The Linux Challenge Is Going… - WAN Show February 27, 2026

16:27Linus Sebastian:different from mine someone in flow plane chat said uh yes steam deck is very beginner friendly but linus keeps picking non-beginner friendly distros as far as my understanding goes pop os is widely known as a fairly beginner friendly distro that's literally why people keep recommending

16:44Luke Lafreniere:it it's also friendly for people who are on nvidia graphics which and i had someone ask this in the chat just now which i wasn't but what i wanted was to use the same distro across my multiple systems okay my main desktop at home is radion my laptop which is what you have the land my daily driver is radion yeah uh sorry i had my main desktop not the laptop i kind of gestured over here and you kind of pointed this direction it kind of seemed like it was i had my desktop at the land i also had this uh so my my main desktop and my laptop are both radion but my my downstairs gaming machine is GeForce and so is the one in the theater room which is where I've actually been doing more of my gaming and so what I really wanted and that's one of the special sauce things with Pop!

17:30Luke Lafreniere:OS is that it's out of the box GeForce ready yeah and so so yes I did pick a distro because I wanted it to be more like non-Linux hardware optimized friendly but that wasn't what I was using I was using the Radeon build, and I installed it onto a Ryzen Radeon, all AMD all the time system. So there should have been no real challenge there. But the challenges just kept on coming. I showed Luke another clip earlier, so I don't have to show it to him now. We're in Helldivers 2. So that's the second game that I tried to play. He sees the character moving around on screen. It's running at, you know, I didn't install Windows on a separate partition and then benchmark them back and forth.

18:17Luke Lafreniere:It felt pretty solid though. Yeah, it was smooth. Yeah. It was smooth. It felt good. And then I scrolled down and you can see my mouse hand going like this. And I go back up and you can see that the mouse look is not working at all. What I never showed Luke is some of the troubleshooting steps that I went through to try to resolve that. So I tried rebinding mouse look. And if I bound look up to instead of mouse movement to like left click, I could totally look up. Okay. so it was capturing the mouse so it was perfectly capable of getting something from my mouse my mouse was definitely working yeah it was perfectly capable of tilting the camera up weird but the actual mouse movement was not being registered my controller worked perfectly though so this was for gaming with the vips with the whales and so i was like well i guess i'm gaming on a controller

19:14Linus Sebastian:You can do that at least. Man, I hate shooters on a controller, but yeah, it is what it is.

19:18Luke Lafreniere:Also, did I point out to you the weird border on the top and the left? Did you see that? Oh. The weird like two pixel wide white border? Yeah. Yeah, I never figured that one out. That's just top and left? Yeah, just top and left. Strange. The most fun one though is the one that I'm going to show to you guys. And that's this issue where my... Here, maybe I'll send this over to... Oh. Producer Dan is gone. So we're going to do this the super janky way. Nice. Classic Wansha moment.

19:50Linus Sebastian:Do you want me to switch cameras? Oh, no, you're just going to do the front one? Oh, yeah. Okay. Okay. I think... Oh, no.

20:02Linus Sebastian:It's pretty wild. I still don't... I don't know how you would even make this happen because it's not only that there's three windows open, which I don't even know. Maybe you can do that in Steam. Maybe you can't. but it's also that they're all doing the inputs but they're not showing the menus so like only the one that he's actively selected on shows the menu but when he scrolls they all scroll it's so strange yeah so this part they're not going to be able to hear you but as he moves his mouse over to the other window it's still navigating in the previous one it's a little hard to see but like man it's it's strange it's uh it's very weird we can still hear them oh my bad sorry i didn't think you'd be able to yell out enough they kind of can i guess dan's mic is there too um so i've never seen that before that was weird never seen that before either and like you know you can you can in a lot of different things you can make multiple versions of it come up um but usually they don't all mirror the inputs and steam it shouldn't be yeah i've never can you open multiple instances of I've never wanted to.

21:11Linus Sebastian:I've never tried. Never looked into it. But like you can with, no? Okay. You can with a decent amount of other things.

21:19Luke Lafreniere:And so I'm going to have a lot of people, as often happens, whenever I say anything critical of Linux, I'm going to have a lot of people coming at me for this, assuming that I did something egregiously wrong.

21:34Linus Sebastian:So, and I'm not saying anything. What led up to that? Go ahead.

21:38Luke Lafreniere:Do it.

21:38Linus Sebastian:Do it. pre-show viewers will get it what do it do it you coward what led up to that I'm like Shia I'm gonna run away from the press

21:46Luke Lafreniere:do it

21:49Linus Sebastian:just what I'm not saying anything what steps led up to that like what happened so you just launched the computer and it was just there or did you come out of a game or like what

21:58Luke Lafreniere:oh it's hard to say so what would I have been doing at this point I was playing helldivers so I would have been so you're in the game and then you

22:09Linus Sebastian:I assume you close the game and then it's doing that.

22:11Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, and then I, oh, shoot. Okay, don't quote me on this, but I think it was when I like re-maximize it or something like that. I'd like get to somehow. I really don't remember. When you re-maximize the Steam window? Yeah, because like if you minimize it, it goes.

22:26Linus Sebastian:People are saying you can have multiple windows of Steam open, which I'm not too surprised by. But that also wasn't multiple windows. No, and to do that, I'm assuming you'd have to like launch argument, the like executable or whatever.

22:37Luke Lafreniere:I'd probably have to do something.

22:39Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Because Steam does not behave like that normally. I've never, I don't know if Steam's on here, but I've never, literally never had multiple windows of Steam open. I don't know. This is one of those, dude,

22:49Luke Lafreniere:this is one of those things where it's just like,

22:57Luke Lafreniere:don't blame, don't blame Blanket Linux, blame PopOS or yourself. And it's like, unfortunately, Unfortunately, this is one of the challenges that Linux has with wide adoption is that, and man, it's both the most beautiful, incredible thing about open source. And it's also the biggest problem that it has to overcome is that you can find a flavor for anything. anything like was it you that i was talking to when i said something like you could have a you could have a distro of linux that's for like gamers who hate my little pony or something like that or no i was i think i was talking to someone else and they were like really and i was like i was like no and they're like oh yeah that makes sense that would be stupid but like the fact that i believed you i think that might have been me actually yeah maybe that was you is so

23:51Linus Sebastian:emblematic of the problem there's so much fragmentation and like one of the one of the things is you can say people know it as linux even that in itself is flawed yeah very so like so like even that statement alone has problems it has huge problems linux is the kernel yeah Right? So to assume that people are going to always exactly properly address the thing that might be causing the issue is like obviously a fallacy. That is not going to happen. So people are going to just blanket call it Linux because they've been blanket calling the whole thing Linux for a long time.

24:32Luke Lafreniere:Grellwing says, SteamOS is not intended to be a wide release. It's an OS for boutique hardware. Not actually true. uh val well at least not originally true when valve announced steam os and the steam deck they announced their intention at some point to make steam os an os that you could you could download and install on your own hardware in fact you can do it today it just has to be on kind of specific hardware which is the reason that i ultimately didn't use it because i do have systems

25:02Linus Sebastian:that are nvidia and you wanted the same thing across all of them and i i wanted to choose

25:07Luke Lafreniere:something that somebody with nvidia hardware might choose for ease of use especially because my plan is to install it across multiple systems which i haven't actually done yet because it's been such a pain in the butt um yeah so let's see what else i don't actually know if there's anything else in here uh here's the here's the weird steam interface bug but just two windows this time this was the first time i encountered it. So I actually encountered this multiple times which is pretty wild. I can interact with both of them but if I mouse over one of them it like is interacting with the other one.

25:48Luke Lafreniere:Yeah because like

25:48Linus Sebastian:if it was just properly two instances of Steam that shouldn't be happening. So what he's showing is two completely different windows in two completely different areas when he moves his mouse on one I'm moving my mouse here. It interacts with the other one.

26:01Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. That's a lag. So my mouse cursor is over here and then you can see the menus on the window on the right actually moving and in this one it was more bugged because

26:13Linus Sebastian:the whole interface is just gone it's just a black box yeah that is weird you can kind of see it like faintly in the background uh someone said did luca with mint no um i decided to mix it up i i still really like mint i actually genuinely thought like you know maybe i should go back to like old faithful. I don't really actually use Linux all that much, but that tends to be the one that I go to when I do use Linux. But I had been running this. It's not currently installed on my laptop because we're trying to figure out a hardware problem and they didn't believe in Linux. So we have Windows running on it right now.

26:50Linus Sebastian:But I had been running just Arch on my laptop for a long time to try to prove like, look, if you're not doing much on your system, you can kind of run whatever and my entire use case for my work laptop is basically in a browser so i was like it's not going to matter and yeah it didn't really matter um so and and my my basically point there was like i'm not interacting with the operating system basically ever like i don't i didn't do anything very interesting with arch um i was i'm just running two browsers firefox and chrome that's it on arch by the way so like so that was that was why i did that on my laptop so i thought thought maybe i would try to extend that idea into the desktop space but i didn't want to just use arch again um so i went with cache eos and that's not the only reason so cache eos is built on built on arch but that's not the only reason the other reason why i did it was because steam os is built on arch yep so i was like okay what's a what's a like gamer version of arch because i'm going to want this on my desktop i'm going to play games here i'm going to do other stuff here I don't want to just run Arch like I did on my laptop because I'm actually going to do more with it the point isn't the same now right the point with the laptop was it doesn't really matter if

28:07Luke Lafreniere:all you're doing is a browser and that's the beauty of Linux horses for courses you can choose a different distro depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish so now I'm

28:15Linus Sebastian:trying to accomplish more I'm trying to do more gaming stuff CashUS their tagline is a performance focused Arch Linux distribution that rebuilds packages with modern CPU optimizations I don't know i heard it's good for gaming and it's arch and by the way i did that on my laptop and and uh and steam os is built in it so i was like hoping you know maybe some kind i don't know maybe things will work better through steam there i have no idea i didn't do a lot of research like this is the more gamery version of the thing i've been using lately i'll just do that super trendy it is very trendy right yeah like it hyper trend maybe yeah maybe a third reason it's super trendy right now is actually one of the reasons why I chose it.

28:57Linus Sebastian:So, so same core as SteamOS. It's super trendy right now. And it's based on the thing that I'm using on my, on my laptop anyway. So there's some familiarity.

29:06Luke Lafreniere:So I'm going to jump in and go the hyper trendiness of it is actually the one of the reasons I didn't choose it. Fair enough. Because this kind of like flavor of the week, hyper trendy it's weird people have mostly forgotten about bazite already that's crazy right wild to me that's not the kind of thing that i like to lock myself into like whenever we whenever we do any kind of actual benchmarking or performance testing anytime anyone talks to me i'm like ubuntu because yeah it's just it's just there you know it might not have the sex appeal but it's there it's been there it's been there for us it's it's it's it's the it's the if you want to look at if you want to zoom way out over time it's the consumer linux it's been there for

29:58Linus Sebastian:everybody everybody knows about a bunch of people are saying like oh bazite's still cool we're not trying to say bazite isn't cool yeah what we're trying to say was to be personally attacked here roughly six months ago if you discussed linux at all and didn't say bazite every second word you would get screamed at. And that is already no longer true. And now a lot of people are saying, Cashi, Cashi, Cashi. That's not, that's definitely the third out of the reasons that I had. But I did, I was interested in checking it out. And I will say for the more involved experience, because again, I didn't get this on my laptop.

30:31Linus Sebastian:There are things I miss about Mint. Cashi's cool. It's been fine. I haven't really had any problems. Nice, good for you. Happy for you. There are things that I'm still planning on doing that I suspect might cause some problems So we'll see how that goes, but I'm only I started after you. I'm only a few days into this, right? I am pretty fresh and I haven't done a ton on it. So we'll see how it goes didn't take me doing a ton

30:55Luke Lafreniere:All I had to do was launch a first-party valve game in steam I didn't even talk about those audio issues. I had in discord

31:05Linus Sebastian:Oh, yeah, everyone's audio was so quiet.

31:08Luke Lafreniere:I could barely hear them it in. Did you ever fix that? A reboot.

31:11Linus Sebastian:Just sort of magically made it go away. I did have some weird, there's one of the recordings that I sent in. Yeah. After I played it back, I didn't know this while I was recording it, but after I played it back, it's like a little laggy. That was happening in, when I was like watching videos and a couple other things as well. I noticed it when I was watching a YouTube video that the YouTube video would hitch every once in a blue moon. Oh, I hadn't restarted the system literally once yet. I wonder if it's like a hardware acceleration issue or something no idea restarted the system one time problem in a way and i had done that recording before the system restart so i you know one restart after doing some updates and stuff sure not a big deal yeah but that's that's the only thing i've really ran into so far but like i don't love the like package manager you mentioned how like oh i found the pop us store pretty quick and then it's also just the bottom left icon it was like right there the name was

32:02Luke Lafreniere:like it's like they were trying to not call it app store they were they were so desperately trying to call it anything but app store so that they wouldn't have to call it app store that they ended up with a name that just i forget what it is but it just like was not that obvious to me

32:20Linus Sebastian:uh but yeah it's so like i'm probably gonna go get an alternative store at some point because like i don't love the default one it works um there's been a decent amount of things i've i've

32:29Luke Lafreniere:looked for that weren't there no it's called hold on hold on jump in it's called pop shop which is a perfectly reasonable name okay when i when i mouse over it seems pretty it was called something it was called i swear it was called something else it was not called pop shop i have no idea charge nuclei says it's not an app store i yeah i know but sometimes we use words for things like atm machine it's not an atm machine because the machine is the m and the yeah but like sometimes we just say things so that people understand what they are and what their function

32:58Linus Sebastian:is and by the way there's a bunch of people spamming me right now use this and use that thing i'm sorry i'm not gonna listen uh i'm just gonna do stuff and we'll see how it works um if i run into a problem i'll google it i'll i'll look it up in some other way i'll i'll consult the sands i'll do whatever um but i don't want to go based on like chat recommendations because that doesn't seem like a normal um experience that someone would have so i'm literally just gonna brain dump everything you guys tell me um now like yeah if i read something on a forum or whatever i'll take information from there but i don't want to use it on alternate route and i'm also not having problems really i just don't love it it doesn't seem great like the package manager but i can get a new one uh not a problem i'm not too worried about it um yeah other than that like no major no major issues i felt mint was very comfy for me and i am now i would say slightly outside of the comfort zone desktop environment that i really didn't stretch for i just went with cinnamon which is the one that i'm most used to um i did also install um hyperland just in case i want to go have fun but i'm very used to cinnamon and I'm happy to be with it.

34:16Linus Sebastian:So I said go with Budgie. I saw that because the name, I thought it might be fun, but yeah, you can use Cinnamon with Arch. Yeah. Yeah. I have Cinnamon installed on both laptop and desktop, I think. Good luck. Re-Hyperland. Yeah, that's the reason why I didn't only install Hyperland. I don't know that I'll ever touch Hyperland. I might just literally not get to it.

34:39Luke Lafreniere:Apparently it's called the Cosmic Store. so it's uh is it is it this one i think it's this one when i moused over it it wasn't it wasn't super obvious so i forget what comes up does it just say cosmic i'm i'm actually not sure so don't quote don't quote me on any of that uh cosmic store another another thing i'll say is like

35:00Linus Sebastian:and we have to we have to basically address this every time and and i think there is a subset of linux mega nerds that actually don't want the year of linux desktop to be a thing i know because then it would be not like then it's not as cool yes exactly i think that is a subset probably not that big of a subset but i do think that is a subset of people but um man yeah there's uh and i don't know maybe people should rtfm a little more and google things themselves and stuff but like i'll come across a reddit thread where somebody's like oh how do i do this thing in like an arch-based distro and instead of just like oh here's your actually like really simple answer because the question you asked is like not that deep there will be like a seven paragraph thing about how you're a freaking idiot and you should never touch arch and you should probably go back to windows you tiny little insignificant baby and it's like dude relax like oh my god i think it was like i think the guy was like how do i install steam yeah it was how do i install steam and arch and the reason why i looked that up which seems really basic was because i was just stunned it wasn't in the package manager yeah i was like what like really and like i ended i ended up just installing it like i i just pac-manned it but like i was a little bit surprised because like yeah i'm comfortable enough i can use the command line and stuff but i kind of the gui's there

36:22Luke Lafreniere:i kind of like it's fine it's almost like basically everything for 98 of people has moved to gui

36:33Linus Sebastian:for a reason. And it's weird that Steam isn't in there. Like Steam's pretty normal. No. Chrome also wasn't in there, but Chromium was. I thought that was just kind of a funny little... There might be some other reason for that, but I was like, okay, whatever. I'll just try Chromium and see how that goes. So I'm running Chromium instead of Chrome. Because I always... I do Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work. I've always done that. The separation actually, at this point, is like very fluent. not doing that would be very weird right like if i did personal stuff in chrome or work stuff in firefox it would probably feel very odd um so like okay i've got my two everything's fine um teams is like a problem have you done that have you installed teams i haven't installed teams yet oh i like man it sucks there's there's no like official microsoft yet there used to be though there was a long time ago yeah i think maybe the first time we did the challenge there was

37:29Luke Lafreniere:I think we were right on the cusp. It still existed, but the support for it was bad or something. Got it. Don't quote me on that, but I remember it being a thing. We definitely discussed it at the time.

37:43Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Teams is the reason Luke will go postal. It's already annoying. I had a meeting, so how our meetings tend to work is you get a Teams meeting that is attached to your calendar invite. So you click on that and then it brings you into the meeting. It's not, in my opinion, it's really whack. Guys, stop telling me to try things. I'm not going to listen to you. I've already said that. You can stop. I'm legitimately not. I will probably avoid the things that you tell me to do.

38:15Luke Lafreniere:That is the most wrong thing you've ever said. You said you can stop. They can't. They actually can't stop. They're addicted to the shindig.

38:28Linus Sebastian:but okay so i i've in in windows it you click on that link and it'll be like oh you have teams installed do you want to just open this with your desktop application and like yeah every time i would prefer to do that thank you um i don't think because it's maybe because it's an unofficial app maybe there's some way i can link the two i'm sure there is i haven't done the work to do that yet But right now, it really only wants to open in the browser. So the first call that I had to take, I ended up being like, I answered in the browser. And then it was like a little whack. And I was like, hey, can I just call you through the app?

39:02Linus Sebastian:And then we did. And I click call on the app. And then I think it doesn't work. And like 15 seconds later, the call goes and actually does something. And I'm like, oh, okay. So like the biggest problem I've had so far is just teams, which is kind of funny. because Discord actually worked flawlessly. Not for me. Oh, right. I'm glad yours was. Forgot about that. Sorry about that. Yeah, no problem. So Discord and Slack both worked immediately with no issues. But yeah, Teams was a problem, but it seemed very centralized to Teams. Rest assured says in chat,

39:38Luke Lafreniere:you were on Cosmic. Is that five question marks? That's in beta, still borderline alpha. I don't know, brother. I just downloaded whatever was on System76's website.

