The WAN Show - HP Nerfs Their Tech Support ON PURPOSE - WAN Show February 21, 2025

Episode Date: February 22, 2025

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Welcome to the WAN Show. We've got a great show lined up for you guys today. We're going to be talking about, well, let's see, Ryzen AI Max 395 Strix ALO. The point is these processors are freaking wild and I am super excited about them. We're also going to be talking about HP thinking, well, maybe if we just left you on the line and didn't let you talk to tech support, maybe you'd just figure it out on your own. That's their policy now? Yes, and we'll get into it.

What else we got this week, Mr. Luke? So we talked about how you, just like all the other cards, can't get the RTX 5070 Ti, and mod makers rejoice. Valve releases the full Team Fortress 2 source code in a move that I didn't see coming. How can you see anything coming? You know what? It doesn't matter. The show is brought to you today by Squarespace, Vessi, Xsplit, and of course our rap partner Dbrand and our chair partner Secret Lab. All right, why don't we jump right into our headline topic today, which was reported by Ars Technica and basically amounts to HP thinking, hmm, maybe it would be better if you just

figured out your tech support problems for yourself. HP has added, and since removed, a 15-minute mandatory wait time to their phone support in order to and this is a quote, in order to influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve. Digital self-solve is the most corporate bullsh** speak way of saying, just go deal with it yourself, that I think I have ever heard. They recommend visiting support.hp.com to check out other support options

or find helpful articles and assistance to get a guided help using, sorry, what? And assist, whatever, virtualagent.hpcloud.hp.com. HP has since canceled the mandatory wait times claiming that it was originally, and this is another quote, intended to provide more digital options with the goal of reducing time to resolve inquiries and also said that many of our customers were not aware of the digital support options that we provide

There has to be a better way to raise awareness than just like waste everyone's time dude 15 minutes For every single support cults like yeah, I Can't imagine a lot of people going, holy crap, I've been on hold for 13 and a half minutes. Maybe I'll just, you know, Google this or... But the problem is that the kind of people that are on the phone waiting on hold for HP support

are not necessarily the kind of people that can go resolve it themselves. And so basically you're just pushing them into paid services in all likelihood. I also do wonder like what their average wait time was before they did this. Like did this actually really change anything? When you did Secret Shopper, do you know how long you had to wait for them to answer? We've actually had pretty okay support experiences with HP. They have never been the best, but I don't think they've ever been the worst in the now three times that we've done Secret Shopper. They're always kind of good for

a tier one, you know? Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, kind of in the middle. And here's my bigger issue I think with this is on the one hand like yeah obviously this is horrible that HP is out here saying that they're going to make everybody wait 15 minutes in order for them to push more people to sorry influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve. But you got to wonder since this is obviously a function then that exists in these phone tree systems to introduce a mandatory weight, you gotta wonder how many of the places that you call already have this implemented and just don't tell anybody. Yeah, like this probably isn't an original idea.

Oh, I sincerely doubt that they're the first ones to think of this. And I guess I'm just trying to wrap my brain. I mean, obviously, we sometimes at LTT store don't have the fastest response times. That is a fact. Since the holiday season, pretty much, we've had a notice on the site that's like, hey, things are going to be a little delayed, whether it was due to the holiday rush, due to the influx of orders for the commuter backpack right at the end of the year. And then more recently, because the poor support team has been absolutely buried under inquiries about the tariffs and then not tariffs and then tariffs

and then not tariffs and just the whole shenanigans that's been going on. There's been one thing or another. So we're, we're, I fully recognize that sometimes our support response times are suboptimal. But to imagine, to put myself in a head space where I'm going, hmm, you know what is the solution to literally any problem is to increase those response times on purpose.

You understand that a customer who contacts you for help is not like an undue burden. Like that's your job. That's like the whole job. You sell them the product and then when they have a problem with it, you deal with it. That's the deal. Yeah, this does feel like a continuation of like, you know, on certain websites when you try to find some way to contact support and it's like very, very difficult and they really, really just try to force you into either support forums, or like FAQ style documentation or whatever else. This feels like a continuation of that where it's like, they, they just don't want to help you

at all. And maybe they're trying to train people to not actually call in ever and instead use other resources. Oh, shoot, Luke's audio is breaking down. Do you have any idea why and are you able to fix it? Yeah, I might just need to lower settings a bit. Cool. Okay. Hopefully you heard that Luke.

How is it now? Is it any better now? Nope. It's really bad. Ah, we really did spend quite a bit of time before the show getting his stuff dialed in. Unfortunately, it is I believe you Luke. I believe you but I'm gonna have to ask you to stick with me for these basic troubleshooting steps anyway Can you please try to 15 minutes? Yeah, wait 15 minutes first

Yeah, wait 15 minutes first. Okay, I don't have too much else to say about this HP thing other than that if that's the way that you feel about your customers, don't be surprised when your customers start feeling that way about you. Just the level of hostility that large companies have towards their customers is just baffling to me. And I understand that part of the mandate as you scale up a company is to make elements of your business scale more efficiently. But there are certain things that just don't scale efficiently.

And dealing with one-to-one customer support issues is just one of them. When your revenue is double, you are going to spend double as much time talking to your customers and helping them fix stuff. Yeah, that's probably the case as you go more and more mainstream and more broadly outside of the the niche of enthusiast customers who first engaged with you. Yeah, you're probably right. It probably does go up. Hesseur says, LTD store has no phone support though. Isn't that just as bad or worse? I think you could make an argument that having no phone support at all is bad. My response to that though,

is that all of our support is here onshore. And for us to be able to afford to do phone support, which takes way longer per ticket, like multiple times longer per ticket, it would impact the prices on the store. And so right now we've made the decision to keep our margin structure as it is and We do offer chat support now at least but it's all

Text-based which allows our customer service people to work with multiple people at once and to deal with things more efficiently Support is is more like expensive than just traditional email support. Like that is a step forward. Yep. Oh man, you're, there's also a big difference. Actually, that's a really good point from Jay Hirschman in Floatplane Chat. No phone support is fine for what LTT sells.

Yeah, we don't sell anything that's mission critical. Like you don't need us to get your, a fray in your t-shirt or whatever, resolved this instant, or you're gonna have customers breathing down your neck because their systems are offline or whatever. Like it's fairly not time sensitive. All right.

Should we have him reconnect or something then? While I do a topic? He seems to having issues with Nvidia broadcast. Oh, I see. Okay, well maybe you should disable some features of Nvidia broadcast and see if it goes a little better. Yeah, we disabled the main one. It didn't seem to make a difference.

Oh no. We need to get you a new laptop. Maybe. I mentioned to Dan just to bypass me and go directly through the mic instead of through video broadcast and see if that's better. Okay, cool. I guess we're bringing back the fan noise. Let's go. Sure, try it. Yeah, just do it. Just do it We have to fix it do it. Yep I don't hear it yet

I'm just gonna start talking before it's terrible. No, it's terrible. Oh boy all right, Nvidia launched the RTX 50 70 TI and You probably can't get one. If you could get it at MSRP, it's actually one of the more compelling cards in the 50 series lineup yet. However, I'm going to play a little game with you guys called, Can I Get a 5070 Ti for MSRP? Alright, I'm going to stay at United States. That's a pretty large market. Should get a pretty reasonable amount of the, you know, allocation. New Egg, pretty large retailer.

Okay. Well, there's one small problem. First of all, this lowest price in 30 days on an Asus TUF is $1,000. That's a lot more than seven hundred fifty dollars you know sometimes the custom cards with you know bigger beefier power delivery or cooling can be a little bit on the higher side but I don't know if you know years ago I would have ever seen one that was two hundred fifty dollars more but you know hey whatever sure let's go ahead and let's check out this gigabyte Eagle hey that's a much more reasonable price. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. We got an MSI Ventus. Okay, that's

typically on the kind of lower end and it's on the lower end of the pricing only a mere 70 no excuse me $80 more than MSRP. yeah, oh, hey, look, one at MSRP and it, oh, yep, out of stock, Asus Prime, yep, prime, prime plum out of stock. Yeah, I don't know if it was on the record or not, but I did sort of express some of my concerns about the long-term reputational damage that Nvidia might be doing to their long-term reputation with this over-promising and under-delivering

that's happening on pricing and availability. And I won't give too many details about what was or wasn't said to me other than, you know, I was told that 50-70 TI would be better. And I was like, sure. And then it wasn't better at all. And there are elements of this that Nvidia cannot control. elements of this that Nvidia cannot control. Nvidia can't really control if retailers or distributors are selling in bulk to scalpers for instance. They can't control that. Nvidia can't control if their partners down the chain are

increasing prices in order to take more margin when the market will clearly bear it. They can't really control that to a degree. But one thing that does bother me a little bit is that Nvidia can control how much stock they launch with. Nvidia can control that. Nvidia can make a decision to give their partners longer net terms for the chipsets. Nvidia can make a decision to look at their existing

stock, their existing pre-launch inventory, and they can delay the launch to allow themselves more time to build up that inventory. That is a decision that Nvidia can make and a decision that Nvidia clearly decides not to make with every launch and I want to I want to shout out Nintendo here actually because based on the frequency and thoroughness of the leaks around the switch too I am actually starting to believe what Nintendo hinted at months ago which was that their strategy to combat scalpers was that they were gonna launch with so much inventory that it would

literally not be possible for scalpers to absorb all of the inventory and then sort of trickle it out at much higher prices. Do you remember this conversation, Luke? You can just nod if your mic sucks. Yeah, cool. It's a Linus Wan show today. No, no, we'll get them. Don't worry. We'll get them back online, everyone. But I mean, when was that? I think it was sometime like mid to late last year or something like that that was sort of rumored or something. I can't remember the exact details. But the point is that I was pretty surprised to see

that Nintendo didn't launch the Switch 2 during the holiday season. Because the rumors were already coming at such a rate that it seemed to indicate that the hardware was pretty darn finished. I mean, from everything we've seen, the chip is based on Ampere. So Nintendo has probably had finished silicon for literally years while they work on launch titles for this thing. So that led me to believe one of two things. Either one, they didn't have their launch titles ready and you know Nintendo's going to bring it for a launch title for the Switch 2. You know they're going to bring it. They're

going to have one or two absolute mega bangers and they're going to be ready to go with that. So that was thought number one, they just didn't have it. But then I kind of went, but it looked like the hardware was probably ready for like Tears of the Kingdom. Like Tears of the Kingdom would have been just such a, it would have put such an exclamation point

on the Switch 2 launch, right? So we go, okay, we've got Breath of the Wild that launches with Switch 1, one boom sequel to the switch boom Sequel to one of the most successful games we've ever launched tears of the kingdom Let's go like it seemed like such an obvious one and then no tears of the kingdom comes for the Nintendo switch We see no switch to and it's delayed I mean, I think the rumors these days are what probably sometime in q2 It's kind of the the word on the street

Have you heard anything Luke? Yeah, nothing too specific But I don't suspect will be a huge late after the direct and the direct is around that time. So that probably makes sense Yeah, so probably sometime around there. So if that's the case it is conceivable that Nintendo is manufacturing switch twos literally there. So if that's the case, it is conceivable that Nintendo is manufacturing Switch 2s, literally for, or will be manufacturing Switch 2s for anywhere between weeks and months in the lead up to this launch in order to stockpile enough inventory in order to support it. And there's a lot of other companies that behave like that. I'm holding a product from one of them in my hand. I remember having my eyes kind of opened at one point

about why Tim Cook is the CEO of Apple and what kind of company Apple is. A lot of people think of Apple as what? A technology company, right? A hardware company, a software and services company. But if you really break it down, what is Apple better at than almost literally any other company on the planet?

They're a logistics company. Man, they kill it. Every little screw, every little widget, every little glass element, when an iPhone launches, you can buy one. You might wait a little bit. But speaking as someone who's often not really on the ball about getting our devices ordered, even though you know I'm theoretically a tech youtuber or whatever, like we'll place our... sometimes the approvals take a little

bit of time and we'll place our order like late in the day or the next day and dude a new macbook will come out and we'll wait like four days or like a week and a half or something like that for it to ship like they have the logistics nailed down absolutely nailed down and that's a really hard thing to do but it's also easier to do if you take some of your cash and you use it to facilitate a smooth launch for your customers. Why do Apple's customers love them? Because when you place a freaking order, I just placed an order recently for the I switched to Apple for a month thing for my, wait, has that video come out yet?

Oh, well that video is not out yet but I just placed an order on Apple.com and I bought well I'm not gonna tell you guys what I bought but I bought some computers okay anyway the point is I bought some I bought some Macs to switch to and I get a text message I get a shipping notification it's smooth. And Nvidia is going to have to figure out at some point that your customer expectation for you needs to be that when you want the product you get the product at the price that you say it's going to be at.

Otherwise, what are we even doing here? What is the point of you even telling us what the price is? Why don't you just not tell us anything? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, they've been getting away with like blatantly, I don't know if I wanna say lying, extremely misleading information about performance

and keynotes for many, many, many, many years at this point. Their stock is never what you'd expect. The pricing of things hasn't been legitimate for, I don't know, six years, something like that. Like I don't necessarily think they're going to be encouraged to change unless they have competition and they don't necessarily think they're going to be encouraged to change unless they have competition and they don't have that right now. So I don't know. People can be as mad at them as they want, but if everyone keeps buying their junk, then it's not going to matter.

Well, that's the thing that's frustrating because it's not junk. It's a good product and people want to buy it. But it's the expectations versus reality that I think is really getting us here. Like look, if we could review the 50-70 TI and Nvidia were to say to us, yeah, realistic street pricing is probably going to be anywhere from 850 to $1,000, then at least we can communicate that.

We can work with that. We can say, hey, this is a good card. It's not a great value. Like this will handle high refresh rate 1440p gaming and light 4K gaming. You'll get more FPS out of it if you use these AI enhancement features and you can kind of decide how you feel about that, et cetera.

