The WAN Show - The Linux Challenge Is Going… - WAN Show February 27, 2026

Episode Date: February 28, 2026

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What is up everybody and welcome to the WAN show. We have a terrific show for you guys today. The Linux challenge is not going well for me. I managed to run into, it's hard to even, it's hard to even quantify them at this point, but at least five things I've never seen before. And I swear, I swear on, what can I swear on? Tell me something to swear on.

The show. I swear on the WAN show. I guess do I put my right hand on it. I swear on the WAN show that I didn't do anything weird. I swear it. I swear it's true. The bug you showed me before the show was wild. That was fascinating.

I swear I didn't do anything. In other news, Donut Labs claims to have made. a solid state battery with the keyword being claims. Uh, this rabbit hole goes pretty deep. Solid rabbit hole. That the state of it is uncertain and nebulous. What else we got this week? Paramount is set to take over Warner Bros in a continued series of media consolidation,

which like should probably concern everyone. Everyone. Cool. Yeah. Uh, also Burger King is vying for. For the throne of politeness with AI and all of their employees' ears all the time. Oh, it's more wired up to their mouths, which is weirder. Oh, wait, really?

I might have misunderstood. I was thinking when you didn't freak out about that, that you probably misunderstood. Yeah, that's a lot worse. The show is brought to you today by Vessie, U-Green, App Control, and Ground News, alongside our round. partner Dbrand and our laptop partner Razor and our chair partner also Razor which it's not a different company it's just it's just razor be funny if it was it'd be funny if it was also Razor just sponsored by both of them okay what's going on what do you want to do we have we have you talked publicly I don't think so about what distro you're going to choose I have not because

I hadn't decided until Elijah and I shot the first episode of Linux Challenge 2026. Okay. And Elijah even did not know that I did not know which Linux distro I was going to be using. He was like, okay, we're at the point in the video where the script just says Linus decides on his distro. And I was like, well, yeah, did you think, did you think I was like faking, reading these listicles just now and like talking to the AI about what I should use?

Oh, interesting. And he's like, so that was, that's the thing is to the greatest degree. that I can, my goal is to go into this kind of, I'm experiencing something relatively fresh. Like I've used Linux before, but it was years ago. And not much. And not that much. I used it for a little while, and then I didn't really use it anymore. And so I'm doing what I do, where I go in and I go, okay, how would I do this?

So I started with like Boomer Best Linux Distro for Gaming. And so I got Listicles again. and to their credit, I think they were a little better than last time. Really? That's actually a little surprising to me. I'm surprised they're different at all.

Except, except, hear me out, wait for it. I followed up by being a non-boomer and typing it into an LLM, which might explain why the listicles are better now. Oh, yeah. And to be clear, I'm not saying, I'm not saying that any of the listicles that I read happened to be LLM written or aided.

I'm just saying it's not impossible. But maybe. And at this point in this current state of the internet, you actually don't, you can never really know because even if they got that information by reading somewhere else, that other thing might have been assisted. It's the whole snake eating its tail situation

that we've got going on here. So I started with Googling listicles like a boomer and then followed up with asking, an AI and once again the overwhelming top recommendation was come online is give popOS another shot so I popped over to their website downloaded the ISO and it was off to the stumbling not quite races yeah now now in fairness the first issue I had was that the M.2 SSD that I've had sitting in my tech sack for the better part of two years is dead. Can't blame Pop-O-S for that.

No. Nope, that's on me not putting it in an ESD bag. Oh, just raw. Yep, it was in there. It was in there. I got an install. Once I figured that out and I used a different SSD, then everything was totally fun.

No, just kidding. Everything got pretty messed up. So I've got a few little clips that I would, love for Luke to see while we're here on the WAN show. I actually, I cheated a little bit, and I showed him one of these earlier. Things were going really great. I managed to find the store almost immediately. I managed to download Steam and Discord basically as, if anything, more easily than if I was on Windows

or if I was on MacOS. Like Windows in particular, you can use the Microsoft store, but like, How is it, Microsoft, that after you force me to sign in with an account when I install Windows, how is it that I then have to sign into that account again when I open my browser and I go to my Microsoft email? Why do I have to do it again when I want to play Minecraft with my kids? Why do I have to do it again? Why do I have to do it over and over? And over again.

I think playing Minecraft takes three, if I remember correctly, because the website and then the, like, launcher, but then you also have to do the, like, the Xbox store, Microsoft store or whatever. Yeah. It's crazy. Wild. Like, like, system-wide, like, user accounts have been a thing for, how long? How long has it been since you just have signed into your Google account once?

Yeah. Like, very long time. Very, very long time. very long time. So that was really easy. That was awesome. And then I like downloaded a game and it like came down pretty fast. And then and then and then things started to get a little weird.

And I ended up having, I ended up actually bailing on Linux on the first night because I had seven people waiting in a lobby for me to play Left for Dead two on top of all the people who wanted to spectate the game who were watching on Discord, which was. like another 10, something like that? How many people were spectating? Probably around there. That sounds about right. So I had all these people waiting for me, and this is what would happen when I would try

to play the game. And it is wild to start this challenge at a land, but if it was windows that he jumped in with, this would have worked off rip. Yeah. Well, yeah. So we have to be like, you know, fair about that. It's wild to start it at a land, but also I tried to throw a softball. I've seen a few Windows installs at lands.

It's definitely happened. I tried to, oh, do I actually have a clip of Leffreda 2 crashing? So I tried to throw a softball by choosing a game that I assumed, and this is not a crazy assumption, that I assumed would be well supported on Linux. Honestly, I think that's not only a crazy assumption, I thought that by playing this game, we were actually giving it an advantage.

I thought I was basically hacking for Steam to choose a first party valve game. Because the win condition for the first episode of Linux challenge is always play a game, right? Would you like to play a game? I honestly forgot that, but I'm happy that I did launch a game technically in the videos that I recorded. Since then, I have launched more games, so it's fine. But yeah, I did launch a game. So I ran into a situation where it totally worked in lobby, but then within about 30 seconds of being in the game,

it would just like hard break. Yeah. Like hard lock up or just hard crash the game. And- Did it throw an error or anything? I don't- Not the first time. Yeah, okay.

And then the second, I can't remember. There's a lot of footage in here because I was expecting this to just be like a quick thing. Like I quickly install and then I'm playing Left for Dead too. I just, I didn't think it'd be that big of a deal. And for reference, just before you keep going, someone said that apparently I did a Windows install at LTX-20203. That doesn't surprise me.

I don't remember that, but it doesn't surprise me either. Frosty Cuyager said some guy said he bought a fresh laptop for Whale-Land on the way there. So, like, this is, people have fresh windows at Lans. It happens for sure. All right, here's me playing through around once I fixed it. Okay, hold on. I think I've got the, I think I've got the error. So, yeah, this is wild.

Here we go. I actually get into a game here I move around my mouse a little bit everything's running it's running at like 300 frames per second and I'm give it like another give it like another probably 10 to 15 seconds I think I get to the bottom of the stairwell

on the first map of the which one is this again what's the finale? The mall dead center sure yeah I don't know any of the map names and Boof, gone. Hard. It just disappeared.

Hard cut to desktop. Application gone. And what's really frustrating is if you go on ProtonDB, you find all these people. It says native. It says native. And the first, when I looked at it, like the first two or three were like, perfect. And I even scrolled down. And the first one on PopOS was like, perfect, excellent, perfect.

Now, when you start reading more of them, you go, oh, well, Hold on a second. People have all kinds of problems with this. Here, there was a really funny one. Can you go down a little bit? Go down, go down, go down, go down. There's one that says, hold on, is this it? Oh, here it is.

Works perfectly out of the box. Tinker steps switch to experimental cell. Oh, no, this wasn't it. There's one that said no tinker steps and then also said tinker steps. Oh, yeah, no, no, this is the one. This is it? So literally what this person says is works perfectly out of the box. Right.

And then the body here is, tinker steps, switch to experimental, set this launch option. Then, then they say, the game ran perfectly for me without any major issues, no tinkering done whatsoever. This is where I end up feeling like I'm put in a really uncomfortable position. because when you are engaging with this level of delusion, I feel like, I feel like I'm made to be the bad guy here. Like you've got this stance that's so far out of reality that you feel like a bad guy. You almost feel like it's,

I almost feel like I'm being gaslit. Like I feel like the, like, I'm the one who's, who's a complete fucking idiot because, You know, it didn't work perfectly for me, and I didn't know that putting it in experimental mode and having a launch argument was no tinkering. Yeah, I don't know, like, where their line is, but in my opinion, if you want to, if you want a year of the Linux desktop, you know, like if you want to go that hard, and you want to call it a native game, you should be able to click play in Steam and it

should just work. Because that's the experience that people are going to have on Windows, right? Well, that's, I mean, except when they don't. And that's really, really important to acknowledge in all this, because I'll come in and I'll say something critical about Linux, or people will feel like I'm saying something critical about Linux because I'll say something like, I launched Left for Dead 2, and within about 30 to 60 seconds, it would crash every single time I launched it. And they'll be like, that's a personal attack. It's like, that's a personal attack on them. And they're like, well, what about all the issues on Windows? I'm like, whoa, bro, we're not talking about Windows.

Yeah, yeah, fair. Nobody brought up Windows, and I'm happy to criticize Windows. You want to watch me criticize Windows? Do you want to do a Windows Criticism Wandshow? I'm sure you're down. Yeah. Look how down he is. Yeah.

I'm going to chime into this one. We got to include teams. Look how happy he is right now. We've got to include teams. But sometimes that's not what we're talking about. We should do Microsoft. Like I, man, was it on the, I can't remember. Yeah, it was on the forum.

It was on LTT forum that Elijah did that video recently where he switched to iPhone. And someone's like, well, you're talking a lot about the, issue switching from Android to iOS, but you're not talking about all the issues going from iOS to Android. It's so bad. Like, you're right. We're not talking about that. Because guess what's happening? Because guess what? Elijah didn't switch from an iPhone to Android. That's not what, that's not what he's fucking doing. Not every video can be about everything. So this isn't about, this isn't about attacks, but it's about me being put in this position where I feel like I have to, I have to like, Yvonne always uses like a pendulum analogy.

when we're talking about like positions in an argument or we're talking about some kind of conflict where she'll talk about how sometimes she feels like because someone else's position is so extreme even though the truth lies here with the pendulum at rest she almost is forced to take this position to try to achieve that to bring us back to center. Very common in politics.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so when I'm up against this is perfect and you're crazy for not recognizing it. It's like, whoa, it can have some flaws. Windows has a lot of flaws. Oh, yeah. It's okay. Oh, so many.

So something that I find interesting about this is Steam Deck is used by a lot of Normies. Yeah. And this is Steam Deck verified. Right? Would you need to make, like, is it different? Would you need to make changes on Steam Deck or would it have had the same problem? That's a good question. I genuinely don't know.

And if Valve is implementing, so do you know what the fix was? So the fix ended up being that I had to force Vulcan, which is a pretty reasonable Linux gaming fix. Except that, and this is again one of those like, how is this a thing, right? This is a first party Valve game. They literally make a Linux distro is not even available in the in-game menu. You have to use a launch argument for it.

Yeah. So I typed it a thing. I switched over to Vulcan, and then lo and behold, I've got a clip here of me gaming for, I think, over five continuous minutes, and it just completely working. Bang, bang, bang, kill all the zombies, running at 300 FPS. Yeah. But that's not what Buddy said. Buddy said no tinkering. And also his fix was different from mine.

Someone in Floplaine chat said, yes, Steam Deck is very beginner-friendly, but Linus keeps picking non-beginer-friendly distros. As far as Meyer-Sanning goes, Pop OS is widely known as a fairly beginner-friendly distro. That's literally why people keep recommending it. It's also friendly for people who are on Invidio graphics, which, and I had someone asked this in the chat just now, which I wasn't. But what I wanted was to use the same distro across my multiple. multiple systems. Okay. My main desktop at home is radion. My laptop, which is what you had the

land. My daily driver is radion. Yeah. Sorry, I had my main desktop, not the laptop. I kind of gestured over here and you kind of pointed this direction. It kind of seemed like it was, I had my desktop at the land. I also had this. So my, my main desktop and my laptop are both radion, but my, my downstairs gaming machine is G-Force. And so is the one in the theater room, which is where I've actually been doing more of my gaming. And so what I really wanted, and that's the, one of the special sauce things with popOS is that it's out of the box geforce ready yeah and so so yes i i i did pick a distro because i wanted it to be more like non-linix hardware optimized friendly but that wasn't what i was using i was using the radion build and i i installed it onto a

rison radion all amd all the time system so there should have been no real challenge there But the challenges just kept on coming. I showed Luke another clip earlier, so I don't have to show it to him now. We're in Hell Divers 2. Oh. So that's the second game that I tried to play. He sees the character moving around on screen.

It's running at, you know, I didn't install windows on a separate partition and then benchmarked them back and forth. It felt pretty solid, though. Yeah, it was smooth. It was smooth. It felt good. And then I scrolled down, and you can see my mouse hand going like this. And I go back up, and you can see that the mouse hand,

Mouse look is not working at all. What I never showed Luke is some of the troubleshooting steps that I went through to try to resolve that. So I tried rebinding mouse look. And if I bound look up to instead of mouse movement to like left click, I could totally look up. Okay. So it was capturing the mouse. So it was perfectly capable of getting something from my mouse. My mouse was definitely working.

Yeah. It was perfectly capable of tilting the camera up. Weird. But the actual mouse movement was not being registered. My controller worked perfectly, though. So this was for gaming with the VIPs, with the whales. And so I was like, well, I guess I'm gaming on a controller. I can do that at least.

Yeah, man, I hate shooters on a controller, but yeah, it is what it is. Also, did I point out to you the weird border on the top and the left? Did you see that? Oh. The weird, like, two pixel wide white border? Yeah. Yeah. I never figured that one out.

That's just top and left? Yeah, just top and left. Strange. The most fun one, though, is the one that I'm going to show to you guys. And that's this issue where my... Here, maybe I'll send this over to... Oh, producer Dan is gone. So we're going to do this the super janky way.

Nice. Classic win-show moment. Do you want me to switch cameras? Oh, no, you're just going to do the front one? Okay. Oh, no. it's pretty wild i still don't i don't know how you would even make this happen because it's not only that there's three windows open which i don't even know maybe you can do that in steam maybe you can't

um but it's also that they're all do they're all doing the inputs but they're not showing the menus so like only the one that he's actively selected on shows the menu but when he scrolls they all scroll it's so strange did you see that though yeah so this part you know they're not going to be able to you. But as he moves his mouse over to the other window, it's still navigating in the previous one. It's a little hard to see. But like, man, it's, it's, it's, it's strange. It's, uh, it's very weird. We can still hear him. Oh, my bad. Sorry, I didn't think you'd be able to. If I yell out enough, they kind of can. I guess Dan, it's Mike is there too. Um, so I've never seen that before. That was weird. Never seen that before either. I was pretty cool. You know, you can, you can, in a lot of

different things. You can make multiple versions of it come up, but usually they don't all mirror the inputs and stuff. And Steam, it shouldn't be. Yeah, I've never. Can you open multiple instances of steam? I've never wanted to. I've never tried. Never looked into it. Uh. But like you can with no, okay. You can with a decent amount of other things. And so I'm going to have a lot of people as often happens, whenever I say anything critical of Linux, I'm going to have a lot of people coming at me for this, assuming that I did something, something egregiously wrong. So, and I'm not, I'm not saying you do anything.

What led up to that? Go ahead, do it. Do it. Pre-show viewers will get it. What, what, what, what led up to that? I'm like, shia, I'm going to run away from the press. And I'm being like, do it. Just what, I'm not saying anything. What steps led up to that?

Nothing. So you just launched the computer and it was just there? Did you come out of a game or like what? Oh, it's hard to say. So what would I have been doing? At this point, I was playing helldivers. So I would have been... So you're in the game and then you,

I assume you close the game and then it's doing that. Oh, shoot. Okay, don't quote me on this, but I think it was when I like re-maximize it or something like that. I'd like get to somehow. I really don't remember. When you reman maximize the steam window?

Yeah, because like if you minimize it, um, it goes, People are saying you can have multiple windows of steam open, which I'm not too surprised. Also wasn't multiple windows. No, and to do that,

I'm assuming you'd have to like launch, launch argument the, like, executable or whatever. I'd probably have to do something. Yeah. Because Steam does not behave like that normally. I've never,

I don't know if Steam's on here, but I've never, literally never had multiple windows of steam open. I don't know. This is one of those, dude, this is one of those things where it's just like, um,

don't blame, Don't blame Blanket Linux, blame Pop-O-S or yourself. And it's like, unfortunately, this is one of the challenges that Linux has with wide adoption is that, and, man, it's both the most beautiful, incredible thing about open source. And it's also the biggest problem that it has to overcome is that you can find, you can find a flavor for anything. like was it you that I was talking to when I said something like you could have a you could have a distro of Linux that's for like gamers who hate my little pony or something like that or no I was I was I think I was talking to someone else and they were like really and I was like I was like no and they're like oh yeah that makes sense that would be stupid but like the fact that I believed you I think that might have been me actually yeah maybe that was you is so emblematic of the problem there's so much fragmentation and like one of the one of the one of the one of the of the things is you can say people know it as Linux even that in itself is flawed

yeah very so like so like even even that statement alone has problems it has huge problems to listen Linux is the kernel yeah right so so to assume that people are going to always exactly properly address the thing that might be causing the issue is like obviously a fallacy that is not going to happen so people

are going to just blanket call it Linux because they've been blanket calling the whole thing Linux for a long time. Grellwing says, SteamOS is not intended to be a wide release. It's an OS for boutique hardware. Not actually true. Well, at least not originally true. When Valve announced Steam OS and the Steam Deck, they announced their intention at some point to make Steam OS an OS that you could download and install on your own hardware. In fact, you can do it today. It just has to be on kind of specific hardware, which is the reason that I ultimately didn't use it, because I do have systems that are invidia. And you wanted the same thing across all of them. And I wanted to choose something that somebody with Nvidia hardware might choose for ease of use, especially because my plan is to install it across multiple systems, which I haven't actually done yet because it's been such a pain in the butt.

Yeah, so let's see. what else? I don't actually know if there's anything else in here. Here's the weird steam interface bug, but just two windows this time. This was the first time I encountered it. So I actually encountered this multiple times, which is pretty wild. I can interact with both of them, but if I mouse over one of them, it like is interacting with the other one. Yeah, because like if it was just properly two instances of steam, that shouldn't be happening. So what he's showing is two completely different windows and two completely different areas. When he moves his mouse on one.

I'm moving my mouse here. It interacts with the other one. Yeah. That's black. So my mouse cursor's over here. And then you can see the menus on the window on the right actually moving. And in this one, it was more bugged because the whole interface is just gone. It's just a black box.

Yeah, that is weird. You can kind of see it like faintly in the background. Someone said, did Luke go with mint? No. I decided to mix it up. I still really like Mint. I actually genuinely thought, like, you know, maybe I should go back to like, old faithful.

I don't really actually use Linux all that much, but that tends to be the one that I go to when I do use Linux. But I had been running this. It's not currently installed in my laptop because we're trying to figure out a hardware problem and they didn't believe in Linux. So we have Windows running on it right now. But I had been running just Arch on my laptop for a long time to try to prove. like, look, if you're not doing much on your system, you can kind of run whatever. And my entire use case from my work laptop is basically in a browser. So I was like, it's not going to matter.

And yeah, it didn't really matter. Um, so it, and, and my, my basically point there was like, I'm not interacting with the operating system basically ever. Like, I don't, I didn't do anything very interesting with Arch. Um, I was, I'm just running two browsers, Firefox and Chrome. That's it. On Arch, by the way. So that was why I did that on my laptop. So I thought maybe I would try to extend that idea into the desktop space, but I didn't want to just use Arch again. So I went with CasheOS.

And that's not the only reason. So Cashie OS is built on Arch, but that's not the only reason. The other reason why I did it was because Steam OS is built on Arch. Yep. So I was like, okay, what's a, like, gamer version of, Arch because I'm going to want this on my desktop. I'm going to play games here. I'm going to do other stuff here. I don't want to just run Arch like I did on my laptop because I'm actually going to do more with it. The point isn't the same now. Right. The point with the laptop was it doesn't really matter

if all you're doing is a browser. And that's the beauty of Linux. Horses for courses. You can choose a different distro depending on what exactly it is that you're trying to accomplish. So now I'm trying to accomplish more. I'm trying to do more gaming stuff. Cash US, their tagline is a performance focused arch Linux distribution that rebuilds packages with modern CPU optimizations. I don't know. I heard it's good for gaming and it's arch. And by the way, I did that on my laptop. And Steam OS is built in it.

