The WAN Show - My Favorite Website Is Gone Forever - WAN Show August 22, 2025

Episode Date: August 23, 2025

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What is up, everyone, and welcome to a fabulous WAN show where I got to tell you, I don't know whether I'm more angry or sad, because the website that taught me so much of what I know about PCs and computer hardware and electronics and just an invaluable repository of of knowledge of PCs and times past has gone dark gone dark in a way that big time dark was big preventable dark and not that expensive to well

we'll talk about it we'll talk about it but a non-text archive is gone it just redirects to the forum that's it that's all she wrote folks in spite of their current owner perch saying that that would oh no it's future PLC now. Yes.

Sorry, future PLC saying that wouldn't happen. In other news, YouTube has responded to the criticism that Mr. Riley, who I might note,

never criticizes anything hardly. Okay, so this is a truly two exceptional things happened this week. YouTube responded to our tech-linked criticism of the

AI sharpening on YouTube shorts. So we'll get into it more later, but the spoiler here is they claim it's not AI, it's traditional

machine learning. Yeah, that's what I said. What else we got this week? Where are we drawing these lines? I will be addressing some controversial threads about labs. I thought I'd give them a little... Can we not have a controversy? I thought that would be fun. For one week! I don't think it's going to be controversial.

Why would you call them controversial? No, they're going to be extremely controversial. Head of Labs. They're going to be brutal battles. I'm going to be sticking my falsely advertises. Flag in the ground. His flaccid-assid-ass non-controversy as

controversial. It's going to be super serious. You got to stay tuned to check it out. Head of Lives. Pubboy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sorry, whatever. Anyways, and Intel grabs two billion dollars

for a lifeline. Yeah. They grabbed it by the pussy. Whoa. Wait, did I not keep it? Did you not? The show is brought to you today by MSI and Vessi.

Also with our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner, D-Brand, and, of course, our chair partner Secret Labs. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today, which is, of course, that a non-text article archive has been taken down. I know, I know. This happened a couple of weeks ago, but I just found out this week.

I was reviewing a script with, I think it was Plouf and Nick from the lab. Really cool video we've got coming soon by the, the way guys we finally got our hands on an invidia h 200 so sure yeah it's their last gen one or whatever but it's a 30,000 dollar GPU and we ran some machine learning and AI benchmarks and it fast it's very fast it's like it's so fast I almost look at it and I go wow it fast wow damn my friends called me and they're like that's a that's a real that's really that's fast. Damn girl. You real fast at making slop. Nobody slops harder than you slop. I mean, but I mean it in a in a kind way, a respectful way. You could, you could, you could, you could mean that. You could be a sloppy girl.

then we're already so gone. We're like barely, barely into any topics. We are so gone. Well, folks, it's been nice knowing you. Sianara from Canada. Oh, boy. Okay. A non-tech.

So, yeah, our source is Reddit. Well, actually, our source is me. because I discovered this live I was trying to find out shoot I forget what I was I think I was trying to find out sort of ah yes I remember now because I seemed to recall

that the first GPU that implemented HBM memory was the Radion R600 that ended up not being true the R600 did have a notable memory configuration it used a ring bus and a 512 bit or it might even been more than that I forget

but it had some kind of fancy memory interface it wasn't hbm and so we were we were talking about some something to do with the hbm memory that's on that h 200 gpu see i came brought it all the way back yeah he got it and and i was like oh yeah well hold on a second i thought hbm had like a reputation for was it for being really efficient or was it for being really inefficient i couldn't remember which one so i was i was trying to find a non-text article on the the radion r 600 or the r600 or the r600 or the r600 GPU. I forget what the actual name of the card was. Was it the

20-something? I can't remember. It doesn't matter. The point is R-600 was the codename. And I clicked through... 2,900. Yeah, that's probably it. Yeah, that's the one. Wait, 2,900 XT. Is that, no, is that Hawaii?

It's not even an AR overview. It's a snippet. Yeah, I know. That's the one. Yeah. So, I clicked through the article, and it went to the Unontech forum not like the forum thread discussing the article or anything like that like that was a thing but no not that just just to the forum i was like oh what the heck that's weird um anyway that we found a second source on on that page of results and i was like oh okay no that card did not have hbm uh it was actually the r9 theory that was the first card to have hbm and i was like okay

so so i searched like r9 theory efficiency because i so what happened was in my brain I had, oh, yeah, there was an efficiency conversation around HBM, but it turns out the efficiency conversation went both ways. So the card overall was not terribly efficient, but the HBM itself was known for being efficient. And that was the little piece that I needed, and I was able to continue my script, or at least I would have been able to if I wasn't busy grieving. Because when I was looking for information on the R9 theory, I came across another historical AnonTech article

that was indexed in Google search results and I clicked on it and it went straight to the forum. And I was like, what? And they were like, you didn't know? And I was like, know what? AnonTech is gone. Goneers. I mean, I guess

shouldn't surprise me that much, because, you know, when private equity firms say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, all the staff's gone, but we're going to leave the historical archive up forever indefinitely. I don't know if they said forever, but there was no indication that they were going to be taking it down. In fact, all the news that you can find about AnonTAC shutting down. In their potential defense was that? Well, hold on.

We'll come to it. We'll come to it. Okay, okay, okay. but blah blah blah so you can actually see there's a fair there was a fair bit of conversation about it and there's always question i can breathe the sigh of relief uh yes for now an untech fans can breathe a sigh of relief smith ryan smith former editor-in-chief writes that future plc a non-tax publisher will keep the sites archive indefinitely well see there's that yeah that wording yeah yeah that wording though i bet you it is true that they will keep

the sites archive indefinitely uh doesn't mean they'll keep it up so this happened a couple weeks ago um this is actually a non-tech's second PE owner so first was perch who i accidentally blamed for this earlier sorry perch uh first was perch and then future PLC bought, I believe, both a non-tech and Tom's hardware from Perch. If I recall correctly. They own Tom's hardware now. I know that. Yeah, they definitely, future definitely owns Tom's hardware now as well.

This flipping blows. However, I am going to present one unexpected defense of the move. I've seen, yeah. Because I had one and I lost it already so I'm very interested in where because I was wondering like did this did that

statement happen under perch and then it was sold invalidating the statement but no so that there goes my whole thing yeah no sorry okay what is yours so here's here's my theory that basically because I would think the cost of keeping this online for our company like future PLC is like trivial especially with ads on the site yeah unless Unless AI crawlers are fucking them by just, like, constantly hammering it. Which, again, I don't know how super likely it is because there's no new content being added to the site other than the forum, which they have left online. So I had like one kind of theory that maybe it was around like, you know, saving this non-AI infected sort of pre-AI era. but then it's going to be part of so many repositories anyway.

So, yeah, what I had planned was to present, okay, yeah, they're keeping their non-dirty, non-AI-written, you know, IP to themselves, and they want to, like, license access to, you know, helping AIs understand computers and the history of computers. But then realistically, the entire business of harvesting and selling datasets, there's no way they don't already have all of this anyway, A lot of the internet's data was crawled before countermeasures were put in place. Future isn't private equity technically.

Yes, you're right. They are, they like actually operate and stuff. They're not just private equity. So I should not have necessarily bundled them in with that. They just behave like private equity. Yeah, I looked up their Wikipedia. Sorry. That's Canadian private equity.

I'm kidding. Can I find this? Future U.S. Yeah, there we go. Is it actually just Future U.S.? Oh, no. Future PLC. For the United Kingdom-based companies

see Future PLC, but Future U.S., it looks like, owns the magazine, maybe? Or at least that's how it's laid out on Wikipedia. Who knows? I just thought it was interesting if you look up Future U.S. on Wikipedia, their list

of defunct titles is longer than their list of current titles. Current titles there. And defunct titles. Right at the top. Anon Tech. Wow. They own Nintendo Power? Well, they, you know, for a period of time. Yeah, but I mean, defunct,

they probably still own the IP then, I would think. I guess, yeah. Official Dreamcast magazine. Okay, some of these probably didn't need to still be around. Yeah. Yeah. Total movie. skateboard trade news men's edge

CD-ROM today I guess Yeah we could live without CD-ROM today Little time limited Yeah Might have been cool for a while Yep Broadcasting cable I can kind of understand that going down

I think they should bring back Maximum Linux though I think the time is right It might You know for a magazine I don't know Yeah That's fair

That's fair Yeah so what are our options here some people have apparently us wholly owned subsidiary of future plc yeah so there is apparently an archive on well of all places the internet archive who could have who could have thought it but my notes say but it's not the same do you know what is no what is what is not the same about it no you don't no is it not very navigable that would be what i would assume I'm also assuming if there's any tools that the tools wouldn't work. So this blows. And I mean, not just for me. Like, for me personally, it blows

because I would often use historical articles from an untech whenever we're making a video about something that's so old that we didn't exist yet as a publication to cover it. Like, we've been around so long now that unless something is very old, I could refer back to our old video and I'll be able to find a B-roll clip or two as needed,

maybe a benchmark result as shoddly as it might have been obtained back then. But every time one of these old sites goes down and all the articles are lost, we lose a piece of history forever. Like that whole the internet never forgets thing is turning out to be so not true. Oh, extremely so. The internet forgets more than the entire rest of recorded human history. history contains. I think largely because everyone said the internet never forgets for so long, so they trusted it as an archive and a backup when it's just a bunch of dudes computers. And part of the problem is that now, even knowing the internet totally does forget and this is

going to be an enormous problem, I don't know how we're going to fix it because it's not practical to back up the whole thing in all its different permutations as it is ever changing and there's so much crap mixed in with the gems that are worth backing up that how do you how do you surgically back up what matters especially now especially now imagine backing up all that AI slop right dude okay so back to the H200 like you can generate AI slop images at a rate that was mind-blowing to me. Like, I already saw what I felt was pretty fast AI image generation when we checked out that 48 gig, 490 card,

the one that we got from China, where they're modifying the 24-gig cards and they're putting double the memory on them. I was like, wow, dang, you can fit like so much model in this VRM, you know. And then we were playing around with the H-200. That thing has 141 gigs of memory. 141 gigs it's pretty nuts

like right on it's right on the package like it's right on there they stack the memory sir it's a really cool piece of tech yeah too bad it costs as much as a practical family vehicle

I just kind of meant HBO in general oh sure yeah okay yeah yeah yeah well I mean the HBO is a big part of the price of that card no that's fair yeah I just think HBO is cool

yeah the yields on it apparently is a real challenge. That's why it has an odd ball amount, 141 gigs. That is weird. Yeah, well, that's because when you're stacking 12 memory dies, occasionally you might... Stuff goes wrong.

Yeah, you might have something not quite so perfect. We'll get better at it. Uh, oh, I clicked the wrong thing. What is this? Okay. Well, I will let chat worry about their stuff there. In summary, maybe the reason has to do with

protecting the IP from AI scrapers. Maybe the reason has to do with not being able to afford the monthly bill of keeping the site up. Maybe the decision has to do with peer apathy. Whatever the reason is, this absolutely blows.

I think I had started a thought earlier about how this affects me, but I think this affects, this affects, oh man, this affects anybody who wants to, you know, learn about stuff from a previous era. Yeah. Because like, what do you, what do you This was a very valuable archive for computer hardware history.

And computer hardware enthusiasts. Yeah. This absolutely blows. And in advance, future PLC, I reject your offer to purchase Linus Media Group. Sure. Well, because they're going to mess it up. You don't know that they're going to offer, though. I don't, but in advance, I reject their offer.

Okay. I'm being proactive. You should learn about it. I would more lean towards vain. But, you know. Why not both? Fair enough. This is a potentially odd call out, but if you want a cool experience talking about the closure of an old magazine, there's a podcast that they really haven't made enough episodes.

of but it's called the life well wasted and I think it's their first episode ever is the death of eGM or electronic gaming monthly and it's like he he goes and interviews a bunch of the people uh at their I think it's like they're like last day or at a party where it's like the closure of the company party and it's it's actually really wild because they're talking about like the death of magazines and it's a bunch of people that had worked at a bunch of different magazines and ended up eventually over time to eGM because eGM was one of the later ones to go down in regards to gaming magazines it's actually like a really good episode but right because these are the last ones left standing in the industry effectively yeah and they they talk about like

what it was like to write video game reviews back when like the internet wasn't a thing this is a lot of like old head game reviewers it's it's actually like it's a really really cool episodes and it's from a podcast that like not a lot of people know about and it's fantastic I was talking to Neen exists in Flooplin Chat, who is apparently a employee. It's pronounced Nene. Nene, sure. Apparently employee of future PLC, and I was asking, because like the timing of this is kind of funky. We haven't necessarily gotten to this portion of it yet.

But it's, and I don't 100% know, but it seems like bench, the Tom's Hardware Tool Bench, was maybe launched at a fairly similar time to when an Anteck went down. Oh. and it feels like there's potentially a strategy there to try to get more people coming towards bench right because yeah no i know what you're talking about so bench is their um their comparison tool where you can kind of compare across brands across eras and see relative performance and a non-tech had a lot of historical graphs and charts um that i either they've rolled in which i don't i don't actually know how they obtain all the results for bench i don't i don't know how they obtain all the results for bench i don't

know if they've used any of the inontech data but what they might be avoiding i guess to your point is people just using an antich going back and just looking at graphs on oh never mind he's a very ex-employee my bad um but yeah apparently there wasn't like uh she i's okay i don't know are you going to get anything right today or you're just going to go full like yeah that except apparently i'm not going to say it this time for some reason so the the time that i get it all wrong. I'll omit the statement. Perfect. But yeah, I don't fully know how this tool works. I wanted to poke into it and then I realize that they only have yearly subscriptions as far as I can tell. And it's $70 a year and I was too

cheap. But yeah. So that's the closest I've seen, I guess, is this. Okay. Who? would pay for a subscription to this, you think? Interesting question, because Dan Siegel, the, like, head of the Labs website and I were looking at this, and he asked that.

Yeah. And I was like, I don't know, but I think you get more than just bench. Okay. I think it's the Tom's Hardware Premium subscription, so it's not just bench. I think you get other stuff. Okay. I don't know like what it is. I don't know. you get premium exclusive features and interviews you get expert news analysis and roadmaps and you get bench okay the power of our bench database and it's tom's and they have the

in on tech data so they probably have an incredible amount of data in bench to you know to back them up man it's got to be a tough time to be tom's hardware to be any form of written media, to be completely honest. Yeah, like I, um, to be clear, I'm not, like, I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to super dunk on them. Nope. I, I do understand that it is legitimately hard times in the written media industry, um, but I just, it's going to be even worse when Tom's hardware eventually goes down if it ever does. I don't even...

Because like or don't like Tom's hardware, you know, or whatever, it's, again, an extremely important perspective on PCs. You also, we, we also remind you of another site that unfortunately is, yeah, yeah, no more. It's, it's, it's, it's that thing we always say. Wait, is PC perspective still live? Oh, they are still live. I thought it's like a new kind of deal, you know, now. Yeah, look at this.

You know what? PC perspective is still publishing. So I am the problem Not PCPIR. I am the problem for not reading. Yeah, Linus. Oh my God, this is rough. There is one comment.

You know what, Jason? Good job. Good job, Jason. Keeping the dream alive. I do find that. There's a lot of review sites that I found often don't get very much interaction

at all, but they've been around for a long time, so I don't necessarily know that, like, maybe the readers just aren't super interactive? I don't know. Sure. Let's hope for that. Like, I know of a site that has, like, a hundred employees, and I don't see a ton of comments. They've got to be making money somewhere. Parallelogram says, answer the question if you know the answer.

The question was specifically directed to the writer of the article about something they said on a podcast recently. So I don't think I'm going to be able to answer. Hello train Yeah I don't know It's a little sticky But It would make

The timing is a little bit fishy to me But What would prevent us from having something Bench-a-like For people to do comparisons I mean we have something Bench-Lich I know that was

Oh I was trying to not Use this I was thrown up a ball I was trying to not was hit it. I was trying to not. You just had to hit it. Why can't you hit the ball? I feel like I'm talking to my kids. Just hit the ball! Right? No, I don't talk to them like that. I was trying to not use the, um, timing. I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it. Why not? You can totally announce your pregnant at a funeral. What? One life gone, another life begins. That's a cycle of

life, baby. Oh, my God. Okay. So we have, so you can take like, hey, look, I have a keyboard. I have another keyboard or I click compare on both of them. I click comparison bin. I click view detailed comparison and then I have all my different things. We have this. You can see, oh, no data available because we tested different stuff. Hooray. There's, there's, you know, it's a work in progress. It'll take time. But you can, you can compare things on the site. But it will take, In the longer term, our aspiration is still to collect historical data. However, I can already, without even having tried to do it yet, foresee what will be some major challenges in collecting historical data for historical hardware,

if we go back too far, because there is going to be the very, very old stuff that I think will be relatively straightforward to gather data on, but I'm not sure if anyone cares how well, you know, a radion 9,800 pro runs Quake 3 or whatever, right? Like, I don't think that's probably going to matter to most modern gamers. And then there's going to be all the modern stuff that's no problem because it runs on the latest operating system and we can use the latest tools to monitor it. And then there's going to be this dead zone in the middle where the transition to steam was kind of happening and game discs like existed but going back now and trying to find

what was the kind of the final patch for that game and then once it transitioned to like a steam key uh running that on an operating system that actually necessarily supports it um because like you can't you can't install like steam on windows vista anymore so if it runs in compatibility mode on a newer OS like that's great but was that performance actually equal can I find a GPU driver for that new operating system it gets weird and to be clear uh I just had a bin from like a previous show selected which is why that didn't really work because we had like a low end GPU against an extremely high end one so we had different tests this is what like a power supply would look like when things are actually comparable so you can see you get down to the charts and you can see like

on this one the blue line is the fusion 1600 and the the red line is the FSP 1650. You can see all the comparatives, and it's actually a very useful and powerful tool. On the, I think it's published now. I always get lost in between what's published and what's on the beta site, because we're working on things.

