. but i think that we should just throw out the headphones let's just throw out the headphones but we we need better headphones don't we i mean i'm gesturing vaguely at the man sitting next to me need is such a strong word it could be a video maybe like we wear them for four hours a week and you complain the entire time i do not that is uh i complain the entire yeah okay sure i I complain a lot on WAN Show.

2:18:36Luke Lafreniere:Not about these. It's 208 hours a year you just complain about headphones. That's what your life is now. Be gone. Be banished. Fly.

2:18:47Linus Sebastian:Fly, you fool.

2:18:49Luke Lafreniere:Wait, have we still not done the AI sharpening topic? No. Holy bananas. Oh. YouTuber Rhett Shull posted a video last Thursday investigating what appeared to him to be AI enhancements being applied to YouTube Shorts without the creator's knowledge or consent after fellow music YouTuber Rick Beto contacted Shull with example posts from his Instagram and YouTube accounts. And I gotta say, the difference is it's pretty interesting. We're not going to play his whole video because that's not how we do our React content. That is a lens. That is a lens and a half that was chosen here. Don't worry about it.

2:19:33Luke Lafreniere:But look at this. You see that shift? You see as he's shifting between YouTube Shorts and Instagram, how different the same piece of content looks. And you can tell from the interface here. Yeah. Okay. So this sparked a whole lot of conversation. And Schull's video included some experiments of his own, seeing the same effect on his own videos that was impacting Beto's videos. He went on to find a Reddit thread discussing the same effect showing up on some of Hank Green's shorts. Then, the plot thickens. After we reported on the story on Monday's TechLinked, YouTube responded with an explanation.

2:20:16Luke Lafreniere:Okay, technically YouTube responded to a guy who retweeted a reposted clip originally tweeted out by some other guy who clipped it from Monday's TechLinked video, but you know what? We're counting it. That counts. YouTube liaison Rene Ritchie said that this is an experiment that does not involve generative AI or upscaling. What it is intended to do is unblur, denoise, and improve clarity using traditional machine learning techniques.

2:20:49What?

2:20:52Luke Lafreniere:Where's the line? Richie also said the experiment was only running on a limited number of shorts, but as far as we could tell, it's pretty widespread. Responses on Twitter were almost universally opposed to using any sort of AI. Because that is generally how people have considered it.

2:21:11Linus Sebastian:Yes. It was called AI until we got new stuff that we called AI. And this will happen again. We will stop calling predictive LLMs AI. Because they're not. Once another layer comes out, and then that's just going to keep going. Yes.

2:21:29Luke Lafreniere:And I remember committing to not call what we have AI and call it machine learning forever. But what I realized is that I couldn't continue doing that forever. Because it's confusing to people that don't understand. Because people get confused who don't understand the distinction. Everything we have now is machine learning. All of it. None of it is AI. We could call it generative machine learning or whatever, but it is certainly not an intelligence of any sort and falls far short of what we think in science fiction terms of what AI is supposed to mean. Yeah, the like 80s idea of AI. Yes, we don't have it.

2:22:12Luke Lafreniere:Not a thing. We're not close. Yeah. Others pointed out the trend of companies is avoiding the term generative AI in favor of the less threatening sounding traditional machine learning. Yeah. Still others pointed out that when every video looks like it's been made with AI, it's going to be a lot harder to identify the ones that actually are made with AI. And it says, Dan has a clip. See it for yourself. Side-by-side comparison of the same clips downloaded from YouTube and Insta. All right, hit it.

2:22:45Linus Sebastian:which one looks more sharp i mean the one on the left was way sharper yeah yeah definitely left by a lot i like too much

2:22:56Linus Sebastian:makes me think our cameras are really blurry

2:23:01Luke Lafreniere:oh this is an interesting one too because you can see it in the artifacts yeah you could really see it when I spun in the chair. Look at the scrolling.

2:23:09Linus Sebastian:Big artifacts. They made your video worse.

2:23:18Luke Lafreniere:This is one of those things where better is not always better. Well, it's... I think it's not better. Well, it is more sharp. And sharpness is generally considered to be a... Sure, but I just mean like...

2:23:38Luke Lafreniere:you could create a lot of metrics and you could use those metrics that you created to measure the one on the left as being better. Yeah. But better is not always better. We had this conversation earlier. The right side looks much more natural. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't feel that mine looked as bad as some of the examples I saw, though. Like, I didn't... I didn't think those examples are particularly cherry picked. This was just a random one. No, I don't. I don't think that either. I just think that maybe whether it's our camera we use or whether it's that particular video, like there were certainly areas where it looked really bad.

2:24:21Luke Lafreniere:But for the most part, I didn't. I felt it looked like over processed, but I didn't feel it looked like AI.

2:24:28Linus Sebastian:Scrappy DP and Floatplane Chat said Peter McKinnon made a video recently on not sharpening your content because YouTube is applying it so hard after the upload. That actually makes a ton of sense.

2:24:39Luke Lafreniere:Interesting idea. Our discussion question here is, is it okay to take a short creator's control away in terms of what their content looks like and what's to stop YouTube from going on and applying these enhancements to everything, to long-form videos, TV shows, films delivered by the platform? Where's the line? And I would say the line is in the rear view mirror way back there. the second YouTube does any processing to your video. And they do it. And they do it on every single video that is served by the platform. They are impacting the look. And that's not a battle. That was never a war. That's how it's going to go.

2:25:20Luke Lafreniere:In fact, Instagram is also applying processing. And what we're watching on the Instagram side is their interpretation, mostly probably optimized to save on to save on bandwidth of what your original file was even your original file you upload is processed and is sort of approximated compared to what your sensor saw and even that is an approximation however i think that we can all agree that making things look more over-processed and AI generated is not good, and this seems to be over the line. Does that seem... Yeah, I like that. Okay, neat.

2:26:12Linus Sebastian:Good one. What do we got next?

2:26:15Luke Lafreniere:I don't know. You want to pick something?

2:26:18Linus Sebastian:Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Cool. Seagate tries an exciting new kind of raid. earlier this year he's doing good earlier this year Seagate security teams working alongside Malaysian authorities conducted a raid on a counterfeit hard drive operation these are man I would love to see

2:26:37Luke Lafreniere:one of these right that would be

2:26:39Linus Sebastian:so interesting how is it even possible I always find remember the genuine Intel CPU thing like what I would love to see the place, sorry Intel, but I would love to see the place that makes non-genuine Intel CPUs.

2:26:57Luke Lafreniere:You mean AMD? Anyway, carry on. Fair enough. Got them!

2:27:03Linus Sebastian:Those are some spicy... How the turntables have turned! Old school war words, yeah. Anyways, the Raid uncovered nearly 700 Seagate drives in various models with capacities up to 18 terabytes along with drives from other manufacturers. The drives are believed to have come from China where they were used to store chia, which is I think a storage currency. Yeah. And sold off after that cryptocurrency became unprofitable. Used drives had their smart values reset. Oof. Data wiped and were cleaned, relabeled and repackaged. So, okay, I see. Sometimes it's a more valuable model than they started out as and were then sold at discounted rates on local e-commerce platforms.