So I was like hoping, you know, maybe some kind of, I don't know, maybe things will work better through Steam there. I have no idea. I didn't do a lot of research. Like this is the more gamery version of the thing I've been using lately. I'll just do that. It's also super trendy. It is very trendy right now.

Yeah. Hyper trendy. Maybe, yeah, maybe a third reason. It's super trendy right now. Yeah. It's actually one of the reasons why I chose it. So, so same core as SteamOS. It's super trendy right now, and it's based on the thing that I'm using on my, on my laptop

anyway. So there's some familiarity. So I'm going to jump in and go, the hyper trendiness of it is actually the one of the reasons I didn't choose it. Fair enough. Because this kind of like flavor of the week, hyper trendy. It's weird people have mostly forgotten about Bazai. already. That's crazy.

Right. That's wild to me. That's not the kind of thing that I like to lock myself into. Like whenever we, whenever we do any kind of actual benchmarking or performance testing, anytime anyone talks to me, I'm like Ubuntu. Because it's just, it's just there. You know, it might not have the sex appeal, but it's there. It's been there. It's been there for us. It's the, it's the, if you want to look at, if you want to zoom way out, over time, it's

the consumer Linux distro. It's been there for everybody. Everybody knows about it. A bunch of people are saying like, oh, Bazite's still cool. We're not trying to say Bazai isn't cool. Yeah. You don't have to be personally attacked here. Roughly six months ago, if you discussed Linux at all and didn't say Bazite every second word,

you would get screamed at. And that is already no longer true. And now a lot of people are saying Cashy, Cashy, Cashy. That's definitely the third out of the reasons that I had. But I did, I was interested in checking it out. And I will say for the more involved experience, because again, I didn't get this on my laptop, there are things I miss about Mint. Cashy's cool. It's been fine. I haven't really had any problems. Nice. Good for you. Happy for you. There are things that I'm still planning on doing that I suspect might cause some problems. So we'll see how that goes. But I'm only, I started after you. I'm only a few days. into this. Right. I am pretty fresh. And I haven't done a ton on it. So we'll see how it goes. Didn't take me doing a ton. All I had to do was launch a first party valve game in Steam. Oh yeah. I didn't even talk about those audio issues I had in Discord.

Oh yeah. Everyone's audio was so quiet. I could barely hear them. Did you ever fix that? A reboot. Just sort of magically made it go away. I did have some weird. There's a, there's one of the recordings that I sent in. Yeah. After I played it back, I didn't know this while I was recording it, but after I played it back, it's like a little laggy. That was happening when I was watching videos and a couple other things as well. I noticed it when I was watching a YouTube video that the YouTube video would hitch every once in a blue moon. I hadn't restarted the system literally once yet. I wonder if it's like a hardware acceleration issue or something.

No idea. Restart the system one time problem went away. And I had done that recording before the system restart. So I, you know, one restart after doing some updates and stuff. Sure. Not a big deal. Yeah. But that's the only thing I've really ran into so far. But like, I don't love the like package manager.

You mentioned how like, oh, I found the pop away store pretty quick. Yeah. It was just the bottom left icon. It was like right there. The name was like, it's like they were trying to not call it App Store. They were so desperately trying to call it anything but App Store so that they wouldn't have to call it App Store that they ended up with a name that just, I forget what it is, but it just, like, was not that obvious to me.

But yeah, it's so, like, I'm probably going to go get an alternative store at some point, because, like, I don't love the default one. It works. There's been a decent amount of things I've, I've looked for that weren't there. No, it's called, hold on, hold on. Jump in, it's called Pop Shop, which is a perfectly reasonable name. Okay, when I mouse over it, it seems pretty reasonable. It was called something, it was called, I swear it was called something else.

It was not called Pop Shop. I have no idea. Charged NuclearSys says it's not an app store. Yeah, I know, but sometimes we, you, use words for things like ATM machine. It's not an ATM machine because the machine is the M and the... Yeah, but like sometimes we just say things so that people understand what they are and what their function is.

And by the way, there's a bunch of people spamming me right now. Use this thing. Use that thing. I'm sorry. I'm not going to listen. I'm just going to do stuff and we'll see how it works. If I run into a problem, I'll Google it. I'll look it up in some other way.

I'll consult the sands. I'll do whatever. But I don't want to go based on like chat recommendations. because that doesn't seem like a normal experience that someone would have. So I'm literally just going to brain dump everything you guys tell me. Now, like, yeah, if I read something on a forum or whatever, I'll take information from there, but I don't want to use it on alternate route. And I'm also not having problems, really.

I just don't love it. It doesn't seem great, like the package manager, but I can get a new one. Not a problem. I'm not too worried about it. But other than that, like no major, no major issues. I felt mint was very comfy for me. And I am now, I would say, slightly outside of the comfort zone.

Desktop environment, that I really didn't stretch for. I just went with cinnamon, which is the one that I'm most used to. I did also install Hyperland, just in case I want to go have fun. But I'm very used to cinnamon, and I'm happy to be with it. So I said go with budgie.

I saw that because the name, I thought it might be fun, but yeah, wait, you can use cinnamon with Arch. Yeah. Yeah. I have cinnamon installed

on both laptop and desktop, I think. Good luck, re Hyperland. Yeah, that's the reason why I didn't only install Hyperland. I don't know that I'll ever touch Hyperland.

I might, I might just literally not get to it. Apparently, it's called the Cosmic, cosmic store. So it's, is it, is it this one?

I think it's this one. When I mouseed over it, it wasn't super obvious. So I forget what comes up. Does it just say Cosmic? I'm actually not sure. So don't quote me on any of that. Cosmic store. Another thing I'll say is like,

and we have to basically address this every time. And I think there is a subset of Linux mega nerds that actually don't want the year of Linux desktop to be a thing. I know. Because then it would be not like gate cute enough. Yes, exactly. I think that is a subset, probably not that big of a subset, but I do think that is a subset of people. But, man, yeah, there's, and I don't know, maybe people should RTFM a little more and Google things themselves and stuff.

But like, I'll come across a Reddit thread where somebody's like, oh, how do I do this thing in like an arch-based distro? And instead of just like, oh, here's your actually like really simple answer because the question you asked is like not that deep. there will be like a seven paragraph thing about how you're a freaking idiot and you should never touch arch and you should probably go back to windows you tiny little insignificant baby and it's like dude relax like oh my god i think it was like i think the guy was like how do i install steam yeah it was how do i install steam and arch and the reason why i looked that up which seems really was because i was just stunned it wasn't in the package manager yeah i was like what like really and like i ended i ended up just installing it like i just Pac-Manned it, but like I was a little bit surprised because like, yeah, I'm comfortable enough I can use the command line and stuff, but I kind of, the GUI's there. I kind of like it. It's fine. It's almost like basically everything for 98% of people has moved to GUI for a reason. And it's weird that Steam isn't in there. Like, Steam's pretty normal.

No. Chrome also wasn't in there, but chromium was. I thought that was just kind of a funny little. There might be some other reason for that, but I was like, okay, whatever, I'll just try chromium and see how that goes. So I'm running chromium instead of chrome. Because I always, I do Firefox for personal stuff, Chrome for work. I've always done that. The separation actually at this point is like very fluent.

Not doing that would be very weird. Right. Like if I did personal stuff in Chrome or work stuff in Firefox, it would probably feel very odd. So like, okay, I've got my two. Everything's fine. Teams is like a problem. Have you done that? Have you installed Teams?

I haven't installed Teams yet. Oh, I like, man, it sucks. There's no like official Microsoft. Yeah, there used to be though. There was a long time ago. Yeah. I think maybe the first time we did the challenge there was. I think it was, I think we were right on the, it was still existed, but the support

for it was like bad or something. Got it. Don't quote me on that, but I remember us, I remember it being a thing. we definitely discussed it at the time. Yeah. Teams is the reason Luke will go postal. It's already annoying. Like I had a meeting,

so how our meetings tend to work, is you get a teams meeting that is attached to your calendar invite. So you click on that, and then it brings you into the meeting. It's not, in my opinion, it's really whack. Guys, stop telling me to try things. I'm not going to listen to you.

I've already said that. You can stop. I'm legitimately not. I will probably avoid the things that you tell me to do. That is the most wrong thing you've ever said. You said you can stop. They can't. They actually can't stop.

They're addicted to the shindig. But okay. So I, in Windows, you click on that link and it'll be like, oh, you have teams installed. Do you want to just open this with your desktop application?

And like, yeah, every time. I would prefer to do that. Thank you. I don't think because it's, maybe because it's an unofficial app, maybe there's some way I can link the two. I'm sure there is.

I haven't done the work to do that yet. Right now, it really only wants to open in the browser. So the first call that I had to take, I ended up being like, I answered in the browser, and then it was like a little whack. And I was like, hey, can I just call you through the app? And then we did. And I click call on the app.

And then I think it doesn't work. And like 15 seconds later, the call goes and actually does something and I'm like okay so like the biggest problem I've had so far is just teams um which is kind of funny because discord actually worked flawlessly not for me oh right I'm glad yours was forgot about that sorry about that yeah no problems uh so discord and slack both worked immediately with no no issues but yeah teams was a problem but it seems very centralized to to teams um yeah rest assured says in chat you were on cosmon Is that five question marks?

That's in beta, still borderline alpha. I don't know, brother. I just downloaded whatever was on System 76's website. I, yeah. I don't know, dude. It just says now with cosmic. I don't make the rules, man. Maybe what I managed to do.

Maybe what I managed to do was catch them at a bad. time again. Wouldn't that be just the way? Cosmic is borked. Cosmic is not new. Cosmic is 1.0 now. See, to me 1.0 means new. And pre-1.0 means not even new yet. Like to me, to me 1.0 is the infant baby.

Like it's still like completely worthless. You ask that infant baby to shovel the snow in the driveway. Useless. infant baby toss it out there doesn't even move anything before that is in womb

so yeah if I'd known better maybe I wouldn't have gone Papa West but now I'm gonna at least I'm gonna at least give it a shot I'm gonna well I feel like I've given it a shot oh I don't want to change it it's such a I feel if if changing your operating system

is not your hobby then this is not an attractive proposition and I think that's something a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their brain around yeah Yeah. Yeah.

Changing my OS is not my hobby. Reddoing the plumbing in my computer? Yeah. That's my hobby. You like the hardware. I could be convinced to do that. Clean out my blocks. Yeah.

Yeah, I will say like, it's been fine, but it has been like, oh, right. I have to install that thing. Okay. Oh, I'm not logged in on all of the different things. that's annoying. Huh, Slack's been quiet today. Oh yeah, I don't have that installed yet. Crap.

That's why it's been quiet today. Oh, no. And then install that and then, oh, everything's fine. Okay, cool. And I think it's, uh, uh, yeah. And I think it's one of those things where like, it all depends on, you know, what your baggage is, right?

I hate logging into things. I feel like half of my life is logging into things, because I do so many disparate tasks in so many disparate platforms that, like, almost any time I get interrupted and I have to do anything, I'm logging in again and fetching a two-factor thing again and then going in remote desktoping into some other thing to retrieve some other token that I need to, like, there's always, I'm always logging into something. So if you tell me, hey, guess what, Linus, there's this trendy, new Linux distro, all you have to do is log in to all your shit. Okay, I'm done. Not interested.

The conversation's actually over now. That went from fun and interesting to kill it with fire with that fast. Yeah, I do, I will say I really appreciate actually the login methods for Discord and Steam these days. The QR coding from your phone is, oh, it's pretty fast for me. I didn't even open those specific apps. I just opened my camera. The camera used the link to open that app to the screen where it did the scan thing. And then I just was like, oh, okay, that worked. And then it scanned it and it just logged me in instance.

I didn't do anything. It was amazing for me. I have my Steam password memorized. So maybe it's just the friction of taking anything. Taking anything out of my pocket is just sort of annoying. That's an example of how many damn times you have to log into things. I, dude, I, like, very rarely logged in my steam. I have way too many of my passwords memorized now, just because it's faster than typing in

my master password and then going and getting my two-factor and then doing my single sign-on. They promised us that pass keys were going to remove the friction. And single sign-on was supposed to make everything magically better. Well, and then it got hyper-paywalled. Single sign-on getting hyper-paywalled is like one of the worst things that have happened to modern computing in my opinion. Yeah, I don't know. Right now, I need something stronger.

I haven't ran into anything that would make me run back to Windows. I have only been using it for a little bit, and I suspect I'm going to hit a hard wall. Yeah, the Indiana Jones game hasn't come out, you know. Exactly. I'm going to hit a hard wall where it's an anti-cheat thing or something like that,

and I just can't run it on this system, and I'm going to go, what the heck? And then I'm going to end up back on Windows. You'll hit the exact same one that I did at the land. There's seven people waiting in a lobby for me. Yeah, it's going to drive me. And I'm fucking around with my special snowflake Linux while everyone else is sitting here going, okay, so what?

Because of your special dietary restriction, we need to make an entirely new meal for you and play the game that you can play. Actually, we don't really need you in our friend group that badly. That sucks, yeah. And that happens. And that happens. Maybe you have a super happy fun time. friend group that you've been with forever and that doesn't happen to you and that's great but

that does actually happen and even if it doesn't and they're nice about it it doesn't mean that it doesn't cause friction yeah yeah i mean and it might happen slow i mean there's a there's someone and i this is someone that i like very much and enjoy as a person but there's someone who kind of stopped getting gaming invites from us because it was very high friction and I love working for him which narrows things down a little

but between audio problems and just general connection stability and you know just oh man that's pretty funny Oh, who'd you think I was talking about?

I'm just kidding. I know who you thought I was talking about. I was going to say, there's another one. Yeah, I guess we're those people. I haven't been playing with you guys lately. I don't like that. Yo, what the fuck? It happens, man.

It happens, man. Mr. Techdiv's going on tech problems. Is this just because I'm on Linux? Mr. Tech Tips got a lot of tech problems. I'm late for a left for dead lobby one time. Sometimes we got an hour to play, and sometimes. it takes you an hour to be set up. Listen.

Listen. Oh, sorry, I have to update. I have to update the transversal auxiliary wave pump in my 14th computer in my seventh room. So that I can play in the, in my theater room. But never mind, that's not going to work because little man wants to play there. So I'm going to play in this other place and then I'm going to play in the upstairs. And then my thing isn't going to work. And I'll see you guys in an hour.

Never mind. I can't play because if I need some help. be back in 20 minutes. Actually, this these other people, what if we just, what if everyone just remoted it in my computer and we play that way away, that doesn't work. Never mind, we'll do this other thing. Okay, you've kind of touched on a number of issues.

I have a very troubleshooting oriented personality type. I get fixated on a goal. And sometimes my goal is something like, we need to play 5V5. And then you have issues with like exit input and the game barely even supports it. Or like the remote software,

like Steam remote, what is it? Remote play together doesn't support that many controllers, but Parsec does, and you make your way down all these like troubleshooting steps. Okay, so that's one of me personality issues that you've identified. Thank you very much. Another one is the multiple systems

and some of them being in various states of set up. Yes, okay, that's a reflection of my fragmented mind. Sure, okay, let's go with that for personality flaw number two. The last one is actually this one comes up a lot and is the one that I guess I don't really talk to you guys about as much, but comes up more often than the other ones.

But sometimes I will go such a long period of time between gaming sessions that like everything's out of date. Everything is demanding updates. Yeah. And that is such an annoying thing about modern gaming that even with a fast internet connection,

I need to be seated at my computer if I haven't played in a couple months. So there could be like a major patch on the game, or there could be like a game ready driver or, you know, whatever, right? Or like just your crap ball logs you out because, you know, how things spontaneously log you out now. And so you have to be like seated at your computer 20 minutes ahead of time in order to make your game date.

It's like at that point, I might as well drive to someone's house and we can just plug in controllers and play Xbox One. Honestly. Yeah. Not one, the first one. where you just put the disc in it and you play Halo. That'd be sick. You just needleer each other until everyone's just angry.

You know? Like, it honestly just sounds more fun at that point. Sword shotguns. Halo 2. The map where there's the ramps and the towers and the blue boingy thing. Solid. Heck, yeah, dude. Solid.

No, but in all actuality, we just haven't been playing very much. Life's been busy. Yeah, I hear you. But, like, every time I go, go to smash champs every time without fail someone says hey you're back and like i do go there once in a while but i'm not attending like i had been like i played ladder last night and um oh you mean for for badminton yeah yeah yeah yeah sorry as you said when i go to smash times my brain's just like whale wood no yeah yeah yeah yeah um so i'm just like i'm not like i'm not seeing

members of the community nearly as much as they're like used they have gotten used to see me can you think it's been open for a year it's pretty wild how crazy is that it was fun having all the land attendees look through the doors and just go like whoa it went the other way too oh yeah yeah badminton people were like what the heck is what is this because i was actually playing in the morning of the saturday so i was i was playing badminton uh from nine to eleven with a group that came up from Seattle. So it's not like we could just like meet another time and play because they were up for a couple of them

had a birthday or something. So they came up. They did the new go cart place in Richmond. I haven't tried it yet. Have you been? No. The like two level one. It looks awesome.

I didn't know we had a two level one. Yeah. It just like they were closed for renovations for like ever. And I want to go. Maybe we should. Oh, man, we should do it for summer fun. Summer's coming up.

That would sweet. Speeders. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's that one. Multi-level tracks. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So I want to, I want to go there. Here, here, here, Luke laptop. Endless ways to play. Oh, look, yeah, they're, they're good. This is clearly them going up. Whoa.

Yeah. 30 minutes. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. I know. They have laser tag and stuff too. Is this the new like Castle Fun Park? No, it's in Richmond. Speeders has been there for a long time, but they renovated. Like the, you know, they have laser tag. They have bowling. They have darts. They have mini golf, like. Castle Fun Park is still my Castle Fun Park. Park. Yeah. Too soon.

They flooded again. I know I heard they flooded again. I feel so bad for them. It's got to be really, if you visit up here and like need a thing to do some night for some reason, maybe you're here for work or whatever. Yeah. Castle Fun Park is genuinely a really good time. Go to Castle Fun Park.

It's a bit out of the way. And they've had like nature trying to tear them down. They've, they had some underground experiences. Like they had this really cool actually underground mini golf and stuff. And their place got flooded. those underground areas got. How could Abbotsford be subject to so many acts of God? Yeah, really?

It's right in the name. It's the Fort of Abbots. Yeah. But yeah, check this out. Like, oh, right. So, yeah, so I was playing with the badminton people. And, like, multiple of the group that came up was like, what is that? And I'm like, oh, well, it's like, it's a land like for gaming.

They're like, oh, like, e-sports. I'm like, yeah, kind of. If you could only play with the people at the land and pretty much everyone was bad. Yeah, yeah, kind of. No offense. I'm including myself in that, to be clear. But yeah, like, dude, on the badminton side, we've been open for one year, and this is what it looks like right now. That's really cool.

Like, this is crazy. Like, kind of, yeah, you can kind of see it. But, like, we kind of accidentally, like, a whole, like, business. And it's funny, right? Because, like, you see so many, like, there's people waiting on the side. right now. You could see everyone like waiting off court. People who don't like understand the sport and the popularity of the sport, there were so many comments on the initial videos like announcing it. Dude, those courts were like very active until like three, four in the

morning during whale land. I'd go kind of poke my head over every once in a while. And then I think there might have been a few even outside of those hours, but like I kind of stopped talking. The late night stuff I think was mostly LMG people. I was goofing around with them for a bit. And like Yvonne was over there. I think like a bunch of the accounting people were over there and stuff. People are still using it. But yeah, like it's, I don't know, yeah, there were a lot of just like,

this is, this is so incredibly stupid. This will never be a viable business. It's like, guys, people need stuff to do. Third places, man. Yeah. Give me some third places. And no offense to Speeders, but give me some third places that aren't $100 every half hour. I had never heard the,

term before until I was chatting with with Sherrod. Yeah. Third places? Yeah. Third place? Yeah. Yeah. And he was just talking about like the lack of third places. And I'd actually like, I don't know, you know how I am. Like someone will bring up anything. And I start going like, oh, you're like, what would be the opportunity to like to fix this?

