The WAN Show - Ban me, Twitch! - WAN Show June 9, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the WAN Show where nothing, and I say nothing, can kill the streak. It's been two years, and whether it's distance or COVID, nothing can keep this man from appearing on the show. Correct. We've got a lot of great topics for you guys today, including that Twitch banned, then unbanned, and multiple things that we would have been guilty of violating, except, I don't know. I actually haven't checked the latest update,

Starting point is 00:00:32 so I'm going to read the notes and hope that they're perfect, and we're all going to learn together what the current state of things is. Also, okay, I'm not going to talk about Apple studies thousands of heads. That's not going to be a main topic, I don't think. But how about Apple quietly releases their own proton compatibility layer? Which, guess what, Luke? I tried. I was going to say an hour ago, but then you were really late for WAN show.

Starting point is 00:01:00 No, I'm going after you for it because it's usually me who's late. He's late this time. I get to get after him for it. I tried it two hours ago. And let's just say, why don't you pick a couple of topics to headline the show? A massive percentage of subreddits are having a, I don't even know what you call it. of subreddits are having a a a i don't even know what you call it they're like blocking themselves uh for going to be interesting and wow there really isn't a lot of other topics to pick um uh you know what no it is going to be ahead sure we could go with that according to Wikipedia, I am dead.

Starting point is 00:01:48 Or that Linus Torvalds is based. Really? I mean, it doesn't really matter. I'm being actually based according to Wikipedia. That's fantastic. No, no, no. Those are two separate things. But let's roll that intro jumping into our first headline topic come at me twitch i have violated your terms of service for

Starting point is 00:02:30 years and i shall continue to do so until such time as you kick me off your platform and i give exactly this many cares twitch updated its terms of service with new rules on sponsorships and multi-streaming on Tuesday. And that, my friends, was when all hell broke loose. Luke, were you following this in real time? Yeah, actually, the amount of streamers that had already abandoned ship was amazing. Yeah, and not just that, but just all you had to do was tweet, I am angry about Twitch right now. And you could immediately get 10,000 upvotes on whatever social media platform

Starting point is 00:03:12 is the flavor of the week these days. The new branded content policy guidelines prohibited all burned in or pre-edited videos, banners, and audio ads, and limited the size of advertiser logos to 3% of the screen. Twitch also prohibited the promotion of a bunch of products, ranging from vape pens to mail enhancement products. Let me tell you guys that this is not the first time that a platform has either changed or made the

Starting point is 00:03:47 decision to suddenly start enforcing their policies when it comes to um content creators promoting brands in a given way i don't know if you remember this very well luke but it was back in i think about 2015 I want to say, that YouTube sent out, or rather, I think it was leaked, but YouTube sent out or created this deck that had some changes to the way that they were handling third-party logos and branded content embedded in videos. And that was actually a huge part of what made us go on to

Starting point is 00:04:28 vessel I was about to say Vessi it's been a very long week that was a big part of what made us join vessel the early access video platform that was in a way the predecessor to floatplane.com do you remember that okay I'm a little rusty on the details but i think it was something along the lines of you were no longer allowed to have a brand logo in your content unless that brand also bought out all of youtube's own um advertising options yeah so that would have included the little pop-up things that came up at the bottom yeah so that would have included the little pop-up things that came up at the bottom back then that would have included like I think the side banners on the side remember this was a long time ago this is like eight years ago um and then I think there

Starting point is 00:05:17 was some other weird stuff too right right right it couldn't be pre-recorded. It had to be integral to the content. Now, making your sponsor reads integral to the content is still recommended by YouTube personnel. But at that time, they said basically that it would result in some kind of punitive action against your channel. So that was when we started recording our sponsor spots ourselves rather than just do or live like as part of our of our a role rather than just doing them as voiceovers with animations. So I think it was that you couldn't have like pre baked anything, even if it was something created for yourself. Now, what happened with YouTube was there was not the same kind of community backlash. I gotta say, it's pretty cool to see the community going to bat for Twitch creators and standing up for their favorite millionaire underdogs here. do think it's pretty crap for a platform to basically say, yeah, here's the terms of engagement. Go ahead and build your business on our platform and then go, ah, rug pull. Just kidding. We're going to change how this works. That sucks. I do think it's cool that the community stood up for

Starting point is 00:06:35 creators, but that wasn't present back then. And so you're probably wondering, okay, why did all of that disappear? And I think a big part of it was just pushback from creators themselves because YouTube never formally changed any of that, but they just quietly never enforced it at all, which I don't know, maybe was what Twitch was planning here. Anyway, coming back to the changes on Tuesday. Additionally, a previous policy that banned twitch partners and affiliates from simultaneously streaming on other twitch-like platforms was expanded to all users

Starting point is 00:07:13 that's a big one basically telling people who aren't even you know your favorite underdog millionaire yet that you better put all your eggs in this basket or you're done you're out forget it that is what interesting timing considering the amount of alternative streaming platforms that there are now like there's there's actually a lot and i don't just mean like i get a kick out of the timing this delay is going to kill us today i think anyway it's gonna be really rough um many popular streamers um let's just it says select out riley is actually updating this topic in real time riley it's the end of the day. Go home. He's probably already gone home. Anyway, the point is many popular streamers, something out of the affiliate program for this reason. Yeah. So the most followed Twitch streamer, Richard Blevins, aka Ninja, is not an affiliate. Twitch

Starting point is 00:08:15 has likewise struggled with the longstanding issue of popular streamers focusing more and more on YouTube as a more reliable revenue source. Yeah. so you can see why they might want to crack down on this. But being a more restrictive platform is not how you get new people. That's not how you get the next Ninja or the next Shroud or the next Dr. Disrespect. Did I intentionally choose people who have had complicated relationships with Twitch over the years? Yes, I did. But that's not how you get the next big streamer to start on your platform, by being restrictive and saying, yeah, while you're making literally $0,

Starting point is 00:08:49 you need to stream exclusively to Twitch. That's kind of ridiculous. Twitch claimed... It feels very much like a move that a company might do when they're in their kind of death throes. You're seeing a lot of people leave the platform, whether it's because of big money from Kik or if it's because of just potential opportunity on YouTube or something like that. And being very greedy and restrictive about their creators is not surprising when they're the losing team currently.

Starting point is 00:09:17 I was thinking a couple days ago about how interesting it is that Twitch used to have, in my opinion, one of the most hardcore dedicated fan bases of any of the creator websites. If you remember back with the Bleed Purple campaign, they had an extremely strong following back then, and they have just completely lost it over the course of like six years. And it's funny because I don't think that twitch's culture has gotten more toxic if anything i think it's just that more things have come to light and they've pivoted to being i guess a little more yeah i'm trying to think i was about to say they've pivoted to being a little bit more structured in terms of enforcement but if if anything, that would be a good thing. I mean, Twitch was all over the place

Starting point is 00:10:07 when it came to creator bans, when it came to community moderation. They kind of always sucked. How is it that we're just kind of figuring it out now? It feels like they care less now. I don't know if that's actually true or not. I do know that a lot of the original people that were around when the Amazon buyout happened are now gone because their shares finished vesting and then they just took off.

Starting point is 00:10:35 So I strongly feel like that's part of it, but I don't actually know. I don't have communication with anyone internally. So, yeah. So the new guidelines then. Oh, Twitch claimed that the new policy was consistent with other services. That's only partially true. YouTube does restrict embedded third-party sponsored content, but it doesn't limit the size of sponsor logos and doesn't limit multi-streaming.

Starting point is 00:11:02 It also allows limited monetization for adult-themed or sensitive sponsor products. The new policy likewise threatens the viability of charity streams and esports events, which is hilarious on a platform like Twitch. The new guidelines were met with immediate backlash and threats of a streamer boycott, to which Twitch quickly folded, apologizing for, and this is great, the policy being overly broad and promising to rewrite the guidelines to be clearer. So then the next day, it's actually kind of amazing how quickly they turned this around and really speaks to how loud the backlash was.

Starting point is 00:11:39 On Wednesday, Twitch released new branded content policy guidelines which removed the controversial changes, at least the ones concerning burned-in content. The ban on simulcasting and prohibited products, though, are unchanged, which is why Ninja is now streaming on Kik, not Twitch. Wait, really? I actually am going to admit that I have no idea how big Ninja is these days, but apparently this is big enough news

Starting point is 00:12:07 that jake lucky here tweeted this it's got 1.1 million views whatever that means but 6600 likes super big news for him to do that wow okay started streaming on kick man kick is a weird one hey the fact that they just blatantly ripped off the twitch source code leak and then are just kind of throwing crypto money at streamers to move to this platform i mean i would have thought that twitch was not unassailable but not assailable by anyone other than maybe YouTube. I mean, I even mocked YouTube's efforts back in the day, just because, like you said, Twitch had that mindshare.

