The WAN Show - DLSS 5 Is Great - WAN Show March 20, 2026

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

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Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. What is up, everyone? Happy Friday. and welcome to the WAN show. Boy, do we ever have a great show lined up for you guys this week? And I don't often get to say that, just completely unironically. I get to have my first hands-on experience with the MacBook Neo, which I haven't touched yet, but I see they left on set for me to check out.

It's why I assume that that's there. I'm actually legitimately super excited for that. Yeah, I was hoping you knew. They told me to bring it. There's the big DLSS-Five news this week. We'll be talking through that. We've also got a special guest who will be joining us for that segment. The one, the only, Mr. Riley Merlock.

Do they come in? No, you don't come in yet. Later. I'll wait. Later. Stay there. Okay. Just stay there.

What else do we have for topics this week? Got some big updates on the... You call Riley Murlock? It's an inside joke. You often do that? A real name. You... Do you do that?

Yeah, quite often. Oh, nice. I actually don't remember the exact origin of Riley Merlock. Did I miss speak? World of Warcraft? No, no, yeah, no, it was a Warcraft reference. I just don't remember why. Stay on topic, Kleinas.

Thanks, Riley. What else we got this week? Windows Recall was cracked again, which is so exciting for me, personally. I really like that. I think that's really good. I think that's good for everybody. genuinely I'm actually not even meming. Also, what else happened?

You know what? I was going through the topics and I noticed it's kind of a good news wind show. Is it? Kind of accidentally, yeah. Yeah, find another good one. He's going to find one. He's going to find one.

Wait for it. What? There's a lot of really weird topics. Oh, that's not a good topic. I highlighted it a good one. Steve Wozni. saw the LTT Coremaster Remote video and liked it. How cool is that?

That's awesome. I heard that we like knew someone who knew someone who knew him or something. I didn't know he saw the video. Oh, I saw his quote. I'm not going to say it. The show is brought to you today by Vessi, factor meals, zero bounce, and AMD, alongside of course our rap partner D brand, our laptop partner, Razor, and our chair partner

also Razor, whose logo I, so, whoops, covered up. There you go, that's better. Sorry, Razor. Got that fixed for you. I should have cut it off. Let's jump right into our headline topic today, which is, of course, DLSS-5. Now, Riley, I'm going to invite you on in just a moment here. No, I've wanted to.

In a moment. In a moment. I'm going to go through the dock, and then Riley, specifically, Like with all the aggressiveness of that uncle that you see every once in a while, but appreciate hearing from just invited himself to come in and talk about this on the show because he has a take to share with the world and tech linked was not enough to contain his take. So we're going to talk about it on WAN show. But first let's get through this. During the keynote of Nvidia's GTC event on Monday, CEO Jensen Huang unveiled. NVIDIA's DLSS-5, calling it, this is a direct quote,

the company's most significant breakthrough in computer graphics since the debut of real-time ray tracing in 2018. While NVIDIA says that the tech infuses pixels with photorealistic lighting and materials, many observers have criticized the handful of demos, saying that DLSS seems like nothing more than an AI slop filter. What did what do people call it? Yassifying faces?

I think so. Is that the term? Yeah. I love it. Anyway, the demos spawned a tidal wave of DLSS5 memes, which escaped containment to the point where Domino's Pizza in the UK joined in. And I have a hyperlink to this. So I feel like it's important for me to click.

it. Solid. Thank you. Thank you, Domino's. That is legitimately helpful and advances the conversation. NVIDIA quickly pinned a comment on one of the demo videos clarifying that it is not a filter. And in a Q&A, following the keynote, Jensen called these critiques, direct quote, completely wrong, saying it's not post-processing at the frame level. it is generative control at the geometry level. This seems to conflict with answers provided by NVIDIA's Jacob Freeman to questions that he was sent by YouTuber Daniel Owen. Good old Jacob.

Jacob confirmed that DLSSF5 only takes the rendered 2D frame plus motion vectors as input. Owen specifically asks if the model is actually aware of things like 3D geometry, 3D depth, etc. and Freeman replies saying DLSS-5, again quote, is trained end-to-end to understand complex scene semantics. NVIDIA says DLSS-5 will launch this fall. They revealed the live demos were running on two RTX-5090s,

one to run the game, the other to run DLSS-5, and while some press has reported that Nvidia does have a version of the tech running on a single GPU, it is unclear at launch, What kind of GPU it will have to be in order to run DLSS-5 and also, like, you know, a game and stuff. Riley, come on and let's talk about DLSS-5. If you want me or not, I'm crashing this show. He's in here, the one and only. Riley Murlock, everyone.

You had no idea I was coming to be here. I totally knew you were coming. You invited yourself here. Oh, my God, he's holding the mic. Dan, please have his mic off right now. It's fine. Just, you know, blah, bra, bra, bra, bra,

hi everyone, I'm happy to join the show. So much worse. That feels nice. So much worse. That sounds good, actually, because it's a good mic. All right, Riley. So hit us with the take that you were so desperate to bring to the Wend show. Why do I give my take first?

I thought, what about your take? No, no, I wanted to hear yours. Well, I think that, so I added in this stuff about who's saying, what, hello? You're talking. Okay. I added in this stuff about, I mean, Daniel Owen posted this video, I think, yesterday or the day before, and that was just very interesting. Because I think the main, the key problem in a lot of this is the definition of the word filter. But also, as I wrote in the discussion question, I think that this issue illustrates a fundamental divide or it brings up a fundamental question.

like do we care about games I like it you're both looking at me like this is fun well I want to hear your take yeah for sure but like I feel like I need to move farther back so that it's more do we care about games as like

a simulation or do we just want our games to look as pretty as possible like is there some value to the nature of the game as a like hard fought technical achievement

simulating a universe? Or are we looking just for pretty games? You know? I think that's, there's that, there's that, there's more, too. Well, I mean, for, my, my initial response to that is that gamers are not a monolithic entity. Yeah.

Right? So, so any question even sort of start, even, any question that even starts with, Do gamers want is already going to create fragmentation within the community. For sure. Because every single gamer is going to want completely different things. And even speaking for myself, the things that I want out of one game are not necessarily the things that I want out of another game.

For sure. When I fire up my Nintendo Switch, I actually don't want to see every pore on Mario's giant Chris Pratt, voice knows. That's not desirable to me for that cinematic universe, so to speak. The Mario Nipples shot was enough. Yeah. You need any more of that. Exactly. So, but on the other hand, you know, if I were to think back to a game that I played that I felt really immersed in, in a realistic world, and this is a deep cut, but freelancer was, was a game that I really enjoyed back in the early 2000s and it was about like exploring

the known universe. If you told me that there was a mod pack like a texture pack slash asset pack that could take that game and I could replay that game in photorealistic quality

and all I needed was like a modern GPU I'd be really excited about that. And then I think you've got a subset of those people that are really excited to experience their game with a fresh shiny coat of paint on it that are going to go, oh, what? So we used AI to achieve that?

Who the fuck cares? Bring it on. For sure. And so you've got many different camps. I probably haven't even scratched the surface of all the different perspectives you could have on it. But I feel like you had a little bit more you were going to expand on after I answered your question.

No, I mean, that's all super, super interesting. I think that that is a core part of the issue here is that, like, People just want pretty games and other people are like really, really concerned about the, like, how it's being achieved and how it's being presented. I mean, I know that you wanted to talk about, uh, Invidia, uh, putting this forward as DLSS-5. Let's get to that later. Okay, fine. Let's get to that one later. Okay, sure, sure.

I think for me, like, obviously there's the initial reaction of like the look. because like the environments I think it I think anyone who's being honest can look at the DLSS 5 on versus off demos and recognize that in many cases it's making the environments look really good it's making them look like a photo taken

that is that is an under discussed aspect of this point I think people are really focused on the characters and that makes sense because you know if you were to tell if you were to ask me, what do I love about one of my favorite games, Final Fantasy 6, what do I love about it? I don't love the quality of the overworld.

Okay, it doesn't look great. Graphically. But I love the characters. And so if you were going to go and you were going to make the overworld look way more realistic, okay, maybe a pixel art game, Sprite game is a bad example. but in general, if you're going to make an environment look more realistic, more true to life, but you're going to mess with

a character that, like, I connected with in some way, that's going to offend me. That's going to affect me a lot more than if you made like a, like, the vine that Tarzan is swinging on look way more viny. I think that's my biggest problem with it is that, like, better graphics aren't always better, in my opinion. And we're talking about arts.

styles and things like that. And a lot of the styles in the video, in the like announcement video are pretty similar. They're all trying to go for like decently high realism. In some cases, 100% realism, like the football club one. Yeah, or like if you're playing like Indiana Jones in the Great Circle or something like that and you told me, yeah, I can make this more realistic. I'd be like, the whole, the whole schick of this game is that you are indie and you're in an Indiana Jones film. But there are a ton of games where if you made the graphics better, I'd probably think it was worse. And putting all of the creative control of that into your GPU's vibe check is maybe not the path.

How to Train Your Dragon Hidden World is actually a film example of that that I found kind of unsettling to watch. Because I've got these cartoon characters walking around in environments that look so photorealistic that I actually found. it kind of immersion breaking. I think the insane success of Pocopia is a good example of this, actually. It's like not a, like this is not, we're not pushing graphic engines to run this game, you know? This is not crushing your 50-90. But people love the game. I think this is what I'm hearing you guys talk about the look of the game a lot and how pretty it is.

and this is why I wanted to bring up the discussion point of like do we care at all that we're making the frame that we're served prettier but but it is essentially and like you know to come back to the filter thing yeah it's essentially I view that as a filter I a lot of people a lot of like more graphically technically technically oriented people I feel like people who know a lot of technical details about graphics are are seeing people call it a slop filter and are like, it's not a filter. It's obviously not a filter. But I think what people on the other side are, there's two definitions. There's two operative definitions of the word filter going on here. I think there's the filter of like Instagram

where it's basically the photo and you're overlaying. Essentially. Yeah, you're changing some color information, but it's the same image. And then, but I think a lot of people who are calling this an AI slop filter are thinking of a filter as something that does not have access to the underlying facts of the game world. It doesn't know the data that is being input

by the developers. It doesn't know the complete shape of those 3D objects that it sees. It's a 2D frame that is being fed into a model and it's outputting an image. That is altered. So it's altered, which is what we mean by filtering. There is one particular example that Daniel Owen does a lot in his video. I encourage you guys to watch Daniel Owen's video. It's super interesting. Yeah, Dan, maybe you could throw that in the chat for us. Yeah. It's linked in the dock. The side of the guy's head in Starfield has no hair. And then in the DLSS-Five-on version, there's hair there.

So it's like changing. And this is why it's so interesting to me, because I'm like, we're no longer simulating the world at that point. Luke, can you bring Potopia? Can you bring that back? Potokia. Can you bring that back up for me for a second? Okay.

So the first thing that I thought when I was looking at, at this. You know, you brought this up and I went, yeah, what a clear example of an art style where I wouldn't want my snorlax to be covered in photorealistic fur and, and look like an actual, you know, like weird fat cat thing lying in the middle of the path. Okay. I would put it. Put it, yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go with this. Put that away. Give me gross snorlax. Put it away. Get it out of here. Here's an alternate take. What if my worldview and my preference is not the be all and end all? Well, it's the impossible.

Well, hold on, hold on. Well, is it? Because, because, I mean, look, every, every game, I shouldn't say every game with a nude mod because some of them they clearly meant for people to put them in. But every game that has a nude mod, right, they didn't necessarily intend for them to be X-rated, clearly. and yet, no, gamers have ultimately decided, by and large, over the course of gaming history, that they're in charge of how they play their game.

If they want to play the mission the way that the game developer intended, then that's by all means they're right. And if they want to completely not play the mission and play a completely different style, that's, there's more genres. I think that's still a problem with the LSS-5, though. Hold on, hold on. I'm going somewhere with this. There's more genres of playing the game a way that it wasn't intended by the developer

than there are ways that the developer intended to play the game, right? Like you talk about like speed running or, you know, not losing health or, you know, whatever challenges people might set for themselves. Right? Exactly. So with that in mind, if I decided whether it was through a meticulously handcrafted mod pack or whether it was through a slop filter that I, I, as a gamer, didn't care about the artist's original vision of the game,

and I wanted to run it some way that I feel like running it. I don't feel that way. I don't want my snorlax to have fur, but if Riley wanted his snorlax to have fur, and there was some AI slop tool available to him that let him do that, or, you know, enlarged Tifa's boobs or whatever, then... I don't... If I may...

I don't think people are taking issue with this... type of thing existing. I think a lot of people are. Well, sure. But I think that's... Really? I think that that isn't the exist... You might have a lot of people saying,

oh, that shouldn't exist or whatever. But I think that the massive outcry, the nature of this particular backlash is more related to the fact that Nvidia is doing it. And Nvidia isn't just some company. Yes. They have 95% market share of gaming GPUs. Yes.

and they have in the past many times you know what do you call it they talk all the time but how they... Yes, they talk all the time about how they set the direction for gaming graphics. They have spent a lot of the last months bragging about how they are the ones that

effectively invented modern computer graphics. Like this is what they're saying. So if they're pushing DLSS-5 and they're talking about how they're working with developers and, well, publishers and the companies, not as much of the developers, but still right now, like this is them trying to push a market direction. This isn't them, this isn't like, I'm agreeing with what you're saying. We were going to say effectively the same thing.

I don't, if someone, if some random company was like, this tool exists, I think there'd be some people being like, that's dumb and not really caring. But the fact that it's DLS is five, it's Nvidia. Yeah. And video kind of sets the tone, sets the messaging and often sets the direction. That's concerning. I just want to, I want to get in there, though, that I, I, to the point of like to the point that some people might be okay with a tool like this existing.

Like I think that if it came out that some indie dev made a version of this that you could like throw into opti-scaler or whatever, like use it with one of the open source tools and people started doing that. I think that it might grow and people might start using it. And it's like, okay, you know, there's still heavy heavy. pushback against AI, but I think that if it's giving you, like, such a big boost, and especially in some games that don't have the resources to, to dump into, like, heavy graphics, like, maybe, maybe that would be, there's a, I'm saying the thing in itself is, it's problematic because of the whole AI connection, but it's not a crazy idea. So to the point that you just made,

I think that's, that's one of those, that's one of those ones where, depending on who you talk to, you'll hear it spun a completely different way. So the way, so the way you, you're, you just spun it was if you can dramatically improve the fidelity of a game where they didn't have the resources to make it look really good you know that's an argument if I were to give

the other side of that argument coin it would be this is just a way of enabling either a game devs to be lazy and if you have that take go fuck yourself because that's that's like not valid

relax or B more realistically publishers and studios to employ fewer game developers and fewer artists to make their games which is realistically

what we're talking about like yes any industry is going to have a handful of just like lazy people who don't feel like doing their jobs but when you look at the kind of attrition that the game development industry

has gone through over the last as long as it's existed it's been a difficult industry to be part of I think for you to point at the individual workers who are working on these games and say, oh, this is just a tool to enable them to be lazy is just such a brain-dead take that I just, I can't really entertain a conversation with you.

So the other side of that coin then would be, so on the one side you go, oh, if this could be a tool, so that's the positive take. This could be a tool for enabling better visual fidelity in games that otherwise wouldn't have had the resources for it. Other side of that take is our corporate overlords who already, launch a wildly successful game and then proceed to lay off half the team, are going to have even more at their disposal to hire few developers and artists in order to create more slop for us to consume.

How do we reconcile those? Because both are true. I have to say now that, like, we have to say now that, like, we have talked a lot about how it increased, like, it does, DLSS-5 does, increase the realism of the image. In one image, it looks like a video game, and in the next image, it looks like...

A more realistic video game? It looks more realistic, but I would say that it goes past, like, if on one side of the spectrum, it's like fake video game look. And on the other side of the spectrum, it's photorealism, like it looks like real life. DLSS-5 goes way past that into hyper-real look.

Like the contrast is high. The saturation is high. The lighting is very global. Like, HDR kind of... Yeah. It's a screen space type of effect, so it only has access to what is on-screen, so it can't simulate...

I mean, the engine is supposed to be simulating the lighting in the same way, but you can see in these demos... I don't think we've shown a demo on screen yet, but I'm sure everyone's seen them a million times by now. You can see in the demos that the lighting is... made much, it's just the, there's so much more lighting everywhere.

It's like they took this like big giant studio light and put it in front of the person. And I think that that is something that is very, very concerning from both an artistic intent perspective, because what happened to simulating things, what happened to giving developers tools in order to, like, they want to light a scene a certain way. And they will have tools. But from the artistic perspective and also from the simulation. perspective, like we're just, it doesn't look good to me. It looks like AI

Slop. Can I show, do we want to show this on screen? Hold on first. On the characters. Yeah, yeah, sure. I do want to address that Nvidia has said, and let's take this for what it is, it is Nvidia's marketing for

a technology that they wish the industry to adopt because it will make gamers and the entire industry more dependent on their products they sell. So let's take this for what it But Nvidia has said that game developers will have the tools to control how DLSS-S-5 is implemented within their game. So how do we reconcile that and everything else that we've talked about so far? Well, we have, so we have details about what those controls will be.

Actually, in Daniel Lohen's video, I don't think there's a screenshot, but I looked at it. I watch video, good video, go watch the video. He's just reiterating actually things that Nvidia has put in their press releases. Developers have access to the intensity of effect of the effect, so they'll be kind of like a slider or they can turn it up and down. They'll be able to mask off areas of the scene, of the frame.

So like this character, I don't want it to enhance this character. I don't want it to enhance that thing over there. Right. And they will have some controls of like color grading. So like they'll be able to say, all right, literal filter. boost this, yeah, like filter type stuff.

Okay. But they won't be able to like, customize it beyond that in terms of like, oh, do it in this style. I mean, maybe they, I'm saying right now,

that's what they, the control sound like. It's coming out in the fall. There's still time. And I think, to be fair, I think the backlash to this is overblown

for something that is not out yet. Like, and I don't want to say, Because I've said many times, I've criticized it many times already on TechLeaks now here. But I do think that this was a massive overreaction. And there are people on the anti-DLSS-5 slide that are like losing their minds in a way that does not behoove them. So we have to keep in mind that it is coming on the fall. They're going to be developing it more.

We don't have the hardware requirements. I have a quick question for you, Riley. Yeah. Are you new? I know, I'm sorry, I'm supposed to be... Sorry, game... I know. I'm so sorry.

I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. No. Well... Hold on. I might have overreacted when I said that. I do play video games. We've got a couple more discussion topics on this, our discussion questions.

One from Avianz is... Actually, let's do the one from Lefour first. I became a subscriber just to send this. says Lafour. Wow. Nobody seems to be mentioning that this technology could go the other way.

I could take a realistic game and, you know, maybe not with DLSS-5, but DLSS 6.9, say for instance. I could take a realistic game and make it look like a cartoon. And they didn't say,

oh, I think, you know, that would be really cool. I would enjoy that. But the implication, given that they're already kind of looking at this and going, Here's a tool. Here's what it does today.

Here's what it could do tomorrow would seem to suggest to me that they could be excited about a functionality like that. What if you could play cartoon freelancer and photorealistic Pokemon? Again, I don't think anyone would have, I mean, beyond all the concerns about AI, like at default concerns, copyright. In general. All that stuff. I don't think anyone would have, I don't think anyone has a problem with the. fundamental idea of a gamer choosing to, you know, basically run a mod on their game, you know? I don't think anyone is, is super, super concerned about that.

I think they are concerned about A, Invidia pushing this, and B, pushing this as DLSS-5. Like, it's not, they're not saying, this is a feature of DLSS-5. They're saying, this is DLSS-5. There's, like, it went from upscaling to, you know, they were changing, like, you know, they were changing like denoising, there was like ray reconstruction and stuff, and now the DLSSS5 is this whole suite of features. And instead of saying, hey, we are, we made upscaling even better or something, more multi-frame gen or whatever, we're saying we took multi-frame gen and put it on to the first frame.

So now all of the frames are gened. It's like, is that DLSS-5 at that point? I wish they called it something else. I mean, I guess my biggest question right now, to your point about the overreaction, because I actually, I see the overreaction both ways. On the one hand, I actually see people's reaction as a completely justified reaction given again, NVIDIA's weight in the industry. Like I've been more trying to moderate the conversation rather than necessarily present my own take up till now.

Do it. Hot take. I see it as a somewhat reasonable reaction in it looking at sort of the industry dynamics around job loss and constrained resources in game development at the same time that the gaming industry is overall making more money than ever. I see these as actually like fundamental

huge enormous problems and Nvidia's weight as a player in the industry and their ability to set the course for game development is a major concern. Oh, absolutely. However, over on the other side, I go, yeah, but how is any of this a surprise? Nvidia telegraphed this

ages ago They literally When they got up on stage And announced Was it was it 50 series Or was it I think it was 50 series They talked about neural rendering Oh sure yeah

What did we think that meant Well this is interesting It meant this Well at the time It meant neural rendering of like textures Like having discrete elements within this fully simulated, rendered world that use machine learning or generated AI even

to help you generate textures and stuff. I know that that's a core... That was not my interpretation at all. Oh, okay. Well, that was the demo that they did when they first mentioned neural rendering. I mean, they had the faces thing last year. Maybe this was me just like skipping a step,

but like what I interpreted that as, as remember that MS Paint demo that NVIDIA did? like, must be like 10 years ago now. Do you remember the one, Luke, where they had like an MS paint grade drawing and then basically Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry? The paint blaster thing? Paint blaster thing.

No, we're talking about different things. Cool. So they had like this MS paint grade like doodle and then basically like AI did it. Yeah. And it turned it into like a photo realistic scene. Yeah. There's been a bunch of demos of that. Like, Nvidia had one a few, like even before ChatGPT and all that.

NVIDIA has been, like, crystal clear for years now, that the path to better. And I say better with huge quotation marks here, because, you know, back to Mario. You know, more realistic does not necessarily mean better. But I think from NVIDIA's point of view, if you want to sell more graphics cards, right, more photorealistic, more true to life,

more true to, not even in just the visual sense, but also the simulation sense, more true to life in the physics and the visuals of the scene is better from Nvidia's standpoint. And so it's been pretty clear to me that they have been saying for years now the only path to better

because Moore's Law is dead. Moore's Law is dead and buried is going to be alternatives to traditional rasterized rendering. And obviously, the future drum that they keep beating is that it's going to be generative AI. Yeah.

And so to me it was just pretty obvious that that was what we were going to get. We were going to get developers going, here's the texture in the game will functionally just be a white, a blue piece of paper that just has ocean written on it. I think that to your point,

the reaction is a bit overblown given that it's like this is obvious. like this is an obvious endpoint for for AI and the way that hardware has been going. I think that the reaction is so strong because, you know, again, Nvidia called a DLSS-S-5. But also to the other thing you said earlier, which is that the state of the industry right now, like it just doesn't feel good.

This very much feels like a you will own nothing and be happy situation where it's like, yeah, okay, our hardware can't really run games anymore. And you can't even buy it actually because everything's so expensive. Hold on. But hold on. Don't worry. Use AI. I got to jump in there.

