NVIDIA’s New CPU Makes Me Excited Again - WAN Show July 24, 2026

18:37Linus Sebastian:But I could also see myself in a situation where there's some form of... Linus gives you all your computers anyway, so it'll use whatever's in it.

18:46Luke Lafreniere:That's kind of fair.

18:51Linus Sebastian:I was explaining that to someone recently. They asked, like, how much something cost, and I was like, I don't know. And they're like, what do you mean? I was like, I don't, like, I haven't built, I haven't bought the components from my own personal computer in a very long time. And they're like, what do you mean? You haven't refreshed in a while? I was like, no. I mean, I haven't refreshed since high school. Like, you don't understand. That's what I peaked. well there yeah there was uh i remember the last time i technically bought pc components was uh intel retail extreme retail edge but retail edge sure and they had extreme editions yeah and yeah they did that's the one that went in the mineral oil tank that's the last one i bought nice because even before we had our agreement thing you had me with different parts i think so i could do like editing better at home or something yeah because it was sad what he was

19:45Luke Lafreniere:trying to edit on. It was out of pity. That system was getting a little old.

19:53Linus Sebastian:All right.

19:54Luke Lafreniere:Why don't we jump into another topic? You want to pick one?

19:57Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Where's this? I want to figure out more about this. Where did it go? Oh, no. I lost it.

20:05Luke Lafreniere:He lost it. He's lost it. Oh, no. Are we going to address the foot cam at all? Or is it pretty self-explanatory?

20:15Linus Sebastian:it's strange i think people are going to see how much i fidget microsoft introduces xbox backwards compatibility program on pc for original xbox games with more to come uh will be available for purchase on pc via game pass this is one part that confuses me or for free if you already have a console digital license so i guess you log in with the same account and then you get access to it on the computer which is actually that's cool that makes sense okay the initial offerings are blinks the time sweeper okay conquer live and reloaded heard of that one crimson skies high road to revenge and fusion frenzy i love fusion frenzy that's actually genuinely pretty exciting especially if they man if they had online multiplayer fusion frenzy i would pay that i would play the heck out of that the the part that confuses me is they will be available for purchase on PC via Game Pass.

21:10Linus Sebastian:What does that mean? It means

21:11Luke Lafreniere:that, wait, yeah, what does that mean? What does that mean? So if you have Game Pass, then you can buy it? But Game Pass is like a rental thing, right? No, no, no, it's a comma, Luke! They'll be available for purchase on PC, available via Game Pass, or free if you already have a console digital license. Three options. That makes way more sense.

21:32Linus Sebastian:okay okay cool so how much are they are they available now when do they become available i i don't know i want to see how much it'll cost me to buy fusion frenzy okay so these are all yeah

21:42Luke Lafreniere:these are all like original xbox games um some outlets have said the experience is mostly good with some minor frame timing and judder issues and dude it's two dollars and 49 cents really it's on sale 75 off okay so the next like six days included an essential game pass or you can buy it for 250 250 can i play this multiplayer

22:11Linus Sebastian:not local xbox local single player shared split screen xbox windows okay well i could do the Because I'm thinking on Steam, you could just remote play.

22:22Luke Lafreniere:Is that what Xbox Play Anywhere is? Xbox Play Anywhere. No, Xbox Play Anywhere is playing your Xbox games streamed to something. I will probably buy this.

22:35Linus Sebastian:Fusion Frenzy was a lot of fun, and I only had the trial disc that came with some magazine. I never even got to play the whole game.

22:45Luke Lafreniere:Okay, well, that answers our first discussion question. Which of these four games are you most likely to play? Oh, Fusion Frenzy for sure.

22:51Linus Sebastian:And I will like actually probably buy it. I remember one time I was at Microsoft hanging out for something. I don't remember what it was. And they had like all the media people that were visiting hanging out in this like random room for a while while they did something. And they had a bunch of Xboxes set up and they had Fusion Frenzy in the machines. And I like, that was one of the games that you could play. And I like recruited some random media people that were there to start playing Fusion Frenzy on one of them. And people started watching. and then people naturally started playing on the other Xbox and then the whole room and it just people playing Fusion Frenzy, this like ancient game and people were having a lot of fun Fusion Frenzy is great I've never tried it It's like Xbox's take on like a Mario Party Oh, okay So like lots of mini games?

23:33Linus Sebastian:Lots of mini games It's been forever since I've played it but I remember having a ton of fun They have like, I mean the thing on the box art There we go yeah that's not a great sales pitch no honestly nope it's not but it's like it's like that uh that like platform game i don't know if they have it here oh where you bump each other off yeah i don't know if one of these is actually gonna show it i thought it's not right at the beginning there is that not to the right to the right everything you own in a box to the oh no that's something else okay some burgers or something yeah sure i mean so again i haven't played the actual 45 mini games so this is a race thing yeah 45 mini games yeah sounds good whatever it was it was like uh if i remember correctly most people played it through the the demo disc

24:21Luke Lafreniere:maybe that was their mistake making the game demo too good it was actually like

24:27Linus Sebastian:there there was a few different mini games there was enough mini games on it that you and your friends could like play fusion frenzy and then be done with it and it would be fine

24:35Luke Lafreniere:like it was it was a little bit too much way to go guys um our other discussion question is do you think Xbox has a vision for the future? I feel like we go back and forth on this every freaking week because it's like there'll be some news will come out and you'll go like, okay, we're so back. And then some other news will come out and we'll be like, they're doomed. Clearly they're just gonna sell it or spin it off. And then the next week it's like, wait, they're actually doing really cool stuff. Can you handle this degree of whiplash, Luke?

25:07Linus Sebastian:I mean, that's life right now. um i think as much like obviously layoffs are bad i think that can be universally just been like okay layoffs are bad people losing jobs are bad 14 layers of management also unacceptable right so like they might also be on a really brutal timer right they might not have a lot of runway to like figure this out when you're doing layoffs at the scale that they're doing you're going to end up like this isn't even like oh big brain this is just very obvious you're going to end up taking people out that shouldn't have been removed you're gonna have mistakes with the layoff of that's and that is very sad really good people trying to do really good things are going to lose their jobs over this that's a uh you know that's a 14 layers of management failure um which sucks but it feels like something that really needed to happen.

26:07Linus Sebastian:Halo Infinite costing$800 million to make is just not okay. It's not a good enough game for that output. They have to figure something out. They have these old, ancient, legendary studios outputting just like, I don't know, in Bethesda's case, practically nothing. Like something's gotta give. When, oh man, I can barely even remember his name, Starfield? When Starfield came out, the conversation was largely around like, this game failed largely because of management failure. Like, this stuff needed to get addressed. There was conversations about like, apparently Todd wasn't even happy about it because like, it was structured where every single decision had to go through Todd.

26:50Linus Sebastian:And Todd was basically like, this is nuts. Like, this isn't how Morrowind was made. This isn't how Oblivion was made. a lot of writers and creatives in the in the creation of the game had more autonomy which is one of the reasons why those games can feel kind of disconnected sometimes you can be in an area doing something and it has like a certain kind of tone and feel and then you go on another quest and

27:12Luke Lafreniere:it's like very different like this is like you it went from like oh spooky scary to like this is kind of funny and whimsical yeah like i remember i i never was able to put my finger on it but i remember that from oblivion yeah oh yeah where it where the yeah big time in oblivion i i never ever put my finger on exactly what i was noticing or even and because i didn't do that i never thought about thinking about why old elder scrolls games so much sense the the various developers

27:42Linus Sebastian:around the company i believe even todd would talk about like after the game came out they would play it and discover things right like it was a lot of very strong contributors right and that's one of the regions why they're able to make them so fast the gap between morrow and oblivion is really short the gap between oblivion and skyrim isn't even really that long and then now we're looking at like just enormous gaps where like i don't know someone will have not been alive when skyrim came

28:10Luke Lafreniere:out and be old enough to enjoy the next game elder scrolls arena march 25th 94 dagger fall September 20th 96 Morrowind That was a That was a pretty big gap Six years Morrowind was like The biggest map In a video game ever When it released May 1st 2002 Yeah Oblivion March 20th 2006 Only four years Then 2011 To Skyrim November 11th 2011 And then Crickets Frickin' Crickets dude it's 2026 bruh it's been 15 years okay okay put to put that in context to put that in context from the elder scrolls arena to the elder scrolls 5 skyrim was 17 years since the elder scrolls 5

29:10Linus Sebastian:skyrim it has been almost been the entire duration of the entire elder scrolls series since we got another Elder Scrolls. Like, that doesn't work. I don't, like, ugh. So something has to break. So some breakage there, as painful as it is, as brutal as it is for the people losing their jobs, as especially brutal as it is for the people that are really doing great work and are also losing their jobs.

29:33Luke Lafreniere:And as brutal as it is for the people staying behind.

29:36Linus Sebastian:100%. The level of demoralization has to be insane. And you have to try to figure out how to keep going on or else your job isn't going to continue to exist and there's a lot of threat looming because there's another layoff coming soon and you don't know that there won't be more because there's something is going to have to change for there to not be more. But the management structures there, and I'm sure tons of other things, are a problem. 14 layers of management doesn't work. When you're trying to do a creative process, especially, oh my god. Way to get out the most bland vanilla Starfield crap ever.

30:10Linus Sebastian:that's how it's gonna work but but yeah it's it's it's interesting you watch you watch like i don't know how can you have a lot of the generally quite serious tones of a lot of the other scrolls games and then also have sheogorath in the world throwing cheese wheels at you for fun like it's it's it's because it's a creative suit someone had lunch with phil schaefer or something

30:32Luke Lafreniere:like yeah yeah like that's the only possible explanation yeah and he was like you know it'd

30:37Linus Sebastian:be funny let's make a cheese dimension uh yeah it's there is like it's i i remember in skyrim i hadn't i had no idea this was coming um i think it was in winterfell you you do like a drinking competition with some dude and then you wake up and like everything is just messed you like black out and then you wake up and everything's just messed up and it turns out the drinking competition was with sheogorath and you have to uncover like what you did while you were blacked out and it's just like what just happened it went from like skyrim i'm a dragon lord to like hang over the movie uh in the middle of the game but it was like actually really fun and engaging in the story of it was really good um and that was so great and now it's you know what is the hue of this pot i don't know better talk to todd um and that that doesn't work and makes it take 17 trillion years to make another game.

31:36Linus Sebastian:So yeah, something has to change at Xbox. It sounds like there's a lot of change. Change is really, really chaotic. I don't think we are even sort of close to the end of the painful, chaotic change. And I hope they find a way out of it because there's a lot of really cool IPs there

31:53Luke Lafreniere:and a lot of really cool people working there, I'm sure. You know what's really funny is we've had some painful, chaotic change here lately. There's a lot of that going around the world right now. I actually like gave an impromptu kind of talk to the writing team like an hour ago where I was basically just like you, I think, actually said it better than I did. So I kind of wish that I had said it better. I don't even know what this is, but it was basically just like, you know, you know, am I stressed? Yes. Yeah. Super stressed. But there's a difference. This is a, this is a stress that is not a, it's not an external stress.

32:37Luke Lafreniere:It's a, like, it's kind of an, it's kind of a, like, like it's time to lock in and there's work to be done and it can be really exciting. And it's, it's, it's stress about, it's stress about like a new opportunity because, you know, I think, I think internally we have a lot of things that we do really well. And I think we have a lot of stuff that hasn't been working as well. And, and, and I think that some of the upheaval that we've had is going to force us to reevaluate and do things differently. I've seen a growing sentiment over the last little while that the content is starting to feel more classic LTT.

33:19Luke Lafreniere:And it's not because there's different people working on it. In a lot of cases, it's some of our, it's some of our oldest timers that are working on a lot of that content. but the processes are changing and we're getting out of necessity slash out of because we're bored of being bored we're getting scrappier again um actually had a ton of fun today like uh elijah elijah was here before the show and he's like exhausted because we shot all day but we shot two ltt's today that were both just just fun amazing you know i it's actually so important and I'm very happy to hear that. Yeah, like one of them, one of them doesn't sound fun.

34:04Luke Lafreniere:Elijah and I were having a conversation and realized, separate from the video, that both of us needed a printer right now. Our reasons for needing a printer were completely different. So he's got a lot more like business administration that he's got to do because of his like streaming side hustle. And he needs a printer. And my kids are getting to like high school age and they need to surprisingly they still need to hand things in whether it's like putting things on a poster board or whether it's like handing in an assignment they actually still need to hand stuff in on paper um more often than i've expected and so we kind of went is that a video is us going shopping for a printer is honestly yeah is us going printer shopping a video and uh and and we made the decision and it turns out that was easy um yeah yeah it's a video and so today elijah and i having done zero research neither of us having bought a printer so to give you context elijah hadn't bought a printer ever and my current most up-to-date

35:14Linus Sebastian:printer that i bought is made by samsung they haven't made printers in a minute i think so uh

35:20Luke Lafreniere:How long do you think a minute is?

35:22Linus Sebastian:Don't look at the chat. Don't look at the chat. They're not going to help you. So when I worked at Geek Squad, they sold Samsung printers. So they definitely made them as of, when would that have been? 2011, I think. So I'm going to guess that they stopped in 2015.

35:42Luke Lafreniere:You're actually super close. hp announced the acquisition of samsung's printer business in 2016 that was pretty good actually so it's been almost 10 years since samsung printers have even been a

35:58Linus Sebastian:thing and you definitely bought yours notably before they stopped being oh yeah brother i'm

36:04Luke Lafreniere:pretty sure yours was old by that time uh it wasn't new so you know yeah so we bet we basically went in like oh yeah well uh you know how about the eco tank is is that a is that a good thing and and it's it's it's really it's really interesting getting a little more that's

36:28Linus Sebastian:actually got to be so much fun watching linus and elijah go into a store and just try to figure what the heck all the terms are on the label for a tech product actually sounds hilarious and the

36:36Luke Lafreniere:most frustrating part is how many terms were not on the label like there's a part in the video where I'm like, see, this is why everybody's turning to AI. Because instead of having standardized labels that all have the same specs so that I can easily compare them, they all have different things on them. One of them says how many pages per minute, and the next one over says whether it has a fax function or not. Does this one have a fax function? How many pages a minute does that one do? I don't know. That wasn't easy. Okay, I'll ask the AI. And now I have to go and cross-check everything.

37:10Linus Sebastian:Verify everything it says.

37:11Luke Lafreniere:Bloody stupid thing it says because I can't trust it at all.

37:14Linus Sebastian:Especially the Google one. Yeah. Well, especially the search integrated ones. Yeah. They're all low tier.

37:20Luke Lafreniere:It's very frustrating. And I actually, also, it was another shopping video, which was like, they were both in the same place. So we shot Linus Buys-Evon a phone as well. And that was frustrating for a completely different reason. How many options do you think there were for buying a printer?

37:40Luke Lafreniere:These days, like eight? Oh, dude. I kid you not. Like 50. Whoa. Tons. You're in... We're in Staples. Ah. Okay. Tons. Okay? We got your Epson. You did say the whole easy button thing. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got your Epson. We got your HP. We got... We... Hey, come on up here. We got your brother. We got your inkjet ring. Are you including... Got your toner. They go tank. They got so many options. Multifunction. They got everything, man. Business grade. Consumer grade. Do you want the free ink?

38:21Linus Sebastian:So, okay. I was basically only thinking like consumer grade. If that helps it at all.

38:26Luke Lafreniere:They got everything.

38:26Linus Sebastian:They probably still had way more than eight.

38:28Luke Lafreniere:They got everything. Okay. Okay. How many options do you think Yvonne had for phones?

38:36Linus Sebastian:I don't shop for things. No. Okay. Uh, is she excluding any? She is not buying an iPhone again. Okay. So, so that's nothing on the iPhone side of things. We got to look probably a couple of generations. Uh, 15.

38:54Luke Lafreniere:You're not even close, but the other way at the store, what there was, and I kid you not, there was the S25 FE. Okay. Their S26, 26 +, 26 Ultra. They had the Flip and both of the new Folds. So we're up to seven. And then they had like the Pixel 10a, 10, and 10 Pro.

39:15Linus Sebastian:They had the Flip and the two Folds. Well, they were just installing them today. But not like a bajillion other things?

39:21Luke Lafreniere:Dude, there was like... That seems wild to me. It was an absolute desert of choice. Huh. Okay, you know what? You're actually really close. No, I forgot. There were two Motorola's as well. There was like two Motorola. So it was like, there was like 12 phones. Okay, sure. So actually you're close. But I was just... Was that Staples again? No, that was Best Buy. So like, where's the, you know, and I know LG doesn't make them anymore, right? But like, where's the LG? Where's the Sony? Where's the Asus ROG? And to be clear, I know those also don't exist, but like, where's the Xiaomi and RealMe?

39:57Linus Sebastian:I mean, that's kind of your point, isn't it? They're all kind of falling off.

40:00Luke Lafreniere:Everything's gone.

40:01Linus Sebastian:OnePlus just left North American markets. no Oppo

40:04Luke Lafreniere:no Vivo Xperia is

40:07Linus Sebastian:are they Japan exclusive now? I think you can get like international ones shipped to you but I don't think they're in retail stores in North America Dan probably knows this one that I have is the 6 or something like that

40:21Luke Lafreniere:it was available in America there's an American variant the previous generation did not have a North American variant

40:26Linus Sebastian:do you have that cool new one?

40:27Luke Lafreniere:not the newest one I just upgraded this I'm good with this one

40:32Linus Sebastian:but I still buy the Chinese variants because they have unlocked bootloader. They're all locked in America. The Xperia phones right now are like my favorite phones on paper if you don't include the price as a line item and then you include the price as a line item and it's like, never mind.

40:49Luke Lafreniere:I gotta go and prepare the other one for you. It's fine. I am so dumb. Anyways. So anyway, I was just, I was blown away. Your options are pretty much Pixel,

41:01Linus Sebastian:iphone samsung or go f**k yourself and the difference between those these days i think is

41:06Luke Lafreniere:also less than like ever before so boring oh p kinetics okay p kinetics in the chat it's like i miss when htc made good phones dude i found an htc one mini in like my seat cushions the other day those were nice and i was like man those felt good those felt really good damn that's nice you Where are the freaking options, man? So yeah, it was really disappointing.

41:31Linus Sebastian:Oh, there were some phones from that era, plus or minus three years, that were just incredible.

41:39Luke Lafreniere:I was a big Droid Turbo guy. I freaking loved the Droid Turbo with the ballistic nylon backing. Actually, you know what? They didn't have it at Best Buy today, so it wasn't an option for Yvonne's purchase, but Motorola has a really nice fold now. The Razer. Check out the backing material.

41:58Linus Sebastian:I was looking at the backing material before I even felt it. It looks really sharp. I don't know if you guys... Which one? That one.

42:07Luke Lafreniere:That's not that close.

42:10Linus Sebastian:I don't think they're going to be able to really see it. Yeah, they're not going to be able to see it. Really nice pattern. It feels great in the hand, actually.

42:17Luke Lafreniere:So I'm probably not going to daily that just because I just got my hands on this and then immediately the Z Fold 8 arrived. And I am very curious to see if I can get used to the form factor. I actually shot the short circuit unboxing of it right before I came down here. Of just like a normal...

42:40Linus Sebastian:Oh, it's not normal. I see. It's like super wide and kind of short. Okay. What did you call me? Right after I said it The f**k did you just say to me? I said it and then just stared at the phone and was like, we're gonna just move on

43:04Linus Sebastian:Oh my oh yeah, that's kind of weird

43:09Luke Lafreniere:One of these days he will become the experienced on-camera personality that he was born to be and he will not hold the camera out of sight or the phone out of sight

43:18Linus Sebastian:Let me look at this real quick. I'm dying. I was not born to be this. We shaped me into this weird amoeba.

43:31Linus Sebastian:It's a strange form factor. Okay, here's my 8 Pro, for example. Yeah. It's very short. It's like right up to where the camera bump is. But then if I open it up... It's enormous.

43:49Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, flip it 90 degrees. No, no. Oh, God. No, the other... Don't even.

43:59Luke Lafreniere:I'll wait. I can wait. What? That's... Stop. Clockwave. There you go. That's right. Good enough. There you go. Now you can see the height difference. Okay, are you actually not going to hold it like that? There you go. There. I'm crying out loud.

44:16Linus Sebastian:I thought I had already shown that. Sorry.

44:18Luke Lafreniere:No. So it's got, it's like the same.

44:21Linus Sebastian:Yeah, you could turn it to the side.

44:23Luke Lafreniere:So I was. Interesting. When I was shooting the short circuit, I was actually like, I was doing the thing where I list all the positives about it so that I can ultimately go, yeah, but like, come on. And then I went and I held it like this and I went, holy crap. they might be onto something it's like like that is that's big you know and it's like and it's light it's only 201 grams it's very like battery life holdable i think as a don't quote me on this it's in the short circuit 46 or 4800 milliamp hours um that's a samsung i've gotten shockingly good battery life out of the Fold 7. I've been extremely happy with it.

45:17Luke Lafreniere:Are they doing battery in each whatever you call it, I don't know, section? Actually not sure. Haven't done a teardown. Wouldn't surprise me if they did. But I'm not sure. Yeah.

45:30Interesting.

45:32Luke Lafreniere:All yours for the low, low price of$2 ,500 US dollars for the 1 terabyte model. No longer interesting. Yeah, I didn't think so. $1 ,900 for the, I think it's a,

45:43Linus Sebastian:is it the 256 or one i think it's a 256 my old my old eight pro is still chooching i uh i am planning on probably doing a battery replacement because the battery on it at this point is brutal it's uh yeah that's the 256 for yeah 1900

46:04Luke Lafreniere:anyone want to pick a topic how did we end up on this after xbox backward compatibility this show

46:11Linus Sebastian:is can't even sometimes we do be doing stuff uh who isn't going to be doing stuff is under 15s in france are not going to be social mediaing unless they find a very obvious way around the law uh french lawmakers approved a bill on tuesday banning social media access for children under 15 the measure must still pass the constitutional council before it can take effect what's the right age for this kind of outright ban that was pretty much all i had to say about it i mean i guess we could do the discussion topic it's interesting i mean i think we've kind of talked this to death a little bit but we can talk about the right age i guess i have no idea

46:51Luke Lafreniere:helpful yeah i'm trying to think like you know what was you know like what was my maturity level then and but the world was so different very very very different like if you had told me at 15 or if you told me at 14 that i'm not allowed to have my msn messenger to talk to my friends i'd been like you're crazy yeah like of course i should and looking back at it i don't i don't think that was a problem but the access to access to it was very different way more limited had to be on your desktop and probably at that time you had a single shared computer for the entire household yeah so it was yeah it was a it was a it was a different time um yeah i could see i don't know crystal says under 13 i could i could see that i i could see 13 as a as a threshold with that said like 13 year olds are no offense 13 year olds but like they're not they're not mentally mature yet like at all um yeah and social media there i guess social media tends to assume that everyone is an adult there's two different conversations here right i think there's one conversation around what should be the age limit of social media and then i think there's almost a separate conversation about what should be the age limit of the like hyper tuned hyper addictive hook you forever like monster that social media morphed into because i don't think there's any reason that a 13 year old couldn't have been on say what facebook was in the early days i would potentially even argue discord now

48:31Linus Sebastian:yeah discord is somewhat monitored discord now i think is more similar to old social media

48:37Luke Lafreniere:platforms in that you are the the human connections server with your buddies

48:42Linus Sebastian:it's kind of like having an msn messenger from back in the day yeah and so and so i i don't see

48:49Luke Lafreniere:a problem with that but you know when you talk about like like if one of my kids asked me hey can I install Instagram? I'd be like, no. Or Twitter, X, whatever.

