The WAN Show - Want Denuvo in Your Game Mods? - WAN Show September 8, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone and welcome to the WAN show. We have a fantastic show lined up for you guys today. What is up with game mods getting DRM? Okay, we're gonna be talking about that. The Starfield DLSS3 mod has reignited controversy over paid mods. Also, Mozilla has found that cars are a privacy nightmare watching you sleep and... not sleep, as it were. What else we got? The Nintendo Switch 2, or whatever it might be named, has been demoed behind closed doors. And we'll talk about what we would want from it later on in the show.

Starting point is 00:00:35 Yeah, I mean, nobody knows anything, but I know what I want to see. Yeah, yeah. And Rockstar, they just use pirated copies of their own games to sell. Yeah. What a hack. Right? What a cheat code. Can you steal...

Starting point is 00:00:52 pirated code? I think so. I think so. I think so. I think there are guidelines about that. Yeah. That's a dated reference. I liked it. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic today?

Starting point is 00:01:25 Paid mods. Starfield's DLSS 3 mod has reignited controversy over paid mods. Modder PeerDark released a DLSS 2 slash XCSS mod for Starfield for free on Nexus mods. But, which is really great, by the way, because the fact that the game did not support DLSS out of the box, as Luke and I observed when we did our early access playtime with it, that unfortunately is not going to be a YouTube video, but will be available on Floatplane. It just, yeah, I can talk a little bit more about that later, but it's not coming to YouTube ultimately. But we definitely noticed that it would have been nice to have DLSS. But here's the thing. In addition to the free mod on Nexus Mods, they also posted an early build of the same mod that included DLSS 3,

Starting point is 00:02:22 including NVIDIA's frame generation feature that is only supported on RTX 4000 series cards, and they released this on their Patreon page, requiring a five dollar monthly sub to access it uh users reported that a single payment though so subscribing for just one month appears to unlock the mod perpetually uh which honestly i like i'm i'm okay with like if you have a subscription but people are allowed to have all you can eat while they have the subscription i mean it's basically the same way that we did all of the behind the scenes content from ltx yeah you you upgrade your subscription to enjoy the ltx content if you still like having 4k on floatplane then great you can keep it and otherwise well you watched it and you can download it even like floatplane doesn't have drm actually but but this mod does uh users reported that the mod requires a login to authenticate that you have paid for it before it will work pure dark also added the same digital

Starting point is 00:03:14 rights management to their DLSS 3 mod for Red Dead Redemption 2 this is in bold I wonder I wonder if hold on I wonder if that means that it's an always online thing no i don't think so because i think it's just an unlocker thing kind of like indicates once you get a check mark and then you're good yeah like winrar style um drr drm though and this is in bold in our notes is virtually unheard of for mods but it seems to have worked in pure dark's favor by some accounts they appear to have made over $40,000 this month, which is, last time I checked, a flipping lot of money, which goes to show you how much gamers value having access to these features

Starting point is 00:03:55 and how baffling it is that Bethesda... There's been some kind of pinfoil hat conspiracy theory stuff that AMD might have put pressure on Bethesda to not have it. But then AMD said they were super chill with it having DLSS. But then Bethesda basically refused to comment on it, really. It didn't have it. And now a single modder in like seven, eight days. I'm pretty sure this was out before the game was out.

Starting point is 00:04:23 Well, no, no, I'm doing the math from early access. Oh, okay, I understand. Yeah, in eight or nine days or whatever it works out to, has managed to hack it into the game. Obviously, QC takes time. In some cases, QC can take more time than the actual development, but it's pretty clear to me that this is something that if they'd had the will, they could have done it.

Starting point is 00:04:43 I do wonder if it's not contractual, but if it's just kind of like uh you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you know yeah under the table yeah yeah right like so i just checked the original mod the free mod on nexus mods was uploaded on september 1st wow now unsurprisingly you gotta gotta love modders and game crackers and hackers and whatnot uh the mods drm was cracked and pirated in a matter of days and a free alternative was uploaded to nexus mods by luke fz relation of yours? Not my alias. Which ignited a debate over Pure Dark's approach. But why? This is cool. So we had the news team reach out to a developer

Starting point is 00:05:34 who explained that there are essentially two main ways in which the mod community views itself. Coined by legendary Morrowind modder, Rai. The cathedral view and the parlor view are sort of diametrically opposed, sort of incompatible with each other in a sense. The cathedral view sees modders participating in a joint effort to build something amazing.

Starting point is 00:05:59 So to those folks, the idea of locking a single stained glass window behind a paywall seems ridiculous and counterproductive i would i haven't asked them if they see themselves this way but i would look at like the skyblivion project in that light it's a huge team of modern enormous undertaking collaboratively working on something for years to make this incredible look into it it's actually stunning basically they take the whole Oblivion game and just into the Skyrim engine. But then with amazing assets to it.

Starting point is 00:06:34 I'm going to be so stoked when that comes out. It is not just Oblivion, but prettier. It is basically rebuilt. So cool. And it looks a lot better than Skyrim did at launch. It looks like heavily modded, beautiful, perfection Skyrim, but it looks a lot better than like Skyrim did at launch it looks like heavily modded like beautiful perfection Skyrim But it's oblivion like it's it's it's incredible It's it's fantastic on the other side of things the parlor view sees individual mods as

Starting point is 00:06:57 Art pieces that are displayed in the modders parlor and the modder can choose to close the parlor doors anytime they choose in addition to modders of the cathedral school here much of the backlash to the mods paywall plus drm seems to be coming from young gamers with little or no disposable income riley's note here is who seemingly possess rtx 40 series cards and a 70 game see i actually am very strongly in riley's camp here i think that a lot of the outrage over five dollar um items is probably manufactured as opposed to or i think people have at least a feeling of being principled on it. Like, I don't think it's about the money,

Starting point is 00:07:47 is I guess what I'm trying to say. Yeah. The debate over paid mods is nothing new. In 2015, Steam added, then removed, paid mod functionality from the Steam Workshop. In 2017, Bethesda launched the Creation Club, a service hosting user-generated content that Bethesda explicitly described as not paid

Starting point is 00:08:06 mods since existing mods were not allowed only new content that was developed with bethesda's approval was allowed but many other user-generated content marketplaces do exist like minecraft marketplace or i mean the entire game of roblox that's the point of road roadblocks, so I guess at risk of us Angering 50% of the internet no matter which stance we take here. Yeah, what's your what's your take on this? I don't know. I think it's complicated. I um well yeah, it's definitely complicated. Thank you for that. I very much Professor professor obvious I like the friend you're like the approach that a group like Skyblivion takes. Sure, but can you demand that? I don't think so.

Starting point is 00:08:50 I think if someone wants to do a whole bunch of work and they want to get paid for their work, it is their right to put their work up for sale effectively. But I just, yeah, I don't know. Why do I even read Twitch chat? Linus, you're disregarding the precedent this might set. I haven't taken a stance! Well, that's, I think, one of my biggest concerns. It could really change the community very heavily. Now, tell me this.

Starting point is 00:09:17 Let's take a big picture sort of 10-year outlook approach here. Do you think that in the grand scheme of things, it will ultimately be a net benefit to the modding community in terms of, and I don't mean a net benefit in terms of money, because obviously if they make money, that is a net benefit. I mean in terms of the quality and the diversity

Starting point is 00:09:40 of the mods that gamers get to enjoy. Do you think it will be a net benefit to modding? I honestly think it would be a net benefit i honestly think it would be a negative okay but i haven't even finished asking the question i know that you and i mind meld but i do need to ask the question for their benefit okay is it a net benefit to have this source of income going into the modding community in general that either doesn't exist or exists only in certain marketplaces like Roblox for example where it's very prevalent or is it a net negative

Starting point is 00:10:11 outcome that and I'm now that he's taken some of the wind out of my sails I'm gonna take some of the wind out of his that could actually hurt the the passionate roots of modding in general in the first place um and take some of the some of the just because i can spirit out of it and potentially hurt modding yeah so yeah that's everything i was going to say uh i i don't know it's it's like if someone wants to work on something they completely deserve the the right to be able to sell it but i do think that some other things come into question at that point. Because if you are doing this for profit, here's going to be a hyper-controversial take that people are not going to like.

Starting point is 00:10:54 Why shouldn't Bethesda get some of that money? Ooh. See, you know what? Okay, look at my screen. Look at what I put in Notepad. See, you know what? Okay, look at my screen. Look at what I put in Notepad.

Starting point is 00:11:11 I specifically, I wrote down, deserve to sell it, because he did say that. They are relying on somebody else's IP, someone else's blood, sweat, and tears, I don't know, someone else's blood, sweat, and tears to provide a platform for them to sell their service. Not only that, but what isn't out right now but will be coming is the Creation Kit, which is a series of modding tools. If you look at something like game engines, if you make a game using a game engine that is free, they will then take money from the sales of your game. Yes. This is a very normal thing so if people are going to stand and and say they want to sell mods which again if they want to i think they should be able to if they're going to use tools like the creation kit or or potentially even if they're just going

Starting point is 00:11:53 to mod the game at all it doesn't make sense at that point for the company that released the game to make some of the money from it i think maybe and i think one of the beautiful parts of the modding community and something that i've really enjoyed about it and before people jump on me i am a nexus mods subscriber and i have donated to multiple modding projects because i have thought it's decently important in the past because i am gaining a massive amount of enjoyment from these mods there's games that i will play with mods on them i would not play without it so like at that point in time okay now that's where we get into a really interesting counterpoint here because you just said modders should be giving bethesda a cut of their revenues but then you also just said there's games that i

Starting point is 00:12:40 wouldn't play and i think for a lot of gamers nevermind wouldn't play, and I think for a lot of gamers, Nevermind wouldn't play, wouldn't buy in the first place, if it wasn't for the rich, vibrant modding communities that are around them. So who should be paying who? Or is this just a purely symbiotic relationship where both parties should tolerate or even respect each other and try to cooperate but then if someone in bad faith creates a mod that damages the brand of the company that created the original game which has happened which has happened i mean rule 34 times well no with with bethesda actually with

Starting point is 00:13:18 i think it was oblivion uh modders found that you could take the the underwear you could take the underwear model you could take the underwear texture off of the character models and when you did that there was graphical things under them and they were like whoa what the heck this is already in the game and then that reached out to i believe esrb and they wanted to change the rating on the game and like all these things happened so this has happened to literally Bethesda and okay so I'm seeing some people in chat being like no Jaden actually brings up a really good point I think you don't have to pay a car manufacturer if you mod your car I think my point here would be the the tools that are being released by these companies in order to allow people to mod it uh i i think

Starting point is 00:14:05 most most games a lot of games have modding happen to them that don't try to make that happen if you know what i mean whereas i think if uh if your car man if a car manufacturer were to provide a tuning shop with resources that enable them to tune the cars better i think that that's something that they could reasonably charge for i think it would be yeah i guess what i would say is i don't think this should be like a requirement but i think at that point that would also that should also be seen as a reasonable approach and another game could take an approach of going look we're going to provide these modding tools and not charge for them to try to be the more hyper mod-friendly game. But I think the anger that would traditionally go towards a game developer

Starting point is 00:14:54 for trying to skim some mod money, if we're all so cool with modders charging for it, I think both of those things should probably be okay. Right. But if the mods are free traditionally, and then the game company is like, like hey we're going to skim some money and you have to pay for these now that's a little weird and then they're imposing their will yeah right yeah that's where i think i'm at now i'm not really sure now back to back to that point that was uh you know basically think about the precedent this sets let's let's talk about that for a little bit if you run a modded game maybe this deserves a

Starting point is 00:15:25 pull i think this deserves a pull uh do you want to set up the pull yeah okay if you run a modded game i would i i would pause it i would i would guess um that you probably don't run one mod so let's let's um let's let's i'm only really speaking to the people who like to mod games here So if you don't want any games and the answer is zero you don't need to participate in the poll Let's say one to two three to five Six to ten or ten or eleven plus or something like that You know how many mods would you expect to be running on a game that you

Starting point is 00:16:07 like to play because there's everything everything from texture packs to you know face replacements to you know sound effect replay like basically the sky is the limit when it comes to modding uh new gameplay modes uh different difficulties you can add new spells like there's all kinds of things the question how many mods would you typically apply to a game so i'm asking it's gonna range an incredible amount depending on what game they play so is this i just want to hear how many mods you actually do typically run yeah like okay yeah yeah one to two three to five six to ten eleven plus uh to 10, 11 plus. 1 to 2, 11 plus, okay. Well, yeah, because honestly, I mean, for Beat Saber,

Starting point is 00:16:49 I will easily be running over 10 mods at a given time. And I don't always, because there's... Oh, no, I think you're not understanding my laughter. There's people that are going to be at like 900. Yeah, I believe you. Okay, yeah. Yeah. But I just want to get a rough idea,

Starting point is 00:17:04 because i'm i'm coming to something with this i'll i'll be i'll be making a point with this at some point uh is that is a pull up okay let's have a look let's have a look at the results here so this is exactly what i was expecting we've got handfuls of people around 10 to 15 percent each that are saying you know one to one to two, three to five, six to 10. Hold on. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. There's a bunch of comments right now that I think are, uh, um, right now we're talking about games that you mod. We're not talking about games that you play. Yes. Yes. It's okay. Okay. Okay. But over half

Starting point is 00:17:44 are saying 11 plus. Yeah. And here's the point that i'm coming to and here's where i think the slippery slope argument starts to gain some momentum for me this is what a 70 game 80 game right like depending on your currency right it's it's gonna be somewhere between 50 to 120 dollars yeah I think it's 79 up in Canada or something yeah something like that by the time you pay $5 which was the price of this particular mod for 10

Starting point is 00:18:17 mods you are dang close to doubling the cost of the game what if you're running. What if you're running 900? What if you're running 900 mods? Now you're playing Train Simulator. Now, unless you're basically like a mobile gaming microtransaction whale, you don't get to play the game that you want to play. Also, if the DRM scheme is such that you have to pay for the mod before you can even try it, I think what's going to happen is you're going to see a lot less momentum for these modding communities, for these modders.

Starting point is 00:18:54 Because people aren't just going to throw it on and see what happens and see if it's any good. Because the only way for them to monetize that model would be always online. it's any good because the only way for them to monetize that model would be always online they would have to check if you're running it so that you could you know have a one hour free demo of a of a texture upgrade mod or something like that yeah now i'm not opposed to that money getting spread around right yeah yeah like compared to the compared to the the the predatory whale model that mobile gaming uses, where all the money is going to the developers, I don't mind the passionate, enthusiastic individuals or small groups in the community making some money. That's not a problem to me. a single-player game going from you know 60 80 dollars to I Don't know 400 bucks by the time you have all the quality of life by the time you have enough freaking

Starting point is 00:19:56 slots in your in your in your in your belt that you can actually like Gobble down enough potions and food to survive some stupid boss fight or something right like That's the kind of crap that yeah probably should be solvable without having to pay a ton of money at least in my like you know monkey caveman early gamer brain but then somebody did that work so why aren't they compensated like is this one of those rare times that i'm just like no i actually cannot take a stance on this i just want to talk through all the different perspectives and then fold my hands like this and go well maybe yeah i like this is effectively what you're talking about right now is why my first initial thing was like yeah it's going to completely change the whole landscape if it goes this way because you look at some of

Starting point is 00:20:39 the games that are most well-known. Oh yeah, Avon Fox in Fullplane Chat said, people copying other people's mods a thousand times over and renaming them to sell will also be rife. Yeah, it's interesting because like if you're selling something, you probably should also be able to handle customer support and refunds. And what if there's compatibility

Starting point is 00:21:05 issues with other people's mods um how do you deal with who has to deal with that problem yeah um and the like drama and issues that that's going to cause um there's lots of issues i just basically my i i i don't know yeah there's a big difference between the level of polish that something needs to kind of huck it out there for free versus be a product versus be a product like i think a perfect to be clear there are plenty of free mods that are absolutely astonishingly good and deserve to effectively equate this is a perfect example of that kind of thing merch messages is a super cool product and really really useful for us what do we say in here no we're saying what we're saying is you and i have talked about this we're saying that if we

Starting point is 00:21:58 were to roll this out for other creators oh yeah the amount of documentation the the amount of uh like polish the amount of um mostly documentation really like just retooling in a bunch of different ways yeah the amount of work that it would take to get it just and then we would basically need plug and play ready like all the time yeah the support because what if there's an issue and and so you you know you look at a product like this and you go wow holy smokes any creator with a shopify store could be could be benefiting from merch messages the same way that we are their communities could be benefiting from instead of throwing money at the screen ordering products that support the creator the creator is probably getting a very similar cut assuming their platform takes you know 50 to 30 percent or whatever it is and you actually get a product in the mail like it's it's just better um and so this isn't to say we will never do that no there's just reasons why

Starting point is 00:22:57 we haven't done it yet but there's been there's been a lot of work that's gone into it to get it to the point that it is and to get it that like 8% more I don't know triple the amount of work like I I don't even know how to quantify that Conrad mm aas merch messages as a service I honestly Conrad works on merch messages Conrad would know better than me, but it's a it's a very very significant amount more work especially to make it scalable like there's Yeah, we're because we're not just making another version for someone We're making a version that can be used by X amount of people not one more person So that in itself is like a huge issue. Here's a question. You might know the answer to

Starting point is 00:23:44 How much more work was flow plane to know so that other God yeah astronomical it was like honestly not really that bad to make it just for us like near the end of the forum version it was pretty good like it was fine yeah uh yeah and then we try to scale yeah forged alliance forever is talking about this uh the default supreme commander community is virtually dead the vast majority of supreme commander sales however small that may be are for using a modded client and my understanding is that they are not allowed to directly monetize. Like they're not allowed to profit from it.

Starting point is 00:24:26 I think it's a not for profit. Don't quote me on that. Not sure. I don't have a, I don't have a ton of detail about that, but they definitely do run it as a very donation only kind of deal. So maybe someone who knows a bit more can post in the float plane chat or whatever else.

Starting point is 00:24:44 I don't know. I think this is extremely complicated. And at the end of the day, it's going to come down to the community, not the collective to decide. It's going to come down to the individual members of the community because that's the thing. We talk about the community as this singular entity a lot, but that's simply not the case. And so even if, let's say, hypothetical numbers, let's say 99% of the community opposed modding

Starting point is 00:25:17 or opposed paid mods and especially DRM mods, how many copies of Starfield have they sold so far? Do we know that? Have they announced anything? I know they had over a million players at one time or whatever. Yeah, over a million players were playing the Premium Edition on both Steam and Xbox, putting Premium Edition sales well above 2 million copies.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Okay, so what's the cost? Okay, you know what? That doesn't matter. The point is the revenue doesn't matter in this for what I'm trying to explain right now, or what I'm trying to demonstrate right now. The point I'm trying to make is that at 2 million copies of this game, and it's a lot more than that, 10% of that would be 200,000, right? And 1% of that would be 20,000. right and one percent of that would be twenty thousand twenty thousand people if only one percent of people are okay with it that's a hundred grand that a modder could make selling their mod for five bucks so even if the community hates paid mods the vast majority are are just unanimous about this well that's not unanimous enough. Sorry?

Starting point is 00:26:27 Sorry, you're saying? If only 1% is okay and buys the mod, that's 100 grand in revenue for that mod. I think it would end up being the 1% conversion rate. Yes, I know. Okay. Yeah, 1% is optimistic for basically just at all. Maybe it would be more like one percent of that one percent that is okay with it which would still be a thousand dollars which is which is still

Starting point is 00:26:52 money a lot more than zero yeah and and i think that if you have a mod that has mainstream enough appeal you might be able to convert it greater than one percent um that and i think we know from the dlss3 mod sales that that conversion rate is probably pretty good. The number of gamers that are willing to accept paid mods seems to be higher than 1%. 6 million. Okay, there you go. Biggest Bethesda game launch of all time.

Starting point is 00:27:17 Yeah. So on PlayStation. So that would be 6,000 now, even if you only convert 1% of your 1% of total possible customers. That is an enormous pool to tap into, even if it's a tiny fraction of the total gamers that play Starfield. So I think the community is just going to decide. And I think that if we're being honest, we know what the answer is. Some people are going to be doing paid mods now paid mods are here to stay i i if i have to make a prediction what i would say is it's just going to split into two camps okay um i think there's going to be a paid modding camp and i think there's going to be a free modding

Starting point is 00:28:00 camp because i think there's a very significant community of people who learn digital art or digital audio or development or whatever else through modding games and they're still going to have a lot of fun with it I think a lot of people still view these things as passion projects or will be creating a mod that they don't necessarily think they could sell maybe it's too minor maybe it's one of those things that's going to end up in the list of 900 mods whatever but i do think you'll get um some major mods that will cost money now it's about to get real luke you saw nvidia's tech demo where they added ray traced lighting to Morrowind with a bunch of replaced assets and stuff like that. I mean, on a scale. Hold on, hold on, hold on.

Starting point is 00:28:52 Stop it. You're doing the thing again. We're even now. Okay. Let me set this up. Okay, okay, okay. If it looked pretty cool, right? Out of 10, how cool would you say that that that looked

Starting point is 00:29:07 to me like 10 yeah i mean i'm a hyper morrowind big morrowind fan yeah yeah okay that mod comes out it looks just like that the whole flippin game looks like that it costs 50 do you buy yeah he's already nodding The whole flippin' game looks like that. It costs $50. Do you buy... Yeah, he's already nodding. So that's the thing, right? Is that it's not only just your principled stance on it. It's also how bad do you want it.