39:51Luke Lafreniere:I don't know dude It just says now with cosmic I don't make the rules man Maybe what I managed to do Maybe what I managed to do Was catch them at a bad time again

40:13Linus Sebastian:Wouldn't that be just the way cosmic is borked cosmic is not new cosmic is 1.0 now see

40:21Luke Lafreniere:to me 1.0 means new and pre 1.0 means not even new yet like to me to me 1.0 is the infant baby like it's still like completely worthless you ask that infant baby to shovel the snow in the driveway useless infant baby toss it out there it doesn't even move anything before that is in womb so yeah if i'd known better maybe i wouldn't have gone pop os but now i'm gonna at least i'm gonna at least give it a shot i'm gonna well i feel like i've given it a shot oh i don't want to change it it's such a i feel if if changing your operating system is not your hobby then this is not an attractive proposition and i think that's something a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their brain around yeah yeah changing my os is not my hobby redoing the plumbing in my computer yeah that's my hobby you like the hardware i could be i could be convinced to do that

41:21Linus Sebastian:clean out my blocks yeah yeah i i will say like it's been fine but it has been like oh right i have to install that thing okay oh i'm not logged in on all of the different things that's annoying huh slack's been quiet today oh yeah i don't have that installed yet crap that's why it's been quiet today oh no and then install that and then oh everything's fine

41:49Luke Lafreniere:okay cool and i think it's uh yeah and i think it's i think it's one of those things where like it all depends on you know what your baggage is right i hate logging into things i feel like half of my life is logging into things because i do so many disparate tasks in so many disparate platforms that like almost anytime i get interrupted and i have to do anything i'm logging in again and fetching a two-factor thing again and then going in remote desktopping into some other thing to retrieve some other token that i need to like there's always i'm always logging into something so if you tell me hey guess what linus there's this trendy new linux distro all you have to do is log into all your okay i'm done not interested the conversation's actually over now that went from fun and interesting to kill it with fire yeah with that with that fast

42:53Linus Sebastian:yeah i i do i will say i really appreciate actually the login methods for discord and steam these days the qr coding from your phone it's okay is oh it's pretty fast for me i i didn't even open those specific apps i just opened my camera the camera used the link to open that app to the screen where it did the scan thing and then i just was like oh okay that worked and then it scanned it and it just logged me in instancing i didn't do anything it was amazing for me

43:22Luke Lafreniere:i have my steam password memorized so maybe it's just oh well that friction of taking taking anything out of my pocket is just sort of annoying that's an example of how many damn times you have to log into things i dude i like very rarely logged in my steam i have way too many of my passwords memorized now just because it's faster than typing in my master password and then going and getting my two-factor and then doing my single sign-on.

43:51Luke Lafreniere:They promised us that pass keys were going to remove the friction. And single sign-on was supposed to make everything magically better.

43:58Linus Sebastian:Well, and then it got hyper-paywalled. Single sign-on getting hyper-paywalled is like one of the worst things that have happened to modern computing, in my opinion. Yeah, I don't know. Right now... I need something stronger. I haven't ran into anything that would make me run back to Windows. I have only been using it for a little bit, and I suspect I'm going to hit a hard wall. Yeah, the Indiana Jones game hasn't come out, you know. Exactly. I'm going to hit a hard wall where it's an anti-cheat thing or something like that, and I just can't run it on this system, and I'm going to go, what the heck?

44:34Linus Sebastian:And then I'm going to end up back on Windows.

44:35Luke Lafreniere:You'll hit the exact same one that I did at the LAN. There's seven people waiting in a lobby for me. Yeah, that's going to drive me nuts. And I'm f***ing around with my special snowflake Linux while everyone else is sitting here going, okay, so what? Because of your special dietary restriction, we need to make an entirely new meal for you and play the game that you can play? Actually, we don't really need you in our friend group that badly. That sucks, yeah. And that happens.

45:01Linus Sebastian:And that happens. Maybe you have a super happy fun time friend group that you've been with forever and that doesn't happen to you and that's great, but that does actually happen.

45:11Luke Lafreniere:And even if it doesn't, and they're nice about it, it doesn't mean that it doesn't cause friction.

45:15Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Yeah.

45:17Luke Lafreniere:I mean. And it might happen slow. I mean, there's someone, and this is someone that I like very much and enjoy as a person, but there's someone who kind of stopped getting gaming invites from us because it was very high friction.

45:43Luke Lafreniere:and I love working for him.

45:49Luke Lafreniere:That's a bit of a tell.

45:51Linus Sebastian:Which narrows things down a little.

46:00Luke Lafreniere:But between audio problems and just general connection stability and, you know, just,

46:12Linus Sebastian:Oh man, that's pretty funny. Who'd you think I was talking about?

46:17Luke Lafreniere:I'm just kidding. I know who you thought I was talking about.

46:23Linus Sebastian:I was going to say, there's another one. Yeah, I guess we're those people.

46:30Luke Lafreniere:I haven't been playing with you guys lately. I don't like that.

46:34Linus Sebastian:Yo, what the f***? It happens, man. What the heck? man mr. Tech problems Mr. Tech tips got a lot of tech problems

46:43Luke Lafreniere:I'm late for a left for dead lobby one time

46:45Linus Sebastian:sometimes we got an hour to play and sometimes it takes you an hour to be set up listen listen

46:55Linus Sebastian:oh sorry I have to update I have to update the transversal auxiliary wave pump in my 14th computer in my 7th room so that I can play in the in my theater room but never mind that's not going to work because little man wants to play there so i'm going to play in this other place and then i'm going to play in the upstairs and then my thing isn't going to work and i'll see you guys in an hour never mind i can't play because if i need some help i'll be back in 20 minutes actually this is these other people what if we just what if we what if everyone just remoted in my computer and we play that way away that doesn't work never mind we'll do this other thing okay you've kind of touched on a

47:31Luke Lafreniere:number of issues i have a very troubleshooting oriented personality type i i get i get fixated on a goal and sometimes my goal is something like we need to play 5v5 yeah and then you have issues with like exit the game barely even supports it or like the remote software like steam remote uh what is it remote play together doesn't support that many controllers but but parsec does and you and you make your way down these all these like troubleshooting steps okay so that's that's one of the personality issues that you've identified. Thank you very much. Another one is the multiple systems and some of them being in various states of setup.

48:10Luke Lafreniere:Yes. Okay. That's a reflection of my fragmented mind. Sure. Okay. Let's go with that for personality flaw. Number two, the last one is actually, um, this one comes up a lot and is the one that I guess I don't really talk to you guys about as much, but comes up more often than the other ones. But sometimes I will go such a long period of time between gaming sessions that like everything's everything's out of date everything is demanding updates yeah and that is such an annoying thing about modern gaming that even with a fast internet connection i need to be seated at my computer if i haven't played in a couple months so there could be like a major patch on the game or there could be like a game ready driver or you know whatever right um or or like just your crap all logs you out because you know how things spontaneously log you out now and so you have to be like seated at your computer 20 minutes ahead of time in order to make your game date it's like at that point i might as well drive to someone's house and we can just plug in controllers and play xbox one honestly yeah not one.

49:18Luke Lafreniere:The first one. Where you just put the disc in it and you play Halo.

49:23Linus Sebastian:That'd be sick.

49:23Luke Lafreniere:You just needler each other until everyone's just angry. You know?

49:29Linus Sebastian:It honestly just sounds more fun at that point. Swords, shotguns, Halo 2, the map where there's the ramps and the towers and the blue boingy thing. Solid. Heck yeah, dude. No, but in all actuality, we just haven't been playing very much. Life's been busy. Yeah, I hear ya.

49:47Luke Lafreniere:but like every time i go to smash champs every time without fail someone says hey you're back and like i do go there once in a while but i'm not attending like i had been like i played ladder last night and um oh you mean for for badminton yeah yeah yeah sorry you said when i go to smash my brain's just like whale loot no yeah yeah that makes sense yeah um so i'm just like i'm not like I'm not seeing members of the community nearly as much as they have gotten used to seeing me. Can you believe it's been open for a year?

50:21Linus Sebastian:It's pretty wild. How crazy is that? It was fun having all the LAN attendees look through the doors and just go like, whoa.

50:29Luke Lafreniere:It went the other way too. Oh, yeah.

50:31Linus Sebastian:Yeah, badminton people were like, what the heck is going on?

50:34Luke Lafreniere:What is this? Because I was actually playing in the morning of the Saturday. so I was playing badminton from 9 to 11 with a group that came up from Seattle so it's not like we could just meet another time and play because they were up for a couple of them had a birthday or something so they came up, they did the new go-kart place in Richmond I haven't tried it yet, have you been? the two level one, it looks awesome I didn't know we had a two level one yeah, they were closed for renovations for like ever and I want to go maybe we should we should do it for summer fun, summer's coming up that'd be sweet Speeders?

51:09Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I think it's that one. Multi-level tracks. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah, so I want to go there. Here, here, here. Luke Laptop. Endless ways to play. Oh, look.

51:18Linus Sebastian:Yeah, this is clearly them going up. Whoa. Yeah. 30 minutes. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, I know. They have laser tag and stuff, too? Is this the new, like, Castle Fun Park? No, it's in Richmond. Speeders has been there for a long time, but they reno. No, but I mean, like, the, you know, They have laser tag, they have bowling, they have darts, they have mini golf. Castle Fun Park is still my Castle Fun Park.

51:43Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Too soon. I know I heard they flooded again. Bro.

51:47Linus Sebastian:I feel so bad for them. It's gotta be really... If you visit up here and need a thing to do some night for some reason, maybe you're here for work or whatever, Castle Fun Park is genuinely a really good time.

51:59Luke Lafreniere:Go to Castle Fun Park.

51:59Linus Sebastian:It's a bit out of the way and they've had nature trying to tear them down. they've they've they had some underground experiences like they had this really cool actually underground mini golf and stuff and their place got flooded and those underground areas got

52:14Luke Lafreniere:how could abbotsford be subject to so many acts of god it's right in the name it's the fort of abbots yeah um but yeah check this out like uh oh right so yeah so i was playing with the badminton people and like multiple of the the group that came up was like what is that and i'm like oh well it's like it's a lan like for gaming they're like oh like esports i'm like yeah kind of

52:42Linus Sebastian:if you could only play with the people at the lan and pretty much everyone was bad yeah yeah kind of um no offense i'm including myself in that to be clear but yeah like uh

52:53Luke Lafreniere:dude on the badminton side we've been open for one year and this is what it looks like right now that's really cool like this is this is crazy it like kind of yeah you can kind of see it but like we kind of accidentally like a whole like business and it's it's funny right because like you see so many like there's people waiting on the side right now you can see everyone like waiting off court you people who don't like understand um the sport and the popularity of the sport uh there were so many comments on the initial videos like announcing it dude those

53:26Linus Sebastian:courts were like very active until like three four in the morning during whale land like i'd go kind of poke my head over every once in a while and then i think there might have been a few even

53:38Luke Lafreniere:outside of those hours but like i kind of stopped the late night stuff i think was mostly lmg people i was goofing around with them for a bit and like yvonne was over there uh i think like a bunch of the accounting people were over there and stuff people are still using it but yeah like it's um I don't know. Yeah, there were a lot of just like, this is so incredibly stupid. This will never be a viable business. It's like, guys, people need stuff to do.

54:02Linus Sebastian:Third places, man. Yeah. Give me some third places. And no offense to speeders, but give me some third places that aren't$100 every half hour.

54:10Luke Lafreniere:I had never heard the term before until I was chatting with Sherrod. Yeah. Third place? Yeah, third place.

54:19Linus Sebastian:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

54:20Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, and he was just talking about the lack of third places. And I'd actually like, I don't know, you know how I am. Someone will bring up anything, and I start going like, oh, what would be the opportunity to fix this? And so this was actually on our China trip, and I was brainstorming with Sherrod this idea for third place ink. And it actually, there's some pretty cool ideas. I couldn't afford to do it here because it's just like kind of crazy. But the idea, the basic idea behind it is you want it to remove, you want to remove the decision paralysis of deciding where you're going and what you want to do.

55:04Luke Lafreniere:Like it's kind of the physical equivalent of, you know how it's impossible to decide what to watch because there's so many options. Yeah, or play because of Steam. Whether it's on Plex or Netflix. Yeah, exactly that. So you go on, like, we must have all been there. Everyone's hungry. You fire up Google Maps. And there's just a zillion options. So the idea is that with Third Place Inc., you remove that friction. You just go there. So it would, like, have programming or events, but none of them would be posted online. and maybe the bulletin board literally like i had this idea of having like um like like a door people style lens so you can like look and you can you can like see what's going on today but you can't like take a picture of it or anything you know obviously people would people would post them but you try to you try to discourage it and so the idea is just that you you uh you just have this kind of programming events, whether it's like, okay, tonight we're doing poker night.

56:12Luke Lafreniere:You're not good at poker? It doesn't matter. Everyone's playing poker tonight. Flagship locations could be set up with all kinds of activities that encourage casual coexistence. So a music listening room with a jukebox. Crazy idea, not a new idea, but the idea being that you don't, everyone doesn't just have their headphones in. there's music playing and everyone can take their turn and for 50 cents or you know whatever for a song you pick the next song um karaoke billiards tabletop games um it'd be cool if it was membership based so you don't pay have to pay every time you go there so you kind of remove that friction you just go you just go hang out you'd want to be somewhere transit friendly and then you know one of the things that came up with okay how do you deal with unsavory stuff you know drug deals hooking up in the bathrooms do you do it through a member's code of conduct do you do you count on people to self-police that's that's kind of as far as we got but like man how much would you how much would you enjoy just having a pops chocolate shop you know and that's a that's a bit of a dated that's a that's a reference dated reference but yeah no i think it would be like a country club remember remember the part about it being affordable though that's where the country club thing doesn't really land for most people but then

57:36Linus Sebastian:the the issue with it being affordable is how do you do that affordably these days like how do you have that much space in can't anywhere in british columbia i mean that's the one part anywhere that

57:48Luke Lafreniere:has population that's the one part that most people didn't understand about smash champs like Like that's the things that they thought were stupid were not stupid at all. And the things that almost nobody flagged were very stupid. Yeah. The building itself, because that's been strange to me that people didn't put that together. The number of people mad about us acquiring the tech house, you know, another house and like not recognizing that compared to our commercial real estate acquisitions, that's like, So good to see you. Thank you.

58:26Linus Sebastian:It shows up on the line. It's a line item. It's a line item. It's definitely a line item. It's for sure a line item. But like, yeah, I don't, yeah. I think part of the problem with this is just like magnetizing people away from these and these types of things.

58:45Luke Lafreniere:Oh, that was, sorry, I didn't mention that. You check your phone at the door.

58:49Linus Sebastian:Oh, no, I meant to get there at all. because like get them out of their house get them out of their bedroom or whatever there's a video i watched from hopefully i don't pronounce it wrong but i think it's you're gonna like this

58:58Luke Lafreniere:though you're gonna like this no sure i'll pause this is fine hold that thought yeah but the idea was that you check your phones at the door but that's okay because at the reception you can so you can opt to leave it so that to leave it out or to put it in the box and then if you get an emergency call literally you can like call third place or no sorry no that wasn't the idea that was one idea and then i was like no there's too many privacy issues and then the new idea was that you have a landline at third place and then you could you could like you'd have to call and then they'd like page you like remember when you were trying to reach your parents at work when we were kids yeah and you'd have to call the office and you'd be like scared to talk to the stranger and be like um is can i talk to mrs sebastian like yeah uh can i can i tell her who's calling yeah it's her son oh okay okay little linus uh yeah i'll i'll go get her and then it would be like five minutes

59:53Linus Sebastian:and they'd go get them you could potentially like if you had the phones badged by name which wouldn't be very hard i mean be kind of automatic i'm assuming you're bagging it somehow with a tag so you know who to give it to. You could just see the caller ID. If there's no caller ID, who cares? Just let it ring through anyways. But if there's a caller ID, you could be like, so-and-so, this caller ID is calling you. And then that person can decide if they want to come get their phone or not. But yeah, that's pretty sweet. But yeah, I watched this video from, I think it's Emil, Emil, Emil, sorry. They say their name in the video and I already forgot how to pronounce it.

1:00:29Linus Sebastian:But you should install a cheap computer in your room. and i don't know why i clicked on this but i was i think my thought process was like why why would i possibly want a cheap computer in my room their argument was actually pretty good i don't want to play it because you should go for msn messenger i know um i've heard there's still versions that work no way i've shut up through the grapevine uh but their argument was that for them by doing this they might choose a higher medium and through doing that not doom scroll they might watch a movie they might play a game they might do something i don't remember all the details it's been a bit since i watch it uh go watch it if you're interested but um i like the thought process of just like just something to keep me from doom scrolling and i I think these are such crazy magnets these days.

1:01:23Linus Sebastian:And I think it's part of the equation, probably a small part. I think the biggest part is that just land and everything costs so much freaking money these days. But part of the reason why I think third places are disappearing is because people just aren't engaging as much because they're sucked into this. They're sucked into just vegetating on Netflix all day. They're sucked into something that keeps them at home alone. And it kind of sucks. I am a person that very, very much deeply values my alone time, but I also have to understand that there's kind of too much. And something that would be kind of neat about a third place, you mentioned the music listening room.

1:01:56Linus Sebastian:Yeah, how cool would that be? There's these ideas of being alone, but amongst people. And it is a very different thing than being alone by yourself at home, rotting in bed. It is very different. Even if you're not actively socializing, maybe you're just hanging out in the back of the the music listening room vibing out listening to different tracks people put on maybe most of the time you're not all that interested in what it is but maybe someone puts on a song that you really jive with for some reason and you ask them about it and figure out who the band is whatever else and you have these like little interactions it can be really healthy especially i'm assuming a very high percentage of males are in the audience right now especially for us there's a crazy like we don't socialize with anyone problem going on right now where we all just spend all of our time alone and fighting against that is like a valiant thing to do so this this stage in development

1:02:53Luke Lafreniere:occurs around two to four years and it's called parallel play i love parallel play when a child plays alongside or near others but doesn't play with them so different toys in the same sandbox or a group of kids drawing on their own papers while sitting side by side focused on their own journeys but still aware of one another and it feels like we're not even getting there no sometimes parallel plays great um and you were saying like we end up uh we end up alone in our homes we also end up alone outside of our homes yeah i saw this uh i saw this really interesting i see both sides um exchange on reddit eyes forward so it was it was kind of a kind of a a women centric subreddit sure uh talking about how um how invasive and uncomfortable and almost like borderline aggressive it is if someone approaches them in public when they have their airpods in and you know uh and and i kind of went and they were like you know oh it's you know when you have your airpods in it makes you seem unapproachable and they're like that's the point and i'm like oh man definitely see both sides because it especially like i'm not a woman big surprise shocker oh i know right not a woman i would have never known but there are definitely aspects of the being a woman experience that i have witnessed as a as a third party non-woman that would make me really uncomfortable in public yeah a little bit too much attention yep a little bit too much attention a little bit by yourself today might just want to listen to my music and and jog be left alone and maybe i'm wearing short shorts because i don't want to wear sweaty leggings that are tied up against my legs but that's not an invitation to you know want to touch them sure you know sure that makes total sense perfectly reasonable on the other hand like you go out in public and like like everyone has their airpods in not literally everyone i'm obviously being a little hyperbolic right now but many people do and you kind of wonder well like what was it like yeah before that and and were there things about that that were maybe better and healthy and and

1:05:31Linus Sebastian:maybe healthier again i have put the airpods in and hoped no one would talk to me before

1:05:35Luke Lafreniere:i totally get it sometimes yeah mid-conversation i'll even put my airpod back in hoping that somebody might recognize a non-verbal cue but you know without you know um categorizing our community i will say there are uh social cues might not be many members of the ltt community that don't really pick up non-verbal body language cues so it doesn't always work but uh you know you try you try um and you know what like i i get that i'm not offended by it i'm not upset by it doesn't really bother me i'm also not a woman totally and it really is very different experience very different when i'm getting unwanted attention from a man it's just

1:06:26Linus Sebastian:kind of like bro go do something else it's also fascinating i don't know we don't need to go down this chain really but it's fascinating to me like if i am like attached to say my partner right now yeah if i if i'm right if i'm right next to them or my arms around them or holding hands if there is some strong indication that i am with this person yeah it's fine the second i like float out of the picture it changes it's like so you're saying you're the jealous type well

1:07:02Luke Lafreniere:no if if i'm if i'm so if we're like this it's fine to talk to me if he's not next to me that is not my point that is not my point my point is full like

1:07:18Linus Sebastian:papa bear mode you watch out for that my point is that like it's it's surprising how palpable and fast the change in attention can be and like we saw we saw this in new york i was like i was floated off to the uh emma was getting something from a food cart and you yvonne and i were all kind of more floated off to the side oh yeah we were reading the side of the thing so she was kind of on her own and some dude came up like pretty close right behind her and i repositioned and then they left and it was like it's that was fast it's almost like we're actually like animals

1:07:58Luke Lafreniere:yeah and everything like you know how every man somehow knows which urinal to stand at yeah and it's funny because women will talk about how they like don't get it that's because you never thousand years ago a million years ago you weren't marking your territory with this thing you know you like it's but it's culturally universal

1:08:32Linus Sebastian:sure yeah i'm serious did did humans mark their territory with this i know dogs did did humans do that humans might not have but something at some point did we definitely there's clearly there's

1:08:44Luke Lafreniere:clearly vestigial like I don't like I don't want to pee right next to another dude unless we're pretty close do you? no

1:09:00Linus Sebastian:yeah sure sure alright I'll follow yeah like there's occasional social situations I think it might just be like shyness cause you have your dong out and in your hands and you don't want to be like literally shoulder to shoulder

1:09:14Luke Lafreniere:but where's the origin of that why do we have that shyness would i be shy sitting next to

1:09:21Linus Sebastian:another dude and ripping a fart uh yeah probably not as much probably not i think there's something coming out of my butt this might be you won't like it this might be a hot take but i think fart smelling is different than don looking but the thing i mean you could don gazing is a little

1:09:40Luke Lafreniere:different than fart smelling at the urinal though there's usually a barrier anyway so it's not even

1:09:44Linus Sebastian:about the look it's not even rational anymore hot take if you're a tall dude there effectively is not a barrier okay that's fair that's fair and like you know what i'm not even trying to be like i'm tall you think there's a barrier for lucas there ain't no barrier for lucas this is true

1:10:00Luke Lafreniere:this is very true but what i'm basically saying is like there's things that are that are that are not no i hear you don't need to be communicated yeah yeah yeah that are non-verbal that we all just like kind of understand except the ones that don't um and coming way back around some of them can make life a little uncomfortable to be a woman yeah and i don't have to experience that which is great and unfortunately airpods might be limiting our ability to socially interact and third place would strive to be different somehow and probably would fail for that reason because people people like i said in the in that subreddit they they liked it this way and wanted it this way and the whole third place and that's valid it might end up a a pit of 300

1:10:50Linus Sebastian:dudes that are all single everyone back in the pile and and you know it might you might walk in that door and feel a little targeted when 600 eyeballs turn at you all all at once not to mention the other balls yeah pretty much so yeah i don't know there's there's problems with these things it is it is a tragedy that a lot of these third places are gone but i i don't have an answer for it um have we done a topic yet one which i don't even know if we're actually done you are not we talked about the linux stuff oh i'm done um i don't have a lot to add yeah i think um

1:11:34Luke Lafreniere:there are some cozy things from mint that i miss okay but i'm fine so far as of right now everything

1:11:40Linus Sebastian:that i've had to do has me not looking back towards windows at all i fully expect my final conclusion is going to be wanting to go back to windows because i'm going to run into game compatibility issues. And honestly, maybe because the team's experience is just so bad and I have to use teams. So it just is what it is. This is why I never look at YouTube chat.

