Tech Over Tea - Meta Suffers, We All Rejoice | Solo

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Recently Meta suffered massive losses because nobody wants to be involved with Facebook anymore and it doesn't seem like pushing the Metaverse is going to help. ==========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 =========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 Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://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, good evening. I am as always your host Brodie Robertson and today we are back for episode 102 of Tech of a T. And I didn't initially plan this, but there is quite a bit of meta news on the roster, on the schedule, whatever you want to call it today. roster on the schedule, whatever you want to call it today, I don't really care too much about Meta as a company. Like, I'm not always focusing what Meta is doing. If you don't know, if you somehow managed to miss the news like a couple months back, Meta is the new parent company to Facebook. They are the alphabet to Google, basically. So, I don't really follow them, but there was a couple of big topics that sort of made the rounds. I even made a video on one of them, or used that as like a jumping board, a springboard, to make a video. That one is the biggest topic.

And you know what? We'll start with the biggest topic. So, let's see. Here it is. Meta lost a little bit of money so on February 6th Meta suffers Meta suffers biggest one-day market landslide in US history with a 322 billion dollar loss so their share price their stock price what if you want to it, fell by 26%. Now since then it hasn't recovered, but it is doing, if I recall correctly, it was doing slightly better. Let's see. No, no, no. Take back what I said. It's still going down. Okay. It was doing slightly better here. Oh no, that's still there. It was doing slightly better here. Oh, no, that's still there. It was doing slightly better over the hours But overall it's it's it's not it's just really not doing well. It's doing really really really bad

So yeah, they they lost quite a bit of money not just Facebook themselves But I know there was a lot of people that had a lot of money in Facebook If you pay attention at all to the Twitch streamer scene, I know that Amaranth lost a shitload of money. Let's see, Amaranth Facebook. Facebook stock, not... There we go. Here we go. Lers nearly $300,000 in one day. So, like, yeah, some people lost quite a bit of money. To be fair, that's a lot of money to have in Facebook. I don't know why she had that much sitting in one place,

but, hey, it's her money. Do whatever she wants. So this was for any number of reasons but not really like you know when something like this happens you can't say oh this one factor is what caused it unless you know the company was caught i wanted to say like you know having slaves but no apple does that uh child trafficking, maybe? Maybe that would make your stock price drop. But I don't know. Judging by how little people care about what companies are actually doing.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. I said $322 billion. It's 230 Australian. I don't know why this lists it in two different ways on the article. Anyway, so there are a couple of things that cause the stock price to go down. Firstly, you've got the concerns regarding the EU and Meta and Facebook, which I'll get into in just a bit. People aren't

really sure, you know, how long or if or what sort of deal is going to go on there regarding Facebook's existence in the EU. Also, there's just a general increase in the number of people who care about privacy. So while Apple isn't a perfect company when it comes to privacy, and they are doing their own data collection or their own first party data collection. When it comes to external services, Apple at least gives a, the idea that they care about privacy,

they give you the ability to block, you know, data collection by these apps, but still actually make use of the apps. So Instagram, Facebook, all of those companies were really whining about this when they were first trying to integrate it, being like, oh, if you don't share our data, you'll have to pay for Instagram. It's like, okay. You can just go away then.

No one cares. Clearly all of these other services don't need to collect your data to run. So I don't know why you need to do that. So anyway, there's that issue, and also there's a lot of people who are just on the flip side of that, sort of caring more, not caring more, not caring, not caring is a better word, not caring about Facebook and caring more about other services. So a lot of young people don't even have Facebook accounts and are spending their time on services like Twitter. Twitter's not the primary one now, but services like TikTok and services like Reddit even. A lot of people are moving away from Facebook to spend their time on other things. And I think that's a good thing. You probably should do that.

Also, there's the thing I made a video on, a general lack of interest in what Meta is selling as the Metaverse. If you haven't seen Meta's Metaverse VR, I'm not even going to use the term Metaverse, it's a stupid term if you haven't seen their VR MMO it's it's the most like how do you describe it most corporate sanitized

boring experience that you'll ever see, so here are some of the avatars so if you're not watching the video right now, basically it's... they just look like... you know, generic corporate art. You know, not the weird lanky body art you'll see in a lot of corporate photos, but if you just imagine what a corporation would draw a cartoon person as, there's nothing exciting about it.

It's just, this is a person. That is all. And I can see why a lot of people aren't super excited about it, because there are other VR experiences and other metaverse, if you want to use that term, experiences, which are offering something exciting. I don't really care about things like Sandbox and Axie Infinity, but they are doing really, really well. I especially don't care about them because they're chilling NFT nonsense, but they are actually offering something to people that they are at least

somewhat interested in. And then you look at other VR chat experiences like VR chat and what that offers, the creativity and the freedom that offers is just nothing. So what Meta is offering is nothing in comparison to that. Why would you want to, you know, have a conversation in Horizon Worlds when you could do this in any of these other services? So I can totally see why people aren't interested in it, ignoring the whole fact that it's powered by Meta, and there's the whole data collection concerns that they're still going to have because that's never going to change. They literally run an ad network while also collecting your data. It's the same problem that Google has with, you know, with Google AdSense.

They collect your data while running an ad network. It's very clearly a, you know, conflict of interest or maybe not conflict of interest, or maybe not conflict of interest, maybe that's not the best term, a tying these two concepts too closely together. Because they're definitely not worried about the conflict, and they're doing that to make the money. But I don't care about meta. I don't know anyone who cares about meta. I'm in a crowd of people who care about meta. I don't know anyone who cares about meta. I'm in a crowd of people who care about tech.

Also, I did see a couple of amusing tweets from Edward Snowden, actually, about Horizon Worlds. So let's see if I can find them. He actually lives on Twitter. He tweets way too much. For someone like Edward Snowden, you'd be surprised by how much he's actually on Twitter. So, let's see. Where is it?

Facebook's vision of VR is a derivative, lifeless world full of derivative, lifeless experience. On brand, really. Yep, very true. Congratulations on inventing linkedin the game good luck with your stock price you know i hadn't actually uh looked at it that way but yeah yeah you know what it really is just linked in the game isn't it uh there's another one in here about

kermit ah it's not vr if i can't get into a fistfight with Kermit the Frog. And you know what? I agree. I agree. If you can't do that, why would I care about it? And then there's the whole issue that metaverses as a concept aren't new. This whole idea of suddenly shilling metaverses, metaverses, I view as basically just a cash grab to convince dumb people to buy NFTs. So if we break down what a metaverse actually is, it's a 3D virtual world existing in a, I was going to say 3D virtual world existing in a digital space, but that means the same thing. It is a 3D world existing in a digital space, revolving around social connections, building up friendships and relationships and people who hate you and all of that fun stuff. That's what it

is. Now, this concept exists in plenty of other games, whether that game is Second Life from the early 2000s, whether that game is Final Fantasy 14, whether that game is Second Life from the early 2000s, whether that game is Final Fantasy XIV, whether that game is even Roblox, all of these games fit the concept of being a metaverse while also being something, maybe not Second Life. Second Life's a weird one. Actually being a good game.

Second Life is more like, look, there's people who play Second Life. There's a weird section of YouTube that is just Second Life YouTubers. I don't understand it. I've somehow stumbled into it every so often and get really confused how I got there, but clearly some people like the game.

All of these things are metaverses so we've had metaverse like the whole concept of an mmo is a metaverse all we've done now is added in vr and added in a cash shop and hey look it's a new thing i actually got into uh i really should stop tweeting about NFTs because every time I do, there's got to be at least one crypto bro, one NFT bro that replies to me and goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on about why NFTs are great. So I was actually getting into a discussion. This wasn't on Twitter, I guess.

It was on Mastodon, but my Twitter and Mastodon are, you know, connected together. I was getting into a discussion with the writer of Boiling Steam, and he spent probably a good hour, I would have to say,

going back and forth with me, explaining why a... So basically, my original thing was, explain to me how a cash shop in a game, an auction house, real money auction house, whatever you want to call it, is different from adding an NFT shop into the game.

Because from the user's perspective, these act as pretty much the same thing and offer the same level of value to their users. And he went into a big discussion about why NFTs are great. And I, like, even after that discussion, I cannot see the merit to adding NFTs into a game. So my issue with NFTs in a game, right? I don't have it like cash shops are one thing.

I don't like cash shops to begin with, but let's say we have a cash shop. Why do you need a blockchain to have a functional cash shop? So take games like CSGO, like Diablo 3, like TF2, any game that has a real money auction house component. Even if that is like external to the game itself, it still has a real money auction house component connected to the game in an official way.

Why do you need a blockchain to do that functionality? I don't see why. Sure, you could make the argument that all of the transactions are on the blockchain and they can't be modified, but why does that matter in this case? Sure, you have the transaction history, but what value does the transaction history actually have? The only people who care about the transaction history are the company. And in many ways, having that transaction history always stored might be a bad thing, because maybe you bought something you don't want associated with your name, now it's always going to be there. So there are downsides to having something always stored on the blockchain.

It's not just, oh it's immutable, that must mean it's instantly a good thing. Immutability is actually a, it's one of the draws and one of the massive drawbacks of a blockchain. Also there are issues with, hey you, like the whole idea of needing a blockchain to sell items so the item will not function outside of the game right so if the item will not function outside of the game why do you need a system that functions outside of the game to sell the item sure you could sell around some like like, I don't know, let's use Final Fantasy XIV. Let's say we have a white beret.