Starting point is 00:12:52 They had that community sentiment, and they've just thrown it away. Can you think of it? Yeah, if you were a streamer, if you were a streamer, you streamed on Twitch. It was an absolute for a very, very long time there. think yeah if you if you were a streamer if you were a streamer you streamed on twitch it was like it was a it was an absolute well you streamed on twitch and you were huge on twitch or you were a nobody on twitch or a nobody somewhere else that was basically it i mean can you think of a platform

Starting point is 00:13:18 that has thrown away the same amount of goodwill as twitch has over the last few years and twitter doesn't count too obvious too i don't i don't even know if i honestly don't even know if twitter would be as big because the the users on twitter are probably just as mad or even more mad well they hated twitter already yeah exactly a lot of goodwill already and a lot of these twitch streamers are actually going somewhere else and finding success right now and facebook in my opinion a lot of the people that have left twitter like like these other services aren't really matching up so it just doesn't really matter and people saying reddit yeah but again people aren't off-boarding anywhere else they're just no i meant thrown away goodwill though And Facebook's thrown away. Yeah, but again, people aren't off-boarding anywhere else. They're just...

Starting point is 00:14:05 No, I meant thrown away goodwill, though. Like, Facebook's thrown away a lot of goodwill, but I feel like Facebook only had a very narrow window of goodwill there. And that was a long time ago. That certainly hasn't happened in the last few years. It's been ages. I mean, I'd say Instagram has thrown away a lot of goodwill. People loved Instagram, and now it's basically like,

Starting point is 00:14:26 uh, Instagram, ick, forget about it. It's too many ads, right? Uh, pretty much ever since the Facebook acquisition.

Starting point is 00:14:33 I was going to say that is also Facebook. Yeah. So yeah. Okay. Tumblr, Tumblr would be a good example. Uh, Netflix,

Starting point is 00:14:42 man. Okay. Netflix is a good one. Props to Top Gear 1224 on the float plane chat. Netflix, man. Okay. Netflix is a good one. Props to Top Gear 1224 on the float plane chat. Netflix through hiking rates, through cracking down on password sharing. And this one's a bit of a slower burn, but I feel like it's all kind of come to a head as users have felt more and more just disposable and disrespected by netflix but the way that they release a season or a couple season seasons of a show leave it on a cliffhanger and then just cancel it that sucks that makes me feel so uninvested in anything that they do that serialized content movies fine it's a one and done it's

Starting point is 00:15:26 throwaway but tv shows i just feel like i might as well not even bother watching anything because you're not going to finish telling the story you're never going to finish telling the story and i'm going to be left with a blue remote yeah yeah i don't even like watching tv all that much but there was the there was the daredevil show on netflix daredevil and the punisher and i actually really liked that and then it just never came back i've heard rumors that it might be coming back again now but like it's just such a common theme that you hear people are like really excited really enthused about a particular netflix show and then it just disappears i mean that one i can kind of

Starting point is 00:16:09 see because it's probably reliant on streaming rights and ip rights with disney who you know low-key has their own streaming platform now that they've been competing with netflix way before that though, but, but it is far from isolated. And so if that's the straw that broke your back, then I totally get it because it's not like they haven't canceled a hundred other shows without tying them up in a nice little bow back to the Twitch thing though.

Starting point is 00:16:41 Um, given the suddenness and confusion of the situation, it's unclear who, if anyone, has actually left or still plans to leave. Twitch's partnership program charges a $25 fee for affiliates that leave the program. And I had a lot of people asking us, you know, what are we going to do, particularly on Tuesday before Twitch had backpedaled? And the answer, if I wasn't clear earlier on in the show, is that we're going to keep doing what we do, particularly on Tuesday before Twitch had backpedaled. And the answer, if I wasn't clear earlier on in the show, is that we're going to keep doing what we do and we're not going to care at all. If Twitch decides at some point to issue some kind of strike to our channel or kick us out of the partner program or whatever the case may be, the first thing I'm going to do is figure out

Starting point is 00:17:21 if we even have a Twitch contact, because I don't think we do at this point then if i find a twitch contact i'm going to see if i can find our contract with twitch which is a special awesome contract that i don't think literally anyone else on earth actually has that um gives us the right to simultaneously stream to other platforms because i was like no and they were like okay when i when i said look we're not going to agree to exclusively stream to twitch that's just actually not how this is going to work we're youtube first and you guys want to be our mcn on youtube or whatever well you can't come in be our mcn on youtube and then tell us we can't stream to youtube anymore it's ridiculous what are you trying to do, hurt our business? And they're like, okay. So as far as I can tell, that whole endeavor

Starting point is 00:18:09 where Twitch wanted to be a YouTube MCN was spun up and sunsetted within a span of like three to six months. So I don't think they ever actually signed anyone else. So what I'll do is I will send our contract that entitles us to stream to multiple platforms, including Twitch at the same time. And then if they refuse to honor that contract, realistically, look, guys, you heard it here first. I'm not going to involve a lawyer. It's

Starting point is 00:18:38 not worth my time. It's not worth the money we make. Like, I mean, I don't even know how do you how do i find out how much money we make on twitch i don't even know here revenue earnings here we go in the last month since may 11th we made 800 dollars on twitch which is like fine you know for a big company like that's no i mean look hey 800 bucks is 800 bucks shout out our dedicated viewers over on twitch scumbags that they are for sending bits or subscribe gifting subscriptions or whatever the crap it is that however people make money on twitch i i have no idea i don't even care because that is, it's 800 bucks, which is awesome. Thank you. But also that is not even around.

Starting point is 00:19:28 It's not even a rounding error. It doesn't even make it into to be rounded for us. And I don't mean that in a disrespectful way. I just mean that we have 120 employees. So $800 a month would be about, would be less than 10 grand a year that would not even pay okay this is US dollars hold on I don't want to screw up this math here that would be at best a third of a person's salary here in Canada assuming that we were paying just marginally above minimum wage. Would that cover the snacks?

Starting point is 00:20:09 I don't, we, you know what? That is a terrific question to which I do not know the answer, but I suspect you are right. We probably spend more on office snacks than we make on Twitch. Amazing. In a month, $800? Yeah, we almost certainly spend more on snacks. So there you go.

Starting point is 00:20:34 Love you, Twitch viewers, but you don't matter. That's why I make fun of you all the time. Love you guys, though. Love you guys, but you don't matter. So yeah, if we no longer stream on Twitch, then that doesn't matter. We'll just stream on YouTube, we'll stream on Floatplane, and we're not going to worry about it anymore. I just got signed out of the doc because, hey, I love the way this works.

Starting point is 00:20:58 You know, Google, they sign you out once a month. So once every four WAN shows, I get signed out in the middle of the WAN show, which is super cool. You'll have to give me a minute here, Luke. Maybe you want to walk us through the next topic. I can start going through it. Yeah. Do you want to do the Proton thing? We can do whatever you want. Apple quietly releases their own Proton, which this is actually absolutely amazing. I'm very excited about this. Apple announced a new game porting toolkit, which simplifies porting games by quickly translating

Starting point is 00:21:30 Intel-based x86 instructions to Apple Silicon instructions and Windows APIs to the corresponding macOS APIs. The kit uses source code from Crossover, a wine-based open source solution for running Windows games on Mac OS, first published in 2007. Developers will also be able to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game, which is cool. The kit also allows DX12 Windows games to run on Mac devices. Diablo 4 and Elden Ring seem to run decently using this method, but other games like Cyberpunk 2077, which shouldn't be too surprising,

Starting point is 00:22:09 ran slowly and with, again, unsurprisingly, a lot of bugs. Mac gaming has started a collective effort to test an extensive list of popular titles and document how well they run using the new software. And the sheet is very easy to use and read, I will also say. According to GitHub senior dev advocate Christina Warren, software and the sheet is very easy to use and read, I will also say. According to GitHub senior dev advocate Christina Warren, this is essentially Proton but for Mac OS this is massive. Apple has likewise announced its newest version of Mac OS, Mac OS 14 Sonoma,

Starting point is 00:22:38 which has a game mode that prioritizes game performance, which is very... Even considering the dx12 layer stuff that part was very surprising to me because apple has often been very weird about gaming weird i'd say ignorant like do you remember when they did that ar that ar demo with i think it was oh man what was the first iphone with the 3d cameraD camera. They had this game running on a tabletop and the developer was there. It felt like the I'm a Mac guy from the old commercials

Starting point is 00:23:14 explaining video games to his grandpa. I was watching this. They have no idea what's going on right now, do they? It hasn't even been like an afterthought. It's often felt like they approach it with like disdain. Like it's, I don't know. This was very, very surprising to me. Honestly, when I saw the first article on this,

Starting point is 00:23:38 I thought it was like a joke. Well, guess what? You were right. It's exciting. I used it today. Oh, is it that bad? Really? Okay. It's complicated on the surface. It's really cool, but I think there's a reason.

Starting point is 00:23:55 And guys, you're going to want to check out the video. Emily got it working on an M M one ultra Mac studio. I think it was. Yeah. I think it's an M one ultra Mac Studio, I think it was. Yeah, I think it's an M1 Ultra Mac Studio. Like a pretty kitted out Mac. And I got a chance to experience multiple games, both ones that worked, ones that didn't work, ones that were running natively on Mac, and then the same game using this translation layer.

