Tech Over Tea - Finally This Podcast Happened | Veronica Explains

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Today we have Veronica Explains on the podcast a Linux and retro tech Youtuber who I'd meant to bring on a long time ago but schedules didn't align at the time but today that finally changes.==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Mastodon: https://linuxmom.net/@vkcWebsite: https://vkc.sh/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/VeronicaExplainsPeertube: https://tinkerbetter.tube/c/veronicaexplains/videos==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as well as your host, Brodie Robertson. And today we are taking a break from the game developer podcast. And we have someone on who I had planned to bring on, when did I reach out to you? It's got to be at least like two years ago, yeah? Something like that. Two years ago, I think.

Yeah. So I'm sometimes bad with email. That happens. Understandable. Well, I think I reached out to you on Mastodon originally. And yeah, I get it. It's totally fine. I probably should have reached out earlier. I changed instances and then stuff got weird. It is what it is.

Veronica explains. That's your name. I probably should have said that. That's my name. That's my legal name. So for anyone who maybe doesn't know who you are, briefly explain who you are and what you do. Well, my name is Veronica. And I do a YouTube and peer two. channel called Veronica Explains where I explain things. And it's mostly Linux and vintage tech topics. So I shoot for like 75% this will help you in your Linux experience. And 25% this is entirely pointless unless you're a vintage tech nerd. And so that I'm hoping. I'm hoping.

I'm hitting that that benchmark pretty well. Yeah, every so often, like, I'll just get a recommendation. Like, it was usually to be a recommendation for some random video from like a year or two ago you put out. It's like, oh, here's just a video on a Commodore 64. Like, okay, I don't have one. I'll watch it. Sure, why not? Let's see what's going on here.

Absolutely. No, it's exciting. It's an exciting time for Commodore people. So it's more thrilling than Linux some days, which is funny. Can you get into that? What do you mean it's an exciting time for common people? People are doing what of, like, mods for them and stuff? Yeah, so people are doing mods, but like the big, the big news, the big scuttlebutt is that

a YouTuber actually who goes, his YouTube channel's retro recipes, he goes by the name perifractic. and he he's like an actor does like Hollywood stuff he just bought the Commodore brand right like just bought it with it's I don't know the financial details I don't want to get into the financial

details because like he's he's working with a bunch of people and hoping it sounds like to revive the Commodore brand and do new things with it. Okay. And we're very early days, so, like, I don't have strong opinions on it because, like, this is all just getting started. But it's exciting because people are excited, and I think that's awesome.

There's going to be a new Commodore 64 coming out from this whole thing. Yeah, exactly. Like a new board of the old system? Yep. So here. I'm just going to reach. So I got my Commodore 64 here that I use for like everything. It's my favorite computer. And this thing has the board from like the 80s in it. Right. Right. Well, a bunch of people over the years have created like FPGA chips to replace certain parts and like it's really cool. And a few people. have done the entire system on an FPGA board. If you're familiar with the Mr. Project, that's a way you can get Commodore 64 experience, but like on a modern set of hardware with USB controllers and stuff.

It sounds like this thing is going to be one of those, but with more direct connection to vintage peripherals. So like if you really like the paddle controllers, you should be able to work with the paddle controllers for those games. um if you liked that original joystick that should be a thing that works um just just all sorts of cool stuff and like i have like cartridges for the commodore 64 that i use in like music making and that stuff will work and so i mean it's kind of cool i like what i see um we'll see how it turns out you know we're still very early days on it and i don't think i've ever heard of a

YouTuber buying a computer brand before. So that might be uncharted territory. Not a notable one. I'm sure it's, it's surely had to have happened before, but nothing is notable as the Commodore brand. That's definitely for sure. Absolutely. I know one of the things is he, like they don't own the Amiga brand.

I keep saying he, like it's just him, but there's a few people involved. And some of them are notable like former Commodore employees. which is kind of cool. But they haven't bought Amiga yet. And, you know, I'm kind of curious to see if they can make that happen. Because if they can reunite the Commodore brand and the Amiga brand together under the Commodore roof, that's going to be kind of cool. So I'm excited to see where they go with it, but like we're still very early days. I am, obviously, you know, I'm aware of the whole Commodore brand and Commodore 64 and all this.

That's well before my time. My first home system, well, my parents didn't really care about computers, so I didn't think we had a computer until about 2007. Oh, okay. Yeah. The first home system we had was a Vista system. I've used earlier, like my school at the time had XP systems. I had friends who had, like, you know, Windows 2000 systems.

But why is it that you want to, like, obviously, you know, there's some, I'm sure there's some nostalgia for older hardware there, but why is it that you want to be, you know, interested? What's your interest in this actually coming from? Why do you have any interest in, you know, Commodore 64? Because a lot of people would consider this hardware, you know, obsolete at this point. Well, sure. And so a couple of, a few things with it. Like, you know, the Commodore 64 is before my time, too, just to be clear. Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Like, I know, sometimes people ask me how old I am, and it's like, I'm. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I think it's good, um, but, uh, the Commodore 64 is actually older than me, but I had systems of this vintage around as a kid, um, either my friends had, like in the case of the Commodore 64, my friends had Commodore 64's lying around and we would play the games. Um, and so that's, you know, in terms of figuring out how a system works, figuring out, like, if you think about the Commodore 64, when you, open up or when you when you when you turn on the commodore 64 you're greeted with a prompt that says ready and there are commands there that you have to type in order to get anything done

and forgive me if this doesn't sound a little familiar as somebody who does system administration like this this it there's a there's a similarity in in scope but the difference you know the commodore 64 came out after unix it's older than Unix. And so it's not fair to say this directly inspired the Linux world, but there are certain things that I think mesh well together. Like, yeah, I think about the idea that back in the day, the software was often copied and redistributed. And, right, it would be common for, you know, a magazine to have code written in it that you would just type into the system

and that's how you would load a game into it. In other words, the source was available. Mm-hmm. And I think that that influenced some folks 10, 15, 20, 25 years later as they were developing our modern free and open source world that like, hey, this kind of reminds me

of that. And I think that that's a big chunk of the motivation. The other motivation for some of this, like, especially the 8-bit era, is you have direct access to everything. It's like if there's a user port on this thing, and if I want to run a command to send voltage through one of the pins, I can do that. That's kind of challenging on a modern computer. Like, it's not impossible. You know, there's systems for that. And there's external boards to, connect to a breadboard or whatever. Right, yeah, but you're not really doing it with like a full-on, you know, AMD system with like some crazy Intel chip.

If you're doing that with modern hardware, you're talking about like small embedded systems for the most part. Yeah. Or like really complex kernel code. Exactly. No, and this thing, you're just like right there. You're sitting on top of it. And that has some, some excitement to me.

And I think it has some excitement to a lot of other people in the Linux community. And I think I think there tends to be some shared vibe between the two. And I think that has that has a good amount of it. Like I think that explains it a bit. So what's some of the fun stuff that you can actually do with a Commodore 64 nowadays? So I'm sure there's tons of mods that are available for them at this point. People fully understand how this system works and do a lot of really cool things with them. So what's some of the stuff that can be done with them? Well, I just did a video, not to plug my video, but I'm a plug my video.

I just made a video about an HDMI mod for the Commodore 64 that replaces the aged, out-of-date RF modulator that, you know, you would basically, yeah. So the RF modulator, a lot of older systems. the Nintendo had this, the Super Nintendo had this. You know, if you think about a television in the 80s had, in many cases, the only input would be the antenna. And so what you would do is you would use an RF modulator to basically create a small little broadcast studio

inside your Commodore 64 or your Nintendo or your Super Nintendo. And it would send out the signal into, basically your antenna port on the TV and you could use that to get your video and audio. Well, nowadays with the proliferation of wireless devices and the changing of the wireless spectrum, that port is for a lot of people, it's basically useless. Like when I plug this in, it's garbage. I can't get anything off of that port. Right. There's too much wireless noise in the area.

It gets disrupted. Exactly. And so it ends up interfering with the stuff. And so what we do is what this mod does is it you remove the RF modulator and you replace it with an HDMI port. And the board actually has an FPGA on it that replicates the video chip. And so it gets the same signal off of the video chip, like literally the same voltages, the same information. information. And it just replicates what the video chip would be sending out to composite video, the older style, but over an HTML port. And then you can just plug it into a modern screen

and just use your Commodore 64 like you would, any other console today. It makes it as easy to use one of these as something like a PlayStation 5. And that, it's actually easier because this doesn't require an internet connection. Yeah, yeah, that is a, I, I, the state of modern gaming is, is something for sure. So with that, with that little FPGA, does it effectively work kind of like how an upscaler would work where you would convert the, from the original source into H? So some, in this case, it's, it's a little bit more simplistic than that. you know, it's not, it's basically replicating the source instead of doing something with the original, like, composite. So, but, but you're basically thinking right. It's, um, it does some,

some basic integer scaling to get it up to 1080p or whatever, but, um, it's, you know, there are scalers that you can use, but like one of the problems with the Commodore 64 is that it doesn't output rgb video okay at least not natively yeah it's it's it's really kind of weird because of when it was created and the like they were they were designing this to a price point sure sure and so they didn't include some of the features that became standard so it's not as easy as like oh i have a crt i'm gonna plug my commodore 64 into it like the nicest video one of these can give you is something that's really close to s video and s video is kind of bad when you compared even, you know, you go five years after this and you got VGA as a standard, you know, it's, it's, and, and the video, you can do so much more with it. I can buy the most fancy scaler imaginable for the Commodore 64 and it still kind of looks muddy without modding it. Right. And that's, and that's just because they designed it to a price point. You know, it's, they, they wanted it to be. And that, that might have been Commodore's ultimate.

failure is designing things to a price point that you know there's a whole we could go on and on for hours about the idea that they lost to Apple because they didn't want to redesign their floppy drive to be faster you know like because they wanted the floppy drive to sell like they were really good at selling computers. That doesn't necessarily mean they designed the best computers and a lot of folks argue vociferously about that.

But no, it's a lot of fun. I have a good time with it. Yeah, look. I was just having look at their sales numbers. Yeah, they definitely were good at selling them. That's certainly true. And, you know, you think about at the time, like,

So my family was more of an IBM family by the time I was old enough to have computer. My first computer that we had in the house that was like a decent, you know, like a computer you could actually get work done on was an IBM Aptiva, which there's a whole backstory with IBM and Microsoft and Microsoft being mean to IBM when Windows 95 came out. And it's a great story. but we had the IBM Aptiva, which could it, from a, from a what it could do perspective was significantly bigger, you know, like, you know, we think about the difference in 10 years of computing. 10 years ago, computers were almost as powerful as today in terms of consumer stuff. Yeah.