2:27:50Luke Lafreniere:This was a whole thing. And Seagate has probably invested significant resources chasing this bulls**t down instead of like working on things that are valuable to their business. I actually really feel for them in this situation. Yeah, that's brutal. This is like not on them. I mean, maybe they could do more to prevent their smart values from being overwritten, but like, I don't know. Should they have seen this coming? I don't know. Maybe this has happened before that I'm not aware of and they like should have seen this coming and should have done better, but I don't know you You build a bigger lock and someone's gonna build a bigger bolt cutter, right?

2:28:28Luke Lafreniere:Like I also don't quite

2:28:31Linus Sebastian:They got they got really kind of f***ed on over this and that sucks. A lot of security is not it's just a bigger delay Ideally, there's there's nothing better than that to try to reduce the impact of these scams Seagate partners are now being required to purchase and resell drives exclusively from authorized distributors

2:28:51Luke Lafreniere:and this is why we can't have nice things because I would love for you to be able to you know buy and sell and move older parts around as needed

2:29:07but now all of a sudden

2:29:09Luke Lafreniere:we need this like central administration of everything and tracking of everything and it legitimately adds cost. It's not that they're just going to gouge or whatever because there's no competition, but it legitimately adds overhead and cost and that just blows for everyone.

2:29:26Linus Sebastian:Kind of wrecks the use market. People are asking if server part deals as an authorized resale. I don't know. Someone want to look that up?

2:29:35Luke Lafreniere:You figure it out? Yeah, Tim also points out it doesn't matter if they make their smart values harder to overwrite because they can also just overwrite the smart values of cheap crap drives and call them Seagate. I knew server part deals was legit. I didn't know if they were an authorized reseller. There aren't that many cheap crap hard drives out there. Like there's only a handful of hard drive manufacturers even left. So I'm not a hundred percent sure on that one. But anyway,

2:29:56Linus Sebastian:apparently they are an authorized retailer. Nice. Very cool. I'm not surprised. They're, very legit. But yeah, but yeah. So Seagate has implemented a global trade screening process to try to identify suspicious suppliers and Seagate reminds customers, or sorry, consumers to exercise caution when buying drives from non-major retailers or third-party sellers.

2:30:19Luke Lafreniere:Toward the Blue in floatplane chat also says your viewers should know that Seagate released a tool where you can check values that are not able to be rewritten. So that's pretty cool. At least they're... That is very cool. At least they're doing things about this, even though none of this should have happened people should just not be buttheads um hilbert gilbertson

2:30:39Linus Sebastian:said that it's in c tools which makes sense very cool the rog xbox ally has gotten a release date

2:30:46Luke Lafreniere:alongside a new game verification program before we go into that really quick i just want to say

2:30:51Linus Sebastian:it's kind of cool that that was negative news but had an interesting and cool story yeah i thought

2:30:56Luke Lafreniere:you'd like that one i like that yeah that is very cool i'd love to see one of these places that would

2:31:00Linus Sebastian:It would be so wicked.

2:31:01Luke Lafreniere:Anyone from Seagate watching? Like, I'll get on a plane. Let's go. Let's go check it out because, like, I feel, it's like, it feels like it'd be if, like, it's like the kind of thing where if, like, Rick Sanchez and, like, Milhouse Van Houten, like, made a meth lab, you know? Like, it's, like, tech meth lab. Like, that's what I'm kind of imagining, you know? I mean, it would be, it would honestly be a really good. Dexter's in there somewhere and like Jason Fox you know like just

2:31:35Linus Sebastian:I think it would be really good exposure for the the communication they're trying to get across of like making sure you're getting legitimate drives making sure that you can check your drives using cTools if you were going to buy off of the used market or something you could check the drive before you actually do the exchange and promoting their whole authorized reseller thing I think it makes a ton of sense and it would be wicked for content. I think Seagate should do it with you. I think that would be fantastic.

2:32:00Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, if anyone knows anyone who's at Seagate, like... Hit them up. That would be wicked content. Let's do it. That would be freaking awesome.

2:32:06Linus Sebastian:Very cool.

2:32:07Luke Lafreniere:All right. Microsoft announced at Gamescom that the new ROG Xbox Ally handheld will be arriving on store shelves on October 16th. And with it, the new handheld compatibility program, an initiative similar to the Steam Deck's compatibility program designed to make more games ready to play on your supported Xbox handheld. Like Valve's initiative, there will be three tiers of rankings, incompatible, mostly compatible, and handheld optimized. Xbox also announced the gaming co-pilot beta via Game Bar, a personalized AI gaming companion that helps you get to your favorite games faster, improve your skills, and it offers context-aware support based on what you're playing.

2:32:53Okay.

2:32:54Luke Lafreniere:After being spotted via benchmark leak, Steam Machines are back on the menu, boys! Let's go. After months of rumors, the existence of Valve's Fremont PC box slash console has been leaked through benchmarks on Geekbench as well as some of the specs listed down below. The processor, codenamed Hawk Point 2, is likely a refresh of Phoenix 2, the younger and smaller cousin of the Z1 Extreme. extreme valve's first attempt to add a console like steam machine experience released nearly a decade ago decade ago to um whatever the opposite of fanfare is but i i feel very strongly i think we're in a different realm that this is a different time this is a different valve a more focused valve and it's a different linux in no small part thanks to the efforts that valve has made to push forward gaming on linux very dramatically different linux here we have specs uh before you actually do that

2:33:54Linus Sebastian:okay uh i'm gonna use this as a shameless plug for uh the is 2025 the year of the linux desktop part one and two articles on the lab site heck yeah so yeah very different linux sorry keep going

2:34:08Luke Lafreniere:heck yeah uh all right back here so okay we get six cores

2:34:18Luke Lafreniere:nice little level three cache and that's about all we know oh there you go there's a geekbench score good job everyone i'm stoked i i i have had a little machine sitting in my family room just like ready for steam os yeah it actually what does it have running on it now it has an nvidia gpu and it uses an mxm module so it's like non-trivial to put an amd gpu in it whatever it doesn't matter just relax um but i haven't been doing much with it i think it still has windows on it because even the like the steam os alikes prefer amd gpus from my understanding so it's been sitting there kind of waiting for steam os to be vendor agnostic and just like ready for any pc starting to you know hopes fading a little bit but i think i could be convinced to just huck it out of there and throw a throw a steam box in there i'm i'm i'm jazzed i just i love the steam os experience especially for a not my only computer spot like in my family room where it's just like yeah i want to play um okay sea of stars had a had a free dlc i want to play the sea of stars dlc that is like the perfect device and the perfect place to do that steam os is just zero bs it boots straight into my stuff although microsoft is coming they're coming with the competition kind of i mean have you seen it no i've been hands-on fair enough it's um the efficiency gains that they are saying they've achieved are it's not steam west level efficient at least not now but they're they're making gains like they literally don't even render the desktop in the background when they're running in gaming mode on this new handheld so look i don't have a ton of confidence either but the xbox team got embedded with windows like went in and you can't deny that on xbox the xbox is an efficient machine he has he has no hope look at him look at the hopelessness in his eyes i at this point