Starting point is 00:29:37 Well, no, I don't think that's it. Because my principled stance isn't that someone doing work to develop something that's super cool should be not paid for it but this is not donation it's not my stance this is no i understand okay what if here okay let's let's let's sicken the deal the mod has denuvo okay i might actually not do it then it has denuvo it's 20 bucks i am particularly against i just want. I just want to, you know, it's $20. It looks like that. It runs great. It's $20.

Starting point is 00:30:10 It has Denuvo. Look at him. He's thinking about it. I am thinking because there are games that looked really cool that I have specifically not purchased because I hate Denuvo. Were they Morrowind? No. This is not a very fair example, jerk. I know, I know, but that's the thing, right?

Starting point is 00:30:27 No, I know, I get it, I get it. That's the point I'm trying to make is gamers are passionate. And sometimes the passion of gamers separates their money from their wallets at times when they know, like, cognitively, logically, that they shouldn't be doing it. We know we shouldn't pre-order. And yet two million concurrence, we're playing Starfield with the premium pre-order edition. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:50 I think Denuvo would be a no for me. So I'd wait till I can crack Denuvo out. I'm not going to say I've never done that. I'm not going to say I've never done that. So maybe there's what I'll call an alternative route. But yeah, I don't know. The point I was trying to make was just that this is not as cut and dried as, yes, always this way.

Starting point is 00:31:22 No, never that way. Everyone's going to have their own have their own like okay I kind of hate the way Nintendo behaves as a company yeah but you still on the switch and you still buy the new games I keep giving the money yeah because I I just I love video games like I'm sorry so the they make fun video games they also make like really stupid bad ones but they make really fun ones too the dan vale said gamers are not passionate we're stupid it's like okay those aren't mutually exclusive yeah they could be why not we can be both yeah we are both we can be stupidly passionate yeah we can be passionately stupid yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah All right, why don't we jump into our next topic?

Starting point is 00:32:07 Before we manage to insult everyone. I think pretty much everyone's mad. But yeah, I think this is just I think that's I think that's less to do with what we said because I don't think either of us ever really took a firm stance on any of this and more to do with people are mad about my uh i think the companies should be able to take some of the cut if they release mod tools thing oh really some people are mad about that but i think okay so here's here's my point there but it's what the market will bear yeah it's whether modders choose to mod for that game knowing that that's the deal if they change the deal, I strongly oppose that. If it starts out as these tools were free

Starting point is 00:32:47 and, oh, a lot of people are using this. This has added a lot of value to our game. New rules, new rules. Yeah. That's not cool. What if the modders using those tools start charging, though? Because the scenario that I was talking about was mods made through,

Starting point is 00:33:04 let's say Creation Kit comes out, because it's not out for Starfield yet, so this applies to none of the mods that are out currently. It's free, and everyone releases mods for free, but then all of a sudden modders start charging, and Bethesda's sitting there going, excuse me, pardon? and I don't know I think I think Jaden's point about the um modding cars thing is pretty valid but then I think the the counterpoint is that Bethesda put work into making the creation kit specifically they did four mods knowing that they're going to sell a lot more copies of their game yes with the longevity that the value that modders create is going to add to it so this is why i i don't think i think another way that i think this might be getting misconstrued is i'm not saying that they should what i'm more saying is that they they're within their rights they could and i would understand why right yeah um i think it would often for for something like uh skyfield i think would be a deeply unintelligent move

Starting point is 00:34:07 starfield but yes yeah sorry what did i say skyfield is really close sick yeah morrow morrowfield more more oblivion um but yeah i think it would be stupid because uh honestly in the state that they release the games like for pc it like needs mods the the you'd like need ui mods you need all this other stuff um and i think the reason why skyrim had the legs on it that it did was the modding community so i think if they if they screw up and they're like no we're you like can't release free mods and we're taking kind of all the paid mods something like that i think that would be just an incredibly stupid move there There's also degrees of taking a cut. If Bethesda came out and said,

Starting point is 00:34:47 look, um, you know, we're, we've got this marketplace and we've got to cover transaction fees and make it like worthwhile to maintain this darn thing. We need like 10 to 15% or something like that. I don't think that's entirely unreasonable.

Starting point is 00:34:59 Whereas if they come in and they say, yeah, it's 50, 50. Oh, that's a lot. That's a lot. Right.

Starting point is 00:35:04 So, and, and there's games like, I think it's, it doesn't Roblox take like 90% or some insanity? Yeah, it's always shades of gray. What would you think about a slider system? Oh, like Humble Bundle? Yeah. I think that... This percentage goes to the, and you can go to zero.

Starting point is 00:35:22 This percentage of the payment goes towards Creation Kit. This percentage of the payment goes towards Creation Kit. This percentage of the payment goes towards the modder. I think if you have that, you might as well just put 100% towards the modder. Because even the most ardent fans of Bethesda games hate Bethesda. So they're all just going to zero you out? Yeah, I really think that that is not even a possibility. People going, you know what? 100% to Bethesda.

Starting point is 00:35:47 Let's go. How many people do you think would skip changing the sliders, though? Like, if they put it, like, 80-20, 20% goes to Creation Kit, 80% goes to the mod creator. It depends on how many dark patterns are involved in the creation of this slider. Because Humble Bundle, for example, at least the last time I bought one was like very front and center hey this is a slider this is what it does you must interact with this button before you can proceed and buy this bundle of games uh it so it's really going to depend on how how skeezy they are about the positioning of the slider and i think i think that's something they could influence a lot. Another thing that I would say is...

Starting point is 00:36:25 We're never going to move on from this topic. Sorry, I have one last bit. Another thing that I would say is that if you're mad about my... I think it could make sense for developers to take out if they make the modding tools. There's this stuff that's already out there. And if you're not mad, now's probably the time. If this is something that you want to stop. Yep.

Starting point is 00:36:51 You pay for it. Wow. Minecraft Marketplace. It's interesting too, because I noticed this, but Rare Loot, who I guess made Skyblock. I haven't heard of these other ones, but Skyblock. It has three out of four on the What's Popular. Wow. I don't know what the splits are here.

Starting point is 00:37:12 I know nothing about this at all. It might only work with one type of Minecraft, because I know there's a bunch of different types of Minecraft. I'm not a Minecraft person. I don't know. The way the pricing is done should be illegal. How it's obfuscated by coins? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:37:23 Yeah, it's stupid. I hate it. The fact that this is marketed at kids and the fact that the pricing is hidden is um extremely problematic yeah and conrad saying to be fair marketplace has some pretty great stuff yeah And there's already amazing mods for Starfield. And there's mind-blowing, incredible, whole-game-quality mods for Skyrim. Yeah. And, like, Skyblivion's coming out. There's amazing things. I'm catching up Bits2435 in the floatplane chat.

Starting point is 00:38:01 That's his whole point. He goes, are they just now complaining about this after years? No, no, that's his whole point, is that if you're mad about this now, you kind of missed the boat a little bit. We've missed the boat a bit. You need to go back and be mad about, it's kind of like if you're mad about

Starting point is 00:38:19 microtransactions in mobile gaming. You need to go back in time and be mad about horse armor. And some people were. And some people, I was. Because people were mad about horse armor. about horse. I'm right people were also mad about how roblox has been around at all Yep, but I think like if if this is something that the community wants to stand up against You got to do it loud and now Yeah, yeah, it feels like we've

Starting point is 00:38:50 Honestly, it seems to me like we may have already reached a point of no return here. Like I don't think that with that person who made the DLSS mod making 40 grand in a month, I guarantee you it's a, it's a gold rush essentially at that point, as soon as one person makes a year's worth of income in a month whoa you're gonna have other you're gonna have people looking there's gonna be parents whose kids have fun modding games that are now pushing them to try to make it a career instead of a passion uh which is straight up gonna make a bunch of things worse in a bunch of different ways why did i read Twitch chat?

Starting point is 00:39:25 Yeah. Beating that horse armor to death at this point. But that's the point. It's the same company that we're centering this entire conversation around. And that was the start of microtransactions in gaming. That was that turning point when we had an opportunity to buy microtransaction crap after the fact or not buy it. And enough of the community, back to my point about whether it's 1% or more, enough of the

Starting point is 00:39:51 community was willing to do that, that Bethesda made enough money that other gaming companies stood up and took notice and went, this is the future of monetization in gaming. And that's what got us where we are today. And there was probably stuff that went on behind the scenes. And there were things that other companies were working on at the same time. It was just that it was one of the highest profile, most obviously successful in spite of how mad everybody was moments for microtransactions. And yeah, we keep talking about that one. Why? Because that was the one

Starting point is 00:40:26 so we could talk about other ones but then we'd be wrong um all right why don't we jump into oh shoot no there was a thing that i had wanted to it doesn't matter what do you want to jump into next n Nintendo demos the Switch 2? Sure. Or whatever it is. According to multiple sources, Nintendo held a closed-door demonstration of the successor to the Switch for developers at Gamescom last month. The demonstration used to target specs

Starting point is 00:40:57 of the new console to run both. The demonstration used... Oh, the demo used the target specs of the console. I just got a like, oh no moment. What? $40,000 for a graphical feature that could be a microtransaction from the company itself. Yeah. Yeah, that sucks.

Starting point is 00:41:22 I didn't think about that until right now. Yeah. That was sort of oh sorry i that was what i was getting at with like doubling the cost of the game and like 300 for the game and stuff like that i know i know and the company could could ship it without dlss3 and be like yeah it's another five bucks or without ultra textures i mean it's it's basically just a first party texture mod yeah do you want do you want... Oh, my God, yeah. Yeah, I know.

Starting point is 00:41:45 Do you want the low-tier version of this game? I know. This is a cool game that has six different endings, or you can get up to 12 different endings for another $10. That's already sort of a thing, yeah. The thing that's blowing my mind, I guess, is the settings behind a microtransaction, because there's already been content, for sure,

Starting point is 00:42:11 but I don't think I've seen settings i mean is is a texture pack not a setting it's kind of content it's kind of a setting which one is it i don't know it's it's it's riding the line yeah yeah it's right there could be sort of right there could fall on this side it could fall on this side i don't know which side is gonna fall on I hate it. Okay switch to run away. We gotta talk about this thing. Sorry go Okay, all right occasionally it's okay to look at twitch chat dark matter synthesis Yes, I was mad over horse armor the problem is we already know gamers don't have any willpower to say no we are Yep, yep, that's 100% true. All right, Nintendo demos the switch to speaking't have any willpower to say no we are fucked. Yep. Yep. That's 100% true Alright Nintendo demos the switch to speaking of having no willpower. I'm probably gonna buy it the demonstration used the

Starting point is 00:42:54 Whatever it was whether it was a developer kit or whether it was a prototype you know we don't know what it is to run both at higher frame rates and Higher resolution in Breath of the Wild and the Matrix Awakens Unreal Engine 5 tech demo that was originally created in 2021 to show off the capabilities of the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X. It apparently is capable of both ray tracing and current-gen HD visuals using NVIDIA's DLSS AI upscaling, which, can I just say called it. I called this hard. I was like, man, switch to should just use DLSS to have like a way better,

Starting point is 00:43:34 uh, like TV gaming experience without necessarily needing to move past mobile capable hardware. What does current gen HD mean? I don't know i was actually i was yes i was i was i was going to come back to that okay sorry you can keep going nope you can keep going because i just got signed out of my google account oh boy uh other reports have corroborated that a switch sequel is in the works and that key partners already have dev kits in hand it's possible that a launch could come as early as the final quarter of 2024. Really? You think so? But Nintendo has made no public commitments at this point.

Starting point is 00:44:10 Well, it depends what it is. If it's a completely new gaming experience, a la Nintendo Wii, then yeah, it's probably going to be a minute because if developers are just getting dev kits now, unless they're going to rush these games out in a year, I mean, good flipping luck, right? Then again, it wouldn't be the first time that Nintendo gave their own internal teams lots of time to work on something and external teams less time. Where was I going with this?

Starting point is 00:44:40 Right. Right. But if it's more of a Wii U, where it's like kind of that thing, but with a gimmick or, you know, more different, then no, I mean, I think it could be realistic. Like if you just plug in Breath of the Wild, and since everything's online anyway, it just downloads, you know, new text, new higher resolution textures or something to your console, and then you just run the game from your internal storage or something like that. Yeah, I don't see why a new console that takes the same basic game cartridges but then just runs them at higher resolution and higher frame rate couldn't come out soon. And it might launch without any particular blockbuster game available for it. I don't know. I have kind of a conspiracy theory here that Tears of the Kingdom was supposed to be a next-gen Switch title,

Starting point is 00:45:30 that that would have been what they did. Honestly, it would have made a lot of sense. It would have made a ton of sense, but I wonder if it was just a matter of, you know, the timing not being quite right. You know, maybe Ada Lovelace came too late and nintendo really wanted the improvement man give nvidia flack all you want go for it do it give nvidia some flack uh they're they're big mean jerks okay that was they don't care about gamers anymore truly powerful words

Starting point is 00:46:01 thank you luke give them flack all you want 40 series is flipping efficient yes really efficient also very expensive and very efficient and i find has a lot of issues expensive efficient mobile nintendo handheld match made in heaven so i i had kind of this theory around the time that tears of the Kingdom was coming out that it seemed kind of overdue. Like it kind of seemed like this should have been the launch title for the next big Nintendo console if it was going to be a Switch successor, which at the time it was rumored to be. But what I kind of wonder is if it matters. I wonder if Nintendo looked at it and went, holy smokes, the Switch and the Switch OLED are still selling, not as well as they used to, but they are still selling. Do we need a launch title?

Starting point is 00:46:52 Or do we just have better hardware and you can plug in all the same games and we're going to continue making games and those games will continue selling consoles the same way that they always do because we're flipping Nintendo and we make great games that people want to play. And, you know, honestly, I talked about this back when the Xbox series came out. My theory was that the Series S and the Series X were just the tip of the iceberg. As it turns out, I haven't been correct, at least not yet. But what I thought was that the series name, which otherwise seemed phenomenally stupid to me, like I couldn't come up with any other reason for it. I thought the series name meant that it was kind of the last generation of Xbox. And from then on, we were just going to get essentially PCs and Xbox clothing and they would just get upgrades what was like Vaguely communicated at the time and and the games would just kind of run better depending on which one it is and I thought that the whole point of series s series X was that they were priming game developers and the community for just

Starting point is 00:48:01 You know Xbox's that are just gaming boxes that can be less powerful or more powerful. And it was, you know, it was already kind of happening in the previous generation. So I don't know. I haven't been right about that yet, but who knows? Maybe Nintendo will be the one to do it and just kind of go, okay, yeah,

Starting point is 00:48:20 we'll just like upgrade the hardware once in a while and keep building gaming experiences for this platform it'll run at 720p 30 fps and on this one or 60 and then it'll run at uh you know 1080p 60 or 120 on this one and we'll do another one a few years later it'll run at 4k or whatever the case may be 1440p i don't know avon fox says uh upgradable xbox let's go okay that i'm not expecting i'm not expecting to happen big doubt so with all that in mind the real discussion here even though we managed to talk about this for a lot longer than i expected was what is your dream now you bought a switch at some point and then returned it if I recall correct No, I still have my switch. I still have a switch. I played it quite well technically

Starting point is 00:49:10 So I had a switch and then I modded it so I replaced the backing with that like Translucent purple retro Nintendo style nice. I actually use it quite a bit. How dare you call the n64 retro. I hate you Just makes me feel really old is um i had one too man when it was current um or did we get it i think we got it the generation after but whatever it doesn't matter um uh yeah but then my parents like stopped working so i was like i'll fix it you can take mine while i do that and then i brought it home and i turned it on and it's never had a problem since so I'm technically using my parents and they're technically using mine but I see they function so whatever but yes I still have a switch long story short yeah okay cool so then the whole idea here

Starting point is 00:49:55 behind this topic was laying out kind of what we think will happen and what we want to happen. First of all, why don't we take turns? My wish list, easily backupable save games. No cloud subscription required. I want it. I think it is not going to happen. What do you want? What do you think will happen?

Starting point is 00:50:32 I want a bit of a return to more fun local party games. Okay, that's content. That's not the console. Yeah, but in my opinion, that's a lot of what Nintendo stuff has been forever. I don't think the actual quality of the console has almost ever been a real selling point n64 like the quality of the wii was not really the selling point no no you have to go back farther than that the content n64 like it's right in the name it's like it's 64 bit like it

Starting point is 00:50:59 was a it was a huge push they actually had the the i did that unboxing on short circuit recently you had your ram upgrade or whatever that was they had the frequency i did that unboxing on short circuit recently you had your ram upgrade or whatever that was they had the frequency of the chip on the box that is such a not nintendo thing to do these days they don't tell you how many gigahertz the switch runs at yeah yeah um but yeah i think that's it because like honestly i enjoyed the oh this is gonna be time for a spicy take i enjoyed my wii the wii u i know i know more than i enjoyed the switch because the wii u is more fun to have people over and play games on yeah that's fair um there was like and not that anyone played it because no one bought a wii u um but that super mar Mario Bros. game that came out for Wii U that had the fifth player and the fifth player had their own screen on the built-in screen handheld that had its own gameplay style and stuff.

Starting point is 00:51:54 That was really fun. Really fun and not doable on any console that wasn't a Wii U because you had to have that handheld screen on that extra controller, all that kind of stuff. So I don't know. I don't know necessarily how the console would do it itself, but I feel like the Wii U and the Wii itself both invited development of that style and the Switch invited single-player experiences. Yeah, I think that's i think that's

Starting point is 00:52:25 really fair i mean obviously neither you nor i has access to nintendo's telemetry data for what percentage of play time on the switch is in handheld mode versus docked mode but i would guess argue most of it's in handheld i would guess the same thing with no like you're saying data behind it i just would argue that that's true well with that in mind i would like to see a higher refresh rate screen i i love that i don't need to see 120 hertz i'd settle for 90 even 75 anything higher than 60 90 i would be stoked on 90 i'd be very happy with 90 because the thing is the difference between 60 and 90 is way nicer than the difference between 90 and 120 and it just has to do with how much the reduction in frame time is between the

Starting point is 00:53:15 two i'm even going to go on a limb and say i would prefer 60 to 90 versus uh 90 to 150 yes i think i'm not sure if like mathematically it quite works out to being better uh but it's it's i just care so much more about just once you get to 90 i'm like pretty stoked on the experience you know um game game grime in floatplane chat. How about just 60 that's actually playable on hardware and handheld? How about just that even? Okay. The point of this is that it's a wish list. It's not a realism list because I don't think we're going to get it.

Starting point is 00:53:59 I think we're going to get 60. This is something that I wanted. I don't know how they would do it, but I wanted some form of accelerator when you put it in a dock i mean that could be done usb4 like yeah there's no way that nvidia couldn't build a chip with some kind of usb4 thunderbolt implementation at this point but like i want it to um i want there to be like a reason to dock it other than it goes on a tv screen and you can see all them pixels interesting i um oh man just everything seems everything seems so unlikely somehow and yet obviously they have

Starting point is 00:54:42 to upgrade it here's what i want to know right back to my conspiracy theory that's where i was going with this uh my conspiracy theory that that they just like we're gonna have switch to for tears of the kingdom and then just like didn't i think that steam deck has put a lot of pressure on nintendo to bother to update this thing and if you look at the timing for when they might have kind of gone, okay, no, we actually seriously do need to actually freaking develop this thing, it's not that unbelievable. Because it doesn't necessarily have to be

Starting point is 00:55:16 right when Steam Deck launches. It could be that it's been like a slow pressure build as the Steam Deck launched, and then gamers really liked it, and then emulators not only existed but got super easy to use and oh my goodness our games run better on it like there might have just been like a like a like a wake up a slow wake up process at nintendo to the fact that they have competition in handheld gaming again. Because that's the biggest reason that I can think of.

Starting point is 00:55:46 That Nintendo needs a sequel for the Switch. Is that they own handheld gaming. They have tons of competition when it comes to living room gaming. And they have basically forever. But they have owned handheld gaming. Basically forever. And so for nintendo you know i would see them losing the living room race as you know a problem but i think to them losing the handheld race is an existential threat if that kind of makes sense and i could see that lighting a serious serious

Starting point is 00:56:26 fire under their butts um we are supposed to now explain and do a couple merch messages so we already kind of covered this earlier in the show but for those of you who are just joining us merch messages are our alternative to super chat to twitch bits or otherwise hucking money at the screen and hoping that Senpai notices you. What you do is you go on lttstore.com and you check out any of the cool items we have there. Like, whoa, we have a wristlet keychain now, a new series of pins, and what is this?

Starting point is 00:56:57 A Luke Newcomb t-shirt design. Hold on a second. Wait, Dan's got a box. He's going to throw it at us oh my okay for luke plus linus but mostly luke ps lcd store.com what is this what uh your water your water bottle is right in the way of the thing you're opening of course you're doing great luke yeah sorry well it kind of matches the color of the shirt a little bit um so hold on this one's gonna be yours for sure.

Starting point is 00:57:25 I actually don't even remember the full... Are you going to wear my face on your body? Of course I am. Heck yeah. I don't even remember the full context for this. I think it was like you trying to stop me from destroying the channel or something like that. That probably sounds about right. Yeah, I don't remember.