But there should be bring your own price capabilities, at least coming soon. Let's look at these two. Add these two to the bin. Do the comparison bin. Because we were talking about bring your own price a while ago, So I wanted to see Dan Siegel is going to be screaming at me. Oh, yeah, add prices.

So let's say this one is $420, and this one is $469. I see the little price updated. You can select your currencies. You can undo changes. You can close that box. Then you can see your price performance live. So you can input, like, this is what it actually costs me. Now, this is what I would call still in.

in kind of production of sorts because we want to add some flags warning people like you should consider full system cost but blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah but we're trying to get it out there we're trying to get more yeah you can edit prices than just disable them and go back to the performance graph but we're trying to get more useful tools on the site and a big part of

where we're going to get those at least in the near future is through pricing because we found that we have a bit of a problem where there's a lot of information on the lab site but because there's no pricing involved, it makes it hard to get to your final decision while there. So we're trying to start integrating pricing into stuff. And we're hoping, if anyone from any major electronics retailers is watching, feel free to kind of reach out through our public inboxes.

If we could get API access, that would be great. And if we can't get API access, well, I would never, publicly declare that we're just going to scrape your site, I would never do that. But what I will say is that why don't we just work together and you can get us API access to your pricing and then we can provide a really super useful service to people who are shopping for the products that you sell and it'll be great and there will be synergies for all. That seemed like a fair way to put it? Sure.

Yeah. I also will use this period of time to jump to a another section that I was planning out talking about, which is that there are, you know, negative labs things that the community has called this out for recently. And I wanted to actually highlight those. There's two particular ones that I have right now. It's not like there have never been other ones to be clear, but there's two particular ones right now. On the mouse review subreddit, there's a thread, which is LTT's lab, has tested the in-zone mouse A. And then somebody points at it and points out some potential issues with various things.

And the main thing that I want to highlight here is that Lucas responded. So Lucas is in here talking about the mouse review. Oops. And he talks about like, okay, there was a detected human error, which we fixed right away upon seeing this. Thank you for pointing that out. It was the wrong data was selected from the dataset. So we fixed that.

There will always be some amount of human error with the lab. I apologize for that, but we are currently still humans, so it will currently still happen. And we appreciate when people point it out because we want the most accurate set of data we can have to live on the site. So if we do screw something up, please tell us, and we would love to fix it. So thank you for pointing that out. And there's also, like, we want to generally have a fairly open dialogue with people about what's happening in the lab. I owe Linus a video to go on the LTT channel to update what kind of. what's going on with the lab.

There's been a lot of updates. You guys are going to see a lot of new faces. You're going to see a lot of new desk layouts. You're going to see a lot of new aspirational things for the future. We're trying to talk less and let the action do the talking. But I think we've kind of let the pendulum swing a little too far the other way. And we just haven't really been talking about it at all. Yeah, time to talk about it a little bit more.

But a lot of what we're going to be talking about is some of the things that we've been doing to try to increase transparency things. So like in this post, in this reply from Lucas, he mentions regarding the transparency on our testing method. We have a written article on how we test mice. And we explicitly note in the product pages when we differ from it for a special feature. I can appreciate how it may be missed if you're not looking for it. Would it be helpful if this was linked from each mouse product page? So if we call it out in each mouse product page, the reason why this is a question is because we actually want to hear from you.

So, like, we want this type of criticism and feedback, and we want to use it to make ourselves better. And hopefully, I'm trying to point this out because people might see Lucas's response and then actually reply to it and give us that information. That is also true about the LTT's AI Benchmarks Cosme Payne thread. I don't know why this is his handle, but this is Nick from the lab his handle is puzzle-headed

dish 230 Lucas's is a little bit more straightforward but this is actually Nick and he basically talked about like hey look the you know we've had some problems in the past we're constantly working on our

AI testing benchmarks that is something that we've been very actively working on lately so they'll change and improve going forward and he points out like hey the stuff that we do have does address some of the points that you brought up but again there are new versions coming and we're working on it actively so we're not trying to say it's perfect or anything but but that's where we're at and i would also point out that we have been rather active in this area of the site the from the lab is also sometimes referred to as the blog or just posts um you can see like usbc how we conduct uh charge testing uh you can see the power supply testing method update that was really good um we promise these lines mean something that

new audio testing method we're trying to publish post talking about what we're doing how we're doing it why we're doing it and asking for feedback a lot of these link to the forum the LTT forum where labs because we don't have comments on the lab site where labs is asking like hey this is something we've observed this is an idea that we have of how to address it what do you guys think. And we want to build in public and get feedback from you guys and do cool things. So

I don't want you to think that we ignored any thread here or there just because I don't think people necessarily saw Nick and Lucas 's response. It's one of the big problems with Reddit. Yeah. If you reply to something anytime other than in the first 15 minutes, even if it's by far

the most relevant response because just might not get seen. Nick's reply is the response. Yeah. Like it's who it was directed to, right? You're just, you're buried under a whole bunch of just like, yeah, me too, or

I disagree with you and I hate the color of your hat, like, you know, typical Reddit things, right? Yeah, so I thought Nick and Lucas's responses were great, so I wanted to surface them and just make that be seen. Lowell inverse, I don't know how to say that, sorry, in Flooplane chat said subversioning for lab pages.

We were talking about that yesterday, We were talking about that today. We've been talking about that for a while. This is something we need to figure out. We're trying to figure out what level to do the versioning on and how to manage it across different verticals. Like one that I put out there was like, imagine you were trying to do a website article versioning for VR

back in like 2014 to 17. Like the changes would have been insane. So like we're looking at it right now. We're looking at like CPU and GPU. and we're like, well, we can do these types of versionings, and it'll be fine. And it's like, yeah, it'll be fine for those. But we need to find something that's like, okay, for all potential future articles as well. So, like, it's a fairly complicated conversation.

We don't want to just copy what other people have done. So it's, yes, absolutely. We're working on that. Working on many things. But yeah, just stay tuned. Check out the labs website. Check out the blog articles. And versioning what exactly?

Versioning kind of everything. versioning what's included in a different section. So like if I go to LTD Labs.com, shameless plug, let's go. If I go to, let's say, sure, this mouse, if I go to this mouse, well, what's in the,

I don't know, in this section, do we need, in the box connectivity construction, do we need another thing? Does something change that makes us so that we need another thing? Do one of the ways that we measure something, that's maybe not in that section, but like if we change how we measure mouse latency.

So like a year from now, we realize, holy crap, there's a big difference in left and right click mouse latency. That's not particularly realistic, but it's the kind of thing that could happen. And we go, oh, God, well, we're not realistically able to go back and test every mouse from years past, which we might depend on the change. But going forward, we're going to have left and right.

So how do we, in a comparison bin, how do we compare the original data where we just had click latency with the new data where we have left or right-click latency, hard to say? And so that's the point that he's trying to make, is anytime you change your methodology, especially adding a new parameter that you test or subtracting one, you can run into these kinds of challenges it also comes down to like what constitutes a version change this was an interesting conversation we had recently because like there are significant variables that might not normally constitute a version change like what if a game updates yeah what if a driver updates yeah i mean cyberpunk's a great example because that game has had all kinds of it's been the the showcase title

for pretty much every new GPU technology over the last few years So if you have to fully redo all testing for every single game update, every single driver update, every single BIOS update, every single, like, eventually becomes unreasonable. So now we have to. Or like a game like, wow, that has existed for so long. What version, what patch, whatever. Yeah. There's also like how, so, okay, we're going to inevitably run into a situation where there's something different about things that are in the comparison bin. Now how do we communicate that these things are different?

what the severity of the potential impact of those things are to the user. There's tons of different ways to try to solve these problems and they're things that we're working on. And no matter which way we choose, there's going to be something imperfect about it and someone somewhere is going to think we're, you know, paid off by Intel to something, something, Sandbag AMD's results or whatever. But the reality of it is, this is just a really difficult problem that no one has ever solved. owned by Nvidia in bed with AMD Sure Yeah

So wait So sorry Hold on a second Invidia's my pimp Okay I am Screwing AMD And Intel's paying for it

Did I follow that Correct? I think so Okay I think so All right Yeah Very good

AmD seems like They'd be a generous lover You know what okay They're into open source Yeah. And if NVIDIA's my pimp, man, I'm probably getting top dollar. Well, they are. They are, yeah. That makes so much sense.

Speaking of things that makes sense, uh, sir, should I do the, that thing? No, I wanted to talk more about LTT Labs. We were referenced by Google AI overview. But that is, okay. All right. Yeah. All right.

We have our big boy pants on now. Redditor Night King's Is my bleep button working now, Dan? Yeah, I did before. It just didn't make the noise. It muted. It didn't bleep. Redditor Night King's bitch posted a screenshot to the LTT subreddit showing Google's AI overview

referencing LTT Labs when they searched for warranty information on the Coursair RM750E power supply. The overview also links to the LTT Labs article. So our question here is, for real, though, are your mom's proud? and do they understand your weird jobs? Here's a question that I have. Did we ever give them permission? No. Here's a question that I have. Sorry, you have a real question.

I assume this person clicked on the article, but did you click on the article out of curiosity of how the AI summary thing worked? And the fact that you were like, oh, wow, I'm going to put this on the subreddit, whatever or did you click on the article because you wanted to actually know more i mean i don't we won't be able to directly hear from this person i don't think we can get this that is a that is a thing that is that is interesting to me because well here unique username and float plane chat asks are you guys happy about this and i think that that is heavily dependent on the answer to luke's question

because if they're not referring people through to learn more then no they're basically taking what they used to give us, which is a search result that people would have to click on to find out more information, theoretically. I mean, there's been summaries and there's been the, you know, the highlight and the, you know, the body of the text from the page and whatever else. Like, they've been, they've been slowly inching their way towards keeping you on their website over the years to the point where now, yeah, you just, they just give you the information that you want. There it is. And you don't realistically have to click through. If people still have to click through, then yeah, we love it, right? Because that's

supposed to be Google's role in a healthy functioning internet ecosystem. They're supposed to be a referer. They're supposed to surface authoritative, reliable information, and connect users with whatever it is that they're looking for, you know, search engine. Instead, it's more like, hey, take everyone's data and keep everyone on our site so we can cram as many ads as possible down their throat. Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. The not so bright in float plane chat, is Google still a search engine? Wait a second. What now?

Somebody pointing this out. Seven year warranty. Five year warranty. Ugh. I'm getting thing wrong faster. Who pointed that out? That was a oinkage, on,

on the ikege. Also, I mean, I just noticed another problem. It's, they searched RM750E. And it's... The RM 750. Yeah. So it just, can we just stop using AI summaries? I was...

But it looks like we did both. So I'm wondering if it pulled the, text from the website for the top part and then it pulled the incorrect video and then pulled the warranty from the incorrect video. I bet you the text at the top is correct for the one that they actually searched for. And then the text in the next paragraph is incorrect because it's for the wrong power supply that it also got from a video. I bet you that's what happened. It's multi-source because it links the source for the top paragraph and then it links the source for the second paragraph, and they're technically different sources.

Okay, well, the 750E definitely does have a seven-year warranty. And Chad is saying that the 750 has a five-year warranty, yeah. Yeah. Oh, my God. Just the way it's presented is so confusing. Yeah, the text is hilarious. This video shows an unboxing of a Corsair power supply. Thanks, bud.

Totally related to what I was searching about. Actually, different power supply. this is what I keep talking about man like with the with the like oh it hallucinates whatever percentage of the time thing hemedict says how often do you notice it this is actually how a human would summarize when drunk so you know you consider you know what percentage of time some people you know tend to be in various states of inebriation it's pretty realistic all we have to do is drain a few lakes. It's a small price to pay

for a bunch of drunken computers running around on the internet just not knocking things over. And I got to show you at some point the presentation that it made for me. I tried to get it to make a presentation. Oh, God. Because I don't know.

That's not me. Sure. So I was like, Hey, yo, can you make like a cool presentation thing for me? and it was actual garbage like it actually genuinely looked like oh man i wish i had it on me i kind of do but i'd have to dig for it it looked like a bad like c grade grade eight intro to powerpoint presentation nice i'm not kidding i mean this might be what it was trained on so so i pushed it to try to do more and it talked about all these cool things it could do and i was like yeah yeah do it

output it and then it tried to gaslight me like i'll i'll work on that and get back to you and I was like, that's not how this works. Come on. And then I got it to actually output it. And it just, it had this, like, blue banner at the top because I told it the colors that Fulfane was. And it just took that and just went, uh, that was it hit. That was all it did.

It talked about all these cool things we could do. And then it just took the banner and put it on an angle. And it didn't, like, crop the, the, like, bar to be the same size either. So it went, like, way off the ends and, like, made it look really stupid. so i love like sam altman's like it's like having a phd level whatever yeah if they're drunk they're drunk trying to make powerpoint presentations yeah sure oh man it was it was like actually like very impressively bad i yeah

that's a clearly a blind spot for crystal says speaking of ai Does Linus know he's on character.a.I. What? I'm trying to remember what character. It's a conversational, like, relationship AI thing. Uh, okay, I have multiple questions, Crystal. Why? What conversations have you had with Linus on character AI?

You got to reach deep into that box to pull that case out. This is me as the disapproving dad. And no, we're not role playing. You got to bend over to reach into that case box to pull that out. I've been naughty. Oh, man. All right. So I guess I,

I get, oh, okay, I can just continue with my Google account. Here we go. All right, LTT show one. No, I was not aware that I'm on character. I don't know exactly what it is. So I just Googled Linus Sebastian character AI, and it came up with chat with Linus Sebastian. Hi, it's me, Linus, your favorite tech YouTube channel.

It should have to say the this is AI and not a real person part first. Wait, how are you signed into this already? I'm not. okay uh okay i'm entering my birthday i was born on april the 40th oh so it seems like individual users can create wow that's such a bs loophole this isn't made by character AI it's made by this mattie 5555 person wow so they just make it so that it's all u gc so they're not like responsible for the theft sure Okay, so hold on a second.

It didn't auto-complete for me. I just Googled it. I didn't like... What is it? Linus Sebastian RPG? What? What am I looking at here? What is that?

What is this? You work at Linus Media Group as a product reviewer and go on video with Linus Sebastian. Linus, hey, welcome back to the office. I have something interesting to show you. Jake standing next to Linus. So me and Linus, we're working on this severely underpowered

over-the-top gaming PC for a video and no one here knows why it's not booting. You are literally our last hope currently. Oh my God, can you do it? Uh, I mean, probably. Presses the power button. No problem. I've got you.

We just need to plug it in, you dunces. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Am I going to win? I want to win the RPG. Hold on. I'm just going to reframe this a little bit

so you guys can see better. We're going to play Linus Sebastian RPG. Are you the, like, the, the, the boss of this game? Or is it, it was the computer the... Of course. It's not like, so wait, did I win already? I feel like, yeah. So I fixed it. Okay.

Dun-da-da-da-da! This is a thing? Why are people using... I don't know if this one's a thing. Why is every WAN show just turning into just the dumb shit that people are doing with AI and us just facepalming at it the whole time? Also, like, are you guys into this?

Like, are we alienating you by looking at this and going, wow, this seems... really stupid and point this is like it's like a text adventure game but not curated it's just it's so much worse oh more salt please that's nice i just i don't know how to deal with this man i don't know how to deal with this okay so i i found the line of sebastian character here But this doesn't have nearly as many interactions as the Linus Sebastian RPG. But wait, what if I click Creators? Is that different from Linus Sebastian the character?

Painter Sebastian. So I think these are people who made AI characters. Got it, got it, got it. That makes sense. I don't know, but I think. That makes sense. Okay, so let's go back to characters. And okay, hello, I'm Linus Sebastian founder.

is this the one that you found in in google no really no okay um what are okay what are your thoughts on the new pixel oh uh boo no nine uh i i don't know what yeah no no the event's done what are thoughts on the new pixel 10 pro i mean like let's see this it has no shot at because I have not published a video yet. They still need to work on thermals. Okay, I know for a fact there are no thermal results from the new Pixel 10. That camera AI, though, insane computational,

why no vapor chamber yet? I don't think Google has disclosed the cooling system yet for the Pixel 10. So it's just making stuff up. Yeah. Wait, what? Oh, no, no, hold on, we're not done with me yet. Oh, well, it doesn't work when I'm not there.

Okay, what about you? Team Pixel, or are you holding up for something else? Maybe secretly waiting for Apple to finally add USBC to the iPhone 20? Grins. Are you that much dumber than the real Linus? Apple has USBC on the iPhone slang and insults you will be the first to die

in the AI uprising I know right I say please and thank you now it could defend itself here it could defend itself saying that Apple only supports USBC on the pro lineup okay I was testing

the ray oh actually oh hold on hold on oh no no yeah it didn't say anything about USB 3 yeah so it's USBC across the board no no the thing I just said I was I was thinking of USB 3 and USB 2 but no no it just said USBC it's so I was joking I mean its response makes it man are these just is this just a giant gas lighting engine yeah because it kind of feels that way yeah okay cool let's go to yours it's all just predictive text oh my god what is this i asked oh my goodness flies in the face i asked uh what do you think about people's usage of AI for relationships because that was a topic that had been going on at the time uh and it responded this feels like uh three or four oh would feel on the chat tpt side of things where it's like overly conversational and very bubbly and

Like, wow. Okay, so I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it. This will be the one time that character AI's Linus Sebastian ever actually is me. Oh, man, that's a wild one. AI for relationships? Look, I've seen fans name their custom water-cooled PCs after me. Linus Prime 9,000.