2:36:39Linus Sebastian:but the hopelessness in your eyes no i'm i almost don't want them to do well oh microsoft yeah I mean The ship has been sailed for so long That you can't see it on the horizon anymore I want Linux to do well That's fair That's totally fair, it's valid It's fair and valid Killed Windows Gaming and pissed on its grave And then now like want it back? Yeah Like no dude, we're all trying to move on Sorry

2:37:11Luke Lafreniere:No, they're the abusive ex-spouse It's done they want you back though get out of here you better not you better not walk away i did on my laptop i've been gone for a long time and it's been fine because they wasted all of the opportunities like i just i don't know it's dude i picked up my laptop so this is uh one of the qualcomm machines i liquid metal spilled in my flow yeah 13 uh we'll make probably be a video I'll try and fix it anyway. The point is I switched back to my Snapdragon machine and I grabbed it out of my bag when I was on set earlier working on the buying Chromebooks for our kids video that I did with David today.

2:37:53Luke Lafreniere:And it was hot. It was closed and it was on. Yep. How is that still not fixed?

2:38:00Linus Sebastian:Yep. That's insane. And like the fact that there's ads in my freaking operating system is crazy.

2:38:08Luke Lafreniere:I mean, there's ads in your mobile operating system.

2:38:10Linus Sebastian:Yeah, that's true. And that's nuts. And that makes me want to move. We talked about the only thing keeping me on official Android right now is the call screening. I think you might like Graphene OS. Yeah. Oh, I am rather certain I would. I want to switch over. It is only call screening. Somebody flagged a call screening option for me that I'll try during my switch. If you try it and it works, I will switch. Yeah. A hundred percent. I'm gone. Like, I'm just, I'm so tired of this. I want to own my own stuff. and like i'm not even trying to like i'm not even trying to be like traditional linux nerd about it i just get out of my things yeah like get out of my way yes just stop pushing i bought windows off like i just yeah what are you doing i am so over it to get the ads out stop screwing with search like just go away let me use my computer windows itself stopped being like cool quite a while ago yeah and then they stopped it felt like they really stopped making things for me yeah and they started just making things like annoying and inserting ads and doing all this garbage so like okay you lost me after windows 7 windows 7 was amazing when's the last time

2:39:26Luke Lafreniere:Microsoft like oh no they've done cool stuff with DirectX okay never mind I feel like there used to be a lot more fanfare around like DirectX and gaming on Windows and I mean this whole I mean the new stripped down you know Windows gaming it just it feels like it's too late to me that's fair

2:39:47Linus Sebastian:if they were working on this remember remember game mode when it was just like well I don't even remember what was so bad about it but I remember testing in the in the bench den just being like what is this yeah gamester windows live was like the worst thing ever yeah it was pretty bad like microsoft gaming networking i'm gonna say now this is not a now but when like forza horizon 5 came out was super annoying it's super annoying to just like play halo randomly now like it's just uh fewer obstacles stop being incredibly it's you know the world is just like when running Linux has been actually less annoying.

2:40:28Luke Lafreniere:Oof.

2:40:29Linus Sebastian:But actually, though.

2:40:30Luke Lafreniere:The sickest of burns.

2:40:32Linus Sebastian:Like, it has been easier and less in my way. I have had to do things to it to make it okay less than Windows. Ouch. Like, at this point, just...

2:40:45Luke Lafreniere:You know what device is likely to work really well and never get in your way? or have anything like, you know, unbecoming about it. What? The Trump phone. Oh, good transition. Check this out. See this? Yeah. So this render of the Trump phone is just an image that they ripped off of this accessory manufacturer website is that wild or what yeah um this is their upcoming t1 and it appears to be a samsung galaxy s25 ultra in spigans and i'm so sorry if i'm saying this wrong s25 ultra thin fit case you can even see their logo under the photoshopped on american flag what a lazy job you need to rip people off better.

2:41:51Luke Lafreniere:Our notes unfortunately say Spagan? Looks photoshopped. You can tell by the way it is. We all know that it's it looks photoshopped. You can tell by the pixels.

2:42:04Linus Sebastian:The crazy part is it would have been so easy to do this not terribly. That's the weirdest part for me. I know. It would have taken seconds more. I know.

2:42:18Linus Sebastian:I do kind of wonder when stuff like this happens and you know this might be hypocritical because earlier in the show i talked about how like you know we're humans we make mistakes sometimes but like when a mistake like that happens i wonder like is this someone inside just being like you know i need a job so i'm gonna do my job but also i'm gonna leave some like easter eggs in there that people will find so that people know this is stupid i i kind of wonder sometimes because that's a wild

2:42:49Luke Lafreniere:mistake yeah ripped off this case and just left the logo on it i don't know the site um still has the old version of the quote unquote the t1 phone that will never exist and isn't real yeah um

2:43:07Linus Sebastian:how is this not such a huge tell for people

2:43:12Luke Lafreniere:that's a longer conversation anyways moving on Nvidia throws a couple of bones to gamers GeForce Now, Nvidia's cloud gaming service can now run on RTX 5080 equipped servers DLSS 4 enables up to 120 FPS at 5k on PC and Mac and at up to 90 FPS on the Steam Deck GeForce Now app Install to Play lets you also install games on your cloud pc if the dev has enabled steam cloud streaming there is a bit of a catch you have to install your game every time and there is a finite amount of storage on your instance you do have to pay extra to get more storage from my understanding so it's a little inconvenient to install your own games but hey at least it's there bringing them a little bit closer to a more shadow-like experience the nvidia app can now automatically enable your preferred DLSS across all games and adds control for a few more settings like NVIDIA Surround, bringing it ever so slightly closer to being a viable replacement for the NVIDIA control panel.

2:44:17Luke Lafreniere:NVIDIA has also teamed up with Discord, bringing instant play experiences with GeForce Now inside Discord, no install required. Just click a link from a friend and instantly load into a game to try it out. That's right, you can play any game you want, as long as that game is Fortnite. And you can only play for a 30 minute free trial that is still nuts that is that sounds like future i haven't heard future in a while that's pretty cool that's pretty cool i mean am i are we

2:44:47Linus Sebastian:overestimating this is it literally just a link that opens a browser and you play the game it's still a cool thing it's still cool game streaming is one of those things that i'm i i think is super

2:44:56Luke Lafreniere:cool i i remember taking so much flack for that video i did like years and years ago comparing latency of um local streaming over the internet streaming and then like rendering locally and saying anything other than that this is horrible and we should all hate it and resist it um and people were like super mad at me about it it's like here we are it's pretty freaking cool and the latency once you're running at 120 fps is not bad kind of approaching magic at that point i mean we know what goes on but it's like i definitely would rather render locally but like if i didn't want to spend i mean i was at best buy today for that chromebook video and it was 1700 canadian dollars for a 50 80 i could buy a lot of g-force now for 1700 canadian dollars it's compelling and that's it for topics it's time for after dark came out of nowhere.