Starting point is 00:24:21 And what I can say more than anything else is that I understand why apple is messaging this the way that they are where they're saying this is not a tool for gamers to play video games this is a tool for game developers to use to develop their games but even then it's kind of it's kind of complicated because think about the issues i mean you did the linux challenge with me think about the kinds of issues that you had running games what percentage of the time was it actually just the fault of the proton translation layer versus what percentage of the time was the problem some kind of redistributable dependency or anti-cheat or um or some some difference in the expected even folder structure compared to the actual folder structure of the device that you're trying to run it on

Starting point is 00:25:25 you know when it looks for you know some a dll or something like that that it goes looking for right so even if this proton compatibility layer worked perfectly how many games would actually be usable. Yeah, honestly, I'm mostly excited about this just because people that were going to just have a Mac anyways now have a more accessible way to approach a certain level of gaming. Like something that I immediately saw was that people were playing Diablo 4. Now Diablo 4 is not exactly the hardest game to run ever, but it means if you have a MacBook,

Starting point is 00:26:10 it means if you have a MacBook, you have a way to play some games with your friends. I'm not expecting this to be amazing. I wasn't immediately expecting a bunch of games to have incredible performance or there to even necessarily be this like huge expansive library of games it's pretty does give them access to more than what they had sort of i mean there are things that are you said you said

Starting point is 00:26:34 you tried it on m1 mac m1 ultra is that top tier one ultra yep and it's man it's see it this is tough coming back to the way that Apple's messaging it. So first of all, like I said, if your experience with Proton, with Linux, with Wine is anything to go by, what do you think compatibility is going to look like? Probably not too great. Now, that has improved a lot. But we have to give credit to who for that. If you had to name one name,

Starting point is 00:27:06 who do we give credit to for the improvements that we've seen over the last couple of years in proton compatibility or in, in windows games on Linux? And I guess I kind of spoiled the answer when I said proton. Yeah. Valve. Yeah. It's gotta be valve.

Starting point is 00:27:22 So wait, hold on a second. If it's valve sitting there going, oh my God, developers are just not going to do this. I guess we better go in and create hacky workarounds in order to get these games running on Proton. And then Apple is coming in saying, hey, game porting toolkit is a tool for developers to port their games.

Starting point is 00:27:50 How involved do we really expect Apple to be? Are they making a real investment here? Or are they basically just ripping some open source tools, adding a little bit of their own stuff? some open source tools, adding a little bit of their own stuff, and the open source community is kind of not impressed with how little Apple has contributed back to open source software in all of this.

Starting point is 00:28:13 Apparently, it's about 20 kilobytes of code, which is like... Thanks. That's not always how things work, but I am assuming their contribution is bad. Yeah, I was just gonna say like i i just wanted to say that's not like that alone is not indicative of of little contribution but i'm sure the contribution is little in this case the contribution's bad and

Starting point is 00:28:35 they should feel bad and um so so so so apple's not going to be making the investments for game developers they're expecting game developers to do the work they're not making the investments for game developers. They're expecting game developers to do the work. They're not making the investments in the underlying tech. As far as I can tell, they haven't contributed any kind of significant... They haven't contributed significantly to the open source projects that have made Proton possible. I am open to being corrected here, though. Of course, guys, let me know in the chat if that is a misconception on my part. And the fact that they're sitting there going, okay, yeah, this is a toolkit. Okay, so what is this exactly? Basically, Apple is what? Putting their shiny logo on open source tools that already existed. They have created the translation layer for DirectX 12 to Metal.

Starting point is 00:29:26 That is an actual Apple thing. But DirectX 9 to DirectX 11 is pretty much piggybacking off of existing projects. And then they're basically going, okay, now go port your games. Now, obviously, between Rosetta and between the game porting toolkit, you know, developers have more than they had before. But if they're basically going, yeah, game porting toolkit is a way to what? See your game running on a Mac and then what, be inspired to create a native port of the game. Like I, I'm skeptical.

Starting point is 00:30:00 I actually was not aware that it was called game porting toolkit or that their approach was that they expected developers to use it as a way to make official ports of their game. All I knew was that you could run Windows games on Mac, which I was all excited about. And I originally took this as a similar thing to how they launched the original watch and how I believe they're treating their headset, which I'm sure we'll talk about later, which is where it's like, it's like a, a demo of something that will hopefully be better later. But now I'm kind of after this conversation,

Starting point is 00:30:35 I'm losing hope. Yeah. I, I mean, specific quote, developers will also be able to launch an unmodified version of a Windows game on a Mac and see how well it runs before fully porting a game. That's rough.

Starting point is 00:30:50 I don't think very many people are going to fully port games. That's also just not true because the vast majority of games that you buy these days are, for better or for worse, from game marketplaces. And we couldn't even get the Windows version of Steam running without some command line nonsense. So Apple clearly has not even gone as far as, yo, Gabe, we need to make sure the Windows version of Steam

Starting point is 00:31:21 runs on the upcoming macOS for stuff and things. Can you leave your bunker in New Zealand to maybe help us out with this? Type some codes. Give us some hacker codes. They didn't even go as far as to have a conversation with Valve, as far as I can tell. Because if they had, this should be a more seamless experience. So I think Apple is basically going, yeah, gaming, woo, woo, gaming, woo.

Starting point is 00:31:51 Okay, go for it, see you later. And you know what? I don't know, maybe it's not true, but given where Apple, given what motivates Apple, right? What motivates Apple? Let's think about that. 30% cut on everything. That is a strong motivator for Apple.

Starting point is 00:32:07 And if you think about that, all of a sudden, a lot of their decisions become really crystal clear, right? Why is it that they provide software support to the iPhone and iPad for six, seven, eight years sometimes. Well, because every time you buy something on it, they get 30%. And if you aren't using that thing anymore, then there's a chance that you will use something else

Starting point is 00:32:35 where they don't get 30% anymore. And to be clear, that's a good thing. That has positive results for the world. People throwing their phones away less often is a good thing. And I have repeatedly applauded Apple's long-term software support for their products, especially compared to their competitors. But that doesn't mean that they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. And so if we look at Apple's actions through that lens, that what actually motivates Apple lens, all of a sudden,

Starting point is 00:33:07 all of this makes sense. Why is this a halfhearted effort? And what's really interesting is if we look at valve and we look at their actions through that, Hey, what do we actually care about? Right. Getting 30% of our revenue cut on all transactions.

Starting point is 00:33:25 All of a sudden their actions make sense too. So why is Apple heavily invested in mobile devices and mobile gaming in the app store? Because they get 30%. Why is their motivation or why is that? Why is their motivation so much lower on the Mac? Because they don't get 30%. Simple.

Starting point is 00:33:44 Why is Valve highly motivated when it comes to steam 30 why is valve support for mac os kind of like well we tried but overall pretty half-hearted because the game library just isn't there so you're getting 30 of basically nothing so it's like yeah okay we'll do it but they're not pushing it anymore not like they did back when they launched it like they seemed to be pretty bullish at the time and since then I I haven't heard boo from valve about gaming on Mac Steam on Mac it's been it's been pretty quiet so I this was another one this was one of those ones where I like you heard about it through the grapevine because I was busy doing something else when the keynote was going on I didn't watch it

Starting point is 00:34:32 personally I read the comments though um so I was busy doing something else so I heard about it and I went oh yeah that sounds freaking awesome let's start gaming on mac only to be ultimately disappointed when i realized no this is this is them you know giving you kind of a shovel and going okay uh you know dig to the center of the earth like yeah sure um with the way that man with the with the motivation that you see from developers to even port their game properly to freaking Windows, right? Yeah. And we're talking porting from the Xbox in some cases. Over the years, man.

Starting point is 00:35:14 Which is like basically running Windows. Yeah. Or actually to a certain degree. Yeah. So when you see that, how unmotivated, where they'll go and they'll hire a third party to go and do it, and that third party will ship some piece of garbage, and they'll be like, ah, it seems good enough, ship it. Obviously, that's not every game developer, and that's not every porting process. Sometimes they are porting from a more complicated architecture, like PlayStation 3 or something like that, or even PlayStation 5 to a degree.

Starting point is 00:35:46 Though in that case, the hardware is pretty similar. It's not every time, but it happens often enough that I think if we're looking at Apple's moves here and going, yeah, we're going to see, you know, a full-scale, like, migration to game developers taking the Mac seriously, I think we've got another thing coming I just don't think it's realistic yeah I seriously doubt it

Starting point is 00:36:10 alright pick us a new topic Mr. Lafreniere or wait Dan is that what we're supposed to do Dan's got paper things but he's just hiding them from me I am I am yeah I mean you still got 20 minutes left if you want to do another topic or we can move right on to merch messages.