Starting point is 00:57:40 I love this. Twitch chat, always with the good takes. Nobody will buy that. Twitch chat, do you have any idea how many of these we've sold already what really? Look at it. It's awesome. I mean, I think it's cool, but I don't know I hazard to assume people would put my face on their body. I mean I'm gonna do it. Hey Hey, I give it. I give it like a couple months before someone has a tattoo of this on their body I give it like a couple months before someone has a tattoo of this on their body.

Starting point is 00:58:07 That would be amazing. Luke Nukem. I remember saying Nuke a whole bunch of times on a stream, but I don't remember why. Like I said, I also do not remember the full context for this. All I know is that I think Sarah did a bang up job of this. Oh, it looks great. I appreciate how... I appreciate how... I appreciate the muscularity that she gave me.

Starting point is 00:58:29 That's pretty fantastic. Yeah, I was going to comment on that. Be like, hey, we actually... Oh, I don't know if the other designers passed their 90-day initial probation period, but there was some help from one of the other designers as well. So Sarah and one of our other designers were together on it. Oh, I can just switch to my cam if you just want to stay there.

Starting point is 00:58:50 Boom. Anyway, yep. Freaking cool. I love it. You guys can check that out at LTT store. We've also got, oh, how does this work? Am I able to have Linus laptop and Linus cam, or are we going to show nipples on Twitch?

Starting point is 00:59:10 Hey, you totally can. That work super cool uh so right so we've also got new versions of the lanyard that are just you know more of like a a bracelet they can you know you clip onto a thing or clip onto other more different thing not everybody likes a huge long lanyard and then series two pins this is a really fun collection sarah did a really great job the hard drive pin is mirrored so it's super super shiny it's kind of hard to tell from that picture but there it is uh i would like to point out that this is not in fact infringing and bemo okay this is the little character from the abcs of gaming oh sorry no i'm just showing how shiny oh now it's harder to see go back that is actually worse uh good job lining see how shiny it is yeah that's the hard drive pin um give it a sec luke i can go to the big one we've got the short circuit blocks

Starting point is 00:59:55 and then which by the way if you look closely this is an s okay and this is a C. Whoa. Yeah, I know, right? Anywho. All right. And a strawberry for no reason. Wow, I've never... Wow. I don't know how to feel about this. The art is fantastic. Wearing my own face and name on my body is a little weird.

Starting point is 01:00:20 You get used to it. Yeah, I was going to ask you how you feel about that. You actually don't... Okay, I think some you get used to it but yeah i was i was gonna ask you how you feel about that you actually don't okay i think some people get used to it i i actually i only notice it sometimes now like i'll i'll have moments where i um i'll find someone's hoodie lying around and i'll be frustrated because we we issue people hoodies like everyone gets a like a merch budget and they can Just request stuff and so you know it's frustrating to me whenever I see waste anywhere And so if people don't label something and they just leave it around You know I'll go like you know I wish people would put their names on things and it's like yeah for me

Starting point is 01:01:00 It's easy because like my name's on all of them. I guess Your name onto something that like my name's on all of them, I guess. Have you like, I'll just have funny thoughts like that. Have you like, sharpied your name onto something that has your name already on it? Yeah, of course. Yeah. I never even like thought about that. Yeah. Yeah. I write on, I write LS on my, my merch items.

Starting point is 01:01:16 Cause otherwise they get mixed up with other people's. That's pretty funny. It makes sense, but it's just pretty funny. Um, I love the design. Thank you. I appreciate it. I don't, I don't fully remember the context. Someone said, yeah, nuke Mars, nuke the moon, nuke everything.

Starting point is 01:01:29 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You were just like, yeah. Why was I doing that? I don't remember. I remember it, but I don't remember why I did it. I don't remember. I don't feel like it really matters that much. It just bothered you, so I just did it for fun.

Starting point is 01:01:40 I don't know. All I know at this point is that it's a really cool design Yeah, no, I love it. It's great. Anyway. I'm gonna have to get like a bunch for my family and stuff Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I hope you have enough merch You'll make some sales off of me Luke behind Luke Newcomb shirts follows friends and come oh There's something else coming don't worry about it what what does that mean is it the budgie stickers look what i said is obviously true

Starting point is 01:02:13 there is something else coming i mean it's factually accurate the something somewhere is coming i'm sure oh apparently i wanted to nuke the moon as a way to terraform it or something i thought i think i was no mars yeah and i was talking about how elon wanted to nuke the moon as a way to terraform it or something. I think I was talking about Mars. And I was talking about how Elon wanted to do that or something. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. Either way. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:02:31 Someone will find it. Luke Nukem plush. Interesting. I wonder at what point we get in trouble over infringement. I mean, it's obviously Luke. Yeah. That's not. It doesn't look like Duke Nukem. I don't even know what you're talking about. I mean, it's obviously Luke. Yeah, that's not... It doesn't look like Duke Nukem.

Starting point is 01:02:47 I don't even know what you're talking about. I mean, neither. Any similarity to whatever it is... And if they made one, it would take them 11 years to release the shirt anyways. Okay, don't poke the bear. You killed him, dude. Oh my gosh.

Starting point is 01:03:07 Absolutely murdered. Luke Sickburn's gone nuclear. Speaking of nuking things, I'm going to bring us back. I know. I'm sorry. It's the new version of AI topics. I'm going to bring us back to that Bethesda topic for a second. No, you're not.

Starting point is 01:03:22 You're going to explain and do too much messages. Okay. I'll save it. I'll save it. I'll save it. You're going to explain and do too much messages. Oh, okay. I'll save it. I'll save it. I'll save it. I'm going to lose the... Okay, fine. Just do it. Let's talk about it.

Starting point is 01:03:30 We're going back to the Bethesda topic. Let's go. It has been brought to my attention by James Ryan and with some help, Handyman, and some other people in the float plane chat that there's some interesting things in the Starfield Eula. One line specifically, I'm going to do section 3.E.

Starting point is 01:03:52 These are limitations and restrictions. Exploit the game or any of its parts, including with limitation the game client for any commercial purpose, including without limitation, renting, leasing, or licensing the game to others, including without limitation, renting, leasing, or licensing the game to others, including without limitation, A, for gathering virtual currency, items or resources for sale outside the game,

Starting point is 01:04:14 or for performing in-game services in exchange for payment outside of the game. In that case, it says EG power leveling, which I think comes from their online services. There's some really weird sections of this EULA that people have pointed out to me before. So these things are all forbidden. Those things stated, which... Why is there pizza here?

Starting point is 01:04:41 Oh. Okay. I don't know. The gathering of virtual currency. That's gold farming. This sounds like part that they took from the Elder Scrolls Online. And I don't think actually pertains to this particular mod, in my opinion. Got it.

Starting point is 01:05:01 But there are really, really weird um like this one that is talking about specific it specifically names power leveling which is a thing that happens in like mmos um there's other sections where it talks about how you can't use mods that would negatively impact other people's gameplay and it's like yeah that doesn't make any sense. This is a single-player game. So there's a ton of stuff in the EULA that talks about multiplayer-specific things. So I wonder if there's like a DLC or something or an expansion coming in the future

Starting point is 01:05:38 that allows you to have companions on your ship that are your buddies. Because why else would they have these limitations in the EULA? Well, that's basically just Star Citizen. It pertains to Fallout 76. That functionality... It's from Fallout 76. Okay. That functionality would take 10 years to build. Obviously. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:05:54 That's generous. But yeah, okay. So they pulled it from Fallout 76, sure. But either way, it came from a game that is not a single-player game. Gabriel R. says, Sorry to keep beating on this, but it seems like an important question. Do you think it makes a difference if we complain at the start of a trend,

Starting point is 01:06:14 like with Horse Armor? It seems to me that companies will push it until they can, no matter what, and it will only stop happening after it becomes so bad people grab their pitchforks and go for the throat. That's exactly the point, though, is if you grab their pitchforks and go for the throat that's exactly the point though is if you grab the pitchforks and go for the throat right at the beginning when you see this behavior that on a small scale might not be a big deal but on a large scale is going to completely change the face of gaming then that will be the point where the pitchforks come out and you go for the throat and they kind of go maybe we shouldn't do this or maybe they just will do it anyway because that small percentage of people will continue to buy it um okay anyway we never finished explaining merch messages so

Starting point is 01:06:53 the point is that we don't do super super chats or twitch bits or anything like that we do merch messages so you guys just go on ltdstore.com and in the cart there will be a box when we're live for a merch message and it'll get sent to producer, who will either just pop it up there or maybe curate it for us to talk about. Or maybe give you a little reply with his burning fingies. Look at them go. They were doing something. Fine. And we're going to do a couple of them just to kind of show you guys how that works.

Starting point is 01:07:22 Dan, do you have a couple of curated ones for us? I do. I do. Let's see. I do saw a putty cat. I do. Do you think traditional style forums will ever make a comeback or are hybrid social media forums like Reddit the best we will get in the mainstream? That ship sailed. Reddit, the Reddit community, and again, I'm speaking of it as though it's this monolithic thing and it's not but but the reddit community as a whole had their shot and that was during the whole you know um spaz thing and i think that what reddit learned from all of that is that people are addicted to reddit and will never stop using red. And I learned the same thing.

Starting point is 01:08:07 There was an opportunity for people to go, oh, this is bad, having all this power consolidated in the hands of a company that clearly doesn't give a f**k. And I haven't seen any kind of meaningful shift to smaller community-oriented forums. Obviously, we continue to maintain ours minimally, but because we do think it's important and there are other small forum communities that do exist, but no, I don't think, I don't think anything beats Reddit anymore. I mean, during that whole debacle, I was saying,

Starting point is 01:08:48 I think this could be it. Dig came and went. But I just... I feel like the rate of change, how we went from Zynga to people just having an MSN profile, how quickly all this stuff journal, you know, like how quickly all of MySpace, like how quickly everything used to change. There's a lot of there's a lot of inertia in the incumbent players now, and it seems like Reddit has got it pretty much nailed down. Yeah, I'm not trying to be pessimistic.

Starting point is 01:09:24 I just, you know, rip nailed down. Yeah. I'm not trying to be pessimistic. I just, yeah, yeah, rip new grounds, right? And for the second one, hey Linus, what is the progress on the smaller LTT store backpack? Yeah, I'm glad you called it smaller and not small because we kind of realized that in trying to keep a lot of carrying capacity for laptops and tablets and devices devices it's not that much smaller like it is smaller it has an external water bottle carrier so all

Starting point is 01:09:50 of that like water bottle capacity is is now is now shrunk or well outside and it does have a smaller bag of holding it is more comfortable on smaller smaller framed people but it's not small I would say it's more like like like a LTT backpack light as opposed to a small LTT backpack I think we're getting pretty close to production for that I think oh I know what it is the hold up is zipper pulls so we want to make sure that our production is done for the replacement zipper pulls for all the people who bought the original bag. Then we're going to production with the smaller bag as well as to production with the lux bag. Yes.

Starting point is 01:10:35 That makes sense. Priorities. I have another update. Sorry. Going to keep doing it, but I think this one's pretty big. I'm gonna keep doing it, but I think this one's pretty big James Ryan again sent me a link to the creation kit for Skyrim and

Starting point is 01:10:55 The like one of the very first sections I'll share my yeah scare my screen This is the top of it the first actual section is restrictions on use The editor is and shall remain oh, okay. Yeah, that's's a good idea i'm gonna do that still maybe maybe even more wow yeah now you don't even have to read it they could just read it the editor is and shall remain the copyrighted property of bethesda softworks and or its designees and you shall take no action inconsistent with such title or ownership, except as set forth in Section 5 below. You may not cause or permit the sale or any other commercial distribution or commercial exploitation, whether on a pay-per-play basis or otherwise, of any new materials without the express prior written consent of an authorized representative of Bethesda Softworks. That's pretty clear.

Starting point is 01:11:47 This DLSS thing was not made using Creation Kit. There is no Creation Kit for Starfield yet. So I don't think that applies to this situation. But it's very clear that Bethesda maintains the legal right to control anything that happens with creation kit with creation kit specifically right yeah okay yeah which again I think maybe I worded it poorly or something earlier but people were like whoa whoa whoa whoa these things weren't made with creation kit I understand that it's not out yet every single um starfield mod currently out was not made with creation kit because creation kit is not out

Starting point is 01:12:23 um and we don't even have a release date for creation kit so like it might not even be soon tim and floatplane chat asks these are big important questions here i sent a merch message about this but i noticed the luke newcomb shirt is a pre-order i thought you said don't pre-order stuff anymore do i pre-order it or not okay it's just a shirt our shirts are already a product that we already ship and it's printed by our printer who does a great job and prints lots of products that we already ship it's a pre-sale so that we don't overproduce it because even though i personally love it and have a high degree of confidence in the design. It's pretty specific. It's not enough to print 10,000 of them and just hope for the best.

Starting point is 01:13:09 So we just want to make exactly as many as you people want to buy. I think the design is great. I appreciate the work put into it. I don't know how many of these are going to move. What if you cheap out on this one though? I actually can't. They are actually just shirts they are actually just shirts that are actually just in our warehouse already and we just take to the printer and they print on

Starting point is 01:13:29 yeah oh man yeah it's not a pre-order it's a pre-sale it's an auction um it's uh anyway do you want to hit us with one more den Dan? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Hey, DLL, celebrating my birthday, watching the WAN show. What is the absolute stupidest piece of tech that you've ever bought that you found you actually had a use for? Oh, man, it's going to have to be like some weird adapter or something for me. Yeah. That I ever bought.

Starting point is 01:14:03 Boy, is that a tough one. That I actually had use for? yeah that i ever bought boy is that a tough one that i actually had use for so and what was it a weird piece of tech was that it i mean it's not a weird piece of tech but it's a stupid stupidest it's not a stupid piece of tech but it's a stupid implementation i did end up using that tv i put in the bathtub i think that's a fair answer more than a little bit it's like who wouldn't and not just me like like when I like my my kids were little right so when the kids were having a bath right we just we put on paw patrol in the bathtub and then you know they'd happen a bath and watch a paw patrol or whatever like cool you're gonna enjoy this xanthroxin and float plane chat said anything silverstone yeah i mean i have a i have a i have a key fob that remotely starts my computer like

Starting point is 01:14:53 sure why not silverstone silverstone makes some weird stuff um mine's gonna be boring i i bought a a 10 key so it's you know you have 10 keyless keyboards. Well, it's the bit that most people chop off. I bought one of those in Taiwan that was, has blue switches made by Leopold. And I was like, you know, I understand the theory of you have your 10 keyless keyboard, and then you have your, your mousing area. I was going to say mouse pad, but a lot of your mouse pads will go on your keyboard have your, your mousing area. Uh, I was going to say mouse pad, but a lot of your mouse pads will go on your keyboard. So just your mousing area. And then you have your 10 key on the other side. And that actually like works out really well. Uh, but like,

Starting point is 01:15:32 I don't know if I'll ever actually use this. And I still use that same 10 key now. And that was like 10 years ago. Oh, I love my stupid little keyboard air mouse thing. Yeah, it's pretty good. Use it all the time. Love it so much that when I realized it was discontinued, I bought two more just so that I would have more to use when it died. And it seems like a pretty superfluous thing.

Starting point is 01:16:02 Like, I don't know, just grab a keyboard and mouse or whatever, but being able to just hold it especially in VR so I use it I use it for my VR my VR system so I'll have my like my headset on and I'll be doing something that I don't know doesn't work in the virtual desktop like anytime you oh I think it's task manager you can't interact with task manager from inside the virtual desktop for some reason I think that's it or is it control I don't know there's something that there's some things you can't interact with and so I'll grab my air mouse and then I'll just be looking at the virtual screen and I'll be able to use it yeah it's like with my

Starting point is 01:16:41 controller it's just hanging from my wrist. It's awesome. Awesome. Did you think of another one? I thought of one and then I laughed at something in chat and then it's completely gone from my mind. I don't remember what it was at all. Was it someone's concern that they might pre-order the shirt but it ships with only one sleeve and they have to wait for drivers to get the other one?

Starting point is 01:17:05 No. Just wait for mod have to wait for drivers to get the other one? No. Just wait for modders to charge for it. No, the green is not glow-in-the-dark, although it does have some kind of fluorescent ink, but it is not glow-in-the-dark. We've experimented with glow-in-the-dark ink, and unfortunately we haven't found one that meets our quality standards.

Starting point is 01:17:23 They tend to fade and not work very well after a pretty short period of time. So that's why we haven't moved forward with a glow-in-the-dark shirt. But yeah, I love the idea when I heard it, when we initially talked about it. There's also like color change ones and stuff like that, but none of them have unfortunately held up.

Starting point is 01:17:41 The staying power is rough. That's why we don't do the hollow foil ones anymore. I saw someone with a pristine the hollow foil ones anymore i saw someone with a pristine gpu hollow foil shirt at ltx they were like yeah i know that these are not very resilient so i never wear it i may not even wash it after wearing it this time i just i might just like sun it you know and get the smell out that way because i love how this thing looks and i know that it won't look the same if i wash it a bunch yeah man. And I can't remember what it was. I don't think I'm going to think of it. I think we should just move on, but yeah. Okay. So I think we need to do topics.

Starting point is 01:18:16 Yeah. Should we do this Google one? I'm not going to lie. I don't even like fully understand what's happening here just because I don't fully know the controls on YouTube. Okay. This is almost two separate things that we've just kind of rolled into one discussion topic because it's basically like Google going all spur change. The original articles here from Ars Technica and Google support, actually. and Google support, actually. Google is rolling out its new Privacy Sandbox for the web, a user-tracking ad platform that's baked into Chrome that uses the information collected through the browser

Starting point is 01:18:51 to inform websites what topic the user is interested in for the purpose of targeted ads. The feature is apparently intended to one day replace third-party cookies. Wow, let's put more power in the Google monopoly. What do you think? It seemed like a good idea. It seems like a good idea to me. Slash S.

Starting point is 01:19:11 I feel like I have to say that. Yeah, it's probably not a bad idea. Yeah. Users will now see a pop-up asking them to turn on an ad privacy feature that will give them more choice over the ads they see while protecting their browser history and identity. While the pop-up does note that users can make changes in Chrome settings,

Starting point is 01:19:34 it doesn't clarify that the feature can be opted out of, and clicking that the highlighted got it at the bottom of the page enables it by default. Other users have reported reported speaking of dark patterns other users have reported seeing a version that makes the option to opt out explicit but it's unclear if this is in response to criticism of the initial pop-up or if it's a regional difference in areas that have more stringent legal standards got it like this first one is extremely dark pattern uh here well here we can actually show it uh this is

Starting point is 01:20:05 what it looks like it's rough enhanced ad privacy in chrome blah blah blah blah blah got it i i guarantee you the vast majority of people are gonna go like oh some weird update okay got it i want to go to my honestly my facebook or whatever it is like. Yep. Yeah. Uh, this is the other version by the way, which makes way more sense. Yep. Meanwhile.

Starting point is 01:20:32 Um, oh yeah. So I don't know. There's not really much discussion here that bad. Meanwhile, YouTube will be altering creators' ad controls in November by removing individual ad controls in YouTube Studio for pre-roll, post-roll, skippable, and non-skippable ads on new videos, and instead making them a single toggle, on or off. Interesting. according to YouTube oh man I love it when companies provide this rationale for changing the granularity of your options as a user according to YouTube

Starting point is 01:21:12 ninety percent of creators already have these okay this says off by default but I suspect that is not right I suspect they mean on by default ninety percent of creators already have these set this way by default that's what I'm assuming this says and some found the options confusing you gotta love that that some some creators didn't like the thumbs down feature so we can remove it we have basically infinite creators so there will always be some group of people that think something and therefore we can do anything that we want all it takes is point.00001 percent of creators

Starting point is 01:21:46 to find something confusing um and some creators will find it confusing mid-roll ads however will still be fully controlled by creators for now i added for now but honestly the the way this slippery slope is sliding uh really does feel like a for now further honestly the the way this slippery slope is sliding really does feel like a for now further youtube says creators will be able to choose to have automated mid-roll ad breaks or manually selected ones oh and manually selected ones rather than choosing one or the other okay so some context for you guys the way that it works now you choose to just let youtube pick where to put mid-rolls based on where it doesn't disrupt user retention or more likely where it makes sense for the amount of time it's been since that individual user has seen a mid-roll because they they try not to they try to

Starting point is 01:22:40 ride the exact line between what you will tolerate and what will make you exit the app right so if someone goes from a video where youtube chose the mid-roll spots and there happened to be two in the latter half or something like that and then they click on a video where the user picked the mid-roll spots and they happen to have a couple front loaded they could end up accidentally overloading someone but in spite of that potential issue they are now giving better control over mid-rolls so you can basically go well i definitely want one here but also you can put them anywhere else you feel like my understanding is most creators do use the automated mid-roll breaks as opposed to the manually selected ones. But I don't have any numbers to back that up.

Starting point is 01:23:29 I'm sure there's some that have very important content pacing, which might want to frame it. Yeah. I think mostly, though, MrBeast uses automated ones the last time I heard about it. And so basically whatever he does is kind of the meta. Whatever one's going to do. Yeah. Apparently he's trying thumbnails where he doesn't have his mouth open or something,

Starting point is 01:23:48 and he saw some positive results from that. So hey, maybe that's new meta as well, is no more YouTuber face. He's still got his lips open, but if you look back, the last six videos or something like that, he's smiling like this in all of them instead of like that.

Starting point is 01:24:06 Sure. It looks like almost like AI-generated face. If Mr. Beast... Here, can I switch over to your laptop? Yeah. If Mr. Beast jumped off a bridge, I really do think that a lot of other people would do it. Would just do it with him? Yep.

