The WAN Show - NVIDIA At War With The Media - WAN Show May 23, 2025

Episode Date: May 24, 2025

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Um, that's not what this page is supposed to look like. What is up you delightful marshmallow chickens? That's right. Y'all my peeps and we're here coming to you live. We've got a great show lined up for you guys this week in classic Nvidia fashion. They are currently at war with what seems like basically the entire tech media. We'll be talking about what's going on and also about how none of this is new. Cool, go Nvidia. What's going on and also about how none of this is new? Cool going video

We'll be talking about some of the really cool stuff we saw here at Computex Okay, there wasn't that much of that We'll be talking about some of the zany stuff that we saw while we were here at Computex in Taiwan What else we got this week, Mr. Luke? The German courts are doing genuinely very cool things. We both linked to this. At least one cool thing. Yeah. But it's the coolest thing that I think I've seen in many years out of Germany. That's fair. And SteamOS moves one... I'm not saying the Germans were right. SteamOS moves one step closer to a wider release with new update.

Thank you. Intro button. I don't know. I don't have one does it Good luck Dan cool Can you do it nice The show is brought to you by, oh god, I can't read the thing. Thermaltake and don't forget our rap partner Dbrand, our laptop partner Del, and our chair partner whoever takes this golden chair in our hotel room. No, no, it's Secret Lab, it's Secret Lab. Okay, we are off to a really good start today. It's fantastic.

Yeah. What do you want to get into first? No problems. Should we talk about NVIDIA's little kerfuffle with reviewers? Sure, I guess they're being nice before 5000 series actually is over why don't we know no why don't we talk about other Computex GPU things because there was actually a fair bit to like about well There was a fair bit to be pretty okay with about GPUs at confidence stuff is interesting. Yeah. Well, yeah Yeah, are you gonna buy one?

No cool, but I wasn't gonna buy one anyways AMD revealed the 9060 XT it's gonna be launching June 5th, which is in just a couple of weeks. The 8 gig version is 299 and We're not super stoked on that But the 16 gig version is at an MSRP anyway of $349 with yes, okay, it's only a 128 bit bus card, which used to mean it would be like $130, not $350. But it's the performance looks pretty darn okay. And AMD is even like decent at ray tracing and they've got like all the upscaling technology

and all of that. So if you're into that, then you can turn all of that stuff on. I mean, that's pretty neat. I know a lot of people are really upset that there's even an eight gig version of the card at all, but can I play Devil's Advocate for a moment here? No.

Okay, let's move on. Intel announced the ARK Pro B60. Really? I mean, yeah, you can. You're just not gonna let me? If you want. No, I mean, look, if that's the dynamic you wanna have, I'm okay.

I've, you know, we could get some leather. You like that? Yeah. Oh boy. Well, it's gonna be one of those kinds of jokes today. Conveniently there's a bed right here. Poor Andy. Yeah, Andy. I heard that if you do that kind of work, you basically can never find like, you know,

non-pornographic work ever again. Is that going to be a problem for you? Is that a thing? I don't know. Couldn't you just not put it on your resume or does it like get around? I mean, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I,

I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, Maybe he's done this kind of work under the table. I was one day only fun creator. Or on top of the table. Yeah. I mean, tables got all kinds of surfaces you can get on top of or under. It's true. Okay, so hold on, hold on.

Let me play Devil's advocate for a moment for the 9060 XT. Yeah. Hey, Gig. 8GIG. Should we be upset about AMD providing the option for someone to have a crappier GPU at a lower price? The thing that gets me is the lower price is still $300, I'm assuming, American dollars. Yes. And the other thing that also gets me is that AMD just cannot decide what their story is on 8-gig GPUs because, you know, whenever they have a VRAM advantage,

they're all like, pfft, pathetic. Our competitor is full of crap, basically. And then when they don't, they're like, oh, it doesn't matter. Yeah, then they're like, well, actually it's fine for 1080p gaming. I went with Sammy to a land cafe this week

and looking at literally all of the games that everyone was playing. It doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter. However, counterpoint, I was supposed to be the devil's advocate, but I guess we're doing a little reverse. It still doesn't make me happy.

If I'm spending $300 on a card, I should get 16 gigs of RAM. We're into role reversal. Come on. To play those games, to play those games that Luke is talking about, right? I could also just be using, I don't know, a 5000 series Radeon card. Or, you know, like, realistically, realistically,

I could be using like a Polaris card to play League of Legends, like who cares? You might want high frame rate though. This is true, this is true. A lot of them were playing CS, a lot of them were playing CS 1.6, which was sick. Really?

Yeah. There was a mix of two, go two or whatever, and then 1.6. Shut up. So sick. So like no source. And they had a LAN version of like 1.6 so they could keep playing.

Dude, is LAN gaming coming? Okay, hold on a second because, shoot, this actually, okay, we're gonna come back to GPUs. There was tons of League of Legends. There was tons of Counter-Strike in general. There was a little bit of Valorant. We're gonna come back to GPUs at Computex more broadly and specifically Nvidia's whole kerfuffle with the media

because I actually wanna completely pivot to another one of our topics and it's going to be quite the pivot. Where is, yes, the Google DeepMind V03 video model, okay, and I promise you this is related to people playing LAN versions of CS 1.6 somehow. Okay, Google DeepMind VO3. It's crazy. Oh, oh shoot, is Dan good at screen share? We have no screen share. No.

Dan, can you do example from prompt streamer getting a victory royale with just his pickaxe? This is absolutely mind blowing. Dan, hit them with that, and then I'm gonna look over there for when it's done playing, because I gotta tell you guys, like I follow the tech space,

I'm reasonably attuned with the AIs that the kids are fooling around with. If you didn't tell me that this was completely generated like the dude in the corner the environment the player model if you didn't tell me that this was AI generated I would not know it's it's it's it's gonna be really bad. And this is just like, this is not even the scariest example. Dan, can you queue up that pharmaceutical commercial? Oh, this one's brutal.

Dude, dude, this is incredible. Okay, I'm gonna not talk over this one. this one. As soon as Dan's ready. Thing worked. Every day felt heavy. I felt trapped. Play it now. Then I tried pupper men.

Our prescription helps your body secrete a special pheromone that attracts puppies. I took the pill before bed, and when I woke up, there he was, the love of my life. The pill does not target depression directly, but we've found that it's- Back to us. There's people in chat being like, wait, this is generated. So Zenith is like, yeah, that looks like AI.

This is gonna fool over 90% of people. Over 90? This is gonna fool over 90% of people. Over 90? This is gonna fool over 99% of people. Probably. There's a couple little things like the dog's tongue when he's licking the gut. The little oddly lagged and does some stuff. It does some weird stuff. I don't think we saw it but I think there's two ladies sitting on a couch and the one part of her hair doesn't move with her head while the other part does. There's little things.

There's little things. That was made with apparently $500 worth of credits. That's wild. Which like that means in a year or two. Buddy who made it, so at PJACCETTURO over on Twitter, PJA says, I used to shoot half million dollar pharmaceutical commercials. I made this for $500 in VO3 credits in less than a day.

He also says, okay I hate a day. He also says, ugh, okay, I hate this, but he also says, what's the argument for spending $500,000 now? And like, I hate that. He's not wrong. He's not the only person asking that question. And I promise. You know, the whole ethics conversation

around pharmaceutical companies, I suspect they're not going to mind. Especially when, I don't know if you've seen it, but almost every American pharmaceutical company spends more on marketing than they do on R&D. So like, if they can drop that marketing budget and not increase the R&D budget. Then surely they could lower prices. Oh. Ha ha ha ha. Let's go. Oh. OK.

So we're going to come back to the other stuff in our Google I.O. roundup, because that's the only part of it that I wanted to talk about, that yes, I am tying back to people playing LAN games. I have a theory. My theory, and maybe it's just the kind of thing that I tell myself when I crawl into my bed and pull my covers up and get into a fetal position every night and go, oh my god, the world. I have a theory that-

We've been doing a lot of that lately. When nothing online is real, the players I'm playing against who are realistically, in many cases, aim-botting. I like this. Okay? Or the news stories that I'm seeing in my social media feed, or the, when, or the, oh, the questions and answers

that I'm looking at on Reddit, remember we talked about that undisclosed study that that educational institute did where they were just like having bots interact on r slash change my mind. You know, when nothing is real, we're all gonna go, you know what? Fuck it and get offline.

We're gonna just like, we're gonna play video games in person. We're gonna demand LAN play. And if gaming companies won't put LAN functionality into their games, then we'll be like, all right, I'ma play CS 1.6. I don't remember where I read this, but I have read that apparently there's been an increase

in more provably bespoke products being demanded by consumers. Yeah. Because there's the whole, like, oh, it's an Etsy shop, and they make it themselves for sure, but it's actually just from Aliexpress. Yeah, that's just another perfect example of everything just being mass produced slop.

So there's been an increase in like, I wanna buy this product and I want a video of you making it. Like that type of stuff. Make a video of me making this product. If it's custom, it's gonna be a little bit harder to match the physical product that it will yeah It will like actually a lot harder. It will dude. I um Maybe oh, okay. Oh

But like there's no point being for or against AI progress. Because it just- It's gonna happen. The horse bolted from the pen at this point ages ago. Anyone still having the conversation of like, should we do this or not is just blind. Yeah. Unfortunately.

So realistically, it doesn't matter what the next thing I say is. If I say I'm for it or against it It is irrelevant, right? But maybe that's the one comforting thought that could make me go. Okay, okay Maybe that's the the positive outcome that that might come from this But but then the thing that made me hesitate to even say that is is like even with how bad even with how bad AI replications have been and with how like identifiable, you know,

scams have been for many years, the video's not up yet, it should be coming very soon. That collab we did with Kit Boga, right? If people are still being fooled by Nigerian Prince emails, effectively, it's going to be so long before my hopeful outcome could ever possibly happen, before this information about misinformation and disinformation propagates enough that we all just go, you know what, basically I just, I just don't believe anything,

forget it. And you can help arm some people, but it'll never work for everybody. I mean, there's the problem of like, some of those Nigerian print scams, they include things like weird typos and things that could tip you off on purpose, because they're trying to weed out people

that are actually paying attention? I did not ever think about that. Yeah, that's like a thing apparently. But I wonder if that bar gets higher the easier it is to be more and more convincing all the time? I think so. I feel like it would. Yeah, no, oh, 100%, no, I think more people

are going to get scammed. I mean, now that you could just generate, you know, a photorealistic Linus that will show you his tech tip and ask you to respond. Like I actually saw someone on the subreddit that was saying that a scammer used my name and was apparently giving away Macbooks, which should have been your first clue.

If I had anyone want that, I would know better. I'm kidding! I'm kidding! Andy, relax. It's okay. He's on a Macbook now. That I gave it. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think most of the editors, Andy, were mostly editors this trip on Macbooks? Yeah. We have found that the Adobe Suite is actually more stable on Mac, which matters more when we're on mobile hardware.

We're so cooked. Not great. Not awesome. Yeah, look, I'm, contrary to the narratives that are constructed I am not for or against anything other than whatever its utility is to me or someone else and The price, you know and and also the the intangibles or actually I was gonna Well, I was gonna call it repair ability and intangible but repairing things is actually quite tangible So so the other you know, the the other X factors

And if a MacBook is the best tool for the job then gosh darn it we're gonna use a MacBook for it I don't care. Yeah, nice. I do agree I Do I was using my MacBook from the MacBook challenge so far past the 30 days Because other than the desktop experience, which I was quite unhappy with, it's a great computer. So I got, this is a new work laptop. My last work laptop was like four or five years old. It couldn't do broadcast anymore.

You don't need to excuse that you allocated yourself budget for a brand new machine when you had a perfectly working machine. When it first showed up, there was a huge pixel issue with the screen. So we used the old Lenovo warranty thing and the dude showed up and like swapped the screen in. Really? I mean that was cool. So that was cool. There was multiple delays, cough cough, but it wasn't debilitating so it wasn't that big of a deal. Now, and it hasn't happened yet this show which is great, but last show we experienced it, the screen will just completely lock. The computer still

functions behind, like I can still click on things even, but the screen will completely lock and the only way to fix it is to sleep the computer, wake it back up again. And I, one of the guys from hardware Canucks, I was talking to him, he has the same laptop, he has the same issue. Why? And that my friends, is why our laptop partner for the WAN show is Dell. Those Dell machines on the WAN show set have actually been like rock-solid. They have. You might even say heart-touching. Wait, those that have actually been like rock solid. They have. You might even say heart touching. Wait, no, no, wrong, bad.

Wrong, okay. Okay, so wait, how, okay. I don't know how we got to where we are now from 8 gig cards. Counter-Strike. Oh, right. Don't worry about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about GPUs at Computex.

Yeah. Intel announced the ARC Pro B60 and B50 Workstation cards. They're using their XE2 Battle Mage architecture with, wow, thank you whoever prepared these notes today, XE Vector engines and XE Matrix Extensions engines. Okay, none of that is the important thing about ArcPro. The important thing about Arc Pro is that we are talking about cards with certified drivers for just a few hundred dollars. B50 is not going to be lighting anyone's world on fire in terms of its groundbreaking performance, but what it does have is certified flipping drivers so that when you're building out, you know, an architectural firm's office

and everyone and their flipping dog needs a professional GPU, you can take your little, you know, slim line, you know, OptiPlex stations or whatever, you can slap these babies in there. They are, I believe they max out at 70 watts, which means that they can work without a PCIe power cable.

They are dual width, half height. They come with both the half height and full height bracket. So you can throw these things into basically any desktop chassis and boom. And I was actually, I gotta admit, when Intel put up the slides about compared to last gen, I was like, y'all had an alchemist pro GPU?