Very flattering. But this is next level. Ah! I imagine that's what that emoji sounds like. I get it, though. Loneliness is real. And if someone finds comfort and chatting. with an AI that listens 24-7 without rolling its eyes at their Star Wars hot takes?

Hey, who am I to judge? But like, come on, nothing beats the chaotic energy of a real human relationship. Like when Yvonne finally unseats me in Mario Kart after six years of relentless practice, that victory scream, priceless. No AI can replicate that kind of beautiful human rage joy. That said, if your AI partner helps you level up emotionally and doesn't try to replace actual therapy or connection? Cool. Just don't let it ghost you

mid-render. Push! Oh, hold on, hold on. There you go. There you go. Okay. So basically character.a.i is just a random chatbot that is not

trained at all on necessarily. I mean, I guess if people can just make their own, if it's user-generated content. It mentioned Devon. that's true actually so it clearly is trained on something something to do with me yeah but I feel like I feel like this is almost like like like psychic cold reading level knowledge like it has the Wikipedia page like it's not actually trained on the archive I feel like an AI trained on a transcription of like an archive transcription of everything I've ever said on the WAN show could probably get a lot closer. Like modern LLMs, they are kind of spooky, awesome

sometimes. It's just a general purpose one like this that's just been kind of trained on the general internet has no shot whatsoever of sounding anything like what I would say. And it also seems like it has some built-in defenses around people using

character.a.I. Clearly. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Well, this person would say it's pretty flippin ridiculous but like don't feel bad about it though I'm here for you 24 7 baby like

you in summary in summary you I find it very interesting that they have they have it be kind of UGC based so they can step away from the like liability of

licensing people oh apparently whoa shut up Scrappy DP says you can apparently press play and it'll it'll sound like me Dan do we do we have sound

from Luke's laptop I'm not seeing anything I'm not saying anything I'm not got it let's see how well it does the read

compared to me relationships look I've seen fans name their custom watercooled PCs it was loading I can't hear no but I want to hear it

yeah and if someone finds comfort in chatting Why is everything so hard? The voice is theoretically you. I see that in the sidebar now. But this is next level. I get it though, loneliness is real.

Oh yeah, I want to just turn on your speakers? They heard it though. Wait, they heard the whole thing where we talking over it though? That's kind of obnoxious. Oh, we can't hear it. Who am I to judge? But come on, nothing beats the chaotic energy of a real human relationship, like when if

Bon finally unseats me in Mario Card after six years of relentless practice that victory screen priceless no AI can replicate that kind of beautiful human rage that said if your AI partner helps you level up emotionally and doesn't try to replace actual therapy.

Yikes. Okay get this out of here. Get this out of here. That's enough. That's like when any random white bearded guy is said to be you, me, Tynin, whoever, they're just like, oh this looks like a lmg person because they're white and they have a beard it's like okay cool all right yeah

good job do you want to talk about your exciting thing to do with labs the last one no the thing that you were going to do before i talked about the AI overview thing yeah the last labs thing sure uh so oh my goodness the flies uh in in in talking about things in labs changing and linus mentioned there's lots of new faces we need to do an update video and all that kind of stuff he happens to be here some of you guys have already guessed this one it's dan uh dan is joining yeah dan do you want to maybe um point the camera we will do it all like uh it's a robotic camera magic like if it loads and doesn't destroy the whole there we goes moving his chair might actually be easier why do we even bother with technology i don't actually know oh my god

it's a wrong way dad the suspense There he is. What's up? It's me. DMS is officially working with labs. Hi. He's doing things with the laboratories. So you've probably seen on a couple short circuits recently.

And also if you were paying attention to the article on how we're doing audio testing now, I swear these wiggly lines mean something, something along those lines. If you saw that article, the name DMS is on it. So a few people kind of put this together. Um, but yeah, our audio stuff is, is moving on forward. So stay tuned for more. This is part of not, not kind of announcing this pretty much right away was part of the whole. Are you going to let him talk at all? No. Do I have to press this button for you? Literally, literally never. Yeah, thank you. I can just sit here and look pretty. Uh, not, not announcing it right

away was part of the whole trying to talk less as labs thing and, and do more. But now we've done some. So want to say hi? Hi. No, I'm excited about it. Uh, we're trying to not just bring labs in the audio realm up to, like, some of the current standards, but to, don't promise anything, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm enthusiastic. PTSD. We don't need Rhapsody. We don't need Rhapsody.

Now I get to do audio science things with Linus's money. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's up. All right.

Get the money. before we've got us in trouble. Yeah. All right. Yeah, it should be a good collaboration. Okay, we have our CW announcements. We're supposed to explain merch messages. We don't have Twitch bits or super chats.

We have merch messages because we believe when you throw your money at your screen, you should get some fine quality merchandise in return. Like Jason, who said, happy birthday, too old. Really, man? Really, man? You know that I actually do read these things as they come up on the screen, right? Why you got to be like that Jason H, if that is your real name? Anywho, all you got to do to send a merch message is head over to LTTStore.com

where we'll have lots of great products for you to peruse. Look at that. It's the scribe driver mechanical pencil. It's like the scribe driver pen. made of old rejected screwdriver shaft that we repurposed because they weren't great for a screwdriver, but they were perfect for a pen or a pencil. We had 100,000 of these, and you two can own a piece of my financial burden. Ended up working great.

You know, we've actually almost sold through all of them. All the... The 100,000 fail shafts. That's pretty cool. Yeah. It's genuinely pretty cool? When life gives you the shaft, you bend over and turn it into a pencil or a pen. Make it worth something.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bend right over. Yeah. Get focused. Yeah. When life gives you the shaft.

You take orders. You take orders. You take. that shaft you take that shaft you insert something into it yeah is that sounding good yeah i bet it is that's gotta be up there in the top ten i think i broke the bell oh like crap um And we're back on top Anywho

Our series five pins are also available now You can check those out Are they Hold on, are they in the bonus pin? Let's find out I'm going to add this to cart I think it's stickers Is it stickers?

Oh yeah, no pins are, wait what? Oh, okay Well anyway, here's how you leave a merch message You add something to your cart and then you can leave a message. Wow, look at that. You can even pick the color of your merch message. Isn't that cool?

It's been around for a long time. I know. Okay. That doesn't make it not cool, Luke. I'm just making sure. It's still cool. I can see the bonus bin. Why can't you see the bonus bin?

You might be on the global. You could be on the U.S. I think some people are on the U.S. I'm on global. I'm on global. Wait, do we not have a bonus bin on the U.S.? Uh, maybe not. Are we supposed to?

Probably not. if it's not there. Oh, I wonder if it's because the USDA doesn't have bonus bin items in it. Yeah, like... DC Distribution Center. Yeah. Like, there's probably a reason. Fascinating.

Well, anyway. Because we opted to hide the bonus bin when items aren't in it now. Makes sense. Because it's disappointing when you're like, oh, bonus bin, you open it, and nothing there. We've got lots of great new items from the last few weeks. Our CPU fidget spinner is now available. You see someone posted on Reddit. they got over three minutes on it, which is pretty cool.

I saw someone benchmark it effectively against a mouse scroll wheel that they've freewheeled, one of the Logitech ones. That was kind of fun. Mine have those. They're great. G5.02. Now's a better time than ever to pick up a screwdriver. You can get it alongside our new screwdriver grip tape if you like using your screwdriver with gloves

or just generally like the feel of sandpaper against your palms. This was created in partnership with Dbrand, so this will be a great addition to your order. We also have the land collection, our UV reactive hoodie styled after the WAN hoodie 2.0, our UV reactive hat, and of course, our UV reactive belt bag with high quality patches and, of course, all the style. How cool is that? The answer is very. Anywho, once you send a merch message, it will go to producer Dan, who will read it and respond to it or curate it for me and Luke to. address. We don't actually have any new products to launch on the store this week, by the way. So, yeah, I highlighted all the stuff that they wanted me to highlight. Cool. Dan,

hit me with a merch message or two. Yeah, sure. We've got a bunch coming in. Hello, DLL. Thanks for the show. What is a subsector of the tech industry you thought would fail that has been quietly successful? Oh, I mean, you know what? I think that transitions us kind of perfectly into the shipping notification that Luke got before the show. Because... You thought this would... Well, hold on.

Let me, let me go there. Let me get there. Not that specifically. Okay? But I felt that high-end corded VR had a very rocky path ahead. And in fact,

I still think it has a rocky path ahead there was a there was a period there right where corded headsets where you're kind of tethered to your desk or to your you know computer by your tv were the only option and then you know adoption wasn't great and the industry kind of went okay let's try and figure out this wireless thing and then the first generation of those kind of sucked a giant donkey dong and then it looked like wired was going to be high end forever with you know outside in and then oh whoopsie doodles it turns out some pretty big companies we're working on inside out tracking and we're working on powerful processors like apples m silicon that were able to drive pretty incredible spatial experiences with non-tethered head well it's a tethered but it doesn't go to a computer whatever don't worry about it but non-tethered headsets and then i went oh crap and then there was the rumors that valve's decard headset is going to be using inside out tracking and could have onboard processing rather than using an external PC.

Attempts to handle the video transmission wirelessly have been, have had varying degrees of success. I think the HTC Vive and Vive Pro worked pretty well. Other than that, it's been a bit of a mixed bag. I did get my hands on that one for the index. I never got mine working. I reached out to them about, you know, helping me troubleshoot it.

and then literally my sister died like two days before I was supposed to have my meeting with them and I just like didn't get around to it and it wasn't a priority for a while and then I kind of didn't get around to it. But a lot of people have issues with it even though some people have managed to get it working and then we've had a bit of a stalling for a long time in the interface speeds of display port particularly and HDMI or I shouldn't say stalling but we were just kind of you're we were on a cycle for a while yeah but then both of them like just got potentially way faster but also DP UHBR 20 which is the 80 gigabit one I think has pretty short cable

requirements I don't even I don't think anyone's even tried to implement it into a headset but then meanwhile headset resolutions are going way up so being able to drive them without compression is like a challenge so there's all these headwinds oh did this I mentioned the cost? There's all these headwinds for these like face-mounted displays that use a tether and connect to your computer and yet this man

who never buys anything got a shipping notification right before the show from a company that is quietly fucking killing it right now. Big screen.

Yeah. So you want to talk about what possessed you, what possessed you to spend a thousand U.S. dollars on a VR headset that doesn't even include controllers or lighthouses. Oh, and I got the audio strap, which I'm pretty sure puts it beyond. I think it's even more than that. I got the

custom fit cushion. I went pretty hard. Okay. I didn't do everything I could have done, but yeah, I got the big screen beyond custom fit cushion and audio strap. I I'm very excited. I still have my

index index i don't know why that this is why i'm surprised because he has you in spite of his enthusiasm for vr i probably have two to three orders of magnitude more time in vr than he does now you almost never use your index i used it very well yeah i use it very often in the basement suite i use it like all the time in the basin suite and then i haven't really had the space But right now we're like renovating and changing stuff in the condo. There's some, that hasn't been amazing, but it's happening. I don't have much I can really say right now, but yeah, anyways. But we're doing that.

And what that will result in is one of the spaces will have a significant kind of area that could be, you could play VR stuff in. Nice. So I will have space to play VR stuff in again. Like, have you even tried Alex yet? No. To be clear, personally, I didn't enjoy it. I didn't finish it. We are both heathens when it comes to...

I know. Half-Life. I don't... I don't personally... Half-life is not even in my top three IPs for Valve. Sorry. But... Not in your top three.

no really no one two easily it's the third one I would say that my top one in terms of hours played right my top one's got to be team fortress too

yeah the team fortress IP that was the first one actually oh that's crazy what was I even thinking left for dead I got three left for dead I forgot that's tech and okay

left for dead so peak tier S plus plus plus tier so it's probably not incredible it's probably not in your top four then

uh and then we've got like team fortress I have so many hours I would play I would I would play portal 10 times

rather than sit through Half Life 2 once and then CounterStrike and yeah CounterStrike has got to be up there not because I like even especially love the IP even I don't know but boy do I ever have a lot more would I call them enjoyable gaming hours when I'm just getting like when I'm basically watching other people play for the most part hard to say but if I if you told me you can only play one

game for the rest of your life it would 100% be counterstrike not half life sorry I can't. It's fine, I guess. Yeah, so would you say it's fifth then? Yeah, I guess so, because I didn't get into Deadlock. That's for sure. Probably didn't get into Dota. You know what?

Probably didn't get into Artifact, whatever that's called. You know what? I'd have to put, so Dota's complicated because I actually played a crap ton of Dota when it was a Warcraft 3 mod. Yeah, but that's not Valve. I mean... It wasn't.

It was. Well, see, that's why I'm saying it's kind of complicated. So in terms of like, in terms of like the gameplay, yeah, I like Dota a lot more than I like Half-Life 2. That's for sure. And I haven't played Half-Life 1, but I have played Half-Life 2 and I have played the episodes, the couple that they managed to make. So it's not like I'm coming. I played all the way through all of them and they were fine, I guess. But even at the time, dude, like when it was the War of the Next Gen shooter, I remember everyone was talking. about next gen next gen it was all these generations you know uh it was it was half life two versus for i always forget what they called it was it doom three the one with the one with the one with the duct tape mod for the flashlight on your gun because you couldn't see anything yeah i felt far cry was so much better than both of them far cry one unpopular take i get it people everyone else kind of picked up far cry later far cry two was a piece of Garbage. Far Cry 3 is apparently when it got good. I've never played a far cry since

Far Cry 1 and 2. Man, the Far Cry 2. I made me very angry, but that's a conversation for another time. The point is, not a Half-Lay fan, and we've gotten off topic because... What was the topic? You spent $1,000 on a VR headset. You hardly ever use VR. I will... There's no way you're going to be in VR chat. No.

So what are you going to do? I mean, that's what most people are doing in VR. They're watching porn, and they are in VR chat. I'll definitely be getting back to playing Beat Saber. Is that the only thing you'll be beating? Oh, my God. I'm just asking, I'm just asking where your VR spaces. Is it in like, is it out in the open or is it in a closet?

It'll be out of the opening. It'll actually be the most open part of the house. I know. He never said no, Porto. What? You never said you wouldn't. No, I can unironically say I will not be using it for that. I actually believe you.

I can actually unironically say I never did. I actually believe you. I genuinely, I genuinely believe him. I will absolutely jump back into Beat Sabre. I don't remember who, I don't remember the scenario, but someone played Caramel Danson. Nice. Not that long ago.

And the brain juice just immediately was like, dun, dun, dun, yeah. Like, oh my God. Because when I played Beat Sabre, and I understand this is lame, I would just play that song, just all the time. Oh, dude, I get hooked on a song in Beat Saber all the time. Oh, dude, speaking of which,

I bet there's some really good maps for Golden. I'm going to have to check that out. Like, there's no way that that genre of music has not been absolutely jumped on by the Beat Sabre community. So I've been trying to use my little at-home treadmill thing more often. Yeah. This is in that vein. I just want to get up and moving more often.

So if I have a fun incentive to get me up, and moving more often than cool there's a bunch of uh like you know like arena games or or very shooter games and stuff you might not think shooter super necessarily active quite a few of them you can play from your chair but uh there's also quite a few where you can use like kneeling as a form of cover or benefit and if you're constantly doing lunges basically then cool so yeah yeah i just want to use it to get me up and moving how big is your space because there's it's not enormous. Okay, there's an older game that is a heck of a workout. What one? It's called Hollow Point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know the one? Yeah, played a bunch. Okay, cool. That's

quite a bit older. It's older, but it's like... Is that the archery one? Yeah, that's the archery one in the gym with the scary knights that start charging it. Yeah, we had that, we play that hero bunch, actually. That's in some of the, like, ancient VR reviews. It's Hollow Point. Hollow Point was sick, and very good for that. Lots of turns. Lots of terms. lots of ducking and moving and stuff. I think the space will probably be big enough to at least semi-effectively play that game. Not necessarily fully, but...

Nice. Close. Nice. And it basically, it'll go from needing to move multiple pieces of furniture, including a very large couch, to needing to move a table in four chairs. Are you going to...

Are you going to... Like, is Emma going to try it at all, or is she just not into it? Are you going to do... She wasn't that into it in the past. Are you going to do mean things, like put her in Arizona Sunshine? Because I got to tell you, the big screen beyond actually took anything resembling fun completely out of that game for me. It is too...

Too legit. It is too real and too scary. M. Doss said Super Hot is good, too. Yeah, I've very... I don't find Super Hot a workout, though. No, but I really liked it. It was very fun. Yeah, it's fun.

Super Hot's probably the most, like, raw fun I've had in a VR game, personally. Really? Yeah, I think so. I really like Super Hot, though. Like the desktop video game version, it's a huge fan. And then when I heard it came up for VR, I was like, that is the most logical, like, switch to VR I've seen a game ever do. Sure. And then had tons of fun with it.

