We Know Why No One's Watching LTT - WAN Show September 19, 2025

20:43Linus Sebastian:you didn't you didn't get a an up count when we got more views i don't know whatever um But yeah, it's if there's a and the sponsors that we currently have can look at, you know, referral rates that they had in the past and notice that like nothing really changed and then things are fine. But if you're a sponsor looking at a prospective channel, your surface level view of them is often their view count. So if you're looking around and trying to view things and you see a tech creator, which might have a higher percentage of people running ad block, it's going to look worse. This did hit all of YouTube, but it disproportionately hit more tech-savvy audiences.

21:23Linus Sebastian:It doesn't necessarily mean tech specifically, but it does mean tech-savvy audiences. Makers, people who are going to modify their things more often, are more likely to throw in something like an ad block than someone who doesn't even know that the extensions for browsers even exist, which is a thing.

21:41Luke Lafreniere:Which is a very significant proportion of the population. and I just want to make it clear because there seem to be a lot of people who are still super confused about my stance on ad blocking I don't use them I have a policy internally here at work that we are not allowed to use them because it feels pretty hypocritical for us to make our livelihoods off of ads and not support the other channels and websites and services that we use in the same way that we expect to be supported. But as far as whether other people should use AdLock, we have always said that that's a personal choice. Luke and I have always owned that there were times in our lives that we pirated all manners of different kinds of content, whether for financial reasons or otherwise.

22:33Luke Lafreniere:And we've always maintained it's a personal choice. The only thing that I have ever asked people to consider is the very, very simple fact that ad blocking is circumventing the method of payment that exists for the content, so is functionally piracy, and you need to understand the impact of your actions. If you want the services and the content that you obviously enjoy enough to watch to exist, then you're either part of it continuing to exist or you're part of it not continuing to exist and there could be an impact there there might not be we luckily have diversified our business in such a way that our revenues from ltt store for instance actually exceed now our revenues from uh like google adsense by a country mile um but this is something that disproportionately impacts smaller creators i mean back when this viewpocalypse first hit i was chatting with dan about it after WAN show because Luke you know doesn't see fit to just even be in the office with us anymore um so he wasn't part of the conversation but uh Dan was saying that he'd spoken with a couple of small creators already who were basically like yeah I mean if this if this is it if this is new normal I'm back to my day job because this is not sustainable for me

23:55Linus Sebastian:it's gonna destroy a non-insignificant amount of people that reached out because they were like i really hope you have some information because if you don't i might be quitting this as a profession that was a probably close to double digit amount of different creators i'm not even kidding very like this was yeah this was terrifying for people it hit our niche harder than probably anyone um or at least close to it um yeah and like the the whole get good thing from from youtube i can't be too mad about that i get sometimes honestly they're just right yeah and there are it's a meritocracy mostly with asterisks yeah and and like i i honestly understand their response at first i was kind of annoyed to be honest that yeah it was buried in a blog post it was buried at the bottom of a blog post and stuff but they have an interesting problem because there are creators complaining about views right now that this didn't affect that much yeah how do they deal with this um because if they say oh it was just ad block then all those creators that didn't have a ton of ad blocking in their audiences might expect their views to come back yeah but they might not because they might need to get good yeah so it's it's tough because YouTube is YouTube as always.

25:18Linus Sebastian:So you're competing against everyone all the time. Your niche is also competing against everyone like as a unit. Because if you get suddenly really interested in some, I don't know, 3D printing, there's a 3D printer back there. If you get really interested in 3D printing, you might get suggested other 3D printing channels as well. So like your niche is competing as a whole, your channel is competing as an individual, and if all of this isn't fighting really hard for eyeballs, you're going to start falling behind. And like, it's

25:52Luke Lafreniere:amazing how much people's interest in things can change over time. Take, for example, help with mortgage. Okay, this is an interest that obviously spiked, you know, after the 2008 financial crisis, and to the point that Luke and I have been talking about recently how we're sort of terrified about what things are looking like economically right now. It has spiked again to the greatest interest in Google search results literally ever last month. Sorry to flashbang you guys with, oh my God, what is going on right now?

26:35Linus Sebastian:yeah there's some i know i've heard some counters to that i i think it's legit but some people are saying there's just more people on the internet than there were before um i mean that could

26:44Luke Lafreniere:account for part of it but i don't think that accounts for no changes since like july of 2019

26:50Linus Sebastian:one really interesting thing is if you look up foreclosure it's not doing the same thing which makes me think that we are in the pre-times yeah well they say you can't you can't know if you were

27:01Luke Lafreniere:in a recession until something like a year after it started or something like that um uh anyway all i know is i was talking to the ltt store team about the plan for black friday cyber monday and i was like hey guys this could be this could be a hurrah i don't want to say last hurrah because i think we're going to survive to hurrah again but it may be it may be one of our only hurrah opportunities for a little while until uh until things kind of settle uh yeah i mean i

27:37Linus Sebastian:had a i had a conversation with someone recently about um they're saying they're talking about how like their viewership is still high but their conversions on things are going down and they were wondering why and i had the conversation about the insufficient funds error that we had been seeing and it was a it was like kind of a a dark convo because like like what you're saying this might this might be a hurrah of sorts for context if people don't hold on for context if

28:07Luke Lafreniere:you didn't watch that previous WAN show uh Luke and I discussed how um there has been a significant measurable noticeable statistically significant uptick in people's non-renewals of float plane being due to the specific error insufficient funds, which we laid out very clearly is not something that we want people going through to support us on float plane. We absolutely value your support, but if it's that tight, then we'd rather you buy food. And you can chart it out over time.

28:42Linus Sebastian:The error rate goes like this. Yeah. Almost like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to be honest. I bet you it tracks that pretty accurately.

28:52Luke Lafreniere:So anyway, yeah, sorry, carry on. You were having the dark conversation.

28:55Linus Sebastian:No, yeah, but part of the conversation was like, hey, I mean, if there isn't money out there, like if the people don't have funds, they can't support you. And we got into the conversation of like, where is it going first?

29:12Linus Sebastian:And credit cards, housing, food. It's been a rough time to be a canary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jonathan posted in Philippine chat. He said, canaries are dying left and right. It's like, yeah, this is, I mean, these are, these are some of the first things to go, right? Like entertainment usually does pretty well in recessions.

29:35Luke Lafreniere:However, I feel like the way people spend on entertainment is really different. Like when we talk about entertainment as being kind of recession proof, one of the main industries where this comes up is, is the cinema, right? But cinema expenses are kind of like they're a night out. They're a splurge item at any point. And people do tend to still want to kind of treat myself once in a while, even when times are pretty tight. And a movie, you know, a night at the movies, I mean, these days it's a little different. But a night at the movies used to be like a pretty affordable treat myself, you know, whether it's a date or whether it's taking the kids out.

30:18Luke Lafreniere:and catching a few Zs at the matinee or, you know, whatever it is. It was relatively affordable. Whereas now, the way that we're talking about spending on entertainment, some, you know, I personally think the LTT screwdriver is a great tool that, you know, you should just buy if you need a fantastic screwdriver with the Trust Me Bro warranty. But for a lot of people, that's like a$70, I want to support this channel expense. You know, it comes down to sort of how people are making that decision. or it could be a five or a ten dollar a month subscription for behind the scenes and early access like on float plane uh i'm not singling out other creators just because i want to use ourselves as the example here but there's lots of ways that the creator economy um asks a lot more from you than necessarily a night at the movies and it's a different kind of rationale like if times are tight i might continue to spend a bunch of money on only fans but if i am boy is that ever terrible prioritization i honestly suspect that might be one of the last things to go for a lot of people okay i'm sorry oh i'm sorry i even brought it up i didn't want to hear you say that really dude although although although i do think that there will be a bit of a shape to it i think that the top creators are probably going to be the ones that survive while the you know the other like 98 that were just barely sort of scraping by on the platform or doing it part-time those are probably going to be the ones that are more impacted that does tend to be the way things go is consolidation in these times if i can throw my theory out there it might

32:04Linus Sebastian:differ slightly and i i could be super wrong here um but it might differ slightly because

32:14Linus Sebastian:sorry i just saw lmg community said the bottom craters pun intended that's that's are you are you a ross or are you a joey um but what i was going to say is i i suspect some people are using that platform for companionship at this point and anyone that feels like they have a connection with the person however obviously fake um is going to hold on to

32:40Luke Lafreniere:that that's yikes um anyway did you want us to show these these lovely graphs dan and bring things back on topic or do we want to talk more about also do you have anything to add about the adpocalypse stuff not particularly at the moment it's all a bit confusing um nice yeah well a big part of the confusing is have they been committed have they been removed is it ubo is it temporary is it not there's like an internal debate for these block lists and are we even fully back

33:14Linus Sebastian:um i don't know because it's hard to say there's a pretty strong argument for us only being

33:19Luke Lafreniere:partially back yeah like have a look at this so here's where we see the decoupling of our typical tracking between desktop and mobile views uh so that's blue and green here so here's the viewpocalypse where desktop views go see you later buddy 10th august 11th yep and then they're still i mean they're still not here and i i don't believe that the ltt audience just like suddenly stop using computers as much one thing is um we may have been basically removed from the algorithm right suddenly we're not getting any views so okay so i actually chatted with a fairly senior uh member of youtube over that topic um yesterday because i it occurred to me um in in our dashboard for instance a lot of the time it'll say things like hey this video is getting a lot of views because it appealed to your core audience.

34:19Luke Lafreniere:So it's like gaining extra reach. And I was like, so if our views aren't tracking properly, does that impact the likelihood of our videos being suggested and gaining virality since they'll be recorded as low view videos? And it was explained to me. And, you know, you have to always take everything, you know, not with a grain of salt, because this is someone that I believe would be very honest with me. So I'm not saying that there's any sort of distrust. But you have to take everything through the lens of the person who's delivering it. And their lens is as someone who works in raw numbers and who, if you cut them open, would bleed red.

35:09Luke Lafreniere:But like YouTube, you know. So they're very pro the platform and justifiably so. They work hard to make it, in my opinion, this is my opinion now, the best video platform on the internet, full stop, period. YouTube is a technological marvel. I have called it the whateverth wonder of the world many times. I think it has all the importance of the library of Alexandria in terms of the wealth of human knowledge and humanity that it contains. I love YouTube as a whole. It doesn't mean I love everything about it, and it doesn't mean that I can take absolutely everything that someone from YouTube says just through my own lens.

35:57Luke Lafreniere:It comes through their lens. So what they reminded me is that those little messages in the dashboard do have to be dumbed down a fair bit to make it easy for the lowest common denominator YouTuber to understand. And also that the recommendation system is really centered around individual viewers, not around creators. When you upload a video, YouTube doesn't go, oh, there's some juicy new content. How can I get viewers to come look at it? Instead, it works the other way. When you log on to YouTube, YouTube goes, oh, a juicy new viewer. What will they watch? And it goes and it finds things from its content library and it serves it to them, it feeds them.

36:44Luke Lafreniere:So with that in mind, if somebody is consistently using an ad blocker, then that will skew their consumption recommendation relationship with the YouTube algorithm. And yes, Luke, I know exactly where you're going with this. What if there are certain channels that they predominantly watch on desktop? And that's where, you know, them having their YouTube hat means that they're not going to necessarily think about or care that much about that being kind of a big deal to someone like me for instance because there are certain types of content that i'm way more likely to watch on tv and certain types of content that

37:23Linus Sebastian:i'm way more likely to watch on my phone like you might watch if you were into football you might watch nfl content on your tv more than more than pretty much any other device because that's where that has been normalized for you over time if you're on your computer thinking about computer stuff you might be more likely to watch tech content these are assumptions but i think they're

37:45Luke Lafreniere:fairly rational yes anyway that's enough inside baseball for today i think let's talk about nvidia investing five billion dollars into intel which seems to be the the the very bad news for one AMD. Although AMD has been kicking enough butt over the last five years that I'm kind of interested to see the showdown. Anyway, let's get into the details. NVIDIA will invest$5 billion in Intel's common stock as part of a plan to jointly develop AI infrastructure and personal computing products. So it's been talked about endlessly how NVIDIA would love to be a CPU company, right? They tried to acquire ARM.