To give yourself psychosis and think that it's good graphics. Okay, but I got to jump in there for a second. Okay, go ahead. Because I just, two weeks ago, played cyberpunk 2077 on a 3060. Mm. And were some of my, was some of the detail that I was seeing upscaled using DLSS? Yes. but I very much owned that GPU

and it very much rendered that game in a way that made me happier than if it didn't have DLSS. Yeah, but you're talking about just upscaling. Yeah, but we're talking about... This isn't just upscaling. It's changing what is being displayed to you. Well, part of what DLSS5 is going to do

is also going to be upscaling. It's an entire suite of features. I don't think it even needs to upscale anymore. It's just replacing the whole frame. But I guess what my question is, is if it's using hardware that I have in my computer, how is it you'll own nothing and be happy? Because I definitely still own that 3060,

and it's not bothering me. It might not own the software. I might not own the software. I mean, that ship sailed years ago. This is an interesting point. No, like you will still need... You'll still need... Well, yeah, we're going towards a situation

where hardware, you can't afford hardware, so everything is going to be a cloud subscription, basically. But... Well, okay, that will... The fact that it's running on $2.50... 90s right now is a cause for concern. Sure. But I guess we're assuming that they'll get it running on a single GPU and then, yeah,

you'll be running it on your hardware still. I'm operating in good faith for now until I see anything otherwise that Nvidia actually does intend for this to operate on hardware that I own. And up until now, I mean, I was really impressed. I think the 3060 runs cyberpunk better today than it ever did. and I thought that was really cool it was part of no it was it was longer than a couple weeks ago it was when we did the

Brazil PC because that was that was what our like pretty good Brazil PC had and that's cool because they might be putting those back into production and stuff like that what I'm saying is what if what if you have to yeah someone in chat's getting what I'm putting down give a rim what if what I'm saying is what if you have to subscribe to a certain level

of DLSS and that's where we could be running into serious trouble because if NVIDIA gets us hooked on the hooked on the the sweets. And yeah, I mean, the first character replaced that they do, there's like every comment on Reddit is like, oh my God, the first thing that they show is they give her like plumber lips and stuff like that.

And it's like, okay. That's, I mean, that's another weird thing. Like when I was talking earlier about you're putting artistic control into like a hardware company's hands is like, yeah, you're also putting like beauty standards into like Jensen's hands. Well, you're putting it into the AI model that Nvidia engineers

create trained on whatever data is going into it. I mean, and there's so much mystery meat that goes into training these AI models. I think that the fact that so much of the criticism was based around the AI slop look is very, very interesting to me

because there is an AI slop look. Yeah, and it feels like it. And it's funny because once the filter goes off, I'm looking at it again, it's like, if you gave me that photo and was like, this is a real guy, and it's like a very stylish,

that one's very obvious, but like the Leon one. The Leon one for me, just stay there. It's like, if you told me, okay, this is a moody, still from a movie I'm working on and this is a guy. It's like, okay, I could believe that's a guy.

This one doesn't look too bad, but I think that the lighting is very low and there's a lot of things in its favor. I think in general, the AI slop look is people are having an issue with it because it represents the homogenized mean. It's like, it's the average of all images. Totally. And the extremes that make visuals and aesthetics. and all kinds of human expression.

Interesting. It is... Looks like Brendan Fraser a little bit. One of my things is like this, this feels like cool. I mean, if we could make every man look more like Brandon Fraser though. Yeah.

I would do that immediately. Hear me out. Hear me out. Brendan Fraser. This to me feels like cool video game. And this, hold on. Cool video game. B movie.

Immediately. Yes. Yes. Like it's, and I, I completely agree with your like, but the hair looks so good.

It, it does look pretty good. But I mean, what, what, okay, now I'm flipping. Now I'm on the other side.

What can we expect? What can we expect from games other than just at, at best, B movie graphics, you know, like looking like a realistic B movie? No,

I think, I think there's a style. It's not gonna look like, like, Dune. Like this one as well. I had this feeling here as well. This feels,

or, what's that? This feels like cool video game. And then it catches up, and now this feels like a different game. See, I feel like this example feels especially egregious because I'm not a Resident Evil fan. Maybe, maybe like, you know, I'm just not familiar with it as much, but I feel like the, the raw image looked pretty bad. Like I, and I'm sorry. Like, that looks, that looks like a PS3 game, maybe.

Okay, I think that's probably your nostalgia glasses, the PS3. did not look this good. I didn't have a PS3 so I wouldn't know but but it looks kind of bad and then it looks like too good it looks like hyper real to the point where it's like are we supposed to be you know I don't know here's the bottom line

which I think is is going to be kind of scary and uncomfortable for people it's going to happen anyway the people having this conversation the people who are who are open to to discussing it

are ultimately not going to be the ones who or the people who care enough to talk about it are not going to be the ones that are dictating the direction this goes. For sure. Like, I read an AI slop novel and... Every night. Immediately my brain turns off. I just can't. And a lot of gamers, if you're a discerning,

Games as art hippie who, you know, loves the game for the sake of the game. You're going to play an AI slop game with an AI slop filter on it, and you're going to have the same, like, gut reaction where your brain's going to turn off, and you're just going to disengage from it. However, lowest common denominator, people are going to turn those filters on. I guarantee it. For sure. And I fully expect in five to ten years, like, if anyone finds this clip or any of the other discussions about this, they're going to be like, what were they freaking out about it? That's so quaint. So quaint that they were so worried about that because everybody is going to be using AI filters on everything. I know that that's where we're going and you're going to be able to play as SpongeBob or Optimus Prime and whatever you want at any time. But I think we'll have lost something in the same way that we have lost something by hooking crazily into social media instead of. like being more present in the physical world.

I actually think that, sorry, it doesn't change your overall point, which was really good. I'm actually pivoting a little bit. I don't, I think game devs would actually draw the line at Nvidia creating a tool that allows you to substitute the main character

for SpongeBob or Optimus Prime because then they wouldn't be able to sell as many skins. Can you imagine Tim Sweeney's tweet if he couldn't sell like Peter Griffin skins for Fortnite anymore because people could just put their own Peter Griffin model into the game. I don't know. He probably be, I feel like he's super behind this. And also that, I mean, I don't want to put words in Tim Sweeney's mouth because you never know

what's going to come out of it. So there's just no point guessing. I do want to say that one thing I have said is that it is genuine, I feel like from a technical perspective, it generally is impressive that this is apparently running in real time. On 25090s. On 25090s, well, yeah, on 1 5090s, just the image model and just 1 5090. But I mean, that's- The scenes are pretty, simple. They are. It's true. There's a lot of static. And in the soccer demo in particular, like crazy, motion is not, you're

talking about this without showing anybody, Lou. I mean, they're not really going to show it. You have to go like frame by frame in that one. Period and comma. Go frame by frame on YouTube. Fun fact. But yeah, the soccer ball gets warped out of existence and at one point his arm disappears because

he's moving fast. The fabric of his shirt is a mess with DLSS-5 on. There's also some other fabric issues. And this is one of my problems too is I think a lot of people are going to turn this on or it's just going to be on by default and a ton of people, never touch settings on anything. And then they won't necessarily know. And it's just going to suck. And babies are going to grow up playing Call of Duty with this on. Imagine those babies as adults. I don't even know how soccer balls work. They'll think they just do that.

They'll be looking at the screens and they look at the rewode and they're like, gross. Yeah. Where's the filter? Where's the shimmer? Reality sucks. Yeah. Reality's terrible. Anyway.

Avions has a question for our discussion questions. Would you be fine with users watching your old content with an AI Yassify mode or AI Yassify filter? And I guess I don't care. If YouTube did that automatically? I'd be annoyed. That's the argument in my opinion. With 95% market share and this being on by default

for a lot of people and Nvidia trying to push the direction of gaming and stuff like that, it's being put on to people. That's the core problem in my opinion. If you have a browser add-on that makes me look like the thumbnail

for Wancho, I don't actually personally care at all. Whatever, dude. Dan, get on it. but but if youtube is like no this is just how it works now um yeah i mean that's weird i have a similar i feel like they wrote in their question i mean why but still i think yeah i think it's a matter of time by the way i mean look at look at youtube storage and bandwidth costs if they could serve 360p video and just count on that everyone's going to have an nPU in their client device

you know they're going to do it we know so that's bad right like we don't want that but like I think I think this is why it's so interesting to me is like are there people out there who seem to only care about the output and as long as the output is pretty

according to like their whatever you know the lack of taste that they have where they're like oh the high contrast pretty girl like it no offense people who like high contrast pretty girls that's your preference but

I feel like I feel like we're losing something because I think we should have real pretty girls with low contrast. I like my women like I like my displays. High contrast and pretty. Oh, gosh. Okay.

I think I have to go now. So that's like the first thing you send on Twitter, or Tinder, what's your contrast ratio? What an opening line. Can you turn the saturation up? All right, thanks, Riley. Thank you.

This was great. Thank you for joining us. Have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for having me. I'm not your mother. I didn't. Nope. Okay.

Yes. There's my game. I think we can make it work. Bye. Bye. All right. Very cool. Wow.

I was just reminded of the thing that I wanted to talk about as part of our next topic. Linux challenge update. Okay. Obviously, you guys are going to get a lot of this stuff. in video two, part two, whatever it is we're calling it. I don't even know what the exact sort of ordering of all the various video things is going to be at this point. But I had, I think I'm, I'm 99.9% sure I'm allowed to disclose where I was. I was in Japan visiting Sony.

Okay. If that's all you say, I'm sure it's fine. Well, no, that's not always fine. but I'm like very sure that Sony said it's okay that I was to say that I was in Japan visiting Sony. I was there for something exciting. I think that's probably implied because I would not go all the way to Japan for something that's not exciting. But anyway, long story short, I needed to output an HDR video. And I needed something that I had licensing for. So I used that test footage from our RE shoot, went back when we borrowed that camera to make a short,

circuit for like an RE cinema camera and I realized I went to plug in my laptop and I went oh shit I'm on Linux right now this was cool on kubun 2 with the AMD drivers so I make no I make no promises for anything other than that getting HDR working was as simple as boop apply and then there was like a slider that honestly kind of limited my ability to get the best

possible output don't worry about those details getting it working looking HDR AF was that easy yeah as far as my understanding goes because kbuntu kbuntu whatever is kde

right yeah so kde as a bunch of people have said in flip plane chat has hDR support the reason why I initially cringed is some of them don't like I think cinnamon doesn't um which is one of the big criticisms that people put on that I just don't really watch hDR stuff so I don't really care so so that was really cool and then this is another one this is another one that's really cool there have been so many aspects of this challenge where I've gone into it going yeah I know it doesn't oh my gosh that is going to be a major challenge um like for instance you know

I'm running on a random laptop, and I really do mean random laptop. This came out like a week ago. It uses Strix Halo, so super obscure hardware. Always a problem. Yeah, like using hardware that nobody, the number of times I've had people ask me over the years. Remember, I used to work at a computer store. I've had a lot of people ask me, what motherboard should I buy? My answer is the most common one.

Almost always is whatever your socket is, however many dim slots you want, whatever form factor you want, whichever one is selling the most. Because that's the one that the company is going to have out there being tested by end users in as many edge cases as possible. And it's the one that they're going to have the most people shrieking at them if it's broken. So you buy that one and you'll probably be fine. I did the opposite of that. I'm using the laptop that nobody is using.

So you're asking for trouble in those situations. So I assumed that things like getting my keyboard backlighting working properly at all the various levels of brightness that it's supposed to work at might be a problem. I assumed that having my built-in display brightness slider working would be a problem. Not only does it work, but is that not the darkest freaking built-in display slider that you've ever seen? You can still see. The screen isn't actually black.

The granularity of the control is so good compared to Windows. And the miracle of Linux is that somebody did that. Somebody was like, you know what? Screens don't go dark enough. That's pretty fucked up and fixed it. They were probably that mad about it too. How cool is that? Yeah, that's cool.

and then and then you go to do you go to do some basic thing and and then it blows up what's one of the things you did that it blew up on

uh hold on hold on oh yeah yeah i couldn't get an Xbox controller paired to it no matter how hard i tried i just couldn't get an Xbox controller paired to it i've had some Wi-Fi connection interesting sorry i've had some Wi-Fi connectivity issues but i'm going to blame that on AMD's piece of garbage media tech Wi-Fi chip partnership because I've had a lot of Wi-Fi issues on Strix Halo laptops on Windows as well. But yeah, I could, so I could get my, uh, I had a gilly kit. I brought two controllers with me on the trip. I brought a gilly kit because I knew that I could use it with both the switch and the computer. And then I

also brought an Xbox controller so that I could play two player games on the computer. So Yvonne and I tried this new co-op dungeon crawler game while we were on the plane. It was cool. Was it cool? I saw that important. I was just curious. I'll know in a second because I'm just firing up to him. But anyway, I assumed I would be able to pair wirelessly the Gilly kit to either the switch or the computer and then the Xbox one to the computer. So I could do either two players there or we could have lots of players on the switch too.

No matter what I did was not able to Bluetooth pair that Xbox controller. Now, in fairness, I haven't looked super deep into it yet. So there probably is a solution somewhere, but I was on a plane. I didn't want to pay $30 for internet. So I didn't have the solution at hand. So I just had to plug in one controller, and then I was able to pair the Gilly Kid over Bluetooth. My earphones over Bluetooth.

No problems. The Bluetooth works, just not with an Xbox controller. We were playing bravery and greed. Okay, I haven't heard of that. Yeah. It's pretty fun. The tutorial is one of those game tutorials where they go, okay, here's how to do this.

Now here's how to do this. Now here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. And here's how to do this. Okay, go. And the difficulty is just like you need to be able to do all of those things immediately. It's kind of like a rogue light. Anyway, it's fun.

I see, I was, and it's recorded because I was streaming. But I got a controller to pair instantly. But it wasn't, it was like the, it was one of the ones from one of the roundups you guys did. Like a fly digie or? Flydigy something. Yeah, okay. I don't remember what it was, but that means that it had the dongle. Oh, yeah, Crystal asked.

I plugged the dongle and it worked right away. Crystal, oh, yeah, that would though. Yeah, no, I know. I'm just, yeah. Crystal asked, does your touchscreen work? Yep. Like, the number of things. The touchscreen working is pretty cool, actually.

Pretty wild, right? Yeah, that's pretty cool. And then it just, like, and then it just like, falls on its face on, like, the simplest thing. It's only the most common PC connected controller in the world. Yeah. And I couldn't, I couldn't connect it. Like, okay, shit.

Yeah. One of the, um, does, how does it connect? Does Windows have some like Microsoft crap and the Linux just doesn't have it by default? No, it uses Bluetooth. I mean, they do, but also I could just pair it to my phone if I wanted. Yeah, like it totally works. And like I can, I can connect on SteamOS. Yeah, rest assured says Xbox uses the X input stuff from Windows and there has to be a translation layer added.

That should be after it connects, though, to map the controller or something, wouldn't it be? Yeah, yeah, Xbox controllers work fine on MacOS and iOS as well. well. Like, it's, it's a thing. They, they, uh, so you might be thinking of some of the older Xbox controllers that were proprietary only for their wireless. Modern Xbox controllers are, you can just connect them as Bluetooth. I do believe they do show up as X input, but, um, for Steam games in particular, uh, Steam will handle any kind of X input translation that you might need on whatever it is that you're doing. And the fact that it wouldn't pair at all. I'm not talking about I got it paired. Yeah. And then the inputs were weird. It would map properly. It would not.

pair. It just wouldn't pair, which makes me think it's not excellent point. But yeah, I have some, oh, right, one of my, like, custom challenges that I'm probably going to end up doing. I might have already said this. I'm not sure. But I'm planning, I actually really like cinnamon. I'm pretty comfortable with cinnamon.

But having been using mint on my laptop, which I'm pointing here because my bag is here with my laptop in it, um, cinnamon feels better on mint. And I'm wondering if I should probably. just use KDE, which is what people expect you to use when you're running cacheOS. So I'm going to try to live swap out my desktop environments. Nice. I've tried that one. And just see how that goes. I tried the removal part.

You tried to, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm going to see how that goes. I think that'll be interesting to do. Something that I did do was I decided that I wanted to continue my like five or six years long adventure of trying to 100% Assassin's Creed Odyssey. My knees have been feeling a little bit better. So I was doing the treadmill walking thing. And I was like, I want to try to play a game using a controller while treadmill walking because that might be easier.

And I tried to install what is it even called now, Ubisoft Connect? Yeah, whatever is called, You Play. Yeah. I just call it You Play. Sure, okay. It only exists as you play. I had a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to do it because I was searching for UPlay stuff and then realize that I was calling it the wrong thing. But sure, yeah, you play.

and it was no problem to get you play installed, the Microsoft Connect, whatever it is. It was no real problem to install the game. I clicked play. It didn't launch. I went off to go to other things. I haven't continued to try to troubleshoot. I gave it literally zero minutes of troubleshooting.

It just didn't work immediately. That is the first thing at all that hasn't worked immediately. Mind paradox says I have one laptop running Linux that won't connect to an Xbox controller. The other running the same flavor of Linux will. no clue why. It probably comes down to the Bluetooth hardware and just some kind of weird edge case. Another thing is that I have put also zero time into this, but I have noticed, there isn't enough of a symptom that I could like screen record it and prove it to anyone. My brain's just detecting freaking ghosts or something. I don't know. But the computer just starts to kind of feel weird. And then if I restart it, it's fine.

So instead of sleeping my computer at night, I've just started shutting it down. And then I just turn it on in the morning. But if I sleep it at night and wake it back up, it just feels weird. And I don't have a bad, I don't have a good explanation for this. I don't know. It just feels odd. It feels like it's like maybe kind of slow or like, I don't know, but not slow enough that it like makes a ton of like I can't record it and show it to you but it maybe I'm like maybe

the menu opens a couple frames slower than it normally would or something like my brain can tell something's happening right I restart the computer I'm like oh okay it's it's like perfect now um but it is no problem if I just shut the computer down at night because it will for sure be fine for a whole day so like if I just shut the computer down instead of sleeping it it's no problem. Okay. I tried just leaving it on over the night instead of sleeping to figure out if it was sleep. Yeah. No. Okay. It was not just sleep. So it has to be something to do with time. My onboard audio stopped working randomly. That's weird. Yeah. And you know what's funny is I have that in my open questions here. Onboard audio not working on my laptop. When did this happen? Question mark,

question mark. I feel like it was working at some point. Or was it? Like I'm like gaslit about my onboard audio and I looked just now and it is showing up. So I almost wasn't able to- Have you been updating? I don't think I've updated since then. Okay. I almost wasn't able to do WAN show last week because if I had had to use my onboard audio with my mic, like just with my IEMs with the built-in in-line mic, I wouldn't have had a working audio device because it just was not working. Oh. But because the road microphone that I bought had an audio device on it. I was able to use that. And then, so I was really confused by that at the time

because I thought it was working. And then now I'm looking at it right now, and I do have an audio device. Is it actually outputting anything, though? Someone asked, is it a really slow memory leak? I don't know. I opened, the extent of the work I did on it was I opened B-top, and it didn't look like it.

Oh, this is not working. So I have our stream. So it's there, but not functioning? I have our stream on. I can see level. Yeah. Oh, wait. Wait, what?

Is that a mic? What? Oh, no, no, it is from that. It just, it happened that the levels were jumping in time with me talking right now. It really was. That was super weird. I know you guys couldn't see that. Yeah.

It did literally exactly track his voice. Yeah, that was really trippy. It seemed like, I was like, what's happening right now? This makes no sense. No, so theoretically I have levels, but I am not getting, I'm not getting any kind of output. And again, like, you know, to its credit, the function keys, mute and everything, all that works perfectly. I just am not getting any audio output. Also, on the, on the mint side of things on my laptop, just still no issues at all. It's been completely rock solid. At this point in time,

if I was going to recommend somebody at distro, I've been, I've been enjoying, no, I know, I've been enjoying Cashie. It's been a fun experience. I would still do mint, man. Like, if, it's just so much easier. The like level of difficulty stepping into it is just so low. And I'm sure people, just like last time will get pissed at me and I just, I don't care. It's, it's so much easier. I showed, uh, I was showing mint to Emma. And she was like, oh yeah, this all just like makes sense. And it's like, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I've been told a lot of times by various members of our audience that intuitive design is not a thing. And no, no, it, it is. And Mint feels pretty intuitive.

Especially an older school Windows user, like most of Emma's Windows experience is like XPVista. And sometimes intuitiveness is context dependent. Relative, yeah. Yes. And so, you know, I think that came up when I was talking about the intuitiveness of something on iOS, where someone was like, that's intuitive to some people. And I'm like, well, it's not iOS users because here's all the other ways that iOS does this. And it's not that way.

so that's not what intuitive means why don't we jump into Sony oh sorry one quick last thing I would bring up okay uh mint has been like sleeping super effectively on the laptop the battery usage seems lower than Windows was other things it's been it's actually really great

something that I'm right now pretty confident is going to survive through this challenge is my laptop being on mint. It's actually just been better. And like my argument, the last time I tried this, which was a long time ago, switching a work computer over, was that Linux got in my way too much. Even Teams has been pretty solid for me. Teams was weird for me for some reason. Well, okay, I ended up figuring it out.

My, my, I think Teams is just a bad program. Really? Tell us how you really feel. And the, like, web app-a teams for Linux thing, I don't think it's really, like, worse. It's just still teams, which is, like, just still a problem. I don't think it's really like the open source project that's the problem. It's just teams. Why are you going to keep attacking teams?

We just dropped 300 live viewers, Luke. Teams fans. No, I'm kidding. It's a reporting glitch. Sorry, I'm not going to start complaining about teams. but crap was I going to say yeah no it has gotten in my way a lot less than Windows is now so it's actually switched I think it would actually be for me at least a productivity reduction that's funny to go to Windows I wrote a whole paragraph that's basically this I think the general conclusion for me is that I could switch but I won't part of the problem. And this is a midway conclusion. This is not the final conclusion. But it's where I'm sitting right now. And I think that a big part of what makes switching difficult is your perspective.

If you want Linux to be a replacement for your Windows PC, then you may end up disappointed. But if you think of Linux, and I mean from a gaming perspective, as more of a console, where you start with what is compatible with my console and you play that, then you may be ready if you can have that perspective. But I don't buy many consoles and I don't do the bulk of my gaming on them. And if you want the broadest compatibility, Windows is still king, especially if there's a social element to your gaming and your group wants to play something that is not Linux-pilled. With all that said, this is the paragraph I wanted to read, I don't think I can go back

to vanilla Windows anymore either. Yeah. It has been so refreshing to not be bothered a single time over the last month to reaffirm once again that no, I in fact do not want Edge as my default browser. It's been so nice. So I think. It's been oddly like calm. Yeah. Like I actually think I'm more relaxed.

Like this is just I fired up my computer before the show and it just had all my stuff on it that I was doing. Yeah. And nothing else. Yeah. Well, I had that Kibbuntu live boot thing, but someone gave me the command to fix that. I just haven't put it in a terminal yet. But that's the other thing, too, is if something like that happens, I believe that I can fix it. And it might be work to fix it, but I believe that I can fix it.

So if I care enough, I'll go do it, and it will probably stay fixed. And with Windows, if I remove recall or I say no to One Drive, or I do whatever, they're going to find some way Windows is going to update. do something, it's going to worm its way back in. Second half, 26. And I feel like I'm constantly under attack. Yeah. Where with Linux, it's like, I mean...