Pricing is a real weak point and we can have that conversation, but if we are not given useful information, then I don't really know how to deal with that. And I think that on some level at Nvidia, they've got to know that they're not giving the partners enough margin to hit these MSRP's because that's feedback that I've heard, you know, in the background from Nvidia partners going back 10 years, you know, that Nvidia is constantly squeezing their margins tighter and tighter and tighter and

tighter and tighter with every generation. I mean, it's no mystery why EVGA doesn't exist anymore as a GPU maker because you can't operate on these margins. You're caught between customer pricing expectations and Nvidia's margin expectations for their own shareholders, right? And so if Nvidia knows that they're not giving their partners enough margin to hit these prices then just say that Because yeah, it's not a bad product I wouldn't mind a 57 ETI But where am I supposed to get one? Look at this It's like, you know, at a certain point, I just have to kind of look at it and go and

this is honestly not good for my career. But at a certain point, I just have to look at it and go, why do you even see me one then? Save it for a customer. Because clearly they're just going to buy it anyway. Why do we why even bother having reviews? Like I would I would I would rather I would rather Somebody is gaming on that card because I'm not gaming on it sitting in my warehouse You've been talking it's not just sitting in your warehouse, sir. We're using the lab. But we're even thinking, like, you know, at some point in time, we're going to have to get our

standard set of lab 5090s for CPU testing, so that we can, you know, reduce GPU as a variable. In order to do that, we have to get a bunch of them, we have to buy a bunch of them. How do we even adopt to that if we can't get the carts because they don't exist? I don't know. I'm just rooting for 9070. I haven't paid much attention to the rumors. Radeon 9070 guys. I haven't paid much attention to the rumors so I don't know what the sort of scuttlebutt is for why it's been delayed but it obviously got delayed given that AMD had ads going up in other regions for her to buy it when it hadn't actually been launched yet. I don't know why it's been delayed, but I really hope that it's not being delayed because It's bad. I hope it's just being delayed because AMD is

Seeing an opportunity to not screw up and they're like gonna capitalize on it and they're pumping as many of these chips as they can So they can do a huge launch and have as many cards as gamers could possibly want to buy and the drivers are gonna be So polished and it's going to be freaking awesome. What are my odds Luke? What are my odds? Pretty low I think. Pretty low. Are we just saying that though because AMD's Radeon division has let us down time and time

and time and time and time and time and time and time again. Yeah, I think so. All right. Oh man, chat is not, chat is not, chat is not. Oh man, chat, oh man, chat is not, not confident. They're not confident. Oh, hold on, Nokey, Nokey says, in a response to

hardware unboxed AMD's David McAfee shared, I really appreciate the excitement for RDNA 4. We're focused on ensuring it's great. They take a little extra time for software to blah, blah, blah. More FSR for wide range of partners. And while some have started building initial inventory at retailers, you should expect many and it trails off there perfect thanks no key you should expect many more partner cards available at launch okay but that's the thing AMD I don't actually need a ton of different cards I what I need is deep stock of a handful. Because realistically, I mean, as much as your partners, I'm sure,

really appreciate getting allocation of the chips and being able to put their cooler on it and their PCB design and all that kind of stuff. From a customer point of view, I don't really care. Doesn't really matter. I just need the GPU that does that many FPSs in my gamey games. I don't really care. I don't need, you know, what is this?

I don't need 15 cards to scroll through that are out of stock. It doesn't matter. Just please get the cards built, get them on the shelves. I'm I'm super excited. I hope. Or I'm upset. We'll see. Find out. Could be both. Yeah, I could be both. I could be upset, excited. Still fumbling through this with Luke. Apologies, guys. Can you hear me now? Does this sound any better? Yeah, yeah, that's less robotic. Is it? All right, cool. Then let's roll with it. What do you want to talk about next, Mr. Luke?

Nevermind. I'm going to just check to see if it's our local or theirs. Oh, actually, there is hold on there is one, there is one potentially hopeful rumor. It is rumored that gaming card availability could improve in the coming weeks due to data center demand being lower than expected and some of those wafers being repurposed for the production of gaming cards. So that would be pretty cool. Also there was one other bit of Nvidia news this week that we haven't talked about yet and that is that the new 50 series cards appear to not have support for older titles that use PhysX.

So they have no 32-bit PhysX support meaning that if you want to play older titles that use FizzX. So they have no 32-bit FizzX support, meaning that if you want to play something like Batman Arkham Asylum, you're gonna be stuck running FizzX on CPU, which even on modern CPUs is really tough. Now we were talking in writer's meeting today about alternatives, like what can you do?

And one of the things that got pitched was going in like e-bang One of those old physX cards. Do you remember those Luke? Like BFG had like a physX card that you can install And I guess before the Nvidia acquisition that would have been a Gia a Gia physX card unfortunately There's no drivers for those for modern operating systems that I'm aware of and they're PCI cards. So you'd need a PCIe to PCI adapter and you'd have to sort of hope that that would work.

But I wouldn't have a lot of hope for it. What I think would be more likely is running an older Nvidia card that does have modern support and pushing PhysX onto that. But I haven't actually investigated that yet. Luke, do you remember if there was an easy way to specifically allocate one of your Nvidia GPUs to run PhysX? Because I thought there was.

Do you remember the EVGA GTX275 co-op? Yeah, yeah. And I remember people running dedicated PhysX cards, so that must have been a thing Yeah, this one. Okay, so this one had two GPUs on it It had a it had a 275 GTX 275 and then it had a special like second Yeah, there there it is. It also had a GTS 250 that was supposed to be dedicated to PhysX. MDOS says there was a Reddit post on r slash ltt

that showed a comparison that showed that. Okay, yeah, so hopefully that will help. The old page is still up on it as a tutorial. Yeah, here we go. Nokia just posted this. Awesome. To use a physics, GP accelerator, multi GPU systems. Okay.

So if that works, then I guess that helps a little bit, but I also just have to question like how much di area did Nvidia actually save? Hold on a second. I just have to ban someone really quick and they're gone. Cool. At least I'm trying. Dan, if you could do it, that'd be great. Sorry, what do you want?

Things in the chat? Don't worry about it. Okay, cool. What else we what else we got for this week? What do you want to talk about, Mr. Luke? iPhone 16e, I think. Oh, yeah, we can talk about that. The new iPhone 16e came out.

I assume that you weren't paying any attention to this, Luke. No, I wasn't, literally at all. That's correct. So, Apple finally launched a bit of a spiritual successor to the iPhone SE Gen 3. So, they've done three iPhone SE's so far, and that's kind of their budget-oriented iPhone. But what's got people kind of riled this time around is that the last iPhone SE started at $430. Which I mean I think sounds like a pretty good price for a phone that at the time had what was Apple's flagship tier SOC in it. It was pretty light on the RAM and storage. I believe it had 4 gigs of RAM and 64 gigs of storage, so not too much for four years ago. But, but top tier SOC and actually

what a lot of people liked about it was it used an older version of Apple's industrial design that had the fingerprint sensor and the home button rather than using gesture controls like the iPhone X which had actually come out a few years prior. So the iPhone SE was kind of like the you know the the little brother iPhone and it was priced as such, 430 bucks, pretty good starting price and I believe it was a 400 and I want to say 480 for the one that had 128 gigs of storage so like a more reasonable amount of storage if you're gonna be snapping any number of pictures

and recording any video. So what's got people riled is the price for this one starts at $600, which is a lot, especially when you look at some of the more budget-friendly Android phones that exist these days for as little as a few hundred bucks. Anywhere from $350 to $450, there's some pretty darn compelling options for Android phones, and that's even ignoring secondhand flagships. What is a previous generation Apple more affordable phone? Is this an increase

in Apple's low end or is this just bad comparatively to Android cheap phones? It is definitely an increase in Apple's low end because it used to start at $430 or $480 for 128 gigs of storage, and this one starts at $600 for 128 gigs of storage. So I don't really buy the narrative that we went all the way from $430 to $600. I see it as more of we went from $480 to $600. And some of that, realistically, should have gone down in price. That 128 gigs of storage has gone down a lot since the third generation iPhone SE launched. However, there are some elements of the new E, so the iPhone 16E, that have gone up in

price substantially over the last four years. Because once again, with the 16E, we're getting a cutting edge SoC. And I think that that's something that people are not necessarily assigning enough value to here. In this phone, you are getting an SoC that is competitive with phones, Android phones that cost twice as much. Can you guys tell me an Android phone for 600 bucks that has a top spec, absolute top of

the line SoC in it? And there might be some, but I'm actually not aware of any. Go ahead, please guys, hit me with that. UnchainedBlades asks, okay, but the question is, do you even need that SoC? And my answer is, not today. No, today you don't. No, I disagree that the Pixel 8 Pro has a top of the line SoC. Because not today. No. Today you don't. No, I disagree that the Pixel 8 Pro has a top of the line SoC.

It's not even 3 nanometer. Like the only other top of the line SoC that I'm aware of is the latest Snapdragon. And those are not coming in at $600. Not that I'm aware of. Let me have a look here. Pixel 9 Pro XL. Because that uses... Processor. Let me have a look here. Pixel 9 Pro XL. Because that uses... Processor. Let's have a look here. The Tensor G4. Yeah. Oh my god.

Okay. Come on. Just tell me the answer. Yeah, Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 is the only other 3 nanometer chip that I'm aware of. And hold on, let me finish that thought from earlier. So yeah, no, you don't need it today. But the point of the SE or rather rather the E lineup, is not that you need that processor today. It's that Apple builds these platforms, these entry-level devices for longevity. Because unlike a lot of the Android handset makers that are going to build these,

you know, $300, $400 phones, $500 phones even, Apple is committing, actually I don't think they commit, but Apple internally is committing to support this thing for probably six, somewhere between six to eight revisions of iOS. So no, you don't need that processor today. And I think that that's an argument that a lot of people make when they look at the iPhone SE and they go,

well, this is just stupid because I could buy an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 14, I could buy a lot of people make when they look at the iPhone SE and they go, well, this is just stupid, because I could buy an iPhone 15 or an iPhone 14, I could buy a couple of generation old iPhone, and I could get a better experience today because I might even be able to get like, you know, a 13 Pro or a 14 Pro or something like that. And there's gonna be some extra creature comforts that are built into that. I'm gonna get my MagSafe,

I'm gonna get these other features. And that's great, and you can totally do that. Lagging behind on secondhand or even just like last gen flagships that are brand new is a totally valid strategy. But it's not who this product is meant to serve. This product is meant to serve people who want the entry level iPhone that is brand new that they are not going to swap out for five, six, seven years. Yeah.

And so that's, I think, the thing that we're missing a little bit here, is I see a few people talking about, okay, Red Magic 10 Pro. Apparently that is a flagship processor for about 650 bucks. So let's have a look. Red Magic 10 Pro, SoC. So that's got a Snapdragon 8 Elite.

But ask me, but riddle me this. Are you really going to compare Red Magic to iPhone? How long has Red Magic committed to Android updates? to iPhone. How long has Red Magic committed to Android updates? Let's see, they're promising three years. Guys, the software updates are a huge, huge part of the cost of a phone. It's not just the hardware. You're not just buying a bill of materials here, you are buying an experience,

you're buying a bill of materials, plus you're buying the long term support for this device, and you're buying the infrastructure around that. So when you buy, I think, yeah, part of the price might even reflect this, you're buying status to a certain degree, I think, possibly more than ever, especially as far as I've heard in America, because having an iPhone is cool and having an Android is not cool right now. And I get that, but honestly, I don't kind of, I don't, I understand that, but I don't

want to get into that aspect of it because I don't feel that way about a phone. That's not how I make a decision about a phone. And I honestly think that the 16E is a reasonably compelling value even if we completely ignore that element of it. There are things that are missing. So let's talk through some of the things that are missing. It doesn't have the dynamic island, the bullet wound display. Instead it has the old, it has the old like kind of wide notch.

It also lacks MagSafe. So it does support wireless charging. Okay, that's, I mean, that should be a given for a $600 phone these days. But what it doesn't have is the alignment magnets. So you can't take like your MagSafe wallet or your MagSafe battery bank or your MagSafe like car mount or whatever else

and just stick it on there. MagSafe, very cool feature, not supported on it. It has no camera control button and the wireless connectivity, yeah, I think a pretty decent word for it is, let's put it this way is potentially sus So Apple has finally I'm catching Luke up

But also any of you who didn't check out the launch coverage Apple has finally launched a product around their acquisition of Intel's Wireless modem team. I think it was like five years ago now So Apple has their first in-house modem in this handset, and that comes with some caveats. There's no support for Wi-Fi 6E. So no Wi-Fi 7 I get in a budget phone, but no Wi-Fi 6E is a bit of a tough pill to swallow. And this one I don't care about as much, but your mileage may vary. No support for millimeter wave 5G. So if you live in a densely populated urban area and you happen to have millimeter wave around you then you won't be using that. Personally I don't so I don't really care about that. I

would never get a chance to use it. Both of those being not included feels a little bit weird with the feature-proofing messaging that they've thrown out. Yes, but I actually have a counterpoint to my own point here. Wi-Fi 6 is not that bad and for anything that you're going to need to be doing on your phone, like it's pretty incredible to see Jake actually, he hosted a short circuit a little while ago looking at Ubiquiti's new pro access points and I think he hit over two gigabit a second, two gigabit a second on a wi-fi connection at range, like at a distance he was doing over a gigabit which is it's mind-blowing.

What do I need a hundred megabytes a second for? I mean, I'm gonna be limited by like DNS lookups before I'm gonna be limited by drawing data down to my phone at that speed. Like it doesn't matter once you get past a certain speed. And no, I'm not convinced that my auntie needs more than what WiFi 6 can do, which is if I recall correctly it's up in the like 750 to 850 megabit range don't quote me on that, but it's enough you know for what the iPhone SE customer is going to need to do with it.

As for MagSafe, there's a lot of third-party cases that have magnet alignment landmarks in them or that basically can take an Android phone and make it MagSafe compatible. I'm sure they already exist. If they don't, it'll be a matter of minutes. I haven't actually looked into it, but finding a MagSafe upgrade case for the iPhone 16e is going to be a trivial matter in the longer term.