And so I was so I was, this was actually on our China trip and I was brainstorming with Sherrod, this idea for third place ink. And it actually, there's some pretty cool ideas. I couldn't afford to do it here because it's just like kind of crazy. But the idea, the basic idea behind it is you want it to remove, you want to remove the decision

paralysis of deciding where you're going and what you want to do. Like it's kind of the physical equivalent of, you know how it's impossible to decide what to watch? because there's so many options. Whether it's on Plex or Netflix. Yeah, exactly that. So you go on, like, we must have all been there. Everyone's hungry.

You fire up Google Maps. And there's just a zillion options. So the idea is that with third place, ink, you remove that friction. You just go there. So it would like have programming or events, but none of them would be, posted online and maybe the bulletin board literally like I had this idea of having like

like a door peephole style lens so you can like look and you can you can like see what's going on today but you can't like take a picture of it or anything you know obviously people would people would post them but you try to you try to discourage it and so the idea is just that you you you just have this kind of this kind of like programming events whether it's like, okay, tonight we're doing poker night. You're not good at poker? It doesn't matter. Everyone's playing poker tonight. Flagship locations could be set up with all kinds of activities that encourage casual

coexistence. So a music listening room with a jukebox. Crazy idea. Not a new idea. But the idea being that you don't, everyone doesn't just have their headphones in. There's music playing and everyone can take their turn and for 50 cents or, you know, whatever, for a dollar. You pick the next song.

Karaoke, billiards, tabletop games. It'd be cool if it was membership-based. So you don't have to pay every time you go there. So you kind of remove that friction. You just go. You just go hang out. You'd want to be somewhere transit-friendly. And then, you know, one of the things that came up with, okay, how do you deal with unsavory

stuff? You know, drug deals, hooking up in the bathrooms. Do you do it through a member's code of conduct? Do you count on people to self-police? That's kind of as far as we got. but like man how much would you how much would you enjoy just having a pops chocolate shop you know and that's a that's a that's a that's a reference dated reference yeah yeah no i think it would be they're like a country club remember remember the part about it being affordable though that's where

the country club thing doesn't really land for most people but then the the issue with it being affordable is how do you do that affordably these days? How do you have that much space in... You can't. Anywhere in British Columbia? I mean, that's the one part... Anywhere that has population. That's the one part that most people didn't understand about smash champs.

Like, that's... The things that they thought were stupid, were not stupid at all. And the things that almost nobody flagged were very stupid. The building? Yeah, the building itself, because... That's been strange to me. that people didn't put that together. The number of people mad about us acquiring the tech house,

you know, another house, and like not recognizing that compared to our commercial real estate acquisitions, that's like... It shows up on the line. It's a line item. It's a line item. It's definitely a line item. It's for sure a line item.

But like, yeah, I don't, yeah, okay. I think part of the problem with this is just like magnetizing people. away from these and these types of things. Oh, that was, sorry, I didn't, I didn't mention that. You check your phone at the door. Oh, no, I meant to get there at all because, like, get them out of their house, get them out of their bedroom or whatever. There's a video I watched from, hopefully I don't pronounce it wrong, but I think it's,

you're going to like this, though. You're going to like this. No, sure. I'll pause this. It's fine. Hold that thought. Yeah. But the idea was that you check your phones at the door, but that's okay, because at the

reception, you can, so you can opt. to leave it so that to leave it out or to put it in the box and then if you get an emergency call literally you can like call third place or you no sorry no that wasn't the idea that was one idea and then I was like no there's too many privacy issues and then the new idea was that you have a landline at third place and then you could you could like you'd have to call and then they'd like page you like remember when you were trying to reach your parents at work when we were kids yeah and you'd have to call the office and you'd be like scared to talk to the stranger and be like, um, is, can I talk to Mrs. Sebastian? Like, yeah, uh, can I, can I tell her

who's calling? Yeah, it's her son. Oh, okay, okay, little Linus. Uh, yeah, I'll, I'll go get her. And then it would be like five minutes and they'd go get them. You could potentially, like, if you had the phones badged by name, which wouldn't be very hard, I mean, be kind of automatic. I'm assuming you're bagging it somehow with a tag so you know who to give it to. Um, you could just see the caller ID. If there's no caller ID, who cares? Just let it ring through anyways. But if there's a caller ID, you could be like, so-and-so, this caller ID is calling you. And then that person can decide if they want to come get their phone or not.

But yeah, that's pretty sweet. But yeah, I watched this video from, I think it's email, Emil, emil. Sorry, they say their name in the video and I already forgot how to pronounce it. But you should install a cheap computer in your room. And I don't know why I clicked on this. But I was, I think my thought process was like, why? Why would I possibly want a cheap computer in my room? Their argument was actually pretty good.

I don't want to play it because you should go watch. For MSN Messenger. I know. I've heard there's still versions that work. No way. I've heard through the grapevine. But their argument was that for them, by doing this, they might choose a higher medium. And through doing that, not doomscroll.

They might watch a movie. They might play a game. They might do something. I don't remember all the details. It's been a bit since I watch it, go watch it if you're interested. But I like the thought process of just like just something to keep me from doom scrolling. And I think it's these are such crazy magnets these days. And I think it's part of the equation, probably a small part.

I think the biggest part is that just land and everything costs so much freaking money these days. But part of the reason why I think third places are disappearing is because people just aren't engaging as much because they're sucked into this. They're sucked into just vegetating on Netflix all day. they're sucked into something that keeps them at home alone. And it's, it's, it kind of sucks. I'm a person that very, very much deeply values my alone time, but I also have to understand that there's kind of too much. And something that would be kind of neat about a third place.

You mentioned the like music listening room. Yeah. How cool would that be? There's these ideas of being alone but amongst people. And it is a very different thing than being alone by yourself at home rotting in bed. It is, it is very, different. Even if you're not actively socializing, maybe you're just hanging out in the back of the music listening room, vibing out, listening to different tracks people put on. Maybe most

the time you're not all that interested in what it is, but maybe someone puts on a song that you really jive with for some reason and you ask them about it and figure out who the band is, whatever else, and you have these like little interactions, it can be really healthy, especially, I'm assuming, a very high percentage of males are in the audience right now, especially for us. There's a crazy, like, we don't socialize with any one problem going on right now, where we all just spend all of our time alone. And fighting against that is like a valiant thing to do. So this stage in development occurs around two to four years. And it's called parallel play.

I love parallel play. When a child plays alongside or near others, but doesn't play with them. So different toys in the same sandbox or a group of kids drawing on their own papers while sitting side by side, focused on their own journeys, but still aware of one another. And it feels like we're not even getting there.

No. Sometimes. A parallel plays great. And you were saying, like, we end up alone in our homes. We also end up alone outside of our homes. Yeah. I saw this really interesting,

I see both sides. exchange on Reddit. So it was kind of a kind of a women centric subreddit talking about how

how invasive and uncomfortable and almost like borderline aggressive it is if someone approaches them in public when they have their AirPods in and you know and I kind of went

and they were like you know oh it's you know when you have your AirPods and it makes you seem unapproachable and they're like that's the point and I'm like oh man definitely see both sides because

it especially like I'm not a woman big surprise shocker oh I know right not a woman I would have never known but there are definitely aspects of the being a woman experience that I have witnessed as a third party non-woman that would make me

really uncomfortable in public. Yeah, a little bit too much attention. Yep, a little bit too much attention. You might just want to be by yourself today. Might just want to listen to my music and jog. Be left alone. And maybe I'm wearing short shorts because I don't want to wear sweaty leggings that are tied up against my legs, but that's not an invitation to, you know, want to touch them.

Sure. You know? Sure. That makes total sense. Perfectly reasonable. On the other hand, like, you go out in public and like everyone has their AirPods in. Not literally everyone. I'm obviously being a little hyperbolic right now, but many people do. And you kind of wonder, what people like, what was it like before that? And were there things about that that were maybe better? And healthy. And maybe healthier. But again, I have put the AirPods in and hoped no one would talk to me before. I totally get it. Sometimes mid-conversation, I'll even put my AirPods back in, hoping that somebody might recognize a nonverbal cue. But without, you know, categorizing our community, I will say, there are...

Ah, social cues might not be... Many members of the LTT community that don't... don't really pick up nonverbal body language cues. So it doesn't always work. You know, you try, you try. And you know what? Like, I get that. I'm not offended by it.

I'm not upset by it. Doesn't really bother me. I'm also not a woman. Totally. And it really is different. Very different experience. Very different. When I'm getting unwanted attention from a man,

it's just kind of like, bro go do something else it's also fascinating I don't know we don't need to go down this chain really but it's fascinating to me like if I am like attached to

say my partner right now yeah if I if I'm right if I'm right next to them or my arms around them or holding hands or something if there is some strong indication that I am with this person it's fine the second I like float out of

the picture, it changes. It's like, okay. So you're saying you're the jealous type. Well, no. If I'm, if I'm... So, if we're like this, it's fine to talk to me. If he's not next to me. That is not my point.

It's not my point. He might go full like pop a bear mode. You watch out for that. My point is that like, it's surprising how palpable and fast the change in attention can be. And like we saw, we saw this in New York. I was like, I was floated off to the, Emma was getting something from a food cart.

And you, Yvonne and I were all kind of more floated off to the side. Oh yeah. Because we were reading the side of the thing. So she was kind of on her own. And some dude came up like pretty close right behind her. And I repositioned and then they left. And it was like, that was fast. It's almost like we're actually like,

like animals. Yeah. And everything, like, you know how every man somehow knows which urinal to stand at? Yeah. And it's funny because women will talk about how they, like, don't get it. That's because you never needed to. That's because a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago, you weren't marking your territory with this thing. You know, you

Like, it's, but it's culturally universal. Sure. Yeah. I'm serious. Did, did humans mark the territory with this? I know dogs did. Did humans do that? Humans might not have, but something at some point did.

We definitely, you. There's clearly, there's clearly vestigial. Like, I don't like, I don't want to pee right next to another dude unless we're pretty close. do you no yeah sure sure all right I'll follow yeah

like there's occasional social situations I think it might just be like shyness because you have your dong out and in your hands you don't want to be like literally shoulder to shoulder but where's the origin of that

why do we have that shyness would I be shy sitting next to another dude and ripping a fart Yeah, probably not as much. Probably not. I think... There's something coming out of my butt.

And you won't like it. This might be a hot take, but I think fart smellin is different than don looking. But the thing, I mean, you could... Don gazing is a little different than fart smelling. At the urinal, though, there's usually a barrier anyway. So it's not even about the look. It's not even rational anymore. Hot take, if you're a tall dude, there effectively is not a barrier.

Okay, that's fair. That's fair. And like, you know what? I'm not even trying to be like, oh, I'm tall. You think there's a barrier for Lucas? There ain't no barrier for Lucas. This is true. This is very true.

But what I'm basically saying is like there's things that are, that are non- No, I hear you. Don't need to be communicated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That are non-verbal that we all just like kind of understand, except the ones that don't. And coming way back around, some of them can make life a little uncomfortable to be a woman. Yeah.

And I don't have to experience that, which is great. And unfortunately, AirPods might be limiting our ability to socially interact. And third place would strive to be different somehow and probably would fail for that reason. Because people, like I said, in that subreddit, they liked it this way and wanted it this way. And the whole third place thing, and that's valid. It might end up a pit of 300 dudes that are all. single. Everyone back in the pile. And, and, you know, it might, you might walk in that door and feel a little targeted when 600 eyeballs turn at you all, all at once. Not to mention

the other balls. Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, I don't know, there's, there's problems with these things. It is, it is a tragedy that a lot of these third places are gone, but I, I don't have an answer for it. Have we done a topic yet? one, which I don't even know if we're actually done. You are not. We talked about the Linux stuff. Oh, I'm done. I don't have a lot to add.

Yeah, I think there are some cozy things from Mint that I miss. Okay. But I'm fine so far. As of right now, everything that I've had to do has me not looking back towards Windows at all. I fully expect my final conclusion is going to be wanting to go back to Windows because I'm going to run into game compatibility issues. And honestly, maybe because the team's experience is just so bad, and I have to use teams. So it just is what it is. This is why I never look at YouTube chat.

I take the middle urinal. I love that awkward moment of silence when they have to decide whether or not to go next to you or go into a stall. Actual monster. That feels like someone that we knew used to vary their walking speed to be a little bit faster. than you or a little bit slower than you just to see how you'd react. Do you know who we're talking about? I can type it. Sure.

I'm going to type it. That checks out. I didn't know that they did that. It feels like that type of thing. It's just the like social observation. They just want to see. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yvonne picked up on a tism thing from me that I hadn't realized that I was still doing. So like, like years into my relationship, she finally acknowledged it out loud. She's like, oh yeah, you're doing that thing where you don't step on cracks, so it makes your, it makes your gate really uneven. But it's fine. And I was like, oh God, now I'm like hyper aware of this. I do stuff like that all the time. But that was, that's not me doing it on purpose to find out how other people will react to it. Yeah. I don't think I even sort of hide that. I'll, like, really dramatically. Like I'll either on purpose

step on all of them or not step on them or something. I have to force myself to not think about it, which makes me think about it a lot. That makes sense. And then I just walk with very even... I actually try to walk in lockstep with her. You're like super robotic? Yeah, she's two inches shorter than me,

but women tend to have proportionally longer legs compared to their torso, so our legs are almost exactly the same length. Eminemey's are exactly the same way. Yeah, so we, so I can, so if I pay attention to it, at all, then I can just like walk completely in lockstep with her. And then I, and then I don't have to think about it as much because if we're attached,

then I don't have to look down and think about where I'm stepping. I'm just a child when I walk. I'll jump on all the lines or avoid all the lines. If there's like a little, you know, I don't know what you want to call it, a little flat bit like stopping the, you know, dirt on a slope or something. I'll try to walk on that. Nice. Who knows?

Nice. Do whatever. Oh, a puddle. Yeah, totally. That's me for sure. I'm out walking. I'm going to have fun. Whatever. What are we supposed to be doing? Next topic. Some comms. Coms. Okay. And CW. Time for some checkout messages. So our end of season sale is extended.

Do you want to fire up LM.g.g.g.g. slash end of season. We are bumping the sale to 30% off. So if there's something you've been eyeing for a while, this is probably the moment to grab it. Um, we are clearing space for what's coming next, which means you can get current season gear at offseason pricing, um, and then wear it now or stash it for next year or you can, I mean, wait and get other stuff later. Either way you win, I guess. Uh, you can find the sale at lmg.g.g.g slash end of season. Oh, there's only these ones left. Well, that's the thing about a clearance sale. Yep. Yeah. So if you see something here that's in your size, you should probably order it.

Now, don't be a Luke. Don't make that noise. I guess you knew what I was going to say. I kept meaning to request this and then I just kept forgetting to. And now it's out of stock. And now it's gone. I actually really wanted one. The last chance sale is also still live.

LMG.g.g slash last chance. there's some really solid deals in here once these ones hit zero that's it shop the sale before it's gone we got the polo shirt we got the dropout hoodie we got the not a hot dog VNAC t shirt

I like that one some bundles there's a lot of really good backpack deals some of these bundles are wild right now yeah so go check that out finally we're keeping the buy more save more deal on all of our blank teas because we get it when you find something that fits well and just works it makes sense to

grab a couple, maybe in a few different colors, and then call your wardrobe optimized. You can check it out at LMG.g.g slash blank teas. Buy more, save more. The more you buy, the more you save. It's girl math. You know you love it. Okay, here you go. Two shirts is 45, three is 60, four is 75, is 80. Yeah. Dang. Yeah, that's a pretty good deal. Yeah. Yeah. High quality shirts. All right. And when you're placing your order, hey, you might want to send a checkout message. The way these work is you just add something to your card on LTTStore.com, and it will go to

producer Dan. If you guys are going to throw money at your screen to check, if you guys are going to throw money at your screen to interact with us on the show, we figure you might as well get high-quality merchandise in return. Like, say, for example, the lawsuit hoodie that Luke had out just now. So in the cart, you can say whether you want your name to appear or not. You can choose a color scheme. And, oh, my God, let me get that out of here.

You go ahead and place your order, and it'll go to Dan, who will reply to it, or who will forward it internally, or who will just kind of pop it up somewhere, or who will curate it for me and Luke on the show. So want to show them a couple curated ones, Dan? Yeah, sure. We've got a bunch here already. last week you talked about Apple headphones on Android with updates. What's your take on Samsung only supporting 3D spatial audio on its own headphones?

I use Sony and it has no support for it. Is that Samsung's fault? Generally speaking, vendor lock is not something that I'm a huge fan of. However, 3D spatial audio, are we talking the kind where it knows, where it is relative to the position of your device, do we know that this is Samsung's fault, or is this something that they specifically had to build for, like, on their hardware in order to make it work?

I legitimately don't know. My new pair of headphones has 3D spatial audio like you've described, and it works with literally anything. Okay. But is that because they did a bunch of extra work, or is it because Samsung specifically... I guess what I'm asking is, did Samsung specifically lock it out?

Or did they just not put in the work? That I don't know. That I don't know. In general, though, no, I consider that to be a downer. If they are selling these headphones as having 3D spatial audio and it only works on a Samsung phone, it's a pretty crummy user experience. I want to be able to mix and match.

I don't want to have to buy my next phone from Samsung. just because my headphones happen to be from Samsung and I really like 3D spatial audio. I don't happen to really like 3D spatial audio, so it's not a big issue for me, but your mileage may certainly vary on that. I know some people like it. Dan, do you like 3D spatial audio? I have never used the feature. So no, I don't. Neat. Okay. Cool. I mean, a huge... Have you not used the feature because you don't like it or do you... I don't use it because I don't like it. Got it fine with stereo. I did try one that was like 3D in a space that was kind of neat.

Like it was kind of more, now it kind of sounds like you're in a good room, which is a little different. Oh yeah, but that's different modes. That's just like a... That's a type of it. But not the like turn your head. It's coming from speakers. Yeah, but that's like a DSP thing.

That's like the good old fashioned EAX. Remember EAX? Yeah, we're just regressing, I guess. You could play around with the EAX profiles in the control. station and my music sounds worse. Dude, I remember. Yeah, right? Like, I'd always, I'd play around with it for 30 seconds just like that.

And then I'd be like, well, this is stupid. I guess I'll just not use this anymore. I was like, pretty much. Yeah. You know, vapor wave played in a dead mall from another room and you're having in a hallucinatory episode. That kind of genre before that was cool. You could have your MP3 player play that, your MP5 player or whatever.

Anyone else? Anyone else? Yeah. Chat's not all excited about 3D spatial audio, that's for sure. So if it's vendor locked for a feature that you think is dumb, does that matter? Yeah, it still matters because it's the principle of the thing, you know? It's still bad. Yeah.

Yeah, like if you have like, I don't know, you have a lollipop where if you press a button and it makes it taste like cum, then like. Sure. Most people probably don't want that. But if you arbitrarily lock it out to only iPhone users because you assume maybe they just, you know, like the taste of corporate dong, then like, that's not your decision to make for them. They should, Android users should be allowed to love corporate dong too. Yeah. Some of them, some of them for sure do you.

I suspect that product would have a very small but extremely dedicated audience. I bet it wouldn't be as small as you'd think. Maybe, maybe not. Could you like upload a taste profile? Jesus. EQ, your throat. Just leave a couple beats there. Would you want another one?

Yeah, give me another. Anything. No. Luke, please give us a mini networking infrastructure lesson. Why is running a VPN of gold mine, but. serving video is a money pit. Oh, that's actually, that's actually a pretty good question. Are users watching videos on a VPN not just as bandwidth expensive?

It's just not as, um, I don't know the, I can't remember the, the, the VPN, but there's a VPN that gives a lot of public data, which is how we figured a lot of this information out on the cost of benefit. Um,

what's the wind one? Wind scribe. But a, oh, that sounds right. VPN based in Canada. They're based in Canada. No, that sounds right. It was a Canadian one if I remember correctly. Yeah, Winscribe.

Winscribe current status, maybe. Registered users. This sounds, this looks like the right page. Maybe there's more information here. But you can see the network utilization, the current users, and the registered users. And basically what the effective. Oh, is this? I feel like there might have been more information on this in the past,

or maybe I'm tripping, or maybe there was some other way we got it. But basically, the vibe that we got is that it kind of seems like a lot of people turn the VPN on, put the hat on, do some pirate hat wearing things, and then turn the VPN off.