It's, you know, it's kind of a piece of shit sometimes. But I'd rather work on my... But it could get... It's going to get better. Yeah. I think that's the big one. Windows is the... Windows can be a piece of shit sometimes,

and it's constantly getting worse. And Linux can be a piece of shit sometimes. And it's constantly. And it's constantly getting better. And it's God, so much better than since the last time we tried. Holy crap. The updating experience on Mint is like amazing. The updating experience on on Cashi is also actually extremely easy. And I really like watching the little Pac-Man thing go across. It's very fun. It feels very like Windows XP, D-Frag. In Cashi, when you update, you, well, in many, you can do it many different ways. But Pac-Man, the like packages.

installer and you can update with it and stuff like that. It shows a little yellow sea that goes across and eats the like dashes as it like progress bars. And I just I just like stuff like that. Oh, some people are saying don't leave us hanging on the game. I did say it. It's called bravery and greed. Yeah. We haven't played a ton of it yet. We've played like an hour. But it was it was fun what we played. It's a little it's a little hardcore gamery for Yvonne. Like even I was having trouble. Oh my God, I started playing God of War. I'm, man, how many hours am I into it? Okay, so I would say that I'm five hours into it

because I have five hours of playtime. I am maybe one hour into this game. Did it redo stuff? Because it's so hard. Oh, interesting. I've never played a God of War game. Oh, no, it's very different. So the combat is not

you know, press light attack, heavy attack block. It's like, okay, well, you could be in two completely different fighting modes with your axe and without your axe. And depending which opponent you're playing against, you may want to be using the axe or not using the axe. And when you're using the axe, here's all of your special button press combinations that you might want to use. Don't forget you need to time your blocks exactly perfectly. You're playing the controller, yeah. Here's your button to swivel around and face the other way immediately. And when you have your axe, don't forget you can throw your axe,

but also here's all the other ways that you can contort your hands in order to. By the way, you have to fight like four things at once, and they don't like wait around for you to be ready. I'm not playing on the hardest difficulty because I thought that would be crazy. I'm playing on the like, just like give me a challenge difficulty. And it is absolutely kicking my ass. So, yeah. I um you're playing on a controller yeah are you not supposed to I mean no you are I just that game

really sold me on like weapon feel in video games oh really acts is probably one of the like best feeling weapons and like especially when you're playing with a controller and the sound mixed with the haptics and everything it just feels meaty when you throw it and you catch it again it's like oh I have my my my my bro back like it just I don't know it felt great well I'm uh you know an hour into it. I've made a little more than an hour. But you are five hours into the feel. I've made a little more than an hour of progress.

Basically, I'm at the point now where I'm figuring out that, okay, I will need to use every single move in this tech tree. Not only I will need to use them, but I will need to be muscle memory familiar with them, which I'm still deciding if I can commit to in current year for a video game. Or if I just need to ratchet down the difficulty. So we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I've been playing it exclusively on Linux. You want to know what's kind of funny?

Imagine playing a PlayStation game on Linux. Like just seriously, though, if you told me 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah. I'd be like, come on. Yeah, for sure. That is wild. That's crazy. That's so cool.

And it's not like some crazy, well, it kind of is, but it's not some crazy like emulation thing. Like, you're not emulating a PS1. Yeah. order to play it. Yeah. It's a very, it's a current-ish god-of-war game that runs on current generation console.

I know it came out in 2018. Stop it. What I mean is that it's not a PlayStation 1 game. I hear you. It's not something that you can just emulate on a potato. Yeah. It's a beautiful looking game and it's just flipping, running on Kiboon 2 on my laptop,

Strix Halo is so cool, dude. Yeah. Like, it's so cool. Yeah, that's really, I cannot, yes. I cannot love Strix Halo hard enough and hate how much it costs more. Oh, sorry, you were going to say something. I have way less, I've just been covering.

Okay, so Slate Spire 2, I haven't really looked into it, but there's no, like, windowed mode. And normally, if you see me play it. You need a windowed mode? I usually play it. Oh, that's right, because you're busy playing that instead of actually readying up in the lobby. Yes. Yes, I'm familiar with you.

Usually I play it in like a very, very small window. A style over top of the chat box where we're all telling you to ready up. Yes, yes, I've seen that. That was unintentional, my bet. But usually it'll just sit on like a side monitor. Yes, he's that guy, Mr. O'Mut. No, I did it literally once. I'm sorry.

But it sits on a side monitor and I'll often just ignore it. It'll be very common that I'll finish a run and it'll be like, oh, your runtime was like 40 hours because I just didn't. play it. And so I just by two is full screen. So I just I'm just like well okay. This is my like oh I have five minutes. I'll throw some cards and then ignore this for eight hours game.

And that actually like I these days are just put stuff on top of it. Is there a weird hacky way to run full screen games in a window? There's got to be probably. I just haven't bothered. But it's been interesting that like you know, say with a fire two's out. I'm going to play that. instead of Slayless Spire one. But my overall playing of Slaith Spire,

if you look at steam hours, has like plummeted. Not even contributing to the concurrence. Yeah, it's not as easy to idle. It's people like you that are the reason that it didn't be. Maybe, to be honest. They were that close to Silk Song and couldn't do it because of this man. Yep, yeah, yeah.

The worst example of that was I went, I think this was when I used to have to leave my computer on for work reasons all the time. And I think I went on one of those like, I went to Taiwan and then took a week off trips and came back and it was still running. Nice. I was just like, oh crap. Yeah.

Oh, right. Holy crap. We really should have called out CW a lot earlier. I actually meant to do it right at the beginning of the show because there is so much going on with Creator Warehouse and LTD Store right now. This week we launched our system error. collection. Luke, do you want to bring up the site?

Apparently other people have it. Maybe I tried too early and they updated it or maybe my system's just being weird, but other people have it windowed mode. I don't know. Anyway. Sorry, which one? Is it a system error? There's no link. I'll just go to the site. I believe in you. The first item in this collection

is the error message hoodie which is inspired by all the inventive ways that your computer sh-s-its itself. This is very swag. Isn't it? It's very swaggy. Is that cool or what? It looks sick. Freaking love it.

You got the little dinosaur with the cacti. You got the 404 error. Like, oh, what a cool, like, if you know, you know, hoodie that just also just looks really cool. And if you don't know, then it just looks like a cool hoodie. We've got the Chrome Dinosaur, an overheating PC. Willie, our Whaleand mascot. Did we name him Willie? Oh, man.

I mean, I guess that makes sense. And a very mentally stable cat, all packed into one slightly chaotic design. Plus, it's printed on a 100% cotton French terry hoodie, so it's actually comfortable enough for everyday wear. Isn't that awesome? Freaking love it. The next item in the collection is the Just Rage Quit T-shirt. This design is our take on that 90s era assistant.

You know the one. But ours is a little more unhinged. We had to really craft the copy for this one so that it didn't sound like go kill yourself. That would be an AI. Yeah, we, we, so we ended up with just rage quit to make it more computery, Gamerie. Finally, not last but least, we have our boot-up toaster t-shirt. This one's a reference to that old PC you had when your siblings called dibs on the nice one,

the one that sounds like an airplane taking off but struggles to open a web browser. Like always, it's printed on our classic shadow blank teas, and you can shop the entire system error collection at LMG.g.g. I always like the little twirl one, this one? because I think it's really cool that you can actually really see the fabric and now they're doing that. Now you can really really see the fabric. I love our blank t-shirts. The team does such a great job.

Yeah. But wait. There's more. What? The tax rate off sale is back. It's tax season, baby. So we went through our warehouse and pulled out a bunch of stuff that has been taken up space and needs to be written off. That includes mystery screwdrivers, mystery shirts, mystery tall shirts.

Whoa! Get a deal on tall t-shirts! I actually just do that. We also have used but like new bags. We have mystery water bottles. We've got some of those retro monitor pet caves that we found in a corner somewhere. Those have been actually really popular. So take advantage of this sale.

And, yeah. Some of these. things are discounted probably a little more than they should be. What? $120 off, $150. Yeah, don't worry about that. It's only a Thunderbolt 3 dock, so it's an older Thunderbolt dock. Is it just in here twice? But it checks out. I was about to clear it. That's just in, that's with displayboard. Yeah. Okay. Um, they cost the same. Yeah, some of these are discounted a lot. Uh, you can think of the sale as kind of like the buying RAM without mortgaging your house sale, says my copy here. Okay, sure.

You can shop the sale at LMG.g.g. slash tax write-off 2026. We got the onesie in there. We got the washed crew neck. It's tax right off season, baby. So we've got a few screensaver party shirts

and various sizes. Some of these, not every size is going to be available. So make sure you guys are checking quick and getting your hands on... Yeah, I was trying to... I was trying to... There was a... Let's see if I can find it.

Oh, right. And as always, now's a great... great time to place an order because you can also send a checkout message. Do you want to show them how to do it? Just add something to cart. It is in stock? What the? Oh yeah, that's a really nice shirt. Did this get restocked like today? It has like a nice stretchy fabric and it has a little lanyard thing in the pocket so you can put your ID card on it and stuff. Yeah, I wanted something that because the stretchy fabric. Yeah. I wanted something that was comfortable, but a little bit sharper just for when I need to wear that. Yeah. And I was shopping on the store. I was going to grab one of

these and I thought Excel was sold out, but apparently it's not. Oh, no, it's this is the U.S. Right. Well, throw it in the cart and show people how to send a checkout message. Pure. There you go. In the cart, you'll see this interface when we're live. It's the best way to send a message into the show. We believe that throwing money at random streamers, I mean, if you want to do it, that's cool. But if you throw it at us, you should get high quality merchandise in return. So go ahead, place your order. Your message will go to producer Dan, who will reply to it or pop it up. there we go down there kind of like that or who will curate it for me and Luke to respond to

so Dan do you have a few comms for us to respond to I do oh you do my goodness we've got a few are into the sales today people placing orders today oh yeah global store sell out of excel that makes sense hi LLD a couple questions about the whale land VIP if I fly to BC will the custom PC include component boxes so I can disassemble and ship at home also can VIP and bring your own computer plus sit together? Because that's the plus ones. Oh. Wow, those are really good questions.

That's very good questions. I don't think it includes all the boxes, but I believe we could accommodate taking the GPU out, at least. Because the systems are shipped to us. So, like, I think we're partnered with StarForge on them. So they're shipped to us. They obviously got here. So they should be safe to ship.

The case box is included. Oh, oh, look at that. Hobbs is in the chat. Of course he is. It says StarForge handles the shipping. There you go. So there you go. StarForge apparently gets the systems back from us.

Make sure they're good and then reships them. That's pretty sick. Apparently, that's how it worked in the past at least. I think that's cool. As for a VIP and a BIOC plus sitting together. I don't know. I don't know. I think you might have to contact support on that one.

They'd have to get back to you. It might be possible. Like, if support, I don't know, it might be possible if you to sit on the end. VIPs also get twice as much space. So realistically, if you put like a non-whale ticket, if you were just willing to have your space and put another person in it,

I couldn't see us saying no. I don't know. That would seem pretty chill. We don't have power though and stuff. I think we'd probably be okay. We could probably figure something out, but just check. Yeah, definitely check with the whale land team.

Okay, Mr. Dan. I got another one here then. I just got a couple of kittens. Any advice on how to organize my setup to make it safer for them and more reliable for me? Oh boy, do I ever have the thing for you? Boop-to-boop-boop-boop-boop-boop. Gear, magnetic cable management. See this?

This is your life today. This is your life with all your cables out of reach of your cat. Seriously. Basically, aesthetics is one reason to have all the cables up off the floor and like, like, channeled up the leg of your desk and like carefully tucked into everything. Pets. Pets and babies. That's the other big one. They are so much less tempted to play with them and chew on them when they're just all, all managed.

And when you do it magnetically, it's not better. It doesn't look better than using little plastic zip ties or doing whatever. it was that you were doing already. And it's really expensive. So how could I possibly sell the solution? Because when you do it with magnets, it will stay done. That's the difference. As soon as you go to change something, when you used little plastic zip ties or whatever,

you go, oh, crap, okay, uncablet. You're not going to redo it. You're going to be able to motivate yourself to do it one time. And if you do it with magnets one time, then when you go to change something, there's no excuse. you just and you're good to go I will say

I love it my with the with the move back in I haven't re cable managed everything and when I put my desk into like Omega standing mode because not only is it standing

but it's also standing while I'm standing on a tall thing oh right on your treadmill yeah so it's like super tall all the cables were tangling and Emma walked in the room and it was just like hmm nice

I was like okay and it does kind of suck but I'm not starting from zero because the pads are still there. Nice. So it won't be as bad this time. Nope, it won't. It'll still take a bit, but it won't be as bad. Yep.

Gerasol actually has another great suggestion that could save you some money. You could use just a couple of the larger MCMs to attach your baby to the wall. That will keep them away from all the dangling wires. That actually... You could use that on a cat as well. I figure if you have four of them,

you just do one for each leg, and then they shouldn't be able to go anywhere. Yeah, I'm not. Extra large for the tail? Not actually pet or child care advice. Yeah. Are cats magnetic? No, no, they're not.

But you'd use the arch and you'd kind of pin down the leg with it is sort of what we were thinking here. Kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding, kitty, kidding, kiddie, kidding, don't worry about it. The point is, we're doing another topic now. Let's talk about, Ooh, Sony,

issuing an update for the PlayStation 3, nearly 20 years post launch. Whoa. That's right. Update 4.93 just hit on a console that launched in November of 2006. The patch notes just say improves system performance,

the same vague wording that was used for the last three updates, but it is believed that the real person purpose is almost certainly anti-jill break measures and a Bluetooth key, uh, Bluetooth, Blu-ray key, uh, encryption key renewal,

which is especially relevant now that Netflix on PS3 has been discontinued, leaving physical media as one of the few remaining use cases for owning the console, aside of retro game, aside from retro gaming. I have to say, I'm going to interject for a second. I, I understand the market trend for physical media is that it's going down.

Mm-hmm. I think it's a lot of it's because there isn't really as many options anymore. And, Oh, kind of two things here. And I have never seen so many people go to places like Willow Video, a like used media store, mostly games, to buy physical like DVDs, blue rays, stuff like that. That place has been bumping. The last two times I've gone in there, there's been like six to eight other customers. It's a small store.

And most of them are buying like Blu-rays. it's been kind of interesting Do you think Blu-rays are going to become trendy like vinyl records? I don't think it's Hey, this is old-school trendy because some people are renting

We walked through their Blu-ray rental section And there was whole rows of movies That were just gone, fully rented out. I think people are just really tired of online subscription stuff And it's like Fascinate

Kind of really expensive And it might be easier to bud like, oh, we can go rent a Blu-ray for not that much money, then I am guaranteed spending however much it is now every single month on like Netflix and maybe also Disney and also maybe Amazon and also maybe whatever all the other ones are. And it's, it's really interesting. How much do they charge to rent a Blu-ray? I'm not sure off the top of my head. I can't imagine it's more than like movie rental rates DVD and Blu-ray new releases $4 for a one-night rental. Where else can you get a night out for five bucks?

I'm saying $4 for the Blu-ray and then a buck for make-it-yourself popcorn at home. You know what's not really all that actually fun? It's not a night out, but it's, you know, is flipping through movies and Netflix. Do you know what I have watched people in the last couple weeks have actually a lot of fun doing? is shifting through the shelf in Willow. I actually hate both solutions for digital media management. And when I say both solutions, what I'm talking about is Netflix, which algorithmically serves you stuff that they think you'll like based on your past behavior,

which in my account is a mess because I'll use it here at work just to put on things that are going to look nice on a TV. and also mine was the catch-all before they had profiles for all the various members of our families. So my recommendations mean absolutely nothing. I hate that Netflix doesn't tell you any kind of either critic consensus or audience consensus evaluation of the quality of this media before you start watching it. I can't deal with that. Flipside.

Plex, which includes both. critic consensus and Rotten Tomatoes, audience consensus, as well as IMDB ratings, or at least I have mine configured to do that, also sucks. On the one hand on Netflix, I don't want to commit to anything

because I have absolutely no way of knowing if it's hot garbage, bring back dislike buttons on absolutely everything with Marquez on this, and then when it comes to Plex, I'll see something that catches my eye in this like smorgasbord of too many options and I'll go oh that actually looks like something I would enjoy

and then I'll get deterred I'll get deterred by someone else hated it and what is really stupid about that is there's movies that I love like just I'm sorry this is going to be an unpopular opinion I fucking love major pain you know what

do is it politically correct today uh i mean it's a wayans brother wayans whyans whatever it's it no let's let's put it that way did critics think that this was a quality film no do even most audience members okay most yes but that's realistically only going to be fans of this sort of like I'd have to Is this a culty movie? It's got to be. There's no way. You see clips from it all the time.

It's in memes all the time. Do you? Oh yeah, it's in tons of memes. Oh, I don't come across. It's in memes for sure. I have almost never come across it in memes. But anyway, look, I love this movie,

but this is a movie that if it wasn't one of the nine VHSs that my friend owned, you know, like you remember how we used to select a movie. is you were at a friend's house for the evening and they would have like a dozen movies and you'd watch one of them it would be obviously one that they've seen 10 times because it's one of the few movies they own but you've never seen it, you watch it together

like that's how I ended up watching basketball because it was one of the like handful of movies that Kenny Alaprandini owned and I was at his house that night and shout out Kenny by the way I know he watches LTT because he messages me every once in a while so how are you doing Kenny? And that's probably, I mean, that's probably another movie that's like probably not especially well critically rated. Yeah, it's got 40%. It's got a rotten score. And even a 74% audience score, I would consider not, you know, that great. I actually don't know if that's a good movie. I haven't watched it since I was a teenager. So I mean, neither. Major pain I have. It was. And it holds up. I freaking love it still. I have no idea if basketball does. But it was a, to quote chat, it was a banger when we were in high school.

Like, I don't know. I also want to point this out. This was crazy to me. I saw this too. And these were very actively being rented out. Oh, wow. 10 bucks for a week for a Nintendo Switch or PS5 game? You can beat a lot of games in a week.

Yeah. Especially if you have a week off. Again, whole rows missing, fully rented out. Like, what? Let's go will a video. That type of stuff, renting games, renting movies, buying Blu-ray's is, actually kind of popping right now, which is very interesting. I don't know if I've told this story on the show, but one of the reasons why I've called out Willow a few times is back in the day at a

restaurant that is now closed, which adds a little bit of more ominous tone to the story. I was sitting there eating with somebody and a couple tables away. I recognize the owner of Willow sitting there talking to someone who looked like probably a CPA of some kind with a papers all over the place talking about how times were tough. This was, this was a long time ago. Okay. And I was like, damn, that's been my favorite store since I was like, a tiny child. I hope it doesn't close.

And that's when I kind of decided to lock in and just like, I'm only going to buy gaming stuff from them. Right. That was, in that moment was when I did that. And now I've extended that to other stores as well that are like, you know, I only go to the one gas station, different things like that. Oh, I tried to, okay, sorry, finish your story. You should, I mean, you don't buy gas at often, but.

Nope. Which is cool. But I don't think like I still love going there and now I just go there because it's freaking awesome. But I don't know if they like need that anymore. It is I, back in that era, I would go in there and I'd maybe be the only person in there or there'd be somebody else. Yeah.

Lately, man, it's just been popping off, which is awesome. I think that's super cool. It's been so cool. Dude, I tried so hard to, uh, to, to, to shop at. at a Canadian chain yesterday. And it, like, completely didn't work. I needed three, what I considered to be reasonably basic things. I needed a long two-millimeter Allen key.

Like, not one of the ones that's on the little, like, folding thing. And not an interchangeable bit one, because obviously I have my own tools for that. I needed a long one because it had to go, it had to go through the, like, axle into the differential on an RC car. It had to go all the way through this thing in order to detach it.

So I need one of those. I needed some brake cleaner and I needed some clear lithium grease. Okay. Relatively basic. Okay, a little bit. It's not a two by four, right?

So I tried to get all three of those things at Rona and we struck out on all three. And I had a super helpful sales associate. They told me after that they knew the channel. So they were like super duper helping me try to find all these things. We couldn't get any of them. Rona's no longer Canadian. Since when? They got bought out by somebody. Oh, when the heck was that? Well, whatever. I tried to go to

home hardware, who I know is definitely Canadian. Which is definitely Canadian. They were closed because they apparently operate on bankers hours. So I had to go to Home Depot. They really do. And they had, they had all three of the things. Rona got bought by private equity? Yeah, Sycamore Partners, U.S.-based private equity firm. Oh, 200023. Home Hardware, however, is a private, 100% Canadian-owned and operated companies, structured as a dealer-owned cooperative, and it has more than a thousand locations. The only problem is... It's never open! They just don't really feel like being open a lot of the time.

They actually, for how big their stores are, they have a shocking selection. Home Hardware is usually like a small store in like kind of strip mall-style situations. Yeah, I needed some, I needed some random like gas fitting or something. and I had actually, this was before I even cared about going to smaller stores at all. And I, so I had already struck out at, I think, Canadian Tire, Home Depot, and Rona. And I was like, oh, yeah, home hardware. Okay, maybe. Because I needed it for that weekend, for a barbecue.

I needed this, like, random gas fitting of some sort. Right. Because the barbecue I bought at Costco used a U.S. interface instead of the like one that was more standard in Canada or something like that, even though I bought it at Canadian Costco. Anyway, the point is home hardware had it. They had one unit in stock. And I was like, how do you have this?

And they're like, I don't know, we try to have the rights. I'm like, okay, you know what? It doesn't matter why you have it. I'll take it. It was like $13 or whatever for one stupid thing. But I was happy to have it because I was able to make burgers. All right. why don't we oh wait no i'm not done talking about the playstation three update yet i want to talk about

the scary part of sony providing firmware updates on a 20 year old console on the one hand that's pretty cool right for them to update the the blu-ray encryption key and all that on the other hand what the fuck what if they hadn't what if sony someday doesn't exist to update to update the firmware this how much does it suck that not only today the things we're getting today are at the mercy of the manufacturer to allow them to continue to function but already we're reaching end of life probably i mean there's no way they continue doing this forever right it's been 20 years we're already reaching the point where pretty basic they did pretty old yeah that's cool but pretty old stuff is purely at the mercy of the manufacturer who made it 20 years ago for it to continue

to function in the way that they said it would. I just wanted to share that little awful thought. Yeah, I don't know how it works, but somebody said it would only affect new releases on Blu-ray, which is not as bad. It still sucks. Not great. Yep. Yep. like I mean my my VHS player doesn't care when my VHS came out no it will just read it now it won't run a DVHS mind you okay like there are you know we have standards people literally we have standards DVHS is a standard I knew I knew yeah yeah yeah we need we need Riley's like thing that he was doing

thanks Dan that was actually pretty good all right well oh float plane announcement yes we should do that what's going on on float plane this week. Early access, early access time. We have opinions about tech. Like, is open source always better than closed source software? Is piracy okay? You've probably developed some thoughts on these subjects.

But do you share the same opinion as the LTT writers? Do they share the same opinions as each other? Find out on float plane early access right now. Boop. Save. Cablamo. You're welcome. What else do we have going on on float plane right now?

Oh, wait, I'm supposed to explain the video further. We gave the writers a statement. They have to say how much they agree or disagree with it, then defend their position, and they can change their position after listening to their peers. That's interesting. Science stuff. You can also check out the nine questions that we cut. But from the main release, boop right now.

Because it was going to be too long. I mean, we knew we were filming extra when we went into it. So we cut some of them. All right. Sponsors 1 and 2. The show is brought to you today by Vessi. They say April showers bring May flowers. But what about March flowers?

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So as things get busy and it starts getting tempting to cut corners to save time, don't let what you put in your belly be one of those shortcuts. Head to factormeals.com slash when 50 off and use code when 50 off to get 50% off and free breakfast for a year. Eat like a pro this month with Factor. New subscribers only, varies by plan, one free breakfast item per box for one year while subscription is active. Did I do the voice pretty good? It was pretty good. I tried.