38:38Luke Lafreniere:There's always been sort of rumor mill scuttlebutt about them wishing they had an x86 license and thinking like, hey, we're a fabulous GPU manufacturer. Why shouldn't we be a fabulous CPU manufacturer? Well, this might be the way for them to get in Rather than acquiring an x86 license, which, to my understanding, no one but Intel or AMD or, man, who's the last one? Was it Via that still had one, but then that became Centaur, but then that maybe is deprecated. I don't know. There was a third. Something like that. There was another. But basically, it's just Intel and AMD. And my understanding is both of them have no ability to sell or assign or otherwise grant their x86 license to anyone else.

39:31Luke Lafreniere:Because they basically decided, hmm, you know what would be better than, you know, everyone else being able to compete? Being a duopoly. That was legal for reasons that I'm sure make sense to someone. Anyway, the point is that this could be the way for NVIDIA to gain access to Intel's x86 license, access to the ability to build x86-based products without actually acquiring it. Fascinating. So Intel says it will design and manufacture custom data center and client x86 CPUs with NVIDIA NVLink as its part of the deal. okay that's pretty cool because envy link is kind of badass like yeah and in the data center like you think of the benchmarks that you do on a cpu that you care about as a gamer right like how many fps do i get in this game or how many cinebench render points do i get or how fast can i calculate you know pi in the data center the actual raw performance of your cpu cores is far, far less impactful in many cases than the speed of your interconnects and how quickly you can get access to other resources within the rack or within the data center.

40:53Luke Lafreniere:EnvyLink is kind of flipping goaded. Yeah. This is pretty cool. Okay. Client CPUs will be x86SOCs with nvidia rtx gpu chiplets do you guys remember luke do you remember that intel nook that had an oh my god do you remember that intel nook so remember when intel made those little micro pieces that intel nook that had an intel cpu and an amd gpu on the same package oh yeah That like unholy Satan spawn of an SOC. It was pretty cool. And that was at a time that AMD's GPU technology was really not keeping up. Intel CPU plus NVIDIA GPU on a single chip? Sorry, the word chip has a lot of room for interpretation here.

41:53Luke Lafreniere:On a single package? Package, yeah. Woo! Woo!

41:58Linus Sebastian:jawa juice pointed this out but handhelds that could be interesting yeah i mean to be clear arc

42:05Luke Lafreniere:pretty good yes is nvidia's gpu tech a little better y 'all dude if i could freaking if i could have oh man like intel's uh intel's last gen mobile chips are actually super efficient it's just like it's hard to care about them right now when their desktops are so far behind and you know they're they're losing their their lead in in server market share for the first time ever and like there's all this like terrible terrible news coming out of intel but their their last gen their last gen notebook chips are actually like pretty damn decent and so if we could take that performance and efficiency throw like a latest gen nvidia gpu on it like man you look at look at switch 2 look at how flippant efficient that thing is how skinny it is how little cooling it needs and yeah there are definitely issues with it i wish it had the same battery life as the switch oled for instance but it doesn't um and for what it is like man is it ever a pretty cool little device yeah that's based on old gpus whereas like because that's that's nintendo's way it's like i don't know give us whatever you were throwing away anyway you know come on nintendo but if you were an asus or an msi or something like that for instance and you were building a new pc handheld with oh i don't know maybe the new windows interface that's supposed to be debuting on the upcoming uh xbox ally x rog whatever the thing is called we've got it we've got it we're going to be playing around with it later on the show like with the latest gen tech dude ah i i love handheld gaming so i'm very excited for this if that wasn't already clear Anyway, we are just weeks past the U.S.

43:53Luke Lafreniere:government making an$8.9 billion investment into Intel common stock, which was roughly a 10 % stake, which means, and this blows my mind, Intel is now 15 % owned by two entities, the U.S. government and NVIDIA. The last two I would have thought.

44:13Linus Sebastian:It's wild, man.

44:15Luke Lafreniere:in a joint webcast nvidia ceo jensen huang claimed that their deal has nothing to do with the u.s government i wouldn't blame him for distancing himself a little bit from some of the controversy around that particular uh transaction and ap news reported that the 23 stock growth represents intel's largest one-day gain since and this is not a typo 1987 yeah anyone like extreme long holding intel is maybe pretty stoked right now uh yeah stoked that maybe one day they could get back what they paid um will this deal involve manufacturing chips in the u.s that's unclear both ceos wouldn't say anything concrete regarding this what what i don't think he had a thunk uh okay it's gone i wonder if this is related to that thing i'm gonna go do i don't know i don't even know what thing you're going to do luke i don't know if i can talk about

45:16Linus Sebastian:it you're so vague posty right now i told you though do you remember can you can you rack the can i rack it doesn't matter because i can't say it so

45:31Luke Lafreniere:anyways uh anyway interestingly recent reports have suggested that nvidia could release an arm based apu powered laptop within the next couple of quarters uh actually a recent report suggested that nvidia was supposed to release that like ages ago but that's a whole separate conversation and the verge's sean hollister put it aptly nvidia and intel basically said they're going to eat amd's lunch and that is in reference to jensen on the joint call saying there is an entire segment of the market where the cpu and gpu are integrated and it's for form factor reasons or cost reasons or battery life reasons, all kinds of reasons, and that segment has been largely unaddressed by NVIDIA today.

46:13Luke Lafreniere:APUs, anyone? Oh boy. Intel told PC World the deal won't affect its roadmap and specifically said they will continue to have GPU product offerings, which unfortunately does not specifically confirm that ARC, notably Discrete ARC, which I am really rooting for, will continue to be that GPU offering. Reuters reports that some analysts have suggested this may be the first step in an Intel takeover or breakup. I actually am not sure that I agree with that. If anything, I would think - I don't think so. The US government and NVIDIA are both stepping in to prevent that is - I think so. Is my read on this.

46:52Linus Sebastian:This is not the same thing, but it feels like tangentially related to when Microsoft invested in Apple. um i think the i think the tech industry wants intel to stick around the tech industry is

47:05Luke Lafreniere:healthier when intel is healthy there is no question no question of that whatsoever and if

47:13Linus Sebastian:and if nvidia can find a way to help keep them around in a way that benefits themselves it makes a lot of sense for them to do that yep um so this this honestly when i when i read this this was like one of the things in the tech industry that made the most sense to me in a long time so yeah i think it's cool i really really hope that arc continues to exist um i don't think that's going to be a problem here uh personally but i i hope it exists should we uh should we should we make

47:43Luke Lafreniere:this into a weekly segment called is arc in stock at msrp and should you buy one i like that yeah

47:51Linus Sebastian:i think that's cool look at this because dude even using them for lossless frame gen and stuff

47:55Luke Lafreniere:like that like they're they are really cool here it is uh new uh sorted by featured you know what let's sort by lowest price intel arc b580 tremendous gpu great gpu now in stock you could get an intel reference card for 249.99 with free shipping in the united states you could get an onyx odyssey for 249.99 also free shipping in the united states if you're partial to azroch and you want an open box steel legend you could get that for$259 with free shipping in the United States uh oh this one is only showing gray here because I actually have it in my cart here's the exact same card not open box for the same price with oh oh but you have to pay for shipping okay all right well whatever um Onyx Lumi is$269 okay now we're getting past oh here's a three fan version for$269 that's pretty good that's pretty oh oh sorry sorry sorry these this is the triple fan and the dual fan so you can get the the triple fan for 259 open box with free shipping or 269 not open box with free shipping i just want to check and see if they still have their if they still have that cool intel days game promotion going right now because they were actually giving away the new battlefield with these i don't see it unfortunately but hey it's still a great deal it's a great gpu at a fair price and it's at msrp so if you or anyone you know is looking for a gpu right now you've got 250 us dollars to spend the arc b580 can be yours and it will not only give you a very satisfactory gaming experience in all but some pretty isolated edge cases where okay they've only been doing this a few years um but it will also hopefully help us make sure that oh my god we have another option for gpus yeah someone says look at the one in your cart uh oh yeah yeah okay that would have been a way for me to check the the promotion um and no it looks like unfortunately the battlefield promotion is no longer here.

50:10Linus Sebastian:What was it called?

50:12Luke Lafreniere:It was called Intel Days or something like that. Can't remember exactly what it's called. Oh, this is crazy. Check this out. Check this out. 70 plus people have this card in their cart right now. There is no way that that is not because of WAN Show right now. That is hilarious. Hold on. Oh, wait. No, hold on. There.

50:36Linus Sebastian:intel gamer days 2025 giving myself six bundle giving myself

50:41Luke Lafreniere:full credit here for that single-handedly selling more arc b580s than anyone else on the internet i'm quite

50:48Linus Sebastian:sure it was called the uh the thing that i just said intel gamer days 2025 battlefield six bundle it went from august 25th to september 14th so it's done yeah bummer

51:00Luke Lafreniere:still dude that was a wicked bundle dude the top one this is crazy cool what the heck oh man this this is fun this is fun let's play let's play how many gpus can we sell on wan show today um to be clear new egg is not the only place that you could buy an arc i have no particular loyalty to new egg the reference card dude wow i wonder what's up with that that's interesting okay okay i do want to know though i want to know i i'm gonna i'm gonna ping oh man i should have used our affiliate code i think we have an affiliate code damn it whatever the point is i i'm gonna message uh i'm gonna message colton i'm gonna ask him to message our new egg contacts and see if we like sold a crap ton of arcs today that's hilarious um well and whenever we talked about gamer days a huge spike that would also be interesting at 11 a.m pacific today okay yeah i'll find out i'll find out i'm uh i'm curious anywho why don't we move on to oh yeah is there anything else you wanted to talk about with respect to the nvidia intel investment i think it's i think this is one of those it remains to be seen but you're always a fan of making bold predictions and then being 100 right about them later so feel free to keep your streak alive uh i'm hopeful for this in regards to

52:33Linus Sebastian:keeping companies alive in order to keep competition strong i i don't necessarily you know i'm not saying either company involved here is necessarily my favorite ever um but bold words decisive words but it's already an incredibly small space for cpus and gpus use and to have one leave who is doing both would leave us with effectively one CPU and realistically one GPU, which is not a good, uh, not a good pool of companies. So we, we need Intel to survive. And I, this gives me some, some solid hope that there's actual possibility there. Cause they, it doesn't seem like they want to, you know, keep a CEO around long enough to actually follow through on their vision.

53:28Linus Sebastian:So, like, if they need shorter-term things, maybe this is it. I don't know. Oh. There you go. Perfect. Nice. I can't do it from here, so thank you.

53:41Luke Lafreniere:All right, what do you want to talk about? No, wait. CW announce. Explain in something. Okay, I'm supposed to follow the instructions from the Dan. Dan, what do I do? I don't see the announcement. I don't see anything there. Talking point. talking point that he's not kidding that's literally all it says you're wearing a shirt how am i supposed to how am i supposed to do this this is a it's a shirt that you can buy now i don't know i don't know how to do this okay it's talking but you've already done it i'm gonna do this explain merch messages well hold on hold on there's a what are we waiting

54:19Linus Sebastian:for someone to fill it out because there's a sale on on the store we can talk about that yeah

54:22Luke Lafreniere:and the shirt uh but it's a huge sale going on what the wait oh okay there's there's the defragmentation sale system cleanup finished savings of up to 65 on select items from september 19th to october 6th what do we got here uh we've got blank t-shirts for we're doing blank shirts for$16.24 we're doing long sleeves for$16.24 Canadian there's some really crazy deals in here actually oh okay I'm told both the people who are supposed to do the announcements are away oh okay ad lib our hydro phase swim shorts so these are the ones that when they get wet, they reveal a pattern. Cool, right? By the way, oh, I learned this the hard way.

55:17Luke Lafreniere:If you run them through the dryer, it kind of bricks that functionality. But apparently you can restore it. Tatiana told me I can fix it by ironing it on very, very low heat. I haven't tried that yet. So anyway, if there's anyone who has hydrophased shorts out there and they have that issue, that's what I've been told by the CW team. uh anywho so our hydrophage shirts are 31.49 canadian on the global store the mac address oxford shirt is seven dollars how did we not save this for black friday i do not seven dollars is that a typo oh we have only one size there's only one size xl in stock it's a really nice shirt and it fits like a shirt should fit and makes you look really cool.

56:10Luke Lafreniere:Anyway, okay. And you're wearing a new shirt.

56:14Linus Sebastian:I have a feeling there's a digit missing there.