Starting point is 00:36:26 Why don't we do some merch messages? Okay, sure. Okay, we'll start by talking about what the heck merch messages are. Hey, Angus B is a perfect example of a merch message. All you got to do is don't send Twitch bits, don't send super chats on YouTube. You want to send merch messages because that way, aside from just feeling good and sending into the show and, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:50 in a way that actually matters, unlike Twitch, haha, got him. So supporting the show, in addition to that, you will also get your order in the mail. So you might get a response from Dan in the form of one of these text messages down here. You might just get your message flashing up on the screen if you want to do a shout out for you know your mom or your so

Starting point is 00:37:09 who watches the wan show or whatever else the case may be dan also curates some merch messages for us to uh talk about during wan show after dark how are we going to do that luke are you just going to close your blinds there or what like is that the plan i can there are there are like blackout blind things or i could just turn the lights off or something yeah i'm stoked i'm stoked so we'll we'll we'll address some of your merch messages during when show after dark and we'll also do a couple now all you got to do to send a merch message is go to lttstore.com check out any of our new products which i guess i will talk about shortly. No, why don't I just do it now? I think we also have a deal this week. Nick didn't clear it with me, so I have absolutely no idea what is going on.

Starting point is 00:37:53 But anyway, we've got a couple new product launches. We have our new button-up shirt. Want to look and feel like a hundred bucks? It doesn't cost a hundred bucks, but we're branching out into just professional attire that totally makes sense in the office. This is from our nine to five line. So hence the cute little, you know, clock thing that's on it. It's soft, it's comfortable. It's designed so that it can be ironed,

Starting point is 00:38:24 but if you don't iron it, it'll look okay. Because, you know, we get our demographic. It's available in two different colors. Probably not going to happen. Yeah. It's made of the same material as our polo. Buttons up all the way. Look at this.

Starting point is 00:38:40 We've got some super, super nice looking, you know, LTT employees who are showing off the goods here. Yeah, that's right. We have, oh, we don't have an extra small of this one. We're moving towards extra smalls of all of our designs to accommodate. I mean, that looks pretty good on Yvonne, considering that it's just's just the small showing off all the different ways you can wear it and everything anyway cool so that's our that's our button-up shirt long sleeve pretty nice and look at that we've got a nice long description for it as well okay I don't remember where I was going with this anyway the point is in the checkout no the cart Luke help me out which one is it the cart in the cart in the cart there will be a box to leave a merch message.

Starting point is 00:39:25 And if you don't happen to need anything from the store right now, you can always just buy a gift card. And then instead of just throwing money at the screen, you'll have the gift card. And then when we come out with something that's more to your liking in the future, then you can order it then. So if we don't get to your message, at least, hey, you get your order in the mail. Also, this is the last chance to grab the labs first series of t-shirts and hoodies so you guys are

Starting point is 00:39:51 going to want to check those out this is our uh non-zippy just regular kangaroo top and our own blanks available in a wide variety of different colors with the labs logo and hashtag first on the back sick oh right and we have a deal what's the deal oh spend a hundred bucks on the store and you get the meme face sequin pillow for free just add the pillow to your cart and then if you also have a hundred dollars of other stuff the discount will be applied automatically all right dan you want to hit us with a couple merch messages yeah absolutely hey ldl any idea what's happening with the new intel workstation cpus that's a really good question i mean we knew that sapphire rapids workstation was coming i i mean aren't there aren't there just motherboards on Newegg? Hold on a second.

Starting point is 00:40:49 I'm trying to think. Yeah, we covered it from a server standpoint. Wait! No, we even did a workstation one. Wait, what do you mean? Hold on. Yeah, they're here. Oh, wait. No, these are Xeon W... Wait, Xeon W. Yeah, those are the workstation ones. Yeah, you can just buy them. What about motherboards? Okay, those look pretty server-oriented. Okay, you know what? I'm sorry. I'm not actually

Starting point is 00:41:13 sure what your question is because I believe they exist. They don't make a ton of sense, so I don't think a lot of people are buying them, but as far as I can tell, yeah, they exist. Someone in Flowplane chat said, the Intel chips are out, not overly impressive,

Starting point is 00:41:34 and Wendell has one. So you can check out Level 1 Techs. I'm sure he has some content on it. Okay, nice. Next up. After Computex, the TechTuber community has had some of the most interesting conversations I have heard in years. Do you have thoughts on Jim Keller's RISC-V project or OpenPleb? is probably going to be absolutely killer, but I have to confess, I haven't looked at what he's said about it publicly.

Starting point is 00:42:10 I know that Jim Keller has given some just hilarious talks recently. He had that really good one where he basically outlined the progression of the Zen architecture, like way past what AMD had announced publicly, and it all looked pretty feasible. And given that it's Jim Keller who designed Zen in the Zen architecture, like way past what AMD had announced publicly and it all looked pretty feasible. And given that it's Jim Keller who designed Zen in the first place,

Starting point is 00:42:29 or what was the chief architect for Zen? Obviously it's a, it's a team effort, but given that it was Jim Keller, you know, it's pretty credible compared to the typical rumors or, or, or leaks that you'll hear about that kind of stuff.

Starting point is 00:42:42 Um, all I can, all I can say is that if Jim Keller is involved, I will be absolutely floored if it's not amazing. And I'm a lot more bullish on alternative architectures than I was in the past. And I have Apple to thank for that. Apple, yeah. Yeah, the fact that they came in

Starting point is 00:43:01 and made the transition again. Like, man apple apple does this man so they went from power pc to intel and then they went from intel over to arm they're just like yo this is how we do and rosetta 2 is kind of amazing the fact that you can run old x86 applications on these m1 and m2 max it's mind-blowing. So if we see a RISC-V design that has that kind of incredible translation capability in hardware, I don't know. The sky's the limit.

Starting point is 00:43:36 I mean, I think for high-performance gaming, it's going to be a long time before you're going to be able to, to run on anything other than, you know, native, but for almost anything else, given how much of what we do on a computer runs in a web browser these days, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:43:58 I, I just, I've given up predicting it to be perfectly honest with you. Ever since I said, crypto will never be actually used for anything when that story came out about someone buying a house with it like nine years ago I I feel like I'm better off not predicting anything about the future and just being you know cautiously optimistic about everything yeah sounds good I love web 3.0. Sure thing. NFTs. Love it. Kidding.

Starting point is 00:44:29 Yeah, I think there's limits to all things. I'm really glad we didn't do anything. Everything with moderation, Linus. Yeah, I'm really glad we didn't do anything with NFTs. What do you mean? The potatoes. That wasn't an NFT. That was just a PNG. It's shocking how many people bought them.

Starting point is 00:44:42 I mean, thank you for your support. Uncle Linus farms all sorts, doesn't discriminate. Real potatoes, picture potatoes. Hey, love it. And massive shout out to the float plane team for turning that around so quickly. The fact that you guys managed to generate those potato images and figure out how to dole them out when people ordered them.

Starting point is 00:45:02 And like, how long did you have? Like 36 hours total to create that entire system for it to happen automatically hard that was that was like to be fair it was just dolly outputting images um yeah but getting it integrated with the store yes that was cool that's the part that made me like all the drop down options and stuff that was yeah that was pretty sweet. Potato network graphics, love it. Thanks, Twitch chat. I just wanted to, you mentioned us generating them,

Starting point is 00:45:30 and that's sort of true. It just wasn't our tool. Oh, no. We didn't use a tool. We did generate it. No, I meant more the workflow. The fact that it was automated, that people could just add it to their cart on the store

Starting point is 00:45:44 and they would get their potato potato actually worked yeah all right want to hit me with one more dan sure thing um hello lld and future me linus with the new software coming to mac to maybe enable gaming do you think they could compete with Valve and Proton since Mac OS is more adopted than Linux? Can anyone tell that Dan has been busy replying to merch messages and hasn't been listening to the show? No, I think it's more like You know as a as a platform for for gaming Just through adoption like removing Linux, right? I Think we I think we've addressed it

Starting point is 00:46:27 okay moving on pretty well yeah i don't listen to you give me a high ld no it's okay i yeah i already removed one of those actually hi ld i recently got into a fang company through my college hoping to get an internship in the future any advice on securing an IT job in the long run, currently in customer support? You know what? I mean, I'd say the biggest thing is, oh man, I don't know. See, I was about to give you, you know, some of the advice that's worked for me over the years. Make yourself indispensable. You know, talk about your accomplishments, but don't brag.

Starting point is 00:47:03 Like, you know, making sure people know what you do. You know, being cheerful. You know, setting boundaries. But also, you know, going the extra mile when it's necessary to make sure that the team succeeds as a whole. You know, all that stuff that should guarantee success in the workplace. But then you've got companies like Meta and Google and I was about to say Facebook because like whatever, you know, you've got companies like Meta and Google, Microsoft, just sort of slashing job. Twitter, you know, just slashing jobs seemingly with very little rhyme or reason in some cases. And I don't know, it feels like what you're asking me is, how do I walk through a minefield without getting hit? And I'm like, yeah, well, avoid the signs that say mine.