I tried to do it pretty good. Do you want to pick a topic for us? Yeah, I do. I really do. You've picked too many topics today. I'm frustrated about it. I'm pissed, really. Sorry. He did three. I think we've only talked about three topics. I wasn't even certain that you were the only one that picked them. I just went with it. Anyways, what I'm actually pissed about is Windows recall existing, and I'm happy that this happened. Windows recall was cracked again. Security researcher Alex Haganah, or Zytax. Um, most, sorry, Twitter. Yeah, on Twitter or other things that have handles. Most, uh, their most recent dive into testing recall's vulnerabilities led to an update to total recall, the extraction tool that Alex developed to find the initial vulnerabilities

back in 2024 that exposed everything being stored in an unencrypted SQLite database. Sick. Sick. For those unfamiliar with Windows recall, it's packed into copilot plus to take regular screenshots of your screen and then stores it locally so that you can ask AI about what you've looked at in the past. It's limited to specific Windows 11 systems as it requires an NPU to support it. The feature originally was defaulted to enabled. Now it's opted. Which is a big improvement. Yes. But still an enormous problem because just because Luke

opts in and all of our chat logs on his system, he has opted in to start. He has opted in to does not mean that I am comfortable with that happening, especially if that were to be compromised at some point. I mean, I would never say anything in a chat to Luke that would be potentially compromat. So I wouldn't care if he enabled Windows recall. However, just in case he were to ever talk to someone who used, let's say, colorful analogies, for instance,

it might be better if he didn't enable it. Yeah. Supposedly, Windows has redesigned the, entire recall architecture to use virtual-based security. However, cybersecurity Kevin Beaumont, also known as Gossie the Dog. You missed a word expert in there, but yes, cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont. Yep. On various platforms, probably Twitter, confirmed that you can just read the database in plain text. Further adding, it contains all manner of fields, which aren't publicly disclosed for tracking the user's activity. Nice. Cool. One of the most dangerous parts is that

using the tool doesn't trigger any antivirus or EDR alert either and can be used as a standard user process. Microsoft may already be ahead of these concerns though. Sure, as a recent Windows Central article, everything can be broken. Everything that exists can be broken into its security can be correct, etc. Or may eventually be able to be. Like maybe today, we don't have the means to open that lock. Yeah. We'll get there. Someday.

Somebody will be curious and interested enough to... Or have enough money to buy the solution. We're talking... And when we're talking about something like recall, when we're talking about something as juicy as all of the user activity on a system, like there's state level actors, guys. Who have functionally infinite resources to put into this?

When the whole laptop saga was going on. Which one? Biden's son, Hunter Biden's laptop. Oh, gosh. How much would someone have paid? Oh, yeah. Anything. Anything.

Like, it's too much of like a, anyways. Microsoft may have already been ahead of these concerns. As a recent Windows Central article from January 30th pointed out, Windows recall is another AI experience that I'm told is under review. stating that their sources claimed Microsoft believes its current iteration has failed. I didn't actually, I read that article, and I don't believe that that article, I don't believe that that statement from Microsoft referred to that there are technical problems in the database being stored in plain text.

I read that as Microsoft understands that it has a PR problem. Yes. That was my interpretation of that statement from Microsoft. So I'm not going to give them credit for this. And neither of my computers running Linux have this at all, which is so cool. And I don't think we honestly have a ton more to say about that. Good job, Alex, good job, Kevin. Yeah.

Hell yeah. Google search. Oh, you want to do this one? Yeah. Okay, let's do it. Google search is replacing headlines. And they're using AI to do it because, of course, the Verge experimented, experience their own headline, which was, in quotes, I used the cheat on everything AI tool, and it didn't help me cheat on anything.

And it was changed to just cheat on everything AI two. I'm assuming that's supposed to be tool. No, I think. Is it actually two? I'll double check. The Verge pointed out that the change title almost sounds like they're endorsing the product. I agree. Oh, it was tool, yeah.

Yeah, okay. So cheat on everything AI tool. I don't even think it almost. absolutely does. The Verge pointed out that the change title almost sounds like they're endorsing a product. I think it just makes them actually sound like they're endorsing a product, which they did not recommend. Cheat on everything AI tool. Yeah, that sounds like an affirmative statement of the tool's real functionality. Especially from a place like the Verge. It makes them sound like they're saying there is a tool that allows you to cheat on everything. Especially because I'm looking.

That's crazy. I'm looking at the at the Verges article. here cheat on everything AI tool yeah it's I yeah I actually this is going to be one of those ones I actually disagree with Mr. Hollister I think that I think that I think that you're I think in trying to present a neutral viewpoint on this which good on you good job that's your job yeah as a as a journalist right that you did the right thing But I think in doing that, you're almost underselling how egregious this is. That is crazy. I don't think it almost sounds like an endorsement.

I think it sounds like, if not a like, you know, Billy Mays here with the cheat on everything AI tool. I think at the very least, it sounds like an endorsement of the functionality of the product. And it very clearly isn't because your original headline very clearly says it didn't help me. sheet on anything. Yikes. This is so bad for two very obvious reasons that people have already thought about, I'm sure. But there's the, by changing your title, they might make it less clickable, which would encourage people to just read the AI summary provided by Google and not click onto your site.

And also, in this specific case, it's a negative title about AI, which they changed into a positive or arguably, but I don't think so, neutral title about AI, as a company who's pushing really hard for AI stuff. So there's like two-pronged definitely bad. This isn't apparently the first time. Google earlier this year was also changing headlines in the Google News tab using AI as well,

and the Verge reported several times where it could give the wrong impression to what the article actually is, including one example where the headline was changed to the complete opposite of what the story actually was, which I think is arguably close to what just happened. The title was apparently US reverses foreign drone ban, was what an article was changed to when it was just an update on the foreign drone band,

not a reversal. Wow. Some comments on the article point out a great point such as, how is this even useful for Google? Well, you have to assume that Google is, I know I told I nope I disagree I see how this is very useful for Google yeah um Google is optimizing for click through and wants to keep you in their ecosystem I think cheat on everything AI tool from the verge is something I would be more likely to click on versus I used the cheat on everything

AI tool and it didn't help me cheat on anything because uh the original headline tells me all that I need to know that there are AI cheating tools that are useless I have no interest in AI cheating, so I don't need to know which specific one it is, so I don't really care. I don't need to click on it. Whereas the cheat on everything AI tool, if it works, I might be more, I might be more interested. Like, I guess I'd be more interested in finding one that works if I cared at all than finding one that didn't work and just hearing like a snarky, you know, anti-AI cheating article. You know what I mean? One of the things, I pointed out my two arguments earlier, but another one of the things with Google in general is they are

primarily interested in retention in their things so they can serve you ads and everything else. So they claim on YouTube that they care about satisfaction and not just retention. But to me, it feels like... A really hard time believing that. It feels like... What is satisfaction if not staying? Retention. Yeah.

And so I think that that has become a little bit perverted over the years. that focus on satisfaction has because retention can be such a powerful proxy for satisfaction, I think that, I think they've lost their way a little bit. And this would be a perfect example because, yeah, I'd be way more likely to click on US reverse as foreign drone ban, and I'd be, if I was an interested party, way more likely to click on the cheat on everything AI tool, then update on this band that already exists

and this thing didn't help me cheat on anything. So in terms of just generating click-through and engagement with Google search results in the Google news feed, yeah, 100% I can understand why they're doing this. Yeah, brutal. Your turn. Don't do that anymore, Google.

Like you're going to listen. What else we got? Do you want some good news? Yeah. Yeah, let's do some good news. Steve Wozniak. Actually, no, that's really exciting. Do that one.

Steve Wozniak saw the LTT core master remote video and liked it. Someone on Discord said they know Steve Wozniak and they sent the Coremaster Remote video to him. Steve responded saying, this is the coolest thing I've watched in ages. This part isn't in my notes. But he also said, I haven't finished watching the whole thing yet. I guess he's probably a pretty busy dude. But hey, I appreciate, I appreciate him watching at least part of it. And I also appreciate him bringing the core master remote into the world.

It is truly the sort of thing that could only be spawned by a big brain engineering type who cannot fathom that other not equally big-brained people. will not be able to fathom this. Uh, it, dude, this thing, did you watch this video? Yep. This thing is so, oh, it's awesome. Cool and totally still works. Even though it was released in, I believe, 1987.

Uh, it's been a while since I, like, reviewed the script with Jordan and actually, like, used the thing with Pankratz so I could get a little detail like a year wrong. But, uh, oh, here it is in action. I love this intro I'm just like going around using this like literally almost 40 year old remote how wild is that to wrap your brain around

and it works great and I'm controlling RGB strips and modern monitors and TVs and stuff with it it's so cool I'm not gonna lie I kind of wanted one after I watched the video like unironically as a cool useful piece of tech at home

not like oh i have this weird archaic thing i was just like oh it's actually just kind of nice it's pretty sweet yeah yeah it's it's really cool and the the deeper you get into it the cooler it is it's it's it's really cool um oh this is a anyway so i just i don't know man i thought that was pretty cool so the communication channels are now open uh i would, I would love it if we could do something with the Waz one day. I'm not making any promises. So maybe. I mean, I've,

maybe, who knows? Maybe. I'm not going to make any promises and I'm not going to put any words in his mouth because I haven't even corresponded with him directly yet. It's so far, it's been my people talking to his people and a message passed along. Yeah. But I just, I just, I just, I just, going through, like, doing like a history of Waz's projects would be so, say, I probably have.

to be a few videos, but it would be so sick. Yeah, I was going to say that sounds like an entire channel, Luke. Yeah, it's awesome. It's a great pitch, but it might be beyond the scope of what we might, what we might do. That Luke, you don't know, he's going to have to ship me around the world when he comes to visit. Let's contrast to that, unless there's more you have to add there. I mean, sure. Wait, what was I going to, what was I going to say? I don't know. I don't remember. is True NAS going closed source? Last week, True NAS updated the GitHub repository with a deprecation notice, stating that the repo is no longer actively maintained and have been moved to an internal infrastructure.

Immediately people were confused and frustrated asking what this meant for True NAS, especially since lots of people either self-host their own data or even run companies' infrastructure and data on True NAS. True NASCTO made a blog post to clear up any confusion stating the following, why we did it, colon. We had a growing problem with bad actors forking TruNAS selling closed source commercial derivatives under their own brands and ignoring GPL and other licensing obligations, no attribution, no contribution back to the project, no support for the community, or the engineering effort that built what they're reselling.

What this does not mean, we are not paywalling existing free features, Period. If it's a free today, it stays free. You then followed up with more clarification on a Reddit post saying the bottom line is the open source bits of true NAS will remain open source. They are GPLV3 after all. The build system is another matter. It's currently changing fairly radically internally now around a variety of reasons, which some of which are related to our signing infrastructure for secure boot, etc. Hmm. Interesting.

Many users understand the change and why it's being done, but are still not happy, mainly for the sake of transparency. So our discussion question here is, is the world trending more toward open source or closed source? I mean, I don't think we have to discuss that for too long.

I think overall we're trending towards open source. There is some, some cruddy stuff going on right now, but usually it's a pretty good ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, any trend has, you know, dips. I think overall the world is headed that way. I agree. I mean, there's a, there's a deep seek, is there not a deep seek thing coming? I've heard rumblings.

A deep seek thing? The last thing that like temporarily crashed the American AI market was deep seek releasing an open source model that like was pretty beast and I have heard through grapevines that there's like another one coming Oh like an AI thing

Yeah yeah okay a new model Oh I thought you were going to say like a like an open source NAS operating system and I was like really? Because I think true NAS is still the I think it's still the one even though there are aspects of it that they are No no no no deep seek is anticipated to release its next generation deep seek V4 model around the mid-February to April 26 timeline Oh, okay. The other question here was, does this affect HexOS at all being built on TruNAS investment disclosure in HexOS? No, it doesn't.

HexOS has another investment partner, TruNAS, X systems. So this does not impact their ability to make HexOS awesome and continue to be built on True NAS and all of that good stuff. So I'm actually, I was quite relieved to hear that that will not be able to be able. problem because that's the first thing that's the first email I sent when I saw this news I was like hey John is this going to be a problem yeah I was pretty confident it wouldn't just because I knew that though yeah he's like nope no it's all going to be good all going to be good hey speaking of things that are all going to be good I don't know if it's all going to be good but I want to try I want to touch the MacBook Neo I haven't actually I haven't seen one in person yet so I I did my video on the

Apple unveiling event six core CPU five core GPU 13 inch liquid retina, yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, can you imagine if I told you, you know, back when you were deliying that Asus Bamboo laptop, that you'd be able to buy a 600 US dollar laptop with a 2408 by 50606 pixel display? I mean, the first thing you would have said was what the fuck are those numbers for a display resolution?

Probably. And then the second thing you would have said after you did the math is, damn, that's some fine pixels per year. here. Yeah, it's only got 8 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage,

but guys. Honestly, at that time, I was even cheaper and I might have wondered if I could just get one in a lower resolution considering the screen size. 600 freaking dollars.

And if it would be fine, don't drop it now. Yeah, okay. Such a chaotic way of open things. That's it. That's your laptop charger. Pretty wild. I mean, it only has, like, I think it was like a 37 watt hour

battery or something like that. It doesn't even have a huge battery. Don't quote me on that. Allo, 8 gigs of ramp. Yeah, what you're doing on here is not that complicated.

Yeah. And it's 600 bucks. You ain't that deep, brother. 500 if you get the education one. Look at this. Look at this. This was apparently,

according to I Fix It, Apple's most repairable MacBook ever. It turns out Apple can just put screws in the damn thing so that we can just unscrew them and then just take the bottom off. It's nice that it's so repairable because the education stuff.

Yeah. If this ends up in schools, it's going to get beat on. Now, I actually saw that Frameworks CEO investment disclosure, Framework CEO did like a reaction to Apple's repairability versus framework. I suspect, I haven't actually watched it. I suspect, you know, yeah, it's not a framework, Nirav. No. But the way that an organization, like a school, is going to repair a laptop is not at the, like,

individual component level. It's like, can they swap in a new mainboard? like the entire, you know, thing, is it, is it possible at all? Can they get the bloody thing open compared to do they need like, you know, a heat gun or whatever to take apart the glue? So, yeah, are they making TVs? Did you message them about that? I mean, I messaged him about it, but I wouldn't be able to tell you anything about his response. Good enough. Um, and like, oh man, the rigidity? Feel it. That looks, I saw, I saw you. Feel it. It feels premium. Like, yeah, it's not milled out of a single piece of aluminum, right? Because they've got, they got screws on the

bottom. It just like pops off. So it's not like they, you know, it's not like a super fancy unibody, you know, like they used to do. There are a lot more expensive laptops. I've done that too that have just, uh, br-h-h-h-hitch feels good. I heard the clothes and knew it was nice. Whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you, did you, did the hair raise on the back of your neck down when you heard that sound? Yeah, I'm glad I'm not on camera. Did you get the tinkles? Did you get the tinkles? That was nice. Dude, the bezel isn't even that big. No.

Like? No. Okay, I'm going to try the keyboard. As far as I've heard, it's just the same keyboard. So it should be good. But we'll see. He didn't immediately... Hold on.

I'm entering the password. I'm entering the password. I'm not trying to use it yet. I'm not trying to use it yet. Oh, man. You know what, though? Dude, wait. I think I might have said a wrong thing.

The bottom's a separate piece, but the top does seem to be unibody. Holy crap. Dude, I think, I think that, I think that, I think this, am I missing something? Yeah, bottom is stamped, but I think the upper, the upper piece is, is milled out of a single piece of aluminum. It is unibody, yes. What?

For $600. How is it so cheap? Is it online? Are you on Wi-Fi? For $600, Luke. Are you on Wi-Fi? Oh, no, I'm not on Wi-Fi right now. No network LNG, I can connect.

Okay. Whoa. Go to Monkey Type. Wait, shut up. W. Colerini says it's injection molded aluminum. Right, because it's using a bunch of recycled aluminum. That's crazy. Dude, that is freaking nuts.

Yeah, current year sucks says, yeah, it's not CNC. It feels like it. could be. It feels really great. It feels like it could be. Like, I do not detect any difference in the rigidity of this chassis and in the deck flex of this chassis that makes me feel like I'm missing out on anything for it not being unibody.

Monkey type. Okay, hold on. I need just like, uh, what the bloody heck of pages. That's right. Oh, no, I was just saying go to the website, monkey type. It's a, it's like a typing test. It's just really easy. I don't know. It's what I use when I'm usually using keyboard. You don't know what to type and then this gives you like an objective. I don't care what speed you come out with. Yeah, for sure. Oh, I was about to say, well, hey, I should just plug into H-DMI and then everyone can just watch along with me. Yeah. Do you have, I might- That is a downside. I have a dongle. See, who can get their doggle first? No, I just gave up. All right. I don't go anywhere without one anymore.

Dan also went and grabbed one for the everyone that couldn't see that. Dongle life. Dongle life boys allow accessory to connect. I mean, we don't have to show people. Why not? We're having a live experience here. It's an experience.

Oh, right. I got to make sure I plug into the USB 3 one. I think it's actually the back one. Is it indicated anywhere? Yeah, software. Use other port for display. That's not bad. That's actually a pretty seamless experience

as far as... intuitive, one might say. This kind of sucks that only one of them supports display, but at least they're using software to make it a somewhat palatable experience for the user. Good luck getting it to work with my system here. Oh, really? Is that going to be a problem? If you can output 1080 and it not be pretend 1080, I hate that on Mac. Mac is pretty bad for it. Windows now, Windows 11, also bad for it. It actually really depends on the system. I think Nvidia in particular works a little bit

better. AMD seems to really struggle with it. I'm just checking here for you. Yeah, we ran into that when we were doing a game stream a little while ago, too. I think it was Intel and that was an AMD that was having the trouble though. It's not I can't remember. I think it was AMD

that we were having trouble with, where it was like 1920 by 1200. I am getting signal. It was outputing at 1920 by 1080 but it was actually a 4k signal or something like that that was like 4 to 1 or something it was ridiculous so yeah I tried 1920 by 1200 are you getting it I'm seeing it but I'm not getting it into my system here okay well give me a second that was no I'm over it okay it looks pretty smooth what age you mind too damn you jinged me okay so for a new keyboard you not used to uh yeah for a brand new keyboard. I'll take 98 words per minute with 96% accuracy. Thank you very much. Very pleased with that.

I think the meta on monkey type is not to go back and correct and you were going back and correcting. So you can see your speed going woof because you were going back. I guess that's true. So you probably even would have been a little fat. There's the, I think the 101 was your like true speed or whatever. Where's that? Raw is 101. So your raw input was 101. Yeah. So 101 words per minute on a freaking keyboard I've never touched before. Like literally, basically first typing other than the password. Man.

So I take it, keyboard feels pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. She's good. Nice. Just like not cheesy, stupid, regular old function keys. I know nothing about Mac OS. It has steam on it.

Trackpad's fine. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Labs has been at this already. This is not the fresh end box. after it, yeah. Yeah, there's steam for macOS. I picked it up from, that's why I brought it because it was in the lap.

Yeah, steam for MacLew. How much stuff is like... Not much. Yeah, okay. But like, you know, there's games. Like here, just like on Linux, it has a little Macpilled filter that you can apply to it.

That's a few. So on the Labs account, we got Baldersgate 3, you know, quality game that people enjoy. I heard it's pretty good. Control Ultimate Edition, CounterStrike 2, Cuphead, Cyberpunk, Dota, Factorio,

Hitman, World of Assassination. Rise of the Tomb Raider Shadow of the Tomb Raider Tomb Raider Sid Meyers Civilization 6 Hey that's It's pretty good at this point

Six 7 never will be but it is Back to the perspective adjustment If you think of your Mac as a console Then you know And you just go with whatever game Your Mac happens to run Then you could find stuff to play Man that's high DPI

Freaking screen $600 dollars. This is going to completely destroy the like I need a laptop for my kid or my grandma market. I would just buy this. I would just buy this. Build quality wise. No question. It seems like it's just a good like actually kind of great. Great. Like what the heck? At this price it's unrealistic. Basically if you can keep your tabs under control so you're not going to use more than the 8 gigs of RAM, it's going to be fine. Yeah.

Unreal. Oh, sorry, yeah, I'm not put back in down. That's actually, it's actually super impressive. This is all you need to know. I've heard, I know we... This is all you need to know? The fact that he couldn't resist touching it, it's a Mac.

Yeah, I don't think that's ever happened before. That's a pretty good point. He wanted to touch it and play with it. Yeah. I've never seen that. Yeah, I don't think I have either. I didn't do that like consciously. I was just like, oh, that's interesting and wanted to like check it out.

Yep. I knew you wouldn't be doing it consciously. You just, I put it there and you couldn't help it. You were like, this can't be as good as he's making it sound. I'm going to touch it. No, I was pretty sold when you had me do the flex thing. I was like, are you kidding me on a $600 laptop? That's insane.

That's insane. I still don't know. I meant your brain. No, yeah. You just, you couldn't help it. Yeah. You just, you had to touch it. Yeah.

You have to experience it for yourself. I still don't, like, I, I tried to open up, like, a menu or something and a bunch of emojis came up. Like, I still have no idea how MacOS works. MacOS and me just do this. But it's not actually MacOS's fault. Like, it, it seems like it's really intuitive for a lot of people. I just, I'm just so not used to it.

There's a lot of things that also people who use MacOS just wish they would change. Yeah. Like, one of the ones that drove me absolutely knucking futs during my last, switch to Mac was that the natural scrolling versus inverse scrolling direction. Apple's logic is that if you like it one way for your track pad, you also like it the... I know, it's crazy. If you like it one way for your trackpad,

you also like it the same way for your mouse wheel. So when you change that toggle in MacOS, they're bound. So every time I switched between using a track pad... Oh, I think I hate that. Where I like natural scrolling and using a mouse, where I like literal directional scrolling, I had to change it. I think there's a little app that you have.

Yeah. So just like anything on MacOS, there's someone built an app to fix it because Apple can't be bothered. But it would really just be better if Apple just like decoupled those things in the menu because a mouse and a track pad are not in fact the same thing. So how about we not treat them as the same thing?

That'd be great. Anyway, there are things about MacOS that are actually just pants on head stupid. But there's also things that are very intuitive to people to whom they're intuitive. What's interesting is this laptop has come back as 1920 by 1260p. So maybe there was just something that wasn't cromulent with the dock.

But, okay. It'd be interesting to see. Andre B asks, Linus, how is that different than Linux? And someone built something to fix a problem they had? That Apple is a multi-trillion dollar company. That's the problem. I hate one of my least, and I understand this is like, I'm going to be biased here.

I fully understand that. But one of my least favorite takes is when like I'll point at like Google or Microsoft or Discord, like I'll make fun of teams and people will be like, flooplane has bugs. Like, dude. Yeah, but like four people work on. Like this scale is so different. The team that works on emojis on teams is almost certainly larger than the entire. floatplane team so we don't even want to hear it yeah it's it's just like man you got to understand the

scale of certain things and you got to understand the importance of the work that they're doing float plane's work is incredibly important to us and our legion of dedicated people who support us on floatplane thank you guys very very much and the other creators on full plane but realistically if float plane you know had something suboptimal we're talking about ten of thousands of users and accessing a service that is not critical to them like getting their work done for the most part. The like economy of a huge part of the world. Yeah, relies on people using teams efficiently and effectively.

Yeah. Like we're not, we're not talking about, we're not talking about parallel software efforts here. Okay. Yeah. I love it when people make an effort to make an analogy. And I appreciate, I appreciate their effort. I appreciate their sacrifice. All right, why don't we jump into Facebook launching a new monetization program

to attract popular creators from TikTok and YouTube? Well, this is the first I'm hearing of it, so how popular could they possibly be? No, I'm just kidding. Facebook has launched Creator Fast Track, paying established Creators, creators guaranteed monthly income for three months to start posting reels on the platform. By the way, your company has heard of this. You just haven't. Right. A thousand dollars a month for creators with 100,000 plus followers on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram,

and $3,000 a month for those over a million. Content doesn't need to be exclusive to Facebook and old catalog content qualifies. After three months, the guaranteed pay stops, but creators keep access to Facebook's content monetization tools and get an ongoing reach boost. Facebook paid out nearly $3 billion to creators in 2025, a 35% increase year over year. So here's my problem with this. Obviously, I'd be surprised if we don't sign up for this because, yeah, I'll take Medis free money.