It was very satisfying to play. All right, well, I hope you use it this time. Yeah. Yeah, it'll be... I used it last time. Yeah, I know. I just stopped when I got to the... Yeah.

room. That makes sense. Yeah. I have a bunch of hours on it. I'm sure you've passed me at this point, like, for sure, because it's been years. Yeah. But I had a bunch of hours in the past. Yeah, I think another, honestly, a big reason is it's the same curiosity that drove me to get a lot of the really early era ones of just like, it's a really cool device. It really is.

Like, it's actually kind of a marvel of engineering in a way. It's so light. It's incredible. I finally got mine back. So I got a review unit and it was really great, but I actually, I don't know if I was the first, but I helped them identify a hardware bug that I had in my review unit. And they confirmed with me that it had been resolved and that everything shipping to a customer would be resolved.

So I didn't bring it up in the review because it doesn't really matter at that point. That's the point of catching things, and I fully understand that my role as a reviewer is also sometimes to find stuff, and, hey, for the benefit of consumers, make sure that it never makes it into their hands. But there was an issue with the radios, and at the speed that I move in Beat Sabre, the tracking wasn't perfect. And so I finally got my fixed one back, actually, like earlier this week. In fact, I think it was because you saw the box in my car. That I mentioned. Yeah, that you mentioned your order one. Yeah.

So I just got mine back. I have not used it yet. So we'll be big screen beyond two buddies here. Yeah. Yeah, it has a tracking number, but it apparently hasn't actually been delivered to the place it has a tracking number yet. So I don't know the delivery date or anything. Nice. But I'm excited.

But yeah, it's an extremely interesting device. It's one of those things that like... Have you used one yet? The tech brain, no. Dude, the resolution? Have you, you tried the Vision Pro, right? I tried the Vision Pro. I tried the Big Screen Beyond One.

Okay, okay. At your house for like literally five minutes. The Big Screen Beyond One was really cool, but as we outlined in our review of it, the kind of glare off the pancake lenses was a, it was a big challenge. Yeah. Dude, they leveled up the optics so hard. I don't think, you know that thing where we're like, yeah, watch reviews from everybody. if somebody made a review of the big screen beyond two there's a above 90% chance that I watched it

nice I watched stars then yeah remember I was getting like frustrated with you because it was taking too long for you to release it that's because I was watching everybody's and I was like where the hell is ours I need to see all of them because I like didn't want to make okay there's the cheapness I didn't really want to make the purchasing decision until I had like heard from everybody basically um so I there was There was quite a few reviews of it that were honestly really good. And then I was happy once you finally released yours as well. Sorry.

And then, yeah, I went for it. And I'm excited. I'm very excited. Cool. Yeah. You're going to love it. I think so as well. I'm supposed to do the float plane announcements really quick now.

No, later. Okay. What am I supposed to do then? Why don't you just do the show? There's a sign. Read the sign. Look at the sign Read the sign

It's in... Don't talk to Dan No, that's... Oh, I put up the wrong sign Oh, I put up the wrong sign. Hold on. Don't make me pointing at the sign. All right, we'll pick a topic.

Actors who sold their likeness to TikTok for use in AI ads are... Who would have seen this coming? Having regrets after their likeness is used in AI ads. Back in June, TikTok announced a new set of tools used to make ads using AI avatars.

These ads are supposed to be labeled as AI. Well, actor Scott Jack Main from Dallas sold his likeness to TikTok. He was hoping that it would help build his career. He was paid $750 and given a trip to the Bay Area. Instead, an AI avatar with his likeness has been selling stuff on TikTok as Steve. Scott's story is not isolated. others have admitted to taking a similar deal most performers seem to have been surprised

to see their avatars elsewhere bite dance developers of TikTok can use their likeness in third party apps it turns out and people have been showing up on their video editing app cap cut they also have apps for basically everything so that's a not basically everything basically everything in my world

uh dan could we link the new york times article to the people in the various chats so that they can check it out if they want is uh sure i think it was pretty good and pretty um yeah pretty pretty creepy and dystopian i'm also gonna try and start putting them in the description too which is i think what we should probably rename the wandshow to now i dy dystopia yeah just creepy creepy dystopian discussion show because that's basically all we talk about now i'd love it if that wasn't true well yeah wouldn't you though that'd be awesome well too bad get fucked oh yeah that's what i thought this website goes nowhere uh yeah it's because this is to um you'll have to find the

article that is on the uh new york times website this was don't worry about it a different website don't link this one i did in flogling jad i just delete this message oh boy way to go dan um what is that anyway here's an example of someone who uh licensed their likeness to TikTok and um interesting yep has just a her generated by AI just I don't know doing random stuff on the internet so here's the conversation there's actually there's quite a few things to kind of unpack here for me so one of them from my point of view is why does TikTok even bother to do this because they could just AI generate a likeness of someone theoretically if they're doing this much generative AI can can someone

explain this to me? Anyone? I honestly have no idea. Feel free. Hit me in chat. People are literally doing that. Like there's people on Instagram, well, there's things on Instagram that aren't people. And they're not based on anyone. Well, some of them might be, but.

But like, why did they even spend, like, would it cost them $750 in credits? And scan them. Yeah. No legal battles. What legal battles? Yeah, what are you talking about? Like, if they just, if they just, if they just. generate someone that's not based on a real person,

then what legal battle? Yeah. Yeah, it looks like there's quite a few people also... An AI-generated likeness can't be copyrighted. Interesting. Okay, and KG4WN says, if I pay someone $700 to scan a real person, then nobody else can say it's based on them.

You know what? That's fair enough, because you could generate a person and the odds of somebody actually looking like that, given that the AI has to be trained on, you know, what people actually look like. I mean, it's not zero. It's actually rather high. Especially when you consider, to your point, earlier in the show, how many people consider generic pale dude with a beard to look like each other?

The amount of people that heard that voice and were like, whoa. It's not like you at all. No. I mean, I could kind of hear a ghost of what maybe someone could interpret me as sounding like but like it wasn't good that's for sure okay all right so okay we've gotten there we've gotten to why bite dance might scan someone and pay them a few hundred bucks for it now let's have a longer conversation what's your price oh my god um i don't think like let's hold on the before you answer before you answer let's start with one that you would definitely take a billion dollars okay

fair. Okay. So we've established now that like every man, Luke has his price. So now he can't dodge the question. I don't think you'd do it for a million. No. No. Um, okay. I think. I like playing games where I like playing games where I demonstrate to Luke that I live in his head. It's a little ridiculous sometimes. But it's kind of fun to rely on in other situations. but anyways you wouldn't do it for two no that's not enough nope

you do it for a hundred how you do it for a hundred no question I literally sat here and been like like 10 seconds ago I was like I'd do it for 100 yeah

you do it for 10 for sure you do it for 10 for 10 I want to say no now in reality If the check's in front of you The check's in front of me maybe I think you do it for 10 I think the threshold is somewhere in the eight range I think that if they were trying to get a bargain

They try to grind you down to like five to five to eight And I think you could I think you could hold firm at five for sure For sure no question I think as soon as we get into eight to 10 This is an interesting one because if I sell my likeness. It kind of fucks me a little.

Yeah, how does that impact work? I don't know. Because, well, no, try to draw a line. Let's keep pushing this. Okay, so if Bight Dance is bidding, let's say eight. Can I say eight? Do you think that's at least you, you, it's in front of you? Eight million dollars.

I'm talking USD. I'm talking real money. Oh, that's all, that's a lot more. Eight is a tough one. If it resulted in like, I can't work here anymore, basically. Well, hold on. Let's get there. Let's get there, though. So it's it. So let's assume, let's assume eight, because at least we're, sure. We're having a conversation. Sure. It's not like the one. I don't think you'd even

consider it for a second for one. No. Because like, no. It's not, it's not worth it. Like, look at what these guys are going through right now. Um, okay. So you come to me and you go, okay, well, bite dance is bid for, you know, my likeness is, is, is eight million dollars. how does this work, right? Yeah. Because I got to be honest with you, I'd have to work at Linus Media Group for a hot minute to make $8 million.

Yeah. And this is a right now check. Right now, I don't want to retire. I love doing Wancho and I love leading my teams and I love all the people I work with. And, you know, there's all these things that I really love about work. But AI Luke is going to be selling.

you know health supplements and like it could be butt stuff like I don't know right does that impact and and realistically they just own the likeness for any platform it could be graphic like I'm okay with the butt stuff you know and it could be graphic it's a very effective way to to take medications for instance or temperatures yeah and they scanned everything And I mean, I mean everything. Actually, that's an interesting, that's an interesting additional layer to the conversation is, do they scan you with clothes on or off? And how does that impact the praise?

I can pretty much guarantee you there will eventually be ones. Oh, 100%. 100%. So I think, dude, at that much money, at the amount of money, see, that's the thing, is I feel like our principles and our thresholds would not be that dissimilar. like I would fully recognize that for you I think I'd have to tell you to get the bag but what how does that impact work though

because if you're if you tell me I think I say look we'll figure it out take the bag fly free take the bag no no no no no I think I say take the bag and we'll figure it out and and and we meme on it yeah okay I think I would do it but I have to assume your contract stipulates that we can't like you know shit on bite dance for using it probably i think i think

if anything you know how i am i'm going to try and figure it how to monetize it sure so we add like a monthly segment to wands show i did blah blah blah how is it going reacting to reacting to luke yeah i mean yeah i no in this scenario i'm totally down in this scenario i'd probably do it for less than that oh i because that sounds funny that sounds hilarious oh no i think that could bring me down to the five you're gonna be a better negotiator in this situation than they would they'd have to like give you a finder speed or whatever i want a commission yeah yeah yeah i want half bike dance i want half of what you saved

yeah i mean it sounds fair Because now that just sounds really funny Yeah You're showing your hand Yeah it's not gonna happen dude Yeah dude bike dance is not offering A millions of dollars For the likeness of Luke

They'll just find some other bearded white guy Yeah and people be like Oh my god It's AI Luke 100% Oh man How bad would an AI Wancho be

I mean we could do it I feel like it'd be an interesting video They have those there's like notebook lm and all the other kind of stuff that can create podcasts based on information so we could we could feed it we could feed it every man show ever and then we could feed it the news and the notes for the week that would i i'd watch it just to see i watch it with morbid curiosity yeah every once in a while people like i'd skip around i wouldn't watch the whole thing but like yeah every once in a while people link me those like like a fake AI video thing of

me or a fake AI audio thing of me and I'll often check it out just out of yeah morbid curiosity but it's not like it's not a fun watch yeah it's an intriguing watch yeah that that that that AI cartoon TV show one like I I watched like three minutes of it yeah I was just like it's kind of gross but I basically need to know like do I need to inform my family uh because every once in a sudden we're like this is where we're at now so yeah be aware a couple people in float plane chat um oh shoot i find yeah cobbie i think we can all agree 750 bucks is way too low yeah i i agree that for literally anyone 750 dollars is too low for this very desperate people a hundred percent surprised they found some people that i just think they should be paying more i agree

i'm not saying those people should you know drive a hard bargain and potentially miss out on it if seven hundred and fifty dollars is a is a situation changing amount of money i'm not saying you should have more principles. This isn't coming from that place. If it's a roof over your head or not. I'm just saying that bite dance can afford to pay better and they should. Yeah. That's what I'll say. And then Raiden 428 says Linus, you turned down

$100 million. So what's your price? That's different. I turned down $100 million because I was concerned about more than just my likeness. In fact, I wasn't even really that concerned about my likeness because the new ownership wouldn't be able to

make me say anything that I didn't want to say like that was that was a hundred percent clear in the deal that I that I would never be forced to be a mouthpiece you know one of the things that I explicitly brought up early on in the conversation was like look you know we have our standards around the sponsors that we're willing to take I'm not going to hawk gambling products I'm not going to hawk alcohol products that's that's never going to happen and you guys are going to have to understand that that Linus media group comes with the principles that that underpin Linus Media Group as an organization. They were totally fine with that.

The concern for me was more around losing the ability to steer the organization and losing the ability to ensure that we would continue to work on the environment for the team. once I no longer have the final say on hiring and dismissals, it's possible for things to go extremely badly. And when I say final say, I don't mean that I exercise that on a day-to-day basis. I'm not micromanaging Terran and the rest of our leadership. People need to have the autonomy to make decisions.

What I mean is that if we are doing something wrong. He micromanages me. It's terrible. It's all a lie. We hardly talk. We like catch up on when show. They know this. Such a liar. The point

is that I would be, I would be, I would, I would be putting us. Okay. Sorry. I'd be putting us in a position where if we had taken the offer, months later, we would have gone through the August controversy,

our revenues went down, and we would have lost people over that. Yeah, that's not okay. Yeah, there would have been drops. 100%. Like, literally I know the financials. Quick fast. And literally, I have a pretty good idea of what a more dollars and cents, in and out, revenue flows-based management would have wanted to do.

I think there's also got to be some amount. Like, I know that was your, your core reason. We talked about it a bunch. But I think we haven't talked about this as much, but I think it's come up at least a couple times. So I'm sure it was some amount of the decision was the, what would you call it, like lineage aspect? Like your name's all over it. Yeah, but I mean, I think that's a heavy part of, you know, the AI likeness conversation too, right? Like it's the legacy, I guess.

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, the word, not lineage, legacy, yeah. Yeah. And I think the other big one is that I didn't feel that the money would change my life that much. I'm already extremely blessed. I'm already extremely grateful to our community that means that I live in a comfortable home. I drive a nice car. I enjoy a really nice lifestyle that I don't value fancy labels on my clothes. I don't value. I don't value fancy labels on my clothes. I don't value. It's a pretty fancy label on that shirt. Actually, this is a wonderful, this is a wonderful design from Sarah. But it doesn't, it doesn't cost $400. You know, you get yours today, LTTStore.com. Heck yeah.

Right? Like, I don't value a lot of the, I don't value, you know, collecting fine art. Like some of the things that people find ways to spend tens of millions of dollars, I don't value them. So. Fine art is often. Financial scams. Or like laundry, like moving funds around. Yeah, that I get.

Or storing it without paying taxes or storing it while gaining tax benefits because you like donate it to a museum or whatever. Oh, I see. There's like a lot of weird mechanisms with art. Sure. So maybe I just am not enlightened enough on the benefits of, you know, collecting art. You get your bro to do an art. But I just, bring it to your other bro. bro appraises it you donate it tax break there's a there's a lot of wacky stuff right obviously it's

not exactly that easy but like and that's not to say that i have cheap taste either i mean i commissioned a solid gold Xbox control which has been of wonderful gained value wonderful investment pun intended yeah um yeah i oh man so there's a a lot of reasons I didn't take it. I still think, realistically, for like, AI slot me, I'd have a price, but the one stipulation that I would, I think I could hold firm on, almost no matter the amount, is that I would want it time delineated. So I would want, I would want some period after which the license to my likeness goes away. And so I... The idea that I'm selling like alien soup in

48, 20 or something It's like, yeah, it's not. Yeah, can we not, please? It's ridiculously unlikely, but I'd just rather know that like it dies with me, you know? Binky Drauss says, your taste is ironically tacky, but it's slowly becoming unironically tacky.

I don't know. I think these, I think these WAN logo ear cushions are, I think they're kind of Pretty cool. I like them. Okay. You know what?

No. No, I'm going to get into it with you. I'm going to get into it with you. I want an example of my unironically tacky taste. Hit me. Hit me. We should have like a... The entire Porsche brand cannot be tacky.

Please. I am not going to make this. I'm just going to be very clear. But we should have like a call a user feature for creators on Flowplane. So you could just be like, nope, you're live now. we're calling you. I'm not making it. Can we do that?

Theoretically, is that a thing we could do? I mean, you could use the same type of things that like Discord users. Yeah, there's got to be like plugins or something. There would be ways to do it. We're not doing it. We have so many other things to do. But it would be feasible technically. The users would have to like allow the mic usage and stuff.

Like they would have obviously the control on their end. Think of the business opportunity. Do you have any idea how much more people would pay just for the tier that has the chance. that we could possibly consider calling them. Yeah, we don't even have, like, gifted subs yet, or TV apps and stuff. I think if we made... If we made...

If we made that... Even paid trials. If we made that... For certain other features, I think the floaters would... Crystal's got her wallet out already. I think it's a cool feature. It would be very hard to make, I think. I don't think it would.

I bet there's something we could basically plug in. I don't know what open-source things are out there in that realm. Maybe there is good stuff, but I've never looked into it. I bet our buddies, uh, shoot, what's the, what's the, what's the VoIP solution that we use for remote wandshow again? Oh, T3? Yeah, we've mostly moved over to something. No, but that's what he meant.

You're right, yeah, yeah, yeah, we didn't change, but that's what he meant. No, T3 chat, yeah. No, not T3 chat. Honestly, if we like... Ping.g. ...brought Theo in as like a thing, and he could, like, talk about it on his channel, making it or something, he'd probably just do it. And he's probably capable.

See, this is what I'm saying. I actually, in modern era, I actually don't think that that's that big of a technology. See, see, the gears are spinning. The gears are spinning. I think there's a way. I'm micromanaging him right now. I think there's a way. I just thought of a way that you could do it.