Starting point is 00:47:52 And it's like, yeah, but it's a minefield. You could just get your leg blown off anyway. And nothing that I say- I'm already in the minefield. Thanks, buddy. Yeah, nothing that I could say could make a difference. I understand where communities like r slash anti-work are coming from. I don't agree with everything that they say,

Starting point is 00:48:09 and I don't think that if I had had that attitude, I would have had the same success in my career that I have. But the other side of that is, well, if you're just going to get sh** canned anyway, regardless of how good a job you do, then what loyalty do you owe the company anyway? I get it. Did you hear about the person

Starting point is 00:48:30 who saved Toy Story 2 getting laid off? Wait, is this also the person who was responsible for Lightyear? Because that was a piece of garbage. I know Pixar let go of a few very very long time team members

Starting point is 00:48:46 i have no idea if that's related i just know um someone ran some command that deleted all of their their like local corporate files for toy story 2 i think it's one person was it it was one of them i don't know uh and then this person happens to have a backup at their like home so they saved the entire project you're right it is too okay yeah yeah i it just it's it's just amazing that like one of the biggest movies of all time was saved by a singular person and then that person was like the fact that it was like possible to lay that person off is just kind of amazing. Well,

Starting point is 00:49:29 yes and no. I mean, okay. Okay. I'm going to, I'm going to be unpopular here, but that was 20 years ago. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:49:39 It does help that they're, they're probably paid in like some amount of their compensation is probably shares. So she produced, they would have gained, they're probably paid in like some amount of their compensation is probably shares so they would have gained she produced Lightyear which was a piece of shit and you know if I okay you know what let's bring it

Starting point is 00:49:58 let's bring it close to home okay Luke Luke Lafreniere was single handedly responsible for getting the float plane platform off the ground okay 10 years later it wasn't but all right well getting it off the ground initially i mean i think you actually oh did it was aj in from day zero? Not technically, but I think it was day eight or something. Okay, because I thought we had, you could download the file from the forum

Starting point is 00:50:36 before anyone else touched it. Okay, so then sure. Because remember, time was of the essence. Okay, I'm going gonna do a short history lesson here just to give you guys context for why i think it's actually appropriate for me to say that luke single-handedly got float plane off the ground well that it wasn't vessel then though or it wasn't a float plane then though it was called rip vessel it doesn't matter and it was terrible it doesn't it doesn't like this this. Like this isn't an amazing accomplishment.

Starting point is 00:51:06 Luke, I love your team. You love your team. You're doing the right thing, you know, making sure that we are respecting the contributions of your team. But just bear with me for a second here, okay? When Vessel shut down, so that was the early access video platform that people subscribed to for $3 a month

Starting point is 00:51:22 that we actually had a fair degree of success with. When they shut down, they gave us something in the neighborhood of, what was it, like a week or two of notice before the site was just going to go dark. We got basically no notice whatsoever. That meant that we had days to come up with some kind of strategy

Starting point is 00:51:43 and communicate that strategy to our viewers on the vessel platform to try to somehow migrate them because vessel wasn't going to be making life easier for us that meant that we had to use what we had and what we had was a video and upload it to vessel right and so luke before anyone else came on board got us to a point where we could point people at the forum and say okay go sign up here we're going to keep you your early access um you're going to be able to just like download the video and you can send payment through our crappy janky payment system on the forum that's very broken and let's try to have some kind of continuity here now luke didn't do everything in the same way that um galen didn't do everything on toy story 2 but luke was instrumental in us getting that audience migrated.

Starting point is 00:52:46 And that audience being migrated was a big part of why we were able to put funding into the platform. The platform essentially funded itself. And if we hadn't had the opportunity to migrate that audience over, we may have never made the investment and float plane never would have become what it is today. I think that's actually a fairly reasonable prediction of how things would have gone if we had not managed to move thousands of users

Starting point is 00:53:11 off a vessel onto pre-floatplane. Vessel, rip vessel was, I think it was just a sub-forum on the forum. Now, let's fast forward 20 years later and you're not working on floatplane anymore because floatplane is shipped or whatever you work on you know um butt boat and oh my god i hope this i hope this ends up being true is buttboat.com taken because i'd love for this to be a product anyway the point is you, you work on you work on fail boat.

Starting point is 00:53:47 I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's like it's a pool floaty. It's a pool floaty and we call it butt boat. Butt noodle boat. OK, so you're working on you're working on butt noodle boat dot com. And it sucks. Everyone hates it.

Starting point is 00:54:06 It loses a bunch of money. I personally think it's pretty crap. And I basically go, hey, Luke, it's been 20 years since that pivotal moment when you did a great job. I really don't know if you've got what it takes anymore. I think it's time for you to hit the bricks and enjoy

Starting point is 00:54:25 your, your, your silver parachute or golden parachute, whatever your parachute is made of. There's probably going to be some kind of parachute involved. Um, hopefully we can still be friends just because you did something 20 years ago. Does that somehow entitle you to be employed there forever? I actually don't think so no and i think i think in this case uh part of their compensation package was probably stocks um so that kind of makes a lot easier um and i i think there's a lot to be said too because like in in your story and i understand you have to distill it down to this or else we would sit here for an hour describing the scenario um but in your story there's like there's nothing that

Starting point is 00:55:09 they did between those two points there's like there's toy story 2 and then there's light year and it's just like uh like i i wouldn't i wouldn't like it to be this is the only thing that they did bad you know sure like if they if they did toy story 2 and then they did good work for however many years you know what that's like you're kind of stuck but here's the challenge what if they did good work for all those years or at worst mediocre work for all those years and then light year sucked well now what are options? Because demoting someone from a producer role, that's tough. What am I supposed to do? Do I publicly humiliate you by demoting you, by putting you back, you know, obviously not to this degree, but do I put you back on,

Starting point is 00:56:01 you know, fetching juice box duty, right? From a producer role, or is it better at that point to go, okay, I guess you're Peter principled. Maybe it's time for a fresh start somewhere else. Is it actually more humane to tell someone, Hey, you actually are not as good as we thought you were. I guess you're going to do like a lower and lower tier duty now i think this would come down to stuff that we wouldn't be able to have visibility on um and like maybe these things happened i don't know but like i would like to assume at a good company that

Starting point is 00:56:38 there would be a conversation about these types of things um and like how how bad was light year um i never watched it uh phil and in floatplane chat says light year wasn't anything special but i thought it was okay sucks seems a little harsh but here's my rebuttal to that pixar is a studio that prides itself on only releases gangers shooting for the moon um and light year was the it's more that the errors in light year were so preventable and look i'm not even talking about any of the culture war crap that took place over the same-sex kiss that was in the movie in fact i thought it was pretty inconsequential i'm talking about the fact that it just it was just stupid um like it it opens spoiler alert and I actually participated in the They're Just Movies podcast episode on Lightyear. So I really watched it with a critical eye, and then I've already recorded a lot of my thoughts.

Starting point is 00:57:52 So this will be repetitive to any of you who watched that episode, but there frankly aren't that many of you, which is why the podcast doesn't exist anymore. Anyway, the point is, the movie opens with, when Andy went to the theater before the events of toy story one this is the movie he saw and then i sat and watched an hour and a half of definitely not the movie that andy watched yes they set the stage completely wrong. Buzz is a little bitch. Emperor Zurg turns out to be himself. And it's like, f***ing what? That makes absolutely no sense for that to be what he watched. absolutely no sense for that to be what what he watched like the they've got these weird kind of you know comedic relief characters that are kind of okay i guess but just but just the actions that

Starting point is 00:58:54 the characters take often make no sense whatsoever like it's just it's fine for kids you know my kids said it was good but my kids will say the emoji movie is good that doesn't mean that it's fine for kids. You know, my kids said it was good, but my kids will say the emoji movie is good. That doesn't mean that it's up to Pixar's standard. And if all I wanted to do was eat some popcorn or whatever, then, you know, sure. Uh,

Starting point is 00:59:17 if I, if it's on out of the corner of my eye and I'm not thinking critically about it, then it's fine. But there were major structural issues with the movie and with its role in the entire cinematic universe that, for better or for worse, it is part of that just were so easy to just not do.

Starting point is 00:59:39 It just... Buzz just could have gone on an ass-kicking adventure where he fights Emperor Zerg. That was all you had to do. And instead, you chose to just completely f*** up for no apparent reason. So that is the kind of egregious error in judgment that I would look at and I'd go,

Starting point is 01:00:03 yeah, I just don't know if your head's in the game. That's my justification. go, yeah, I just don't know if your head's in the game. That's my justification. Yeah, I looked up the Rotten Tomatoes and I was surprised because it shows audience score 84%, tomato meter 74%. But I think it just immediately comes back to what you were talking about earlier, where Pixar has to release bangers every time.

Starting point is 01:00:28 And you think about the investment period that they have for these movies like they'll work on one of these things for such a ridiculously long time um like i remember hearing just about how they rendered the water was this pixar finding nemo was that pixar i think it was yeah finding nemo's pixar um yeah i i remember reading articles on just just purely how they rendered the water for finding nemo and it was like amazing like the work and time investment back then to be able to do something at that level was incredible um and i'm sure if i look up rotten tomatoes finding nemo's like% or something stupid like that. 99%. Yeah, exactly.