So we sell around this white beret, and we have a blockchain that exists externally to the game. You can sell this white beret without ever having a Final Fantasy XIV account. But why would you do that? Besides trying to, you know, shill it and flip it to make money, what value does that offer to the people actually playing the game? My argument there is it offers nothing. And then there's the argument of, okay, so if you buy the NFT, then that can never be

taken away from you. Okay. So that is a fair argument. Yeah. If you buy this, then if your account gets banned, then you could just link the wallet to a new account. And then you still have all your same items. Fair enough. Except it doesn't work like that because while the NFT on the blockchain, while the blockchain, all that fun stuff, is going to be immutable, we're ignoring this whole front end. So all a blockchain is, is a database. A blockchain is a database. There's no... There is no use of the blockchain without having some sort of front end

to interact with the blockchain. No one, I guess, besides, unless you're specifically using the blockchain as a database, there's no reason to have the blockchain there without having some sort of functioning front end. Now, the problem with functioning front ends is even if you own an NFT, let's say we have an NFT with a certain ID

and then your account gets banned. What the owner of that blockchain could do, what the owner of that game could do, is then blacklist every single NFT you had associated with your account, and if you make a new account, now you can no longer use those items in the game. Sure, you own them, but now they're worthless. This is the problem.

No one wants to discuss the issue of front ends when we're talking about this whole issue. But the other problem is, let's say you don't trust the company not to take away your items or not to do anything shady with modifying a traditional database. Why do you trust them with a blockchain?

Because sure, the blockchain is there right now, but what if they just decide, hey, all of this stuff you bought on the blockchain, this no longer matters because we're going to remove the blockchain. Sure, you own it, but once again, it's lost all value because the entire use case has been taken away. the entire use case has been taken away. There are so many places where the use cases for a blockchain, especially in games, there may be possibly use cases in the future for other domains, but in the case of games where it does not make any sense to me,

and every explanation I have heard ignores all of these concerns or tries to, I guess, brush them under the rug, sweep them under the rug, that one, sweep them under the rug as if they're issues that don't really matter and shouldn't be actually discussed. if we're talking about now nfts in a separate context let's say we're talking in the ticketing context or someone's brought up the argument of housing let's say you know the the deed to the house is handled through an nft let's say we're in this magical world where governments are you know accepting of nfts which is not the direction we're going down right now, a lot of countries are sort of cracking down hard on this. At least the countries that aren't run by boomers that know what Wi-Fi is. Bare minimum. At least know what Wi-Fi is.

There's so many countries where I don't think that some of the politicians own phones. Like, that's how out of touch I'm pretty sure some of these guys are. So, let's talk about, say, ticketing and housing, for example. So, the current ticketing industry is very, very interlocked with the, I guess, what's the word for it? The location, the event, the ticketing industry is very tied with the locations that you actually want to book. So a lot of those big arenas have direct partnerships with these big ticketing companies. So let's say we offer NFT tickets. Why would a company that

has complete control of those tickets decide they're going to do that? Why would they take away the power they have to control who can buy and sell these tickets and put it on a blockchain? Because I don't see a reason in their position why they would want to do that. Sure, having tickets on a blockchain might be a perfectly valid use case and it would make it very, very easy to make it so you can't resell them.

But why would any company give you the freedom? Why would anyone... Why? Why? Let's say they don't limit reselling. would any company give you the freedom? Why would anyone, why? Why? Let's say they don't like, let's say they, they don't limit reselling. Why would a company give you the ability to resell the tickets? But if it's to stop reselling, there's already ways to stop reselling.

Like, I don't know how people don't understand this, but you can have tickets that are associated with your ID. And if your ID doesn't line up with the ticket, then it's not a real ticket. And then you can have a code on the ticket when they scan it. If the information on the ticket, on the QR code,

doesn't align with the information in their system, then that is not a valid ticket or that's been a ticket that's been resold. There are basic ways to stop ticket reselling without needing a blockchain. And there's no reason why companies would want to encourage it when they already don't like the idea of ticket reselling. Now, when it comes to the housing market, while the ticket market, you know, you could do this as like a thing with random venues. Let's say there's indie venues that want to offer NFT tickets. Sure, that could possibly happen.

Housing is a whole different situation because housing is very regulated by the government. Now, why would any of the, why would the banks, why would the government, why would anyone involved in this chain remove the control they have over your ability to purchase a house and then put it on a blockchain? Why would that be a thing that anybody would do?

Sure, it could offer better reporting. That's totally fair. But so would more digitized solutions that just, you know are electronic like digital solutions and electronic so could more digital solutions without relying on so many paper records like we still do i can't speak for every country but australia still very very uh very very heavily uses paper records that they just scan in to have in a digital form. But that's not great because those are hard to parse.

And you need specialized algorithms to, you know, parse the text on those documents, like the written text, not the font on the documents. So while that's the case, and yeah, that would make it better. Why would they do it? Like, this is the whole problem. You can come up with use cases for NFTs, but why would anybody actually let that go through? Why would anybody in the position of power that currently controls that industry let that thing happen? I don't have an answer for that, and nobody can give me an answer for that because I don't think there is.

I think it's one of those things where it's like, oh, just wait for the future to see into the future. And 10 years from now, everything will be NFTs. But we're forgetting how we actually get there and the roadblocks that would be on the way that I don't think are ever going to be lifted. These are roadblocks that are so deeply entrenched in the ground that I don't think it's even worth discussing some of these use cases if you're never going to be able to get to a point where anybody would actually be able to use them. Yeah, that was not a topic on my list. That was not a topic on my list that was not a topic on my list whatsoever um

speaking of topics you know we'll go into another topic so a couple years back i believe it originally started back in 2017 uh the uk was trying to introduce porn licenses. What's this, 2017? 2018, this link is from. But I believe it was, there were discussions about it back then. So UK newsstands will sell porn passes to verify ages under new laws. Now, this I don't believe ever actually went through because it's fucking ridiculous. believe ever actually went through because it's fucking ridiculous um but there are more uh there are more uk being crazy trying to trying to not understand how porn works how how the not just

porn how how the internet works in general trying to limit this now you can make the argument that there there should be controls in place to limit what minors are able to access. And I can totally understand that, and that's a perfectly noble goal to have. Now, the problem, though, is that this is the internet. So, porn sites will be legally required to verify users' age. So, porn sites in the UK will be legally required to verify the age of their users under new internet safety laws.

The legislation, which is a part of the draft online safety bill, aims to give children better protection from explicit material. Sure. The measures to ensure users that are 18 or over could see people asked to prove their to prove they

own a credit card or confirm their age via a third-party service now the owner credit card one is kind of ridiculous because i didn't actually have a credit card till i was 21 probably no probably like 22 actually so there's a lot of people out there who don't have credit cards because uh a lot of people don't understand the value of having credit. You have people in, you know, the Luke Smith. No, you know, Luke actually does care about credit cards because he performs credit scammy stuff. There are a lot of people who are in like the G crowd

that don't understand the value of credit, just see credit as a bad thing but credit is incredibly useful if you actually want to be able to purchase things like a house or purchase an expensive car, not even expensive just get a car loan so sites that

fail to act could be fined up to 10% of their global turnover the online safety bill is expected to be introduced to Parliament over the next few months and is designed to protect users from harmful content. Okay, so yeah, the previous measures were dropped in 2019, the porn licences.

So children's safety groups have been long calling for age verification on porn sites over fees. It's too easy for minors to access publicly available material online. Studies show that half of 11-13 year olds have seen pornography at some point. Judging by my experience, yeah, that sounds not possible, likely as well. Experts who work with children say it gives them unhealthy views of sex and consent, putting them at risk from predators and possibly stopping them reporting abuse. You know, totally fair.

I'm not saying their reasons for doing this are bad. I think it is a noble goal you have. The issue, though, is VPNs exist. That's literally the end of the discussion. So you have this in place. And then what you do is you download a VPN. You download one of the free VPNs even. You route to any other country, like the US.

Usually the US is one of the free servers available. And then it doesn't show you the thing. Because I'm telling you right now that every single porn site isn't going to be putting in the level of controls that companies like Netflix or Hulu or places like that are doing where they are trying to detect VPNs and limit their usage. Companies like this are going to put in the bare minimum control. They're going to say, okay, is your IP from this location? Cool. You're in the UK. We're going to show you the prompt. Your IP is not in that location. Well, hey, we can detect that you have a VPN. We're

just not going to do that though, because that's not in the criteria. It's not something we have to worry about. But the other concern is the other concern, the other issue every time something like this is brought up is what do you do with sites that are not expressly designated, expressly dedicated as

porn sites? Take Twitter, for example. Twitter is full of lots of porn. Lots and lots of lots and lots and lots of porn. So would Twitter have to verify people's ages then? Would, you know, would you have to be verifying your age to change your age controls on Google search? There's all of these places where it's completely ignoring the fact that it's not just dedicated porn sites that porn exists on. It's on all of these other sites and it's not going to be addressed. It's not. It won't be. And this is probably not going to pass as well because it's, you know, like the earlier passes they had, it's seen as too privacy invasive.

The government's gonna know every single person that goes to a porn site, every time you go to a porn site because you have to verify every time your cash is cleared. This is not a thing that's going to be accepted by any uh, privacy advocates let's see if any privacy advocates are here so privacy concerns it will be up to companies to decide how best to comply it will be up to companies to decide how best to comply with new rules well well um they're gonna put in the bare minimum effort then now if the government says firms should not process or store data that is irrelevant to the purpose of checking someone's age, well, the fact that you've checked someone's age indicates the fact that you have to know who that person is.

So you're gonna know they accessed a porn site. Like, you can't do this unless you just don't keep any logs, in which case there's no point doing the checking anyway because you have no logs of it. Despite the widespread use of age verification technology in sectors such as online gambling, there are still fears it poses privacy risks. Well, it poses privacy risks there, but the difference in online gambling is you're then connecting your bank account and sending money to these services. So even if they don't know your name from the verification, they'll have your information from the bank statements or however you get the money into the service, whether it's your crypto wallet or anything like that. It's still, you're putting money into the service. You never have to put money into

an adult service, into a porn service, anything like that if you don't want to. Campaigners have warned that a database of pornography users would be a huge hacking target for blackmailers. Yes. Jim Killock of the Open Rights Group, which campaigns

to preserve digital rights and freedoms, said the rules would benefit age verification companies while offering little practical benefit for child safety and much harm to people's privacy. You're not mentioning VPNs directly here, but you are basically saying VPNs here. There is no indication that this proposal will protect people from tracking and profiling porn viewing he told bbc we have to assume the same base uh basic mistakes about privacy and security

may be made again but lane corby executive directory a director of the age verification providers association said firms he represented had developed a wide range of method to brute to prove someone's age without disclosing their identity to the websites they visit. To the websites they visit. But disclosing their identity to you.