Thank you very much. Put that in, you know, the fund to pay people with or, you know, beautify the office or do whatever the crap else it is that we're doing around here with our money. funny um wait i agree this is linus's only poison you think i don't read the things you type in chat what is i meant to type position oh it is clearly oh okay uh it is critical to the world that we get our floatplane videos what do you mean says one of our floatplane viewers and i said i agree this is only linus's position okay i get it all right i get it but i accidentally typed poison what are you talking about my poison in here for yeah i know my best why is float plane conspiring

I was just joking and that I just completely type out a whole word and made it very confusing. Okay. So obviously I'll take meta's free money. I'm sure. Yeah, that'll help to fund various endeavors around here that we do. But I have about this much faith in their ability to build a creator monetizing system that is as powerful as what YouTube has done. For me, the bigger question is, will YouTube continue? to degrade in quality and eventually meet Facebook where they are making Facebook competitive.

Because Facebook has tried to compete in creator monetization before. They had a whole program. They were like, we're launching video. And then it turned out a lot of the stats for their engagement with that was actually very fake. And although the whole TV industry and especially newsprint industry is legitimately fake. Yeah, and how are they doing these days? Yeah, that's fair. So Facebook did that whole push and then completely abandoned video creators. And then didn't the same thing happen with live streaming?

So here's my issue, Facebook, is YouTube, for all of their warts, has been shockingly consistent. They have never altered the deal on the payout for Vod content. And while they didn't really have to, they created. a reasonable program for shorts as well, that shares revenue with the creators who create on their platform and who give their platform any value. I don't think that Facebook really understands

the value of original human crafted content. Facebook seems to be perfectly happy to simply maximize engagement with any slop garbage on their platforms. and that fundamental inability to understand what makes YouTube valuable, what makes YouTubers interesting for people to engage with, and the fact that Facebook has tried to court creators before and utterly failed because they just altered the deal and bailed.

Gives me zero faith that they understand what it is that people value about a platform like YouTube and that they. and that they will be consistent and will be able to support this over the very long term that it's going to take to build that trust. I just don't buy it. However, YouTube also seems to be shifting their priorities

and I'm not sure if YouTube fully understands the value of what they created over the last 20 years anymore either. I'm really worried about that. I'm getting pretty worried about it. What was I going to say? don't want to lose my thing, man. Yeah, I mean, it's overall, I think YouTube has been a pretty good, it's been a pretty good gig, hasn't it?

I don't even just mean, and it's been pretty great to use as a user. I was going to say both sides. Like as, as a, it's all about stacking Ws. Yeah. The more wins, it's been a win for sponsors and advertisers. It's been a win for the creator economy. It's been a win for viewers, I think, overall. YouTube makes more money on ads than like everyone.

Yeah. Like, it's clearly winning for them. Can we just not. f*** it up. And you've managed to do so for a really long time. Yeah. Like impressively.

Very. Just keep going. Like say what you will about Susan. Rest in peace, right? Like, clearly they did a lot right under her leadership. And I'm just, I've met Neil a couple times actually

because he didn't used to be like the CEO big shot. I never got to meet Susan. But I've met Neil a handful of times. And he's a super smart dude. I just, I want to see, I don't know, I kind of, I kind of want to chat with them, you know, just have a chat. Like, what are we, like, what are we doing? Careful.

Yeah. Can we please. Yeah. Can we please be careful? It's just, it's like, you know, everyone's driving down the road in like little normal cars and stuff. And they're trying to like, while all the traffic is go by, just roll a spaceship down the middle.

managed to for all of these years. Yeah. And now they're screwing around. And it's like, we, watch it. Terrible analogy.

But watch it. Because like, the potential damage is just so high. Yeah. So high. I think, like, I think you kind of compared it to the library of Alexandria sort of.

Yeah. No, not sort of. Directly. I believe it's a wonder of the world. We are legitimately at risk. of losing it. Like it's actually very important that they

like keep their head on their shoulders. Hey, I told you that during my vacation, I learned how to strip down an RC car differential. You did that off YouTube? Of course I did. I had to fix my washing machine a while ago. YouTube. It's really important. Everything I like learned these days

involves if not exclusively YouTube. So the Almighty Q asks, what are they doing that's so bad? it's not so bad as much as it is a direction it smells weird yeah the vibe is off as the kids might say um they're just they're doing stuff that's like it seems to not be aligned with the YouTube identity it seems to want to be everything to everyone instead of be itself Like I forget why I was talking to my kids about this for some reason,

about just like it, maybe it was to do with like their app usage or something like that, but it was just like how YouTube is not content to, no, it must have been Yvonne, how YouTube's not content to be YouTube. And they're so focused on how to compete with TikTok and how to compete with traditional media that they're losing track of,

of what made them special in the first place. I don't, I don't want, I was talking to, yeah, I remember now, I was talking to Yvonne about how you felt the need to remove the YouTube app from your phone. As like a deep enjoyer of YouTube. Yeah. And how that felt, how it feels like, like a bad habit now,

or it can feel like a bad habit. Ugh. It's, yeah, it's, um, it's not good. to me it feels like you and I are so deeply rooted in this so we can smell it already yeah because we're like right up in it we live it and i feel like this is maybe a windows like 10 moment windows 11 is maybe coming and we're worried about that and after windows 11 as far as we can tell is just death valley like so it's like i'm worried about where it could go because the vibe the leaning the direction and stuff are concerning. Like the parallels can't be ignored.

Search has been fundamentally broken for years. You're a goddamn search company. How can your search be this bad? One of the biggest criticisms right now of Gmail and drive is it's impossible to find anything. The search companies, two of the search companies major products, searches like the main complaint.

and has gotten actively worse, it feels like. Yeah. Like, this is bad. It's very concerning. And YouTube is still great. And, you know, Gmail's still pretty cool. Still wonder of the world. Drive, it's still like the best experience for a collaborative text editor that I've had.

Docs, but yes. Well, yeah. Yeah. But it's in drive, whatever. But it's the trend line. It's doing that. Yep. Maybe, maybe that. It's only a little down, but it feels like it's down. And that's just like, oh, no, because this thing is extremely important. So we needed to not go down. Yeah, anyways.

Speaking of things getting worse, Plex is now enforcing its remote streaming paywall on smart TVs. Starting March 23rd, users on Samsung, LG, Vizio, PlayStation, and Xbox will need either a Plex pass for $6.99 a month or the cheaper remote watch pass, $1.99 a month, to stream personal media outside their home network. This has been rolling out since late 2025, but smart TVs are the latest devices to get hit. It is important to note that only one person in the relationship needs to pay if the server owner has a Plex pass, which is still available in a lifetime form, which makes a big difference to me. It does, actually.

When something requires a subscription, I think that's pretty fucked up. But when something can be purchased outright for access forever, that helps a lot. However, when the deal is being altered, that's pretty fucked up. So we're kind of in a, we're kind of in a fucked up sandwich here with some, you know, not f*** up meat in it, if that makes sense. anyway an email went out to let people know

that this is now starting to be enforced and our discussion question is Plex built its entire user base on being the free alternative to paid streaming platforms for filthy pirates at what point does nickel and diming the core feature

drive those users straight to something like jellyfin I mean I think that point has been happening for an awful long time now I still use it because I have a lifetime Plex pass, but there are certain aspects of Plex that are so degraded at this point that they're basically not functional. I mean, here, let's go to the Linus Cam for a second here. I have my Plex up.

My back button is just not working. The app's been so buggy for me lately. My system-wide back button works. So that's the magic of Android for you. That's wonderful. But this is something that I only just discovered because I haven't tried to download any media directly to my device lately. So I, well, it was really broken for years, the download feature.

And so I tried to download some stuff for the plane. And here's a bunch of stuff that I downloaded. So that's good. It finally works. I was able to download something to my phone. There you go. Whatever. The point is.

There you go. There you go. It's working. Okay. So that's cool. Intro skip. Intro skip is working. That's a good Plex feature, Plex pass feature.

But then here's something bad. I'm just going to skip over to the end of this. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, we got 12 seconds left. You might have noticed that interface looked kind of crap, right? Pretty crap interface, just a list of files. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Whereas the Plex app used to support sorting all of your downloads. like according to the show that they are and the episode that they are and stuff now the list of files not only is not sorted in any meaningful way did you notice the next file didn't start playing so this is random

snippets of the episode just play until it crashes that's odd is it just a bug what year is it Luke and then it just dumped me back on, it dumped me back on the file list.

What year is it that I can't just play back a basic video file on my phone? That's a little odd. How is it that a company whose entire job is playing video files? That's your,

that's actually your job, is that there's a video file and it plays on the device that I play it on. I'm not even asking to stream it. You don't have a functioning player. It doesn't just bug out when I play a file. It is 2026.

And it's so wild to me that companies like this, I just looking stuff up and I'm trying to find like actual stats on this. But it sounds like they were like nearing profitability in 2024. they've existed for so long. I just, I just, I just, I just don't, I don't understand it. At what point do they just throw away whatever code they have and just use VLC? Like I just, honestly though, what is the, for what Plex is? I'm a little surprised they bother to have their own player.

To be honest. like I I I I yeah humanoid says just give you a plain file download well that's the that's the thing I don't always want just a plain file download because I want to transcode it so this is transcoded so to Plexus credit it managed to do that mostly I think uh I got had about a 5% fail rate and I couldn't even

in regards to what your local phone sees that it could still be a plain file download oh well yeah so so to Plexus credit they did to the transcode but yes that's all I have on my phone as a plain file. And what was really irritating was because it stores the data in a within some, look, I'm not an expert on Android file management. So because it stores the data within the app, I guess, rather than within the folder structure in a way that is user accessible, I couldn't even open up VLC and then just

browse to it. Like it's not just in your downloads folder, which it, for, I, you know, I, you know, I, don't see any reason why it couldn't just do. Why not? It already has weird limitations where it like only works if you like have that screen open stuff reliably and theoretically it can do it in the background I think but it like only maybe like sometimes works. Anyway.

Weird company though. Yeah. Weird company. I don't know. I wish them. I just like I wonder how much money they have. I wish them. To be able to have devs and do things.

Overall, I love the idea of the product. And I mostly love what the product mostly is. We've even, like, we've worked with them. We've done some sponsorship stuff with them in the past. I think Colton's team is in talks about, like, getting LTT on their, like, free Plex platform. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Luke, Dan and I used Plex for a movie night, like not that long. ago. That was pretty cool. It was something that none of us had a physical copy of or even a

not physical copy of. And we wanted to watch Dr. Strange Love and it was just like on Plex and we just watched it and it was a pretty great experience. Worked perfect. Yep. Um, also worked perfect like 10 years ago though. No, I don't think Plex had, um, just like movies integrated 10 years ago. Oh, that was theirs. Yeah, that was theirs. I forgot that was theirs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Do you ever think you'll switch to jellyfin? Asked Black Raven. I'm just going to have to at some point.

I don't feel like I'm being given a choice. I guess that's the point of what I was trying to say. Like when I criticize Plex, it's coming from a place of rooting for them. I want them to succeed. I want them to build a great product that I'd be proud to support and proud to use. And you know what? It's much like the way I feel about Windows. I am not anti-Microsoft in that way.

There's certainly some things Microsoft have done that are hard to support, but I want to love Windows. I want to use... Some of the things about Windows are pretty magic. The fact that I can fire up software from 25 years ago and just like run it on my computer, 25 years ago, if you fired up software from 25 years prior and just expected it to run.

Good fucking luck. Good luck, brother. If you wanted to run 1985 software on your Windows XP machine, come on, man. Yeah. That's what, no, not even, not 1985.

That'd be like 1975. Yeah. That's why I'm like, what was software even like? Yeah. Like, think about that. And sure, not all of it works, but, you know,

compatibility mode or, you know, whatever, right? But you get what I'm talking about here, right? Like, a lot of it does work. And that's remarkable. That's incredible. I could go get, my old ano-602 disc

that I originally played on Windows 98, I think, and I could probably put that in my computer today and have some chance of running it. That's pretty awesome. I like Windows, or at least I want to.

They're just making it really hard. Yeah. Yeah. Like really, really, really hard. So hard. Getting a raging love for Windows. I think it's leading over here. All right, do you want to pick a topic? No, I don't want to do that.

What do we want to do? Diggs Open Beta. I knew it. I called it. I had it open on my screen. I knew it. Diggs Open Beta shuts down after just two months blaming AI bot spam.

Oh! Dig shut down its open beta on March 14th. Get them out of here. Get them out of here. Exactly two months after launching on January 14th, after AI-driven bots and SEO spammers overwhelmed the platform within hours of launch. The team banned tens of thousands of accounts and tried multiple third-party tools, but nothing worked. It's worth pointing out that founder Kevin Rose had pitched AI as the fix for moderation headaches back in 2025,

saying it would remove the janitorial work, and it ended up becoming the problem. Not the attempt of it removing the control of work, just AI being the generation of all the garbage. Dig isn't permanently dead. A smaller team is staying on to rebuild and Rose is returning full time in April. But CEO Justin Mazel admitted that positioning Dig as a Reddit alternative wasn't imaginative enough. Oh boy. We're not 100% certain, but we think that somebody that applied to

something. I actually have to be that vague, unfortunately. Used not only an AI generated resume, but an AI generated portfolio website. We think that both happened.

From the same person? Same person. And one of the reasons why is there's like kind of specific wording on the portfolio website that was used in the job posting, like very specific wording. Oh, so It's like a resume creation tool that you just insert the job posting into, and then it sh-s-out

an optimized resume for that job posting. And portfolio site, which is the crazy part to me. Wow. We're not 100% sure. Oh. This is like, this is a crazy arms race, though. I was reading, you know those business insider articles that end up in your newsfeed every once in a while? I've applied for, I've applied for 500 jobs and have.

haven't gotten a single one. First of all, piece of advice, if you're hoping to get a job, probably the last thing you want is a profile of you in Business Insider saying that 500 other companies already decided I'm not good enough. Look, we should talk about challenges. Maybe just don't use your real name. You might want to anonymize it a little. Send in an AI picture and change the name. But anyway, the point is that in a world where people have to apply for 500 jobs and in a world where companies are filtering through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of AI generated resumes and applications, this arms race is only going to make this problem worse, Luke, because if you had already applied to 499 jobs, what are the odds

and knowing that probably nobody's even going to read it and sending in an AI built, optimized to be read by an AI resume, was maybe a better shot. of at least getting a chance to have an interview, would you consider it? Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I definitely. I would. 100%. It's interesting, too, because, like, someone in Full Planchot, I lost it, but someone in Full Point Chat said most companies, like, most companies, oh, there it is, sinful hands,

said in fairness, most companies don't even read resumes. It's going through a filter or AI. Yeah, exactly. Which is interesting. I don't know if that's true. Really? My wager would be that most current job openings are going to be at a company that filters or uses AI review or whatever. Oh, I see.

I don't think most companies are. I suspect if you go for smaller companies. They probably aren't using it as much. Yeah. I think it's less likely as you go down the chain and it's more likely as you go up the chain. But then a lot of small companies. But I'm not trying to call your thing out as being wrong. I think it is effectively a correct statement.

I just, I just, in, I'm kind of saying that for people that are applying to jobs to kind of maybe tune your approach a little bit. If you're applying to a mom and pop shop, just know that it's probably less likely that they are using AI filtering. Like maybe put your resume in an envelope and handwrite your name on the envelope. Maybe. You know, maybe the kinds of touches that show. And that's not going to work for Google.

Yeah. Yeah. Aside from what you write in the content of your cover letter. show that you understand their vibe. And when they're getting inundated with very AI-feeling resumes. Something hand-made. And they're tired of, oh, yeah, okay, this is another AI-generated resume. And then they get something that feels real, whether it's handmade or just feels real at all.

Yeah. Like, I'm literally wondering at this point if I see a typo in a resume, if I'm going to think it's like a good thing. I. Probably not. I hate that I don't. But you know what I'm... I'm not sure if I disagree with you. You know what I'm saying.

I know. I hate that. Because not that long ago, I would have said, really? Get out of here. In the world of spell check, you can't... You can't be bothered to run it through a spell checker. That would have been my, like, you know, I'm obviously amping it up a little bit. But that would have been my thought.

It's like, really, you don't care enough. Time to typo every word in my restaurant. To bother to spell check, right? Whereas now... Don't do that. Whereas now... I would almost feel like this is too perfect

you didn't bother to type it yourself if yeah if someone dumps something on me that is like very obviously AI written and it's supposed to be like about them it does start to feel weird because it doesn't feel like

they're talking to me you know what I mean um so it's like okay I'm now interfacing with the AI representative of you instead of you yeah and that literally

their agent. Yeah, it doesn't feel 100% correct. So I don't know. And this is, you're going to have to roll this gamble. And I mean, ways of doing resumes has always been a gamble. People have said the one page thing forever, but then there's people that want more information. Um, there's some people that are going to jump through and only look at your education. There's some people that have jumped through other stuff. So it's always been a gamble. But this is just another way of kind of looking at it is the different size of the company might impact the way that you want to apply. to it. But yeah.

Good, now let's talk about the way we apply our sponsors to this video. The show is brought you by Zero Bounce. Depending on the business, reaching out to potential clients, partners, and customers via email can be a huge part of your marketing strategy. But how good is that strategy if you and your team

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are pretty pretty critical. I'll have a little talk. Yes, you should try Zero Bounce. To help him with that. This is all in the notes, by the way. The show is also brought you by AMD. We had a new AMD upgrade.

Go live this week, which you should totally check out. Nate really, really was channeling the ultimateness of the AMD Ultimate Tech upgrade. He got a new NAS with a bunch of storage. He 3D printed his own case, which worked out about as well as you might expect. There was a bit of jank, but the functionality was superb. He went with an upgrade for his gaming PC. including a Ryzen 9 at 7-9800 X3D. He also picked up a giant motor for his mill.

He's doing like a DIY, or excuse me, router. He's doing a DIY router table with Tynan. He had a whole bunch of really cool stuff, and Nate's a super fascinating character. You name something, he's knowledgeable about it. He's into it. He even comes to badminton tonight, unlike some people I know, Luke, Dan.

Anyway, if you want a chance to win your version, very own 9800 x3d you can enter amd's latest giveaway at the link in the description uh amd also has a discussion question for us have you ever built or upgraded a pc because of a specific game what game and how did that work out for you i built uh i built a new computer for colton for diablo three and he still owes me lunch wow that was a while ago yep what a deadbeat still owes me lunch Absolute deadbeat. It's an inside joke. He doesn't actually owe me much.

I did not build a computer for it, but I was very jazzed, even though I'd never played Half-Life, and I didn't really, like, understand all the hype around it because I'd never played it. But people were so hyped that I just got kind of swept along with the hype and excitement, and I was very jazzed that my All in Wonder 9600 Pro included a coupon for Half-Life 2. Do you remember that? It was a whole thing where, you know, just valve time things. They partnered with ATI to do free copies of Half-Life 2 with GPUs.

And then by the time the game actually came out, I had actually upgraded my GPU. I never played Half-Life 2 on my All in Wonder 9600 Pro that included the game. I didn't play Half-Life 2 until I had an X-800 card, I think. Pretty funny, right? That is pretty funny. So yeah, it didn't work out that great Classic Valve time All right, let's jump into our next topic here

You want to pick one or shall I? I will, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you don't have one, I have one. No, go for it, yeah. All right, this is great. Check this out. Yeah, okay, what? Is this fake?

This has got to be fake. Initially, it looks... Initially, it looks really fake. Yes. But that looks really real. The reflections look pretty good. You were pretty sure it was fake, right? I was so sure it was fake.

Is this real? It's real and old. It predates AI. Yeah, I was like, part of me thought I had seen it before, which is actually why I thought it was fake. Not why I thought it was real. I actually did not. I actually did not know this was old.

Okay, so fine, apparently this is not news. Walmart does not do this in Canada. The reason that I put it in the dock, though, was I wanted to discuss, like, you know, drone delivery packages, because this has basically been promised since drones first became accessible as a consumer item. Yeah. Right? Like, I bet there's a WAN show from 10 years ago of us being like, oh, man, like quadcopters, quad rotors are so cool. I can't wait till they can bring a pizza directly to my bedroom window. and then I just swipe my Meg stripe card

because we didn't have tap to pay yet. Did we? I don't know 10 years ago. Whatever. The point is, I can't wait to put my Meg stripe card in the drone's butt cheeks and then, you know, take my pizza and everything's amazing and futuristic. In terms of solving that problem, do you feel like we're really any closer

to you ordering something off of Uber Eats? Safe fly lanes, dude. Walmart. I think we're further, actually. actually. Really? I think there's been more laws put in to stop that type of stuff since then than anything that would enable it.

I think hearing stories, self-promotion of my sick-ass, cool-ass, dope-ass brother, he's a firefighter for city of Vancouver, hearing some of the stories of like, someone will try to get cool fire footage on a drone and the blades will melt and they'll just and the firefighters will have to like retreat and wait if people are flying drones in because they're like actually really dangerous especially when people have the like older heavier ones uh like it's it's actually just like not okay you're in a huge building fire it's like five stories up and it just comes flying down um even the the the light ones that you don't need uh like a permit for and all of that what what is it 250 grams

I'm not sure. I don't remember. The drone, there was a drone that hit a Canadian water bomber, and I think it took the water bomber out of service or something. 250 grams. Now, hold on a second. That doesn't sound like a lot, but that's half a pound. If somebody were to drop a half a pound rock on your head from five stories,

you'd be pretty upset. And they got helmets and stuff, but like, you don't know how big it is, you don't know how much it weighs. You don't know. Right, you can't tell that. What if something's attached to it to make it way more? What if it's like someone actually trying to be a jerk? You have no idea.

Yeah, there was a drone that hit and damaged a water-dropping Canadian super-scooper, and the aircraft was grounded after managing to land safely. E-Gadgett guy says, there are problems. It's plastic, though. I mean, it doesn't matter at that speed. Yeah, wait, what? Weight is weight. 250 grams of anything hitting you from five-star.

is it matter at all? Well, it matters a little bit because there's going to be potentially some give in it. Oh. But also maybe not because if it strikes you like battery first, then there's no give in that. There's also like, I mean, if you're flying it through a fire, you might not necessarily be carrying too much about the local laws of what you can fly. Yeah. And it's, and the air resistance, like it's not, it's not one of those things where it's just like, okay, well, what if it was, what if it was, what if it was, what if it was, what if it. was half a pound of feathers. And it's like, well, yeah, because there's air resistance. But just because it's made of plastic doesn't mean that this air resistance is going to be any higher than if it was a rock.

Once the, yeah, once the wings are basically gone, density plays a role. Yeah, guys, but like these are pretty. Sort of. Come on. Have you seen the size? Figure it out. Have you seen the size of those drones? They're still just going to freaking, okay, I'll tell you what.

Anyone arguing this point right now? Anyone arguing this point, okay, with hard hats, okay? because we're firefighters. If you are willing to stand under a five-story building and have us drop a half-pound drone onto your head and have it hit you in the head, I'll stand under a five-story building and I'll take the rock. Okay?

If you think they're not the same thing and you think this is not a big deal, let's go. Someone's going to do this now. That, I mean, I don't think my side of the bed is ever going to matter because they're not going to be in any condition to okay they'd say they'll survive yeah they'll be fine this is a very bad idea but the problem is that you don't know that it's that light um it could be anything the one that i know of that i remember firefighters actually retreating for um or that's what i heard at least there was multiple of them

and this was quite a few years ago and they were a lot heavier a lot heavier these were like bigger drones. Right. So it was like actually kind of a problem. Like what did a Phantom 4 way? And you know it was probably honestly it was actually probably a lot. Remember these bad boys? No like this is the era that when these were prime.

Oh God. So these were like three pounds. Yeah. And I'm thinking about it now. It wouldn't have been five stories up. It would have been a lot higher because it's above. That would have killed a man. It's above the building.