Starting point is 01:01:09 So like this is what you're aiming for. And the gap, when you look at performance metrics for things, or really almost any measurement, if you're looking at something, yeah, performance metrics for practically anything. If you look at it, the gap between 99 and 99.9 and basically everything before 99 is such a huge difference because those extreme top performers at the very, very, very top end are going to do so incredibly vastly better than everything that's like 98 and below. So you, yeah, hitting like 80 something, it's not really acceptable for a studio at that size.

Starting point is 01:01:51 People are talking about a lot of stuff in the chat. I feel like I should address some of these. One, people are saying that it made 224 worldwide on 200 million. That means it lost money. That production budget does not include marketing budget, which in the case of a major hopeful blockbuster like this, That means it lost money. That production budget does not include marketing budget, which in the case of a major hopeful blockbuster like this is going to be tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. It is not by accident that everywhere you turn,

Starting point is 01:02:16 you see marketing for latest Pixar Fest, whatever the case may be. So no, it didn't only make a little bit of money it lost a ton of money um and that's that's a lot worse than is that is that total box office as well because the theaters take a very significant portion of that uh no i think that's their take don't quote me on that i'm actually not 100 sure the math, but what I know is that if you see production budget, 100 million box office, 100 million,

Starting point is 01:02:48 that movie lost a ton of money. Um, yeah. And there, there was another one here like, Hey, you can't just fire one person over or something like that. And it's like,

Starting point is 01:02:57 yeah, or maybe you can, maybe it was their call. Maybe the buck, maybe the buck did stop with them. And also they fired a bunch of people. Um, it wasn't just her.

Starting point is 01:03:05 So there's that. There's people talking about how, hey, maybe it didn't make money on the box office, but, hey, maybe it made money on toys. Not every one of Pixar's films does really well on toys. I have this conspiracy theory that that's why it took so long to do an Incredibles sequel. Because I don't see nearly the same kind of merchandising on Incredibles compared to some of their more cutesy stuff.

Starting point is 01:03:29 Something like Cars. Why did they make three of those in rapid succession? Because they sell a lot of freaking Cars merchandise. Little boys, little four-year-old boys love Cars. And honestly those aren't my favorite movies either.

Starting point is 01:03:47 I absolutely hate the Cars universe. I think they're relatively garbage compared to a lot of what Pixar has done. But there's no doubt that they're going to keep pumping out Cars because, boy, does it ever do well in terms of toys. But I'm not convinced that Lightyear, the fact that they went animated live action i'm not convinced that lightyear would have really moved the needle for them yeah oh no oh no i'm making people mad this 23 year old boy likes cars i love cars could be

Starting point is 01:04:20 worse could be planes yeah that's true um wait they made something called planes is that real yeah yeah yeah it's one of those like direct to dvd garbage like lion king one and a half like that that kind of thing yeah okay yeah yeah um topic change yeah yeah let's move on i don't even remember how we got to what we're talking about right now you know what should we talk about the uh review of the stick locks yeah let's talk about jake simmons review of our stick locks i have to confess i had never heard of jake simmons before 57 000 subscribers all right i tried stick locks on every controller okay this is freaking awesome. That's more controllers than we tried it on.

Starting point is 01:05:09 So you guys are going to want to go check that out. But in the meantime, I have a summary of some of the findings. Works on OG Xbox, Atari VCS, Razer Kishi V1, Dreamcast with some wiggle, N64, I wasn wiggle, N64. I wasn't expecting N64 to work. GameCube slash WaveBird, but not the C-Stick. Wii Nunchuck. Did not think to try that.

Starting point is 01:05:34 Wii U controller and gamepad. And Switch with a custom grip case. Doesn't work on PS2, PS3, modded PS5 with swappable stick covers. The sticks are too tall. PS Vita, the sticks are too short. And Atari joystick. It goes on but doesn't prevent movement. And look at this! A little tier list and everything for us!

Starting point is 01:05:54 That's amazing! Hey, thank you so much for taking the time making the... Okay. Alright. Now you're just memeing. Now you're just now you're just memeing now you're just trolling um love it though all right luke do you want to pick us a topic sure yeah um let's talk about louisiana age verification laws uh let's talk about Louisiana age verification laws.

Starting point is 01:06:25 Let's talk about those. Two states, Utah and Louisiana have passed recent laws requiring pornographic websites to verify user age via government ID. Okay, I'm going to let you finish, but that sounds like a terrible idea. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Let's keep going. Government ID age verification. Let's go. Pornhub complied with the Louisiana law, which uses a state run system. Oh boy. For digitized identity confirmation, but blocked the entire state of Utah because Utah has no such system. Virginia, Mississippi,

Starting point is 01:07:06 state of Utah, because Utah has no such system, Virginia, Mississippi, and Arkansas are all considering similar laws. According to Pornhub, it was one of the few adult sites in Louisiana, well, okay, on the internet, I guess, that complied with the law. Consequently, it saw an 80% drop in traffic in the state, while some of this loss is driven by increased VPN usage, which we know for a fact, because right around when this happened, there was a chart of popular Google searches by geography, and the state of Louisiana was like, by far the biggest spike was for VPN. So that's definitely a thing that happened. It is also saying that it is likely

Starting point is 01:07:48 that a large percentage of users simply switch to sites that haven't complied. And I also agree that that is true because you're going to have a bunch of people that aren't really that into tech that probably have no idea what a VPN is and that also don't want to like hand over their government ID, which both of those things

Starting point is 01:08:07 sound very likely and very true. Earlier this week, Louisiana passed additional penalties for websites out of compliance, including up to $5,000 every day in potential fines. In quotes, this makes the internet more unsafe, Pornhnhub argues by shuffling users away from sites that safely measures its place with safety measures of well with safety measures of place cool um pornhub reported that louisiana users have already experienced identity theft as a result of the age verification law they're also not, because there's probably honeypot sites. Now, hold on. Before you say the last part,

Starting point is 01:08:47 let's talk about what Pornhub is right about. And they are definitely right that submitting your government ID online to some random patchwork of verification systems, because, man, let me tell you, if if u.s tax code is anything to go by this is going to be an absolute show it's going to be a disaster um also hey luke do you remember that time i forget what state it was but didn't they basically just have some kind of credentials available on the site or something like that? Or the roster of all of their workers in Inspect Element or something like that?

Starting point is 01:09:33 It was like the password to be able to access the user database for a government website was stored in HTML or something. It was something crazy like that. And then when a reporter talked about it, they brought him to court for hacking because he pressed F12 and read something. Yeah. That was amazing. There's also, if I remember correctly, in Australia,

Starting point is 01:10:00 their passport database or something leaked. This stuff, just because it's like oh there's a government system that verifies the id like that's not that's not better um it was social security numbers for teachers um and it was censored visually but if you did inspect element it was totally visible yeah so even censor it why would it even be there it's so stupid but these are these are the kinds of these are the kinds of people that you are going to be entrusting your government issued id to um they're right they're right that submitting your your idea and i mean oh man that is even that is even aside from just the ideological angle that you can attack this from so a no you shouldn't be submitting your government

Starting point is 01:10:54 id online to a database where it probably will be leaked that's number one and and i'm not saying the solution is to have websites maintain this because that's even worse you don't want every random what i'm gonna i'm gonna send my id to every like random porno pornography site sure because the porn industry has a really great reputation for you know only engaging in business in the most up and up way so so sure that sounds like a great idea um but regardless of where i'm sending it that is an awful awful idea and they are they're right that this actually does make internet users largely less safe yes you know what i am you know what i am i am going to go at it from the ideological standpoint as well i couldn't help noticing that these are mostly right-leaning

Starting point is 01:11:56 states isn't is this a small government thing to do is that not part of this conversation i uh i'm having a i'm having to say like what do you think what do you think an alternative solution could be that still approaches because it doesn't seem it doesn't seem like they're trying to yeah no i guess they sort of are like if if there's if there's laws already in place that you aren't supposed to be able to access this stuff unless you're a certain age um in in in i'm gonna put in quotes here in improving uh their ability to enforce those laws um kind of potentially might make sense. Sure, but like it's... But this is just a terrible way of going about it.

Starting point is 01:12:49 What do you think about... I've been sitting here trying to think about alternative ideas. What do you think about if they had like a block list that parents could... If they had a block list and instructions on how to set it up that parents could run at home or something like that? think that would providing resources is fine yeah yeah yeah but the whole idea with small government is that you're not supposed to just you know step in and make decisions on behalf of people um that's like the whole the whole idea it's not supposed to be a nanny state and this is

Starting point is 01:13:27 1000 percent nanny state this is modern this is net nanny state yeah um like like literally if they if they gave residents um you know the uh a resource that was like hey uh you know all you have to do is contact your isp and you can request you know the to pie hole you know every possible source of pornography and you can report a new one here even that is a lot more regulation than some people um would want like that's a lot more interference and you know a free and open marketplace or you know whatever whatever it is but it's certainly a lighter touch this is a this is heavy-handed this is this is here's how we're doing it and if you don't comply we're going to fine you five thousand dollars a a day. Also, our system is stupid.