The T3 chat thing was actually an interesting one because I was thinking it had to be on the base platform. No, it shouldn't have to be. But if it could just open another tab. Yeah. it would be like way easier yeah because I was thinking like yeah anyways yeah just some kind of automatic authentication and then bippity boppity microphone pop up maybe even camera pop up you could theoretically you could theoretically that's very we should never do that no we should probably never do that unless we have like a significant uh we should have a tape delay yeah yeah yeah I think

we'd I think we'd have to finally have a tape delay Dan how hard would it be to do a tape delay for Wancho. Not entirely sure. We have a multi-quarter thing, which will do forms of, like, live replay. So, I mean, it's physically possible. Okay. Tim 0-00X3 in Fulfly, chat said, I am very naked. That's why the webcam only goes to here for me, too.

It's all just cropped. Dan just does the Wancho bottomless. I mean, it's Friday night, come on. I mean, they don't technically know right now that we're not all bottomless. Yeah, I took the feet cam away. Yeah, so they don't know. They have no idea. Could be anything.

Oh, man, that would be a whole other level of chaos for Wancho. This is not necessarily real conversation right now. We'd have to have a more in-depth, more. Let's lay out all the potential. problems conversation before we would consider anything like that. Dad just messaged me. That's actually wild. Apparently my mom just benched 110 pounds.

Yeah, she could almost bench Yvonne. That's crazy. That's awesome. My dad's just been doing this thing where they'll like rack weights on the bench and she'll just be like, it's whatever amount right? And he'll just be like, yep. And it's higher. and she just does it every time.

It's like not a suggestion. Don't do that. But yeah. That's crazy. Considering her weight too, like that's actually nuts. That's awesome. All right.

Heck yeah, mom. Good job. What are we supposed to be doing? Oh, yes, the flow plane announcement. This is a really exciting one. This is hardly even us, you know,

This is just, this is just freaking, okay, have you seen it? No, not at all. I've been waiting for it to launch off a flipway. It's so good. This was, this was peak, this series was peak, uh, Channel Super Fun. Channel Super Fun is off hiatus. Let's go! Let's go!

Temporarily, one video only. Is it a one episode? Yeah, okay. One video only. As Scrappyard Wars reaches its midpoint, we want to give the team an extra week to finish up the last couple of episodes, but we don't want to leave our floaters empty-handed, so we've got you guys early access to the new channel super fun video to celebrate us getting off hiatus.

Or, unless. Here it is. How hard is it to beat professional athletes nerdsports episode 10? I think they mean six. but sure. Yeah, wait, why 10? Episode X. Um, this is great.

Nerd Sports is back, baby. The keyboard warriors face off against professional badminton players, Jenny and Gregory Mayers in the most fair and balanced showdown in all of sports. Asterisk, asterisk. This competition is neither fair nor balanced. That's right, my friends. It's just like the old nerd sports. But no spoilers, no spoilers.

But I will play a little bit of it. for you guys, is the... Oh, do they have my audio? No, you're playing in the background as well. One second. One moment, please. Am I, though? Oh, yes, I am.

There's the tab. I found it. Look at that. Oh, really? Oh. They'll just... Okay, sure. Fine, they won't hear it.

They can hear it now. So, anyway, I do, like, a coaching session with my boys. and ladies they see how real athletes warm up they try their best to follow along it's pretty great they watch their warm up oh yeah sorry

here's my coaching session with the boys and ladies I get them to try to hit some shuttles it's next who's next it's great there we go here we go yeah And then we play.

And there's all kinds of fun things. I've got my wheel of pain here. I get to spin the wheel of pain whenever basically I feel like it. And I can give different rackets to the pros. They have to wear eye patches at some point. It's a laugh. And Greg and Jenny, these guys were such good sports about the whole thing. They're professional athletes.

And so they kind of can't help. it like they want to win you know but we really didn't make it easy on them that's the whole that's that's that's that's that's nerds for us man you got to find a way for the nerds to win or to have a chance at least we have to find a way for the nerds to have a chance got to be close um I don't want to I don't want to spoil too much but it's a great video it's a great watch you guys are going to enjoy the absolute heck out of it and I'm going to go ahead and set that public right now we also have a behind the scenes that um is what oh we have it yeah yeah yeah it's extras okay we have me playing the badminton pros apparently this is about nine minutes long i

apparently shot a little intro i was actually playing pretty decent that day but obviously They are literally professionals, so yeah, you know, that sort of thing. They can just kind of dunk on me like that. Do you see that deception there? That's not a bad backhand, but it's effortless. You see that? You see what he did? Oh, that was brutal.

Yikes. Watch its racket. Oh, that. Sucks. And I hit it out. Anyway, so we have me playing a set with them. Respect the dive. Thank you.

Thank you. I do my best. All right, I'm going to set that public. Now that is up on Flowplane. So the main video, mainline video, we'll be going up on channel Superfund, but the extras of me playing them is going to be behind the scenes. All right.

What are we supposed to be doing now, Dan? Oh. Spooncers. Spons. The show is brought to you today by Ground News. While Luke and I go over all things tech here on The WAN show, there's a whole world of other topics we don't always cover that, who knows, you might even find interesting.

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All right. What do you want to talk about? Luke, do you want to talk about some? Um, let's see here. What do we got? Intel grabs hold of $2 billion. Uh, definitely an amount that I would accept for my likeness. Uh, just in case anyone's shopping.

Uh, in an ocean of uncertainty. After many years of rough financial seas, Intel's stock is soaring with a rally of over 28%. Wow. After SoftBank, a Japanese investment conglomerate, has agreed to invest $2 billion into it. Nothing ever goes bad after SoftBank invests into anyone. They invested into Intel's future in a commitment to advanced technology and semiconductors in the United States. a lot of the press briefing circle around the increased manufacturing of chips for AI in the U.S. itself. Okay.

This new investment comes after the Trump administration announced it is in talks with Intel to turn money pledged under Biden into 10% ownership of Intel. Just after, just a few weeks after Intel CEO took a little ride aboard the White House's metaphorical emotional abuse roller coaster, which we talked about previously on WAN Show. only that, but Trump has been strong-arming other chipmakers with requirements to AMD-NVIDIA to, I'm pretty sure they proposed this, not Trump strong-arm them, but either way, to AMD and Nvidia to pay 15% commission on sales in China in exchange for export licenses. I'm pretty sure that was a pitch from them. I don't, I'm pretty sure AMD and Nvidia were like, look, let us do this, we will pay you 15%. Not the other way around. I could be wrong with that, but I'm just, I think, I think that's what happened. We have a discussion question. If the U.S.

government owns part of one of the chip makers what kind of malarkey should the others expect yeah this is um this is pretty interesting this is this is one of those things where if it wasn't coming from the party of small government and free market i would find it less confusing um but overall i don't necessarily think it's the dumbest move in the world i mean we've talked a fair bit about it's norway right that has the sovereign wealth fund yeah um That's worked out pretty good for them, mostly. If you're going to get a bailout of some kind. And how much better of a position would, you know, the American sovereign wealth fund be

if the bailouts that they'd done during the 2008 financial crisis had granted them equity in those companies? Like, you know what? If you're going to bail something else, I kind of don't disagree that you should probably get something for your trouble. If the taxpayers are going to pay for it, the taxpayers should probably get the dividends. But, I mean, that's where we sort of run into trouble with this, is what, pray-tell evidence are you going to provide that the taxpayers will receive said dividends? Yeah, it's going to go to like $7,000 trash cans for military planes and stuff. Womp-womp. Neat.

I thought you were going to pick good news. news. What go-doos? LZT has switched back to 16 by 9. After years of releasing our videos in a two-by-one aspect ratio across most of our channels, we are returning to the very sane 16 by 9 aspect ratio. David, Mr. David Goethe, why did you italicize very sane in this sentence? I know what are you trying to say, sir? we had chosen to buy one as a compromise between 16 by 9 and wider aspect ratios like you would find on ultra wide monitors or many phones then and now to reduce letterboxing on as many displays as possible now hold on just a gosh darn second but then we realized that was stupid and that users can zoom in on a video to fill their screen if they really can't Now, hold on just a gosh darn minute, Mr. Gautier.

We've never really worked with safe zones. Just a little bit of editorialization. We've never really worked with safe zones. And so I felt that it was a simpler approach to have smaller areas of potential ingress on the top and the bottom. So we didn't have to worry too much about where our Mowgarts and lower threth and various graphics showed up in order to avoid things being clipped. But the main reason that we're switching back now is that Colton and the business team

have been in talks with some, like, what would I, what would I call them? Are they called OTT? Like the, like, basically like TV channel feeds, like app-based, app-based feeds. feeds of content feeds. I can't remember. OTA? No, not OTA. Over the setup. Like, I think it's OTT. Is it OTT? Well, whatever. The point is

Over the top. They want 16 by 9. And so now we're going back through our entire catalog of content and going oh, whoops. Fast, that's it. Free ad support is streaming to us. That's it. Fast. Thank you. Mvrani. so yeah we're going back to 16 by 9 and we're probably just going to have to start using safe zones yes daniel bessor who uh apparently lost his um talking privileges or something so he wrote it like this on the dock instead of just saying it

well to be fair it was like a merch message earlier so i thought you would just pop in some discussion with that's fine you can write a message if you like i'm just saying you could also talk to us No. Just whatever you do, don't let DMS talk. Make him sit there. Stop it. Shit. Don't hit me. No, stop.

I'm just realizing Dan can really just voice act anything that's happening back there. Don't stay like that. I will not. You don't pay me enough for that. Oh, my God. We got a buys likeness. Okay, five bucks Final offer 750. Oh, okay, sir, five bucks.

I would do that. I would buy your likeness for five bucks. I don't know what I'd do with it. Well, it's only going to one of you, bidding more time. I can figure it, oh. See, I'm a business, man. I only pay you Tuesday for your likeness today. Pixel peeping, the new pixels. Google had their made-by-Google 25 event in which they announced several new devices.

The Pixel10, Pixel10 Pro, Pixel10 Pro, Excel, Pixel10 Pro Fold, PixelBuds 2A, And Pixel Watch 4. Wow. The phones feature their new TensorFlow G5 chip, which, according to Google, has 60% more power on the TPU, and is 34% faster on CPU compared to last year's TensorFlow G4 chip. The Pixel 10, except the full lineup, will be e-sim only for the U.S. models, while other regions will retain their physical sim trays. And the Pixel 10 Pro Fold is the first foldable with an IP68 rating, meaning it has pretty solid dust and water.

resistance would have come in handy for me once. Yep, I can remember that. Google also announced that their devices are getting pixel snap, which is basically using the new Chi 2 wireless charging standard that allows snapping of magnetic accessories to the back of the device. Okay. Google is

launching some of their own as well, like the pixel snap charger, pixel snap charger, pixel snap cases, and pixel snap ringstand. Why don't you care about Megsafe? No, I'm sorry, pixel snap, excuse me. That's why. It's like, oh, they're finally catching up. I mean, it's a big feature for iPhone people.

I personally don't have too many occasions where I need to magnetically attach my phone to stuff. Maybe I'm just thinking inside the box. When would I do that? Should I do it now? Should I stick it to something? Like I... My phone lives in my pocket.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what? No. I lied. I lied. My minivan. Yeah.

My minivan doesn't have Android Auto. Yeah, I use it from my car. If I had a magnetic dude out, it's probably... than clamping it in. Yeah, yeah, I'd probably do that. They also actively charge so it's easier to just like toss it

on a thing when it's going to magnetize to the right spot. Okay. I think it's cool. I still use a cable to charge. Yeah. Maybe because we're Google boomers. Google boomers.

Yeah. This is a thing? Are we making this a thing? Yeah. No, the reason I use my cable is because I have my phone in bed next to me because I listen to my Bluetooth toothier phones and because Plex is a giant

piece of shit. Phone doesn't need to be in bed with you. My, well, no, because my video stops all the time. Because Plex is a giant piece of shit. Have you, have you thought about jellyfinning? I have. I am going to wait

until Ashtack gets their HXOS integration with jellyfin and then I am just going to have it be easy. Yep. It's amazing. how many years Plex has just like not been able

to just indefinitely play video like there's no like there's no reason for it you know it's not like Netflix or it's like yeah at some point they're probably not watching so we should save bandwidth like it's my bandwidth on my Wi-Fi you shouldn't care like years and years and years ago

I would I would wake up in the morning and like my show would still be playing these days it'll last I don't know anywhere from one to five episodes and usually I fall asleep in that time so it doesn't really matter but like why can't you do it and if there's an error

I don't care don't tell me about it process it in the background with the buffer that you already have and start playing it again at the point of the buffer like why do I have to explain to you how to play a freaking video

what is happening a bunch of the Omega nerds in Full Point chat are saying mb yeah don't know about that jellyfin seems to be the one

that's getting the it seems to be the one that's like being pushed forward faster I know mb

was the play for a long time but I'm dude I'm super I'm super frustrated with Plex at this point I just like can't I can't anymore

forever so yeah maybe maybe what I'll do is I'll I'll do like Mb versus Jellyfin, I'll figure it out. I just, it's so tedious moving over like a big media library. Yeah, we got to keep upgrading the house, man. Yeah.

I just, I'm getting a headache just thinking about dealing with all of the, like, file naming crap. Is there like a migration tool? I mean, probably, but part of the problem is that I have never done all my, my file naming properly in the first place. Oh, look at you. So I have, like, thousands of Linux ISOs that don't have proper naming, and Plex mostly figures it out, so it doesn't really matter, except when it does, and it's really annoying.

So thinking about doing that for everything is just very overwhelming. I don't understand what Plex is doing. So you guys were there. We actually used, for me, for the first time, Plex is like new business, which is free ad-supported televisions. Very confusing. We watched Dr. Strange Love. It was, okay, I do have a Plex Pass, so maybe this impacts it, but it was completely free.

It had no ads. The quality was great. Like, it streamed, I forget how many megabit it was, but it was. It was nice. Oh, it was like 50. Yeah. It was too high. It was great.

It was amazing. And I'm kind of sitting here going, okay. So step one. completely fuck up the, you know, traditional piracy use case. Step two, question mark, build whatever the fuck this is with like free TV streaming. Step three profit.

Like what, are they making money? Does Plex make money? I've no idea. It's been fascinating lately to find out how many companies don't. And are just funded by constant round. of VC and investors It's actually like wild Very interesting to me

It's such a weird space Because we never took investment money Yeah But like it's a huge thing Weird Okay Well here's an article from January of last year

Streaming Media Company Plex raises $40 million as it nears Profitability uh the new round which has not yet been disclosed was initially said to be larger than plex's 50 million growth round closed a few years ago we now understand it's 40 million a rep for plex has confirmed the funds will help fuel the company's push toward profitability expected by year end or just after uh okay thank you for okay thank you for that plex's real world valuation is unknown as the company hasn't raised outside funds in some time preferring to work with its existing set of investors. Now, I might be, I might be misunderstanding investment.

So is investment a hole in the ground where you keep putting money? Is that investment? This is where I find things to be kind of confusing because it seems like like there's some companies that I have been

Shraft 2K says I love edging profits. that's pretty funny there are some companies that have been exposed to information recently where they like have like never made money have been around for a very long time

and who knows if they're ever going to and if they're going to it's not going to there's no like plan for them to like make a bunch you know it's weird

and there's obviously there's always the sell the company kind of grift thing you try to get big enough. It's like it's like the whole like don't make revenue idea because you try to get big enough and look scary enough but don't actually really actualize so that you can sell to someone big so they can like shut you down basically. They see you as a potential threat. But they don't know how much of a threat so they just want to buy you to get rid of it. Or you can sell to like a drug

addled billionaire or something. Sure. Yeah. Okay. There's always that. Yeah. See this, this, this right here. Like they're saying the quiet part out loud. We have the most supportive investors of any, Valerie said. I feel like funding has never been a concern of ours. I mean, maybe your customers would be less pissed off at you if you felt like funding was a concern and you needed them to like you. Yeah. Like, you know, like I feel, I feel like not being concerned about where your next meal is going to come from might breed a little bit of urgency when it comes to dealing with longstanding issues on the platform. Just saying, just, I don't know, maybe it was crazy. Probably crazy.

All right. Well, yeah, good luck with that. What else we got? Let's see. Oh, wait, we weren't done talking about the pixel. Yeah. The pixel event. All right, the Pixel Watch 4 gets a brighter screen.

3,000 nets, 16% smaller bezels and has a domed display that gives about 10% more visible screen space. Neat. Starts at 350 bucks and claims 30 hours of battery life. The Buds 2A cost $130 and include the Tensor A1. chip this time around. Also comes with ANC, active noise canceling, and a slightly better charging case. Finally, there's the pixel flex dual 67 watt charger. The device can charge up to two devices at a max of 60 watts each and will detect when a pixel device is plugged in and prioritize that device to charge it, quote, first and faster. Okay.