Starting point is 01:24:21 Oh, jeez. What's happening? Oh, jeez. Oh, jeez. The Zoom. The Zoom is not happy. Wow, Luke. What's happening? Oh, geez. Oh, geez. The Zoom. The Zoom is not happy. Wow, Luke. We're going to end it.

Starting point is 01:24:28 Do you even compute? Well, the touchscreen is... Luke, compute him. The touchscreen. We won't be making that shirt anytime soon. But yeah, something about the thumbnails. His face looks very edited. This is great.

Starting point is 01:24:42 If in 724 and float plane chat says spoke too soon, that is not better. So I didn't see their original comment, but I guess they were saying, oh, this will be a big improvement. Yeah. Okay, we're back to your laptop. I don't know. Can anyone's teeth actually be that white? That's kind of what I'm saying. It almost looks like a really, really good Sims model.

Starting point is 01:25:10 Can't deny that it works. Something is being edited there. Literally anywhere from 100 to 200 million views per video. I mean, who else can do that? If that smile could get me 100 million views, sure, I'll smile like that. I mean, I tried. I didn't do as good of a job. I'm not as young as him, unfortunately.

Starting point is 01:25:27 And now we need to photo edit you. Looks AI-generated? Yeah, like almost does. It has, I don't know what it is. And like, I've obviously seen him. So like, I'm not saying he looks like that. I'm just like these. No, he looks like a pretty normal dude.

Starting point is 01:25:43 Yeah, and then these, they just, something's different. I don't know what it is uh cargo asks any rain cover updates yeah i had someone ask that on the forum and i said look i'm sorry we're not done yet but we sent them a prototype rain cover yeah rain cover for the backpack oh yeah yeah oh i saw the design for it though okay you know how reflective stuff can be like silver or it can be like kind of rainbow? Why not both? So we're going to have, it's kind of inspired by the Northern Lights

Starting point is 01:26:13 desk pad. No, no, like both on the same design. So it's kind of inspired by the Northern Lights desk pad and it's going to be like trees in the foreground and they're going to be like the rainbow one and then like mountains and then like kind of constellations in the sky and it'll be on the back of your backpack i'm not exactly a rain cover connoisseur but all the ones that i see are just black that's cool that it has a graphic on it yeah and it's reflective so the

Starting point is 01:26:37 idea is that it'll be safer at night because it's something we um didn't think of when we did the original design for the backpack and so hey at least if you're going to be out riding with it, well, hey, maybe you'll put a rain cover on and then at least we'll have something reflective for it. Yeah, cool. I have no idea how much it'll cost. Yeah, I don't know. It'll cost however much it costs. I mean, realistically, most of our products are just cost times some percentage that kind of makes sense. Like it's not, but we're not really, yeah, we're not really like that.

Starting point is 01:27:09 We have some that we make like an outsized margin percentage on, but generally speaking, that's just the, like the lower cost items where a big part of the cost is not the COGS, the cost of goods sold. It's like the handling costs and just the overhead involved in performing a transaction. Like if we had something that cost 30 cents and we marked it up 100 points, I can't sell something for 60 cents because I can't even cover what it costs for someone to put it in a warehouse and then go get it from a warehouse and then put it in a box and send it to you. Like it just doesn't make any sense. Whereas for something that costs $10, yeah, we might charge 20 bucks for it uh because we can we can absorb those costs much more easily so it's it it varies a little bit depending on the actual like base cost of the item

Starting point is 01:27:53 but um yeah i think some people are going to misunderstand that because you didn't specify cogs every time it was just cogs and you said cost oh cost is cogs yeah cogs is cost so when he's talking about cost he just means of the the components that go into the thing yeah but then it has to be shipped the the people that put it in the box there's a there's a handling fee every single time they do that for every single individual item like that that's a fee that is charged to us by a third-party company it's not just like a number i'd pulled out of my butt like it's a real fee. And then there's other things the whole way along,

Starting point is 01:28:28 et cetera, et cetera. But yeah. All right. Thanks to Moosend for sponsoring today's show. Moosend is an email marketing platform that provides business owners with a suite of tools to improve customer relationships through personalized outreach.

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Starting point is 01:29:02 Get a move on. Go to lmg.gg slash moo and try MooSend free for 30 days. Thanks to Cuddly for sponsoring today's show. Fact. Animals are cute. Unfortunate fact. There are millions of animals in less than desirable situations that need support. Cuddly helps give animals a healthy life and a loving home by providing tools and resources to support animal welfare organizations around the world. All partners featured on Cuddly are not-for-profit or municipal agencies and have

Starting point is 01:29:29 been verified to ensure that they are in good standing. You can donate to an organization or even a specific animal featured on their weekly wish page. Check them out at lmg.gg slash cuddly to learn more. That's lmg.gg slash c-u-d-d-l-Y. Your donation could help change the life of a furry friend. Thanks to Snooze for sponsoring today's show. Having trouble sleeping? Snooze makes sleep compact white noise machines aimed to improve your quality of sleep. Snooze delivers a consistent, natural,

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Starting point is 01:30:09 Check out the Snooze Pro at lmg.gg slash snooze. That's lmg.gg slash s-n-o-o-z. Don't snooze on Snooze. Okay, thanks, Dan. Welcome. Hey, guys. Sure. Cleo Abrams predicts tech advancements if sustainable,

Starting point is 01:30:24 high-scale energy production like nuclear power is widespread. Hit us. Sure. Cleo Abrams predicts tech advancements if sustainable, high-scale energy production like nuclear power is widespread. What do you think will be the biggest change to our lives with unlimited power? I won't feel bad for leaving my computer on all the time. I don't know. I mean, I got to say, I'm sorry, people who live in places where power is very expensive or environmentally impactful. Here in BC. Wait, you don't even sleep it? No.

Starting point is 01:30:53 Why? Well, how will I remote into it? You can wake it. Yeah, but it's not reliable. That's probably true. Like, I don't know, man. Sleep isn't reliable in general. My computer just doesn't sleep now.

Starting point is 01:31:07 I might as well call it restart. We talked about this in the recent thing. So you'll hear us talk about that soon. But yeah, my computer just, it's like a delayed restart. If I set it to sleep, it'll restart in two or three hours. I don't know what to tell you. So we live in British Columbia, Canada, where all of our power comes from falling water and you can you can you can talk about the environmental impact of hydroelectric power all you want but the reality of it is those dams are

Starting point is 01:31:36 already there um the power that they generate is just there and you can either use it or you can lose it and so um it's cheap it's cheap it's plentiful uh we don't i think for the most part really think about power consumption honestly not a ton a little bit now there are energy costs here that are higher than other parts of the world like whenever i hear americans complaining about their gas prices i kind of go hey by the way yeah ours only look low because they're in liters yeah which is one one fourth of a gallon okay we pay a lot for fuel which is one of the reasons i i learned this recently actually apparently vancouver is the tesla ownership capital of if not the world north america and i would have thought well you know california right trendy blah blah blah you Currently, Vancouver is the Tesla ownership capital of, if not the world, North America. And I would have thought, well, you know, California, right?

Starting point is 01:32:28 Trendy, blah, blah, blah, you know, conscious or whatever. Yeah, but electricity is really expensive in California. Electricity costs freaking nothing here. trying to say is that for me personally it wouldn't change anything because um power literally runs out of the taps like water but um in terms of like like globally you know i would i would expect to see i would expect to see more widespread use for example of things like climate control like i would expect that to become more affordable for people. I would expect even more of a push towards the data center. Like one of the biggest costs

Starting point is 01:33:13 of running a data center is power. So I would expect to see even more investments in data centers. I would expect to see more experiences that are data center focused. I mean, I've been talking about how I think the data center could change gaming for a long time like like just massively much more massively multiplayer

Starting point is 01:33:31 worlds could be achieved by having everything clustered in one place and everybody else remoting into it and just getting their video feeds here's a here's a weird negative take yeah sure i think light pollution would get really bad oh people just what just like don't bother turning off. LEDs last for freaking forever. Sort of. So there's a whole thing. I think, man, okay, I'm going to get a lot wrong

Starting point is 01:33:52 because this is a rabbit hole I went down a while ago. But what I, my understanding is that that was a big part of the sales pitch for LEDs. And I don't mean LEDs in general. What you said is not false. But LED light bulbs, like that screw into a socket, what I've heard is that much like traditional light bulbs, while the technology is inherently more reliable,

Starting point is 01:34:16 it's kind of been engineered to not be that reliable. Yeah, because like super, super OG light bulbs, like filament light bulbs, would also just last for incredible amounts of time. And then they were engineered to be worse. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, my understanding is LEDs are not designed properly to last.

Starting point is 01:34:38 But in theory, yeah, what you're saying is correct. You could have bulbs that are just, I don't know, just like on all the time. Who cares? But then people want to sleep, right? like then again you see a lot of be able to see the stars and like go hiking and not be like wow the it's glowing like no i just meant people are going to want to sleep so they might turn off the lights in their house but then it occurred to me that a lot of modern architecture has a lot of lighting on the outside of buildings like every every new house listing you look at this is supposed to be a farm but they found some loophole to make it so they can just build their

Starting point is 01:35:12 giant mansion on it and not farm at all all those that have like 10 million lights all along the the roofing are in the entire perimeter of the house oh my god okay it's not like a spaceship taking off it's a house you can relax i don't know okay up next would you go back to living without technology if drivers became a monthly subscription without a buy it for life option would you this is a weird question so basically living without technology yeah oh i see yeah if your computer just stops working if you if you don't pay for it you want to use usb no subscription yeah no i would i would probably pay like what am i ultimately yeah i yeah and that's some people are going to pay and then those people

Starting point is 01:35:57 are just going to have such a significant leg up yeah and that the thing too is that like you got to remember for me technology is not just recreational, right? Like that's how I make my living. Your job, me too. And so it's kind of like the way that I complain about. Yeah, Trent and Floating Chat, I would pirate the drivers. Let's go. Yeah, I mean. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:36:18 Unless the inconvenience of pirating the drivers and the reliability of pirating the drivers makes it so much worse than... Remember, too, Linux is not the problem here, though. Like, we're not talking about Microsoft here. We're talking about hardware manufacturers. We're talking about hardware drivers. So that's not even the solution, unfortunately.

Starting point is 01:36:37 Linux has a lot of generic drivers for things. That's true. But if all of a sudden hardware manufacturers started charging what Linux Foundation someone they find some way Yeah, if they find some way to DRM it then like remember guys. This is a hypothetical Scenario it's can we also assume that? Piracy or Linux doesn't solve it. Yeah, we're we're trying to in good faith answer the actual question and the answer is yeah, just like Adobe I the actual question um and the answer is yeah just like adobe i complain about it i'd be upset but people keep using premiere but i would shop and everything i'd keep i'd keep buying it um

Starting point is 01:37:12 the second it touches work things stuff gets interesting yeah because vote for your mouse i do think that could be the thing if that happened, which I don't actually think it's going to. But if that happened, I think that that would be the thing that would finally usher in the year of the Linux desktop. The year of the Linux desktop. Can you name slightly harder? I mean, you're already wearing that shirt and you're going to year of the Linux desktop meme on me. I actually really like it i know it's awesome it's pretty great you know what i'm not gonna say which of the designers who

Starting point is 01:37:50 worked on it because i don't want to single anybody out but somebody expressed to me that they weren't that confident in their work on it i don't know i think the design is great i was basically like nah man you good i don't know how well it's gonna sell but i don't think that's because the the design isn't i just i don't know i mean i can find out for you doesn't take that long it's just it's in reference to such a niche thing okay some people are buying them i don't make the rules, man. Yeah. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:38:26 I think it looks cool. Yeah. Anyway. Okay, Dan, hit us again. Sure thing. Hi. I always wanted to know how you decide what tier of car to review. For example, the difference between a Platinum F-150 Lightning and Standard is almost twice the price and different specs.

Starting point is 01:38:43 You know what? We run into the same challenge with just about everything. Laptops are another perfect example of this. You can configure the same laptop and have completely different characteristics for the final machine in terms of everything from performance to battery life. And of course, to price.

Starting point is 01:39:03 I mean, look at a MacBook. It can be configured anywhere from you know a couple grand to six grand depending on what kind of storage options you put in them and unlike a macbook a pc laptop can have a much more more bigger difference in terms of performance at all of those different price tiers because the configuration options are so much more granular i I mean, on a MacBook, a lot of that price at the top tier option is gonna be because you like stuffed it full of SSDs.

Starting point is 01:39:29 That's not something that impacts the average user's daily experience. It's just how much of a digital pack rat you can be, right? It doesn't matter that much. But on a lot of machines, yeah, it's extremely challenging. Even stuff like Kingpin cards back in the day. Yeah, yeah. Stuff like that, it's like,

Starting point is 01:39:44 oh, is this even the same thing really? Is this a 980? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Who even draws the line at, you know, what is one thing versus what is a completely different thing? So, you know, when it comes to things like cars, a lot of the time, realistically, we're kind of at the mercy of what the manufacturer has in their demo, demo in their press car stable um and so for something like the um for something like the taikan uh so that was that was a car that um no that was was that the first like car review that i know the first one was the volt and that was just because that was the one i bought and the reason i bought that particular trim level was because i bought it second hand and that was the one that was a good deal

Starting point is 01:40:27 and then with the taikan that blue one was the one that was in the the porsche like press press car pool and then what's funny is i actually ended up having a the kind of problem that i guess you're sort of trying to highlight here because I went and I purchased a Taycan based on my experiences with it I didn't like bother to test drive exactly the model that I was buying and I didn't realize just didn't really think about about it I was like oh yeah it's like a Taycan but like more better it's one of the the higher tier ones I didn't realize it weighs like another 600 pounds or something because it's got more motors in it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:07 And I like, obviously if I thought about it for 20 seconds, I probably would have thought, oh yeah, you know, maybe they didn't have anywhere else that they could shed more weight to put these extra motors in. But then, you know, maybe I would have assumed, oh, I don't know, maybe it's now has more carbon fiber in it or whatever and they balance it out that way but but no it's just it's just heavier and so what i realized is that while it's really quick off the line and it really is um around corners it's a bit floatier and sometimes i actually like missed the the regular like i think it was a 4s or the baseball i can't remember which exact one it was that i did the review on but i actually missed that one because it wasn't a light car by any stretch.

Starting point is 01:41:49 I mean, no electric car is going to be agile the way that an ICE car might be. But sometimes I miss the at least somewhat agile or agility of that lighter car. So, no, yeah, it's a huge problem. Same with the GR the gr corolla like it was it was what toyota had now a lot of the time those press cars are the one that sells yeah for and that's for two reasons one is that's what they want reviewers looking at because realistically like they've done all the market research they've done all the development they know what configuration of the car is a good one they know which one they're going to make a bunch of so that's what they want people looking

Starting point is 01:42:27 at so that it's representative except when they don't right um and then number two is a lot of the time those press cars i mean they don't get they don't get shredded unless they go to mr beast i guess he shredded a lamborghini it doesn't matter the point is like they don't just get crushed right so someone's going to buy it at some point so um it might as well be something I guess he shredded a Lamborghini. It doesn't matter. The point is like they, they don't just get crushed. Right. So someone's going to buy it at some point. So, um,

Starting point is 01:42:48 it might as well be something that is easy to get rid of something liquid. Um, but as I alluded to before, that's not necessarily always the case. Sometimes they, they might equip something with really nice options. Uh, you know,

Starting point is 01:43:01 in particular, you could see this on things like sound systems that might not change the handling of the car at all, but do change the experience and comfort. And because a car is so emotional, it is such an emotional product compared to something like a graphics card, which you can objectively measure the goodness of in every way. A car is just so subjective and so you know i could see that as a way that they could try to there's a ton of reasons why i really like my car and if you took it away and gave me an almost identical car even like same

Starting point is 01:43:39 model and everything i would not like it and so that can introduce a lot of subjective bias or a lot of like subconscious bias is what i mean to say. If, if, you know, they make sure all the press cars have the like $700, you know, nicer seat option or something like that, even though they know most people aren't going to spring for it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, it's tough. I think the answer is when we have a choice, what we try to go for is the one that makes sense. And this is actually part of what inspired that video that we did on how starting at is the biggest lie in tech. almost always a crappy configuration that is intentionally one that is, is, is kneecapped in some way so that people will buy the next one,

Starting point is 01:44:31 right? Like it's never the one they actually want you to buy. Yeah. And, um, and it was, it was a conversation that we were having around how challenging it is to talk about pricing for laptops,

Starting point is 01:44:44 because on the one hand, you know, it is to talk about pricing for laptops because on the one hand you know it is honest it is truthful it is factual to say this machine starts at $1,199 or whatever the case may be but it is not representative if you know that the configuration that makes any sense is more like $1,500. So generally speaking, what we would like to do is we would like to review the configuration that we think makes sense. The problem is you can get it wrong. What if the configuration that we think makes sense, because it's only another hundred bucks for the Core i7, doesn't make any sense because the thermal solution can't handle the extra heat output from the Core i7 and it ends up throttling to the performance of the core i5 anyway that's a very real problem in laptops so we don't have a perfect

Starting point is 01:45:32 answer um you know in a you know in a perfect world we'd love to just test every single configuration then we can tell you which one's the best one yeah we uh we had the ambitious goal of doing that once with the m1 MacBook. We actually bought them all. We bought like 20 of them. And then long story short, we just didn't have the testing capacity and they ended up getting distributed for internal use. Thankfully, we have a lot of Mac users now. So it wasn't a complete waste. But got them.

Starting point is 01:46:01 And I got one more for you here. Yeah. And I got one more for you here. Yeah. Hi, part of the 1% of the viewer audience here got recommended to only WAN show at first a few years ago due to all the podcasts I watch. What part of the YouTube algorithm keeps on surprising you? Live VODs 100%. Oh, yeah. Yeah, not just WAN show. The way that just random three-hour videos of me building a computer will get three, four, five million views, whereas if we had actually put in the work to cut that down toODs of previously live content is separate from regular VODs, which is separate from shorts.

Starting point is 01:46:53 They are separate but related. So I can tell you that for sure. And it never ceases to surprise me it seems weird to me because myself as a viewer the amount of times that i'm gonna want to go watch a vod of a previously ran live stream is honestly very low no but it just auto plays like i i've seen i've seen it's anecdotal right it's not perfect evidence but i've I've seen, it's anecdotal, right? It's not perfect evidence, but I've seen lots of people. And then the watch time is fat. Who are like, yeah, I fell asleep watching LTT, and like three times this week,

Starting point is 01:47:35 and every single time when I woke up, it was that I love building computer stream. Like, that is a thing. Interesting. Okay. Oh, man, people are actually talking about it in float playing chat right now yes people leave odds on while going to sleep yeah yeah 100 percent i guess uh do you guys want any pizza or should we save it for later oh what kind of pizza is it i don't know i'll look why don't we save it for after dark save it for after dark all right okay

Starting point is 01:48:02 a couple more topics luke what do you want to talk about i kind of want to talk about uh rockstar selling pirated copies of their own games i was gonna say the same thing that's pretty funny rockstar has been caught selling cracked versions of their own games on steam again developer silent found a tag for razor 1911 a norwegian software cracking group while looking through the hex codes for Midnight Club 2, which was delisted from Steam in 2018. According to information by Vedim M and Firehead, so hopefully I said those right. Well, Firehead, I'm pretty sure. But yeah, anyways, this isn't the first time that Rockstar has been caught reselling pirated versions of their own games. Manhunt was first released on Steam in 2008 but for unclear reasons it was unable to run on

Starting point is 01:48:46 windows vista despite the fact that the original disc copy could however a fix could be implemented by changing a single value in its code the same fix that would allow the cracked version of the game created by razer 1911 to work on vistaista. Oops. Interesting. In 2010, a user found that the Steam version of Max Payne 2 contained the logo of Wares Group Myth in its code, which was removed a few days later, unsurprisingly. This was followed by an update to Manhunt, which utterly broke the game.

Starting point is 01:49:22 This is likely because Rockstar replaced the cracked file with its own copy, which had been rendered unplayable due to anti-piracy measures put in place by Rockstar during development. Very cool. The games were originally sold with DRM copy protections and required a matching disc in the

Starting point is 01:49:39 drive in order to run. That was up for the kids out there. That was a common thing. That was very common, yeah. But Rockstar also added additional booby traps meant to make the experience of playing a cracked copy miserable. In Manhunt, these included locking nearly every door in the game, crashing whenever the player acquires a health pickup, and disabling the mouse and keyboard if a player manages to get five headshots.

Starting point is 01:50:03 These booby traps were quickly subverted. I do kind of love that. That is pretty funny. And the cracked version was released only three days after the official launch. I remember there were certain games where you could load the game with the game in your optical drive, and then if you were out of land, you could just eject it after the game was open and pass it to your buddy.

Starting point is 01:50:25 Yeah. Anyways, when Rockstar removed the copy protections, they failed to remove the booby traps that were set off by the absence of these copy protections, meaning that legitimate buyers over the last 13 years have been sold a broken game however the old executable remains in the steam folder really simply renamed test app.exe its hex codes also contain tags from razor 1911 most community patches to allow the steam version of manhunt to run still use this test app executable as a base rather than try to fix Rockstar's own version. I don't even think there's anything else to say here other than... That's hilarious. LOL. Razer 1911 doing work allowing people to keep playing Rockstar games.