Totally missed that. Did anyone care about that? Wait, did they actually? Yeah, apparently. Oh, wow. I had no idea. Yeah, no, I had no idea. And so I was quite surprised because the slide that had all of the companies that they had

certified their drivers with was like impressive. I was like, yo, SolidWorks, Autodesk, Blender, like y'all got like really like the big names here. That's really good for a first gen product that hasn't even launched yet. But just like on the gaming side, Intel software side for ARK has been cooking. Like the amount of performance they squeezed out of what, I think now that Battlemage is out,

Intel would probably even admit was a fundamentally flawed architecture in Alchemist. Like they had issues with the, I think it was with the internal caching or something that was the reason that like you absolutely needed resizable bar or it basically went to craptown in a hurry in terms of performance. I forget what the exact technical reason was, but there were hardware reasons that Alchemist was not very good. Boy, did they ever squeeze a lot of it,

and that gives me so much confidence in their commit level, because you can release a GPU relatively easily. And I say this as a lay person who could not possibly hope to design and release a GPU. I say this as like, compared to a CPU. GPUs are relatively, relatively simple. But it's the software. The software will kill you. That's the challenge that Intel knew that they were coming up against.

It wasn't, can we build a parallel processor? The rate at which you need to release stable drivers, right? Because of all these new games coming out and stuff? Like, damn. Here's a question for you. Do you think ARK can survive and thrive and continue forward if TAP retires? Let's get to that in a second. First, let's talk about the B60. This is a more performant card. This one, instead of being 70 watts, I believe it's a couple hundred watts. Don't quote me on that though, the watts are not in here. Doesn't matter, the point is, this is meant to be more like a cheap and cheerful 24 gig AI capable card that you can have in a slightly higher end workstation,

slash, they have this concept that they were showing off called Battle Matrix, and they're doing some, again, down to the software, they're doing some software tomfool software. They're doing some software Tom foolery That's supposed to make it much easier to take a whole pool of these cards up to eight of them Combine the memory split up your AI workloads so you can chunk it out and chew on the whole thing in parallel And you know what is the performance going to be as good as an Nvidia solution? Be real no right, but the price a lot cheaper, but the price is gonna be as good as an Nvidia solution, be real.

No, right? But the price. But the price, literally, we are talking about if Intel gets their way, and this comes to market at the pricing that they're targeting, we are talking about a full fat rack mount solution with 192 gigs of usable VRAM, plus you can stack it up with system memory that you can you know stack it up with

System memory that you can overflow into we're talking about starting it anywhere from five to ten thousand dollars And they are not giving pricing for b60 pro But what they are saying is that that five to ten thousand dollars is for the whole chassis with anywhere from one to eight GPUs, so it's like okay, I think I can do the math. And on the record, but you know, don't quote me on this, right? They're saying that they think they can do even better than the $700 or so per GPU that that would, that five to $10,000 mark works out to.

Like given time, I mean the hardware, right? The hardware is literally just an ARC B580 for the B60 Pro, or for the Pro B60, excuse me. So yeah, nothing should prevent them from doing this for 500 bucks or whatever. And if the goal is to get an install base out there, which is an assignment that Intel seems to somewhat understand at this point,

then that's exactly what you need to do. You make this investment upfront in the software ecosystem for developers, and then you make the hardware accessible. If I can get like a whole last server platform for it realistically Not that different a price from like a Mac studio And like that that is a You know a decently substantial group of people because there's a lot of like small the medium-sized businesses that want local

like LLMs, inline IDE assistance, stuff like that, that are building these solutions? And if you could just do it with ARCards, like, why not? Dude, speaking of ARCards and pricing, I had a intense conversation with a very, very, very old acquaintance of mine, Vivian, who is running the discrete GPU. She's a VP and GM, so basically running discrete GPU for Intel Arc, where I have to confess,

Vivian, if you're watching this, I know you don't watch my own show that's totally fine But if you're watching this what you're not I'm sorry. I was a little cranky I got a little bit set off by one of the slides that Intel had in their deck the whole the whole thing was about ARC Pro and you know I I've so I Didn't make the video about this or anything like that, but their ARK Pro deck had one slide right at the beginning, okay, that was like ARK Battle Mage. So it was about the non-pro, right?

ARK Battle Mage leading performance per dollar and, you know, basically was kind of setting the stage for let's go non-gamers we got we're gonna have great performance for per dollar just like we do with our gaming cards um and it was like best performance per dollar asterisk best value for gpus under 300 which is one hell of an asterisk. Yeah, that's a... Asterisk two, as of November 2024, because... Yeah, OK, so that was my face.

That's rough. The November 2024, I suspect, is probably just because that's when they ran the numbers. And they're not going to rerun those numbers for one slide in an ArcPro presentation. So I'll let that one- I also had a fairly convenient time to have ran the numbers.

I'll let that one pass. I'll let that one pass. But the one- It's also been a long time since then. The one that I was really upset about was that it said under 300 US dollars. And when I basically was like, hey, so look, I don't wanna be that guy, but it's literally my job

to press GPU companies on the fact that GPUs cannot be purchased at MSRP. I don't like you guys showing this slide when I can't buy an ARC-B580 for under $300. Yeah, this card shouldn't be able to be on the slide that it's... when I can't buy an ARC B580 for under $300. Yeah, this card shouldn't be able to be on the slide that it's... That's when the conversation got a little bit intense.

And that's at least 93% my fault, because I was just, we got off on the wrong foot a little bit, I really didn't like that. And then the response was not great. We got off on the wrong foot a little bit. I really didn't like that. And then the response was not great. I'm not gonna name who said this part because it was whole group setting. There was like a dozen intel people in the room. So someone was like, yes, you can.

And I was like, okay, show me. And they pulled up like minefactory.de or something. And I'm like, okay, show me. And they pulled up like minefactory.de or something. And I'm like, right. That's where I got a little more frustrated. Your slide says US dollars. You don't get to convert euros to US dollars and tell me I can buy an ARKB580 for under 300 US dollars. That sir is actually bullshit. That's wack. You're not allowed to do that. And so what I basically said to them

is look, what I need is I don't need you to fix it right now. I don't need you to call up Newegg who is in the middle of the night now, and tell them to fix their pricing. But what I need is a coherent strategy that Intel will be employing to ensure that ARK B580s will be available at MSRP. In the US, in US dollars. And then I got more intense, because basically, and I'm not going to name sort of names, but people

started to kind of pipe up and go, well, you know, we can't control what our board partners do in terms of pricing and what retailers do in terms of pricing. And I basically was like, I'm not going to let you finish, but I worked in the channel. Do not tell me that. You absolutely have levers, you absolutely do. Whether or not you choose to pull them, that is your choice, but you have levers. You have levers in terms of production. If Arizona Ice Tea can do it.

You have levers in terms of production. You have levers in terms of production. You have levers in terms of allocation of parts. You have levers in terms of the marketing funding that you provide to your partners, both manufacturing partners and retail partners. You have levers in terms of the fact that you have a founder's edition. You have your limited edition cards that have an Intel label on them that you could literally control the pricing on that only exist so that you can put pressure on other board partners to fall in line in terms of pricing. Everybody knows that's why Founders Edition exists, right?

I just listed, and that's not even all of the levers, I listed many levers that you have to manage channel pricing. It's not legal in every market, but there is, actually, okay, that typically goes the other way, but there's things like map pricing where you have a minimum advertised price. That can be considered price fixing depending on the market. I'm just saying, illegal or not, many brands attempt to do it. So there are levers. There are levers to pull.

And after things got a little intense for a little bit, I got a firm commitment that Intel would come to me with a strategy where they were gonna get pricing to MSRP. And I didn't even ask for like $249.99. I was like, look, I get it. This one has three fans on it. It's $269.99. Okay. This is an OC.

Sure. Whatever. Product variance, whatever. That's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's fine. There's more than a decade of precedent for, hey, this one is a little more, this is one

a little more fixy fixy. We did some extra special stuff with the VRMs. No problem with that. But if you're going to say, and this is where the sticking point is, if you're going to say, this GPU costs this much, and you're going to ask me to say, this GPU costs this much, don't make me a liar. I don't like that.

Now hold on a second. Callmecana says, isn't this a slippery slope? Isn't this level of control the same thing you criticize NVIDIA for? What I criticize NVIDIA for is multifaceted. And I guess that actually transitions us perfectly into our next topic, which is RTX 5060 and in general, NVIDIA's current kerfuffle with the media very, very broadly. NVIDIA's level of control is unlike almost any other company in the industry. I would say maybe, not maybe, Apple and NVIDIA are the two kind of birds of a feather that I point to when I look at the level of control that they maintain over their product, their image and branding, their partners, the media.

They both exercise it in their own special, unique ways. I mean, I remember that video that Marques and Mr. Who's the Boss did ages ago talking about the way that companies can control the narrative through access. Neither of them named Apple, which I thought was curious at the time. I was kind of sitting there going, companies that refuse to work with you if you, you can criticize the product, but if you talk about them the wrong way,

they refuse to work with you. We don't mention them in our video about companies that do that, but I get it, I get it. Yeah, so Apple is a great example of you've gotta kinda play the game and they don't tell you what the rules are, so you just got to kind of play the game and they don't tell you what the rules are, so you just have to err on the side of,

not saying the wrong things to make sure that you, stay on the list, right? Yeah. NVIDIA doesn't do things that way. NVIDIA for the most part actually takes criticism. We've criticized NVIDIA a lot over the years. They have generally been okay about taking criticism from the media and I suspect the reason for it is it used to be that in general they saw the benefit of working with media and understood that

they had to take their lumps and then now I think it's because they just kind of don't care. I think it's because it's just sort of irrelevant. So the reason has changed, but in general they've taken criticism from the media. Yeah, they seem to take criticism, but they can be pushy about the message that they want. Oh, they can be extremely... They don't care if you like go after them. They can be pushy and they can be petty and they can be vindictive Yes. Oh, yeah big on that last big on that last one and and I've talked in the past about how I do think that It is a fundamental cultural issue at the company. I think it comes from the top down

but in general they have they have mostly But in general, they have mostly tried to work with the media, but they also have their own issues. And it goes way back. Was it the 1080 launch, the one where you guys were stuck in a room with no internet, while Nvidia basically did the entire announcement that prior to that they would have briefed the press and the press would have done it. And they've slowly taken over the role of spreading the news about Nvidia that the media

used to have and made it Nvidia's job. I don't remember the exact details, but if I remember correctly, they didn't tell us stuff like the price and a few other really key things that if you published an announcement video, you would really expect to have, and they kept those for the keynote. And then the keynote was like really long and we couldn't really leave during it. And then after the keynote, we were stuck in this weird location where like nobody had internet, there was no appropriate places to film, and there was a Deadmau5 concert super loud in a relatively small building

so that you could still hear it when you're outside. So you couldn't actually record because you just get, I mean, I'm not saying that Deadmau5 himself would necessarily do this just to be clear, but I'm assuming he's under some form of label that might try to copystrike your video or whatever. So like it was a very complicated situation and it was very intentional. Yeah, so NVIDIA's control, I guess what I'm saying is it's weird and it changes, right?

That's the thing that I think a lot of people miss when we're when we talk about a company is moves that Nvidia pulled 10 years ago are not we're not executed by the same people that are you know pulling moves today so you know back to back to managing pricing yes yesIA absolutely put undue pressure on their board partners to meet NSRP targets that were not sustainable for their businesses. Yeah, it's a different problem. We saw a large number of NVIDIA board partners

disappear over the last 10, 15 years. However, however, I don't have a reason to believe just yet that Intel is doing the other problematic part of that that Nvidia was doing where they are not providing their board partners with adequate margin for survival. That was the issue was that Nvidia was forcing this artificially low price while slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly chipping away the margin that they were leaving for their board partners in that target price. I think this type of stuff, including a lot of other things, is why EVGA ended up bailing.

NVIDIA also put extremely restrictive, I was going to say the word guidelines, but they're less guidelines and more pirate law. They put extremely restrictive guidelines in place for their board partners in terms of the types of products they could build in order to differentiate their own brand. Like, project or sorry, GeForce Partner Program. GeForce Partner Program. G-Force Partner Program, which was called out many years ago by Kyle from HardOCP. He was the one who ended up,

I think he's probably been blackballed by NVIDIA more times than the current crop of YouTubers combined. Kyle from HardOCP did a really great job of investigating the G-Force Partner Program, which was this extremely restrictive system that Nvidia put in place for their partners that controlled everything from what kinds of products they could build, to what they could clock them at, to how they could package them and message them.

So if you've noticed over the last 10 years that GeForce boards have gotten more and more samey and boring, even down to the packages. Like, you ever notice the packages all look the same now? Even this one. Yeah, of course, it's got, it has all the requirements. Like, that's. And it used to be so fun. That's what Nvidia does.

Oh, we have a topic about that too actually. Oh, okay. He hasn't read the whole doc yet, but that one's gonna be pretty fun. So yes, yes. Putting pressure on your partners, okay, to maintain pricing in the channel or whatever, yes, that is something that I have criticized Nvidia for but it's part of the

broader Nvidia behavior that puts their partners in a position of constant fear You know you talk to you talk to an Nvidia partner off the record and you kind of go. Okay. Well like Yeah, why don't you just, why don't you just take some of those GPUs that you got and put them on like a cool small form factor card? We're like, Oh, because we're afraid. Yeah, yeah, Dad will never give me another GPU again. Dad will take my allocation of GPUs, which I do still make money on, and I need to make money on because I spent all this development cost building these approved, data-approved

products. It'll just take my allocation for that quarter and give it to my biggest competitor. And I don't know for a fact, allegedly, allegedly, I don't know for a fact that they would do that, but I've heard this fear consistently enough from enough of dad's children that I think I kind of believe it. Yeah. So that's... Oh, that thing happened by the way. Oh nice, so screen is completely locked and I have to sleep it and then wake it up again And it'll work fine. So if you've ever wondered what what happened. Do you remember those really cool little as rock mini desktops?