2:45:58Linus Sebastian:What did you find? After Dark? Is that exciting? Yeah.

2:46:05Linus Sebastian:I like the After Dark part of the show. Always have. Yeah, you do.

2:46:12Luke Lafreniere:We get to hear from our subscribers. Like Jordan, thank you for the sexy merch, Pookies. Thanks, Jordan. Energy. my god no you don't get to hide you don't get to hide your camera if you're gonna do that i've got a message here from fred oh no happy birthday late you're oldie get right what ow what come on get right what the heck fred n get right anonymous says nice chefs this is what you curated today forget it you're going away again somebody curated these these are not mine luke I didn't do it okay maybe they were accidents one of them was on purpose the nice shafts absolutely would have been an accident yeah I would have responded

2:47:05Linus Sebastian:in kind to our lovely store participants I feel like we need to have like track on who did it that would actually be kind of sick I wonder if there was a sneaky a sneaky developer in the in the dashboard that thought it would be funny

2:47:20Luke Lafreniere:yeah I mean If I notice something like that, I'll pull them out. I'll pull back the shafts if that happens.

2:47:28Linus Sebastian:Okay. I think it's funny.

2:47:31Luke Lafreniere:Let me do my real job now. Linus, Luke, and Dan, what do you see as some of the big challenges LTT and float playing in the next two years? What are some things you're excited about? TV apps. Okay. Challenges for LTT. I think we face the same sort of macro challenges that the entire rest of the tech media industry does. I think that a slowing pace of consumer hardware development is very challenging. And that's not to say that, you know, the scientists and engineers that work at these companies are not doing really incredible work. and creating innovative new technologies. I think it's just to say that in a lot of categories, we've sort of reached a plateau where most people mostly don't care or can't tell the difference.

2:48:33Luke Lafreniere:Like TV is, I think, a great example of this. Like I was shopping for TVs recently. If you've been watching the latest Scrapyard Wars series, you'll know that I was at like a like an open box TV retailer and as much as I love a nice TV and I have really nice TVs in my home I was comparing like a very a very basic you know 70 like you can get a gigantic 75 inch TV I found a deal and this is not a major spoiler because it's just a thing that I saw in the store, I found a 75-inch TV for$550 Canadian dollars and it came with a free soundbar. Whoa. So for context, for my American friends out there, that's about$380 US or like$370 US or something like that.

2:49:31Luke Lafreniere:And it comes with a free soundbar that was like a hundred plus dollar value Canadian or something like that. So we're talking like a few hundred dollars for a 75 inch tv and so i'm looking at that and i'm just kind of going well my goodness um how much more how much better does something have to look for me to spend three thousand dollars on it now a freaking lot so we've we've reached this end and it looks not bad like it didn't have great hdr but a lot of people either don't understand or can't see the difference which is like valid you can it's like when a car person comes up to you and they're like man what do you think of these new rims and you're just like i don't know they're made of metal i guess right but is that good right like for bbs for a lot of people right for a lot of people just like you know it's hdr it has more color gamut it means it means nothing to them they don't care they're just they're they're watching fox news or cnbc they don't it doesn't matter right um and so we've reached this point where where these new developments like uh i saw i saw a news article on lg apparently has a prototype oled tv that uses tandem oled so that's the the same tech that apple's using on their latest ipads and uses two stacked oled layers to achieve much much greater brightness while maintaining inky blacks like that blows my mind apparently it can achieve like 4 000 nits on this i think it was an 83 inch display and i'm sitting here going like man that's so cool um but it's cool past a point that i think most people will necessarily really care about which is um a big challenge coming back to your question for tech media because i think the pool as as the mainstream good enough cheapo commodity tech reaches a point of being good enough for more and more and more and more and more people i think the share of enthusiasts who care about every pixel and who care about every megahertz is going to be reduced um the refresh cycles on these things are also getting more and more difficult to keep up with annually i mean nvidia used to be yearly apple has been yearly on a lot of their products.

2:51:59Luke Lafreniere:They're still yearly on the iPhone, but I don't know if that'll last forever. Like, they're certainly not yearly on a lot of the Mac products that they just outright don't bother to refresh once they have a new generation of silicon. And so there's kind of less to talk about. I think that the economic conditions right now, globally, are challenging, affecting people's discretionary spending. And I don't foresee, and I'm not an economist, but I don't foresee with taxation, both in the form of regular taxation, but also import taxation going up. I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Generative AI, for all of its uselessness and hallucination, has disrupted the job market already.

2:52:49Luke Lafreniere:It is disrupting people's livelihoods right now.

2:52:53Linus Sebastian:We've been saying from the start, like the companies that are really going to kill it, in my opinion, and I still think this is true, are companies that find ways to use AI to accelerate the people that they have and use that to grow and bring in more. Not companies that use it to just shrink their workforce, but stock price go up, win, fire, person. So people are just doing it anyways. anyways it's frustrating because there are effective ways for many people I'm not going to say everyone but for many people to use it to genuinely help them in good ways there's also a ton of ways to use it improperly but a lot of people are scared to let it affect their productivity in a positive way because they don't want to contribute towards losing their own jobs and that's just bad employers in my opinion And it's frustrating that there's like any of them at all, really.

2:53:51Linus Sebastian:But anyway, sorry, just minor aside.

2:53:53Luke Lafreniere:And generative AI is going to threaten our business from other vectors as well. I mean, you know, we talked earlier about how the Anantek article archive went offline. And one of our speculated reasons for it is that Future PLC, who owns Anantag and Tom's Hardware, launched a new feature allowing you to compare products across brands across generations. And it's paywalled. um so our theory is that maybe they wanted to instead of making all of that archival data and information available for free move it behind the paywall where it can be sustainable for the future plc um and also to keep it away from the prying eyes of ai web crawlers that are going to scrape all this data and then just like shart it out into a search result or into a chat bot that doesn't compensate the real actual people who really actually picked up gpus and put them into benches and and tested things um allowing them to keep their jobs so that that's a threat that's a threat towards us as well like if ltt labs can be scraped and can just you know you can search up anything about a corsair power supply and it'll just use our video as a source but not compensate us in any way that's going to be a real challenge for us right we're still very committed to doing it but But I would be lying if I didn't say that building out something like the lab has impacted our profitability.