No one's worried about the porn sites knowing who you are. It's the people that are collecting the data that they are worried about the porn sites knowing who you are. It's the people that are collecting the data that they are worried about. It doesn't matter who has the data. The data is being stored somewhere. By using independent third-party organizations, which are audited and certified to comply with the highest standards of data

protection and security, adults can be confident their own privacy was preserved while their children are protected. I love how this guy has to be in a position where he's shilling his verification service while also ignoring the fact that VPNs exist. Like you're in a position where you are operating on the internet and you have to pretend like VPNs do not exist because if you acknowledge that VPNs exist you acknowledge the service you're offering is effectively useless in any countries where you know your services are not being offered

before I forget to talk about I want to talk about the whole EU thing with Meta because Meta, because Meta, they basically threatened to pull out of Europe. Now, they say they didn't do that. They say that, oh, this is something they were just revealing to their shareholders. But I'll read their response to this in just a moment. So this is all about how Meta wants to be able to easily transfer data from their European Union customers over to their servers in the US. And the reason why they want to do this is because the European Union does not have jurisdiction over data that doesn't belong on their soil. So what they say is this down here. Where is the message? If a new transatlantic data transfer framework is not adopted

and we are unable to continue to rely on SCCs or rely upon other alternative means of data transfer from Europe to the United States, we will likely be unable to offer a number of our significant products and services including Facebook and Instagram in Europe, Now, this wording is genuinely hilarious, because you're complaining that your business practices do not allow you to operate effectively in the European Union. Because the European Union actually has sensible data protection laws that make it difficult for companies like you to actually operate.

Now, after this statement, and after it made the rounds in all of the news outlets that care at all about talking about Meta, which is all of them, they put out this statement right here. So, Meta is absolutely not threatening

to leave Europe. So, Meta is not wanting or threatening to leave Europe, and any reporting that implies we do is simply not true. Much like 70 other EU and US companies we are identifying a business risk resulting from uncertainty around international data transfers. You know they're not wrong they are identifying an uncertainty around data transfers. An uncertainty that made you say that you possibly may not be able to offer your service in that region because of those uncertainties. But sure, it's not a threat.

This is not new. transfers in each of our earnings since at least Q2 2018 and highlighted the specific risk to our services in Europe and the need for a safe, secure EU data transfer mechanism in our last four earnings. Just because you've talked about it for a while, you know, a while because the EU is slowly getting better about privacy, does not mean that you're not once again trying to throw your weight around to make politicians bend your will. You know, like you've done in Australia where... Sorry, no, it was reverse in Australia. What country was it they threw their weight around? I can't remember.

But it's not uncommon for Facebook to want to throw their weight around to basically get companies to do what they want. International data transfers underpin the global economy and support many of the services that are fundamental to our daily lives. Businesses across industries need clear global rules to protect transatlantic data flows over time. There have been reporting to the press

that we are threatening to leave Europe because of the uncertainty over EU-US data transfer mechanisms. This is not true. Like all publicly traded companies, we are legally required to disclose material risks to our investors last week as we have done in our previous four financial quarters. We disclose that continuing uncertainty over EU-US data transfers and mechanisms poses a threat to our ability

to serve European customers and operate our business in Europe. Operating your business in a way that requires you to transfer EU customer data to another region. But you're not throwing your weight around. Definitely not. We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe. Of course we don't. Of course we weight around. Definitely not. We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe. Of course we don't. Of course we don't.

Definitely not. But the simple reality is that Meta, like any other business, organization and services, relies on data transfers between the EU and US in order to operate our global services. Now, nobody else is struggling transferring data. Like, there's no issue transferring data between these regions. You can do that just fine.

The issue is the kind of data you want to be transferring. We're not alone. At least 70 other companies across a wide range of industries, including 10 European businesses, have also raised the risks around data transfers in the earnings filings. Let's see.

We have absolutely no desire to withdraw from Europe. I know, I read that one. International data transfers underpin the global economy and support many of the services that are fundamental to our daily lives. For many years, the legal framework supporting the transfer of data across the Atlantic has faced severe disruption. The safe harbor agreement was struck down by the European Court of Justice in 2015. Last summer Privacy Shield, which was used by more than 5,000 customers on both sides of the Atlantic, was also invalidated by the European Court of Justice. I do not know about these two specific cases, so I cannot comment on them.

These decisions have been made based on a conflict between EU and US laws over the protection of data. We want to see the fundamental rights of EU users protected, and we want the internet to continue to operate as it was intended, without friction,

in compliance with applicable laws, but not confined by national borders in compliance with applicable laws but not confined by national borders in that i might just be misunderstanding that um but i do like to see how they describe it as the fundamental rights of EU users protected. But they're fine violating the rights of users in other regions. Because, hey, there's a conflict between EU and US laws over the protection of data. So, like, in the US, unless you're in California, you're fucked, I guess. Businesses need clear global rules to protect transatlantic data flows over the long term.

I do agree with this. I think that every country should operate in a more... Not operate in a more European Union-like fashion. Operate with more European Union-like data protection laws. Because right now, they are far ahead of the pack. Basically only California is even remotely similar, but definitely nowhere near the level of the European Union. Like other companies across a wide range of industries,

we are closely monitoring the potential impact to the millions of people and businesses who use our service as these developments progress. Like other international and European businesses, brands, and trade organizations, we hope to see continued progress in negotiations for a privacy shield replacement to protect transatlantic data transfers,

ensure robust privacy protections, and keep global communities, economies, and businesses and families connected. And you know what? That all sounds lovely. That sounds so lovely. We're not going to specifically bring up any of the EU laws

that get in the way of uh us collecting data but you know what it sounds lovely as it does doesn't it meta just wants to protect they just want to protect eu users data they don't want to strong arm the eu into you know changing their laws to make it so you don't need to have as much protection there, or maybe there's some exemption for the way that Facebook operates. No, Facebook and Meta would never, ever, ever do such a thing. They are a totally aboveboard company that everybody clearly respects. Yeah, that's not fucking true at all, is it? So that's enough meta for now.

I want to talk about some gaming topics. We actually have quite a bit of gaming stuff on here. And the first one I want to talk about is this really, really weird keyboard replacement. Now, it's not a keyboard replacement entirely. It's not going to replace your entire keyboard, but in a gaming context for certain types of games, it might do so. So this is the Alt Motion Controller. And do we have a picture of it here or do we just have the videos? We do not have a picture here, but there should be a link to the website. Yes.

Here it is. The Alt Motion Controller. The Avatar Motion Controller. This isn't a replacement for your mouse. So unlike a lot of controllers out there, a lot of different interaction methods, this is not going to replace your mouse. It's a lot of controllers out there, a lot of

different interaction methods, this is not gonna replace your mouse. It's thumbsticks. You're never gonna want to replace a mouse with thumbsticks. That's just dumb. But... Also, only having three things, it might seem very limited, but let's see some of the demos here. Obviously, I cannot play... I probably could play the audio. I'm not gonna play the audio though. I'll let you see the demo on screen. Can we get to actual gameplay? Not just... yeah here we go. So I'll show you how the interactions actually work in a moment, but movement obviously works fine. You know you have a joystick there, but with only three joysticks, you might be really confused about how you do anything that's not that.

Clearly, he's picking stuff up and doing everything, you know, you'd normally expect to do in a game. Different, uh, different button to press to do that. Um, all that fun stuff. There's another one here for Doom as well. Um, and it works basically the same way. Once again, obviously movement isn't a concern really at all because it's a thumbstick. But it's not emulating a thumbstick.

While it's using thumbsticks, it's not a thumbstick per se. It's actually emulating key presses. So I think the best way to understand this thing, so clearly like you can use it perfectly fine, but the best way to understand this thing is to actually see a see a diamond or see a diagram of it. So, I love this picture here. So their idea of the problem with a regular keyboard is to press keys, let's say you're using keys in the Q to R and Z to V range in that sort of bank of keys, and I guess A to F as well, to like move, to press these buttons, you do have to like readjust your hand quite a bit. Not, maybe not as much as this, like what are you pressing

here? Control and, ah, yeah, no, I would never use a control N binding. That, that, no, don't do that. And if you are, I'm gonna do, uh, I'm gonna use both hands for that one. I'm definitely not doing that. So basically you are constantly repositioning your hand, and they say this is a totally stone age, archaic way to play modern games.

But with this, basically what is this? Eight directions? Yes. So rather than being a regular thumbstick, it's actually a eight directional control. So you can use any of these, uh, it doesn't necessarily have to be mapped this way, but you can have it mapped to WASD on the four cardinal directions, and then maybe Q, E, Z, and C on the diagonals, but it's not just that single one. So this is just an example of eight key commands mapped to one of the three joysticks. You can map over a hundred key commands and macros to the three joysticks and the steering wheel.

Now, I haven't seen a good explanation of this steering wheel, so let's have a look right here. So this is your primary joystick. Okay. Then you have your left auxiliary and your right. I would imagine that you'd want to have, you wouldn't want to have all your movement on the main joystick because then you wouldn't be able to do things like move on diagonals. You'd want to probably have, then you wouldn't be able to do things like move on diagonals. You'd want to probably have... I would probably have W being on forward and then S on backwards because you never need to do both at the same time. And then left push on this one, right on the right push on this one.

Then I'll fill in the rest with whatever seems sensible. So the primary joystick can instantly execute dozens of keyboard commands and macros. The eight button program select a matrix. So, oh okay, so the wheel here is basically for selecting the set of key combinations you're in. Are you... I can't imagine you're modifying that like during intensive gameplay. Maybe you would have it like set up for various different games, but I don't think I see this guy actually moving the steering wheel because that would be really... this guy actually moving the steering wheel because that would be really

that would be a really weird way to interact I would have to assume because you'd have your finger on top of it and then you'd have to like somehow claw grip under it to move the thing and that wouldn't really be

oh wait are you moving the steering wheel here? you've got your... I guess you could move your finger that's sitting on the right joystick. So normally that would probably be your thumb. And then shift it like that, I guess. Did you actually shift it here or not? I don't think you are.