You know, like, you can make the point about, like, AI and so-called AI, but, like, beyond that, you're, it's all really boring now. It's, it's more iterative. As someone very much in the gaming space, I fully agree with this. If you look at, if you look at games that came out in 2015 compared to games that come out now, in some ways you can argue there's been sort of a downgrade in graphics as there's been sort of a, a shift in focus away from sort of stylistic usage of graphics technology into chasing hyper-realism. So it's kind of like taking a downgrade as I've been like chasing these like very impressive realistic lighting techniques and things like that.

But for the average user, like Word 2015 and Word 2025 and the power of the system that a regular user is going to really going to really use, unless you're doing like video rendering, things like that. For the average person, you can get by with a 10-year-old laptop and it'll be fine. The battery might be dying, but that's the only problem it'll have.

It's amazing how different it is now than it was back then where two years was a generation. And it felt like it. Like the leap from, you know, 8 bit to 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit was it was like a flash you know like it was it was just so incredible and um you know I was just a kid but like I you know learning about computing during that time period was like you couldn't keep up and it was that was a good thing like it always

gave you more and more and more stuff to learn and it felt very immersive and I think to a certain extent the hardware side just feels boring right now like it's it's a slight amount of chasing some kind of benchmark but like unless you're you care about like encoders or something i you know i don't know what people are doing buying a new graphics card every two years like why why bother video games raising their performance requirements basically that's yeah that's effectively at all um Yeah, I don't have enough. I don't have anything else. That's pretty much it.

It's just amazing how it's, it just feels different. Like, um, I, I remember playing Mech Warrior 2 for the first time. And, um, you know, I went from, I went from, you know, games like Mario. You know, we're talking very pixily, uh, very, um, you know, straightforward. word like like linear gameplay to uh this this kind of big it wasn't quite open world but it felt like it but but like the the the the i remember being so thrilled with like polygon rendering and the the the idea that i can turn in the game and the there's parallax scrolling and and all like and that was so new

and I just don't see that out of my like nothing wowes me right right you know I don't know when we're gonna get we might not get back to that I don't I don't know it kind of makes it boring like I you know I see oh there's a new Doom big whoop you know yeah like when Doom 26

yeah Doom 26 that's when the roommate came out when that came out I was like wow this looks really impressive and it's like it was bringing it did feel like a Doom game it legitimate was bringing Doom into the modern era and I think the last time I was genuinely impressed by the look of a game

probably when the PlayStation 4 came out I reckon which at this point is a good 10 or so years ago right like I I think we're you know

racing games, for example, they used to be a really pinnacle of how amazing rendering could be because you'd have these, you usually have these really big budgets and then massive car companies really wanted their cars to look as close to real as possible. So you would see like a new Grand Turismo game or a Forsa game and every time it was just like, this is amazing looking. And now it's just like, that's a car. Yep. That's exactly it. No, it's, I think it's just kind of boring. And I think, you know, like one of the things about, like, people are still making new games on, for these older systems. Like, I know, like with the Amiga, I have like six new games I need to try out that I got on, I think, Itch recently. And you give me an example of a name. I am not a- Well, one of them I've actually played so I can speak to it is called Turbo Tomato. and that one I really like it's a lot of fun it's kind of a puzzle get through game you know like it reminds me a little bit of frogger it's it's it's but like it's new and it's exciting and somebody came up with it and it's got a new um you know like it feels good because it's it's new stuff right but it's it plays on original hardware you know like I don't need an emulator to play it although i can play it on an emulator but like it's awesome on the amiga i can sit and

you know play on it all day long um and that's just a ton of fun that people are still doing that and discovering new things that these things can do i i that's inspiring because you know if people can figure out ways to make this ancient tech that has no internet no you know no sort of like modern paradigm if people can figure this stuff out that that's an exercise in the brain power and that's something that I find inspiring

I do think there's definitely something interesting about having such like low level access to the computer that you just don't really get anymore and there's a reason for that like it's very difficult to port older games because you're

writing them directly for the hardware it makes sense why we've gone down this route of drivers and the hardware's gotten considerably more complex if you had to directly control the GPU for a modern game. Good luck with that one. Yeah, absolutely. Well, and some of this, I think some of it might be that we have, like, there's basically two processor architectures right now. You know, just thinking about the logistics of it. Like, if you look at the way you assembled a program in the 1980, it was exceptionally different because like it wasn't a simple matter to port a game from an

Amiga to an Atari to a Commodore 64 to an IBM PC like all of these different architectures had different needs right it was effectively a new game at that point yeah exactly and it felt like it and and it's it's kind of I think that forced people to get creative in a way that maybe they don't have to today. It's a little bit more monolithic, although it's not technically a monolith, but it's a little bit more monolithic in terms of how we work on that stuff.

And like, I'm not an engineer, so I don't get into the ins and outs to that directly, but like I think that the constraint of a limited platform gave your brain more stuff to do. And I think that that process may be created really interesting stuff. And I think more people should develop under constraints.

I think that it's a fun exercise. It's like when I make music and I decide I'm only going to play this one guitar, I'm not going to go grab 15 other instruments from my, you know, like it forces me to think. Yeah, one thing I'll often say is limitation breeds creativity. And that's sort of a problem that we have not just in the games industry, but in just programming in general you have these incredibly powerful systems that you can really do anything you want with at this point

and that sort of creates a situation where you can do anything but what do you do with it, right? It's like when you're dealing with something that's considerably slower like one of these systems you actually do have to, like how do you fit a game into the limited storage and limited memory you get on something like a commonal 64. You actually have to...

64 kilobytes. Yeah, you actually have to think about how your game is laid out to make that actually work. Yep, 100%. No, it's kind of fun too, because, like, you know, people come up with creative solutions

to solve those problems. I saw, like, on the VIC-20, VIC-20 games are often cartridge games. And a nice thing about a cartridge game is you can typically include additional, memory inside the game, but you're limited by mapping capabilities and physical space and there's all kinds of fun

constraints that you have to work around. And like you said, limitation breeds creativity. I think that that's exactly what it is. And we, I think sometimes we lack that. And I think it's nice to be on a platform that incorporates it. So what else tends to tends to grab your interest. A lot of things grab my interest.

So, like, are we talking about just computers? Are we talking about more general? If you want to go general, you can go general if you want to. Well, I'm really into music. You know, like I always have been. I've been a musician since I was...

five years old and you know just any instrument that i can find i i try to pick it up and i try to figure it out and um do you have something you tend to gravitate towards the most um well my my my brain thinks in guitar you know like i picked up i picked up guitar as a as a teen and like i clicked with the guitar in you know i think it's it's got a um there's an opposite thing here with with the part of me that really likes computers guitars are all like organic you know like it's it's very um unpret like you can have the same model guitar and you can have four different physical specimens of it and they'll all feel different you know like and that's i i think that's kind of you don't see that with computers as much so i i think that's kind of fun and uh i i i've

very much enjoy that whole world. There's a whole, you know, like music YouTube is kind of a trip. And it's a little different. I don't know how much music YouTube you watch, but... Usually on the consumer side rather than the creation side. Okay, yep. I do, you know, you get YouTubers who are talking about like the art of making, music and the equipment involved with it. And, like, there's some similarities with, like,

tech tube, but it's, it's, there's, there's a different sort of vibe with it that, that, that I, I, I find to be fascinating. And, like, you, like, one of the, like, two, like, two, I'll call out two YouTubers who I really like, who I think exemplify this, this, this really well. And one of them is Pat Finnerty, who he does a channel, like a series of videos called What Makes This Song Stink. And in it, he's talking about horrible songs and breaking them down in music theory-wise in terms of why they're horrible. And it's incredible. It's one of my favorite things. And anytime there's a new Pat Finnerty video, it's like, got to watch. You know, like that immediately gets my attention. And another one who she has an awesome community is Emily

Hopkins who does like harp videos, but she plays her harps through guitar pedals. Oh, okay, yes, I do recognize this channel. Yes. Emily Hopkins is awesome. And she has a really fantastic fun community and like they support musicians and and um you know like like just teaching people how to use the certain pedals so like you like i don't know if you're familiar with guitar pedals uh a little bit i'm i'm aware of them um yeah feel free to explain them so sure i can do that um so you have a guitar and the guitar makes sound you know you plug in an electric guitar and you strum a chord and it goes brann and you want that sound instead of being a nice clean you want it to sound like and so you will plug in a pedal which electrically modifies the signal

to make and that's the goal is i appreciate the sound never yes i i don't have an amp plugged in right now I got an amp back there, but I need to, it's not hooked up, and I'm not going to do that right now. But so what we do here is like, you might have, say, as an example, a delay pedal, which you'll make your sound and it'll, like, echo it. So brunt, brach, but that sounds like a simple thing, but sometimes you want something rhythmic, like two of them chained together in stereos so that they ping pong off. and actually setting that up can be labor intensive and can pull people out of the art of music making and they're just like reading instructions and sometimes it feels like you're doing an IKEA thing

instead of like actually doing your craft. So I love videos that go into the details of how to like, here's how I got this sound and it's fiddling with the knobs and showing it. And channels that do that well, I think, are fun. There's a few that I like, but yeah, Emily Hopkins is chief among them at this point. Yeah, I do have a guitar sitting back there. I need to practice.

I'm not very good with it. It's one of those, like, there are many things I would like to get good at, but there's only so much time in the day. 100%. Yeah. I spend too much time chasing. those things, which is why I don't make videos as often as I want. Yeah, I was going to ask you sort of, what grabs your interest when you want to make a video?

Because you kind of have a bit of a, a bit of a rant. It's like focused around old tech and Linux, but it's a bit of a random assortment in those sort of spaces. If you ever figure out what motivates me to make a video, let me know. no it's um i yeah like i just kind of do the thing i want to do if that makes sense like i don't know that there's a really good rhyme or reason to it maybe there should be um oftentimes it'll be something that like a patron will throw at me like you know somebody on patreon will be like um hey veronica you should you here's a thing you might not know about it maybe you want to cover it and

it'll be like oh that i i clearly there's interest and you know like i'll ask questions and just kind of do it um i have a backlog you know here's here's one of the things that i used to do when i was system administrating system administrating cisadminning um i usually type cisadminning but how do you is it administrator like administrating i i don't know what how to describe that I'd probably go cis-adminning. That's where I would lean to. Yeah. When I was doing...