49:03Linus Sebastian:Yeah, that's a hard no. TikTok. Hard no. Yeah. Those like infinite scrolling, freaking billions of dollars spent in mind control type things is a different threshold. And it like feels weird being like, yeah, Discord's the good one. I think there are obviously, as we saw when Discord did some not cool things recently, there are other similar alternatives the line for me and the reason why i'm saying discord is yeah it can be used poorly you can end up on really bad communities on discord there's uh there was some stuff in the news recently of some like really terrible things going through discord that's going to be true for everything um but i think in general when when used fairly appropriately it'll be direct messaging with your friends very similar to msn yep and a a potential like server thing that you could just have with your friends from school that should theoretically do a decent job of of uh having some amount of wall in between just the whole open internet and this thing our

50:05Luke Lafreniere:rule with our kids is hey you're a minor and the deal is if you're allowed to use a platform that enables you to communicate broadly with the world we're allowed to look at it and we'll tell you we're going to come look at it and we'll do it together we're not going to snoop on you there will be no cloak and daggering in this relationship that's nice that's cool but that's the deal yeah um and some people might look at that and go helicopter parenting um knock on wood my kids all seem like they're turning out really good so far so no regrets and there's i'll stay in my

50:43Linus Sebastian:little helicopter you know just like every single thing if the if the kids are i like that that's amazing uh not even what a helicopter sounds like nope that's fantastic um riding in the linus copter if they really want to if they're really motivated enough they could just memorize the server id and just leave it every time like there there is if the kids really want to yep are super motivated there will be a way around it that's how i feel like with all of these laws too it's like yeah okay until i go on to like some realistic looking video game and make a character and then do some AI altering to the character and make it look like I create a persona and then create that digital persona online.

51:27Linus Sebastian:And now I'm an adult who's able to get onto these social media platforms. Like there are ways around it, but I think even putting up a little bit of a barrier to try to dissuade and effectively communicate to parents, like, hey, this is dangerous for your kids, genuinely, I think can be a good thing.

51:44Luke Lafreniere:Glow says, as someone that was raised by the internet with no parental guidelines thank you for watching out for them

51:57Luke Lafreniere:all right

52:02Luke Lafreniere:okay um maybe i'll pick the next one here sure should we get all the xbox stuff out of the way or you know what no i'm gonna i'm gonna go with this one um the tariff saga continues and i'm not talking about the most recent retaliatory tariffs for wildfire smoke, which is wild. No, I'm talking about Nintendo filing a motion to dismiss the class action from gamers who say that Nintendo would be double-dipping by keeping its tariff refund after they passed tariff costs on to customers. Nintendo's argument, in its lawyer's words, is that buyers received exactly

52:54In other words, Nintendo's version of events is,

52:59Luke Lafreniere:the sticker said$499 for one Switch 2, please. You paid$499. We gave you a Switch 2. The deal is now done. the reason this is coming up is that nintendo raised prices actually on both the original switch and switch to accessories citing tariffs the supreme court struck those tariffs down in february nintendo sued the government for its own refund in march and then gamers filed the class action in april nintendo's filing argues that it has no legal duty to retroactively adjust prices on completed sales saying, that's not how commercial transactions work. Game Files' Stephen Totillo was first to report the motion.

53:45Luke Lafreniere:Our discussion question is, Nintendo blamed tariffs for price increases, then they sued to get their tariff money back while telling customers, a deal's a deal. Legally, they might be right, so why do some people feel that they are so wrong? And I, this is one of those ones, I think I both sides to this the last time we talked about it. And I'll let you talk first because, spoiler alert, I'm going to both sides it again. So get ready.

54:15Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I mean, there are other costs involved as we talked about this last time. Thanks, Dan. It's not like, I mean, there's even legal fees with them trying to sue the government to get their tariff money back. Like there are other costs involved. It doesn't just magically evaporate like that.

54:32Luke Lafreniere:The tariffs are also going away. the tariff cost is being taken or refunded to Nintendo because the tariffs were found to be illegal. There's nothing illegal about Nintendo putting a $4.99 price tag on something and you paying it. That's legal. That's really nice. That sucks. No one's saying this doesn't suck. It's just, it's not illegal.

54:59Linus Sebastian:I think the people suing Nintendo are going to lose. Um...

55:04Luke Lafreniere:I mean, yes. Yeah. Yes, they will. Yeah. But what about the moral question? Morally speaking, do you think they're right? Should Nintendo pass the tariff refund back along? I think part of it would be nice.

55:24Linus Sebastian:I think if they could somehow figure out what a reasonable portion is, because again, there's...

55:31Luke Lafreniere:Turning L's into W's. Sorry, I'm going to let you finish, but I have an idea that I will pitch to Nintendo free of charge in a moment. Okay, cool.

55:41Linus Sebastian:It's like, obviously, the legal fees involved with this cost something. Pivoting the whole company, the amount of wasted time that they could have been doing other cool things, trying to figure out what is an appropriate rate that we can set it at with these literally constantly changing tariffs. What are these countermeasures we can do to move manufacturing or do other things to dodge these tariffs? all of that has actually very substantial costs. So if you work that out and then figure out how much is remaining in the increased pot, then you could put that out.

56:10Luke Lafreniere:Okay, here's my pitch to Nintendo free of charge, okay? As an act of goodwill, you guys take your tariff refund, which is going to be all done out in public, right? So everyone's going to know how much tariff refund you get. And you basically go, okay, here's the deal. Everyone who bought a Switch 2 so far and everyone who bought a Switch 1 since some date gets$5 off a game over some amount in the Nintendo eShop. At the end of the day, it actually costs you nothing because you are incentivizing a purchase. So you will make money on the transaction. You could think of it as a marketing expense, and it's still an act of goodwill.

57:01Luke Lafreniere:Realistically, in terms of what class action settlements ultimately end up being, still giving something back to the entire Nintendo Switch customer base and Nintendo community. It's a way to kind of be a good guy and spend the money that you got after the fact, but on something that ultimately benefits you and your customers we take a big l we turn it into a

57:27Linus Sebastian:w everybody wins yeah i was i was also potentially thinking some like uh nintendo online time or something like that yeah yeah something like that could be cool yeah some some kind of some way to to turn this this crappy situation doing something for the customers makes sense a full refund of the entire difference of the cost doesn't because nintendo still incurred a lot of cost trying to deal with this situation um but but yeah there's something some form of uh making the lives better of the people who bought it at the inflated price would be really cool i mean i don't even know if

58:05Luke Lafreniere:it has to be because okay because if you make it the people who specifically bought it the inflated cost then then that's basically that's setting a really dangerous precedent for nintendo because now all of a sudden you are opening the door to the conversation of like you know if there's ever like like if if nintendo gets a rebate from their their battery oem like is everybody going to get is everybody who bought a switch going to get a refund like come on it comes back down to what

58:38Linus Sebastian:you were kind of saying though the tariffs were illegal tariffs um and they said that they raised the price specifically for that so did they raise the price because of an illegal activity from their battery manufacturer i mean that they then got refunded for we'd never know that's true maybe

58:52Luke Lafreniere:yeah we would never know that right so so they're setting like a really weird precedent if they go and alter the deal after the fact whereas if they just say hey here's a windfall we love our switch community so very huggy muggy much here's something then i think that defuses a lot of the anger and maybe even goes more broadly than just the people who you know paid more than they would have liked for for a game console yeah i think that's cool i i and look i'm not saying

59:21Linus Sebastian:you know five dollars logistical absolute freaking nightmare which would be clear which one gift cards refunding oh that yeah that's insane yeah whereas like in like uh like running a promo

59:31Luke Lafreniere:basically saying, yeah, for the next week.

59:33Linus Sebastian:I bought my Switch from Willow. Let's say I bought it during the tariff increase. You think Nintendo is going to specifically talk with Willow to get in contact with me to give me money back? How any of this happens, I don't even know. There's probably a simpler way. They could set up some site and you can try to submit a receipt or something and then they have to do OCR stuff on figuring out if the receipt is legitimate. Ain't any of that happening. Yeah, probably not. So I like the idea of the something. I think that's pretty cool. eShop gift card, free Nintendo online, something like that would be pretty sweet.

1:00:15Linus Sebastian:All right. Speaking of online shops. Don't they do this all the time with rebates? No, because the ones you're thinking of is a rebate that you get on the purchase of the product. So you would get some form of information that you then submit in order to get a rebate back. This is retroactive. Yep. So it would not... So we weren't planning ahead for it this time.

1:00:34Luke Lafreniere:Yes, which is actually a huge problem in this case. They're finally here. The last socks you'll ever want to buy, the LTT Forever socks. Oh, dang it, it moved right as I tried to click. Available in, well, sort of available. Some of the colors are already... Man, we, one of these days, we're going to nail our forecasting, but it is not this day. The point is, on the, is this the US site? Yeah, on the US site, we still have one color and one size. And I think the global site still has, yes, the global site actually still has pretty decent socks. Stock socks. Stock sock. They're pretty decent socks.

1:01:17Luke Lafreniere:Stock. The forever sock is finally freaking here. After six years, we have dropped our much-anticipated forever sock. We obsessed over everything, from the premium merino wool blend to the copper-infused odor control to the reinforced heel and toe construction. The result, a long-lasting sock that I think is the last socks you'll want to wear. And yes, we are even backing them with our limited lifetime warranty. So my notes here say, go make your feet happy at lmg.gg slash forever sock. And then it says, note, high chance US site will be sold out by four people. Oh, okay. Well, that was a while ago.

1:02:01Luke Lafreniere:Uh, cool. But the global site, global site still has stock. And US site still has smalls, I think. Our forever sock is a great opportunity for you guys to send in a checkout message. We on the WAN show believe that if you're going to throw money at your screen, at live streamers that you should get something great in return for that money so we don't do twitch bits we don't do super chats what we do is comms a checkout message all you got to do to send one is while we're streaming head over to ltdstore.com add something to your cart and you will see in the checkout one of these you click this button and you can type a message you can change the color you can decide whether to display your name or not display your name and then all you got to do is go to the checkout and your message will go to producer dan there he is who will i don't know pop it up here or he'll reply to it or he might curate it for me and luke to respond to so producer dan do you want to show the folks what that might look like when you curate a message yeah i've got a bunch here the first one here is actually about the socks so that works great that makes sense hope you're swell dll can you explain how you choose skews for your first items for your items.

1:03:15Luke Lafreniere:Why three colorways and not two styles for socks? It feels like variety should beat out colors to my novice noggin. That is a great, great question.

1:03:32Luke Lafreniere:We do our best. We actually agonize over this kind of thing.

1:03:40Linus Sebastian:You're just genuinely trying to predict the future. Yeah. And in a lot of ways, because you're trying to predict the future of what colors people want, you're trying to predict the future of what sizes people want, and you're trying to predict the future of that in different geographical locations, because now we have two stores.

1:03:55Luke Lafreniere:What styles they want, too. so we were going to launch with a half crew and then we ultimately made the decision to launch with a full crew because we kind of figured, okay, well, the trend right now is that, you know, kind of like how hemlines rise and fall with trends, sock heights rise and fall with trends, ankle socks are out and longer socks are trending back so we wanted to get out ahead of that.

1:04:25Linus Sebastian:this is where i'm this is probably the thing i'm most unk about i i can't do it which the tall socks oh you can't do it drives me crazy you're an ankle sock guy oh yeah but literally always oh that's crazy yeah i have never once liked like even when i'm trying to go like as warm as

1:04:45Luke Lafreniere:possible in a snow boot you'll wear an ankle sock in a snowboard boot i believe i have done so that's insane okay so we can safely ignore him yeah um you know what's funny is five years ago i was the unk guy because ankle socks were in and i was wearing full cruise yeah yeah so uh that was another thing that that shifted us towards the full crew for the launch um and so so right so in response why not two styles instead of three colors so for one thing two styles in two colors would have been four lines, which would have been 33 % more. So four doesn't sound like a lot more than three, except that four is 33 % more.

1:05:31Luke Lafreniere:And already with the three, we have three sizes times three colors. So that's nine times two locations. So that is 18 discrete bins somewhere in order to have a sock. If we had gone with two colors in two styles, that would have been, what did I just, What number did I just say? 18? Yeah. So it would have been 33 % more, so it would have been another 6. It would have been 24. It's insane. It scales really, really fast.

1:05:58Linus Sebastian:How many SKUs do you guys have? It's thousands.

1:06:00Luke Lafreniere:I don't know.

1:06:01Linus Sebastian:Yeah. I know it's thousands. Yes, it's thousands. It's thousands.

1:06:04Luke Lafreniere:I know it's thousands. I literally don't know exactly how many it is. I can check if you can. No, no, no. I'd rather not know. It doesn't matter. You do not want to know. Yeah, rather not know. Bent Bob says, why not XL size? Because we didn't. We had to start somewhere. This was our first foray into socks. we were pretty bullish on this uh clearly we were not bullish enough we did not order enough um but we will we will order more and when we do so you can expect that we are going to be looking at uh over the next little while hey do we do a half crew do we do an ankle do we do expanded sizing because to say that the launch has been successful would be uh an understatement one of the things that we struggle with though and i'm just gonna i'm just gonna be real with you guys right now is maintaining momentum on our products we will have these like amazing product launches and we'll sell you know a few socks yeah in a day and then a couple months later the the buzz is kind of like died down and we really struggle we're doing better we're at like to be clear we're doing better at it and we're always improving but we kind of struggle with the ongoing marketing of

1:07:15Linus Sebastian:our products there is yeah yeah uh and i'll go go i i do think sometimes it's we make such a varied

1:07:28Luke Lafreniere:set of things oh we do that it can minus lead development it's not it's actually they're getting better about that too the fashion team is really putting a lot of pressure on me to have a cohesive, you know, product roadmap, uh, rather than just like, like, okay. Okay. I was in the middle of the meeting where they're literally going through the fall winter 27 plan with me, like to give you some idea how far out ahead they are on this stuff, because they're like organized, real, like organized people. Um, and, and I'm like, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. I just had a, I just had a brainstorm.

1:08:02Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Uh, can we do a t-shirt that just has like a pie symbol and then like a picture of a rat because i think our audience would just freaking love that and they're like oh yeah well yeah we'll put it in the pile just so you gotta you gotta have a balance of both you gotta have just like the creative dragon energy and then you've also got to have the like the structure um and so so what you're seeing here is creative dragon energy hey we need to make this thing and like here's all the like cool stuff it should have and this is gonna be awesome and then it's like okay we need to start somewhere so here's how we pare down the offerings to something reasonable and and here's how we kind of like go to market and then expand it but then where luke is going with this is like okay as we take that slow and steady approach in the background how exactly is it that you can tell what kind of

1:08:46Linus Sebastian:store this is well okay here's my question yeah without the banner how did i not wear that shirt for the video anyway go ahead without this banner let's pretend this banner is not in rotation let's go forward a few weeks a couple months whatever where are the socks they are under apparel nope really

1:09:09Luke Lafreniere:oh okay well um okay i'll i'll ask for that to be moved we make so many different things that

1:09:19Linus Sebastian:sometimes the categorization of stuff gets kind of weird um like if i go under tools and i click on screwdrivers um oh it has improved someone listen to me thank you very much uh but it's it's sometimes finding stuff on the store is like kind of hard and part of that is because we just make so much stuff i don't know that many stores other than like a freaking i don't know

1:09:52Linus Sebastian:target that sells like some of the the variety of different things that we have we have apparel both tops bottoms loungewear underwear jackets vests hats everything you can imagine for apparel we have screwdrivers we have tape we have the bit cases we have bits we have cables we have cable management we have uh thermal pads we have uh hand slider things for mouse pads we We have cable management of keychains, pins, stickers, toys. You haven't even mentioned water bottles. Pet caves, water bottles, desk pads, stationary. What is happening? Well, it doesn't move. And it just keeps going. So it's difficult to, I sympathize with the problem, but it's difficult to like kind of decide where things are going to go and make them discoverable.

1:10:37Linus Sebastian:But also some people don't necessarily realize that these are clickable things that are categories. So like it's the whole thing. It's all very tough. See like backpacks is like that right now. There's no subcategory for backpacks. It's just the backpacks category. But then like screwdriver, there's screwdrivers, but then position and ratcheting.

1:11:04Luke Lafreniere:For what it's worth. It's so hard. Don't take this the wrong way. The team that works on the website, we know that it's a difficult challenge. Yes. And no matter what we do, it's not going to be perfect.

1:11:17Linus Sebastian:It's a very difficult problem to solve when you have this many different things.

1:11:25Luke Lafreniere:I mean, I think what I'm discovering is like as much as like, like remember when, remember when like Asus would get all butt hurt when we would say, when we would just call their ROG monitor an Asus monitor. And you'd be like, oh my God, just relax. You're Asus. You make ROG. Just chill, right? It's because they make so many things. They need their categorization to make sense. I'm beginning to understand why you need sub-brands.

1:11:52Linus Sebastian:This problem is a big part of the reason why I gave so much props to the Forever Sock name and the TrueSpec name is because giving them something more searchable like that is like helpful. the search on the store is starting to become significantly more important because like just finding things is tough

1:12:16Luke Lafreniere:Simpleton says I did not realize the title was of the categories that were like clickable yeah yes yeah so if that's true how do you find a backpack

1:12:28Linus Sebastian:so it's like it's oh so I I I'm very interested in uh I was talking to turn about this the other the day having um like mouse behavior stuff on the site i'm trying to figure out like how yeah how people actually use the site um because i'm interested in what people click on and i i wonder like how much of that like recency bias in product releasement for sale releasement in product releases for sales is the banner because the banner is really effective at you know getting something out in front of you. The shop products down here, these categories, it all looks nice. The store looks great, but there's just so many different things.

1:13:12Linus Sebastian:If we just sold t-shirts, it would be fine, but we don't. We also sell everything. Tools and nice pads. Where do we put all this stuff?

1:13:21Luke Lafreniere:Cable management. Yeah. Pens.

1:13:26Linus Sebastian:Where are pens? Accessories? Accessories? Nope.

1:13:30Luke Lafreniere:Home and decor? Maybe stationary. We also do accessories for the screwdriver, like grip tape, extensions. There we go. We got it. There we go. Floppy disk notebook, notebook, and also... Children's toys? Mechanical pencil and pen. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about the children's toys. Books? Home of decor. All right. All right, Dan. We get it. We get it. Decor? What do we have under decor? Okay, we need to just blow those away. There's eight left. There's eight left. Can you guys do me a favor and just buy those, please? That would be great. Then we could get it off the site. Yeah, then we can reprint them.

1:14:08Luke Lafreniere:No, we're not reprinting them. What are the reviews on this? People left reviews on this? This has five stars.

1:14:15Linus Sebastian:Dude, it's all five stars. This product is perfect. What the? Go away. We'll likely get sticker bombed.

1:14:24Luke Lafreniere:I just wanted something to fill some space on my wall. Once again, LTT delivered with this masterpiece. It's a damn good print. Creator Warehouse seems to only be able to deliver at 110%. I can't wait to see what new products are released. Absolutely beautiful accent to my drab room.

1:14:43Linus Sebastian:It really should have looked at the specs. Thought the print would be way larger, but that's my fault for not paying attention. I will apply a thick epoxy coat the same way I coat my stickers. And other print-based decor.

1:14:56Luke Lafreniere:Huh? I don't know what that means.

1:14:58Linus Sebastian:Me neither.

1:15:00Luke Lafreniere:Was that one com? Yes. Okay, hit me, Dan. We're on one today. You're still doing good for time. Okay. Dear Linus, what would you change about the Canadian school system as a father and company founder? As the principal of a German primary school, I always enjoy looking beyond my own system. Cheers. Are you trying to get me in trouble? I feel like you're trying to get me in trouble. I'm going to get you in trouble. I plead the fifth. Because I'm going to... There's no way that I'm going to be able to talk about the school system without there being a bunch of hot takes. Nice. I've probably got already in my mind, I've probably already got three things that could get me cancelled.

1:15:44Luke Lafreniere:Oh. So first of all, bring back letter grades at every stage. What is it? That got rid of letter grades? What is it? Yeah. You guys don't know about this? No. No, we're old. We're both childless dungeon nerds. One terabyte hard drive was cool. I mean, right. Now I have that in RAM. Oh my God, do you? I don't have a house. I just have the RAM.

1:16:13Luke Lafreniere:So, yeah. So grades are done from emerging to developing to proficient to extending. That's how grading is done up until... It depends on the exact school and the exact school district. But in the province of British Columbia, that's been the guidance for quite some time now. As long as my kids have been in school. I don't like it.

1:16:38Linus Sebastian:So it's like... Kids are wrong. It's all graded out of five instead of a hundred? It's also the kids' fault. No. Even though it's my generation.

1:16:44Luke Lafreniere:I blame the children. So you don't get a letter grade. you just get this like you get this word that describes um your your mastery of the material and um the way that it was defended i remember reading what to me and again this is to take this for my ignorant boomer take that it is um you know maybe maybe they're right maybe it's a better system i am i am not a professional studier of this but to me i read what seemed like pretty much the most asinine possible defense of this system um from some minister of something or some bigwig of some sort in the newspaper to give you some idea how long ago i was reading about this and basically they were like this system is designed to facilitate communication between the school and the parents to really give them an idea of how their kids are doing

1:17:47Linus Sebastian:and i'm like that's what the f***ing letter grade was for i could actually see kind of both using combination because i could see one being a trend line and one being the state or how do

1:17:57Luke Lafreniere:you do like gpa like everybody's like i have a 4.0 gpa like yeah but i i got exemplaries luke that's why we had work that's why we had like the effort grade oh okay so they were when i was in elementary school we had two grades for every subject we had your your like your score on your assignments grade a b c c or a b c plus c and c minus and then like uh like uh like basically i forget what it was like incomplete or something like we didn't have f's already they already we'd done away with f's because f's are bad um and then we also had a g s n so good satisfactory and needs improvement for like your effort and your attitude so we like already had that i don't

1:18:44Linus Sebastian:remember if that was a thing for me or not um my elementary school was also kind of weird but

1:18:50Luke Lafreniere:so i'm just i so anyway so yeah first thing i would do is i would say hey um why don't we just why don't we just keep giving everyone a letter because everybody just boils this new system down to letters anyway yeah um yeah and then we just have a more granular system where within the letter you also have an exact number okay yay we already had that cool wonderful um number two and this is this is one that's probably gonna get me into a lot more trouble but the bctf is way too powerful bc teacher foundation federation federation the union i was guessing um i had terrible teachers i had really good teachers but i also had terrible teachers and when you could get the good teachers you know talking and you know building rapport like i had some some of my teachers i was not inappropriately but like i was i was pretty close to i was yeah me too like i i there were a couple of my teachers that I hung out with after I graduated and like, you know, went to see and talk with and say, how are you doing?

1:20:00Luke Lafreniere:Here's how we're doing. And that was cool. It was like, not weird. Like it was cool. And you know, when you get them talking, they are as frustrated as anyone that terrible, terrible teachers are stuck in the system. And Because the union is so powerful, they just end up getting shuffled around from school to school or worst case, from district to district. And you can't get rid of them. You can't drain the sludge. And at the same time, you've got new, freshly trained, like freshly out of school with all the latest educational methods, freshly educated, want to teach. They're so excited to teach young minds and they can't get a freaking job because you've got this dead weight in the system that, quite frankly, shouldn't be anywhere near our youngest, our most valuable resource as a country.