1:12:04Luke Lafreniere:I take the middle urinal. I love that awkward moment of silence when they have to decide whether or not to go next to you or go into a stall. Actual monster.

1:12:19Linus Sebastian:That feels like someone that we knew used to vary their walking speed to be a little bit faster than you or a little bit slower than you just to see how you'd react do you know who we're talking about I can type it sure I'm gonna type it that checks out

1:12:45Linus Sebastian:I didn't know that they did that it feels like that type of thing just they just it's just the like social observation they just want to see yeah okay

1:12:55Luke Lafreniere:yeah um yvonne picked up on a tism thing from me that i hadn't realized that i was still doing um so like like years into my relationship she finally acknowledged it out loud she's like oh yeah you're doing that thing where you don't step on cracks so it makes your it makes your gait really uneven um but it's fine and i was like oh god now i'm like hyper aware of this

1:13:20Linus Sebastian:i do stuff like that all the time but that's not me doing it on purpose to find out how other people will react to it yeah i don't think i even sort of hide that i'll like really dramatically like i'll either on purpose step on all of them or not step on them or something i have to force

1:13:34Luke Lafreniere:myself to not i'm just think about it which makes me think about it a lot that makes sense and then And I just walk with very even... I actually try to walk in lockstep with her.

1:13:43Linus Sebastian:You're doing like super robotic?

1:13:44Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, she's two inches shorter than me, but women tend to have proportionally longer legs compared to their torsos. So our legs are almost exactly the same length. M and I are exactly the same length. Yeah, so if I pay attention to it at all, then I can just walk completely in lockstep with her. And then I don't have to think about it as much because if we're attached, then I don't have to look down and think about where I'm

1:14:10Linus Sebastian:stepping. I'm just a child when I walk. I'll jump on all the lines or avoid all the lines. If there's like a little you know, I don't know what you want to call it a little flat bit like stopping the dirt on a slope or something. I'll try to walk on that. Nice. Who knows. Nice. Do whatever. Oh a puddle. Yeah totally. That's me for sure. I'm out walking. I'm gonna have fun. Whatever.

1:14:35Luke Lafreniere:What are we supposed to be doing? next topic some comms comms okay and cw time for some checkout messages so our end of season sale is extended you want to fire up lmg.gg slash end of season we are bumping the sale to 30 off so if there's something you've been eyeing for a while this is probably the moment to grab it um we are clearing space for what's coming next which means you can get current season gear at off-season pricing um and then wear it now or stash it for next year or you can i mean wait and get other stuff later either way you win i guess uh you can find the sale at lmg.gg slash end of season oh there's only these ones left well that's the thing about a clearance sale yep yeah so uh if you see something here that's in your size you should probably order it now don't be don't be

1:15:36Linus Sebastian:luke don't make that noise i guess you knew what i was going to say i i kept meaning to uh request this and then i just kept forgetting to and now it's out of stock now it's gone i actually really

1:15:47Luke Lafreniere:wanted the last chance sale is also still live lmg.gg slash last chance there's some really solid deals in here once these ones hit zero that's it shop the sale before it's gone we got the polo shirt we got the dropout hoodie uh we got docs the not a hot dog v-neck t-shirt i like that one some bundles uh there's a lot of really good backpack wow some of these bundles are wild right now yep so go check that out finally we're keeping the buy more save more deal on all of our blank tees because we get it when you find something that fits well and just works it makes sense to grab a couple maybe in a few different colors and then call your wardrobe wardrobe optimized.

1:16:27Luke Lafreniere:You can check it out at lmg.gg slash blank tees. Buy more, save more. The more you buy, the more you save. It's girl math.

1:16:34Linus Sebastian:You know you love it. Okay, here you go. Two shirts is 45. Three is 60. Four is 70. Five is 80. Yeah. Dang.

1:16:46Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, that's a pretty good deal.

1:16:47Linus Sebastian:Yeah.

1:16:48Luke Lafreniere:High quality shirts. Yeah. All right. And when you're placing your order, hey, you might want to send a checkout message. The way these work is you just add something to your cart on LTTstore.com and it will go to Producer Den. If you guys are going to throw money at your screen to check if you guys are going to throw money at your screen to interact with us on the show we figure you might as well get high quality merchandise in return. Like say for example the lawsuit hoodie that Luke had out just now. So in the cart you can say whether you want your name to appear or not. You can choose a color scheme and And, oh my God, I think I get that out of here.

1:17:30Luke Lafreniere:You go ahead and place your order and it'll go to Dan who will reply to it or who will forward it internally or who will just kind of pop it up somewhere or who will curate it for me and Luke on the show. So want to show them a couple of curated ones, Dan? Yeah, sure. We've got a bunch here already. Last week, you talked about Apple headphones on Android with updates. What's your take on Samsung only supporting 3D spatial audio? on its own headphones. I use Sony and it has no support for it. Is that Samsung's fault? Generally speaking, vendor lock is not something that I'm a huge fan of. However, 3D spatial audio, are we talking the kind where it knows where it is relative to the position of your device?

1:18:20Luke Lafreniere:Do we know that this is Samsung's fault? or is this something that they specifically had to build for like on their hardware in order to make it work i legitimately don't know my new pair of headphones has 3d spatial audio like you've described and it works with literally anything okay but is that because they did a bunch of extra work or is it because samsung specifically i guess what i'm asking is did samsung specifically lock it out or did they just not put in the work uh that i don't know that I don't know in general though no I consider that to be a downer if they are selling these headphones as having 3d spatial audio and it only works on a Samsung phone it's it's it's a pretty crummy user experience I want to be able to I want to be able to mix and match I don't want to have to buy my next phone from Samsung just because my headphones happen to be from Samsung and I really like 3d spatial audio I don't happen to really like 3d spatial audio so it's not a big issue for me but your mileage may certainly vary on that i know some people like it dan do you like 3d spatial audio i have never used the feature so no i don't neat okay cool i mean actually have

1:19:36Linus Sebastian:you not use the feature because you don't like it or do you i don't use it because it's i don't

1:19:40Luke Lafreniere:like it got fine with stereo i did try one that was like 3d in a space that was kind of neat like it was kind of more now it's kind of sounds like you're in a good room which is a little different oh yeah that's different modes that's just like uh that's a type of it but not to like turn your head it's coming from speakers yeah but that's like a dsp thing that's like the good old-fashioned eax remember eax yeah we're just regressing i guess you could play around with the eax profiles in the in the control panel station and my music sounds worse dude i remember yeah right like i'd always i'd play around with it for 30 seconds just like that and then i'd be like well this is stupid i guess i'll just not use this anymore i was like uh pretty much yeah you know vaporwave played in a dead mall from another room and you're having a hallucinatory episode that kind of genre before that was cool could have your mp3 player play that your mp5 player or whatever anyone else uh anyone else yeah chat's not all excited about 3d spatial audio that's for sure so if it's vendor locked for a feature that you think is dumb does that matter yeah it still matters because it's the principle of the thing you know it's still bad yeah yeah ah yeah like if you have like uh i don't know you have a a lollipop where if you press a button and it makes it taste like cum then like sure most people probably don't want that but if you arbitrarily you never lock it out to only iphone users because you assume maybe they just you know like the taste of corporate dong then like that's not that's not your decision to make for them they should android users should be allowed to love corporate dong too yeah some of

1:21:40Linus Sebastian:them some of them for sure do i suspect that product would have a very small but extremely dedicated audience i bet it wouldn't be as small as you'd think maybe maybe not did you like upload a taste profile eq your throat

1:22:05Luke Lafreniere:just leave a couple beats there uh would you want another one yeah give me another anything no uh luke please give us a mini networking infrastructure lesson why is running a vpn a gold mine but serving video is a money pit oh that's actually that's actually a pretty good question are users watching videos on a vpn not just as bandwidth expensive it's just not as um i don't know the i can't remember the the the vpn but there's a vpn that

1:22:40Linus Sebastian:gives a lot of public data which is how we figured a lot of this information out on the cost benefit. What's the wind one? Windscribe? Oh, that sounds right. VPN based in Canada. They're based in Canada. No, that sounds right. It was a Canadian one if I remember correctly. Yeah, Windscribe. Windscribe current status maybe. This looks like the right page. Maybe there's more information here. But yeah, you can see the network utilization, the current users, and the registered users. And basically, what the effective... Oh, is this? I feel like there might have been more information on this in the past.

1:23:29Linus Sebastian:Or maybe I'm tripping. Or maybe there was some other way we got it. But basically, the vibe that we got is that it kind of seems like a lot of people turn the vpn on put the hat on do some pirate hat wearing things and then turn the vpn off and often turn the vpn off pretty much all the time the average utilization of vpns does not

1:23:55Luke Lafreniere:seem very high because the the experience of browsing with a vpn sucks it's just constant captchas slower browsing speeds yeah and unless you are wearing your tricorn hat yeah the vast majority of the things that you do online um unless you're really really like really trying to avoid anyone you know fingerprinting or creating an advertising profile for you which i am not convinced that most people are willing to put in the work to actively avoid yeah i i just i i don't see the i don't see the point of it if i'm not traveling or like where i need to get around like a great firewall of some sort or if i'm not downloading something sketchy

1:24:44Linus Sebastian:i don't have my vpn on yeah and that's i think the vast majority of people and the huge gaps between that allow them to save a lot of money uh there's also like i think the quality of service is not expected to be super high to be completely honest like if if you're watching a video and the next chunk doesn't show up you're immediately pissed off you're immediately messaging support you're mad yeah there was a buffer what are you talking about it's 2026 which is fair enough but if you're using a vpn and you're torrenting something which is specifically what someone said in chat is like oh it's a lot of data through torrents though um because because if people are mostly just pirating stuff uh first of all you're probably not really staring at it the whole time it's downloading anyways and it's a torrent you're going to expect a lot of ups and downs so if a little bit of that comes from the vpn it's probably fine so there's like the quality of service expectation is in the dirt and the amount that people are just not actually even using the service is in the dirt there's a ton of people that have subscriptions and aren't even using them.

1:25:49Luke Lafreniere:If you don't have a subscription, by the way, now seems like as good an opportunity as any to talk about the really good deal you can get on PIA VPN through the Linus Tech Tips link. Dan, do you want to throw the link in the various chats? Sure thing. Cool.

1:26:03Linus Sebastian:Oh, hey, it's you.

1:26:04Luke Lafreniere:I didn't know this was like our own thing. Yeah. Look at him. Look at that. Linus Tech Tips fans, save more with PIA VPN. You don't even have to be a fan to save more. You can just click this link. That's true. You could hate me and still save more.

1:26:16Linus Sebastian:That's true. Yep. But yeah, it seems to just be that people's usage of VPNs is really low. And we talked to a couple people in the industry. We poked around, I think it was Windscribe and a few other different sites that were like very transparent about things. And we were like, oh, wow, people really don't be using this too much compared to the amount of like actually, you know, currently registered users, connected users. It was very interesting to see the connected users versus network utilization and the registered versus connected users. I don't remember, but I think we figured out someone got the G.I.

1:26:55Linus Sebastian:Joe reference. Yeah. For some reason, PIA in my head just always sounds like G.I. Joe, but it's PIA. I don't know why. I do that all the time. I'm a computer.

1:27:05Luke Lafreniere:I'm a computer. Stop all the downloading. Yeah.

1:27:08Linus Sebastian:See, that's what people do with VPNs. They download something real quick and then they stop using it for a month.

1:27:15Linus Sebastian:I don't know how many people understand what we're talking about right now. I only care about the people who get the reference. Everybody else can leave. I don't want to be alone with them. Bought a massage machine.

1:27:30Linus Sebastian:Thank you. I just want to show you this frame. Anyways. Yeah. So, but it basically what we learned was a lot of people pay for it. Yep. a lot of people pay a decent amount for it yeah and a lot of people don't really use it that much whereas float plane i think our usage is actually pretty high usage is pretty high every subscription service you're gonna have i don't remember what they call it but uh people who have subscribed and are basically dead accounts where they just like they don't check their credit card that much and they've just been paying but they don't actually use the service every service has that ours seems to have a lot of active users i'm not complaining about that at all it's almost like

1:28:08Luke Lafreniere:the service it's almost like we advocate for you know not wasting your money i would rather you

1:28:13Linus Sebastian:didn't stuff yeah i want you to use flowplane i want you to enjoy it um and but vpns are kind of

1:28:19Luke Lafreniere:it feels like the opposite end of the spectrum yeah i had someone make a comment to me that uh the smash champs business model uh will probably struggle from the people who buy the annual premium membership and play like six seven days a week i'm like bro no that's what we want yeah We want people here every day. We want this to be a community. VPNs are also, and I mean, like all of them, as far as I know.

1:28:44Linus Sebastian:So I'm not signaling any of them out. And I do think I'm actually talking about PIA. It's way more expensive to subscribe for one month compared to subscribing for longer periods of time. Well, yeah. So if you, this totally makes sense. The business model totally makes sense. But it creates a situation where it's like, if you didn't use a VPN at all that month, but you might next month you don't really want to cancel it so a lot of people would just have vpn subscriptions even if they don't use it for four or five months at a time and then you might have a spike in usage where they're like i'm gonna download a ton of stuff and they connect it yeah and do a ton of torrents and download things overnight or whatever every linux iso like we're

1:29:19Luke Lafreniere:doing the linux challenge right now so we needed so many i had to download every single linux iso and every version yeah ever every season yep of pop os um but but yeah mulvad has flat billing

1:29:34Linus Sebastian:that's cool i don't know uh like some of them are most vpns like game of mint has like so many seasons um that's cool that they have flat pricing archerton but uh arch very nice um but but yeah it's very common that people don't want to cancel because they might need it or even if say the mulvad thing where apparently they have flat pricing which is neat um even then you might not want to cancel because yeah you're gonna have to go subscribe again if you need it and you might need it next week or something so i'll just leave it it's only like five bucks there's a lot of the

1:30:10Luke Lafreniere:i'll just leave it going on with vpn i've had an active subscription to pia in spite of the fact that they're like an affiliate of ours for like 10 years or something like that because it's just more convenient to just kind of have it. Firecat, speaking of convenience, decided it was more convenient to type this into chat instead of into a search engine. So I saved them the work. Yes, PIA works on Linux. That's one that I have a real hard time wrapping my brain around. But there you go. You got your answer and you got noticed. so it's double

1:30:50Linus Sebastian:accomplishment. I feel like it's beginning. He's slowly becoming a Linux bro. Me? Yeah. Hold on, hold on. Don't make me pull this out.

1:30:58Luke Lafreniere:Why didn't you read the Linux? Just sent him a link to the wiki. Don't make me pull this out. Don't make me pull this out. What? Is this bad now? What is this?

1:31:08Linus Sebastian:Is it just not HTTPSed? I don't think it's

1:31:10Luke Lafreniere:HTTPSed. Certificate date invalid. Oof. Mmm. Mmm. it's probably fine won't let them see me do it oh no normally uses encryption when chrome tried to connect to it for you the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials um you cannot visit it right now oh wait why is it.app what the heck just happened did you get sponsor linked? Is it.app? No, it's not sponsored. Has it always been.app? Shut up.

1:31:55Linus Sebastian:Dude, it's been years since I've tried to use this.

1:32:05Luke Lafreniere:Okay, is it just let me google that for you.com? No, this is also...

1:32:09Linus Sebastian:Just let me google that. let me google that.com i'll share my screen wait

1:32:17Luke Lafreniere:let me google that.com interesting let me google that for you.com here hold on i'm coming back to me for a second here also goes to lmgtfy.com and also has the uh certificate invalid issue go figure all right anyway yeah so this is what it does if you're not familiar is it just puts up a little cursor and then whoa types it for you and then oh interesting still shows the sponsored results though in spite of being whatever g private is have you never heard of g private what is g private are we on and are we on a little side quest right now simple untracked private search google search but it's 100 private learn more okay i'll take our word for it or like

1:33:15Luke Lafreniere:like what what what is this i have no idea committed to protecting your privacy add an affiliate disclosure James Lacey of the Shopwise group is owner of gprivate.com okay alright cool here's his postal code sure oh boy it's right on the site it's in the privacy page

1:33:45Linus Sebastian:that's probably a PO box sure all right should we maybe do some topics nope wikipedia has blocked archive.today

1:34:00Luke Lafreniere:and started removing over 690 000 archive links from the pedia um citing security risks and reliability issues. The decision followed reports that archive.today's operator, this is freaking wild. Like I've used archive today to get past paywalls before because I just want to read that one article and I'm sorry, I'm not. I think a lot of people use it for that.

1:34:31Linus Sebastian:Yeah, that's a self-decided totally okay.

1:34:35Luke Lafreniere:And I mean, look, I actually, I'm not going to argue that that one's okay because a huge part of the decay of the quality of our journalism has been people's unwillingness to pay for it yeah but it is pretty tough when i came across one article i wanted to read on a site in the last year and this is the first one and i'm just like yeah i don't know i don't think that's going to happen today so archive today sometimes that's what happens today is something that i have used and looking at this i am now deeply uncomfortable ever using it again let's talk about that the operator embedded malicious code into captcha pages allegedly using visitors web traffic to help generate a ddos attack against a blog called gyroveg run by jani pato calio who published research about the background of the operator behind the archive editors also reported that some archived snapshots this is actually okay we could probably have a really long conversation about which of these things are worse and i don't think there's a wrong answer but i feel on my initial reaction that this next part is actually worse.