I think... Yeah, I don't think... No, you're not shifting it to a different profile. So it's not to expect that you're going to do that. But I guess in some situations, maybe that does make sense. So normally, you would have... 24 things bound, I would say, I guess.

But... Obviously, this isn't viable for every single game. But I think for some games maybe this could work. Okay, so let's see the pros and cons of this. So the pros of a keyboard and mouse works, or gaming keyboard works with a mouse. Very difficult to master. I wouldn't say a keyboard is very difficult to master.

I would say it's definitely not a steep learning curve either. A lot of games are using a very small set of keys. I wouldn't say it's... Yeah, I definitely wouldn't say it's a steep learning curve. Typing wastes hundreds of milliseconds every minute of play. I love these cons. They're actually amazing.

Steering land-slash-sea vehicles and air vehicles by typing is unrealistic. That's fair. Yep, I'll give you that one. I've never really been a fan of doing any sort of driving on keyboard. Typing is a distraction from focusing on playing. Typing is the way you play. What are you talking about?

Even skilled players can hit the wrong key in the heat of battle. Even skilled users of your weird controller here, I guarantee you're going to make wrong inputs from time to time especially when they're new to it so that's not even worth considering Are typing to control your avatars unintuitive and unrealistic? I can agree with that yeah, that's a fair statement

You need to be a hand-in-tortionist to reach all the keys to play In some ways, I agree that's true but that's true. But that's where something like an MMO mouse comes in and you let your thumb on your mouse hand control things that are not easy to hit. Keyboards are designed to type letters, not play video games.

Yep, you know it's fair. That's true. Console slash PC controller. controller designed to play games uh sure okay i'll i'll give you that one cons does not work with the uh with a with a mouse i don't know what games you're playing man usually you can like switch back and forth pretty easily uh aim assist seriously what the fuck um depends on the game and usually games let you turn that off and you actually want aim assist on a controller because controllers are considerably less accurate uh impossible to precisely slash quickly aim with

mate have you seen some of the high level fucking FPS players on console? Go back and watch some of like the absolute heydays of Call of Duty. Like the optic and phase days, and tell me that it's hard- or tell me it's impossible to aim accurately with a controller. It's definitely more difficult. It's a much bigger learning curve, but it's definitely not impossible either. Uh, precision aiming is a critical part- is a critical gaming skill you won't learn here. I disagree. Anyway, so what are the pro- there are no cons, there are literally no cons of the avatar controller, which is always a great way to show that you're being totally transparent.

So, no typing required. Fair, because you don't have keys. There's also no typing required when I drive my car, but that's also not something that we talk about because it doesn't matter. No steep learning curve, start playing immediately. I would argue that due to this being a whole new interaction method where you're using thumbsticks to interact with keyboard controls, I would imagine this would be a,

maybe not a super steep learning curve, but there is a steep learning curve here, and it is going to take quite a bit of time to actually learn. Designed to play FPS, action, and any games. Mate, you don't want to be saying any games there.

Without an MMO mouse, you're not playing an MMO with this. It's not going to happen. You literally do not have enough keys to play an MMO mouse, you're not playing an MMO with this. It's not going to happen. You literally do not have enough keys to play an MMO. Like, unless you bind control to one of the thumbsticks, I guess. Like, you're not hitting all your hotbar without a MMO mouse. It's just not going to happen. So, maybe not for MMOs, but I think you could possibly set it up in a way where you could play an MMO.

I don't think it would be as effective because you'd have to have control and shift bound to one of the sticks. And if you did that, then you wouldn't be able to move left or right. And there's many times when you want to be kiting enemies, and that just wouldn't work. Faster than typing on a keyboard. I'd have to try that myself to tell you that, but I imagine it could be. Especially without having to worry about the hand re-jiggering,

all of that fun stuff. I think if you got used to it, this could certainly be easier, not easy, quicker, quicker than typing on a keyboard, um, easier and more fun than typing on a keyboard, that's the same statement that you said already, uh, it's probably more fun. It's different. It's a new interaction method. I could certainly see that being interesting. Includes a built-in analog

steering wheel. That's not a pro. That is a feature. No constant repositioning of your hands and fingers. Yeah, that seems like that's the case. I guess early on, you probably still would be, though, just because you're not really comfortable using it out of the box. I guess early on you probably still would be though. Just because you're not really comfortable using it out of the box. I hope that Linus Tech Tips ends up doing a video on this.

If it ever does exist. Let's see. Joysticks have trigger sensitivity controls. I'm not sure what that means. Works with your favorite mouse. Yes, because it's not a mouse. Incredibly immersive and realistic gameplay. Yeah, it's definitely realistic when I start walking forward by pushing a stick forward.

Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. You know what you're talking about. Features vector dimensioning controller. That doesn't mean anything. Those are just words. Easy to use whether you are 5 or 105. Actually, you know what, that might actually be a fair argument because as a five-year-old

you would probably struggle to hit many of the keys on your keyboard. I think you would still probably be able to use this even if you're fairly young. Assume you don't have, like, baby hands. Intuitive joystick avatar motion control. That's just a feature. That's not a pro. Individually adaptable, flexible, and versatile.

Sure. Steer with the wheel. Oh! Wait. flexible and versatile? Sure. Steer with the wheel or... Oh! Wait. You did not mention that's what the steering wheel could do. Hold up, hold up.

The steering wheel can be used... Wait, is the... Oh, are those two separate things? So the steering wheel... Okay. So the steering wheel... Okay. So the steering wheel is separate from the mode selector. That's a horrible diagram. That is a really bad diagram.

User replaceable analog sticks. Okay, that's good. Inclusive ambidextrous design. Okay open-source hardware and software Oh Are you saying that you're possibly going to have Linux support for this Let's see. FAQ. Do you mention

it right now? Is the old Avatar Motion Controller compatible with macOS or Linux? Only Windows drivers will be available at launch. The old driver software is fully open source, and we hope to have a very active developer community that will write drivers for Mac and Linux. So no.

But, hey, maybe they will have it at some point. How much is it? I don't know how much this thing costs. There's an FAQ there about the price. Why is the controller so expensive? We chose to make it in the United States. That's cool. Giving our people jobs instead of giving them to China or Vietnam.

I can respect that. Unlike so many products today, our controller was not built with planned obsolescence. You should be able to use this controller for many years. The joysticks can be replaced. You don't have to buy a new controller when they eventually wear out. You just replace the joysticks can be replaced. You don't have to buy a new controller when they eventually wear out. You just replace

the joysticks and it will work like new. Now, how much is the thingy? This is such a bad website. Your cart is empty. Okay. How do I put something in the cart? How do I pre-order this? How...

Okay, this is not going well. I'm going to look it up. How do I pre-order this? How? Okay, this is not going well. I'm going to look it up. Alt motion controller. Pre-order. There we go. Thank you. That's not that expensive.

That's actually... That's not that expensive. Anyone who's saying this is expensive full price sure I can accept that would be expensive but anyone who's saying this price rate is expensive

that's in the range of a high end keyboard and this is clearly like a very you know specialized designer device like that's not a ridiculous price 250 at 250 i would have to i don't know i would i think i would have to know what it's like first before i would consider actually using it. But it's still not

completely I guess what's the word? Completely out of everyone's price range. I don't know. I don't know. Look, if it ends up being good, maybe I'll get one. I'm perfectly fine trying out new things. And it sounds like content,

especially if it does get a set of Linux drivers. If it gets Linux drivers, I'm without a doubt using it. I'll at least try it. Especially if when places like Linus Tech Tips end up trying it, if it's good, then sure, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But we'll see. We'll see. I don't know what it's going to be like. So, speaking of games, I mentioned Final Fantasy before. So, I've been leveling before. So I've been.

Leveling up a lot of alt jobs. I've by no means done. All of the jobs available to me. In A Realm Reborn. There's plenty of things I still could be doing. FFXIV. Let's see if I can. Can I bring up my account?

Here we go. Maybe I should have just brought it up before that would have been a better solution then we need to do search or i could have just cut for a moment anyway uh here a character profile so by no means leveled up all of the jobs available to me in wrong reborn like i still can do uh marauder, Dark Knight, Pugilist, Lancer, Rogue, Conjurer. Scholar is only 52 because I've been leveling my Summoner. And yeah, Blue Mage is a weird exception. That one will happen whenever it happens. I might go back and level up my Marauder though. I don't know because I want Warrior. Warrior

is just fun. I've played Warrior on my ult while I was trying to get to level 30 and I enjoyed it. But now that I've gotten a couple of things leveled I wasn't really sure about what I was going to go into the next set of patches with.

So I finished the baseline Romerborn stuff and now I'm doing the patch content. So we're doing the 6.1- uh 6.1- the 2.1 stuff. 6.1 is Endwalker. We're doing the 2.1 stuff and I've sort of decided that I'm going to play Summoner. Like, I didn't think a DPS would be what would end up hooking me. But honestly, the Summoner rework is really fucking good. Like, I really hope when 6.1 drops, they do not...

Like, unless you're going to do, like, you know gonna do like you know balances with With potencies all that fun stuff I really hope they don't touch the summoner much because it's really really really fun if you haven't played summoner yet, I I really recommend it because with endwalker they basically just Nuke to the entire job and added the new job into the game. It's not even remotely the same thing anymore. And I think what makes it feel really fun

is it's got a lot of... Maybe not a lot of mechanics. Maybe mechanics isn't the best way to put it. No, I think that works. It's got a lot of off-GCD abilities. It's got a sort of flow to its mechanics, which isn't that hard to understand. So when you hit...