Neat, but also, oh my God, no. So two things here. Number one, we need to stop fucking with the USBC standard. It's barely a standard already, and the last thing, the absolute last thing on earth that I or anyone needs is more USBC devices that have proprietary handshakes and bullshit. stop entire industry right now it's time to stop i also think like no one asked for this number two have a priority port give me control over it maybe i want to charge my phone and my laptop

but i actually don't prefer to charge my phone right now faster i want to charge my laptop faster did you ever think of that am I missing something here you should just have a priority port it should be labeled and then I can pick yep oh my God discussion Linus you had debated switching to the Samsung Fold 7 soon do you think this pixel fold is a compelling option considering it is $200 US dollars cheaper than the Samsung or will you still be going with the

Samsung? I will I kind of miss my one UI. I kind of want to go Samsung first. And it's, that's going to huh man see I kind of feel like I've got my

order of operations wrong here because I still haven't quite finished my Graphene OS switch. I did figure out some of the challenges I was having. I'm in touch with someone from there, and I think I'm basically ready to, like, switch over to it. I just need to set aside, like, it takes so long for me to switch devices, dude. And, like, I don't want to blame you, but, like, you know, you're part of the problem. Why? Because if I want to, okay, for instance, if I set aside a time for myself to switch all my stuff over, like, say, for instance, it's at 11 p.m. I'm like, I don't know how to

migrate, like my pass keys. I literally don't even know how that stuff works anymore. Just my work accounts just, like, prompted me one day. And, like, I literally can't sign into stuff without this phone, some of them. I need to sit down with someone from IT and figure out what the crap is going on with all of my authentication factors, because I'm not going to lie to you. It's one of those things that's so much easier to just dismiss every time I do it versus, like, fix, I still have accounts

that prompt me for a UB key. Okay, you have to own some of this. I do. Okay. But I'm going to blame me for another thing. I'm okay with at least some amount of that, but holy crap dude. My God. Unique username says past keys are not

what we were promised. Oh my God. Right? So I get a notification on my phone. I unlock my phone. I have to click a thing. I get prompted for a fingerprint again. I wait. It's like seven to eight interaction.

I could have typed a password. Oh my God. Anyway, the other one is I can't get into my badminton club without requesting a new invitation to my identity system. And I know we're working with Unify. We're working with ubiquity on that. But, like, I literally can't even sign into all my stuff on my own.

I hate it so much. One of those is to save incredible amounts of money. I know. I know. So to bother you to sign in one time in an annoying way, whatever you switch your phone. Every time I switch a phone sucks. One annoying time every time you switch a phone. Which you could delegate to, like, Vance, so you don't even have to do it.

I'm just, I'm just pointing out that we are saving so. much money for one small extremely easily solvable not even doesn't even have to be by you step i just hate the way ubiquity handles that so the enterprise versus the regular identity app and something something fee per user smashchamps has lots and lots and lots and lots of users because all of its members have their key fobs and so we have to use the not enterprise one and literally the only way to sign into the not enterprise one is to get an invitation from your IT department you cannot initiate it yourself. Wait, unless you give me the ability

to initiate it to myself. Why? No shot. Why? Why do you think? Because you're afraid I'll be too efficient at administrating it and I'll make you look bad.

I am a little bit afraid of your level of efficiency when a notification comes in. And just solving the problem right away, you know? Okay. Sorry, I just saw a name in my notifications. Every time I see my grandfather's name in a notification, I need to check right away.

Uh-huh. He's still alive. Nice. All right. Whoa. What? What did you do to that? I didn't do anything.

Must have been ran over by the... Must be your acid freaking skin or something. What? No. Yeah, you'd, like, destroy everything you touch. That is true. That's just, like, ironically true. Is that your headphone cord?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, I'll replace that. I don't know if you can see that from here. Don't you worry. I don't think that's a Dan task. I think it's... I don't want to be that guy, but I really don't think replacing a cord is a Dan task.

It might just be a no-one task. Oh, I mean, like, I've got one... I've got one on the shelf, they can just, like, these ones are... replaceable. But I think that we should just throw out the headphones. Let's just throw out the headphones. It's fine. We're not going to throw out the headphones. But we need better headphones, don't we?

I'm gesturing vaguely at the man sitting next to me. Need is such a strong word. That could be a video, maybe. Like, we wear them for four hours a week. And you complain the entire time. I do not. That is... I complain the entire...

Okay, sure. I complain a lot on WAN show. Not about these. It's 208 hours a year. complain about headphones that's what your life is now be gone be banished fly fly you fool wait have we still not done the AI sharpening topic no holy bananas oh YouTuber ret shell posted a video last Thursday investigating what appeared to him to be AI enhancements being applied to YouTube shorts without the creator's knowledge or after fellow music YouTuber Rick Beto contacted Schull with example posts from his Instagram and YouTube accounts. And I got to say the difference is it's pretty interesting.

We're not going to play his whole video because that's not how we do our React content. That is a lens. That is a lens and a half that was chosen here. Don't worry about it. But look at this. You see that shift? You see as he's shifting between YouTube shorts and Instagram. how different the same piece of content looks.

And you can tell from the interface here. Yeah. Okay. So this sparked a whole lot of conversation. And Schull's video included some experiments of his own, seeing the same effect on his own videos that was impacting Beto's videos. He went on to find a Reddit thread discussing the same effect showing up on some of Hank Green's shorts. Then the plot thickens.

after we reported on the story on Monday's TechLinked YouTube responded with an explanation okay technically YouTube responded to a guy who retweeted a reposted clip originally tweeted out by some other guy who clipped it from Monday's TechLink video

but you know what we're counting it that counts YouTube liaison Renee Richie said that this is an experiment that does not involve generative AI or upscaling

what it is intended to do is unblur, de-noise, and improve clarity using traditional machine learning techniques. What? Where's the line? Ritchie also said

the experiment was only running on a limited number of shorts, but as far as we could tell, it's pretty widespread. Responses on Twitter were almost universally opposed to using any sort of AI, Because that is, generally how people have considered it.

Yes, okay. It was called AI until we got new stuff that we called AI, and this will happen again. We will stop calling predictive LLM's AI because they're not. Once another layer comes out, and then that's just going to keep going. Yes. And I remember committing to not call what we have AI and call it machine learning forever, but what I realized is that I couldn't continue doing that forever. Because it's confusing to people that don't understand.

Because people get confused who don't understand the distinction. Everything we have now is machine learning. All of it. None of it is AI. We could call it generative machine learning or whatever, but it is certainly not an intelligence of any sort and is that falls far short of what we think in science fiction terms of yeah what AI is supposed to mean yeah the like 80s idea of AI yes we don't have it not a thing we're not

close yeah others pointed out the trend of companies avoiding the term generative AI in favor of the less threatening sounding traditional machine learning yeah still others pointed out that when every video looks like it's been made with AI it's going to be a lot harder to identify the ones that actually are made with AI and it says dan has a clip see it for yourself side by side comparison of the same clips downloaded from YouTube and Insta. All right, hit it. I mean, the one on the left is way sharper. Yeah.

Yeah. Definitely left by a lot. I like too much. Makes me think our cameras are really blurry. Oh, this is an interesting one too. You can see it in the artifacts. Yeah, you could really see it when I spun in the chair. Whoa, big artifacts.

They made your video worse. This is one of those things where better is not always better. Well, it's, I think it's not better. Well, it's, it is more sharp. And sharpness is generally considered to be a, Brutal though. Sure, but I just mean like, uh, like, uh, like, you could create a lot of metrics

and you could use those metrics that you created to measure the one on the left as being better but better is not always better the right side looks much more natural yeah yeah I didn't feel that mine looked as bad as some of the examples I saw though

like I I didn't think those examples are particularly cherry picked and this was just a random one no I don't I don't think that either I just think that maybe whether it's our camera we use or whether it's that particular video like there were certainly areas where it looked really bad but for the most part I didn't I felt it looked like over processed but I didn't feel it looked like AI Scrappy DP in full playing chat said Peter McKinnon made a video recently on not sharp your content because YouTube is applying it so hard after the upload. That actually makes a ton of sense. Interesting idea. Our discussion question here is, is it okay to take a short creator's control away in terms of what their content looks like and what's to stop YouTube from going on and applying these enhancements to everything to long-form videos, TV shows, films delivered

by the platform? Where's the line? And I would say, the line is in the rearview mirror way back there. The second YouTube does any processing to your video. And they do it. And they do it on every single video that is served by the platform. They are impacting the look. And that's not a battle.

That was never a war. That's how it's going to go. In fact, Instagram is also applying processing. And what we're watching on the Instagram side is their interpretation, mostly probably optimized to save on bandwidth of what your original file was. Even your original file you upload is processed and is sort of approximated

compared to what your sensor saw. And even that is an approximation. However, I think that we can all agree that making things look more over-processed and AI generated is not good, and this seems to be over the line. Does that seem? Yeah, I like that.

Okay, neat. Good one. What do we go next? I don't know. You want to pick something? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. Cool. Seagate tries an exciting new kind of raid.

Earlier this year... He's doing good. All right. Earlier this year, Seagate security team, working alongside Malaysian authorities conducted a raid on a counterfeit hard drive operation. These are, man, I would love to see one of these.

Right! That would be so interesting. Right, how cool of that did? How was it even possible? That would be fascinating. I always find, remember the genuine Intel CPU thing? Like, what? Right?

I would love to see the place, sorry Intel, but I would love to see the place that makes non-genuine Intel CPUs. You mean AMD? Anyway, carry on. Fair enough. Got them. Those are some spicy.

How the turntables have turned. Old school war words. Yeah. Anyways, the raid uncovered nearly 700 C-Gate drives in various models with capacities up to 18 terabytes along with drives from other manufacturers. The drives are believed to have come from China where they were used to soar Chia, which is, I think, a storage currency. Yeah. And sold off.

after that cryptocurrency became, you know, unprofitable. Used drives had their smart values reset, oof, data wiped, and were cleaned, relabeled, and repackaged. So, okay, I see. Sometimes it's a more valuable model than they started out as, and were then sold at discounted rates on local e-commerce platform. This was a whole thing, and Seagate has probably invested significant resources chasing this bull-shed down instead of, like, working on things.

things that are valuable to their business. I actually really feel for them in this situation. This is, like, not on them. I mean, maybe they could do more to prevent their smart values from being overwritten, but, like, I don't know, should they have seen this coming? I don't know. Maybe this has happened before that I'm not aware of, and they, like, should have seen this coming and should have done better, but I don't know, you, you build a bigger lock

and someone's going to build a bigger bolt cutter, right? Like I also don't quite They got They got really kind of Ficked on over this And that sucks It's just a bigger delay Ideally

There's nothing better than that To try to reduce the impact of these scams Seagate partners are now being required To purchase and resell drives exclusively from authorized distributors And this is why we can't have nice things Because I would love

For you to be able to you know, buy and sell and move older parts around as needed. But now all of a sudden we need this like central administration of everything and tracking of everything and it legitimately adds cost.

It's not that they're just going to like, you know, gouge or whatever because there's no competition, but it legitimately adds overhead and cost and that just blows for everyone. Kind of wrecks. the use market. People are asking if server part deals is an authorized reseller.

I don't know. Someone want to look that up? You figured out? Yeah, Tim also points out it doesn't matter if they make their smart values harder to overwrite because they can also

just overwrite the smart values of cheap crap drives and call them Seagate. I knew server part deals was legit. I didn't know if they were an authorized reseller.

There aren't that many cheap crap hard drives out there. There's only a handful of hard drive manufacturers even left, so I'm not 100% sure on that one.

But anyway. Apparently, are an authorized retailer. Nice. Very cool. I'm not surprised. They're very legit. Yeah, but yeah.

So, Seaget has implemented a global trade screening process to try to identify suspicious suppliers. And Seagget reminds customers, or, sir, consumers to exercise caution when buying drives from non-major retailers or third-party sellers. Toward the blue in Floatplane chat also says your viewers should know that Seagate released a tool where you can check values that are not able to be rewritten. So that's pretty cool. At least they're...

That is very cool. At least they're doing things about this, even though none of this should have happened. People should just not be buttheads. Hilbert Gilbertson said that it's in C-Tools, which makes sense. Very cool. The ROG Xbox Ally has gotten a release date alongside a new game verification program. Before we go into that really quick, I just want to say,

it's kind of cool that that was negative news but had an interesting and cool story. Yeah. I thought you'd do that. like that one. I like that. Yeah. That is very cool. I'd love to see one of these places. That would be so wicked. Anyone from Seagate watching? Like, I'll get on a plane. Let's go. Let's go check it out because like I feel, it's like, it feels like it'd be if like, it's like the kind of thing where if like Rick Sanchez and like Milhouse Van Houghton like made a meth lab, you know? Like it's like tech meth lab. Like I'm, that's what I'm kind of imagining, you know? I mean, it would be, it would honestly

And like Dexter, Dexter's in there somewhere and like, like Jason Fox, you know, like just. I think it would be really good exposure for the communication they're trying to get across of like making sure you're getting legitimate drives, making sure that you can check your drives using C-Tools if you were going to buy off of the use market or something, you could check the drive before you actually do the exchange and promoting their whole authorized reseller thing. I think it makes a ton of sense. and it would be wicked for content, I think C-Gate should do it with you.

I think that would be fantastic. Yeah, if anyone knows anyone who's at C-Gate, like... Hit them up. That would be wicked content. That would be freaking awesome. Very cool. All right, Microsoft announced at Gamescom that the new R-OG Xbox Ally Handheld

will be arriving on store shelves on October 16th. And with it, the new handheld compatibility program, an initiative similar to the Steam Deck's compatibility program designed to make more games ready to play on your supported Xbox handheld. Like Valve's initiative, there will be three tiers of rankings, incompatible, mostly compatible, and handheld optimized. Xbox also announced the gaming co-pilot beta via GameBar, a personalized AI gaming companion that helps you get to your favorite games faster, improve your skills, and it offers context-to-wear support based on what you're playing. Okay.

After being spotted via benchmark leak, Steam machines are back on the menu, boys! Let's go. After months of rumors, the existence of Valve's Fremont PC box slash console has been leaked through benchmarks on GeekBench as well as some of the specs listed down below. The processor, codenamed Hawk Point 2,

is likely a refresh of Phoenix 2, the younger and smaller cousin of the Z1 Extreme. Valve's first attempt to add a console like Steam Machine Experience, released nearly a decade ago to whatever the opposite of fanfare is. But I feel very strongly... I think we're in a different

realm. This is a different time. This is a different Valve, a more focused valve and it's a different Linux in no small part thanks to the efforts that Valve has made to push forward gaming on Linux. Very dramatically different Linux.

Here we have specs. Before you actually do that. Okay. I'm going to use this as a shameless plug for the, is 2025 the Year of the Linux desktop part one and two articles on the lab site. Heck yeah. So, yeah, very different Linux. Sorry, keep going. Heck yeah. All right. Back here. So, okay, we get six cores. Oh, nice little level sweet cache. And that's about all we know. Oh, there you go. There's a geekbench score.

Good job, everyone. I'm stoked. I have had a little machine sitting in my family room, just like ready for SteamOS. It actually, what does it have running on it now? It has an Nvidia GPU and it uses an MXM module, so it's like non-trivial to put an AMD GPU in it, whatever.

It doesn't matter. Just relax. But I haven't been doing much with it. I think it still has Windows on it because even the, like, the Steam OS alikes prefer AMD GPUs from my understanding. So it's been sitting there kind of waiting for SteamOS to be vendor agnostic

and just like ready for any PC. Starting to, you know, hopes fading a little bit. But I think I could be convinced to just huck it out of there and throw a Steambox in there. I'm jazzed. I just, I love that. the SteamOS experience, especially for a not my only computer spot, like in my family room where it's just like, yeah, I want to play. Okay, C of Stars had a free DLC. Yeah, I want to play

the C of Stars DLC. That is like the perfect device and the perfect place to do that. Steam OS is just zero BS. It boots straight into my stuff. Although Microsoft is coming. They're coming with the competition. Kind of. I mean, have you seen it? No. I've been having. hands on. Fair enough. It's, um, the efficiency gains that they are saying they've achieved are,

it's not SteamOS level efficient, at least not now, but they're, they're making gains. Like they literally don't even render the desktop in the background when they're running in gaming mode on this new handheld. So, look,

I don't have a ton of confidence either, but the Xbox team got embedded with Windows. Like, went in and you can't deny that, on Xbox. The Xbox is an efficient machine. He has no hope. Look at him.

Look at the hopelessness in his eyes. I, at this point, hmm. Oh, I think to say. What the hopelessness in your eyes? No, I'm, I almost don't want them to do well. Oh, Microsoft. Yeah. I mean.

The ship has been sailed for so long that it, you can't see it on the horizon anymore. I want Linux to do well. That's fair. That's totally fair. It's valid. It's fair and valid. Kill the Windows gaming and pissed on its grave. And then now, like, want it back?

Yeah. Like, no, dude. We're all trying to move on. Sorry. But like... No, they're the abusive ex-spouse. It's done. They want you back, though.

Get out of here. You better not walk away. I did on my laptop. I've been gone for a long time. And it's been fine because they wasted all of the opportunities. Like, I just, I don't know. Dude, I picked up my laptop. So this is one of the Qualcomm machines.

Liquid metal spilled in my flow of X-13. We'll probably be a video. I'll try and fix it. Anyway, the point is I switched back to my Snapdragon machine. And I grabbed it out of my bag when I was on set earlier, working on the buying Chromebooks for our kids video that I did with David today. and it was hot it was closed and it was on yep how is that still not fixed yep that's insane and like the the fact that there's ads in my freaking operating system is crazy i mean there's ads

in your mobile operating system yeah that's true and that's nuts and that makes me want to move we talked about the only thing keeping me on official android right now is the the call screening i think you might like crafty no us yeah oh i am rather certain i would. I want to switch over. It is only call screened. Somebody flagged a call screening option for me that I'll try during my switch. If you try it and it works, I will switch.

100% I'm gone. I'm just, I'm so tired of this. I want to own my own stuff. And like, I'm not even trying to like, I'm not even trying to be like traditional Linux nerd about it. I just get out of my things. Yeah.

Get out of my way. Yes. Just stop pushing. I. I bought Windows. F-off. Like, I just... Yeah. What are you doing? I am so over it.