When I was doing that thing, I used to do... Like, I would record scenes of me doing the thing, like, just screen recordings. And pick out parts that I found interesting. And that's kind of where the little Linux lesson started, is I would voice over okay people don't know how to do this I should explain it and that became the start of the little Linux lessons series

and that like kind of experience leading to the video I think that's still kind of my motivation it's like as I'm going about my day this thing I realize oh people don't know how to do this

I should make a video out of this And nowadays it's a lot of like, you know, people will say in the comments, hey, I'm confused about this, this thing, you know, like I think I did, what was a video that that I did that with recently? Static sites. I made the statics. I did a video recently about spinning up a static site generator. And that was totally based on the comments. from another video I did about VimWiki where I did the VimWiki video and I talked about how it has an HTML kind of exporter

but if you really I use VimWiki for like four years I didn't know that. Yes it does. You can create an HTML version of your VimWiki. It's not great. Mainly because

like if you wanted to make like a like a like an actual website that people would consume, I find it to be kind of cumbersome. And so the way I've accomplished this in the past is I would do my markdown in VimWiki and all that stuff. But then I would sync that to a repo that would run a static site generator. And so I can still get to the markdown bits from VimWiki. It's still lightning fast, speed of VimWiki. And then I'd use the markdown generator in or I'd use the static site generator in the markdown to actually control how the site looks and how it behaves right and I

kind of casually mentioned that in the VimWiki video people were like okay we want to see how you make a static site so that led to the next thing so like at this point that's kind of the the one of the bigger polls for for making videos So you're trying to let the interest of people watching the channel kind of direct you towards things that might be interesting to talk about. You know, if a lot of people are asking me questions, it gives me an idea like, okay, maybe I should talk about it. And, like, I know I do a lot of jokes where I talk about, like, engagement farming.

But when I do my engagement farming joke, and it really works, that tells me, okay, maybe there's, there's something to it. And that I think, I think that that influences it a bit. Like, what was another one? I had a video do really well at this. The Linux Mint versus Linux Mint Debbie in addition video that I did a couple years ago, that one was entirely spawned off of every comment. I, I ever got talking anytime I mentioned Linux Mint, everybody would talk about Linux Mint Debbie in addition. And it's like, I guess I got to make a video about this because everybody's talking about it. And I'd like to just point people to the one video and be like, I already talked

about this. You know, like let's be done with it. So I really went all out in that. But like in that video, I did an animated intro showing them as being like different bands. And like you have Linux Mint, Debbie in addition is the is like REM and Pearl Jam. Whereas like the original Linux, I was going to make the original Linux mint like the Beatles or something. But I think I decided for Star Trek just because I called it the flagship Ubuntu base. edition and then I had the enterprise kind of show up. But like, animation's fun. What was I saying?

What guide you towards making a video? Oh, yeah, it's, I have ADHD. It's whatever I want. Fair enough. Yeah, no, I get it. Whatever floats my boat that day. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. No, I totally get that as well.

Um, so I do think it is really cool that you got this kind of like mix of the old hardware and the Linux stuff as well. Like, I've been trying to like sort of branch out a bit from just doing the Linux stuff. That's kind of like what the, my channel is basically focused on at this point. Sure. Early on, I did do a bunch of random things, but now it's kind of like I, I'm in this. niche. And I'm trying to like, I like the niche I'm in, but I would like to do things outside of that as well and just sort of see how they go. Right. You know, there's, I think there's two schools of thought on it. And like, I, I decided right away I didn't want to do. Like, you know,

when I, when I named the channel, I thought about calling it, Veronica explains Linux. And then having another one, like, Veronica explains. vintage computers you know Veronica explains retro you know like like separating it out um and the reason I decided not to do that is because one I don't want to check more than one YouTube studio really

like I totally get that yeah like I don't want I don't want to go you know that that you're going into the right and clicking like change the channel and then change the channel again and then change the channel like I don't want to do that that's too much work but but

that it's like a lot of this stuff blends together for me and I oh did I disconnect from Jitzy wait what's happened here uh what's happened wait why can I someone disconnect okay lovely someone disconnected who disconnected did you disconnect? um I don't think so can you still see me in here me? I can, could you hear me through that? No, you, you disconnected quickly. Okay. Sure. Fine. I don't know what happened. That's Australian internet. It's fine. You're much cleaner now. You were, you were a little pixily before. You just cleaned up. Hmm. Okay. So I don't know what that was. Do I still look and sound okay? Yeah. Yeah.

you're totally fine um okay yeah weird okay anyway um yes so what was i saying what was what was your question um um there might not have been one oh uh god it was like a 30 seconds ago yeah nope it's that's it's it's poof it's out of my brain now no i feel the exact same way let's see uh Linux we're talking oh we i think we're talking about youtube studio we were talking about channels and yes thank you okay i'm like i was thinking about stuff um you know there's there's just i i think that when you niche up it's harder to break out of a niche and niching up i think can lead you to like lead one i'm speaking generally here um an audience faster you know like if if i only ever made videos about

scalers you know like like you know vintage computer scalers it would be great for people who are into vintage computer scalers but then if I decided you know what I kind of want to now talk about vintage televisions half my audience would be like I don't want to hear about that and I was trying to be very intentional right away with the channel like my first video I made it about a vintage piece of, it was about the wise terminal, like an actual, an actual terminal. That thing your terminal emulator emulates, I made a video about that thing and connecting it to a modern Linux, which is a Raspberry Pi and, you know, like some stuff. And I did that as the first video because I wanted to be kind of intentional about we're, you know,

not just going to talk about the one thing. We're going to talk about more than one thing. And I've tried to blend the two as much as I can. And it's hard. I mean, sometimes a video doesn't do as well as I would hope. But I think that's the case of everybody. And sometimes a video pops off that I'm not expecting. Like that Commodore 64 on the internet video,

I don't know what happened, but that video exploded. and I didn't expect it to. I think there is a very... Well, there's obviously a very dedicated community of people who are interested in the Commodore 64. Right. But there's also a lot of people who

sort of have a passing interest in weird old tech. Like, you'll see videos... A great example is a while back there were these videos that came out of what happens if I connect a Windows XP... system to the internet. Yep.

And a lot of those videos like really popped off, not because XP is something that anyone really cares about, but it's sort of, like people know about XP, they're aware of it. And they're like, oh, okay, well, what happens if I actually do this? And there is that like very dedicated niche of people who do really care about XP. So you get that like initial, that initial interest. in it and then the people with passing interest it gets to them and they're like oh that seems like

a weird cool thing to check out and they give it a look I guess yeah no that totally makes sense the you know it's it's just kind of it's funny

I think how the I think the YouTube algorithm is something I'll never understand and like I think I'm done trying to it's it's just it's going to be a thing where like I just kind of do the thing I want to talk about like I'm sitting here looking at this I got this goofy piece of hardware here and what this does is it converts a Sega Genesis controller

to something an amiga or a Commodore 64 can use and it's such a small thing but there's a ton of really interesting like science behind it why does this work why is it necessary who came up with it how does you know why can't you just plug one in directly you know like this port the the the you know the DE9 port was at one point the standard before uh like serious real and US, like, this was kind of the de facto, every console had that port on it. There's at least eight videos in that, but like, will people watch them? And it's kind of like, I don't know if I care anymore. You know, like, I, because I want to talk about it. And, and I think

when I, when I spend a lot of time, I think this might be true with everybody. If not, I apologize to everybody. But when you spend a lot of time sitting there thinking about what's going to do well, that's time you're not spending creating. And I think that I need to like kind of get past that. And I think a lot of people can relate to that. That it's like, oh, I might be spending too much time in the planning stage. Right. And not enough time in the actually making your art or actually doing that thing stage. And like right now I'm doing a house project.

We're ripping up their kitchen up there. I'm stuck in the basement. And so we're ripping up the kitchen. And it's like, you know, you spend a year planning it. And then the work is like 15 minutes. And it's like, why do I spend a year planning? this. I should have just started. This is actually a really good point because I've had people come to me ask like,

oh, how do I start a YouTube channel? How do I, how do I get started? What do I do? And then, like, six months later, they're still thinking about that first video. And at the end of the day, the first video you make is probably going to be bad, right? Like, You can sit there working it for two years and you're probably not going to make the best thing you're going to make because you don't really have that experience in actually creating not just one thing, but a range of different things that all inform sort of the direction you want to take things that develop your own style. And you kind of need to have that baseline level of experience before you're going to be ready to make something. you really want to make. And a lot of people, they get really caught up in making that first thing, the perfect thing. And it just never gets, it never gets released. They never actually follow through with it. I think, I think that's a lot of it. And like, I know I can speak to my

own experience with it where it's like, I first had the idea of doing a YouTube channel, like, in, I think, 2014, 2015. And I didn't actually publish my first video, I think, until 2021. And it was just because I was, I was sitting there thinking, oh, well, what kind of camera do I want to use? Oh, well, what kind of microphone do I want to use? Well, what kind of stuff do I want to cover? Like, do I ever want to talk about Windows? I probably don't want to talk about Windows. Do I ever want to do like the kind of news? like tech news. I probably don't want to talk about tech news. You know, like, do I want to talk about tech news? I don't know if I want to talk. You know, like, and I, I spend a lot of time on that.

And that was all time. It was embryonic. But like at the same time, I think, I think the cake baked in the oven for really long time. And I don't know that that made the cake taste any better. You know, like, I think at the end of the day, it just, just start, you know, just start doing the thing. Yeah. There's absolutely value in thinking about some of that early stuff, but you can definitely get caught up in it thinking it's more valuable than it actually is and just not actually doing it. It's not just with that, right? Like you can think about it with, you want to start a band, right? And you're like, okay, you and your friends are together. You're like, okay, we're going to start this band. And then you kind of just don't really do anything with it. never write a song, you never perform, you never, you never really actually commit to doing the thing. Yep, 100%. That's totally, you know, my, I'm in a band. And my band, um, you know, we, we all live in different parts of the country here in the United States. Like, um, I'm in a band with other YouTubers. It's actually, uh, we caught, we recently decided we're going to refer to

ourselves as the retro tube faculty band and so we're we're it's it's four YouTubers getting on stage of vintage computer festivals and being silly and it's taken me like a year to put out the EP. A big part of that is that I spend so much time on the which microphone do I want to use for this? Mm-hmm. Oh, which, which delay pedal do I want for this? And, and it's, it's endless mental deliberation. And luckily, my bandmates prod me along.