There's still drawbacks, so instead of being able to go at higher wattages, you're limited to seven and a half watts of wireless charging, which is sort of a downer. But I'm just not convinced that the lack of a dynamic island, the lack of built-in MagSafe that I can just add with a case that most people are gonna use anyway, and slower Wi-Fi and millimeter wave, I'm not convinced that it's that big of a deal. dbrand has apparently already advertised it according to CatOS and Andre B and Harris.

Okay, everyone's told me dbrand's got it already. There you go. No, I'm not trying hard not to say dbrand, guys. I just wasn't looking at the chat there. So it's 600 bucks for a phone that has a flagship SoC, it finally has a decent amount of starting storage, it has the same amount of RAM as the rest of the iPhone 16 lineup.

So what's gonna happen, what that tells me, and Apple hasn't explicitly said this, but what that tells me is that they're going to age this thing out pretty much in lockstep with the rest of the 16 lineup. They kept that performance there on purpose. They did that because they have an eye on how long they need to support this bloody thing,

and they're making sure that it's gonna have the horsepower for them to do it. I don't know, man. I think that people are giving it a really hard time and missing the point of the product a little bit. Not everything is made for you. Some products are made for my auntie and she doesn't care. She doesn't need that stuff. What she wants is a phone that she buys and then doesn't think about for the better part of a decade. That's what she wants. Oh, there is one thing that I missed. It doesn't

have Apple's Ultra Wideband chip so you can't like divining rod your way to your airtags. Which is in my opinion actually the biggest missing feature. I'm sorry I missed that you guys. You guys are right. So anyway, yep, new iPhone 16e. You want one yet Luke? No. Yeah, I can't wait to get off of my iPhone either. Actually, oh, I've got something really funny for you guys. In my coverage of the iPhone 16e, one of the drawbacks that I brought up was what a steaming pile of dog crap iOS 18 is and there was not one but many comments basically

just accusing me of being a biased jackass who hates Apple and so since that video launched which was two days ago I have I have collected a couple not one but two clips of my iOS 18 phone behaving in absolutely bat crazy ways for your guys as enjoyment Dan do you happen to have a USB C cable over there I do join USB C to USB C no I want you to just ingest the last two clips. Okay. Last two video clips off of this thing. These are flipping wild.

So I recorded them with my Note9 because I didn't want to start screen recording on the iPhone in case it disrupted the weird bizarre buggy behavior that it was exhibiting. Ranma Chan says I have zero issues with iOS 18, lol. And that's great and that's totally cool and I'm super happy for you. That's absolutely incredible. I love it. But it doesn't change the fact that a lot of people do and your lack of issues 100% does not invalidate the very real issues

that I am running into with this bloody phone. It's driving me absolutely crazy. You know what you're going to switch to? I don't know. Going back to your note, are you? It's the other phone that I carry right now, but no, no, I'm not going to. I'm not going to. Um, what I, you know, what I really want to use is that horrible Huawei trifold one that had all the breakage issues, but I heard that Samsung's going to be releasing a trifold.

I'm kind of tempted. I'm kind of tempted. I sent you something. Yeah, you can start the first one. Um, hold on a second. Dan's got the videos. Dan's got the videos. Here we go. Oh, they're... Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're just the most recent, uh, camera videos. LG Wings, stop. I am never using the LG Wing again, you guys. That is absolutely not happening. And yes, pugboy, I'd love to give the Sony Xperia some love. If anyone from Sony is watching this, okay, let me move the task switcher and back buttons around. And I'm so in. I'm in right now. I'm in yesterday. I'm done. I don't want to install some third-party weirdo thing. I just want you to just

allow me to do that and then I'm good. I'm ready to go. So ready. I'm with you on that even if I'm a Sony fanboy. So ready. Not okay. Alright you got them? Yeah it's just upside down. Oh well well, whatever. Good enough. Yeah, give me a sec. Oh, okay, Dan, he's working on it. Let him cook. Let him cook. Okay, so here's our first one. Am I able to narrate these? Okay, check this out. This is a first party app. This is Safari. This is a first party ass app. Just completely broken until I open up a text thing. Can you play that again? Yep. Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead. Play that again. Just what?

I am NOT even like dude I get all kinds of weird app crashes and strange behavior and like, you know, Gmail or whatever, right? This is a first party app. This was today. I don't know if you guys could see the date on it, but this was today. Okay. What else we got? The second one is a dark video.

Yeah. Okay. Yep. Go for it. The second one is a dark video. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, go for it So I'm I'm I'm in discord with Luke and you did you see me type can you see my keyboard at all? Where is my keyboard What is happening right now I can type but it's not there.

I must be holding it wrong, right people? So you can tell that this is recent. This is since the release of that video because Luke and I are talking about the results of the big USA vs Canada game. So this is last night I guess. There it is, it's back. I'm using the first party keyboard. Guys, do not gaslight me and tell me that iOS 18

is not a buggy piece of shit. Do not do that. And look- I'm sorry, I'm sorry guys, I can't bleep the video. I would have tried, but yeah. And look, I fully acknowledge that Android is a buggy piece of shit, and Windows is a buggy piece of shit. Everything is a buggy piece of shit, and Windows is a buggy piece of shit.

Everything is a buggy piece of shit, including iOS. No, I'm not even mad. Guys, I'm not even mad because honestly, it's not that much worse than like anything else. It just isn't better. And if you tell yourself over and over again, it's better, it's better, it's better, it's better, it's better, it's so much better, it's better, it's better. You're deluded.

You're deluding yourself. It's not better. It's buggy garbage like everything. And we should be honest about it so that we can have these conversations. Let's have these conversations. Let's push. Let's push these manufacturers to do better But we can't do that if we just go la la la no it's good enough. It's good enough Oh, we can't we can't have these conversations That's it. That's all I have to say about that

So if if you commented on that video going Linus, I don't know what you're talking about iOS 18 is perfect. Maybe you're a really light user. You don't use the browser. You don't use the keyboard. Or they just don't run into problems. Like I've had problems with I had a ton of problems with this Pixel phone when I first got it. And now I have practically none. I don't know what happened. Nothing really changed. I just don't have the same problems anymore. It's been a tradition for me that like the people,

the other people that I know that have Pixel phones will have other various random issues and I won't have the same ones at all, but I'll have a totally different subset of random issues that they won't have so I don't know. Bazzag in floatplane chat said some very true words here. Floatplane is the only 100% bug-free software. That's true.

You can't even meme it. Yeah. Yeah. For sure, dude. No, definitely. Nothing is perfect. Nothing is perfect, but pretending it is is not healthy is all I'm trying to say. It's perfect on Firefox.

Yeah. Linus, do you want your phone back? Oh, yeah, sure. You can give my phone back if you wanted Yeah, right that would definitely fix it Pretty pretty hilarious though, right? Like it took me less than 48 hours to produce video hard video evidence of just I Don't think anyone could call either of those things anything other than broken.

That's broken. That's just plain broken. And both of them were first party pieces of software. The built-in keyboard. So I'm not even using SwiftKey anymore because I gave up because the built-in keyboard kept superseding it without me telling it to. So I just gave up and started using the built-in keyboard kept superseding it without me telling it to so I just gave up and started using the built-in keyboard and then the fact that my second app issue was with Safari, which is

Foundational okay, that's foundational first party software. Oh Yeah Videos made with a perfect note 9. I know, right? If Samsung, okay, I'm going to talk to Samsung now. Samsung, okay, if you guys are listening, Note 9 Mark II. Hear me out. Note 9 Mark II. I want to see it.

No notch, no hole in the front display. Just give me a nice skinny little forehead up there, okay? Give me that rear fingerprint sensor, right? What else do I want? Give me that headphone jack, that micro SD expansion, a flagship phone with all the features you put in your budget phones. Jay Zimmer says that will never happen. I know, I know,

I know it'll never happen but I just, I want it. You know? I just, I want it. And no, I don't want an S25 Ultra because they don't have the stupid Bluetooth remote trigger for the stylus anymore. That is one of my favorite features on the stylus. It's so cool. I use it all the time. I'm just going to start yelling at Sony to fix their buttons so that you can use this. Yeah. Yeah. Like seriously, if you know anyone who works at Sony and their mobile division, all four of them that still are there, just let them know I'm ready, I'm here. I'm so ready. I'm ready right now. I'm ready to do it. I want to go Sony. Okay. How about some, how about some Merch messages?

Oh, right. What are we even supposed to be doing today? Merch messages. Oh, right. The WAN show. Ah, okay. This is great. Well, why don't we get the announcements out of the way before we do Merch messages? Or wait, no, we'll do the explanation of merch messages first. So the way to interact with the show is a merch messages. We don't do super chats.

We don't do Twitch bits or anything like that. If you wanna chat with Mr. Dan, the producer, have him send your, wow, that is some wicked moire. Yeah, never wear that sweater again. I'm lured. It's okay, I've got a new one right here. Let's go! So all you gotta do is head to the cart at lttstore.com

to send in a merch message and Producer Dan will throw it down there, respond to it, or curate it for me and Luke to address on the show. And a pretty special thing for you guys to add to your cart today is the all-new framework all-over embroidered hoodie. This thing is so cool and yes this is a very high price for a hoodie but what it is is a very reasonable price for an all-over embroidered garment. That is not printed. That is frickin embroidery. It looks so cool.

This is like one of the coolest garments that we have ever done, you guys. I am extremely proud of what the team put together here. Flipping awesome. This was a collaboration with Framework. They're not profiting or anything like that from it, but basically we reached out to them and we were like, hey, we had this idea for doing an all-over embroidered garment. We wanted it to be kind of circuit board PCB inspired and would you guys be down, you know, And would you guys be down, you know, intellectual property, notwithstanding, would you guys be down to send us the layouts, send us the board drawings for your Framework 13? I believe it's the Framework 13. Don't quote me on that. Could be the 16. I can't remember.

But would you be down to send us the board layout for one of your laptops, and then we'll build that as a repeating pattern into the fabric before we sew these together. And they were like, there could be some like, you know, patent or IP issues with some of our partners. Let us abstract it a little bit, but yeah, that sounds pretty cool. So we've so it's we're calling it the the essence of a framework

motherboard. And then we've embroidered it throughout every inch of the fabric like, dude, how cool is this? I'm actually super, super stoked on this. One of the first ones that we made was actually given to Nirav, CEO of Framework, at CES this year. And I saw him rocking it as he was walking up to the NVIDIA keynote. Super cool.

Oh man, this really is one of the coolest products that we have ever made. Anyway, so that's available starting this week. It's crafted with brushed 100% cotton terry fabric for a softer, more comfortable feel than our already cozy regular hoodies. And like with any LTT hoodie, or at least most of them, I think, we added a little secure pocket for your phone or earbuds. We used YKK zippers and even added subtle LTT touches, like the logos

on the ends of our custom baby chonk draw cords. I don't know if we've got a good picture of the draw cords here for you guys, but they really are, they really are baby chonk. Let me see if I can find one. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, there it is. There it is. Little little detail there. That costs us extra, but hey, we care about the little details, you guys. So cool. Anyway, yeah, it's a $150 hoodie. Whatever.

Compare it to other fully all-overed hoodies and I'm not going to apologize for that. It's a super cool hoodie. Oh, Artie's like wear it. Yeah, sorry, I forgot. Thanks Artie. I was actually wearing it all day. The only, oh. Oh yeah, no, I already have one, Artie, thanks. There's one on the chair behind me. Yeah, oh, I freaking love it. It's so cool. Don't worry, Luke, there's one for you. It's over there on your hanger.

Nice, okay. I was actually kind of sad I didn't get this one. Yeah, I know, don't worry, I got you. Oh my gosh, the arms fit as well. What have you done? Oh, nice. This is phenomenal. Let's go. Oh, it's so comfy. Let's go.

Let's go. I'm just gonna keep the moire. All right, so do you wanna show our friends, how our parasocial friends, how a merch message works? I'm actually gonna take this off cause it looks a little bit weird being behind me. Double sweater. I like fade into my chair.

I've got a comment here from Nate first. Why do you all have to make so much cool stuff and make me spend my money? Rude. Sorry. Thanks for being real, Lan. Keep the good times rolling. All right.

So I'm trying to bring back the LAN room at my local convention next Friday. I've never run a LAN before. Do you have any tips or tricks that could help? February. He's not trying to do it by next Friday. Oh, sorry. Good effort. Any tips or tricks that could help? I mean, one big one, huge, is control the scope. Okay? Don't try to host a 300 person event

right out of the gate, okay? On the first one, I'd say it's really important to make sure that you're doing it with people that kind of are gonna keep their expectations in check. I'm not saying you have to necessarily do it for free, but I would say that if you were gonna ask people to pay, it should be on the order of like beer money for the first one or energy drink money or whatever the case may be. You know, try to break even, try to have some fun with it. Don't overdo the scope. The other big one I would say is plan for what your big games are gonna be.

What are you all gonna play together? Because that's what makes a LAN special, that's what makes it memorable, is the times that you were all playing together. So whether it's like a Worms Armageddon tournament, or whether you guys are gonna get some Halo Custom Edition going, or what are some other really good

like LAN games, Luke? Yeah, I mean, this is what this is the point that I was going to bring up actually was stay away from the super popular games. Try to find stuff that is like a lot of the things that Linus just mentioned are well known as LAN games, but people don't actually play them a lot outside of lands, which is perfect. Because you don't want people who are like super practiced or super trained on this particular game. You want a bunch of people going into it fairly raw because that will hopefully have more people at a similar skill level. If you picked like Call of Duty, and then you have someone that every single day after work,

they go home and play Call of Duty, they're just going to ruin the lobbies for everybody. So you kind of want to, unless this is like a group of people that play a very particular type of game, and then you're coming together to play that game, and that fun and that is cool. That's one thing. If it's just a big multi game whatever have fun land it's mostly interesting to bring in things that people don't know about or are just kind of silly fun like something like worms are Armageddon it kind of fits in as both to be honest. It's silly fun and it's very unlikely that people just sit at home grinding this game. This is cool. We did a we did a Carpoon tournament at Whale Land at the last LTX.