Yep. Even the half pound ones though. Like none of this matters. Because getting hit by a half pound one is not good. Yeah, I'm not saying it's good. But I'm saying when it's this era, when everybody's running around with Phantom Fours. And there was like no regulation.

And it's like not actually five stories up. It's like probably seven or eight because it's trying to actually see the whole building from above, which I'm realizing now. Like it gets pretty sketch. Yeah, let me see if I can find it. I think the primary problem is the water bombers, apparently unauthorized drone flights have repeatedly forced firefighters in British Columbia

to halt aerial firefighting operations, causing dangerous delays to primarily wildfires. That's nuts. People are... Because it can hurt the planes. People are so stupid. Crazy, man. Like, it's just, it's shocking how stupid people can be sometimes. Let's see, what do I want to try to segue this into?

Oh, this is a good one. co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, has spent so far $45 million to fight the California billionaire tax. At what point

would it be more cost effective to just pay your fucking taxes? Like seriously, though, I pay my taxes. Why why is this a fight?

Why does this have to be a fight? $45 million. Now, in fairness to Mr. Brin, it is estimated that he would owe upwards of $12 billion in taxes, given his net worth of $247 billion. But also, like, I don't know, dude. Apparently, he changed his address to try to avoid it. Yeah.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, also co-founder of Google, also contributed over $3 million to this. Meanwhile, Jensen Huang, uncharacteristically going with the popular thing to say here, has reportedly told Bloomberg that he is perfectly fine with the tax. I don't actually know the details of the billionaire tax. Do you know much about California's proposed tax? Not in that bracket, brother. Also not in that country nor that state. I have no idea.

I'm not in any of those things either. Sounds like a good thing, though. Screw them. Well, here's the thing. It only works if everyone works together to tax the ultra wealthy. Yeah. Because the ultra wealthy are literally the most portable people on the planet. And most influential.

Yeah. So they can just, well, it's the portability that matters for everyone to work together on making sure that they're taxed. because as soon as you tell them, yeah, we're going to tax you, they can just leave. Like he apparently did. And there are actually economic problems with all of the rich people just leaving. No, it's not as simple as, well, who's going to create the jobs now? Like, that whole argument is phenomenally stupid.

But also the, well, there's not going to be any impact because everyone will just pull together and everything will be exactly as fine as it was before. also not true. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between. It is good for the economy to have business leaders. That is true. But no, we're not completely dependent on them either. So let's see, let's have a look here. A one-off 5% tax. So 5% one time, man, it's a, it's a tough thing to do. Like, I even talked about this in the how does LMG spend money video, where if you were to tell me, okay, we're going to give you a tax for 5% of your net worth today, I don't know that I would be liquid enough to sustain regular business operations if it was based on like the

valuation of like companies that I own equity. I think if you're a billionaire, unless you're Gabon, which in that case, it'll probably be fine. I suspect you're owning public companies. So you might need to reduce your ownership share in order to sell some stock to pay. But then that would have a potentially pretty impactful knock on effect if all of a sudden... And this is why rich people don't get tax is that core argument. Yeah. Gilmorty says I pay way more than 5% of my net worth annually. Way more than 5%. I don't know if you fully understand... He means the effect. what net worth is.

He might. Pay 5%. I pay more than 5% of my net worth annually. Could you do that easily? I guess you could if you're, if you are, yeah, if you own nothing and are happy. I suspect most people could do that easily. Yeah. Yeah.

If you're not a homeowner, then you could do it. Yeah, pretty easy. And most people aren't. Let me see. Is that true? I'm not sure if that's true. It depends on. which generation you're talking, Luke.

Because I think baby boomers might have a different definition of most people than Gen Z and upcoming Gen Alpha here. So the break is above 30. 25 to 29, only 36% of them own, down from 44 in 2011. Yeah. And 30 to 34 is 52.3,

which is down from 59. In 2011. My generation already, when we were graduating from university, or not graduating in my case, we already felt like the door had been closed behind the previous generation. And we were like basically left with the scraps at super inflated prices. And depending on the market you're in, it got a lot worse after that. Hey, the good news in Vancouver is things seem to be not. reflected in the pricing necessarily yet, but in terms of the demand in the market, which

will hopefully eventually impact pricing, things seem to be, I wouldn't say freefall, but you talk to like realtors, they're like, yeah, it's dire. Oh, yeah. Like, like, dire. Nothing's moving. People aren't changing the price downwards, but nothing's really moving. So as someone who has had to, um, who has had to like buy property. before to accommodate

business expansion. I have kept a pretty close eye on the commercial real estate market in the Vancouver area. I have never. Oh my God, Colliers, your website is such a piece of crap.

Please, for the love of God, just work this one time. Please. Oh, my God. Can you just zoom in that area? Maybe. No? Hold on, I'm working on it. There you go. Just move a little.

Please. Oh, it moved. Thank God. Okay. Here we go. That's why I use Linux. I have never seen it like this. Not only that.

That's a lot of places. Dude, this is commercial. Yeah. This is industrial and commercial. No, I know. And like, I have seen this map before a long time ago. And there was like a few dots. Even if I look at for sale.

That is nuts. and what's really going to stand out. Hold on a second. Okay, the quad? Dude, it used to be everything was pre-sold like a year before they completed. New price available? That's a BD building. Oh. Yeah. Beady buildings would have been completely sold out like ages before completion. Dude, they finished the quad months ago. This is down in Campbell Heights, which was like the hotness a few years back for development.

Okay, but hold on. There's more. Here's that abandoned mall. It's back on the market. You remember the one we've talked about multiple times? Yeah, yeah. Is this the haunted one or the other one? No, no. That was the hotel.

Okay. For sale by court order. For sale by court order. For sale by court order. For sale by court order. Oh. Dude. There is so price reduced.

Court ordered sale as well. Also, here someone's already trying to flip a building at the quad. The listing above was BD. listing for sale for sale for sale price reduction dude i have never seen it like this price reduction for sale by court order it's happening it's bad it's happening no no but it's bad for landowners which i'm okay with because well i'm personally okay with it's just i mean we're also looking at unemployment in canada at the same time though yeah what we hit 6.9% nice yeah yeah nice for sure yeah well I mean, look, it's the number, Luke.

It's not a good thing. I'm just saying it's the number. You can't... We can't not acknowledge the number. No, I'm saying nice. I'm just also dying. Yeah. Oh.

But, hey, things might get a little more affordable. If you are one of the 93% that has a job. And if that percentage doesn't go up? Yeah, things have been a little tough in Canada. Anyways, let's talk about something else. I'm getting sad. Okay. I can find something better.

Um, um, uh, uh, oh, oh, yeah. Oh, video game age ratings are changing in Europe. I just got a headache. No, no, this is good. No, it's just from the, we're good. Starting in June 2026, Peggy is overhauling its rating system so that monetization mechanics that directly determine a game's, oh, so that monetization mechanics will directly determine a game's age rating for the first time. Loopboxes and gotcha systems will default to 16. and up. Games with NFTs or unrestricted chat will go to 18 and up, and time-limited offers, like battle passes, will land at 12 and up. So, EA Sports FC, which currently sits at Peggy 3, could jump to Peggy 16 under the new rules due to Ultimate Team card packs. Peggy Director Dirk Bossman's notes an experimental rule, a game triggered for a Peggy 12 rating for battle passes, can lower it to Peggy 7 if

they include a hard toggle to disable all spending by default. This is so based. Yeah, it's really based. I love it. Super based. Can the EU just like stop being so? Actually, no, I take that back. Can the EU keep being based?

And can the North Americans get it together and be equally based or more based? What if we had a baseness competition? And everyone could see who can be the most based in terms of regulating bullshit that shouldn't exist or shouldn't be targeted at kids. about that. Yeah, I like that. What an idea. One note on the previous topic, some people asked,

does Canada have the same under-employment issue that America has? What they mean by that is like people with big cool degrees working in lower-end jobs or whatever. There is also, however, a really big problem right now because the unemployment numbers don't sound that great in quite a few countries, but what is also buffering that is. is that a lot of people are not able to properly claim unemployment because it is more advantageous for them to just like drive Uber Eats or do that grocery delivery thing or whatever, the like gig economy jobs.

Right. A lot of those don't get counted as unemployment, but if we're being honest with how much they pay. You're not employed. Yeah. And that doesn't mean that working for yourself does not mean that you like have a job and are bringing an income. but that means that gig economy stuff probably doesn't really count in regards to

like you being able to realistically sustain yourself for a super long period of time. So like the real doesn't have a career number. A solid, sustainable going to cover your back, giving you health benefits, career number is way higher. I genuinely wouldn't be surprised if Canada's is like 10 or over. if we're counting all of that. I have no idea, but there's so many different factors in here that aren't being counted.

Don't forget about all the people who immigrate here and have like super badass credentials back home, but can't use them here. No, this is what I mean. That's what I mean by under-employment. No, no, I know. I just mean, I thought you were just talking about that in the context of locally trained people

who just are not able to find a job in their trained field. Yep. Yeah. had like super turbo immigration for probably about the last 10 years. And a lot of, a lot of it was not seemingly thoughtfully done. Yeah. Is all I'm going to say. Canada lived off immigration.

We were a massive country with no population. We lived off immigration. Our immigration model was like extremely positively looked at worldwide. People would, other countries would refer to it as the Canada model and how they wanted to adopt or be more like the Canada model. And then we just made it dumb. And then we just went, as you said, turbo mode and didn't adjust housing, didn't adjust infrastructure, didn't really have a plan, just flooded people in as hard as we could.

And the structure... Not even as hard as we could. It was hard for me to... That's actually a good point. I'm going to bring up... I know where he's going. I've talked about this story before, but I'm going to bring up Mr. Dennis Liao. Okay?

He doesn't work here anymore. but I love Dennis. He's amazing. He's amazing. I enjoyed working with him for all the years that I did. He was a super productive member of our team. And when I use the word productive, that has like an icky kind of, you know, HR corporate feel.

But when I talk about productive in this context, I mean he's the kind of person that you want in your country because he's going to come in and he's going to work. He's going to contribute to your GDP. He's going to pay taxes. he's he he he he he he came in he's gonna be doing stuff he was young he's a doer he was young he had training in Canada he went to BC IT the BC is for British Columbia okay he went to BC IT spoke English was a young was single didn't even have a bunch of like like

non-working family you know baggage to bring with them and again I'm using this from like a like a GDP planning standpoint. We're ignoring the human element, okay? We're going purely like cynical, practicalism, okay? Country strategy hat. Yes. Yeah. He should have been the easiest fucking person in the world. It was very tough.

To bring in and work for us. And it was darn near impossible. And it cost so much money and it took so much time. And that was when we were turbo immigration. And so I looked at it. and I just went like, so who is coming here? Yeah.

Like, I don't understand this. We've had extremely... She was coming from Taiwan, a liberal democracy. He wasn't coming from somewhere where like there's a huge like values clash. Like it just seemed obvious, you know? We've had a bunch of people that we've had that are extremely valid to immigrate because of very specific, difficult to get skills that are not findable in Canada or, you know, similar stories.

that have been practically impossible to bring up. It's been really weird. And then, yeah, the immigration door has still been so, so, so open. But again, the biggest problem really was that we just opened the gate immigration-wise in a however way. And there was like huge companies bringing up in Canada that were like, oh, you want to immigrate to Canada, pay us a private company a ton of money and we'll work you through the system.

And that was like a huge thing in Canada. Anyways, we didn't adjust up anything to support them. again all of that stuff infrastructure housing policy policy nothing nothing adjusted we just immigrated crazy amounts of people like make it make sense like I uh like we we have the we have like ghost communities that are being like completely hollowed out and then we're just like okay yeah let's bring everyone in and dump them into the same

three metropolitan centers yeah which is weird which is like well like wait hold on a second, like, what are we doing strategically as a nation to, to leverage these human resources, which, again, is not the kind of like, like, like, like, like, ykey, you know, resource management that, that, you know, I want to do or that I feel comfortable, you know, even, even advocating strongly for. But it just felt like, like, like, like, I wouldn't say, okay, you know, yeah, you, you, you, if you immigrate to Canada, you have to live in, you know, you know, very, you know, for three years or something like that.

Like I don't know if that, I don't know if that would fly. I don't, I don't even, I, I wouldn't ask for that. But on the other hand, you know, we subsidize people's school in certain professions. And then we say you can earn back your credentials if you work in a remote community or you do this or you do that. You contribute to the, you know, the greater strategy of, you know, what we're trying to achieve with those professions. So why wouldn't you necessarily employ?

a strategy like that for immigration. You bring in trained professionals and then you kind of go, okay, yeah, and we'll waive all these costs and we'll provide all this subsidy in order to grow in a way that's healthy and structured. Look, I'm coming up with this off the top of my head. Canada needs medical staff, like super bad. Sure. Like, I don't, I don't actually have a clear plan because it's not actually my job to run the province or the country. I'm just saying any kind of plan. Any plan, any plan might have been better than no plan. There was no plan. And there seemed to be no plan. Adam pointed out, this is so hard to talk about because people hear what Linus and Luke are saying and then say so immigration bad. Yeah, we're not. That's why I prefaced it with like our immigration model was so good and we immigrated a lot of people. Yes. We just, I would literally be the stereotypical immigration hater who married an immigrant. Yeah, yeah. There's a very genuinely common topic on WAN show back in the Langley House was that Canada had a lower population than California. We used to talk about that all the time. It's a very common thing for us to bring up. That is no longer true because we immigrated, I think it was, at least half a million people a year as a country of at the time less than 30 million people. It was crazy. Like, and with with no plans to support it at all.

It was just wild. It was so wild. Yeah, anyways. It was insane. Um, yeah. Uh, what do we got here? Oh, this is rough. As reported by Tom's hardware, the header of Silicon Powers US Online Store, so this is a RAM

company, stated, a full refund of the original price will be issued if there is a shortage of replacement products. And this seems to be as a direct response to the scarcity of memory in the current market. However, as of now, it just says, SP has recently become aware of discussions regarding our RMA handling procedures. They're claiming that their SOP was not followed and that warranties will continue to be governed by their warranty policy. Oh, okay. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh, this is a nothing burger now. Forget it. This should have just been removed now that they have adjusted that. Adobe has settled their DOJ lawsuit for $150 million.

This was a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and the FTC over its subscription canceling practices. And I got to say, their subscription counseling practices, I immediately, my first thought when I saw them was, that's got to be illegal. Like, do you remember how I guess it used to work?

Maybe they've changed it now. Where once you bought a seat, you couldn't cancel that seat at any time. You had to keep it for the entire year. There's, honestly, there's, subscriptions really need a look. Slack kind of works this way, but they're actually pretty...

No, Slack doesn't work that way. Never mind I take that back completely. GitHub is probably the easiest example here. You have to buy seats and then you like assign users to the seats. That's so archaic and should be removed. It is clearly just a way to steal money from people. Like it's actually insane.

Anything that works that way is ridiculous. You should assign a license to like a person, an email, whatever. And the second they don't need that license anymore. it should be gone. It's not a seat that you then put an email in. No, screw that. That's obviously a way to steal extra money.

Which is exactly how the Adobe one worked. And as long as we were growing as a company, it never actually impacted us because we never had any empty seats. But then as soon as you had an absence, even during the time it took when you had to backfill a position, you were paying for a seat that nobody was sitting in.

But here's the thing, and this probably didn't happen. We're a relatively small company. Here's the thing. It creates a weird cycle, even when you are growing as a company, where it's really annoying to have to go through and buy a seat and then assign a purse and do all this kind of stuff. So people will just buy bucket.

The buy a seat thing has a changeable number of seats. And people will just be like, oh, whatever, just 10. And then they'll slowly fill them over the next couple months. So like, for a lot of people, it does still cost some money, even if they're just growing. The lawsuit started back in 2024. with the US government alleging that the company was burying early termination fees in fine print and behind hyperlinks when customers signed up for Creative Cloud subscriptions. Those fees could hit up to 50% of the remaining subscription term.

Yeah, okay, that's right. Which on annual plans could be hundreds of dollars. Ridiculous. On top of hiding the fees, Adobe was also accused of making the cancellation process as painful as possible, routing customers through multiple web pages and phone trees designed to delay and discourage them from actually canceling. This $150 million is split into two halves. 75 million goes to the DOJ as a civil penalty, and the other 75 million goes toward free services for affected customers,

though Adobe hasn't said who qualifies or what exactly they'll get. I'm not expecting anything. Adobe doesn't admit to doing anything wrong. This is so frustrating to me about settlements. I understand the idea behind settling out of court and that not necessarily meaning that you admit that you're guilty of anything. but if you're paying $150 million and you kind of go, yeah, but I didn't do anything wrong.

And also, as part of the deal, you have to change what you're doing. Like, something here isn't adding up. You can't just be like two plus two does not equal for, right? I had to pay a gigantic penalty, and I have to do it a different way. But the thing I did, that wasn't wrong. Come on, man.

Anyway, as part of the deal, they now have to clearly disclose termination fees and how they're calculated before people sign up, and they have to send reminders before free trials turn into paid plans. Nobody is getting refunds for cancellation fees they already paid. The free services are the only compensation on the table. Ridiculous. For context on how little this actually hurts Adobe, the company pulled in $6.4 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2026 alone. this settlement is less than three days of revenue okay wonderful so this is about like uh median income vancouver okay so 40 let's call it 45,000 dollars uh if i made 45,000 a year how much do I make in three days let's see if AI can do math this will be fun approximately 100% okay so this is a

about like, this is about like, uh, like a couple speeding tickets. Neat. So they're going to learn absolutely nothing in the same way that people who get a couple of speeding tickets probably don't take their foot off the accelerator. Okay, cool. Well, that's good. Very neat. Meta has removed, or will remove, excuse me, end to end encryption for private Instagram

messages. And this ended up being less of a big deal than I thought. and yet an even bigger deal than I realized. Let's go through the dock first. The feature will stop working after May 8th of 2026. But here's the thing. End to end encryption on Instagram was always opt-in and only available in certain regions, first tested in 2021 and formally rolled out in late 2023.

Meta says that there are reasons. for killing it is low user adoption. Okay, so on the one hand, I was like, okay, so this isn't that big of a deal because most people weren't using it anyway. But then I was like, wait, but this is an even bigger deal because what it looks like to me

is that meta is intentionally nuking this because they intentionally implemented it in such a way that people wouldn't use it. And then I got even more depressed when I realized that this was a feature that was supported on a platform that a shocking number of people used to message each other. Like, like, why? Why do you need to message people on Instagram of all things?

It's an app for looking at pictures or moving pictures as it were. Why do you need to, why would you need to message anybody there? It doesn't matter. I think I know. The point is they do, they had support for encryption and they're like, give it to meta.

I think my argument would be that it's not an app for looking at things anymore. I know. It's an app for sharing it to your friends. So you're already in the share window and then you can say words in it. But if you're cool, you don't. You just react to it and then send the next meme. Anyway, users with the existing encrypted chats will get in-app notifications to download their messages in media before the message.

May 8th cutoff. Meta has not said whether these encrypted chats will be permanently deleted after the deadline. Meta is pointing users who want encrypted messaging toward WhatsApp, where end-to-end encryption is on by default for all messages and calls. Critics have pointed out that this timing lines up with growing legislative pressure around child safety and age verification laws and with coming EU rules around the application of end-to-end encryption. Boo. In other news, has reportedly ceased production of their Galaxy Z trifold after just three months. They're ending sales saying that they never intended for the phone to be a mass market product. Evidently, they saw the trifold as a technology showcase to demonstrate Samsung's foldable

engineering, not as a revenue-generating product. I actually believe that. Rising costs of core components like DRAM and NAN Flash and application processors apparently left virtually no profit margin on the device. So as part of the limited release, the phone was only sold directly through Samsung.com and small batches. Each batch sold out in two to five minutes. They apparently moved around 3,000 units across the first two allotments. I was really expecting this to be released and I was going to buy one. So that's kind of a bummer. Demand for the phone was apparently so high that it was trading at nearly three times its retail

price on the secondary market in South Korea. Samsung's mobile C.O. said last month, hasn't decided whether the trifold will get a sequel, citing manufacturing complexity, but did say that some of its features, like the widescreen aspect ratio, could come to cheaper foldables over time. Oh, I would, you know, it's funny because as a company like Samsung, I would think that I would see this situation and go, oh, well, we should just charge three times as much for it and then make more of them, and then it would definitely be profitable. Am I missing something here? Because, like, I see why musicians, like, I see why artists don't just charge three times as much for their concerts because, like, there's the optics.

Like, that's something that we actually... But I think the 3,000 people that bought the trifold for $3,000 could probably still afford it if it was $5,000. Yeah. Like, if you bought a $3,000 phone, you probably don't care. Yeah. So this is clearly a luxury item. But, like, we even leaned into the whole concern around pricing for events. when we named our land, whale land.

We were like, oh, yeah, well, we're going to acknowledge that we could charge as much as we wanted for this thing, because people are going to come to it anyway. We'll call it Whale land, and we'll have whale tickets for the people who would pay $5,000 to come. We're going to make it a good value for them. You're going to get a computer included in that. Like, we're not actually looking to milk anyone. And then, but that revenue will help subsidize it for all the people that we can, like,

charge a reasonable price for, but you have to find a balancing act, because you don't want to charge so little that you just sell it immediately. people get mad at you, but you don't want to charge so much that people feel like you're overpricing it and making it out of reach for fans, and then they get mad at you. But like Samsung, what's their concern there? Why do they care? Like if I, yeah, if I'm Taylor Swift or whatever, I want to find that balancing act for, you know, my concert ticket so that people are not, you know, upset one way or the other. But they could just have a $5,000 phone, right? Am I missing something here, guys? at the end said

Taylor Swift absolutely drags her sad fans over the calls for concert tickets not as much as people would pay though that's what I'm saying which is crazy like people will pay

multiple times her face value on the ticket to go to her concert so she could go higher that's all I'm trying to say um ticket master intensifies all right guys

uh I think we've just got one more big topic and then we can move into After Dark. Congress is fighting over, oh no, I'm going to ignore that one. Reddit users uncover, or Reddit user uncovers who's behind Meta's lobbying for invasive age verification technology. Meta spent a record 26.3 million on federal lobbying in 2025, deploying 86 plus lobbyists across 45 states, which is more than Snapchat, Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia combined.

Part of that operation involved covertly funding a group called the Digital Childhood Alliance, a coalition presenting itself as a grassroots child safety organization with 140 plus members. Despite coordinating a 20-plus state legislative campaign with confirmed tech funding, the DCA reports an anomalously small amount of gross receipts to the IRS under $25,000, and its website went live fully formed within 24 hours of domain registration. Doesn't really seem like a grassroots organization, does it? Supplementary note on a common point of confusion, people have been saying on that META's lobbying effort cost $2 billion.

This apparently is not accurate. The researcher analyzed $2 billion in grants across Arabella Advisors' nonprofit, ultimately ruling that pathway out. Bloomberg reported that META is one of the funders of the DCA, citing three people familiar with the funding. When pressed in a Louisiana Senate hearing, the DCA's own executive director confirmed tech companies provide funding but refused to name them saying she didn't feel comfortable answering.

The legislation that META is backing called the App Store Accounting Accountability Act would require Apple and Google to build and maintain age verification infrastructure at the App Store level. Critics argue this effectively creates a persistent identity layer that is queriable by every installed application. Social media platforms, including MetaZone, would face no equivalent requirements under the same bill. Note that two separate bills are being conflated in some coverage of this. Meta's bill, the App Store Accountability Act, places compliance on app stores like Google and Apple Apple's App Store, or Google Play and Apple's App Store. A separate bill called the Digital Age Assurance Act goes further requiring device-level age

collection baked into the operating system itself. Four states have now signed the App Store Accountability Act into law, Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama. In Louisiana alone, meta-deployed 12 lobbyists across nine firms for a single bill that passed with no opposing votes. The full investigation sourced from IRS 990 filings, Senate lobbying disclosures, state ethics databases, campaign finance records, and corporate registries has been published at T-B-O-T-E project.com and is mirrored on GitHub by the researcher under the handle upper up.