2:55:26Luke Lafreniere:It absolutely has. I mean, doing anything by hand with humans, building our content the way that we continue to do it has impacted our profitability over the years. So those things are not slowing down. Those things are going to continue to be challenges. It's not all doom and gloom. I think our team is more locked in than it's been in probably a couple of years, actually. And I don't think I'm the only one who's seeing that. I've had some good conversations with people. We have some new hires starting in the next little bit that I'm very excited about on the writing side. I'm really excited about the direction the lab is going under Luke's leadership.

2:56:10Luke Lafreniere:Thank you. Yeah, I think we're firing on more cylinders. I am hopeful that while we might not be back to a cadence of six uploads a week, I'm hopeful we can get to a more regular upload schedule again relatively soon. I think that's something that would be good for our viewers and also good for our company's ongoing viability.

2:56:34Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, the future is looking up, but that doesn't mean that we can ignore the headwinds that are coming our way and coming everyone's way realistically. Thank you. Hey, LLD, just got my Ally battery upgraded after your video for the JSAX upgrade kit. JSO, I think. JSO upgrade kit and loving it. Linus, would you consider any further modifications to your Ally in the future? Maybe RAM? Thanks. I don't think I need more RAM. I've never run into a game on my Ally. I mean, I mostly just play tape-to-tape. Do you know I have over 300 hours in tape-to-tape now? it's amazing how quickly they add up when like my wind down before bed is to lie in bed and play a

2:57:19Linus Sebastian:run there's a decent amount of idle time too oh there's a ton of i've ever loaded up yeah

2:57:24Luke Lafreniere:take the tape actually logs your on ice time so i think i'm at like 170 hours or something of on ice time makes a bit more sense but that's still a lot so that's the game i primarily play on my ally and don't need more ram for it but definitely enjoying the battery life upgrade it's just like we saw when asus went from the ally one to the ally two for some reason the battery life benefit is more than just the like watt hours increase i i don't i don't i someone's gonna have to math that for me because i don't i don't quite get it but i'm into it so i've been enjoying the absolute heck out of it.

2:58:03Luke Lafreniere:I would love to have a bigger SSD in it. I'd love to just have, you know, entire libraries of Linux ISO, older, more pixelated Linux ISOs that are just kind of on tap. But beyond that, no, I love it. It's been very, very good to me. And I am excited for the Xbox One, but I don't know. I might be more excited for potentially a Steam Deck 2. I need it to be competitive. on GPU power though. Like the Steam Deck was kind of, it fell behind really fast. And you know me, I like cutting edge performance. And on handheld, every 10 % is noticeable. When you're at 32 FPS, the jump to 35, it's like, I want that.

2:58:52Linus Sebastian:Here's another spicy one to add in on the whole Windows Linux thing. Yeah. This is why I haven't, this is a major reason why I haven't bought a gaming handheld. is because I kind of didn't really get in on Steam Deck early enough. It feels like I'm kind of in Steam Deck 2 waiting room. Yeah, okay.

2:59:12Luke Lafreniere:And they're taking a minute to get around to that for you.

2:59:16Linus Sebastian:I'm all good. But I'm looking at the alternatives, and the big push right now is Windows-based alternatives, and I'm like, I want to support the Linux push. i just if i'm gonna be voting with my wallet right like i'm tired of of the garbage that has been shoveled into my face from windows from so for so long i'm pissed that there's no alternative i'm pissed that there isn't like a windows premium where i don't get trashed on with ads and other stuff like that i'm pissed that i can't get away from certain telemetry things without registry jumping and whatnot. And then having to redo that because Windows Update just decides to like change things or whatever.

3:00:01Linus Sebastian:So I'm trying to get out. So I'm not going to financially back a thing that I'm trying to get out of. So I'll wait for Steam Deck 2. That's fair. Is what it is.

3:00:11Luke Lafreniere:All right, hit me, Dan. Hi, LDL. Instead of glazed AI interactions causing users to expect other people to act like their chatbots do, doesn't it also seem likely that these users will also start to act like their chatbots no i don't think so i think being glazed is not necessarily going to make you become a glazer no i honestly think it'll largely do the opposite effect

3:00:40Linus Sebastian:especially when you don't glaze back and it keeps glazing you yeah like let's let's think about sort

3:00:46Luke Lafreniere:of like a like a parallel like i i often talk about how i think that like influencers and famous people are sort of uniquely vulnerable to uh giving into narcissistic tendencies because i think that anyone would would struggle um to stay grounded when they're surrounded by hundreds thousands or millions of people that are telling them how incredible they are all day every day well riddle me this these professional being glazeders are they generally known for being like the super most amenable people in the world like as a group i'm not saying there aren't nice

3:01:31Linus Sebastian:celebrities the opposite you're used to getting catered to yeah and i'm sure you you you know you let it slip here or there uh and you don't communicate with the eye nicely and you notice and it keeps glazing you. So there's no incentive. There's no reward loop. Yeah, there's no penalty. A non-jerk.

3:01:49Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. This interface is broken in a way that I'm not really sure how to deal with. So I click this. It asks me, really? And then I can't interact with it.

3:02:04Linus Sebastian:Weird. I haven't had any of those problems. Let me go look. Cool.

3:02:09Luke Lafreniere:Do you want another one while we wait?

3:02:11Linus Sebastian:Yeah, hit me.

3:02:13Luke Lafreniere:Hey, WAN.DLL. With everything being so software and driver-focused, do you think there will become microtransactions or DLC for graphics cards? Oh, man. We didn't talk about it because I just had had enough bad news last week. But you saw that... Who was it? Was it Volkswagen is adding a subscription for more performance to their car or whatever it was?

3:02:39Linus Sebastian:You don't click on the really. you just click on the button again oh not the most intuitive neat okay uh vw uh performance

3:02:49Luke Lafreniere:subscription i think it was yeah that's brand new right i think that was yeah vw introduces monthly subscription to increase car power eight days ago i just i had enough talking about bad news last week so i just didn't feel like it yeah but here it is the optional power upgrade will cost 16.50 a month or 165 pounds annually with that said this also made me far less upset it is not outlandish hold on hold on i'm going to defend this it is not outlandish to charge more for a higher performance model and in this case i know the exact same hardware is in there but you could make the argument that there might be a higher likelihood of long-term damage to the vehicle if it is somehow being pushed harder and there could be some cost there i don't know that they've actually done the math you know correctly i'm sure there's margin in it but as long as there's a lifetime subscription i will be far less upset about a month or as long as there's a lifetime purchase option i'll be far less upset about a subscription being offered steak boy and

3:04:03Linus Sebastian:flow plane chat brought up an amazing comparable yes what if this was a driver for a graphics card as long as there is a lifetime subscription so now you have to buy your graphics card and pay for a subscription to the drivers to get it to be slightly faster to be clear you can still