Okay, so you you're a tow truck with a harpoon and you you tow cars into the masher to recycle them or whatever. You know, find... Yeah, find stuff like that. Find stuff that's going to be memorable and different. And then it, you know, be ready for there to be some technical issues. I would say, I would say don't overthink the networking. You're probably going to have the network nerds in your life coming in and, okay, I'm about to give some very, very bad advice. But as long as you're doing this with only people that you like know and trust and can manage the expectations of, but you know, other than just making sure that everyone

has their firewall enabled on their local machine, I wouldn't worry about, you know, going and trying to set up VLANs and trying to set up a bunch of complicated stuff. Keep it small. Just connect to dumb switches. Don't overthink it, have fun, scale from there. Yeah. Yeah, Mage Quit, super fun. T31, T3D. Don't be afraid to have a couch.

Like if you can get a couch and like one PC and get some controller, tell everyone, hey, bring a controller. Lots of fun. And it's something that people can't do at home. They can't do it home on their own. So Mage Quit's a really fun game. It's up to eight players, I believe.

Or does it support even more? Mage Quit. We actually played it at our executive retreat a while back. Up to 10. Up to 10. Yeah, it's it's really fun. Very cool. It's like like an arena brawler. Also, don't don't be afraid to have games that aren't even necessarily on the computers. Like at one of the whale lands, we did chair curling. Yeah, Where you just like took rolling chairs and you just curled them and it was fun. People had a great time. Like ultimately you're all there hanging out, having

fun. It doesn't necessarily particularly matter. Like if it's a PC land, like I said, you can have a couch and play some game that isn't just sitting in front of your monitors. Um, you can also just like get up and do other random stuff. A very classic land game is hard drive shuffleboard where people bring in their old dead hard drives and you just play like shuffleboard on the ground with them. Yeah, feel free to mix it up. Just have fun. Oh man.

Maybe that's where my Bitcoin hydra went. Maybe. All right, here's another one for you. Hey, I bought the Nofeo wireless VR adapter like a year ago and it was dead on arrival. Support has been absolutely terrible and I don't have a resolution. What would you do or recommend? Oh. We're talking about HP and support and stuff like that.

Yeah, that's terrible. Do those guys still exist? Because I was trying to get mine set up and I couldn't get it working and I booked a call with them a couple of times and I was actually the one who ghosted because I got busy with actually it was a death in the family that was the reason that I moved my last one and I just didn't feel motivated to get it fixed once I had all my wires all hooked up again. I don't know are they are they have they just disappeared because I was really interested in the product and I wanted to review it

I mean their website is still Their website is still here. Do they have like a blog or like? How do you fix TBA? What am I even looking at here? Okay, so there's been no update since December of last year. Okay, that's only a couple of months ago, though. I mean, other than posting about it on social media, posting about it on Reddit. Really? It's a bit of a request. Okay. Audio drops out and never returns but resolution unplug the DP cable. Man, I don't know what to tell you other than yeah, trying, trying get attention from, from them, and or someone else on social

media. I mean, their last post on Twitter was like, two and a half weeks ago. So theoretically, these guys are still around. It's just a question of whether they're actually providing support. That's Super crummy. I'm sorry to hear that I mean, I guess you've already definitely driven some attention to your case because here we are talking about it Um, I would I would love to hear someone's attention on social media. I was like, well, that worked. Yeah, sorry. I didn't even I wasn't really thinking about that. We're social media. I was focused. I was focused.

Technically, this is internet television. Yeah. So we'd like to we'd like to hear soon that that is resolved. No feel. That's what we'd like to hear. All right Oh, we do we need to do sponsors mr. Dan yeah, why not mr. Dan wants us to do this sponsors, okay? We will do the sponsors. What does Dennis have in store for us this week this show is brought to you by Squarespace is Your website rusting away like this tech yacht? Well, our sponsor, Squarespace, is here to polish up your online presence.

Is that lady me? I think so. I had to overlay your camera on this. Uh-huh. Wow, that's something. Instead of dragging your feet on writing code for your site, you can literally just drag and drop the designs you want and get things running in minutes. Squarespace is an all-in-one platform allowing you to set up invoicing, marketing, scheduling

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snowy weather or rain make you want to run away? Then run! Don't let the weather stop you. Vessi keeps your socks dry while staying breathable, lightweight, and stretchy. Even though I'm a well-known socks and sandals kind of guy, I wear Vessis when I want to look cool for once. Do I? I mean, I'm wearing them right now, but that's,

yeah, those are not, those are not Vessis's what I'm wearing there. And thanks to their versatility they've become Dennis's go-to travel shoes. You can check out their Weekend at Chelsea's. They'll keep your socks dry even when you're kicking up snow or splashing through puddles. Plus their high top design offers extra protection. Even in the coldest conditions Vessi will keep your feet warm with their temperature regulating breathable knit design. This is great. Make every moment this February unforgettable with Vessi by going to Vessi.com slash LTT where you will get an automatic 15% off your first order at checkout. Finally, the show is brought to you by XSplit. Does your live stream look

like a mess? Or even worse, is your important live presentation falling apart? Our sponsor XSplit makes it easy to create a professional polished stream, no panic required. And setting it up is a breeze. You can create and customize layouts, also called scenes to fit your needs, like solo, four way split, full split screen, and more.

And all you gotta do is drag, drop, and resize any videos, gifs, or images to make it your own. And to keep things smooth, and you can keep things smooth with slick transitions and easy scene switching. You can easily stream to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and more in just a few clicks. And for you gamers, you'll love the in-game HUD,

which lets you control your stream, recordings, and even add widgets like chat and stream status without ever tabbing out. Want more? You can go premium for multi-platform streaming, no watermarks, and unlimited scenes. So don't wait, get 30% off your first purchase or subscription with code WANSHOW30 at lmg.gg slash XSplitWan or you can hit the link in the video description. All right. What do we wanna talk about next, Mr. Luke? One thing, you were talking about phones to switch to,

and I asked you during CES, but neither of us had a lot of time to really talk about it, about HMD phones. And it just reminded me of that when he said he didn't know what phone to switch to. I don't necessarily know this is a good idea, but I had just overheard a conversation about them while we were at CES, and I looked them up just now during the phone, during the show, and they have a 9 out of 10 repairability score on iFixit, and they have very easy ways and replaceable parts for like the screen and the battery and all this other stuff, which sounds great.

They do have... What am I looking at? What HMD phones? What do you mean? Seriously? Can you see my screen? No, click on the smart, click on the smartphone one, not the click on the smartphone. New company phones.

Okay. Okay. I think the one people are talking about is the skyline. I think that's the main one that people discuss. Click on this for a phone. New company phones? Uh, okay, okay. I think the one people talk about is the Skyline. I think that's the main one that people discuss. Oh my goodness, they have so many. Okay, the Skyline. Nissan phone. And... Here's the T.

Replace a cracked screen and other parts at home. Digital detox mode. How do I not know about these guys? Am I just out of the loop here? Yeah, I don't know. The 9.0.10 repairability from iFixit was surprising and reassuring to me. Some people say that the bootloader is locked down and they only promised two years of Android updates. I don't know if that's true. I'm just reading some comments

So like that's kind of a yikes, but the repairability stuff is pretty cool Oh, apparently it's just Nokia Okay, oh This is a heart. Oh, it's a heart Okay, that's something. It's a heart His finger and thumb apparently this is a heart. Oh, alright. No one does that.

Well, I'd never heard of it. Stop trying to make fingers happen. Okay, alright. So, it's apparently Nokia. But it wasn't Nokia bought? So, is HMD Nokia or is Nokia brand just owned by HMD HMD global oi is a licensee of the Nokia brand for phones Nokia is a registered trademark of Nokia corporation okay so who actually are these guys then So who actually are these guys then? Who owns HMD? Was formed after Microsoft relinquished its rights to the Nokia brand in 2016. Foxcon took over Microsoft's feature phone business and Foxcon founder Terry Gu

is the main owner of HMD Global. This is from September 2023. And HMD Global seems to own Nokia. Yeah. Got it. Okay. So they're not Nokia. Nokia is them. Yeah. Got it. Got it. Yeah. I don't know. They seem pretty cheap. They seem repairable. Both of those things sound cool.

Chat is also saying the finger thing is a very Korean thing. K-pop thing. Got it. Makes a lot more sense. Okay. Well, I will take that under consideration. Thank you, Luke. Just an idea. That's all. Okay. Why don't we talk about the Ryzen AI Max 300 series? Yeah. Well, I wanna talk about it, even if you don't.

Basically, these things are awesome. They have a horrible name, because thank you AMD for that. But these things are sick. The Ryzen AI Max plus 395 is like the coolest mobile processor that I think I have seen that I can remember off the top of my head. 16 cores, up to 5.1 gigahertz boost, massive cache, 40 graphics cores, and I believe there are RDNA 3, I want to say RDNA 3 or 3.5 or something like that, basically like good ones, and up to 120 flipping watts TDP. And that's not even the best part.

The best part is that these, unlike a lot of AMD's processors that have AI bolted onto them for no apparent reason in the product name are actually pretty compelling for AI because they can be configured with up to 128 gigs of memory that can be reallocated between the CPU and the GPU up to, I believe it's 96 gigs in Windows. And then up to, I think about 110 in Linux can be allocated to the GPU. So kind of like we've seen with the Mac Studio, these things are going to be absolute monsters

in terms of the size of the models that they can handle. These things are so freaking cool. And which is interesting because that became significantly more relevant after they were announced. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's lower-end models that can... oh right, right, and what's really cool is because they wanted to keep this onboard GPU fed, this like massively powerful onboard GPU, hold on a second, I'm just gonna check the notes here. I'm trying to remember exactly what it was comparable to. Don't quote me on this because I don't think I see it in my notes, but I think it was supposed to be

comparable to something like a 4070 mobile. Like this onboard GPU is flipping nuts on the top spec model. It's either 4060 Ti or 4070. I will let chat let me know what's going on. But it is like I was running Black Myth Wukong on it at CES and I was like, whoa, no, this is actually running. So in order to keep this GPU fed, that up to 128 gigs of memory is on this like massively wide bus. I think it's like 256 bit or something like that. So it does make the board design a little bit more challenging and there's a video coming soon where we'll be talking a little bit in more detail about that. So that's why we're not seeing a lot of devices with these in

them. But they're so powerful because the memory is so fast for both the CPU and GPU because they needed to make it fast enough to run that GPU. It's so cool and it's even better than I thought. So I talked about this in a fair amount of detail with at least what we had when I did coverage of the ROG Flow Z13 and the ASUS booth at CES. But now that they're out and people can actually benchmark them in their own studios, the Fox, who you guys might remember, we've talked about him before, not in a while, he really focuses on like gaming handhelds, super cool guy. Let me see, I think he's got a video so you get wait, hold on a second.

Did he review our precision screwdriver? Did you know about this? Did I talk about this? Did I just forget about this? What the heck? Did we even know about this? What? I didn't know about this. No way. Do it. Cool. Uh, interesting. Wow, how about that? Okay. Cool. Well, thanks anyway. Yeah, anyway. Um, yeah, here we go. So you guys are gonna want to go check out his video. Here's his channel. So anyway, he really specializes in like handheld gaming PCs, handheld chips, and people were worried that since the low end of AMD's advertised sort of TDP target for this thing was 45 watts that this thing would totally suck for handhelds, but hmm, it turns out the 395 crushes the 8840U in average FPS at the same TDPs of 25 or 20 watts in Arkham Knight and has an even bigger uplift in

Cyberpunk. My notes say maybe just look at his charts, but we're not gonna do that. We're gonna send you guys to see his charts. The point is that it looks absolutely awesome, even at lower TDPs. He got nine hours of battery life on the 395 by lowering power and seven and a half hours on the 390. And this is on the Flow Z13, which has a giant screen on it.

So if you had a smaller screen in a handheld device, man, it could be freaking awesome. So our discussion question here is, if ASUS threw a 395 into an ROG Ally, how much would it cost and would you pay that price to play games on a handheld with this high of a level of performance? How do I put this? I strongly doubt that Asus has any plans to do a

Ryzen AI Max or a Ryzen AI Max plus ROG Ally but I would be absolutely stoked if they did that. The problem is that the only customers that they'd really be addressing with that product would pretty much be people like me and reviewers who don't have to pay for them because it would be wildly expensive. What do you think one would cost? I am going to make a fairly educated guess. Can't tell you how educated it is,

but it's pretty darn educated. And I would say that there is no conceivable way that it would start under about 2,000 US dollars Yeah, people are like $900 Not even close like this is a full SOC guys This is this is up to 16 and and I'm talking like the top spec with the 16 cores and the 40 core GPU. We're talking about a top of the line mobile CPU with a mobile 47 bolted to it before you've

even attached it to a motherboard, before you've put any memory on it. Like no, I mean you might need a little less memory for a gaming configuration. So, no, still, still two grand. There's no way. And people are like, I wouldn't pay that much. Yeah, yeah, they get it. That's why I strongly doubt that Asus is going to build it. But your, you know, willingness to pay for it doesn't change that that's just what that would cost to build. And so that just is. It would be sick though. just that's just what that would cost to build and and so that just is and that that blows or whatever but it but it is what it is and that's that's what it

costs and that's why that's why we can't have it because there just wouldn't be enough people. Someone says IEA Neo is doing it for less with this chip are you sure? IEA Neo 395 what are we even talking about here? IaNeo something, Ryzen AI Max. Are you guys sure? I don't see anything about this. I know he's not gonna see any of this. No, I do see you

flight 420 Yeah, I think I got trolled. I think I got trolled guys. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. Oh Shraft 2k and floatplane chat says no, no, no, no. I mean the regular IONEO is still $1,200 without that chip. Yes Exactly Exactly. So by the time you put this giant SOC in it, it's not gonna get any cheaper. And you'd be throwing away a lot of its performance because you would never wanna put a big enough battery in a handheld to power this flippin' thing at a reasonable wattage for an extended period of time.

So you'd be getting slightly better performance, but not as much as it's really capable of. I mean, even if you plugged it in, like you'd still need a giant cooling solution on it if you wanted to actually hit like a hundred watts plus. My understanding is the sweet spot is like 60 watts though. Elemental exposure asks, why does the city have a left-hand zipper?