So this is pretty cool. You guys should go check it out. It's a pretty fascinating look into how... Money buys policy. Yeah. And how that policy is not always... It's not always obvious why we don't want it and why it's worth so much money for these companies to have it. Cool.

Very. Is that the last topic? Yeah. Why don't we do some after dark, shall we? Yeah. Let's do it. Well, there was technically Congress is fighting over user-generated content liability protections, but I don't know if I want to talk about that right now.

Dan, hit me. Sure. Welcome to After Dark. Yeah, I've got a few here. Nice. Hey, LRLD. I guess this was from back when Riley was still here. Oops. Rest in peace.

Question for Luke. I'm a tech lead of a cross-functional team. That's not really a question. My company just introduced an AI first policy. Still not a question. I personally hate AI and also communicate this to leadership. Any advice? There's a question.

I'm going to let you go first on this one, I think. What would you? Okay, actually, let's roll play. Luke, I've just had a meeting with Taryn. And, hold on. Our new policy is an AI-first policy. Oh, you communicate that you hate AI to me. Clearly from the merch, check-out message.

The policy hasn't changed. Now, what do you do? That wasn't really role-playing. I basically just asked his question again. I want to flip the script and what I'd be willing to compromise on is maybe you can just type it out because I'm assuming you want me to answer first anyways.

No, no, no, no, I don't have an answer. I'm very curious what you think I would do if you told me to do that. Oh, interesting. Okay, well, you're a subversive git. So what you're a subversive get. what you would probably do, oh man, what would you do? And this is not a recommendation.

This is you just saying what you think I would do. Yeah. So I think what you would do is you would be really sulky for a little while. I would ask what's wrong. And you would tell me, hey, I don't feel that that issue is resolved at all. You would lay out all of the things that you presumably have already told me, because I'm kind of going based on this scenario here. You would say, I really feel strongly we shouldn't do this.

And here's the negative outcomes. And I'm assuming I am role-playing right now because we don't have an A-I-first policy, but I'm kind of role-playing the person that you're like hardlining it. Because there are things that I've hard-lined, right? So I'm pretending that I would hardline AI. So I would say, look, I really.

need your support in this. And I feel like what you would probably do is you would do the bare minimum. You would put on a poop-eating grin and you would say the script to your subordinates. And then when it ultimately, but you wouldn't follow up with them. So you would support, you would pay lip service to the effort and you would support it in that way. but with your body language, it would probably be pretty clear that you don't like it

and don't think it's a good idea. And you wouldn't enforce that we do it. And then what you would do is you would wait several months and then you would come back to it and you would say, hey, for all the areas where we've implemented this, how's that going?

Probably with a smug look. And are we ready to reevaluate this? And you wouldn't probably phrase it quite like that, but you'd basically go, I've thought this is stupid the whole time. And here's the things that it has impacted negatively. And are we ready to ditch this yet? Also, you're dumb. I think that's about what you would do.

So what I would maybe recommend that you do is, uh, is, you know, I'd make arguments as to why it might not be a good idea. And then try to work on a way that they can agree with you to do it that they think they are still doing an AI first approach even though it like isn't really.

Try to find a way that makes them think that you're complying. Yeah, you know we're not fooled. But only like sort of do. And not in the way that that story was said, which is probably accurate, but not in that way. Yeah. Getting buy-in ahead of time is really important to covering your own butt. Yeah.

Because as a lead, as a manager, you're in a really difficult position right now. One second. I'm curious. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Dan, does that sound accurate? As someone that I technically manage, you can be a lot. honest. Yeah, I think so.

Okay, sorry. Not advice. So as a lead, right? Like, as a team lead, you're being put in a really difficult position because your job ultimately, right? Like, you're going to have whatever your quarterly KPIs are and you're going to have whatever is your formal job description. But putting that aside, your job is the success of the company, right?

And if this company is not successful, you are in effect. as a leader. And sometimes you need to take bets and risks. And so you're in a difficult position here because if you are instructed to do something that will ultimately be detrimental to the company, even if it's in your job description that you need to listen to your direct superior or whatever, right, then you're putting yourself at jeopardy in the longer term. However, if you don't tow the company line, then you are almost certainly putting yourself

in jeopardy in the very near term. Yep. And so that's a really tough, tightrope to walk. Yes. And so that's why that point that Luke made about getting buy-in for whatever your action is, put together a plan for what your AI first implementation looks like and get someone to say, that sounds like good AI. Yes.

If you can, do a couple small test cases for how it is successful. Make them feel like a success for having a success for having. the idea. And yes, and run it like, okay, and find some studies because they exist of like highly dedicated, we only do things through AI groups that have bombed and failed. Yeah, show you put the work in. Show you considered it and thought about it and found a better way because everyone likes a better way. And then find some hybrid approach that allows people that really hate it to not lean on it too much, but can also kind of encourage people to look into it and potentially use it properly and try to build some like workshops or something with your team to show them or work with them

to find ways that that they can use it to benefit them individually. I have found more and more over time. For a while there, I was like a lot of people use AI wrong. There is a correct way to use AI. And now I think a lot of people use AI wrong. There are correct ways for individual people to find benefits in it. And there are ways that I know of people that I've recommended, people use AI in certain ways, and they found tons of success in it that are not ways that I use it.

At the end of the day, though, if you want to keep your position, you're going to need to get buy-in, both up and down the chain. So just like saying yes, yes, yes, and then like venting to your supporting teams about it is not going to work for you. and saying no and being an obstruction to instructions filtering down is not going to work for you. You're going to have to find a way to get buy-in on both sides. And it's not going to be easy. There is very often a middle.

And in this scenario, I suspect there's a middle. I just, yeah, you got to find a thing that fulfills their, you know, And like, as someone who gets spam emails from companies that know the positions I have and stuff like that and gets lots of news fed to me by Google and various other groups because of the positions that I have and whatnot, man, there is a lot of money being spent on trying to tell leaders of companies that they have to do this. So just understand that they're very likely trying to do the right thing. A little bit of empathy never hurts. and are just being told by an incredible amount of different vectors

that this is the right thing to do so they're trying to do it and add some information to the conversation and come up with an approach that makes them not feel like an idiot and you know, okay,

we're still going to explore this potentially more than we did in the past but we're going to fetter it down a little bit and because of better to say, do it a different way than like find a, you know, a path that's best optimized for our strategic objective. You know, you got to our team.

And our goals, it'll be most effective. We'll get the most output, whatever, through this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And show test cases where things went poorly, show test cases where things went well. I found something that can help your argument, actually, is if you don't just show, like, a mono story. Like, if you show like, okay, here's a bunch of test cases. three out of four of these went really poorly. This one did go really well,

but like the chance of us landing that is really low. So let's maybe like go for this kind of other thing. Make it look like you actually did look at both sides of the argument. That can also help. And actually do it. I didn't mean make it look like you did. Actually do it. And then present the whole findings.

That can be good. A question for Luke as a fellow fan. We got one more. We got one more from a professional communicator on our team. our customer service supervisor, Adam, says, TLDR, express your disagreement, find common ground, commit to whatever direction you land on. If you end up proven right, you can always come back to the conversation. But once you've committed to a direction, you've got to, you've got to sell it. You've got to, you've got to commit to it. You've got to move in that direction because if we're not

all moving in the same direction, if you've got people swimming this way and people swimming that way, you're just going to end up going in circles. Yeah. It also said if you end up proven right, you can gloat then. And like, kind of, but I would just do that to like your partner or something. Yeah, I wouldn't gloat. I left that out of his message on purpose. Yeah, okay.

I know how you mean it, Adam. I know how you mean it. But in air quotes. It was in air quotes. It was in air quotes. Well, they're not air quotes when you write them down. Then they're just quotes. I knew what he meant

But, all right. Hit me, Dan. A question for Luke. As a fellow fan of deck builders, what kind of things do you want to see more of in the genre? I'd like to see different themes. I've had this idea in my head of like my favorite two like rogue like games in a law,

like in forever probably are FTL and Slaid the Spire one currently. I still prefer one over two. but they're tuning it, they'll figure it out. I'm very confident in that. And I always was like, man, it would be really cool

if there was like, you know, spaceship themed one. And then there's been a couple like FTL style deck builder games that have come out and they just really haven't hit.

But pretty much all the deck builders that I've played feel very like RPG coded. Warriors, wizards. stuff like that. Robs. Yeah.

Like it's all like yeah. Like literally FTL has I'm sorry Slater Spire has like Clear Warrior Art type Yeah

Clear rogue archetype Clear like I don't know Sorcerer archetype Like it's just it's Okay cool So you want classes like You know Desk

Deskjockey You know Like like low mobility but like high intellect but zero magical affinity you know like I just I don't know I always imagined

maximum Cheeto consumption stats I always imagined like a Slate Aspire one where it was it was management of your whole ship but still a deck builder and you would like pull the idea that I had was that you would pull you had multiple decks that you would pull

from a certain amount of cards every turn and there would be four different things and one of them would be for like ship maintenance and one of them would be for offense and one of them would be for something and I thought of it like an energy type system and blah blah blah blah blah I had all this kind of stuff

and then every time that a ship spaceship like rogue like deck builder game would come out which is that's a lot of qualifications but there's been a few of them it's just like I don't know I feel like they they miss the mark and every fight ends up feeling almost exactly the same it's just like yeah okay

variance is I think what I would say disciple, Kurt, asks, define deck building, please. And I thought I'd bring up this illustrative image. That's a nice deck. It's a really nice deck. Do you like fish decks? Do you might be a gay fish? No, a deck builder is talking about cards.

So generally you would start the game with like a fixed set of cards. Usually very simple, very kind of bad cards, actually. and then as you progress through the game, you have selection options. You can choose, usually choose, sometimes you get it randomly or whatever, from card options and build your deck by adding or removing cards from it. Often you want to remove some of those starter cards that you had or any negative cards that you receive and then add good cards to it. And then the reason why it works really well for rogue likes is because there is often multiple ways to build the deck.

And then you have multiple characters and each character has multiple ways to build their each individual deck. And each run ends up being unique because of that, which makes it really fun. So the spire is probably the most well-known and in my opinion best like video game deck builder. and their board game has got to be one of like the best co-op board games I've ever played. It's actually so good. I was expecting it to be like somewhat

it's a video game board game gimmicky and that it's like incredible. So good job. Love the when, bros. Love the gear. What's the best engineering slash bodging video you feel you've done? Oh, the best bodging.

I'm actually just, uh, I'm just looking through our videos now. I, I, I, I, I, I want to, I want to talk about, man, we do so much, dude, we do so much weird stuff. Like, like, like, does anyone even remember the time we cooled a PC with like pond water and let it just, let it just sit in the sun and grow as much goop as it possibly could? And then we like tested it for, like, for microorganisms and stuff. Is that the Team Water video? Yeah. Dan and I saw a really interesting stat lately.

Yeah. Which is that that video had really high retention. Really? It got like no views, super low views. Got really low views and like crashed the channel for a while. Yeah, I thought it was a really good video actually. Way, way above normal. It had like actually statistically very high retention.

Go figure. So in like a ton of ways, that was a wicked video. and YouTube was just like, no. Very weird. Okay, this is not an all-time favorite bodge, but this is definitely a recent favorite bodge. We needed cooling for a thread ripper chip, and our Bruce Chilis-Chiller decided to give up the ghost.

So we just grabbed an ice bucket, put some ice in our nice bucket and then just ran ice water up to it it was pretty cool and then for reasons that we still don't really understand we put our heads in the ice bucket yeah

where did that happen? Why did this too? Yeah I don't know why either of us did it but we definitely did it Was it only you and me? Well I think I did it because you did it Ploof did it too okay yeah we were all basically being followers I think I can't find it though that's sometimes just how that works I think my favorite one is the one that I did hooray

when you had me like fix that CPU for my own rig upgrade yeah that was awesome I don't remember the title of the video the rule was Luke got a sick a sick CPU but he had to fix the pins on it yeah

it was awesome it was super fun oh man of course I go back to it of course the playback glitches yeah so Plouf put his head in it and then grew hair. Oh, wait, it's me.

And then, yeah, I don't know. We did that for, yeah, for reasons. You know, it's a, you never know. You're going to click on an LTT video. You never know what you're going to get. Yeah. Oh, no, I have an answer. My all-time favorite bodge was the time that we bought like half a dozen dead motherboards

off of eBay. and I fixed every fucking one. That was crazy. That motherboard do you fix in Scrapboard or where is still on your desk? That was crazy. Have you seen it? I haven't touched it yet. I've been away.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's fair. That was crazy though. Yeah. That was really cool. You can't script that. That was one of my favorite videos you guys did in like a big chunk of time. That was really awesome.

Okay. All right. Now I'm glad I have a good answer. That was just, oh, one time, you know, broken motherboard, bring it back to life exciting. Doing it like half dozen times in a row, that's nuts. I, Linus-led development. Question for Linus.

What's your most favorite memory from growing up on a farm? I remember feeding cows and it always makes me so happy. Thanks for the quality products. Well, it wasn't plucking turkeys. It wasn't scooping chicken poo. Man, I'm not really the outdoorsy type. This may come as a surprise to you. Yeah, don't say.

Yeah, right? Okay, okay, okay, here's what I've got. I'm going to go with eating quality, double-smoked farmer sausage that we know is totally clean of any kinds of weird scary hormones or or like antibiotics or like any kind of like junk that that farmer sausage that like just you know straight from from pig to table I don't think I've ever eaten anything that's like like a meat thing that's as good as like a double smoked just like high

quality, totally organic, everything, farmer sausage. Dude, this is, this is not the same thing. Don't eat a lot of pig these days. Their high intelligence has sort of made me a little uncomfortable with the whole idea. I didn't like know they were that smart back then, but I'm not going to lie, they can be pretty delicious. I'm not going to remember the place and that makes me sad because I've been there a long time and I know it's just like along the drive.

I don't actually know the name or the location. but there's a place when you go camping somewhere in BC that's a gas station on a on a reserve and they have like their own smoked jerky that they make like there and you can just buy like a brown bag of it and they just sell it to you by like weight or whatever nice holy crap

I haven't had that in like probably six years like it's been a long time but like whoa, it's really good. Crystal says organic is a marketing term, which is totally true. But the context that I used it in was that this pig was fed with like kitchen slops. So I consider that organic matter. Yeah. Organic matter made up of the meat, which I then ate, which makes me organic.

That actually rings a huge bell home a one. Please stop saying farmer sausage? Why? What? That's what it's called, isn't it? I have no idea. It's not a thing? Yeah, farmer sausage.

Or a Mennonite sausage is a coarsely ground smoked pork sausage, traditionally seasoned with salt and pepper known for its simple, hearty flavor. Wait, no way. I think this might be it. Oh, stop. What?

Do you find it? Someone might have just known? What the frick? No way. DeRoche Corner Store. I think this is actually correct. Oh, sick. Hey, oh, I have to derail the conversation. Let me know when you're ready. I'm very, my brain is exploding, but I think that's right. I think it's DeRosh Corner Store. Anyways. Okay. Did anyone else, Dan, Luke, did anyone else notice this before we started the show? Look how much less fucking room I have for my tabs. What the fuck is this?

It is really annoying. When did this happen? Oh no, mine says new Chrome available. It's been a bit. You know what's super sick? What the heck? You know why you're so upset about this? Because I've been Firefox pilled for the last few weeks.

Yes. Because I barely touched my desktop. So most of my Linux challenge has actually been on Kibuntu. And I didn't bother to install another browser because Kibuntu came with Firefox and I like signed into it. And then I was lazy. So default browsers work, by the way. when they're good what the heck is that

this is one of the reasons why I think I'm going to have a really hard time if I even do going back to Windows because this type of crap is going to be all over the place why is this and this isn't Microsoft this is Google yeah but look at okay we're going to go back to it we're going to go back to it again because this is bad enough okay one two three four five

I could probably get here we could probably get six tabs in here before things get really bad But, okay, we waste all this space. This is all wasted so that you can have buffer for your stupid ask gem. What is this? Clearly, I don't have room for it here. So get out of here.

At the very least, collapse it down to just the icon, because you know you would do that if it was just my tabs. If it was just my precious tabs? Sorry, I'm getting all angry, but I just like, come on, man. Here, I'm just going to right-click it. Okay, okay, okay. Unpinning it is that simple. All right.

I'm somewhat calmed down now. But not entirely. That's a lot better than I expected. It is better than I expected. I didn't think it was going to be unpinnable. That is a lot better than I expected. What's the over-under on it coming back next time you relaunch Chrome? See, that's the issue.

They're boiling me. I'm a frog and they're boiling me. Is it on yours? No, mine says new Chrome up. date or new Chrome available. I was going to say update it and see what happens. I suspect mine is updated, but I'll check. I have too many tabs.

Mine is up to date. Dang. That would have been interesting to try. Hit me, Dan. Sure thing. I got a merch message earlier that I said to contact support, but it was a bit different. Linus, using one of the cables in the car. What they said is, hey, Dan, I did ask support.

They basically didn't answer me. Okay. So I was wondering, Linus's opinion, would he use a cable in the car, given the temperature swing if no wireless Android auto? And also if the black LTT pen and pencil are limited release. No, the black pen and pencil were limited stock when we launched them because we knew we had enough of them to launch it, but we knew that we didn't have enough to meet the demand. So we basically were just like, hey, if you want one, make sure you get it right away. But they are coming back eventually. And I am hopeful that we will find that those black pens and pencils are going to be so durable out in the field that we might be able to bring back black shaft screwdrivers with a very similar finish, no promises.

As for using, I assume, you're talking about our true spec cables in the car. a huge part of the reason that we chose the silicone sheathing for the cables was that we wanted something that was UV-resistant and the main use case for a USB cable that needs to be UV-resistant was having it in your car where a lot of the time the sunlight will come in and will degrade the what is it usually PVC derived cable sleeving

and as for why we didn't do a braided one I don't you didn't ask but whatever I'm explaining the whole rationale behind why we ultimately chose silicone the reason for not doing a braided one is that while they're really nice while they're really nice they tend to really get super destroyed

once there's any kind of damage to them and so we we opted for silicon so look I'm not going to promise that in a very demanding environment like plugging and unplugging sometimes, you know, many times a day. And, you know, like mine, for instance, gets shut in my armrest because that's where the plug is, but I keep my phone in my cup holder.

And so it just gets every time I need to access my armrest, I like mash it. Is it going to last forever in that application? Like, um, no. But so far, my true spec cable that's in my car is operating perfectly. And I'm very happy with it doing that. I've also seen a few reports in reviews for the product and discussion about the product on Reddit, where people have said that they were having a lot of issues with their Android Auto or their carplay prior to getting a true spec cable, and it resolved their issues.

I've used it in a use case that I've killed a lot of cables in, actually, which is Pokemon Go Walkin. If you're out for a really long time, you're going to need to plug into a battery. When you're moving, that's a lot of strain. So not only just that, but if I don't feel like, sometimes I'll just hold the entire battery and the phone and the cable plugging it in and everything and whatever who cares. Sometimes, especially if it's like one of those big fat like 20,000 milliamp hour batteries, ideally it's in my pocket. And then I just have a cable running the whole way. When it's in my pocket, the battery is likely, especially my shorts would have these like enormous pockets.

The battery is likely to rotate and then it'll torque on the cable while it's in my pocket and it'll break the end. and so far it's one of the longest lasting ones. It shows no issues at all. No guarantees. Your mileage may vary. These are very demanding use cases. This is a brutal use case. I expect it to probably break eventually.

A cable is like, I wonder. It's still a wear item. Yeah. I wonder how long it's going to last, which is one of the reasons why I'm still doing it. Let's be realistic, but it's a high quality wear item.

Yeah, Pogo eats the battery. If you're playing for more than an hour, much a requirement. Yeah, and there are, there have been times where I'm out for more than eight. So like, yeah. Some of the like fests or tours or whatever, those will like, those are, those are eight plus hour days. So you're going through some batteries. I'm usually bringing multiple. Nice. Thanks for the big sale LLD. What is? Oh, sorry. Yes. Sorry. I'm going to interrupt you for you. Go for it. I have seen this news put out everywhere on Pokemon. Go stuff and we'll see if people can prove me wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's, it's like very

misleading about Pokemon Go. Okay, it's not misleading about what their intentions are, but I think it's misleading about what the reality is. Talking about how Pokemon Go, like, Pokemon Go players are mapping out the world through constant AR scanning. I don't know a single person who ever has AR enabled on any level in Pokemon Go. Everyone turns that off. Oh, no, I'm pretty sure people do. I'm sure kids do. Yeah.

All of the groups that I've been to, which do include kids and everything, every single person hasn't turned off. Never use the AI function. Yeah. A.R. It just makes it stupid a catch. Now everyone turns it off. Yeah.

Like, it's, it definitely happens for sure. But in my opinion, one of the reasons why the original founder got less interested with Pokemon Go. It's because his goal was this whole AI. thing and no one ever bought into it. No one cared. It was kind of stupid the whole time. It's the first thing I turned off. AR uses even more battery.

It's like actually basically everyone turns this off. Okay, got it. And then they had this thing where it was like, oh, you can scan, like do AR scanning of different areas and we'll like do something. No one ever did those. AR mapping of stops. Do you do that? That's what Byron says.

Interesting. See, that's interesting to me. Christa says I always used it, Lull. Oh. Okay. I'm certain there are people. See, I delete scanning stop research every time. Yeah, that's Pinkrats though.

That's like one of the most technical people that you know. That is true. That is true. Just throwing that out there. But yeah, I think, I think like, I think a lot less people I think there's a lot more people that use that play Pokemon Go than people realize

and I think a lot less percentage of those people use AR than people realize. I think both of those things are true. Hit me Dan. Thanks for the Big ZaylLD. What is the strangest game you have ever played? I'm just going to put this here. Not the strangest game I ever played, but...

No, we've played some weird. ones. What was that like rock throwing game or something that we played? You're not talking about disc jam, are you? No, no, no, no, no, no. Multiplayer again. We played some game where like, I feel like you had to throw things at each other. You two big dudes. You had to throw stuff at each other. Prisoner simulator was weird. That was weird. That wasn't that one though. Drunken fight simulators pretty. We were on this kick for a while where we would sort steam by its cheapest games.

We only did it once, actually. I thought we did it more than once. No, we should do it again. We should do it. It was really fun. And we would just buy like one dollar games. Oh, they were less than a dollar, sir. They were like 30 cents a lot of the time.

And then play it till it got boring. Barrow 2020. I think something that turned us off was a bunch of them ended up being just like renamed and repackaged demo projects. Yeah. And it was like, hmm, okay. I want the actual jank. Yeah.

I want the crap. This was... This was legitimately... Play-through no commentary. There's a video of this? I know, right? This was legitimately fun for a few minutes? Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was fun for a little bit. Not weird, though. Nope. It's just a racing game. Yeah, but, like, you know, yeah, pretty, pretty good. But it was like for a game that I think... I think that one costs a dollar.

Yeah, something like that. I got a dollar out of it. Definitely. I'm gonna... I think you got more than a dollar out of it. I think you were... streaming still back then. Oh, that makes sense.

I think that's what motivated us to do it. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm going to go on the, I'm going to go on the store right now and find out how much Barrow 2020 is worth. It is available right now. Barrow. It's no longer called Barrow 2020. It just seems to be called Barrow. Just Barrow.