And often turn the VPN off, pretty much all the time. The average utilization of VPNs does not seem very high. Because the experience of browsing with a VPN sucks. It's just constant captcha's slower browsing speeds. Yeah. And unless you are wearing your tricorn hat,

the vast majority of the things that you do online, unless you're really, really, like, really trying to avoid anyone, you know, fingerprinting or creating an advertising profile for you, which I am not convinced that most people are willing to put in the work to actively avoid. I just, I don't see the, I don't see the point of it. If I'm not traveling or like where I need to get around like a great firewall of some sort, or if I'm not downloading something sketchy, I don't have my VPN on. Yeah. And that's, I think, the vast majority of people and the huge gaps between that allow them to save a lot of money.

There's also like, I think the quality of service is not expected to be super high, to be completely honest. Like if you're watching a video and the next chunk doesn't show up, you're immediately pissed off. You're immediately messaging support. You're mad. There was a buffer. What are you talking about? It was 2026, which is fair enough. but if you're using a VPN and you're torrenting something, which is specifically what someone said in chat is like, oh, it's a lot of data through torrents though. Because if people are mostly just pirating stuff,

first of all, you're probably not really staring at it the whole time it's downloading anyways, and it's a torrent. You're going to expect a lot of ups and downs. So if a little bit of that comes from the VPN, it's probably fine. So there's like the quality of service expectation is in the dirt, and the amount that people are just not actually even using the service is in the dirt. there's a ton of people that have subscriptions

and aren't even using them. If you don't have a subscription, by the way, now seems like as good an opportunity as any to talk about the really good deal you can get on PIA VPN through the Linus Tech Tips link. Dan, do you want to throw the link in the various chats? Sure thing.

Cool. Oh, hey, it's you. I didn't know this was like our own thing. Yeah. Look at him. Look at that. Linus Tech Tips fans save more with PIA VPN. You don't even have to be a fan to save more.

You can just click this link. That's true. You could hate me and still save more. That's true. Yep. But yeah, it seems to just be that people's usage of VPNs is really low. And we talked to a couple people in the industry. We poked around, I think it was Winscribe and a few other different sites that were like very transparent about things.

And we were like, oh, wow, people really don't be using this too much compared to the amount of like actually, you know, currently registered users, connected users. It was very interesting to see the connected users versus network utilization and the registered versus connected users. I don't remember, but I think we figured out someone got the G.I. Joe reference. Yeah, for some reason, PIA in my head just always sounds like G.I. Joe, but it's PIA. I don't know why. I do that all the time. I'm a computer. I'm a computer.

Stop all the downloading. Yeah. See? That's what people do with the P.S. They download something real quick and then they stop using it for a month. I don't know how many people understand what we're talking about right now. I only care about the people who get the reference. Everybody else can leave.

I want to be alone with them. Bought a massage machine go. Thank you. I just want this frame. Anyways. Yeah. So, but basically what we learned was a lot of people pay for it. Yep.

a lot of people pay a decent amount for it. Yeah. And a lot of people don't really use it that much. Whereas Floplaine, I think our usage is actually pretty high. Usage is pretty high. Every subscription service, you're going to have, I don't remember what they call it, but people who have subscribed and are basically dead accounts where they just like, they don't check their credit card that much and they've just been paying,

but they don't actually use the service. Every service has that. Ours seems to have a lot of active users. I'm not complaining about that at all. It's almost like we, It's almost like we advocate for, you know, not wasting your money. I would rather you did. I want you to use Foplin.

I want you to enjoy it. And but VPNs are kind of, it feels like the opposite end of the spectrum. Yeah, I had someone make a comment to me that the Smash Champs business model will probably struggle from the people who buy the annual premium membership and play like six, seven days a week. I'm like, bro, no, that's what we want. Yeah. We want people here every day. We want, we want this to be.

a community. VPNs are also, and I mean, like all of them, as far as I know. So I'm not signaling any of them out, and I do think I'm actually

talking about PIA. It's way more expensive to subscribe for one month compared to subscribing for longer periods of time. Well, yeah. So if you, this totally makes sense.

The business model totally makes sense. But it creates a situation where it's like, if you didn't use a VPN at all that month, but you might next month, you don't really want to cancel it. So a lot of people would just have VPN subscriptions,

even if they don't use it for four or five months at a time. And then you might have a spike in usage where they're like, hmm, I'm going to download a ton of stuff. And they connect it and do a ton of torrents and download things overnight or whatever. Every Linux ISO. Like, we're doing the Linux Challenge right now. So we needed so many Linux ISO. I had to download every single Linux ISO and every version ever.

Every season of Pop OS. But, but yeah, Mulvad has flat billing. That's cool. I don't know. Like some of them are big. Most VPNs, I don't think. Game of Mint has like so many seasons. That's cool that they have flat pricing.

Archerton. But, Architon. Very nice. But, but yeah, it's very common that people don't want to cancel because they might need it. Or even if,

say, the Moldad thing, or apparently they have flat pricing, which is neat. Even then, you might not want to cancel it because, yeah,

you're going to have to go subscribe again if you need it. And you might need it next week or something. so I'll just leave it. It's only like five bucks. There's a lot of the, I'll just leave it going on with VPN. I've had an active subscription to PIA in spite of the fact that they're like an affiliate of ours for like 10 years or something like that because it's just more convenient to just kind of have it. Firecat, speaking of convenience, decided it was more convenient to type this into chat instead of into a search engine.

So I saved them to work. Yes, PIA works on the. That's one that I have a real hard time wrapping my brain around. But there you go. You got your answer. And you got noticed. So it's double accomplishment. I feel like it's beginning.

He's slowly becoming a Linux, bro. Me? Yeah. Hold on, hold on. Don't make me pull this out. Why did you read the mix? Just sent him a link to the wiki. Don't make me pull this out.

Don't make me pull this out. Oh. What? Oh. Is this bad now? What is this? Is it just not HGVS? I don't think it's HGVS.

Certificate data invalid. Oof. Mm. Oh. Mm. It's probably fine. Won't let them see me do it. It's probably fine.

Oh, no, normally uses encryption. When Chrome tried to connect to it for you, the website sent back unusual and incorrect credentials. Um, you cannot visit it right now. Oh, really? Why is it dot app? What the heck just happened?

Did you get sponsor linked? Is it dot app? No, it's not sponsored. Has it always been dot app? Shut up. Dude, it's been years since I've tried to use this. Okay, is it just let me go to that for you.com. No, this is also...

Just let me Google that. Let me Google that.com. I'll share my screen. Wait. Let me Google that.com. Interesting. Let me Google that for you. dot com. Here, hold on, I'm coming back to me for a second here.

Also goes to LMTFY.com and also has the certificate invalid issue. Go figure. All right. Anyway, yeah, so this is what it does if you're not familiar is it just puts up a little cursor and then types it for you and then, oh, interesting. Still shows the sponsored results though, in spite of being whatever G Private is. Have you used G Private before? I've never heard of G Private.

What is G Private? Are we on a little side quest? What's happening right now? Simple untracked private search. Google search, but it's 100% private. Learn more. Okay. Take our word for it or like,

what is this? I have no idea. Committed to protecting your privacy, ad affiliate disclosure. James Lacey of the Shopwise group is owner of gprivate.com. Okay. All right.

Cool. Here's this postal code. Sure. Oh, boy. Well, it's right on the site. It's in the privacy page. It is indeed right there.

I didn't... That's probably a PO box. Sure. All right. Should we maybe do some topics? Nope. Wikipedia has blocked Archive.

Dot Today and started removing over 690,000 archive links from the Pedia, citing security risks and reliability issues. The decision followed reports that Archive. Today's operator, this is freaking wild. Like, I've used Archive today to get past paywalls before, because I just want to read that one article, and I'm sorry, I'm not. I think a lot of people use it for that. Yeah, that's a self-decided, totally okay.

And I mean, look, I actually, I'm not going to argue that that one's okay, because a huge part of the decay of the quality of our journalism has been people's unwillingness to pay for it. But it is pretty tough when I came across one article I wanted to read on a site in the last year, and this is the first one and I'm just like, yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's going to happen today. So archive today, sometimes that's what happens today,

is something that I have used. And looking at this, I am now deeply uncomfortable ever using it again. Let's talk about that. The operator embedded malicious code into CAPTCHA pages allegedly using visitors' web traffic

to help generate a D. attack against a blog called Giroveg run by Janie Patocaleo who published research about the background of the operator behind the archive. Editors also

reported that some archived snapshots, this is actually okay, we could probably have a really long conversation about which of these things are worse and I don't think there's a wrong answer. But I feel on my initial reaction that this next part is actually worse.

Editors also reported, and we're talking Wikipedia editors, that some of the archived snapshots on Archive. Today were altered, including a case where the credited author of a blog post was reportedly changed within an archived capture. This combined with an absolutely bonkers set of threats made from the operator toward Jenny Patacallio, including the threat of a gyrovage branded gay dating app, made Wikipedia editors determine that the service posed reputational and security risks. Which when I first read just the subject line of this happening, not in the Wandauk, I read this a bit ago,

But when I read the subject line of this happening, I was like, what, that sucks? And then I read more into it. I was like, whoa, that makes a lot of sense. This is really important. Archive. Today is not the Internet Archive. They are two different things. So far, the Internet Archive has not, and that includes the Wayback Machine, has not done anything to make us question their integrity and credibility of that group.

Yeah. archive today just completely obliterated whatever goodwill they might have had because your entire your entire raison d'etra

as an archival um well archive damn it I painted myself into a bit of a corner there and it kind of sucks because a lot of these archive sites have been like amazing for so long like internet archive is so based sorry I didn't finish that sentence but your entire you is that we trust you to be an accurate record of what we otherwise might have lost.

Yeah. You're supposed to be built on a rock solid foundation of truth and accuracy. That's the whole point is that things are not forgotten and lost and allowed to be obfuscated or gaslit in the future. So if you're going to do that, you're cooked. Yeah. way back machine has been used as like hard fact for a long time yeah and like yeah and it has to be that if it's anything other than that then it's worthless now yeah it's rough totally understand

the decision and agree with in my opinion you can't you can't do those things you can't associate with those things you can't associate with an archive that's editing data like it just doesn't work that's crazy fundamentally doesn't work also like I have no idea if this is the case, but like I have noticed times when I go to archive a page and it seems like it's like doing a lot for a long time. I wonder if my

connection was being used for a DDoS attack. It says it was in CAPS though. But then like have you ever actually tried to submit a page for archival? No. Okay. It does like a whole bunch of stuff which kind of and I don't

know the exact mechanism that it uses because I've just. It's just like compressing thing. never looked it up. I've never figured it out. But what I assume is that it's easier for them to grab the assets through you and have you upload to them. Yeah, I assumed so. Rather than you just flag it to them and they try to download it because they would probably get, they'd probably get flagged for all the archive requests that they're doing. That's my assumption, but I really, I really, I really, I really don't know that. But there's been times when it's taken a really long time for just like a text page.

And I haven't really fully understood why that would be. And I wonder if, if, if, you know, my, my upload was used for this in some way. I don't, I don't know. I don't have a single clue. Me neither. Nipolis Cage asks, why would one archive a page? So, reasons to archive include

logging changes before they happen. So this has come up a lot recently with the DOJ in the U.S. publication of the Epstein files. There's been a lot. There's a huge tech conversation that somehow we have not had around the

Epstein files, around preservation of data and government censorship and government manipulation of data. There's been multiple documented cases where they have made changes to either the

redactions or in some cases by removing data that was originally published in order to make it more difficult to find. Yeah. So yeah, that's a good reason. I have done some personal archiving, but I haven't submitted something for archiving.

Like I know there was a particular video not that long ago that said some particularly disgusting things. And I didn't actually want that person to be able to get away with just like pulling it down or whatever. So I myself download it and I had multiple other people downloaded as well. I think I have that video. Yeah. So like there are things like that that that I.

done. Yeah, but it's always been a personal effort. I haven't submitted for archive anything. Another really good reason is it can just be kind of a fun time capsule. Oh, totally. Like going and browsing NCIX.com from 2005 is both fun and also educational. NCX.com on the wayback machine is wild. It's pretty fun. And so being able to see accurate, like definitely accurate, which is again, why the trust is so important, accurate pricing from back then, being able to call back specs, see how it was marketed, right? That's something that's not going to be captured

on an incredible resource, like tech power-ups, you know, GPU, what do they call it? They're like GPU index. But that won't be captured there. You won't see what the retail pricing was. You won't see what the product photos looked like. So an archived snapshot of the site from that time

is irreplaceable in that way. Nothing else can do that. another reason would be to circumvent paywalls. I mean, I already kind of talked about that, is they have their surveys of downloading the entire page and then just making that available without any kind of like scroll to sign up to keep reading or whatever else.

What are you up to over there? I'm loading NCX from 2005. Oh yeah, baby. Woo! Get that Lexmark, Z705 color ink. Jet printer. Pentium 4. This is, man, dude, this is what I'm talking about, though.

Where's some RAM? Can I get some RAM? People, people are so upset about how expensive tech is. And I'm just like, bro, it's like, yeah, it was always, it was always expensive. 512 megs for 162 bucks. Let's go. HyperX, baby. Get that Corsair value select, buddy. That's, that's the move.

course there, value select. These old Kingston HyperX, like blue with the silver, like, pincher things on it, those are legendary. That ain't nothing compared to my OCC platinum, though. One gig. Get that platinum super, super mirror silver heat spreader. Mm-mm, mm-hmm. And that was back before they were honeycomb to save on material.

Mushkin still exists, fun fact. I know they just because of NCX they don't in my brain. Yeah. Because NCX is gone. They were like NCX was like my only portal to muskin products. How cool would it be if we could bring back NCIX.com? I'd still love to do it. That'd be pretty sick.

There was way back machine snapshots from 2026. What's going on? On NCI of NCIX? Yeah, let me jump back. Oh, no, I think it's still a thing. Didn't someone try to, I think someone tried to bring it back. January 23rd, there's a snapshot. Ew.

See what it is. Is it just some AI junk? Ew! Oh my God. No, no, no, don't look, don't look, don't look. Okay, this is crazy. This is crazy. Check this out.

Wait, what was that first one? Wait, what the? It redirected to this. Oh, it was worse before. Oh, the last one. Oh, wait, yeah, there it is. That's crazy. Oh.

What? I've never heard of this thing. I mean, it looks horrible. It kind of does. Oh, well. It looks absolutely horrible and no one should use it. What if we showed you anime bobs? I'm going to have my junk throwaway email.

Yeah. This looks like an, oh, no, I was... I'm sorry, I'm having troubles responding right now. Please try again later. It'll cost free. I mean, I didn't say anything, bro. Ask me. Okay.

What would Linus think about being on this site? Enter doesn't send. Oh, my God. Enter doesn't send! Ah! There's one login. It's Keeper. Oh, dude.

Keeper on the two factor. Enter doesn't confirm it. Oh, really? It drives me on desktop. It drives me nuts. Weird. Anyway, hold on. I'll increment the counter.

Okay Hold up Oh my Oh gosh Which Linus are we talking about here Well he definitely wouldn't use Alarm or Emergency Light emoji

The Linux Colonel Daddy Linus Torvalds would absolutely hate being on This site If it's any social media cesspool Dude straight up called Is this trying to like is this the way this site thinks I would talk? I guess.

A disease that encourages bad behavior. Spills energy drink. Wait, but if you mean me, Linus Sebastian from LTT, I'd be like sponsor block activated, but only if they send a 40-90. Torvalds tried Google Plus once because it was less mindless, bailed.

So it goes back to talking about Torvalds again. Yvonne's take. Just use FaceTime Boomers. Verdict. This is... That's brutal. So stupid. That's actually just not good.

Yikes. What the hell is Linus social opinion? I don't know. What is that? is that is that on here Linus yeah this is dude this is so bad okay it was just redirecting to the YouTube channel for a bit there that would definitely be a better thing for it to do

they did that like in January so I'm still poking around oh like this year yeah there was there was one day I think it was this one let's see it's on the 23rd yeah YouTube that's definitely a better place for it to go than this hot garbage. It's back to, it's back to garbage. There's a bunch of snapshots in 2025. What was going on here? This one, three snapshots in one day. What was happening? I really wish that, oh yeah, this is just the domain being available page, I think. Or like being for sale

or something. Oh man. So does that mean that whoever this chatifylife.a.ai has acquired it now then? Who knows? That would be really disappointing because I would have loved. to buy it and resurrect it, but I just... Yeah, there's a buy-this domain thing. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's a shame. Woo!

Woo! The owner of NCX.com is offering it for sale for an asking price of, whoa! One million dollars. So I was aware of that, which is why I didn't buy it. Yeah, screw that. It was worth a fraction of that. The meme is not worth that.

Yeah. there's absolutely no way. I'm sorry, but it's been way too long. No one really cares anymore except for. Oh, Crystal says no, it's still for sale. For a million dollars. Well. Which might as well mean it's not. Are there services where you can like lease redirecting? Because that kind of makes sense. Probably. So you find like, yeah, no, that's got to be a thing, right? You find parts domains and you just like. Park domains that get a little bit of traffic. Yeah. Because NCX would for sure get a little bit of traffic. Yeah, people are saying yes. People are saying yes.

Yeah. Okay. Oh. Okay, this message from Helen Keller for 2069 is a little confusing, but I think I understand what they're saying. I'm clawing back a charity website for a client that got turned into a naughty website. Oh, a clawing back a. So yeah, a charity website that existed and was a thing. And the client who owned it had it turned.

turned into a naughty website so that they could just like steal traffic that's yeah that's rough that's rough do y'all own the nc ix youtube channel no so the ownership of all the nc ix intellectual property is complicated which is one of the big reasons why we haven't made a real serious written offer for it because the original owner of it has a version in his his mind of who owns it and the creditors after the bankruptcy have a version in their mind of who owns it and they don't necessarily agree and somehow the domain and trademark and YouTube channel were not resolved at the time of the bankruptcy so we have in the past. We have in the past approached the group that handled the bankruptcy on behalf of the creditors and said,

hey, so you guys didn't like get this. So if we buy it, do you commit not to pretend that it's yours because you like never got it? And they're like, we're not even going to look into that. Which basically is a big problem for us. that's not interesting enough for us right now once you guys make it a very popular domain again then it will become suddenly interesting for us again yeah so it's it's untouchable so it kind of is is doomed to rot forever um unless the owner allowed it to lapse maybe and we sniped it but even then the trademark could be could be a problem i don't even know that for sure

I didn't know there was someone on the ACX channel that I didn't know. I don't recognize this guy. Oh, oh, shoot. I think he's someone's brother. Oh, okay. Yeah. Is that? Oh, wait, well, I don't want to, like, dox him.

Yeah, no, no, no. I mean, he's someone's brother, probably, like, statistically speaking. If anyone... He's in a few of them. Yeah. I want to say... Hold on. They're thumbnails were pretty good.

I did stuff for a long time. I must have really not been paying attention at the end there. Makes sense. We kind of had a lot going on. Oh, here we go. His name is Barrett. Got it. Cool.

Yeah, he's Luke's brother. Yeah. Cool. Let's go with that. Yeah, long lost. He actually did some work for us at one point, I think. Oh, really? Really nice guy.

Cool. Uh, float plane announcement. Uh, but, but couldn't come to Whale Land? Well, guess what? We released a vlog featuring Sammy's very first land experiencing. Here's the vlog. It includes very normal things like a fire truck. That's for gaming.

See? See all the gaming happening in the back of the firetruck? There is a lot of gaming happening in the back of the truck. There's actually a lot of gaming happening elsewhere on the firetruck. I'm not going to spoil the entire fire truck video, but there's, there's a lot of, like, pretty wild fire truck things that happen that involve gaming and whatnot. That's not on the fire truck, but Whale-Lan. Whale-Lan was pretty cool.

A lot of cool stuff of Whale-Lan. You should check out the vlog. Oh, yeah, Floplane audiences loving this one so far with a 300 to one like-dislike ratio. Nice. Small cameos from Bringas Studios and Dankpods and Linus doing the thing. What does that mean? Did you drop something? It just happened.

it was just at the end of the video already yep yeah there it goes all right thank you thank you for that Sammy that's very helpful check it out at lmg.ggg slash fpwan nice all right

we're supposed to do sponsors now okay the show's brought to you by vesey James from the business team said he owes me an apology and also a thank you a few weeks ago he correctly uh okay referred to the atma weapon by its translated name ultima weapon but out of shame he has put down his play-through of final fantasy quote unquote three thanks to me and our sponsor vessi though he's finally seeing the outdoors for the first time vesey has empowered him to go enjoy even wet grass thanks to their stormburst low tops as always vesey claims their shoes are completely waterproof, so even Ultros can look stylish running errands.