1:20:56Luke Lafreniere:Like if we're looking at it from like a very macro standpoint, you know, every hour of a student's time in the classroom that is wasted is such a squandering of the most important part of that person's young life that is laying the foundation of the rest of their time here on this earth. And it just, it offends me. There, period. It offends me. And this is one of those ones that's a tough conversation because I am not against worker protections either. An abusive employer should not exist. And unfortunately, that's why we have collective bargaining. Because the time before collective bargaining was bad.

1:21:44Luke Lafreniere:That was bad. That was not a good solution. In the case of the BCTF, not a fan. To be clear, I've been out of the school system for a long time, but I have had kids in the school system much more recently than that, and I have certainly encountered similar issues. So I'm not convinced that it has been meaningfully changed. The other thing, the last thing, and this one's probably the least.

1:22:16Luke Lafreniere:Andre B says, The big positive of the BCTF is the fighting they do for class size and composition limits. That is absolutely true.

1:22:23Linus Sebastian:Yeah, he's not against all of it. I don't think there's been any point in my life where I thought the level of tenure protections that they have there makes sense. I thought that when I was in high school. Yeah. But I also thought in high school that some of the class sizes were a little freaking silly. So I don't know. There can be good and bad things about a department.

1:22:48Luke Lafreniere:Aquarius Babe says, me cracking up. went to the same school as Linus, and there were some horrible teachers. One was shuffled around and ended up setting fire to the science room at the new school. I did hear about that. And this is one of those things where, you know, someone's all mad at me, anti-union rhetoric again. Get over it. No system is perfect. Every system has flaws. Yes, even that one. And I've been up close and personal with some of the flaws of this specific organization in this specific region, which by the way you probably know nothing about get over it i'm not saying this broadly and i'm

1:23:25Linus Sebastian:not saying that they shouldn't exist he literally also said that they do good stuff as well absolutely

1:23:31Luke Lafreniere:um but not everything about it generates a positive outcome and if you cannot handle that then you're probably your your view is probably too narrow i'm sorry you gotta broaden your view What's your last point? Last point is I think that we focus too much on pure academics. Yeah. I think that in our desperation to make sure that nobody gets left behind, we actually hold back the brightest pupils when it comes to academics. And we end up completely wasting the time of people that don't need to be able to do advanced algebra. that where it will literally never come up.

1:24:17Linus Sebastian:Maybe there's something else that might help them a lot more. This is, I think this question came from, came from someone in the German program. I remember when I was in high school, I took German and we would learn different things about Germany. I remember hearing about, I'm going to screw up a lot of these details, but I remember hearing about some of the details of how the German school system works, where once you're at some grade, I don't remember which one, I remember thinking that it was like either really early high school or like kind of middle school-ish. Switch to a vocational stream.

1:24:46Linus Sebastian:You would pick a road. And I remember thinking like, man, that's cool. And I remember hearing some of the other kids in the class pushing back being like, I don't know what I want to do yet. But in my mind, I was like, damn, dude, I do. Like if I could go down a path that was more tailored for that, like my God, I would love that. It's also tailored to your skill level, you know?

1:25:08Luke Lafreniere:And to be clear, some schools actually do a pretty good job of these types of programs like fourth grade my school wasn't perfect like to to i forget their username but to their point there were there were some really really bad teachers in our school and but there were also some really cool programs uh we had an incredible automotive shop um very well equipped and like we would we would actually work on people's cars and and so in much the same way that you'll have like a student dentistry at like the university or whatever. And like the high school students were learning real, real mechanic skills.

1:25:51Luke Lafreniere:That is awesome. In high school. That is very cool.

1:25:55Linus Sebastian:Strongly support that.

1:25:56Luke Lafreniere:All that I know about, you know, changing oil and doing alignment and anything to do with cars was the one term I took of it. And I was like, okay, this isn't for me, which is good for me to know. But we were like, we were learning real shit. Yeah. and the theory, and it was freaking awesome. And the people who enjoyed that stream loved it and were bored senseless in English class. To be clear, I'm not saying that people should graduate high school without being able to read a book.

1:26:24Linus Sebastian:I think you need certain minimums. I think you should take a certain minimum of math so you don't just get scammed for the rest of your life. I think you should take certain minimums.

1:26:32Luke Lafreniere:But that math should be focused.

1:26:34Linus Sebastian:It should be focused on how to run a small business.

1:26:38Luke Lafreniere:Sure. That would be awesome. Like, dude, I went all the way through to math 12 and I still don't know what practical application there was for most of what I learned. Yeah. Well, there isn't.

1:26:50Linus Sebastian:And so unless you go down a like if you if you go down engineering, if you go down something else, there absolutely is. But if you're but what percentage of the population is that? But you do. I understand wanting to cultivate more people into STEM and all that kind of stuff. But if you're just forcing people down the line and they know they don't want to go that road anyways. And they don't want to be there. Yeah. And they're just going to fail out or struggle and just be pissed off anyways. I think allowing them to go do something else is totally fine. That being said, I don't think Math 12 is required.

1:27:19Linus Sebastian:No, Math 12 is not required.

1:27:21Luke Lafreniere:But you have to do up to, I think it's like 10 essentials or something like that or nine essentials. I thought you even had to do 11. That may be true. I don't remember the rules anymore. It's probably changed by now. It's been a minute. But basically what happened was, and this was true at the time, was you had to reach a certain level of math according to the grade level attached to it. So what they did was they created different levels of the class. And I forget what it was, if it was nine or 10 or 11, but there was like, there was principles, which was the mainstream one. There was enriched at our school anyway.

1:27:54Luke Lafreniere:There was, I believe, enriched, which was the like more like university prep one. and then there was um essentials which was basically from my understanding it was grade eight math but like you're taking it in grade 10 or grade 11 or whenever it was and as long as it had that number on it then like we taught them grade 11 math but but you didn't so what are we even what are we even all doing here what are we even talking about if it's a

1:28:22Linus Sebastian:business level thing or like taxes or you know how to not get bamboozled no it was just lower level math yeah that's a little sad um but i i can definitely understand like okay you know what uh i'm in x course i don't care about the english your example that you just gave was automotive i don't care about english now okay well you're gonna need to write sometimes it's just a fact a life so we'll get you to a certain point where you can like write coherently and you know you should be able to prove that you can do an essay so you can kind of bundle your thoughts and and uh form an argument um so that if if you know if your automotive shop that you end up having ever gets in like legal trouble or something you can organize your thoughts and defend your case cool you don't need english 12 for that but but we'll get you to like some functional level sweet I like the idea of at least getting people to these functional levels in a variety of different areas.

1:29:20And the other thing that, you know, the best argument I think I could even give for why we should change.

1:29:31Luke Lafreniere:Because I could see some people hearing, you know, what I say. I'm actually pretty passionate about education in general. It's really funny. We had that exclusive on float plane last week and people were like, Whoa, that is a really good swimming teacher. It was like, yeah. Cause I've, I've basically spent my whole life teaching people stuff in one form or another, whether it's about computers or, um, aquatic exercise or painting houses or whatever. I've, I've functionally always been a trainer or teacher in some form. Um, it's something that I get joy from. It's something that I legitimately actually enjoy.

1:30:11Luke Lafreniere:And the best argument I can give for why we need to change this is not that, you know, I'm some elitist who's like, oh, yeah, only, you know, the smart kids deserve a chance or whatever. No, it's about giving everybody their best possible chance. And the current system is not working. Like, every year, there's a fresh batch of articles with college professors lamenting the fact that kids are arriving at university and college and don't know how to read. And it's like rubber stamping everybody through the system is clearly not working.

1:30:47Linus Sebastian:I think also like, and this seems to be a fairly obvious thing in like almost every realm, but like real feedback. So you can, and not, you know, mean punitive feedback, but real feedback can be really useful for people to try to kind of shape things. you might want to know if you're kind of capable of going down a certain path, right? Or, or maybe you're capable, but how difficult will it be for you? And if something else feels natural and you're getting good responses, your grades are going well, whatever, that might be a good path for you to follow. Um, but some of these courses that I'm hearing where people can't read when they get into it are like, yeah, maybe you should have known this wasn't going to work out for you before you got a massive student loan.

1:31:40Linus Sebastian:Maybe if they had proper letter grades. This is what I'm saying. Like it feels like we're not only not necessarily setting them up for success, but then how the whole student loan system works and how important that part of your life is for setting up your future. You're not just not setting them up for success. You are specifically also setting them up for failure. I think both things are happening

1:32:02Luke Lafreniere:I am starting to get very curious who exactly Aquarius Babe 86 is the 86 would seem to indicate not only we went to the same school but we were the same age and you say metal art and jewelry was one of my fave classes ever it turned into one of my hobbies did we take metal art and jewelry together? shout out Mr. Russell or was it Sour? I think Sourby taught mine anyway shout out Mr. Sourby too anyway Are you done with the merch question? Excuse me? Excuse me? What did you just call it? So I want to do the support topics? What did you just call it? Merch question. Excuse me? I heard the question.

1:32:49Luke Lafreniere:What was it? There was a word he said that I don't understand. Question. Oh, the product question. that's not even what it's called either well it's not called that okay no no are you done with the comp yes i'm done how about some more topics sure you want to pick one should we do the lg one sure sure yeah lg abuses oh hold on hold on hold on hold on hold on uh the the the the person in float plane chat is upset they did not say i was spewing anti-union rhetoric they were saying a lot of comments on float plane were okay all right all right all right okay i'm sorry i'm sorry i I assumed because you did not address anybody that you were talking about what I was talking about.

1:33:31Luke Lafreniere:And I'm really I'm not I'm not trying to be anti it. There's really good things about it. It's just that I've seen bad outcomes up close, both through my involvement with one back when I was teaching lifeguard or back when I was teaching swimming and when I was a lifeguard and through just especially hearing my parents talk about it. My parents are both teachers, and it's really frustrating for your star team members when the losers get paid the same and you can't get rid of them. It's so demoralizing. Anyway, okay, Luke, carry on.

1:34:12Linus Sebastian:Aquarius Babe responded, LOL, wouldn't expect Linus to remember me. I was a student aide for his grade 8 computer class.

1:34:24Luke Lafreniere:I only had computers for a third of a term. I really don't remember that. All right. Well, was worth a shot. Yeah.

1:34:35Linus Sebastian:Okay, carry on. LG abuses Windows Update driver install to push... Ugh, McAfee. After numerous user complaints on the LG OLED subreddit, a Gamers Nexus investigation found that LG has been taking advantage of a Windows feature that allows a hardware support app, in this case, the LG Monitor app installer, yikes, wow, to be automatically and silently installed alongside the device drivers when a new device is plugged into a Windows 11 machine and drivers are automatically installed via Windows Update. That blows. These hardware support apps are apparently granted significant privacy-breaking permissions without any form of user consent or even notice.

1:35:20Linus Sebastian:why does windows suck so much oh my god in this case the lg monitor app among other things shows uh large pop-up ads for trials of mcafee antivirus some users report that this has been happening since 2024 um since this came to light microsoft stepped in and windows chief pavan told the verge that lg has agreed to immediately disable the mcafee pop-up and pledged that Microsoft will keep improving here with our ecosystem partners. No, I think you just need to change the rules on that one. LG attempted to defend their behavior with an uncredited statement to Windows Latest. LG Electronics reiterates that McAfee is not installed automatically.

1:36:12Linus Sebastian:It is never installed without users' explicit consent. The LG Monitor app installer is distributed through Microsoft's official Windows distribution process, which included McAfee as an option. Yeah, we know that's the problem. McAfee will be installed only if a user actively chooses to proceed with the installation and provides consent. Under no circumstances is McAfee installed automatically or without user authorization. The LG Monitor app installer does not access, collect, or transmit any user. I don't want you to tell me that. I want it to not be possible.

1:36:48Luke Lafreniere:To be clear, I like drivers automatically appearing. So I'm actually just, I'm going to push back on just that part. I like the idea of that I plug something in and it just works. What I don't like is when it's allowed to have a parasitic payload. That's my point. Yeah. Well, no, no, I just want to be really clear that if there is a monitor, like, driver that i need so that i can use a hotkey to change my brightness or like whatever right like if there's something that enhances the user experience yay um mcafee prompt uh no yeah um and also to luke's point that shouldn't be possible what what are the what like what are the punitive measures that someone like a microsoft could take if somebody does this like let's get creative here what can microsoft do to police this uh make it so that violations have a huge cost how could they how can they enforce that what do you mean okay you send msi a bill for a million dollars what makes them aren't msi excuse me no uh lg you send lg a bill for one million dollars why would they pay it

1:38:04Linus Sebastian:stop supporting their devices that will hurt them that will hurt the customer though i don't think

1:38:10Luke Lafreniere:any solution should hurt the customer.

1:38:12Linus Sebastian:I would stop supporting their devices in this way and I would give the users a flag, some type of notification that's like LG was found to be distributing what is arguably malware. In order to get driver updates, please follow this manual process and then link them to some documentation.

1:38:31Luke Lafreniere:But then would that... I mean, in order to get LG drivers, presumably they would have to be linking them to an LG source. How would Microsoft then ensure that that LG source does not include a McAfee installer?

1:38:48Linus Sebastian:So how exactly, is this Windows Update that it goes through? It's not, right?

1:38:51Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, it goes through Windows Update, I believe.

1:38:54Linus Sebastian:It happens silently in the background, though. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that's still worth it because at least you're flagging to the user that LG was, like, abusing systems and is not cool.

1:39:06Luke Lafreniere:charge nuclear hack goes ha ha ha ha ha linus thinks they care about the customer i didn't say that what i said was it should the solution should not harm the customer that's what i said i didn't say that anyone agreed with me i just said that i feel that yeah um yeah mind paradox says how about a check that we must be notified before software is installed and only if we actively say yes to install it okay okay counterpoint counterpoint users will often to their own detriment put off installing updates i mean that's a huge part of why actually you know it's fun we just did a windows tier list we shot it earlier this week and we were we were we made a joke about the first windows that introduced automatic updating and talked about how it's hey so microsoft can break your computer every patch tuesday uh but also here's why it was necessary because in especially the early days of connected devices and and the broader internet just kind of coming online people not updating their shiz was a big problem it was a huge huge vector and any vector that the user refuses to patch is by definition an unpatched vector right So automatic updates, I think in the modern world, I don't think you can get away from that.

1:40:32Luke Lafreniere:I don't think I would advocate for that. And if you give the user a choice, they're going to dismiss it. Some number of times out of 10. Okay, let's see if anybody else has any really good ideas.

1:40:46Linus Sebastian:I don't think you have to force automatic updates. I think you could make it up to the user.

1:40:50Luke Lafreniere:But then the more compromised devices there are, the worse everything is for everybody.

1:40:59Luke Lafreniere:more zombie devices is bad.

1:41:01Linus Sebastian:Yeah, but I should still be able to control my system. Like in Linux, I mean, we're pushing everyone to go to Linux. You can do whatever the hell you want. You can. I don't think either of my systems are running automatic updates. I just also update them. I also find updating in Linux to be like fun and rewarding and updating in Windows to be horrible and slow and not rewarding and scary. And just generally bad. So, like, there are very different experiences. The Linux one is really fast for some reason. Really fast. And then Windows one will genuinely take very long often.

1:41:37Luke Lafreniere:So what would your solution be if we didn't force people to update? Because, like, I think part of the reason it works so well for Linux is that Linux people generally skew more tech savvy. I think I would be okay with it just being an opt-out. Can you do that on Windows update? Not forever. Eventually it will force you to install. especially security updates um and so so like what would be what if linux went more normie because that like it's there's a there's a selection bias in the people who are who are running these operating systems so i would actually agree with you that right now the approach on most mainstream linux distros is not a problem because we are hoping that that kind of fades over time

1:42:18Linus Sebastian:exactly so let's imagine that it does happen you want linux to be forcing automatic updates now

1:42:23Luke Lafreniere:So, well, no, what I'm asking you is what's your solution then? Because I think everyone, I hope, pretty much agrees that a massive army of unpatched devices is super, super mega bad. And I think you guys know from administering even a very tech-savvy company that people will put off updates as long as humanly possible, as often as humanly possible, once you get into the broader population. So what's your solution then, I guess is what I'm asking.

1:42:54Linus Sebastian:um i don't know so i necessarily have one on a business level the businesses can enforce updates we enforce updates um on a personal level though like i i want control over my computer

1:43:05Luke Lafreniere:i know you do but like my my aunt i think lost her control over whether she's allowed to decide to update privileges when she decided not to update and and her as like the the like family

1:43:20Linus Sebastian:administrator as it were i think you can make that choice it's not that i don't want the option for automatic updates sure it could even be in my opinion default on which will mean that 90 plus

1:43:32Luke Lafreniere:percent of people are never going to turn it off well then i mean that's i want the ability to control my computer i know but i'm not talking about you so i feel like we're both kind of i think we're both kind of talking past each other it could be default on though is what i'm saying No, no, I get it. I just mean, like there's two angles here. Because the problem here is that I agree with you. I want to control my computer too. If I say, no, I'm actually in the middle of something right now, and you rip away control and take away my ability to do something for three minutes, five minutes, ten minutes.

1:44:12Luke Lafreniere:Sometimes a really long time. We were literally in the middle of that Windows tier list shoot. And Jordan's computer forced him to apply an update. And it was the computer that he was using for the web-based, like, you can run any version of Windows in a web browser, like, background that I had behind me that we were changing with every version of Windows. And we had to pause the bloody shoot because of Windows updates.

1:44:38Linus Sebastian:I mean, we have this on WAN Show all the time. our like Google sessions will log us out because we only use these once a week. I can't agree with you more

1:44:47Luke Lafreniere:that I want to control my computer and I want to decide when I want to update. But that is kind of separate from the conversation that I'm having, which is what is the broader solution so that we don't have a giant army of insecure computers everywhere. I think the broader solution is default on. default on and we just we hope that people don't get they stay tech savvy enough to they don't get tech savvy enough to disable that while not getting also tech savvy enough to

1:45:21Linus Sebastian:understand that they should update we hope that i genuinely think over 90 of people will never even go to the control panel option to do anything with it in the first place i think that's prob

1:45:30Luke Lafreniere:i mean i look 95 of statistics are made up oh yeah right mine was extremely made up based on however stardust i suspect you're not that far off i think so i just i i'm fretting because for sure because to me the the risk of of many many many unsecured devices is is very scary

1:45:56Linus Sebastian:yeah the risk of uh malware being able to deploy that way is also scary though we just saw that with Linux. The AUR got compromised. If those updates were forced down my throat, I'd be pretty pissed about it. It's the whole, I don't remember exactly how the phrase goes, but it's like if you sacrifice liberty for security, you'll have neither whatever, blah, blah, blah.

1:46:17Luke Lafreniere:Apparently that gets misquoted a lot. I'm going to help us get it right this time. Let's see what it is. If you, something, liberty, freedom, etc. Security, security, you deserve neither like i can remember enough of the words that i can kind of okay here we go um oh okay we've got an npr article ben franklin's famous liberty safety quote lost its context in the 21st century so he once said those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety and this often comes up this is from npr in the context of new technology and concerns about government surveillance.

1:47:02Luke Lafreniere:But Benjamin Witts, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and editor of Lawfare, tells NPR's Robert Siegel that it wasn't originally meant to mean what most people think. Franklin was basically, and so he's paraphrasing here, basically said those who would trade privacy for a bit of security deserve neither. What is the exact... Oh my, okay. Well, this is a lot longer, unfortunately, than...

1:47:28Linus Sebastian:It's just like a conversation.

1:47:29Luke Lafreniere:I can read right now. You know, there's all these quotations. Think of kill all the lawyers, right? From Shakespeare. Nobody really remembers what the characters in question were saying at that time. Okay. You know what? I'm going to have to look at this again later. I'm not going to take a stance on the quote for right now.

1:47:47Linus Sebastian:I think either way is basically my point, whatever the heck the quote even is, is there are, as we're literally talking about right now, ways that that can be used maliciously. Yeah. And I would like to be able to choose how to defend myself. I do think for the vast majority of people, the right approach is going to be automatic updates. Rip out the Ethernet cord.

1:48:07Luke Lafreniere:Oh, sorry.

1:48:07Linus Sebastian:Go ahead. I think for the vast majority of people, automatic updates is the right approach. The Internet's over! I even think the annoying persistence that Windows has might even be the right approach for most people. sure that being said if someone wants to go in and try to do something manually to change how their computer works i think they should be able to do so and it good luck everybody and there will be bad there but there's already bad dude there's the the loop there's bad everywhere the the like that insane worm that's out there that's controlling like a crazy amount of computers right now is that the one in rfk jr's brain Dan was so ready for that well because I had the same joke as soon as you started as soon as you started with that worm I was like here it comes

1:49:00Linus Sebastian:let's see

1:49:13Linus Sebastian:let's see

1:49:14Luke Lafreniere:okay mind paradox summarized it thanks mind paradox in float plane chat from the article he was writing about a tax dispute between the pennsylvania general assembly and the family of the pens the proprietary family of the pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar the proprietary family yeah like like a proprietor yeah um the legislature was trying to tax the penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally.

1:49:57Luke Lafreniere:The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it. so okay he didn't mean it like like just like broadly necessarily he was talking about something very specific i mean it's a it's a banger quote one way or another and it's a sentiment that even outside of the context i think resonates with a lot of people i think sometimes it can

1:50:25Linus Sebastian:be taken too far uh yes pretty often maybe but but i think in like in in this case uh i think security vulnerabilities are gonna security vulnerability and it is what it is like the that whole thing of like every lock can be picked is just more true than a lot of people are comfortable with and every form of security can also be used as offense is another thing that people also need to be aware of and it's just yeah I don't know I

1:50:59Linus Sebastian:should the shy Hulud worm that was distributed through npm is also like huge and terrifying and the the aur hack was huge and terrifying and these things are like very real and happening really fast right now yeah

1:51:15Luke Lafreniere:say you what you want and i don't think it's gonna slow down useless you know ai search results or whatever but ai is definitely making some stuff happen in terms of security right now you know

1:51:28Linus Sebastian:how I said that I kind of like updating on Linux? Yeah. Part of that process right now is in cacheOS, when I do the update, it will read Arch News. It will check Arch News to see if there's anything going on. Oh, yeah. And if there's nothing going on, I'll be, okay, cool, I'll update. I think it was yesterday I checked, like, I'm going to do some updates, and it was like, there's some things happening in Arch News. I didn't even look. I was just like, never mind. Everything's fine. closed it i'll wait for that to resolve i'll come back soon we'll figure it out um there are other times where i've read it and then decided from there if i want to move forward or not but in this particular case i was like i was gonna be leaving the computer shortly and was like i could run an update real quick and then it was like i'll just do that later uh like that's really nice windows does not do that there has been a lot of times where a windows update has gone out and the internet collectively has been like, oh my God, do not update to this.

1:52:29Linus Sebastian:It's been happening a lot. Yeah. And I really appreciate that that level of safeguard is there on the cashy side where it's like, there's some news going on. Here's the ways you can find it. You can go read it, make your own decision and go from there. And the Windows side is just like, la, la, la, have fun. Here's your update. It might brick everything.