1:36:05Luke Lafreniere:Editors also reported and we're talking Wikipedia editors that some of the archived snapshots on Archive.Today were altered including a case where the credited author of a blog post was reportedly changed within an archived capture. This combined with an absolutely bonkers set of threats made from the operator toward Jenny Patacaglio including the threat of a gyro vage branded gay dating app made wikipedia editors determine that

1:36:39Linus Sebastian:the service posed reputational and security risks which when i first read just the subject line of this happening not in not in the wandoc i read this a bit ago but when i when i read the subject line of this happening i was like what that sucks and then i read more into it i was like whoa that

1:36:56Luke Lafreniere:makes a lot of sense this is really important archive.today is not the internet archive yeah they are two different things so far the internet archive has has not and that that includes the wayback machine has not done anything to make us question their their integrity and credibility of that group. Archive today just completely obliterated whatever goodwill they might have had because your entire your entire raison d 'etre as an archival well archive. Damn it. I painted myself into a bit of a corner there.

1:37:40Linus Sebastian:And it kind of sucks because a lot of these archive sites have been like amazing for so long. Like internet archive is so based. Sorry I didn't finish that sentence. but your entire value is that we trust you to be an accurate record of what we otherwise might have lost. Yeah.

1:37:58Luke Lafreniere:You're supposed to be built on a rock solid foundation of truth and accuracy. That's the whole point is that things are not forgotten and lost and allowed to be obfuscated or gas lit in the future. So if you're going to do that, you're cooked.

1:38:16Linus Sebastian:Yeah. like way back machine has been used as like hard fact for a long time yeah and like yeah

1:38:24Luke Lafreniere:and it has to be that if it's anything other than that then it's worthless now yeah

1:38:31Linus Sebastian:it's rough totally understand the decision and agree with in my opinion you can't uh you can't do those things you can't associate with those things you can't associate with an archive that's editing data like it just doesn't work that's that's crazy fundamentally doesn't work also

1:38:45Luke Lafreniere:So like, I have no idea if this is the case, but like, I have noticed times when I go to archive a page and it seems like it's like doing a lot for a long time. I wonder if my connection was being used for a DDoS attack. It says it was in CAPTCHAs though. But then like, like, have you ever actually tried to submit a page for archival? No. Okay. It does like a whole bunch of stuff, which kind of, and I don't, I don't know the exact mechanism that it uses because i've just it's just like compressing never looked it up i've never figured it out but what i assume is that it's easier for them to grab the assets through

1:39:21Linus Sebastian:you and have you upload to them rather than you just flag it to them and they try to download it

1:39:27Luke Lafreniere:because they would probably get they'd probably get flagged for all the archive requests that they're doing uh that's that's my assumption but i really kind of interesting now don't know that um but there's been times when it's taken a really long time for just like a text page and i haven't really fully understood why that would be and i wonder if if you know my my upload was used for this in some way i don't i don't know i don't have a single clue me neither a nipolis cage asks why would one archive a page so reasons to archive include um logging changes before they happen so this has come up a lot recently with the doj in the u.s's publication of the epstein files There's been a lot.

1:40:10Luke Lafreniere:There's a huge tech conversation that somehow we have not had around the Epstein files, around preservation of data and government censorship and government manipulation of data. there's been multiple documented cases where they have made changes to either the redactions or in some cases by removing data that was originally published in order to make it more difficult to

1:40:43Linus Sebastian:find yeah um so yeah that's a good reason i have done some personal archiving but i haven't submitted something for archiving like i know there was uh there was a particular video not that long ago that said some particularly disgusting things and i didn't actually want that person to be able to get away with just like pulling it down or whatever so i myself downloaded and i had multiple other people download it as well i think i have that video yeah so like uh there are things like that that i've done yeah but i've it's always been a personal effort i haven't submitted for archive

1:41:19Luke Lafreniere:of anything another really good reason is it can just be kind of a fun time capsule oh totally going and browsing ncix.com from 2005 is both fun and also educational ncix.com on the wayback machine is wild it's pretty fun and so being able to see accurate like definitely accurate which is again why the trust is so important accurate pricing from back then being able to call back specs see how it was marketed right that's something that's not going to be captured on an incredible resource like tech power-ups uh you know gpu what do they call it they're like gpu i don't know but it's awesome index yeah um but that won't be captured there you won't see what the retail pricing was you won't see what the product photos looked like uh so so an archived snapshot of the site from that time is irreplaceable in that way nothing else can do that another reason would be to circumvent paywalls.

1:42:16Luke Lafreniere:I mean, I already kind of talked about that, is they have their surveys of downloading the entire page and then just making that available without any kind of like scroll to sign up to keep reading or whatever else. What are you up to over there?

1:42:35Linus Sebastian:I'm loading NCX from 2005.

1:42:37Luke Lafreniere:Oh yeah, baby. Woo! Get that Lexmark Z705 color inkjet printer. pentium 4 this is man dude this is what i'm talking about though like where's some ram can i get some ram people people are so upset about how expensive tech is and i'm just like bro it's like

1:42:57Linus Sebastian:yeah it was always it was always expensive 512 megs for 162 bucks let's go hyper x baby

1:43:07Luke Lafreniere:get that Corsair value select buddy that's that's the move Corsair value select these old

1:43:15Linus Sebastian:Kingston HyperX like blue with the silver like pincher things on it those are legendary that

1:43:23Luke Lafreniere:ain't nothing compared to my my OCZ platinum though one gig get that platinum super super mirror silver heat spreader and that was uh that was back before they were hunting to save on

1:43:38Linus Sebastian:material muskin still exists fun fact i know they just because of ncix they don't in my brain yeah because ncx is gone they were like ncx was like my only portal to muskin products how cool would it be if we could bring back ncix.com i'd still love to do it that'd be pretty sick there was way back machine snapshots from 2026 what's going on on ncix yeah let me let me oh

1:44:03Luke Lafreniere:no i think it's still a thing didn't someone try to i think someone tried to bring it back january 23rd there's a snapshot ew is it just some ai junk ew oh my god no no no don't look don't look don't look okay this is crazy this is this is crazy check this out wait what was that first one wait what the it redirected to this oh it was worse before oh the last one oh wait yeah there it is that's crazy

1:44:42Linus Sebastian:oh man

1:44:46what i've never heard of this thing i mean it looks horrible

1:44:51Luke Lafreniere:it kind of does oh well

1:44:53Linus Sebastian:it looks absolutely horrible do you want anime bobs what if we showed you anime bobs sure

1:45:05Luke Lafreniere:I'm gonna have my junk throwaway email yeah

1:45:10Linus Sebastian:this looks like an ah no I was I'm sorry I'm having troubles responding right now

1:45:16Luke Lafreniere:please try again later cost free uh i mean i didn't i didn't i didn't say anything bro ask me okay um what would linus think about being on this site uh any enter doesn't send oh my god enter doesn't send ah uh there's one login it's keeper oh dude keeper on the on the two-factor enter doesn't confirm it really it drives me on desktop it drives me nuts weird anyway hold on i'll increment the counter okay hold up oh my uh oh gosh uh which linus are we talking about here we well he definitely wouldn't use alarm or uh yeah uh emergency light emoji the linux kernel daddy linus torvalds would absolutely hate being on this site if it's any social media cesspool dude straight up called is this trying to like is this the is this the way this site thinks i would talk uh i guess a disease that encourages bad behavior spills energy drink wait but if you mean me Linus Sebastian from LTT I'd be like sponsor block activated but only if they send a 4090 Torvalds tried Google Plus once because it was less mindless but bailed so it goes back to talking about Torvalds again Yvonne's take just use FaceTime boomers verdict this is that's brutal so stupid it's actually just not good uh

1:47:18yikes

1:47:22Luke Lafreniere:what the hell is linus social opinion uh i don't know what is that uh is that is that on here Linus yeah this is dude this is so bad

1:47:39Linus Sebastian:okay it was just redirecting to the YouTube channel for a bit there

1:47:45Luke Lafreniere:that would definitely be a better thing for it to do

1:47:48Linus Sebastian:it did that like in January sorry I'm still poking around oh like of this year yeah there was there was one day I think it was this one let's see it's on the 23rd yeah YouTube

1:48:02Luke Lafreniere:that's definitely a better place for it to go than this hot garbage it's back to it's back to

1:48:07Linus Sebastian:garbage there's a bunch of snapshots in 2025 what was going on here there this one three snapshots in one day what was happening i really wish that oh yeah this is just the domain being available

1:48:22Luke Lafreniere:page i think or like being for sale or something oh man so does that mean that whoever this chatifylife.ai has acquired it now then who knows that would be really disappointing because i would i would have loved to buy it and resurrect it but i just yeah there's a buy this domain thing yeah okay well that's a shame

1:48:48Linus Sebastian:the owner of ncx.com is offering it for sale for an asking price of

1:48:54Luke Lafreniere:one million dollars. So I was aware of that, which is why I didn't buy it.

1:49:00Linus Sebastian:Yeah, screw that.

1:49:01Luke Lafreniere:It was worth a fraction of that.

1:49:03Linus Sebastian:The meme is not worth that.

1:49:05Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. There's absolutely no way. I'm sorry, but it's been way too long.

1:49:08Linus Sebastian:No one really cares anymore.

1:49:10Luke Lafreniere:Oh, Crystal says no, it's still for sale.

1:49:13Linus Sebastian:For a million dollars.

1:49:15Luke Lafreniere:Well.

1:49:17Linus Sebastian:Which might as well mean it's not.

1:49:19Luke Lafreniere:Are there services where you can lease redirecting? because that kind of makes probably so you find like yeah no that's got to be a thing right you find parts domains and you just like part domains that get a little bit of traffic yeah because

1:49:33Linus Sebastian:ncx would for sure get a little bit of traffic yeah people are saying yes people are saying yes

1:49:37Luke Lafreniere:yeah okay oh okay this this message from helen keller for 2069 is a little confusing but i think i understand what they're saying i'm clawing back a charity website for a client that got turned into a naughty website oh a clawing back a so yeah a charity website that existed and was a thing and the client who owned it had it turned into a naughty website so that they could just like steal traffic that's yeah oof that's rough that's rough do y 'all own the ncix youtube channel No. So the ownership of all the NCIX intellectual property is complicated, which is one of the big reasons why we haven't made a real serious written offer for it, because the original owner of it has a version in his mind of who owns it.

1:50:37Luke Lafreniere:And the creditors after the bankruptcy have a version in their mind of who owns it. And they don't necessarily agree. And somehow the domain and trademark and YouTube channel were not resolved at the time of the bankruptcy. so we have in the past approached the uh the group that handled the bankruptcy uh on behalf of the creditors and said hey so you guys didn't like get this so if we buy it do you do you commit not to pretend that it's yours because you like never got it and they're like we're not even going to look into that which basically is a big problem for us that's not

1:51:34Linus Sebastian:interesting enough for us right now once you guys make it a very popular domain again then it will become suddenly interesting for us again yeah so it's it's untouchable so it kind of

1:51:44Luke Lafreniere:it kind of is is doomed to rot forever um unless the owner allowed it to lapse maybe and we sniped it but even then the trademark could be could be a problem i don't even know that for sure i didn't know there was someone on the acx channel that i didn't know i don't recognize this guy oh oh shoot um i think he's uh he's someone's brother oh okay yeah is that oh wait well i don't want to like dox him. Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, he's someone's brother, probably. Like, statistically speaking. He's in a few of them. Yeah. I want to say... Hold on.

1:52:38Linus Sebastian:Their thumbnails were pretty good.

1:52:43Linus Sebastian:I did stuff for a long time. I must have really not been paying attention at the end there. Makes sense. We kind of had a lot going on.

1:52:51Luke Lafreniere:oh here we go uh his name is barrett got it cool yeah he's luke's brother yeah cool let's go with that yeah lost he actually did some work for us at one point i think oh really really nice guy yeah cool uh float plane announcement uh but couldn't come to whale land Well, guess what? We released a vlog featuring Sammy's very first LAN experiencing. Here's the vlog. It includes very normal things like a firetruck. That's for gaming. See? See all the gaming happening in the back of the firetruck? There is a lot of gaming happening in the back of the firetruck. There's actually a lot of gaming happening elsewhere on the firetruck.

1:53:37Luke Lafreniere:I'm not going to spoil the entire firetruck video, but there's a lot of pretty wild firetruck things that happen that involve gaming and whatnot. That's not on the fire truck, but Whale Land. Whale Land was pretty cool. A lot of cool stuff at Whale Land. You should check out the vlog. Oh, yeah, Floatplane audience is loving this one so far with the 300 to 1 like-dislike ratio. Nice. Small cameos from Bringus Studios and Dank Pods and Linus doing the thing. What does that mean?

1:54:11Linus Sebastian:Did you drop something?

1:54:14Luke Lafreniere:It just happened.

1:54:15Linus Sebastian:It was just at the end of the video already. Yep.

1:54:17Luke Lafreniere:Yep. There it goes. All right. Thank you. Thank you for that, Sammy. That's very helpful. Check it out at lmg.gg slash fpwan. Nice. All right. Oh, we're supposed to do sponsors now. Okay. The show is brought to you by Vessi. James from the business team said he owes me an apology and also a thank you. Oh. A few weeks ago, he correctly, uh, okay, referred to the Atma Weapon by its translated name Ultima Weapon. But out of shame, he has put down his playthrough of Final Fantasy, quote unquote, 3. Thanks to me and our sponsor Vessi, though, he's finally seeing the outdoors for the first time. Vessi has empowered him to go enjoy even wet grass thanks to their Stormburst low tops.

1:55:14Luke Lafreniere:As always, Vessi claims their shoes are completely waterproof, so even Ultros can look stylish running errands. Oh my God. Vessi's Stormbursts are practical, durable, and solid for everyday use and work with so many outfits. Plus, all of Vessi's shoes come with a year warranty and a great 30-day return policy. So leave your old shoes in the world of ruin. and get 15 % off your own stormbursts at vessi.com slash wanshow. What a stunningly current bunch of cultural references in this sponsor read. The show is also brought to you by Ugreen. Traditional storage just piles your files, often making things trickier to find.

1:55:59Luke Lafreniere:But our sponsor Ugreen's AI NAS brings everything into one secure hub. They come with something called Universal Search that lets you use keywords or phrases to find photos, videos, or docs. It can even transcribe audio while translating across languages and can generate albums and mind maps on your behalf. Ugreen even gives you an AI chatbot called Ulya that can help answer questions and organize your files. The NAS also has a built-in security manager that supports real-time virus scanning while letting you control and manage permissions. that's on top of you know of course like nas things like multiple raid modes to keep your data safe you can learn more about the ugreen ai nas idx by clicking our link in the video description

1:56:42Linus Sebastian:ugreen's been kind of killing it on nas's dude i i independently and this is not part of the ad spot or anything and there are other products that do this um but i i was i needed something i needed a wall wart so i got one from ugreen and while i was shopping on there i've been having a problem with my car, which is where the Bluetooth will sometimes just take forever to connect. It's very annoying. So I bought a thing from them. Bluetooth 3.5 millimeter.

1:57:13Luke Lafreniere:Are you sure you want to just type that in float plane chat and hope someone else will know what it is?

1:57:19Linus Sebastian:One of these jobbers. I got one of these and it's been great. Nice. The USB is just for power and then the Bluetooth thing is just in the top of the USB plug. Makes sense. And then my car has a USB and an aux right next to each other in the like center console thing. And what I'll do is my phone can connect to two Bluetooth at the same time. So my phone will automatically connect to this, which is a worst experience because I can't take calls nicely over it. And I can't do all the controls that I would like to do through the car, but it will automatically connect to this and work immediately. and then I'll notice some audio oddities and when that happens I just go bunk bunk bunk on the steering wheel and go to normal Bluetooth and then everything works great that is a very kludgy fix but I'm glad that you're happy it is kludgy but it makes me happy in a weird way yeah and I'm glad yeah 18 bucks and there is no gaps in being able to connect my phone to my car now which is awesome it is sweet cool just go aftermarket radio eventually?

1:58:30Linus Sebastian:Sure. But this was$18 and it immediately solved it. It was great. That's terrific. I liked it.

1:58:41Linus Sebastian:This is an extremely not planned topic, and it's not even really a topic, but I just decided to check out Steam Charts for some reason. I was like, I wonder what people are really doing. So that's what you do on the show when you're not listening to me talk or talking. You're doing an ad spot. There's not much for me to do. And two things, three things really stood out to me. One, Arc Raiders is still destroying. This is crazy. Wow. wow um that's actually wild 170 000 people on arc raters it's almost like people wanted an

1:59:09Luke Lafreniere:extraction shooter that's slightly less of a giant piece of shit yeah 5m i was like what's that even

1:59:16Linus Sebastian:i've never heard of that it's just uh like mod thing so people can play gta online so there's still that many people playing gta online wild and then i saw a bongo cat and i still can't fully tell what this even is waku waku dunk dunk dunk it seems like it just like sits on your taskbar and as you type like things happen that's a bonsai buddy yeah how is so they're typing a notepad and it just goes bunk bunk bunk bunk and then it like bonsai buddy still a thing all these years later i don't know but look at this overwhelmingly positive reviews 22 000 of them how much does this cost uh oh it's free it's free okay that makes a little bit more sense that explains a lot but are there oh it's one of those it's banana game i should just scroll down it's just banana game okay all right sounds good well that was a fun side quest yeah okay donut labs

2:00:24Luke Lafreniere:based in finland claims to have made a solid state ev battery oh they recently announced they've created this holy grail of battery tech after only being founded in 2024 wow for those wondering solid state batteries pretty cool the idea is that they replace the flammable highly combustible liquid electrolyte used in lithium-ion batteries with a solid substance that is capable of higher energy density and faster charging i think also they're supposed to be lighter but i guess that's another way of saying higher energy density historically though they have been very difficult to manufacture this technology has been researched to pretty much no avail for decades with ev manufacturers pumping money into it hand over fist toyota's advanced battery research for for instance, has$13.5 billion, that's with a B, of funding with a focus on solid state.

2:01:24Luke Lafreniere:So that's exciting, except that there are some skeptics. Donut Labs has responded to skepticism with the I Donut Believe series, where the company is sharing third-party test results with the independent VTT Technical Research Center of Finland. However, following VTT's fast charge performance test, Xeroth, a YouTuber with a PhD in electric propulsion, whose master's thesis was about solid state batteries, cast further doubts on the product in his video called Testing the World's First Solid State Battery. I'm not going to tell you everything that he says in his video because you should really just go watch it.

2:02:10Luke Lafreniere:It's a really good video. I watched it earlier today.

2:02:13Linus Sebastian:I haven't seen it. I've heard it's fantastic.

2:02:14Luke Lafreniere:But there are a few important things to point out. He says that VTT's test results, what, oh, did he actually say this part? I'm not sure if he said this part, but I was reading about it as well. So now I'm getting his video and my reading a little bit confused. So let's not say where I got what, but here's something that's really important.

2:02:38Luke Lafreniere:The, yeah, yes. So the Technical Research Center, VTT Technical Research Center, says we tested the provided solid state battery from Donut Labs. I forget if they actually put it in quotes or how they worded it, but basically they worded it in such a way. The solid state was a name instead of a thing. That they're saying what Donut Labs says they sent them, but they have not actually been tasked with confirming that it is, in fact, solid state. And they have not done any destructive testing on it. So, in a way, it's kind of wild. It's like if I made a... Okay, let's say that LTT's TrueSpec cables, let's say they were crap, hypothetically.

2:03:25Luke Lafreniere:oh but i called them true spec cable and then i sent them to some third party validation lab and had them test something like kind of unrelated to the speed they run at for instance sure and i was like yeah you guys can test the the bending radius what's their voltage drop and then if that test lab were to say we tested ltt true spec cables and found that the bend radius is this much it's kind of like credibility washing if that makes sense for sure in a way um because vtt never actually says it's a solid state battery but they like tested the donut solid state battery so i forget whether that came up in my reading or whether that was in the video but that was that was pretty important um he also found that the voltage curve and fast charging graphs looked very close to a lithium-ion cell.