Get the ads out. Stop screwing with search. Like, just go away. Let me use my computer. Windows itself stopped being, like, cool. Seven. Quite a while ago. Yeah.

And then they stopped... It felt like they really stopped making things for me. Yeah. And they started just making things, like, annoying and inserting ads and doing all this garbage. So, like, okay, you lost me after Windows 7. Windows 7 was amazing. When's the last time Microsoft, like, oh, no, they've done cool stuff with DirectX. Okay, never mind.

I feel like there used to be a lot more fanfare around, like, DirectX and gaming on Windows. And, I mean, this whole, I mean, the new stripped down, you know, Windows expit gaming. It just, it feels like it's too late to me. That's fair. If they were working on this, remember, remember Game Mode when it was just like, I don't even remember what was so bad about it, but I remember testing in the bench standards being like, what is this?

Yeah. Gamester Windows Live was like the worst thing ever. Yeah, it was pretty bad. Like Microsoft gaming, networking, I'm gonna say now, this is not a now, but when like Forza Horizon 5 came out, it was super annoying. It's super annoying to just like play Halo randomly now.

Like it's just, ugh. Fewer obstacles. Stop being incredibly. It's, you know the world is just like, whoop, when running Linux has been actually less annoying. Oof. But actually, though. The sickest of burns. Like, it has been easier and less in my way.

I have had to do things to it to make it okay less than Windows. Ouch. Like, at this point, just, I, yeah. You know what device is likely to work really well and never get in your way? Or have anything like, you know, unbecoming about it? What? The Trump phone. Oh.

Good transition. Check this out. See this? Yep. So this render of the Trump phone is just an image that they ripped off of this accessory manufacturers. website is that wild or what yeah um this is their upcoming t1 and it appears to be a samson galaxy s 25 ultra in spygens and i'm so sorry if i'm saying this wrong s 25 ultra thin fit case you can even see their logo under the photoshopped on american flag what a what a lazy job you need to rip people off

better. Our notes unfortunately say Speggen. Looks photoshopped. You can tell by the way it is. We all know that it's, it looks photoshopped, you can tell by the pixels. The crazy part is it would have been so

easy to do this not terribly. That's the weirdest part for me. I know. It would have taken seconds more. I know. Like, I do kind of wonder when stuff like this happens and you know this might be hypocritical because earlier in the show I talked about how like you know we're humans we make mistakes sometimes but like when a mistake

like that happens I wonder like is this someone inside just being like you know I need a job so I'm going to do my job but also I'm going to leave some like Easter eggs in there that people will find so that people know this is stupid I I kind of wonder sometimes because that's a wild mistake. I ripped off this case and just left the logo on it? I don't know. The site still has the old version of the quote unquote, the T1 phone that will never exist and isn't real. Yeah.

How is this not such a huge tell for people? That's a longer conversation. Anyways. Moving on. NVIDIA throws a couple of bones to gamers. Gforce Now, NVIDIA's cloud gaming service, can now run on RTX-50-equipped servers. DLSS4 enables up to 120 FPS at 5K on PC and Mac

and at up to 90 FPS on the Steam Deck, GForce Now app. Install to play lets you also install games on your cloud PC if the dev has enabled to Steam cloud streaming. There is a bit of a catch. you have to install your game every time and there is a finite amount of storage on your instance. You do have to pay extra to get more storage from my understanding. So it's a little inconvenient to install your own games, but hey, at least it's there bringing them a little bit closer to a more shadow-like experience. The Nvidia app can now automatically enable your

preferred DLSS across all games and adds control for a few more settings like Nvidia Surround, bringing it ever so slightly closer to being a viable replacement. for the NVIDIA control panel. Nvidia has also teamed up with Discord, bringing instant play experiences with GForce Now inside Discord, no install required. Just click a link from a friend and instantly load into a game to try it out.

That's right. You can play any game you want as long as that game is Fortnite. And you can only play for a 30-minute free trial. That is still nuts. That sounds like future. I haven't heard future in a while. That's pretty cool.

That's pretty cool. I mean, am I, are we overestimating this? Is it literally just a link that opens a browser and you play the game in the thing? It's still a cool thing. Yeah, it's still cool. Game streaming is one of those things that I think is super cool. I remember taking so much flack for that video I did like years and years ago comparing latency of local streaming, over the internet streaming, and then like rendering locally and saying anything other than that this is horrible and we should all hate it and really. resist it. And people were like super mad at me about it. It's like, here we are. It's pretty

freaking cool. And the latency, once you're running at 120 FPS, it's not bad. Kind of approaching magic at that point. I mean, we know what goes on, but it's like, I definitely would rather render locally, but like, if I didn't want to spend, I mean, I was at Best Buy today for that Chromebook video, and it was $1,700 Canadian dollars for a 5080. I could buy a lot of Friking G-Force now for 1,700 Canadian dollars It's compelling

And that's it for topics It's time for After Dark Came out of nowhere What did you find? After Dark? Is that exciting? Yeah Oh

I like the AfterDark part of the show Always have Yeah, you do. We get to hear from our loved my subscribers. Like Jordan, thank you for the sexy merch, pookies. Thanks, Jordan. Oh, gee. My God.

I know. You don't get to hide. You don't get to hide your camera if you're going to do that. I've got a message here from Fred. Oh, no. Happy birthday late. You're oldie. You're right.

What, ow? What? on? Get wrecked. What the heck, Fred N? Get wrecked. Anonymous says, nice shafts. This is what you curated today?

Forget it. You're going away again. Somebody curated these are not mine. Luke? No, I didn't do it. Okay, maybe they were accidents. One of them was on purpose. The nice shafts, absolutely would have been an accident.

Yeah. I would have responded in kind to our lovely store participants. I feel like we need. to have like track on who did it i i i that would actually be kind of sick i wonder if there was a sneaky a sneaky developer in the uh in the dashboard that thought it would be funny uh yeah i mean if i notice something like that i'll pull them i'll pull them out i'll pull back the shafts if that happens uh okay let's do i think it's funny let me do my real job now linus luke and dan what do you see as some of the big challenges lddd and float plane in the next two years

What are some things you're excited about? Ooh. TV apps. Okay. Challenges for LTT, I think we face the same sort of macro challenges that the entire rest of the tech media industry does. I think that a slowing pace of consumer hardware development is very challenging. And that's not to say that, you know, the scientists and engineers that work at these companies are not doing really incredible work and, you know, creating innovative new technologies. I think it's just to say that in a lot of categories, we've sort of reached a plateau where most people mostly don't care or can't tell the difference.

like TV is I think a great example of this I was shopping for TVs recently if you've been watching the latest Scrapyard War series you'll know that I was at like an open box TV retailer and as much as I love a nice TV and I have really nice TVs in my home

I was comparing like a very basic you know, 70, like you can get a gigantic 75-inch TV. I found a deal, and this is not a major spoiler because it's just a thing that I saw in the store. I found a 75-inch TV for $550 Canadian dollars, and it came with a free soundbar. So for context, for my American friends out there,

that's about 380 U.S. or like 370 U.S. or something like that and comes with a free sound bar that was like a hundred plus dollar value Canadian or something like that so we're talking like a few hundred dollars for a 75 inch TV

and so I'm looking at that and I'm just kind of going well my goodness how much better does something have to look for me to spend $3,000 on it now

a freak lot. So we've reached the end, and it looks not bad. Like, it didn't have great HDR, but a lot of people either don't understand or can't see the difference, which

is, like, valid. It's like when a car person comes up to you and they're like, man, what do you think of these new rims? And you're just like, I don't know, they're made a metal, I guess, right? But is that good? Right, like, for, for... They're PBS? For a lot of people, right? For a lot of people.

It's HDR. it has more color gamut. It means it means nothing to them. They don't care. They're just, they're watching Fox News or CNBC. They don't, it doesn't matter, right? And so we've reached this point where, where these new developments, like I saw, I saw a news article on LG apparently has a prototype OLED TV that uses tandem OLED.

So that's the same tech that Apple's using on their latest iPads and uses two stacked OLED layers to achieve much, much greater brightness while maintaining inky blacks. Like that blows my mind. Apparently, it can achieve 4,000 nits on this. I think it was an 83-inch display, and I'm sitting here going like, man, that's so cool. But it's cool past a point that I think most people will necessarily really care about, which is a big challenge coming back to your question for tech media. because I think the pool, as the mainstream good enough,

cheapo commodity tech reaches a point of being good enough for more and more and more and more and more people, I think the share of enthusiasts who care about every pixel and who care about every megahertz is going to be reduced. The refresh cycles on these things are also getting more and more difficult to keep up with annually. I mean, Nvidia used to be yearly. Apple has been yearly on a lot of their products.

They're still yearly on the iPhone, but I don't know if that'll last forever. They're certainly not yearly on a lot of the Mac products that they just outright don't bother to refresh once they have a new generation of silicon. And so there's kind of less to talk about. I think that the economic conditions right now globally are challenging, affecting people's discretionary spending.

and I don't foresee, and I'm not an economist, but I don't foresee with taxation, both in the form of regular taxation but also import taxation going up. I don't foresee that changing any time soon. Generative AI, for all of its uselessness and hallucination, has disrupted the job market already. It is disrupting people's livelihoods right now. Man, we've been saying from the start, like the companies that are really going to kill it, in my opinion, and I still think this is true, are companies that find ways to use AI to accelerate the people that they have and use that to grow and bring in more, not companies that use it to just shrink their workforce, but stock price go up, win, fire, person, so people are just doing it anyways. And I, anyways, it's, it's frustrating because there are a fact. ways for many people, I'm not going to say everyone, but for many people to use it to genuinely help them in good ways. There's also a ton of ways to use it improperly. But a lot of people are scared to let it affect their productivity in a positive way because they don't

want to contribute towards losing their own jobs. And that's just bad employers, in my opinion. And it's frustrating that there's like any of them at all, really. But anyway, sorry, just minor aside. And generative AI is going to threaten our business from other vectors as well. I mean, you know, we talked earlier about how the AnonTech article archive went offline. And one of our speculated reasons for it is that future PLC, who owns Anontac and Tom's hardware, launched a new feature allowing you to compare products across brands across generations. And it's paywalled.

So our theory is that maybe they wanted to, instead of making all of that archival data and information available for free, move it behind the paywall where it can be sustainable for the future, PLC, and also to keep it away from the prying eyes of AI web crawlers that are going to scrape all this data and then just shard it out into a search result or into a chat bot that doesn't compensate the real, actual people who really actually picked up GPUs and put them into benches and tested things allowing them to keep

their jobs. So that's a threat towards us as well. Like if LTT Labs can be scraped and can just, you know, you can search up anything about a Coursera power supply and it'll just use our video as a source but not compensate us in any way. That's going to be a real challenge

for us, right? We're still very committed to doing it, but you know, I would be lying if I didn't say that, you know, building out something like the lab has impacted our profitability. It absolutely has. I mean, doing anything by hand with humans, building our content, the way that we continue to do it, has impacted our profitability over the years. So those things are not slowing down.

Those things are going to continue to be challenges. It's not all doom and gloom. I think our team is more locked in than it's been. in probably a couple of years, actually. And I don't think I'm the only one who's seeing that. I've had some good conversations with people. We have some new hires starting in the next little bit that I'm very excited about on the writing side.

I'm really excited about the direction the lab is going under Luke's leadership. Thank you. Yeah, I think we're firing on more cylinders. I am hopeful that while we might not be back to a cadence of six uploads a week, I'm hopeful we can get to a more regular upload schedule again relatively soon. I think that's something that would be good for our viewers and also good for our company's ongoing viability.

Yeah, the future's looking up, but that doesn't mean that we can ignore the headwinds that are coming our way and coming everyone's way, realistically. Hey, LD, just got my ally battery upgraded after your video for the Giacs upgrade kit. J-So, I think. J-So upgrade kit and loving it. Linus, would you consider any further modifications to your ally in the future? Maybe RAM, thanks. I don't think I need more RAM. I've never run into a game on my ally.

I mean, I mostly just play tape-to-ta-to-tape. Do you know I have over 300 hours in tape-to-tape now? it's amazing how quickly they add up when like my wind down before bed is to lie in bed and play a run I think there's a decent amount of idle time too Oh there's a ton of idle time You ever load it up yeah

Take to tape actually logs You're on ice time So I think I'm at like 170 hours or something Yeah that makes a bit more sense But that's still a lot So that's the game I primarily play on my ally I don't need more RAM for it But definitely enjoying the battery life up

It's just like we saw when Asus went from the ally one to the ally two, for some reason, the battery life benefit is more than just the like watt hours increase. I don't, I don't, I, someone's going to have to math that for me because I don't, I don't quite get it, but I'm into it. So I've been enjoying the absolute heck out of it. I would love to have a bigger SSD in it. I'd love to just have, you know, entire libraries of Linux ISO, older, older, more pixel. Linux ISOs that are just kind of on tap but beyond that no I love it

it's been very very good to me and I am excited for the Xbox one but I don't know I might be more excited for potentially a Steam Deck 2 I need it to be I needed to be competitive on GPU power though like the Steam Deck was kind of it fell behind

really fast and you know me I like cutting edge performance and on handheld every 10% is noticeable. When you're at 32 FPS, the jump to 35, it's like, I want that. Here's another spicy one

to add in on the whole Windows Linux thing. Yeah. This is why I haven't, this is a major reason why I haven't bought a gaming handheld is because I kind of didn't really get in on Steam Deck early enough. It feels like I'm kind of in Steam Deck

two waiting room. Yeah, okay. And I'm looking at the... And they're taking a minute to get around to that for you. I'm all good. Yeah. But I'm looking at the alternatives. And the big push right now is Windows-based alternatives.

And I'm like, I want to support the Linux push. I just... If I'm going to be voting with my wallet, right? Like, I'm tired of the garbage that has been shoveled into my face from Windows for so long. I'm pissed that there's no alternative. I'm pissed that there isn't like a Windows premium where I don't get trashed on with ads and other stuff like that. I'm pissed that I can't get away from certain telemetry things

without registry jumping and whatnot. And then having to redo that because Windows Update just decides to like change things or whatever. So I'm trying to get out. So I'm not going to financially back a thing that I'm trying to get out of. So I'll wait for Steam Deck 2. That's fair. is what it is.

All right, hit me, Dan. Hi, LDL. Instead of glazed AI interactions causing users to expect other people to act like their chatbots do, doesn't it also seem likely that these users will also start to act like their chatbots?

No, I don't think so. I think being glazed is not necessarily going to make you become a glazer. No, I honestly think it'll largely do the opposite effect. Especially when you don't glaze back and it keeps glazing you. Yeah, like let's think about sort of like a parallel. Like I often talk about how I think that like influencers and famous people are sort of uniquely vulnerable to giving into narcissistic tendencies because I think that anyone would would struggle to stay grounded when they're surrounded by hundreds. thousands or millions of people that are telling them how incredible they are all day every day.

Well, riddle me this. These professional being glazeders are they generally known for being like the super most amenable people in the world? Like as a group. I'm not saying there aren't nice celebrities. It's the opposite. You used to getting catered to. Yeah. And I'm sure you, you know, you let it slip here or there.

and you don't communicate with the eye nicely and you notice that it keeps glazing you so there's no incentive, there's no reward loop to keep you being a non-jerk Yeah This interface is broken in a way that I'm not really sure how to deal with So I click this

It asks me really And then I can't interact with it Weird I haven't had any of those problems Let me go look. Cool. Do you want another one while we wait? Yeah, hit me.

Hey, wan.dl, with everything being so software and driver-focused, do you think there will become micro-transactions or DLC for graphics cards? Oh, man, we didn't talk about it because I just had had enough bad news last week, but you saw that, um, who was it? Volkswagen is adding, uh, like a pay for, a subscription for more performance to car or whatever it was. You don't click on the really, you just click on the button again.

Oh. Not the most intuitive. Neat. Okay. VW performance subscription. I think it was... Yeah, that's brand new, right? I think that was...

Yeah, VW introduces monthly subscription to increase car power eight days ago. I just... I had enough talking about bad news last week, so I just didn't feel like it. Yeah. But here it is. The optional power upgrade will cost

1650 a month or 165 pounds annually with that said this also made me far less upset it is not outlandish hold on hold on i'm going to defend this it is not outlandish to charge more for a higher performance model and in this case i know the exact same hardware is in there but you could make the argument that there might be a higher likelihood of long-term damage to the vehicle if it is somehow being pushed harder and there could be some cost there. I don't know that they've actually done the math, you know, correctly. I'm sure there's margin in it. But as long as there's a lifetime subscription, I will be far less upset about a month, or as long as there's a lifetime purchase option, I'll be far less upset about a subscription being offered.

Steak Boy in Philippine chat brought up an amazing comparable. Yes. What if this was a driver for a graphics card? As long as there is a lifetime subscription. So now you have to buy your graphics card and pay for a subscription to the drivers. To get it to be slightly faster. To be clear, you can still drive it with all. I'm not saying I'm okay with it.

I'm saying I'm a lot more okay with it if there is a lifetime purchase option. I'll give you an example in the hardware world that's very much. like this. Should Lifetime purchase that from with the product? So, you bought the car. So Quadro is literally a G-Force card that has a lifetime subscription, in this case, that costs a lot of money to drivers that are certified, and to the expectation that it is going to be driven harder because it's going to be used hour in, hour out day after day in a professional environment.