That used MXM. Yeah DPUs you ever wonder what happened to those you ever you ever? You ever wonder why there was never, you know, updated mobile GPU things for a particular generation of laptops? You ever wonder why Framework has only Radeon as options? You ever wonder any of these things? It's because, allegedly, NVIDIA's partners are terrified, I'm not petrified, would be the right word,

because they won't act. They are petrified of running a foul of NVIDIA by producing a product that NVIDIA hasn't signed off on. And I gotta tell you, some of the off the record conversations I've had, so I can't repeat these because they would be too identifiable. Some of the off the record conversations that I've had about Nvidia's logic for why these products can't exist, dude, it is some moon logic.

Makes literally no technical sense. Like, like, like, like fall of an empire, people who have no idea what any of this is are making decisions that have no basis in logic or reality. And it's very troubling. However, however, I was chatting with Alex and he has a theory that, oh, hold on, we should do a recap of the 5060 okay, so 5060. It's 8 gigs 128 bit bus it's $300 it loses to the 3060 Ti and ARC B580 in some tests Multiple creators like Hardware Unboxed, J's Two Sans, Paul's Hardware Digital Foundry and more have criticized both the card And this is where we get into sort of Nvidia's

Not playing ball Fairly, I think I think I've talked about I've talked about this phrase a lot I think in the last couple of years is good faith, you know, what does good faith mean engaging in good faith? Right. It means that you know being most for the most part, right? Forthright, honest, working together on, you know, a solution that benefits everybody. And I think that's what the media asks for from companies, right? Is can we work together in good faith, understanding the value that we each bring to the table? I understand Nvidia, the value that you each bring to the table. I understand, NVIDIA, the value that you are bringing

to the table by providing me with the card early so that I can test it and evaluate it. That has a positive effect on my business. That is- That also has a positive reflect on the audience. And- Positive effect on the audience. Yeah, so that has a positive effect on my business.

It also has a positive effect on the audience who gets to have all the reviews multiple perspectives which Luke and I have always stressed is extremely important all of which had ample time to put together their analysis and and presents it in a way that is Professional and thorough without being pushed or or forced really to say anything in particular. Very key, very key and that's part of NVIDIA's benefit. What NVIDIA gets in return is the credibility of these quotes that hey this card is good or it's really well optimized for that that they can then use to market that

card without having to pay for it. Actually, my understanding is a lot of publications do charge for them to have the logo or the badge or the quote or whatever. We don't, but in a lot of cases that's the that's the quid pro quo is we get access to the card so that we can do a great job. You get more thorough, more complete information because everybody isn't rushing against each other to be the first to publish, and NVIDIA gets credible third-party validation

of their claims about the product. That is everybody working together in good faith. And this launch has not been handled well. Reviewers were not given drivers in time for the initial embargo. It's kind of funny to me that right now, this time, exactly now, is when everybody's like really mad about this. We made a video one month ago now about the situation where Nvidia wasn't providing drivers for the 8 gig variants of the 4060 series. And we basically said exactly what they've done now,

which is it looks like what they're trying to do is they're trying to create an environment where all the reviews of when you search for keyword 4060 are going to be of the TI 16 gig. Because they're just not even gonna bother seeding these other cards and they're gonna kinda try to bury it and make Sure that it doesn't get covered that much So therefore the best performing videos on the topic of 4060 are gonna be for this card that performs Markably markedly better

Hey it came to pass we're not about it now I don't know whose permission we were waiting for to be mad about but hey, we're all on the same page now But there's another layer that is actually that is actually worse And this is this is this is This is not good Some creators were given access to the drivers ahead of time But only if they agreed to certain stipulations, like testing games at 1080p, including older cards,

like the RTX 2060 and 3060, or even requiring multi-frame gen results to be included. Now, I want to make this very clear. In our review of a 4060 8GIG, should we do one, we would seek to include older cards. 5060. We would include, oh sorry, thank you, 5060. We would seek to include older cards

because I think that's really relevant, especially if they have a- You wanna track what people would actually be upgrading for. Large install base, okay? We would include multi-frame gen tests, we have done. A lot of people are turning those settings on, even if a lot of people in the comments are really angry about it. But what we wouldn't be doing is limiting our testing to that, because that does not

paint the entire picture. So NVIDIA did exactly what I predicted they would do, but they actually took it a step further than I thought that they were capable of. And that last part we should be extremely upset about. It's not the first time that Nvidia has teased a card through select media. In fact, we have participated in that before. We did, we were the first to game on the 3090. I think it was us and MKBHD went live with 3090 videos before the review embargo. But in that

situation, it was clearly not a review. There were stipulations on what we could show, but all of that was communicated extremely transparently. It was a preview. Whereas... I also tend to not mind, like if a manufacturer is like, hey, we really want to show off this particular use case, it's not necessarily a bad thing to include, but you should still include the things that you want to include. And you can mention in that part of your video, like, X manufacturer, X company, whatever, thinks this use case is important, and then give your opinion on why you agree or don't

agree. I don't know. I think that's fine. So lame. And like- Not to be surprised. It's kind of sad to me that Nvidia seemed to get pretty cool leading up to the 5000 series launch. And then they're just like, yeah, we're not releasing new cards for probably like two years anyway, so. So I wanna talk about that.

I wanna talk about that. I had a chat with Alex. We just like bumped into each other in the lobby because we're staying in the same hotel, you know, things that happen. And he had an interesting theory that Nvidia's behavior right now is not born out of malice, but is born out of just utter incompetence.

Hold on, let me get there for a second. Give me a second to get there. What I was very specific about the words born out of. So his theory is that after the 5090, the 50 series, and his theory is like, there's a lot of evidence to back this up, is that the rollout of the 50 series has been a cluster. Oh yeah.

Like there was the black screening issue, there was the issue with cards not having the right number of CUDA cores in them. They somehow managed to still ship that connector. They shipped some with more. They, yeah, the engineering oversight on the 5090 with the pin balancing, the, I mean, what else has there been? Oh, okay, I mean, there's the pin balancing, what else has there been?

Oh, okay, I mean there's the fact that they're announcing 50, 60 laptops here at Computex and you still can't buy a 50, 70 laptop. Did you notice that? I never put that together, but that's rough. Well, dude. Like, I don't think that the GeForce side at Nvidia rough. I don't think that the GeForce side at Nvidia is either being resourced correctly or prioritized. There's that story, I don't know if we talked about it on WAN Show, if I just heard this

somewhere, but Jensen was talking to their whatever, I'm gonna assume the title here, but like head of AI at Nvidia and said to imagine every Nvidia employee standing in the parking lot and that they were all available and ready to work for AI. So basically you can loot any team in the company for whoever you want. And that I'm sure that happened to GeForce to a certain degree.

So, let's come back to my very specific wording. I don't think that this was born out of malice, but I think that once your back is against the wall, I think you start to, I think you start to find underhanded ways to dodge accountability. I think that, I think that in order to, I think this is an exercise in butt covering.

I think trying to cover up how crap 50, 60 is. I think this is, and this is never. So I guess what you're saying is it wasn't premeditated. Yes. Things started to go bad and then they did bad things. Yes. That's my theory. Okay.

That's my theory because I think you and I have both met a lot of technical people at Nvidia who would never dream of misleading about the product. Sure. The technical guys there are so good. They, I mean, they literally, Nvidia literally built the industry standard tools for, or built industry standard tools for testing, you know,

frame times and GPU power monitoring. That tend to be like pretty well respected and fair. They really like care about, you know, making a great product. So let's not imagine for a second that the technical folks there are not aware of issues. Yeah, right. And and and if you talk to them about it, they're they're like, yeah, yeah, this one's like really good at this.

And this is a challenge in this scenario. And so if I had to guess, I'd say this just basically comes down to the same kinds of issues that, you know, we run into with with Intel during the stagnation years, where you just have, you know, these business monsters, these executives that are just looking to cover their hide and figure out how to get their quarterly bonus by covering up the products that aren't that good, hoping, I don't know, the media won't notice or whatever. And it just sucks because I feel bad for all those really incredible technical people

who are really trying to build the best possible product. I mean, that's fair. This is a similar story all the time. You have the same thing with developers at gaming companies. The people working on the thing itself are not making the marketing and business decisions at the company, but they catch a lot of the flak. And a lot of times, they're the ones making the thing,

so it's their baby, so they feel the flak more heavily than some of the people making the decisions around how it's marketed how it's communicated stuff like that. I saw a really cool quote from someone at Take Two that was basically just like, I don't know Rockstar we just leave them alone. Yeah the CEO. Was it? Yeah I don't know I just came across it and I was like, that's cool. Yeah, it was sweet. I wonder if I can find it.

Like, dude, can you imagine... Okay, look, the technical folks don't always make sustainable business decisions. It's also a little privileged being like the company that owns Rockstar to be like, yeah, we just leave them alone. They just make billions of dollars, so we're just like, oh, it's fine. Yeah, I don't know. Yes, yes, yes.

And if Rockstar wasn't making, what is it, they're still making like a quarter billion dollars a quarter on GTA V. And I think over $200 million a quarter on Red Dead Redemption. So apparently the, it's a, I can't show you guys, but a GamesRadar article that says, Take Two's CEO is probably the world's only person to refuse the chance to play GTA 6 because I'm not a gamer and his role is to get out of their way.

So basically like, he didn't want to play it and then have comments and then you know maybe he says something someone hears something and then something's actioned because of it because he's just like I'm business yeah this is not me. I'm gonna do business do your thing. Yeah make games. Just like all right dude. I don't know man I get yeah very privileged. If you're gonna be the CEO of a gaming company and you're not a gamer, that's probably the way to approach it. I like that.

To be honest. I respect it. I respect it. I respect it. Because when you have like, and like, okay, I mean, our very own CEO, Mr. Taron Tong, will occasionally like pitch into me

with like content ideas. But he's always like, or just don't. I fully recognize that this is like not my world and you've been doing this for 20 years and I've been a fly on the wall watching you do it on the content side of things for two years. You know, yeah, whatever. And to his credit, occasionally the ideas are really good

and the dynamic for us is a little different. So I can't really feel that pressure, right? He's my boss but I'm also his boss. I'm my own grandpa, you know, like that whole thing, right? But I appreciate and respect when people can be a leader of a company but also recognize that they are not an expert in what all the people at that company do. Yeah, probably a very small percentage of them,

realistically. Dude, oh man, the bigger we get, the more I notice that. Yeah. Is like, I'll be like, like hey what are you working on and someone's like working on something I'm like cool. Even within my teams like what I'm often looking for is a strong and well reasoned argument not a thing that I necessarily premeditated because a lot of times it's like I have no idea but based on what you're saying is it like pretty obvious that you've done your

research and this like makes sense yeah okay? Okay, cool. Go for it. Yeah. With the camera ops, they'll be like, hey, what do you think of this angle? Because I know that if I say, you know, do this angle, I'm going to get cooked. Yeah. Because they know the angles better than I know the angles. Yeah. They're looking at the viewfinder.

But sometimes it is reasonable to ask because maybe they've been rushing or whatever and they just didn't really think about it. Yeah, maybe they were setting up all the gear while I've been kind of standing looking around or maybe I have an idea for how I want it to flow into the next shot or whatever and it's gotta be a collaborative process

but you gotta let experts cook. There's just no other way around it. collaborative process, but you've gotta let experts cook. There's just no other way around it. What the heck are we supposed to be talking about? Do you think, okay, you gotta, real talk, okay? One of my big things, right, is I have people around me that help keep me accountable, you know,

and help me not just lash out emotionally. Sometimes I do it anyway. Nice. But we've been taking some flack for making a video about a golden 50-90 at a time when other people are holding Nvidia accountable. Yeah, as if we're not. As if we didn't talk about this a month ago.

As if we don't have a long history. I actually compiled a list of times LTT held Nvidia accountable. It goes back almost 10 years and includes basically every major thing, Project Greenlight, GeForce Partner Program, when they turned off overclocking on their laptops and they blah blah blah. There's all kinds of things. Would it be an emotional and unnecessary response? And I'm talking to you guys as well. So, hit me up, float plane chat.

Can you relax? Okay, would it be an unnecessary and emotional response for me to do a video basically going, okay, here's what Nvidia is doing right now. The title I have in mind is, right now. The title I have in mind is, why is LTT silent about Nvidia's media manipulation? Despite not having been. And then basically the video lays out the many, many not silent times, you know, back when Hardware Unboxed was being bullied by Nvidia and Nvidia

was basically saying, cover RTX more favorably or we'll never see the card to you again. You know, do I have to lay this out because a lot of people don't seem to have a clue? I think you could, but I think your tone matters a lot. What if my tone was as deeply sarcastic as I have ever been in my life? Yeah, I think that wouldn't be good. Okay, let me pitch you. Let me pitch this. Let me pitch this. Oh, you wrote it already? Let me pitch this, okay?

This is one of the... this is just kind of how Linus thinks sometimes. I haven't written it already. Yeah, okay, so it's text. I have some notes. I have a couple notes. But I do have kind of a concept for it that I think... This is sometimes just how he thinks. That I think is really funny.

Okay, so... Of course. The title would be like, Why I've Stayed Silent About NVIDIA, and we've got like, you know... Oh, sorry, just... Nardella and Floatplane Chat said, made it a Float Plane exclusive.

Just so you know, and just so some of the audience knows, if he did that, it would be blood in the water like you've never seen. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, keep going. Yeah. Just in case there's any questions about that.