Starting point is 01:51:19 There is something to talk about. Okay. There is something to talk about. Okay, so clearly Razer 1911 is subverting, you know, piracy protections on copyrighted software. Yeah, like you can say what you want about people enabling piracy stuff. But Rockstar still is stealing their copyrighted code. Do two wrongs make a right? No.

Starting point is 01:51:47 So what Rockstar is doing is still wrong. Yeah. I think it would be hilarious if Rockstar had to pay Razer. Well, Razer would have to reveal who they are. Yeah. Maybe they just have to send Bitcoin they are. Yeah, that would be kind of, maybe they just have to send like Bitcoin to some mysterious address or something. It's kind of like how you assume that, you know, your drug dealer's not going to call

Starting point is 01:52:10 the cops when you don't pay them. Right. Yeah. They'll find a solution, but. Yeesh. Yeah. Oh, man. Very funny.

Starting point is 01:52:18 I doubt anything's going to come of this because of basically what we just said. Yeah. But yeah, that's's that's brutal and they should stop doing that ken k says but to write make an airplane that's pretty good i don't think i've heard that yeah dan's not there to ding the thing um oh in another in another uh small aside before we move on to our next topic here or not another in a small aside before we move on to our next topic here, or not another, in a small aside, we need some help. We're working on a video on 3D movie projection, passive 3D movie projection. And we are hoping that someone in our audience has some experience with passive 3D setups and could maybe give us a hand.

Starting point is 01:53:01 and could maybe give us a hand. We have a bald-out Stuart 3D screen coming in, but we've had some trouble acquiring appropriate filters, glasses, and I think we could probably find a projector. But if you have some recommendations, it turns out that the LS-12000 that I've been using in my theater now because of something, something, laser, something, something, it doesn't work for 3d so please get in touch via our website contact form which is at linusmediagroup.com slash contact

Starting point is 01:53:31 dash us or email info at linusmediagroup.com if you work in that industry what's left of it or if you have any you know old gear that you don't need anymore that we could borrow from you or buy off you or whatever the case may be. We're particularly interested in like a quality setup. So not acrylic filters, glass filters, if possible. I've got a kind of a whole series of videos that I want to do around it. I want to get some, I basically want to get 3D movies running but i also found out that there are 2d to stereo 3d converters that you can just run modern games with um and i want to play around with that as well i also want to set up like a retro setup so go back to like gtx 280 or 480 whatever whatever the last no 580 still did 680 Whatever the last driver and last generation of hardware that supported 3D Vision was,

Starting point is 01:54:26 build like the banginest. The 580 still did? I believe so. The banginest NVIDIA 3D Vision setup. I know 480s did. Hold on. Last driver to support NVIDIA 3D Vision. Yeah, so I had kind of like three video ideas in mind for it.

Starting point is 01:54:44 Okay, here we go. Um, yeah. Turing. Turing supports it. The last driver that got it was a windows 10 64 bit standard 425.31. Man. Ah, this is something that makes me really sad. Okay. 3d vision is going to be one of those forgotten irretrievable gaming techs you know why because by the time windows 10 rolled around people weren't buying physical copies of games and if they were they were running through steam or something so what's going to happen is valve is going to drop support for windows 10 someday not immediately but someday and even if you have a machine even if you have the 3d hardware even if you have copies of the games that technically do support it you won't be playing it unless you pirate i don't think that's

Starting point is 01:55:41 a hot i i i i think we should care so i almost don't even want to a hot... I think we should care, so I almost don't even want to make this point because I've always been very rah-rah physical games for this exact reason, stuff like that. But a lot of those games are able to be ran through executables from the folder. So if you had a backup, you're fine. But what if it's a DRM issue?

Starting point is 01:56:00 Yeah. You want to play Batman Arkham Asylum game of the year. Then you're screwed. It's a Steam game. Yeah. That's it. That's it. That's all. In fact,

Starting point is 01:56:08 I'm trying to think. I had a copy of not Game of the Year and there was a whole thing with Games for Windows Live. Oh, yeah. So Batman Arkham Asylum was a Games for Windows Live thing.

Starting point is 01:56:18 So when Games for Windows Live went away, everyone who had a copy on Games for Windows Live got a Steam copy. So it is possible that no that game which was a 3d vision title simply doesn't exist outside of steam imagine trying to go back to this era that we're in right now say it's say it's 20 say it's 25 years from now

Starting point is 01:56:41 yeah and you want to go back and play ballers gate 3 i don't know oh yeah i don't even know if that's a good example but some some game that came out recently sure diablo 4 the likeliness you won't oh diablo 4 you definitely won't be able to play because it's it's effectively like a weird form of an mmo like there's there's a lot of go back and try to play fortnite in 25 years it's like i i probably i'd argue that's that was the biggest game of the last like x amount of time oh yeah and i mean even today if you want to play fortnite as it was five years ago you can't minecraft can't do that whatever yeah yeah uh oh this is great that last 3d vision supporting driver rtx 2080 ti i am going to play arkham asylum in stereo 3d like i could have never imagined it

Starting point is 01:57:34 when it came out yeah no i'm like super stoked what yeah i'm really excited wow yeah all right yeah so i i've got like a whole series of videos planned so if you we we have had is that a rare nvidia w like do we have to give it to them on that that's a long support window for something that people were not really using yeah nvidia's software support love or hate nvidia and they do make mistakes even on the software side they've got like outstanding bugs that have been sitting there forever that should have been dealt with like any company their their driver control panel looks like it's from 15 years ago like that yeah they've got their issues but in terms of hardware product support man how long has the nvidia shield had support i mean it's still an active product you mentioned phys x is still

Starting point is 01:58:21 supported uh like for example in mafia 2 yep yeah 100 we'll give them that yep so you got it you got to give them you got to give them credit where it's due because otherwise when you criticize them people can't take it seriously right yeah exactly the newsletter oh no i haven't mentioned the newsletter. We have an awesome, we haven't really done many newsletter updates for LTT Store lately, but we have a really cool one going out that you guys are going to want to make sure that you are signed up for. Oh, really? They don't give me any teasers in here or anything? Well, whatever.

Starting point is 01:59:01 I read it. It's all about what we've learned about injection molding and plastics as we've um explored different colors for the screwdriver and lead up to ltx and in some of the upcoming products uh so it gets into like the the the fine details of how the coloring is done and what that affects and um pressing versus cold pressing the the ratchet assemblies into the handles and what we were that we've got like a it's not sorry I was going to say like a like a blown up version but it's not blown up it's like a cross section so the team ripped one out created a cross section of it and they show like a cold press versus a hot press to show how our initial assumptions about hot press being better were actually not correct.

Starting point is 01:59:46 It turns out that they both kind of eat into the handle in the same way, it turns out. Yeah, really, really cool update. So you can sign up for the newsletter. Sorry? I'm over it. Oh, okay, fine. If it's on my WAN Show email, then I'll look at it.

Starting point is 02:00:05 But it's a newsletter, right? Couldn't we just go look at it on the store? I don't think it's up yet. I think it's going out this weekend or something like that. I'm pretty sure it's up. Okay, yeah, here we go. Linus laptop. Tools, tools, tools.

Starting point is 02:00:19 It's been a year since the screwdriver launched. So, yeah, you can kind of see all that stuff and are we allowed to use that you know what i'm not gonna overthink that uh this is a whole rabbit hole this like swirly thing here that's going on yeah anyway uh this this is a thing that happened oh my yep anyway um wow that hair doesn't matter the point is really cool newsletter you can sign up at ltdstore.com and and that newsletter is on the store oh is it okay yeah you can also go check it out there then mozilla report finds that cars are a privacy nightmare nobody saw this one coming this is wild speaking of things we should have flipped the desk over when it initially started happening

Starting point is 02:01:09 and people have just accepted enough that it is happening. According to a Mozilla Foundation report on 25 car brands, which, like, how many car brands are there? I was going to say, that is actually a very substantial amount of car brands, which, like, how many car brands are there? That is actually a very substantial amount of car brands. Cars are the worst product category they have ever reviewed for privacy. Every single brand failed to meet Mozilla's minimum privacy standards and collected excessive amounts of personal information, including photos, calendar information, location, driving speed, musical tastes, race, immigration status, and medical information. Both Kia and Nissan permit the collection of data regarding a user's sex life,

Starting point is 02:01:54 and six car companies permit the collection of genetic information or genetic characteristics. 84% of the car brands share personal user data with service providers and data brokers. 76% claim the right to sell the information. And 56% are willing to share user information with the government and or law enforcement if requested. Tesla, surprise, surprise, was the worst ranked company in the survey and failed every single one of mozilla's privacy criteria you know what's crazy you know what is squeaky clean on this list uh acura my car really not the brand but my car yeah it doesn't have like smart anything i don't think nope You won't even pay for a map update. No and rightly you shouldn't that is so stupid. It is very dumb

Starting point is 02:02:48 It's like hundreds of dollars just in case anyone's like $400. It's really it's not like two hundreds of dollars It's a lot. I don't remember how much it is But it's a lot Mozilla also says that it could not confirm that any automaker met its minimum Security standards regarding data encryption and protection against theft, and that car companies provided less detailed security information about their products than most dating apps and sex toy manufacturers. Mozilla said that it is typical advice to help consumers protect their personal data. Oh, that their tip.

Starting point is 02:03:22 Oh, it's up. That's the wrong. It's doesn't matter. Minor details said that their typical advice to help consumers protect their personal data oh that their tip oh it's up yeah it's the wrong it's doesn't matter minor details said that their typical advice to help consumers protect their personal data feels inadequate given the circumstances and that they have started a petition demanding car companies halt their current data protection programs discussion question what should users do when there is no reasonable way to opt out of a highly invasive product within

Starting point is 02:03:46 a given market how has the automotive industry become this kind of a wild west with respect to privacy it's been pretty wild this this is a very small but legitimate reason why i haven't wanted to upgrade my car and i'm not kidding and i've mentioned this before I actually like that my car is dumb I Don't know there's just there's certain things about smartifying a car that like bother me and always have DMACC asks how does a car know about your sex life? Well, let me tell you It knows where you don't own a house yet. It knows what time all that, that too, to be honest. But it also knows where you're driving and at what time. And for how long you're there.

Starting point is 02:04:29 Your car knows a lot, man. Stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. This is great from Trent R in Floatplane Chat. Is it just a matter of the first politician getting their mistress outed by a smart car or something? And then all of a sudden this starts changing or like what what's gonna be what's gonna be the tipping point for this where it goes the other way i don't i don't know oh man yeah xfn 724 this is a really good point i think

Starting point is 02:04:57 the second comment i've had from you this show i drove a 91 car until 2021 when they wouldn't renew the inspection on it so that's less of an issue here where you can not only drive ancient cars but you even get cheaper insurance you get collector's plates and stuff ditched it yeah it's yeah um they had they had a what was it air care yeah yeah um even then there were like exemptions for like collectors and there was very easy ways to get around yeah it was the whole thing which is why they ditched it but but in a lot of places it's not even uh how how harmful the emissions are anything like that in a lot of places it's as simple as oh your car's older than that we will not we will not even try to inspect it and basically that car just gets put on a ship and sent somewhere else where it will continue to

Starting point is 02:05:46 emission however was here I don't really understand what problem you think you're solving and then you just like have to buy new one it's that simple like I I noticed this when I was in Germany I was like there's no and Singapore too like there's no old cars on the road. What the heck? In Singapore, it was explained to me that the lottery system for even getting a license to drive is so expensive to like corruptly bribe your way to winning all the time. That basically the only people who can afford to drive a car are the ones who can afford to drive a nice car. That was the way it was explained to me by someone from Singapore. I have no idea if it's still the case that was a long time ago and who knows maybe they were misinformed um but in germany my understanding is that they simply do not um they they they do not allow you to drive a super

Starting point is 02:06:41 old car so guys please please let me know if i am mistaken oh i thought you didn't tell people what car you drive no i do it's been in scrapyard wars and stuff people know oh i've always avoided it oh no no all right cool it's been on camera like a bunch of times there's even uh if you remember that i watched this recently because someone was asking who uh nick van berkel was a random conversation um but i i brought up channel super fun and saw when we pranked i think it was us pranking berkel that the office got broken into or whatever nice oh wait no it was us pranking you for something that your car didn't work. Oh, yeah. It was when you guys said that my flight got moved. My flight time got moved. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:30 And I offered to drive you. My car is like in that video. And that was back then. So it's been around forever. Yeah. There are some questions that I sort of have about this. My understanding of Germany is wrong. In fact, you don't pay taxes for your car once it becomes an old timer.

Starting point is 02:07:45 Okay. Then maybe it's just a cultural thing. I do know that there are countries where the, yeah, they basically just, I mean, the person who left this comment is lives in one of them clearly where old cars,

Starting point is 02:07:55 they simply won't renew your inspection for the most part. Maybe with Germany, it's just more of just like a culture thing. Oh, okay. No, hold on a second. As a German,

Starting point is 02:08:04 most cars are killed by tv fur i don't know what that is safety road worthiness not general too old ah so it's that the regulations change and that car is no longer considered roadworthy okay i knew there was something okay thank you for thank you for clarifying that interesting um okay yeah very Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Very, very interesting. What else we got here? Oh, the video game voice actors are considering a strike. Yeah. The actors union SAG-AFTRA has decided to hold the general vote on whether to authorize,

Starting point is 02:08:39 that's pretty key here, a strike against video game companies. This doesn't necessarily mean that a strike will happen, just that if the vote is successful, This doesn't necessarily mean that a strike will happen, just that if the vote is successful, they will have the authority to call the strike when negotiations, when slash if negotiations fail. The union is seeking similar terms to what they asked of TV and film companies, like an 11% wage increase and protections from AI. The last time video game voice actors held a strike was in October of 2016 which lasted 340 days the eventual agreement included a new bonus system and increased transparency during the hiring process so that actors would know at least the genre of the game and whether their work would include include profanity slurs

Starting point is 02:09:19 sexual or violent themes or physical stun stunts. What the heck? What? For a voice actor? Okay. The agreement did not guarantee residuals, a key point of contention. Reportedly, a stalemate has already been reached in negotiations with, surprisingly, Activision and Take-Two. Discussion question.

Starting point is 02:09:40 What is the best way to help voice actors? What is the advantage slash disadvantage of having multiple sectors striking at once? Man. It might bring more attention to it as an advantage. I don't think there's a bunch other than that, though, to be honest. And I don't think that for outside of a very vocal minority of really supportive gaming fans, I don't think that most will care.

Starting point is 02:10:06 I think that they will just want their games. I mean, we've seen that. I'd love to say otherwise, but we just talked about horse armor earlier in the show. This isn't just true for gamers. If I'm being completely honest, this feels true for basically everything. Wait, what? Really? One sec, sorry. if I'm being completely honest this feels true for basically everything um wait what really one sec sorry no it's still up okay um but like people will have stances on things and then the

Starting point is 02:10:38 second that those stances get challenged if it inconveniences them is less entertaining or cost them any amount of money it's decently common that those stances will then be ditched apparently a lot of voice actors do mocap as well i just i just would have assumed someone else did the mocap i had no idea it kind of makes sense i mean i could definitely see if someone's multi-talented or whatever they might as well but they don't tie together the emotion of what you're saying with physical actions and your your face and your oh that's probably it i bet you it's a bunch of face facial movement stuff well that wouldn't be a stunt but like it could be tied into the whole capture yeah yeah yeah that yeah makes sense um hold on one one quick thing uh someone in twitch chat it's not changing

Starting point is 02:11:19 regulations in germany it's just not worth repairing a car if it fails the TV Okay. Okay. All right good to know a fine you're updating or whatever else. Thank you for the clarification. That's great It doesn't change the point that some people will not have the option discussing policy with Germans. They're gonna be specific Also apparently part of what I said was right and in some city centers Bands based on emissions do exist. Okay, so yeah, I'm not completely wrong. I'm just German wrong Right so back to back to the voice actor strike So here's my concern and we've talked about this a little bit even though it's it's not really you know related to our industry being in YouTube we have talked talked a little bit about SAG-AFTRA and about the Writers Guild Strike.

Starting point is 02:12:07 And what I have expressed before and what I'm going to express again is I think it's too late. I think it's too late for them to stop the AI onslaught because that's what all three of these have as at least one of their central protections from ai themes is protections against ai and protection for that there will be i mean in particular the writers guild wants protections against just stuffing them in a room to you know

Starting point is 02:12:40 turn some ai horse plop into something palatable with a tiny team and then never even be on set so that there's no career advancement that's what they're trying to prevent and ultimately i don't think any of the studios are interested in in in their career growth they they see them as they see the whole thing as transactional and i think that now that the power of ai has been demonstrated i think once chat gpt3 broke ground the the the horse was out of the barn i i think they saw oh we are this close and and maybe their perception is actually wrong i mean we've seen a lot of problems oh yeah with with large language models in their current form. They're not perfect.

Starting point is 02:13:27 But I think to, let's face it, probably a pretty technologically normy person who might work as an executive at a film studio, it seems pretty great. And if they're looking at it going, okay, well, assuming explosive development in this area, like we see in tech, if they're just extrapolating based on what they've seen before, then it seems like we're so close that we can just twiddle our thumbs for a little bit here, not negotiate anything. And this problem will solve itself one way or the other, either with these people starving themselves to the point where they come crawling back for work or to the point where we just replace them with machines. Okay. I'll just wait. If the latter happens, movies are going to suck even more than they do now. I know, right? I will say there was some recent good ones.

Starting point is 02:14:17 I haven't seen Oppenheimer, but I've heard it's good. And Barbie was great. But for years now, movies have been kind of not awesome, in my opinion. I am scared for the video game voice actors' chances here. And just like I've said about the Writers Guild and, to a degree the actors guild i think that um i think they have leverage they have that they have the star power at least um but i think that i i in the same way that i've expressed uh concern about the writers guild i just feel like the video game voice actors are going to come in hot they're going to maybe feel good about

Starting point is 02:15:03 their chances and i think what they're gonna find out is they have absolutely zero negotiating leverage i i i don't know man i think that uh i think that developers will just kind of go okay forget it then and they will pivot to technological tools and gamers will be enraged and then they will buy the game anyway would you wager yeah that there are more gaming studios than there are um what do you i'm gonna stop you here because i don't know yeah there's so many indie in both for both that i i just i would have no idea how to how to compare the numbers because i feel like like people are talking in chat right now about how um you know how i mentioned oh it's for facial animations and you're like yeah but they said stunts so it's more than that

Starting point is 02:15:55 um bg3 ballers gate 3 yeah um someone mentioned that and this makes sense because they're really good uh but they mentioned that the voice actors did mocap while they were talking. And the facial animations while people are talking are very good, so it makes sense. So I wonder if a game like BG3 where all the lines are voice acted and they have this mocap on faces

Starting point is 02:16:17 and it's a really good immersion quality beneficial part of the game. I wonder if certain studios will just opt to work with the new terms of the um voice actors guild or alliance or i'm not sure which actual oh no okay apparently seg after is also the union of the video game voice actors i'm based on what i'm hearing here i don't actually know i didn't know what union they were part of yeah sorry um but yeah i wonder if some studios will decide to work with them anyways because they're like this is going to be a quality differentiator for us um that's honestly going to take a very long time for ai to catch up with properly yeah you're probably right um but i also

Starting point is 02:16:59 do wonder if in the same way that uh television studios just pivoted to reality TV and found out that people will just consume whatever dreck they give them. I wonder if a lot of them will just not care. Yeah. As someone who actually doesn't really care about voice acting in games, I prefer to read and I will, I, I actually find it really distracting. One of the things that I like to do is I changed the, uh, the voice track to like japanese or something because i find it way less distracting to have because i'll i'll advance the text as fast as i can read it which is at like probably about six to eight times the speed that they will read the lines and so i find it a lot less distracting to have words cut off in the middle of them when they're in a language i don't understand um i don't care i i but i know a lot of people really like

Starting point is 02:17:47 i very much appreciate it not only do i find it's a big immersion bonus but um also just with with my troubles with reading it like right it's nice it feels it feels a lot more relaxing to not have to read um and uh it also just i can go so much faster because i'm not getting lost in text or whatever else minorly dyslexic um yeah i don't know people people do not like my uh my skipping voice acting you're skipping. Oh. I don't know. I just, I don't like it.

Starting point is 02:18:26 It's slow. It's a personal preference thing. Yeah, it's just slow. I don't, I skip it sometimes if I'm not as interested in the conversation. Just space bar, space bar, space bar, skip through it.

Starting point is 02:18:35 But usually I don't. Oh, well, no, I don't, I don't skip reading it. Like, I want to know what's happening. I just don't want to, I just don't want to, I don't want to hear people say it like I I forget which Final Fantasy game

Starting point is 02:18:49 switched to like full voice acting was it nine I'm not gonna know ten yeah I can't remember but I just I I hated it I was like this sucks bring back text let's go text and like oh man games that don't support I think tapping to completely fill in a text box like when they're like and you can't speed it up I just I want to throw my controller through the TV I can't that's never a problem for me I can't keep up with it anyway Apparently was 10. Yeah, agreed grand wig 9 was So good, I can't he has never played like any of the good Final Fantasy games. He's played like eight. Yeah It was great. I really liked it and then I never played another one I

Starting point is 02:19:44 Made it like 45 minutes into eight. And I was like, this is stupid. And I just, I couldn't. Sorry, I just couldn't. People do like eight. I just, yeah. It's not that I don't have patience. I just don't have time.