56:15Luke Lafreniere:We'll get to that. No, I think that's right because we only have the one size. So we're just trying to blow away the XLs. Still, like... Oh, dude, this is hilarious. This is the shirt that I was wearing today. They had me change because I'm supposed to wear the polo, which is, I think, a launch of a new color today or something like that. But I was totally wearing the not a hot dog, I'll kill you in ketchup v-neck. Oh, wait, this is a v-neck. Okay, this is a v-neck of it. Okay, so I wasn't quite wearing this. Okay, so the v-neck is$12.49 Canadian. These circuit desk pads are$20 Canadian. Canadian oh sold out okay apparently you guys have found stuff big nerd gaming oh sold out okay

57:04Linus Sebastian:okay you guys seems like it was things with only like one size left okay yeah you guys

57:10Luke Lafreniere:out those sizes you guys found hey but you can still get the brick screensaver shit dude these are so popular around the office people wear the crap out of these anyway uh wow yep so there's a bunch of stuff you can still get a firewall department nope not anymore sold out uh yep that makes sense uh anyway the one that i'm wearing is our green polo shirt that that can't be the green one there that's got to be the black one hey yeah there we go there we go that's the green one you too can look like a professional like colton here available in at least a couple of sizes 14.99 canadian small or large if you happen to be a smaller or large okay there i i I think I did.

57:53Luke Lafreniere:Did I do it right, Dan? Did I do a good job? Talking point. Was I a good...

57:58Linus Sebastian:I think that's the best we can do.

57:59Luke Lafreniere:Was I a good shill? No. You were the best shill. Couldn't have said it better myself.

58:09Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Right. Merch messages. So if you want to interact with the show, the best way to do it is with a merch message. And this basically comes down to mine and Luke's philosophy that if you're going to throw money at your screen, you should get high-quality merchandise in return. So all you've got to do is add something to your cart, maybe from our defragmentation sale. Go to your cart, and when we're live, you will see the merch message box where you can put your... You can say if you want your first name and last initial, or if you want to be anonymous. You can type a little message. You can choose a color.

58:49Luke Lafreniere:you can opt into email communication about your message you can get clarification on what the crap that means and then you can go ahead and place your order it will go to producer dan who will type a response or throw your message message your put it at the bottom of the screen like like jacob ells uh or he can what else can he do oh yeah he can forward it and get you a response after the fact if you opt into the email thing or he could just throw it away he actually has that power he can just he can just nuke it send good merch messages or trash wow aggressive um do better thank you dan if he curates it then it will be for discussion later on the show for me and luke and we'll do a couple of those to show you what that looks like sure yeah i've got a bunch coming in seems like the europeans are happy we're doing an early show nice with the final fantasy tactics remake launching soon will you be playing it and will you quote unquote challenge luke to play you should give triangle strategy a try great game i have been triangle strategies on my list but i haven't played it yet and i will almost certainly replay final fantasy tactics before i play triangle strategy just because oh my god it's final fantasy tactics and it's possibly the best game ever no no no it's probably not the best game ever but it's it's so good it's incredible i think i should challenge luke to play it but i'm gonna have to come up with something that i have to do like luke is there something that that sort of you've been badgering me to do that you can think of right now because i i'm down for round two i'm down for round two i i'll think on it i'd love to push you through unmodded morrowind why the f**k would i want to play that spend 45 minutes making your character get killed by a crab i did try to play morrowind once so oblivion was my first elder scrolls and i enjoyed the crap out of it i put probably a couple hundred hours into oblivion which for me is a lot and that's that's that's a that's a lot of attention span for for me um and and i just enjoyed exploring and enjoyed fighting enjoyed every aspect of that game and i was like oh man i want more elder scrolls and we were years away from skyrim still at that point so i was like how about i play morrowind i bought it and i played it and i walked down a path this is all i remember of it there's like the starting village or town or whatever and then i left it and i walked down a path and i got absolutely f***ing obliterated by something and i was like i don't even understand what to do like this is back when games had

1:01:31Linus Sebastian:manuals that's a more accurate yeah it's a lore accurate morrowind experience um yeah i'll think of some um unmodded morrowind beating ftl would be kind of fun um never played faster than light or like unlocking three ships or something because you could beat it pretty fast i think

1:01:58Linus Sebastian:beating Slay the Spire I feel like I could probably do it with a game that's like a roguelike but then the the the task would just be actually like beating the game um I'll find something I'm not gonna figure it out now but I'll find something okay all right hopefully

1:02:12Luke Lafreniere:whatever you pick is more fun than what you picked last time part of last time was Titanfall Titanfall was great. Titanfall 2 campaign was outstanding. Pirates of Silicon Valley was a tough watch, and Hackers was a really tough watch.

1:02:31Linus Sebastian:I still adore both of them.

1:02:33Luke Lafreniere:I think between the two of them, it took me about nine seedings to get through them. Like, I'm sorry. There are definitely some, yes, Hack the Planet, And there are definitely some great lines in both and some great moments in both. But as films, I am not convinced that they are very outstanding. I'm sorry. This is going to be I know this is going to be a super controversial take for some of you.

1:03:02Linus Sebastian:Pirates of Silicon Valley gets me jazzed up. I think part of it's like when I saw that was like my my like God tier computers teacher was like. showed it to a class of us that like actually really cared about this stuff to like inspire us and it kind of hit at the right time so there's there's i mean there's definitely like really intense nostalgia glasses with both of them um it is what it is

1:03:33Luke Lafreniere:uh dan hit me sure hey dll how do you react when people tell you you have in some part influenced a significant part of their lives or careers someone working in tech after becoming interested in watching youtube um i mean i i think in the early days i just kind of found it hard to believe because i just felt like i was a kid playing around with computers on camera um i was you know just doing i was just doing my job to an extent i um you know i i i think i just didn't really know how to process that. I didn't really know how to deal with that because it seemed like almost like too much pressure.

1:04:13Luke Lafreniere:Like, oh, I don't want to be responsible for people's, you know, career choices or whatever. But these days, I've really embraced that and I've come to see that as kind of our role in the tech space because we are not going to give the deepest dive into, you know freaking packet sniffing encrypted usb connections and and reverse engineering you know embedded display port to make a custom laptop you know that's that's not really going to be our thing there's going to be other channels that are going to go much deeper into any given vertical than we ever will but i see our role as fire starters um you know our job is to to put people on a path where they, so we just like, we kind of throw some, some Tinder and we throw some, some sparks at it.

1:05:12Luke Lafreniere:And we put people on this path where they can then bloom into an inferno of incredible tech passion and knowledge. And it's something that I think that I think we do really well. I actually had a really cool interaction along these lines just yesterday. we had a really nice gentleman by the name of tom who came here all the way from brazil which was apparently an arduous journey and involved almost getting deported when he landed in canada because they simply didn't believe that he came all the way here for two days to claim a prize.

1:05:53Luke Lafreniere:Even some of his own family members were like, I think you're being trafficked. So he's a winner for ROG Rig Reboot. Anyway, I drove him back to the hotel after we shot yesterday and he basically was like, yeah, I was a gamer, but it was actually your content that made me passionate about tech and solving tech problems and kind of set me on the path that I'm on right now and helped ignite this passion. And I kind of went, mission accomplished. Because that's what we're trying to do. And there's things that Tom is way better at than me, which is exactly what I want. That should be the goal of every teacher where your job is to get people excited.

1:06:43Luke Lafreniere:Like, that's my primary job is to get people excited about technology. And then I get to sit back and see where they take it from there. And that was, that was a super cool experience.

1:06:59Luke Lafreniere:Oh, Dan, Dan put a new thing there. It says two more topics. All right, Luke, you want to pick one? I feel like I've done most of the talking today. Sorry. Yeah,

1:07:08Linus Sebastian:I'm going to go a little bit. Not actually. Sorry. Can I, can I, Can I get you to bring up YouTube real quick and look for a channel? You can't share my screen.

1:07:19Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, sure. I guess I'm just your bitch now, apparently. I let you talk one time and you're like, yeah, could you just start issuing orders? Sorry.

1:07:29Linus Sebastian:Look up just James Channel. James Space Channel.

1:07:32Luke Lafreniere:James Channel. Sure. James Channel. Games for James.

1:07:37Linus Sebastian:This is a full plane creator, actually. works with Mr. Dank pods on the garbage time channel doing automotive stuff. What? And also makes really cool things. So I saw this Xbox one come through recently and he's done stuff like this a few times. Like if you scroll back through his channel, this is not the first time he's done something like this. Look at the disc. Look at the disc drive.

1:08:09Luke Lafreniere:oh this is sick um but you know we've taken he's glued down the wire the bodge wire oh yeah dude oh yeah it's glued professional glue like okay sorry yes carry on uh

1:08:24Linus Sebastian:and we've done this a few times where we've like uh featured you you were talking about how oh we might not be the person to reverse engineer uh the internal display port whatever blah blah blah blah um Yeah, like we might not be We might not be the person doing this either And I think it's been a fun trend that we've had over the last little bit Of showing off some really cool stuff that creators on YouTube have done on WAN show and I wanted to feature James channel for a second because this video was Wild it was it was very fun. The end result is insane it's just it's a trip and I think our audience would enjoy it so yeah go check it out he's got tons of stuff

1:09:18Luke Lafreniere:that's a party I would attend

1:09:21Linus Sebastian:I mean right out the gate he was hitting it hard if you look at the first video on his channel there was no chill at any point in time. The first video on his channel is a one million view video from two years ago of making a portable Super Nintendo.

1:09:39Luke Lafreniere:Brilliant.

1:09:41Linus Sebastian:With like duct tape. All right.

1:09:46Luke Lafreniere:It's awesome. So yeah, feel free to go check out James' channel if you want a deeper dive into depravity. Okay, why don't we pick another topic then? Wait, was that a topic? No. Oh, okay, cool. Luke, do you want to pick a real topic this time? Sure.

1:10:03Linus Sebastian:Speaking of handhelds and making things portable, I guess, Windows handheld gaming mode leaked. I think you have to do something for this. Microsoft's much-anticipated handheld gaming mode is now available to preview if you're running Windows 11 25 H2, which is currently in release preview on Windows Insider. redditor gogc123 posted an extensive guide on getting things up and running tried at your own risk of course we've got it set up on this ally x so let's try it out and then there's some notes here that says uh you're in 1080p couldn't get display mirroring working otherwise drag finger up from the bottom to alt tab oh that makes sense that's interesting but that makes sense I had to manually putz around to get the option for the new UI to show up at all.

1:10:56Linus Sebastian:Steam games work great. Game Pass stuff was a little iffy, but seems okay after bypassing our cache servers.

1:11:02Luke Lafreniere:Okay, so this is the part where I switch over to Luke Laptop Rear. And this is it. so i had i did have a hands-on with the rogx ally x xbox x whatever the new one is called um having a very hard time remembering because it's just a bunch of random brand words uh combined in ways that don't make any sense to me um it's an xbox name what can i say but i didn't have much time with the actual ui of um that like the new handheld gaming mode windows ui at all so this is it so what am i looking at here okay so here's here's game pass which makes sense it's pretty responsive not bad actually oh you know what it's it's better in person because this is a 120 hertz display and you guys are seeing this probably through 30 fps capture so so don't don't read too much into the kind of like leggy lookingness of it it actually looks really smooth in my hands.

1:12:10Luke Lafreniere:What else do we have over here? So here's my library, I assume. Cool. Here's a bunch of Steam games. So Microsoft didn't explicitly say during the event that they would support Steam because, you know, it'd be weird for them to name a direct competitor to Game Pass or whatever. But they did say that third-party stores would be supported and winked really, really hard or they had something in their eye or something. so here's a bunch of steam games i'm not going to launch a game yet because i kind of want to poke around in the ui first but we've got installed owned okay oh okay so here's owned so all of the games that we have installed are not owned all right i might have to figure that out before we actually play a game if we're going to play a game uh installable what's the difference between owned and installable i'm sure i'll figure it out at some point uh all right cool cloud playable one thing that i don't see in here is the uh validated for windows mobile devices or whatever oh here's input okay so yeah obviously pc gamepad and And okay, what's capabilities?