1:52:47Luke Lafreniere:I mean, yes and no. They do do them in a rolling fashion. So they don't actually just go to everybody at once. So it's a dice roll of whether or not it's a la-ha-ha-ha. Sure is. I'm just, I'm just, it is better. It is better. It's not perfect. Russian roulette with production hardware. I just want to make sure that if we're going to dunk on them, we are dunking on them accurately. They deserve the dunk. They just maybe didn't deserve that last little bit of razzle-dazzle. Okay, that's, that, that's all I'm going to say about it. Extremely reasonable.

1:53:20Linus Sebastian:CatOS linked this, which is actually really cool. Windows patch scanner, Windows update regression feed for sysadmins. That's neat. This is probably, Dan, let me know what you think on this one. This is probably one of the most vibe-coded looking websites I've seen in a while.

1:53:35Luke Lafreniere:Is that a Vista icon?

1:53:37Linus Sebastian:It is. It is. It has all the telltale design signs.

1:53:42Luke Lafreniere:I don't really know anything about vibe-coded websites.

1:53:47Linus Sebastian:It's just different color palettes that they use, different kind of styles.

1:53:50Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, that like orangey kind of. Yep. This is like, give me a Web 3.0 Silicon Valley website, which is hacker-focused and uses terminal font.

1:54:02Linus Sebastian:And ElectroBot in chat said it's a nice design, IMO. I'm not even pointing out the design is bad. I think the design is great. If this isn't a vibe-coded AI-designed website, then this website was trained upon. I guarantee it. Oh, yeah. It looks really good. I love this style. Yeah. I think it looks great. personally but it's just it it immediately jumped out at me as like the the way that they did the boxes where they did they chose the color palette and stuff like that it's it's either been heavily trained upon which is quite likely or it's uh vibe designed yeah we should probably do a couple

1:54:38Luke Lafreniere:sponsors uh first our floatplane announcement luke gets cancelled on floatplane this week Nah, didn't happen. Is there any context for that? Or do I just need to... I have genuinely no idea. Do you have Flowplane logged in? Yeah. Okay, do you want to do that? Do you want to show what I'm supposed to be showing right now?

1:55:01Linus Sebastian:Because I can't read the notes and also screen share. Okay, it's going to take me a second. But I can get there. He's cooking. Let him cook. Because I'm logged into my account, not that one. But I can get there.

1:55:13Luke Lafreniere:Can't you just open up the exclusives tab? oh it's already released yeah oh my bad oh that's what he's talking about okay it's sammy versus luke where they fight with tasers yeah which um is not something that i personally would have approved on work time uh as a work activity this is the same reason why i i i just think the windows

1:55:38Linus Sebastian:updates shouldn't be automatic you know sometimes you just you need to improve some things yourself we so at open sauce is this what all the screaming was maybe at open sauce they had taser knife fights uh so sammy and i had a taser knife fight uh it was great okay i don't know what part of

1:55:57Luke Lafreniere:the video it's in yeah there was a lot of stuff at open sauce that would not have passed the safety checks to get into our office i thought sammy had uh bought taser knives and you're doing this in the lab? No. I mean, I would not put that. Oh yeah, there was also

1:56:13Linus Sebastian:a turret that would lock on to your junk and try to shoot you in the junk. Yeah. Here. Yeah. Where does it go?

1:56:26Luke Lafreniere:At least you're wearing goggles.

1:56:28Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways. It's got junk tracking.

1:56:34Luke Lafreniere:Junk tracking. Here we go.

1:56:35Linus Sebastian:Here's the taser knife fight. You don't get to see the whole thing, but

1:56:41Luke Lafreniere:um it's like you're not allowed to kick sammy that's not really the point that's it no more um and there there's another there's another one uh you get the full you get the is it full uh uncut uh it's 36 minutes it might actually be full uncut yeah it ended up being a whole saga trying to figure out if we were getting high voltage high wattage output because in order to do 240 watts the float plane power brick um goes up to 48 volts the float plane power that's a float framework okay the framework power brick goes up to 48 volts and we didn't have a volt meter or any way to put an ammeter in line or even like a kilowatt, like a wall-mounted power meter.

1:57:35Luke Lafreniere:We had nothing, and the laptop itself was not reporting the power correctly, which we knew because we had a total of, I think it was, 150 watts of power consumption between the CPU and GPU alone. And it would say it was charging at 20 watts, and the total power coming over the power brick was 65 watts, which clearly does not actually add up and so it was a whole saga determining whether or not an ltt true spec cable was actually working properly with nurov's laptop um so you've got you've got the whole and there's like by the end of it there's like probably 20 30 people watching

1:58:20Linus Sebastian:the pressure i i didn't actually i ran into you a couple times but i didn't actually see you doing this video in particular but i like heard about it in in positive ways but i just thought it was really interesting because we've been like you know passing ships at the night at events for years yeah we don't actually see each other at events almost at all not usually we're usually working on other things even when we were both doing video stuff we'd probably even see each other less well let's divide and conquer yeah exactly yeah so like but and like i knew you were off doing things and we'd maybe meet up at night for dinner or something and check notes but like other than that i never really heard about what you're doing i heard about what you're doing at this event i heard other people talking about it which was just very interesting dude that video

1:59:08Luke Lafreniere:and the people that we went around and talked to was the like i couldn't if i went and i hired an amazing marketing firm and gave them a giant bucket of money and asked them to come up with use cases and customer testimonial scenarios to help sell our product. They never would have come up with... Did you watch that video? I haven't seen the whole... I've skimmed through a couple parts of it. Have you watched the end with the autonomous RC cars? No. Watch it. I heard about that.

1:59:43Linus Sebastian:It's crazy. That's one of the things that I heard about.

1:59:45Luke Lafreniere:it like there we're i'm trying to like close out the video and they're sitting there in the background going like are you guys seeing this the latency so much lower it turned out that not only did having a proper length cable so having less loss um probably this is the hypothesis for now but having less loss contribute to um less voltage drop which contributed to the the the real sense camera running more stably but also the data rate was higher and also also that we expected the part we didn't expect was when they switched to our cable their wireless started working better because and buddy was talking about how a lot of the time um like crappy unshielded usb can actually emit broad spectrum 2.4 gigahertz rf that can jam wi-fi and because of some other limitation in their little autonomous car platform that they were building they had to use wireless for one of the communication links and it turns out that they didn't realize that part of their problem was that the rf interference maybe this is the hypothesis we don't know this for sure yet but was jamming it because as soon as we put in our cable it just started working um and we're using a bit of a different style of construction not that it's not to spec it's to spec it's true spec it's to spec but it's like a more expensive coaxial cable rather than a than a traditionally constructed cable that's part of why they're so thick yeah and we've been making an argument

2:01:23Linus Sebastian:forever that they're not for every single application under the sun but this is a it's a cool argument of like there was a tangible benefit for it in that situation that's yeah so

2:01:32Luke Lafreniere:i already told the shorts team and i told dave from cw i was like y 'all need to get that content y 'all need to chop it up y 'all need to get it out there because i i literally i couldn't write a better endorsement for the product than that that's crazy here's a derailment for a second

2:01:49Linus Sebastian:what did you think because i've been singing open sauces praises for years but you've never been

2:01:54Luke Lafreniere:before oh super fun yeah it's amazing yeah it was like i am not sure if i understand the economics of it no and i hope that that's not a problem for them it's like sincerely because it is like maker mecca man like incredible if you are i i i don't think i could endorse open sauce enough If you are a creator type, like tech curious, or you want, like, somebody to just take your kids, man, to get them inspired about STEM and creating and just building something. Rocketry, robotics, textiles, clothing. I don't think there's a better place that you could take them. I don't think there's a better place that you could go that I've seen.

2:02:42Luke Lafreniere:Woodworking, metalworking, hacking. Everything. Everything. I mean, Buddy. You can make a thing. Buddy built a VR headset with CRT displays. Do you see that? No. You missed that? I missed a lot of stuff. That's tragic. I missed a lot of stuff. You know those little handheld TVs with the little antenna and everything? So those are the really old ones had CRTs in them. Yeah. So Buddy took two of them, disassembled them, and made a VR headset. Why? Because he f***ing could. I saw a booth where they took, what was it?

2:03:17Linus Sebastian:classified nuclear documents or something and turn them into candy? Sorry, what? They would let some form of mold eat it. And then they just kept doing this multiple chemical processes and then just eventually turn it into a sour candy. I don't remember exactly how it works.

2:03:38Luke Lafreniere:That sounds like a Nile Red video.

2:03:40Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I think it's in that Full Plane Exclusive. I'm not sure that it is. I know we filmed it for that, but I don't know if it actually ended up in the video or not. but yeah just i don't know who knows just crazy stuff um they had like examples of what the candy was supposed to taste like there they didn't have um the the actual like nuclear secret candy but they showed how they did the process um and i talked to oh it didn't end up in the video unfortunately damn okay i i talked to them for a while about like like okay so it's it's an An inspiration of it that you did make yourself is here to try.

2:04:19Linus Sebastian:I will try one of those. Cool. I will take unlabeled candy from a stranger. That was silly, but whatever. And I tried it and was like, all right, this tastes like slightly odd candy. Sounds good. How did the Nuclear Secrets candy taste? And he was like, kind of terrible. It was really, really sour, like right off the hop. And then it was just like, ugh, after that. It's like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. It's like mold excrement sour candy.

2:04:49Linus Sebastian:not exactly what you're probably aiming for uh but they talked about like the stuff they had to go through to learn how to do that and it's very interesting they also had a vr headset that was um like ai powered irl adblock so you walk around with a quest on and if it thinks the thing that it's looking at is adblock it'll like blur it out or something i don't remember what it actually tell me this you're on the vegas strip

2:05:15Luke Lafreniere:There's a big van with girls girls girls on the side Do you just not see it in it?

2:05:21Linus Sebastian:Yeah, probably okay.

2:05:22Luke Lafreniere:Just checking.

2:05:23Linus Sebastian:Yeah, they're also saying like it's some crappy little model so like the the the the chick that worked at the booth had a shirt on and she was like Yeah, it thinks it's an ad for some reason it like totally wasn't it was just some pattern I mean a lot of shirts are ads. This one wasn't though, right? Just you know some some pattern Very interesting booth to hang out at man. There's a lot of really cool stuff The taser knife fighting was like amazing. So much fun to watch. Just how everyone would fight in like different ways.

2:05:51Luke Lafreniere:How much did it hurt compared to when you had the dog collars? Oh, did Sammy never even hit you? You weren't curious? You didn't try it on yourself? I didn't bother. I'm actually really surprised. I'm actually a little disappointed. I thought he was going to get me.

2:06:08Linus Sebastian:I just, I'm a little disappointed that you didn't hit yourself. To the point where I got him in the leg one time. When you get someone in the leg, you have to start hopping on the other leg. Oh, yeah. Okay. And he was like, oh, you should make it fair. And I like sacrificed my own leg. But you didn't touch yourself. No. I'm kind of let down. I wanted the surprise of getting hit. And then I just... You'll have to watch the footage. The guy running the thing said we were one of the most entertaining duo he had the whole event. And that was like later on on the Sunday, I think. oh wow okay is that accurate what day were you there saturday i was there saturday later on saturday i i found out that i wasn't on the site there was a while when there like people were lined up to do selfies i don't think you were like a speaker or anything uh okay i think i think you go on the site if you're doing like a panel because then there is like a meet and greet thing

2:07:03Luke Lafreniere:and stuff oh because i i wasn't sure if i was supposed to be i was like well i i don't know i i I have a badge, I'm here, but I was just standing in one of the halls, and there was like a lineup to get selfies or whatever, and there was a point, there was like a period for a while, where two out of every three people were like, I didn't know you were going to be here. I'm like, did you not hear the last person, you were standing right there when the last person said that to me. But people, they just walked up and said exactly the same thing every time, like, well, here I am. I just thought it was funny.

2:07:37honestly yeah i'm a little disappointed too i think after we were done the fight i had

2:07:44Linus Sebastian:gotten him in a particular way that i was busy apologizing for which you'd have to watch the video to go see nice um but it was the balls i think i was i think i was i think i was focused on apologizing for that i just never really thought about it but yeah i wanted it to be like kind of a surprise i didn't want i didn't want to just because i think he had had he demoed it before no i don't know i don't remember but yeah i was expecting it to be a surprise um yeah it was fun uh what's really cool nasa was there nasa had an actual full booth they brought heat shield samples from artemis 1 and artemis 2 to show the difference between like the entry skip versus the through and through and how that affected the the heat shields they had an actual moon rock.

2:08:33Linus Sebastian:What? So I said like, wow, this is the closest I've ever been to the moon. And then I got corrected. It's the closest the moon has ever been to me. Interesting.

2:08:43Luke Lafreniere:Thinking. Hold on. I'm going to get there. Oh, secondhand embarrassment. This is the moon has ever been to me. That's really cool. The argument was that

2:08:54Linus Sebastian:in this scenario, I was the one with more mass. Right.

2:08:58Luke Lafreniere:That makes sense.

2:08:59Linus Sebastian:Because it was just a little rock not the whole right uh they also had a wind tunnel model of the orion capsule and they talked about like the difficulties of doing scaled models and wind tunnels because the smaller you get the tighter the tolerances get right and like how insane that can get and

2:09:18Luke Lafreniere:like i mean is is there a certain point where the size of the model relative to like the size of an air molecule matters it didn't sound like it okay there's a couple questions going back and forth i hope i didn't get that wrong but there was um so nasa gave luke a massive correction that's pretty

2:09:39Linus Sebastian:funny that's a good one that's pretty good they also mooned him yeah uh um but yeah no like one of the things he was saying was they had done up all these different wind tunnel tests and then on Artemis 1, it was fine, but there was anomaly detected during the launch, and they were surprised by it. They took it back to the wind tunnel, tried to recreate that exact scenario, were able to recreate the problem, came up with a solution, tested it a bunch, implemented it for Artemis 2, problem solved.

2:10:09Luke Lafreniere:That's pretty cool.

2:10:10Linus Sebastian:Pretty sick. Pretty sick. That's pretty cool. I learned about, they have an arc jet that they test the heat shielding for, and hearing some of the specs for the ArcJet was crazy. It's like a plasma cutter, but instead of a little dot, it's like a freaking pipe. It's just wild. He was talking about the air intake that they use for it, which is apparently the way he was describing it, it sounded like it was basically the side of a building. Crazy. I don't know. I want to look more into that stuff. Okay.

2:10:45Luke Lafreniere:Let me see if I can find... Okay. Anyway, there are a ton of other booths like Hot Dog Racing and Real Steel the Movie IRL, all of which are exactly what they sound like. You can go cancel Luke at lmg.gg slash fpwan or over on our YouTube members. Now I'm supposed to do sponsors. Dan wants me to do all four. I'm going to leave it up to float plane chat. Okay, you guys can tell Dan if that's okay or not. Yeah, do you want an uninterrupted rest of the show or do you want me to break it up later?

2:11:17Linus Sebastian:By the way, I think I'm mistaking the intake for the ArcJet and the intake for the Wintel.

2:11:22Luke Lafreniere:All right, Wintel not intake. Okay, most of Floatplane is saying get all four out of the way now. All four, do three. Ooh, I like that. That's pretty funny. Oh, that feels gross. Why don't I like that? All right, okay. All right, sure. Most of Floatplane chat says do all four. Okay, let's do it. The show is brought to you by Shox. you shouldn't have to choose between listening to the new madonna album or hearing your boss invite you to the company barbecue with shocks you don't have to they're open dots to clip over the ear canal clip or they're open dots to clip over the ear canal rather than going directly in or covering your entire ear so you get a comfortable fit that keeps you in tune with your surroundings whether that's at the gym or at work while still providing clear quality audio This is thanks to Shox's Bass Sphere 2.0 with Dolby, a spherical acoustic system that's built around two custom 11.8mm drivers that perform like a single 16mm one.

2:12:18Luke Lafreniere:And because they've been designed to essentially clip onto your ears, there's no dedicated left bud or right bud. They're totally interchangeable. And the OpenDots 2 will automatically detect left from right when outputting sound. Oh, that's kind of cool. You'll get 10 hours of playback on a single charge or up to 40 hours with the case. and with fast charging, five minutes plugged in will net you two whole hours of music. That's roughly into the groove on repeat 30 whole times. Use our link to go grab yourself a pair just in time for that company barbecue. Use code WAN at checkout to get$15 off as well.

2:12:52Luke Lafreniere:So that's that QR code right there. The show is also brought to you by Squarespace. whether you're trying to start a business, promote your music, or start up an underwater hockey club.

2:13:07Linus Sebastian:What? What? Is this real?

2:13:14Luke Lafreniere:It doesn't look like AI. I think it's underwater polo. Or is that something completely different? No, that's definitely a hockey puck. Really? Almost certainly. Look at it. It's like a green hockey puck. okay that's crazy and they're playing with like butter knives or something what am i looking at here okay the point is you gotta get some of this an easy to navigate website is important with squarespace you'll have everything you need to build a great website without the fuss or confusion you don't even need to know how to code you just need to know how to drag and drop you can piggyback off of one of several templates or use squarespace's design intelligence tool by answering a couple of prompts to create something unique.

2:13:54Luke Lafreniere:They even help with things like SEO to ensure that your website is easier to discover. If something isn't working, you can use data that they provide to make any needed adjustments to your page. On top of that, you'll get real-time updates about website traffic, revenue sales, so you can make better decisions for your business. And as I'm sure that our listeners know well, we've used Squarespace for many years for our linusmediagroup.com website. So if you're ready to dive in, build your website today and get 10 % off your first purchase by visiting squarespace.com slash when. The show is brought to you by XSplit.

2:14:28Luke Lafreniere:Streaming can seem like a lot of fun, even if the field feels heavily saturated. But there's no better way to learn than by, well, just jumping in. Our sponsor, XSplit, gets you right into it with tools for recording and streaming on the most popular platforms like YouTube and Twitch. And if you want to add a little more character to a stream or a presentation, you can choose from several preset layouts and transitions to keep your audience engaged. They use a customizable drag and drop interface too, so you can resize gameplay or camera footage based on what you think is most important to your video, and Premium offers a ton of extra tools like watermark removal, multi-platform streaming, and higher resolutions.

2:15:06Luke Lafreniere:There's even beginner-friendly editing and mixing tools that are built right into the platform. So go to lmg.gg slash xsplitwan or use our link in the description or scan this QR code to get 30 % off your first purchase or subscription with code WANSHOW30. I mean, what's the worst that could happen? You have some fun and make some friends? Actually, that does sound terrible. Do I have to make the friends? No. Nice. You're okay. Finally, the show is brought to you by AMD. It's AMD ultimate tech upgrade time. And this month, it was our product designer, Robert Lau's turn. Not only was there a secret prototype in the video, but for his upgrade, he got a new espresso machine, floor mats, a new seat for a spike, a PC that can play Excel at 60 FPS, and even a welding lesson.

2:15:49Luke Lafreniere:That's right, we got to weld something, Luke. It was pretty cool. Nice. And if you want a giveaway of your own, check out the link in this week's video or on tonight's show for a chance to win one of two PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT GPUs. uh luke as you know amd always gives us a topic to discuss and uh so here it is with modern gpus leaning harder into features like upscaling and frame generation to deliver smoother gameplay are we entering an era where the best gpu is defined more by software versus raw performance alone was this this was amd's question i doubt it but uh i guess that's where we're at i don't make the rules that's what's in there and as you know i'm not going to tell you to say anything you don't want to say so no i know yeah luke what do you think how should people weigh native performance

2:16:46Linus Sebastian:versus the real world experience with these features enabled wow uh i think it somewhat

2:16:55Luke Lafreniere:depends keep in mind amd is never going to give you an upgrade so what do you owe them yeah true are you eligible i can't remember technically yes oh are you now okay well then

2:17:03Linus Sebastian:they might i've so tread carefully no no uh sorry um i think it depends on the type of games you're playing or the applications you're using it for oh dan someone said the amd link is broken do you mind dodging uh sure thanks dan but yeah i mean it depends if you're trying to play uh some game that super highly benefits from just like, you know, frame gen, 4X, whatever, then you're going to want the software features.

2:17:37Luke Lafreniere:If you're not, then maybe you won't. How would you define a game that benefits from that? Because no matter what game it is, if you're running frame gen at 4X, for instance, you will be generating a lot of frames that do not come with the latency benefit of actually rendering more frames? I don't know.

2:18:01Linus Sebastian:I would assume, you know, I don't know. Train Simulator?

2:18:07Luke Lafreniere:Train Simulator. Oh, okay. So you're talking games where there actually is straight up less real-time interactivity and you could benefit from just much smoother animations even if it does come at the cost of some latency. Yeah. Okay, and then I'm going to throw in on the other side, if you have a pretty decent base frame rate already, adding a little bit of frame gen,

2:18:35Luke Lafreniere:I generally don't do it.

2:18:36Linus Sebastian:I'm still not doing much. But it's not that bad. I'm 40-80. I'm still not doing much. Pretty strong card. Not really needed.

2:18:44Luke Lafreniere:I think that's... I mean, I think the answer is simple. It's like both. Both? Both. Yes, both is good. That's what I kind of said.

2:18:54Linus Sebastian:It depends on your games, depends on what you're playing, depends on what you need it for. You're going to need raw performance. I mean, we're seeing this as... Depends on operating system to a certain degree. They said, I think the question was specifically around software, but I think compatibility and ease of use comes in under the software umbrella. If I can throw AMD a bone, most of the people I know that are having a better time switching to Linux right now are running AMD cards. A lot of the problems that I've had switching to Linux is the fact that I'm running a 4080. it's directly tied into the Envia drivers and the issues that that come with that I know this was a problem for Forza where I was trying to figure out why the heck I couldn't play Forza on Linux very easily and then I was talking to multiple other people that were all having no problem with it and ended up figuring out that all of those people were running AMD cards and it seems to be a consistent problem so that might play into it a lot of people are moving over to Linux at the same time the software solutions on the nvidia side seem really strong right now and if you want framework gen if you want dlss if you want that stuff that stuff is really strong on green team

2:19:59Luke Lafreniere:the latest fsr is getting better um but i also think that that's one way that our discussion question was almost uh like incomplete because running the newest models of upscaling uh does require faster hardware so you you are going to need both and not not just you know compute units like you're more you're more traditional um like like render cores you're also going to need um like machine dedicated machine learning acceleration um dedicated ray tracing hardware say what you want about you know whether you like ray tracing or not it's not going anywhere it's here to stay and you're going to need dedicated acceleration for that too it's going to have to

2:20:43Linus Sebastian:be a combination so rest assured full plane chat said i got a 90 70 xt and my issues went away on linux last of us was unplayable on nvidia so like there's a lot of it depends on your setup it depends on your use case it depends on the games the applications all that kind of stuff uh i think i think it varies more right now than a lot of times whatever uh than a lot of times in the past because of Linux being much more viable for a wider amount of people. Depends on your mom. You know what else depends on your mom? Underwater hockey is totally a thing. Really? Oh yeah. Turkey beats Great Britain six years ago so it's before this would have been generatable.

2:21:29Linus Sebastian:800 ,000 views. Yep. Was that an ad? That was an ad. Nice ad for a screwdriver. Why did it just freeze? Oh, okay. Alright. Yeah, they do be playing. There's a club in Vancouver called the Ninjas. No way. So you have fins, so you're like ripping. Really fast, actually.