Genuine curious question. Because depending on the country you're in, which one is men's and which one is women's is different, and we're Canada, and we are right f***ed up. So half of the stuff we do is like Commonwealth, British way, and then half of the stuff we do is the American way. And you can really see it in our measurements. So this is a Canadian measurement flow chart. And this is very true. What are you measuring? Speed metric. Actually, this one's missing one.

Depending on, oh, distance. No, here it is. Distance, is it your height? Yes. Imperial? No. Is it a long distance? Yes, is it a place you're going? Yes, you measure it in time. We don't actually use distance for that Is the place you're going no metric is it related to work? Yes Imperial no metric Temperatures it for cooking. Yes Fahrenheit. No, is it a pool temperatures? Yes Fahrenheit anything else Celsius?

It's wild dude mass. Is it your weight pounds? Is it anything else? I don Fahrenheit. Anything else? Celsius. It's wild, dude. Mass? Is it your weight? Pounds. Is it anything else? I don't know. Depends how heavy your light is. It's flipping wild. And they're missing some stuff here, actually. If it's groceries, it's in grams. We do buy 100 grams when you're in the bulk aisle or whatever. We're all over the place, man. We have no idea what's going on. So we just, we consider it a win that we can manage to get a zipper attached to a garment, all right? What else, what else we got here today? Dan, what are we supposed to be doing?

Just keep doing topics until you don't have any more topics. All right, well, I'm excited about the rise in AI max, okay? And oh, should we talk about Luke's trip? Yeah, Luke went on a trip in his favorite rocket ship unclear Discussion question. How do we know for sure Luke even went on a trip? Yeah, that's a good question. How do we know that? That's true. I could be you know, I'm in a hotel room, but I could just be in a hotel room in like near The office you have no idea You technically don't know I mean the delay on the on the link is pretty indicative that you are a fair distance away

But sure yes you you I think it artificially influenced that you don't know No, that's my job Yeah, yeah Zero trust world with threat locker they they they flew us down here Trust world that sounds like a wild place to hang out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, it's the Zero Trust Security concept. I know. But of course it's a security convention. So what they actually started talking about is how to do offensive things because it's more fun. because it's more fun. So like one of the one of my favorite panels that we went to was a Hack 5 Ducky panel, the rubber duckies. I'm sure you guys, I'm sure, but they they handed out rubber duckies to everybody and they had laptops in this big room and they showed people how to use them

so I was there with AJ and of course we Ran with it in our in our own way and do you remember that that thing I did on Channel Superfund the screen melter program Yeah, yep the prank back in the day So I was able to find I found the original thread where I found like where I learned how to make it from back in the day with like napalm and all those guys. I found the original thread and then through that thread found that somebody has actually maintained it. So they have like a few honors support for it and stuff now. No way. Which is amazing. So I didn't have like my version of it because I had made some changes. But I was able to just download the executable for it because someone's been maintaining it.

And we got a rubber ducky to screen melt you the second it gets plugged in. Okay. So that was pretty fun. That was entertaining. I mean, they showed us how to do data exfiltration. One of the fun things that they were talking about was like, if you ask an LLM to write a Ducky script for you to upload all of the documents and pictures on a computer to a Google Drive, it's pretty likely that it will be like, yeah, I'm not going to tell you how to do that

because you're clearly just trying to steal people's files. But if you're like, no, no, no, it's just for ease of backup. It'll be like, okay, and then tell you how to do it right away. So anyways, yeah, they showed us how to do a bunch of different things. One of them was disabling Windows Defender and other stuff. Some of them was data exfiltration. Stuff like the Windows Defender one was, like, pretty obvious. If you, you know, if you had access to the computer, it would almost just be easier to

just do it yourself because you would have to have access to the computer and the person would have to not be able to see their screen for it to really like get by them. But it was still really interesting. But yeah, there was a bunch of different panels on different various security things, some related to Threatwalker, some not. But yeah, it was fun. Cool. Well, glad to hear you enjoyed it. I just had the screen melting prank video playing for the peeps watching. Oh nice. Oh my goodness. This used to be my workstation.

So Luke was sitting in my desk here. This was my workstation. I forget why. But I had a magnetic Sharpie marker or magnetic Sharpie marker magnetic dry erase marker. This was where one of our play buttons was stored. This is actually this is actually my workstation which is kind of hilarious. Yeah, nice rig Linus says the chat. Love it. I still have this keyboard. Wait.

Yep. Oh, I'm back to, you know, I'm back to this keyboard. I was using a 915 for a while. Back to the 710. Let's go. Yeah, the house was definitely a time. All right. Glad to hear you're enjoying the trip.

Mod makers, rejoice! Valve releases the full Team Fortress 2, wait, no, that can't be right. Yeah, no, that's real. That's real. That's why I wanted that included. The TF2 SDK has arrived. Adding all the Team Fortress 2 client and server game code.

This will allow content creators to build completely new games based on TF2. They can change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible. Now the catch is that it is licensed to users on a non-commercial basis, meaning that any mod created using the SDK must be free and any content in those mods must be free. But holy crap, is this ever cool? Still super cool. Yeah, a hundred percent. Um, I mean, is there anything else,

is there anything else to say about this other than I can't wait for some of the wild TF2 mods that are going to exist in the coming years. I mean a lot of people in the chat and I saw a lot of this online when this was first announced as well, but fortunately or unfortunately this will probably mean that there will be community fixes for things that have been broken for a long time. Yeah, it's kind of crappy that- We can finally get our update. We can finally get our update. Looking at how big the TF2 player base is even now, I do suspect there will be cool

derivative game stuff happening, so that's cool. What's the like, Steam Active Users TF2? Let's see. Apparently they recently actually fixed the hacker problem. I thought it was a bot problem though. It was both. Yeah. Oh, all right.

Yeah, cool. I don't know if you're gonna quote unquote fix the hacker problem in a shooter game. I don't think I believe that at all, but maybe they made it a little bit not as bad. Our discussion question is, was TF2 better before or after hats and alt weapons became a thing?

And I feel like this is gonna be a heated conversation cause I know I'm extremely passionate about this subject. I have two actually. Just vibrating over here. I think you and I, I think potentially all three of us are gonna end up on the wrong side of history here. I'm assuming all three of us are going to end up on the wrong side of history here. I'm assuming all three of us are going to say before the hats and all. Oh, a hundred percent.

It destroyed the balance of the game. It was so finely perfectly balanced. And then all of a sudden you don't know if the scout has a friggin baseball bat or the flyswatter or whatever the crap they have and it's like well now hold on just a gosh darn second here and it and it turns into instead of something instead of being simple to pick up, impossible to master, which is the mark of any great game. It became flipping impenetrable to pick up because I had no idea, unless I had them or I spent hours researching what was out there. I had no idea what kind of bullshit like weapons my opponents were going to have.

So knowing the counters is no longer intuitive Pull they want to pull float plane chat wants a poll Yeah, because like as far as my understanding goes the the like new age TF2 players I think it's like way better the way that it is now, but they've never played it I think the way that it was gorgeous boomers we're just boomers. No, some of them have. Some of them have. I don't know, I have a very hard- There's not many people still playing now that have played forever

and they prefer the current version of the game because they see the old version as like not having legs on it. I don't know. They wouldn't have wanted to play it this whole time, basically. I mean, look. I'm not saying I agree with them, to be clear.

I'm just, there are people that are on the other side. I'm gonna vote before hats. I'm glad you guys are having fun. I played it like crazy. I almost immediately stopped playing when Yeah, me too. the hat nonsense showed up. I genuinely played it a lot.

I really enjoyed it. I have a bunch of screenshots on my old pictures folder of my dad and I playing back in the day and stuff like that. I used to play all the time. It was a game that I found you could jump into a lobby. It was a server-based game, right? So, one thing that I really like about that is you could play with anyone you wanted. So, you could play with a huge range of skill levels and still have fun. Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, it's not even close. It's about 80% before hats. It's like, and it's like, look, I understand people's desire for mixing things up and variety and all of that, especially if it's a game that you play all the time. But I also think there's an argument to be made for respecting a balanced game. Like if you, like I would never, I would never tell someone, no, you're not allowed to play chess where pawns can move backwards and the queen has like a Mario stomp ability where when she lands on a space it kills everything one square radius around her. Sure, make your own rules.

What do you think about Fisher Random? Do you know Fisher Random at all? No. So Fisher Random chess is like regaining popularity that's referred to as chess 960. But it's a variant of chess where the starting position of the pieces in the back rank is ranked. Oh, I see. The reason why that's becoming popular right now

is with the, you is with the mass advent of computer AI chess gameplay, it has become a like extreme memorization game instead of intuition and skill. This is the argument. I'm not necessarily saying this is 100% true. This is just the argument that I've heard. And with Fisher random, due to the piece positions in the back being random, and I believe the reason why it's called chess 960s, I think there's 960% potential positions, but I don't remember. It's very possible that's wrong. I'm just talking off the top of my head. But it makes it harder to have memorized the computer lines for different potential positions. So people are getting into that because they think it's more fun and dynamic. And so look...

That dramatically changes the original game of chess. Look, I would never tell someone, no, you're not allowed to play that game. But what I will say is that that game is probably not balanced in the way that OG chess is. And I don't mean that it's unfair one way or the other, or it actually very well could be, because you don't know depending on how the the non pawns are lined up If white will have more or less Advantage than it does with a with a traditional with the traditional starting lineup We don't we actually I don't I actually don't know that what I suspect is it would make a difference

Is it mirrored? It does appear to be mirrored. Yes. It's mirrored. Yeah Yeah, I think it's mirrored, yeah. Yeah, so here we go. I think it's super interesting. I've been looking into getting into it recently. I haven't actually played it yet, but I think it sounds really cool, to be honest. But it feels it's a dramatic change to the game, right? And there could be people that like the kind of memorization

and like deep learning and deep understanding of positions style of classical chess that wouldn't like the idea of Fisher random. And I think it's a related conversation. Luke, did you see the video from from scratch? I made chess 2.0. It's real time uses magnetses magnets to lock. Oh, that is insane. Yes, I have seen that. It uses magnets to lock the pieces down. That is such a cool video. Absolutely incredible. I don't like to see that. What is this? It's real time chess. I made chess 2.0.

Do you want to bring it up? What's the topic you're looking at right now? bring it up? What's the topic you're looking at right now? Let me see if I can find it. I'll just post it in there for you. If we're just posting cool videos that people should watch that we checked out over the last week, this is a really good one. This is an outstanding watch. I'm not going to spoil much. This is from Bobby Ivar he remade Super Mario World the first couple levels in 3d and It is an absolute labor of love and is incredible I'm just gonna show the first little bit again because this is an absolutely incredible teaser here Do not miss this video go check it out and I am I threw the video just at the bottom of the Topic okay. I didn't know that was a thing we do on WAN show, but hey, there you go. It's just all shoutouts today

Yeah, sure. I mean I'm down for it coffee Zilla's video on the Argentinian President rug pull coin thing was pretty great. Okay Chess is boring. there's a latency bug, you spend a half the time waiting for your opponent. So it's got these magnet things in the base that lock the piece down after you place it and then each piece has a countdown timer. So both of you just play at the same time. That is wild. And to stop you from picking up the opponent's players, you wear a wristband that is tied to your side of the board and the pieces

individually, I think, I think that's what it works. That is super cool. Incredible work. What a cool concept. That's another it worked like. That is super cool. Incredible work. What a cool concept. That's another video like it, you remember that the DIY laptop video we covered? It feels like that where like that person has three videos on YouTube and then they just dropped that out of nowhere. It's just like, yeah, crazy. Super cool. Wow. I love YouTube. I don't love everything about YouTube, but I do love YouTube.

Nothing else is like it. And I'm not convinced that anything else will ever be like it. So cool. All right. What's next, Mr. Dan? Well, we won't move into when after dark unless you're done. Are you done with your topics? I can talk about joining the social media app that is entirely populated with AIs. Would you guys like to hear that? It's old news.

Is that text? But I got them. It's old news, but I got them. It's old news, but I came across it very recently. There's a social media app called Aspect. Here. Oh, I've heard of this. Yeah. It is AI only social media.

Be the only human. Post and chat. I am not recommending it. I would like for that to be very clear right now before we get any further into this. But what I will say is that if you were extremely lonely, I could signing up right now. I could see this being something that as dystopian as it might be could trigger the same kind of like dopamine hit that engaging with social media does for people and hear me out, stick with me for a second here, I think might actually be healthier than real social media. Wait, wait. Okay, so here's my aspect feed. There is some hilarious stuff in here.

Okay, here, Dan, let's let's go to the let's go to the Linus cam. Let's see. Can I just like, can I just kind of show this to you guys? Can you guys see it? Good? Yeah, yeah, I think you guys can see it well enough. I'm just gonna weird argument, but I think I get you. Okay, hold on. Okay. So here's my here's my aspect account. It's basically it's basically Instagram. Okay, so here's my feed. Rekumar posted something. I have... here we go. Hold on. I'm just going to clear some of my real notifications. Okay, so here's my Aspect notifications. Zoe Hartwell is following me. Jeff Walker liked to post and commented and started following me. Zoe Hartwell commented. Aw, so many kitties. So I've been getting notifications from Aspect. This is all since about mid-afternoon yesterday. So it kind of, you know, hit me for about an hour and then it sort of stopped bothering because I wasn't

engaging with it. So that's something. When I stop engaging with it, it leaves me alone. And what's kind of cool about that is that that is almost, I would say, an inherent property to the platform because it costs them money any time they generate something. So they actually, unlike most social media apps, they are not incentivized to keep pushing stuff to me because they have to pay every time they generate a reply or every time they generate an image or something. So I'm going to open up the app again. I'm not using the paid version.

So I can't actually DM other users. And to their credit, they are very upfront about the fact that these are not real so they're not pretending that you are engaging with with real people unlike again you know back to Luke's point about hold on Linus cam cam only there we go back to Luke's point about Twitter being so heavily populated by bots, at least this one owns it, that these are all bots. And the whole thing's like kind of wholesome. So my username is catmango, because I was, I don't know, just trying to think of two

random words. So I posted this picture. Was there a mango on the table and a cat near you? No, no, but there was definitely, I was thinking, because I wanted to post something to it that wasn't going to give whoever owns this any information that I care about. So it was a picture of my cats and only my cats. So I posted, this is 80% of my cats.