1:13:34Luke Lafreniere:Okay, hold on. This is probably user error. Okay. Oh, okay. Cloud enabled Xbox achievements. All right. Players. Oh, okay. This is cool. I'd like to be able to add more of my own. Like one of the things that is really great about Steam is being able to have your custom filters, which are often community generated and maintained. So I like to use things like four player, local multiplayer and stuff like that to help find games you know during uh during an event or whatever playable without tough touch controls oh okay so here's a bunch of usability stuff single stick gameplay this is really cool microsoft has a great mind for accessibility with xbox and this actually feels like an extendability of that oh well i misread it it is called accessibility features okay good good good uh that makes sense okay what else we got oh which drive it's installed on okay i don't know that i would care that much about that but hey whatever genres okay cool so you've got some filters there in the library okay cloud cloud gaming i could play a cloud game from the cloud like for instance uh but the asphalt legends play with cloud can i do this will we have a big sword

1:14:58wait for it i'm interested in what happens here i mean i have no idea what accounts we have or

1:15:05Luke Lafreniere:haven't even set up on this but like am i am i cloud gaming right now that's pretty cool sure seems like it except i accept the permissions i accept the risk

1:15:20Linus Sebastian:very nice that our firewall is allowing this to happen

1:15:23Luke Lafreniere:is is it oh yeah well yeah it is 20 years of asphalt

1:15:37Luke Lafreniere:oh okay can't skip it nice nice let's just watch this more oh a lamborghini oh my god okay well whatever the point is it seems to be working it seems to be working okay do i have an overlay though okay so here's the asus overlay but do i have a microsoft overlay okay no that's armory crate so there is a dedicated xbox button on the new ally xbox x i don't have one on this one so now i'm in armory crate it completely ignore that okay so here's my alt tab menu by dragging up and then oh oh that's interesting can i even use the touch screen yes i can i can tap with the touch screen hold right trigger to accelerate yeah i can do that cool so i can tap with the touch screen but i can't looks like drag with the touch screen if you get what i mean like i can't go oh wait yes i can yes i can okay cool cool cool cool well that was the alt tab thing right you swiped up from the bottom yeah yep i thought i couldn't use the touch screen i thought i had to go back to the joystick but i don't oh yeah yeah yeah yeah let's stick an x okay got it got it oh yeah drift drift all the things i'm just gonna hold x the whole time oh okay well that's the break so cool look i've never played this game okay i i think i'm cloud gaming right now okay now what do i do now i quit the race i want to i want to close this game i want to go back to the ui now if you didn't catch our video on the new xbox x ally x x stream um oh interesting here's a little thing see this thing in the top left corner sorry if you didn't catch our video um one of the benefits of this is that it doesn't actually like render the desktop behind it so theoretically it's saving a lot of resources and they claimed big savings in terms of ram uh that will hopefully result in better performance in games but i don't know if that's been proven yet one way or the

1:17:41Linus Sebastian:other okay so anyway sorry back to this is that why when you're alt tabbing the background is just like that like whitish gray yes sir okay so i clicked that thing in the top left here's a little

1:17:52Luke Lafreniere:performance monitor thing can i like pin this because you're cloud gaming oh yeah right right right right yeah okay so yes the cloud gaming just worked effortlessly like that xbox social um audio audio devices okay that's actually pretty handy to have here uh personally i would okay yeah no yeah you just tap to tap to click game assist which uh yeah sure i mean i can talk about that another time uh do i have like screen cap what is this okay so this is quick settings oh more settings here we go cool sorry guys i'm just i'm i'm just exploring this for the first time one sec go to the more settings yeah what's the gaming features your system is direct x12 ultimate ready it is direct storage optimized and this version of windows supports the latest direct storage i o optimizations seems more like information than settings but sure yeah then well it is features those are features okay here's home uh usually you can set settings okay so let's go let's go home can i just like close the game look at that jump back in so is that game closed wow that was a very xbox console like experience so if i had an xbox button it would be that quick to go back home that's pretty cool i like that here's the store because obviously there's a store everything has a store okay hold on i'll go back to home for a second here hopefully you guys are finding this as interesting as i am what is the store is it just microsoft like windows store whatever that's even called yeah i don't i mean i think that's uh that would be a pretty far leap for them to not only integrate games from other storefronts but also integrate other storefronts don't think that's gonna yeah it's just unfortunate theirs is like the worst one

1:19:53Linus Sebastian:I might even argue that it's worse than Uplay or whatever it's even called these days Microsoft Launcher or whatever

1:20:01Luke Lafreniere:oh here's the download interface okay so if I I want to go back to that view profile settings okay let's just close that okay I want to go back to this and I'm going to go to no man where would that Xbox what happens if I slide in from the sides okay notifications what if i slide in from this side oh okay slide in from the side gives me that interface cool that's cool okay so let's let's use this to jump right into a game that i don't have open so presumably it is managing all this in the background it's closing asphalt it's firing up steam because remember the asphalt wasn't a steam game and then we're firing up tape to tape which i'm going to use this moment to promote tape to tape is a great little roguelite hockey game that is being developed by excellent rectangle really small team canadian team uh it's their first game and you'd never know it playing it because it's super cool super fun no investment no investment whatsoever i just think it's a super cool game and i love it we've invested time uh yeah definitely lots of time uh hold on i don't want to continue oh oh how's my screen cap going here oh oh hold on i'm gonna give it the old unplug and replug here one sec we're in a box yep but i'm working on it i'm cooking hey oh you know what i wonder if it's a resolution issue yep yep yep this is what this is what jordan was talking about yeah cool uh let's go with that one what are my odds here hey let's go it's gonna work pretty

1:21:49Linus Sebastian:quick there was a a good question from roy yamaha um which was at some point in time you should switch to the desktop to see how long it takes considering it's not loaded oh that's a good idea

1:22:04Luke Lafreniere:okay do you know how to switch to the desktop not does anyone know not a clue at all i was like i'm kind of thinking i'd rather just play video games i'm assuming well at the end you know okay here we go i'm assuming you have to close this whole

1:22:21Linus Sebastian:thing here we go in the tab screen apparently it's in the tab screen dude i haven't played

1:22:27Luke Lafreniere:the not like alpha development branch for so long, I barely can figure out how to do anything. This is wild, dude. I'm so slow. I think they've juiced the Calaveras in custom game a little bit. All right, sure. You know what? I got a goal. All right, so we're going to slide in from the right. there we go and then okay performance monitor okay what's this anyone any idea how to switch to desktop okay i'm gonna go home so that they said it was an alt tab alt tab oh okay cool okay i'll do that in a sec so first hold on i kind of i suspended that game sort of maybe i don't know did i so if i jump back in or no it that closed the game so it's not like like you have on xbox where you can like, oh wait, no, I said, oh, interesting.

1:23:32Luke Lafreniere:Okay, well that's pretty cool.

1:23:37Linus Sebastian:Very cool. I mean, it makes sense, but it's cool.

1:23:44Luke Lafreniere:I love throwing the stick, dude. I love, I love throwing the stick. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Okay, so let's do the alt tab thing. So I'm going to drag up from the bottom.

1:23:56Linus Sebastian:Okay, and then there's a windows icon somewhere someone said there's a windows like there it is down at the bottom

1:24:00Luke Lafreniere:Okay, so here's all my alt tabs So armory crate which I opened before is their settings which I looked at before is there I assume I can just swipe them away by throwing them away. Nope. No, it's an X in the corner Or I can press the X button weird Nope, neither of those are actually working to close that one. I'm trying to close it I mean this is this is pretty released. So let's not yeah harsh yeah uh okay so i'm gonna click windows desktop now fix i might have missed you are exiting to desktop you have full access to windows a blah blah blah yeah don't remind me of this again

1:24:36Linus Sebastian:there is a don't show me again button yeah okay well that was quick

1:24:41Luke Lafreniere:oh and it's gone oh right right right because like obviously i still have my game open and stuff so okay i don't lose my game i can still keep playing and i can throw my stick again and I can hit this guy. I'm going to kill him. Jump it into the corner and then go kill him. No, they're going to get a goal. No, don't get a goal. Sorry, sorry. I'll stop playing video games now. Anyway, it's a really fun game. I've been enjoying it. Yeah. Oh, I got two with the stick throw. Took him out.

1:25:18Luke Lafreniere:Boom. Got her.

1:25:22Linus Sebastian:boom sorry sorry i'm done now you know how you know how um i like that show shorzy yep you know they released a hockey game no way shorzy hockey game is it is it supposed to be good find it uh no oh that's unfortunate mostly positive reviews now

1:25:49Linus Sebastian:yeah okay one of the positive reviews says it looks promising when it's completed it's currently in early access i really wish they just partnered with tape to tape um because honestly playing the shorzy game i think i played it for like 10 minutes and then was like uh

1:26:11Luke Lafreniere:nah oh that's a bummer yeah i mean this is cool like actual fight in a boxing ring i mean i didn't get that far i will admit okay i mean maybe we should give it a shot is it single

1:26:24Linus Sebastian:player uh it's it definitely has single player i think it also has yeah yeah co-op and pvp okay cool i mean i think i'll give it time at least until it's out of early access to like really cast judgment but right now it uh doesn't seem that amazing 39 reviews that's about 2000 sales so not super popular okay yeah i don't think they've really been promoting it a ton yet

1:26:49Luke Lafreniere:yeah maybe they'll promote it more when it's like actually done and not like bad yeah or maybe they realize it's bad and it'll be bad forever and they're just not going to promote it you never know early access is a it's a very mixed bag like tape to tapes early access luke and i have talked about it and like he thinks it could have just been tape to tape one and i absolutely think that all the work that they've done since then could have just been tape to tape two dude it's a

1:27:18Linus Sebastian:dramatically different game like and and people were very happy with what it already was um it's interesting but like i i'm just saying like if if shorzy paired with them to just make like an alternate campaign i think that would have been awesome oh as like a shorzy dlc yeah something

1:27:35Luke Lafreniere:like that yeah i mean excellent rectangle is like still balls deep in development of just the base game as it is so they're probably a little ways off from like partnering on skins and dlcs and whatever i don't even know if i don't even know if they have any capability of adding that kind of stuff in the future um but yeah they seem like super cool guys yeah and very responsive in their discord i was complaining about the behavior of the defenseman in the trio mode so that's when you're playing with just three players oh uh-oh what now no i just thought like while we're talking

1:28:10Linus Sebastian:about games i should give another shout out i don't know if i actually did i talk about the very pod racing-esque game that I found at PAX?

1:28:21Luke Lafreniere:Maybe?

1:28:22Linus Sebastian:I'm not sure if I remember. Do you know what it's called? So, when I went to PAX, the most standout game to me was a game called Ascent Rivals. A-S-C-E-N-T I know how to spell Ascent. I was partially saying that to myself. Do they have a good trailer?

1:28:42Luke Lafreniere:i'm checking right now yeah it looks like it i'm playing the trailer right now sir

1:28:47Linus Sebastian:so the the gameplay of this so far this doesn't really show what it's actually like to play the

1:28:51Luke Lafreniere:game at all uh okay dual engine controls man are they gonna really show ever uh i mean this is

1:29:02Linus Sebastian:definitely pod racing yeah so i i never have seen any of the like gunplay stuff i've only seen the racing um and you if you join their discord i think it is you can get uh access to this game for free right now um as like a as like a test um this looks really awesome people have tournaments all the time um the the mechanics are really cool i it it felt really intuitive to me um which was odd because they're very weird but you have like grav control so like gravity um on each side of your ship so if you pull the right trigger the right side of your ship will be pulled to the ground interesting you pull the left trigger the left side of your ship will be pulled to the ground right and then your thumbsticks it's just forward and back they have a public play test right now you can yeah yeah you can just join it you can you can jump on it um so if you press forward on a thumbstick that is engine full thrust if you pull back it's engine off that's it so you don't have turn left turn right you have to like if you want to turn right you want to turn the engine on the right off and and pull the gravity down on the right in order to like twist around a corner um very very fun i i had a really good time with it it's the most fun racing game i've played in a really long time and it's like super super early on um people saying with both sticks yeah you need both sticks and both triggers to be able to control your ship i don't remember what they actually call them so again to go straight you would i think you would be on both triggers and forward on both thumbsticks because you're pulling yourself tight to the ground which would benefit going fast and both your engines are on then if you wanted to turn right you would either just grab right which would mean letting go of your left trigger in order to stop the gravity on the left side of your shift chip to turn that way with full possible speed or if it's a tighter turn you would let go of the or potentially pull back on the thumb stick on your on your right side and let go of the trigger on your left side so it's like you you're it's it's so interesting it's very very unique it's really fun they also have this system where you can turn off your engines by pulling both the thumbsticks back and then you slam them forward and it gives you like a short warp so like if you if you're if you're going and you go over a gap while you're floating in the middle of the air you can turn your engines off and then slam them back on the second you land and you go super super fast really quick it's very it feels very like um very active so basically it's my Tycho Scorcher

1:31:51what?