2:21:56Linus Sebastian:There's a bunch of people in the audience watching this as an audience in an arena must be nuts.

2:22:07Linus Sebastian:This is crazy. Apparently, there's like a decent amount of contact that's allowed even. Like, yeah, they just ran into each other. Like, apparently, it's like not a super passive sport. I was reading that the 3D elements of it get really interesting. Because like, you can think you're on a breakaway, but someone can come from like above you and check you.

2:22:30Luke Lafreniere:Right. Which is strange. Can you juggle and if you flip Then can you touch it again and then be able to boost again Like is it Rocket Underwater soccer I don't know my son was explaining it to me at some point Like you can do a reset or something So that you can like go again Yeah Alright This is crazy I Eat Plastic says it's the closest thing we have to Actual Quidditch

2:23:00Linus Sebastian:Now you just need like uh like i don't know a tiny little tiny little sea entity that one person has to go try to catch and if they catch it every single other thing that happened in the entire game is completely irrelevant yeah yeah the whole quidditch thing was very distracting for me in the harry potter verse

2:23:25Luke Lafreniere:someone told me at some point that rowling like hated sports and intentionally made a sport that was stupid because like the point was that sports are stupid i'm not sure if i believe that though i don't care is quidditch intentionally stupid i'm uh oh uh yes ai says jk rowling intentionally designed Quidditch to be frustrating and absurd as a direct subversion of logical sports culture. Cool.

2:24:00Linus Sebastian:Uh, okay. Good job. You really stuck it to him. Nobody does a sport anymore.

2:24:09Luke Lafreniere:She wanted to create a sport that would deliberately infuriate men who care deeply about the rigid statistics and logical scoring systems of real world sports. and then and then the men

2:24:22Linus Sebastian:made quidditch in real life and gave it better rules and get freaking owned

2:24:31Linus Sebastian:get dunked on el bozo anyways

2:24:44Linus Sebastian:speaking of getting dunked on India fined HP$14.4 million for rigging government bids and fixing ink and toner prices. Jeez, wow. India's competition commission hit HP India with that fine that we just mentioned across two separate rulings, one covering PCs, laptops, desktops, workstations, accessories, the other one covering printer supplies, ink, toner, consumables. The scheme ran on the government e-marketplace from 2017 to 2020, where HP coordinated with its resellers to prearrange bids and submit fake cover bids, making tenders look competitive while a pre-picked HP partner won and taxpayers overpaid.

2:25:29Linus Sebastian:The strange part is that HP India reported the whole thing itself. it filed under India's leniency program basically self-snitching before regulators had any evidence hoping to get full immunity really? The investigation that followed turned up WhatsApp chats, emails, and even a 2019 video from a reseller meeting laying out who would submit fake bids and who should win each contract HP's defense was that it wasn't the mastermind just commercially forced into propping up the scheme because its own ink prices were so high that resellers were threatening to switch to cheaper counterfeit products.

2:26:11Linus Sebastian:Okay, so HP, I think I found the part where you screwed up. It even wrote in its filing that it humbly objects to being called the kingpin of the arrangement. The commission called it a cartel anyway and named HP India as the central architect. so it got a partial penalty cut for coming forward but was denied the full immunity it wanted this

2:26:35Luke Lafreniere:story is so funny i just i i saw the headline and i was like moderately interesting and then i read even a couple minutes further into it and i was like what meanwhile in india what sorry what's

2:26:50Linus Sebastian:going on we object to be calling the kingpin but i guess you can call us uh you know the central architect, that would be fine. And cartel. The central architect of the cartel, that's okay. We just don't want to be called the kingpin. That's associated with a villain in the Marvel universe.

2:27:08Luke Lafreniere:Speaking of legal trouble, just weeks after dbrand had to kill its companion cube case over the Valve intellectual property problem, a printables user named Jaren rebuilt the whole thing from scratch as a free 3D printable project. and it is already past 10 ,000 downloads. He worked entirely off of photos of dbrand's design, used none of dbrand's files, and put up 39 files for assembly videos and a full parts list down to the screws and magnets. It is doable on a single extruder printer with filament swaps, and he has since added pre-painted files for multicolor printers. There's even a plain weighted storage cube variant if you just want the version without the heart.

2:28:00Luke Lafreniere:dbrand got shut down for using Valve's IP without permission, and now this recreation is based on dbrand's design without dbrand's permission. That's pretty funny. That's it. And because there's no commercial endeavor here, Valve is extremely unlikely to do anything unless Buddy starts charging for the files or something like that.

2:28:22Linus Sebastian:It doesn't look like he is right now. I was wondering about that.

2:28:25Luke Lafreniere:Are you on it right now? Yeah. Okay, here you go, guys. You can have a look at it. How cool is that, man? I mean, it looks awesome. It looks freaking awesome. Yeah, it does. That's amazing. Man, I just, I love the maker community and 3D printing community and just the way people so selflessly give of their own time so that other people can just have a little bit more joy. How cool is that? Yeah. Like, out of 10.

2:28:56Linus Sebastian:I think genuinely 10. What else would be a 10? What are some... Puppies. 10.

2:29:06Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, puppies are a 10. Yeah, I think this is a 10. Yeah, I think this is on par with puppies.

2:29:10Linus Sebastian:Yeah. That's why OpenSauce is so awesome.

2:29:13Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Because everyone there is just this. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Okay, but tell me this, though. What if OpenSauce had puppies? Can you exceed 10? Did you miss the puppy room? Shut up. There's no puppy room. Was there a puppy room? I don't think so. Oh, stop. They're 3D printed. This guy. 3D printed puppies. What if it was both? There you go. Open source puppies. You wouldn't download a puppy. Okay. This is cool. Speaking of makers and STEM, Northwestern University engineers have unveiled Phantom Twist. Luke, do you want to bring up the video of it taking off? Sure. A drone that makes itself roughly 10 times harder to see than a same-sized quadcopter by spinning its entire body 15 to 25 times per second.

2:30:06Luke Lafreniere:It debuted July 16th at the Robotics Science and Systems Conference in Sydney. Jeez. And in flight, it kind of dissolves into a faint, semi-transparent smudge. and remember guys we're looking at it now against like dark high contrast objects this is like the worst case scenario if this thing was in the sky just like up against the blue in the dazzling light of the sun i do not know how you could see it the way it works is the body spins or sorry The body sits still while only the, oh, sorry. The way it works is it has one motor and one propeller. The prop spins one way and the entire rest of the aircraft counter rotates the other way.

2:31:02Luke Lafreniere:So no part of it ever holds still. It stays stable through the gyroscopic effect and steers by varying its motor thrust mid rotation. People are commenting that apparently it's like super loud. It's super loud. But if it was high enough, it wouldn't matter. Maybe just fly higher. According to the researcher's paper, the Disappearing Act works because of the persistence of human vision. Our eyes accumulate light over a window of roughly 50 to 150 milliseconds, sort of like a camera's exposure time. Anything spinning faster than that gets averaged into the background, which is the same reason that fan blades look transparent.

2:31:40Luke Lafreniere:The paper points out that the drone's spin rate is comparable to the 24 frames per second that movies are shot at. I don't actually know how relevant that is here, but sure that's nice the team did not design the layout by hand they had a computational model generate around 20 000 stable configurations then used ai optimization to shuffle the motor battery circuit board and counterweights around until visibility bottomed out that is okay something that's actually very cool use of ai before anyone gets too excited or worried it currently relies on an external optical tracking system to fly so it's indoors only for now the thin carbon fiber rods and wires are still faintly visible up close and it is just as loud as any other small drone so your ears will catch it even if your eyes didn't the team's pitch is wildlife monitoring okay and infrastructure inspection with future versions aiming for transparent materials and quieter props um it's gonna have to be a lot quieter to be useful for wildlife monitoring i think but hey um neat our discussion question is do you have any uses for an invisible drone maybe don't answer that

2:32:54Linus Sebastian:i know who does no i don't

2:33:03Luke Lafreniere:i talked to my lawyer who oh you know people Gross. I'm going to move on. This one's just funny. Author Dave Eggers, best known for the memoir, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, and the novel The Circle, criticized ChatGPT directly to OpenAI employees. And this is especially funny because he was invited to speak to the OpenAI employees by the company's CEO, Sam Altman, after Eggers publicly criticized AI-generated fiction. So he used the opportunity to challenge employees over AI's impact on education and creativity. And this is a quote saying, why don't you leave your house, leave the screen, meet some people, get yourself in a writing group, and also said, or also warned them that AI could be silencing an entire generation or two.

2:34:11Luke Lafreniere:And what he meant by that was that by making teachers' jobs more difficult and preventing students from developing their own writing skills and authentic voices, that they would not have the skill set to tell their stories in an authentic, personal way. I heard there was a teacher who put... I just thought this was badass. That's all.

2:34:30Linus Sebastian:There was a teacher who put some text in an assignment, like how to do this assignment thing that was, I don't know, transparent text or something. So when it was copy-pasted, it grabbed it. Oh, no. But if you were just trying to read it yourself, you wouldn't see it. And it said something along the lines of like, I don't know, use this strange word in a context that wouldn't make any sense. It specifically says that wouldn't make any sense. And it was something like, these numbers are going to be wrong, but the scale I think is pretty correct. Yeah, Madagascar, that was it. You use the word Madagascar in a way that wouldn't make any sense.

2:35:07Linus Sebastian:And the assignment had nothing to do with it at all. Okay. And maybe the person who said the word Madagascar will know. But if I remember correctly, it was like 40 students. Like two of them didn't do it. Like two of them didn't have Madagascar in the final. Something like that was some insane ratio. But I, the, the numbers don't, don't listen to the numbers. I don't remember exactly what the numbers were, but it was like some insanely high percentage of people. there was also another teacher who did a um take home do-it-yourself midterm and an in-person no

2:35:37Luke Lafreniere:computer final yeah that one was a little while ago i think we talked about that on my show oh

2:35:40Linus Sebastian:was that when yeah that was uh that was college i think very interesting yeah where like uh the

2:35:45Luke Lafreniere:everyone aced the midterm and then when he said it was going to be an in-person final like a whole bunch of people dropped out of the class and it turned out that like again two of the students had consistent grades across the midterm and the final.

2:35:57Linus Sebastian:One of them was just an honest... Absolute Chad. Well, one of them was a Chad who got like 98 both times or something. And then another one of them was just an honest person. And that's their redeeming quality. 60-something both times. It's like, all right. Nice work. You know what? There is... Man. 32 out of 35 failed, apparently.

2:36:21Luke Lafreniere:This is going to be... I don't know. This might ruffle some feathers, but I think I would rather have, in terms of who I'd rather work with day to day, I think I'm getting to the point where I'd rather work with someone honest with integrity than a genius.

2:36:34Linus Sebastian:Yeah. I think LMG Community said it well, though, Mr. Chewy.

2:36:42Luke Lafreniere:He's like totally not our community coordinator anymore. No, you should get a new account. You really need a different tag, Chewy. Yeah, you do. Your job title has actually changed twice. since then. And also quite significantly.

2:36:55Linus Sebastian:He said, I just don't know how kids could possibly resist the temptation of using AI. And honestly, I agree. That's

2:37:03Luke Lafreniere:an unfortunate, but like pretty based take. I hate it. Thanks, I hate it, basically. Yeah. I think it comes down to... Would you have been able to resist? No, I would have used it in some way. Your options would have been play Morrowind. or sit and do tedious homework. I'm already cooked. See, that's what I'm talking about. As soon as I, as soon as, like, as soon as I put you back, I give you a temptation that is irrelevant today. You wouldn't play Morrowind today. If I was like, oh, Luke, here, I installed Morrowind on your computer. Are you going to be able to focus on WAN show? You're like, what are you talking about?

2:37:45Luke Lafreniere:Of course. There's no way you're going to play Morrowind during WAN show. There's no way you will disrespect our viewers that way. See, now I've already turned him off it. I'm updating Steam. You're not.

2:38:00Luke Lafreniere:Unbelievable.

2:38:01Linus Sebastian:Actual child.

2:38:02Luke Lafreniere:You're an actual child.

2:38:04Linus Sebastian:I mean, that's why I have three monitors.

2:38:06Luke Lafreniere:You can't see what I'm doing. You can't see that he's playing Morrowind. But as soon as I pull out the, like, period-appropriate temptation... No, I think I... I think it's an easy choice. You play Morrowind.

2:38:18Linus Sebastian:I'm really trying to wonder... I definitely would have used it as a shortcut. I don't know if I would have used its output.

2:38:24Luke Lafreniere:There's different times in my life that I think I would have used it more or less. Yeah. And by using it at all, I think I might have stunted the growth that would have led to the higher probability of using it at other times, if that makes sense.

2:38:37Linus Sebastian:I think, especially with some of the really big problems I had in high school of the grammar and punctuation and stuff.

2:38:46Luke Lafreniere:Oh, if you could have. I wonder. The dangerous thing about being smart with a learning disability is that you're invisible if you want to be. You can fake it. And you'd have better tools for faking it.

2:39:02Linus Sebastian:I would have found a way to hide that with that. So I probably would have used my own words, but I would have used it to give me the correct punctuation. Interesting. But I probably would. I don't know. I'm looking at how I've approached it so far, and I believe very strongly in the you have to own the output thing. And I think I would have been informed enough to know that you could do things like hiding text. Maybe it was one point font or something, hiding text somewhere or doing other little tricks. I would have known that there are ways for teachers to detect it, like M dashes and all this other kind of stuff.

2:39:39Linus Sebastian:And I wouldn't have wanted to risk that.

2:39:41Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

2:39:42Linus Sebastian:But I would have definitely used it as a proofreader and would have adjusted my hand-ins based on it and would have used it as a shortcut. I'm fairly certain that would have happened, especially when Morrowind is calling.

2:39:55Luke Lafreniere:I didn't really learn to enjoy writing until after high school.

2:40:02Linus Sebastian:The wacky thing for me was I enjoyed writing. I just couldn't get good grades because I would just butcher spelling, grammar, punctuation.

2:40:10Luke Lafreniere:Interesting. The only reason I learned to enjoy it was because I had a teacher who pushed me to become more proficient at it.

2:40:17Linus Sebastian:See, that's so interesting because I almost had the opposite. Mr. Thompson said that he actually really liked my writing and I was getting just kneecapped by, because my previous teacher would take a point away for every single mistake. So he liked the writing, but my punctuation would be weird. So I just get 50 % like all the time. Yeah, we had, Mr.

2:40:40Luke Lafreniere:Horn was exactly the same. I think it was 0.5 of a point off. And this was out of 10. Yeah. So if you made a handful of mistakes. It's just gone.

2:40:48Linus Sebastian:So I just couldn't, I couldn't perform. So he capped it at 10%. Right. So if I like wrote something really good, but the structure of it was bad, the punctuation was bad, stuff like that, I could still get 90. And then I got like very close to 90 in the course. And I started really enjoying it. Mr.

2:41:07Luke Lafreniere:Horn had no such accessibility mode that I'm aware of Yeah, I don't think most do But what we were allowed to do Was we were allowed to pick a partner before we handed in our assignments and do a proofreading pass See, that would have helped a ton So what he taught us I like that I forgot about that That's actually really cool That's one of the reasons I'm so good at editing, I just realized That's a really, really cool solution That's hilarious I really like that Although it did mean that the winners won more and the losers lost more. So you get paired with someone who's... Well, no, you picked your partner.

2:41:41Luke Lafreniere:So I would go and pick another ace in the class and we would check each other's work and we would both get nine and a half or ten out of ten.

2:41:50Linus Sebastian:That happened kind of naturally for me in university. There was a crew of people at BCIT that I'm still friends with, the boys, and we would all help each other study with stuff and I really think it raised the whole group to another level. There's a lot of dropouts in that course. And that crew stayed together and didn't drop out the whole way through. I mean, until I did, I guess. Oops. But that was for different reasons.

2:42:21Luke Lafreniere:At Zymask, does school need to be fair? Nothing is fair.

2:42:27Linus Sebastian:nothing is fair but we should strive for fairness if that makes sense best we can yeah i still think teaching people the value of editing and like caring about someone else's work and trying to help each other succeed is very valuable i don't think there's necessarily a way you can possibly make that purely fair because you can't make every single pairing perfect maybe you don't do the pick your partner maybe you rotate through somehow i'm not sure yeah That probably has its own flaws.

2:43:02Luke Lafreniere:What else we got here? What's something cool? Oh, that one's not cool. That one's not cool. That one's interesting. Oh, I've got a pretty cool one. Go for it. Do you want to do... Oh, I thought it was kind of your turn. I picked a cool one for you, though. Sure, I'll do it.

2:43:21Linus Sebastian:man this whole we stopped doing it for a while and we're back to it the title is the same as the first yeah I just stopped reading the titles okay I will stop doing that as well a federal judge has given final approval to Anthropics 1.5 billion dollar copyright settlement with authors and publishers which the court called the largest copyright class action settlement in history a A billion and a half? Yeah. I mean, that is massive. That's pretty big. It covers about 482 ,000 books that Anthropic downloaded from piracy sites like LibGen while building training data for Claude and works out to roughly$3 ,000 per book before fees.

2:44:04Linus Sebastian:I don't necessarily know what that means. Before fees. Legal fees? I assume so. Oh, God.

2:44:10Luke Lafreniere:Is it going to be like$3 at the end of it? uh no no no no the authors get three thousand dollars per book i think oh before i hope not

2:44:19Linus Sebastian:we'll see hopefully i'm reading that wrong over 91 of covered authors have already claimed their

2:44:24Luke Lafreniere:share tells me it's more than three dollars if people bothered to do it does it sounds like a

2:44:28Linus Sebastian:lot of them did that's pretty sick and anthropic is also required to destroy its pirated copies yeah sure sure it's already trained on it um judge alsup ruled last year that anthropic buying physical books, scanning them, and destroying the originals was fair use. Nice! We can buy Blu-rays and rip them, and then it's totally legal now. Thank you. And that training AI on books is legal. What wasn't legal was downloading millions of pirated copies to build a permanent library, and that's the part Anthropic paid to settle before a jury could set damages. Because it settled instead of appealing, none of this becomes a binding precedent.

2:45:05Linus Sebastian:Damn it. Nope, that's actually maybe good. Is it? Yes. Okay, we'll talk about that in a second. So the dozens of similar suits against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI are still live with judges free to rule differently.

2:45:17Luke Lafreniere:But wasn't this a good... Or rule the same. Because at least one of these is bound to go through and not get settled. It's kind of where my head's at on this. I see, okay. So what's nice is that this is... You just don't want one to go a totally different direction and go through. Sure, this is true. But this is resolved for now and the authors get something, which is not enough in my opinion. I don't think it's enough. I don't think it's enough. Um, it's, man, it's something.

2:45:44Linus Sebastian:It's something though. It's something. So I see what you're saying. You didn't want the precedent set with this because it might be too low. I just want to, this is a, this is, this is a start.

2:45:55Luke Lafreniere:It's, it's a, it's a, it's if, if these are my possible outcomes, right? And everything to this side of the middle is bad and everything to this side of the middle is good we're kind of like we're like here yeah you know we're like oh it's it's it's good i could hope for better still yeah that's where i'm at for sure so you're holding out hope for

2:46:17Linus Sebastian:better i'm holding out i'm holding out for a hero man wendell's turnstone video is still not up come on wendell come on right up what's turnstone turnstone is cool i the the answer to like all of this stuff for me is run stuff locally um i i think that is the right way to get back at them Dude, the latest Chinese models look crazy. They also look very hard to run, but they'll be quantized down and whatnot. They look crazy. Turnstone is like Odysseus, PewDiePie's thing, but more tuned for Enterprise. Oh, okay. And Wendell's building it. Oh. And he hasn't said a ton else publicly yet, but he has said publicly that there is a video on Turnstone that is coming.

2:47:06Linus Sebastian:and I'm excited because it's very cool. That sounds very cool. It is very cool.

2:47:14Luke Lafreniere:Next topic. Ethan Immortal says, as a publisher, it feels a bit like robbery where they got to keep what they stole and I was offered a market value. I was still robbed. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, that's totally fair.

2:47:31Linus Sebastian:If this was a person, they wouldn't have to... pay$3 ,000 per book, they would go to jail.

2:47:39Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Which is crazy, right? Anyways. Oh, that was actually something that didn't make it into our notes about the India, like, ink price-fixing deal thing, is that apparently there, executives are actually, like, we're personally punished for this. which is like i can't believe i'm saying this but like hey maybe india has something to teach us about how to punish like antitrust stuff yeah i'm trying to look it up um

2:48:17Linus Sebastian:reddit co-founder aaron schwartz uh pirated stole whatever you want to call it i think it was like what I'm seeing here is 4.8 million, uh, J store documents from MIT, which is, I think like, uh, published papers and stuff. Um, and yeah, Reddit co-founder accused of stealing 4.8 million J store documents from MIT.

2:48:43Luke Lafreniere:Repeated visits to access network and download documents for distribution, distribution on file sharing sites.

2:48:48Linus Sebastian:Okay. And this is like for context, as far as my understanding goes, if you email the authors of a lot of these papers, they will just send it to you because in how their system works, they're, they're probably employed by like a school or whatever else. They like have to publish these papers this way, but they don't actually want to charge people for it. So he's like trying to make it so these papers can get out more easily because that's scientific progress, open learning, all that kind of stuff. He did not get dealt with in the same way. Oh man, I just had it on screen and then lost it. Sorry.

2:49:20Linus Sebastian:Here it is. the charges were filed in Boston on Tuesday by the attorney district carried a penalty of 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine what? so we seem to be a lot harder on a random individual dude

2:49:38Luke Lafreniere:float plane chat is being pretty based here's the deal when corporations can go to jail then they can be people no I agree how about they just have to Dude, if you, if the punishment was that if the corporation commits a crime that would have resulted in a six month prison sentence, if they have to actually get just like their one phone call a day for six months, you man, we would, all of a sudden, they'd be on it. They'd be, they'd be so adherent to the law. It'd be wild.

2:50:22Linus Sebastian:speaking about a post-corporate world, Fallout 5, Fallout 3, and New Vegas Remasters, and the most interesting part, the very most interesting part that people have a lot of mixed opinions on, New Obsidian Fallout is official.

2:50:38Luke Lafreniere:So I am amazed that you picked this topic as one of our headline topics at the beginning of the show. Usually, I have a pretty good idea of what you're going to pick. I know that you love Fallout but I can't believe that after all the news that has come out of Bethesda and Microsoft and id and all of that mess right now sometimes I'm just a dumb little boy who likes his little video games that you're not looking at this through a cynical lens going here's this is obviously just a shiny distraction hey ignore all the bad news right now Fallout Is it I mean am I Am I just being too cynical

2:51:20Linus Sebastian:The part that is interesting to me is Obsidian's involvement

2:51:24Luke Lafreniere:No it looks like it's not me LRFTW says Luke smoking That copium hard Hurt me again Todd I'm ready

2:51:34Linus Sebastian:I will get excited I'm ready for the pain Will Vietar take me It never goes away Yeah Obsidian is the interesting part to me. Yeah, that's the good... It's a little questionable. It's been a hot minute. The obsidian of the now is not the obsidian of the then. So it's interesting.

2:51:55Luke Lafreniere:Then it was black and glass-like. And now it's black and glass-like and older. No, you deserve the second one.