And that, that helps. That is the best thing of having other people involved, yeah. Yep. And, and that's, that's been a positive in my life. So I think that's a really good thing. But no, we, we, it's all kinds of fun when we actually get to be on stage together. And I only wish, like, the only thing I wish we're different is that we lived in the same geographic vicinity and could actually get together easier. Because it is literally like, we got time zones different, but we also have like, the mid, the middle between all of our points is probably Chicago, Illinois.

and even that's an eight to 12-hour drive. You know, like, that's kind of rough to just kind of get together and hang out and do stuff. So it makes it kind of hard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it, right? You would like to do more and I... Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you...

At least you're doing something, right? Like, you've taken those first steps. It's just the, then you've actually got to do the coordination past that point. So, I don't know, I don't know if you, like, ever, ever run into the... I know you put out more videos than I do. Yeah, and people comment on this. You're like, I don't know how you have this much time to do it. Yeah.

It's, but, like, you know, you see, you got that fancy stream deck. So you can, like, call up your scenes in real. time, which is awesome. I only recently got this set up. I had it sitting in a box. Again, this is going back to all the sec. I had it in a box for about a year, and I didn't take it out of the box, and it took me like five minutes to set it up.

There's a couple of really good open source tools. Like, the official software doesn't work, but there's a couple of really good open source tools to configure it on Linux. It works right now. Which one you're using for it? Are using Boat Swain? No, I'm using, um, what's it? I got, let's give me one second, stream deck UI, is that what it's called?

Okay. Yeah, that sounds right. Um, I tried Boatswain, um, it has issues with the OBS, uh, web socket right now. The web socket changed out versions and Boat Swain's not updated to the new web socket. Oh, yep. Okay. Yeah.

I, I'm, I'm aware of that. Uh, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm leaning toward... So I think I might want to do more streaming. And a reason why is that there are certain topics that, you know, like I think about distro reviews as being the classic example of this. I really don't think... I don't love watching distro reviews.

Let me put it that way. And a reason I don't love watching distro... I'm not trying to pick on people who do distro reviews. Like, like, do what? what you do. But so much of distro discussion is it gets back to that iterative thing.

Where like You might not be mean to know I will be. A lot of distro reviews are wallpaper reviews. You said it. I didn't say it. I'm going to let you say that. Nobody can get mad at me. I didn't say it.

But the like the distro reviews thing I don't love watching them. Sure, sure. I don't learn much from them, but I think there's something

different about a live experience. Yeah, you can let people you can get the viewers to sort of direct you to things they want to see on the distro and you can explore it with them. Exactly. And

like it might be a wallpaper review, but like we're having fun together. Like, and we're having fun reviewing the wallpaper. paper. And that's kind of light and fluffy, but it still accomplishes the goal of showcasing something different. I used to do a little bit more of this. And what happened was I actually switched rooms. And I was like, I don't want, you know, like I'm less treated in here. And so it was like, oh, I got, I got to focus on the treatment before I can start to do more. And it's like, no, I don't. I just need to do it.

but my gear addiction still required me to purchase a new microphone still it's a real problem I understand that problem I also have this other problem where I don't like to spend money so it's like I want there's things I want to buy but then I'll hold off buying them like I've been saying I'm going to upgrade my PC for like two years now and I haven't done so I have a list of parts And I like, I'm more than happy to explore things that I can buy, but then actually clicking that button, like, I can afford it. That's not a problem.

I just don't want to. Nope, that's legit. The, the, oh, geez, I, I, I don't like spending. I'm in, I'm from Minnesota in the United States. And Minnesotans and Midwesterners are kind of notorious for avoiding the spending. of money as much as we can and looking for the deal like like i bought the microphone but you have to understand i shopped for months finding a used one at like a used emporium locally like going in and try like oh it's it's just it's it's it's a it's a thing it's it's it's it's a it's a thing it's it's

a problem that my entire state has, my entire region of the, of the country has, where, like, the deal is the part you lead into. Like, oh, yeah, I got this new microphone. I got it for a deal. Like, I can't justify spending retail. Absolutely no way. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, you can't do that. Like, I, I, I think there are rules about it. So. No, I, I, I totally get that as well. Um, um, um, Um, I, I've looked around like so many different places before, like, when I, why did I disconnect? What? Uh, was, oh my God. Okay. Um, I love Jitzy today. Jitzie's, Jistsey's doing, Jistis doing a fantastic job. Um, oh my God. Oh, okay. Um, okay. Okay. Thank you, Jitzy. Thank you, Jitzy. Did I just... Uh-oh. Hi. Hi. I hate this... I don't know what happened there.

Okay. Fine. You're still connected. I'm aware. I can still see your other... I'm well aware. It'll disconnect eventually. Oh, things are going so well. Okay. We'll just let other Brody disconnect eventually. There we go. Okay.

Other Brody's gone. Okay. As I was saying, Um, Yep. Okay. You disappeared and came back. Yeah.

When I bought my current system, I think I bought the parts for it across four different stores. Just because I was like, okay, this is like $5 cheaper here. It's $10 cheaper here. And I spent so much time saving like $30 maybe that it was not worth it. But like, I saved $30.

Yeah. Oh, 100%. I'm right there with you. We, you know, like, I often go to like e-wasters. You know, like this is, this is a thing. It's definitely a thing. looking for just that one part and it's like how you know some people do this with cars where they'll go to like junkyards and they'll look for just that one part yeah yeah i got a lot of uh a car friends my family yeah nope just that one part i'm looking for just that one thing like i got a i got a 486 and i'm looking for just that one like clock battery holder so that i can reassemble it to stock and this is i can order the part from like Digi key it can be here in in two weeks or less you know like coming like it's

probably a three day shipping and nope I'm I will keep looking for a long time that is how that works yep yep 100% well especially for things like you know you don't need to spend money on right like you don't like I've got I've got a bunch of um I've got a bunch of teacups that I bought at a garage sale for like a dollar each. Absolutely. I don't need new cups. All my coasters. Actually, this is kind of cool.

I don't know where they originally sold, where you could originally buy them, but there were these, I assume they were sold to tourists. Sure. They're these coasters of famous Australian pubs. And I found them at like a secondhand store years ago. and they look great and they were super cheap and they are great coasters and I spent basically nothing on them

and honestly they're awesome and I've got like a bunch of place mats as well the same as it's just like if I don't need to spend the money on like new things I don't want right nope

like I'm yeah I'm 100% with you no and like I do this with manual too. Like I have a substantive computer manual collection and like

what was the one I bought, I bought a manual for the like TI 994A you know like a Texas Instruments thing and like I bought the original user guide and I did not own the computer

and I said but I will someday and when I do I want the manual and then lo and behold last year I was at a vintage computer festival in Chicago, and there was the computer. And it's like, I was right. I'm ready to go. Like, I might have a copy of the manual to repair a Macintosh SE 30, despite the fact that I do not own a Macintosh SE30.

But someday I will. Someday one will be on my desk. And when it is, I'm right. ready. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, so when you're looking at, well, firstly, what do you consider to be retro hardware, because different people are going to have different ranges and, like, what sort of range are you interested in? So, I make a distinction, this might be a silly distinction, but it's one I make, where I make a distinction between

retro and vintage. And so retro is a style in my mind. Right. And vintage is of an age. Okay. So like, you know, we talked earlier about the new Commodore 64.

I would call that retro, but it's not vintage in that it's new. Right. Similar to those the company that was selling like new the clicky keyboard. I'm blanking on the name. Oh, yeah, the Model M and the...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a company selling like new versions of those. I'm blanking on the company. You mean like this one. Is that actually one of those? There's a... This one's actually an original... This one's a vintage one, not a retro one. This is actually from IBM. but it was made by the people

Unicom. Unicom. I was going to say that's the same company that made them back in the day. They just, you threw a series of spinouts and stuff like they have a different name, but it's the same people. It's the same, that made at the same factory.

So like, but I would call that retro and not vintage, a new one, but mine, which is from the 80s, I would call vintage. And so I, that's, the reason I make that distinction is simply because some stuff I'm not interested in just because it's retro, but I might be interested in the vintage equivalent of it. So like, I, you know, there's a proliferation right now of modern computers that work in eight bits or do. like you know like simple little things uh and a a good example of this is the eight bit guy has

something called the commander x16 i don't know if you're familiar with the eight bit guy from retro tube or anything like that probably have seen a video here and there yeah he's uh he seems fine whatever but like i'm not trying to be rude about a project um but it's like you know, it doesn't, it, it, it, it does modern stuff that people are writing right now. And I'm really glad that there are people who are interested in those constraints. I don't know if I would necessarily want to invest in making a video about it because it's not vintage. And it doesn't peak my, the artistic interest quite the same way, if that makes sense. Like, there's, there's something about making.

a video or writing a blog post or talking about something that's of a vintage that I don't necessarily feel about talking about something that's modern but has a retro feel.

Right. So you value the I guess the age of the age and maybe the legacy is not the right word there? I think there's more to talk about with the age and the legacy. You know, like, talking about a new system, there's not the history to kind of dwell on. And like, that's the part that I find to be fascinating as far as a story goes. You know, again, it's not picking on the people doing it. But like, at the end of the day,

from a content perspective, that's, I think, where more of my interest lies in making the thing. And so like that that's the part that I think gets to me. And and when it comes to that aspect of it, yeah, I'm really interested in basically 1998 and before. If that makes sense. So like I use 1998 as the distinction because 1998 was the year that Steve Jobs released the Bondi blue. I'm saying Bondi because you're all. Australian and apparently that's how you pronounce it. Bondi blue IMac G3. The first IMAX. Oh, that one. Yep. Yes. And this

in my mind is the end of the vintage that I find to be interesting. That's the tail end. Because this computer was the first mass popular super successful computer that only used USB it was designed around the internet you could just plug it in and you just start going you don't have

much to do um and and it really does feel like kind of the beginning of the modern era is that particular point and within a couple of years beige was out all everything was we can get connected to the internet oh this has you know you get get you online like it suddenly starts to look like the modern era it might be slower than the modern era but in my mind 1998 represents that break where everything that like you know by 2000 you start seeing laptops with Wi-Fi on them you start seeing like the the it starts to look like today right right right and the coincidentally like around the same time, you start seeing NT. You start seeing, like, XP was just around a corner.