I don't know what level it is. But when you start unlocking your carbuncles, so you get your first one, then you got your yellow carbuncle and your red carbuncle. Then, you basically have this really fun rotation where you're basically always summoning stuff. So, those ultimately get replaced with Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda, but the mechanics are the same. So, you'll use your ability to activate your, I can't remember what it's called, your summon gauge, I'm going to call it, because that's basically what it is.

So that'll have a 15 second cooldown, and once that cooldown is over, then you can start summoning the various things. And you don't just get to summon one of them, you actually summon all of them. So by the time you've cycled through Ifrit, Titan, and Garuda, or whatever order they're in, I always start from the Garuda side and then work my way down. It doesn't matter which order you

work your way in because you're going to be using them all anyway, unless you're trying to match burst windows of other people in your party. But if you're not matching burst windows, it doesn't really matter which order you do it in. At the end of the day, you're going to be doing all of the damage anyway. So basically you cycle your way through all of these summons. And when you summon each of the Eggies, they're called, you will get a really powerful attack from the summon. And you'll also be given this gauge where you can use a modified version of your base spell. So, there's Ruby Rain, Topaz Rain, and Emerald Rain. That one, yes.

And these do modified versions. Did I say Rain? I meant Ruin. Ruin is what I meant to say. Ruby Ruin, Emerald Ruin, and Topaz Ruin. Yes. So the Garuda ones, those are really quick because Garuda, you know, is really quick. Then Titan is a bit slower, but still instant cast.

Then when you get to Ifrit, Ifrit is really powerful, but there is a cast timer on these. So using those ones might be a little more difficult. So maybe you want to go and combine your Ifrit abilities with your Swift Cast, for example, and then get the damage out a little bit quicker. And then once that cycle is done, there's about 10 seconds if you do your rotation properly, where, at least at my level, you're just going through your regular... using your Ruin ability, maybe you're using your Aetherflow abilities, and you're just getting

out some extra damage before the rotation starts again. And then you just keep doing that rotation basically until everything is dead. And everything dies really quickly. Like, Summoner, you don't have to be good at Summoner, and Summoner does a fucking lot of damage. I don't know where it sits on the FF logs right now, but I'm not good at Summoner, and it always feels like I'm just tearing enemies apart compared to most of my party. This might just be the fact that

there's a lot of really bad players on Oceania, but like, even when I've run into decent enough players, like, Summoner seems to just tear shit apart. So, Summoner seems to just tear shit apart. So Summoner is going to be what I go into the next section of the game with and then from there I don't know. I do want to actually properly try out healers. So

Scala would be a concern right now unless I like drop back to a lower Like do dungeons at a lower level because being level 52 Because they're both based on Arcanist, they share the same level pool, so, yeah, um, I don't know how to play Scholar, and it's level 50, so basically, I'm like someone who's bought a boost, and that wouldn't be fun, so maybe I'll learn as a, uh, as a Conjurer, so as a White Mage. But if I drop back to doing Sastasha and things like that, I guess I could learn Scholar like that. That's certainly one way to do it, but I'm not too sure.

And I'm certainly going to go back and... I mentioned before, I'm going to go back and try Warrior and Dark Knight, all that fun stuff. I've not really done melee DPS. I do have a level 50 Samurai, but Samurai starts at level 50. And Samurai is boring as fuck at level 50. I don't know how anybody became a Samurai main when Samurai first dropped, because it's not fun.

It's really not. If you enjoy Samurai, like, that's cool to me. You can enjoy your Samurai. I'm just going to play anything else. to me. You can enjoy your samurai, I'm just going to play anything else. I also do enjoy Black Mage, but I think why I prefer Summoner more than Black Mage is when I play a caster, I like to be a relatively mobile caster. While Black Mages are more mobile than they used to be, there's still a lot of things where, you know, Black Mages don't move.

They have a lot of things with cast times. They have ley lines. Sure, you have your Swift cast and there's some other things you get like your Instant Cast Fire 3, but at the end of the day, Black Mage is more about getting out of the way of damage doing a shit load of damage or cutting AoE times as fucking close as possible and then swift cast and then a slide cast on your way out

so you stand in the AoE you don't move you get your cast out like just before it's about to end you move you get out of the AoE, and you don't die. That's how you play a Black Mage. Summoner though, it's a lot more running around, doing fun stuff like that. It's sort of, there is certainly cast time stuff on it,

but I would say it's sort of, it's sort of between a Bard or any of the other physical range DPS and a Black Mage. It's somewhere in the middle. Like, you have a lot of instant cast stuff, but then you also have some things which are cast time based. And I think it adds a nice dynamic to the way you actually play Summoner. Granted, I've only played it to level 50 or level 52, I guess. So I can't really say what it's like after that, but when I get up to Heaven's Ward, if I decide to keep playing Summoner then, you know,

we'll see what it's like then. I am obviously going to be leveling every job to max level at some point, even the crafting and gathering jobs, it's just a matter of, you know, when we get to the point where I have content at that level, because I can get to max level right now. Problem with that is because I haven't done any of the expansions, there'll be no max level content. On the note of Final Fantasy, though, I'm also considering doing some Final Fantasy streams.

Now, I don't know how I actually want to handle it. So I don't know if I want to put it in the place of my regular streams. I might put it in the Thursday slot or something like that and just, you know, play Final Fantasy during that time. That could be fun. But I might also do sort of like a more casual stream outside of my regular stream time

so normally when I'm streaming on Thursday, Friday, my time 10am ACDT, yeah that one it changes when I'm not in daylight saving so don't take me saying 10am ACDT is the time I do it's only 10am ACDT

during ACDT but outside of... Oh, sorry. In those stream times, I'm trying to actually create an entertaining stream. But it might be fun to do streams in my general off time, like on the Saturday and Sunday, and not make it as serious of a thing.

Just stream whatever it is I'm doing. And like, oh, I'm going to play some... I'm going to level my jobs. I'm going to do gold source. I'm going to do anything like this. Not really treat it as like that serious of a thing. Just like... Just have fun with it.

Maybe not even stream it on YouTube. Maybe just stream it on Twitch even. Because then I wouldn't have to make a thumbnail. I don't know. Maybe I'd make a thumbnail and just do whatever. Be like, oh yeah I'm gonna play Final Fantasy. If I did do that though, I like, it would like, I wouldn't be putting on, I probably wouldn't have my lights on to be honest, I didn't even know to have my webcam on. I might just like have the game playing there, have the mic on, obviously still

be talking, because why would you watch a stream of someone playing Final Fantasy if they're not going to provide any sort of entertainment whatsoever, but not treat it as, like, a this is a stream, this is, like, a actual thing we're doing. Just be like, yeah, you know what, I'm going to throw the stream on and just have some fun because i do enjoy streaming and recently i've actually been building up a bit of an audience on the gaming channel it's not uncommon for there to be anywhere from five to eight people actually watching while i am streaming which you know relative to my main channel is still small, but relative to the size of the channel

that's quite big because the channel is a fraction of the size of the channel, but I'm still actually getting what like a sixth of the views. Obviously main channel isn't a streaming based channel, so it totally makes sense and the time I stream isn't viable for a lot of people who may want to watch me, but this is

it's exciting to see that people are actually watching the gaming channel because clearly it indicates that I'm doing that people are actually watching the gaming channel because clearly it indicates that I'm doing something right there. I've said from the start, though, the gaming channel is basically just me having fun, me just playing games. I play games I want to play. Someone asked me to play Dying Light 2. I have no interest in playing Dying Light 2.

Maybe I'll play it. Is that an FPS? I don't really play that many FPS. Mainly because I'm not good at them. Dying... I wrote Frying Light 2. That is not the same thing. Dying Light 2. It looks like an FPS.

Yeah, it's an FPS. Maybe I'll play it. I don't know. Or like, some people ask me to play Doom. Like, yeah, sure, Doom's fun, but like, I can't do Doom on stream. I just can't. I cannot talk and play an FPS. Same with the reason

why I don't play RTS games on stream. Firstly, I'm just not a fan of RTS games, but I am... I've never really been good at them, so if I want to have an entertaining stream while also playing a game like that, unless your entertainment is going to be me just yelling about how I'm suffering, I don't see any way that I can actually make that exciting to watch. But RPGs and actually mainly RPGs, RPGs, action games, things like that.

That's something I have a lot more experience in and something I generally can, you know, turn my brain off to the game and still play it well enough. Yeah, basically. Actually, Summoner is really good in that regard. Summoner, like, it's got a pretty basic rotation. You don't really need to think about it. Just hit the things when they glow, and then you just win. It's not as much as some jobs, but it's also not as complex as others. Like, my understanding is Monk, definitely Samurai, and Ninja. Samurai is probably the least of that list,

but Monk and Ninja both require a lot more paying attention to what's happening. Maybe I'd be able to play them on stream, but maybe not, like, doing any remotely difficult content. Definitely like, you know, basic dungeon-y stuff, but anything more than that, possibly not. But, I'll let you guys know what's gonna happen with my streams as it happens. Or maybe you'll just see the stream live and be like, why is

Brody live on a Sunday? And then you'll see, oh, he's just playing some Final Fantasy, isn't he? And that's what I'll be doing. We'll see. We'll see, oh, he's just playing some Final Fantasy, isn't he? And that's what I'll be doing. We'll see. We'll see what happens. But speaking of games that I enjoy playing, Stardew Valley is a game that I would honestly love to play again.

And this mod seems really, really cool. So Stardew Valley Expanded, basically my understanding is it's... Treat it more as like an expansion pack than a mod. Because that's basically what it is. I'll put the trailer on. We'll mute the audio. But the write of this article basically says it's pretty hard to work out where Stardew

Valley ends and where the mod begins. So it adds in a bunch of extra, you know, liveliness to the world. Why are you the only farmer in this town? Why are there certain people that you just never really interact with?