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You can learn more about the U-Green AI NAS IDX by clicking our link in the video description. U-Green's been kind of killing it on NASS's. Dude, I independently, and this is not part of the ad spot or anything, and there are other products that do this. But I was, I needed something, I needed a wall wards. So I got one from U-Green. And while I was shopping on there, I've been having a problem with my car, which is where the Bluetooth will sometimes just take forever to connect. It's very annoying.

So I bought a thing from them. Bluetooth 3.5 millimeter. Are you sure you want to just type that in? float-playing chat and hope someone else will know what it is. One of these jobbers. I got one of these and it's been great. Nice. You just,

the USB is just for power and then the Bluetooth thing is just in the like top of the USB plug. Makes sense. And then my car has a USB and an ox right next to each other in the like center console thing. And what I'll do is my phone can connect to two Bluetooth at the same time. So my phone will automatically connect to this, which is a worst experience because I can't take calls nicely over it. And I can't do all the controls that I would like to do through the car. But it will automatically connect to this and work immediately. And then I'll notice some audio oddities.

And when that happens, I just go bunk, bunk, bunk on the steering wheel and go to normal Bluetooth. And then everything works great. That is a very clodgy fix. But I'm glad that you're happy. It's, it is clodgy. But it like makes me happy. in a weird way. Yeah, and I'm glad.

Yeah. Yeah. So glad. 18 bucks and there is no gaps in being able to connect my phone to my car now, which is awesome. It's sweet. Cool. Just go aftermarket radio eventually? Sure.

But this was $18 and it immediately solved it. It was great. That's terrific. I liked it. This is an extremely not planned topic and it's not even really a topic. But I just decided to check out Steve. team charts for some reason. I was like, I wonder what people are really doing. So that's what you do on the show when you're not listening to me talk or talking. You're doing an ad spot.

There's not much for me to do. And two things, three things really stood out to me. One, Arc Raiders is still destroying. This is crazy. Wow. That's actually wild. 170,000 people on Arc Raiders. Well, it's almost like people wanted an extraction shooter that's slightly less of a giant piece of shit. Yeah. Five M. I was like, what's that even? I've never heard of that. It's just a, like, mod thing so people can play GTA online. So there's still that many people playing GTA online, which is wild. And then I saw a bongo cat, and I still can't fully tell what this even is.

Baku-baku. Dunk, dunk, dunk. It seems like it just, like, sits on your task bar, and as you type, like, things happen. Oh, it's a bonzai, buddy. Yeah. So they're typing a notepad, and it just goes, bunk, bunk, bunk. And then it like Ronsai Buddy's still a thing

All these years later I don't know But look at this Overwhelmingly positive reviews 22,000 of them How much does this cost? Oh, it's free It's free, okay

That makes a little bit worse That explains a lot But are there Oh, it's one of those It's banana game I should just scroll down It's just banana game Okay

All right Sounds good Well, that was a fun side quest. Yeah. Okay. Donut Labs based in Finland claims to have made a

solid state EV battery. Oh! They recently announced they've created this holy grail of battery tech after only being founded in 2024. Wow. For those wondering, solid state batteries, pretty cool. The idea is that they replace

the flammable, highly combustible liquid electrolyte used in lithium ion batteries with a solid substance that is capable of higher energy density and faster charging. I think also they're supposed to be lighter, but I guess that's another way of saying higher energy density. Historically though, they have been very difficult to manufacture. This technology has been researched to pretty much no avail for decades with EV manufacturers pumping money into it hand over fist. Toyota's advanced battery research, for instance, has 13.5 billion, that's with a B, of funding with a focus on solid state. So that's exciting, except that there are some skeptics. Donut Labs has responded to skepticism with the I Do Not Believe series, where the company is sharing third-party test results with the independent VTT.

Research Center of Finland. However, following VTT's fast-charge performance test, Ziroth, a YouTuber with a PhD in electric propulsion, whose master's thesis was about solid state batteries, cast further doubts on the product in his video called testing the world's first solid state battery. I'm not going to tell you everything that he says in his video because you should really just go watch it. It's a really good video. I've heard it. I haven't seen it. I've heard it's fantastic. But there are a few important things to point out. He says that VTT's test results, what, oh, did he actually say this part? I'm not sure if he said this part, but I was reading about it as well. So now I'm getting his video and my reading a little bit confused. So let's not say where I got what,

but here's something that's really important. The, uh, but, but, yeah, the, uh, yes, so the technical research center, VTTT technical research center, says, we tested the provided solid state battery from donut labs. I forget if they actually put it in quotes or like how they worded it, but basically they worded it in such a way. The solid state was a name instead of a thing. That they're saying what donut labs says they sent them, but they have not actually been tasked with confirming.

Proving, yeah. That it is in fact solid state and they have not done any destructive testing on it. So in a way, it's kind of wild. It's like if I made a, okay, let's say that LTT's true spec cables, let's say they were crap, hypothetically. Oh. But I called them true spec cable, and then I sent them to some third-party validation lab and had them test something like kind of unrelated to the speed they run at, for instance.

Sure. And I was like, yeah, you guys can test the bending radius or something. voltage drop. And then if that test lab were to say, we tested LTT true spec cables and found that the bend radius is this much. It's kind of like credibility washing, if that makes sense.

For sure. In a way, because VTT never actually says it's a solid state battery, but they like tested the donut solid state battery. So I forget whether that came up in my reading or whether that was in the video, but that was pretty important.

He also found that the voltage curve and fast charging graphs looked very close to a lithium ion cell. Also found that while the energy density actually seemed like good, it wasn't what Donut initially claimed. And then there was something that he brought up that I'm not actually sure if is an actual issue, but that is that they reached,

during their testing, they reached a 90 degree Celsius safety, limit and they had to apply another heat sink in order to do the charge test again and i think it was like 11c charging rate but from my understanding that might be a ztt safety protocol based on other battery chemistries so that might not actually mean that they were sure that this thing was going to combust sure but if xeroth is right that this thing seems to just actually be like maybe a good one but just a lithium cell of some sort then vttt was very smart to have their safety testing protocol because theoretically donut labs claimed that with their solid state battery

and i'm using quotes here uh had an operating temperature that was safe of up to 100 degrees Celsius so um or something like or maybe more i can't remember but more than 90 was what they claimed uh no not zip tit tuning different thing different thing oh sorry did i say zttt vttt technical research center of finland um yeah not zip tituning yeah i mean they're they're they're They're cool, but unrelated to this. What would be super based? Yes.

They should just bring Xeroth out. I think they would do it. I think they would rather continue to trickle out information so they get to enjoy. Because I wouldn't have talked about them if it wasn't for their back and forth with the community about the veracity of their claims. They first showed up on my radar when they were making fantastical claim. about this cell at CDS. Yeah. They're clearly riding this.

And I'm taking the bait, Luke. I'm taking the bait because it is more important to me to say, hey, this thing that everyone's talking about, hold on a second. There are people who are talking about how maybe we shouldn't be talking about it than it is to not talk about it. I will la la la la, la, la, la, until people like Ziroth who are genuinely third party

and have nothing to do with that company or not compensated by that company in any way and we're able to freely get it on their own or are able to check it out. And then I'll be interested or not. What's the first product that it's supposed to go in? It's like a motorcycle or something, right? I'm not sure.

Donut Labs. Motors, batteries. Oh, God. Okay. Well, I can't find what it's supposed to go in. I mean, if it is real, that's fantastic. And if it's not, that's not surprising. And we'll see how it goes.

Oh, okay. Apparently I am correct. Wiley Giraff says, yes, it's supposed to go in a motorcycle within a couple of months. That's their claim. Cool. It's apparently called the Verge motorcycle. Here it is. Oh, my God.

just no like oh for crying out loud uh sure 600 kilometer range in an electric motorcycle

would be wild yeah all of this would be wild if this could ever actually happen like what if I try to book a test drive uh whatever you're not even I'm over it

yeah I just don't think I don't think I'm ever going to do I don't think I'm ever going to do an electric motorcycle. I mean, ever's a big word, but I just yeah, I don't think I'm ever going to do it. Hey, what do you want to talk about next?

What's in the dock? Short circuit? Sure, fine. I didn't get to see the video. I don't even know what happened. I never saw the video, which is part of the problem. Yeah. Earlier this week, one of our channels, Short Circuit, published a video on a water bottle that made some, let's call them, bold health claims.

Yeah. A type of product we'd talk about on one way show. We'd like to first and foremost, we'd like to first and foremost thank our community for flagging this and holding us accountable for the bold claims, I'm going to call them, that this bottle was made. making to their target market. The first time I heard about this was when our former community manager, now he has a different role, but he still talks to the community, messaged me when I was on a ski slope on a class trip going, hey, did you know about this video? And I said, excuse me, what the fuck?

No. from what I'm told in our notes here, the intention of the video was meant to be a they claim piece, not agreeing or disagreeing with the product, but rather showing it. And that clearly didn't come across. And me coming into this after the fact, I am extremely frustrated.

at the various breakdowns that seem like they may have occurred. We are in the process of an investigation, so you won't hear me saying exactly what happened, because at this time, I have not gotten a full post-mortem report. What I do know is that this outcome is not okay because it made, from my understanding, extremely silly claims

like health-related claims about performing hydrolysis on water in your water bottle and whatnot. So in response to this appropriate flagging of this video from our community, we posted the following statement on both Reddit and on the Short Circuit YouTube channel,

hey everyone, we've removed this short. We agree that the product wasn't framed with the level of skepticism. It warranted, and it was published without going through our normal technical review and leadership approval process. We do not support or endorse

unsubstantiated claims made by this manufacturer and we're taking steps internally to ensure our review process is consistently followed moving forward. Thanks for holding us accountable. One of the first responses I saw to this on Reddit was, what does that even mean? It wasn't published without going through

the normal technical review and leadership approval process. What do you think that means? Wait, really? Was that actually? I think it's pretty obvious what that means. It means this is real bad,

and I found out about it long after the damage was done, unfortunately, which is, you know, it's something that... It's a fact of larger companies. I'm just not willing to take the fall for anymore. Okay.

There was a time not that long ago. Did anyone ask you to? Oh, I mean... On this? Internally, of course not. But there was a time not that long ago that the assumption is just that when something goes wrong,

you know, Linus is accountable. You know, like even, like, you want to go way back to the statement that was made that triggered the whole 2023 drama that I didn't make. But the expectation was I apologize for it. What's the, what, oh.

Yeah. Like on the tour. Yeah, okay. Yeah. And so, you know, that's something that I flatly reject at this point. I'm sorry, I'm not going to be, as a spokesperson for the company, I can speak on behalf of the company. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I would still expect that.

But I'm not going to fall on, but I'm not going to fall on the sword and I'm not going to take, I'm not going to take accountability for stuff I didn't do anymore. Yeah. I don't know if that's what people wanted. I mean, it's a, yeah, stay the path. So this is what I'm talking about. Stay the Path says, sorry, dude, this company has your name on it. You own the company. Everything under LTT is under you.

This is a company you own. This is all you. And that's nice and that's your opinion, but I'm not willing to do that anymore. I'm sorry. It's just not going to happen. It's not compatible with me continuing to do this. I feel like I think there's a gap happening right now where like, I think Stay the Path's comment is that like you have to address it and you literally just did address it.

Sure. You said there was a mistake. You said we're addressing it. You thanked the community for pointing it out. Those things happened. I don't think that they're asking for you to do, I don't know, have you seen this video of the like volleyball player, the Japanese volleyball player that like spiked a ball and it hit this. I did see that. And he does the dive.

Yeah. I don't think they're asking. for you to dive under the net and do the apology bow. I think you should keep reading chat. Okay. Before you keep talking. I think it's an understanding gap on both sides, but I will keep reading chat. I'm also looking through.

I realize that searching Linus on the Linus Tech Tips subreddit is a little tough. But if you do space, Linus space, it does a little bit better. I got that trick from chat last week. That's a good trick. I got that trick from chat last week. It's pretty good. the comments talking about you individually don't seem to be asking for that um again you have to you have to okay i'll keep looking at the chat um but yeah just the the the truth of the matter

and this is just this is just one of those things where you don't have to like it but it's just going to be how it is i think there's i think there's different levels of apology i think there's ownership of like hey this is my company and my company made a mistake and there's here's the action company is taking. Yeah, sure. Yeah. And that's one thing. That's no issue.

I think that's, I would like to think, I'm still watching chat, that that is what most people are asking for. And I think what you're talking about is I personally and personally, individually, I did this, I made this mistake, I'm taking ownership for this problem. I don't think people are generally asking for that. Yeah, you should read chat more carefully. I'm looking for sure. And it's one of those things where, like I said, the bottom line is I'm not going to

to do it anymore. I'm just, you know, because there are cases where it really was, you know, a problem that existed, you know, in our, in our, in our process, right? And there are cases where over the years, and it's happened many, many times, I have explicitly laid out how we need to do it, and it hasn't been followed, and we made catastrophic errors because of that, and I've fallen on the sword. And I'm not going to do it anymore. Yeah, but okay, my point is that I think some, and I've talked to you about this before,

my point is that sometimes I think you just do that, but like no one was looking for that or expecting that. Like there will be a, someone will point out something on Reddit that is like a particular department. It's happened with me. There's been something with like laps, which is now my thing. And you've jumped on the thread and brought a lot of attention to you in association to the problem when you had nothing to do with it.

And I've been like, bruh, like let me respond. These are, these are my people. these are my things. Yeah. So. I don't know. They might have shut up because I said stuff, but I'm not, I'm also, I read kind of slow, so I'm trying to keep up with the chat, but it's moving kind of fast.

But I haven't really seen a lot of it. Yeah, I can find some stuff if you need. Sure. Yeah, it's, and whatever. Not doing it. Sure. Yep. It's just, it's not, it's not, like I said, it's not, it's not,

compatible with me continuing to do this. And so, you know, if that means, you know, making changes here, then we're going to make those changes because it's not compatible with me continuing to do this in this form. All right. Giving every kid access to tech in the classroom. Turns out that might have been a mistake. This is rough, dude. Gen Z is the first generation in history, in recorded history,

to score worse on standardized testing than the earlier generation. One leading factor, and I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm reading the notes for now, one leading factor, as pointed out by neuroscientist Jared Cooney-Horvath via TechSpot, seems to be the negative correlation that exists between the time students spend on digital devices in school and their academic performance, the more screen exposure, the poorer the results.

For the last two decades, U.S. schools have spent a total of more than $30 billion with a B dollars on laptops and tablets for students. And here's a chart showing how higher in-class computer use is correlated with significantly lower math and science performance across both, high income and middle income countries. This is mind blowing. These are pretty big jumps. Now, it is very important to note, and this is one of the reasons that I am so opposed,

and this comes up a lot between me and the labs team, for instance, that I'm so opposed to non-zero y axes. And I get it. The argument is always, hey, I'm trying to accentuate the difference to make the graph more readable. And my response is always, if you have to do that to accentuate the difference, then I guess the difference wasn't so big. I see both sides.

We want to clearly indicate which one is the winner, right? Yeah. And in this case, a difference in a total score of 550 and 500 is like, hugely problematic. It's also weird because the top two, the bottom line is actually 480. And the bottom two, the bottom line is 470. It's off by 10. And it's also like, what do these represent?

Like is, what, I don't know, is this American school system or something? Like, what is a 490? Is a 490 a C? Okay, that's a completely separate issue. But basically, that's a valid issue. I mean, it's effectively the same issue because we're talking about what is the severity of the difference between the things. Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

It's, I hate it when we mess with a y-axis. And so I will often get into it with labs, especially around things like FPS graphs, where they're like, no, I really want to, I really want to do this. And I basically go, and like one of the most famous ones was me and Lucas around efficiency plotting.

Oh, really? because he rightly like he kind of malicious compliance showed me what it would look like at zero where the efficiency of basically every power supply is pretty much the same and

and I was like okay well how about this compromise we show the like that they're all basically the same and then we show a zoom in because to me that context of, hey, they're all basically the same, is actually really, really important

when you're understanding that when we're looking at the difference between 80 plus silver and 80 plus gold, we really are just kind of splitting hairs here. It's not that big of a deal. But in the context of engineering a power supply, achieving that extra percent or 2% of efficiency can be a Herkulean effort

and cost a lot of money in the materials. And so I totally understand why you want to show, hey, they achieved something here. And you want to make your visuals readable. Yeah. Anyway, I don't want to go on this side topic for too long. But the point is just that this is wild. I'm not going to say causation. But there is a pretty clear correlation that tracks...

Consistent as well. Yeah. Across fourth grade math, fourth grade science, eighth grade math, and eighth grade math. and eighth grade science. I don't know where they're finding these kids who almost never use a screen, but good on the parents. That's, uh,

I suspect, is there schools that just have not adopted? I'm assuming. Is this, oh, this must be in school use. That makes way more sense. Yeah, yeah,

this is in school use. I mean, it says right on it. It sure does. I, uh, where's the source for this? People are asking for the source here.

I think it's from TechSpot. Here you go. Uh, so text, Spot interviewed the dude and here's the the uh the district yeah here you go the trends in international mathematics and science study or tim's

freaking wild however however lots and lots and lots of other factors oh yeah absolutely at play here i suspect honestly a bigger impact would be electronics use outside of the classroom um yeah i don't know how you'd control for that. You can't, like at all. Not as a learning institution. Parents would not self-report correctly. And this, dude,

this one blew me away. I was, I was helping out with a class field trip the other day. They did a, they did a ski field trip. I was going to say, was this the mountain? Yeah. And, you know, I like to, I like to be involved while I still get a chance. Yeah. You know, like, my kids are not going to want me as a, you know,

parent chaperone forever. It comes back around, I think. Yeah, well, that's what I hope, right? But there will be a gap in there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But basically I was so I was chaperoning this thing and one of the kind of side eyes and like kind of, you know, undertone conversations that I had with one of the teachers was how impossible it is to get just like accurate height and weight of the kids on the intake form for the ski trip. which is really important because when they're adjusting the bindings in the tech shop for your ski rentals, they need to know how strong of a skier you are, how old you are, and how much you weigh,

so that they can make sure that they will detach correctly in the event of a crash, right? And I overheard, or what was part of, I wasn't eavesdropping, but I was part of a conversation where one of the other parents speculated that the reason that the teacher got, like three different like clearly incorrect responses for one kid was that it's actually the kid doing all correspondence with the school

because the parents are just like not involved and didn't know how to like measure themselves and I was like oh my god basically but it pretty much it highlighted

why you could you could never count on getting any kind of accurate, meaningful data about out of school use. Oh, you could never do it. I just suspect that's a very significant impact. Because, I mean, because of tangential things, right? Like, if they're, if they're spending all their time doom scrolling because their parents don't care anyways, like, is their attention span so wrecked when they're in class that whether they have a screen in front of them or not, they're just not going to absorb

anything? Like, that type of stuff, I think, is relatively important. Daniel Chin says, this isn't even a Y-axis. issue. There's not enough description about the study methodology and without actual controls. There's a panoply of confounders. Okay, but we're not talking about that. We're talking about Y-axis issues with the presentation of anything. And yeah, that's why I have carefully avoided saying that it is like a causation. I've said correlation. All we've seen is that Jared Cooney-Horvath says and that there seems to be a negative

correlation. That's what we've said. And I pointed out that the way that these are laid out makes it look like a bigger difference than it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's how we got into the conversation about the importance of drawing attention to, at the very least, if you are not using a zeroed axis. That's all. It's okay. It's also clearly a multi-faceted problem and is not just down to using computers in the classroom. Because we had computers in the classroom. And we had the computer lab as well. Like we used computers all the time when we were in school. You had computers in the classroom that wasn't the computer lab?

Yeah, we had like, when I was in elementary school, we had often like one computer in the classroom. And so if you finished your work early, like you could play Oregon Trail sometimes if you teacher was a bro. Sure. not at your desk though but sure I don't think I had many of those examples but maybe it was a thing and I don't know that was like a thing at some schools

and that was like before even teachers had a computer at their desk yeah yeah sometimes there would just be like a station yeah little workstation in the computer in the corner or like if you had a student that had like a learning disability or something then you'd often have a computer for them to use

yeah um Reddit has been fined by the UK for not verifying ages of users the 14 and a half million pound fine I love that money in UK is in weight units was issued after the UK Information Commissioner's office It makes it sound so big Yeah it does

It's like you know those giant checks It's like here's a million pound check Oh gosh Here's a 14 million pound pound fine. Put it down on something solid because you know, ah! Anyway, so. Oh my God, I broke my hand.