Starting point is 01:14:26 And it's one of those things where I don't think it's exclusive to right-leaning or left-leaning politicians. I think that every politician, almost across the board, seems to fundamentally misunderstand how tech works. The vast majority of them are actual dinosaurs. This is not how tech works this is not the vast majority of them are natural dinosaurs this is not how tech works you can't just some some rando website based in china or based somewhere in eastern europe or whatever what you're going to send them a bill for five thousand dollars a day they're just going to not pay it. And then that's it.

Starting point is 01:15:08 That's actually the end of that entire interaction. So all you're doing, and this is a valid argument from Pornhub, all you're doing is you are penalizing, you're putting at a disadvantage the websites that are willing to work with you on regulation by enforcing regulation that is stupid and doesn't make any sense. So great, you have successfully even further deregulated the pornographic material that your citizens still definitely have access to.

Starting point is 01:15:40 Absolutely wild. And the thing that's crazy to me is it's not like they're imposing this on twitter yeah it's not like they're imposing this on reddit it is it's not like they're imposing this on okay anything else twitter has gotten i swear to you i know this is anecdotal but twitter has gotten even worse to the point where i i can't click on anything that's trending and scroll more than maybe like five or six tweets before I will almost certainly find hardcore pornography it's unbelievable yeah so like what do you need that age verification for for twitter now I don't know it seems weird I don't know. Seems weird. I don't know, man.

Starting point is 01:16:30 Oh, man. There's some shockingly bad takes in the chat. Oh, man. Oh, wow. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. However, I had cut you off before you finished going through the notes on this. And the reason for that was that I wanted to talk about what I agree with Pornhub about first.

Starting point is 01:16:53 But it's also necessary for us to talk about the ways that I don't agree with Pornhub. Their solution is device-based age verification rather than requiring users to submit their ID when they access an adult site. That is stupid. And obviously not going to work. Device-based age verification would be... Oh, man. Possible. It would be oh man possible it would be possible but they would need major buy-in from i mean who

Starting point is 01:17:33 apple google microsoft uh we would have to we would have to move into a world where uh i mean i guess they'd probably need firefox on board brave while we're at it and there's no way brave's going to support any kind of anything to do with any of this i suspect um they would need so many entities on board because they're proposing device-based which is obviously asinine because the second i hand my kids my phone to follow some origami tutorial, oh good, they're now verified for Pornhub. That was definitely that good system, right? But I could see if it was actually built into something like biometric verification. So you go to this website and you just tap your fingerprint sensor or something like that

Starting point is 01:18:25 i could see that working that's hello that's not device-based though that's biometric authentication and then all of a sudden okay who's responsible for storing those credentials and validating them in the first place okay well now we're back to the same bloody problem because it all has to be an essential database. So their device-based authentication is, what's the word for that? A red herring? I'm going to have straw man. I can't remember.

Starting point is 01:18:52 It's a something. Not a straw man. No, it's a red herring. Something that misleads or distracts from the relevant or important question, I guess. That's not quite a red herring either, actually. Basically, it's a distraction. It's a smoke screen. There, that's what I was looking for. They're basically going, don't do this because it negatively impacts our business. It comes back to

Starting point is 01:19:14 what we were talking about earlier, where, you know what, maybe they do actually care about a safer internet. Realistically, what they probably care about is running their businesses in a competitive manner. And the fact that because they are not based in, you know, the Middle East somewhere, actually Middle East would probably not be a good place to be based if you're running a porn site, but Eastern Europe somewhere, because they're not based in Eastern Europe somewhere, they actually may be subject to paying these fines, which is the real reason that they're complying with these new standards and these new verification policies. And they just don't want to do it

Starting point is 01:19:46 because it puts them at a competitive disadvantage. That's the real reason. And then they're proposing solutions that I think they ultimately know aren't going to work to just delay the implementation of anything because at the end of the day, nothing is going to work in the same way that they were never able

Starting point is 01:20:04 to keep Playboy magazines out of the hands of horny teenagers in the same way that they were never able to keep Playboy magazines out of the hands of horny teenagers in the woods or whatever. Right. Like that's what I was just going to say is like, if you, if you are someone who is very much in support of restricting access to these types of things,

Starting point is 01:20:19 I think the thing that you need to understand about this particular situation is that it, it didn't even sort of work. Like users either just VPNed or they just used a different website and that is always going to be a thing. So, like, it's just a bad solution because it leaves the people that are using it in a very sketchy situation of having their government IDs leaked. And if they don't go that route. Remember, if this user list leaks, you're going to be verified as someone who visited a pornographic website. Which, you know what? I don't care.

Starting point is 01:21:06 Your SO might. Maybe your employer is like, hardcore anti-pornography. Maybe they fire you. Should that be any of their business? Like if we want to... It might be a conversation you want to have with your SO if that's something you're hiding from your SO.

Starting point is 01:21:24 But your employer, yeah, I don't know. That's probably not a conversation you want to have with your SO if that's something you're hiding from your SO. But your employer, yeah, I don't know. That's probably not a conversation you want to have with your boss. There's no reason why they should ever need to know. I just mean in general. Like, okay, Luke, I think you and I both are pretty open in terms of communication with our SOs. But even you and I, I don't think agree on everything. And I'm not going to get into details. you and I, I don't think agree on everything. And I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into details, but there are lots of things that some, for some couples are totally normal and something

Starting point is 01:21:50 that they talk about very openly. And for other couples are things that they simply don't talk about. You know, like for some people, um, the idea of spending any money or having a savings account that their SO doesn't know about is ridiculous. Like, to the point where that would be essentially financial cheating. Whereas other couples literally have a relationship policy where they don't talk about finances with each other. There's a broad spectrum. And I'm not judging right now.

Starting point is 01:22:23 That's not the point of any of this the point of this is that a database of people who accessed porn leaking could have serious negative ramifications for people that are avoidable and unnecessary and that are people's personal choice sort of how they want to manage their communication around it okay that's all i'm trying to say because like like uh the hub um is is quite general but there's a lot of sites that aren't general sure right yeah so what if what if something about certain preferences that you may have comes out um that you you aren't exactly ready to say you're in the closet and you're not ready to talk about that yet we might as as well just say it, Luke, right? I mean, we're...

Starting point is 01:23:07 Yeah. I don't know if this episode even necessarily qualifies as appropriate for general audiences anymore with how much we're talking about this stuff. But I mean, I got to be honest with you. I have pretty much just accepted that when and if my kids get curious about this stuff, there's nothing I can do to prevent them from accessing it.

Starting point is 01:23:27 So we're just going to have to have frank conversations about it. You know, hey, you know, that's, you know, that's not, that's not real. That's not how that actually works. You know, these are actors. I think this is no longer really a tech conversation, but I think that point right there is like the most important part of the whole thing like don't please god do not go into any of this stuff in real life with an expectation that it should be anything even remotely like what you just view but anyways let's uh let's maybe topic change. Sure.

Starting point is 01:24:14 Speaking of Reddit and how I'm sure Reddit isn't going to require this type of age verification, but sure has a lot of that kind of stuff on it. Wow, great segue. Subreddits protest API costs. Over 2,000 Reddit communities, and as far as I know, including the Linus Tech Tips one, which is not run by us. Over 2,000 Reddit communities are planning to go dark for 48 hours on June 12th

Starting point is 01:24:35 in protest of Reddit's proposed API costs due to the likelihood of pricing out third-party app developers. Nearly 40 of the subreddits have over 5 million subscribers each. The block that they're planning on doing will last at least 48 hours,

Starting point is 01:24:52 but some of the subreddits may not come back at all. Wow, I didn't know that part. Some people are mad, and rightly so. Yeah, yeah. Following concerns raised by disabled moderators.

Starting point is 01:25:09 I genuinely don't know what that means. Reddit has said that it will make an exception to the API prices for non-commercial accessibility focused third-party apps. Okay. The third-party apps Apollo, Syn third-party apps apollo sync and reddit is fun have already

Starting point is 01:25:28 announced that they will be shutting down when the new api rules come into effect reddit meanwhile is reportedly laying off around five percent of its current employees what's going on um something that's uh one notable oh uh yeah something that's something that's not in notes, but I wanted to talk about a little bit is the developer of the Apollo app, who I didn't realize is Canadian. Yo, shout out, fellow Canadian. The developer of the Apollo app posted a really, really good rundown

Starting point is 01:25:57 of why this is a problem, like why what Reddit is doing is so unfair. The ways thatdit has misrepresented or even outright lied about what's going on and um a really sort of solid breakdown of why they basically were given no choice but to shut down their app like it's it's it's it's a completely untenable situation and they also did a really good job of outlining the hypocrisy of reddit throughout all of this where they even you know provided assurances that they're not going to pull a twitter and basically just turn off third-party apps um and yet have essentially done so. He's got receipts, which is really cool.