Why are, like, actually the big thing is, why are you the only farmer? Like, if you're in a farming area, obviously, there's going to be other farmers that are around. So you can go and, like, visit their farms,

do all that fun stuff. There are more areas you can explore, more people you can meet. You can go, dimension, go to those other farms. There's, I think there's also, like, more, I think there's also more fish more items more to the underground region

more to whatever is this new? I don't even know every time I play Stardew Valley I play again from the start and I've sort of like forgotten most of what's going on in the game. I've never played any of the update content

from my understanding. Like, I've gotten to the desert and that's basically it. Um, so I really want to play Stardew Valley again. Maybe this is something I'll play on stream, to be honest. Because I genuinely adore this game. And maybe I'd play it with the mod and just, you know, see how that would go.

So, you know what? If you've not played Stardew Valley or you've played Stardew Valley and played everything you wanted to play in it, try out this mod, I guess. This is definitely new new isn't it? I don't believe you could ever go to the city. I don't know. I've never actually modded like I said I've never modded Stardew Valley because I've never gotten to the point where like I needed mods. It's never been a game for me like Minecraft where Minecraft... Because I played Minecraft for so long, I found that at some point it ended up getting fairly

boring because you know when you played from beta and the update cycle that came out like back then it wasn't really that ex- like most of the updates weren't that exciting. Like, oh, there's a new block. Hey, there's a new mob. That's cool. Sure, if you're like a really- if you're a really creative person, maybe it's different, but I was never really that creative in the artistic sense. So I sort of played through the content, built up my farms, and then when my farms were done, they were automated to the extent I wanted them to be automated. I was generally just done there.

Stardew Valley, though, is different. Stardew Valley... I enjoy the Stardew Valley gameplay cycle. I don't know if I mentioned this on the podcast. I have spent, like, multiple real-world hours fishing in Stardew Valley. I've said this. No, I think I might have said this before. If a game adds a fishing mechanic, I instantly think that game is a better game.

FFXIV, fishing, great game. Hades, fishing, great game. Stardew Valley, fishing, great game. Minecraft, even though I get fairly bored in it, great game. It has fishing. And the fishing is much better than it used to be. There are like different kinds of fish now and there are fish in the water and all that fun stuff. Fishing is good. I like fishing. I want to go fishing again. Like actual fishing. I haven't been fishing in quite a while. Maybe that's something I need to do before we, uh, before the, like, the wintry, the cold seasons

end up starting again, and it's not really a pleasant time to go and do that. I don't know, maybe I'll take, like, a weekend off or a week off, uh, YouTube or something and do that. I've been meaning to take time off. I, I've, like, planned everything to take time off, off. I've, like, planned everything to take time off like months in advance. I just never actually took the time off. So, like, I've got an entire week of videos queued up

to go and do that. It's just a matter of actually sitting down and saying this is when I'm gonna stop. This is when I'm gonna go and do whatever it is I'm gonna do. Travel across the state or something. Go visit some family.

Whatever I want to do, it's just a matter of doing it, which is the reason why we don't have guests on the podcast. It's just a matter of me sending DMs. I'm lazy. Yep. Speaking of being lazy lazy imagine being so lazy that you just wait in a queue for 24 hours to play a game so mortal online 2 is a it's a hardcore sandbox mmo by, it means full loot. It's full loot. I never really liked the looting system in RuneScape.

I've never really liked looting systems in any games. If I die, I don't want to lose my stuff. But Mordaline Line 2 has a small community of people that want to play the game. And there was a 24-hour queue on launch day now to be fair launch day problems are fine the problem is when launch day problems uh go past the launch day so my understanding this lasted a couple of days after launch. But, here we go. So, it had...

According to SteamDB, it had an all-time peak of 1,185 players. Mortal Online 2 has sold 110,000 copies. Of course, not all these players here are online at the same time. According to SteamDV, Mortal Online is peaked at 9,600 players. So the funny thing about this is because we know how many players are online and know how many players were in the queue,

you can work out how many players the server can support. And I think it was around like 2,000 or 3,000, judging by the numbers that I've heard. So this is, okay, this is the thing, right? What makes Mortal Online like the, what they sell it on is rather than having a bunch of separate servers, it exists in this individual world. All the players in this MMO are in the same world. Now, the issue with this idea is that that's not viable. I don't know what sort of magical server technology they're trying to operate here.

I think they said they want to have 100,000 people on the same server. Mortal Online 2, 100k people, same server. I believe that's the general idea that they've been saying. Either way, they want to have all the plays in this game on a single server which has it's problems because you generally can't build servers that

that do that oh yeah they did say 100,000 people which is insane hey if you could do it I would love to see it but it seems like you're struggling with 3,000 right now. Also, apparently this game launched without a visible queue system. So you could be in the queue, have no idea how long the queue is.

It could be five minutes. It could be five years. You have no idea. And the problem with this is it also didn't indicate whether you were in the queue. So you could think you're in the queue for five hours and never be in it because it kicked you and

you didn't know. How a game launches without a queue system when it's an MMO or has any multiplayer component? I don't know. I genuinely don't know. This is such a basic piece of tech, especially because this isn't the first MMO they've made. There was a Mortal Online 1. They should know, they should know this, to fix this when you have your second game. Now it's, it's one thing to, it's one thing to

criticize what they've done with the game. It is an, uh, it is an indie MMO to be fair. So I think there is some leeway with the level of polish the game has, but when it's missing like basic shit like that, that's a, that's a whole nother question. Like that's just, that's just a problem that should have been addressed before launch, especially when you had a, a pre-launch, I guess, server load test, beta test, whatever you want to call it. It's not a beta test.

I really don't like that companies are using the term beta test to mean that. But these are things that should have been addressed beforehand. Now, this also isn't on the topic list. I want to talk about people using the term beta and alpha. So you have, you know, the newest Battlefield game, whatever the game is that you like to play, it'll likely have, if it has a multiplayer component, an online beta or an online alpha.

Now, alpha and beta are very useful developer terms they mean so an alpha is usually a a functioning concept for the game a functioning concept for the game the software whatever it is it's nowhere near polished you probably don't even have models for the characters in yet. A lot of things still, you know, require vast, vast work. You haven't even worried about doing things like balancing in the case of a game. That is an alpha. Then a beta is... You've got the baseline of the game there. It works.

Maybe you need to worry about tweaking. Maybe some of the models aren't finalized. Maybe it's quite buggy that's generally what you mean by a beta now when you see a an Online beta for a game that comes out a week before the game launches. That's not a beta that is a demo and it's very important to distinguish these terms, because a beta is something that is still very much in development. If your game is coming out in a week, that game, if it's gonna be on consoles, literally has already shipped. So unless we're releasing a day one patch and you haven't even finished the game yet, that isn't, like, that is the release build of the game. You cannot call the release build of a game the beta of the

game. If you want to release a beta, like, six months behind, like, that's different. A lot of games do actually do that, and that is totally fair. But if it's there like the week the game is coming out you don't have time to fix those bugs even if we are like shipping a day one patch a lot of the things being reported in the demo are not going to be fixed so to call this a beta is just lying about what it is but when you call it a beta for whatever reason it makes people more excited because they have this idea they still have this idea in their head about what a beta is, even though the term hasn't been used in that way for, what, since like Bad Company 2? Maybe earlier? I know Battlefield 3 had a beta in this context. It just bothers me. As someone who has an understanding of some of these developer

terms it really does bother me when marketing teams use them in ways that they don't actually mean and really can like really confuses people on what it actually means because when a game actually does release in a beta state a lot of people then criticize it being like, this is really buggy. This is a terrible game. Like yeah, it should be a terrible game. It should be really buggy because it's not done yet. That's what a beta should be. A beta isn't a server load test. Actually, that's another thing. If you're gonna release something a week before launch, demo, server load test, all of these terms i think are totally valid generally server load test is used in a fairly accurate way uh the problem with server loads though

is a lot of server load tests is uh they they do as private tests so you have a fraction of what the player base actually will be, which isn't really a fair server load unless you're disabling a lot of the servers. So if you're trying to test like one server and you have 10 and then you have a tenth of the regular population, that's fair. But if we have all the servers enabled and we have a server load test going and there's a private test, like that's not a thing where you're really gonna get any useful data. All you're doing there is a demo, is a marketing piece to get people hyped. And not saying that's a bad thing.

I like the idea of games having demos. But, call it what it is. If it's a demo, call it a demo. If it's a server load test, call it a server load test. If the game isn't done, it's in a really early state, call it an alpha. If the game is in a better state, but still nowhere near done, call it a beta. Call it what it is. If you even call it what it is, um... Gaming Chromebooks. That's just a statement I didn't think I'd ever say. So we knew that Steam was coming to the Chromebooks, but there are...

Okay, so NVIDIA is also demoing DLSS and ray tracing, which is a fuck... I don't know what you're doing with that one. On ARM-based Chromebooks. Are there Chromebooks with, like, actual... Have you put an RTX GPU... They've put RTX GPUs in a Chromebook. Okay.

So, yeah, you straight up got RTX Chromebooks. But, yeah, this might be a thing that's happening. There are drivers for RGB keyboards, speculation that HP and Lenovo could be testing gaming Chromebooks. I can sort of meme on the fact that it's a Chromebook, but there's never been a reason why Chromebooks have to be low-powered devices. They generally are low-powered devices because Apple completely dropped the ball, and Microsoft completely dropped the ball

and let Google just take over this space. Because Apple stopped offering their lower-end devices back when they had the plastic shell MacBooks. That's what most schools used. Or they would use older generation MacBook Airs, things like that. And then Microsoft just hasn't done anything. There are no good, really low-end Windows-based laptops. You cannot tell me one.

I don't think they exist. Because when you have a low-end laptop, what a low-end laptop means in the Windows space is an old laptop. So a $500 laptop is probably a laptop from like 2017, for example, whereas a $500 Chromebook is a modern generation ARM-based CPU, maybe a modern generation ARM-based GPU, modern components, it's just lower end components but

there's no reason why they have to be because ARM based chips are quite powerful go to the top end smartphones go to the top end like Samsung does Google still make phones? I don't know I have no idea actually

but like the top-end Android manufacturers, they're incredibly powerful devices. Google Phone. Do they still make pixels? When was the last pixel device? I don't know. They could. It's just blanked out of my memory.