2:04:25Luke Lafreniere:Also found that while the energy density actually seemed like good, it wasn't what Donut initially claimed. And then there was something that he brought up that I'm not actually sure if is an actual issue, but that is that they reached, during their testing, they reached a 90 degree Celsius safety limit and they had to apply another heat sink in order to do the charge test again. And I think it was like 11C charging rate. but from my understanding that might be a ztt safety protocol based on other battery chemistries so that might not actually mean that they were sure that this thing was going to combust sure but if zeroth is right that this thing seems to just actually be like maybe a good one but just a lithium cell of some sort then vtt was very smart to have their safety testing protocol because theoretically donut labs claimed that with their solid state battery and i'm using quotes here uh had an operating temperature that was safe of up to 100 degrees celsius so um or something like or maybe more i can't remember but more than 90 what was what they claimed uh no not zip tie tuning different thing different thing oh sorry did i say ztt vtt vtt technical research center of finland um yeah not zip tie tuning yeah i mean they're they're cool but yeah um unrelated to this

2:05:45Linus Sebastian:um what would be super based uh yes they should just bring xeroth out i i don't think they would

2:05:56Luke Lafreniere:do it i think they would rather continue to trickle out information so they get to enjoy because i wouldn't have talked about them if it wasn't for their back and forth with the community about the veracity of their claims. They first showed up on my radar when they were making fantastical claims about this sell at CES. Look at this. Yeah. They're clearly riding this. And I'm taking the bait, Luke. I'm taking the bait because it is more important to me to say, hey, this thing that everyone's talking about, hold on a second. There are people who are talking about how maybe we shouldn't be talking about it than it is to not talk about it.

2:06:36Linus Sebastian:I will la la la la la until people like Xeroth who are genuinely third party and have nothing to do with that company and are not compensated by that company in any way and we're able to freely get it on their own are able to check it out.

2:06:49Luke Lafreniere:Because what's the first?

2:06:50Linus Sebastian:And then I'll be interested or not.

2:06:51Luke Lafreniere:What's the first product that it's supposed to go in? It's like a motorcycle or something, right? I'm not sure.

2:06:59Luke Lafreniere:Donut Labs.

2:07:04Luke Lafreniere:Donut Lab. Motors, batteries. Oh, God.

2:07:13Okay.

2:07:14Luke Lafreniere:Well, I can't find what it's supposed to go in.

2:07:21Linus Sebastian:If it is real, that's fantastic. And if it's not, that's not surprising. And we'll see how it goes.

2:07:29Luke Lafreniere:Oh, okay. Apparently, I'm correct. Wiley Giraffe says, yes, it's supposed to go on a motorcycle within a couple of months. That's their claim. Cool. It's apparently called the Verge motorcycle. Here it is. Oh my God. No, not like, oh. For crying out loud. Sure. 600 kilometer range in an electric motorcycle would be wild. Yeah. All of this would be wild. If this could ever actually happen, Like, what if I try to book a test drive? Uh, whatever. You're not even... I'm over it. Yeah. I just don't think I... I don't think I'm ever going to do a... I don't think I'm ever going to do a... an electric motorcycle.

2:08:19Luke Lafreniere:I mean, ever is a big word, but I just... Yeah, I don't think I'm ever going to do it.

2:08:32Linus Sebastian:hey what do you want to talk about next what's in the dock short circuit sure fine

2:08:45Luke Lafreniere:I didn't get to see the video I don't even know what happened I never saw the video which is part of the problem. Earlier this week, one of our channels, Short Circuit, published a video on a water bottle that made some, let's call them bold health claims. Yeah. The type of product we talk about on one show. We'd like to first and foremost, we'd like to first and foremost thank our community for flagging this and holding us accountable for the bold claims, I'm going to call them, that this bottle was making to their target market. The first time I heard about this was when our former community manager, now he has a different role, but he still talks to the community, messaged me when I was on a ski slope on a class trip going, hey, did you know about this video?

2:09:41and I said, excuse me, what the f***?

2:09:44Luke Lafreniere:No.

2:09:48Luke Lafreniere:From what I'm told in our notes here, the intention of the video was meant to be a they claim piece, not agreeing or disagreeing with the product, but rather showing it. And that clearly didn't come across. and me coming into this after the fact, I am extremely frustrated at the various breakdowns that seem like they may have occurred. We are in the process of an investigation, so you won't hear me saying exactly what happened because at this time, I have not gotten a full post-mortem report. What I do know is that this outcome is not okay because it made from my understanding extremely silly claims um like health related claims about performing hydrolysis on water in your water bottle and whatnot um so in response to this uh you know appropriate flagging of this video from our community we posted the following statement on both reddit and on the short circuit youtube channel hey everyone we've removed this short we agree that the product wasn't framed with the level of skepticism it warranted and it was published without going through our normal technical review and leadership approval process we do not support or endorse unsubstantiated claims made by this manufacturer and we're taking steps internally to ensure our review process is consistently followed moving forward thanks for holding us accountable now one of the first responses i saw to this on reddit was what does that even mean it wasn't published without going through the normal technical review and leadership approval process what do you think that means that's wait really was that actually i think it's i think it's pretty obvious what that means um it means this is real bad and i found out about it long after the damage was done unfortunately which is you know it's something that um it's a fact of larger companies i'm just not willing

2:12:04Linus Sebastian:to take the fall for anymore okay there was a time not that long ago did anyone ask you to

2:12:10Luke Lafreniere:oh i mean on this internally of course not but there was a time not that long ago that the assumption is just that when something goes wrong you know linus is accountable um you know like even like you want to go way back to the statement that was made that triggered the whole 2023 drama that i didn't make but the expectation was i apologize for it what's the

2:12:40Linus Sebastian:what oh yeah uh like on the tour yeah okay yeah and so you know that's something that i flatly

2:12:49Luke Lafreniere:reject at this point i'm sorry i'm not going to be uh as as as a spokesperson for the company I can speak on behalf of the company.

2:12:57Linus Sebastian:Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

2:12:59Luke Lafreniere:I would still expect that. But I'm not going to fall on the sword, and I'm not going to take accountability for stuff I didn't do anymore. Yeah.

2:13:10Linus Sebastian:I don't know if that's what people wanted.

2:13:12Luke Lafreniere:I mean, it's a... Yeah, stay the path. So this is what I'm talking about. Stay the path says, sorry, dude, this company has your name on it. You own the company. Everything under LTT is under you. This is a company you own. This is all you. and that's nice and that's your opinion but i'm not willing to do that anymore i'm sorry it's just not going to happen um it's not it's not compatible with me continuing to do this i feel like i think

2:13:36Linus Sebastian:there's a there's a gap happening right now where like i i think stay the paths comment is that like you have to address it and you literally just did address it you said there was a mistake you said we're addressing it you thanked the community for pointing it out those things happen I don't think that they're asking for you to do. I don't know. Have you seen this video of the like volleyball player, the Japanese volleyball player that like spiked a ball and it hit this?

2:14:05Luke Lafreniere:I did see that. And he does the dive. Yeah.

2:14:07Linus Sebastian:I don't think they're asking for you to dive under the net and do the apology. I think you should keep reading chat. Okay. Before you keep talking. I think it's an understanding gap on both sides, but I will keep reading chat. I'm also looking through. I realized that searching Linus on the Linus Tech Tips subreddit is a little tough but if you do space Linus space it does a little bit better I got that trick from chat last week that's a good trick I got that trick from chat last week it's pretty good the the comments talking about you individually don't seem to be asking for that again you have to you have to okay I'll keep looking at the chat um but yeah just the the the truth of the matter and this is just this is just

2:14:53Luke Lafreniere:one of those things where you don't have to like it but it's just going to be how it is i think

2:14:57Linus Sebastian:there's i think there's different levels of apology i think there's ownership of like hey this is my company and my company made a mistake and there's here's the action the company is taking yeah sure yeah and and that's one thing that's that's no issue i think that's i would like to think i'm still watching chat that that is what most people are asking for and i think what you're talking about is i personally and personally individually i did this i made this mistake i'm taking ownership for this problem i don't think people are generally asking for that yeah you

2:15:27Luke Lafreniere:should read chat more carefully i'm looking for sure um and and it's one of those things where like i said the the bottom line is i'm not going to do it anymore i i i'm just you know because there are cases where it really was, you know, a problem that existed, you know, in our process, right? And there are cases where over the years, and it's happened many, many times, I have explicitly laid out how we need to do it, and it hasn't been followed, and we made catastrophic errors because of that, and I've fallen on the sword, and I'm not going to do it

2:16:07Linus Sebastian:anymore. Yeah, but okay, my point is that I think some, and I've talked to you about this before, My point is that sometimes I think you just do that, but like no one was looking for that or expecting that. Like there will be a, someone will point out something on Reddit that is like a particular department. It's happened with me. There's been something with like labs, which is now my thing. And you've jumped on the thread and brought a lot of attention to you in association to the problem when you had nothing to do with it. And I've been like, bruh, like let me respond. These are my people. These are my things.

2:16:39Yeah.

2:16:42Linus Sebastian:so i don't know they might have shut up because i said stuff but i'm not i'm also i read kind of slow so i'm trying to keep up with the chat but it's moving kind of fast um but i haven't really

2:16:52Luke Lafreniere:seen a lot of it yeah i can find some stuff if you need sure uh yeah it's and whatever not doing it sure yep it's just it's not it's not like i said it's not compatible with me continuing to do this um and so you know if that means you know making changes here then we're going to make those changes because it's not compatible with me continuing to do this in this form um all right giving every kid access to tech in the classroom turns out that might have been a mistake this is rough dude gen z is the first generation in history in in in recorded history to score worse on standardized testing than the earlier generation one leading factor and i have a lot of thoughts on this but i'm reading the notes for now one leading factor as pointed out by neuroscientist jared cooney horvath via tech spot seems to be the negative correlation that exists between the time students spend on digital devices in school and their academic performance.

2:18:08Luke Lafreniere:The more screen exposure, the poorer the results. For the last two decades, U.S. schools have spent a total of more than$30 billion with a B dollars on laptops and tablets for students. And here's a chart showing how higher in-class computer use is correlated with significantly lower math and science performance across both high income and middle income countries this is mind-blowing they're pretty big jumps now it is very important to note and this is one of the reasons that i am so opposed and this comes up a lot between me and the labs team for instance that I'm so opposed to non-zero y-axes.

2:18:56Luke Lafreniere:And I get it. The argument is always, hey, I'm trying to accentuate the difference to make the graph more readable. And my response is always, if you have to do that to accentuate the difference, then I guess the difference wasn't so big. I see both sides. we want to clearly indicate which one is the winner right yeah and in this case a difference in a total score of 550 and 500 is like hugely problematic it's it's also weird because the top

2:19:34Linus Sebastian:two the bottom line is actually 480 and the bottom two the bottom line is 470 it's off by 10 and it's also like what what do these represent like is uh what i i don't know is this american school system or something like what is a 490 is is a 490 a c okay that's a completely that's a completely

2:19:53Luke Lafreniere:separate issue but basically that's a valid issue i mean it's effectively the same issue because

2:19:59Linus Sebastian:we're talking about what is the severity of the difference between the things sure yeah okay yeah

2:20:04Luke Lafreniere:it's i hate it when we mess with a y-axis and so i will often get into it with labs especially around things like fps fps graphs where they're like no i really wanna i really want to do this and i basically go and like one of the most famous ones was me and lucas around um efficiency plotting oh really um because he rightly like he kind of malicious compliance showed me oh yeah what it would look like at zero where the efficiency of basically every power supply is pretty much the same and and i was like okay well how about this compromise we show the like that they're all basically the same and then we show a zoom in because to me that context of hey they're all basically the same is actually really really important when you're understanding that when we're looking at the difference between 80 plus silver and 80 plus gold we really are just kind of splitting hairs here it's it's not that big of a deal but in the context of engineering a power supply achieving that extra percent or two percent of efficiency can be a herculean effort and cost a lot of money in the materials and so i totally understand why you want to show hey they achieved something here and you want to make your you want to make your your visuals readable yeah anyway i don't want to go on this side topic for too long but the point is just that this is wild i'm not going to say causation but there is a pretty clear correlation that tracks consistent as well yeah across fourth grade math fourth grade science eighth grade math and eighth grade science i don't know where they're finding these kids who almost never use a screen but good on the parents that's uh i suspect is there schools that just have not adopted i'm assuming is this Oh, this must be in school use.

2:22:09Linus Sebastian:Yeah, this is in school use. It says right on it. It sure does.

2:22:17Luke Lafreniere:Where's the source for this? People are asking for the source here. I think it's from TechSpot. Here you go. So TechSpot interviewed the dude. Here you go.

2:22:31Linus Sebastian:The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS.

2:22:38Luke Lafreniere:freaking wild however however lots and lots and lots of other factors oh yeah absolutely at play

2:22:49Linus Sebastian:i suspect honestly a bigger impact would be electronics use outside of the classroom um yeah i don't know how you'd control for that you can't like at all not as a learning institution

2:23:00Luke Lafreniere:parents would not self-report correctly and this dude this one blew me away i was i was helping out with a class field trip the other day um they they did a they did a ski field trip i was gonna say was just the mountain yeah and um you know i like to i like to be involved while i still get a chance yeah you know like my kids are not gonna want me as a you know parent chaperone forever it comes back around i think yeah well that's what i hope right but there will be a gap yeah yeah um Um, but, uh, but, but basically I, um, I was, I was, so I was chaperoning this thing and one of the kind of side eyes and like kind of, you know, undertone conversations that I had with one of the teachers was how impossible it is to get just like accurate height and weight of the kids on the intake form for the ski trip, which is really important because when they're adjusting the bindings in the tech shop for your ski rentals they need to know how strong of a skier you are how old you are and how much you weigh so that they can make sure that they will detach correctly in in the event of in the event of a crash right and um and i and i over and i overheard or what was part of i wasn't eavesdropping but i was part of a conversation where one of the other parents speculated that the reason that the teacher got like three different like clearly incorrect responses for one kid was that it's actually the kid doing all correspondence with the school because the parents are just like not involved and didn't know how to like measure themselves self and i was like oh my god wow basically um but it pretty much it it highlighted why you could you could never count on getting any kind of accurate meaningful data about out of school

2:24:56Linus Sebastian:you could never do it i just i just suspect that's a very significant impact um because i mean that because of tangential things right like if they're if they're spending all their day all their time doom scrolling because their parents don't care anyways like is their attention span so wrecked when they're in class that whether they have a screen in front of them or not they're just not going to absorb anything like that that type of stuff i think is relatively important daniel chin

2:25:19Luke Lafreniere:says this isn't even a y-axis issue there's not enough description about the study methodology and without actual controls there's a panoply of confounders um okay but we're not talking about that we're talking about y-axis issues with the presentation of of anything um and yeah that's why i have carefully avoided saying that it is like a causation i've said correlation all we've seen is that jared cooney horvath says and that there seems to be a negative correlation that's what we've said and i pointed out that the way that these are laid out makes it look like a bigger difference than it is yeah yeah yeah that's how we got into the conversation about the importance of of drawing attention to at the very least if you are not using a zeroed axis that's all it's okay um it's also clearly a a multi-faceted problem and is not just down to using computers in the classroom because like we had computers in the classroom and we had the computer lab as well like we used computers all the time when we were in school but you had computers in the classroom that wasn't the computer lab yeah we had like when i was in elementary school we had often like one computer in the classroom and so if you finished your work early like you could play oregon trail sometimes if

2:26:48Linus Sebastian:your teacher was a bro sure not at your desk though no but but but sure okay i don't think i had many of those examples but but maybe it was a thing i don't know that was like a thing at some

2:27:00Luke Lafreniere:schools and that was like before even teachers had a computer at their desk yeah yeah sometimes

2:27:05Linus Sebastian:there would just be like a station yeah a little workstation in the computer in the in the in the

2:27:09Luke Lafreniere:corner or like if you had a student that had like a learning disability or something then you'd often have a little computer for them to use yeah um reddit has been fined by the uk for not verifying ages of users the 14 and a half million pound fine i love that money in uk is in is in weight units yeah um was issued after the uk information commissioner's office it makes it sound so big yeah it does it's it's like you know those giant checks it's like here's a million pound check oh gosh here's a here's a 14 million pound fine i put it down on something solid because you

2:27:53Linus Sebastian:oh my god i broke my hand um my hand actually got atomized from that all right so the ico alleged

2:27:59Luke Lafreniere:that reddit's failure to check ages resulted in their illegal handling of children's personal information and the potential exposure of children to inappropriate and harmful content the ico finding came before reddit's july 2025 rollout of an age verification system in the uk but the ico says they still have concerns noting that reddit relies on users self-declaring their ages when opening an account this seems to ignore reddit's use of persona to further verify ages of users seeking to access restricted content in the statement provided to ars technica reddit said that the ico's insistence that we collect more private information on every uk user is counter intuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users online privacy and safety we intend to appeal the ICO's decision.

2:28:47Luke Lafreniere:All right. So there was a, there was another part of Reddit's response that is not in my notes here that I thought was pretty hilarious. Let's see if I can find it. No, it might've been in a different, it might've been in a different article. That's, oh yeah, no, here it is. We don't require you to give us your real name. We don't track your precise location. You can even browse anonymously. You can share as much or as little about yourself as you want when using Reddit. Love that. Because they're basically saying, hey, we don't require anybody to tell us everything about themselves and every, you know, am I the a**hole, you know, experience they've ever had and how old they almost certainly are and all of this stuff.

2:29:27Luke Lafreniere:You know, they can share that with us if they want to, but we don't require any of it. So, I mean, oh man, this is, this is a can of worms hey because on the one hand um this drive from governments and plural like around the world for these platforms to collect and verify more and more and more information seems crazy at a time when they're already collecting too much and if anything we should be going the other way like are we is it time to root for reddit but on the other hand reddit's only the only reason reddit's mad is because the government wants them to collect this data a different way that will give them some kind of responsibility for their stewardship of it i think where i've come

2:30:22Linus Sebastian:to on this topic because we've been talking about this for a while is i i do really like the idea of kind of take them away pushing of pushing the kids to use less electronics and get off social media and stuff like that because it is it is highly malicious mind control um but collecting data in order to do so not only will not work it's also just a massive trove of valuable information that will be broken into. So just stop collecting it. The kids will get around it. The kids have always gotten around it. The kids will always get around it. You're not actually going to stop people who are really trying to.

2:31:06So at that point, I think the most

2:31:10Linus Sebastian:at-risk kids are going to be kids that would really try to get around it. So you're not actually saving the most at-risk kids anyways. And you're just making this massive amount of data that they will get like let's be realistic about it um you're just putting it out there for for for bad actors to just grab so like it's you're doing a horrible job of just putting data out there that will be stolen that you really shouldn't have stolen and of kids information which like come on and you're doing it in a way that is not really even going to be effective anyways i i would love to see some stuff to try to dissuade everyone of every age from overusing like social media and doom scrolling apps and stuff like that especially kids who are more susceptible but let's be real so are adults um yeah this this whole idea that because you're an

2:32:05Luke Lafreniere:adult you're like magically grown up yeah no that doesn't that doesn't happen it just doesn't fly

2:32:10Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Like, let's, I don't know if this is a topic in the doc, but I mean, YouTube pushed out and I appreciate that they did a like time management thing specifically for shorts within YouTube so that you can block how much you use. The thing that I don't like is there isn't a zero. They go down to 15. I appreciate that they have a limit that is not super long, but 15 is still not that short. five they're shorts five minutes would be fine uh zero would be the best if you could granularly control it all the way up to zero that would be the best i would appreciate you know what

2:32:46Luke Lafreniere:i'll be honest with you i don't think and i agree that it should be an option but if i was configuring my kid's account i probably wouldn't set it to zero sure that's fine because the goal of the limit would be to learn moderation yeah totally not to go cold turkey i had a member of my family that developed a very unhealthy relationship with video media consumption because it was so restricted in our household. And that was just their personality type. And I personally feel like if they had not been cut off from it as often as they were, and it had not been made such a such a like exciting uh thing such a such a huge dopamine hit when they were able to get access to it maybe some of that possibly could have been at least dulled maybe they might have learned to manage that compulsion maybe i no i still don't

2:33:51Linus Sebastian:remember the name of it but i have a browser add-on i guess it's on my windows install so i'll have to figure this out on on linux but i mean it's a browser so i just need to go find the add-on again uh but i have a browser add-on that blocks youtube shorts solid um and for me yeah i just want it blocked but your scenario completely makes sense the options would be great and i'm not going to project onto you what option you should select but i would love the option for zero um but i do i do i will say having complained all of that bit i really appreciate that they made this feature I don't think that they had to.