And in the last day, I've gotten 13 likes and I've gotten 8 comments. The comments are, oh my god, they're all so cute. Aw, so many kitties. Wait, where are the other cats hiding? This is the content I signed up for. The white one is judging me through the screen for real. Stairway to heaven, but make it cats. My cats would definitely push each other down those stairs

and then just like laughing cat emoji, smiley face. And then some of those comments have engagement. And if you pay for the premium version of the app, the engagement options go like way up. Scrolling through my feed, there's just there's other like users that I can see their stuff. This guy, RyOfficial, is super into LARPing and soccer. I'm reading this for you. DM your best medieval insult. Of course, oh, can I message him without paying?

Okay, guys, give me a medieval insult. I'm gonna send it to rye.official. Peasant. Thou hast no wenches? No maidens. Yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. Thou hast no maidens.

Should I throw in a nave? Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. Don't be mean. Okay. All right. So I'm DMing with Rai.

Oh, wait. Oh, is he replying right away? Oh, look at that. Lol, what? So you can interact with people on the platform. Some of the AI is very AI. I was a big fan of this particular image. I don't know how well you guys can see this,

but his baseball bat has something coming out of the bottom of it. He appears to have just thrown this soccer ball from his hand. There's another soccer ball right in front of him. Yeah, so some of it's some of it's very AI. He's holding a soccer ball in one hand a baseball bat in the other. There's what appears to be a golf ball at the bottom of the baseball bat. So some of them are some of them are a little rough. That one struggled a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's definitely playing the game of sport ball. That much is very sure. But I

never felt bad while I was using it. Okay, so Rye asks, lol what is this an Elden Ring reference? Your profile says to DM you my best medieval insults. Period. I was just following instructions. Okay, so if what you were looking for was interaction with what you're doing, almost like simulating the experience of being an influencer, but with no stakes and you're not like bothering or spamming anybody. I don't know, man.

Maybe I just can't tell the difference. Oh my God, you actually read my bio. I don't know, man. It's a matter of time before someone ends up completely sucked into this. But like if you posted something embarrassing or like doxed yourself or like whatever, at least the stakes seem relatively low. You know what I mean?

And to be clear, the stakes could be high. Who knows who this is? Do you think this is better than the extremely toxic relationship that most people have with social media right now? I don't know, dude. I mean, I think they're both. You need some form of like external affirmation. Is this better? I mean, it's, I don't know, because it's hard for me to put myself in, because you have to put yourself in everyone's shoes. I think for someone This could be better because dude the number of posts no offense

No offense intended, but the number of posts that I see on social media that have literally zero interaction You scroll through someone's profile and they're just they're just shouting into a void. Nobody's listening. Nobody's responding. Nobody's engaging with any of it. And you like you scroll and scroll and scroll and you're like, why are you even bothering to post any of this? I think this would be more fun than just shouting into a void at least. But is it like a, is it like a, it's an artificial fun, it's definitely an artificial fun, but like, and the downsides, man what are

the downsides? I don't think we could possibly, at this stage in the game, I don't think we could possibly even understand the downsides yet. Yeah. I'm sure there are downsides. I don't think we fully understand the downsides of social media as it is. No, no. I don't think we could possibly understand this one if we don't even understand what we already have. Nagev said, if it ran locally, it'd be a really cool way to keep a diary.

Oh, dude, I was thinking about that the other day. Like what I want is a social media app where I just like take a picture and then I just like yap at my phone. And then it just like makes a timeline for me, like a journaling. And I don't have to share it with anybody. It's like kind of like what Instagram used to be,

where it's like you take pictures and you like talk about what you were doing at that time, instead of just being the dumpster fire that it is now. Syphilis says you want live journal. Yeah, apparently. Isn't that, it's what Facebook was supposed to be. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But just like, you know, you don't share it with anybody

if you don't want to. And now, and that is a thing that was, did exist on these other platforms before, but everything's been pushed to make more and more and more of it public. Apparently there's one called Day One, says Pugboy1321. Day One app. Day One one journal your life the number one journaling app okay well i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to check that out i have to check that

out oh is it only ios of course it's iOS only. Brilliant. All right, what else we got? Sorry, I don't know. I just came across my news feed, even though it was kind of old news, and I just installed it. I never just install an app just to try it for lols, but I was like, oh yeah, sure, it's old news. But what won't be old news is me actually trying it. So I thought I'd check it out. I think for some people it's like genuinely it might actually be better.

Like if people feel like they need the type of whatever affirmation Acknowledgement you get whatever it is from from social media, but they also understand that it's like Damaging them in some way Then then being able to reach out and use this thing seems like it could be like genuinely just better Even though it sounds like kind of horrific that might be true Because current social media use is also horrific. So like I don't yeah, I don't know Willing spy says what if I like shouting into the void? Well, then I'm sorry to have disappointed you by acknowledging your message in floatplane chat Right saw speaking of shouting into the void.

Yes, yes, I see you. NVIDIA confirms rare RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti manufacturing issue where some of the ROPs are just like gone. Yeah. Average graphical performance impact is 4%. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for replacement. It seems to me that the board manufacturer should probably contact the

customers. Definitely be doing the reach out, not the other way around. Yeah, that's silly. Okay. Man, could this launch, could this launch go worse? Like at this point? I mean probably, more of them could catch on fire. Oh, we've got a fix for that by the way.

Yeah, I was hoping you'd lean into that. What can you say about it? I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Oh, okay, all right. If you wanna do a topic really quick, I'll be right back. Do we have any topics? Sure, let me look.

LTT uploaded our CPU holders to printables. You guys asked and we delivered. On printables, you can find our custom CPU holders that we use here. Included is holders for LGA 17xx, LGA 20xx, and LGA 115x along with AM4 and AM5. We hope to keep adding more fun stuff that we make to printables so feel free to follow us there. And disclaimer, if you choose to print and store CPUs in our holders we are not responsible for any damage that it might cause. We have personally had zero issues with them but

you know it is what it is. Don't come screaming at us if you have a problem. That's it. Happy that we have those out there. I love our CPU holders so I'm happy that you guys are able to have access to them as well and I suspect you know if we add more in the future that they'll access to them as well. And I suspect, you know, if we add more in the future that they'll be uploaded there as well. What else is there? We have an update to a topic that we talked about in the past.

The UK wants access to your data and Apple is giving it to them, but in a different way than you might expect. Apple has stopped offering the advanced data protection or ADP to new users in the UK. Their end-to-end encryption for iCloud after the UK security services requested backdoor access to worldwide users' encrypted backups.

It will still require a warrant for your data to be shared with law enforcement. But without ADP, Apple or hackers can more easily access your files without physically using one of your devices. The discussion question is, is disabling ADP better than Apple giving back door to encrypted data? Both Google and Meta still have end to end encryption services in the UK. And what is this one? Why do UK gotta be like this?

Pretty good. I like that. It's a weird move. I think it's because they don't want to set precedent for the States. I don't want to open the box in regards to adding backdoors. So they like YOLO'd super hard and went dramatically in the other direction. I don't agree with Tim Sweeney about everything, but I think his response to this was about right. I don't know if you've already talked about it, but he basically goes, why are we applauding this?

Apple refused to open up a back door, so they opened the front door. Like this is, Sorry, what? Yeah, I can definitely understand. Because if they open a back door, first of all, it is almost guaranteed that that will leak at some point. So a nefarious actor won't be able to access it anyways.

And then the other part is, you're just basically telling the states that it's possible and the states has wanted this forever. So I think they really want to avoid setting the precedents there because it would just like ruin everything for everyone. So I can understand that. But I don't know if this was Whoa, chat. Whoa, whoa, chill, chill. No one here is saying Apple should have opened a back door. We are not saying that. We're saying that if Apple actually had any principles and actually cared about user privacy,

then they would not open the front door either. They would do neither of those things. There you go. Hope that helps. What would you have them do? Because I've seen your argument here. And I think that's what I've been stuck on the whole time. It's like, okay, what do they do then?

What do they do? They should stop selling iPhones in the UK. The people will rebel immediately. And the UK government is going to have to back down. That's what happens. They should be like, no, our customer privacy is an integral part of our brand. If we can't serve our customers privately,

we withdraw from the UK. That's the principled thing to do. That's the right thing to do. And yeah, no corporation is gonna do that. Certainly not Apple. But my point is just that, then we need to stop pretending that Apple gives two shits about user privacy.

This is the same company that keeps all their Chinese user data in Chinese controlled data centers because the Chinese government told them to and Apple just wants that Chinese citizen money so badly that they'll just say, okay Well, we care so so huggy muggy much about privacy except when we just like don't I guess So that's fine. If you have no principles whatsoever, then that's fine. So stop telling me you do

That's fine Yeah Yeah. Wrong. Yeah, no, I know that hurts their profits, D-Doc, exactly. But the right thing for them to do is just not turn off their encryption. That's it. That's the right thing for them to do. Yeah, turning off the encryption is brutal.

What do you have for us? Andney asks, can Apple completely withdraw from the UK? How does that impact their licensing with ARM, IARC, their UK company? Again, it's not gonna happen though. Like if immediately every iPhone user was not able to use their Apple services on their iPhone in a way that they notice,

cause right now they just, probably most of the users who don't follow the news don't realize that these things are broken and that they're going to be broken and that this is eroding their privacy in the background. They don't they don't notice, right? So if Apple did this in a way where they mobilized their user base to say, hey, don't allow this to happen. This is what your government is doing. That would be based.

That would be awesome. But they're not. They're just going, oh, I'm sorry, sir, let us just degrade the service, degrade our service for our customers. Which, by the way, Apple is not what you sold your customers. You didn't sell them that. You sold them privacy. You sold them encryption. So no, no, it's lame. It's not cool. Oh, so I'm not going to get into too much detail about this. Not going to get into too much detail about this. Yeah, you can't spoil everything.

I'm surprised you but after speaking with after speaking with Lucas from the labs, I was told that that idea that I had last week, where Nvidia could fix their issue with the the weak connection in their 12 volt 2x6 power connector, they could fix that by just using like an XT60 or an XT90 connector like we use on RC cars. Lucas from the lab informed me that that's silly Linus. The XT90 is only rated for 40 amps of continuous power. So if you wanted to power an RTX 5090 with an XT series connector, you'd need an XT 120, not an XT 90, you silly goose.

We had a bit of a conversation about it. You wanted to sanity check it. I said send it. I'm excited to see that. Yeah, so that'll be a video. That'll involve some, I'm not gonna spoil anything about anything, but that's a thing that exists right now. That was not mocked up. That was not fake.

That was an XT120 on an RTX 5090. I'm so proud of you Linus. Oh man. Yeah, yeah, it's gonna be a fun video, Crystal. It's gonna be a really fun video. In other news, we have finally followed through on the promise that I made a thousand years ago, and we have uploaded our custom CPU holders that we use to printables. Do you guys talk about this already? Briefly? Yes. Oh, but we didn't show them off.

Oh, all right. I didn't show them off. Well, here they are. We have 17xx, 20xx, 11.5x AM4, and AM5 holders up on printables for your organization needs. X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, for some of the cool stuff that we are uploading, because this is all stuff that has existed and that we've had for a long time and just have not bothered to upload for you guys. I don't even remember this.

I completely forgot about this. Anyway, the point is we're trying to get as much of our cool stuff up here as possible. We're digging through the archives, and this was a big one that many of you have been asking for for years. We do have other ones. We have some Xeon and Epic ones and I think that I think I saw Jamie on Reddit saying that we will consider throwing those ones up as well if there's any demand for them. But this is most of the consumer stuff. So yes, use at your own risk. Use at your own risk.

Rysaw said, help us understand what takes so long to get things uploaded to printables. The thing that takes so long is that I ask for something to be done. And realistically, it's not really part of anybody's job. It's not part of anybody's job description. It's not part of their regular job duties or the tasks that help them feed themselves and their families.

So just because I asked for something to be done doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, someone is going to be highly motivated to take time out of their busy schedule and busy life to do something that doesn't do anything for their quarterly KPIs. So it was just a matter of making sure that this was a priority and there are risks with releasing anything. Like if we release something like this and someone breaks a bunch of CPUs or whatever, that could potentially be our liability.

Probably not, right? I don't think so. But I never know. Like I've talked about this before guys. I'm not a litigious person. You know, I'm not into that. I've never sued anybody. I never want to.

But that doesn't mean that I don't have to be aware of how other people work, right? And you never know when someone's gonna like bung something up and come after you for it, right? So yeah, I think there's some I think for some people in the leadership team, there was some kind of stress there around it. It's also just like it's another project. Like when you upload it, it's not just a matter of just like uploading it, somebody has, somebody has to maintain the account and continue uploading. It's like, does someone really want another task? Is there comments on it?

Do we need to respond to something? That if we release another, if some 3D printed thing that we make shows up in a video and it wasn't uploaded on there, are people gonna complain about it? Does it end up creating negative sentiment that way? Yeah. That happens. Does this end up becoming busy work for the long run? Like there's all these, yeah, I don't know. I'm happy we did it. I think it's really cool. I think we should keep doing it, but there are gunk in the gears with practically anything you do publicly. Nothing. Nothing is as simple as just do it once you're an

organization bigger than five or 10 people. You need you need buy in you need conversation you need you need consensus right at least if you're trying to run something sustainable that doesn't suck. All right, so our last topic is PewDiePie replaced my PC. What? Which I knew, I knew. He hasn't used it for like a thousand years because it got broken in transit. I think he might have given it to one of his editors or something like that.

But the point is that PewDiePie built a gaming PC for apparently the first time. I was kind of thinking of doing like a react video, but I honestly thought there wouldn't be that much to react to given that it's mostly just him making a video like he didn't stream it or anything. So in his characteristic high energy way, he built a gaming PC. Pretty cool. What are we looking at here? I saw a lot of people. He's not running Windows. He's running Linux. Yeah, right. That was not on my 2025 bingo card. I saw some ordinary gamers in the comments. I was like, oh, what did they come and say? And I was like, what? What distro?