Oh, no, I guess they do. 5G Google Pixel. I guess no one's... Yeah, they could, uh, it's just blanked out of my memory, uh, oh no, I guess they do, 5G Google Pixel, I guess no one's, yeah, they do, yeah, no, literally no one talks about pixels anymore, because, I, I don't know, I don't know why no one talks about pixels, there was a brief period where all of the, all of the tech YouTubers were all rocking pixels, I don't know what they use now. I think a lot of them might use iPhones. Anyway, that's not the point. If we take an ARM-based chip out of a phone where it's going to thermal throttle to all hell and then put it into a much bigger chassis,

it might still thermal throttle, but not to the same extent that it would in a phone. And a device like that would be quite powerful. And there's no reason why you couldn't go higher than that. Combine a ARM-based CPU with a typical laptop GPU, you could make an actual good ARM-based gaming device. It's a matter of whether you would have game support for it because most games aren't compiled for ARM So unless you're doing like ARM translation

That could work. I know that's how a lot of things get run on the M1s M1 Macs but it does obviously eat into your performance, so you would need a higher spec device to make this work So you would need a higher spec device to make this work. The one advantage this does get is that, at least at this stage, I know it's changing with Fuchsia, at this stage, Chrome OS is basically Android and Gen 2. So if you get something working on a Chromebook,

getting that working on regular desktop Linux wouldn't be the most impossible thing. Especially if you just make it available on Android. There are plenty of ways to run Android stuff under Linux anyway. There are hardware based, yeah, hardware

level virtualization to run Android apps. There's a lot of distros that actually ship with it straight out of the box. So as much as I don't want to run a operating system by Microsoft, I don't want to run an operating system by Google. But I don't think it's inherently a bad thing for Google to get involved in this space and for there to be more competition in the operating system space, giving Microsoft a reason potentially to try to improve their systems.

And sure, maybe it'll take some of the focus away from Linux, but I think ultimately more competition is always a good thing. So let's see. Oh yeah. Um, I am not a big fan of voice commands, but I do think that more, um, what's the word? Um, um word for making accessibility, that one so, I do think more accessibility is a cool thing

Sony will test hey Playstation commands for the PS5 it's not something that I would ever consider using but you could use this to open up games apps, settings, control playback for show and song. You know, basic sort of stuff that you would expect to be in a voice control system.

I love they call it Hey PlayStation, though. I kind of wish they gave it a shorter name. PlayStation is way too many syllables. Siri. Alexa. Oh, Siri. Alexa. Oh, no. Alexa. Wait. PlayStation. No, Alexa's just

too many syllables. But I guess Alexa rolls off the tongue a little bit more than PlayStation does. Maybe that's the problem I have. Hmm. I kind of wish they gave it something, like, I don't know, Hey Sony. Hey Sony would work, actually.

Yeah, that's actually perfectly fine. Hey Sony is a pretty easy one to say. Let's see what people in the comments say. Hey PlayStation, don't hard crash when I put you into sleep mode. Is that a thing the PS5 does? That's beautiful. But yeah, I'm never going to use this myself,

partially because I don't own a PS5, but even though I did, I just generally don't like voice controls anyway. I'd much rather just press buttons because any argument you can make to me that voice controls are faster, I'm going to tell you to fuck off because you're wrong.

But I'm also in a position where I have full hand movement and I have full sight so for me yeah it is faster but not everyone does and for those people maybe something like this actually is viable as much as I don't like the data collection

that your phones have in that way voice commands on a phone actually are useful. If you had a privacy-focused virtual assistant on your mobile device, I don't think that's inherently a bad thing. Some people are against virtual assistants from the outset, and early on I was as well. assistance from the outset and early on I was as well. But I think once you get to addressing accessibility concerns, then there are legitimate use cases for something like this actually

existing. But data privacy is also very important. So Google, stop listening to everything I say and just don't feed your algorithm with all of my conversations. That would be lovely, thanks. Maybe I'll use your system if you stop doing that. But you know what? It's never gonna happen, is it? You're always gonna keep tracking your data, always gonna keep collecting it. Because how else will we make money from selling ads? So scammers are going to be scammers. And sometimes it's fun to see the ways that people try to operate to extract money out of people as efficiently as possible.

So I saw this post over on news.com.au about an ATO scam. So this is an ATO scam targeting cryptocurrency users. The way it works is pretty straightforward, but to someone who isn't too in the know about how the ATO operates, it does seem fairly viable, especially if you also don't know how domains operate. if you also don't know how domains operate. Basically, what it does is you get a text message that says, you were suspected in cryptocurrency tax evasion. Firstly, that is a really weird way for the ATO or anyone else to actually word that.

No one would really say it like that. Connect your wallet to provide detailed information. Visit ato.gov.au.crypto. Now, this is the interesting part, right? So you see ato.gov.au. That's the ATO domain. For anyone who doesn't know, the ATO is the Australian Tax Office. So you see ato.gov.au. Now, if you don't have an understanding of how domains work,

that clearly looks like it's from the ATO. It's not some like weird sketchy link that's using some non-Unicode characters. It's literally a domain that looks like it's pointing to the ATO. The.crypto is important. So I don't know if there's more to this but there are no ATO domains that end in.crypto

because.crypto would be a different top-level domain the top-level domains being used by the ATO are.gov.au if there's anything after that it's very evidently something different but if you don't know how domains work you could see that and think oh it's very evidently something different. But if you don't know how domains work, you could see that and think, oh, it's clearly must be this. So when you go to it, the basic idea how it works is you will input your myGov information. So your login information to the

online portal, and then you'll also put in information about your wallet. And this will allow people to... I imagine it probably asks you for some information to reload the wallet. So ways in which you can just take the wallet to another owner and then just take the data. Or they would ask you directly for payment in crypto. Either way. These are not things the ATO would ever do. If you ever receive a message like this. Even if it's not just from the ATO.

From any tax agency out there. I don't think there is a single sensible tax agency. That would contact people. Through text messages to say they are suspected of some sort of crime. If they suspect you of a crime, then you'll receive an email, you'll receive some sort of official communication,

maybe a letter if your country doesn't use email for government stuff. You'll receive an official communication from that organization. You won't even generally receive a phone call, because phone calls are very easy to fake, and a lot of people aren't going to trust them. So you want to make sure that the person being contacted

is as sure of this situation as possible to make it seem like, you know, they're not being, like, to make them know they're not being scammed, not make them seem like. You could argue by yourself that the tax collection is a scam, but that's not for me to talk about. So, be careful with things like this. Even if you are a fairly knowledgeable person, even if you are fairly well understanding of how the internet works, it's still pretty easy to

fall for a scam like this. I don't think that most people watching this channel would end up doing that, but if you have family members who may be caught by something like this, you have friends, you have anybody else that you might know that could be affected by a scam like this, make sure you... If they do talk about anything sketchy like that, make sure you talk to them about it, make sure they're informed before they possibly interact with anything sketchy like that, so that if something does go down, then they end up being... they something does go down then they end up being they end up being safe they end up being protected now where do we want to go from here um let's see

we could talk about oh yeah so here's a short one actually ultima online a game that I never actually experienced, is still getting updates. It received an update for its 25th anniversary. It received a Valentine's Day update. Let's go to the Ultima Online website. Ultima Online. One of the very, very early MMOs. Something that sort of... It's one of the MMOs that structured what an MMO was

prior to World of Warcraft coming out. So, this game is still relatively consistently updated. I don't know how many people still play the game. Do we have a... A lot of older games have server listing. Let's see if we can find how many people play Ultima Online

still. Ultima Online player count. Here we go. There's a total of 344,000 players, but that's not how many active players. So, back in 2021 they still had 13,000 daily players. Holy shit! Alright. So I guess, um...

Oh, it's pulling from MMO population. Oh! Okay, no, that's... That's, that's... Okay, no, that's a nonsense site. If you don't know what MMO population is, this is a nonsense site. If you don't know what MMO population is, this is a site that...

Let's see what the top MMOs are. So, full list. Is it full list? Yeah, full list. So, top MMOs. World of Warcraft. Fair. Destiny 2.

Uh-huh. Final Fantasy XIV. Old School RuneScape. Warframe. World of Warcraft Classic. Roblox. Roblox is not an MMO. Elder Scrolls Online, sure.

Elite Dangerous. New World. RuneScape. Guild Wars 2. Star Citizen. A lot of these things, you know, are MMO. A lot of these things you know are MMOs. World of Tanks. Not an MMO. Ashes of Creation. A game that's not out. A game that nobody is playing. Terror. Terror is basically dead. I'm pretty sure that Final Fantasy 11 has

more players right now than Terra does. This is not a site that you want to like... you want to give any weight to. It's not a site that... I don't know how they collect their data, but they certainly don't get it through any official means because they have data for games that there's no possible way that you could get data for. Let's see a five-year breakdown of 14. of 14. My assumption

is it's probably partially Google Trend data and the limited reporting this company has actually put out. Google Trend data is without a doubt a big part

of what makes up this data though. Wait, did it say that 14 had 500,000 players in 2017? FFXIV ARR. Should I know what expansion was out?

Stormblood? Stormblood. Or was it Shadowbringers? Uh, Stormblood was the expansion in 2017. Maybe, maybe, I find it very strange there was like a dip in the middle of the year. Uh, But hey, this is basically Google trend data. Anyway, don't take this site as a serious thing.

Especially when it says Ultima has 13,000 players online. I thought that sounded weird. There is 200 to 400 players online Atlantic Primetime. Yeah, that sounds about right. That sounds, 1,300 sounds closer to accurate.

Um, 13,000 players on Ultima. Maybe Ultima's still fun. I don't know. But I have my doubts about the number of players. I don't have any interest in playing Ultima. I want to play a game. The problem with playing an old MMO, especially

something that old, is it's been around since we didn't know how to make MMOs. We didn't know what made a good MMO. We were just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what stuck. So there's a lot of game design in it. I believe Josh Strife Hayes did a video on it.