My hand actually got atomized from that. All right. So the ICO alleged that Reddit's failure to check ages resulted in their illegal handling of children's personal information and the potential exposure of children to inappropriate and harmful content. The ICO finding came before Reddit's July 2025 rollout of an age verification system in the UK. But the ICO says they still have concerns, noting that. that Reddit relies on users self-declaring their ages when opening an account. This seems to ignore Reddit's use of persona to further verify ages of users seeking to access

restricted content. In the statement provided to Arce technica, Reddit said that the ICO's insistence that we collect more private information on every UK user is counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our user's online privacy and safety. We intend to appeal the ICO's decision. All right, so there was another part of Reddit's response that is not in my notes here that I thought was pretty hilarious. Let's see if I can find it. Now, it might have been in a different article.

Oh, yeah, no, here it is. We don't require you to give us your real name. We don't track your precise location. You can even browse anonymously. You can share as much or as little about yourself as you want when using Reddit. Love that. Because they're basically saying, hey, we don't require anybody to tell us. everything about themselves and every, you know,

am I the asshole, you know, experience they've ever had and how old they almost certainly are and all of this stuff. You know, they could share that with us if they want to, but we don't require any of it. So I mean, oh man, this is, this is a can of worms, hey? Because on the one hand, this drive from governments and plural, like around the world for these people,

platforms to collect and verify more and more and more information seems crazy at a time when they're already collecting too much and if anything we should be going the other way like are we is it time to root for reddit but on the other hand reddits only the only reason reddit's mad is because the government wants them to collect this data a different way that will give them some kind of responsibility for their stewardship of it. I think where I've come to on this topic, because we've been talking about this for a while, is I do really like the idea of kind of pushing the kids to use less electronics and get off social media and stuff like that, because it is highly malicious mind control.

But collecting data in order to do so, not only. will not work. It's also just a massive trove of valuable information that will be broken into. So just stop collecting it. The kids will get around it. The kids have always gotten around it. The kids will always get around it. You're not actually going to stop people who are really trying to. So at that point,

I think the most at-risk kids are going to be kids that would really try to get around it. So you're not actually saving the most at-risk kids anyways. and you're just making this like massive amount of data that they will get like let's be realistic about it um you're just putting it out there for for for bad actors to just grab so like it's you're doing a horrible job of just putting data out there that will be stolen that you really shouldn't have stolen and of kids information which like come on and you're doing it in a way that is not really even going to be effective anyways. I would love to see some stuff to try to dissuade

every one of every age from overusing, like, social media and doom scrolling apps and stuff like that, especially kids who are more susceptible, but let's be real, so we're adults. Yeah, this whole idea that because you're an adult, you're like magically grown up. Yeah, no, that doesn't happen. It just doesn't fly.

Yeah. Like, let's, I don't know if this is a topic in the, doc, but I mean, YouTube pushed out, and I appreciate that they did a like time management thing specifically for shorts within YouTube so that you can block how much you use. The thing that I don't like is there isn't a zero. They go down to 15. I appreciate that they have a limit that is not super long, but 15 is still not that short. They're shorts. Five minutes would be fine. Zero would be the best. If you could granularly control it all the way up to zero,

that would be the best. I would appreciate it. You know what? I'll be honest with you. I don't think, and I agree that it should be an option, but if I was configuring my kids account, I probably wouldn't set it to zero. Sure, that's fine. Because the goal of the limit would be to learn moderation. Yeah, totally. Not to go cold turkey. I had a member of my family that developed a very unhealthy

relationship with video media consumption because it was so restricted in our household and that was just their personality type and I personally feel like if they had been if they had not been cut off

from it as often as they were and it had not been made such a like exciting thing such a huge dopamine hit when they were able to get access to it, maybe some of that possibly could have been at least dulled. Maybe they might have learned to manage that compulsion, maybe. No, I still don't remember the name of it, but I have a browser add-on.

I guess it's on my Windows install, so I'll have to figure this out on Linux, but I mean, it's a browser, so I just need to go find the ad-on again. But I have a browser add-on that blocks YouTube shorts. Solid. And for me, yeah, I just want it blocked. But your scenario completely makes sense. The options would be great. And I'm not going to project onto you what option you should select,

but I would love the option for zero. But I do, I will say, having complained all of that bit, I really appreciate that they made this feature. I don't think that they had to. They had just an individual limiter for YouTube. I appreciate that they made one separate for shorts. They are different things. I understand they're in the same app.

They are different things, and I appreciate that they did that. YouTube does a lot of things pretty wrong. Yeah. They do some things very wrong. They do a lot of things kind of right. This is in the, a little wrong, but mostly right category, I think. I appreciate that it exists. And I don't think there was going to be some law that there was going to make them do this.

So, like, I appreciate that it exists. Yeah. I would never describe myself as a fan, but I respect a lot of what YouTube does. And I have said before and we'll continue to say, I believe that YouTube is alongside Wikipedia, the Library of Alexandria, one of the most important things the human race has ever built.

going to say like I I totally I respect your stance on I'm not going to call myself a fan. I love YouTube. I think it is fascinating that they haven't been so much worse than they are. And like I you know what? I'm very quick to point out things that they screw up. I think the whole members spam thing, which we'll talk about shortly, was a mistake. I think not having zero on the shorts thing sucks. Removing the dislike button was just so dumb and I would really like for it to come back.

But at the end of the day, YouTube is amazing. what a platform. And like the fact that they haven't, yeah, the fact that they haven't just gone full nuclear terrible is like kind of fascinating. Please keep it up. It's legitimately, it's really important to please keep it up. And it's been sketchy lately.

But I believe in you. If there's any major concerns, I'm going to have some FaceTime with execs soon. Topic type and kind of the, the funnel the shorts. I think there is a problem right now with YouTube, where YouTube was about people, and it was organic,

and it was the place you could go to learn basically everything. And it felt like an app made by, yeah, you could just find everything. And right now, it feels like it's getting too hype-focused. There isn't really the consistency. I give them that feedback basically

every time I talk to them, but I'll try again. It's more extreme than ever, I think. And I think you're seeing it in this flow that we've talked about on Wancho a bunch of times where channel performance is much more individual video based. And you have huge swings and viewership between videos. I have found more than ever that I'm losing creators. I think the subscribe button should mean more. Okay.

I think that's one of the things that should happen. Because, like, I'll watch a creator. The search is, oh, man. mind-blowingly bad. It's mind-blowingly bad, but at the same time, again, to give them credit, holy crap, is that a lot of stuff to search through? But it does seem pretty rough. Honestly, I don't think this is a hot take.

Search for Google in general has been kind of in the pits. Search and drive is terrible. Search and Gmail is terrible. All this stuff has been pretty rough. And this is someone who just said, I love YouTube, and I still love YouTube. I'm just being honest about some of the negatives. I think there is a lot of soulless, negative, genuine brain rot content, stuff that does not enrich your life in any way that is being forced to the front of YouTube and shoved in front of your face. And I think that will decrease people's appreciation and usage of YouTube long term.

I think it is a short term strategy to combat things like TikTok. And I think it will rot their overall market dominance in the long term. I think they need to understand and appreciate what they are, which is the video platform of the internet. They stopped publishing user numbers because they basically just said, we have everyone. Know that, understand that, own that, and have a higher level that you hold yourself to compared to other platforms. And I don't mean that you have to like start banning this type of content. It's never going to happen. It's a bad form of moderation for YouTube.

You're still going to have flat earth and new landing conspiracy videos on YouTube. But part of YouTube has been that that has. been there the whole time. Yeah. And that's okay. But remember that you can float wholesome content. You can push wholesome content. You can, you can push out these smaller creators more. And I understand that you are. Again, I do love YouTube. But what I'm experiencing right now is that I'll see a video with, oh my God. Yeah, this, I mean, I'll see a video with 19 million views, which is the first thing that showed up when I, when I opened YouTube. Yeah. But this might actually be a real cool video.

Or a meme. I'm not, yeah, smash the rock. Yeah. Oh no, no, no,

okay, he's getting into stuff. That might actually just be a really cool video. My point was more Mr. Beasty type stuff. But I might get a video with, perfect. I might get a video with millions of views right next to a video with seven views. Maybe somewhere in the middle a little bit.

Right. This is everything I'm seeing is these like huge, dramatic, um, I'm not necessarily into it, but I will say that's, pretty quintessentially YouTube. Yep.

But it's just, yeah, I don't know. Bring back the middle content. Bring back the wholesome stuff. Bring back the stuff that someone's going to look back at their usage of YouTube positively. I think I really appreciate that they're adding these limiters, these abilities to set your own limiters to things like shorts. I remember back in the day when no one would have wanted that for YouTube. because YouTube is a space where you went to go learn things,

grow, experience, you know, see behind walls, all that kind of stuff. And it's going down the extreme brain rot funnel now, where people are going to look back to their childhood of using YouTube and only think of things that were just a waste of time for them.

And I think that's not necessary. And I think you can do that while keeping all of these different types of content on the platform, but just not hyper pushing, these like objectively kind of things that aren't great for your brain. Okay. Rant over. That's really good. Mind paradox made a really good point.

Scientifically speaking, the earth is flat. 75% of the earth is water. 95% plus of that water is nod carbonated. Therefore, if we were to round, the earth is flat. That isn't even the direction I thought they're going in. That's fantastic. In a sense. That's pretty good.

Acting like we didn't have things like Smosh and other millennial brain rot. No, I didn't. I didn't act like that at all. I've said that's been on the platform the entire time. That is literally not what I said in the slightest. What I did say was how they promote different things. And I don't expect them to not promote that. I'm just hoping that they try to really balance things out and promote wholesome things as well.

Like our brain rot was was. was pretty bad. Dude, we had some heavy brain rot. We had lots of it. Oh my God. Shoes. Like, what was he going to show?

Like this, this was massive. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, I always hated that to be honest. I never liked that.

I was very confused why people were into that. I, yeah, I was, yeah, whatever. Again,

I'm not expecting it to not happen. I'm expecting it to be a little bit more measured. And I feel like, and it's a it's such a fine line. This is one of the reasons why I'm very happy to openly say that I love YouTube because my God is at a difficult line and they have straddled it so well for so long. I feel like we're just, we're just slipping a little too far one way. And I'm just asking to just try to bring it back a little bit. I don't want to swing too far this way. We talked about that whole pendulum thing earlier in the show just because it's swaying a little bit this way. I don't want to bring it all the way back.

I just want it to try to be in the middle. I expect it to be full entertainment mode sometimes or you watch that slop and it's okay. It's fine. There's a place for that. I just want the other stuff to also be brought up. That's it. I'm just trying to find another like a horribly stupid video from back then

but I don't think I'm going to be able to, I don't think I'm going to be able to find it. Do you want to pick another topic? Sure. Spionsoors. Uh, oh, but, yeah, I suppose I could, I suppose I could do that. I can do a topic while you get reset if you want to look for something. I'm going to try and find a really stupid video.

Yeah, okay, here we go. Here we go. Here's, uh, here's some of our, here's some of our old school brain rot. Uh, hold on. I'm getting an ad. Thanks, YouTube. Oh, boy. Um, Anthropic in the DOD.

There's, there's, uh, opening eye on the DOW. you. There's a lot of stuff happening in AI right now, but oh my goodness, I would have never remembered this. This made me think of power thirst. Power thirst. Wow. Anyway. Sometimes you want just like dumb, silly fun things. It's okay. I'm not saying to never do it.

There's a balance. That's all. All right. Should we talk about Burger King? Yeah. should do that. Burger King is vying for the throne of politeness, thanks to AI. What a title. Burger King is entering the AI chatbot race with Patty. Okay, unironically, pretty funny. The name? Yeah. It's a good name. The Open AI powered Burger King assistant who will live in the headsets of employees with the purpose of assisting with meal preparation, notifying management of issues such as a downed point of sale or low stock,

as well as evaluating employee interactions with customers for friendliness by tracking the use of phrases such as welcome to Burger King, please. And thank you. Okay. See, I don't think it's in the mic. What says it's in the mic? Well, it would have to be. If it's listening to what you're saying, as in the employee.

Oh, I thought, okay, I thought you meant like it would like override some just start talking. Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely listening. Yeah, so, um, I thought this was peak dystopian. I just think they were already doing it. That's why I didn't react too much.

You think they were already doing this? I thought they were already tracking phrases and stuff. Is that a thing? I thought they were because everything that goes through the mic is technically going through a computer system. Like McDonald's has like server racks. Are you sure? Uh, no, it's not.

No, I'm not sure, to be clear. Okay. I just thought that. Because I was, I was not aware of, of this at all. But, but basically like this,

pretty much as far as I can tell, is like a turbocharged version of the coffee shop AI thing that, did we show on Wanshore? Was I just talking to one of the writers about that? I can't remember. Coffee shop. But it had like boxes around people and like said how many drinks that they had made in the last hour and like tracked how long customers had been.

and sitting at particular tables. See, these are the types of things that I thought kind of already existed. But this, putting it right in the headset, so all of a sudden you could get like a counseling notice for forgetting to say, please, to a customer 10 times in one day or like whatever threshold they set. Like, this is, this is the step. This is it. This is the step before complete human replacement.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I feel like I was talking to Yvonne about this because this is going to be this is going to be one of those times when I feel like people are some there's going to be a group of people that are not going to like what I say. As as an employer who at this time in companies wholly owned and operated by himself has somewhere in the neighborhood of around 150 plus people. because usually when we give the employee count, we're just talking like Linus Media Group

and like closely affiliated companies, but you know, you start to bake in things like the Smash Champs Badminton Club. Like they've got a lot of part timers. It's retail, right? Like it's a bit of a different situation. We've had major issues sometimes

with people who, in many cases, like we don't always get pay scales perfect, but with people who, many cases are very competitively compensated for what they're doing, doing things on the clock that I think it would be hard to argue are not unacceptable. So for instance, you know, are not acceptable. Hiding in a bathroom and having a nap when you are on shift.

Really? Yeah. So there's a certain corner of the internet. for whom wage theft exists, but time theft does not. Trying to have a balanced take here, I say they both exist. Sure. And to some people, that will be very controversial. To them, I say, hey, you run a business.

See how well that works for you. All right, cool, good chat. Output. All right. So with that in mind, basically how my conversation with Yvonne went was there's a huge problem because you have, and I think it's really important to point this out, a minority of employees who behave in such a way that supervision is necessary. you have, I hope, a minority of employers who behave in such an overbearing manner that we have exceeded supervision

and we have made it to monitoring. There are many such cases, however, where there's like, maybe there's one bad apple, maybe one person fell asleep in one bathroom. Well, that's not what I'm talking about. Sure, unfortunately. But there's, there tends to be some really, like, oddly expensive

to the point where you're never going to pay it back off and overbearing reactions. Okay, so that's kind of where I'm going with this. So you exceed supervision, which in my mind should largely be traditionally

human supervision, right? So you exceed supervision, you make it into monitoring. You make it into um, yeah, I think monitoring is probably, to just pop it.

Yeah. And I think I think part of our problem right now is that we're in a death spiral because the more of this monitoring level of supervision, the more you make your way into like complete breach of autonomy

and privacy at any, like at any given moment, like the more disenfranchised you might have a worker become and the bottom line, is as a business, you're never going to be happy about giving money to someone who's not getting work done. And if they're not getting work done because of how hyper disenfranchised they are, that's not going to change. You're not going to want to pay them to do work they're not doing.

And then you're going to try to monitor them more. They become more disenfranchised. They want to do less work. And I feel like while in any individual workplace, you can break the cycle, collectively. As like a people. As a society. Yeah. I feel like we're circling the drain here. And I think, I mean, wages are not keeping up. It's hard to be motivated at work when you make work long hours, make little money, whatever that. Lozert says, I think the word you're looking for is micromanagement, but I'm not. No.

Because there's a big difference between micromanagement, which might be necessary in some cases. or that person should just be let go. But sometimes that's not what you want to do. Sometimes you'd rather kind of go, okay, no, like we really need to carefully set expectations here. You know, whatever it is, right? But that's really different from, I have a camera trained on you at all times

that has an AI monitoring it, that is compiling data and stats, that I can go back retroactively and dig through any time you were ever on shift and any little thing you ever did. That's not micromanagement. that's like that's spying if that makes sense and to be clear like we have cameras in our places of work we're on camera right now and i'm not talking about that one or this one or this one

where is it whatever it's in here there's a there's a security camera in here thanks dan dan pointed out i still can't see it whatever i assume i assume dan knows what's going on look at him that's the face of a man it's over there in the corner thanks dan perfect um and and Oh, man. See, this is where, this is where, like, the realities of running a business kind of coincide or collide with some of my philosophical, I wish it was this way, beliefs. Like at Smash Champs, for instance, the extensive security system that we have, has resulted in reduced shrink for our retail operation. It has resulted in multiple cases where we have been able to ban members who have stolen from our other members. members. Oh.

Oh, yeah. I mean, dude, people are fucked up, man. It's like, we're trying to have a community here. We're trying to just like play sports together. And you've got people that will be caught. Caught in 4K.

Taking something that's not theirs. And we have literally heard the, oh, I didn't know that belonged to them line. I fucking hate that line. Did it belong to you? Did it belong to you? Then what? Why would you take it?

I hate that. I get, I get triggered by that line. Yeah, we've had rackets. Shuttles. Shuttles are becoming a big one. Well, they're so expensive. Because they've become so expensive. And even used, like ratbag shuttles are actually going for money.

Not much. It's like by the pound. Because people will use them for training. They'll use them for just like feeding drills and stuff. And it used to be that those were considered. like, oh, here you go. Worthless. Now they're like worth money now

because new shuttles have gotten so expensive. And so because people like need to carry a tube around with them and because all the tubes kind of look the same, like with rackets, people have it like in their bag. You'd have to be pretty conspicuous to like open someone's bag and take a racket out, right? But shuttles, they'll have them on the bench, you know. And so we, yeah, we've had cases with rackets.

We've had cases with phones. Oh. Right. A phone is so, like, personal. Yeah, that one was really unfortunate because it was an acquaintance of an acquaintance. It was a known person, so that was a really unfortunate conversation to have to have. Don't like that. You know, we've had, like, we've had all kinds of things.

We had an allegation from a neighbor that a member performed a bio act in public near our facility. Oh, yeah. and we had to, you know, we had to track that down. That was wild. And so, and look, we've only been, we've only, that was like a GTA moment. Dude, we've been operating for a year. And already, this is just, this is just the stuff that's flowing off the top of my head, man.

Right. And so I'm sitting here going like, yeah, on the one hand, you know, yeah, we shouldn't like, we shouldn't like have cameras everywhere, man, and like, all the cameras, man. But on the other hand, I'm sitting here going, how on earth would we have resolved some of this stuff if we didn't have a record that we could track back to. I think it depends on the usage of it. Was the bio moment solo? Yeah, it was a solo bio moment for sure.

For sure, bud. Yeah, I think like, are you sitting there in an office upstairs with the like stockbroker style monitors just staring at all your employees all day? If so, no, no, no, no. Oh, I was going to say, you know I don't have that console. So if you're doing something like that, like, that's clearly like, oh, my God, go away. If you're reviewing footage in case of incidents, that no longer really bothers me. I think I'm pretty sure in Canada you can't record audio in a work, in like an office-style workplace.

Oh, I don't know. I think that's a thing. Yeah, we were trying to figure out because I think we wanted the audio for the Bamerton footage or something. Oh, yeah, yeah. for like, and then we were like, wait, games.

Can we? And then there was like something, because it's a public venue and it's like a service that's being offered and therefore talked about and there's like signs and stuff,

then it like becomes more fine. But if I remember correctly, regardless of the signs situation, if it's just like an office, you just can't do it. Like it's a, I think it was more okay for the public. It was okay for the employees.

Yeah. S.F. Wong, this is a good one. As a business, what about using? AI to monitor things like a manufacturing floor to do time studies and improve inefficiencies rather than to judge people.