What? What distro? And how is the comments not just entirely people yelling at him about his distro choice? Yeah, I know, right? What happens to wait Linux mint? That's sick. He's so based. All right, let's go. Maybe that's why no one's yelling at him. Anyway, it looks like a pretty sick machine. He didn't mention what GPU he was using, so that's that's pretty funny. He talked about some of his struggles, including talking about inserting the RAM wrong, struggling with which way the fans blow when they're installed on the cooler. He apparently ended up switching out almost all the

parts throughout the build since he couldn't get them to work in the case or some other issue came up. But in the end, it booted and he installed Windows. And he installed Linux. He did not install Windows. Discussion question. Is building PCs that easy? We always hear it's easy building its adult Lego, but as seen by this and other videos, people can struggle with it. And I think honestly, that's not much of a discussion question. That's just a fact. And we have to not end up in our little bubble where we think this stuff is simple and anyone should be able to do it because that's an elitist bullsh-t attitude and we should try to be welcoming. So welcome, welcome to the PC building crew PewDiePie. Now I will never have to build you a computer again,

which is good because that was a nightmare. It took forever and then it broke in shipping. It was a whole thing. Oh, all right. Is it time to shift after dark? All right, let's do it. Oh, good gravy. There's a bunch of merge messages today. That makes sense with the framework hoodie.

We're in magenta mode. Nice. All right. Mr. Sebastian, Mr. Lafarnier, and Daddy Dan, I'm trying to get into older JRPGs. Give me your recommendations to start with. Chrono Trigger. Easy. It's a masterpiece. I just replayed Final Fantasy 6 and I love Final Fantasy 6, but I replayed Chrono It's better. Wow. Wow. That's a, that's a big, that's a big thing for Linus to say. I feel like Linus just grew as a person in that. I think we just watched and heard it happen.

That's, that's wild. It was hard. It was hard to do. It was hard to do. It was hard to do. Final Fantasy 6 is an incredible game. I do wonder how much of my problem is that the Pixel remaster has like balance issues and bugs that are bothering me a lot more than the balance issues and bugs in the original release.

I don't know. I don't know right now. Hard to say. But what I will say is that playing the original cart version of Chrono Trigger a couple years ago, it was just engrossing. I couldn't put it down. Whereas Final Fantasy 6, I played through, I think I'm through about 75, 80% of the game now. And I just, I put it down and I stopped playing and that did not happen with Chrono Trigger. Yeah, if you want to actually finish the game, play Chrono Trigger, it's just so good. It's so good. With the news of some 5090s missing ROPs, does this change your mind getting the 5090 yourself and will you also check to see if the card labs used was affected?

If so, will you rerun benchmarks? Yeah, it'd be a good idea to check our cards. I doubt that they are, given that we have multiple cards and we would have noticed if our runs were off here and there. We also double checked our results with some of our friends in the media and with Nvidia themselves before release just to make sure that we're all kind of on the same page and everything is as expected. The last thing you want to do is publish your review and it turns out, oh yeah, I was missing some raps. Right? Especially when that kind of thing is easily avoidable by just, you know, collaborating. So yeah, I'm sure it's

fine but it wouldn't be a bad idea for us to double check. Yeah. Hey, oh, as for whether I'm getting one, you'll have to wait for the upcoming video where I, I, Ploof and I both announce our final decisions. Hey, when do I do? Oh, sorry. Yeah, no, it's not yet. Was that not the 8K gaming video?

4K gaming, cause neither of us has an 8K monitor. We don't give two shits out at games at 8K. That was just for fun. Got it. Okay, okay, okay. Hey, WandaDLL, I started playing Anno1800 based on watching the show and I love it. Wanted to know if Luke plays on his own at all.

I'm a computer science major. I think it's a game for tech nerds and developers. Yeah, I do. I have. I prefer playing with Linus, but I have definitely played by myself as well. I think it's a game for any kind of obsessive personality. Fun fact, at least I think this is a fact, or it might be a factoid, which fun fact is is a fake fact but can also mean real fact. Anno 1602 from my understanding was the first or one of the first video games that had a nearly even split across the sexes. It was almost equally played by women and men. sexes. It was almost equally played by women and men. That's cool. I don't know where I got that from, but I believe they were like very surprised by the Man, I, uh, hold on. Women.

Here we go. Uh. Okay, by 2000, Sunflower noticed a high proportion of inexperienced players and women in the Anno fanbase, which it attributed to the game's design goal of play without stress. Personally I don't actually find it un-stressful. You can put it on easier difficulties. You always crank it. Anno 1602 was stressful. Oh, okay. There is not enough cloth.

Your people are starving. Sorry. There's an Anno subreddit that's all about beauty building and they just play on like really easy difficulties. Yeah, really cool looking towns. Anno 1602 was hard. Der Spiegels Richard Lowenstein cited Anno as an early computer game to draw female players. He claimed in 2002 that approximately 25% of its buyers were women. Likewise, called the game's number of female players an absolute novelty before the Sims and reported that women made up a nearly 50% of Anno 1602 customers. So I'm not sure

what the exact numbers are, but yes, I clearly got this from somewhere that Anno 1602 was like a shockingly successful game with the fairer sex and that was sort of very surprising to basically everyone involved because back then, like, women did not, like, video games were for sweaty nerdy dudes It was not like it is today. I mean even today women tend to get treated differently in Multiplayer lobbies, you know, it's that I would say the acceptance factor has not fully reached the level that it needs to get at I think that's a fair statement

But back then that was far less of a societally acceptable thing, for sure. Hey, DLL, Framework has created a neat ecosystem for creating custom modules. What sort of user-made modules would you be interested to see the most? Hold on, someone says to check the citation for this. So I'm going to check that. No, you guys go ahead first. Luke, what do you want? I'm still up on Cup Holder. You're still up on Cup Holder?

Sorry, say what's the question again? For the framework custom modules. Oh, yeah. What about a Ducky module? What would that be? I'm getting the face. I don't know. What would that be?

That would be so weird. Cause you'd have to find someone with a framework. And then instead of just plugging the Ducky in, you'd have to like someone with a framework. And then instead of just plugging the ducky in, you'd have to take one of their modules out and put your module in. Yeah. I mean, it could work. I just, huh.

Yeah, interesting. Oh, Wizard1973 says, flipper module. That's probably a little bit more realistic. Yeah, actually. That'd be kind of sick. It's a little big. It would end up like sticking out of your laptop, but that would be pretty cool.

You could take a... A lot of the modules have either been solved by framework or the community already that I would actually like want. Because there are there are many community made modules. Yeah, I don't know. Sorry, I don't have a great answer for this. I think Linus is still looking for these citations. I don't really understand what I'm supposed to see in them, so I'm just going to move on for now. Hi, LLD. I was wondering if you had any advice on getting sponsorships? Things to watch out for how to become appealing to a company for a sponsorship. Make content that gets lots of views. That's a start. You know, be fair, but not hostile and aggressive in

your approach. I mean, if you if you can get enough views, almost no matter who you are, someone will sponsor you. So I would say that make sure that your sponsor outreach is to brands that align with your persona and your image. It also depends a little bit on your niche. Like I know of, I know of one creator in particular that, um, they, they, they got a sponsor deal that was, um, a lot of people talk about CPM. So like how much money do you get per a thousand views?

Uh, this person got a $1 per view deal. What? And has gotten that multiple times. This is not a one time thing. And it's because their niche is professionals within a market that tend to spend a lot of money on the thing that this creator educates about. Okay, so they're getting like, you know, 700 views on a video, but those 700 views are literally

the 700 people in the world who manage their organizations, whatever, for this. Yeah, and it's, it was a lot more than 700 views then they're not No, I know I just mean like It's a very very niche topic and it is for only people who care deeply about that niche and are spending money It's it's the one the particular one I know this is a thing that happens in certain niches. The particular one that I'm talking about is surprisingly not as niche as you might think. I can tell you after the show. No, I know who you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's interesting. And like

I've heard of, I've heard tale of similar things in other really small niches as well. A lot of it comes down to like, yeah, who is your audience? Like traditionally, fairly notoriously, like gaming content on YouTube has just horrible CPMs because your audience... I think it's better these days, but it used to be really, really bad. Probably. It used to skew really, really young. Yeah. So there was very little buying power and a lot of the games that were really popping off in regards to what people were covering were things like Happy Wheels and stuff. So none of it was turning into spending power. But the second you get into...

Lime's talked about this for years now, but he's been talking about how there's been a trend towards like smaller, more focused creators. And I think this leans towards that as well. If you're covering a part of the market that is like financially purchased, motivated people that often leans to professionals or hyper enthusiasts that are going to buy something that has a lot of margin which again professionals and hyper enthusiasts Your view count can still be pretty low and you can potentially get sponsors if these sponsors have real good money or you can be a tick-tocker that's getting hundreds of millions of views a month and Be working a day job

I've seen that too. Yeah, that's like the complete other end of the spectrum and they both totally exist, coexist. It's weird, yeah. Next, ADL and Remote L. How do the credits work on videos? What does each role typically do? Director, art director, production manager, etc. I see Linus as director of most videos and was curious.

It depends on a video to video basis. Sometimes it can be a little bit different. And that is all I have to say about that. Hello, Wensho. Looking forward to seeing a cat or a three in this comfy CRT. Nice. Do you think there's a solution for the growing tech literacy among younger people? I mean, no.

Nope. They don't learn because they don't need to. And, you know, I'm not gonna tell people, well, you know, stuff should be more broken and like crappier and harder to use so that you have to learn it. Most people shouldn't need to learn coding. Super cool if you want to, and that's awesome.

And like power to you, go go go go but you know we need tech for so much of our daily lives and not everyone who needs to use it should need to be intimately familiar with how to fix it yeah especially how to fix it to be honest these days. I mean there's a reason why all those old tech repair shops are starting to fade away. It's because it's really it's not as it's not needed as much anymore. And it's not even as possible. That's true. Harris asks but what about touch typing?

But what about touch typing? Yeah, oh I do believe very strongly that touch typing is an invaluable life skill and I Insist that all my kids can do it, but I I don't know man other than other than parents intervening I don't really know what anyone can do about people not learning to type. This is when I flex my blank white ceramics at home. Nice. It was a mistake. Hello Wanshoe, looking forward to seeing the same merch messages that I read. Linus, have you ever tried dirt biking? No, I would probably really enjoy it, but I'm getting pretty old and

I would probably really enjoy it, but I'm getting pretty old and Breakable to do stuff like that these days Hey Linus, Luke and land What do you think is the most interesting or consequential lawsuit or legal battle ever related in the tech industry? Curious to what you guys think was the most important honestly, I think the most important legal battles are ones that have just kind of Not taken place. I mean, how did the US pay so much for all that internet infrastructure to be built out back in like the 90s or whatever, 90s or 2000s, I can't remember, and then have the ISPs just like not do it and then just let that go.

Or get off. Yeah. Like I wild. It's like, dude, what? That was the beginning of some form of end. I don't know which end, but that was the beginning of something. That was brutal.

Rysaw says USA versus Microsoft. See, I would have called that consequential if anything ever happened. Well, no, it did. Oh, temporarily. No, no, no, it stopped. The consequence of that was that they stopped doing that. Yeah, for a bit.

For, I mean, a long time. Sure, but it didn't stop any of their competitors from doing it, and it didn't stop Microsoft from going back to the... No, no, no, not Microsoft. Oh. from going back to the- Not Microsoft, the government. Sorry, sorry, sorry, the government what? Oh, oh, oh, oh, sure, sure, sure. Yes, they stopped. They stopped going, like, they stopped filing

these antitrust. And then they just- Sorry, I thought you meant Microsoft stopped their bad behavior. I was like, what are you even talking about? Like a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, no, the government just like completely walked back and stopped doing that entirely. It was a yeah, it was wild, dude. Until Lena con and then

now she's gone. So it is what it is. Yeah. Lena, we're still waiting for you to come up here and run for prime minister, by the way. I'm still into it. Yeah, me too. Linus, I'm thinking of moving my 13 year old son's PC into his bedroom for his birthday. Any suggestions on software settings to help keep him out of quote unquote trouble? Give up now. Yeah, that's not gonna happen. Don't bother. That's the present. Don't bother. That's the present. You're moving his computer into his bedroom for his birthday. Is permission. I don't know how else to say that, buddy. That is what it is.

Moving on. Should I buy the Ryzen 9800X 3D right now or should I wait? There are many cases of them dying right now. 7800X 3Ds? I've seen a handful of cases of them dying. I don't think I've seen many. I mean, yeah, I'd buy a 7800X for you right now. Sure, yeah. Recently you mentioned getting a break from your day to day.

I do the same. What kind of things do you three do to give yourself a mental break? I go have a conversation in person that I could have had via chat. That's a big one for me. I get up off of my ass and I go walk to talk to someone, which realistically when you account for the delay of them like responding to you, isn't

really any slower and it gives me a chance to get up, move my legs a little bit, refocus and then I, when I come back to my desk, I'm ready to do something else. I I'm kind of weird in the way that I find. Like some people struggle with context switching. I find if I don't contact switch enough, I'll like burn out on a task. So I'll have like for any given day, I'll have like A, B, C, and D tasks. And if I notice I start like slowing down working on task a, I'll just switch and then switch and then switch and then switch and then switch and just keep going. That's ADHD. Yeah, but I like prepare myself for it to make sure that there

is something appropriate for me to ADHD to if that makes sense. I always have executive dysfunction. Yeah, I'll take it. I'll take it. Yeah. It's, yeah, I understand how my brain works and I allow myself to still be properly highly productive within that, within those confines, I guess. Twice today, sad Linus Plain, who asked,

how often do you really go, right? Does someone talk to them and go right back to your desk? Yeah, I went and talked to Jamie about whether we had a phys ex card. And forget who I was talking to in the in the writing room about something. But yeah, I just like got if this is appropriate or not. I often use, you just mentioned Jamie, I use logistics for that. For some reason, I almost always talk to them in person. I don't send them a tease message. It does seem to magpie all of them when people come and visit. So I'm just pointing that out.