Starting point is 02:19:58 That's, there's a big difference. Well, there isn't a big difference. They're kind of the same thing. Yeah, I tell people that I liked eight and they get so offended because they're like, Oh, like six or seven or whatever was so much better. Blah,

Starting point is 02:20:11 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I can't believe you like that one. I was like,

Starting point is 02:20:14 it's the only one I, I play. I thought it was good. Like, I don't know. What do you want from me? Come on. Someday.

Starting point is 02:20:22 Squall was awesome. I had the necklace. I had the necklace with the lion with the sword through the top i had that for a while was it a sword gun or a gun sword a gun sword gun blade i don't care to be more specific yeah it sounds stupid yeah it was sick if if you have a gun it was why do you need a blade on it what is this like the year 1850 get your musket maybe in other AI news Gizmodo replaced Spanish

Starting point is 02:20:53 languages editor with machine a geo media with machine owners of Gizmodo have laid off the editorial team of the site Spanish equivalent who used to translate articles and write their own original content. The site is not shutting down. Instead, it will be populated with machine-translated articles

Starting point is 02:21:13 from the English site. During the transition, I'm sure you guys know that hilarity will ensue. This is very sad for the people who lost their jobs, but it's funny that GeoMedia is basically having this turn into a PR disaster immediately. That's the funny part. During the transition, some readers have complained of reading articles

Starting point is 02:21:34 that start in Spanish, then switch to English partway through. Here's an example, and I'm about to butcher this, so get ready. Oh no. Oh no. La empresa no respondio di... Okay, it doesn't matter the point is... That's probably why the form asks you to give your country of residence.

Starting point is 02:21:53 It seems that Nere is granting some people limited rights to... What is this? What the heck? I... I really... I don't know i understand that like gpt4 and some of these other things are surprisingly good at translation but i really think there's oh no spanish would like a word with you i don't speak spanish i think especially once you get into the nuances of language and when you get into like advanced levels of writing and people trying to get something across through indirectly referencing something and all these little subtleties that happen in natural language. I find it really hard to believe that AI translation is going to be able to keep up with this super well, especially over time.

Starting point is 02:22:40 Like if models are not being retrained and updated with current events. And you're still going to need people. Like we talked about using AI translation for dubbing for our videos. And even then, like even at our scale, there was no possibility of us not having a human check them. Of course, you're going to have to do that because otherwise you end up with this. In fairness to me, me okay my accent probably wasn't much worse than this translation i was just reading i mean the translation just quits and starts reading english so realistically that's what i did they were pretty similar

Starting point is 02:23:16 uh geo media has been experimenting with ai generated articles since at least july which initially ran without oversight or input from Gizmodo's own writing staff, it is unclear if these algorithmically produced articles will then be subject to machine translation and republished. Oh, my goodness. The dog's breakfast you would end up with if you have an AI-generated article that then gets AI-translated into Spanish. Oh, no. Oh, no. Oh, no. All right. Linus with big translated by AI Spanish energy.

Starting point is 02:23:52 Heck, yeah. Next topic. Yeah. Nah. Do we even want to talk about that? Oh, yeah. This is cool, though. Framework.

Starting point is 02:24:04 Oh, yeah. Investor disclosure. Found. Framework. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Investor disclosure. Found some old main boards. How does this happen? Well, see. Can you explain? That's the reason this is in here. Because on the one hand, I think this is super cool.

Starting point is 02:24:16 Framework apparently found a load of old, completed laptop main boards while they were shutting down the original factory that was producing the framework 13 in china um if you guys watched our recent factory tour you'll know that framework is now producing their laptops in taiwan framework has decided to process these boards update their firmware and make them available to customers the boards come with intel tiger lake based core i5 1135 g7 processors and will be available for 200 bucks less than half the original price and reminder for those of you who don't know framework laptops have motherboards that can easily be run outside of the laptop which is super cool uh these cpus are based on gen 12 they have xc graphics um no gen 12 no they're gen 11 i don't know what this means but they have

Starting point is 02:25:06 xc graphics apparently and they come with four cpu cores eight threads and no performance or efficiency cores they're just they're just cores so on the one hand yeah that's super cool and actually if you just needed like a decently powerful and efficient single board computer, essentially, seems like a not terrible idea. On the other hand, again, as an investor, I have some concerns. Framework, what the heck? How did you lose a bunch of motherboards? Guys! Here's the maybe silver lining.

Starting point is 02:25:44 They seem to have been doing fine yeah without them maybe you wouldn't have needed my money how does this happen i mean okay look you ask how this happens but you literally work at the company that recently experienced some colossal communication issues So on the one hand yeah, I'm sorry framework you're forgiven. I fully understand Experienced a lot worse Good job Whoo with that should we after dark?

Starting point is 02:26:28 I think it's time for a show after dark. Maybe some pizza. Oh, man. It's a good thing we're only talking to the people who watch wan show for hours yeah i was gonna check how long two and a half hours you guys get us yeah luke with the immediate 180. I did kind of set you up for it, though.

Starting point is 02:27:08 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was pretty good. Oh, boy. All right. I'm starting at the top of potentials. Dan's getting his pizza, so he can't pick. We've temporarily lost a member of the show. I don't actually want any pizza.

Starting point is 02:27:20 That's fine. Hold on, hold on. I'll replace him. One sec. I'll replace him? Oh, wow. Oh. Oh. Oh.

Starting point is 02:27:37 Oh. That was my big effort. That was as much time as that gag was worth. Yeah, that's fair. Oh, pizza. Do you want some, Luke, or are you still off pizza? as that gag was worth. Yeah, that's fair. Ooh, pizza. Do you want some, Luke, or are you still off pizza? I'm off. Yeah, I figured.

Starting point is 02:27:50 I wouldn't, like, if I know the day before or something, I can adjust things. I'm just a pinch check. I'm just a pinch check away from pizza. My pinch check is currently default failing, so that's okay. I'm doing pretty good, though. I'm happy with how things are going. Oh, I'm happy with how things are going. You look good. Yeah, thank you. Dan's been coming to the gym with me. What? Oh, that's okay i'm doing pretty good though i'm happy with how things are going oh i dance i'm happy with how things are going you look good yeah thank you dan's been coming to the gym with me what oh that's awesome yeah yeah it's been awesome came all three days this week i'm

Starting point is 02:28:12 probably gonna be adding a uh fourth day to the rotation starting this week but no one wants to do that with me which is fine um i i'm already losing three days of my week. Yeah. I have to do some work at some point. Yeah. You know, I don't usually do Domino's. I'm kind of like a Panago or like smaller pizza place guy. I'm going to shout out a local place and hopefully I don't ruin it that way. But Clayton Gate Pizza is amazing. What is garlic flavored sauce?

Starting point is 02:28:46 Anything called just... Flavored. There's no ingredients on it. Oh. Anything just called sauce. Like, is it a mayo? Is it a... You know, am I overthinking this?

Starting point is 02:28:59 Coagulated garlic flavored liquid. People say probably garlic butter, but I don't think so because garlic butter has garlic in it. It's probably oil and xanthan gum. Yeah, they wouldn't Thanks Dan. I'm looking up the ingredients. I'm gonna eat it. Alright. Oh, it does, ah, kind kind of i don't know my other options are marinara and ranch though so i'm sorry i can't eat ranch ever since i you're a no ranch kind of person yeah well i'm not a no ranch kind of person i'm in i ate nothing but ranch dressing on every vegetable or salad for like the first 15 years

Starting point is 02:29:45 of my life person. And now I can't even look at it. I'm one of those. So that's why I say my like, I'm allergic to eggs line because I don't want to have a conversation about it. So I just say I'm allergic, even though I'm not. I just can't eat them anymore. That's me and seafood.

Starting point is 02:30:01 Yeah. Because the second you say you don't like seafood, seafood people will try to get you to try a seafood that they're sure that you'll like. Yeah. And I'm just like, I don't feel like talking about it. Exactly. Um, I don't like seafood. And then, and then what's really funny is people will catch me eating scallops. And they'll be like, I thought you don't eat.

Starting point is 02:30:21 I thought you're allergic to seafood. And then I'll have to explain. Actually, I lied to you. I am not allergic to seafood. I'm just allergic to seafood that tastes like shit. Oh, so I like seafood. The problem for me is that I don't like the super oceany taste. And I also don't like playing Russian roulette with my food.

Starting point is 02:30:41 So for something like, for something like prawns good prawns that don't have that super like seafoody flavor are delicious oh yeah like so good but then if i get one that has that like hyper oceany taste and do you know what i'm talking about with the oceany taste but i don't actually mind it i am exactly the same way as you, Linus. I tell people I don't like fish. It's just the fish taste. For me, that ocean-y taste is an immediate turnoff. And for me, playing like maybe this will be delicious or maybe this will make me want to gag.

Starting point is 02:31:20 It's not worth it. It's like not worth it. I don't get that. So when i was growing up for about two weeks out of out of most uh for probably about four or five years there for two weeks out of every one of those years i would go on a camping trip with my best friend's family and we would have probably more than half of the food that we had during that camping trip would be pulled from the ocean in some way. Crab traps, um, shrimping nets or whatever they were,

Starting point is 02:31:52 um, standard fishing off the back of a boat, whatever we'd eat what we caught basically. And that sort of temporarily ruined me on seafood because then any other less fresh seafood was now bad because i had experienced that but then that faded over time and now it's fine but i've never minded the the oceany taste at all we did one family trip down to port townsend i think on that trip alone i probably ate more mass of seafood than i have in probably the rest of my adult life because it's it hits a little different all we did was put down crab traps pull up crabs dip them in butter and eat them like for a week um and it was yeah and like when it's good it's so good so like at a restaurant like banana, I'll order the like abundance of seafood dish and I'll eat basically everything in it.

Starting point is 02:32:48 You won't get me to eat a muscle with a gun to my head, but there's, there's like pretty much everything else in it I'll eat because I know that it's going to be like really good quality, but. Mussels are like, yeah, those are those I had to Google it cause I had to see if they were different than clams and oysters, but those are, those are still super seafood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:04 I just, I actually see, I like those. It's also a also a texture thing for me it's it's like eating a slug like i just to be clear i knew they were different but i wanted to see the picture of it to see exactly which one it was because i didn't fully remember i'm also i'm also super like like texture sensitive so there's like there's fruits that i won't eat because like the the texture bothers me or or they're a big gamble so i like fruits that i can't eat because like the the texture bothers me or or they're a big gamble so i like fruits that i can tell from the outside what they're going to taste like so i love apples grapes you can tell just by like touching them if they're going to be good whereas fruits that you can't tell so like a pomelo or pomelo or however you pronounce it um those ones

Starting point is 02:33:41 like i'll i like them enough that i'll try a little taste, but in general, like I won't go out of my way to go peel one because there's a strong probability that it will be bitter or something like that. I don't think I've ever had one of these. It's just not worth it. When they're good, man, are they ever good. Yeah. They're, they're like really delicious.

Starting point is 02:33:57 Cool. But I just, I don't like stuff that is, I don't like stuff that's, that's a gamble. I'm not a huge fan of of mush or like slimy Though either of those textures will throw me off like buy grapes at TNT the crunchy ones Some Concord grapes I gotta tell you guys I've had ones that are like they feel like hand fruit like you put one grape in they feel like hand fruit like you put one grape in your mouth oh it's so good yeah yeah very good okay anyways should we start the the messages of merch sure yeah we got lots of potential so if you guys want to i'll start them down go for it yeah first off here hey dll first ltc store buy plus first merch message. Thanks for inspiring my interest in tech.

Starting point is 02:34:47 Do you have any advice for working through decision paralysis? Any breakthrough aha moments you personally had? Thanks. I wanted advice. I like lists. Yeah. Like, remember I was telling, but this is going to get worse before it gets better. Remember when I read out my list of games that I have on my to play list last week.

Starting point is 02:35:10 And then remember how my brilliant idea for deciding which one to play was to have the community just pick them for me because I don't have a solution. I'm sorry. Dang it. I was hoping he would have a solution. Yeah. Sometimes when I'm working on housework and stuff like that, I will just start walking. And then the first thing that I see that kind of looks amiss,

Starting point is 02:35:32 I will fix it. I don't commonly employ this, but there's two things. One of them is a calculation that you can kind of do that you have to add some weights to it, which is like, like, what is the timeliness of this thing? What how do I rank the importance of this to myself? What is the like? Yeah, it's like importance, urgency, whatever. I use it for work, but you can also use it for personal stuff.

Starting point is 02:36:03 I use it for work, but you can also use it for personal stuff. And another way to do it is I, the first time I ever heard of a pros and cons list, I like immediately hated it. And I was like eight. Because even then I was like, this has flaws. Because a lot of people are going to look at this and equate these. And they don't have the same weight. And you might have like... It has 10 pros and one

Starting point is 02:36:26 con and the con is you die yeah like oh there's there's too many pros i've got to do it like that's just so yes i'm dead now yeah like oh my god so it's always bothered me so something that i prefer to do i rarely do this but uh something that i do prefer to do is you you you do one of those like four four cell grid systems with like urgent versus not urgent important versus not important and then you just do whatever's urgent and important and timeliness and all that kind of stuff yeah uh but no no no you you do the four four cell grid system and then it's it's then you do the pros and cons like you know how sometimes you'll see those like political leaning ones oh sure yeah And you put different groups on there so you can understand.

Starting point is 02:37:07 Because sometimes I'm like, I don't know where this newspaper lands or whatever. Sure. And then I want to know. And you see those grids? I do one of those. Then you do another one for whoever assigned that newspaper a spot on the grid. And then you do another one for whoever assigned them a thing. It's like impossible.

Starting point is 02:37:22 Good luck. But you could use that to show a visual level of importance. If you're like having a hard time putting number values to things, you can effectively do that on a visual grid by having importance be low and then something else be left to right and then visually see how things kind of come up. But I don't know. I don't suffer from this as much unless it's purchasing decisions and then I suffer from it brutally. This is amazing.

Starting point is 02:37:48 VNG Supernova and Floatplane Chat just flagged this for me. The backloggery. You have the games, play them. See every game you own in one place, customized, custom entries support every game, retro to modern, famous to obscure, customize the look of your profile, track your progress, and beat your backlog.

Starting point is 02:38:08 So you just enter a list of, according to VNG Supernova, you can use it to pick a random game from your backlog based on criteria you set. Huh. Yeah. That's pretty sweet. I've never heard of this before. That seems cool. Oh, yeah.

Starting point is 02:38:22 I could see how this would be great for streaming. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure if I was into Twitch or something, might have seen it before but i never have seems that's pretty cool seems smart you have said in the past you don't like it when people talk to you about your youtube career when at personal gatherings but do you like it when people discuss tech with you in the wild thanks Thanks for everything. I think it depends. I mean, at a gathering, it's less that I don't like talking about my career. I'll talk about work the same way anyone will, and I'll ask people questions about their work.

Starting point is 02:38:57 What I don't like is people fawning over it. I would just like to be there as another just like to be there as just have a conversation another parent of one of the children at this party um and it makes me really uncomfortable when i feel like i am not just um with other parents you know like i'm not i'm not in youtuber mode i'm not at ltx i'm not signing things like it's uh like i would just like to be able to turn that part of my brain off and just have a conversation with another person just just you know just be normal right um so that that was gonna effectively be my answer for the second part as well when having conversations about random tech stuff yeah just talk to me like you would anyone else and we'll have a good conversation

Starting point is 02:39:39 yeah but when suddenly like you're you're effectively trying to like watch WAN show and you're the only commenter. It's like, yeah, this is not great. Like I'm down to have a conversation with you. That's totally cool. But I don't want to like present, you know, I don't, I don't know. It's, I, it's, it's fairly subtle, but it's important in my opinion. The other thing is just read the room, right? Like I, um, I've, I've, it's not like I haven't seen some of the recent criticism that's come out around me. I've seen some people say that I was, you know, very aloof or dismissive at an event or something like that. And the only real feedback I have for that is, was I working? Were you interrupting? Was I literally in the middle of a take or something

Starting point is 02:40:18 like that? Because yeah, I will, I will, I will, I will tell people, I'm sorry, I can't talk right now when I am sitting in a booth writing a script. I'm sorry, I can't have a 10-minute conversation with you right now because at pretty much every point in my career, I have been either fighting for survival or fighting to grow the company and support the team or, or whatever else it is. And when you're, when you're, when you're trying to, you know, go into particularly an event, cause that's, that's some of the feedback that I saw. Um, if, if you want to have any hope of extracting the kind of value that you need for the cost that it, that is associated with attending these things, you're going pretty hard and there's so much stuff there in some cases

Starting point is 02:41:06 that you've got to, it's intense to try to cover it all. And then honestly, the worst problem is when there's nothing and you're trying to create something out of nothing. And I feel like over the years, I've had a lot of encounters with people where they are sort of oblivious to that and don't realize that I am not there to socialize. And, you know, maybe part of it is just that, yeah, I tend to be a very work-focused person.

Starting point is 02:41:37 I don't have much of a social life. I don't necessarily always pick up on obvious social cues. You guys may be able to relate. Pretty common. Um, I don't necessarily always pick up on obvious social cues. You guys may be able to relate and pretty common. No, I don't. Uh, I, I don't have time to have a long conversation when I'm working. Um, especially when I'm somewhere where every, what you might not understand is that three steps ago, somebody else interrupted me. And five steps before that, somebody interrupted me.

Starting point is 02:42:09 And three steps before that, somebody interrupted me. And, you know, I'm trying to be nice, but I also have a job to do because if I don't do it, then I'm just going to walk out of here having done absolutely nothing. And so it's, yeah, it's tough. I don't really know what to say about that other than uh sorry um you know maybe maybe catch me at like a party next time although that'll be tough i i used to try to make appearances but then i just i really don't like them i go to a maximum of one per show these days and even then that's rare and i will usually leave early i don't like

Starting point is 02:42:44 them you know what's really the you will usually leave early i don't like them you know what's really the you know what this the most frustrating part of them is for me it's that the music's too loud okay the reason why i leave early is because i i will usually try to collect some people that i want to talk to and then ask everyone if we can all leave so we can actually have a conversation because if i'm there for an hour or more, I will lose my voice 100% trying to yell over the stupid music. And the best venues, the only ones that I've stayed at

Starting point is 02:43:12 are when, if there's music, it's really quiet and it's just like a hangout space. Those are awesome. Almost never happens. But it's always like a bar or a club or something and they have music slamming and it's so annoying. Which I don't understand because particularly in the tech industry, the first thing everybody says,

Starting point is 02:43:29 the second they walk up to you is like, man, the music is way too loud. I can't hear you. And then you complain and you say, Hey, turn it down. And then they do for like,

Starting point is 02:43:38 they turn it down like a fraction of a thing. And then you can tell they like turn it back up after a couple minutes. It's like, can you stop? Can you just actually not do that? Where this is a professional function and i'm trying to talk to people and we're all trying to not get sick meanwhile i'm like leaning into people like this while they're trying to talk so i can hear them yeah and they're doing the same thing for me and it's like man this is just it's so dumb i i hate that stuff so much yeah night pause and float plane chat says yeah i don't know anyone that likes it it's it's bizarre to me we we had a pool party at my place

Starting point is 02:44:11 a little while ago and i was playing around with the with the levels on everything and basically what i aimed for was i can tell there's music on yeah the idea was that if there's an awkward pause there's music and if people are talking, you don't really notice it anymore. Yeah, yeah. That sounds perfect. I was like, yes, go Linus. And I never had an issue talking to anyone. So that was great.

Starting point is 02:44:34 So frustrating. Yeah. What was even the merch message that started this? Should we stay on topic? I don't know. I don't remember. Up next. Cool.

Starting point is 02:44:44 DLL. Back in the olden days, goods and services were paid for with the trading of goats. How many goats would you say you are each worth and why? Thank you for feeding my pin obsession. How much? Wow. We're getting into the worth of a person now? How many goats am I worth?

Starting point is 02:45:01 I mean, I would... How many goats am i worth i mean i i would how many goats per hour i was about to say i think any human is worth almost an a limitless number of goats but then if you were to tell me look i'm gonna slaughter 10 million goats for this one person i'd be like wow that does really seem like a lot of goats um you know what i'm gonna fall back on one of my classics. I, I define the value of pretty much anything in terms of human life. So we can actually do the math on this because to raise a goat, to care for it and feed it and give it water, um, does cost some human life. So I would say that the worth of the worth of a one person is how much

Starting point is 02:45:47 reasonable remaining life expectancy they have divided by the amount of the, the, the, the, the number of hours of care required to raise the number of goats or whatever. You guys get what I'm saying, right? So the,

Starting point is 02:46:03 the equivalent amount of, of goat raising time for someone else, right? Like to me, the problem with stealing from someone is that you are stealing their money, which equals time, which equals their life. You're stealing someone's life by taking something that they worked and they earned. And so, you know, in the same way, by slaughtering a goat,

Starting point is 02:46:25 you are slaughtering the effort of that person who raised it. And that's what I'm going with. I'm stealing a comment from Flo Plainchat and reworking it a little bit, but I'm going to say you're worth one goat. One goat because... Because you're the goat.

Starting point is 02:46:42 That's stupid. Like, I knew you were going there, but it's one of those things that I can't even... I can't even beat you're the goat that's stupid I like I knew you were going there But it's one of those things that I can't even I can't even beat you to the punchline because I don't want to be the one to say that I knew that too He looked at me in a certain way and then looked down because he knew I was gonna say but he was stuck Because if he guesses that and then it's something else... F***ing hell.