You start, like, suddenly, the world looks much more modern. Right. So things kind of, it's that shift into things starting to kind of kind of look all the same, tech feeling like it moves considerably slower, even though even though we're having so many iterations happen it's a lot more like micro iterations yeah a little bit yeah it's you know i think about it more like um that story is one we're currently living but there's something fascinating about like you know like with the commodore 64 just to you know because i have one sitting right here is like bbsing and you know getting

connected to BBSs and like the way that online was in the 1980s and the earlier part of 1990s that it was different. It was not what we're used to today. It was more deliberative. It was more community building. It's more anonymous or at least more one might describe it as more lurker friendly there's actually a really good book I think it's called lurking I wonder if I have it sitting right here how

how a person became a user yeah how a person became a user yep that it's an awesome book it's definitely worth reading because it kind of outlines it if anyone wants to get it it's pretty cheap yes it outlines that

distinction or that that transition period really well and um yeah i read it recently it's really good the i i i love this notion of the pre constant connection era as being a place where it was exciting to get connected and now it's it's just i'm connected you know like it doesn't it the magic doesn't feel like magic anymore yeah i hear this a lot from people who are very into vinals and that's like a thing that's really come back where vinyl music is a very deliberate action absolutely you will lift up the thing you'll put the vinyl on there unless you've got a fancy player which you might where it like automatically puts the needle down for you,

you put the needle down, and then when you want to listen to the rest of it, you will have to flip it. And you can't just have all your music there. When that's done, you've got to take it out and do the process again. Absolutely. Getting online then was very much a thing you,

it was a process, it was a thing you had to do. It wasn't just, hey, I can pick up my phone and I'm online. That's it. Yep. And it was so hard compared with today. And like, you know, I'm all for the democratization of connectivity.

Like, I don't want to gatekey people. But there was a difference in communities when, like, every link you clicked, you understood you were taking time. Like, right now we click a link where there instantly. Right. And if it's not an incident, then, love who got annoyed. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But back then, I didn't click a link if I didn't want to spend the time on it.

You know, like when I was, I was, you know, 12 or 13 when I was first getting into the web. And, like, at the time I had, I think, a 28-8 modem. And, like, on 28-8, I am not clicking that link unless I really want to see that site, that site. You know, like I remember following NASA's, they had like an Aurora guide or something like that for like seeing the Northern Lights. And it was like, I'm not clicking on this link to show something that's happening in Michigan unless I think it's really going to be stunning, which caused the designers of the website, I think, to have to be more deliberative with their text. you know, they had to actually sit and, and ponder, we need to, you know, we don't just want to show an image because the image is going to saturate the modem connection. It's going to slow down and people are going to not click on the site. So we need to be careful about what we put on here. And we need

to be very intentional. And that was the web to which I learned about the web. And I learned about the tech. And I, you know, I was a kid. but I was there for that. And I think that that kind of inspires me when I think about modern tech and trying to be more deliberate. Like I try to make, you know, with my videos, I try to make them an experience because that's what I had. You know, like at least like with what we would now call a blog post, but like we just called them websites at the time. like you didn't put something on the web unless it was very intentional

because it took you time to put it on there and it took somebody else time to click on it and they would just ignore your website forever if you were being disrespectful about the connection. You talked a bit about community before and I think part of that is the fact that it's very easy to

jump from place to place to place and you know like prime example let's take Reddit for example Reddit has all of these different sub-communities and you never really have to be attached to any of them because it's so easy to just move between them but when it actually took effort to find a place where people were communicating online

like that and a place that you really fit into it was a sort of idea where you kind of had to like you you know you you would fit in a you'd try to fit in a bit more because it was it would take more effort to find a new place right no i i i i hear that completely like there's a whole um there's a whole like theory of face work here too i where where um when we had different websites or like I remember America Online was a little like this we had different like chat rooms and different chat areas and you would have to engage a different face

for being in the like horror movie chat room than you would be in like the chess chat room you know like you there's a different culture a different concept

and I think that people kind of understood that in the same way we understand that like we we put on a different face when we're spending time with family versus when we're spending time with friends you know we speak differently we might um mode switch a little bit i think i think that's natural i think that's like a healthy social thing and i think to a wide extent the homogenization of platform has really kind of broken that and now people kind of behave the same way across communities in a way that we didn't before and I think unfortunately a lot of that is shit posting you know that's kind of the cultural currency is how much like how what does

does our post translate to in terms of reach? And that is how we determine our legitimacy to be in a space. You know, like Reddit is the example, will tell you somebody's like a top 1% poster. And that encourages a certain type of behavior. YouTube's now doing this with live streams where they're like crowning the person in the I still have not worked out how the XP system works. It's bizarre. Yeah.

Because I thought it was maybe based on your activity in the chat, but then I had someone who posts like 20 messages, some regular joined, and then they're automatically the crowned person. I still have no idea what they're doing. Or like, does it have to do with super chats? Like, I don't know. I've not had, on that channel, no one had done so. So it's definitely not that.

Okay. Yeah. Like, I can't figure it out either. It's kind of bizarre. And that's what you want. You want a system that's completely bizarre that rewards people for things that you can't possibly know why they're being rewarded for it.

And that's exactly the scenario we're hoping for. But I think there was something like online communities of old needed to be intentional because otherwise you were wasting people's not only time, but like it cost money to have a connection. You were, you were spending money on that connection. So you didn't want to be rude to people. And when you go back a generation before and we talk about like the BBSs, you know, not only did that obviously tie up your phone line unless you were rich enough to have two phone lines, but like you were, if you were connecting to a BBS that wasn't in your geographic area, that cost you long distance that was you you had to be really not rude to people um in terms of as

the platform creator in terms of how you respect your audience you had you had to take their time seriously and so like when i think about how bbs is operated and how they treated the the user versus how reddit does reddit is not suffering from that constraint YouTube is not suffering from that constraint. I think that that leads to different design choices. And I think that we're seeing the impacts of those design choices in not only like the proliferation of, of, of YouTube face, but like people's attitude and behavior online going from being reasoned to edgy. And that making life less fun to be in these platforms. And I just, I think that as we kind of as a generation grows up having seen this,

we're going to see the impacts of that. And, you know, hopefully platforms take steps to, you know, instead of rewarding people for stuff we don't know, maybe they'll tell us why they're rewarding people. And we can criticize them into changing how they do it. I don't know. I just explain the problem. I don't necessarily come up with the answer.

Yeah, don't get that. I think we're going to see something very... So, one thing is, I'm of that, like, last generation that was sort of go... Like, I had a period in my life where there wasn't widespread every single person having a smartphone. Most of people I knew didn't have a smartphone until mid... mid to late high school. So I at least had that, like, early childhood period where, like, I had a phone, but the phone was like, it was like a flip phone I could make calls my parents.

So it was like, it was still a phone, but it's not like what you're seeing now, where you're seeing kids who are, you know, seven years old with an iPhone, three iPads and everything else. I do think there's going to be a very interesting conversation that happens as, like, this generation that's grown up entirely on technology reaches into adulthood. And we're starting to see the youngest of these people start to make their way into that. And then there's all of the other challenges happening at the same time with the widespread adoption of these AI tools. And I'm hearing from hiring managers that they are hired... I heard one story recently.

They hired someone and immediately fired them when they found out they hired a developer who asked the AI chatbot, how does Git work? Immediately, nope, you're gone. You are not even remotely qualified for this position. When I was getting started, at least Google didn't report back to my boss when I asked how Git works. Like, that was at least an advantage. I bet with some of these chat bots, I haven't looked to see.

I got out of the sysadmin game right before the proliferation of chat tools and like all this stuff. And so I haven't seen how reporting works, but, like, it was amazing how many bosses wanted search histories of their employees. Well, you're seeing this thing become common where they want to do these, like, surveillance tools on work laptops and things like that, which became very common with, like, people doing work from home. they want to like monitor you to make sure that you know you're actually doing work and yeah oh i i when when when when covid hit and people started working from i i was doing pretty well at helping uh companies get like vpn set up and like these because i did um contract sysadmin work so um basically helping the IT people figure out how to do a thing. And the

a lot of the VPN stuff I remember like C-suite folks asking me, oh, does the VPN go both ways? And it's like how about no? I'm going to go with no. Wait, so they, I'm assuming they wanted access to the

employee's systems then. Yes. What do they have at home? and I remember saying, I want you to talk to your lawyer about this. Ask the same question you just asked me. Ask an attorney. Then get back to me. Yeah, yeah.

I can't help you with this. But, oh my goodness, it was a lot of fun. The nice thing was at the time people were so desperate that, like, I actually had a lot of control over what, I would, you know, take and what I wouldn't. Like, if somebody who's being a jerk about it, I could say, I don't want the gig, you know, go find somebody else. And, yeah, I kind of loved my clients because they were being very, I was able to choose the ones that were more trusting. Right. The ones that weren't doing, like, terrible

things and, you know, like, I, the ones who didn't want to take advantage. So that, that had, you know, at the time, it was definitely a, it favored the admins. It favored us. I don't know if that would be the case today with so many companies thinking, you know, these so-called AI tools can just do it for you. But like, good luck when prod gets deleted. Did you see the, the Replett thing recently where for anyone who's unaware Replet was just like that database, what database?

That doesn't exist anymore. Just delete it. It was me like sipping my tea. Like oh, apparently you need a DBA still. Imagine that. Imagine that. What is your general stance on this on this tolling that's sort of You know, I don't have a, like, I don't have a serious, like at the beginning of all my videos, I do have a disclaimer

that I don't use generative AI. And a reason why is that one, a lot, like, a lot of people use it and they don't disclose that they're using it. And it leads to questions. Like, and I started to notice that in my own comments, like, oh, you sound. slower today, is this an AI version of you? And it's like, so I need to say I'm not using it. And that's, that's all fine. But like, I do kind of think that when people use it, they should at least talk about it.

You know, like, and a lot of people do. A lot of people say, I'm, this is a AI version of my voice. And, like, I don't have a problem with that per se. Like, I have concerns about the training data. I have concerns about. I have concerns about like the copyright rights being violated by, you know, writers and stuff. Like that, my concern is more the ethics, not to mention the environmental stuff. Do I care if somebody's using some server in their basement to create art? No, probably not. Would I like to see the art? I don't know.

Like, I just find it boring. It all kind of looks the same right now. And like with the music, it all kind of sounds. sounds the same. Like, I'm not worried about it coming for my job anytime soon. And if it does, like, I still like making video. I still like making music. I still, I like the art part of it. I don't think a computer doing that work for me is ever going to change the fact that I enjoy it. Right. Right. If that makes sense. So, like, I don't, I don't worry so much about that um when it comes to people using these things as like google replacements you know

like this yes yeah i please explain this tweet all this sort of stuff where i really worry about it is that the way they've they've oriented these tools is it's oriented toward pleasing the end user and not oriented toward providing them an answer. And, you know, you can see that, like, I don't know if you've ever spun up one of these on your own hardware and, like, seeing how the prompts work and stuff. But you can see in the design, it's, it's really aimed at, I want to make you happy. And I feel like that's the wrong approach.