It is 90% off and is 64 Canadian cents to buy. 100% worth it. Do endorse for that price. For that price, I will also, yeah. Apparently, there's Barrow. No, no, no. There's so many Barrow games. I was just going to say, yeah.

Barrow is not Barrow 2020. Barrow was in fact released in 2018. Barrow 2020, though, is also 90% off and also 64 cents. Strong recommend at that price. Yeah. They have a, they won't release in 2022. That's called Barrow F-22. and it looks like it's like formula racing

and yeah very positive reviews and it's 64 cents Canadian there you go guys Barrow it's this is actually I wasn't going to say this is the weirdest but it's now the weirdest when I realize that there have been a dozen Barrow games

and almost all of them cost less than an American 50 cent coin. Yeah. Yeah, they're very cheap. Yep. It looks like on sale, not on sale, they're like six, seven bucks. I don't know if I'd do that.

Nope. But when they're on sale, yeah. Yep. 64 cents, do it. Yeah. How do you guys decide what topics or ideas are viable for main channel videos? And are there video ideas you regret not pursuing? Oh, too.

I regret not pursuing a video idea like every week. Like, it's so often that we'll be like, oh, we should, like, we should do that. And then just the logistics of re-cajiggering what everyone is working on can be really challenging. We almost did our MacBook Neo video, either a day or two days later, because of just prior obligations for other videos that we were working on

or had scheduled for release. And I had to pull a fair number of strings in order to, like, get that pushed over the line. As for how we decided, side on what to do, well, there's the viability conversation, feasibility, exploration aspect, and also just like, how interesting is it to the team? Dan? How many views do we think it's going to get?

What is the impact on the credibility of our channel? You know, is it good for our brand or bad for our brand? It's a whole kind of rubric. does it align with a current sponsor project that we need to do or like a current you know sponsor idea like yeah it might be that a sponsor needs to show something off and you've got a video idea that's been on the dock for like three years and it's been interesting but you just haven't quite had enough motivation to make it and you know people like it but yeah or it's a lot of work and the extra money would actually help to justify it's a big one and then that'll kick that idea

into the front yeah yeah yeah message for Linus. How much French do you remember? Are you still able to follow a French discussion? A petit bit, but I... Hmm. I have the sense that something to be in... Conversation in French, it's... It's difficult. I have no idea how bad my grammar was just now, and I know my presentation.

pronunciation was terrible, not aided by my braces. But, no, it's pretty difficult. The rapid fire speed at which French people talk was never something that I was able to follow with ease. But if people spoke slowly to me, I was conversational at one point. That was a very long time ago. I was like 16. So, yeah. Hello, L-L-L-N-D, the Goober.

But he's not a goober. What does goober mean? No, no idea if you've talked about this recently. What's a goober? A peanut. He doesn't look like a peanut. It's a different streamer. True.

No idea if you talked about this recently, but motorcycle update video, when excited to see it pushed together? He was snacking on a sack of goobers, was he? I want to call them goobers forever now, I think. Sorry, what was your question, Dan? I wasn't listening.

I love Goober. I was busy discovering that Goober meant peanut. So rude. No idea if you talked about this. Motorcycle. Yeah, there's a lot of motorcycle questions. Maybe we all roll them together. I'll message.

The last I heard was, it's going well, slight problem with the rear shock we ordered. It was in storage for so long that the oil leaked out. It's proving to be a problem for warranty because we ordered it so long ago. Don't stress, I'll take care of it. So that was on March the 9th. It has since been 11 days.

So I will send my classic every so often, he's not looking, but that's fine. Every so often a how goes. I'm sending work messages. I'll find out how goes, you're welcome to send any messages you want. It's free country.

Dan, hit me. Let's group all the motorcycle stuff together. What gear do you use? What gear do I use? Usually the sixth gear. We're getting into spring, eh? The motorcycle messages are going to come back. There's been so many.

We didn't get many at all for a long time. Well, it's finally time for me to ride. Did you mention it in a video, or is it just that time of year? Sammy's been talking about it. He keeps messaging me about when my motorcycle is going to be done. I think he wants to do a float plane exclusive on it. Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.

I was like, why did he rides? You will never ride that machine. You're so wrong, you gadget guy. I don't care if you say slash us. You're still wrong. You're wrong. I will. I'm going to.

I swear it. It doesn't feel like a Sammy thing to ride a motorcycle, but it does feel like a Sammy thing if a motorcycle like matches his outfit to like stand near it and look cool. I could see that. Yeah. Sorry, the ding was because that was a joke. Yeah, so what gear do you use? Did you talk about the gear?

I use like crappy old Joe Rocket gear from when I first got a motorcycle like almost 20 years ago. So let's not get into it. And I use showy helmets because they fit my head shape really well. Not because I think you should spend that much on a helmet. It's honestly pretty bad idea. But what you should do is you should buy a helmet that fits you. So like I put on an awry and even though it's like a fancier like top of the line helmet or whatever, at least was back when I was like into gear and like.

learning about it. It did not fit my head shape well, so it would have been a very silly thing for me to buy. You should buy something that fits regardless of the price because you're on a motorcycle, man. You're going pretty fast. You hit your head. How about be less cooked? Maybe. And I think this is the third one. We could deal on the backpack bundle. Surprise the Thunderbolt dock is in here. Linus, do your kids consider riding a motorcycle? Nope. That was really fast. Actually, you know what? I haven't seen him drive yet.

I haven't seen him drive a car. I'd want to see my son drive. He's a pretty responsible person. He's never going to watch this. I think with some proper training, he'd be completely fine. I think he'd be. I'm not encouraging.

It's not the motorcycle rider that I'm worried about. I'm not worried about his skills. Yep. And I think he's also like, I don't want to say intelligent enough. wise enough to be pretty aware of that. He's a sharp kid. Yeah.

I'd still prefer he didn't. I'm not promoting or suggesting. Yeah, I'd still prefer he didn't. Yet you will? I mean, it's not like a lot of people depend on me, so it should be fine. Not like them. Yeah. I mean, they're the next generation, you know?

They got to think of all the future people who could be born. You've done your like factory work. You've output your people. Yeah, that's right. Hey, hey, look, how much did you contribute to the birth rate? Not at all. Well, there you go. I'm at three.

I'm well above national average. Isn't national average like super low now? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I used to always quote like white picket fence 2.3 kids, but I don't think it's that anymore. No. Good Lordy. I think it's basement suite.

2.3 cats. Almost low one, I think. Canada's birth rate for 2024, was 10.01 per, oh, actually, so it's actually up a little bit in 2024. But, sorry, this is live births per thousand people. So the last couple of years are actually up a little bit, but overall it's been catastrophic. Yeah, apparently in, that's wild.

2023, it dropped to 1.26. I always feel bad for the parents to get 0.26 of a kid. Don't laugh. What is that? like a leg up to the knee. Like, on a good day? Like mid-thigh, maybe.

It takes practice. Up next? Yeah. Yeah, yes. What is your keyboard setup for gaming at your TV slash projector? I find that with my PC, the next room over,

there's too much keyboard lag. I have a USB extension to the projector room with two and a half gigs USB. Uh, I have one of these for when I just need to use the mouse and keyboard. It has a gyro mouse in it.

And then the left click is up here on the shoulder and the right click is up here on the other shoulder. It has just enough keys to be like kind of useful. Here's the Windows key. It doesn't have F keys, which is really annoying, but it has media keys, so that's less annoying. Can you combine the media keys to F keys? Maybe.

Never looked into it. And then I have one of these. for like if I'm actually gaming or I need to use the computer for a bit RIP Rockat right they're like gone now? I don't think so are they what was Rockcat was a German computer accessories manufacturer based in Hamburg no way when did they shut down yeah founded 2006 defunct 2024

they were acquired by Total Beach in 2019 oh bummer All right, well, I'm glad that I bought three of those keyboard mouse combos when I realized that the whole trend of desk boards was going away. I should have got more rock-ass stuff when they're around. This is the classic problem. But they were like the creator of things that definitely not enough people were going to buy, but were really cool. Like they made monitor bags for going to lands. Nice. There was like 12 people that were going to buy that.

Solid. But it's awesome. It's super cool. A LD, always fun to hear your take-on musicals, and I have some friends on the Book of Mormon tour that came through Vancouver Bit ago. Did you catch it, and would you ever do videos on Live Theater Tech? Live Theater Tech is probably not enough overlap with our core audience. I don't think we'd be able to do that. I did not catch the tour, but I have seen it on Broadway.

I absolutely love the Book of Mormon. I don't think it's fair that Tray Parker gets to be that talented and also who did he co-write it with? I believe he co-wrote it with someone who wrote Book of Mormon Trey Parker, Matt Stone,

and Robert Lopez. This is hilarious. The AI overview. It's Google, get it together. Okay, your summary up here knows what I'm talking about and your AI overview is like Joseph Smith translated the book of Mormon from ancient metal plates

you found in 1823 etc etc etc obviously not what I'm talking about see your first real search result knows what I'm talking about everything else knows what I'm talking about anyway I'm from Malaysia what was your favorite part of the country

and do you plan on coming back anytime soon? The badminton scene here is crazy, and you should come and play a few games. Oh, I actually, I played in Malaysia when I went there like 10 years ago. That was fun, and yes, I know the badminton scene is crazy. It's also really hot to play there. The same issue that I have when I play in Taiwan is like freaking dying in the heat. A lot of the time it's like in school gyms and stuff like that,

and there's no air conditioning. So you just, I once sweat all the way through the bottom of my badminton shoes playing in Taipei. That was crazy. You would think it's a completely rubber sole, but it turns out, and this was when I discovered this, it's actually not in the particular shoes I have.

There's a little, like, spot in the bottom where it's just, there's like a hole in the rubber, and there's, like, something else is there's, like, a mesh there. So everywhere I was stepping on the court, I was leaving little spots, which, so I had to retire for the evening because I, was dangerous anyway. Yeah, yeah, I'd love to play badminton,

but going all the way to Malaysia to play badminton when I live like less than 20 minutes from my own badminton club would be a little unhinged. But I do sometimes like to play when I go on vacation. Hi, Linus, we both have worked now for defunct computer shops in the Fraser Valley. Nice. What is one tech store you were surprised to not make it? And how many do you expect to close with today's cost of parts? I was a little surprised that Future Shop sold out.

It seemed like they were doing fine. Totally fine. Which was kind of a bummer. I'd rather talk about the one store that I'm surprised does still exist. How does Attic still exist? They managed to outlast NCIX with, oh wait, do they not still exist? I've never even heard of Attic. ATIC on Broadway

Oh I never went down there they are I never went down to Vancouver Most trustable I think you were I think the word you were looking for was trustworthy Attic Or trusted This is their website

To my knowledge This has always been their website What's that computer What are they selling right now No I think this is like an old Whoa this is just like old junk that doesn't work. Like this is,

here's a Lenovo core I5 desktop. This is a real company that definitely actually exists. The very first time I interacted with them, it was on the advice of Kyle, who I did my Quebec exchange with and who told me he'd build my first computer for me and show me how to do it. So he was like instrumental

in me becoming Linus Tech Tips. Shout out Kyle. he was like, yeah, I get stuff at NCIX or ADIC. They're both on the same street, so you can just go to both of them. I bought a hard drive at Attic, and I realized upon walking out the door, you know what, I'd rather have the 80 gig one with the 8 meg cache than the 120 gig one with the two meg cache. And I walked, or maybe I went the other way around.

I don't know. I walked back in the door and I said, actually, can I exchange it for the other one that I was considering? and they charged me a restocking fee for the brand new thing that I had literally just walked out the door with and I never shopped with them again. And they somehow still exist

in spite of that approach to customer service. They must do B2B or something because like it clearly isn't their website that's gaining the many favors here. No, look at Twitter logo and that Facebook logo. It's been a while for that one. Yeah. Yeah.

Software antivirus, just like completely empty categories on the side of their website. Video logo. Scroll down. There you go. Vida partner force. Like what is their GPU solution center? Is that Windows 8? Is that Windows 8?

If you scroll down on the side banner? I didn't see the Windows one. Right there. Oh, here. No. What is that? Is that 10? That might be 10.

Do great things with the best Windows ever. What was 10? There you go, baby. Microsoft headsets. Like, this is just LifeChat headset. Price $28. Cash discounted price. Regular at 2940.

Like, seriously, you have a cash discounted price on your... What year is it? These guys are hilarious. Not an endorsement. This one's a bit for both of us. Dan, what resource or community would you recommend for an amateur, impoverished sound guy? And Luke and Linus, where do you go to a bit of both of us? find communities for somewhat niche hobbies.

I mean, I had a really great interaction at the local hobby store when I decided not to buy the replacement differential gasket and differential fluid that I needed online and decided to go pay extra to go buy something in person. I already did the research to find out what I needed. So I could have just ordered it. But I was like, you know what? that's stupid because running an RC shop is a very challenging sort of endeavor that only someone who's really passionate would do. And while I was in there, a handful of other people came in

and just like wanted to chat about it. They didn't care that I was a complete nob and I have no idea what I'm doing. And the car that I have on the counter is some piece of crap, ARMA plastic thing from 10 years ago that obviously has not been taken care of. They just like want to chat and shoot the breeze. And so I'd say going to meetups, going to mom and pop shops

that specialize in that stuff, that can be a good place to start. As for the amateur impoverished sound guy bit, no comment there. Dan, you're up. Yeah, it really depends on your niche. Generally, it is piracy, learn and then buy what you like.

and an SM 57 is $100 and you're fine. That's it. You're good. But as for software, there's like dozens of DAs. Generally, either try a trial or steal them, learn what you can, and then buy the one that you like. If you're making money with it, absolutely buy it. But there's lots of free stuff out there too. Communities are just watch YouTube tutorials.

It's a black art, so you will never know how to do it. Remember that. I have generally found that Reddit is good for information, and Reddit is often not good for community. So you know how the Linux people are on Reddit? It's like that times 100 for anything audio related. So this is sick. And this is true for like a ton of things.

People on Reddit are just really mad all the time. And if you want to like, like if you if you go out, we were talking about Pokemon Go earlier, so I'm going to use this example again, If you go out to like your local community Pokemon Go event, you're probably going to have a good time and people are probably going to be pretty chill and like be enjoying the game and play the game a little bit and then just enjoy nature and walk around a little bit and just do whatever. And you go online on the Reddit and it's like just screaming the whole time. It's wild. So I don't know if I can really recommend Reddit these days.

And Discord is questionable as a community thing to be completely honest. It's a little tough online, but I've really enjoyed going to common places. I did a crazy fast this week, went to go get faa at our favorite fa place to break my fast. And I got there a little bit late for the people that I was going to eat lunch with. And they mentioned that they had another person coming. And the waitress, I guess, saw me out of the window and was like, is it him as they were ordering? And they were like, yeah. And she was like, okay, well, you guys are going to order.

I know what he's getting. and I was like I freaking made it I did it I have Langley Vietnamese I have one it's so good and it's so cheap I have one more point

if you want to go into audio engineering specifically you're going to have to be Pro Tools so get a trial or something you have to be on Pro Tools learn Pro Tools enjoy your blender level

1,000 page manual on shortcuts learn all the shortcuts you're in for a rough time. Yeah, you think Adobe's bad? Yeah, good luck. Okay, up next, as a new dad, I would love to know what's the best lesson you learned from your kids. Oh, that's a cool question.

What's a cool way of frame of that? Oh, man, that's a hard one to just try to come up with off the spot, off the top of my head, on the spot. I can combine the things. Oh, man. I don't know. I mean, I'll just go with the one that I talked to Yvonne about most recently, because I think coming up with the best one is going to be darn near impossible

after doing this for 14 years. I would say the most recent one, it was, you know, watch out for the weight of your words. I think a lot of parents talk about their kids not listening to them, and that being, you know, detourable. you know, they don't listen to me. They, you know, they'd go and do the wrong thing. But the conversation we had very recently was be careful what you say because they just might listen.

They might, they might do it. You've got to be always cognizant of both setting a good example and being aware of the danger of giving poor advice or setting a bad example. and also being careful not to guide them too much and sometimes not telling them the path so that they can learn to set their own path. And so we were talking to my son about investment. You know, he has collected some red pocket money over the years. We pay him for any of the work that he does on the channel, all of the kids. And so he has some money.

He doesn't spend money. He's like the most spendthrift person I know, and I know you. He does not spend money. It's crazy. I don't understand it. Money burned a hole in my pocket when I was his age. Anyway, we, um, so we, we were just kind of like advising him a little bit on what he might want to do in terms of, of investment strategy.

And as, as you know, we know, we're not, we're not seasoned investors. We're not experts. I actually work a job, um, as opposed to just, you know, coasts. off of capital. And so we kind of talked him through it. And at the end of it, Yvonne and I were sort of discussing based on, you know, the decisions that he was making and kind of feeling like, you know, maybe we, maybe we were almost like too cautionary or like too, um, too biased in the way that we presented the information.

And that might have like biased him when really what we want to. to do is learn at this stage because it doesn't matter if he makes any money in his investments right now. It's not really relevant. What's relevant is that he's learning. It doesn't hurt if he makes some money. And it certainly would be relevant if he lost a bunch of it, you know, but just making sure that we have our priorities in straight in terms, priorities straight in terms of how we're presenting this information. Like one of the things that I pushed him really hard to do was to read up on the Dutch tulip crisis. And, you know, the goal wasn't to, like, spook him,

but it was to make sure that he understands the concept of a bubble before he jumps in right now. You know, not that there's any bubbles right now. But anyway, sorry, that's something. No, that's actually really interesting. I think, like, I feel like I don't have this so much for, like, individual quotes when I was pretty young, but I'll talk to people now that are,

still heavily affected and have shaped their lives or have issues with certain problems over individual quotes, one-off lines from their parents when they were kids. Like, it's pretty wild. Going back to the previous topic, and this is not fair. I have to point that out before I make this point. This is extremely not fair. It's an open community. Every open community can have this type of stuff.

I'm not actually trying to characterize the whole platform in any way. It's just kind of funny and interesting. I don't know if you knew about this, Linus, but this, what the heck? Diplomatic militaristic? What are we even talking about here? That's not my screen. Offline, Luke, laptop? Is it your screen? What?

Did I do them backwards? No. Oh, when I was messing with the thing. Give me one second. That's from a long time ago. How long was that sitting in a buffer somewhere? Your camera is also... Rosen.

Can I just cancel this? No, okay. There you go. There we go. Do you know what this? Do you know who this is? Maxwell Hill, the first registered to hit one million karma. Do you know who that is?

No. Wait, isn't that, uh, Dazain Maxwell? Or like, that's what we think, right? No, it is. Do we know that for sure? As far as my understanding goes, yeah. And like 20 years, 15 million karma. Uh, let's see.

Let's see. Let's check. my understanding is it looks extremely like 99.9% suss but I don't think we actually know no yeah there's like a theory that she used the Reddit platform to aid in her in the elite sort of shaping of public discourse and also to stay abreast of everything that's going on and also for like recruitment for Epstein's whatnot

not. Yeah. Did you just learn about this? No, but I just learned that it might not be real. There's a lot of, there's a lot of indication that it appears to be real. So like to your credit, if you're going to believe something that was an internet hoax,

this one seems extremely credible. I did fall for that. I did definitely fall for that. This one seems extremely credible. So, yeah. Does anyone have proof that it isn't her? Nobody here is like calling you out for, for like falling for it. Like I think it's like, we are pretty sure it has it.

We're pretty sure it is. It's pure C theory sugar snack says not her. But what's the? Yeah, but what's the, what's the D.D.? What's the due diligence? Apparently the evidence that it is real is also. It's very circumstantial. Pretty thin, yeah.

But there's, I mean... Maxwell in their name and they disappeared at the same time that they got arrested. Yeah. But we don't have the, we don't have the, you know, the Epstein emails to prove it. No. No. Because we have a lot of Epstein's usernames and stuff. Yeah.

From that, but we don't have hers. We're ready, Dan. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, I don't have much else to say. I thought it was legit. Nah, it seems like it's, it's unknown. Hey, all, would you consider donating to your favorite Linux distribution or bug bounty program

if they would work on things that annoy you the most, so you wouldn't be able to fully transition to Linux? Yeah, I'd consider it. I think that, yeah, I'd consider it. I don't know that most of the things that I would... Oh, man, where's the line between a donation, a contribution, though, and like expecting an open source developer to just like be your little bitch and fix your little uh sort of quibbles i i i i i i like the idea of donating i don't like the way you've necessarily framed it here is i guess where i'll land on that yeah yeah oh boys excited for

the next whale land linus what a crazy thing are we planning this time i i don't I don't know if we're planning anything crazy. I think it'd be kind of crazy if the 8V8 worked perfectly this time. We have some ideas. We have some ideas for how to fix some of the issues that we were having. What we can't fix... Someone owning it makes sense. What we can't fix is the human behavior around it.

So it'll sit idle and then Luke and I will go over and be like, hey, want to play Halo? Yeah, let's play Halo, bro. And then there'll be a line, like a lineup to play the 8V8. And then Luke and I will be like, Oh, there's a line. The game's over. We should cycle out.

We should cycle out. And then literally no one will even sit down. To be fair, it was like a pretty rough experience. Yeah. We have some issues to figure out. If it was a good experience, maybe that'll change. Maybe it would have changed it. Yeah.

Last one I got for you today. I am a low-volt technician and have been rocking the OG backpack and screwdriver as my dailies. Blinus, have there been any low-volt upgrades to your house since the last video? Any plans in the future? I don't think so. I got my house to the point where I was basically just like, I don't want to, I don't want to touch this anymore. One thing that I did come across is I was having a lot of issues with that whole concept that I had where my one gaming machine would power the gaming in the land room, in the theater room, and in my office upstairs. I ended up with three separate machines for that, not because I wanted to, but because Windows's multi-monitor management was really poor. It assigns a permanent forever, you cannot fix this ID. You know the one, two, three, like when you press identify, it assigns a permanent one that the last time I looked into it, there was absolutely no way to fix or override.

So what that meant was that for some reason, something, something, hotkeys, and going to the primary and not it interfering with potential other inputs because there was also supposed to be, the one at my station downstairs was supposed to be a guest one for the kids to put their friends at that that didn't have any of my stuff logged in or anything like that. So it hasn't worked out that way. but basically the multi-monitor management across the three rooms was really, really crappy because I couldn't force it to say this is the primary display. And it was just bound to two. And I went as far as even reinstalling windows and like connecting that one first. And that didn't work for some reason that I don't understand. So however Microsoft derives its, um, it's, it's,

identification for which monitor is which was just not fixed. to me. EGadgett guy says it can be overridden by unplugging and plugging them in a certain order and sometimes it doesn't. No, it can't. I trust me. I hiked up and down the stairs of my house more times than I can count trying to do it that way. It did not work for me. But I came across this. It's called Monarch, a display switching utility that might make it easier to manage my desktop across multiple locations. So I shared this with myself. Someone posted it on Reddit, I think, for quick monitor detach and layout switching. So this looks like it might help me finally achieve that,

which does not change anything about my setup right now, but would cause me to run some more low voltage because then I could use my computer in all of those places. I could run another display port up to the family room as well, and then I could just have everything everywhere. And then this would be next level. I could finally do the thing I wanted to do with level one text displayport KVMs,

and I could also have like a SteamOS machine that runs to all those places and then I could just create some automations that will switch all the inputs and then I can have like voice activated things like be like play Steam OS in the theater and it could just... That'd be sick.

So that's what I'd like to do next but I'm on there's always something. As a bit of a callback to that whole Reddit thing, Enigma Blade said, I used to modd subredits with people who modded other subredits with Maxwell Hill and they were active in private mod, mails and messages after Gislein's arrest.

Okay. So sounds like probably not a thing. Maybe hoax then. Yeah. You know what's not a hoax? Is we will see you again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. That was fast.

Bye!