Yeah. So yeah, I'm thinking like with the duct tape across the mouth or something like that. Nice, good. Yeah, okay. So get that clickbait in there. So, so I made a wave of outrage over Nvidia's manipulative and coercive behavior toward their partners in the media. Many of you have been asking, why have I been silent? Yeah.

To answer that question, I guess I'll need to investigate Nvidia's history of behavior toward their partners in the media. And since I've been such an obedient little submissive for Nvidia, I'll have to learn about it. Okay, so you got to cut that bit. From the coverage of other media outlets. Oh, this one looks good. Yep, yep.

All right, cut that bit. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. So I'm imagining we Photoshop the channel icon and the channel I click on is actually LTT. Ah, okay. And then we do, did you ever watch the spooky fish episode of South Park way back in the day? It's from like season two or something. Basically there's a parallel universe and,

here hold on, let me see if I can, let me see if I can find this. Yes, here we go. The evil versions of all the boys look exactly the same, but just have a crappy beard. So I'm imagining, as I learn about all the things Nvidia has done over the years, we actually motion track a crappy goatee onto the

LTT videos that I'm like learning about it from and then we do a big reveal at the end where we like take off the goatee and we're like, wow, it was us all along. I'm not going to get away with this, am I? I think it's really funny though. I think you can do it. I think you've got to drop some of the wounded puppy stuff. I just want the B-roll shot of me being an obedient little submissive. Yeah, okay, maybe.

But I think- Now he wants it. It's funny. You're gross. The problem is you've got to keep it in the funny realm instead of the like, why is everyone mean to me realm? Oh, I- Because if it's the why is everyone mean to me realm, it's just, it's not gonna go-

Okay, I didn't give you the next line. So when I clicked the channel, I'm like, whoa, that guy and I could be brothers. Let's see what he has to say about the most recent fiasco about limiting review samples and drivers for the RTX 5060 series and then I kind of Watch a short clip from it. I'm outraged Anyway, so I was kind of thinking it'll be it'll be very tongue-in-cheek Or maybe we just won't do it. But I don't think it's a bad thing Necessarily because I and we talked about this recently,

where like, I think sometimes in moments like this it makes sense to just kind of have a open discussion with the audience. And I think a problem that we've been having, I've been talking about this literally for years at this point, a really big problem that this niche has been having for a while. And it's weird because for many, many years this was not a problem at all, but this has become a major problem over the last few years, is that if any reviewer is not saying the exact same thing as every single other reviewer. They are condemned. And it's not just us, I'm not just saying us. I have seen this with other creators as well.

That sucks, that is super bad. As an audience, you should not want that. That is horrible for you, and it's horrible for the creators. So once the video transitions into the more serious side, Coffee Kadachi, yes, that would be the plan. You know, I've got this kind of line, when I say anything positive about Nvidia,

I'm labeled a shill. When I say anything negative, I'm labeled a hater. In this polarized world, a person like me, who calls out good and calls out bad, ends up outcast by both camps. Is that really what we want? I don't think that's what we want. But you're making it about you again.

I think you should be talking about the industry. I'm literally responding to people being like, how can you say anything that is different from what other people are saying right now? How can I talk about this card, which actually I don't even, that's the really bizarre one, is a lot of the like, why are you covering Nvidia positively comments are on a lot of the like, why are you covering Nvidia positively?

Comments are on the video of this card where I kid you not the first line of it is mocking How the 5090 is overpriced? literally the very first line you don't even have to like You don't even have to make it past the midway point in the video, which I know that most people don't. Yeah. You have to make it to the first line. Yeah.

To know that we're taking the piss. I'm interested because we filmed a short that's not out yet at an internet cafe here in Taiwan. And the short opens with like, what the heck is a, cause this was the original reason why we went to this place nine years ago. What is an Nvidia certified LAN center? And it ends with effectively, they just spent a bunch of money.

Nice. But I am rather certain that people are gonna be like, oh, how are you covering this right now? And we're literally like, yeah, they just put their badge on the store if you buy enough GPUs, and that's it. We don't praise Nvidia's involvement at all. We're like, this is a really cool land center.

And what is the Nvidia part? They bought a lot of GPUs. So then how do you get that message across without, to your point, being a wounded puppy or talking about yourself? Because at the end of the day, the problem is about like, you know, here's what we're trying to do and here's why it matters and here's why you should probably care

and why just being in camp for this company or camp for this company or camp against this company is really, really, really, really bad. Because it is really, really, really bad. I wonder as well, like, a conversation that Linus and I have been having is just that like, I think we're looking down the barrel of PC hardware in general being a niche that is

following the population trend in most countries. It's getting older. There's not as many new entrants. I was having a conversation with some creators here, which is like, there aren't as many, there aren't that many younger PC hardware creators showing up at these events. Interesting. Like I was sitting around at a dinner

that was like an open invite to basically any PC hardware creators here, and most people had gray in their beards. Like, yeah. And I was like, hmm, this is interesting. It doesn't necessarily bode well for the future of this niche. And one of the things that doesn't bode well for the future of any niche,

unless it's a niche that's based around social interaction, and this is not one, this is a niche that is based around, ideally, objective product evaluation is drama and chaos and it's it's a problem because when if you think about if it's a video game let's go completely outside of this niche if it's a video game and you're a little bit interested in the video game and you go on to the subreddit for that video god why it's just on fire.

Yeah, don't do that. Never go to the subreddit for something you like. Are you more or less interested in that game now? Less. If anything, it's less. Like we're not, this isn't inviting. Here's my problem though,

and this is what I keep running into, is every time I tell myself, hey, I want to be a voice of positivity. I want to be excited about things. Something like terrible happens. Like it is it is legitimately not cool and very anti-consumer and I I blame all of the big players literally all of them. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, your key guys. I blame all of them for the fact that naming schemes are a cluster. They are, in my opinion, and this, so I'm making it very clear, this is allegedly, they

are intentionally misleading. Oh yeah. They intentionally obfuscate product information. Every launch. To make it easier to sell older generation hardware. Yep. I understand why they do it because if you can just not just not necessarily just older generation hardware but but lower end cheaper something less expensive.

And so how am I supposed to stay positive. Yeah like you don't I don, and that's the other thing. You can't be positive all the time. Like my whole, oh, if everything's on fire all the time, it's not very inviting community. Yeah, I'm gonna stand by in that statement, but you also just can't leave these companies doing horrible things alone.

We're reviewers, we need to point it out. But. So then back to, okay, how do I not be, how do I not address it? When I make a video that isn't even like positive, it's just about a thing. Yeah. And I'm not negative enough,

or I'm not on the right negative bandwagon, and I'm sitting here going like. That's tough. Y'all exhausting. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, like I And and you know what? It's it's a good comment, right? Like Linus you should just not care about the feedback at all and just like do your thing just you know

Make whatever whatever video you want. But It's it's not it's not that easy. It's not it's not that easy. It's not that simple. I wish that I didn't have to care at all what people think of the videos. If you're just like, yeah, Linus, just be you and we'll check out your contents. But I've always been someone who obsessively

reads the comments and tries to Tries to cater to the audience that is Literally you go to any YouTube Conference you go to any creator meetup. Hey, what's one of the keys to success? Know your audience interact with your audience understand Understand your audience and if the audience, you know and understand your audience. And if the audience wants to be up on this scummy behavior or this incredibly boring product or whatever,

I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place because if I make a video about a boring product, that's inherently a boring video. And if I don't make a video about this boring product, then I'm silent. and it's like, yo, huh. You know, I don't and so you have this like conflicting feedback, none of which is right because I promise you that, you know, people are not going to tune into that.

They don't, it doesn't resonate with them. Boredom doesn't sell. Yeah. And I wish I had, I wish I had solutions. I wish I had solutions here, but it's tough. Yeah, like my whole comment on the like, oh, the Nvidia LAN Center certification is just buying some GPUs.

That's at the very end of the short, because it's really boring. We didn't know the answer before we showed up. When we figured out the answer, we were like, oh, I mean, I guess we'll answer the question considering the question is at the beginning of the short, but it is boring, so we'll put it at the very end. By the way, I've lost the comment now,

but I'm gonna have to give this to you. This is my geek card. I don't get to carry it anymore. Because no, I did not realize that the beards on the South Park episode were a Star Trek reference. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh uh do I have to like throw this away? I didn't either. what I didn't either. What? I didn't either. Oh really? I don't think either of us get it. Get it out of here. Yeah. Well that's my, I mean that's my room key actually but. You don't need to go back.

I might need to. Nope. But my stuff's in there. Too bad. Okay. I have, and oh boy this is gonna upset some people. I have never watched the entire original series. Me neither.

I have seen bits and pieces. Me too. You know, I've seen enough, you know bits and pieces that I like very much get the vibe. I've seen full episodes even but I have not watched the original series. I've seen like the one good movie with the whales or whatever, but I was a child. I was a literal child. I don't remember anything other than I think there were whales in it. Yeah. Uh oh, oh no.

Heresy, oh no. We're just talking about how people shouldn't be mad all the time, then you just piss them all off. Okay, I'll watch it, I'll watch it, I'll watch it. I've actually been, I've been watching, like, old media. I finally watched Mad Max 2. So I have now seen Mad Max 2.

I have finally watched Highlander. There was another, and I'm going to pronounce this in a very specific way, there was another Linus that for reasons that maybe will become clear in the future, prompted me to watch those movies. So I have now watched them. I still have not watched the third Mad Max, which is the last part of my assignment. And then hopefully once that happens,

I will be able to talk about why someone named Linus felt that I needed to be aware of the cultural significance of these movies. I'm excited about that. There'll be something. That's all I'll say. So that could be maybe something that could, I don't know, who knows. I mean, you never know, right?

The world's crazy. World's crazy. Crazy bad sometimes, crazy good sometimes. Let's have some fun, you know? Yeah. Hey, by the way, you guys are probably wondering like what's up with this thing, this tower that's been between us the whole time.

So a lot of people, I think, didn't manage to pick up on this, even though I literally held up an invoice for it. But I bought this. Yeah, this was not a review sample or a gift. That was like a major part of that video. Or whatever, yeah. Oh, dude. You even talked about how to get it home and everything.

It's amazing. It's amazing what people can manage to not retain in the first 30 seconds of the video. I try not to let it bother me, but as you can tell, it ain't working. Anyway, so I bought this because, and again, a lot of people probably don't know this, but I skipped 40 series in effectively silent protest because no one really seemed to notice or care. What? I skipped 40 series.

What? Because of Nvidia's crappy pricing. I don't think so. You're an Nvidia shill. Thank you, thank you. You probably just said that. I'm ready for an upgrade, and I was like think so. You're in a video show. Thank you. Thank you. You probably just said that. I'm ready for an upgrade and I was like. I'm sure you had 40 90s in every system.

Hey, if I can get content out of it, then hey, if I can buy like the golden 50 90 and then I can also get some content out of it, then yeah, you know what? Screw it. Let's do the bougiest build and then I can also get some content out of it, then yeah, you know what? Screw it. Let's do the bougiest build so I could get like a series of videos out of it

and that'll help to absorb some of the ridiculous cost. Do you have any idea how much this thing costs? Did you say like eight grand? So there's a range. There's a range online. I found out during the handoff that our Procurement team was supposed to have been given a discount code that was supposed to make it closer to the lower end of the range And they just we didn't get it nice so I paid about eight thousand US dollars

For this GPU sick. Have you seen it in person? No It's not worth it And adding insult to injury the video didn't get a lot of views. Yeah, so it didn't But but but but but the plan the plan is still to it's still to you know do other content with it, so hopefully that'll help. My plan has been disrupted a little bit. Okay. Because James had a really good idea

for instead of me doing like a golden build or something like that, which realistically I was gonna water cool anyway, so like, what's the point of a heat sink with gold on it? But I kinda thought that would be funny in like a completely twisted eat the rich way, is if I buy a golden GPU, literally take all the gold off of it

and then put on a water block, and then I don't know, maybe I'll have to gold plate the water block myself or something, anyway. I just, I thought that'd be funny. I'm like That's edgy. I'm gonna leave that out. We're good. No, I'd like to hear it I'd say you could like hang it off the front of the case Yeah, wear it sure Not the way I meant that but yeah for sure James had a better idea. Okay. What if we take it to the tech mall?

Like have that guy or someone So I don't want to okay, you know what sure I'm gonna I'm gonna tease the premise I Went back to the tech mall Golden GPU in hand and I said, okay, I have- This is empty. I have the Sultan of GPUs. Who can build me the best throne for it? Whoa.

And we got- Wait, is it a competition? The quotation slash concept and design part is a competition. Okay, fair. And we ultimately chose a competition. Okay, fair. And we ultimately chose one builder. Okay.

To build the ultimate throne. I haven't seen it yet. Oh, it's in there right now. It's in there right now. Dang! Okay. Nice. So theoretically, this is my new gaming PC.

In here. I haven't seen it yet. So we'll have that video coming Hmm I Recently became aware at the time of picking up the system of a challenge that may change the concept somewhat But I'm gonna save that for the video. I Might not get to keep my golden GPU, is all I'll say about that. So guys, stay tuned, this is gonna be pretty fun.

I think that if the concept art is anything like the finished system, this is gonna be one of the coolest systems we have ever shown on the channel. And I hope I'm not hyping this too much. They must not have had a ton of time. The builders messaged me in the middle of the night saying, hey, we're still up, we're pulling an all-nighter working on this system.

So they went hard. All right. They went pretty cray cray. I'm pretty excited. It's gonna be pretty cool. It's gonna be pretty cool. I hope that we're allowed to just do cool things. Nope, illegal. Yeah, I don't know. Arrested, put in jail.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, I think one of my biggest pushes is we can and should stand up to bad practices from companies. And we have, and other creators should as well. But I don't think that should mean that we have to stop making this a fun niche to be in, instead of a niche that just screams all of the time. Yeah.