Like, search engines shouldn't want to make me happy. They should want to give me truth, you know, like, that's the idea. I but like obviously with the commercialization of it a happy user is a repeat user and and I think that I think that for something that's supposed to give you knowledge that's the wrong way to go like I kind of gravitate more toward books because the book doesn't care how I feel and I like that Google kind of stopped you know Google even before Gemini Google was giving me results. based on like it was less a direct result and more a vibe and even I noticed duck duck go even starting to do that where it was like I would search for like how do I code this in bash and I was getting results for a like festival in Minneapolis and it's like Just give me the information. Yeah, I'm intrigued by search engines that you either host yourself or that you pay for

because it kind of takes away that impetus. There's one that a lot of people were talking about that you pay for a while. Coggy. Which one, sorry? Coggy, right? Yes, yes, yes, that is the one. And I might be pronouncing it wrong. I tried it.

I liked it just fine. I kind of had some concerns about management. and you know without getting too much into like they got kind of a weird to me like crypto e and they want to do their own AI bot thing and like I just kind of found that to be a little like a little odd um they also like we're saying things to paying customers like you know telling some people we're going to manipulate the results and then telling other people we're going to manipulate the results and then telling other people we're We don't manipulate the results. And to me, that seems like putting your thumb on the scale, which when you say you're not doing that, but then it looks like you're doing that. Like, I just, I don't necessarily trust them. And it, but like, I did think the results were pretty good. You know, like, but like I don't necessarily want to be in somebody else's bubble either.

So that's, you know, for better or worse, I kind of decided it wasn't worth the money at that point. But I might revisit it at some point. if either management grows up a little bit or they, you know, toned down some of the AI stuff. My kind of main concern with a lot of the AI tooling is it is very much negatively affecting people's ability to find information. Sure. A search engine made accessing information easier than, like, you know,

going to a library and working at how they're, sorting system work. It's considerably easier than that, but you still had to understand how do I find this information? What am I trying to solve? How do I actually think about the problem? Whereas what you're seeing

with, whether it be Gemini, GROC, any of these tools, is basically outsourcing your critical thinking, and I don't think that is I don't think that's going to be healthy in the long run. I agree with you completely. It's, um, and I, I, I think it's a parlor trick. You know, like, just at the more basic

level, like, it can't be everywhere. Like, even if they want it to be everywhere, it's still limited to the, you know, physical device that contains it. And like, we have interactions in the real world that can't be dictated by this. And I think at the end of the day, like, you're going to see people, you know, like you mentioned with how do I use Git, you know, you're going to see people hitting a wall. And I think where I, where I see this, like the bubble bursting is you're going to see companies hitting a wall, where you're going to see, there's going to be some issue. Like, you know, you talked about the database being deleted. You're going to see some issue where some major company loses a boatload of money because of some outsourced process that they

weren't thinking about anymore. And when the lawsuits start flying, I don't know that it actually matters who it's decided is at fault, if it's the AI company, if it's the company that did the thing. I think you're going to see managers saying, I don't know if I trust it. Right now it's shiny and new, but that'll pass. And when it does, and there's issues like this, we either have to solve the issues or we're going to stop using the tools in the same way. And I think I lean toward the ladder because I don't think, like, unless we're talking implants and brains, it's not going to be everywhere with us, you know, not quite literally.

One issue we're definitely going to run into, and it's already kind of starting to happen, is a lot of these smaller startup development firms, they are sort of, we're seeing a drop-off in junior positions. Yes. And senior devs who know, like, who use these tools as a way to enhance what they're doing, like, who have a well, you know, you've been doing this for 15 years, you're a well-established developer, you know how to write code, but you're used. using this as a way to deal with things you don't want to deal with that at a previous time the juniors would have been dealing with. And I think a lot of these companies

are betting on the fact that it's going to get to a point where you can eliminate the juniors and immediately jump people right into that senior position. And I don't know if that's going to work out for them in the long run. I think

we are legitimately going to see an issue of a skill vacuum where the older people are kind of like, you know, they're getting ready to retire and there's no one there to replace them. It's like, it's like the issue of legacy COBOL code, but across the entire industry. Absolutely. I was going to say, we saw this. And the thing is, cobal did not go away. And neither did COBOL positions. and, you know, it's still, like, if you want to learn it, it's pretty lucrative, you know, like, I, I learned it and, like, I was never hurting for work. You know, like, this is definitely a thing. Yeah, that doesn't necessarily mean that I recommend it to everybody because, like, you're dealing with, you're dealing with perception a lot.

and that perception can harm you in terms of like your prospects you know like so like people assume you don't need this this this role like oh we should eliminate the the code that requires this you know like we don't we shouldn't use fortran we shouldn't you know whatever take take pick your poison um and when you're dealing with that you not only have to convince people to bring you in but you have to convince people that the thing you learned was worth learning. And that can itself become a limiting factor. So, you know, like what I recommend to people is it's not something I'd recommend you learn unless you're really committed to the bit. And, you know, like in my case, I was always fascinated by the technology of yesteryear.

So, like, for me, it made sense. It's like I wouldn't necessarily tell people to go learn. Java just because you like Android. That's, you know, like that doesn't necessarily, these things are not the same. Like, like, there are different reasons. Like, you should learn Java if you like coding

in Java. And if you don't like coding in Java, don't learn Java. Do something you like to do. Don't learn Cobal just because you want a job because you're going to have to be convincing people of your passion for the thing. Because there are people

with a passion for the thing. and so like it's it's really a simple matter of if you want to do the thing you have to actually want to do the thing and then I think people will hire you even if it's in a kind of junior training role position but I think getting back to the AI bit people like hiring managers are going to start to think oh we don't need to hire for that the problem is the people who programmed your cobal system died they're not there any like you can't hire them because they're dead now so I think we need to this is a problem that is going to have to be solved one way or another I think a lot of people

are going to replace cobal code with with crummy like other right I've heard people getting hired to like port cobal to C sharp and other things like that C sharp is is the cobal for 20 years from now. C-sharp is Microsoft-skinned jaffer.

There you go. Any of the C-sharp fans out there? Yeah, there's going to be so much legacy jobs in C-sharp and dot net. And, like, they're going to be good government jobs. But, like, I don't think that's going away anytime soon. And because, you know, it's inertia. And I think right now it feels like the world is pulling forward. but I think when these tools start to have problems

and I think we're already starting to see a little bit of that I think that bubble's going to burst and it's either going to burst or it's not going to burst and if it doesn't burst I guess we just have to hope it does a good job but I'm actually pretty confident it's going to burn this feels a lot like the dot com era in 98

not yeah everything every, you put dotcom into everything. Like you have, for those a period where during earnings reports, companies would just mention AI and that would be a way for them to go, like Taco Bell, for example, they talked about AI drive-thrues. What was it? I'm shopping for dishwasher right now and I'm looking through last year's model versus this year's model and they're adding AI.

I have an AI rice cooker. I don't know what the AI does. It's a rice cooker. It works great. We used to call that like a set point. No, that's actually what it is. It's like AI temperature control, but it's just like it automatically shuts off when it gets too hot. Yeah, we've had that for 80 years. Yeah, I have a kettle. It does the same thing.

I have a toaster. It does the same thing. My, my thermostat's a hundred years old. It's, it's an AI in that when it gets to a certain, see, when it gets to a certain point, it stops. It's AI, it's artificial and it's intelligent. Mm-hmm. That's it. One of the reasons I call it so-called AI is just because, like, I, you know, I say that in my, it's, it's, what is AI really? Hmm.

You know what I mean? like what what which part is AI versus like my thermostat like this line is really blurry and I have a feeling a hundred years from now people will laugh at what we call the AI and um just like we laugh right now at what people 50 years ago called AI right like this is I I think we're we're at such early days for this kind of concept like we're not we're not lieutenant commander data just yet. Going back a little bit to the whole idea of like generative AI, I am generally opposed to it, especially you're seeing a lot of these like,

I guess content slop farms appearing on YouTube. There's just garbage content. Yeah. Now, I would have said I was entirely against it until the other day. So I saw this, this Iraqi guy who runs an engineering channel. He actually, like, physically makes things. But he doesn't speak English well and uses the tool to voice over the videos. This is a weird, different situation where he's actually doing something really impressive in the real world

and using this as a way to communicate that information to people. And I see that. I am much less opposed to this. Well, like, you know, I think about accessibility tooling and like the classic example of this right now is captions where Google kind of does a lousy job of auto captioning. Whisper does a much better job. It's not perfect.

You know, there's a lot of like I've tried it and it gets like 80% of the way there. If you're willing to clean it up, It's a really good base point to go from. Yeah, it's an excellent base point. And like, it's hard to argue with that. But I have literally watched folks who do not have hearing understand the conversation because of an AI model that they've got like, and I'm not going to go tell this person, you're being immoral because I fundamentally. disagree with this tool that you're using. Right.

Like, it's real hard to argue that when it's giving somebody the ability to participate. And that, like, I just, you know, I can criticize the ethics of the company that's putting it out and say we should have more transparency around sourcing. But, like, I'm not going to sit there and go tisk, tisk, tisk at some person who's understanding the conversation thanks to this tool. that's like I'm absolutely not and so it's that's why I try to be I say I don't use generative AI because I want to be transparent about my usage of it but that isn't the same thing as telling people you shouldn't use it and like I get criticized all the time from people in the

comments now saying like oh why do you hate on AI and it's like when did I say that you know like show me where in the video I like me saying I don't use a tool is not the same thing as me yelling at you like I and if you're seeing that like you've got your you're too online go go go do something else for a bit like you know I'm saying it because I you know I'm proud of the fact that my vision you know like here's a good example the band queen you're probably familiar with the band queen um they for several of their albums they wrote no synthesizers were used in the making of this album and part of that was because if you listen to like their their production their vocal layering their guitar layering it's so thick and full that i could understand how

the audience at the time might have thought it was a synthesizer and they were just proud of the work that they put into it and they you know they like they and eventually they did start using synthesizers you know like as the technology changed they adapted to the times and they started incorporating synthetic elements into their their music as the band evolved and as the members grew up and like I'm just proud of the visuals that I do you know like I spend a lot of time getting the camera angle right getting the lighting right like I I this stuff takes time I'm proud of it and I want to tell you that I don't use a generative AI tool to replicate this because this is my art and I'm proud of it and I know not everybody thinks of YouTube is art but I do and every angle was deliberated every you know the lighting was intentional like I move things around I'm getting everything set up and when folks assume it was AI. It's like I feel like it

it kind of diminishes the work I put into it. Right. Right. So I just like to say it. You know, and that's that's all boiled. I do think people should disclose when they use it. Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. But like at the end of the day, it's just because I like the art and I like showing that off.