So it's, oh my, what the? Boy, are you ever, boy, are you ever treading a fine line there, brother? That's not treading the fine line. That's already a product. No, I mean, the world's most ethical manufacturing

foreman, sure, could be looking purely for ways that they could improve their own performance by laying what I'm saying is not untrue by laying out

the stations more efficiently or whatever but literally any human being in existence would also be looking at that other the other meatbags out there and figuring out

which ones of them are scrolling on their phone instead of popping widgets together or whatever else it is they're supposed to be doing and it's very like inhuman

to expect people to be 100% on task for four hours and then 30 minutes later four more hours. It's like not really how humans work. But there's there's yeah. So things get a little bit weird because you give people too much data and then they're like, wait, I don't like that. I paid for that minute.

I need you working for that minute. And again, it's just not really how people work. But then like how do you, how do you find the acceptable bar? Because you actually do need output from them or else your business closes. So like it's, that's where like ideally you find in my perfect happy fun time world ideally you find a measurable can i work there so ideally you find a measurable amount of output that you want from this person

that is worth the amount of money you're paying for them and if they're hitting that output it doesn't really matter too much on the other end but that's certain positions it's really hard to measure relative yeah that too uh but it can be like okay What if this isn't a widget maker, right? Like, what if this is something completely different? How do you measure the output of every single possible role at Linus Media Group, for example? No. I think that's potentially impossible.

We have a really... We have a weird business, and we have a lot of people that wear a lot of funky hats. Yep. Not even normal hats. We have a lot of people that wear some really weird hats. Yep. And potentially a lot of them at once. So it's like, how do you measure the output of that person?

Almost impossible. Very difficult. So, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's something that we often come up against as we're sort of figuring out, you know, how you, how you measure output, how you, how you track that against, against costs, how you try to optimize. You know, it's a good thing, though. I think it's one of the things that keeps the content always changing, keeps working here. here dynamic. Like, it's been interesting watching people comment recently that, you know, the reason LTT's

going downhill is because they've had a lot of turnover in their on-screen personalities. And I'm kind of sitting here going, okay, A, all you have to do is go as far as Social Blade to find out that, no, in fact, viewership has not gone down since those events. In fact, it's a little bit up since then, which I'm not attributing to that either. I'm just saying the causation relationship that you have. conjured out of your out of your brain hole is not actually a thing that happened

and one of the things that's that's cool about LMG is that as we have changes we just kind of adapt we just we make new styles of content we're always we're always looking for you know what is exciting to whoever

the team that's here is we're always we're always changing we've been around for 17 years guys 17 years in that time you know my interests believe it or not have changed pretty dramatically a fair bit your interests have altered yeah in the what are you up to you got to be up to like 13 15 that can't be right pretty sure it is From NCX days. 15? 13 would be since working for Linus Media Group.

The Linus Media Group hasn't existed for 13 years. Not till the end of this year. Okay. So then 14? 14. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Oh, no.

Is LTT at 18 now? Ugh. Uh, uh, I hope not. Oh, man, I'm getting so old 2020. Wait. What? Oh Got confused

Six years ago The first LTT video was posted On Reddit So 2020 is the post date of this Reddit post Not the Okay 17 years November 2008 So we'll be at 18 this year

Good Lordy Anyway So where I was going with this Is that you're going to see the content Continue to change And I think that's part of what has given us Our Staying Power I'm actually really excited

to see some of the stuff that David Pancratz made his solo on camera debut recently over on Short Circuit, checking out a Derbauer branded, like, TestBenzh. Actually, one of our editors did a Short Circuit recently that I thought was really good. It didn't get a ton of views, but when I was, I don't always feel compelled to message the production or crew or the host when I review one of our videos. but this was one that I reviewed just because he was new and I thought Peter just did like an outstanding job

of this video the feedback on it is quite positive but yeah just needs a few more views guys go check it out it's a really good video and a fight deck is not something that we would have had the internal

interest to cover in the power like super high level unboxing. I think you might find Razor did one like a thousand years ago that we did an unboxing of. I remember that, yeah. I think we still have those. Really?

Yeah, but those would be like, those would be like garbage by today's standards. Oh my God. Remember when our thumbnails looked like that? Because I did them. Just text on the entire thing. Why was I feeling so aggressive that day? Who knows? that's funny

yeah well it was a different time it was a different time yeah I think stuff like this and part of that I think is kind of the beauty

of short circuit is you're gonna have some weird stuff on there sometimes and uh I think junk food swarrel might not

you know get a bunch of clicks just because of what it is but that doesn't necessarily mean the video's bad hmm that is great Tyler R says I miss the old text

thumbnails I meticulously copied it. Good for you. If you want a Photoshop template, we post that. I don't think anybody needs that. What they do need is to hear about Drop, no longer operating as a standalone business by March 31st. Drop founded in 2012 as MassDrop

is closing at standalone e-commerce store at the end of next month as part of the Coursair integration following the 2023 acquisition. The last data place orders is March 25th, and Drop rewards will also expire that day, so use them or lose them. Drop.com will become a landing page

for brand collabs under the Corsair umbrella. Community reaction is generally negative so far for the people who still manage to care, which seems like not many. I saw some. I did actually read through some of this, and I saw a few people comment that the newsletter, which is apparently a big part of Drops deal, has just been kind of full of the same stuff over and over again lately.

I think Drop in general has kind of been like that. I remember back in the day, I used to go to MassDrop when it was MassDrop, like all the time. I was genuinely on there like a lot, but it was because they'd have a lot of really weird stuff come through that was interesting. I remember they used to be really into like knives Oh yeah That makes sense Like everyday carry Yeah they were huge in the everyday carry scene

There were tons of other stuff And for a long time now It's been mechanical keyboards headphones That's it It's like okay After a while I have a keyboard I like I have some headphones that I like

There's no real reason for me to come back to the website If that's all they're ever really doing now And yeah They used to get into some funk stuff, and they were really around the original idea of mass drop, which was just like using collectivism to get cheaper prices on things. And that was really neat. And then they stopped doing that, I guess.

Corsair was a really weird company to take public. Like, this seems like it has not gone particularly well. Oh, yeah. The timing was a little rough, wasn't it? Didn't they go public over COVID? Here, Max, I think so. Maybe their goal was just go public during COVID. Well, was that a high, right?

Everyone was like hyper into gaming and streaming. Yeah. I mean, the owner's out, I think. Don't quote me on that, though. Does Andy Paul still own any of... Oh, does he not have a Wikipedia page? Well, that's something that he won't have in common with you if we get our way. Oh, my God.

Don't never forget, guys, Luke Lefrenier needs a Wikipedia page. Um, yeah, Hobbs is saying like they, they used to have actual group eyes, too that were exclusive to mass drop. Like seriously, how important is this guy compared to Luke Lefranier? Is this your relative, by the way? Yeah. Oh, that's cool. Very, very disconnected.

But technically along the line somewhere, yes. That's super neat. I poked through a couple, uh, family relatives to figure out, like, is there a chain? Oh, whoa, he's good. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah. Dang. I was thinking about

my dad has one of his jerseys. I was thinking about getting one of his jerseys 14 points in 16 games in the 23, 24 playoffs? Yeah. Bit of a gamer.

They're not doing so great though. The Rangers, yeah. Yeah. So his jersey was on sale recently and I might actually grab one because it would be kind of cool to have a jersey with your name on the back

that is not a custom jersey. You know? That's pretty sick. That's pretty cool. What was I going to say? Yeah, Insomniac in Philpinchot also said It's kind of like what happened to Humble Bundle Over the last five-ish years

Humble Bundle is still a thing Humble Bundle is still a thing? Wait, no, I think I knew that. No, no, I knew that. Humble Bundle, what do they have? What do they do? Get great games every month with humble choice For only $18.

Oh, it's a subscription. Is it a subscription? I think it's a variety of things. Bundles, okay, games. books. Oh yeah. You can humble bundle books. They had some Linux administration thing recently and I was like, ooh, interesting.

And then I was like, uh, I'm not diving that far in. I think you get to keep them though. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. So it's not like, I think GameBass works. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, it's, it's a, I don't know if there is a subscription or not, but either way, humble bundle has always been you keep it.

So if they did have one, I'm sure it would be, it would be like a loot box kind of thing. not a pay to access okay so these are just uh overwhelmingly positive games bundle I mean that sounds pretty good I like overwhelmingly positive things here we go

uh all right but then I have to pay at least $20 and 46 cents Oh you will get you will get all eight items oh yeah all of these are all items so what if I put in a dollar Oh, okay, no, you have to pay at least 20-0.46.

Okay, that's interesting. It's not that bad for that many games. I don't know how much they cost outside of Humble Bundle. Yeah, me neither. But apparently they're all like super, super positive. Highly rated. So that's something.

What is bug fables? Monster Train is good. I played Monster Train. Oh, yeah? Okay. I found a bug in that game that made me like, I could beat anything no matter what. They have this, I've played both Monster Trains now.

I think that's Monster Train 1. In Monster Train 2, there's like different floors and you put your units on the floors and then enemies come on and they attack once and then they go up a floor. And I found this mechanic where there's a card where you can play the card and then it will move one of your characters on the floor. And then there's an affix that you can put on the character that makes so that they gain a permanent stat when they move. but the

it would try to figure out where the character would move before you played the card when you would hover the card over but that would mean that the character would move as far as the game was concerned so you could just highlight the card over and then unhilate the card rapidly

and you just gain permanent stats just completely broke the game I did it for one run because I thought it was funny and then I was like I'm never doing that again I have to like you know, it removes the entire fun of the game if you do that. But yeah, you could just one shot anything.

It was pretty good. It's pretty good. Cool. Let's one shot this message from our sponsor, App Control. Our applications on your controller getting out of control? Well, check out our sponsor App Control. It's a task manager, but with more features. App Control has things like historical resource monitoring,

so you can keep up to three days worth of information on CPU, GPU, RAM, and usage, as well as seeing which apps have access to things like your mic, webcam, or location, including when your location is hidden. If something new or unusual starts running in the background on your computer, app control will notify you so you can take any necessary security measures. You can sort apps by publisher, disable individual apps, and see what an app is used for with a single click. And the cherry on top? It's free.

So get app control, the feature-rich task manager alternative at app control. dot com. Finally, the show is brought you by ground news. Obviously, the WAN show is a trustworthy place to get all your favorite tech news. But how much do you trust any other outlets? Our sponsor Ground News is here to help you break free from media bias and better understand where your news comes from. They bring together articles from several sources and let you see things like political bias,

ownership, and how reliable the reporting tends to be. Let's talk about NVIDIA for a second. When it comes to covering NVIDIA, and specifically talking about AI, it doesn't look like the right-wing side of the media landscape reports as much as the left. And we see this mirrored in another story regarding Google rolling out nanobanana 2, an update to a Gemini's AI image generation model. Based on the information on ground news, it seems that right-leaning sources only report on AI news what involves Wall Street earnings.

Things like the Blindspot feature, or these bias breakdowns, can help you ask important questions when engaging with the news. So get the transparency you deserve from your news and save 40% on ground news's Vantage plan with our QR code on Steam. That actually leads very well into another topic, which is that Paramount is set to take over Warner Brothers. Netflix has officially dropped out of the bidding war to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, which leaves Paramount Skydance in the lead to acquire Warner Bros. Warner Bros. Pictures, CNN, and HBO Max.

Paramount already owns CBS, Paramount Plus, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon. They agreed to pay a massive $7 billion termination fee if the deal fails to get regulatory approval. Netflix's co-CEO stated that they declined to match Paramount's revised $31 a share offer, so approximately $111 billion. because it is no longer financially attractive. Yeah, I should think not. There's a significant amount of political drama surrounding this deal

because Paramount's bid is not enabled by Paramount doing so good that they have so much money that they can run around scooping up former competitors. It's because instead Paramount's bid is backed by a major right-wing donor, Larry Ellison. Meanwhile, Netflix's co-CEO Ted Sarandos reportedly visited the White House. House hours before dropping out of the bidding war. Interesting. The merger isn't finalized yet, but is expected to face heavy scrutiny, well, will it, though, from both the U.S. Department of Justice and, this is more likely, from European regulators.

The California Attorney General has already confirmed that there's an open investigation with the California DOJ. Discussion question. Is streaming trending towards a giant monopoly worse than we ever had with cable TV? Yes. yes it is that's why the pirate hats are coming out yeah so this is

more consolidation in the media we consume is bad yeah I will say that and hopefully that is simple enough that everyone on every side of the political spectrum can

kind of go oh yeah that makes sense and recognize that this is bad cool good chat by the way um paramount owns cnn yeah i said that oh okay i didn't hear that part so this is going to be very interesting in terms of a pretty obvious reason why there's so much pressure to actually do this yes that's as far as i can tell the only reason that um certain people involved in facilitating this deal have any interest in it whatsoever speaking of weird stuff HP is selling

1.2 terabyte laptops on Amazon. Kind of. The HP store on Amazon is selling low-end entry laptops and advertising them as one terabyte plus devices. The catch! One terabyte of the storage is OneDrive cloud storage. Also, in the case of this 1.6 terabyte one,

512 gigs of it seems to be... Oh, wait. 512 gigs of it seems to be a portable. hard drive. Wait, what? Let me see if I can find it. What is this picture? Is this AI?

It could be. That water bottle is like on her knee? Is this just bad Photoshop or is this AI? I can't tell. Because like clearly this shadow under here would also, she would have shadows under her fingers. Yeah, but like where's the water bottle? Oh yeah.

Yeah, it's AI. You think it's AI? I'm pretty. pretty sure. It could be a bad Photoshop. Uh, what's the graph? Yeah,

let's have a look at these. That's AI. This is AI. Yep. Okay. Oh, my God. Nice. Okay.

Well, that answers it. Yeah. Oh. Very cool. Very good. Yes. Um, that's all ridiculous. Is this deceptive marketing?

Yes. I mean, specify in the title that is OneDrive. They first say it's, 1.6 terabyte of storage. Like, ah, man. Yeah. I think it is. This one's better. This one's better where they don't combine it. That's totally fine. However, this is still, this is still yucky. That's a problem. This is still super yucky. The title on this one is fine. Yes. The category is not, but the title on this one is totally fine. However, how long is this included for? Unless it's less than, it's less than years than... They could fix it if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it, if it's, it's, if it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's

was a fixed period of time, I don't even care if it's less than years. If it's not forever, right, it would, in my opinion, would need to be in brackets at the end. Plus one terabyte of cloud storage for three years. Or if the price for the product said the upfront price and the subscription to maintain that storage. Sure. I'd be fine with that as well. I think so. Also fully acceptable. Yeah. Yuck. We got a no notes. Uh, the king of plasma TVs is done making TVs. Panasonic is pulling a Sony and giving Skyworth control of their television business with the aim for the Chinese firm to take over manufacturing, marketing, and selling Panasonic TVs across the U.S. and Europe. Earlier this month, Panasonic announced plans

to eliminate 12,000 jobs globally, which is surprisingly only 4 to 5% of their workforce. That's a giant company. Holy crap. Panasonic makes like a lot. of stuff. Yeah. Just apparently not a lot of TVs these days. Yeah, yeah. To be clear, they're pulling a Sony in the sense that they are... Offloading their TV business at least to a certain degree.

They seem to be doing it much more so. Yeah. Yeah, but they're doing it a lot more into a different company. It's to Skyworth rather than TCL, which is to Sony, more like... It seems like more of a partnership on the Sony side because they like own part of the joint venture, whereas it seems like Panasonic is just like, well, Okay, you go ahead. This feels kind of like when you'd see like an old brand that used to be cool,

like you'd see an RCA like flat panel. You'd be like, did RCA ever make flat panels? And then you look into it and it's just made by like some random Chinese brand. Sad. Another no notes, but I suspect we'll talk about it for a little bit. YouTube rep has confirmed the ability to filter member only videos.

as of right now our LTT memberships are back online. They sure are. You should still go to LMG.G slash FPWAN for better pricing, but it's there if you'd rather stay on YouTube, which we know some of you would. We're slowly uploading new exclusives, new as in they weren't uploaded as of when this membership thing was turned off in the past.

So some of it will be a couple months back. We're still in the process of uploading new exclusives. It's taking a while, as apparently there's a limit on videos uploading. Oh, that makes sense. that does make sense but I'm surprised it applies to all channels yeah I've I could see that a lot of hacks and stuff yeah yeah I could see that yeah that's fine yep so the the feed is going to be kind of a mess but Luke is going to show you guys real quick yeah a super awesome hack for not seeing any of the members videos if you

don't really want to for one thing you can say don't show me these anymore and for another excuse me you can click this thing on public there you go boop they're all gone and then won't see any of them, which is why we agreed. Not a bad solution. Yeah, that's why we agreed to turn them back on. You can also click on Just Members Only. You could do that. Or you can click on.

Oh, why is that a thing? I saw that and tried to click away from it. I did not. I did not. I don't even know what that's in reference to. I don't either. Freaking Sammy. Can't trust that guy.

Oh, man. All right. Hey, this is fun. Remember how I said that I had faith that Apple was going to add and to end encryption for RCS to iPhone to Android communications? They almost immediately did as part of the beta. So they are now testing that. The second beta of 26.4 has support for it. So that's pretty cool. Our discussion question is, now that Apple's original lack of encryption argument no longer applies. What do you think was the real reason they waited so long to adopt RCS? Shame. It's just definitely shame. Because they just plain didn't want to. Yeah, they wanted to shame Android stuff. Yeah. Um, there's a new app that lets us track Sammy specifically. No, it's people with

smart glasses. But realistically, it's just Bluetooth devices. But in this case, it's probably coded for specific IDs that show you smart glasses. Anyways, with millions of pairs of smart glasses now in the, in the wild, you never know who might be secretly filming. And you still won't. But a new app called nearby glasses scans for Bluetooth signals and warns users when smart glasses may be in use. The app is currently available on the Google Play Store with iOS in the works. Neat. Leaked charger for a new iPhone. Apparently they're going magnetic only.

Blah, blah, blah. Is it a portless iPhone on the way? We've all known this was going to happen for a while. No, this seems very, very rumor milly. Okay, I'm not engaging with that. What else we got here? Discord is delaying its global age verification rollout. Discord is now pushing back their rule changes to the second half of 2026.

Before they introduced the new rules, the company will be adding more options for users to verify their age and add the ability to make spoiler channels, which are essentially age-gated chats for NSFW topics. They also plan to publish a blog post explaining exactly how their age estimation systems work. Well, that'll be an easy way to get around them then. Quote from Discord CEO says,

The way this landed, many of you walked away thinking we're requiring face scans and ID uploads from everyone just to use Discord. That's not what's happening, but the fact that so many people believe it tells us we failed at our most basic job, clearly explaining what we're doing and why. Okay, well, we'll see how it goes in another job.

other six months or so. Yeah, the problem is the way this landed was you were working with like the Palantir guy. I don't remember his name right now. Yeah. Like, it's not a great look. That's,

I think the main reason, that's the main reason why I was pissed. Hey, do you want to be not upset? Yeah. Uh, sure. This is pretty cool.

Ars Technica posted this article. Oh, yeah. In spite of big offers from tech companies. Oh, my God. Many farmers are being supreme. based and refusing to sell their land for data center use. So based.

82 year old, this is so cool. 82 year old, Ida Huddleston told representatives of a Fortune 500 company when she rejected their offer of $33 million for 650 acres of Kentucky farmland. There's a quote, you don't have enough to buy me out. I'm not for sale. Leave me alone.

I'm satisfied. based. Another farmer in the same county, it says country, but I'm sure they mean county, because obviously they'd be in the same country. 75-year-old Timothy Grosser declined a proposal to name your price

when a tech company sought to buy his 250-acre farm. This was reported by The Guardian. The money's not worth giving up your lifestyle, Grocer said. Based. Based. And agricultural land. Farmers being based again.

Agricultural land has been a target because it has access to water. It has traditionally been relatively inexpensive for the amount of area you can get per dollar, which if you're trying to build a sprawling data center might be an advantage. I think access to power has also been an advantage traditionally. Oh yeah, foreign power. Yep. It's like way cheaper. There's a discussion question here.

It says here in BC we have the agricultural land reserve to theoretically at least protect farmland. Do you think other regions could follow that example? I think they could. I think the agricultural land reserve is extremely documentedly. And I mean, you could just take a drive in some of those areas horrifically abused by the ultra-rich in BC to just have insanely massive mansions, pay way less in power, pay way less in taxes, pay way less in lots of different things by just. kind of basically pretending that they're farmers by having a tiny little bit of their land dedicated to farming something. It's very, very common that it's wine grapes.