And I think that's important to remember because if we do become a niche that just screams all the time, we are just begging for our death to be accelerated. That's it. I like building gaming PCs and stuff. Yeah, yeah. I think it's fun and cool.

I think we all started doing this for fun, and now we're just angry screaming redditors, and that's like not cool. And we should be angry and scream sometimes. I gotta try to keep this measured, because I'm not trying to say we shouldn't do that. And each creator should find their own way to stand up against Really negative crappy business practices from these companies Yeah, I never go full reddit though. Yeah. Yeah, there's there's a difference agreed half those. Yeah. All right What are we supposed to be doing? I don't know probably sponsors or one of our 47 announcements All right, what are we supposed to be doing?

I don't know, probably sponsors? Or one of our 47 announcements? Yeah, let's do sponsors. We'll do sponsors, okay, yeah. Wow, we have not done all of our topics yet. No. The show is brought to you today by Thermaltake. It's not a hot take that this immersion-cooled PC that Luke and Sammy checked out is pretty badass

but Sorry, it's not really meant to hit the market quite yet But what is coming soon our thermal takes mine cube AIO coolers and their project edge CPU fans We went to take a look this week during Computex and some pretty neat stuff their patented mine cube coolers have four Yes, my friends four 720 by 720, four inch LCD screens, all able to show unique visuals or real-time PC info. The goal for Thermaltake here was to make it easy

to customize and control what you see with their brand new software, which comes with an AI tool that helps generate an entire story to play out across all the screens. Good Lord. They also showed off their Project Edge fans, which also have LCD screens on them that are linkable showing real-time information, pictures, GIFs, and more. Plus, with the magnetic connection, daisy-taining them together and creating a cool seamless

design is a breeze. They also showed off some new colors for their popular TR-100 Mini-ITX case, now available in a future dusk and gravel sand. Do you put it on your lawn? Sorry, sorry. And they even added two brand new form factors to the line, the Micro-ATX TR-200 and the ATX TR-100. Both come with a front-loaded PSU design and support for a 6-inch LCD display. Man, these guys really like their displays. Who can blame them though? Screens?

They're kinda cool. Everything is set to come out sometime this year, so head over to Thermaltake.com and keep an eye out for when they're available. Thanks again to Thermaltake for being the sole sponsor of this week's special Computex 2025 edition of the WAN Show, or as we call it, the Taiwan show. Aha. Nope, nothing. Wow. Not even, thanks Andy.

Maybe the Final Fantasy one. Please don't. Please don't, that won't be necessary. Okay, what do you wanna talk about? Wait, that's it? We just have one sponsor? That's it. Nice.

Do we wanna do some of the announcements? We can do, well let's do whatever Dan tells us. There's so many of them. Dan, you're in charge. Why don't you get through a couple announcements and then we'll just try and go through all of these topics because there's a couple. Announcements. An LTT store first. Dan, you're gonna have to click links and show things I guess. Are you on it? He's on it. He's on it like a bonnet. Like a hood. Like a hoodie. Ah, Like a hood. Like a hoodie. Ah, that's pretty good. We're launching a run of our original hoodie blanks for purchase for the very first time. Custom made with 100% cotton for comfort and a French terry interior to keep things breathable because we couldn't find a hoodie out there that felt like how we think a hoodie should feel. Available now in black and brick, a darker red. You can get yours

today at lmg.gg slash blank hoodie. We are also announcing pre-tariff pricing returning to LTT Store US for commuter backpacks and magnetic cable management. This weekend on the US site, global customers, you are already getting pre-tariff pricing after conversion, so technically this is also for you. So commuter bags and magnetic cable management, now's a great time to pick those up if you are in the US. We've got this, yeah, we've got that all on lttstore.com. If you guys want to use one of those items to send a merch message, hey, merch messages are the way to interact with the show. We don't do Twitch bits or super chats. We like that if you throw your money at the

screen, you actually get something in return when you send a merch message. So all you got to do is go to lttstore.com, add something to your cart, and you'll see a box when we're live that will give you a space to type up a merch message. It'll go to producer Dan, who I guess is gonna have to turn on his own camera. There it is, nice. It doesn't work as well when I can't turn him off while he's still leaving. I know, I know, it's terrible.

Yeah. You gotta do it to yourself. Kinda breaks the vibe, anyway. So it'll go to producer Dan, Dan who will reply to it, or send it to someone to help answer your question, or will even curate it for me and Luke. So Dan, do you want to hit us with a couple of merch messages to show the folks how it works?

I'm not entirely sure I have any tonight. None. Really? This is what happens when I don't mention the merch for the first hour of the show. All right, why don't we jump into another topic then, shall we? Yeah, I'd jump into another topic. Something might've failed on the back end.

Should we talk about something really cool? Yeah. Let's talk about German courts getting it right. Yeah. This is awesome. Do you want to read the topic for a change? Sure. I gotta find it first, give me one sec.

Uh oh, our merch message is broken. Is that what you've been tappity-tapping at? Uh, no, I've been tappity-tapping at a lot of other things. I got it. We're back on now. All good. Oh, everything okay? No.

A district court in Cologne has ordered Netflix to reimburse a customer 200 euros for failing to get the customer's consent for subscription price increases. Netflix increased its prices by over 50% between December 2017 and May of 2022. The price increases themselves were not condemned by the court, rather the lack of informed consent. That's the particular issue. A ruling from the Berlin Regional Court in 2021 found a provision in Netflix's user agreement that granted the company the right to increase prices at will and without the subscribers' agreement was unfair and thus invalid.

A higher... yeah, everything you sign is not technically binding if it's just BS, which is... weird, but probably good. Because nobody reads that stuff anyways. A higher court upheld this ruling two years later. While Netflix has presented German users with a dialogue box, I guess, to agree to more recent price increases, it appears that this may not actually track and just assume that the user agreed if they don't unsubscribe from the service. Whoa. This means that if you didn't use Netflix for a couple months, or your kid clicked through

the dialogue on your account and you never saw it, you'll be billed at the increased rate without consent. Yeah. Interesting. And that's very common, just to be clear. Not necessarily the kid thing, I don't know about that, it might be, but the... Oh my god, dude. The people just having accounts that they don't use is like, huge.

The kid thing is definitely a thing, I promise you. Not surprised. The case clears the way for other German users to file complaints, and the Consumer Rights magazine... Don't even try. Stiftung Warrantest? You tried. Yeah. Butchered that.. Okay, well the entire comment section is just that now. That's better than other things. Luke, are you not even German with a last

name like La Freniere? I mean we have a Nvidia box on screen, we might as well take some flack off. Yeah. And I'm actually like just as German as I am French. Life is strange. Anyways, in a separate case, the Hanover Administrative Court has confirmed a judgment stating that cookie burners- Hold on, hold on. Let's talk about this first one first. Okay.

This is sick. Yeah, it's great. This is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Why do you just get to unilaterally? I do understand legally why you are allowed to unilaterally increase the price of a subscription service because technically every month is a new contract.

So you can just, I don't know. Yeah, it's a new contract now. And so if you stay subscribed, you agree to the new contract. No, that shouldn't be how things work. And if you want to negotiate a new contract, in my opinion, you should have to cancel everyone's contract and then sign them up again. You should have to go through

the whole sign up process again. I guarantee you, if that was how it worked. Companies would stop doing that immediately. Companies would immediately not doup process again. I guarantee you, if that was how it worked. Companies would stop doing that immediately. Companies would immediately not do this ever again. They would not raise prices. They would set a price that is actually sustainable and then they would not touch it. For the love of God, not touch it.

And that doesn't mean that they can't increase pricing. They absolutely can. But it would be on future signups. So if you get grandfathered in at a low rate, if you get a low rate, you get a promotional rate or you get whatever, then that's it, like you got it. That was the deal that you signed up for.

If they change the deal after, then that literally isn't the deal you signed up for. Quite literally. This is so validating because I feel like I've talked about this so many times. I freaking love it. Like there's immense lock-in from payment processors, but it's not even because it's that hard to, on a technical level, swap in and swap out payment processors.

The problem is that all your legal payment agreements are in that other payment processor and Like Stripe talks about how they can handle migrations and stuff, but it's really not that clean and You start actually talking about it. It's a lot more complicated and it's it's easier in some scenarios and blah blah blah, but there's things that different payment processors will do to try to increase this level of lock-in and nobody really changes the payment processors pretty much ever if they have subscriptions because the chance that these people won't come back not just because they

might have forgotten that they have the subscription because you're re-asking them if it's worth it. Friction. And just re-asking them if it's worth it. Friction. And just re-asking them if it's worth it, you will lose a ton of people. A ton. I love it. By the way, we did get a detail wrong in that VPN story last week apparently.

Sure. When they said they didn't acquire the existing customers, they actually didn't acquire the monthly subscribers either. Oh, okay. So I'm a lot more okay with it. So they had a bunch of free people who were obfuscated in the P&L by the paying customers and when they bought it, they didn't get the paying customers

and weren't told about the free people. And the free deals were available through like third party websites and stuff. So we're like not obviously apparent. Get them at all. They should have had no users. Right. So.

Hello? Oh, hi Dan. He's back. Who, who dropped? Was it me? Or you? You, I think. Okay. Are we, are we gonna come back? Yeah, there you are. Because if it was us that dropped, you would have kept streaming, right? I thought I kept streaming and just lost you guys. Okay. Yeah, there you are. Because if it was us that dropped, you would have kept streaming, right?

I thought I kept streaming and just lost you guys. Oh, okay. Cool. Oh, no. All right, have fun. We're back. We're back. We're back.

Okay, cool. That's pretty neat. Hey, guys. What's up? Cool. So apparently the last thing they heard was zero users. So long story short, yeah, basically by cutting those people off who in their mind they were doing a favor to by allowing them to continue to use the service they hadn't even acquired

users for for free. They were like being bros. I don't like how any of this went down. The whole thing is like sucky. But that is more bad on the company that sold. Yes, versus the company that actually acquired the VPN. And it adds some nuance to the situation that I felt we should definitely follow up on. Oh yeah, that's fair.

Yeah. All right, cool. This is unrelated to the topic, but if we want to correct things from last week, I have something to correct as well. should definitely follow up on. Oh yeah, that's fair. Yeah. All right, cool. This is unrelated to the topic, but if we want to correct things from last week, I have something to correct as well. Oh, what now? I had said, this is important.

Okay. Like I gotta come true with the audience here. Come true? Okay. Is that not a phrase? Is that what I'm saying? So why don't you correct that first? Is there something close to that? a phrase? Is that not a saying? So why don't you correct that first? Is there something close to that?

Be real. Maybe that's it. Come clean. Come clean, come clean. That's the one. Come clean. Yeah. I gotta come clean with the audience here.

That's not how that works. The clean up is after. Anyways. I lied last week. Did you? Yep. Not intentionally, but I was wrong. Well, but it's not a lie. Okay.

I know, I was making fun of you. Dan, hit his doesn't know thing. Yeah. I said that I had a character in Final Fantasy VI. Oh. And I only thought I did. You thought you had a character. Because I've. Oh. And I only thought I did. You thought you had a character. Because I've done some.

You don't have any characters? Are you high? The whole game is like that you have tons of characters. No, and I don't even remember their name because I renamed them. Terra. There we go. Terra Branford.

Sure. Imperial Magitech. When do they talk about last names? How do you know their last name? Why would I not? I don't think I've ever seen their last name. Why do you think it's called in the whole game? Chigaro Castle.

OK, yeah, sure, fair. So what do you think Edgar's last name is, smart guy? Branford's castle. I just. When did they talk about her last name? Pathetic. OK, well, I renamed some characters while I was literally don't yeah, I just have to like Know the canon. Okay, sure. It's like my favorite game of all time. So I just like know things like okay. Yeah

Sure. Um, so I had renamed some characters. So when he asked me if I had Tara Tara, I thought I did. did, but I had a different character. Okay, so what character did you even have? I don't... Setzer or something? How could you possibly... I didn't know the names. How could you possibly think the old Bushido guy with the mustache is named Tara? That's not the old Bushido guy with the mustache oh is named Tara that's not the old Bushido guy you're wrong about your own game the gambler sorry ah ah you possibly I only know that because that's one of the characters I didn't rename

how could you possibly think the white-haired gambler dude is named Terra. Honestly, I never, ever had them in my party. Ever. And I forgot anything about them at all. And I had just gotten them. But isn't the iconic opera scene and everything and like the, what do you mean you just got them? No, you got them in the World of Balance. Oh, no, no, no.

In the World of Ruin, I had just gotten them. And I never had them in my party ever in World of Battles. I can't believe I just brain farted. Look, before the show started, okay, I had to go back to my room to get my headphones. I literally went up instead of down. And then literally didn't realize it and tried my key card on someone else's room

before I went, oh my God, I'm on completely the wrong floor. Just to give you some idea of where my brain is at. But yeah, I have Tara now. Okay. Are you sure? Yeah. Okay. Actually in the party. What color is her hair?

White? I don't know. How can you play, how can you look at characters for this long and not know what they look like? Do you even, are you even playing the game or are you just having an AI do it? I don't think it should count. Pink or something?

If he doesn't know what the main character. When you have her go trance, it's definitely like white and pink. Okay, anyway. I know the blitzes, but I don't know the character's names or what they look like. There you go. Okay. I can do the blitz inputs by memorization.

I love that I literally lent him the SNES controller to play this game so he could have the authentic experience and an adapter. And he went and he took his hand and he went, I know the Blitzes and he used the arrow keys. I played with the SNES controller at home a little bit. I didn't want to take it traveling because I don't want to break it. It doesn't matter. They're cheap, dude. It doesn't matter.