2:52:06Linus Sebastian:Isn't that like the main guy coming back? I've heard yes, but all the structure around him is changed. No Man is an Island. Maybe not completely gone. I can't claim to know, but it's interesting because, I mean, if you look at Fallout, I liked Fallout 3. Fallout 3 was alright. Fallout New Vegas was incredible. Has a lot of, like, the best quotes in games ever in it and is still a cult classic to today. Fallout 4?

2:52:38Luke Lafreniere:More like Fallout for the birds. I didn't play it I don't know

2:52:45Linus Sebastian:Fallout 5 is I don't know if Fallout 5 is the Obsidian Fallout or if Fallout 5 is Bethesda Fallout if Fallout 5 is Bethesda Fallout if they keep going down the path they have been going lately it's probably gonna suck

2:53:03Luke Lafreniere:it's just all settlement building

2:53:05Linus Sebastian:yeah something like that Fallout 5 was Bethesda was or wait was is bethesda is bethesda okay excuse me yeah so whatever the obsidian one is is the one that i'm more interested in but you know fool me uh roughly seven times or something

2:53:24Luke Lafreniere:and maybe i'm the fool but shame on dan maybe maybe catching strays maybe todd can can sit in a

2:53:32Linus Sebastian:immersion sensory deprivation chamber or something and become what he once was and revitalize all of Bethesda and give us a good Elder Scrolls and good Fallout.

2:53:42Luke Lafreniere:Maybe he has a midlife crisis and just goes like, wait, what if we made good

2:53:45Linus Sebastian:games? Wait, what if they were fun? That'd be crazy. I don't know, that sounds stupid. Yeah, probably. Well, I got my tanks recharged of copium so I'm all ready to go. Let's go.

2:54:00Luke Lafreniere:I owe Sammy something and I think he's expecting me to do this on my phone, but I'm not going to. Huh? Weak. Okay, Dan, Sammy needs that timestamp. What? Sure. We don't have Noki in the chat today. Hi, me again. Do you mind filming a horizontal video of you saying weak? I forgot to ask. I was too stunned by the feet cam. Thank you. Sammy, Sammy, Sammy, Sammy. Two hours, 58 minutes, 48 seconds, 30. can i get a clap thank you editor's note uh yeah whatever all right

2:54:42Linus Sebastian:man it's been a long week do we talk about the the craziness now yeah sure let's talk about the fallout 5 is currently in pre-production and will use the creation engine 3 also used for elder scroll 6 note from david which which one had which one was starfield what creation engine Three? Two? Two and a half with... I think that. What version of... So does that mean also Starfield?

2:55:07Luke Lafreniere:Two.

2:55:09Linus Sebastian:Two. Yes, two. Okay, so there's hope. There's more hope. Only I gotta talk to my dealer and order more copium. Yeah, maybe Creation Engine will save us. Maybe they'll scoop up all the people Id just lost.

2:55:26Luke Lafreniere:I mean...

2:55:27Linus Sebastian:It would kind of make sense.

2:55:28Luke Lafreniere:Their engine is so based. Yeah. But then, wait, these are both under the Microsoft umbrella. Sure are. They're in no way. Yeah, okay. Why am I even listening to you? They're also extremely related. Dude, you are not even sitting on... And then they're going to get all the real Earth people. And they're going to get the composer? Don't talk to me about video games. That is their worst take. Yeah. In all the many years that we have hosted this show together. You expected good takes from me about Bethesda? Look, I take you seriously. I respect you as a friend and collaborator. I can't be... That was bullshit.

2:56:10Linus Sebastian:You're a... Oh my god. It took me a second.

2:56:16Luke Lafreniere:I didn't manage to connect the dots for how fucking stupid that was. because I expect so much better from you.

2:56:38Luke Lafreniere:Okay, why don't we pick another topic? My God.

2:56:45Luke Lafreniere:We have no whimsy. No whimsy in this man.

2:56:48Linus Sebastian:Yeah, gee, yeah. You're whimsy-less. You can't have magical pixie dust thoughts in there. Let us dissociate. That's all we have left. Okay. Now let's go into an insane whiplash of a topic. Framework cuts Laptop 13 Pro pre-order RAM in half. Yeah, investment disclosure. I'll let Luke do this one. Massive increases in cost have forced Framework to alter pre-orders for the upcoming Laptop 13 Pro. Laptop Pro 13.

2:57:18Luke Lafreniere:Framework Pro 13. whatever, Kipcom, you could do your thing.

2:57:21Linus Sebastian:Okay.

2:57:21Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, it's written wrong in here. It's not Luke's fault.

2:57:24Linus Sebastian:Pre-order holders report RAM allocations being cut in half and pricing for the pre-orders being updated. The company announced in a blog post that their LP Cam 2 supplier has more than doubled RAM pricing over their existing inventory. Framework chief exec and TrueSpec cable enthusiast, Nirav Patel, wrote that this cost increase goes beyond, far beyond anything we had predicted and anything we're able to absorb without placing our ability to operate at real financial risk. Framework says they have enough LP Cam 2 modules on hand to cover existing pre-orders, but not in capacities that match the pre-orders.

2:58:05Luke Lafreniere:So no, they don't. So no, no, no. So LP Cam 2 modules, it's one module per system. It's not like SODIM where you would have two. So they have, in terms of the quantity of lp cam 2 modules they have enough of them but not with the right number of dyes on them i see so not the right uh yeah yes i see i get it

2:58:33Linus Sebastian:that was actually pretty good uh the blog post breakdown uh breaks down the pre-order changes tldr if there aren't enough modules for your order it's being downgraded to the next lower ram configuration at the original price for that configuration okay that's a little better than i thought uh the blog also warns of cost increases on other hardware which will impact new orders

2:58:57Luke Lafreniere:as well yeah i i didn't put it in the doc for this week i think but uh tsmc it's rumored that tsmc is increasing way for oh no it is in here tsmc plans chip price hikes in 2027 of um baseline 5 to 10 percent with some ai and hpc customers facing effective cost increases of up to 25 percent through additional surcharges these reported increases are tied to rising manufacturing costs overseas fab investments and just plain old strong it's you pay me demand it's honestly wild they could be this might sound like an insane statement

2:59:37Linus Sebastian:they could crank it so much more i know so much more i know they literally came out and and pointed at like sk hymix and samsung and we're like we're not doing that they could though and it's really kind of wild that they're not and there's a lot of theories as to why is it just down to like taiwanese culture like i what are the other theories i think it's down to the defense of taiwan because if they crank it too high you're incentivizing development elsewhere yeah that's my theory the same guy that brought to you maybe bethesda should just hire the id guys to the creation engine yeah i mean the other part too as i could i could see valuing the long-term

3:00:23Luke Lafreniere:partnership i mean you look at the way you can you can uh like uh okay look at what's going on with um well look at how hungry everyone is to switch to chinese ram what's that what's that thing oracle bought that everyone's all mad about uh or hold on who oh no no no i remember uh who owns vmware right now broadcom that's right everyone's super mad at broadcom because they bought uh they bought vmware in 2023 and have just been like cranking the screws in fact did that not make it into WAN show last week that uh it was a really cool article I read I think it was on Ars Technica about a company that found a solution it was like a restaurant chain that found a solution to converting all of their vms restaurant or retail retail sorry retail was a chain that converted all of their vms off of vmware and just kind of like told the story of the very difficult, painful migration that they had to go through.

3:01:21Luke Lafreniere:And how just the comments was hilarious on this article because everyone was talking about how much they just f***ing hate what Broadcom is doing with VMware, but they feel so locked in and they can't wait to jump ship. And I mean, maybe part of it is also just prudent business management. Just because you're on top today and you have all these partnerships today doesn't mean that, and you want to benefit from being a technology leader. So TSMC is clearly increasing pricing. But if you turn the screws too hard, you're incentivizing outside demand or outside competition. You are, you know, just, you know, I don't know, you're being kind of a jerk.

3:02:05Luke Lafreniere:And also you're making your partners irate. You're making them look for the exit. So maybe it's a little bit of all of them. i mean i don't sit on their board i don't know but yeah just guessing just guessing uh what else while this is going on nvidia is reportedly raising geforce gpu kit prices nvidia board partners are said to be paying more for both gddr6 and gddr7 geforce gpu kits however the reports do not confirm whether these higher component costs will directly translate into higher retail gpu prices but how could they do anything other than that that okay so gpu prices are going up There you go.

3:02:41Luke Lafreniere:You heard it here first.

3:02:45Luke Lafreniere:Our discussion question is, PC building feels like a luxury hobby right now, but has it always been this way?

3:02:52Linus Sebastian:No. I would argue no. The reason why I would argue no... I think it's cyclical. At least to a degree. When's the last time it felt like a luxury hobby? Oh. Man, I really... like basically go to before i was functional as a human no i wouldn't i wouldn't say that i'd say

3:03:19Luke Lafreniere:it felt man it felt very luxury hobby in like the early sli days although it didn't have to be i mean i think that's the i think that's the difference is that premium options does not mean luxury hobby no that's true i but i mean working in the department that i was working in i had a lot of exposure to the people who treated it like a luxury hobby like we had a there was a player on the vancouver canucks who i mean i'm probably far enough removed from this now that i could just admit this i would just i would just search his name in our system once in a while just to see what kind of crazy shit he bought because he would just buy the highest end everything the second it came out and like it it just really surprised me the first time he like showed up on my radar because he bought like an over$1 ,000 high capacity SSD.

3:04:08Luke Lafreniere:And I was like, wait, that guy? Because I don't see that as like the professional athlete thing to do. I mean, obviously he has the money, right? You know, guy had a nearly 100 mile an hour slap shot. He's getting paid for it. But like, sorry, he's super into like gaming and computers. And he would buy things one at a time. So he's clearly doing it himself, which is like based AF. That's cool. He could obviously afford to have somebody else build him an extreme edition computer with a high capacity Vertex 3 SSD, whatever the exact specs were.

3:04:51Linus Sebastian:My argument, because someone insomniac in chat said, Luke taking this stance when Linus has refreshed his computer last how many times? I understand where you're coming from. I don't think that's a valid argument at all. The reason why I would say that is looking at how I got into the hobby. A big part of the reason why I got into the hobby was because, oh my God, it is so much cheaper and more accessible than cars. It was like, can I go down one of these two paths, cars or computers? And it was like, well, one is hilariously expensive, requires tons of room, lots of kind of expensive tools or access to them.

3:05:24Linus Sebastian:And oh my God, things break all the time and they cost a lot and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the other one, I can enter. with no tool costs? Right. At all? Well, you could buy a bougie screwdriver to do it. Maybe, yeah. Or not. Or just borrow your dad's, which he, like, almost certainly has at least a, like, Phillips screwdriver. It's, like, the most common thing ever to work on computers. And then when I first got into it, like, my stuff wasn't nice, but it played games just fine. Dude, the entry-level I can play friend-slop games computer right now is still very cheap.

3:06:06Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I'm actually, I'm on here right now. Like one of our discussion questions that we hadn't got to yet, I was prepping for it, is like, hey, how cheaply could you do just like an Optiplex build these days? And it's still actually not that bad. I don't like this one. I don't like just eight gigs of RAM.

3:06:27Linus Sebastian:That's also more expensive than like...

3:06:30Luke Lafreniere:Another one I liked better. well okay remember though i'm i'm looking for eighth gen yeah so eighth gen 16 gigs around you got to watch out for the shipping though it's a hundred dollars shipping on this bad boy but that's to us that's to us that's international shipping yeah okay if this was domestic shipping in the u.s that would be considerably cheaper zero dollars import i wonder if part of the shipping is that the imports included it is it's it's part of ebay's whole they uh they have depots that US sellers ship to, and then they handle all of the paperwork so that the international shipping goes smoothly.

3:07:04Luke Lafreniere:It's a whole thing. But anyway, it's 16 gigs RAM, 250 gigs SSD, so you're still going to need to probably pop a hard drive in there. You're going to need a GPU, but we actually have a 1080 retrospective coming soon, and we found that the 1080 Ti in particular is actually still very usable. So for probably around$250, bucks you could you could friend slop it with all your friends um and that's just like grabbing a

3:07:32Linus Sebastian:pretty quick ebay listing there's a lot of the stuff that i got when i was first starting was helping people fix their computers um i don't know a friend would want to build a computer so i'd help them build the computer they would want to upgrade the fans that came that came with the case so they'd replace the fans that came with the case they have a few computer fans now they don't have any use for it okay those are my computer fans now um just little little things like that as you're going along it's a it's a hobby that is very effective for flipping parts you you have a hundred and a hundred bucks more than you had before you can go on facebook marketplace you can sell your gpu um for some cash combine that with the hundred extra bucks you had um and get a very significant increase in gpu and just plug that into the system you currently have most likely you can keep using things like your case for a very long time apparently jeff geerling still has like one of his first ones nice it still uses it um yeah even right now when it's like the worst i was saying the the i think i slightly misspoke which got people to dive on me immediately again which is confusing to me but whatever um i think i said something once i was surprised by that price that isn't what i meant i meant i was shopping for dell Optiplexes or Dell somethings during last Scrapyard Wars.

3:08:54Linus Sebastian:And what I was trying to point out is that that is even those systems are significantly more expensive than they were. And still, that's not a crazy amount to get into a fresh new hobby. No. I don't think I would put this in the category of luxury hobby. I think that's a big jump.

3:09:12Luke Lafreniere:No, I think that's actually fair. And Pankratz posted in chat, you're not fitting a 1080 in there, lol. To which I will reply, not Not with that attitude. Cut it! Not with that attitude. But with a bit of handiwork.

3:09:29Linus Sebastian:Yeah, engage with the part of the hobby that's really fun.

3:09:32Luke Lafreniere:Anything can fit in anything.

3:09:33Linus Sebastian:Yeah, you can figure it out. I believe in you.

3:09:37Luke Lafreniere:Oh, man. And yes, I did not factor in an extra power supply, though. So you will need a better power supply in order to run a 1080 or a 1080 Ti or something like that.

3:09:48Linus Sebastian:but the power draw of just that card isn't going to be super high so you could get a fairly low cap power supply for not a crazy amount of money as long as it has the connectors or you can

3:09:59Luke Lafreniere:figure out a way to get conductors connected to which is fun which is cool unless you break it and a hundred dollars is a lot of money to you like it was in the early days of us pursuing this hobby oh dude the panic attacks i had at times but the the panic and the stress is part of the fun is what makes the payoff so worth it yeah and like trust me guys i get it

3:10:25Linus Sebastian:i understand what you're trying to project it sucks right now it's expensive right now yeah it's still a hobby that people can get into with not a ton of cash no you're not going to have some sick 50 90 water cooled uh amazing you know it has that screen thing from corsair that you can mount anywhere and all this other fancy crazy but you know what nobody has that stuff i think this

3:10:51Luke Lafreniere:is something that like yeah i think people really really don't realize how rare the customers for this stuff are because it's all over like your your your instagram feed or whatever battle stations but i worked at the computer store do you know how few people buy thousand dollar cpus yeah like that's rare do you know how few people are buying top of the line gpus in the grand scheme of things how what a tiny tiny percentage of the market they make up most people are just like running

3:11:26Linus Sebastian:a regular computer when i was when i was building a bunch of computers for myself for my friends all that kind of stuff everybody was sitting on 60 series it was bougie if you got a 70 No one got an 80. 90s were absurd. Was 90 even a thing yet? Probably not even. Yeah, I don't think so. I think they had other nomenclature for their dual GPUs. 8 Ultra was a thing for a bit.

3:11:51Luke Lafreniere:And then, oh yeah, no, no, hold on. There were 90s. So I think a 590 was a dual GPU. Yeah, so 90s were a thing.

3:11:57Linus Sebastian:I was still building computers for friends in that era. So yeah.

3:12:00Luke Lafreniere:Okay. And it's like nobody got those cards. Yeah, I'm trying to think. The first dual GPU was the 5950 X2, was it? Oh, man. Wow, I used to know this stuff. 5950 X2 GPU. Is that right? Oh, man, no. No, no, the 7950 something. 7950 X2. What was it called? 7950 GX2. Man, that thing was so cool.

3:12:36Luke Lafreniere:Look how cool it is! It's got the whole two stacked PCBs, two whole separate coolers, internal SLI bridge, there's PCB1, here's PCB2, you got the... Oh man, you got the... Hold on, where'd the bridge chip go? There it is, look at it go. Why does it keep changing which picture I'm looking at? Can I zoom now? Oh, come on, touchpad, don't let me down. It let me down, I'm over it. The point is, very cool, very expensive. Almost literally nobody bought them. Yeah.

3:13:12Linus Sebastian:They're unheard of. It also depends on the circles you're in. And if the only people you're hearing talk about computer stuff is dudes on the internet that only get views on their videos when they show the super fancy expensive cards, then you're just going to see the super fancy expensive cards.

3:13:29Luke Lafreniere:And also, but that's what companies market too. because it's halo marketing. And it works. And you see it across so many industries, PCs, fashion, the amount of effort and money and time that companies spend promoting their top-of-the-line experience that almost nobody will actually buy, but because it's cool and sexy, it creates brand appeal. and then you go in and you actually buy the thing you can actually afford it's it's marketing 101

3:14:07Linus Sebastian:so i have talked on this show almost as many times as i possibly can since i learned this piece of information that a buddy of mine's son was using a 1080 to play on decently high settings at decently solid frame rates arc raiders yeah i've pointed that out like as many times as i

3:14:23Luke Lafreniere:reasonably can and and it's because i'm trying to promote the idea that you don't have to upgrade

3:14:28Linus Sebastian:You don't have to spend crazy amounts of money.

3:14:29Luke Lafreniere:And it's worth noting that compared to our previous$69 gaming PCs that we've done in the past, this Optiplex was quite a bit more expensive, but that's because I went out of my way to pick something with a six-core processor. I was going for something that wasn't quite... That's a decent machine. That wasn't quite just barely usable today and unusable tomorrow. You could actually get a couple years out of this thing. It's worth putting a little bit of work into fixing it up. so i did that on purpose you could get something cheaper um hey speaking of getting things cheaper according to bloomberg's mark german apple is preparing an apple upgrade leasing program with clarna that wouldn't help you get things cheaper at all but would let you pay a monthly fee for devices instead of buying them outright with the option to upgrade at the end of the lease so so what is apple just a financial engineering company now?

3:15:26Luke Lafreniere:Like, what are we talking about here? Apple already offers an iPhone upgrade program that lets customers finance and eventually own an iPhone, but this new program is a broader leasing program which would reportedly include iPhones, Apple Watches, iPads, and Macs. iPhones and Apple Watches would have two-year leases, while Macs and iPads would be leased for three years before customers could upgrade or return the device. The program is aimed at making Apple products more affordable up front by spreading payments over time, while also encouraging customers to upgrade to newer devices on a regular schedule um our discussion question this is kind of funny is i'm not sure how they do this in you know america and the rest of the world but how is this any different from a canadian phone plan where you just slowly pay off your phone over the course of your plan what makes this different slash special i don't know you get to give apple the money and clorida even though this uh would you lease a piece of tech i mean i think we've talked about that enough on the show i don't think we have to do that particular um discussion topic but like here's a crazy idea apple free of charge what if if you're reaching the point where your customers literally can't afford it anymore what if you just like and i mean as someone who loves technology and loves progress this might this might be out of character for me but what if you just chillax for a second what if the new iphone doesn't cost more than the last iphone for one try it for one year just to see what it's like you might like it you know as crazy as that sounds

3:17:11Linus Sebastian:they might have learned something from the neo well they increased the price of the neo but wasn't it like relatively reasonable based on memory prices going it's still pretty reasonable yeah maybe they maybe they did but then why do

3:17:24Luke Lafreniere:they need all why do they need a device leasing partnership its full name is macbook neo right i believe so iphone neo iphone neo the one but then what cut down processor would they put in an iphone neo a watch chip Like what are we talking about here Sure thanks Dan They got those No I mean like seriously Okay then what do they put in a cheap watch Dan What do they put in the Apple Watch Neo Dan Time

3:17:58Linus Sebastian:Just put the watch pit Wait your feet actually aren't touching Sorry they are

3:18:04Luke Lafreniere:They're hitting Here I'm hitting the floor you can look you can verify if you'd like all right for them to not be touching would look would look like this i don't know it doesn't look that different but the point is the point is they're definitely touching whatever's in a ti84 get a casio you can write apple on it Oh, no. Okay. Hey, LTT Labs had some new articles this week. I haven't read them yet, but you want to talk about it?

3:18:43Linus Sebastian:We'll be doing stuff. Yeah. There's multiple. I don't know if we talked about it on the show last week, but there was the 1080 article, and ever since then, there's been three. We'd be pumping out articles right now. It's been really fun.

3:18:58Luke Lafreniere:I've been really enjoying this series, the LLM quantization. I've read part one and two and all the supplementary material and videos.

3:19:06Linus Sebastian:Ukarsh has really been running with this. It's been cool to see him do this. Yeah. It's been awesome. Lab's article released from the LLM quantization series. That was 2.5, right? Yep. Is that correct? Yeah. This is an unplanned part. Oh, right. The.5 is unplanned, I guess. Unplanned part slash article to focus on the floating point number format and how it works. This one has some myeth, but it's fun.

3:19:31Luke Lafreniere:you should go check it out um i found the the the math to be not too over the top so far like it's

3:19:38Linus Sebastian:dumbed down enough that i was gonna say that's that's largely the the writing baby yeah um good job but uh also labs article looking at intel's intelligent bias control 3.5 announced with the arc g3 series of chips it advertises that it will not operate the p cores under 14 watts we found that it is actually more complicated and interesting than that. Turning off some of the E and LPE cores as well. There's almost zero information about IBC available online, so we thought we'd try to characterize it. We showed Intel our results, and they said that it is behaving as expected.

3:20:19Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, Tom Peterson was very, very smug about intelligent bias control, even though it's something that on the surface did not really sound that different from what anyone else had been doing with um sharing power budgets between cpus and gpus but he seemed to be and he would know under the impression that this was quite differenter and betterer and so apparently it's uh quite differenter which is which is pretty cool to see i wish they would have just communicated you know more of it more directly but sure yeah i guess leaving it to us to discover is fun too uh finally microsoft is experimenting with ad supported xbox game streaming they're testing a free tier with xbox insiders allowing players to stream select owned games in one hour sessions without a cloud gaming subscription microsoft says that ads will appear before gameplay not during it the test is meant to keep gameplay uninterrupted while paid cloud gaming options remain ad free that's the most boil the frog thing so they kind of contradict themselves here because it's in one hour sessions after which time they will not put up an ad that interrupts your gameplay but you will have to re-authenticate and they will put an ad before you start a session which presumably if you've been gaming for an hour would be in the middle of your gameplay.

3:21:49Luke Lafreniere:Maybe I'm missing something here. According to the Xbox folks, ads should provide value, avoid interrupting gameplay, meet Xbox's quality standards, clearly identify what is being advertised, and fit player expectations on each platform. The goal is to make cloud gaming more accessible by giving more players a lower cost way to stream the games they own.

3:22:21Luke Lafreniere:So I think the most interesting discussion question we have here is Microsoft says ads should create value. In your experience, what does that look like? What ads might you like to see before a gaming session or before the next hour of your gaming session that could add value to you?

3:22:44Linus Sebastian:I'm trying to, I'm trying to, I'm trying to really genuinely, uh, I can actually hear,

3:22:52Luke Lafreniere:I can actually hear the gears turning in his, in his head case right now. Like I,

3:22:59Linus Sebastian:I was really thinking so hard. I was genuinely trying to find like, is there anything? Is there possibly some charitable interpretation of this?