3:04:22Luke Lafreniere:with all i'm not saying i'm okay with it i'm saying i'm a lot more okay with it if there is a lifetime purchase option i'll give you an example in the hardware world that's very much

3:04:33Linus Sebastian:like this should lifetime purchase with the product it's just you bought the car so quadro

3:04:37Luke Lafreniere:is literally a g-force card that has a lifetime subscription in this case that costs a lot of money to drivers that are certified and to the expectation that it is going to be driven harder because it's going to be used hour in hour out day after day in a professional environment i care a lot less when it's professional product though we're not talking about professional products

3:05:00Linus Sebastian:and that's fair enough and that's fair enough i'm just saying that the parallel not saying not not trying to insult the the clearly very professional car yeah yeah i just mean i just

3:05:10Luke Lafreniere:mean we already have very clear parallels in the hardware industry this thing's going to be in the user space okay fair enough i'm just saying it's it's a thing that exists and that i have i have been upset about like i have been upset about the exact same bloody bunch of times the exact same silicon right being locked down in this way i find it i find it very frustrating but i also do recognize that in the case of quadro or in the case of this there could be additional costs so let me here let me put it this way ltt screwdriver right if there was a professional version of this that included i don't know let's say once every two years you can mail it to us and we'll like disassemble it and lube it and polish it for free or something.

3:06:06Luke Lafreniere:Like if there's some kind of additional work of some sort that we're doing. So what I'm saying is I don't know the math. I don't know the math on how many more failures they'll have for pushing it that much harder. But there may be some math there. And they're insuring it? I would assume it is covered under warranty to have it at this higher performance level.

3:06:29Linus Sebastian:How long is your warranty though?

3:06:31Luke Lafreniere:not that far on most cars yeah so i look i'm not saying it's great i'm not saying i love it i'm saying as long as there is a lifetime option let's make the car cost a thousand dollars more well sure but that's exactly what they did they made it cost 649 pounds more and i think from a percentage standpoint like if it's a hundred thousand dollar car and they're charging me 650 i'm gonna be like why are you nickel and diming me if it's a thousand dollar car and

3:07:00Linus Sebastian:charging me 650 bucks that percentage point makes it more understandable i think i'm just viewing it the same thing in the same way but with a different lens if that kind of makes sense where like the fact that the monthly one exists is what bothers me i understand that it makes it more okay like you see what i mean it makes it more okay to you that the lifetime exists for me it makes it less okay that the monthly exists it's kind of the same thing i don't like either of them. It's glass half full, glass you know.

3:07:29Luke Lafreniere:I mean Walker here says it's not uncommon to pay for tuning a vehicle that increases the horsepower without any hardware change. Yeah, it's just a one

3:07:38Linus Sebastian:time cost. And so is

3:07:40Luke Lafreniere:this. Well Unless you buy the subscription. I just don't like that the subscription exists. I don't like that the subscription exists either but if people choose a subscription when they have a lifetime option they have to own at least some of the responsibility for the vastly larger amount of money they will pay over the lifetime they own this purchase okay what about nvidia one cent per month per cuta core

3:08:11Luke Lafreniere:again i don't i don't love it i don't want it you're gonna have to you're gonna have to graphics cards okay super subsidized if nvidia okay so here you know what let's draw a consumer parallel that i actually would be okay with oh no if nvidia gave me another 200 watts on the 5090 full warranty everything's covered and they were like yeah it's another you know okay so what's this in the context of a vehicle so they're charging 600 let's say what this is a 30 000 vehicle something like that 50 maybe 60 you think it's that much i don't know it's just i don't know what cars cost oh my god it's the it's the like limit limit breaker subscription

3:08:54Linus Sebastian:yeah and it's effectively just a warranty effectively just an overclocking warranty if they let you do it without that but you lost your warranty yeah i think i'd be more cool with it that was pounds right yeah 40 000 pounds 40 000 pounds so we're talking because that's

3:09:15Luke Lafreniere:literally just a warranty at that point so call it 50 000 so we're talking in this case about 1.5 percent of the cost so if nvidia said okay on your two thousand dollar gpu uh it's 20 it's 30 bucks and you can have another a month no no no total lifetime lifetime it's 30 bucks and you can have another 100 watts or 200 watts or you know whatever if you could if you could do it anyways but didn't have a warranty.

3:09:45Linus Sebastian:I'm slamming that button. I'm doing that.

3:09:46Luke Lafreniere:This totally even exists. People buy this all the time. This is the OC variant. This is the OC variant. And you don't even get additional power limit. Cars have trim levels. The car trim levels, though, that's a tough one. Well, no, they're doing what the graphics cards do. You can get the OC car or you can get the normal car. They're just doing that in the same car.

3:10:08Linus Sebastian:I think we're going too far with this because we're just we're now just describing a an extended warranty well sort of it's not a it's not a

3:10:18Luke Lafreniere:warranty levels it's a yeah it's a different tier of product and i've made the argument since forever that you should never buy the oc lesser card when the not oc better card is now so close in price but i mean the difference between a 5080 and a 5090 is now a thousand dollars so oc 5080 could make sense and in the case of the 5090 there is nothing higher so if you want any more if they were to come to me and say yeah it's an extra 30 bucks or 50 bucks for the oc variant that runs a little faster we bend it a little better we made sure it's going to work and we're going to cover that i don't see that as an extended warranty i see that as a ever so slightly faster

3:11:02Linus Sebastian:product the reason why i'm saying extended warranty is because if you could just do it yourself

3:11:05Luke Lafreniere:yeah and that's what happens when they're the same product like you can take a car and put a bigger engine in it but the manufacturer also produces that same model of car that has the bigger engine in it already but this vw is just both of those cars in one car like it's a 50 80 and a 50 90 in a single card and then you just pay the extra thousand dollars and now it's a 50 90 instead of a 58 yeah in this case the difference in performance is pretty small though so i feel a lot less like they're totally sandbagging me of course like like they could have just afforded to give me you know a car that performs twice as good well this sucks it's not a different car um yeah but this is just the same car it's just slightly more tuned er and i think yeah i i hope i'm not just gonna completely end up cancelled over this again because hamnetics says linus's point about accelerated wear profiles is a decent one when something is worked harder there could be additional wear and the reason that i went to that first is because we were talking specifically about batteries and electric motors an ev right that is so important your argument makes complete

3:12:11Linus Sebastian:sense and it's totally fair and totally fine the problem is it will immediately be abused well immediately and unquestionably it's it's the the future problem because now you you pull back more and pull back more and pull back more and paywall more and paywall more and paywall more yeah like heated seats it's not the the the like base concept is the fine i guess that you're describing it's it's the what will companies do it i feel better about this than the bmw heated

3:12:39Luke Lafreniere:seats personally yeah you know what i think i do too because the heated seats that's literally in there like it's it's literally so inexpensive for you to implement it that you can literally put it in every single vehicle that rolls down the line and becomes cheaper because you do that yes less skew um but even then it's the same cost blending right so the people who pay for it are subsidizing the people who don't pay for it to put it into every vehicle um i still i still don't like it i can still not like it in this case i actually yeah i agree with you dan i don't mind this as much as the heated seat activation no i think one percent feels bad if it was 25 percent like if the 50 to 50 90 upgrade was a thousand dollars and the card was 500 bucks that feels more okay in a way this feels nickel and dime but i know what you're talking about especially on electric so yeah sucks it feels welcome to current year though yeah it's bad it's it's not good for the world

3:13:42Linus Sebastian:The step is not that bad, so you don't look at it that closely. Slippy slope.