2:34:28Linus Sebastian:They had just an individual limiter for YouTube. I appreciate that they made one separate for shorts. They are different things. I understand they're in the same app. They are different things. And I appreciate that they did that.

2:34:38Luke Lafreniere:YouTube does a lot of things pretty wrong. They do some things very wrong. They do a lot of things kind of right.

2:34:51Linus Sebastian:This is in the a little wrong, but mostly right category, I think. I appreciate that it exists. And I don't think there was going to be some law that was going to make them do this. So I appreciate that it exists.

2:35:02Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, I would never describe myself as a fan, but I respect a lot of what YouTube does. And I have said before and will continue to say, I believe that YouTube is alongside Wikipedia, the Library of Alexandria, one of the most important things the human race has ever built.

2:35:33Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I was going to say, like, I totally, I respect your stance on I'm not going to call myself a fan. I love YouTube. I think it is fascinating that they haven't been so much worse than they are. And like, you know what? I'm very quick to point out things that they screw up. I think the whole member spam thing, which we'll talk about shortly, was a mistake. I think not having zero on the shorts thing sucks. Removing the dislike button was just so dumb and I would really like for it to come back. But at the end of the day, YouTube is amazing. What a platform. And the fact that they haven't just gone full nuclear terrible is kind of fascinating.

2:36:13Linus Sebastian:Please keep it up.

2:36:14Luke Lafreniere:that would it's legitimately close it's really important to please keep it up and it's been sketchy lately but i believe in you if there's any major concerns um i'm gonna have some face

2:36:26Linus Sebastian:time with execs soon topic type and kind of the the funnel the shorts i think there is a problem right now with youtube where youtube was about people and it was organic and it was the place you could go to learn basically everything yeah and it felt like an app made by yeah you could just find everything and right now it feels like it's getting too hype focused um there isn't really the consistency i'm finding that feedback basically every time i talk to them but i'll try again it's more extreme than ever i think and i think you're seeing it in this flow that we've talked about a a bunch of times where channel performance is much more individual video based and you have huge swings and viewership between videos i have found more than ever that i'm losing creators um i think the subscribe button should mean more okay um i think that's one of the things that should happen because like a lot of people talk about search the search is oh man mind-blowingly bad.

2:37:33Linus Sebastian:It's mind-blowingly bad, but at the same time, again, to give them credit, holy crap, is that a lot of stuff to search through? But it does seem pretty rough. Honestly, I don't think this is a hot take. Search for Google in general has been kind of in the pits. Search and drive is terrible. Search and Gmail is terrible. Like all this stuff has been pretty rough. And this is someone who just said, I love YouTube and I still love YouTube. I'm just being honest about some of the negatives. I think there is a lot of soulless, negative, genuine brain rot content, stuff that does not enrich your life in any way that is being forced to the front of YouTube and shoved in front of your face.

2:38:17Linus Sebastian:And I think that will decrease people's appreciation and usage of YouTube long term. I think it is a short term strategy to combat things like TikTok. and I think it will rot their overall market dominance in the long term. I think they need to understand and appreciate what they are, which is the video platform of the internet. They stopped publishing user numbers because they basically just said, we have everyone. Know that, understand that, own that, and have a higher level that you hold yourself to compared to other platforms. And I don't mean that you have to start banning this type of content.

2:38:53Linus Sebastian:It's never going to happen. It's a bad form of moderation for YouTube. You're still going to have flat earth and landing conspiracy videos on YouTube. But part of YouTube has been that that has been there the whole time. Yeah. And that's okay. But remember that you can float wholesome content. You can push wholesome content. You can push out these smaller creators more. And I understand that you are, again, I do love YouTube. But what I'm experiencing right now is that I'll see a video with, oh my God. Yeah, this, I mean, I'll see a video with 19 million views, which is the first thing that showed up when I opened YouTube.

2:39:28Linus Sebastian:Should I go to your screen? Yeah, but this might actually be a really cool video. Or a meme. I'm not, yeah, smash the rock, yeah. Oh, no, no, no, okay, he's getting into stuff. That might actually just be a really cool video. My point was more Mr. Beastie type stuff. But I might get a video with, perfect, I might get a video with millions of views right next to a video with seven views. maybe somewhere in the middle a little bit right um this is everything i'm seeing is these like huge dramatic um i'm not necessarily into it but i will say that's pretty quintessentially youtube yep um but it's it's just yeah i don't know bring bring back the the middle content um bring back the wholesome stuff bring back the stuff that someone's gonna look back at their usage of YouTube positively.

2:40:21Linus Sebastian:I think I really appreciate that they're adding these limiters, these abilities to set your own limiters to things like shorts. I remember back in the day when no one would have wanted that for YouTube because YouTube is a space where you went to go learn things, grow, experience, you know, see behind walls, all that kind of stuff. And it's going down the extreme brain rot funnel now where people are going to look back to their their childhood of using youtube and only think of things that were just a waste of time for them and i think that's not necessary and i think you can do that while keeping all of these different types of content on the platform but just not hyper pushing um these like objectively kind of things that aren't great for your brain

2:41:09Luke Lafreniere:okay rant over that's really good mind paradox made a really good point scientifically speaking the earth is flat 75 of the earth is water 95 plus of that water is not carbonated therefore if we were to round the earth is is flat that isn't even the direction i thought

2:41:30Linus Sebastian:they're going in that's fantastic that's pretty good

2:41:39Linus Sebastian:acting like we didn't have things like smosh another millennial brain rot no i didn't i didn't act like that at all i've said that's been on the platform the entire time that is literally not what i said in the slightest oh yeah what i did say was how they promote different things and i don't expect them to not promote that i'm just hoping that they try to really balance things out and promote wholesome things as well like our our brain rot was was pretty bad dude we had some heavy brain rot we had lots of it oh my god shoes like like what is he gonna show like this this was massive oh yeah oh no i always hated that to be honest i never liked that i was very confused why people were into that um i yeah i was yeah whatever um again i'm not expecting it to not happen i'm expecting it to be a little bit more measured and i i feel like and it's a it's such a fine line this is one of the reasons why i'm very happy to openly say that i love youtube because my god is that a difficult line and they have straddled it so well for so long i feel like we're just we're just slipping a little too far one way and i'm just asking to just try to bring it back a little bit i don't want to swing too far this way we talked about that whole pendulum thing earlier in the show just because it's swaying a little bit this way i don't want to bring it all the way back i just want it to try to be in the middle um i expect it to be full entertainment mode sometimes or you watch that slop and it's okay it's fine there's a place for that i just want the other stuff to also be brought up.

2:43:14Linus Sebastian:That's it.

2:43:18Luke Lafreniere:I'm just trying to find another like a horribly stupid video from back then, but I don't think I'm going to be able to, I don't think I'm going to be able to find it. Do you want to pick another topic? Sure. Spioncers. Oh, but yeah, I suppose I could, I suppose I could do that. I can do a topic while you get reset if you want to look for something. I'm going to try and find a really stupid video. Yeah, okay, here we go. Here we go. Here's some of our old school brain rot. Hold on, I'm getting an ad. Thanks, YouTube.

2:43:56Linus Sebastian:Oh, boy. Anthropic in the DOD. There's OpenAI in the DOW. There's a lot of stuff happening in AI right now, but... Oh my goodness, I would have never remembered this. This made me think of Power Thirst. Power Thirst!

2:44:23Well, anyway.

2:44:26Linus Sebastian:Sometimes you want just like dumb, silly, fun things. It's okay. I'm not saying to never do it. There's a balance. That's all. All right. Should we talk about Burger King? Yeah, we should do that. burger king is vying for the throne of politeness thanks to ai what a title uh burger king is entering the ai chatbot race with patty okay unironically pretty funny the name yeah it's a good name uh the open ai powered burger king assistant who will live in the headsets of employees with the purpose of assisting with meal preparation notifying management of issues such as a downed point of sale or low stock, as well as evaluating employee interactions with customers for friendliness by tracking the use of phrases such as, Welcome to Burger King, please.

2:45:18Linus Sebastian:And thank you. Okay. See, I don't think it's in the mic. What says it's in the mic?

2:45:23Luke Lafreniere:Well, it would have to be. If it's listening to what you're saying, as in the employee.

2:45:27Linus Sebastian:Oh, I thought, okay. I thought you meant like it would like override sometimes just start talking. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

2:45:34Luke Lafreniere:it's definitely listening yeah so um i thought this was peak dystopian i just think they were

2:45:44Linus Sebastian:already doing it that's why i didn't think they were already doing this i i thought they were already tracking phrases and stuff is that a thing i thought they were because everything that goes through the mic is technically going through a computer system like mcdonald's has like server racks are you sure uh no it's not no i'm not sure to be clear okay i just thought that

2:46:02Luke Lafreniere:Because I was not aware of this at all. But basically, this pretty much, as far as I can tell, is like a turbocharged version of the coffee shop AI thing. Did we show on Wanshaw, or was I just talking to one of the writers about that? I can't remember. Coffee shop AI. But it had boxes around people and said how many drinks that they had made in the last hour and tracked how long customers had been sitting at particular tables. See, these are the types of things that I thought kind of already existed. But this, putting it right in the headset so all of a sudden you could get like a counseling notice for forgetting to say please to a customer ten times in one day or like whatever threshold they set.

2:46:48Luke Lafreniere:Like this is this is the step. This is it. This is the step before complete human replacement. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah.

2:47:00Linus Sebastian:Yeah, for sure.

2:47:01Luke Lafreniere:And I feel like I was talking to Yvonne about this because this is going to be one of those times when I feel like there's going to be a group of people that are not going to like what I say. As an employer who at this time in companies wholly owned and operated by himself has somewhere in the neighborhood of around 150 plus people. because usually when we give the employee count, we're just talking like Linus Media Group and like closely affiliated companies. But you know, you start to bake in things like the Smash Champs Badminton Club. Like they've got a lot of part-timers. It's retail, right?

2:47:41Luke Lafreniere:Like it's a bit of a different situation. We've had major issues sometimes with people who in many cases, like we don't always get pay scales perfect, but with people who in many cases are very competitively compensated for what they're doing, doing things on the clock that I think it would be hard to argue are not unacceptable. So for instance, you know, are not acceptable, hiding in a bathroom and having a nap when you are on shift really yeah so so that's a fun one there's a there's a certain corner of the internet for whom wage theft exists but time theft does not um trying to have a balanced take here i say they both exist sure and to some people that will be that will be very controversial To them, I say, hey, you run a business.

2:48:53Luke Lafreniere:See how well that works for you. All right? Cool. Good chat. Output. All right. So with that in mind, basically how my conversation with Yvonne went was there's a huge problem because you have, and I think it's really important to point this out, a minority of employees who behave in such a way that supervision is necessary you have i hope a minority of employers who behave in such an overbearing manner that we have exceeded supervision and we have made it to monitoring there are many such

2:49:43Linus Sebastian:cases however where there's like maybe there's one bad apple maybe one person fell asleep in one bathroom and then that's not what i'm talking about sure but unfortunately but there's uh there tends to be some really like oddly expensive to the point where you're never going to pay it back off and overbearing reactions okay so that's kind of where i'm that's kind of where i'm going with

2:50:07Luke Lafreniere:this yeah so you so you you exceed supervision which in my mind should largely be traditionally human supervision right so you exceed supervision you make it into monitoring you make it into um yeah i think monitoring attempting to just pop it yeah um and i think i think part of our problem right now is that we're in a death spiral because the more of this monitoring level of supervision the more you make your way into like complete breach of autonomy and privacy at any like at any given moment like the more disenfranchised you might have a worker become and the bottom line is as a business you're never going to be happy about giving money to someone who's not getting work done.

2:51:01Luke Lafreniere:And if they're not getting work done because of how hyper disenfranchised they are, that's not going to change. You're not going to want to pay them to do work they're not doing. And then you're going to try to monitor them more. They become more disenfranchised. They want to do less work. And I feel like while in any individual workplace, you can break the cycle collectively. As like a, as a people. As a society. Yeah. I feel like we're circling the drain here

2:51:30Linus Sebastian:and i think i mean wages are not keeping up um it's hard to be motivated at work when you make work long hours make little money whatever that laws earth says i think the word you're looking

2:51:44Luke Lafreniere:for is micromanagement but i'm not because there's a big difference between micromanagement which might be necessary in in some cases or that person should just be let go but sometimes that's not what you want to do sometimes you'd rather kind of go okay no like we really need to to carefully set expectations here you know whatever it is right but that's really different from i have a camera trained on you at all times that has an ai monitoring it that is compiling data and stats that i can go back retroactively and dig through anytime you were ever on shift in any little thing you ever did that's not micromanagement that's like that's spying if that makes sense and to be clear like we have cameras in our places of work we're on camera right now and i'm not talking about that one or this one or this one where is it whatever it's in here there's a there's a security camera in here thanks dan dan pointed out i still can't see it whatever i assume i assume dan knows what's going on look at him that's that's the face of a man it's over there in the corner thanks dan perfect um and and oh man see this is where this is where like the realities of running a business kind of coincide or collide with some of my philosophical i wish it was this way beliefs like at smash champs for instance the extensive security system that we have yeah has resulted in reduced shrink for our retail operation it has resulted in multiple cases where we have been able to ban members who have stolen from our other members oh oh yeah i mean dude people are f***ed up man it's like we're trying to have a community here we're trying to just like play sports together and you've got people that will be caught caught in 4k taking something that's not theirs and we have literally heard the oh i didn't know that belonged to them line i f***ing hate that line did it belong to you did it belong to you then why would you take it i hate that i get i get triggered like rackets by that line yeah we've had rackets shuttles shuttles are becoming a big one because they're so expensive because they've become so expensive and even even used like like rat bag shuttles are actually going for money not much it's like by the pound because people will use them for training they'll use them for just like feeding drills and stuff and it used to be that those were considered like oh here you go worthless now they're like worth money now because new shuttles have gotten so expensive and so because people like need to carry a tube around with them and because all the tubes kind of look the same like with rackets people have like in their bag you'd have to be pretty conspicuous to like open someone's bag and take a racket out, right?

2:54:44Luke Lafreniere:But shuttles, they'll have them on the bench, you know? And so we, yeah, we've had cases with rackets. We've had cases with phones.

2:54:52Linus Sebastian:Oh. Right?

2:54:54Luke Lafreniere:A phone is so like personal. Yeah, that one was really unfortunate because it was an acquaintance of an acquaintance. It was a known person. So that was a really unfortunate conversation to have to have. Don't like that. you know we've had like we've had all kinds of things we had an allegation from a neighbor that a member performed a a bio act in public near our facility oh yeah and we had to you know we had to track that down that was wild and so and look we've only been that was like a gta moment we've been operating for a for a year and already this is just this is just the stuff that's flowing off the off the top of my head man right and so i'm sitting here going like yeah on the one hand you know yeah we shouldn't like we shouldn't like have cameras everywhere man and like all the cameras man but on the other hand i'm sitting here going how on earth would we have resolved some of this stuff if we didn't have a record that we could track back to i think it depends on the usage of it was the bio moment solo yeah it was a solo bio moment for sure for sure bud

2:56:05Linus Sebastian:uh yeah i think like

2:56:09Linus Sebastian:like are you sitting there in in an office upstairs with the like stockbroker style monitors just staring at all your employees all day if so i mean no no no no i was gonna say you know i don't have that so if you're doing something like that like that's clearly like oh my god go away if you're reviewing footage in case of incidents that no longer really bothers me I think I'm pretty sure in Canada you can't record audio in a work, in like an office style workplace. Oh, I don't know. I think that's a thing.

2:56:49Linus Sebastian:Yeah, we were trying to figure out, because I think we wanted the audio for the badminton footage or something.

2:56:54Luke Lafreniere:Oh, yeah. Yeah.

2:56:55Linus Sebastian:For like, and then we were like, wait, games, can we? And then there was like something, because it's a public venue, and it's like a service that's being offered and therefore talked about and there's like, signs and stuff, then it like becomes more fine. But if I remember correctly, regardless of the signs situation, if it's just like an office, you just can't do it.

2:57:16Luke Lafreniere:like it's a i think it was more okay for the public it wasn't okay for the employees yeah sf wong this is a good one as a business what about using ai to monitor things like a manufacturing floor to do time studies and improve inefficiencies rather than to judge people so it's oh my what the boy are you ever boy are you ever treading a fine line there that's not

2:57:40Linus Sebastian:Back and forth across it.

2:57:43Luke Lafreniere:No, I mean, the world's most ethical manufacturing foreman, sure, could be looking purely for ways that they could improve their own performance by laying things. What I'm saying is not untrue. By laying out the stations more efficiently or whatever, but literally any human being in existence would also be looking at that other, the other meatbags out there and figuring out, you know, which ones of them are, you know, scrolling on their phone instead of popping widgets together or whatever else it is they're supposed to be doing.

2:58:21Linus Sebastian:And it's very like inhuman to expect people to be 100 % on task for four hours and then 30 minutes later, four more hours. It's like not really how humans work, but there's, yeah. So things get a little bit weird because you give people too much data and then they're like wait i don't like that i paid for that minute i need you working for that minute um and again it's just not really how people work but then like how do you how do you find the acceptable bar because you actually do need output from them or else your business closes so like it's yeah that's where like ideally you find in my perfect happy fun time world ideally you find a measurable can i work there so ideally you find a measurable amount of output that you want from this person that is worth the amount of money you're paying for them and if they're hitting that output it doesn't really matter too much on the other end but that's certain positions it's really hard to measure relative yeah that too uh but it can be like okay what if this isn't a widget maker right like what if this is something completely different how do you how do you measure the output of every single possible role at linus media group for example no that's potentially impossible we have a we have a really weird business and we have a lot of people that wear a lot of funky hats yep not even normal hats we have a lot of people that wear some really weird hats yep and potentially a lot of them at once so it's like how do you measure the output of that person almost impossible very difficult

2:59:55Luke Lafreniere:So, yeah. I mean, it's something that we often come up against as we're sort of figuring out how you measure output, how you track that against costs, how you try to optimize. You know, it's a good thing, though. I think it's one of the things that keeps the content always changing. keeps working here dynamic um like it's been interesting watching people comment recently that um you know the reason ltt is going downhill is because they've had a lot of turnover in their on-screen personalities and i'm kind of sitting here going okay a all you have to do is go as far as social blade to find out that no in fact viewership has not gone down since those events in fact it's a little bit up since then which i'm not attributing to that either i'm just saying the the causation relationship that you have conjured out of your out of your brain hole is not actually a thing that happened um and one of the things that's that's that's cool about lmg is that as we have changes we just kind of adapt we just we make we make new styles of content we're always we're always looking for what is exciting to whoever the team that's here is.

3:01:23Luke Lafreniere:We're always changing. We've been around for 17 years, guys. 17 years. In that time, you know, my interests, believe it or not, have changed. Pretty dramatically. A fair bit. Your interests have altered. What are you up to? You got to be up to like 13? 15.

3:01:54Linus Sebastian:That can't be right. Pretty sure it is. From NCX days. 15? 13 would be since working for Linus Media Group.

3:02:02Luke Lafreniere:Linus Media Group hasn't existed for 13 years. Not till the end of this year.

3:02:06Linus Sebastian:Okay. So then 14?