Josh Strife Hayes. I know I've seen someone play Ultima. Maybe it wasn't Josh that I saw it was someone else but yeah there is a lot of modernization that's happened to MMOs for like

a good reason that's sort of polished a lot of the rough edges away that never needed to be there making it too realistic in some ways is basically part of the issue making it too much of a a living world but hey if you still play ultima good on you that's cool um what else we have uh oh right but i want to talk about this before we end so I did a video about the Arch Linux C

toolchain, probably I want to say about a probably like a week and a half ago as you guys are seeing this but we've gotten an update about you know, what's going on in the situation, at the time we had heard nothing.

So for anyone who didn't see that video, basically the Arch Linux C toolchain was really out of date. Like updates had come out eight plus months ago and had not been shipped yet. Now at the time, at the time of recording, this is not an issue. It's fine to keep using Arch. Arch is not unstable,

it's not really dangerous, anything like that. But this is a dangerous trend that we don't want to continue down. We want to make sure these things get updated so that, you know, if you want to actually use this system, you can use it in an effective, safe way.

We didn't have any notification about what was going on, though. So everyone was really confused. Foronix did an article about it. Then I did a video on it. And it sort of blew up. And now we have gotten a response from the maintainer. So Giancarlo, I'm sorry, I can't pronounce your name. He is the maintainer of the Arch C toolchain.

The singular one maintainer of the C toolchain. One dude does it. It's a problem. And it's always been like that. And it's slowly going to be changing. So hi all, most of you are aware that our tool chain is currently outdated we always had very few people working on it through the years and i took over once bath left bath was the previous maintainer and i don't know if bath

was his real name because that's a great name uh because it was needed however i've been very i've been having very little time to work on Archblade stuff recently, and the toolchain is the most noticeable victim. So a lot of the other packages he works on have actually been updated. The problem with the C toolchain, though, compared to updating some random user space application, is that updating the toolchain is a much bigger task. If you fuck up the toolchain, nothing works. So, getting that working is important,

given it is the most time-consuming. Yes, as I was saying. In this meantime, a few things also happened that compound to the issue. Among them, we enabled LTO. Right now, I'm working on bringing new Glibc 2.35

and also waiting on binutils release so we can bring the toolchain up to date so rather than going to the latest version that's available now and then binutils coming out next week whatever it is, he's waiting on that one because usually there is a fairly large release cycle between it so

if you wait a couple extra weeks it's fine the next set of updates will be a couple of months down the line. I'm aware we also have a GCC release coming out soon, and the toolchain will need a rebuild then. I don't believe we have an ETA on that one. I know Glibc is... Actually, no, that one's out.

Yeah, that's why you're working on it. That came out a couple of days ago. So for the future, we are trying to bring more people to work with the whole tool chain so it is not much of a bus factor we should have at least two tool chain maintainers yes yes definitely at least two just in case you know one of them wants to have a holiday like just have some time off because this is a volunteer project. So I totally understand wanting to take time off the project. There just needs to be some backup. There needs to be someone there so that things don't go to shit

when you decide to take a day off. So I hope this serves to assuage the concerns over the current status of our toolchain, both present and going future. and the only reason I knew about it is because some random dude in the Arch forums posted about it and that made its way to Reddit. That kind of blew up a little bit. Like, a few people talked about it, but it didn't really blow up to the extent that it needed to

until I made my video on it. And I did notice some people in the thread um, the thread where Giancarlo talked on Reddit about this, uh, bring up my name, like, hey, look, I, I, Pharonix and Brody Robertson did this thing, and you know what, it always gives me, like, you know, uh, what's the word, um, a nice, nice fuzzy feeling every time someone... Can I find the post? I probably can't. Ah, here it is.

Someone mentions my name in like a... Hey, you're doing a positive thing for the Linux community. Here we go. I totally didn't upvote a post about myself. We'll update the up vote the other one as well this is always nice to see

I know some YouTubers when they get mentioned on on Reddit it's just like a wall of down votes but hey people seem to at least think that video was a positive one and that's a good thing. Because I wanted to make that, like,

I don't have the skill set to fix this situation. But I wanted to get the information out there so people that do have that information and do want to fix it, do have the knowledge that it's even happening. Because I made that video and a lot of people were like, I didn't even realize it was out of date. Some people were like, oh yeah, it was weird that, you know, part of the tool chain was missing, and was out of date, but I didn't really put any, uh,

weight on it, um, but it's good to see that running the channel actually does have a positive effect, uh, even though, you know, a lot of the time, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing. I genuinely don't know what I'm doing. I'm just like shit-talking the entire time, winging it as I go. If you think I have a grand plan and I know what I'm doing, mate, you're giving me too much fucking

credit. I got no idea what's going on and I just stumble into things that work, apparently. So, let's see. I guess we can rapid fire a couple of things on here. I think I talked about Bloodborne PSX a little while ago, but it's finally available. I know a couple of the FromSoftware streamers,

the guys who stream Bloodborne, Dark Souls, all that fun stuff have been playing it and it looks looks pretty cool It looks kinda jank as fuck in some way, but you know the jank as fuck is part of it being a PS1 inspired game I might stream it, to be honest. Even though I'm...

I'm going to talk about how I'm not a big fan of Bloodborne. I don't like Bloodborne. Like, it's probably... Okay, it's not my least favorite. It's definitely not my least favorite Soulsborne game. But it's also not one of my favorites. I would say it is... It is at the second from bottom. I

really prefer Dark Souls, definitely prefer Dark Souls over Bloodborne, but I can appreciate Bloodborne for what it is. And something like this maybe playing this would make me appreciate Bloodborne more. I know it's cool that it's cool to see stuff like this you don't really see Maybe playing this would make me appreciate Bloodborne more. I know, it's cool to see stuff like this. You don't really see much. Like, you certainly see a lot of 2D games, and you see a lot of low-ish poly 3D games. But the PS1 had an interesting style.

It was so low poly that it was its own unique art style of low poly. When you look at a game that came from the PS1 era, you know that game came from the PS1 era. It just radiates that certain kind of PS1 art style, PS1 energy, that not many things really replicate. And having that art style with a modern game philosophy, like modern game controls, all that fun stuff, because playing games from back then isn't fun,

because they weren't great. Some games were good, but a lot of games were janky in their control schemes didn't really have a good understanding of how to write games, it was more like hey we want to do things and we're going to fucking wing it we're going to make it work

and we're going to be good, not to say that everything from that era was bad, like you know if you get a Super Mario game playing on a CRT without having, you know, like, not playing on a modern screen where it's going to have a massive input lag, play on CRT, it plays great, but some more complex stuff doesn't, and you can certainly see that even going into the early PS2 era, a lot of the early PS2 games felt kind of janky. To be, like, if we're being completely honest with ourselves, they felt kind of janky.

Not to say they were bad, but in some that jank is kind of endearing, but jank is a good way to put it. So, I think we've gone over pretty much everything. Oh yeah, Google Chrome's getting a new logo. We're going more minimal. Also got gradients on it. You can't really see the gradients but those are gradients. Do you know why it has a new logo? Because the logo is more accessible now. I don't know what the fuck that means. But the old logo had an unpleasant color vibration. What the fuck does that mean? I don't know.

Apparently it had an unpleasant color vibration. Like these colors being next to each other, like in certain configurations, it was like unpleasant to look at or something i i don't know i look i i think google just wants to make a new logo i think they just want to make a new logo let's go like as minimal as possible we're straight up we are like unironically at the meme level now where google is just going to circles like give it a couple of years every single google logo is just going to be a circle. I was even going to find it, actually.

How every Google logo looks. Let's see. I can't find it. There was one that basically just replaced all the logos with squares. It just squares with the red, yellow, blue, and green in different orders. And I can't find it right now, but that is sort of how I'm starting to feel looking at the Google logos. Can we just go back to like, not even a regional Google logo.

Let's go back to like 2000 or 2010. That would be lovely. Let's not keep making it like as minimal as possible. But nothing will stop the trend of minimalism. And designers are sniffing too much of their own farts and thinking they're too important. And think they're more important than their art is somehow less unpleasant. Does not have an unpleasant color vibration. Anyway, that's going to be the end of today's podcast.

Yeah. So on my gaming channel, by the time you see this, I will not be streaming Spyro because Spyro will be done. I do not know what will be in its slot. I will work that out when we get there. Could be anything. I don't know. Maybe I'll go play Kingdom Hearts 2. I love Kingdom Hearts 2. It is a great game and I am playing play Kingdom Hearts 2. I love Kingdom Hearts 2. It is a great game. And I am playing the Kingdom Hearts series. So you know.

Something's going to happen. But you know. A lot of the games from this point on. I do really enjoy. So we'll see what happens then. I still will be playing Hollow Knight though. So come catch some more Hollow Knight. If that's what you want to do. Let's see.

What else do we got? Main channel? I've got no idea what's coming out because I can't predict into the future. There'll be more news. There'll be more Linux. There'll be more Linux gaming probably. I'm probably going to keep doing Linux gaming related stuff until the Steam Deck comes out

and then if it flops completely I'll find some other cash account. I'm going to keep talking about Linux gaming because I enjoy it. I'm slowly building up an audience out and then if it flops completely, you know, I'll find some other cash. I'm going to keep talking about Linux gaming because I enjoy it. And I'm slowly building up an audience that at least in some fashion cares about Linux gaming. So clearly it's something that people enjoy and I enjoy as well. So I'm going to keep doing it. That's going to be it for me.

So if you want to go check out my Patreon, become one of those awesome people. I really need a list for this overlay. I don't have one though, but the list is getting quite long. I think there's like 35 people in it now, and then 36 if you take Cyan from the YouTube membership. I have one member.

Oh, there's also a member over on Subscribestar, that one. And someone anonymously donating on Liberapay. But I don't know who they are because they're anonymous. So yeah. Check out the main channel, Brodie Robertson. Check out the gaming channel, Brodie Robertson Plays.

Video for this is available on YouTube, Noticy, under Tech of a T. The audio version is on every single podcast app out there that uses RSS feeds. And yeah, that's going to be it for me. So, I'm out.