3:13:46Luke Lafreniere:Bazag says, with your experience with TeamViewer, I think you would trust lifetime subs less, especially in this corporate environment. You are 100 % right. In this case, though, they would have to actively brick it, whereas TeamViewer's service runs through their servers. I don't see any reason why my additional horsepower would have to do an authentication check every time I turn on the car. Until it does. If that were the case, well, then that's where Luke's slippery slope argument, which as fallacious or fallacy or whatever, as invalid as a slippery slope argument might be. So, you know, at a certain point, we've seen it happen enough times that we kind of have to go, okay, slippery slopes are valid.

3:14:29Luke Lafreniere:Slippery slopes are absolutely valid. When you sell the car, it doesn't transfer. So the new person also has to buy it. Is that true for this one? No, I'm just giving them ideas.

3:14:37Linus Sebastian:But that is absolutely something they would do. I find slippery slopes to be completely valid in these types of conversations. Right. Less valid when it comes to.

3:14:46Luke Lafreniere:A specific.

3:14:47Linus Sebastian:Like, and in between two individuals that know each other type situation. Sure. Because at that point in time, you can be like, you can trust me to not slippery slope this. And that's a valid argument. So then you can counter. But in these types of situations, it's like the company's massive entire reason to exist incentive is to slippery slope this. So it's like you should almost trust them to do so more than anything else.

3:15:12Luke Lafreniere:So Crystal points out this is also the same hardware just like the heated seats, but it's the wear profile. Yeah. That's the difference. Yeah. You know, they validated. Validation is not a joke, right? They validated it at a certain performance level. Now they validated it at another performance level. There may be a maintenance or wear cost there. It's harder on the batteries. It's harder on the batteries. is it's harder on the motors. Okay. Want to hit me? Hello, bad cholesterol, LDL. What punishment are you three willing to commit to for the first person to break the WAN streak? Love the content.

3:15:49Luke Lafreniere:Shave Luke's head, please. Yes, I also say we shave Luke's head if anybody misses.

3:15:53Linus Sebastian:What if anybody misses?

3:15:55Luke Lafreniere:That's a great suggestion. I appreciate that. I second it, actually. Yeah, there we go. All right, settled. Moving on. That's ridiculous.

3:16:04Linus Sebastian:Oh, my goodness. What are we willing to commit? I mean, it's not going to be me, so I don't care. Yeah, honestly, we needed nothing to be insanely diehard about this already. We may have actually had this conversation before. Maybe. It's been so long we forgot.

3:16:22Luke Lafreniere:I think there may be a consequence. I think we might just not remember what it is. Do any viewers remember? I still like that we have to shave Luke's head, but none of us are going to be the one who is going to allow that to happen. Oh, yeah.

3:16:35Linus Sebastian:The pride of not losing is worth more than me shaving my head. Yeah, absolutely.

3:16:40Luke Lafreniere:100%.

3:16:40Linus Sebastian:I don't want you to have to shave your head. That'd be fine. Dunk take. Again, I thought I was going to be bald my whole life into my 20s, and then I finally realized that that's not how that works.

3:16:52Luke Lafreniere:Flow plan shot doesn't recall any punishments. Maybe I'm just imagining it. I mean, that's possible.

3:16:57Linus Sebastian:I think we might have had the conversation, but maybe it never turned into anything.

3:17:02Luke Lafreniere:loser has to do WAN show in full blue man group makeup I mean we would just do that anyway that'd be hilarious yeah that sounds fun it's more of a it's a pride thing um Yvonne would actually kill me if I shaved my head oh it's Luke's head right okay okay so if anyone breaks the streak we shave Luke's head okay all in favor

3:17:33Luke Lafreniere:it's on camera the motion passes

3:17:37Linus Sebastian:no that's not how that works that's not how that works I'm actually completely okay with that being mine but I feel like we'll talk about it another time we'll figure something out you know it doesn't make sense that if Linus doesn't show up then I have to shave my head I mean and apparently you

3:17:56Luke Lafreniere:I mean you raised your hand

3:17:57Linus Sebastian:No, no.

3:17:59Luke Lafreniere:All right, hit me, Dan.

3:18:01Linus Sebastian:You can take Luke's 2.5 pound weights. That would be more annoying for Little Man than me at this point. Hello from the East Coast.

3:18:11Luke Lafreniere:Question for Luke and also Linus in parenthesis. As the infra team grows, are there any plans for IT admin-focused content? A day in the life of your infra team, network deep drives, etc.? Probably not. cool good chat boring yeah hey six foot two six foot one and allegedly 5.6 i actually go by five foot 14 uh are there any examples of products with really anti-consumer behavior that you would refuse to review on for example action cams requiring mobile apps to initialize no i mean i think our job is to is to call these things out is to shine a light on on a on a bad practice or a bad product i think refusing to review it is in a way even passively contributing to the problem it's like when people with ethics and integrity resign their post uh when they're asked to do something um by a superior and then yeah they just put someone in who would happily do it yeah so they keep their ethics and they keep their integrity but by resigning they clear the way for someone to just do it anyway we haven't actually accomplished anything here i think in the past when as a society it felt like we had some shame

3:19:35Linus Sebastian:i definitely admired that more because it would bring more of a spotlight to it and then change is initialized and that person who asked for the thing might get removed but that doesn't

3:19:43Luke Lafreniere:seem to be the case anymore in modern year so um so it seems like there needs to be a new meta and my meta is definitely if something's interesting enough to make a video, I don't care how anti-consumer it is. Let's make a video about it and talk about how much they suck. Hey, LL and D, have you heard about the Final Fantasy XIV drama this week? Square Enix issued a cease and desist over an add-on that let players share custom character mods. Do you think this ties into payment processor censorship? I mean, were the custom character mods quite X-rated? Is that what we're talking about here? I didn't think that it was a problem until you mentioned the payment processors, and now I'm concerned again.

3:20:29Linus Sebastian:I don't think that's related to it. Add-ons weren't allowed in Final Fantasy XIV already, as far as my understanding goes. And customer character models? Custom character models could be perceived as cheating. I can't find anything

3:20:45Luke Lafreniere:about XXX character mods.