1:31:53Luke Lafreniere:so this is an RC toy that I got for like a mega special Christmas present when I was a kid and it was like six wheels which they advertised as six by six I think which is not how that works at all no um i had the green one i thought i could have sworn it was called monster but this is definitely the car like i i recognized the car for sure um and it it had dual dual forward and back sticks for control which my friends found extremely confusing but to me was always very intuitive so the right stick drove the right wheel and the left stick drove the left wheel and unfortunately it and this was not something that they made clear in the advertising for this thing uh but it only drove the middle wheel on both sides so these were just for stability wheels

1:32:49Linus Sebastian:uh so it's not six by six it's like one by two and the and the the battery lasted for about

1:32:56Luke Lafreniere:six minutes anyway um sorry yes that sounds like a really cool game and the gameplay looks honestly amazing i man it was it was really fun i haven't played all the features yet all

1:33:07Linus Sebastian:that kind of stuff i didn't have a ton of time to play it before i uh started going on many trips so my whole house fell apart. But anyways, but I had a ton of fun with it for the like one night that I could play and I'm really excited to get back into it. I got on the leaderboard for one of the maps, which felt really cool. There's, I was watching some of the like record runs and it's a lot of kind of just turning your engines off and back on again to do the warp mechanics. So I sort of hope the balance changes there to be more based around like tight cornering and stuff. Yeah. And like drifting.

1:33:39Luke Lafreniere:are they working on like co-op like two player pods so you could have like uh like a gunner

1:33:46Linus Sebastian:and i honestly don't know um i talked to one of the guys for a while but it's it's been a bit like i saw sniping going on like is that but you you do that as the pilot i think that's you i think you like relinquish controls of the ship for a second and then shoot and then keep going there's A lot of damage mechanics. Using the warp thing, if I remember correctly, damages your engines to a certain degree. Bashing into walls damages your engines, and you can blow up, which is interesting. I think they have battle royale modes, but they also just have races, which I'm pretty sure don't involve the combat.

1:34:25Linus Sebastian:So if you just want to zoom around, that's definitely an option. All I've really done is solo time trials. um but yeah dude a a two player so yeah so uh tim 000 x3 in full pinch that said double dash a two player where you're in one ship i think would be super fun something that i thought was really interesting was i noticed on their on their website they have their like sponsors and some of them kind of make sense like okay starforge is there msi is there but then there's Dirtfish, Shelby, and Celine. Shelby, like Mustang? Yeah.

1:35:09Linus Sebastian:I have no idea what's going on here, but they have crazy partners.

1:35:14Luke Lafreniere:Someone has a relative who works at Ford.

1:35:17Linus Sebastian:Maybe. And like Dirtfish, too. The whole thing is really interesting. I don't know what's going on here, but I'm very excited about the future of this game. And I hope that people try it out and have fun.

1:35:32Luke Lafreniere:All right, cool. Why don't I pick the next one? Meta has unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban display. Meta announced its first consumer glasses with a built-in display at Wednesday's Meta Connect 2025 event. The Meta Ray-Ban display glasses have a 600 by 600 full color display in the right eye that apparently reaches 5 ,000 nits and is reportedly almost undetectable when you are not wearing the glasses. It's paired with the neural band worn on the wrist, which can control the glasses via finger movements, and you can even input text by handwriting on a surface with your finger. That sounds horrible, but better than nothing.

1:36:16Luke Lafreniere:Another big feature is live translate and live captions. It can apparently display captions only for the person that you are talking to, which as far as accessibility features go could be an absolute game changer for like literally millions of people um the glasses drop in the u.s on september 30th for 800 dollars and sales will expand to canada france italy and the uk early next year also it has a rechargeable and foldable case which is pretty cool meta also updated their non-display ai glasses with the ray-ban meta gen 2 at 380 dollars and the 499 oakley meta vanguard smart glasses that are marketed toward the fitness crowd like runners and bikers these glasses can be integrated with garmin smartwatches and strava um is it happening like is is this the moment when you even consider them i know but let's put aside that it's meta for a second

1:37:14Linus Sebastian:yeah yeah okay that's a good put aside because i was gonna i was gonna prequel it with like no chance not from them um it's definitely getting interesting i i think we're actually

1:37:27Luke Lafreniere:pretty far out still personally um man rebrands work dude i hate that they work but there's a couple people in floatplane chat they're like who's meta meta's facebook and don't kid yourself their facebook yeah yeah yeah i think i think the sports ones are pretty interesting i saw

1:37:47Linus Sebastian:uh at an ifa i saw a pair of glasses that look extremely similar to these oakley's yep um and it kind of made a bunch of sense to me in regards to like being able to record your run and do

1:38:02Luke Lafreniere:things like that yep um or i mean it could even just be like man it's a wild world that we're living in is it a terrible idea to take a dash cam out with you you know yeah it's really not

1:38:14Linus Sebastian:yeah okay and by run i i meant your ride i guess the the example in the photo is someone on a bike

1:38:20Luke Lafreniere:and that makes sense either way i'm just saying like having a having an everyday dash cam for life honestly doesn't seem like the worst idea in the world dash cam for your life suit feels like

1:38:33Linus Sebastian:it's a sales tagline for these to be honest. Purchase now comes with free bulletproof vest. Oh! No! Oh man.

1:38:46Luke Lafreniere:A vest doesn't really seem like enough. It seems like enough to be a turtleneck. You want it to be really effective. It's a dangerous world.

1:38:56Linus Sebastian:So Linus did it. I did what? I was gonna text you guys that joke because I didn't want to say it. That's not a joke.

1:39:04Luke Lafreniere:That's serious. Like, it's a wild, dangerous time, man. Yeah, that's true.

1:39:15Linus Sebastian:Wow, off rails a bit. Yeah, it's, like, we saw one of these glasses, not the ones that I was talking about that looked like the Ray-Ban ones, but we saw another brand of these. I think it was TCL at IFA. And I really, I don't think they're ready yet. I think the neural band thing is an interesting idea, but I think the ultimate winner here is going to be someone who just already has a good smartwatch that can integrate with the glass as well. Yep. Instead of like this unique band that you only really use with your glasses. Like this is what I kind of mean by I think we're still pretty far out.

1:39:50Linus Sebastian:I think we're getting to the point where for certain early adopters, these are going to be cool. I already know people that wear the metaglasses and like them. Yep.

1:39:57Luke Lafreniere:But not very many. Taryn's a daily driver. I know Artie's a daily driver. um i've actually got a pair sitting on my dresser at home that every day i get up in the morning and i look at and i'm like okay i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to try them right like i how how can i how can i be incredibly a gadget guy and not have tried them at this point they have that much

1:40:18Linus Sebastian:acceptance at the very least yeah yeah it's they're they're interesting i i think mass market appeal i think we're still pretty far out personally um but they're definitely hitting the the the niche crowd and i'm not surprised i would not be surprised if like you know these gen twos hit an even wider audience um

1:40:47Luke Lafreniere:we've talked extensively about what we would want out of smart glasses right and both you and i have discussed how we just have terrible memories for faces and names digital rolodex okay luke this is a this is a big question would you buy the product that you want you know the one that we've been asking for for 10 years would you buy it if it came from facebook bearing in mind luke and this is very important, that almost no other company on earth would have enough personal information from everyone to build it.

1:41:28Linus Sebastian:One of the one of the whack parts about this is and something that might make me say no, is that while you and I have also discussed about how like our privacy is basically just null and void at this point, like almost what's the point in defending certain levels of it obviously there's certain levels which will um always be defended but there's there's a lot of it that's just out there but the the problem is that this is other people's privacy um which which i think would still kind of hold me off or would result in me only wearing them in certain situations um like if it's a digital rolodex thing and i wear it to ces um yep i don't think i'm that bothered by that use case like at trade shows places where there's very little expectation of privacy there's cameras everywhere everyone's expecting recordings to be going on i could see that you think you have a level of privacy on the shore at a show floor of any kind i think you're just being silly um i think that's okay but in day-to-day life like going to dinner with someone or hanging out with friends i think it would still weird me out um people are talking about no local processing yeah like if if these aren't processing locally through a connection to my phone or something um then there is a compromise of other people's privacy that is potentially going on and i don't like that

1:42:55Luke Lafreniere:ixfn724 says you will have an ad strapped to your face at some point and brings up that and this isn't actually in the topics this week but samsung has apparently confirmed that their expensive smart fridges are now going to start serving ads to you in your kitchen like when is it enough

1:43:15Linus Sebastian:yeah i maintain give me the dumbest fridge possible i don't i don't want a fridge with a screen because anything with a screen that also has an internet connection will eventually receive an ad and i just don't want it yikes

1:43:30Luke Lafreniere:oh we're supposed to do sponsors now speaking of ads the show is brought to you by odoo is life hitting you fast and furious oh well can we use this uh

1:43:44Luke Lafreniere:dan i don't i don't write these uh okay uh leaving you with no time to manage your business by unifying your processes and apps with the help of odoo you can spend time less time doing things and more time getting things done organize your sales team with their crm app which you can use to sorry i'm still thrown off which can help you schedule calls send quotes and invoices and adjust your pipeline and you can make sure the math is mathing with their feature-packed accounting app for something really custom you can even design your own app in odoo studio but what if you only need one app to plug that leak in your processes good for you because you can get oh man sorry good thing because you can get unlimited access to any single odoo app for free so use our link in the description for a free 15-day unrestricted trial of odoo's entire suite and see for yourself just how much time you could possibly be saving okay the show is also brought to you by vessi weekends are typically reserved for alternative activities and unlike with a pair of heavy duty boots, Vessi's weekend sneakers can let you do it in style, all well covered by their dry sock guarantee.

1:45:05Luke Lafreniere:Using their patented material called Dymotex, they, like the rest of Vessi's lineup, are designed to help keep moisture out while letting heat and sweat escape. They're fashion forward, easy to slip on and off, and have a thicker cushioning midsole for more comfort and support. With a one-year warranty, 30 days of returns and exchanges, and free shipping on orders over$110, there's no good reason not to try out a pair. So save 15 % off today by heading to vessi.com slash LTT or by clicking our link in the description. Finally, the show is brought to you by AMD. Josh's AMD upgrade is now live and available for your viewing pleasure.

1:45:49Luke Lafreniere:It's a perfect treat for the start of the back to school season. It says talk briefly about upgrade. this one was wild josh has worked here for years now but he always worked under yvonne so i honestly had my first conversation with him that was longer than 10 seconds like a month ago um i just i just didn't know the guy because while i will go out of my way to do temperature checks or get to know with people in you know other managers departments just you know so that i know yvonne and i are basically the same person so if she's on it then i just i consider it on and um like okay yep your team's good good see you later because you can you can't have you can't have relationships with everyone like it's uh it's it's very challenging so josh was a bit of a black box for me going into his upgrade a couple of weeks ago when we shot it and he is still an enigma luke have you watched josh's amd upgrade no i saw it go up but i haven't seen it i watch all of them but i haven't seen it yet how about you dan i have not no i i skipped through some of it this morning i saw there was burgers yeah and so things josh's house is like what i imagine the inside of my brain would look like it is literally piled luke do you remember when we did a small renovation back when we were working out of my garage like at my house uh for for for linus media group do you remember when that one time i wish i'd taken a picture of it because it was so funny where we had to move everything out of the garage so we could do something we

1:47:45Linus Sebastian:were painting or building a set or he was building the tech quickie set sure we had to move everything

1:47:51Luke Lafreniere:into my living room and my living room was just piled with boxes yeah yeah that's how he lives just his house yeah that's how he lives there's a there's a half of a finished project literally within reach at any given moment piles of paint cans uh like an mdf hand-built dresser he he is like diy king like if there is something that he can do himself he does it himself and i assume he'll finish it eventually and and i didn't realize like how how much of a passion he has for learning how to do things and then getting bored of them and moving on to the next thing so it was it was a lot of fun and i i love i love doing these series because it really gives me an opportunity to get to know people that i otherwise would not really get a chance to to get to know um anyway to go along with this upgrade amd of course has another amazing giveaway for you but before that they want us either of us to tell a quick story about juggling gaming while in school amd you already got talk briefly about the upgrade i'm not doing that today uh that was riveting at least i'm assuming it was hard to tell when writing these talking points without knowing what y 'all are going to say.