3:23:08Luke Lafreniere:Yeah.

3:23:08Linus Sebastian:I don't think so. Uh, I got, I have to imagine the add value is like to Microsoft. They don't mean to the, do they mean to the user? They mean to the user, Luke.

3:23:19Luke Lafreniere:They're not going to say add value to Microsoft. I mean, that would be easy.

3:23:23Linus Sebastian:There's no, I don't.

3:23:29Linus Sebastian:I mean, there is, oh man. I think that just means high success rate. I think so too. Because if, which, which highly targeted, carefully targeted. Yeah, which obviously means beneficial for the company, beneficial for Microsoft. But they're just packaging it in a different way.

3:23:47Luke Lafreniere:And look, get ready for the 1800th hot take from me so far this WAN show. Ads are good. But I believe that if we can get an ad for one of our products that we think is really great in front of someone who buys it and enjoys it, that's actually not terrible for them.

3:24:12Linus Sebastian:the primary holder of value in that scenario is not the consumer though no i'd say it's the ad serving platform i think you could argue that they're like if you genuinely see something and you're like oh cool that like solves a problem or looks like a thing i've been or saves me time or inspires me in whatever way sure and then you buy it or makes my feet not stink sure and you're happy about the result then sure i can then i can say there was added value we stacked three w's i still think the primary w holder is you know the the ad the person serving the ads oh yeah

3:24:52Luke Lafreniere:obviously they're the they're the they're w prime they're the top w

3:25:02Linus Sebastian:Oh man

3:25:06Linus Sebastian:Does that still exist?

3:25:07Luke Lafreniere:What are some examples of It does W Prime is still a thing That's so cool Man when's the last time you went on Major Geeks? Oh it's been 10 million years When's the last time this was updated?

3:25:20Linus Sebastian:Yeah I was going to say I don't know if this is really A thing still

3:25:24Luke Lafreniere:W Prime is a leading multi-threaded benchmark for x86 processors. Sorry, is that a Black Friday ad? Here? What the? What? Okay, well, I'm clicking it. Maybe it will generate value for me.

3:25:38Linus Sebastian:I don't know what that is. Good luck, Sean.

3:25:40Luke Lafreniere:Okay. Summer sale on iobit.com. Driver Booster Pro keeps over 18 million drivers up to 10. I need that many drivers. None of this is an endorsement. No. Just throwing that out there. Whoa! But hold on. I have to order now, Luke. It's 500 milliseconds. Wait, no. It's going down. I've never seen milliseconds before. I've never seen milliseconds on the counter before. You have 15 minutes? Yeah. That's so much time. I have 15 minutes and 24 seconds. 23 seconds and 300 milliseconds. I'm going to see what happens. Yeah, I will. 100%. Yeah, thank you. Are both of these in sync?

3:26:25Linus Sebastian:Are they not?

3:26:26Luke Lafreniere:They're too far away for me to see them both with my gaze Okay well we'll let them go We'll let them go It'd be so funny if they weren't I think they are though Exxon Fang says No you're gonna lose the discount if you leave it open

3:26:48Linus Sebastian:Ad supported game streaming makes me want to die Okay next topic That's it It's time for After Dark

3:26:54Luke Lafreniere:We made it

3:26:56Linus Sebastian:Hooray I will choose to Consume less but buy the things I own As much as possible Hooray

3:27:09Luke Lafreniere:Hopefully soon You get to keep doing one of those And It just doesn't become impossible Oh Well yeah that. Womp womp. All right. Comms. LLD, any guesses on when we will see the Steam Deck 2? Amazing it's not a question about the frame. I know Valve will likely wait for components to get cheaper first. And Luke, has anyone told you you look a little like Will Riker from Star Trek The New Generation? Is he white and does he have a beard? Dan, unacceptable. What? Unacceptable.

3:27:55Luke Lafreniere:Are you trying to trigger me? Star Trek, the new generation?

3:28:03Linus Sebastian:I thought he said next. No, I said new. You said new? He knew what he did.

3:28:10Luke Lafreniere:Did you see? No, get back on here. Did you see?

3:28:14Linus Sebastian:Did you see what he did?

3:28:19Linus Sebastian:unacceptable they will be now that Linus has pointed out unacceptable Daniel Desser

3:28:23Luke Lafreniere:autocorrect not okay not okay no no no rebuttal you're done you're off I Don't even know what the question was anymore. I'm so upset right now Star Trek the new generation Yeah, what was it?

3:28:38Linus Sebastian:He's so easy, he's so easy to upset They need to, they need to release that I gotta not do that he gets upset

3:28:43Luke Lafreniere:Um any guesses on when we'll see the new Steam Deck 2?

3:28:47Linus Sebastian:I'm sorry Linus I do feel like personally that Valve feels a little burned on hardware prices right now. I know, right? So I think they are probably, even if they were planning on releasing one in like late 2027, which was an idea that I had in my brain a while ago, I suspect they might be pushing that plan back because I think they don't want to release anything in the hardware environment that we're currently in.

3:29:12Luke Lafreniere:Straight up. 100 % agree. however i do think that the pressure is going to build over the next couple of years when the playstation 6 launches what's going to happen is games that are targeting playstation 6 are going to start coming out and they're going to suffer straight up not going to run on this on the steam deck yeah straight up not going to happen yeah hello dll question for luke maybe tips on motivating developers on testing more and being proud of their work? I feel like our team is like so, like takes pride in their work so much. Hire developers who take pride in their work, maybe step one, but I'll let you, I'll let you carry on.

3:29:55Linus Sebastian:Yeah. I mean, that's, that's tough. Testing more is interesting. I don't know if you can train people to take pride in their work. You have to inspire, not train. it might be better for them if you let them do some like developer experience style stuff where you make sure that you're giving them cycles of time where they can make things that already exist better make them easier to maintain improve the user experience it's a little bit hard to tell without knowing what you're building how many tests do you actually need if you if you do I'm sure it depends what you're doing.

3:30:38Luke Lafreniere:Is it an MRI machine or is it a, you know, fun little web game? Yeah. You may still need a certain, yeah. Like I guarantee you this wasn't tested that much.

3:30:49Linus Sebastian:It said 80 % code coverage and it's like, yeah, I mean, I doubt it.

3:30:56Yeah, yeah.

3:30:57Luke Lafreniere:I discovered this when I was doing an audit. I think I told you about this, Luke.

3:31:02Linus Sebastian:I had no idea that this existed and I. Yeah, you told me how you found it.

3:31:06Luke Lafreniere:Don't get hit by the red cameras.

3:31:08Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Crazy.

3:31:10Luke Lafreniere:Ah, crap. No! No, no!

3:31:15Linus Sebastian:You got owned. No! We should update this. Ah, no! We should update this to computer components and make it so that RAM is the really bad one. Oh, I'd be so down.

3:31:27Luke Lafreniere:Bring back a classic LTT reference.

3:31:33Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I don't know. it doesn't I don't think it comes down to convincing I think it comes down to inspiring man these Mac books are getting me set certain benchmarks find user feedback show the impact of actions make sure that they understand you know what they're doing matters and why

3:31:56yeah

3:31:58Linus Sebastian:I'm not sure sorry I don't think that's an incredible answer honestly without knowing the thing that you're building it becomes a little bit more difficult if i knew the thing you're building i could probably answer more thoroughly i have spent almost a million dollars damn next question he just got roasted by red camera hi dll what's

3:32:20Luke Lafreniere:a piece of tech you've trained yourself to work around rather than just replace oh um okay this is going to be about the biggest first world problem ever but the 115 inch TCL TV in my home theater does not have dedicated IR signals for power on and power off.

3:32:43Linus Sebastian:Oh my steak it's just so juicy.

3:32:46Luke Lafreniere:Yeah you know what?

3:32:48Linus Sebastian:My lobster.

3:32:49Luke Lafreniere:When you're trying to

3:32:50Linus Sebastian:Why is my lobster so buttery? I have to eat it out of a bowl.

3:32:53Luke Lafreniere:When you're trying to make a setup that is.

3:32:56Linus Sebastian:It's so tender my knife just. I don't even need it I bought this amazing knife I can't even use it do you guys want to hear the answer or not sorry sorry i wasn't even listening so

3:33:08Luke Lafreniere:the issue is that um it doesn't have ir signals for power on and power off it only has a power toggle signal and okay the idea there is that well whenever it's off you should press the power toggle button and it will turn on like you would want it to and when it's on you should press the power toggle button and it will turn off like you'd want it to but many other tv manufacturers even if their remote only has a toggle and even if they do have an ir code for toggle they also still maintain power on and power off now in theory in a perfect world cec is the solution you just power on your other device and it passes through cec commands and your tv magically powers on.

3:33:58Luke Lafreniere:But in the real world, if you happen to have more than a couple of devices, and especially if one of them happens to be a PC,

3:34:10Luke Lafreniere:CEC either isn't a thing or it doesn't work very well. I even have a$50 CEC dongle connected to my PC right now in that room. So what will happen is, the most recent version of trying to get this working is that any of the other devices with CEC, if I'm using CEC to rely on it to turn on the TV, will create what's called a CEC storm, which can accidentally wake up the PC, which then, because it also has CEC, will then grab the input and switch it over into the wrong thing. It's a whole fucking mess. And if TCL just had power on and power off IR commands, then I could just use my old Harmony remote, and I could press one button, and it would turn everything on in sync, turn everything off in sync, and see the problem with the toggle.

3:34:59Luke Lafreniere:So you can use the toggle as well, but the issue is that if anybody is standing in the wrong spot or does something or a command doesn't go through for whatever reason, they can end up out of sync. So your receiver and your computer will turn on and your TV will turn off, and then you press the button again and your TV turns on and your computer and your receiver turn off. and if you're trying to set up a setup that is family user friendly and that you want people to actually be able to use like we have a karaoke setup in there and if my little kids can't figure out how to turn it on they're never going to use it and like that sucks like why even have it then um like i'm not here it's friday night i'm not at home if nobody can use it if dad's not here that's that's stupid that's not technology making our lives better that's technology just being present and being a cost and taking up space it sucks um and so figuring this out um has has actually caused me many many lost hours uh because cec is just such a nightmare like my nvidia shield actually has very granular controls of cec so you can go and you can say turn it on and when the shield turns on, tell other things to switch the input, turn other things on.

3:36:18Luke Lafreniere:When other things turn on, do wake the shield. You do do this, do do that. It's got like six different toggles for all the... He said do do. Thank you for that. It's got six different toggles for all the different potential triggers from either side. Meanwhile, my AV receiver just has one thing. CET on. CET off. That's it. Great! Thank you. Not actually helpful. And then the same with this useless TV that doesn't have power on and power off commands. So, of course, it wouldn't have proper granular controls in the CEC for it as well. So you'll end up with stupid stuff. Like, one thing. Oh, and don't even get me started on the deplorable mess that Logitech left Harmony in when they EOL'd everything.

3:37:05Luke Lafreniere:Like, if I could just get the Harmony software to do exactly what I told it to do. like I came up with this one crazy solution where I was going to use the shield I'll turn on the shield first and have it turn on the tv and then turn on the pc switch the input and then turn the shield off and I could set the shield to turn things on but not turn them off or no what was it turn things on but not be turned off by other things and then I wanted to create a power down sequence that would actually power up the shield turn off the pc and the receiver no turn off the PC, then have the shield turn off, which would turn off the receiver and the TV.

3:37:43Luke Lafreniere:Like I had like figured it out. This is the kind of stupid bullshit workaround that no one should have to do. But like I was at the end of my I was at the end of my freaking rope. And then that ultimately didn't work because the Harmony software doesn't allow you to just arbitrarily turn this on and then turn that on and then put a delay anywhere you want. You can only put delays in certain spots. And I'm like, if it just completely got out of my way and let me do whatever I wanted, then I would have automations that would work. And yes, I know that there are replacements to the Harmony, but none of them solved the underlying issue of that my f***ing TLC TV doesn't have dedicated power on and power off commands.

3:38:22Luke Lafreniere:And I don't want to replace it because to replace it would cost me like anywhere between$20 ,000 and$30 ,000. So, and it still looks pretty good. No, it's a pain in the butt.

3:38:33Linus Sebastian:Yeah. it's huge you gotta haul it out of there and yeah kind of a nightmare um for me i don't think i have an amazing answer i think mine is more just that the bluetooth in my car has become unreliable um i don't really want to do surgery on my car and replace the media console um so what i have done is i bought one of these things let me see

3:39:02Luke Lafreniere:i'm aware of the unfolded circle i actually have one at home and i'm going to try it out i don't know if it's going to help though so the best case the the best solution i can come up with now is that i need to create a jarvis at home kind of thing that uses the camera view uh in the in the home theater to determine if the tv is on or off and then you try to do that with odysseus and then try to figure out some kind of an automation so that it will re-sync it if it gets out of sync that's like that's the the only solution i can come up with right now that has a

3:39:34Linus Sebastian:problem exists but that sounds pretty cool um but yeah i bought one of these um off of ugreen's actual website because i didn't want to get off amazon um and i you know my phone can connect to two different bluetooth devices so while it's sitting there repeatedly trying to actually connect to my actual car and failing over and over and over again i can just connect to the ugreen adapter it doesn't sound quite as good as just natural bluetooth right to the car i'm assuming because of the aux connector but it sounds pretty all right um it's not the end of

3:40:07Luke Lafreniere:the world or anything probably more to do with just like low quality bluetooth okay i never really

3:40:12Linus Sebastian:dove into it i just assumed it was the aux but yeah i don't know um and i will i will hear there's like a slight amount of lag that will happen when it finally connects the the other bluetooth connection to my car. So I'll hear the song just kind of like and then keep playing. Oh yeah, okay. And I'll be like okay, cool, I can switch to the Bluetooth in my car now. And like, usually it's not a problem. Usually the Bluetooth will just connect automatically, but every once in a while it'll take like 10 minutes. And it's like nah, I could have been listening to music or a podcast or whatever, and that's just kind of annoying.

3:40:46Linus Sebastian:This was like an 18 Canadian dollar plug it in once. It has worked every single time forever since then. Sure, why not?

3:40:57Linus Sebastian:Cheers, DLL.

3:40:59Luke Lafreniere:Regarding our luggage weight chat six months back, it's OSHA limits for baggage handlers. That's why the cap is per bag, not total. It's like, I think it's 50 pounds per bag, which is the maximum single person carry. Yes. So, Flair, totally aware. So then why is it that what they actually wanted me to do was just pay more?

3:41:27Luke Lafreniere:If they're not allowed to lift the bag at the weight that I had, I'm aware of that. Maybe they only have one person. That was not why I lost it. Why I lost it was that my bag was well within the limit of what they are allowed to carry. It was just over the weight allowance before you have to pay a bit more for it. And my partner's bag was like 20 pounds under the limit while I was like two and a half pounds over it. they would have been fine.

3:42:03Luke Lafreniere:Howdy, DL. Could we get a material cost breakdown for the socks? I'm an AV tech, and these socks would have been magical, but$15 a sock is tough. Side note, the screwdriver has been a reliable tool. Material breakdown. I think it's actually right on the packaging. 33 % polyester, 30 % merino wool, 18 % nylon, 13 % acrylic, 6 % spandex. They almost had 60 % merino wool. But what we actually found was that there was a significant amount more pilling on the 60 % merino wool due to the natural fibers. And we have enough of it in the current composition to... This is an area where we actually have to be really careful because we did independent third party testing and found that because of the thickness of it, um, which is like due to the cushion, which is like a desirable thing that we don't want to get rid of because of the thickness, it doesn't actually dry very fast.

3:43:10Luke Lafreniere:Like I will not, I will not advertise this as a quick drying sock, but what I can say subjectively as the person who's been doing a lot of the wear testing for it is that when and if my feet do get exposed to moisture either through their own secretion of moisture or outside factors they still do subjectively a good job of making my feet not feel super wet so they still have that natural wicking quality and that was something that we weren't really sure how to sell so we didn't so we just don't really talk about it in any of the marketing on the site or on the packaging. But what I found was that with the 30 % Merino wool, you still get that benefit.

3:43:58Luke Lafreniere:And so not having the ugly pilling and having something that kind of looks a little nicer and just, you know, feels more reassuringly quality after a few washes and still having all the the benefits of the natural fiber as far as you know my wear testing goes um that was why we ultimately landed on this composition as for why it's so expensive i don't know if you noticed but everything has gone up in price and we are not like outside of the price band for like a like a a high quality merino wool sock. And we've got the copper infusion that helps with odors. I'm not allowed to say antimicrobial, but what I can say is that everyone knows where odors come from and it reduces odors.

3:44:53Wow.

3:44:54Luke Lafreniere:I didn't say nothing. Stunning. So it's, it's a really cool, it's a really cool treatment. and

3:45:04Luke Lafreniere:I mean creator warehouse teams got to get paid lifetime limited lifetime warranty costs money I mean that's something that I feel like I've I've kind of harped on before and people get mad at me for it sometimes but like there is no free lunch ultimately the consumer pays for everything and we felt that in terms of creating a total package around these that was going to be competitive um it was going to be we had to weigh the cost of what that warranty is likely to cost us against what our positioning is going to be in the market and what we determined was that it's probably going to if we didn't do it we would still be so close to competitors who do offer it, that the value proposition would not be as good.

3:45:57Luke Lafreniere:So we're better off baking some warranty fulfillment into the cost, understanding that, you know, that is going to drive the price up a little bit. Like it's all, it's like boring, it's boring business stuff. But why does it cost so much? Because things have gotten freaking expensive. We actually had a, we had a quarterly financial meeting. Luke was in it the other day. And one of the things that came up is that due to tariffs and fuel surcharges and just general inflation, our cost of goods sold is up by deep into double digit percentage over the last, honestly, not that long of a period of time.

3:46:43Luke Lafreniere:And we've done everything in our power to try to keep our external prices reasonable as much as we can for customers. There's actually been some

3:46:53Linus Sebastian:it might sound weird and my god am I old and lame but it's actually been some really cool stuff that's been done to try to keep that stuff down. That team's been working.

3:47:05Luke Lafreniere:I know. And you know what? It's been really discouraging I think both for the team and for ownership to be very blunt with you guys right now we're deep in the wan show so you know hopefully i'm not gonna you know say anything that's gonna get me into too much trouble here but like everyone in an org working like harder for a worse result is super demoralizing across the board and especially when the whole thing is so unnecessary um it's really frustrating and so yeah i just want to take a moment i guess then to to acknowledge the incredible work that the team

3:47:49Linus Sebastian:is doing to make this less that's happening actually across the board because yeah cw's dealing with you know the oil issues costs of everything going up largely related to oil issues but sometimes not 100 percent um tariff nightmares uh the lmg side is dealing with um from talking to a bunch of creators recently it feels like all of vod is slightly down and one of the underlying assumptions is that it's just watch time going to shorts yeah so all the vod is slightly down right now and the pc space has hurt like most of anything because everything's just so expensive and the hobby is very difficult to be interested in right now because the stuff that's coming out it isn't all that interesting or new or crazy, or it's just for AI.

3:48:39Linus Sebastian:And it's all mind bogglingly expensive compared to how expensive it used to be. So it's tough to make content in that realm that people want to watch and engage with. And then you get on the float plane side, we have a similar problem when it's tough for people to be interested in watching, engage with this type of content, people are going to unsubscribe. And also we're dealing with AI pressures where if we're in a data center, That data center rack space is going to have people that want to bid on it for way more. Also, that data center who has to constantly buy and refresh their hardware is paying way more for it now.

3:49:16Linus Sebastian:So they are going to be, in some cases, massively increasing their prices. And even just the services, the software as a services that we're using, they are running into the same problems with their bills. Therefore, they are going to increase the prices on us. So actually every single segment within the umbrella organization is like under some form of like effectively attack. Want the kicker? Yeah.

3:49:44Luke Lafreniere:Badminton shuttles.

3:49:48Linus Sebastian:No way. I think you told me this.

3:49:51Luke Lafreniere:Mega inflation.

3:49:52Linus Sebastian:I never really thought about it. So yeah, I guess literally everything.

3:49:55Luke Lafreniere:So this one's fun because apparently it's a duck feather shortage that comes down to changing dietary habits in China.

3:50:09Luke Lafreniere:Okay. And you can only use the feathers from the left wing, which really doesn't help. And it's a whole thing. Yeah, basically.

3:50:21Linus Sebastian:so somebody in in full plane chat said full plane is sinking question mark question mark question mark katowas said so i want to address uh we are not going quietly into the night i i just we've got some cool ideas i just mentioned that the cw team has been moving and shaking and making things happen and doing some really cool creative stuff don't count flow plane out we've got some strategies aj's been cooking up um some stuff we can do that will likely make it into videos I'll say that much so far. I don't want to commit to plans because the plans are still being made. But we're not just sitting here going like, oh no, the bill's going up.

3:50:56Linus Sebastian:I guess we're just screwed. We're working on making a... Full Plane's whole thing was that it was supposed to be defendable against... Sustainable. Sustainable and defendable against the bill changes that other companies might have. The idea was that we were supposed to be able to be free from lock-in and all that kind of stuff. So this is just our biggest test.

3:51:26Luke Lafreniere:Rod posted in Floatplane Chat, you could just fill the Smash Champs building with water, play underwater hockey, and call it Splash Champs. We wouldn't even have to make that many changes to the sign, just the one letter. It's actually genius. One of two letters, sorry. my god i mean you could take an m hold on m you could make the l out of part of the m so you just buy one more p and then you're in good shape yeah yeah that's fantastic oh this is interesting radin 428 says hawaii also imports lots of chinese feathers for making cloaks etc same shortage we use the entire bird though uh price is up and can't get some types at all i guarantee you it's the left wing you can't get any of for making cloaks they said yeah i i don't know what a hawaiian cloak looks like but what i do know is that we need to drop in on this timer and find out if i can still get my three dollars off get it before it's gone it's oh my god that this is so like early 2000s web look at it turning my cursor into a popsicle and look it's 310 bucks.

3:52:40Luke Lafreniere:I don't want 92 % off expired. Okay. So if I actually lose it, I mean, can I just refresh it? It's$30 now. So it's just that's crazy. There's no way. Hold on. There's no way. Okay. Bye now. Hold on. Can I still get my$3 off? I want my$3 off. Where's my$3 off? Dude, scammer gets scammed. You took too long.

3:53:08Linus Sebastian:I got wrecked. That's actually crazy.

3:53:10Luke Lafreniere:I can't believe they actually followed through on it. Wow, they're committed.

3:53:13Linus Sebastian:They commit to the grift. I'm also surprised by just refreshing. You can't like get through it. That's wild.

3:53:20Luke Lafreniere:Everyone's like, clear cookie, clear cookie. Guys, we know there's ways around it. Yeah, we know it's a cookie.

3:53:24Linus Sebastian:Yeah. I'm just surprised they actually like did it. Yeah, me too. I thought it was going to hit zero and they're going to be like, we're going to be nice to you this time.

3:53:33Luke Lafreniere:Last chance, last chance.

3:53:35Linus Sebastian:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

3:53:36Luke Lafreniere:yes conrad we know all right dan hit me uh sure would you recommend the steam cube for people that are moving off consoles and looking for their first pc it's hard for me to recommend the steam machine at the price that it's at yeah um and right now i would say that you just shouldn't move off your console like i think the timing is so bad okay here's a question when do you think the timing will be better it's hard for me to say because i don't know what playstation 6 pricing is going to be tsmc is going up yeah but like is not signaling that it's going down right now i can buy a playstation 5 for like under 500 this This is literally half the price.