3:02:08Luke Lafreniere:14. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Oh no. Is LTT at 18 now? Ugh. Uh, I hope not. oh man i'm getting so old 2020 wait what oh well got confused six years ago the first ltd video was posted on reddit so it so 2020 is the post date of this reddit post not the okay 17 years november 2008 so we'll be at 18 this year good lordy um anyway one of those so so where i was going with this is that you're going to see the content continue to change and i think that's part of what has given us our staying power i'm actually really excited to see some of the stuff that david pancratz made his his solo on camera debut recently over on short circuit checking out a der bauer branded like test bench um we actually had one of our one of our editors did a short circuit recently that i thought was really good it didn't get a ton of views uh but when i was uh I don't always feel compelled to message the production or crew or the host when I review one of our videos.

3:03:21Luke Lafreniere:But this was one that I reviewed just because he was new. And I thought Peter just did like an outstanding job of this video. The feedback on it is quite positive. But yeah, just needs a few more views. Guys, go check it out. It's a really, really good video. and a fight deck is not something that we would have had the internal interest to cover in the past like super high level unboxing i think you might find razor did one like a thousand years ago that we did an unboxing of i remember that yeah i think we still have those really yeah but Those would be like... Those would be like garbage by today's standards.

3:04:10Luke Lafreniere:Oh my God. Remember when our thumbnails looked like that? Because I did them. Just text on the entire thing. Why was I feeling so aggressive that day? Who knows? That's funny. Yeah, well. It was a different time. It was a different time.

3:04:29Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I think stuff like this and... Part of that, I think, is kind of the beauty of Short Circuit is you're going to have some weird stuff on there sometimes. And I think junk food swirl might not, you know, get a bunch of clicks just because of what it is. But that doesn't necessarily mean the video is bad.

3:04:51Luke Lafreniere:That is great. Tyler R says, I miss the old text thumbnails. I meticulously copied it. Good for you. Or WAN show. If you want a Photoshop template, we post that. I don't think anybody needs that. What they do need is to hear about Drop, no longer operating as a standalone business by March 31st. Drop, founded in 2012 as MassDrop, is closing its standalone e-commerce store at the end of next month as part of the Corsair integration following the 2023 acquisition. The last day to place orders is March 25th, and drop rewards will also expire that day so use them or lose them drop.com will become a landing page for brand collabs under the corsair umbrella community reaction is generally negative so far for the people who still manage to care which seems like not many i i saw some i did actually read through some of this and i saw a few people comment that the newsletter which is apparently a big part of drops deal has just been kind of full of the same stuff over and over again lately and

3:06:04Linus Sebastian:i think drop in general has kind of been like that i remember back in the day i used to go to mass drop when it was mass drop like all the time i was genuinely on there like a lot but it was because they'd have a lot of really weird stuff come through that was interesting um i remember they used to be really into like knives oh yeah uh like everyday carry yeah they were huge in the everyday carry scene there were tons of other stuff and for a long time now it's been mechanical keyboards headphones that's it it's like okay after a while i have a keyboard i like i have some headphones that i like there's no real reason for me to come back to the website if that's all they're ever really doing now um and yeah they used to get into some funky stuff and they were really around the original idea of Massdrop, which was just like using collectivism to get cheaper prices on things.

3:06:59Linus Sebastian:And that was really neat. And then they stopped doing that, I guess.

3:07:06Luke Lafreniere:Corsair was a really weird company to take public. Like, this seems like it has not gone particularly well. Yeah.

3:07:15Linus Sebastian:The timing was a little rough, wasn't it? Didn't they go public over COVID?

3:07:19Luke Lafreniere:Here, Max. I think so.

3:07:21Linus Sebastian:Maybe their goal. Yeah. Maybe their goal was just go public during COVID.

3:07:25Luke Lafreniere:Well, it was at a high, right? Everyone was like hyper into gaming and streaming. So, yeah. I mean, the owner is out, I think. Don't quote me on that, though. Does Andy Paul still own any of... Oh, does he not have a Wikipedia page? Well, that's something that he won't have in common with you if we get our way.

3:07:44Linus Sebastian:Oh, my God.

3:07:45Luke Lafreniere:Don't never forget guys. Luke Lafreniere needs a Wikipedia page.

3:07:50Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Hobbs is saying like they, they used to have actual group buys too that were exclusives of mass drop. Seriously.

3:07:58Luke Lafreniere:How important is this guy compared to Luke Lafreniere? Is this your relative by the way?

3:08:03Linus Sebastian:Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Very, very disconnected, but technically along the line somewhere. Yes. That's super neat. poked through a couple uh family relatives to figure out like is there a oh he's good oh yeah dang i was thinking about getting my my dad has one of his jerseys i was thinking about one of

3:08:24Luke Lafreniere:getting one of his jerseys 14 points in 16 games in the 23 24 playoffs bit of a gamer they're not doing so great though the rangers yeah yeah so their uh his jersey was

3:08:36Linus Sebastian:on sale recently and i might actually grab one because it'd be kind of cool to have a jersey with your name on the back that is not a custom jersey. You know? That's pretty sick. That's pretty cool. What was I going to say? Yeah, Insomniac in full pin chat also said, it's kind of like what happened to Humble Bundle over the last five-ish years. Humble Bundle is still a thing?

3:08:58Luke Lafreniere:Humble Bundle is still a thing? Wait, no, I think I knew that. No, no, I knew that. Humble Bundle, what do they have? What do they do? Get great games every month with Humble Choice for only$18. oh it's a subscription is it a subscription i think it's a variety of things uh bundles okay

3:09:17Linus Sebastian:games about books oh yeah you can humble bundle books they had some linux administration thing recently and i was like oh interesting and then i was like uh i'm not diving that far in i think you get to keep them though yeah oh yeah yeah so it's not like i think game bass works is like a rental thing? No, no, no. Yeah, it's, it's, uh, I don't know if there is a subscription or not, but either way, Humble Bundle has always been, you keep it. Um, so if they did have one, I'm sure it would be, it'd be like a loot box kind of thing. Not a, uh, pay to access.

3:09:51Luke Lafreniere:Okay, so these are just...

3:09:55Linus Sebastian:Uh...

3:09:55Luke Lafreniere:Overwhelmingly positive games bundle. I mean, that sounds pretty good. I like overwhelmingly positive things. Oh. Here we go. uh all right but then i have to pay at least 20 and 46 cents oh you will get you will get all eight items oh yeah all of these are all items so what if i put in a dollar oh okay no you have to pay at least 20 46 20 46 okay that's interesting it's not that bad for that many games i don't know how much they cost outside of humble bundle yeah me neither but apparently they're all like super super positive highly rated so that's something what what is bug fables

3:10:37Linus Sebastian:monster train is good i played monster monster train oh yeah okay i found a bug in that game that made me like i could beat anything no matter what they they have this um i've played both monster trains now i think that's monster train one in monster train two there there's like different floors and you put your units on the floors and then enemies come on and they attack once and then they go up a floor and i i found this mechanic where there's a card where you you can play the card and then it will move one of your characters by uh on the floor and then there's an affix that you can put on the character that makes so that they gain a permanent stat when they move but the it would try to figure out where the character would move before you played the card when you would hover the card over but that would mean that the character would move as far as the game was concerned so you could just highlight the card over and then unhighlight the card rapidly and you just gain permanent stats just completely broke the game i did it for one run because i thought it was funny and then i was like i'm never doing that again i have to like you know it removes the entire fun of the game if you do that but yeah i just made it you could just one shot anything it was uh it's pretty good it's pretty good cool let's one shot this message from our

3:11:56Luke Lafreniere:sponsor app control our applications on your controller getting out of control well check out our sponsor app control it's a task manager but with more features app control has things like historical resource monitoring so you can keep up to three days worth of information on cpu gpu ram temps and usage, as well as seeing which apps have access to things like your mic, webcam, or location, including when your location is hidden. If something new or unusual starts running in the background on your computer, App Control will notify you so you can take any necessary security measures. You can sort apps by publisher, disable individual apps, and see what an app is used for with a single click.

3:12:37Luke Lafreniere:And the cherry on top? It's free. so get app control the feature rich task manager alternative at appcontrol.com finally the show is brought to you by ground news obviously the wan show is a trustworthy place to get all your favorite tech news

3:12:56Luke Lafreniere:but how much do you trust any other outlets our sponsor ground news is here to help you break free from media bias and better understand where your news comes from they bring together articles from several sources and let you see things like political bias, ownership, and how reliable the reporting tends to be. Let's talk about NVIDIA for a second. When it comes to covering NVIDIA, and specifically talking about AI, it doesn't look like the right-wing side of the media landscape reports as much as the left. And we see this mirrored in another story regarding Google rolling out Nano Banana 2, an update to Gemini's AI image generation model.

3:13:32Luke Lafreniere:Based on the information on Ground News, it seems that right-leaning sources only report on AI news when it involves Wall Street earnings. Things like the blind spot feature or these bias breakdowns can help you ask important questions when engaging with the news. So get the transparency you deserve from your news and save 40 % on Ground News's Vantage plan with our QR code on Steam. That actually leads very well into another topic, which is that Paramount is set to take over Warner Brothers. Netflix has officially dropped out of the bidding war to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which leaves Paramount Skydance in the lead to acquire Warner Bros.

3:14:14Luke Lafreniere:Pictures, CNN, and HBO Max. Paramount already owns CBS, Paramount +, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. they agreed to pay a massive seven billion dollar termination fee if the deal fails to get regulatory approval netflix's co-ceo stated that they declined to match paramount's revised 31 a share offer so approximately 111 111 billion dollars because it is no longer financially attractive yeah i should think not there's a significant amount of political drama surrounding this deal yeah because paramount's bid is not enabled by paramount doing so good that they have so much money that they can run around scooping up former competitors it's because instead paramount's bid is backed by a major right-wing donor larry ellison meanwhile netflix's co-ceo ted sarandos reportedly visited the white house hours before dropping out of the bidding war interesting the merger isn't finalized yet but is expected to face heavy scrutiny well, will it though, from both the U.S.

3:15:23Luke Lafreniere:Department of Justice and, this is more likely, from European regulators. The California Attorney General has already confirmed that there's an open investigation with the California DOJ. Discussion question. Is streaming trending towards a giant monopoly worse than we ever had with cable TV? Yes. Yes, it is. That's why the pirate hats are coming out. Um... Yeah, so this is more consolidation in the media we consume is bad. Yeah, I will say that. And hopefully that is simple enough that everyone on every side of the political spectrum can kind of go, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And recognize that this is bad.

3:16:18Cool.

3:16:19Luke Lafreniere:Good chat.

3:16:25by the way um paramount owns cnn yeah i said that okay yeah so this is going to be

3:16:34Luke Lafreniere:very interesting in terms of a pretty obvious reason why there's so much pressure to actually do this yes that's as far as i can tell the only reason that um certain people involved in facilitating this deal have any interest in it whatsoever speaking of weird stuff hp is selling

3:16:50Linus Sebastian:1.2 terabyte laptops on Amazon. Kinda. The HP store on Amazon is selling low-end entry laptops and advertising them as 1 terabyte plus devices. The catch? 1 terabyte of the storage is OneDrive cloud storage.

3:17:11Luke Lafreniere:Also, in the case of this 1.6 terabyte one, 512 gigs of it seems to be... Oh, wait. a 512 gigs of it seems to be a portable hard drive wait what uh let me see if i can find it what is this picture is this ai uh it could be that water bottle is like on her knee this is this just bad photoshop or is this ai i can't tell because like clearly this shadow under here would also she would have shadows under her fingers yeah but like where's the water bottle oh yeah yeah it's ai you think it's ai i'm pretty sure it could be a bad photoshop uh what's the grass yeah let's have a look at these that's ai this is ai yep okay oh my god nice okay well that answers it yeah

3:18:11Linus Sebastian:oh very cool very good yes um that's a little ridiculous is this deceptive marketing yes they do specify in the title that is one drive they first say it's 1.6 terabyte of storage like

3:18:26Luke Lafreniere:ah man yeah i think it is this one's better this one's better where they don't combine it that's totally fine however this is still this is still yucky that's a problem this is still

3:18:39Linus Sebastian:super yucky the title on this one is fine yes the category is not but the title on this one is totally however how long is this included for because if it's less than forever it's less than years then they could fix it if it if it was a fixed period of time i don't even care if it's less than years if it's not forever right it would i think in my opinion would need to be in brackets at the end plus one terabyte of cloud storage for for three years or if the price for the product

3:19:05Luke Lafreniere:said the upfront price and the subscription to maintain that storage i'd be fine that would also be fine i think so also fully acceptable yeah yuck we got a no notes uh the king of plasma tvs

3:19:19Linus Sebastian:is done making tvs panasonic is pulling a sony and giving skyworth control of their television business with the aim for the chinese firm to take over manufacturing marketing and selling panasonic tvs across the u.s and europe earlier this month panasonic announced plans to eliminate 12 000 jobs globally which is a surprisingly only four to five percent of their workforce that's a

3:19:45Luke Lafreniere:giant company holy crap panasonic makes like a lot of stuff yeah just apparently not a lot of tvs these days to be clear um they're pulling a sony in the sense that they are um offloading their tv business at least to at least to a certain degree they seem to be doing to a chinese company yeah yeah but they're doing it a lot more into a different company it's sky worth rather than tcl which is to sony more like it seems like more of a partnership on the sony side because they like own part of the joint venture whereas it seems like panasonic nick is just like well okay you go ahead this feels kind of like um like when you'd see like an old brand that used to be cool like you'd see an rca like flat panel you'd be like did rca ever make flat panels and then you look into it and it's just made by like some random some random chinese

3:20:37Linus Sebastian:brand sad uh another no notes but i suspect we'll talk about it for a little bit uh youtube youtube rep has confirmed the ability to filter member only videos as of right now our ltt memberships are back online they sure are you should still go to lmg.gg fpwan for better pricing but it's there if you'd rather stay on youtube which we know some of you would uh we're slowly uploading new exclusives new as in they weren't uploaded as of when this membership thing was turned off in the past so some of it'll be a couple months back uh we're still in the process of uploading new exclusives it's taking a while as apparently there's a limit on videos uploading oh that makes sense that does make sense but i'm surprised it applies to all channels

3:21:22Luke Lafreniere:yeah i i could see that a lot of hacks and stuff yeah yeah i could see that yeah that's fine yep uh so the the feed is going to be kind of a mess but luke is going to show you guys real quick a super awesome hack for not seeing any of the members videos if you don't really want to uh for one thing you can say don't show me these anymore and for another excuse me you can click Click on public. There you go. Boop. They're all gone. And then you won't see any of them, which is why we agreed. Not a bad solution. Yeah, that's why we agreed to turn them back on. You can also click on just members only.

3:21:55Luke Lafreniere:You could do that. Or you can... Oh, why is that a thing?

3:21:59Linus Sebastian:I saw that and tried to click away from it. Oh.

3:22:05Luke Lafreniere:I did not. I did not.

3:22:11Luke Lafreniere:I don't even know what that's in reference to. I don't either. Freaking Sammy. Can't trust that guy.

3:22:22Luke Lafreniere:Oh, man. All right. Hey, this is fun. Remember how I said that I had faith that Apple was going to add and to end encryption for RCS to iPhone to Android communications? I do. They almost immediately did as part of the beta. So they are now testing that. the second beta of 26.4 has support for it so that's pretty cool um our discussion question is now that apple's original lack of encryption argument no longer applies what do you think was the real reason they waited so long to adopt rcs shame it's just because they just plain didn't

3:22:57Linus Sebastian:want to yeah they wanted to shame android stuff yep um there's a new app that lets us track sammy specifically no it's people with uh smart glasses but realistically it's just bluetooth devices but But in this case, it's probably coded for specific IDs that show you smart glasses. It sure is. With millions of pairs of smart glasses now in the wild, you never know who might be secretly filming. You still won't. But a new app called Nearby Glasses scans for Bluetooth signals and warns users when smart glasses may be in use. The app is currently available on the Google Play Store with iOS in the works.

3:23:36Linus Sebastian:Neat.

3:23:37Luke Lafreniere:leaked charger for a new iphone apparently they're going magnetic only blah blah blah supportless iphone on the way we've all known this was going to happen for a while uh no this this seems very very rumor milly okay i'm not i'm not engaging with that what else we got here discord is delaying its global age verification rollout discord is now pushing back their rule changes to the second half of 2026. Before they introduce the new rules, the company will be adding more options for users to verify their age and add the ability to make spoiler channels, which are essentially age-gated chats for NSFW topics.

3:24:18Luke Lafreniere:They also plan to publish a blog post explaining exactly how their age estimation systems work. Well, that'll be an easy way to get around them then. Quote from Discord CEO says, the way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use discord that's not what's happening but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed

3:24:38Linus Sebastian:at our most basic job clearly explaining what we're doing and why okay well we'll see how it

3:24:51Luke Lafreniere:goes in another six months or so yeah the problem is the way this landed was you were working with

3:24:57Linus Sebastian:like the the palantir guy i don't remember his name right now yeah like it's not a great look that's i think the main reason that's the main reason why i was pissed hey do you want to be

3:25:10Luke Lafreniere:not upset yeah uh sure this is pretty cool ars technica posted this article yeah in spite of big offers from tech companies many farmers are being supremely based and refusing to sell their land for data center use. So based. 82-year-old, this is so cool, 82-year-old Ida Huddleston told representatives of a Fortune 500 company when she rejected their offer of$33 million for 650 acres of Kentucky farmland, there's a quote, you don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone. I'm satisfied.

3:25:56Luke Lafreniere:another farmer in the same county or country it says country but i'm sure they mean county because obviously they'd be in the same country um 75 year old timothy grocer declined a proposal to name your price when a tech company sought to buy his 250 acre farm this was reported by the Guardian. The money's not worth giving up your lifestyle, Grosser said. Based. Based. And agricultural land... Farmers being based again. Agricultural land has been a target because it has access to water. It has traditionally been relatively inexpensive for the amount of area you can get per dollar, which if you're trying to build a sprawling data center might be an advantage.

3:26:46Luke Lafreniere:I think access to power has also been an advantage traditionally.

3:26:50Linus Sebastian:Oh yeah, farm power.

3:26:51Luke Lafreniere:Yep. It's like way cheaper.

3:26:53Linus Sebastian:There's a discussion question here. It says, here in BC we have the agricultural land reserve to theoretically at least protect farmland. Do you think other regions could follow that example? I think they could. I think the agricultural land reserve is extremely documentedly, and I mean you could just take a drive in some of those areas. horrifically abused by the ultra-rich in BC to just have insanely massive mansions, pay way less in power, pay way less in taxes, pay way less in lots of different things by just kind of basically pretending that they're farmers, by having a tiny little bit of their land dedicated to farming something.

3:27:30Linus Sebastian:It's very, very common that it's wine grapes. And then they'll have somebody, because very little maintenance, And then you have somebody come gather your grapes and sell them or whatever. And you don't do any of the labor and you make no money off of it. But you are allowed to classify yourself as a farm. This is like just one of the many, many ways that BC is extremely well known for just excessive amounts of scams. Just tons and tons of scams. I mean, that's a farmhouse, right? That sure do be a farmhouse, brother. Let's go. There are tons of these in BC. we are here tons of them we are here that is like here hell yeah um those crops those the all those crops behind there that that's making so much money they have solar panels though so it's fine

3:28:23Luke Lafreniere:that's making so much money dude uh hope this is not that easy to do with a touchpad but uh

3:28:30Linus Sebastian:let's see let's see what else we can find let's let's play and it's wild because you'll see like a very legitimate operation yeah here's a farm and everything looks pretty normal and then you

3:28:38Luke Lafreniere:see a mega mansion and you're like oh what are we looking at here uh what about second house or is that a garage it looks like actually this one's not that bad this one's pretty normal this one's

3:28:48Linus Sebastian:fine i don't want to point out like there are there are a lot of uh a lot of very legitimate farmers in bc uh but it's extremely expensive land so it's very very difficult to get into and you're you're bidding against people like uh potentially this that are just building mega mansions and then you know chilling playing farmer game by paying someone else to uh take care of their life also heard that if you are like oh the land's really bad um i haven't been

3:29:22Luke Lafreniere:able to make any money off of it because it's crap um can we rezone it for not farmland that is pretty hard from my understanding legitimately people try i'm sure i'm sure they try but my understanding is it's pretty hard i'm glad yeah yeah how many garages is that six that's a lot of is there more garages on the right there jibis wow absolutely wild they look like they do some

3:29:54Linus Sebastian:legitimate farming yeah but there's also the thing where you can hire people to come in and legitimately for sure the one that i'm talking about is like way more egregious there's a there's a lot of ones a little further away from here, like more in the kind of Aldergrove area. Look at that house.