1:49:09Luke Lafreniere:It turns out the answer was nothing. Anyway, AMD is giving you a chance to upgrade your PC. That we're sure is definitely meant for school. Yes, yes. With a bundle that includes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, a motherboard, and 32 gigs of RAM. You can enter the giveaway by using our link in the description. Good luck, and thanks again, AMD. The AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade Series is really one of my favorites, and I think that's true of a lot of you as well, based on based on your your comments all right want to pick another topic luke sure let's see

1:49:45Linus Sebastian:here what do we got uh let's do another fun one the linus size screwdriver oh i thought you were gonna do the mothlin oh we could do that no let's do the linus size screwdriver all right reddit user kenton bomb 84 used their custom made printer oh that's cool i didn't actually realize that part to print a linus-sized shaft, specifically the screwdriver shaft. And the whole thing, right? Like, what do we... Look at this. It's huge. But they didn't just print the shaft, right? Nope, they printed the whole thing. Yeah, okay. The writing confused me for a second. That's like two pounds of support.

1:50:29Luke Lafreniere:Like, this is... It looks so heavy. I mean surely the infill must be pretty low but still what the heck man that is crazy and what are you doing with it does he see what he's gonna do with it body pillow oh my god yeah that printer is super cool like you must have a very specific need for oh my god I love that it has like a print bed from some other printer in here and it just doesn't fit at all not nearly large

1:51:09Linus Sebastian:enough like what yeah so apparently it's a 550 by 550 by 2000 um the print took 20 hours the infill percentage was four percent and apparently it was like five kilograms of material

1:51:26Luke Lafreniere:oh man you absolute mad lads this is why i love this community amazing that's so cool who else would think that this needs to exist and who else would go many steps farther and make it exist 20 hours is insanely short speaking of things that are sort of um questionable whether they need to exist or not casio's stress-relieving furry robot is coming to the u.s pre-orders are now available for the cuddly bot which is expected to launch on october 1st for 429 and the source is the verge this is the mothlin are you stressed because of the extreme financial state that the world is currently in spend 429 dollars on us we didn't make any notes on this because oh

1:52:21Are you good?

1:52:22Luke Lafreniere:Oh, okay. We can talk about that. Yeah, no, sorry. I just, I clicked Canada on the Casio site and it said there's no page. So I guess it's not coming to Canada. I'm just, I'm doing this live because I heard of the Moflin, but I didn't really have a ton of details about it. Oh my God, already red flag, red flag. Let's pick out all the red flags. Powered by AI. That's a giant red flag. Yep. Companion. That is a giant red flag. No, a machine is not a companion. Emotions. Describing it as having emotions, that's a red flag. Describing it as being like a living creature is a red flag. So of this sentence, let's go ahead and fire up a notepad here.

1:53:12Luke Lafreniere:let's look at the percentage of this that is red flag so it isn't smart it's not a companion it is powered by ai so let's go ahead and bold that what oh my god just bold it i don't care right now emotions like a living creature so this is about 70 percent red flag right out of the gate let's keep going oh it gets worse does designed to support reassure and grow with you through life's everyday moments so you're supposed to take it with you everywhere red flag and it supports yeah reassure it will definitely do but that doesn't make it not a red flag

1:53:58Linus Sebastian:oh my god yeah i mean someone someone in full point chat at the beginning of the show said by the way ai told someone to unalive themselves again and at this point it's happening so often it's like not even newsworthy anymore.

1:54:11Luke Lafreniere:Your smart companion understands you. No, it doesn't. It's just lines of code. It's a little more complicated than that. But basically, it's just lines of code. It doesn't understand anything. Okay. Emotional support. Jesus, they're actually, they're saying the quiet part out loud where they're just like yeah we want to hook you emotionally on the dopamine hit that our product will give you and maybe we won't make it a subscription someday and milk you continuously forever yeah oh my god support you can feel whenever you need it oh my god they learn and respond uniquely to their owner's actions becomes part of the family

1:55:15Luke Lafreniere:Perfectly portable. I mean, yeah, portable. A safe and non-judgmental companion. Okay, I want to unpack that a little bit. There are certain things that, like, shame and embarrassment and societal and peer pressure can be good for. you should feel a little bit of judgment about certain things i'm not going to get into what they are because i leave that to cool yours and your community's morality right yeah i'm not gonna i'm not gonna push my own values on you because i don't know you but someone literally every

1:56:00Linus Sebastian:community in existence ever has always had something shared values like hey maybe you know

1:56:08Luke Lafreniere:incest is bad, right? That's something that hopefully, oh my god, hopefully, we can literally all agree on.

1:56:20Luke Lafreniere:Some communities... Look, I don't want to talk about the royal family today.

1:56:29Luke Lafreniere:Sorry, Dave. Which one? Specifically the English. that was who that's going after I don't think punching up counts I mean they have so much more money than me that I think I'm allowed to take shots which to be clear is not actually how things necessarily should work but they have definitely got so much more incest than me that I think I can take shots I was trying to work that in but good job

1:57:01Linus Sebastian:I do think there's a thing that's more universally hated that they may or may not also be allegedly engaged in.

1:57:10Luke Lafreniere:Or what are we talking about? Relations with the little ones. Well, okay. So that, the reason I didn't choose that is that unfortunately, and this is deeply tragic, is not universally agreed on. There are many parts.

1:57:23Linus Sebastian:Well, neither is the one that you said.

1:57:26Luke Lafreniere:So on a -

1:57:28Linus Sebastian:Welcome to the world. Roll tide.

1:57:37Linus Sebastian:The roll tide was amazing. Bye, Luke.

1:57:44Linus Sebastian:We got him, Dan.

1:57:55Linus Sebastian:Hi, Luke. How are you? Is he going to make it back? i think i think we uh i think we ended them cool it's over i can find a topic yeah new topic uh i don't even know what we were talking about oh whoa he came that's not where i expected to come

1:58:16Luke Lafreniere:back from all right anyway one of my biggest problems with ai is that they just affirm you and um complete non-judgmentality is i don't personally believe healthy necessarily depending on what it's not judging there are things that your ai should judge um oh my god wellness benefits they're literally selling it as a wellness tool like you should not be allowed to do this? Where are the regulatory bodies that are going, hey, AI is an experimental ass piece of bullshit and you can't market this as health and wellness. You actually don't know that. You haven't proven that. This is literally why regulations exist for things like food and drugs.

1:59:19Luke Lafreniere:So that you can't sell people wellness. Literally. This is literally snake oil literally to be clear ai machine learning generative ai even can be very useful tools i'm not inherently saying that i'm anti these tools i'm saying that we shouldn't be able to sell them as things that they are not. And wellness, they are not at this time.

1:59:58Oh my God.

2:00:01Luke Lafreniere:Anyway, I don't think I can look at this anymore. What do you want to talk about next? Yeah, let's do that.

2:00:08Linus Sebastian:Is there something more positive?

2:00:15No.

2:00:17Linus Sebastian:OpenAI announces plans to add aid estimation and Twitch adds age verification. OpenAI says that they're building, in quotes, building toward a long-term system to understand whether someone is over or under 18 in order to give them age-appropriate policies in prompts and generation. Twitch has also implemented age verification using the same system as Discord, requiring users to upload a photo of their face. discussion question is first chat gpt notifies laws enforcement law enforcement in certain circumstances and now age verification so much for valuing user privacy is all this inevitable how else could this go it totally is inevitable and there is no other way that it could go and your only way out is locally running ai wendell has a great video on it i'm not going to go bother find it again um but run your ai locally do it locally it's the only way out the only path forward.

2:01:13Linus Sebastian:Find a way. Nice. I looked at a bracket instead of the camera. There we go. Nice.

2:01:23Luke Lafreniere:Alright, I don't want to talk about that for any longer either. Can we find some good news? Do you have any good news? Hey! There's a date set for a UK Parliament debate on the Stop Killing Games petition. The debate was confirmed in July, but now has a date set of November 3rd. We have a link to format of petitions debate if you're interested. Can't say I'm that interested. But there are some potential outcomes. So petitions debates can't directly change the law or result in a vote to implement the request of the petition, but they can help raise awareness of the issue among members of parliament and the wider public and put pressure on the government.

2:02:00Luke Lafreniere:So it seems like the best outcome we can realistically hope for is spreading awareness so that MPs realize that this is a cause that their constituents care about. So this is the whole thing where if you release a game and someone pays for it you can't just like turn it off and decide that well it's off now sorry you paid for it good luck have fun um and hopefully we can continue to gain momentum here and eventually uh they will not be able to do that anymore cool good chat uh what else we got here do you want to

2:02:31Linus Sebastian:do our last main topic oh i forgot that was even up there yeah you want to talk about you want to talk through that one this is pretty wild asus gaming laptops are broken and apparently have been since 2021 uh muhammad mat matala aka zefek zefkek has posted a an extra i think i got it has posted an extensive account of his investigation into stuttering freezing and other performance hiccups that have plagued high-end ASUS laptops since 2021. For years, users have reported stuttering during basic tasks like YouTube playback, audio crackles, and pops on Discord calls, and the mouse cursor freezing for just long enough to be infuriating.

2:03:18Linus Sebastian:The problems impact millions of ASUS Strix, Scar, and Zephyrus laptops, which typically include top-tier Intel CPUs, RTX 30 or 40 series GPUs, and plenty of RAM. Users typically report trying everything to fix their systems with many even installing Linux only to find the problems persist regardless of the operating system which is pretty wild a lot of the Lenovo laptop I'm currently running where the system just the the main screen just stops working randomly and I have to close it and open it again it's fantastic using freely available tools Zefkek was able to monitor process latencies under windows on multiple impacted systems finding enough evidence to implicate high DPC or deferred procedure call latency originating with ACPI.sys, but that doesn't mean it's a Windows problem.

2:04:10Linus Sebastian:ACPI.sys isn't a typical driver. It's effectively an interpreter for the ACPI machine language, the code provided by the laptop's firmware. If ACPI.sys is slow, it's because the firmware is passing inefficient or flawed code to execute. Not good. Digging further, Zephkek discovered that the latency spikes aren't random events. They recur reliably every 30 to 60 seconds. While random interruptions might point to thermal throttling, a repeating pattern shows that it's a systemic issue, perhaps a timer or a scheduled event in the system logic. Reviewing raw event data, and it wouldn't be something like Armory Crate because it still happened when they installed Linux.

2:04:54Linus Sebastian:Okay, interesting. Because my first assumption was like, maybe this is something going on with Armory Crate. reviewing raw event data uncovered a high priority interrupt handler gpe lo2 consistently taking more than 13 milliseconds to execute which as far as high priority interrupts go is an extremely long time it might as well be forever and then it repeats itself roughly every 30 seconds event data also revealed that the system repeatedly tries to turn the discrete gpu on and off even when it's supposed to be permanently active. That's rough. Every time that interrupt is fired, the same sequence occurs.

2:05:32Linus Sebastian:The handler checks battery status, the firmware tries to change the GPU's power state, the system runs normally for 30-60 seconds, and then rinse and repeat. Zefkek extracted and decompiled the ACPI. I love that they carried the touch. This is so awesome. Zefkek extracted and decompiled the ACPI tables provided by the BIOS to the operating system, Finding code, he says, violated several fundamental principles of firmware and kernel programming. Oof. There are multiple calls to sleep inside the interrupter handler code. There's a link here of disassembled code, and the comments are from the Zephkek.

2:06:13Linus Sebastian:The sleep function completely halts the execution of the CPU core it is running on, which then can't process other interrupts and won't allow the kernel to schedule other threads or to update system timers. And it gets worse! The entire loop is effectively a poorly designed task scheduler inside the interrupt handler, which can hold a CPU core hostage for seconds at a time, which, when you're trying to use the computer, is going to feel horrible. When the event queue is finally empty, the code generates a new artificial event, guaranteeing that another interrupt will fire shortly, creating the pattern of ACPI spikes observed in the initial investigation and creating a pattern of muddy-feeling computer usage.