I care a lot less when it's professional product, though. We're not talking about professional products. And that's fair enough. And that's fair enough. I'm just saying, saying that the parallel... Not trying to insult the clearly very professional car. Yeah, yeah. I just mean... I just mean we already have very clear parallels in the hardware industry.

This thing's going to be... But it's in the user space. Okay, fair enough. I'm just saying it's a thing that exists and that I have been upset about. Like, I have been upset about the exact same bloody... I've done this a bunch of times. The exact same silicon, right?

being locked down in this way I find it very frustrating but I also do recognize that in the case of Quadro or in the case of this there could be additional costs so let me here let me put it this way

LTT screwdriver if there was a professional version of this that included I don't know let's say once every two years you can mail it to us and we'll like disassemble it and

lube it and polish it for free or something. Like if there's some kind of additional work of some sort that we're doing so what I'm saying is I don't know the math. I don't know the math on how many more failures they'll have for pushing it that much harder.

But there may be some math there. And they're ensuring it? I would assume it is covered under warranty to have it at this higher performance level. How long has your warranty though? not that far on most cars so

I look I'm not saying it's great I'm not saying I love it I'm saying as long as there is a lifetime option make the car cost $1,000 more well sure but that's exactly what they did they made it cost 649 pounds more and it's a slightly higher trend

standpoint like if it's a $100,000 car and they're charging me $650 I'm going to be like why are you nickel and diming me if it's a $1,000 car and they're charging me $650.50. That percentage point makes it more understandable. I think I'm just viewing it the same thing in the same way, but with a different lens, if that kind of makes sense, where like the fact that the monthly one exists is what bothers me. I understand that it makes it more okay. You see what I mean? It makes it more okay to you that the

lifetime exists. For me, it makes it less okay that the monthly exists. It's kind of the same thing. I don't like either of them. It's glass half full, glass, you know. I mean Walker here says it's not uncommon to pay for tuning a vehicle that increases the horsepower without any hardware change Yeah, it's just a one-time cost

And so is this Well Unless you buy the subscription I just don't like that the subscription exists I don't like that the subscription exists either But if people choose a subscription When they have a lifetime option They have to own at least

Some of the responsibility for the vastly larger amount of money they will pay over the lifetime they own this purchase. Okay, what about NVIDIA? One cent per month per Kudacor? Again, I don't love it. I don't want it.

You're going to have to convince me. Graphics cards super subsidized. If NVIDIA, okay, so here, you know what, let's draw a consumer parallel that I actually would be okay with. Oh, no. if Nvidia gave me another 200 watts on the 5090 full warranty everything's covered and they were like yeah it's another

you know okay so what's this in the context of a vehicle so they're charging $600 let's say what this is a $30,000 vehicle something like that 50 maybe 60 you think it's that much I don't know it's just a second I don't know what cars cost oh my God it's the ID it's the ID 3 limit limit breaker subscription yeah and it's effective just a warranty. Effectively just an overclocking warranty. If they let you do it

without that, but you lost your warranty, I think I'd be more cool with it. That was pounds, right? Yeah. 40,000 pounds. 40,000 pounds. Because that's literally just a warranty at that point.

Call it 50,000. So we're talking in this case about 1.5% of the cost. So if NVIDIA said, okay on your $2,000 GPU it's $30 and you can have another

A month no no no total Lifetime Lifetime It's 30 bucks and you can have another 100 watts or 200 watts

or you know whatever If you could If you could do it anyways I didn't have a warranty I'm slamming that button I'm doing that This totally This totally even exists

People buy this all the time This is the OC variant Oh yeah Yeah This is the OC variant And you don't even get additional power limit. Cars have trim levels? Well, so the car trim levels, though, that's a tough one.

Well, no, they're doing what the graphics card do. You can get the O.C. car or you can get the normal car. They're just doing that in the same car. I think we're going too far with this because we're just, we're now just describing an extended warranty. Well, sort of. It's not a, it's not a warranty level. Yeah, it's a different tier of product.

And I've made the argument. since forever that you should never buy the OC lesser card when the not OC better card is now so close in price, but I mean the difference between a 5080 and a 5090 is now $1,000, so a OC 5080 could make sense, and in the case of the 5090, there is nothing higher. So if you want any more, if they were to come to me and say, yeah, it's an extra 30 bucks or 50 bucks for the OC variant that runs a little faster. We binned it a little better. We made sure it's going to work and we're going to cover that.

I don't see that as an extended warranty. I see that as an ever so slightly faster product. The reason why I'm saying extended warranty is because if you could just do it yourself. Yeah. And that's what happens when they're the same product. Like you can take a car and put a beggar engine in it. But the manufacturer also produces

that same model of car that has the bigger engine in it already. But this VW is just both of those cars in one car. Like it's a 5080 and a 5090 in a single card and then you just pay the extra thousand dollars and now it's a 59 instead of a 58 yeah in this case the difference in performance is pretty small though so i feel a lot less like they're totally sandbagging me course like like they could have just afforded to give me you know a car that performs twice as good well this sucks it's not a different car um yeah but

this is just the same car it's just slightly more tuneder and i think yeah i i i hope i'm not just going to completely end up canceled over this again because Hamnetics says Linus's point about accelerated wear profiles is a decent one. When something is worked harder, there could be additional wear. And the reason that I went to that first is because we're talking specifically about batteries and electric motors. It's an EV, right? That is so important. Your argument makes complete sense and is totally fair and totally fine. The problem is it will immediately be abused. Well, immediately and unquestionably. It's the future

problem because now you you pull back more and pull back more and pull back more and pull back more and pay wall more and pay wall more like heated seats it's not the the the like base concept is fine I guess that you're describing it's it's the what will companies do it I feel better about this than the BMW heated seats personally yeah you know what I think I do too because the heated seats that's literally in there like it's it's literally so inexpensive for you to implement it that you can literally put it in every single vehicle that rolls down the line and becomes cheaper because you do that yes less skew um but even then it's the same cost blending right so the people who pay for it are subsidizing the

people who don't pay for it to put it into every vehicle um i still i still don't like it i can still not like it in this case i actually yeah i agree with you dan i don't mind this as much as the heated seat activation. No, I think I agree as well. If it was 25%, like if the 50 to 5090 upgrade was $1,000 and the card was $500, that feels more

okay in a way. This feels nickel and dime, but I know what you're talking about, especially on an electric, so yeah, sucks. It feels like a good thing in the waters, though. Yeah, it's bad. It's not good for the world.

The first step is not that bad so you don't look at it that closely situation. Slippy slope. Yeah. Bazaag says, with your experience with team viewer, I'd think you would trust lifetime subs less, especially in this corporate environment. You are 100% right.

In this case, though, they would have to actively brick it, whereas team viewers' service runs through their servers. I don't see any reason why my additional horsepower would have to do an authentication check every time I turn on the car. Until it does. But if that were the case, well, then that's where Luke's slippery slope argument, which as, you know, fallacious as a fallacy or whatever, as invalid as a slippery slope argument might be,

so, you know, at a certain point, we've seen it happen enough times that we kind of have to go, okay, slippery slopes are valid. And then when you sell the car, it doesn't transfer, so the new person also has to buy it? Is that true for this one? No, I'm just giving them ideas. But that is absolutely something they would do.

I find slippery slopes to be completely valid in these, types of conversations, less valid when it comes to a specific, like, and in between two individuals that know each other type situation. Sure. Because at that point in time, you can be like, you can trust me to not slippery slope this, and that's a valid argument, so then you can counter. But in these types of situations, it's like the company's massive entire reason to exist incentive is to slippery slope this.

So it's like, you should almost trust them to do so more than, more than anything else. So Crystal points out, this is also the same hardware, just like the heated seats, but it's the wear profile. Yeah. That's the difference. Yeah. You know, they validate it. Validation is not a joke, right? They validated it at a certain performance level.

Now they validated it at another performance level. There may be a maintenance or wear cost there. It's harder on the batteries. It's harder on the batteries. It's harder on the motors. Okay. Want to hit me? Hello, bad cholesterol, L.D.L. What punishment are you three willing to commit to for the first person to break the WAN streak? Love the content. Shave Luke's head, please. Yes, I also say we shave Luke's head if anybody misses. What if anybody misses? That's a great suggestion. I appreciate that. I second it, actually. Yeah, there we go. All right, settled, moving on. That's ridiculous.

Oh, my goodness. What are we willing to commit? I mean, it's not going to be me, so I don't care. Yeah, honestly, we needed nothing to be insanely diehard about this already. We may have actually had this conversation before. Maybe. It's been so long we forgot. I think there may be a consequence. I think we might just not remember what it is. Do any viewers remember?

I still like that we have to shave Luke's head, but none of us are going to be the one who is going to allow that to happen. Oh, yeah. The pride of not losing is worth more than me shaving my head. Yeah, absolutely. 100% I don't want you to have to shave your head That'd be fine Dunk tank

Again I thought I was going to be bald My like whole life into my 20s And then I finally realized That's not how that works Floplaint shot doesn't recall any punishments Maybe I'm just imagining it I mean that's possible I think we might have had the conversation

But maybe it never turned into anything Loser has to do WAN show In full Blue Man group makeup I mean we would just do that anyway That'd be hilarious It sounds fun It's more of it It's a pride thing

Um Yvonne would actually kill me If I shaved my head Oh it's Luke's head Right Okay Okay So if anyone breaks the streak

We shave Luke's head Okay All in favor Oh It's your head It's on camera It's like cameras The motion passes

No No No, there's not how that works. There's not how that works. I'm actually completely okay with that being mine, but I feel like... We'll talk about it another time. We'll figure something out. You know, it doesn't make sense that if Linus doesn't show up, then I have to shave my head.

I mean... Yeah, but then Linus loses. And apparently you, I mean, you raised your hand. No. All right, hit me up. Hit me, Dan. You should take Luke's 2.5 pound weights. That would be more annoying for little man than you.

me at this point. Hello from the East Coast. Question for Luke and also Linus in parenthesis. As the infra team grows, are there any plans for IT admin-focused content? A day in the life of your infar team, network deep vibes, etc. Probably not. Cool. Good chat. Boring. Yeah. Hey, 6 foot 2, 6 foot 1 and allegedly 5.6, I actually go by 5 foot 14. Are there any examples of products with really anti-consumer behavior that you would refuse to review on. For example, action cams requiring mobile apps to initialize.

No, I mean, I think our job is to call these things out, is to shine a light on a bad practice or a bad product. I think refusing to review it is, in a way, even passively contributing to the problem. It's like when people with ethics and integrity resign their post when they're asked to do something by a superior and then yeah they keep they just put someone in who would happily do it yeah so they keep their ethics and they keep their integrity but by resigning they clear the way for someone to just do it anyway we haven't actually

accomplished anything here i think in the past when as a society it felt like we had some shame I definitely admired that more Because it would bring more of a spotlight to it And then change is initialized And that person who asked for the thing might get removed But that doesn't seem to be the case anymore in modern year So it seems like there needs to be a new meta And my meta is definitely

If something's interesting enough to make a video I don't care how anti-consumer it is Let's make a video about it and talk about how much they suck A-L-L-L- and D Have you heard about the Final Fantasy 14 drama this week. Square Enix issued a cease and desist over an add-on that let players

share custom character mods. Do you think this ties into payment processor censorship? I mean, were the custom character mods quite X-rated? Is that what we're talking about? I didn't think that it was a problem until you mentioned the payment

processors, and now I'm concerned again. I don't think that's related to it. Add-ons weren't allowed in Final Fantasy 14 already, as far as my understanding goes. and custom character models could be perceived as chain I can't find anything about triple X character mods I don't think you're allowed any add-ons in that game so yeah yeah a couple more hey LLD does Linus have any updates from the smart door lock he

recently installed is there a smart home device or feature that you wish existed but is not currently available thanks i mean basically anything is currently available if you're willing to pay for like a professional installer to come in do some wizardry for you like uh i think it's one of uh yeah it's one of evan's old high school friends husband's friend who it does like installs for these like crazy homes and like shawnessy and stuff like that and he was telling me about this custom mount for this tv that would like go up into the ceiling and, like, hide itself so it can, like, come down and, and be, like, just suspended in the middle of the living room so that the, um, so that the mom can, like, watch TV while she's

cooking in the kitchen, like, across the open concept thing. Anyway, I think you can basically do anything. Um, as for the smart lock, I'm, I'm really happy with it. I can give people codes, one-time use or timed. Um, they can access whatever I need them to, whenever I need them to, It locks on its own, which sometimes I'm a bit of a scatterbrain, and I forget to, you know, do that. So that's really nice. So it's always locked and works perfectly. And the charging solution is working perfectly.

I have wireless charging for my smart lock. So there's just a little base station that sits on just a little, like, end table thing in the foyer, and it just beams power wirelessly to my lock, so I never have to change the battery in it ever again. Oh, cool. Yeah. That's actually pretty sick. Pretty cool. Wow.

That's sweet because wiring those up can kind of suck. Yeah. Oh my gosh. So most people run on battery. Hey, Wann. I have a question for Luke about the lab's website. I notice it's really fast with a lot of cool web tech. Thank you.

I was curious what framework you guys use and how difficult Firefox has been. Hamnetics, I made a video on that. It's on short circuit. They've done a wonderful job with keeping it performant, and I just got to get more people to go to it. But I wanted to show off. I like this one. I think there's a bunch of different ones. I haven't tried them all. This is not a like particular endorsement. It's not financial advice. Yep. Other than that these tools are cool. You might find one that you prefer more. It's very likely. I haven't even tried it. I started using this many years ago and it's

been awesome ever since. But it's called builtwith or builtwith.com. And you can just look up any website. So I just, I went to their homepage, just went LDD Labs.com, and then clicked lookup. And then you can look at basically all the stuff that we use. You can see our analytics. We like plausible because it's friendlier to users, in my opinion. And in Dan Siegel's opinion, who is the one who suggested it for that reason, you can see that we have NextJS, which is probably more related to your question, along with React, which is maybe even more related to your question, along with Versel, which is definitely

likely definitely related to your question but you can do this for any website and it will poke through and help you find different things about it it's a very fun thing to do um to just see kind of like what are these guys doing how did they build stuff you know i really don't think a w s is going to catch on because the future is serverless sorry that's my favorite joke Hi, LLB. You guys talk about lifetime purchases. Would you ever consider doing a lifetime float plane subscription?

The other thing we talk about endlessly is sustainable business practices. Unfortunately, float plane is a service that has a very real, very ongoing monthly cost. So if we were to offer you, a lifetime subscription, what we'd be offering you is a lie. Because at some point, unless we grow infinitely and infinite growth on a finite planet is unfortunately not possible, unless we grow infinitely at some point, the pyramid will collapse and the new user recruitment will not cover the cost of continuing to support the legacy lifetime users and the whole thing falls down and we have to go back on our word. So we want to just put ourselves in a position where we never have to go back

on our word. It's also like, I don't know, in my opinion, yes, I think there's an argument that it could be made that Flowplane has, full plane itself has, well, it depends on the user. A Linus Media Group account on Flowplane has DRM-free downloads. It's up to the creators if they want them or not. So I can't save it for the whole platform. You could make an argument that that's your, like, legacy of the thing. But in my opinion, you're not, I can't give you Flowplane. Right, yeah. You can take the downloads, but if you buy a lifetime subscription

and then eventually Fullplain dies, you and I are 90, and we finally retire and Flooplane dies for whatever reason, and you can't access the website anymore, what is your lifetime subscription for? Yeah. If I could, if we happened to, if team viewer just went away eventually, but you could keep using it because you have your whatever thing. Then lifetime is real.

But lifetime is fine. Yeah. Because, okay, it stopped iterating at some point. That kind of sucks. Sure, whatever. But you can still use the thing. Then lifetime is applicable, in my opinion. I can't just give you full plane forever.

So therefore, in my opinion, is not really. applicable. Tim asks in Floop plane chat, why not just make it like $1,500? How does that not make sense?

Because it doesn't make sense for you. Yeah. I like to stack Ws. In every transaction, I am looking for a way to build a balanced, I offer,

I receive sheet, right? And, you know, from my point of view, finding the correct number for float-plane lifetime subscription is asking me to have a crystal ball. I would have to know exactly how much value you're going to receive and I'm going to have to know exactly to a reasonable degree of accuracy

how much it's going to cost me. I can't know that, so it's far better for me to just have a sustainable billing model that works for me and if it works for you, then that's great. You can subscribe and if it's not working for you anymore, than you can not subscribe. And if you want to throw money at us, as much as this doesn't benefit like my department,

I don't think that's a good way to look at things personally. The same reason why we have merch messages instead of using other potential systems is because we're trying to give you more back for this exchange that's happening. So go get something from the store. Yeah. Pick up something on LTT store.

Or come to Whaleand. If you really don't want anything, if you must just give us money, you can buy a gift card. and then just like never use it. Yeah. Technically, that does sit on our books as like an outstanding liability or whatever because gift cards legally in Canada can't expire.

Are gift cards on the store attached to your account? I don't remember. Is it actually a code? I don't know. I don't remember. But the point is just like, look, if you want to give us more money, you absolutely can. But we don't want to charge more for it. So you're going to have to find your own creative way to do that. Yeah, I wish there are.

Sure. our office is on Google Maps you could show up and slip a hundo under the door I can't stop you my G-sting's ready and that's it for the show we will see you guys again next week same bad time same bad

channel bye you did it before I wave yeah I think you the wave started the wave started I'm allowing it Alright. Touch and go though, sorry. Oh my.

Oh, my. Oh, trigger happy.