Okay. You can also just not carry it. That's fine. You can just play not carry it. That's fine. You can just play with your keyboard like a pleb. Truthfully, the first time I actually beat the game, because I didn't beat it when I owned it as a kid. I was a kid and I was too dumb. And then I lost my Super Nintendo

when I moved between my parents' houses. I didn't have it anymore. And so the first time I actually beat the game was on ZS NES on a computer. So I 100% used a keyboard for that. Oh it's actually way easier to input the blitzes on a keyboard. I could see that. For whatever reason like the most powerful ones are incredibly easy though. That's just like going in a circle. That's a remaster

thing. Oh and they're they're much harder on the controller. Okay. Like I said, they're really easy on a keyboard. Well, I mean, but one of them is literally just one way around the circle, the other one's the other way around the circle. Yeah, but if you get pressing it wrong. Or no, it's not the other way around the circle, it's just the continuation of the circle.

If you get pressing it wrong, like if you accidentally start at an angle, it's a lot easier to screw up on a D-pad that literally doesn't have diagonals. Right. Right? Because it's just across D-pad. So you have to nail it. And you will screw it up for... I have been annihilated because I kind of screwed up a lot of the balance of the original game. Like the sword techs or whatever, Bushido abilities.

They were called sword tech. That wasn't a brain fart on the original. The Bushido abilities, you can just use anyone you want now. It's like you had to wait before. So if you were playing in the active battle mode, you'd be getting hit while you waited for him to queue up Quadra Slice and stuff. Yeah, so like.

I never really run him anyways. Ah, he sucks. The weird thing for me right now is I have way harder of a time with the random encounters than I do with bosses. I wipe bosses, no problem. Often two, three turns in done took very little damage if nothing And then I'll just die to random encounters by getting like one shot out of nowhere Like first move random encounter characters dead

What and this is like happened multiple times. Have you considered that you may be a bad gamer? I have. I've never lost to a boss in the game so far. I have party wiped multiple times. To just like random encounter trash. Which is so annoying because it's less likely that I saved recently. Wild. Alright, why don't we talk about the other cool thing?

In a separate case, the Hanover Administrative Court has confirmed a judgement stating that cookie banners must not be designed to encourage users to consent and that website operators must offer a clearly visible reject all button on the first level of cookie consent banners if the banner includes an accept all button. That's huge for me. That's so cool. The judgment came after Lower Saxony's data protection officer demanded a redesign of a media company's cookie banner because it didn't obtain effective informed and voluntary consent before setting cookies and processing personal information. The company disagreed and claimed that the data protection authority was not responsible for monitoring illegal provisions concerning cookies. The court found that rejecting cookies on the banner in question was much more complicated than accepting them and that the banner used misleading wording such as

optimal user experience and accept and close while the term consent was completely missing. user experience and accept and close while the term consent was completely missing. That's super cool. That's just awesome. Cause like sometimes, oh man, there are so many bad cookies. Sometimes there are cookies that do enhance website experiences.

Maybe we would be, no, go ahead. Almost never do I care though. And I just reject everything. But it's still, but it's still, this is so, I love it. Yeah, that's great. I hate that it's only gonna be in Germany. Yep.

Yep. But hopefully, you know, these types of things, hopefully they bleed out over time. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, Apple is certainly doing absolutely everything in their power to slow roll any of the antitrust and regulatory stuff That's hit them over the last little bit man fortnight is back on the app store and

It's pretty crazy our discussion question for this topic is Is Apple the most childish corporation on the planet or does that award go to someone else because? Wow, have they ever engaged in some like peak level malicious compliance over this whole third party payment processors on the App Store thing. It's almost like the only reason they ever cared about any of it was so that they wouldn't have to compete and they could take their enormous cut acting as the sole monopolistic payment processor on this platform. I feel like there's gotta be worse ones.

This is just the one that's like most in our orbit. It's just hilarious. Yeah. After Apple lost the court case regarding in-app third party purchases, Epic submitted Fortnite for approval to the App Store. Apple, this is so funny. This is so Apple too. Oh man. Apple refused to either accept or decline the application,

leaving it in limbo. Because if they declined it, well then, you know, they'd get in trouble. But like, I don't know, do we have to accept it? I mean, we're like, we're looking at it, I don't know. US District Judge, Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who by the way is an absolute Chad from everything that I've seen about her, wrote in an order that Apple has to accept or decline the application. And this is a quote, Apple is fully capable of resolving this issue without further briefing

or a hearing. Based. Apple has since accepted the application and Fortnite is now back on the App Store. Huge. For real though, actually like super, okay, I feel like I always have to disclaim this, right? Cause not a fan of everything Tim Sweeney does, all right? But this genuinely benefits every Oh, this was massive developer. Yeah for iOS. I'll also give them a show

I don't like fortnight I think I've played it one time ever and did not enjoy it and never played it again I mean in fairness for tonight changes a lot so you might like it more now I think they're doing probably like a lot of stuff where you can make all kinds of new game modes and stuff But look cool., the point is... Either way... The point is be open-minded, okay? Try anything twice.

It's currently number one in adventure games on the App Store and already has over 20,000 ratings and has been up for like days. So clearly doing pretty well. Yeah. like days, so clearly doing pretty well. Yeah, as Jamesh says, yes, Sweeney is doing this for the future of games, which is like his company's future, you know? I think a lot of it is like personal vendetta. We're just benefiting from it, which is great.

It's a huge win for everyone, and realistically, he's one of the few company leaders who has the money, and not just the money, but the absolute iron balls to do this. Because Apple is a vindictive company. If you step out of line, Very Nvidia-esque. They will never engage with you again.

To Nvidia's credit, they actually do let bygones be bygones eventually. They, we were blackballed for two years over the Hard Run box thing. Yeah, we'll see. And we are officially un-blackballed now. We could be blackballed again, but. I'm really wondering how much of it was just like,

clear the field before 5000 Series comes out. And then who cares after that? No, I think it was more a specific person who was asked hurt. Yeah. Yeah that's my theory. We'll see how things go in the next like six months. I'm reserving judgment until... yeah. There's been some bad that I don't even think is not super public yet. It's not mine to release. Oh. Yeah. Oh no. Oh yeah.

Like real bad. More? Okay, why don't I talk about something good while he types that up. SteamOS moves one step closer to a wider release with the new update. Valve has released SteamOS 3.7.8 which comes with official support for third-party PC handhelds. This is so cool so you could just go install it on your ally or your IONEO or whatever along with a bevy of other upgrades. This

is the first version of the software to offer an official recovery image with explicit support for installation on devices with AMD hardware, okay, so not just anything just yet, and an NVMe drive, although Valve does specify that it is targeted towards handheld devices and is not final. So you can basically install it on like whatever, as long as you've got AMD hardware and an NVMe drive. There's also explicit installation instructions

for the Legion Go and ROG Ally. Is it the year of the Linux desktop actually though this time? This is so cool. Other upgrades include new Mesa graphics drivers base, Bluetooth mic support and desktop mode, still no gaming mode, battery management tools, and the ability to turn a Steam Deck- turn on a Steam Deck via a Bluetooth controller, which was previously only possible on the OLED. So this is super cool if you have just like a Steam Machine in your living room.

Remember when they used to call them Steam Machines? So if you just have one as like a living room console, you can just use your Bluetooth controller to be like, boop, turn my Steam. Ah! I'm so excited. I'm so excited. And I'm excited for competition. Look at the way Microsoft has allegedly

Woken up and is like, you know Allegedly partnering with a suits on the ally to and you know trying to make windows a better like gaming platform like Let's go competition. It's always good. Yeah. Hell yeah. Literally competition is always better than not competition. I Think if there's a time that competition was worse, I guess if you had like a super fragmented market and then like, like, okay, I think there's a, there's probably a middle ground.

There's a middle ground. No, no, I'm even thinking businesses. Okay, so, so imagine a world, okay, you don't want there to be one bank or one insurance company because that's terrible, because then there's no competition. But you also don't want there to be 10,000 banks and 10,000 insurance companies

because those will be very small companies and those types of institutions need scale in order to absorb the sometimes large one-time losses that they can experience. There's a middle ground. I think there's some debate there on the bank side of things. No, dude, when you have like a thousand tiny banks, it's much easier for there to be a bank run because it can be in like a very localized spot.

When you have Omega banks. Well, no, this is bad. They cause recessions due to bad practices. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm saying that more is not always better. Sure, but you're not saying that infinite competition of infinite parties is good, you're saying that competition is always good.

Is that what I said? I don't remember my exact wording. You said competition's always good. I said it's always better. Yeah. But that doesn't have to mean that there are thousands and thousands of players competing sure I'm just saying there's a middle ground of like like like peak competition goodness That's all I'm saying. I think we do this as a company. I know I do this so I'm not trying to exclude myself I think sometimes we're like we get and this is why I say I don't know all the time. So I'm 100% on board with this.

We're so worried about people just taking crap that we say and twisting it. That we run around in so many circles that we end up losing the plot part way through. Oh man. We're just saying black and red is a cool color combination, that's all. That's all. We like just saying black and red is a cool color combination. That's all.

We like it for gaming PCs. Who made their uniforms? Aren't they like still around? Hugo Boss. Yeah. And super famous. Hold on. I don't want to get that wrong.

I don't want to get that wrong. Very fashionable. Nazi uniforms. I think it was Hugo Boss. Yes. I think it was Hugo Boss. Yes, Hugo Boss apologized for Nazi past. Yeah, okay, okay, yep, there he goes. Yeah, so Hugo Boss. By the way... Really? Yeah. I saw it. Like, there's no belief here. I saw it. He showed me.

He's gonna deal with it in his own way or whatever. How can they be actually that stupid? I think is the question. But this is my, like, I don't know, man. We'll see. We'll see over the next while. When I was digging up all the times that we've been in the game, I was like, I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and

I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna

go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna go in. But this is my like, I don't know man, we'll see, we'll see over the next while. When I was digging up all the times that we've criticized NVIDIA in the past, I came across some stuff that I had forgotten about. And one of them was an LMG clip where I, I basically came out and I was like, I no longer believe they are playing 4D chess. I believe they're idiots.

Past Linus, smart guy. Eye, beard. I saw that and yeah. I saw that and genuinely like kind of laughed because it was just so dumb. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And like the timing of it.

It's terrible. Holy dude. Hey, more good news though. Yeah. Remember that NAS company that I invested in? Yeah. Remember how people were like hating on the launch and the comments were all like,

this is pointless, no one would ever buy this. If you're excited about this, you should feel bad. Remember how they had a really, really great launch and lots of people gave them a bunch of money? Want to hear one of the cool things that they are already doing with that money? Yeah. ZFS Any Raid sponsored by Eshtec, so that's the the NAS company that I made the small investment in. This is so cool. Earlier this week, dude, I have wanted to talk about this so hard because I have known for a while because they basically immediately,

when their first couple days of sales were bonkers, they were like, oh my God. Like, there's stuff that we had on the roadmap for like the future that we could just immediately start fixing because there's these projects that are just like super cool, but just not funded. So people can't work on them. And we could just do this cool stuff.

Dude, oh, I've wanted to talk about this. Basically since they're freaking went out from cover, whatever, whatever, blue cover wanted to talk about this. Basically since they freaking went out from cover, whatever, whatever, blue cover, whatever it's called when like a startup stops being stealth, unstealth mode, whatever. There's a term for it, doesn't matter. The point is, earlier this week, Eshtec, the creators of HexOS, investment disclosure,

introduced to the world. ZFS AnyRAID, developed by Clara Inc., sponsored by Eshtec. ZFS AnyRAID will introduce two new pool layouts, AnyRAID Mirror and AnyRAID Z1. AnyRAID Mirror will be available first and will ensure that all data will be written to two different disks in pools of more than two disks of differing sizes. So this is a little bit out of order but the point is you can raid disks in ZFS so so so raid Z not

like hardware raid like software at raid Z like ZFS so you can you can create pools with differing disks. And you were always able to do that, but there would be a huge loss in total capacity. You would basically go lowest common denominator. So if I had a 10 terabyte drive and a two terabyte drive, and I RAID Z1'd them or whatever, whatever. I think technically RAID Z1 is not a mirror

even though it kind of operates like a mirror if you just have two drives, don't worry about it. The point is if I used them, I would get a total of four terabytes of usable capacity out of my 12 terabytes. That's not a great experience. So, any RAID Z1 will take the same concept and features as ZFS RAID Z1, so where you can

lose any one drive, and it will add support for mixed drive sizes. This is so cool. So how much space can we gain? Here's some examples. We have a pool with a 4 terabyte drive, a 6 terabyte drive, and an 8 terabyte drive. So we are, this is some mix and match here, alright? Okay, check this out. Wait, I can't screen share.

Dan, Dan, can you show them the table? On it. So in mirror, so this is a traditional mirror. I can't see that, Andy. In a traditional mirror, we would get 10 terabytes only. Out of our total, what is this, 12 plus 8, 20, out of our 24 terabytes. That is an awful amount of storage to give up to parity.

Okay? In new, any RAID mirror, we get 12 terabytes. Okay, that's not a lot more. But as you can see on our table that Dan maybe has on the thing, I can't tell. You can see on our table that if we add a 4 terabyte drive, we actually get half of the capacity, whereas with the old mirror there would be no change. Okay, so a little bit exciting. Here's where things get really cool in Raid Z1 versus any Raid Z1 our pool capacity goes from literally half Okay, 12 terabytes to 16 terabytes out of our initial 24 and then if we add 4 terabytes we get 2 and a half terabytes instead of

Okay, actually that works out a little bit better on the other one. The point is more! The point is more. When is it coming? Eshtec says, they won't even say soon, but they will keep the community updated as the project progresses and hits key milestones. I am pretty excited. Getting more of your user space out of Mishmash of drives is a very consumer friendly feature that has pretty much no benefit whatsoever to enterprise customers who are just always using matching drives which is why this has never been worked on. And just like how a lot of people were like oh like as a home lab enthusiast this isn't necessarily something that I would want.