2:07:00Linus Sebastian:This is compounded by a number of other issues, including failing to check which GPU is active before sending potentially damaging commands to it, calling time-intensive power and battery polling functions in the middle of already stalled interrupt handlers, and implementing a second separate power management system in the firmware that features many of the same problems. It is a long technical report, if this wasn't already, and there's so much more that we just glossed over. So go check it out for yourself.

2:07:30Luke Lafreniere:Dan, do you want to throw links in the chats on the various platforms? Thank you.

2:07:37Linus Sebastian:And it says that the conclusion makes an excellent TLDR. ASUS has put out a statement on X or Twitter or whatever it's called, stating that they've seen recent reports and are actively investigating which um so the discussion question is what the hell asus five years uh and then has chat run into this how did asus handle your support requests and what do they

2:08:02Luke Lafreniere:need to do to make this right that's tough i mean they need to fix it first yeah regardless of whether the system is still under warranty they need to are being actively supported they need to issue a firmware fix for this absolutely um but other than that other than that i doubt they will do anything else but i mean honestly oh man they need to do at least that they need firmware updates for all of these laptops that fix the acpi issues and that is going to be i mean if it's pretty much every high performance laptop for five years, this is going to be a gargantuan task to go in and fix all the various...

2:08:51Luke Lafreniere:Because I'm sure that they're not running the exact same code on a laptop from four years ago as today. So whatever this is, it's probably persisted through multiple changes. So they need to go and they need to fix all different permutations of this. What a mess. It could be pretty similar. I just wonder why I would never have noticed it. Because I have daily driven a, like, I really like my, shoot, I forget what it's called right now, but the convertible one with the XG Mobile connector.

2:09:30Linus Sebastian:Is that a Strix, Scar, or Zephyrus?

2:09:33Luke Lafreniere:No, it's a Flow.

2:09:35Linus Sebastian:this this said um the problem in the problems impact millions of strix scar or zephyrus laptops

2:09:43Luke Lafreniere:oh wait no it is a zephyrus then zephyrus g g13 uh is it oh no hold on what is it uh flow i think you might be i think you might be on a zephyrus i think you might actually have one the rog flow x13 i i don't think it's a zephyrus just a flow i also had a flow um

2:10:03Linus Sebastian:so I wouldn't have noticed it either.

2:10:05Luke Lafreniere:Apparently, the more cores you have, the less likely you are to notice it. And that was an 8-core laptop, so maybe that made a difference.

2:10:13Linus Sebastian:Maybe.

2:10:15Luke Lafreniere:Unreal. In other news, China has accused NVIDIA of violating antitrust laws and has banned Chinese companies from buying their GPUs. Wow. Yeah, China really cares a lot about fair competition in the market. So, dude, man, it's wild watching. Actually, realistically, any of the big players these days complain about international trade and international law and order. They're so brazenly, transparently only self-interested and hypocritical. But anyway, China accuses NVIDIA violating antitrust laws. what will this mean i don't know realistically no amount of banning nvidia gpus by anyone to china has seems to have made a lick of difference in terms of chinese firms acquiring nvidia gpus so i fully expect this to not change that much but we'll see how it goes and now i

2:11:19Linus Sebastian:think it is time the the the subtitle says this may also be another indirect tactic in the ongoing trade negotiations it's like hmm yes it may it may for sure uh the tiktok sale deadline has been

2:11:32Luke Lafreniere:extended again apparently i actually don't feel like talking about that either so let's move on to when after dark shall we let's do some merch messages yeah sure thing yeah there's quite a few today and it seems like people liked the sale yeah i was just checking the uh i was checking the store sales and i forgot to do my usual reminder when we have a sale with a bunch of loss leaders to be like hey so we're losing money on all that stuff could you like please add something else to your order so no one did so that's cool good to know that call out works it does it does people are actually usually pretty chill they're like oh yeah i'm getting a shirt for six dollars i should probably you know order a notebook or something else that has some margin

2:12:16Linus Sebastian:That$7 button down was definitely a deal. That was a deal of all time.

2:12:25Luke Lafreniere:Yeah. Appreciate you guys anyway. So, yeah, we defragged our warehouse, and that's cool. But that is all we accomplished today. I guess we also get some wonderful conversation starters in the form of these merch messages. Hit me, Luke. Dan whatever your name is well this one is for Luke I can see how you read that with brain split question for Luke how is learning Godot going thank you oh I haven't touched that in a

2:12:59Linus Sebastian:while it's a good question I've wanted to get back to it I've been rad I I don't know if I've touched it since joining labs nice like it all yeah i will get back to it it was fun i was having a good time i got so my plan at the time was to make something that i would never be able to release i don't know if i ended up talking about this on the show at all um or i wanted to i just i didn't want to think about the inspiration of the thing that i wanted to make i just wanted to make like a self tech demo like what can i do i want to learn i want to get used to working in this system what can i do so for some reason it came to mind that i want to recreate kelefin which is like the elf starting area from everquest that i played when i was like 10 or something but i wanted to make it in 2d and imperfectly but it gave me a framework for like okay there are these types of enemies there is this friendly area where you can have like shops and stuff and then there's this like more advanced area with orcs later on that you have to go into a cave like it gave me like okay i have a perfect picture of exactly what i need to make i know the leveling scaling i know the difficulty scaling i know the loot everything boom done so i didn't have to think about that anymore i just had to make it um and that felt like a good like okay i can actually start building things immediately instead of like humming and hawing for years over what exact game I want to make.

2:14:28Linus Sebastian:It was like, no, I'm just going to do something. And I got decently progressed into that. I had different zones. So unlike in EverQuest, where you just walk, you could zone into the town of Kelothan. So you didn't go up the elevator into the trees anymore, you just walked in. And then you could walk out into the forest, and there was the skeletons and the bees and whatever. And then you could walk out further, and then zone out into where the orcs were, and you could kill stuff and loot things and that all kind of sort of worked which was neat um and then i want to keep going from there so we'll see but uh i'm going to need a little bit more free time so uh definitely not this month uh because this month has been the busiest ever and uh probably when my house is not uh effectively non-functional so those two things will need to be resolved and then we'll we'll get moving again uh next vimeo

2:15:27Luke Lafreniere:sold to bending spoons company that bought we transfer changed the terms of service to include ai training where can creative safely host their short films and reels without breaking bank on float plane for price uh there's i hate that this is the answer but that is such a niche use case that most people aren't even going to think of much less be willing to pay for that i um i I don't even know if it would be worth it for us to develop a paid video hosting tier. I mean, Luke, am I totally off base here? Am I completely missing this? It sounds like Vimeo. But Vimeo sold to Bending Spoons. Oh. And they changed the TOS to include AI training.

2:16:11Luke Lafreniere:That's the whole question. Luke phased out of the content. I did. For the beginning of the thing.

2:16:19Linus Sebastian:I thought it was specifically for Linus. so I tuned back in later on.

2:16:26Luke Lafreniere:I don't think it makes a ton of sense for us. Dude, I just heard back from the Tape2Tape dev team just right now. The update I just pushed should help fix the defenseman behavior. These guys are so awesome.

2:16:39Linus Sebastian:That's pretty legit.

2:16:44Linus Sebastian:We could do it, but there's another path that we're currently following that I think... Okay, so we have this problem where there was one specific point in time in the history of Flowplane where we had a bunch of creators asking for features. And they were like, yeah, if you supported X or Y feature, I would join the platform. And we did a number of things in order to support said features, some of which were not light lifts. I'm talking like very extensive work, very extensive changes. and I'm fairly certain genuinely zero of them that said hey if you support this thing I'll join

2:17:26Luke Lafreniere:ever did join it's been a pattern for us that um creators and we're not going to pretend that we're perfect either because I think both of us struggle in this area oh yeah creators have a tendency to be very busy um very spread very thin um very uh in some cases like hyper focused on other things and what that boils down to is creators and i hate to generalize but i will because i'm one of them so i'm allowed to do it i think i think that's how this works creators tend to be pretty flaky oh yeah there i said it yeah so like one one of the ways that

2:18:08Linus Sebastian:So we have three different polls on our development team, right? We have the users, we have the creators.

2:18:14Luke Lafreniere:Polls, P-U-L-Ls, P-U-L-L-S, just so you guys are clear. It sounded like P-O-L-L-S or P-O-L-L-E-S. Oh, no, sorry, yeah, yeah.

2:18:22Linus Sebastian:I guess there's kind of like four. There's the users, there's the creators, there's the business, and then there's the developers. Because we have to make some stuff that is for the developers, right? But you have to do work that is tuned towards making our lives not completely horrible.

2:18:40Luke Lafreniere:Because if you never do that, you end up in a situation where you, well, not only that,

2:18:45Linus Sebastian:but you end up in a situation where you can't make anything. Because you just have so much tech debt that so much of your time is wasted maintaining junk. And you just can't, you end up cycling forever without actually producing anything. So you have to do some dev tasks. You have to do some creator tasks. You have to do some user tasks and you have to do some business tasks. And if you don't do a little bit of everything, someone will get pissed off. And we've kind of shifted the creator tasks mostly, not entirely, but mostly away from prospective creators to doing development for the creators that we have.

2:19:22Linus Sebastian:And then if that results in us gaining new creators, then great. And if it results in the creators that we currently have being happier, then fantastic. and that's it but um our batting average is extremely low for doing things for other creators that then results in them actually joining the platform the literal only time that that has actually ever worked was the open sauce team with sauce plus which was the biggest bet that we ever made in that working so i'm happy that happy that it turned out um yeah

2:20:04Luke Lafreniere:feel free to hit us dan sure our id department just removed user admin privileges and uninstalled almost all software so we can't 3d print etc question where is the line between cyber security and be being able to get work done yes that is a really good question uh dan and luke feel free to address this because i was trying to so this was a wang show a few weeks ago this was a wang show a few weeks ago i was trying to get a microphone working and i couldn't install the driver then i couldn't install the software then i couldn't install some dependency in order to get my stupid elgato microphone the one that is right in front of luke right now i was trying to get that working and I couldn't on my stupid work laptop.

2:20:51Luke Lafreniere:And I basically, in a fit of rage, said, turn this off on my laptop right now because I need to be able to work. And I'm sure that we've all felt that feeling while still at the same time fully understanding the importance of these protection mechanisms and recognizing the kinds of catastrophes that they can prevent. So how do we balance that, Luke?

2:21:15Linus Sebastian:In that situation, I think it was the right tool applied to the wrong people, if that makes sense. I think, like, it's tough because we, as an IT team, overreacted to us having security issues. We had the hack a while ago, and then we had the barbecue-ing more recently. um we also have a uh what this guy um who needs to do a huge variety of things with his devices oh me so it's hard to like and i have so many devices and and so many devices always changing those devices are often like given to other people for certain periods of time and then also he'll have like three phones at once but he doesn't want to actually migrate his security tools from one phone to another ever um so like it's a pain we're we're tasked with like we're tasked with one second uh oh fun fun times uh we're tasked with securing something that is under a decent amount of attack with custom tailored attacks as well that most of the people not most of the people that a lot of the people here can't have advanced security or else it impacts their ability to do their jobs in some cases or just extremely slows them down in other cases writing team would

2:22:54Luke Lafreniere:be a great example of that like it's literally their job to install random software that nobody ever heard of, you know?

2:23:00Linus Sebastian:Yeah. But then they're also major targets because a lot of them have public-facing personas. really high-level access to different things. So it's tough. And we've made mistakes there. We've pushed security too much in a way that negatively impacted people to the point where their ability to do their jobs was impacted enough that they were very frustrated. This has happened. In one of those cases, we used a really fantastic tool, but we tried to deploy it I was gonna say site-wide but I mean like like company-wide and it technically still is but we tried to deploy it in like a really low level for them and it just didn't work for them like at all so so how it's currently working is we have it in like a listening mode so it's not actually doing anything and if we detect a problem we can crank it up so it's already on the system which is which is I think the better way to use it but that's not how we initially deployed it.