And then they'll have somebody, because very little maintenance. And then you have somebody come gather your grapes and sell them or whatever and you don't do any of the labor and you make no money off of it. But you are allowed to classify yourself as a farm. This is like just one of the many, many ways that BC is extremely well known for just excessive amounts of scams. Just tons and tons of scams. I mean, that's a farmhouse, right? That sure do be a farmhouse, brother.

Let's go. There are tons of these in BC. We are here. Tons of them. We are here. That is like here. Hell yeah. Those crops, all those crops behind there, that, that's making so much.

much money. They have solar panels though so it's fine. That's making so much money dude. I hope this is not that easy to do with a touchpad, but let's see, let's see what else we can find. Let's, let's play. And it's wild, because you'll see like a very legitimate operation. Yeah, here's a farm. And everything looks pretty normal. And then you see a mega mission and you're like, oh. What are we looking at here? What about second house or is that a garage? It looks like it's actually. This one's not that bad. This one's pretty normal. I don't want to point out of, like, there are, there are a lot of, a lot of very legitimate farmers in B.C. But it's extremely expensive land, so it's very, very difficult to get into.

And you're, you're bidding against people like, potentially this, that are just building mega mansions and then, you know, chilling. Playing farmer game by paying someone else to take care of their life. I've also heard that if you are like, oh, the land. really bad. I haven't been able to make any money off of it because it's crap. Can we rezone it for not farmland?

That is pretty hard, from my understanding, legitimately. People try. I'm sure they try, but my understanding is it's pretty hard. I'm glad. Yeah. Yeah. How many garages is that?

Six? That's a lot of garage. Is there more garages on the right there? Cheebus. Wow. Absolutely wild. They look like they do some legitimate farming. Yeah, but there's also the thing where you can hire people to come in and legitimately farm.

No, for sure. The one that I'm talking about is like way more egregious. There's a lot of ones a little further away from here, like more in the kind of Alder Grove area. Look at that house. Wow. And meanwhile, this one. Ooh. Damn.

Oh, my. Damn, that's a big house. Oh my God, this one couldn't even all be in a straight line. They're not even pretending that they ever go any farther out of the house than this wall. Yeah. Sure, though, we go, you know, do crop things. Oh, my God, look at this one. The main thing, the main thing that sounds out to me, like, if they actually, if they actually end up producing, like, good crops, I don't really care that much.

if they happen to be super rich and they're like, whatever, I'll farm this land and I'm going to just pay someone else to do it and I'll slap a house here. Like, that doesn't bother me that much. The main, a little bit, but not that much. The main ones that bother me is when they just have like a tiny amount of the property

dedicated to that, like minimum requirements, which is often not that high. And then they do it, it's like yikes. Look how many cars are in front of this place? You know you can only drive one at a time, right? Some of these might be multifamily.

Oh, I'm sure they are. Yeah. That was just a guy in his dog. Need 12 bedrooms. There's an extremely, if you want to have fun one day, if you go around Google Maps.

There's way more than I thought there was. Look into how much people make in this province. And then just have fun looking down some of the roads. Look into some of the costing of certain areas and go, wait a minute. Oh, you mean all the illegitimate money? Yeah. That doesn't make any sense. The top end of people's earning in this province is, you know, this much.

That means there's that many people. A huge percentage of them live in Vancouver. Okay, cool. What are all these places? How is there so many places worth like double digit millions of dollars? And there's just so many of them. Our across the street neighbors when I was in my teens were just known to be gangsters. I think I've told you the story probably.

a few times. One of the in-home geek squad guys when I worked in in in a, uh, at geek squad, uh, worked at like a very obvious hell's angels place. Uh, and the guy just like was laughing about he offered him a beer and stuff and he said no, obviously. And then as he was leaving, he was like, guess what I do for work? And he was like, what? He's like, I, I don't remember what he said. I repair ref, I work for like a refrigerator repair company or something. And then just huge belly laugh. He's like, Like, he's like clearly clearly. He had like a crazy Harley.

He had some, he had some leathers and stuff. Like it was very obviously a Hells Angels bro. Just, just messing around. I'm in waste management. That's a pretty, that's a pretty big tell.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, BC, BC. Ah, man, I don't remember what it was. I'm pretty sure it was New York Times. It was a long time ago. but they did like a most corrupt place in North America and it ended up being Vancouver. This was quite a while ago.

Things have probably shifted a little bit but probably not that much. There is a lot of money moving around in BC in illegitimate ways. Well, Sean Caldera was actually talking to me about what's going on in Fort Langley right now. Oh, dude. Where real estate developer, bro,

couldn't get permits to build just like whatever he wanted. So he ran and became the mayor so that he could just greenlight whatever he wanted to do. And then his influence is spreading. And like the whole vibe of Fort Langley has changed very significantly because there was all these rules about historical buildings and how high they could build and all this kind of stuff.

And he's blown that out. And now it's just like another suburb. Well, the one main street. It just, it doesn't feel historic so much anymore. There's a couple, there's a couple buildings here and there. But it just feels like, I don't know, I'm in. like a trendy street in Vancouver now. It's just in the middle of nowhere.

It's kind of sad. I should put in a whole food. It's a pretty small place, maybe a half. Oh my goodness. Sorry. Oh, man. What were we even talking about? Who knows?

Farmers refusing to sell the data centers. Oh, yeah. Cool, based. Based. Sam Altman, Defends AI at the India AI Impact Summit. this okay are you ready for your eyes to just about roll out of your head I don't know anything about this topic yeah open AI CEO Sam Altman argued that it's unfair to only look at the energy consumption it takes to train an AI because it also

takes a lot of energy to train a human sorry I wasn't ready for that at all that's wild we would need to factor this is a quote 20 years of life and all the food you eat during that time before you get smart. Ah, so humans are just, are just, uh, it's, it's just the matrix now. Altman further claims that if you compare a GPT inference query to a human answering a question, probably AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis. Holy crap.

Whoa, dude. He completely dismissed concerns over chat GPT's water usage as totally fake, arguing that modern data centers don't use a vaporative cooling. I mean, some of them do, but that, I mean, that I'm not even going to pick apart that much when the whole, like, okay, oh, man, good Lord. So here's the, okay, I could wax philosophical on the value of a human life and therefore just obviously being more valuable than, you know, an AI agent or whatever, right?

Like, I could do that. But instead, I'm going to go all the way to the high. hyper-capitalist side, and I'm going to meet you on your own turf, and I'm going to say why that was such a fucking stupid thing to say. Okay? In a way that is undeniable, that AI will never pay taxes. Oh. All right. All right. You're done, bud. False equivalency. And I don't even have to get into whether humans have a soul or, you know or just If you look at all the ways that Open AI started he was talking about

how it was going to save humanity and a universal basic income and all this kind of stuff and now he's saying like ah you don't need the plebs I've got chills damn it's he's getting a little bit more real here

boom which might be good boom scam Altman dude yeah you can't tax pop more callers Sam I'll never forget so that's why we should

that's why we should even from a hyper capitalist, don't care about anything, but more money standpoint. That's why we should invest in humans and training humans, and we should not invest in training. What am I looking at?

Why can't I scroll up? There we go. What is this? Does he have two callers? He sure does. Rockberry. Popping collars, Sam. We didn't forget about looped, Sam.

It was scamy company. lied about your users? We didn't forget, Sam. A little evil boy. I don't like you. You know what's funny is we had like that concept of a line of clothing products. So we had the Steve, that turtleneck,

that mock neck that was based on Steve Jobs. Sam, and he just have a greener. Just have like a stupid double collar on it. That would be amazing. I think we won't do that. Yeah. The Italian government has declared all cloud storage users guilty in advance.

A levy of up to 30 euros per year will be applied to cloud storage accounts based on the reasoning that that storage space could be used for copyright infringement. The Italian Minister of Culture signed a decree extending the levy that previously applied only to physical media and at the same time increased the fees for physical media.

The Italian Society of Authors and Publishers welcomed the move while Italian consumer and technology advocacy groups are calling the move anachronistic. These sorts of levees are not new. Germany introduced similar levies in the 1960s, after legislators were convinced that cassette recorders would destroy record sales. Fun fact, did you know that the Canadian private copying levy is still set to 29 cents per blank CD and has been extended to 2027?

That's one of the reasons that blank media was more expensive here than it was in the states. However, I am going to say something once again. again, I know, huge surprise to everyone, that might come across controversial. The levy on blank CDs was actually a lot simpler for me than the Canadian government actually enforcing copyright. I paid a little bit of levy on every blank CD, and I never worried about, like, the music industry, busting down my door. Sure.

And as long as this levy kind of sits there as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as a, as an invisible shield against me ever actually, like, being punished in any way for the songs I downloaded on Napster, I was actually pretty chill with it. Italian friends, I encourage you to explore self-hosting. Yeah, you could do that, too. You have your own cloud. Blackjack. And they don't have to know about it.

Nice. Solid. Oh, hey, whoa, was that it for topics? Oh, do we talk about OpenClawe? Yeah, I didn't catch that much about it. The lady had her emails deleted? Yeah, it's, we don't have notes on it. I don't know enough about it.

Cool. Let's not do that then. But it is, you want to, let's just do this bit. Let's just look at their website real quick. The AI that actually does things. I mean, it does do that. Clears your inbox, a little bit too much, maybe. Sends emails, manages your calendar, checks, your invite flights, all that kind of stuff.

Look at this. What it does. What it does. What it does. It runs on your machine. It uses any chat app that it has. It has persistent memory. It controls your browser.

It has full system access, including reading and writing files, running shell commands, executing scripts, full accessed or potentially sandboxed. And people are letting this rip. Apparently, uh, Facebook researcher person, it deleted their entire inbox. It's probably efficient. Not entire, but a lot of it. Yeah. Emails are slowing them down. Delete the whole thing.

Maybe that's good. Sweet. I don't think we have a time. else to say none of us have used this um it's super dangerous it uses an old OS with a ton of vulnerabilities yeah not too surprised is what it is um neat all right dan do you want to switch us over to after dark wait are you hold on i don't have the twitter installed that's one of my problems when there's somebody that i can only communicate with on twitter i just constantly uninstall it and i'll i'll install it again because i have to go message somebody

and then I'm like, oh, crap, I ghosted this person for a while. I hate that it's like sometimes the only way to contact people. Hey, you want to know what's already started? What? After dark? Oh. Nah. And you can tell.

You can tell how controversial it is. Like ratio. Oh, man. I'm surprised you went back to it. I don't know anything about Pop Boys. I've never used it. nothing about it. I have no opinions on it. I just, uh, I'm surprised once scorned, he returned. Well, the narrative, the narrative last time should be, uh, the narrative last time was that was a fluke.

That should never have happened. Yeah. They patched the bug. That's not normal. And I was like, I, was that the only thing? I don't remember. Yeah, because I, well, I, I just never got as far as even having it installed. So you tried to do almost the first thing and then it nuked and then he went somewhere else. And then I went elsewhere, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. All right, Dan, hit us.

Sure thing. Hey, Linus, a while ago you teased us with a sling bag for handhelds and tablets. Any updates on that sling bag? Oh, uh, oh, shoot, probably. But I can't actually remember. right now. Matthew's working on it. I saw a newer version

of it a little while ago. I think we put it on pause, waiting around for Switch 2, is what I want to say. So the latest version of it has, it's bigger, so it could accommodate a Steam deck, but it has an insert so that you can put like a Switch 2 securely in it, or a Switch 1. But it's tough, man. When the form

factors of these handhelds are so... They vary so much. Yeah, they're so different in terms of their thickness and girthiness and Mollers are both kind of the same thing. But like whether they have like handles on them or whether they're like super skinny with joycons, like, ah, it might be one of those things where when we finally release it, it's ultimately not really what you want because we have to target something or we end up targeting nothing and then nobody wants it. What chipset are you using for the Linux challenge? I've used Linux since Slackware 1.0.

and I can't get anything to work properly on Strix Halo. I constantly forget the hardware in my system because I didn't build it myself. Interesting. I am using a variety of chipsets, one of which is Strix Halo. I'm actually, I think this is launched now so I can show it.

But I've been using this PX-13 from Asuse for a little bit. It's a Strix Halo system with, a convertible thing. It's basically the old Flow X-13, but without the XG Mobile, without a dedicated GPU, with 40 gigabit per second USBC, and with beefy cooling and Strix Halo.

This is a side note. I think it's not worth uploading our back catalog. I'm just going to side note real quick. This is, I know we can press the thing, and I think that's really cool. cool, but when people don't, I guess just, I don't know how to uncheck it. So this is what the page looks like. I know, it's a temporary issue, though. But there's literally no videos on my entire page that are not members only. Yeah. And I don't know if people are going to know to click this. Yeah, it's so little

of how people find our videos anyway, like really like negligible. I'm just boomer boy. Yeah, I do that to find videos. I know. Okay. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. Uh, okay. Hey Luke And it's temporary I fully acknowledge it's a problem You're right I think some people were upset About it being on the home page

Home page I think you can just click I'm not interested in this on the home page You can't do that on the actual channel page But you can just click public on the channel page There are solutions everywhere As far as Mary's saying it goes It does seem to remember

It will forget after a little while But it will remember Okay more merch messages Hey Luke Do you still play the new Mario cart No. I quit the first day. I bought a switch. This is probably the most disappointing purchase in a while. I bought a, I went blind into the new Mario Kart. Just expecting, you know, I've enjoyed like every Mario Kart. Someone's screaming no wrong. It's correct for me. I, uh, yeah, I bought a switch to almost exclusively for Mario Kart. I played Mario Kart 8 and Mario Kart 8 deluxe, both a lot. I played Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U a bunch, and then I played Mario Kart 8 deluxe or whatever it's called on the switch quite a bit as well. I played mostly on the Wii U, I think, but I also played on the Switch.

Very excited about New Mario Kart, was excited, just didn't look into things because I didn't want it spoiled. Played a fair bit in one day, and the whole time I was just like, oh, I don't like certain things about this. I really, I always really loved drifting. in Mario Kart loved it. And then now it's like, the drifting was weird. It didn't feel good for a variety of reasons. I don't think I'm the only one that thinks that. And then they have this new like rail grind thing that I really did not like.

I had a few other things that just made it really whack. It felt even more encouraging of exploits than previous Mario Kartz. Usually in previous Mario Kartz, the exploits were cool but kind of hard to do. So you wouldn't see them in like online competitive play much. and literally day one people were doing like under map exploits and crazy stuff

in the new one because of all the different systems that they support that is just kind of whack yeah I did not have a good time and I have not played it since honestly my Switch 2

is not getting a lot of play time yeah like probably sell it I think my son made the wrong call yeah I think he should have gone with a handheld PC

disappointing man I was talking about that when it launched. He uses it when we travel. And in fairness to Nintendo, it'll probably have like a seven-year lifespan. Yeah, probably. So there'll be plenty of time for banger games to come out for it. I'm going to interject here with another merch message. What you're referring to as Switch 2 is in fact Switch 2, or as I've taken to referring it. Sorry. Linus, wondering if your son is still liking the Switch 2? My daughter is now asking for one as a high school graduation gift?

He's not using it that much. Bottom line, he likes it when he uses it. He uses it when we travel, but we don't travel that much. And usually when we travel, we're like doing stuff. Like two of our recent trips were ski trips. So we're up early.

We eat. We ski. We come home. We maybe play like some card games or hang out. we let them bring their friends on one of the trips. So the kids brought some friends. So they hung out for a little bit. And Yvonne and I hit the hot tub.

And then we all collapse in our beds. And I mean, the way we travel is pretty type A. Yeah. So like I'm talking we leave here Friday night. We ski Saturday morning. We sleep in the hotel for one night. We ski Sunday and fly home Sunday. Like 48 hours.

doorstep to doorstep from home to home. Oh, yeah. So there's not a lot of room for like playing Mario cart on your switch in all that. Oh, by the way, totally unrelated. I tried skiing for the first time in over 25 years. It was fine. Back to boarding? Yeah, I think I'm going to go back to snowboarding.

Yeah. But not because like skiing is like a problem, but just because I've only boarded for over 25 years, I am more comfortable and therefore having more fun on a board. I talk to my kids about this all the time, how you have to kind of, when you're an adult especially, you kind of have to invest in getting good at something to have fun with it.

And I hate that video games have become that now, because that, like, I find my, I used to think, well, I'm really, like, jumping between topics here, but I used to hear people say, yeah, I only really play single player stuff now because, like, multiplayer is not fun because I'm not sweaty enough, and I didn't feel like things were that sweaty then,

but now I'm totally there. I don't think this is age. I think things have changed. I'm not sweaty enough of a skier to have fun skiing the way that I have fun boarding, though. If you look at like Counterstrike lobbies back in the day, even the tryhards back then,

in not all cases, definitely, but in a lot of cases would be seen as like very casual players these days. In regards to the effort put into the game. Right. Like the fact that it, is genuinely common for people of like warm up and aim trainers. Like no, dude.

That's crazy. The sweaty guys play every day after work. Wow. Yeah. And now what do you have? Yeah. 60 hours a week of practice? Yeah.

That's crazy. And like it's like I remember I played on some some pretty good teams. And I remember like the idea of practicing if it wasn't just a scrim was like funny. Insane. Like like you would. What are you talking about? Like when I was in high school, if someone's, said they were practicing a video game like you would have gotten an involuntary chortle like just like

that one but like even it's hilarious to think about it i remember our like our best player was talking about how you wanted to do like effectively aim training and like teaching people some like movement things and stuff like that and everyone other than me was like no i'll scrim i'll like play and just get better through playing just do some puggies what are you talking about i'm not going to like No, not a, not a chance. And now, and now people like very voluntarily on their own just to queue up like normals, they're not on a team. None of this matters.

They're going nowhere. We'll like practice and aim trainers for a long time before they jump online. Like the, the, the playing field has legitimately shifted. We have not just gotten older. It's probably both. Yeah. But it's not just getting older. Yeah.

Aye, aye, aye. Last one I've got for you tonight. Whale VIP here. Oh, what's up? G.G. on the Helldivers game. Yeah, it was my first time playing. It was fun.

It's a good game. What game slash activity slash et cetera do you wish you could have done at the land? I wanted to chair curl and I missed it. I was busy. Chair curling is so fun. I still can't believe your dad didn't win. He got, yeah, he got. Didn't he win at one of our things once?

I thought so, yeah, okay. somebody he had a great shot apparently and somebody just like whipped their chair and took his chair out i mean that's curling right there's yeah there's there's there's offensive measures to this game but you only have one shot you can't like in a curling game it goes back and forth constantly you throw your chair once right right so like you had a good shot and it got taken out it just is what it is all right um some of it's like the order that you just happened to be in uh i don't know um what was I going to say. Yeah, I wish the 8V8. We got to kind of figure that out because that I really, I already agreed with the vision, but now I saw the vision and it was bright and there was just

issues with it. Yeah, I hope we can get there. Yeah. It will take a long time. There were a lot of technical issues with the 8V8 this year. When we were using it, it was great. The whole idea of everyone just sits down and you just play. And there's no like, oh, sorry, I, No, I don't have you on Steam. So can someone lobby up so that we have like only a A joinable person? Two degrees of separation between whoever's running the lobby. Okay, sorry, are we using the official servers?

Oh, well, I only have a pirated version of the game, so I'm not going to be able to join an official server. Oh, God, well, no, I have the official game. I have to go get a pirated version of me. No, good Lord. Like, that whole, that whole foreplay is just so not sexy. For me, it was also just the defaultness of it. people gathered near the entrance of the 8 v8

and everyone was like we're playing halo there is a blue side and a red side there is the blue team and the red team I wonder what team I should join nope no you just join I'm blue 7 well I join blue like cool like there's there's no you just get into the game pretty quick you just start playing it was it was pretty sweet

yeah he had some issues with the net booting and we'll, we'll... There's some problems. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. We need someone who's going to own it and then they'll own it. Huge props to the Whaleand team. Shout out Evan and Pancrap.

I think they might mean Yvonne? Or do they mean Evan like our new social guy? Hmm. Cool. Evan the volunteer. Yeah, I thought so. I thought that might have been his name. Oh, that guy.

Evan's pretty based. Yeah, Evan's cool. Yeah. And archive. I'm really bad with names, so I thought his name was Evan, but I didn't want to say it. But yeah. Okay. Wow, is that it for The Man Show?

All right, we'll see again next week. Oh, whoa. Same bad time, same bad channel. I feel like that snuck up on me. I don't know why. Four hours flies by when you're having fun. Bye! Bye!

Bye! Oh.