Starting point is 02:47:11 You guys are on your own. Goodbye. Okay. That was great. Next up. I'm sure that was much more fun for me than anyone else. Where's the bell? I really enjoyed that. Awful man. Oh man.

Starting point is 02:47:21 Where's the bell? I really enjoyed that. Awful, man. Oh, man. What's the process like for designing and choosing new pins to put out? Oh, man. Usually it's me, Sarah, and Nick kind of brainstorming stuff we think is cool, stuff we think is memeable, stuff we think is pretty. We have...

Starting point is 02:47:44 Okay, I'm going to spoil it. We have a really cool series coming out called Dead Pixel. Oh. It's just a monitor. It just has a dead pixel on it. Oh, my God. It's going to be like a whole collection. Wow.

Starting point is 02:48:00 Don't worry about it. So it's like the I bought this product just to bother you collection Yeah I was just gonna say for people that that doesn't bother if they have friends that that bothers that's gonna be such a way to Troll that's really exciting. I like that. We have one. That's just a dead pixel so you can just put it on stuff Wow hey, I'm being called a psycho Wow. Hey, LLD. I'm being called a psycho.

Starting point is 02:48:30 You know what? I don't think it was actually my idea. I think it might have been Sarah's idea. We all knew this. Hey, LLD. Any updates on the Noctua Edition screwdriver? Also, any future plans to bundle the normal and stubby screwdrivers? I got a lot of merch messages about this, so I thought I'd curate one of them. A bundle?

Starting point is 02:48:49 Didn't even occur to me, to be perfectly honest with you. Yeah, I could see us doing something like that in the future, but maybe not for a while. The thing with pricing is there's lots of different ways to do it. You can do it by what the market will bear. You can do it by cost plus percentage you can do it by um i mean yeah i guess those are kind of the the biggest ways uh but for you know a lot of companies one of the factors that they will consider is not with your customers so anyone who bought the stubby and the regular one at full price is going to expect that the next day after the launch,

Starting point is 02:49:26 there isn't a promo where they could have gotten a better deal on it. So it'll be a little while. Stubby is selling really well at the price that it's at. And, you know, we need to make sure that we're keeping up with production and everything. But I could see something like that happening at some point in the future. That's a cool idea. I'm not given a timeline for this at all, though. Oh, as for the Noctua Edition, I don't know, sometime late this year, early next, I think.

Starting point is 02:49:52 I think Retro Driver is going to be the first sort of regular-priced new colorway that comes. Actually, I don't know what the pricing is going to be yet. I don't know what volumes we're producing so that that's a that's a big impact on pricing uh no that's not the one uh no that's not the one hold on there's one in here that is definitely there seriously how many screwdrivers do I have in my backpack right now this nope dang it this one there it is uh the retro driver is coming very soon I'm just going to switch to the linus cam uh hopefully sometime in the next you know what i'm not going to promise anything i don't want to get it wrong but yeah i freaking love this one as a as a kid who played retro games

Starting point is 02:50:39 yeah that's no no no it's not sorry there's one on the wall behind him there is one over there yeah he was talking about yep what in the what in the world could that be um yeah so this is a cool screwdriver it's the retro screwdriver yeah sorry it was just in front of there yeah anyways yeah yeah yeah uh someone flow plane chat uh said get dbrand to make a dead pixel screen protector. You could put on other people's phones. Oh, you're a bad man. Now that it's been said, it's an inevitability. Oh, man.

Starting point is 02:51:22 Okay, up next. Let's see. Hey, Ld uh how have the first few weeks under the slower video output workflow been uh ps can't wait to get my hands on the stubby i'll take this one since luke doesn't really work on that many videos it's been it's been a bit of a mixed bag um i think it's there's been some really sort of funny stuff like Times when when I'm the one saying hey this needs to be pushed or hey this needs to be cancelled and other people are just in old habits Which is like

Starting point is 02:51:59 Really okay, yeah it's been in some cases frustrating because you know on the one hand yeah yeah we spent a week sort of working on a lot of our communication and um you know we may i think we learned a lot but on the other hand you know we're still finding a lot of challenges we're still finding a lot of problems like there's there's videos that um even though we are taking more time we are still running into it's a lot of moving pieces like this is something i think a lot of people don't necessarily understand is every video has at least you know five people involved in it and it's not always the same five people and so you know what works really well with

Starting point is 02:52:40 with you know one team might not work as well when one or two of those team members are swapped out and it's, it's kind of constant, right? And, um, so we're still finding a lot of, a lot of challenges that are nothing to do with time and just everything to do with process and communication. We're going to keep working on it. And, uh, you know, I'm really, I'm actually really happy with the videos that we have released post-break. Uh, one thing that's new, um, effective, let me just have a look here. I just want to see which video it started with. effective uh Radeon 7700 7800 XT video um I will be doing a brutal QC pass on every single LTT which I don't know maybe maybe I should have been doing all along I haven't had time so that's something that I'm gonna have to figure out and hopefully it will be something that I can do in the long term with the time

Starting point is 02:53:46 that I would have been doing like executive management things that I don't really want to do anymore. And I think Taryn and the rest of the exec team should be doing. And, you know, so we can get back to our daily upload cadence. I think that is still a goal

Starting point is 02:53:57 we'd like to achieve in the long term. So hopefully it's something that I can continue to do or that I don't need to do at some point if we get people kind of trained up. But one of the videos that is probably coming up on Sunday, but if the ECC squad finds any severe problems with it, will be pushed to next week. severe problems with it will be pushed to next week. Um, I went through and I did an absolutely savage pass of, and it went from 24 minutes to 20 minutes. And so I think that something you guys can look forward to as, as I go through and just brutally ax things from videos is that you're going to see a, a lot less B material in the videos, and B, maybe a lot more like float plane exclusives and stuff. A lot more cutting room floor that's like kind of fine

Starting point is 02:54:53 and would have been, you know, A material that ended up in a YouTube video before, but now is just cut. Yeah. Gets the cut. Good evening, LLD. Those are my wife's initials. Linus, what's your darn tough sock poison? Cushioned or uncushioned?

Starting point is 02:55:10 Ultralight. Light? Mid? Heavy? And what height? Well, I'm wearing them now, so that'll be easy. This one. Hold on. Height. That one. this one hold up height that one that's a surprisingly effective way to communicate i wear these talk love it hello ll and d love the show love the merch linus what happened with the stray cat you found in your yard you mean the stray cats that live with me now i curated this one for you oh yeah um their names are brownie and noodle um so named because

Starting point is 02:55:52 they are brown and a noodle so noodle has the he does this thing where you know how cats like curl up their legs under them well noodle does that but he also does a thing where he just splays out every single leg. Um, particularly when he's feeling shy. So he did that a lot when we first adopted him. Um, yeah, they're,

Starting point is 02:56:14 they're doing great. They, they are not as socialized as a cat that as a very, very small kitten had a ton of human interaction, but they get better all the time. And they are at the point now where particularly at certain times of day, you know, how cats are,

Starting point is 02:56:30 um, they genuinely like and seek out human interaction. So, um, we're, we're, we're really glad we adopted them. They are cats.

Starting point is 02:56:40 So, you know, they tear up the carpet and just do cat things because, you know, you, right. Because the cats, um, but we're, you know, they tear up the carpet and just do cat things because, you know, f*** you, right? Because they're cats. But we're happy. And Dash ultimately has gotten to a point where she'll tolerate them. She's not nearly, she's not as happy as she was when she was an only cat,

Starting point is 02:57:00 but she's not nearly as stressed as she was when she lived with her brother, actually. So they've reached peace at least she was super unimpressed at the start but yeah she was not she was not into it um but now now she's she's she would never like groom them or anything but she doesn't hiss at them all the time either so yeah we're good hey dll what would it take for all three of you to shave your beards or just one of you it has to be a lot i thought i could get you to do it what if i like, you know what? Yeah, I could probably get you to do it. I just, I'd like play on your feelings or something. I would be like, yeah, I'm going to shave mine and donate to something.

Starting point is 02:57:53 And if you do yours too, then I'll double it. Oh, yeah. I thought you were talking just me. I think just me would be pretty hard. I think me joining the group would not be that hard. Yeah. See, that's the thing. If I did it with you and it was for a good cause like luke's in it's easy yeah

Starting point is 02:58:07 it's easy yeah um i was actually really close to doing it a couple weeks ago yep as just as just like i actually thought it was happening no yeah it's uh i i don't know it i think it would have i thought about it as like kind of like a new leaf thing. Yeah. You know, like, like, like new era, we're, we're, we're, we're changing a lot of things up. So I'm just going to like shave the beard. But then I thought about it some more and I was like, that doesn't actually mean anything. And so to me, it feels kind of cheap,

Starting point is 02:58:35 even if other people thought it was, you know, symbolic and cool. So I just, I decided, I just thought it was kind of a cheap stunt. So forget it. Yeah. I just, I don't know. If the wife tells me to shave it, it's gone.

Starting point is 02:58:49 And if she tells me to keep it, it's here to stay. For me, it's that simple. That's kind of where I've been, and Emma likes the beard. Yep. So, yeah. Yeah. And honestly, I would not want to upkeep non-beard. Yeah, not shaving every day is like

Starting point is 02:59:06 kind of great it's nice i trim it like once a week and sometimes i forget and i do it in two weeks and it's like okay it's fine yeah just it just covers the like bear patches better okay yeah yeah it's kind of whatever right i don't know i think i've been watching you all for a decade and i've seen myself going from a PC building noob to wizard who advises friends on building. When did you guys realize you had that expertise? I think expertise is a strong word to describe building computers. I don't know. I've, um, I've ended up in, I wouldn't say heated conversations, but certainly disagreements over this in the past I remember talking to someone from a boutique system integrator

Starting point is 02:59:50 who referred to the people who like the team that designed their systems as engineers and I was like You guys assemble computers you guys assemble computers um like to be clear like i'm not not dissing anyone who does actual engineering like they weren't designing their own cases they they were just picking off the shelf parts and building computers and um they were they were not happy that i told them i didn't agree with that and um that was kind of where we left it i guess because i wasn't really going to back down on that that's not engineering yeah from i don't think it was a major moment for you it was just something that i happened to be passionate about like a lot of my friends were into technology i just happened to be more focused

Starting point is 03:00:41 on the pc side of things so So I would be happy to help. It was a way to do odd jobs and make money to support my gaming habit. Yeah, absolutely. So that's something. I just hate waste. I hate seeing people waste money. And so I would learn about it and advise.

Starting point is 03:00:59 I want to play cool games with my friends. And sometimes if it was PC games that kind of required them to have a cool pc so i just tried to make sure they did too i don't know whatever hey dll now that both of the screwdrivers and backpack are released with the cable management coming soon what's next any teasers can't wait for the cat bed yeah Yeah, we have a precision driver coming. We have, oh, have we talked about the fail pen? Only a little.

Starting point is 03:01:35 On the WAN show? Yes, a couple of times. Oh, all right. Well, we have the fail pen coming. It's really cool. I haven't seen it ever. Oh, it started out like yep that's made out of a screwdriver shaft um and now the fail pen is like wow that's a really nice pen i can't

Starting point is 03:01:52 believe this is made out of a screwdriver shaft it's yeah the team is doing a really really good job of pushing that product along i'm pretty I'm pretty excited for it. Did they tell you about the chess problem that they ran into with it? The chess problem? Yeah, engineering chess problem. Like kings, queens, bishops, chess? Yeah, but like a puzzle. This drove me nuts.

Starting point is 03:02:16 I never knew this was called a chess problem. Okay, hit me. And I overheard Dan talking about it, and I was like... It's all... I know any of us can think about it. So it has that J on the backside of it, right where you uh where you kind of flick the the locking mechanism machining that in the real action yeah bolt action machining that in the real world absolutely trivial modeling that

Starting point is 03:02:36 in saltworks has stumped your entire engineering team myself a friend of mine who's a manufacturing engineer and now his friends. And so this, this little tiny problem of how to properly 3d model a J is going around our engineering circles. Can we just paint it with matte paint and then scan it? No, no, no, no, no, so making it super easy, programming it to be visually exact how it comes across in the real world is like, no, but that's what i'm asking i'm asking can we just manufacture it and then scan it no no no why not because we know how to do it that's why it's a chess problem it's like a theoretical problem why does that make sense why does that

Starting point is 03:03:17 make sense so chess chess so chess problems are like that here is a board state, win in two moves. You have to, like, complete... So what you're saying is that it's unnecessary to solve it because we can manufacture it already? You can do it, but it's like... So why are we spending cycles on this? Hold on a second. No, no, no. I mean, it's now wasting lots of people's free time because we want to know. Because it shouldn't be this difficult, and it's this difficult, right? Okay, but it's their free time. Oh, yeah, 100% free time. Oh want to know because it shouldn't be this difficult and it's this difficult right okay but it's their free time oh yeah 100 free time okay well then sure yeah yeah yeah cool so so making i just don't understand why it's called the chess problem yeah you and i have very different concerns about this yeah oh whatever it's a pen yay

Starting point is 03:04:02 it's good pen yeah and it's made of it's made of what otherwise would have been wasted crappy failed uh driver shafts which is great yeah uh okay next uh hey lld i work with cfd at nasa a recurring problem is old sims that are lost because of software changes what is your most frustrating example of losing work from loss of backwards compatibility? Computer fluid dynamics, by the way. I don't know. I think I find the most interesting example of this is when you go through certain manufacturing shops or different places

Starting point is 03:04:46 like that and they'll have some computer windows 95 yeah and it's still chugging along and it's like what would you do if this broke and they're just like not even want to think about not make money yep um it's like wow okay most of what i do is uh like text based like i think like if you really boil it down i'm a writer or like a writing editor right so we've done a pretty good job i think as a computer industry um you know as as as humans of making text file formats pretty darn forward and backward compatible so i have not really experienced a ton of lost work due to backwards compatibility i have experienced lost save games due to you know games i can no longer play because they're not compatible with the current operating system so if i ever wanted to go back and play them um you know that's

Starting point is 03:05:41 that's definitely something that i that i've, but I think that's like kind of the closest thing that I would have to that. Oh yeah, a DDoC, a good full-plane comment. Microsoft's getting rid of WordPad. Did you know that? No, that's... WordPad is going away and I think the next major Windows update,

Starting point is 03:05:59 like we're not even getting like a, you know, a five-year warning or anything like that. Ah, WordPad is such a lifesaver when you just need to open a document on a brand new computer. It otherwise serves absolutely no purpose for me because I pay for Office 365 and I pay for Google Docs. Go me. I spend way too much on word processing software, but it means that I don't need it. But man, the people who do need it and the times that

Starting point is 03:06:25 they do need it boy is it ever handy that sucks you just like borked out my computer it did not like bouncing it's okay it's solved now i'm surprised how much it didn't like that like notepad notepad plus plus what if you don't have an internet connection? You can't download it. Wordpad is the infrequently used, but when used, oh man, I'm happy this happened to be on my computer. Yeah, because the alternative is notepad. Yeah. Not notepad plus plus, because for whatever reason, you don't have notepad plus plus yet. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:06:59 Yeah. Yeah. Wait, you guys pay for Google Docs? Yes. Yep. And Teams. And Teams for Google Docs? Yes. Yep. And Teams. And Teams. And Slack.

Starting point is 03:07:08 We know. What? Oh, for the dev team. We don't pay for Slack for everybody. That's true. But for the dev team, we do pay for all three, don't we? Well, the local ones, yeah. Good gravy.

Starting point is 03:07:17 Yeah. Sick. Yeah, it's a lot. I recently dropped the LTT screwdriver 130 feet off a small tower. It survived, short of losing all the bits on the way down. Do you have any extra crazy stress testing on your products? Okay. Do you know about the keycap?

Starting point is 03:07:42 The keycap statue. Keycap statue. I totally forgot about the keycap. Oh my gosh, no. So, the problem with the keycap statue, which is a solid aluminum keycap that is like this big, is not producing the keycap or polishing the keycap or it being beautiful and something people everywhere will need to own. The problem is shipping the key cap or polishing the key cap or it being beautiful and something people everywhere will need to own the problem is shipping the key cap because it weighs so much

Starting point is 03:08:13 even though it's made of aluminum and is so small that you need to have a box that's like three times its size. We also have, we have yielded on our, um, only paper packaging policy for the key cap and the key cap alone. Because from my point of view, if we lose a bunch of these key caps to damage and shipping, it's going to be worse. We're actually not really doing ourselves any favors here, uh,

Starting point is 03:08:44 by using paper, you know, packing uh getting getting the packaging right for that has been a real challenge and it's mostly just communication with like packaging manufacturers like no okay let's try this one more time i need like a solid inch of foam at every quarter or at every corner nothing else is acceptable they're like well what if it was a solid inch of foam at every quarter or at every corner nothing else is acceptable they're like well what if it was a solid inch on this side and then like a quarter of an inch on that no ah okay no it needs to be this much because this thing weighs a flipping ton uh so one of the things that we'll be doing is like hocking it off the roof of the building to make sure that when that stupid final packaging arrives this thing is going to arrive with people in one piece but yeah i'm really excited uh don't worry for for everyone

Starting point is 03:09:29 who's like oh my goodness how much is that going to cost i could never afford it the answer is a lot and i know uh we're going to make a smaller one we'll have like a little cute like like pocketable sized one and then a medium one and then like a ridiculous one you're gonna have a key cap keycap no well people can already buy those only keycaps you can't use yeah yeah yeah yeah oh i mean well no no they're completely unusable they're solid oh like the entire thing is one giant hunk of polished aluminum wow yeah they're they're they're really cool wow yeah like the first thing that nicholas plouffe said keyboard enthusiast like

Starting point is 03:10:05 these the kind of person who buys a like a wall mount to put his keyboards on you it's like well i'll need one oh that's great uh okay up next was there a point that videos weren't scripted? If so, when did it feel like it was necessary to write every video? It's been really gradual slash never happened. Videos weren't scripted at all until the first build guide was not scripted. So if you go back and watch that, be impressed because I did that all from memory. That was really hard uh i'm not that good anymore it's it's it's a practiced skill like i i can't ad lib as well as i used to

Starting point is 03:10:51 be able to yeah um like i watched that and i'm like it was dang it's kind of similar though uh if you watch some of the early scripted videos i bet you those kind of suck because you slash we are not used to being on teleprompter yet yep whereas now i'm pretty good at it even you're pretty good at it in spite of the dyslexia like it's well do you know my whole trick i've talked to you about this before right how i read prompters i think you have but i think i forget it's like it's very significantly memory this is why i'll get like it even happened when we were filming the gpu video i think i said like four words in a row that were wrong and you were like what and it's like yeah because i didn't read them i like thought that's what was there uh so i'll i'll see like one or two words and then remember

Starting point is 03:11:41 what's coming next and then just say it and while i'm saying i'm trying to refocus on the next one and then i just like kind of crawl through the script from memory that's why like when game linked gets me to host i ask them to send me the script ahead of time i read through the whole script at my desk and then go and host it i could never possibly hope to do that it took me a long time you could tell me three numbers and then like play a sound and then ask me to repeat those three numbers i wouldn't be able to tell you what they are like i have absolutely no short-term recall like that i don't know if you remember this but back in the house um i resisted the teleprompter change yeah i know because i just like couldn't do it uh and

Starting point is 03:12:21 then the early version of this style was i just didn't I would I would move the script to the fixed part yeah sit there and make Brandon at the time probably wait read the whole thing just in my head and then present right and then I would just do that over and over again and then eventually I just got a little bit better and a little bit better. And then I started being able to do that and then move it to the next one and then read, but say something else. So I'd be like absorbing the information for the next section. And then I kind of got from there and there and there

Starting point is 03:12:54 and just slowly got a little bit better over time. See, I do kind of that, but in much smaller chunks. So I'll do, I'll read ahead like at most a sentence, but I can't do paragraphs. There's absolutely no way. Back to your question, we never fully transitioned, right? If we do a live stream, WAN show, a build, whatever, that's not scripted. Actually, the video that I'm in the middle of shooting right now that is on the PC build corner at the moment and is maybe I don't know about 25% shot all I really have is like

Starting point is 03:13:36 For each we're doing a build we're doing compensator compensators coming back compensator for let's go and all I have for you know a script is just the price of each item a couple key specs just you know to make sure that in case i've forgotten if it's 16p cores and 80 cores or 8p cores and 16p cores like there's a lot of stuff out there and not all of this is hardware that i do know like obviously and i know what a if 13 900 ks is or whatever um but you know this capture card you know we'll have a couple speeds and feeds that matter for it and then a little bit of the rationale for why we chose it for compensator that's all i've got and it's just it's all point form so i'll just read through it and then i'll go host the section so we do still do stuff that is unscripted yeah um or like one of the videos that's coming out

Starting point is 03:14:19 this weekend is me and alex um basically like cable managing a wall. It ends up being a lot more interesting than it sounds. I promise you. It's way more interesting than it sounds. But it's completely unscripted. We have some main story beats that we expect to hit. We're going to talk about Wi-Fi audio versus Bluetooth audio. And we're going to talk about the costs associated and how you could do this on a tight budget.