If this ever changes and for some reason I start using generative AI, I'd want to disclose it because I think that that's the right way to go. And I think that we just get too hung up on the are you using AI are you not using AI and it's more like you know I care about the ethics of it more so than you know like like are you happy are you just putting out videos because you're making money off of it or do you actually like creating this do you like the crafting because if you're doing it for the money and you don't like the crafting of it like the

AI slot farm you know like that I don't have a lot of respect for sure sure but like Like, if you are engaging in art and you're using things that I wouldn't use, I can at least respect you for disclosing it and talking about it. You know, like, that's how I feel about it. No, I think that's a pretty coherent sort of stance on it. I try to be coherent. That's a good start. Now, YouTube does have a little thing to, like, mark if the video is using AI.

The problem is I don't think they enforce it. No. You're also supposed to mark when your video's sponsored, but like, I know lots of people who get free stuff and they don't disclose it. Yeah, or it's like, it's a very, people can get real weird about what is and is not a sponsor. Like, you'll see that there's a lot of these finance videos, for example, where it's Like, they're using a very specific platform, and it's not sponsored, but one of the co-founders of the company is in the videos. Like, okay, right.

What are we doing here? No, I, I, that happens plenty. And, like, I think of gear tube and, you know, just going back to, like, music stuff, you know, like, if you get sent the guitar or get sent the pedal or get sent the synthesized. it, you know, whatever the case might be. I think you should say it. Hmm. I think you should say it right away because, like, somebody who's giving you something for free, like, my, my favorite expression is thoughts and opinions are my own.

Mm-hmm. Like, are they? Right. Are they? You get, like, I, somebody sends me something for free. I kind of think they're awesome. I do get that at a smaller scale. When we're talking, like, take,

Take a channel, like a Linus Tech Tips, for example. Yeah. Like, they get sent so much stuff that I think in that context, like, they get sent too much stuff to make videos on. So the... Oh, absolutely. Just receiving of... If they receive a GPU, they have bins of GPUs.

Yeah, it doesn't possess the value to them the same way. Yeah, yeah. I do think... I see that. On a smaller scale, though, like, I got sent, like, a Linux phone to do a review a while ago. Oh, sure. And that, like, very clear, like, hey, this was sent to me. Yep.

You know, check it out if you want to check it. I wasn't, I don't, if you get paid for a review, it's not a review. It's a sponsorship. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's different. I've had companies be like, hey, I would have paid you to review. It's like, no, stop it. Do you want an ad?

We can talk about that, but I'm not doing a review. Yeah, exactly. Nope, I've had that, you know, I haven't done ad reads yet because like I just, I hate the idea of like blocking up the content, you know, like the information and having to separate some of the information from other information using like, you know, presented by our sponsor. Like knowing how people kind of drop off at that point, it's like, I'm already fighting for your attention. I don't want to get into that. I think it's different when somebody sends you something, but I think you should disclose it really early on. I think that's the key. Like I've generally been opposed to this.

I'm kind of softening my stance now on it. Only because I, you know, my patrons had a very frank conversation with me where I was talking about the ethics of buying a thing with the money that they send me. when I could just reach out and get the thing and then not be spending their money on this thing. And it gets into this whole stance of a wise use of money to avoid saying they sent me this for review. Right.

You know, like, why am I spending, like it's money I could spend on eating. and they're the ones footing the bill and they're saying we don't care why do I have a stance that maybe they find unnecessary you know like it kind of led me to okay maybe I should just open up a little bit

just a smidge about getting sent free stuff so that is to say I'm a shill now every video I'm not making a video unless you send me at least $5,000 worth of stuff. There's no, no rules, like, it's no holds bar. Yeah, all of my way, on videos, I'm actually sent a check by Red Hat, so.

Oh, okay, so they send the Red Hat check to Australia, too. I get mine, yep, every SystemD video, you know, Microsoft and Red Hat both team up to send me anytime I talk about System D, every mention, I'm getting money right now. Yep, you mentioned per word PayPal go burr There are actually people It's so funny Like I have made so many videos

Critical of Whalen And every time I make one positive one It's just like Oh he's getting paid by redhead I'm like I know my regulars And I recognise names I know when they're messing around

And I see people that I know I know I'm not messing around like what are we doing here? It's amazing. That's incredible. No, I love the conspiracy theories about who's getting paid by which big giant company to talk about big giant thing.

It's like, I don't care about Wayland. Like, it's, you know, I use it. Right now I'm actually using X-11 because I'm recording an album. And a plug-in that I use doesn't seem to want to work on ex-wayland you know like it's just a simple little thing but it's like i'll drop to x-11 for this so i like installed mate the other day and um and it's like oh i i remember why i liked this but then i am getting obes working and things are different i had to

reconfigure everything and it's like i remember why i disliked you know like it all it's it's all just stuff i do like i don't care you know people people people people get so hyped up about it. What do you find yourself, this is kind of the first mention of, proper mention of Linux the entire. Yeah, here we go. Let's talk about Linux. We're like, what, two hours in?

Let's talk about Linux. Yeah, just before we finish off the episode. Oh, yeah, by the way, I use Linux. What do you find yourself daily driving right now? I, so I've been using Debbie in for a while. I used Pop OS for a good long time. I like the cosmic alpha. There's just some rough edges that would prevent me from,

editing with it and doing it for music. But I liked the cosmic alpha. I'm excited to see where they go with it. They don't package it for Debian yet. On my editing rig, I've been Debian testing now because we're days away from Trixie being stable. I'm probably going to rock stable for a year and then decide something else. I, you know, I'm a YouTuber. We got to like try different things and stuff. More recently, I just got off of a stint running genome. It's better than it used to be. There's some design choice.

I have a file in my VimWiki that I'll never show anybody called Everything Annoying About. And it's everything I try and every annoyance that I have with it. and I actually found that I was deleting stuff out of Ghanome faster than I was adding stuff. That's good. And that's, I think, promising for them. I mean, some things are just silly.

Like, I maintain Gnome is making a, the wrong choice. It's not the choice I would go with by not including a task bar option. Mm-hmm. You know, like I know everybody's going to say there's plugins. I know there's plugins. there's you know like dash to panel dash to doc i've used them all they're all good but i have watched so many live streams where somebody's trying gnom for the first time and they go where's the panel and it's like that is such a stop for people that you know like it's a computing metaphor that

for better or worse has been with us since the 90s at least incorporating it a little bit way. I want to say it's actually a bit old than that. Wasn't it? Oh, absolutely. But it's been like a standard on virtually every system. I would say it probably became a standard like with so many other things, probably with the Lisa. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Sure. But like Windows 3.1 didn't have a panel. Sure, sure, sure. That's like your computer, by Windows 95 every system virtually that anybody was using had this. Right.

And I get the idea behind, you know, the overview. I can appreciate it, but like, just, just give us a toggle, you know, like something simple, just, like, I think 80% of the problems with Gnome be solved with that, like, 80% of everybody's issues be solved with that one thing. They are not going to take this advice. That is okay. You do you. I'm glad for dash to doc.

I'm glad for dash to panel. And then before I just dropped to X-11, I'm using Matte right now. But I was on sway for a bit again. And I do like sway. I like manual tiling. It's kind of nice to have the fine-grained control. Hands on the keyboard, less hands on the mouse. I'm a fan of that.

But I know, I think you're using what is it, the paper one. Neri, yes. Yeah, Neri, thank you. I keep wanting to call it Paper WM, but that's... Yeah, paper WM, that's the Ganome Extension, yeah. Yep, and you like that one? You're having done with it.

Yeah, I've been, I've been vibing with it. It's nice. I like, I've always preferred the dynamic tiling over manual tiling. I did start on I3, but then when I went to BSPWM and awesome and... Oh, sure. Yeah, I, I, Jen, like, I get the idea of being out of like fully control where the tiles go but I end up basically just doing the same thing anyway

and creating like the you know the golden yeah the golden ratio so it's just like I'd much rather just let it do that for me and then Neri you have that infinite horizontal space and I don't know if it's better than using work spaces for everything I'm still trying to work it out because I do tend to lose track of Windows, which, yeah, can be a problem, but that's kind of the thing. So I ran into that because I tried PaperWM. And I really liked

it on my writing laptop, you know, like the laptop I use for writing scripts and, you know, like coming up with stuff. I thought it did fine there. Using it for editing, I found that, you know, I do basically a lot of drag and drop of clips, you know, like I arranged the clips in the folder before I actually open up the editor, Caden Live, and then I drag them in sequentially, and then I start laying them out. And I found that, you know, I have clips in multiple different areas. I was trying to organize that, and it was just a pain having them not tile on the same workspace. You know, like workspaces were something that I actually found that I was using a lot of, and I was losing windows. And so, like, I just wasn't able to use it in that context very well. I think if I didn't

edit video and audio, I could see myself really liking that a lot more. Or at least if I didn't edit video and audio so complex, with such a complex setup. Like, you know, I basically, at any given point, I have three file browsers up collecting information from my frequently reused clips, my B-roll, my A-roll, and I'm importing and putting them in and then aligning it with the audio. Right. And that's typically my workflow. And with three file browsers up, it was just so hard to keep up on it without workspaces. You know, like, what I like about sway is that you can assign the workspaces to a specific

monitor and then be done with it. So, like, I can have, like, I have one monitor here, which is my file browser monitor. And it's also my Commodore 64 monitor when I'm, you know, doing footage capture from it. So I can just hit a couple of buttons to change it. But because Sway is smart enough to know, I, you know, don't send this workspace to any other monitor. It just kind of hangs it in limbo. So I don't lose the window placement. Any other, like, you know, KD Plasma, Ghanome, Mate, like when I turn off the monitor in that way, it moves the windows.

and I lose where everything was. Right. Because sway is so manual, it does not move it. And that control over it has made it so I'm not feeling like I need to pull out a third monitor for the Commodore 64. And that little thing is just such a teeny little difference, but it's super helpful for me. I found a workflow that works for me now, but it was very much a matter of a trail and error to really make it fit.