3:54:28Linus Sebastian:That's a way better deal.

3:54:29Luke Lafreniere:This is half the price of a Steam machine.

3:54:31Linus Sebastian:Dude, PC is so cooked right now.

3:54:33Luke Lafreniere:Yeah,$470. I mean, the last Scrapyard Wars, I literally won it by buying a used PlayStation 5.

3:54:39Linus Sebastian:And it wasn't even that bad then. Wow. That equation just got way better. Yeah. How much was yours? Do you remember? I want to say$325 CAD or something. I remember it being like a crazy deal. $375 CAD? Even back then, meaning that those prices are probably decently similar to where they used to be.

3:54:57Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I mean, this is not a bad deal. No. $425 plus$35 shipping. You get a controller, an HDMI cable, a USB charging cable, and a PlayStation 5. 98.6 % positive ratings out of 9.2 thousand ratings. Like, this is the disc edition, too. Just buy it. Like, no, don't buy a Steam machine. Kind of depends what console they're on. And you'll be able to play GTA 6, which you will not be playing on a Steam machine. This is a more performant computer. For the difference, you could buy this PlayStation, you could buy a$500 PC, do all your computing on the PC, do your gaming on the PlayStation. Like, look, obviously, I'm a very pro-PC guy.

3:55:42Luke Lafreniere:I freaking love PC. I love PC gaming, but... Playstations are a ripping deal. I'm also not out here to give you bad advice. Yeah.

3:55:53Rod Rosenberg.

3:56:02Linus Sebastian:Okay, Rod is forwarding a message from the guy who made the Linux migration tool. We talked about it on WAN last week. It helps you migrate from Windows over to Linux, supports a whole bunch of distros, does some really cool stuff. I'm currently doing a quadruple dual boot test because this tool was originally not built to install multiple Linux distros also kudos for getting the first part of my name correct good job Linus the second part is Dutch for pigeon sick okay cool nice keep up the good work that's awesome that's a it's a cool tool man hell yeah sweet thanks for forwarding that Rod

3:56:49Luke Lafreniere:Dan, hit me Hi DLL, I am a university professor and I'm getting... Oh, speaking of Dan, hit me I ran into the guy who made the thing Me too! At OpenSauce He specifically requested that I come and find him It's over there, we should show it again Yeah, yeah, yeah

3:57:06Linus Sebastian:I uh

3:57:12Luke Lafreniere:So he just, he made a little thing We don't have it plugged in right now I told him that I

3:57:17Linus Sebastian:that I kept it on a shelf behind me and he assumed that we had thrown it out immediately. No.

3:57:22Luke Lafreniere:And I was like, no, shut up.

3:57:24Linus Sebastian:You're wrong. Dude, it's so funny. It's amazing. This is art, man.

3:57:27Luke Lafreniere:Oh, yeah. Why would we throw it away? This is one for the archive.

3:57:31Linus Sebastian:Yeah, we're keeping this forever. I'm so sorry. That's fantastic.

3:57:35Luke Lafreniere:Anyway, sorry. Hit me down. Hi, DLL. I'm a university professor and I'm getting iPad kids in my first year programming. We were talking about this earlier. One couldn't even type just two finger pecking with ai tools well the next gen i mean oh yeah i can't what they don't understand as well as file systems are a big one right yeah with ai tools will the next generation even need keyboards i mean they'll need them but will they know how to use them that's the question can't they just talk to like uh copilot siri google there's a meme there's a

3:58:13Linus Sebastian:I'm pretty sure it's just a meme, but there is a Silicon Valley meme where programmers are getting rid of their keyboards because they're just speaking to their agents.

3:58:22Luke Lafreniere:I don't see that as too much of a meme, honestly, given another six months.

3:58:27Linus Sebastian:I don't want to sit there and freaking talk all the time. I want to type. Does that make me all the kids are wrong, Boomer? Boomer! Sometimes I just want to relax. It's not relaxing. Yeah, but you can sit on the couch with your eyes closed and just go like,

3:58:43Luke Lafreniere:blah, blah, blah, blah. It's also... Man, send me a div. It's always funny to me how obviously forever alone certain developments are. Like, the fact that you can be talking and not disturb anybody tells me so much about you. Just jabbering at your computer all day. Like, okay, tell me you don't share a space with someone without telling me you don't share a space with someone. That's a good point. Like, oh, man.

3:59:11Linus Sebastian:I'm stunned unintentional self-own going to university for software development not knowing how to type is wild

3:59:20Luke Lafreniere:that's crazy man and the fact that nobody at any point told this kid maybe don't go into software development

3:59:27Linus Sebastian:or like spend a weekend on what is it called a lot of people

3:59:36Luke Lafreniere:I think just go into software development because they think it's got good money in it and i think one of still one i don't know yeah i mean it's it's like it's what you read about i think maybe one of the reasons why it's so nice working here and maybe why your developers are so good is because they like like it it's kind of like fun and it's their hobby and they just

3:59:59Linus Sebastian:happen to have gone to school for something they enjoy some of them someone didn't go to school skip that part yeah started working professionally yeah i think a lot of

4:00:12Luke Lafreniere:yeah i didn't i didn't go to school for this really uh which is it's interesting what are they gonna do what are they gonna do are we cooked like as a species i think quite literally like we're past the one and a half degrees threshold right uh yeah quite quite far yeah yeah cooked but that's okay the solution is to turn on more air conditioning right yeah that's how it works oh we just had a record of power use for all time in bc just build more nuclear power what are you guys talking about i said to me i'm actually kind of pro nuclear power but no i know everybody should be i said i like i'm just i'm more green than both of you i said we should add another ocean could you maybe virtue signal harder just make another ocean yeah because we're hydroelectric we don't use stinky buildings yeah but hydroelectric only works it so so i just build another mountain just to import mount baker i think this is before your time did you you know you're post banff right we did a company workcation to banff i'm five i wasn't allowed so i i also don't yes i'm post so we did an lmg work occasion to banff and uh we went to see a glacier and they showed us like like in actual walking stepping up the hill the like spikes in the ground for how much it was receding every year and we were like oh well that's not good um what's the solution and they're like there isn't one and we're like okay so what's the outcome and they're like well this glacier has water runoff which is you know how it like melts and stuff that fills these bodies of water which powers all this hydroelectricity when it's gone there will be no electricity and i was like oh time for nuclear enrichment

4:02:28Luke Lafreniere:well I mean if we're already over 1.2 then can we just like go back to dirty coal like just give up

4:02:36Linus Sebastian:we just need to make an air conditioner for the earth so giant mirrors

4:02:42Luke Lafreniere:just put the heat data centers in space yeah or just get a big ice cube and then put it in the ocean maybe we should cool the data centers

4:02:54Linus Sebastian:in space with acs that dump the data centers in space heat on earth well put a big peltier

4:03:00Luke Lafreniere:outside in geosynchronous orbit yeah watching the data centers in space debate has been fascinating i don't know if i can remember the last time that both sides of an argument were so effectively arguing past each other it's like you've got the one side that's like they did the math it's totally possible they have a ton of experience with building satellites and cooling things in space and then you've got the other side saying there's a lot of practical problems like how do you swap a ram stick and also like the costs of the launches which by the way fuel is not getting cheaper and also like it's fucking impractical and stupid.

4:03:47Luke Lafreniere:Not that it's impossible. Not that the math doesn't work. But the real world is not just math. And they're just going...

4:03:54Linus Sebastian:What we really need to do is not use traditional launching mechanisms. What we really need to do is just spin stuff really really really fast. Okay, that thing's cool. I love spin launch.

4:04:06Luke Lafreniere:I hope if it ever works it's really cool. If it ever works for sure. Do you guys know what this is? Basically you just rip it around this like thing you spin it and then it goes Yeah, theoretically it's like a throwing

4:04:22Linus Sebastian:It makes a lot more sense on the moon to launch things away from the moon. Yeah on earth I don't know. I just push stuff to Mars if you were on the moon I mean compared to here, you know, you give it a hard kick

4:04:40Luke Lafreniere:yeah uh okay let's see ild i recently helped someone connect to wi-fi 8th gen intel laptop and it couldn't find the couldn't find any of the wireless bands from the newer router and could only connect to the stock at router stop at stop pretending i'm not pretending this one's actually really difficult uh ever heard of this before at &t at &t there's no ampersand no it's it's a mars attacks reference

4:05:22Luke Lafreniere:god i love that movie

4:05:27Luke Lafreniere:um yeah wireless is black magic um

4:05:35Luke Lafreniere:one of my one of my ongoing problems boy am i ever leaning into the first world problems on this stream is that this laptop my strix halo laptop cannot connect to the wi-fi access point on the falcon it's pretty annoying actually i should have gone with that for my workaround so what i have to do is i have to connect my z fold 7 to the wi-fi in the air and then I have to enable my mobile hotspot and then I have to hotspot to my laptop

4:06:09Linus Sebastian:at 38 ,000 feet. Can we add more things? Can we add more things? Oh, no. My fruit is too vibrant. My steak is too juicy. My lobster is too buttery. The hot tub is too hot.

4:06:24Luke Lafreniere:I think my internet not working is actually not a my fruit is too delicious problem.

4:06:30Linus Sebastian:My whiskey's too oaky.

4:06:33Luke Lafreniere:My boobel has too, no, my LaCroix has too much fruit. I mean, that would be a problem. It's supposed to be basically unpleasant. Oh, man. But yes, I've heard of randomly Wi-Fi things that supposedly are interoperable, just not working with each other. Yes, I've heard of that. It sucks, basically. Yeah, sorry to hear that Hi, John he says my heavy dick tracks

4:07:22Linus Sebastian:Oh, man.

4:07:28Luke Lafreniere:Oh, no. Did I say LaCroix? Is LaCroix? I don't know. I think I said LaCroix. I don't know. Yeah. I think it's LaCroix. I don't buy TV static.

4:07:39Linus Sebastian:oh man do people even know what that is anymore oh my god i am old tv static yeah you're probably

4:07:44Luke Lafreniere:old all right hit me down uh hi lld darn tough socks aren't available in australia so i've been waiting for the ltd socks forever why not luke what does a typical leg day look like for you i can't wait to work out and travel in these good socks you really have been waiting for them you bought five pairs. That's crazy. Four black slash gray, and then just to spice it up, that one day a week you got the magenta. Very nice. I like that. Very nice. That's actually a pretty base loadout.

4:08:17Linus Sebastian:That actually kind of makes sense to me. Yep. Okay. Business in the lots and party in the few. Alright, tell us about leg day. So I have knee problems. So I start mine by reverse walking on a treadmill. Wait. Wouldn't you start by waiting a bit? Oh my god.

4:08:38Luke Lafreniere:That reverse walk is awesome. Okay, reverse walk. Yeah, I really, really liked that. Yeah. I've never... It works really well. But how do you keep the food in it, though?

4:08:47Linus Sebastian:Oh, that's good. I like that one. That's like a top 10 2026 right there. It is tough on the... It is tough on the social anxiety scale, because you look psychotic. Oh, yeah. Okay, if you have a buddy and you're both doing it. If you have a buddy helps a lot. That's easy Even if the buddies just like chatting with you while you do it or something It helps a ton.

4:09:11Luke Lafreniere:You could be doing any stupid thing in the gym and if someone else is doing it you feel totally fine about it I've totally experienced that exact same thing

4:09:18Linus Sebastian:I don't think you've done stupid things on the level that some people do.

4:09:21Luke Lafreniere:No, that's and that's totally true But I'm also very shy and I worry about pictures of me on reddit. So I definitely have anxiety about doing stupid things in the gym. And if someone else is doing it, it like goes away.

4:09:37Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Unless it's CrossFit. Okay. So the, the, the thing is that you're fighting the resistance of the treadmill. So you actually don't want to turn the treadmill on. You leave it off and you, you face backwards on the treadmill and you kind of brace yourself on the arms of the treadmill and then push the treadmill like the right direction. The right way. Yeah. but yourself with it unpowered and then that can help warm up your knees you'll feel it in your quads a little bit as well but that can help warm up your knees for me that's very important if i don't start my leg days with that the chance that i end up with some form of injury like genuinely skyrockets this is very important for me depending on the day i will also do these weird lunges that i don't know the name of where the goal is to get your knee kind of like as far of your toe as you can without bringing your heel off the ground on your lead leg.

4:10:32Linus Sebastian:And then your back leg goes like very, very far back. I also, I don't know if you're supposed to do this. I allow myself to go a little wide with the stance on that. So I don't fall over. But yeah, I will often do those things maybe while I'm like waiting for someone to do something. From there, once I'm warmed up again for knee stuff for me i will go and i will do a bunch of quite low weight hamstring curls um to to kind of wake the hamstrings up and stuff once i'm done those i will go and bang out just a bunch of squats because hell yeah uh and then i will go and torture my quads in some way by either doing lunges until i can't or you do weighted lunges or regular lunges yeah yeah or

4:11:18Luke Lafreniere:Or both? Usually weighted. Start low weight and then work your way up?

4:11:23Linus Sebastian:I really have. So traditionally, I would do some pyramid thing where I'd start on lower weights and then work my way up. What I've been enjoying lately is the bags because the bags are kind of like weird to hold. And one of the things I like from lunges is just the stability aspect of like moving with weight. So I'll carry the bags and usually the bags are kind of more annoying to deal with. So I will stay fixed, but I'll carry a decently heavy bag. so it's either that or leg extensions and again i'm just like trying to burn down my quads basically so i'll just go really hard and then i'll end it again with light hamstring curls because heavy hamstring curls have a tendency to really wreck my knees so a lot of leg day is like dodge the knee problems but train the legs sounds like the biggest ones is the squats and lunges yeah okay I really like squats and lunges.

4:12:15Linus Sebastian:Squats and lunges are good.

4:12:16Luke Lafreniere:Cool.

4:12:17Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

4:12:18Luke Lafreniere:Hey, WAN people. What a hot take. One quick second. Sorry.

4:12:21Linus Sebastian:Gas Racing said bags help with balance. Change shoulders too. Yeah, I'll carry the bags in a variety of ways. Kind of like Zurcher by holding it like this or go on one shoulder or go on the other shoulder. I will tend to move them around a decent amount because I am trying to shift how the balance works. It's interesting that it said help with balance. Maybe with training balance. I found dumbbells or kettlebells to be the best for balance for me, but I don't actually know what the answer to that is. One of the reasons why I went to bag was actually because I found it was less stable.

4:12:53Luke Lafreniere:I can tell you that the only professional badminton players who have ever showed me how they practice weighted lunges used dumbbells.

4:13:01Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

4:13:02Luke Lafreniere:So that's the only piece of information I can provide. I don't think you guys have weighted bags, though. No, but that's what they do. Oh, yeah. Yeah, in their own gym. That would be what they do. Weighted lunges are fantastic. Yeah. And I started doing it, and he's like, no, no, you have to push off explosively with the weight. And I'm like, oh. Well, that's because you guys are trying to go for, like,

4:13:23Linus Sebastian:plyometric movement and stuff. Sure. Which is awesome. That's very cool. I like that type of training.

4:13:29Luke Lafreniere:More?

4:13:30Linus Sebastian:Hit me, Dan.

4:13:31Luke Lafreniere:Hey, WAN people, what hot take of yours from the past five years turned out to be totally on the money, or turned out to be totally wrong? Adblock is fundamentally piracy. I have seen the conversation dramatically change as people have developed more of a relationship with the creators that they follow and understand the economics of the creator economy better. As people just have become more familiar with the idea, it's not so shocking anymore. There's still people who are like super offended by that. And that's nice. It doesn't really matter. I mean, at the end of the day, I never said don't pirate.

4:14:10Linus Sebastian:Yeah, you're drawing your own line.

4:14:11Luke Lafreniere:What I said was, you know, decide what's right for you, but understand the impact. That's all I ever said. And one of the funniest, and it's been interesting watching the way the diehards who have not given in on this have kind of moved the goalposts. Like one of the big arguments at the beginning was, you know, Google doesn't define it that way on the YouTube platform. And then it was like shortly after that YouTube did update their terms of service and was like, yeah, like doing anything that counters our ad delivery mechanisms is against TOS. And like, yeah, it's like super against TOS. It's the form of payment for the content that you are consuming.

4:14:51Luke Lafreniere:And if it's not worth it to you, then the not pirate version of that is you don't consume it or you do consume it. or option number three, conveniently in the shape of a hat, is you just own it. And I never said, don't do it, don't own it. I never said, don't do it. I just said, own it. That's all. And as for ones that turned out to be totally wrong, I mean, I always go back to this one. Back when that first guy bought a house with Bitcoin, I was like, this is stupid. This will go absolutely nowhere. And now I wish I had had Bitcoin at that time.

4:15:30Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I forgot about the wrong side, so I'll kind of steal similarly from that. I remember very early days when we were both still at NCIX. We were looking around at a bunch of GPUs in the room, and I was like, maybe we should put these on benches and mine coins, and then just kind of shrugged and didn't bother. Yeah, we both were like, maybe we should, and we both just didn't bother.

4:15:50Luke Lafreniere:We looked at how much it took to mine a whole coin, and we were like... That would take too many weeks. yeah or days even because this was very only get 10 yeah oh no it was way more than that in a block

4:16:04Linus Sebastian:wasn't it just like 50 to 100 it's crazy so that's that's i think about that surprisingly often because we had so much access to hardware we could have actually power we could have just

4:16:16Luke Lafreniere:left it running there nobody cared no not at all um thing that ended up being true i mean i think the most the most like luke just crystal balling the future has was probably drone warfare but i don't know if that was on when maybe not on when like i've been talking about that for a long time like really long time like basically going back like years before the russia ukraine conflict like talking about how like when is everybody going to figure out that swarms of cheap drones with c4 on them is going to completely completely invalidate any kind of at the time modern air defense um this is a huge problem how is nobody paying attention to this we had like a ton of conversations about it do you see the do you see uh do you see britain's laser gun yeah that's pretty cool very interesting because rate of fire is now however much power you can feed it yeah um that that one's pretty cool the range looked actually pretty decent on it but like yeah i mean it's only it's literally an arms race like i wonder how a really rapidly spinning drone

4:17:33Linus Sebastian:that you can't really see you will apply to that yeah but it wouldn't be able to what kind of a payload could it carry tiny tiny right but then how big of a payload do you need to assassinate a person if you're shape charging a single person you might be able to get away with it it's it's the whole thing is very interesting but it's my argument and this was a very very long time ago but my argument was that the industrial might has always been an incredibly important part of war especially going back to like the origins of total war with napoleon and stuff and if you look at industrial right might right now it's pretty centralized bruh and that centralized place is really good at making what batteries lots of small cheap motors yeah all of those things plastics like pretty much everything involved cameras honestly um like like honestly everything chemicals okay yeah yeah literally everything critical minerals they want us to keep listing things particularly really good at making yeah and i'm looking at the the the equations for how something would go with what kind of volume they could output if china went on a total war path and was just like okay every single factory in the country is now doing this like cool nice laser bro i don't know man i think uh I think we would all be lucky little people if the Russia-Ukraine war is the end of...

4:19:06Linus Sebastian:I mean, it's literally not even the end. We've been watching this with Iran. It's... Anyways, yeah.

4:19:14Luke Lafreniere:Do you see that Ukrainian drone that's just like made out of plywood? You knew the one I was talking about immediately. Yeah. That thing is sick. That is wild. It's... The second rev of it that had the way extended range is crazy.

4:19:31Linus Sebastian:Yep.

4:19:33Luke Lafreniere:The climate wars are going to be nuts.

4:19:41Luke Lafreniere:Jamon says China's building a dozen nuclear reactors. Maybe 10x that number. I have no idea how many they're actually building, but China's working on some really cool small modular ones that look sick. And I guarantee you they're building more than a dozen of them. You might be right about the like large scale ones though.

4:19:57Linus Sebastian:There was some interview. I think it was between Zelensky and Trump, but I actually don't remember. I didn't really care about who he was sitting next to. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you want to go to Moscow to meet with Putin? I won't go to Moscow. Too many Ukrainian drones there. So funny, dude. Oh, my God.

4:20:16Luke Lafreniere:And it was fast. Yeah. Well, it's almost like he was a comedian in another life. Yeah. Yeah. Dude's sharp.

4:20:24Linus Sebastian:That was like, oh my god. Will you go to, yeah, anyways. Wild. Last one I got for you today.

4:20:35Luke Lafreniere:Also for Luke. I know you're not super impressed with your Switch 2, but I was just wondering if you're going to pick up Splatoon Raiders. Seems to be Nintendo's take on Looter Shooter. Really?

4:20:49Linus Sebastian:Looter Shooter? Splatoon Raiders? Nintendo in current year? It's out already?

4:21:00Linus Sebastian:What is this? I actually really enjoyed the first Splatoon. I actually genuinely thought it was a good game. If it's multiplayer only honestly I'm not interested at all. And honestly if it's single player... Scour the Spiralite Islands. Search for treasure. Fighting big. Okay so there's PvE stuff involved? Fight Salmonoids, gather salvage, and uncover mysteries of the islands. Is this PvP? How does this work? Tink with your gear. Man, Tarkov, but you're actually... Squid is...

4:21:37Luke Lafreniere:Single player. In this single player focused game, play as a mechanic. Huh. Can you play co-op though? If you can play co-op. This seems like it would be super fun co-op.

4:21:47Linus Sebastian:I'm probably just going to get it if you can play a co-op.

4:21:51Luke Lafreniere:With your gear. Something, something, speed tank, power tank, tactical tank. The gameplay looks pretty fun. Moving, swim, sore, ink. Okay, okay, okay. The mechanic. Anyone, anyone?

4:22:05Linus Sebastian:Different archetypes.

4:22:08Luke Lafreniere:Co-op, anyone? I'm going with chat because this is not telling us nothing.

4:22:14Linus Sebastian:Call our friends for help. You can also join up with up to three other players online or via local wireless. Do you not need

4:22:23Luke Lafreniere:the Nintendo thing? The game will scale power automatically to make sure everyone has a good time. Okay. That looks pretty fun. That genuinely looks really fun.

4:22:32Linus Sebastian:Very cool. There was a double asterisk on the... Okay. Additional games and systems required for multiplayer modes sold separately. It doesn't say that you need... Nintendo Online.

4:22:42Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. That's pretty cool.

4:22:43Linus Sebastian:That is so wicked.

4:22:45Luke Lafreniere:Every once in a while Nintendo does something pretty cool.

4:22:47Linus Sebastian:This genuinely looks sick. I will probably get this. I didn't know this existed. Thank you for the heads up.

4:22:53Luke Lafreniere:All right. And I think that's pretty much it for today. Wicked. We will see you guys again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. It's not doing it. It's not doing it. Oh, no. Okay, I guess the WAM show goes forever now. Oh, no. We got to wait another week.

4:23:13Linus Sebastian:The physical version being so much more expensive is so lame.

4:23:17Luke Lafreniere:What do I do? $15 Canadian dollars at$10 US. It's worth the reflip. Let's watch him panic. Do you want to get at least$10 off flipping the physical version? What do I do?

4:23:30Linus Sebastian:Oh, there it is. Bye. Oh, now he's stuck there.

4:23:37Luke Lafreniere:I had it. It's an invisible. This is all invisible over it. And I had it disabled because of the feet cam. Ah. Right. Thank you.