Starting point is 03:14:43 We know approximately what we're going to talk about, none of it's written out so it just yeah it depends apparently there's a special font for dyslexics i was gonna say there's a couple people that mentioned this and i actually did want to talk about that um someone mentioned comic sans i've heard that before i don't find it makes any difference at all i I think personally, yeah, I don't know. Um, what I have seen, uh, and I, I might say this wrong, but it blew my mind. I think I even told you about it was if I remember correctly, it's, it's multicolored text and like the root word is colored in one color. And then the rest of the word is colored in another color. I that's how it goes i don't think anyone linked it um but the second i read it it felt like i was on like nitrous or something like just like i was reading two or three times faster than i normally do and i wasn't losing my

Starting point is 03:15:37 spot that's my biggest problem is i lose my spot all the time right i have a really hard i'll just it just i don't know if there's a superpower that i have you can read it's that i can it's that i can no i can skim wicked fast okay yeah i can't read wicked fast i actually skim sort of okay so my superpower would be that if you hand me a book and let me read for as long as you want and then rip it out of my hands close it and give it back to me i will be like immediately back to where i left off oh yeah i don't know i don't know i don't know why it's not usually a useful skill but it is something that i can do crazy fast and yet you know i was talking earlier about how i have basically no recall for exact numbers or exact

Starting point is 03:16:27 letters or words but in terms of like um like cues like familiarity i have no problem with it so i'll just open a page you'll be like no i haven't seen this i've seen this haven't boom i'm at the spot on the page and like when people would get mad at me for you know like i i had four i had four siblings you know so someone would get mad at me for losing their spot in the book i'm like whatever just who cares about a bookmark just just open it yeah just open it and get to the spot you were at but why does this matter um and and like a lot of people are I didn't even realize that other people don't skim like that I Want to be able to do that with games yeah, that'd be kind of cool. Just find your spot in a game

Starting point is 03:17:13 Apparently there's tons of examples of this there's tons of different fonts. There's tons of different attempts people That's super cool. I can't we just need to find a prompter app that would support it I'm having a hard time functional finding We just need to find a prompter app that would support it. I'm having a hard time finding the one that really worked for me. And a lot of the ones that people have linked are not it. And they don't feel like they're working right now, at least for me. So I don't know.

Starting point is 03:17:37 One of the reasons, I thought it was super interesting. But one of the reasons why I didn't try to be like, let's find ways to force my computer to load all text like this, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. And this could be flawed logic but the way i'm thinking about it is i'm gonna leave my computer at some point and i find like my ability to read is almost like a forced skill that i have to maintain so if i use this uh i don't know if people are not gonna like this or not but if I use this, I don't know if people are not going to like this or not, but if I use this, this crutch of this special font on my computer, I'm not going to have that all the time. And I feel like when I'm away from that system, I'm probably going to be worse off because of it. If that makes sense. I don't know if that's actually true or not, but that's one of the reasons why it's kind of like the same reason I was always interested in learning Dvorak as like a Layout, but I'm like, okay, but anytime I go to anyone else's computers a laptop. It's not gonna be Dvorak

Starting point is 03:18:33 So like I don't want to train to learn that it Like I don't know so it's super interesting. I find it very interesting that it works so well You're just the kind of person who plays on hard mode. I get it. Yeah Like that that's you know I find it very interesting that it works so well. You're just the kind of person who plays on hard mode. I get it. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. Like, that's, you know. And you know what's funny is I was talking to, I forget, optician or what's, optometrist, whatever. I was talking to an eye doctor of some sort. if you force yourself to see clearly like more clearly like you like you can you can you can you can achieve slightly better clarity by like kind of like really trying really hard

Starting point is 03:19:13 you can actually build up your eye muscles to the point where they will deform your eye and they will make you less likely to need glasses as as soon whoa whereas i thought i was always communicating the opposite. That's crazy. Well, I don't know. Maybe he's wrong. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair enough. And in extreme.

Starting point is 03:19:29 Non-medical advice, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, in extreme cases, maybe it would go the other way. But, like, I asked. I was like, because I have a very mild subscription. Subscription. Prescription.

Starting point is 03:19:40 I have a lot of subscriptions. That's the age we live in. I have a very. Don't then. They're not mild. I have a very of subscriptions. That's the age we live in. I have a very mild prescription. And I asked, I was like, yeah, my eyes feel less tired when I use them. But tell me this, by not trying as hard all the time, am I potentially going to, you know, need my glasses more? And he's like, in in some cases like trying really hard can actually make a difference and i was like oh interesting um so in the same way like trying really hard to

Starting point is 03:20:13 get your brain to like because dang it try to do it that's that's what i feel about the the prompter stuff is like uh i was off video for like years and now i do it infrequently but do it sometimes by video i mean vods not wayne's i was obviously still doing a show um but i was off off vods for a long time and my first few videos back were really hard because i hadn't done prompters in a really long time yeah and now it's i'm kind of oh yeah you were great when we did the thing too bit of a learn so yeah i'm a little bit more used to it again bit like kind of the whole riding a bike thing where like I definitely didn't lose it entirely um but I was rusty um and now I feel like I'm kind of getting it back um but yeah that's why I haven't like actually used it too much but it's super cool that it

Starting point is 03:20:59 exists because um mine seems pretty mild, all things considered. And I know people that have it a lot worse. So if it's a lot worse and you like need something, I think it's really cool that something does exist that you could use. I think that's awesome. This is interesting. A lot of people are talking about just interesting eye stuff.

Starting point is 03:21:20 Someone said they got corrective lenses that helped alter the shape of their eye so that they didn't need them anymore Like it's gonna it's gonna depend What's wrong with your eye obviously right like Someone said um yeah I can see Perfectly but I was getting headaches I went To the optometrist and found out I needed glasses

Starting point is 03:21:36 Because there I I'm assuming their eyes Were straining so hard that The poor muscles were just in a constant State of strain uh yeah that's that's wild um and yes to be clear i'm not talking about squinting anyway uh dan hit me uh yeah sure i got an interim message uh it's about the chess problems going back to the pen uh they're called chess problems because players come up with challenging theoretical puzzles that don't really matter.

Starting point is 03:22:05 Ah, okay. That's kind of why I was saying it was on the free time and you're, and you, they were not spending time on this. I still disagree because that chess problem could come up in a real game, but the need to model this thing will never be a need to model it. It is only for fun. I think these chess problems, like the theoretical board state, would not get there. Do you know what I mean? It would be a really, really... You would never play chess

Starting point is 03:22:31 and get into this board state, but it is possible, right? Right. You have one pawn in your queen and your king left. And they're all in the wrong places. Yeah, okay, I understand. We just model the J,

Starting point is 03:22:44 and then you make the machine do it and you're done you don't you don't spend hours upon hours uh i gotta sorry i gotta jump back for a second this i've never seen this before this is not the one i was talking about but someone linked this in flow plane chat i read this before i recognized that i was even like trying my brain registered all of the words in this and then I was like wait I have to I didn't go back to the first word to read it and then I was like hold on I already read all of this like it was it literally confusingly fast I've never even seen this font before it just like immediately absorbed

Starting point is 03:23:18 No, probably not and like I I don't even think I think my method's fine. That's just a Gmail logo. It's pretty much Actually the bottom left really does look like it. Well, that's just a Gmail logo. It's pretty much. The bottom left really does look like it. No, they're too recognizable as different shapes. But yeah, so like, I don't know. I can't explain it. A bunch of the ones that were linked today didn't work for me at all. And then this one was like, whoa, yeah, definitely worked right away.

Starting point is 03:23:41 I have no idea. It's weird. Even if I like found something like that and I found a way to implement it across all the things that I read on my own devices, I probably wouldn't do it because I want to keep the learned skill up so that I can do it when that font isn't existing. All that kind of stuff I said before is still the same. But yeah, I don't know. For some reason that worked for me, made it easier. Not a clue why. Okay if lmg grew to corporate size operating as a mid to large enterprise could or should the wan show continue would adding a disclaimer to the show avoid any potential issues i really appreciate you guys so we are uh well we're not we're not

Starting point is 03:24:21 mid-sized really not by the canadian definition i think it's 200 plus or something like that i thought it was 100 plus yeah or might even be like 500 plus or something we're still a technically a small small business um i'm gonna say now i don't ever want to get big enough that the wan show can't continue WAN show is something I find genuinely enjoyable. Um, it's something that I find helps keep us grounded. Um, I, I, I think that being so, so disconnected from the community that I am not allowed or feel like I can't talk to them anymore would be really isolating for me. Um, and I think by the time I got to that point, I probably just wouldn't want to do it anymore is sort of where I'm at on that.

Starting point is 03:25:10 I think we're a midsize company. Uh oh. Depends on the definition. Not everyone defines it the same way. Yeah. Oh. This is like, this is like defining generations of people is a meaningless and b nobody agrees so i do agree that it's meaningless but i did just find a stats canada government of canada

Starting point is 03:25:35 website that says that it's 100 to 499 employees it's mid-size okay so we have several small companies fair enough got him came out of nowhere i love it i genuinely didn't see that coming oh okay last one on my uh curated list hereLD. Catching the show a bit late, but any update on Floatplane merch? No, I don't think so. Oh, no. We have blue base shirts that I think we're working on production, or maybe I wasn't happy with the color. Well, see, here's the problem.

Starting point is 03:26:19 Floatplane's branding was never professionally designed, really. On a technical level it was yeah well the point is it lacked some they don't have a pantone yeah um that's a problem when you want to make something that matches something so we got the shirt and we're like well this doesn't match the site it doesn't match the previous float plane shirts we made it is blue so i guess that's i think it's straight up in my opinion if it's a shade of blue it's probably just pick like 20 pantos like a lightish blue is probably like the ocean it's it's it's most of the blue pantone even the floatplane website has multiple shades of blue on it there's a light blue and a dark blue i know i was wondering why i didn't have a pantone in my docs which is a problem nuts yeah so uh i i don't know we're

Starting point is 03:27:10 we're as we're as ready to go as we are ready to go and i don't really know the the answer i just i think the reason why i'm like uh is i mean if it isn't a pantone now it's not gonna be one later like at a certain point just oh well and facebook's 2fa is not working right now and i'll explain why that matters as soon as i can get logged into my account okay okay is this right don't save this browser other people use this computer wait is my dad in chat it's your dad in chat what's your dad doing in chat someone just added liquidus which would be my dad but i don't see where he said and oh he he pasted micro-sized company micro-sized

Starting point is 03:27:52 business less than 10 employees small size business 10 to 49 okay that's as defined by wikipedia if i remember correctly government of canada just has small medium and large okay i i have it so hold on there was a message um okay so uh brandon asks hey uh been looking in been looking into getting into badminton but i have no idea what to look for for our first racket uh where's somewhere to start so you are going to want to start oh i wonder i wonder what my most recent marketplace searches are. I guess we're going to see. Here we go. Air hockey. I love air hockey.

Starting point is 03:28:29 I was looking for a VapoChill. Do you remember those? Yeah. Yeah, I was hoping to get my hands on one. I couldn't find one. Okay, what is that fan controller that you and I both had? M3T Balancer. Yeah, he knew like immediately.

Starting point is 03:28:41 See, that's the thing. Remember when I was trying to talk to you about the old german uh fan controller that's it my associative memory skills are very good astounding if you tee me up i can knock it out of the park but if you ask me to just remember something that i don't care about or that i have no familiarity with that there's nothing to to to seed it i got nothing i don't remember why we were talking about it but i was talking about tea balancers with dan the other day i still have mine kicking around somewhere what i was geez linus do you think that's like an adhd thing because i find i'm almost identically exactly the same um it could be yeah could also just be like being a big dumb idiot that is so true but we're akin yeah no I it's a surprise you got wrinkles in your brain you know your bad

Starting point is 03:29:37 thoughts no no bad thoughts only good thoughts free PC so I was thinking that would be kind of a cool video like what PC could you get for free for literal free I actually did find some there was one that was like free computer but you have to take all 10 of them and I was like I was very close to getting up from my desk and like going and getting the ball just doing it yeah just for fun uh computer case I don't remember why I was searching for that oh look badminton racket because someone asked me this not that long ago a dollar no that's gotta be fake right uh that's probably just people put that and then they have pricing in their post for all the individual i got it okay so here's the thing never buy this uh this is like plastic wrapped um they, they, these have, uh, probably a T joint here. So they're,

Starting point is 03:30:29 they're not a one piece, um, frame. You shouldn't be spending like this kind of money. This is like 60 us dollars. That's, that's a little bit too much to get started. Not by much. I would say something like this is where you want to start something that is this is to you this is pretty heavy so maybe not quite something like this but something that's a single piece frame and so you can check here as long as it doesn't have any like a t-joint here that's probably fine as long as it's a carbon graphite body that's basically been the technology since kind of the late 80s early 90s i guess so finding like an old racket um ideally instead of two you you want a higher number like a three

Starting point is 03:31:12 you racket or something like that so you get something that's just yeah see this is probably fine and then you should spend another 20 25 bucks uh canadian so like 15 to $20 US and you should get it restrung. The strings are gonna make a way bigger difference than the actual racket itself. Oh, do we have some more? I don't have any more curated. I can go straight into the potentials if you want. Um, yeah, we can we can read through them i mean yeah there's oh yeah okay yeah sure okay uh at linus do you think the boom in more powerful handheld gaming devices will cause ar to gain popularity no the apple push into ar is going to cause ar to gain popularity like big time um imagine pokemon on the steam deck 3 played on the go

Starting point is 03:32:02 while wearing an ar headset um i don. I don't see that being realistic. I just don't think the market is big enough, especially when... What is it? Niantic or whatever their name is? What's the Pokemon Go? That's about right. Yeah, something like that. Especially when they're already so invested in mobile OS development. I would expect that we will instead see it come,

Starting point is 03:32:24 but maybe just a little bit later once the hardware that's already in your pocket is capable of a more AR-like experience. Anonymous asks, you've mentioned your ADHD helps you come up with new ideas because you get bored quickly, but what are some challenges and how do you overcome them? Oh, lots of challenges. I get bored really quickly. overcome them oh lots of challenges i get bored really quickly and honestly it's um it's like a superpower but it's also kryptonite like it's uh i i i just like don't know what to do with myself a lot of the time like you know why why do you workaholic i don't know what else to do i just need to like do stuff uh i don't know. Yeah, it's tough. You know, I'm obviously, you know, for me, it's not debilitating, which is, you know, really good.

Starting point is 03:33:12 I'm really thankful for that. But it can be a challenge sometimes. Yeah. Finally ordered a water bottle, says Jacob W. Such a wonderful upgrade. Is there any product that the staff? No, a straw for the water bottle. Oh, a straw for the water bottle. Is there any product that the staff no a straw for the water bottle oh a straw for the water bottle is there any product that the staff has upgraded with a third-party item i'm sure people have upgraded basically everything with third-party items

Starting point is 03:33:32 um i mean we are working on a lid upgrade of our own so that's something i guess i can i can leak uh one of the big things no i will not leak it can leak uh one of the big things no i will not leak it my uh i i asked because it's a water bottle lid you don't it's pretty good don't want it to leak it's pretty good but it'll have uh easily removable o-rings little pull tabs on them so you can clean them better cool yeah that's like one that's like the big feature aside from just being a little bit more robust i i uh asked for carabiners were on my christmas list and my brother got me these like awesome like rock climbing quality carabiners so I added those to the backpack I don't know if that would count as modding yeah sure upgrading but I really liked the carabiner that was on there I thought it was

Starting point is 03:34:19 cool that it came with one on that side bit but I was like I want more and ones that can carry your like heavier stuff, because those straps that the carabiner's on are very strong. You can hang some pretty serious things off there. It makes the backpack extensible, which is pretty sick. Okay, a couple more curated here. Okay, heywan.dll, First merch message. I've been a systems administrator for Unix for over

Starting point is 03:34:47 25 years and recently had a heart attack. Any suggestions if I no longer want to manage million dollar plus projects and I think a million plus projects and not be on call 24-7? If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't be

Starting point is 03:35:04 here. Please tell us. Yeah. If we knew the answer to that, we wouldn't be here. Please tell us. Yeah. If you figure it out, you don't even need to send a merch message, okay? Just fire me an email, and I will be grateful to your sage wisdom sharing that you've done with me. Thank you.

Starting point is 03:35:20 I'm so sorry. Hello, LL. Hope for speedy recovery, though, by the way. Oh, that's why it's buzzing. My phone. And your phone. Sorry, I was responding to something, so I missed that. Oh, no, no, no, not there.

Starting point is 03:35:38 But, yeah, I don't know. That's a tough one. What I was thinking, and I'm sorry if you said this already, but what I was thinking, and I'm sorry if you said this already, but what I was thinking, because IT and systems administration is just kind of like that. But you might be able to work with the organization that you're in and turn into more of like a training and advisory role. You have some very serious experience,

Starting point is 03:36:02 so you could be very effective in that way. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. Hello, LLND. I had to get a couple of screwdrivers to match my company's red dump trucks. What videos do you wish you could get a do-over or revisit with the resources you have now? I'd love to do whole room water cooling again, but like properly, like banging, like awesome. And I'm like kind of doing it with the pool, but it was, it was super cool having it like

Starting point is 03:36:40 plumbed into the office. I, you know, I'd love to have, you know, chilled water at a fixed temperature on tap for the lab, for example, for testing. You know, if we ever tested water blocks or something, not that anyone cares, like they all basically perform within a very narrow band anyway. So people went from caring a lot about water block performance back in like

Starting point is 03:36:59 the mid two thousands, maybe even late two thousands to now mostly mid 2000s to like. Lurse the aesthetics. Now I don't think, I don't think, does EK even publish performance numbers on their site? I think it's just aesthetic. I don't know. And, and that's, to be clear, I'm not saying that's a huge problem.

Starting point is 03:37:15 Like it's, it's been a pretty much solved problem since about 2005 to 2008. Maybe like maybe into 2010. to 2008 uh maybe like maybe into 2010 um but it's basically now it's just an optimization exercise for every given platform where you're just playing around with your major variables which are the restrictiveness of the design uh how much impingement you want on the copper plate the thickness of the plate and the density of the pin or fin structure like it's about it when when uh swift tech released the uh apogee skf i think it is but it's like sky it has skived copper which basically means you take copper and you have a blade that is so sharp and so thin that you shave the copper and then fold it up into a fin and then you shave the

Starting point is 03:37:59 copper and fold it up into a fin and then you create like a micro fin structure like that, that's it. That's the end game. There's no further thinness increase in surface area per unit, you know, CPU die area that you can possibly achieve at that point because it becomes impractical to have the fins go any higher, and it becomes impractical to have the fins go any higher and it becomes impractical to have them any closer together because you just wouldn't have enough room for water to reach the very base where most of the thermal transfer is actually happening like nothing's actually happening once you once the fins are over you know a millimeter a couple millimeters high so that's why all designs are like kind of the same um and because any modern microprocessor is going to be designed to be

Starting point is 03:38:46 air-cooled, any modern water block design, not even a state-of-the-art one, is going to be fine, as long as you have adequate radiator capacity. So just, I don't know, it's just the kind of thing I don't think we would ever get into reviewing because it frankly just doesn't matter anymore i am a salesforce developer with an idea to create a business to business platform as a service but i have no minimal viable product what advice would you give to somebody starting out with no business management experience any pitfalls to avoid all of them um just do your best you know try and do better every day that's uh that's basically all I can tell you, right? It's tough though. Be ready.

Starting point is 03:39:29 And all that's left is one inning coming and that's all we got. Oh, there's two now. It's getting out of hand. I got one. I'm going to add a sorry so it's nicer sounding. I'm going to add a sorry so it's nicer sounding. Do you think there's a future where Nintendo bows out of the console space and we see Nintendo IPs on Xbox, PlayStation, et cetera? I mean, we already saw like a mobile Mario game at some point.

Starting point is 03:39:54 That was very surprising. And then they like stopped as far as my understanding goes. Are they still, they did Mario Run or Jump or whatever it's called. They do anything after that? Super Mario Run was 2016. The most recent one, as far as I can see, in a rough Google search is 2021 with Pikmin Bloom. Mario Kart World Tour.

Starting point is 03:40:25 Animal Crossing Pocket Camp was apparently a huge success pokemon sleep in 2023 but they've technically already done stuff because pokemon go i don't know if i know i know nintendo owns a pretty significant amount of the pokemon company but they're not the sole owner marvin the robot says der bauer talked about how that method of fin manufacturing made thermal transfer worse. It's like I said, it's all trade-offs, right? So you can machine it, but you can only get a bit so small. You can skive it, but sure, it might harm thermal transfer. The point is that without some kind of complete revolution

Starting point is 03:40:58 in manufacturing techniques, we're not going to see blocks with materially different performance anymore. Mario Kart Tour, which I've never personally heard of is a free i'm sure there's microtransactions mobile game um with a rating of 4.3 stars that has 2.1 and a half million votes on android alone there you go all right i don't think i don't think nintendo's gonna get sick of selling their own hardware anytime soon though i think they're a very traditional company and it's honestly been to their benefit in a big way like for all you can hate on nintendo all you

Starting point is 03:41:35 want i sure do i the fact that you can't back up your save games on a mobile device without paying for a monthly subscription is one of the most anti-consumer, just brazenly anti-consumer things in gaming today, in my humble opinion. To me, the value of my save game is so much higher than the value of the cartridge that I bought. Like it's,

Starting point is 03:41:56 it's, it's everything depending on the game that you're playing. And, but to their credit, they're one of the, they're one of the few companies that has remained committed to just single player or multiplayer contained experiences that you don't have to pay a whack ton of money for after you've already bought them. They're doing that, apparently. But they're also delivering on those self-contained traditional

Starting point is 03:42:28 experiences and i think that's super cool and i think it's super cool that the land show's over we will see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye man you guys love pins.

The WAN Show - Want Denuvo in Your Game Mods? - WAN Show September 8, 2023

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