3:20:47Linus Sebastian:I don't think you're allowed any add-ons in that game. So, yeah.

3:20:55Linus Sebastian:Couple more.

3:20:56Luke Lafreniere:Hey, LLD, does Linus have any updates from the smart door lock he recently installed? Is there a smart home device or feature that you wish existed but is not currently available? Thanks. I mean, basically anything is currently available if you're willing to pay for like a professional installer to come and do some wizardry for you. Like, I think it's one of, yeah, it's one of Yvonne's old high school friends, husband's friend, who does like installs for these like crazy homes and like Shaughnessy and stuff like that. And he was telling me about this custom mount for this TV that would like go up into the ceiling and like hide itself.

3:21:34Luke Lafreniere:So it can like come down and be like just suspended in the middle of the living room so that the mom can like watch TV while she's cooking in the kitchen, like across the open concept thing. Anyway, I think you can basically do anything. As for the smart lock, I'm really happy with it. I can give people codes, one time use or timed. Um, they can access whatever I need them to whenever I need them to, it locks on its own, which sometimes I'm a bit of a scatterbrain and I forget to, you know, do that. So that's really nice. So it's always locked, um, and works perfectly. And the charging solution is working perfectly.

3:22:16Luke Lafreniere:I have wireless charging for my smart lock. So there's just a little base station that sits on just a little like end table thing in the foyer and it just beams power wirelessly to my lock so i never have to change the battery in it ever again oh cool yeah that's actually pretty

3:22:33Linus Sebastian:sick pretty cool wow that's sweet because wiring those up can kind of suck yeah oh my gosh so most

3:22:40Luke Lafreniere:people run a battery hey when i have a question for luke about the labs website i yes notice it's really fast with a lot of cool web tech thank you i was curious what framework you guys use they have done how difficult firefox has been hamnetics i made a video on that it's on short circuit

3:22:58Linus Sebastian:they've done a wonderful job with with keeping it very performant um and i just got to get more people to go to it um but i wanted to show off i like this one i think there's a bunch of different ones i haven't tried them all this is not a like particular endorsement it's not financial advice Yep. Other than that, these tools are cool. You might find one that you prefer more. It's very likely I haven't even tried it. I started using this many years ago, and it's been awesome ever since. But it's called BuiltWith or BuiltWith.com. And you can just look up any website. So I went to their homepage, just went ldglabs.com, and then clicked Lookup.

3:23:33Linus Sebastian:And then you can look at basically all the stuff that we use. You can see our analytics. We like Plausible because it's friendlier to users, in my opinion. and in Dan Siegel's opinion, who is the one who suggested it for that reason, you can see that we have Next.js, which is probably more related to your question, along with React, which is maybe even more related to your question, along with Vercel, which is definitely, likely, definitely related to your question. But you can do this for any website and it will poke through and help you find different things about it. It's a very fun thing to do to just see kind of like, what are these guys doing?

3:24:09Linus Sebastian:How did they build stuff?

3:24:10Luke Lafreniere:you know i really don't think aws is going to catch on because the future is serverless

3:24:21Luke Lafreniere:sorry that's my favorite joke last one i've got for you today hi lld uh you guys talk about lifetime purchases would you ever consider doing a lifetime float floatplane subscription the other thing we talk about endlessly is sustainable business practices unfortunately floatplane is a service that has a very real uh very ongoing monthly cost yeah so if we were to offer offer you a lifetime subscription what we'd be offering you is a lie because at some point unless we grow infinitely and infinite growth on a finite planet is unfortunately not possible unless we grow infinitely at some point the pyramid will collapse and the new user recruitment will not cover the cost of continuing to support the legacy lifetime users and the whole thing falls down and we have to go back on our word So we want to just put ourselves in a position where we never have to go back on our word.

3:25:32Linus Sebastian:It's also like, I don't know, in my opinion, yes, I think there's an argument that could be made that Flowplane has, Flowplane itself has, well, depends on the user. A Linus Media Group account on Flowplane has DRM free downloads. It's up to the creators if they want them or not. So I can't say it for the whole platform. you could make an argument that that's your like legacy of the thing but in my opinion you're not I can't give you Flowplane right yeah you can take the downloads but if you buy a lifetime subscription and then eventually Flowplane dies you and I are 90 and we finally retire and Flowplane dies for whatever reason and you can't access the website anymore what is your lifetime subscription for yeah if if i could if we happened if team viewer just went away eventually but you could keep using it because you have your whatever thing and then it doesn't lifetime is real but lifetime is fine yeah because okay it stopped iterating at some point that kind of sucks sure whatever but you can still use the thing then lifetime is applicable in my opinion i can't just give you full plane forever so therefore in my opinion is

3:26:54Luke Lafreniere:not really applicable tim uh asks in floatplane chat why not just make it like 1500 how does that not make sense because it doesn't make sense for you yeah i i i i like to stack w's in in every transaction i am looking for a way to build a build a balanced i offer i receive sheet right And from my point of view, finding the correct number for floatplane lifetime subscription is asking me to have a crystal ball. I would have to know exactly how much value you're going to receive. And I'm going to have to know exactly, to a reasonable degree of accuracy, how much it's going to cost me. I can't know that.

3:27:42Luke Lafreniere:So it's far better for me to just have a sustainable billing model that works for me. And if it works for you, then that's great. You can subscribe. And if it's not working for you anymore, then you can not subscribe.

3:27:53Linus Sebastian:And if you want to throw money at us, as much as this doesn't benefit my department, I don't think that's a good way to look at things personally. The same reason why we have merch messages instead of using other potential systems is because we're trying to give you more back for this exchange that's happening. So go get something from the store.

3:28:13Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Pick up something on LTT Store. Or come to Whale Land. If you really don't want anything, if you must just give us money, you can like buy a gift card and then just like never use it. Yeah. Technically, that does sit on our books as like an outstanding liability or whatever, because gift cards legally in Canada can't expire.

3:28:31Linus Sebastian:Are gift cards on the store attached to your account? I don't remember. Is it actually a code?

3:28:35Luke Lafreniere:I don't know.

3:28:35Linus Sebastian:I don't remember.

3:28:36Luke Lafreniere:I don't remember. But the point is just like, look, if you want to give us more money, you absolutely can. but we don't want to charge more for it so you're going to have to find your own creative way to do that.

3:28:47Linus Sebastian:Yeah, which there are. Sure.

3:28:50Luke Lafreniere:Our office is on Google Maps. You could show up and slip a hundo under the door. I can't stop you. My G-sting's ready. Oh my god. And that's it for the show. We will see you guys again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye! Whoa, you did it before I wave? Nah, I think you, yeah, the wave started, the wave started. I'm allowing it. Alright, it's touch and go though, sorry.

3:29:22Linus Sebastian:Oh my. Oh, Trigger Happy.

3:29:35Linus Sebastian:So I'm gonna pull my chat, wait!