2:23:54Linus Sebastian:So it created, created some frustrations. And I think this type of thing will somewhat always be a problem. Um, but we're, we're trying to find the fine balance between not just leaving the door completely open, but still allowing people to do their jobs with as little friction as possible. Yeah. it, it frustrates me to no end that, you know, to log into something, I have to do like a song dance and, and, uh, and just waste a ton of time and all this other kind of stuff. But then I also understand that my accounts, if compromised, would be really bad. Sean in Flowpoint chat just said, if there were no users, my job would be simple.

2:24:36Linus Sebastian:Yeah. So it is what it is.

2:24:40Luke Lafreniere:Yeah, standing in the unemployment line is a simple job. To be clear, it's not a threat or an attack at Sean. Sean's amazing. We love Sean. I just mean like if there were no users you wouldn't need an IT admin either yeah so it's one of those things where it's like you have like a horrible aggressive chicken and a rotten egg you know you have to you can't have an IT department without users, you can't have users without an IT department, they're always kind of at odds with each other a little bit

2:25:14Linus Sebastian:it's an interesting company to do things at too right, because like we'll do something and we'll have three quarters of the company not even notice. Yep. And like it is intense levels of lockdown and they don't even notice because we've done a lot of pre-planning to try to catch as many use cases as we can. And then that same thing will apply to another department and like seconds into it, they're like, I cannot function. Everything is ruined. Turn this off now. So we have to have stuff that's like, you know, custom tailored to all these different departments and stuff. and that's getting easier and easier to do over time.

2:25:52Linus Sebastian:It's, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all right.

2:25:56Luke Lafreniere:All right. How long do you think before RISC-V architectures disrupt the x86 marketplace for Intel and AMD? At least a few more years. Soon. But soon, yeah. I mean... x86 yeah that's going to be a little while but in terms of like embedded devices it's happening now

2:26:27Luke Lafreniere:thanks for the discounts what do you think would happen to valve or steam if gaben weren't to step down without a succession plan i fear the changes that would happen if valve went public valve is one of those companies that clearly has a guiding north star that is not only how to make enough money to buy the earth and all the heavens and all of the large ships that sail within them um and i i i share the same concern because steam is not a monopoly because they do have legitimate competition but they are absolutely a behemoth in the space and whatever they do it's like how i'm always whining about whatever Apple does because they're so powerful in the space that whatever they do is ultimately going to spread everywhere else.

2:27:19Luke Lafreniere:And so as long as Valve continues to do things that are good and are largely beneficial for gamers, then the gaming space will be improved by that. But if Valve were to become more restrictive or become more anti-consumer, then I think that would proliferate everywhere. Yeah, I fear what would change if Valve went public as well.

2:27:40Linus Sebastian:Yeah, this was a speculation. I don't know if it was on our subreddit because someone like cross posted it or if it was on our subreddit because someone originated it there. But this was a discussion on the subreddit recently. And it was it was concerning. That was, I think, one of those moments where it's like, you know, nothing is nothing is as permanent as it may seem because like, for pretty much close to the entire history of what I remember of gaming with an internet connection, Steam has existed for me. It's been there for you. Yeah. And then the idea of it being significantly compromised is like something that hasn't really been a concern.

2:28:22Linus Sebastian:You know, there's concerns with it taking a 30 % cut from developers and stuff. Sure is. How they treat the user has never actually really been a concern.

2:28:36Luke Lafreniere:and the user aka the source of skin skins milk to be clear not everything valve does is like super you know great um not at all but but i

2:28:50Linus Sebastian:think they are pretty clearly the best out of the various options um and we'll see what happens when

2:28:58Luke Lafreniere:he when he eventually must leave us so sakias asks there's no point for valve to go public though right they make so much money do they have to go public if gabe dies without a proper replacement would it even make financial sense to go public so going public would be a way for them to be owned by you know the people um but realistically it would probably be a bunch of that's not how that works private equity firms um yeah isn't it isn't it like one percent of people own i think it's

2:29:29Linus Sebastian:like 97 of stocks or some crazy crap like that i don't remember the exact numbers i don't think

2:29:34Luke Lafreniere:they're quite that extreme but it is quite extreme um and then but if they sold to private equity so the problem the problem with an asset like valve is that the only entities that can afford to buy it are the kinds of entities that have accumulated so much wealth usually through not giving a f*** about anything other than the acquisition of wealth that you wouldn't really want them to be in charge of something that you want to care about you. That's the problem. And if Gaben were to just like bequeath it to the employees of Valve or something like that, that would be extremely complicated too.

2:30:11Luke Lafreniere:The tax bill on such a bequeathment would probably bankrupt them all before they could get a benefit from owning it anyway. We actually, no, Valve is so profitable that maybe not either way it would be legally complicated and from a corporate governance standpoint i don't know that i'm convinced that that would be a great system anyway um like like what is like so what valve would go like co-op essentially i i don't know i have i have i mean i i'm not personal friends with gay men we've exchanged emails once i think i don't even know if he actually replied i don't remember but the point is um i worry about it and and i don't think the succession is or will be simple so apparently the

2:31:07Linus Sebastian:top one percent own roughly 50 of all corporate entities and mutual fund shares the combined top 10 % of people own 87 % of the market. So the chance that, you know, it'll be truly owned by the people is, in my opinion, non-existent.

2:31:30Luke Lafreniere:Cool. Next, greetings from Europe. I've learned a ton of management lessons from your wild CEO stories. Everything from managing cookies to people. Do you ever miss those challenges and the lessons they brought? No, I don't think so. I think I'm largely glad that I have the experience that I have today, even if in some cases it makes things less fun. Like, I can't say the kind of stuff that I used to say because I, you know, I've learned lessons about how people will interpret it. with that said if anything i've probably leaned back more yolo lately now that i'm in my zero given phase um and i don't miss being more buttoned up either i think i think it's always evolving and you always have to be learning and while you change and evolve the world is changing and evolving around you as well like working with the people who are joining the team today is not the same as working with the people who joined the team you know 12 years ago anymore people have changed i've changed everything the world has changed uh and i no i don't think i miss it i i like and i'm still learning maybe that's part of it too is if i wasn't still learning every day then i might miss that time when i was challenged and learned but every are challenged and learning but now if every day is a challenge every day i was gonna say you still are never stops which is which is good but tiring hey let's say if linus friend jimmy decides to move his tonight show to float plane would there be um perhaps a need for a network upgrade more dev time priority or luke wouldn't even notice i mean so jimmy doesn't own the just throwing that out there um so wait wait hold on a second kimmel is that i can never remember what all the well think about the various shows are called does he even host the tonight show think about the yahtzee leaving escapists and moving to second wind they just kind of rebranded it no tonight tonight show is uh who who actually i can never remember what all the various shows so the late show is steven colbert tonight's show is jimmy fallon i think you've got your jimmies confused it's a jimmy kimmel live um that was pulled off the air um what was the question again moves to flow plane what happens probably not that much to be honest with you live would be really challenging if they actually intend to live stream but um i mean to work on our live stuff

2:34:11Linus Sebastian:Jonathan was here today, which is why nothing went wrong. That's just how the universe works. But, yeah. Up next.

2:34:22Luke Lafreniere:Love your content and merch. If you had a possibility to reawaken with the hype any dead or discontinued online game, what would it be? Reawaken with the hype. Reawaken with the hype. Oh, like it was when it launched, and everyone's into it, and the community is vibrant or whatever. Something like that, yeah. Is that what we're talking about? I think pretty much. Just bring one back from the dead, and people are into it. Because it's an online game, so you can't really do it without the players, right? Oh, that's a really good question. Man.

2:35:02Linus Sebastian:I don't... My problem is it's not the hype.

2:35:07Luke Lafreniere:it's the culture yeah well i mean i i'm assuming it's both like it's the player base and i don't

2:35:14Linus Sebastian:know that they're hand in hand because the culture is like how people approach the game like think about how people played counter-strike when we were kids compared to how people play counter-strike now it's not a hype thing you just mean the general culture of like extreme

2:35:30Luke Lafreniere:sweatiness in every element of gaming yeah but if you could bring back the hype you could bring back a large enough player base that there'd be someone for anyone to play with

2:35:40Linus Sebastian:I do find that that happens but I find that it only lasts for like at maximum a week or two I think we saw this with um Battlebit where like for the first little while Battlebit was really really fun um it was people kind of messing around uh you'd have like war cries as the matches would start like it was cool and then people kind of stop talking and focusing on just kill farming instead of having fun and playing objectives and and doing stuff like that that happens all of the time it's i find online gaming just objectively less fun now because everyone thinks they're going to be the next um competitive gamer all of the time people are are like you don't play multiplayer games without watching meta build guides on youtube um like it's it's uh old man yells at cloud though

2:36:38Luke Lafreniere:luke no for sure i get that um back in my day we wore the meta on our belts which was the fashion

2:36:46Linus Sebastian:at the time i think i think a big problem with this as well is the lack of server browsers yeah um because like back in the counter-strike days again there would be those like weird mods like You could play the Warcraft 3 Counter-Strike mod where your character would have Warcraft 3 abilities and level up and all this weird stuff. There was scouts and knives for the people who wanted to sweat, and there was other weird game modes for other people. When it's just matchmaking, put me in a random game mode. Calculate my MMR, daddy. Yeah, I think. And that's publicly shown all the time. like it makes you focus on one thing and that thing is not necessarily maximizing your amount of fun um two fort no hats is is based yeah i like uh gary's mod from matt rules 12 yeah yeah

2:37:44Luke Lafreniere:maybe something not sweaty my selfish answer for this one would be supreme commander vanilla i didn't like the changes to forged alliance um and supreme commander was just goaded it was so good but I think a more realistic answer for what would give me more long-term enjoyment would probably be Left 4 Dead Left 4 Dead 2 added a lot I personally felt it added too much Left 4 Dead 1 was tight it was well there's only four campaigns or something I think four or six something like that and there was only four special infected there are some areas where the new infected did balance things a little bit better i think the spitter was an essential add-on because it kept the survivors from cornering up too much and just kind of just being an impenetrable wall of bullets in front of a corner and making it impossible to get at them at all um but yeah left left for dead one back to peak hype would be amazing team fortress two pre bullshit uh would also be amazing so like no hats no special weapons just balanced gameplay um that i think is just kind of missing in the current version of it and it was it was simpler it's like there's a reason chess has withstood the test of time it's easy to learn impossible to master and that's what i feel some of those earlier iterations of games that are still around today like tf2 is still around today but it was easy to learn impossible to master when every character just had their one load out of weapons and both teams only had the same roster of characters to choose from so it was all move counter move whereas now it's like i don't know there's there's too many variables you can't balance it it's impossible yeah what's the linus method for cleaning the desk pad keep missing the deals on a new one um the correct way is to just take a damp cloth and like wipe it down um i have personally run them in the in the washing machine um i have done okay with it customer service yells at me every time i talk about doing that though because apparently it's bad really bad depending on your washing machine and stuff so don't do that so if you just use like a damp cloth and wipe it down that's one thing that or that's one way to do it you can also use soap like just like you would clean a stain out of a carpet you can put some soap in the damp water just i would i've tested in a corner where it's not that visible first before you use a cleaning agent on it but just like dish soap should probably be fine and then rinse it off mlb playoffs are right around the corner and Canada's team is in first place.

2:40:39Luke Lafreniere:Will y 'all be following the Jays postseason? Also go Astros. Baseball is a sport that I don't think I've followed since about 1994. So like all the baseball players I know are like Ken Griffey Jr. so i i would be really hard for me to it would be hard for me to jump back into it i think at this point good luck jays though apparently our our women's uh rugby team just won the semis though oh let's go yeah nice hell yeah well the last one i got for you hey there my question to you is out of all the things you have publicly upgraded throughout the channel which one did you regret and which one did you absolutely love oh i regretted upgrading to uh the sets that we built in our warehouse here when we first moved in sets it turns out were not warm huggy muggy um vibes the way that working out of a house were for the audience and they made that very very clear to us.

2:41:54Luke Lafreniere:As for which one I absolutely loved, I'm going to go with air conditioning in the warehouse. It's a really expensive upgrade, both in terms of the initial deployment and in terms of the ongoing costs to maintenance and power. But boy, does it ever improve the livability of our spaces. I love air conditioning. That's all I got. That's it for today. Well, hey, thank you guys very much for tuning into this. the Wandomly Early Show we'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel alright

2:42:32Linus Sebastian:bye

2:42:50alright

2:42:51Linus Sebastian:I gotta bounce. Have a good day. Bye!