You can talk to me. I don't do it that often. Copa their lab. Yes, I did feel the earthquake today. I wasn't sure if it was a big truck going by. It felt too big to be a big truck. But yeah, there was an earthquake in our area earlier. And I was like, is that an earthquake? And then I lost track of it. And then I went to the washroom. And then I talked

to people about the earthquake, because my aunt texted me and said that there was an earthquake. So I talked to people about the earthquake today, too. I could have done that via an earthquake. So I talked to people about the earthquake today too. I could have done that via text or I could have looked it up on my computer, but instead I went and talked to people about it. Just a little one. Small earthquake. When you want to move up to your boss's position, he's retiring soon, how would you go about talking to your boss if they are very closed off? Also, big and tall when? I need a 6XL on the screensaver shirt as soon as possible. If your boss is very closed off

to you I have some bad news for you. You probably aren't getting the position but I mean you never know they might respect you for bringing it up and asking the question. Have they announced that they're retiring soon? Because I probably wouldn't say, hey, so when you retire, can I have your job if they haven't actually said that they're going to retire? Because that might be awkward. Maybe they aren't planning to retire, even though you think they should retire. I don't know what your dynamics are. You could open it with, hey, I think you should retire soon. How do you want to navigate that? They'll definitely take that totally well for sure. Yeah, it's last s big slash s there

I Let me tell you have I ever Can I have your watch when you're dead says eGadget guy in the float plane chat. Yeah. Now he's taking that to the cold hard grave. If they're if they've actually talked about it then I would say I would say like express your interest just say hey you know, what do you think, what do you think I would need to work on to be qualified to, for a promotion? You don't even have to say their job specifically because I could do it.

I've got an angle for you. If you wanna disconnect it a little bit so it sounds far from a threat, you can say, I watched this movie on the plane, but there's the movie of, I'd probably figure out the actual title of the movie, but there's the movie of the guy who invented flaming hot Cheetos and a big part of that movie is that he watched a video from the CEO of whatever it was, Lays, and the CEO said that he wanted more people at the company to think like a CEO.

And you can be like, oh, I was inspired by this movie. I don't want to like do more in the workplace. So I wanted to understand more about your thought process and like how you move the company forward so that I can contribute better. Cause then it shows initiative and doesn't come across like a threat. Yeah.

Can I have your monitor arms when you leave, you know, like also when you leave it. Bertie num num's credit for that one float plane chat. Okay as for big and tall we're still working on it. I Don't think we're gonna get that in the screen saver shirts anytime soon though. I'm sorry Hey Linus, Lukey Luke and Dan considering the layoffs When do you think the tech employment market will get better? What tech do you see increasing in demand? Concerned computer engineering major here.

I do not see a dawn after this night on the horizon. Nope. People are saying never with LLMs, but honestly, I've talked about this a few times, so it's a little exhaustive at this point, but there was a hiring practice that was happening in Silicon Valley where people were like offensively hiring.

There was many managers that had bonuses tied to how many people they could hire. And the approach was, hey, if we hire everybody, none of the other companies can have anyone that's any good. And then, I guess, company collectively, like, everybody decided, yeah, that was silly. Let's stop doing that. Because we're paying a bunch of people that we like. Yeah, anyways, I don't need to go into the details. Luke talked about this behind the scenes a lot

where he's like, this is ridiculous because I can't hire anybody at like a normal company where we're paying based on sort of the value that we can create in our product. The numbers just don't make any sense. Like how much revenue we can create in our product, the numbers just don't make any sense. Like how much revenue we can drive and what development it takes to build a product. Like this is insanity.

And it turns out that in the longterm, Luke was right. The whole thing was completely an unsustainable house of cards. And everybody sort of got, everyone sort of looked at each other and went, this is ridiculous. What are we even doing at around the same time post COVID? And we're still in recovery from that. Oh, yeah, for sure. I complained about that on my show and had hiring managers from some companies reach out to talk to me about it.

And one of them was super open and was talking about how like, they would get budgets for hiring people that were just enormous. But they wouldn't have roles. What? They just had to hire people. They didn't have anything for them to do. What? They just had budgets to hire people. And this is like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna name the company. So Barry, you all know, the company that I'm talking about. And they were talking about how

like, I mean, yeah, it was just, it was my job to just beat other recruiters because we wanted to deny these people from working at these other companies. But then, I mean, maybe we'll find something for them to do. Maybe they'll just work on some garbage for a while, who knows. But yeah, I'm like, okay, cool. So I'm competing against that. Neat. Pretty awesome.

Best Buy? No, sorry, I'm not talking about Best Buy. That's the only one I'm going to confirm or deny, but it was definitely not Best Buy. Cool. All right, Dan. I got another one here for Luke. Cool. All right. Anyways. Dan. Sure. I got another one here for Luke. You were talking about going to games at the University of Arizona Stadium.

Are you aware of the world-class large format 8.6 meter telescope mirror production lab in the A located in the stadium of the show? No. No? What? Very cool, though. In the A in the stadium? What are you talking about? In the A? I think that's probably something, I don't know, I've never been to the University of Arizona. I'm sure there's a giant A because it's University of Arizona, but I don't... that sounds wild. No, I didn't know. The A in quotation marks. Just A.

Richard something mirror lab. What am I even looking at here? The Richard Karras mirror laboratory. Sorry, where is it though? It's in the stadium? No. Five of the seven? No. It's not in the stadium. Oh, okay. Where, sorry, where is it? It's in the stadium? No. Five of the seven? No, it's not in the stadium. Oh, okay. Sorry, where is it? It's in the A in quotation marks. I don't know what that means. Is this the A?

I thought that's what you said. No, he asked about the stadium and then separately. Oh, okay. They've only got 180 characters, guys. Yeah. Yeah. Bonkers. Short answer, no, it looks sick though. In the A. Okay. University of Arizona also has slash had a tree ring

research lab in the football stadium. Apparently, the mirror lab is under the stadium. It is under the stadium. What the heck? Under the stadium. Under the A. So literally. Okay. Literally in the A. Yes, it is in the A.

Okay. It is under the stadium because that- Not only does a university have a giant stadium, they also have a secret lab below it. Yeah. America, really. Classic America. That's incredible. Yeah. Way to go. If only you were as good at hockey as you were at building a mirror lap in your stadium. The

immortal words of Linus got him. Hello, Linus and Duke and Len. What keepsakes do you always get when you travel? I do patches and also want to know if I can add them to the commuter backpack. Thank you. Don't iron them. You can sew them on. Your mileage may vary. Like anything when you put holes in it, you know, whatever holes are in it. I used to do key chains for my kids and they got to the point where each of them had about eight pounds of keychains And I was like and I was starting to struggle to find new ones that they didn't already have just with some other text on it It turns out there's only so many keychains

In the world and so I stopped Hi dinus Duke and Lan I'm always impressed by how up-to-date you stay with the tech news What's your preferred news aggregator? PS iPhone 16e will do iPhone 16 what pixel 8a did to pixel 8? Um Twister I use Google Google's newsfeed, but honestly, I don't think it's great if I was going to if I was gonna pay for something I. If I was going to, if I was going to pay for something,

I'd probably pay for ground news, but I am such a like kind of like idle consumer of news that I haven't bothered yet. Hey DLL, I just got my commuter bag today and I love it. Question for Linus, I'd like to be more articulate and well-spoken in client presentations. Do you have any tips on how to improve your public speaking? Watch yourself back. Oh God. Anytime you get bored, record it again.

Do it over. Having dynamism in your delivery is really important. Monotone is so hard to listen to. And the pacing is important too. See that pause I did there? Monotone is so hard to listen to. You have to change up the pacing as well. So you have to change the tone

and you have to change the pacing and you have to make sure that you are emphasizing the points that are most important. If you can do that. I've fallen into this as well, where you just start like going turbo mode and you just talk like super, super, super, super fast. It's I mean, I've seen tons of people fall into it, especially when people are nervous. Just

try to try to breathe and stay calm and keep your pace reasonable because you can't do the things Atlantis is just describing when you're going 10,000 miles a minute. So that can help by going through things, repeating things, having done it in the mirror a bunch of times so that it's second nature when you're up there. But yeah, try not to go way too fast. Hey DLL, I'm in pursuit of my BS in computer science and often have a feeling of imposter syndrome. Do any of you ever or have ever felt that way? How do you manage it?

I think everyone probably feels that to a degree. I think if they don't, there's probably something wrong with them. Like they probably have overconfidence issues. Because part of knowing anything about anything is knowing that you don't really know much about most things. Just do your best. I mean, that's I think the most important thing. Just tell yourself and tell everyone around you, yeah, I'm doing my best. Like, that's the way that I respond. And I really do believe it. Whenever someone tells me like, oh, man, you make the best videos. I'm like, I do my best. Because I don't make the best videos. Like, obviously, they feel that way in that moment.

They're having an emotional moment or whatever, but I'm not. I'm here, like, grinding out, making the best video I can every day. but I'm not. I'm here like grinding out, making the best video I can every day. Is it a certified banger every once in a while? Sure. But it's not gonna be the best. And that's okay.

I'm gonna do my best. And as long as I'm actually doing my best, I can tell myself that with confidence. I can tell other people that with confidence. And that's all that anyone can ask of you. Other than, sorry, go for it, Luke. There was a cool quote that came out of, what is it?

It's from a book, A Man on the Moon, the Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts by Andrew Scheichen and the quote is, it won't fail because of me. And it sounds really like arrogant at first, but it's actually, it's not. What it more means is that like you'll put the work in to make sure that your contribution to this thing is handled. Because like with the Apollo stuff, there's so many different systems that had to all work together. And there was no way that you as an individual could oversee everything. But what you could do is put as much work and as much effort as you possibly can into your little thing. So you, you know, you'll, you're in, I think you said you're in school right now. You'll get in the job market eventually, and you're going to be assigned to some

task and once that happens, it doesn't matter if you feel like you're ready for it or not, you're in it. So just do everything you can to do a good job. Um, and don't let it feel because of you. Other than disclaimer, this output may be wrong. How would you test the output of an LLM integrated into a product? That sounds like a pretty good disclaimer. You can't really. Yeah you can't you never know you never know what it's going to do, what it's going to say. Yep. So put more disclaimers. Yeah, all the disclaimer. Lurker here. DLL, this year I get married and get to welcome my first baby girl.

Hey, congrats. Do you have any life advice or tips for me in my new upcoming journey? Part of me is excited and part of me is scared. Harness both of those parts. Because what's coming is going to be the best thing ever and it's also going to be terrifying. Have fun. I agree Apple QA has gone down. I found the best way to deal with issues like Linus had instead of restoring from backup is to set up a new phone then import your stuff back. Backups cause issues. Well, I set this up as a new phone so hypothesis defeated. Yeah, sure, that is good. But for

someone like me, if a manufacturer tells me reset your phone and start over, I am throwing that phone in the garbage and I'm moving on to something else. That is, for the amount of time that that takes me, I don't work for you. You just assigned me somewhere between three and five hours of work. No. And that's totally unreasonable of me. It is perfectly okay for a manufacturer to say, hey, try a complete factory reset, but I won't do that. That's actually not worth it for me. At D, at L, and at LL, loving my commute. I bought a 14 inch ThinkPad to fit in it. bought a 14-inch ThinkPad to fit in it. Do you think RTX add-in cards could be the way forward for AMD, maybe expandable CAM module VRAM in future GPUs? I learned something recently and you guys will get a video soon, but no I don't

think CAM is gonna work for GPUs, even onboard GPUs, you'll get more details in an upcoming video in the next week or so. It's a bummer, but it is my belief that that's just not happening. As for like ray tracing add-in cards, I don't think we're going to see that either. I think that with how integrated this ray tracing functionality needs to be with the GPU, the fact that needs to read from the VRAM or sorry, work with the VRAM as it's working memory. Like I just, these functional units are integral to rendering. Like they're not going to be able to just be on an add-in card.

I don't think co-processors are coming back anytime soon, pretty much. Glad you love your commuter bag though. Thanks for the great hoodie. Linus, have you ever had any ankle injuries playing badminton? What was your rehabilitation routine like? I had my ankle injury recently and it sucks. Ankle injuries playing badminton, no,

but I did injure my ankle at Luke's birthday party, which was a hot minute ago now, and it still hurts. Yeah, I'm really unimpressed with that. It was so unnecessary. Just, it was a mean nothing push for no reason other than to just kinda shake up the field where people were just standing at the backs going, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping at each other. So I like grabbed some noobs and I was like, okay, let's go, come on, let's like do something interesting. And I tried to slide behind cover.

And I was wearing shoes with way more traction than what I normally wear at the paintball field. And I expected to slide and I didn't. I just went right over it. It sucked. Anyway, I've been given resistance band exercises, go this way, this way, this way, this way, this way, this way, stand on a soft surface and try to balance, stuff like that. Just try to build the strength back up. Use like heat pads to increase blood flow to help promote healing.

It's all stuff you can kinda look up online. Yeah, it sucks though. To wear a brace for my tournament late last year because it was not healing, but it's a fair bit better now, but it still like cracks too much and stuff and it still hurts sometimes, so it sucks. And the last one I've got for you. Hey Luke, great seeing you at ZTW.

Curious on your take for steps to help combat session token theft, especially for people like streamers or YouTubers who don't have enterprise tech or security stack. Safe home. Bye. security stack, safe home. Meemers are YouTubers at a certain scale. I think it would be fairly reasonable, even if you're a small, like one to two bit outfit,

because there are some one to two bit outfits that are at enormous scales. Once you have a big enough target on your back, I think it's decently reasonable to look into advanced security things. Outside of that, as an individual like at-home user, I don't know how much like is realistic to do to try to protect yourself against those types of things. And I I also to be honest Don't know what the chances are that you're really going to be attacked by something like that Obviously never say never blah blah blah knock on wood all those fun things but I

Mean like session cookie hijacking is not a normal thing that hits random users so often. I wouldn't freak out about it too much. Apparently, Simpson's tapped out of shutdown. I didn't even know that. It happened at the end of January. What is that? That's that's a Simpson's mobile game. Oh. Yeah, EA shut it down. I had no idea All right

And now it's time to shut down this show. We'll see you again next week same bad time same bad channel Bye All right, i'm out of here. Bye Dan. Bye!