Sure. Cool. This caters to not necessarily home lab enthusiasts as well, where it's like, this is just what I've got, and I wanna make something out of it. Yeah. So this is, in my opinion, this is a very, like, informed thing for them to back early.

Super cool. I think it makes a lot of sense. Super cool, it's for people who are just, you know, building their first Jellyfin server. Yeah. Who are doubly. I've got some old desktops that have been in the garage for a few years that have some drives in it. Let me throw these in here and do what I can.

Super excited for this. Sick. And I'm super excited to see them taking that initial money that they got from their, from their like alpha, you know, hey, trust us, we're going to do cool stuff with this, like launch, and then actually doing cool stuff with it. Just because I'm starting to see this already. No, we are not saying that nothing else can do this. No, but ZFS This was not a feature of

ZFS and so that's what's really exciting is you get all the ZFS goodness, but also mix-and-match Awesome Awesome. Yes. I know drobo existed ages ago. That's not the point The point is and there's yeah other ones Awesome, yes I know Drobo existed ages ago. That's not the point. The point is... And there's other ones. CFS. One thing, we have until your cutoff that you defined 18 minutes.

We have until your face. 18 minutes. I'm good, whatever. I'm already checked out of the hotel. Um, nerd. Yeah. And I was on top. Well, we can go a little longer.

We'll go a little longer. All right. I, we'll, we'll do our best. Okay. We'll do our best. We always do our best. Hey, do you wanna, do you wanna go through the, the Computex roundup from someone not Computex?

Apparently it's supposed to be wacky stuff. So Dan, do you wanna just like pop them up on screen in sync with us? We'll go through in order. Yeah, depends how fast you are. Let's go up to the dock, Dan. All right, so I'm gonna click the first one. just like pop them up on screen in sync with us. We'll go through in order. Yeah, depends how fast you are. All right, so I'm gonna click the first one. It's a Pulsar X Noctua mouse.

Okay, 100%, I saw this and just thought someone was trolling with like AI models. I didn't think this was real. Oh yeah. What? I saw it in person, it's real. Are they actually gonna like sell these? Or was it a... What part of real do you not understand sir? That Thermaltake oil case thing? Yeah. They've had a different, dramatically different iteration of it every year. I don't know if that's

ever gonna be for sale. It's... I love going and seeing what they're currently doing. I don't know if they're ever gonna sell it. We'll see. It weighs about 20 grams more than the regular, I forget what model of mouse this is, Feynman or something like that, hold on. Yeah, the Feynman mouse. The weight distribution felt a little different to me as well.

It's got a fan in it, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's probably gonna feel a little bit different. I definitely had some ideas for a V2. Right now the fan is just on. And I was like, oh, it'd be kinda cool if it had like a moisture sensor

so that it only turns on if your hands are actually sweaty. Cause sometimes I'm a pretty warm boy, but other times, in the middle of the night in particular, I get to be a pretty cold boy. You have PWM it basically. You know those like the single button that just cycles through memory sensitivities? It may be controllable.

I'm not sure actually if you look. It is controllable. OK, so it's controllable, but it's always on yeah, yeah Anyway, it's pretty cool. It's pretty light. It's like 60 something grams. It's not bad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, pretty cool. Okay next up 3000 watt PS use More than one brand was showing off power supplies that were 3000 watts or more. Basically AI. All right, let's move on.

Inwin unveiled whatever this is. They say this case is trophy inspired. It is over a meter tall and will support full size 50 series GPUs. I should certainly hope so. Imagine it didn't. Yep. In wins back with another signature case.

They do that. They do that. And apparently it weighs like 40 kilos or something like that. Nice. I don't remember the number. Don't quote me on that. But apparently it weighs a lot. I was talking to someone from our team who saw this in person. I didn't actually catch this short circuit the thermal rate frozen creator

Okay, okay this actually looks extremely legit dude AMD Strix Halo is, I swear, the coolest CPU in the last, I don't know, 10 years. I can't think of anything cooler in that timeframe. Yeah. I get Apple's M silicon, it's really cool. But like on the PC side, dude. I interpreted it that way.

It is so cool. Like that is a gaming PC in Alex's hands that is capable of like playing black myth Wukong. Yeah and The fact that the remote right is getting into PCs. I mean, obviously they know the cooling for PCs. So like why not? But this looks awesome Oh, I don't know. I guess investment disclosure, since framework also makes a Strix Halo thing. Oh, okay. But like, that's the... Sure.

Okay, I don't know the right way to handle this, because that seems dumb. Like, why am I bringing up framework if all I'm saying is that something else looks awesome? No, it's good. Well, yeah, it's good for framework, but is that actually good for the audience? I'm not 100% sure. Probably not. But it's good for framework, but is that actually good for the audience? I'm not 100% sure. Probably not. But it's good for framework and it's the law. Got him.

I love it. You legally have to advertise your framework. I think that's hilarious. I genuinely think that's very funny. Like I, that is thoroughly entertaining to me. In other news, hey do you need a monitor on your CPU cooler? Because there's a lot of them. Wait is this real? The first one? The first one's not real, right? I don't think so.

It looks like a tablet. Is this real? Is the Zygmatech one real? Do you know, Dan? No idea. It slots into the Zygmatech pump by sliding into what looks like an alien's shoulder socket. Okay, apparently it's real

I did not catch this that it wow that boy that is something that makes Cooler masters and thermal takes look downright reasonable Lee and Lee also has a curved display on their AIO check this out. I Don't Lee also has a curved display on their AIO. Check this out. I don't. Hey, sequel to the all screen PC. Let's go. I guess. I just, I think the, yeah, I don't know. I don't want to be, I don't want to be too negative after spending a significant part of the show talking about how we need to be more

positive. But stuff like that makes me feel like we're running out of ideas. I mean maybe it's just not for me. Didn't all of Computex kind of feel like we're running out of ideas? It sure did. It was a this was Knock Twist booth was super cool. Their evaporative thermosiphon cooler if If it performs anywhere near what they think they can achieve, it will be a remarkable piece of kit at a astronomical price, probably. So there's some innovation there. Seasonic, I liked.

But like basically they're just like fixing someone else's problem, you know? So it's hard to get excited about that. It's like, oh this card no one can afford won't blow up anymore if I add this thing. That isn't out yet. Yeah. Cool. that isn't out yet. Yeah cool. ASUS has an ergonomic keyboard with a split in the middle. Okay. That is not an ergonomic keyboard that is just a keyboard that separates in the middle but I think people do still categorize that as

ergonomic. Really? Because of your shoulder rotation. Okay. Yeah. Alright. So it's not ergonomic in all ways but it's ergonomic for your shoulder rotation. Okay. Yeah. All right. So it's not ergonomic in all ways, but it's ergonomic for your shoulder rotation. Keyboards like this have existed for a long time. There was many of them at the show. I'll allow it. The Silverstone Retro case is legitimately cool. Okay, this was actually cool,

but it's not a new idea, that's for sure. Specifically an old one. It looks sick though. I genuinely really like it. Yeah. That's for sure Specifically an old one. It looks sick though. Uh I Genuinely really like it. Yeah, and Unlike the first gen one it gave more thought to like cooling and putting modern hardware in it and so yeah like you can you can really put a top-of-the-line gaming machine in this and build a sleeper without doing any of the actual like Fabrication work of building a sleeper. This looks amazing.

I wonder if this would be a theft deterrent. Like if you did up your setup, like retro style, and put like, if you 3D printed a bigger bezel on your monitor, and used beige key caps on a sick mechanical keyboard, and if you did it up, would anybody steal it? Okay, hold on a second. Hold on a second. Could there be a way for us to social experiment this?

Can you, you know how bait cars, they can kind of bait people and trying to steal them? Bait a whole computer. Bait a house. A house? Because someone would have to like go into it. And then we have to like see if they take the computer. Work with Mark Rober.

Like is that a thing? There's got to be a YouTube channel that like does this. Well, Mark Rober did the porch pirate thing for years. Well yeah. That's porch pirating though. I mean not every porch pirate is just gonna like walk in the front door. Way significantly more common. Yeah. I have no idea.

I think baiting someone to break into a house is probably pretty hard to predict. Gilmore Dee in Floplane chat says whoever did that bait would be a master. All right on that note, we should move on. PC World, scented thermal paste. Our question from the writer is would Elijah eat this? Yeah. I feel like if you paid him like 20 bucks I think he'd send it. Scented thermal paste. Wow. We're definitely not out of ideas. We've started

scenting thermal paste. Yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna close that topic. Cool, we've got an announcement. It's not like innovation is impossible. This isn't new, but we saw Fractal go with the wooden, and that dramatically changed the case industry. Yeah, yeah, that new Antec one. The new Antec case is interesting. Like there's stuff that people can do. I meant it as wooden, like the fractal one.

Oh, I thought you meant the... Did they do a collab? Yeah, they did. It has wood on it. Oh, it does? Yeah, cause like, you know, trends. Yeah. This week on Flowplain,

we've got a ton of behind the scenes from our time at Computex and some more Firetruck slash April Fool's behind the scenes as well with a new Why is Wan late episode. We're supposed to watch the clip so I guess I'll click on it now, Dan. I can't really show a float plane clip because I have to log in and things like that. You can't show a float plane clip. You'd have to log in. Well, I think the question, Dan, that is on all of our minds is why are are you not logged into Float Plane?

Yeah. Don't you care? Yeah. Okay, let me just download it and then add it to the streaming software so that I can show it for four seconds. Nice. I can't tell if his voice was coming through to them,

but if it wasn't, it was loaded with passive aggression. Oh no my... Floating Plane's actually really fast so that took like no time at all. Nice. Good job Luke. Got him. Here you go. What is it? This button? And off you go.

I do what I'm doing, shut up. Shut up. You got zero. Oh, I think I got zero. That's number one. You're in? You're in? Okay. That's hilarious.

Oh, it's so cool. I love that it works. Yeah. That's so cool. That's pretty cool. We will also have Secret Shopper part four, the finale, which will be available next week up early on Float Plane, so go check it out. And then we have a final ROG Rig Reboot reminder. There are only a couple of days left to get your submissions in for ROG Rig

Reboot. We're picking three winners, two from North America, one international to be flown to our studio to build a PC with me on camera. You just got to submit a video showing us why you need a rig reboot. Whether your system's unable to keep up with your workflow or you can't run demanding games or it's just absolutely cooked, we need all the deets. This is a competition that rewards creativity

and originality, so make sure your video is unique and not like a past submission. Yes, we will know. 30 to 59 seconds, show us your current setup, tell us why we should pick you, and again creative submissions are open until 445 p.m Pacific time Sunday May the 25th and Dan is gonna post the submission link in all of the various chats um Merch messages. Oh good lord. We haven't talked. Oh, we did talk about vo3. Okay, good

Oh, yeah, we should do a couple of merch messages. Dan, wanna hit us with that? Yeah, sure thing, I've got a couple here. DLL, I'm a late joiner into the LZD cult about four to five years ago, so this may have been asked before, but what are your favorite colors? Is Linus's pink or orange? I don't know if anybody has ever asked that before.

I have never had what are your colors merch message before? A favorite colors. Uh, I don't know. Maybe like a like a cool like a cool blue green. It depends. There's certain things that I like some colors and there's certain things that I like other colors. I'm painting my bike pink.

Well, I'm trying to paint my bike pink. Adapting. Yeah. Historically, I was always red. Red and black. These days I've been an enjoyer of browns and greens more. Really? Brown is an unusual favorite color. It's certainly like a decor trend,

everything tan and brown, but I don't know if even those people say yes my favorite color is tan and brown. Like I bought some shorts recently that are brown. Right. I think they look nice. Yeah, but brown, again, people buy brown shorts because they look inoffensive. I don't know if they buy brown shorts because the round minecraft block is a cool aesthetic Yeah, yeah, okay Slimming you know it's slimming You know you wear the brown pants and a green shirt Embrace it sure Dan You gotta wear the brown pants and a green shirt. Just embrace it. Sure, Dan.

Hey, Taiwan Show. What's the best non-AI tech you spotted at Computex this year? P.S. Linus, have you learned nothing from the last time you played with gold? Also I'm charged shipping on gift cards now. Hey the last time I played with with gold the controller appreciated a lot. That ended up being a tremendous investment, pun intended. Get it? Yeah. Nice. I don't think I saw

anything on the show floor that said it was AI enabled that I was excited about at all. One funny thing that I ran into though, did you see the AI golf booth? No, there was a big AI golf booth. I haven't talked to any, I've talked to a bunch of people that saw it. I haven't talked to a single person that saw it work. I saw them working on it for a pretty considerable

amount of time. I was standing there with Sammy trying to wait to see if they're gonna get it working. And then they claimed they got it working. They had someone go up to like test it. And they took a really long time trying to wait to see if they're going to get it working. And then they claimed they got it working, they had someone go up to like test it, and they took a really long time trying to get the golf ball in the tee. They finally got it. They whiffed hard, took a really long time to set it up, like they missed the screen.

They hit the ball, but they missed the whole screen, which is like almost everywhere the ball could have gone. They took a really long time setting it up on the T again, hit it again, whiffed the screen again, and then the system stopped working again. And we just laughed. That kind of encapsulated a lot of the AI enabledness that at least I saw at the show. But I was only on the show floor for one day, so maybe you saw something.

I doubt it. But maybe. Boy. My favorite thing is probably... I'm gonna go with the boiling cooler. I like cool cooling stuff. It was AI enabled? No, that wasn't AI enabled, was what they asked.