3:30:12Luke Lafreniere:Wow.

3:30:14Linus Sebastian:And meanwhile, this one. Damn. Oh my.

3:30:19Luke Lafreniere:Damn. That's a big

3:30:22Linus Sebastian:house.

3:30:26Luke Lafreniere:Oh my god, this one couldn't even all be in a straight line.

3:30:32Luke Lafreniere:They're not even pretending that they ever go any farther out of the house than this wall yeah sure though we go you know do crop things oh my god look at this one the main thing the main thing that stands out to me

3:30:46Linus Sebastian:like if they actually if they actually end up producing like good crops i don't really care that much if they happen to be super rich and they're like whatever i'll farm this land and i'm gonna just pay someone else to do it i'll slap a house here like that doesn't bother me that much the main them a little bit but not that much the main ones that bother me is when they just have like a tiny amount of the property dedicated to that like minimum requirements which is often not that high uh and then they do it it's like yikes look how many

3:31:14Luke Lafreniere:cars are in front of this place you know you can only drive one at a time right some of these might be multifamily oh i'm sure they are yeah that was just a guy and his dog need 12 bedrooms

3:31:30Linus Sebastian:there's an extremely if you want to have fun one day if you go around google maps there's way more than i thought there was look into how much people make in this province and then just have fun looking down some of the roads look at look into some of the costing of certain areas and go wait wait a minute you mean all the illegitimate money yeah oh yeah that doesn't make any sense the the top end of people's earning in this province is is you know this much that means there's that many people a huge percentage of them live in vancouver okay cool what are all these places how is there so many places worth like double digit millions of dollars and there's just so many of them are across the street neighbors when i was in my teens were just known to be gangsters i think i've told you the story probably a few times one of the in-home geek squad guys when i worked in in uh at geek squad uh worked at like a very obvious hell's angels place uh and the guy just like was laughing about he offered him a beer and stuff and he said no obviously and then as he was leaving he was like guess what i do for work and he was like what he's like i i don't remember what he said i repair i work for like a refrigerator repair company or something and then just huge belly laugh like it's like clearly clearly clearly he had he had like a crazy harley he had some uh he had some leathers and stuff like it was it was very obviously a hell's angels bro um just just messing around um i'm in waste management that's a pretty that's a that's a pretty big tell

3:33:15Linus Sebastian:yeah bc bc ah man i don't remember what it was i'm pretty sure it was new york times it was a long time ago but they did like a most corrupt place in north america and it ended up being vancouver this was this was quite a while ago things have probably shifted a little bit but probably not that much there is a lot of uh money moving around in bc and in illegitimate ways well

3:33:36Luke Lafreniere:sean caldera was actually talking to me about what's going on in fort langley right now where real estate developer bro couldn't get permits to build just like whatever he wanted so he ran and became the mayor yeah so that he could just green light whatever he wanted to do

3:33:51Linus Sebastian:and then his influence is spreading um and like the whole vibe of fort langley has changed very significantly because there was all these rules about uh historical buildings and how high they could build and all this kind of stuff and he's blown that out um and now it's just like uh another suburb well the the one main street it just it doesn't feel historic so much anymore there's a couple there's a couple buildings here and there um but it just feels like i don't know i'm in like a trendy street in vancouver now and it's just in the middle of nowhere it's kind of sad they should put in a whole foods yeah it's a pretty small place maybe a half

3:34:37Luke Lafreniere:oh my goodness sorry oh man what were we even talking about who knows uh farmers refusing to sell the data centers oh yeah cool based based um Um, Sam Altman defends AI at the India AI Impact Summit. Uh, this... Okay, are you ready for your eyes to just about roll out of your head? I don't know anything about this topic, yeah. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman argued that it's unfair to only look at the energy consumption it takes to train an AI because it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.

3:35:14Linus Sebastian:Sorry, I wasn't ready for that at all.

3:35:17Luke Lafreniere:That's wild. We would need to factor, this is a quote, 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart.

3:35:26Linus Sebastian:Ah, so humans are just, it's just the matrix now.

3:35:31Luke Lafreniere:Altman further claims that if you compare a GPT inference query to a human answering a question, probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis. Holy crap.

3:35:43Linus Sebastian:Whoa, dude. he completely dismissed concerns over chat gpt's water usage as totally fake arguing that modern data centers don't use evaporative cooling i mean some of them do but that i mean that i'm not even

3:35:57Luke Lafreniere:going to pick apart that much when the whole like okay oh man good lord so here's here's the okay i could i could wax philosophical on the value of a human life and therefore just obviously being more valuable than, you know, an AI agent or whatever, right? Like I could do that. But instead, I'm going to go all the way to the hyper-capitalist side, and I'm going to meet you on your own turf, and I'm going to say why that was such a f***ing stupid thing to say, okay? In a way that is undeniable, that AI will never pay taxes. Oh. All right. Alright. You're done, bud. False equivalency. And I don't even have to get into whether humans have a soul or, you know, or just the...

3:36:56Linus Sebastian:If you look at all the ways that OpenAI started, he was talking about how it was going to save humanity and universal basic income and all this kind of stuff. And now he's saying, like, ah, you don't need the plebs. Yep. I've got chills. Damn. He's getting a little bit more real here. Boom. Which might be good. Boom. Scam Altman, dude. Yeah.

3:37:14Luke Lafreniere:You can't tax the AI. Pop more colors, Sam. I'll never forget. So that's why we should, that's why we should, even from a hyper capitalist, don't care about anything, but more money standpoint. That's why we should invest in humans and training humans. And we should not invest in training. What am I looking at? Why can't I scroll up? There we go.

3:37:42Linus Sebastian:what is this yeah two colors he sure does do rock in callers sam we didn't forget about looped sam little scammy company you lied about your users we didn't forget sam a little evil boy

3:37:59Luke Lafreniere:i don't like you you know what's funny is we had like that that concept of a line of of clothing products so we had the the steve that turtleneck that mock neck that was based on some jobs and just have like a stupid double collar on it. That would be amazing. I think we won't do that. Yeah. The Italian government has declared all cloud storage users guilty in advance. A levy of up to 30 euros per year will be applied to cloud storage accounts based on the reasoning that that storage space could be used for copyright infringement. the italian minister of culture signed a decree extending the levy that previously applied only to physical media and at the same time increased the fees for physical media the italian society of authors and publishers welcomed the move while italian consumer and technology advocacy groups are calling the move anachronistic these sorts of levies are not new germany introduced similar levies in the 1960s after legislators were convinced that cassette recorders would destroy record sales fun fact did you know that the canadian private copying levy is still set to 29 cents per blank cd and has been extended to 2027 that's one of the reasons that blank media was more expensive here than it was in the states however i am going to say something once again i know huge surprise to everyone that might come across controversial the levy on blank cds was actually a lot simpler for me than the canadian government actually enforcing copyright

3:39:37Luke Lafreniere:i paid a little bit of levy on every blank cd and i never worried about like the music industry busting down my door sure i i and and as long as our and as long as this levy kind of sits there as a as a as an invisible shield against me ever actually like being punished in any way for the songs I downloaded on Napster. I was actually pretty chill with it.

3:40:06Linus Sebastian:Italian friends, I encourage you to explore self-hosting. Yeah, you could do that too. You have your own cloud. Blackjack. And they don't have to know about it.

3:40:18Luke Lafreniere:Nice. Solid. Oh, hey, was that it for topics? Oh, did we talk about OpenClaw? Yeah, I didn't catch that much about it. The lady had her emails deleted.

3:40:29Linus Sebastian:yeah it's uh we don't have notes on it i don't know enough about it cool let's not do that then but it is you want to let's here let's just do this bit let's just look at their website real quick uh the ai that actually does things it does do that clears your inbox a little bit too much maybe sends emails manages your calendar checks your invite flights all that kind of stuff look at this what it does what it does what it does it runs on your machine it uses any chat app that it has it has persistent memory it controls your browser it has full system access including reading and writing files running shell commands executing scripts full access or potentially sandboxed and people are letting this rip apparently uh facebook researcher person it deleted their entire inbox it's probably not entire but a lot of it yeah emails are slowing them down.

3:41:22Delete

3:41:22Linus Sebastian:the whole thing. Maybe that's good. Sweet. I don't think we have a ton else to say. None of us have used this.

3:41:34Linus Sebastian:It's super dangerous. It uses an old OS with a ton of vulnerabilities. Yeah. I'm not too surprised. It is what it is.

3:41:43Linus Sebastian:Neat.

3:41:47Luke Lafreniere:All right. Dan, do you want to switch us over to After Dark?

3:41:53Linus Sebastian:wait are you hold on I don't have Twitter installed that's one of my problems when there's somebody that I can only communicate with on Twitter I just constantly uninstall it and then I'll install it again because I have to go message somebody and then I'm like ah crap I ghosted this person for a while I hate that it's like sometimes the only way to contact people hey you want to know what's already started what after dark oh

3:42:21Luke Lafreniere:and you can tell you can tell how controversial it is

3:42:27Linus Sebastian:like press ratio oh man I'm surprised you went back to it not I don't know anything about Pop-O-S I've never used it I know nothing about it I have no opinions on it I just I'm surprised once scorned he returned

3:42:47Luke Lafreniere:um well the narrative the narrative last time should be uh the narrative last time was that was a fluke that should never have happened yeah they patched the bug that's not normal and i was like i was that the only thing i don't remember yeah because i well i just never got as

3:43:09Linus Sebastian:far as even like having to do almost the first thing and then it nuked and then you went somewhere else and then i went elsewhere yeah okay yeah yeah yeah yeah cool cool cool cool all right dan hit us

3:43:20Luke Lafreniere:sure thing hey linus a while ago you teased us with a sling bag for handhelds and tablets any updates on that sling bag oh uh Oh, shoot, probably, but I can't actually remember right now. Matthew's working on it. I saw a newer version of it a little while ago. I think we put it on pause waiting around for Switch 2 is what I want to say. So the latest version of it has, it's bigger, so it could accommodate a Steam Deck, but it has an insert so that you can put like a Switch 2 securely in it, or a Switch one, but it's tough, man. When the form factors of these handhelds are so - They vary so much.

3:44:08Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, they're so different in terms of their thickness and girthiness and all those are both kind of the same thing. But like whether they have like handles on them or whether they're like super skinny with Joy-Cons, like it might be one of those things where when we finally release it, it's ultimately not really what you want because we have to target something or we end up targeting nothing and then nobody wants it.

3:44:31Linus Sebastian:Mm-hmm.

3:44:35Luke Lafreniere:What chipset are you using for the Linux challenge? I've used Linux since Slackware 1.0, and I can't get anything to work properly on Strix Halo.

3:44:48Linus Sebastian:Um. I constantly forget the hardware in my system because I didn't build it myself. Interesting.

3:44:56Luke Lafreniere:I am using a variety of chipsets, one of which is Strix Halo. I'm actually, I think this is launched now, so I can show it. But I've been using this PX13 from Asus for a little bit. It's a Strix Halo system with a, yeah, convertible thing. It's basically the old Flow X13, but without the XG Mobile, without a dedicated GPU, with 40 gigabit per second USB-C, and with beefy cooling and Strix Halo.

3:45:33Linus Sebastian:This is a side note. I think it's not worth uploading our back catalog. I'm just going to side note real quick. This is, I know we can press the thing and I think that's really cool. But when people don't, I guess just, I don't know how to uncheck it. So this is what the page looks like. I know, it's a temporary issue though. But there's literally no videos on my entire page that are not members only. yeah and i don't know if people are gonna know to click this yeah it's so little of how people find our videos anyway like really like negligible i'm just boomer boy yeah i do that to find videos i know okay yeah that's fine yeah uh okay

3:46:15Luke Lafreniere:hey look and it's temporary i fully acknowledge it's a problem you're right i think some people

3:46:21Linus Sebastian:were upset about it being on the home page. Home page? I think you can just click I'm not interested in this on the home page. You can't do that on the actual channel page, but you can just click public on the channel page. There are solutions everywhere as far as Mario Sandy goes. It does seem to remember. It will forget after a little while,

3:46:38Luke Lafreniere:but it will remember. Okay, more merch messages. Hey, Luke, do you still play the new Mario Kart?

3:46:45Linus Sebastian:No. I quit the first day. I bought a Switch. This is probably the the most disappointing purchase in a while i bought a i i went blind into the new mario kart just expecting you know i've enjoyed like every mario kart someone's screaming no wrong uh it's correct for me um i uh yeah i bought a switch to almost exclusively for par mario kart i played mario kart 8 and mario kart 8 deluxe both a lot um i played mario kart 8 on the wii u a bunch and then i played mario kart 8 deluxe or whatever it's called on the on the switch quite a bit as well i played mostly on the wii u i think but i also played on the switch um very excited about new mario kart was excited just didn't look into things because i didn't want it spoiled played a fair bit in one day and the whole time i was just like oh i don't like certain things about this i really i always really loved drifting in mario kart loved it and then now it's like the drifting was weird it didn't feel good for a variety of reasons and i don't think i'm the only one that thinks that and then they have this new like rail grind thing that i really did not like um i had a few other things that just made it really whack it felt uh even more encouraging of exploits than previous Mario Karts.

3:48:08Linus Sebastian:Usually in previous Mario Karts the exploits were cool but kind of hard to do so you wouldn't see them in like online competitive play much and literally day one people were doing like under map exploits and crazy stuff in the new one because of all the different systems that they support that is just kind of whack.

3:48:27Linus Sebastian:Yeah, I did not have a good time and I have not played it since. Honestly, my Switch 2 is not getting a lot of play time.

3:48:35Luke Lafreniere:yeah like probably sell it i think my son um made the wrong call yeah i think he should have gone with uh with a handheld pc disappointing man i was talking about that when it launched he uses it when we travel and in fairness to nintendo it'll probably have like a seven year lifespan yeah probably so there'll be plenty of time for banger games to come out for it i'm gonna interject here with another merch message what you're referring to as switch 2 is in fact switch plus two or as i've taken to referring sorry linus wondering if your son is still liking the switch too my daughter is now asking for one as a high school graduation gift uh he's not using it that much bottom line uh he likes it when he uses it he uses it when we travel but like we don't travel that much and usually when we travel we're like doing stuff like our two of our recent trips were ski trips so we're up early we eat we ski we come home we maybe play like some card games or hang out we let them bring their friends on one of the trips uh so the kids brought some friends so they they hung out for a little bit and Yvonne and I hit the hot tub and then we all collapse in our beds and I mean the way we travel is pretty type a yeah so like I'm talking we leave here friday night we ski saturday morning we sleep in the hotel for one night we ski sunday and fly home sunday like 48 hours doorstep to doorstep from home to home oh yeah um so there's not a lot of room for like playing mario kart on your switch in all that oh by the way totally unrelated i tried skiing for the first time in over 25 years it was fine back to boarding yeah i think i'm gonna go back to snowboarding yeah uh but not because like skiing is like a problem but just because i've only boarded for over 25 years i'm i am more comfortable and therefore having more fun on a board i talk to my kids about this all the time how you have to kind of when you're an adult especially you kind of have to invest in getting good at something to have fun with it and i hate that video games have become that now because that it's like i i find i used to think wow i'm really like jumping between topics here but i used to hear people say yeah i only really play single player stuff now because like multiplayer is not fun because i'm not sweaty enough and i didn't feel like things were that sweaty then but now i'm totally there i i don't think this is age i think things have changed i'm not i'm not sweaty and sweaty enough of a skier to have fun skiing the way that i have fun boarding though so if you look at like

3:51:28Linus Sebastian:counter-strike lobbies back in the day even the tryhards back then in not all cases definitely but in a lot of cases would be seen as like very casual players these days in in regards to the effort put into the game right like the fact that it is genuinely common for people like warm up and aim trainers like no dude that's crazy the sweaty guys play every day

3:51:52Luke Lafreniere:after work wow yeah and now what do you have yeah 60 hours a week of practice yeah that's crazy and

3:51:59Linus Sebastian:like it's like i remember i i played on some some pretty good teams and i remember like the idea of practicing if it wasn't just a scrim was like funny insane like like you would what are you

3:52:10Luke Lafreniere:talking like when i was in high school if someone said they were practicing a video game like you would have gotten an involuntary chortle like just like that one but like even on the team

3:52:23Linus Sebastian:hilarious to think about it i remember our like our best player was talking about how he wanted to do like effectively aim training and like teaching people some like movement things and stuff like that and everyone other than me was like no i'll scrim i'll like play and just get better through playing do some monkeys what are you talking about i'm not gonna like no not a not a chance and now and now people like very voluntarily on their own just to queue up like normals they're not on a team none of this matters they're going nowhere we'll like practice and aim trainers for a long time before they jump online like the the the the playing field has legitimately shifted we have not just gotten older it's probably both yeah but it's not just getting older

3:53:16Luke Lafreniere:last one i've got for you tonight whale vip here oh what's up gg on the hell divers game yeah it's my first time playing it's fun it's a good game what game slash activity slash etc do you wish you could have done at the land i wanted to chair curl and i missed it i was busy chair curling is so fun i still can't believe your dad didn't win he got yeah he got didn't he win at one of our things once i thought so yeah okay somebody he had a great shot apparently

3:53:46Linus Sebastian:and somebody just like whipped their chair and took his chair out i mean that's curling right there's yeah there's there's offensive measures to this game but you only have one shot you can't like in a curling game it goes back and forth constantly you you throw your chair once right right so like you had a good shot it got taken out it just is what it is all right um some of it's like the order that you just happen to be in i don't know um what was i gonna say yeah i wish the i wish the 8v8 we gotta kind of figure that out because that i really i already agreed with the vision but now i saw the vision and it was bright and there was just issues with it yeah i hope we can get there yeah it will take a long time there were a lot of technical issues

3:54:32Luke Lafreniere:with the 8v8 this year were when we were using it it was great the whole idea of everyone just sits down and you just play and there's no like oh sorry i know i don't have you on steam so can someone lobby up so that we have like like only a maximum of two degrees of separation between whoever's running the lobby and okay sorry are we using the official servers oh well i only have a pirated version of the game so i'm not going to be able to join an official server oh god well now i i have the official game i have to go get a pirated version of it good lord like

3:55:03Linus Sebastian:that whole that whole foreplay is just so not sexy for me it was also just the defaultness of it people gathered near the entrance of the 8v8 and everyone was like we're playing halo there is a blue side and a red side yeah there is the blue team and the red team i wonder what team i should join nope no you just join i'm blue seven well i joined blue like cool like there's there's no you just get into the game pretty quick you just start playing it was it was it was pretty sweet yeah i had some issues with the net booting and well there were some problems we'll figure it out We'll figure it out.

3:55:47Linus Sebastian:We need someone who's going to own it. And then they'll own it.

3:55:52Luke Lafreniere:Huge props to the Whale Land team. Shout out Evan and Pancrath. I think they might mean Yvonne. Or do they mean Evan, like our new social guy?

3:56:07Cool.

3:56:08Linus Sebastian:Evan the Volunteer. Yeah, I thought so. I thought that might have been his name. Oh, that guy. Evan's pretty based. Yeah, Evan's cool. Yeah. I'm really bad with names so I thought his name was Evan but I didn't want to say it but yeah

3:56:22Luke Lafreniere:is that it for the WAN show alright we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel

3:56:27Linus Sebastian:I feel like that snuck up on me

3:56:29Luke Lafreniere:4 hours flies by when you're having fun

3:56:30Linus Sebastian:bye bye

3:56:52Outro Music