And if you've got something that, like, I always tell people, like, if you'd like a floating environment, if you like a tiding, I don't like what you do is. But, like, I like to experiment with different things and see if they improve it, if they make it worse, and just try things out. Absolutely. At the end of the day, you can just try it out.

If you don't like it, you can just stop using it. You don't have to be committed to it. it's one of the things I love about distros you know like arch debian um and to a certain extent to boon too but it's it's a little different you know like your gen two you're like you can the the the desktop environment is uncoupled from the distro mixOS just so you guys can comment about so yeah i forgot that one um but i like having that that that decoupling because like you know mint as the as the as the archetype of doing it the other way around.

When the desktop environment and the distro were so tuned together, I think it creates a it's hard to change something

if that makes sense. It's hard to, like when I was on PopOS pulling in switching to KDE plasma was like awkward and weird. right and it's i i find that i'm just increasingly drawn to the distro is just a base and the desktop environment like i don't distro hop really anymore i desktop environment hop and

i think that that's good like that's i'm i'm fine with that i still have a fedora machine running upstairs and an arch machine and like you know because i have to test stuff but Um, at the end of the day, it's like, it's all just kind of window dressing is the part that I really care about. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, like, do I care if I'm using apt or Pac-Man? No, probably not.

Like, like, I might have opinions about performance. Mm-hmm. But in the modern era, do I care? You know, what do I care if something is three seconds slower than something else when I'm, you know, sitting there, like, taking a drink while I do that? Like, who cares? The funniest discussions I see are people that complain about the fact that the Gen 2 2 package manager is written in Python.

Like, that's the part of the Gen 2 Package Manager that is your point that's going to slow you down. Not the compiling the software, not downloading the software. No, it's written in Python. That's your problem. it's it's a certain like I'd call it myopic but I think that's insulting to people with myopathy I don't understand that that concept it's like you know people talk about like I did my video recently where I talked about my Linux video workflow and I talked about how Caden Live doesn't have GPU rendering that's not experimental they got experimental GPU rendering but they yeah exactly um

And people were like, it's insulting that Caden Live doesn't have this. It must take so much longer for your CPU to render. It's like, well, one, not really. But two, you know, when I hit render, I don't sit and just stare at it. Like, I go do other things with my life. Like, what do I care if it takes 10 minutes longer to render? Like, even if it took 10 minutes shorter, I'm not just going to sit and stare at it while I wait for it to render. I'm going to go, like, get some laundry done.

I'm going to go do, like, there's other things. Like, this is an active time for me. What do I care? And it's, it's, and nobody's had a good answer for that. It's like, you know, just because something doesn't exist on paper that somebody else has doesn't mean it's better. Plus, for systems where they do GPU render, there are glitches and other issues. Like, I know people who use resolve, who've had to re-render the same project three, four times, because, they're having like GPU bugs and that's on Windows you know like that's not even a Linux thing

that's a Windows thing it's like you know the CPU has been remarkably consistent for me and I've I've upgraded my system I think twice now CPU wise since I started the channel and like CPU rendering's never been a bottleneck that I can actually imagine um do I wish there was more it could take advantage of I mean probably but more to is scrubbing than anything else. I'd love scrubbing to VGPU accelerated. But even that's kind of a minor, like, who cares? You know, like, it's, we're getting into such little minuscule details that, like, at

the end of the day, I'm just here to make art. Well, for me, what I do is, because I tend to work on multiple videos at once, I will render one out, and then I just start editing the next one. Sure, absolutely. And then when that one's rendered, then I will start working on the transcript for that video. And I just have this chain of things that just flow into each other. And when that's done, I'll probably go work on my thumbnails, right? Like, I have other things I can do.

Yeah. People forget that. And it's like, but you don't in real life. You know, like when you're making food in the kitchen, you typically work on multiple parts at the same time. you know like if you're making dinner you don't just like i'm just going to cook the main course and every side is going to have to wait until the main course is finished then by the time you actually finish everything the main course is cold like people kind of multitask and and i think we understand that in the real world but when we talk about our computers we forget that you're like

this is just a part of the process you know it's like so fast now that you know if you if you think back to like um you know let's think back on like uh universities in like the 70s that were like you do some big math project and it's going to take three hours to finish it so like you just go do some other thing right like computers now are so fast when something isn't fast people don't really know what to do with that time absolutely no it's it's you just go online more and you wait um you use it like people you know when we talk about time wasters it's like what do i care about gp u rendering when like mastodons right there you know like i i know where the bottleneck is

it's it's my mastodon account that's the bottleneck like there's not a bottleneck somewhere else but no like when when my computer's rendering i'm often like working on the thumbnail you know Like, that's a good example of it. Like, I can go, I can go take those photos or go do the thing while the rendering is happening. And I can count on one hand the amount of times that I've had a problem with the render. And usually it was something I did. Yeah. You know, like some flag I tried that didn't work.

And it's like, oh, I got to redo it. Often I just that I didn't check it and I left a cut in that shouldn't have been there. Yep. Or I'll do. I just repeat the same words. I'm like, oh, I screw that up, do it again. I'll render a small portion of the video in like 1280 to make a small file so I can share it on

like through Matrix or Mastodon or something. So I'm not sending a big 4K file. And I'll forget that I checked that box. And I'll render the entire video. And it takes longer because it has to rescale it too. So it's like, why? It's taking a little longer today. And then I get the file and it looks like a potato.

And it's like, oh, that's why. I guess I got to redo this, but that's my, that's my problem. That's not, that problem would exist even with GPU rendering. Yeah, yeah, GPU's not going to save you from your own incompetence. Well, that's not what the AI companies tell me. That's true. Well, look, Nvidia, Nvidia's bottom margin is very, very tied to how many AI companies they can convince to buy thousands of GPUs. Sure.

that's exactly it if you want to if you want to be very um very worried about the direction things are going look up the revenue charts from invidia and look at the graph for data center and AI it's just like woo yep i i keep thinking about um all the like right now there's this whole thing happening here in minnesota about a uh farm that's going to be built you know in southern Minnesota for for AI stuff and it's like there's going to be a power generation thing there's going to be a you know obviously like they're going to need cooling and they're going to need like there's there's going to be environmental stuff and that that's its own thing um which obviously I have concerns about because it's my neck of the woods and you know like maybe we should be

concerned about that but beyond that aspect of it it's like we're giving tax breaks to a company that's going to end up, like, eliminating jobs because of it. And it's like, maybe that's the wrong approach? I don't know. Like, maybe instead of doing this thing, we should, like, I mean, put your thing in, but, like, how are you contributing to the jobs you're about to take away from Minnesotans? Like, right, right, right.

But nobody listens to me, unless I'm explaining it. Well, we could probably just keep going forever, but we probably should end this. off at some point. We have gone a bit over two hours now. No, this has been a lot of fun. I very much appreciated the... I'm sorry it took so long for us to actually... No, no, it's fine. It's totally fine.

Yeah, I'm happy to do another one anytime. So, just let me know. If you start now, maybe in two years, we'll do a follow-up episode. Well, assume you don't change your email address and a bunch of other things. Hopefully it doesn't take two years. No. So let people know where they

can find you and check your stuff out. Let's see. On YouTube and peer tube, I'm Veronica Explains. On peer tube, I have a single user peer tube instance called tinkerbetter. Dot tube. I don't know why it's not Veronica Explains.2. It probably should be. I need peer tube to figure out how to port your followers and then maybe we'll talk. And then I have a website at vkc.sh. And I should blog more often. What is dot-sh? That's a country code. It is a country code.

I mean, to me it means it's like bash scripting, which I thought was clever. I got a short URL, but maybe it's the sayshel. It can't be the Seychelles. Maybe it's the Seychelles. St. Helena, apparently. St. Helena. There we go. Okay, sure. Well, hopefully they like me paying them for my domain.

I feel like the majority of the people who are buying. dot-sh domains are probably buying it for the same reason that you bought it. Yes. I'm probably going to switch to Veronica explains.net at some point soon, just because I'm running into an issue where email, I was getting the dot-sh was being blocked by people's emails, and it's like, okay, this is going to be frustrating. Like, even if it's legit or not, I just, I got to be done.

So dot net is probably going to be the way we go. So we'll see. Yeah, that's spinning up your email and trying to get, um what do you what do you call like uh um what's the word like reputation email yeah reputation stuff is i feel what the exact correct term is but that that's some idea i have a dot i o for one of my things and um it was amazing how as soon as all the news came out about like the potential end of the dot io domain like immediately companies started updating their firewalls for it and it's like nothing's happened like you all and it doesn't matter

matter if it's legit that they're making a change, they're making the change and it's impacting my email delivery. It's like, I can't win with that. So speaking with dot com and dot net, probably a good idea. Iro is an interesting, like, this is a bit of a random side tangent, but removing a country code probably wouldn't happen. It would just be shifted over someone else, because um, Russia has two of them that they were supposed to get rid of. Um, um, that they were told to get rid of. I think they, USSR,

they had the USSR one. They were told to get rid of it. Better enough. No. No, I have a sneaking suspicion. that I will be around for a while. Yes,

someone's going to run it. Yeah, people, there's way too much money in it. Exactly, but people love to dream. Anything else you want to direct food to, or is that pretty much it?

I think that's probably, you know, my band has a show coming up. Can I talk about my band's show? Go right ahead. We're going to be playing at the vintage computer festival Midwest in Chicago in September. And I think their website is BCFMW.

Vcfm. Let's, yeah, let me see if I can pull it up. Bcfmw. Yeah, Vcfmw.org will talk about it. It's September 13th through the 14th in Schaumburg, Illinois. I don't know where that is. It's just outside Chicago. So, yep, and we'll be performing our retro tube faculty band novelty rock set.

So, and you can find out more, a band has a website at the stopbits.net. And it's a lot of fun because it is, I made it in AOL press. So it's a good time. Nice. 90s tech. That is everything? Yes. Yes, that's everything.

I have to promote. I have nothing else to promote. Okay. My main channel is Brodie Robertson. I do Linux videos there six-ish days a week. Sometimes I stream as well. I have the gaming channel that is Brodyon Games. By the time this comes out, I will probably be

playing Metal Gear Solid and Yakuza 6. I don't know, maybe. Check it out. See what's over there. I've got the React channel where I upload clips from the stream. Brodie Robertson Reacts. And if you're watching the video version of this, you can find the audio version on basically every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. And if you'd like to find the video, it is on a YouTube at Tech Over T. I'll give you the final word. How do you want to sign us

off? Let's see. Consider using a Commodore 64. Like one of these. Like you use cartridges and have fun. Yeah, that works.