Oh. Yeah. So I'm gonna go with the boiling cooler. That looks sick. Nice. Hey, kind of related to AI, Signal is blocking Windows recall, Microsoft's AI enabled constant logging of everything

that you do on your computer. Signal Messenger is warning users that the privacy of their communications is being threatened by Windows recall. Microsoft's AI tool that will screenshot, index, and store pretty much everything a user does every few seconds. They have updated Signal for Windows to by default block the ability of Windows to

screenshot the app. Signal's move reduces the possibility of recall indexing private messages but doesn't eliminate it because users can change the setting within the desktop app, for example if they want to make use of accessibility tools like screen readers. Signal officials note that Microsoft has made many adjustments to Recall in response to critical feedback over the last year, but Recall still places any content displayed within privacy protected apps like Signal at risk. We've actually got a video coming up about Recall. We kind of totally on purpose have a laptop from back when Recall was first announced that we did the like, hack-sering to make it work even though it wasn't an AI enough laptop.

And we left it disconnected completely from the internet as a time capsule of Windows Recall when it was first launched. and we take that out of the mothballs and a brand new signal, a signal excuse me, a Windows Recall laptop and show the differences in behavior. How they log, how it's encrypted or not encrypted and it's a really cool video. Yeah that's cool. That we totally on purpose definitely kept that laptop disconnected from the internet for a year. Nice, happy accidents. Happy accidents. Yeah, no, we just like... A lot of recipes are made. We were originally planning to make a video

about Recall and then Microsoft bailed on the launch. And so we were like, oh, okay, well, we can't really make this video. So we just like... They're not even releasing it. Yeah. So it was like written. Yeah. But we just like put everything away. And so it ended up working out, so we'll do the video now. Our discussion question is, is anyone excited about Recall? No. Really incredibly draconian IT teams. Cool.

Yeah, but they already have tools like that, so it's not even like, Microsoft's just reinventing the wheel from that perspective. Well, maybe they could save money on their tools that they have that already do that, because you're right. Man, floatplane chat is hilarious.

Any excuse to mention that you use Firefox? Every single floatplane user uses Firefox. I know that, I know that, I know that. I know that this is just fact. It's like it's a law of the universe. Yeah, even the ones that use Chrome. This is super cool. They still use Firefox.

Coach, a small French company, sells a product called Infinite Battery, which allows users to swap individual cells inside in order to have them the battery last longer. The company explains that most e-bike batteries are made up of collections of 18650 cells which are wired together in series and parallel and often an e-bike's battery will fail and stop working even if only a small handful of these individual cells stop working. The product is a fireproof

casing and some documentation that allows users to swap in fresh cells with only a screwdriver. It also has a built-in battery monitoring and other stats that can be seen through your phone and is currently compatible with about 90% of existing e-bike brands. This is super cool. That's awesome.

Yeah, we did a video, man, this was years ago at this point, where the title is, This Should Be Illegal, Battery Repair Blocking. And it was when I discovered that not only will brands not enable you to replace the cells in your battery pack, but some of them will actively block you from doing it by detecting a change in voltage at the BMS and then self-destructing if at any point that voltage goes outside of certain parameters.

And this is back when Colin was working here. He told me that apparently some of them are so, so bad that not only will they self-destruct if it like goes to zero but they will self-destruct if you charge them and it's like it suspiciously charges like too much more better you must have changed the cells in here and they'll turn off just go to sleep forever. That is brutal. I still believe everything that I said back then that should be illegal. And I think that this e-bike company sounds super cool.

Yeah, that's awesome. There's some Microsoft announcements from Build 2025. Microsoft has made their Windows subsystem for Linux, LSX, open source with the code up on GitHub now, LSX allows Windows to natively run ELF executables and implement Linux syscalls inside the Windows kernel. Very cool. Microsoft is also adding model context protocol support in Windows 11 for tighter integration with AI. All right. From an official statement, the MCP platform on Windows will offer a standardized framework for AI agents to connect with native Windows apps, which can expose

specific functionality to augment the skills and capabilities of those agents on Windows 11 PCs. Okay, and finally Microsoft has announced the newest web syndication standards, NLWeb, designed to make it easier for AI to crawl the internet and add tighter AI integration into web pages. Cool. Hooray. In other hooray news, OpenAI buys one of

Joni Ives' companies, IO, for six and a half billion dollars. Oh, good. I'm happy they had that much money. I was reading an article about this acquisition that highlighted products that the ex-design chief at Apple was working on with his like Love From or IO Company, like whatever it is that he's doing. And one of, I think, two projects that they highlighted

was that he's designing his company's headquarters. And I was like, okay, like, right. But isn't that just like, like a necessary thing that because people need a place to sit? Like, what do you actually, what do you actually do? I'm actually, I'm a hundred percent not sure. And maybe I'm missing something here, but I haven't seen anything that LoveFrom or IO have done

that are worth $6.5 billion. Like, can we contextualize this at all? Like, this must be a game changer. Like absolute game changer. Can you guys let me know what Love From and or IO have done to be worth six and a half Bs? Apparently Sam Altman has been working with Johnny Ive already on some like, I'm assuming AI enabled

smart wearable necklace thing. Because apparently we didn't learn anything from the AI pin. So maybe... No one's giving me anything in here. Well I don't think they've done anything. So I think the the value is this... No, no, no, let's not mess stuff up. They've done like design work for companies. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it's not like... Oh, but I don't think they value is this. No, no, no, no, Lofts on the Stuff's done stuff. They've done design work for companies. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, it's not like it's like. Oh, but I don't think they've released a product. It's not like Johnny Ive's just been sitting there. Wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, no, I would, I would. He seems like a go-getter. You have Grindr. I just... What? The 6.5 billion? Yeah. What is your what to? Sorry, what did, sorry, sorry, 6.5 billion, what about the 6.5 billion?

What, no, you said what to? No, no, no, don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. Okay. I must have misheard you. Okay, cool. I think it's the whatever, they've already been working together behind closed doors on a device. Sure, but for six and a half billion dollars. Oh yeah. whatever, they've already been working together behind closed doors on a device.

Sure, but for six and a half billion dollars. Oh yeah. Like how many units of said device could you possibly be hoping to sell such that you could amortize over that number of units the $6.5 billion acquisition of your partner? I really, you know the analysis that happened when Elon bought and sold his companies to each other?

Yeah. And people were like, oh, it's because he's effectively moving money around so that he has more stock control of a higher percentage of whatever, blah, blah, blah. I really wonder how much of that is happening en masse in the AI space, as there's all this this funding going in and then companies are finding like oh everyone kind of hates it and there's a lot of

free models and there isn't actually a ton of money in like developing LLM tech let's just like buy companies and do this other stuff to like move the money around. I mean, I guess. Well, hey, congratulations, Johnny. That's a lot more money than you would have made hanging around at Apple. So, yeah, good job. Yeah, sure. Unless just moving money around. I mean, I really feel like it might be. There's all these rumors about OpenAI and Microsoft kind of breaking up and

I don't know the last thing that OpenAI did that was big in the news that wasn't drama. Compared to other companies that are like pushing big models and arguably more effective models than OpenAI's models, many of which are just open source, which just like largely removes the need for them to exist. I don't know, it's an interesting field for OpenAI right now, but yeah.

Our discussion question, which I actually do want to discuss for a bit, is let's say this isn't a necklace. Let's just speculate that it's not a necklace. What wearable AI tech can you think of that would actually be something you would consider buying? Because I have felt a little left behind by current hardware trends. I don't want smart glasses,

at least not in their current form. I don't know how many people do. Well, some people do. I mean, Meta's selling some glasses. I don't use, I actually don't even, this is not a copilot enabled PC. I don't even have I actually don't even, this is not a copilot enabled PC, I don't even have a copilot button. I, yes it is, it's right there.

Okay, so you're clearly in the same situation as me. Oh my god, it does do something when I press it. Well, I'll have to kill that. I'll find a way. Yeah, it's not, okay, the point is, I have used copilot enabled PCs and have only ever pressed the button by accident. I don't use- I've never even pressed it by accident.

I don't use AI in- Even though it was there. I blocked it out like you blocking out ads. Nice. But people are, like, I don't really use it as part of my workflow. Like occasionally fire up, you know up chat GPT or whatever to, when I was brainstorming names for Smash Champs, I was like, oh, okay, yeah,

what would you call a badminton center? I ultimately went with something that was different from anything that spit out. But like, yeah, I used it as a sounding board, but I almost, I will never rely on it. I shouldn't say will never, I don't mean that future looking, maybe someday I will rely on it,

but I never rely on it. Nothing to do with it right now. And so I just feel like all the new products that are coming out are not for me. I like to write things myself. I don't want to wear smart glasses, and I'm just like, can I just, I don't know, wear smart glasses and I'm just like can I just I Don't know. Can I just have like ear pods?

Okay, like they could be headphones already I love how effective Apple's branding is man the fact that you called them ear pods is like Mind-blowing to me. I I go out of my way consciously to call these my earphones these days because it just it bothers me that my kids call any earphones AirPods. Like it just bothers me. AirPods are not a monopoly even though they basically are. Sorry, sorry, it just bothers me. The reason why I do like calling them ear

pods? I know they're the only ones that... I hate all the other ones. I mean you're wearing ones that seem to be staying in okay? They like hurt because I had to jam them in. Like my ears will be sore for the rest of the day oh whoa is me. Yeah I mean it's better than the other parts that are going to be sore. Okay, sorry, I don't know why I said that. It doesn't matter. But okay, if you look at like AirPod 4s, they got actually pretty significantly smaller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there is room to have some expansion to fit a little bit more tech in there, especially

if it's just like reporting out to your phone or something. Okay so... And then you could hear because they they have the ability to talk to LLMs now. Okay so so but then let's let's let's ask the usual question. Right. And that is why would that need to be in my earphones? Why wouldn't it just be in my phone which is connected to my earphones? Yeah. Okay, so let's try again. There's no wearable then though. That's the problem. Other than glasses. Like what the heck would a necklace do? Nothing. Well it could have a camera on it.

You laugh, but it's basically that stupid Google thing. You know that Google camera that would take pictures with AI at the right times or whatever. Everyone's completely forgotten about this. I bring it up every once in a while. I don't remember that at all. It's so bad. Do you guys remember what that stupid thing was called, Chat? You're like pretty hyper out of time.

I can help you go pack up your room if you want. Sure. What else do we need to get through? We got a couple of more questions. There's one more really important thing. Okay. Two brave souls, our clip says, hold on, hold on, yeah hold on, Google clip, I think that's it. Or wait was Google clip software?

I don't remember this at all. Clip on camera device designed by Google, two and a half stars from the verge, nice. I think that might have been it. Anyway, hold on, hold on. You're gonna like this. Two brave souls are fighting to preserve the lost art of GPU boxes. Oh, okay. Check this out. Look at this. It's like a table book.

Oh, that's cool. They went around. Look at what we had. They were man. I knew you're gonna like this. Oh, that's cool. They went around look at what we had they Man, I knew you're gonna like this and painstakingly captured cool GPU box art From back in the day and just made like a table book of it Look how like this is a crazy card and how like normie and plain that looks

Yeah compared to all this stuff look at this This is so awesome. Dan. Are you getting this on screen at all? As your hopes of Dan Overclawed yes, I can see it an archive of graphics card box art is a new book showcasing the most radical GPU box art from the bygone era of bombastic branding and is being being released by publisher Lock Books on May 31st. Curated by Mike McCabe and Sam Bailey it will feature over 300 retail boxes from the late 1990s through to the early 2010s plus over 50 GPU print ads from the golden age of gaming magazines. That's all, that's cool, I like it. Let's do a couple of messages. Sorry?

We should get one for the office. I'd be down. All right. Couple left here. Hi, DLL. Recently upgraded PC after years. Why in 2025 does it seem like Windows... Is Windows unable to migrate apps and settings seamlessly? For example, Android, iOS upgrades do. Resetting up apps, explore pinned items is still so manual. apps and settings seamlessly. For example, iAndroid iOS upgrades too.

Resetting up apps, explore pinned items is still so manual. That's a good question. I mean, I actually find the process pretty darn manual on Android and iOS as well. Windows, really? Sometimes they work. If you upgrade Windows, isn't it pretty seamless? Or do they mean moving devices?

I think they mean like a fresh install. That's what it sounds like to me. Like when you upgrade a new system. Yeah, migration. And like, I guess for me, I would say there's a really, really fine line between carrying forward settings that will be helpful to the user

and carrying forward garbage. Crud that might have been like bunging up your previous Windows install or your previous app install. So I just don't know, I don't know how you'd fix that without making a lot of other things worse.

And you might say, okay, yeah, but I'm the user. I could decide what I prefer, but a lot of users would probably use this convenient option and then have their system be bunged and then blame Microsoft for it so I can see why a fresh install is a fresh install I get it. Last one I've got for you today Linus have your badminton friends over there reacted to smash champs yet? Uh yeah, yeah I had told them last year that it was coming so pretty much everyone. I showed them some of the pictures on like google maps and stuff like that and they're they're mostly like

what really? I'm like yeah yeah I mean I told you I was doing this. They're like, yeah, but like, it looks really good. Yeah. Thanks. Got him. Appreciate that. Yeah, it's been good. I got together with most of my badminton crew this year. I played every day. I'm dying. I think one of my toenails on my left foot

is probably going to fall off. My tennis elbow is... Back full force? No, but it's... I have like no grip strength right now from just like using it hard all week. I think I lost about six pounds. I've got little man doing five different things for his forearms.

Oh really? Yeah. Five different things. I mean, at his age, there's probably a sixth, but. That's on his own. Yeah. Yes. And I guess we'll see you again next week.

Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye. Same bad channel. Bye! Thanks for watching!