Starting point is 01:26:48 Most parts of Canada, as far as I'm aware, are single consent recording. When I say states, I just mean like places. I don't mean like United States. But single consent recording places. So that means that as long as one party gives consent, you can record an interaction with someone. So he actually recorded his calls with Reddit and posted the audio so people can see where Reddit lied.

Starting point is 01:27:19 Basically just in the conversation said one thing, fully understood what he was saying, and then turned around and completely misrepresented it to the community in an effort to turn it into like a, he says, she said situation. It's not, it's very black and white.

Starting point is 01:27:35 Reddit went full scumbag on this and it sucks. Yeah, that's really rough. Yeah. I like that part there's some other really good uh comments in the chat talking about how not not only it's not just shutting down as a form of protest it's also shutting down because the moderation tools that they use rely on the api and they're not going to start paying reddit to moderate Reddit. Now my understanding is that this isn't in our notes either. So guys,

Starting point is 01:28:10 you're going to have to correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding is that Reddit has said that they're not going to, they're not going to charge moderation tools, but don't quote me on that because I'm not necessarily sure that they would 100% be able to differentiate. I mean, they literally just got caught lying, right lying right so yeah and they're also big liars so yeah what does their word mean at all my understanding is that oh oh oh right this was yesterday that i was reading that there was going to be an ama and so the today. Oh man, I haven't even, oh wow. This is, oh wow. Oh wow. This is, this is as bad as like it could be. Um, so yeah, they did an AMA and this is,

Starting point is 01:29:16 wild uh oh wow so you got called out for being a two-faced piece of shit and your best response is to attack the integrity of someone for recording and leaking a private phone call integrity of someone for recording and leaking a private phone call. Wow. Wow. You want to read some of it out? I'm trying to find it right now. Oh, sorry. His joke is the least of our issues. His behavior and communications with us has been all over the place,

Starting point is 01:29:52 saying one thing to us while saying something completely different externally, recording and leaking a private phone call to the point where I don't know how we could do business with him. And so this is talking about the developer of Apollo, Christian. Wow. This is unreal. Christian literally has tapes and you're going to double down on this. Like what is actually happening right now? How are they, how is this, how is this, how is this a serious company run by serious people? Now you asked before Luke, you know why they're making these changes and,

Starting point is 01:30:35 uh, it's supposed to be because they're aiming to go IPO. So they're looking to boost revenue, uh, you know, do all those things that look good to, for an initial public offering, which sort of reinforces people. I wish I wish firing a bunch of people isn't something that looked good for a public offering. It is apparently, but I just hate that that's true.

Starting point is 01:30:55 That's really frustrating. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where I feel like we've experienced a period of shocking stability in internet services. Do you kind of get what I mean? Like for 20 years, basically everyone has used Gmail. You know, for a solid, what, 15 years, pretty much everyone used Facebook. And then recently, you know, over the last two, three years, it's like, oh, okay. Yeah. No, I message on, you know, Facebook's not cool. My nan uses Facebook. Um, but like, even then most people I know still have a Facebook account so that their nan can message them. Right. Like it's,

Starting point is 01:31:46 so that their nan can message them right like it's it's it's sort of it's sort of ubiquitous right um for for i mean yeah i'm trying to think like you have to go back maybe what 12 13 years to when dig was a thing and then reddit took over absolutely took over there hasn't been a reddit competitor reddit and youtube yeah in my opinion have been like staples incredible unassailable mainstays for a very very long time yeah and so i feel like it lasted so long that we started to take it for granted but it used to be that this kind of stuff happened all the time. You know, E-bombs world showed up and disappeared over a span of a few years. You know, Newgrounds went from being huge to being utterly irrelevant over a span of a few years. Like this kind of stuff happened a lot. But we've just experienced this unprecedented period of stability in the online services that we use that I feel like is being disrupted right now in a way that we're just not used to. Reddit is not unassailable.

Starting point is 01:32:56 Guys, we don't actually have to accept this. And I feel like that this period has resulted in complacency from these platforms as well, where they're just being blatantly anti-user to the point where they must just think you have no other choice. Guess what? LinusTechTips.com still exists. If you want to go to a private forum and talk about stuff, you can. F***ing do it. We have been told a ton of times by a huge variety of people to just stop having the forum exist. No!

Starting point is 01:33:40 Because, like, they're like, oh, I mean, you guys have a subreddit, and, like, there's hardware subreddits and PCMR subreddits and all these other different things. So like, you don't really need to have your own forum in 2023. Yeah, we do. For a lot of reasons, they're right. But then for a lot of reasons, they're also wrong. And this is this is the reason why they're wrong uh we like having our own stuff it's why we have the forum it's why we have floatplane um because it it makes our things a little bit more unassailable right and we we come from an era of the internet where things were not stable at all and we we have not forgotten, apparently, which is probably good. Well, yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:26 I mean, especially because we've experienced it too. I mean, what happened to Vessel? We talked about that earlier on the show. It just disappeared like that. And we're going, okay, well, I guess we need to build our own Vessel because we can't rely on anything. And we've seen it. If I remember correctly, the notice we got from Vessel was immediate, wasn't it?

Starting point is 01:34:43 No, it wasn't quite immediate. Or it was like Friday to Monday or something? Yeah, we had not a very long period of time. It was basically at the end of the month it's over, was what we got. We're just shutting it off. That was after the Verizon acquisition. And another example that, you know,

Starting point is 01:35:00 I'm glad we didn't just move to Patreon because there was that thing a couple of years ago where Patreon stopped, or the deal that they had with Vimeo just got sunsetted and everyone's rates got jacked up. And we're sitting here going, ours didn't.

Starting point is 01:35:15 You could have been on float plane, but like, you know, whatever. But then, you know, that's people putting their destiny in our hands too. And we like to think, you know, trust me, bro, we got you. Don't worry about it. But like you and I could be on the same plane and it could crash, you know, at which point,

Starting point is 01:35:30 you know, maybe, maybe things do change. I mean, I'm, I'd like to think that we're setting things up between you building out your team, me hiring a new executive to keep this thing running, not just a new executive, but having the executive team here to keep things, to keep things running smoothly, even if something did happen to me. But that takes time. And those things definitely didn't exist three, four, five years ago, right?

Starting point is 01:35:54 Yeah. Yeah. This is great. Looking like I should never be on the same flight. There was one point in time where the entire executive team, including one that at the time was not announced, but is now, which is Taryn,

Starting point is 01:36:10 the entire executive team was all on a ferry together. Yeah. And I remember thinking while we were on there, like, you know? With how reliable BC Ferries has been lately. Yeah, yeah. Really interesting. So everyone, what, just shows up on Monday monday i mean their key cards would still work but like yeah then what i what do we do yeah yeah oh man yeah who so okay shares in the company there people can still get paid yeah shares in the company would pass to our kids

Starting point is 01:36:45 but they'd be held in trust by the executor of our executor of our will um they would probably be subject to inheritance tax so the kids would basically have to sell the company that's yeah um and you just have to hope that whatever shark that smells blood in the water ends up being a friendly shark. Which I mean, statistically unlikely. Yeah. Well, you know, Oh, okay. Anyways. What's up? Oh, yes, people are talking about what kind of trouble Reddit appears to be in financially as well.

Starting point is 01:37:31 Fidelity, which led Reddit's $700 million funding round in 2021 at a valuation of $10 billion, has marked down the value of its Reddit stock again, reports TechCrunch. Okay, they marked it down by over 40 as of the end of april insider previously reported that they'd already marked it down in january in their january disclosures of course like a private stakeholder i guess they're kind of this is gonna be fuzzy math there fuzzy math

Starting point is 01:38:02 people seem to like hate it when I talk about this because I think reality just sucks and they find that very frustrating. I genuinely think that's what it is. But a massive percentage of stuff on the internet is not financially viable. This whole Twitch thing happened, right? And all these people are super pissed off

Starting point is 01:38:23 and they're pointing at different creators and they're like, hey, you should make a Twitch competitor. I had a few people tag me on Twitter being like, oh, just open Floatplane up and then bring a bunch of creators on. It's like actually making a Twitch creator is actually just a terrible idea unless your whole goal is to market gambling to children

Starting point is 01:38:44 like Kick or whatever else like i i don't they're they're like there there's it's such an incredibly deeply bad business model just having like open free streaming to infinite people is incredibly rough. There's a lot of stuff that makes sense. As annoying as it is, it makes sense that Twitch has been trying to do. Like I've looked at some of Twitch's actions where they're trying to like, the most recent one is just stupid in my opinion. But some of their other ones where they're like trying to get more percentages on things or they're trying to charge more for things. And I'm like, yeah, that sucks in a lot of cases for creators. This is bad, and the approach is bad,

Starting point is 01:39:31 and all those different types of things. But I understand where it's coming from because they're just hemorrhaging money all the time. And Amazon is sitting there being like, what are you even for? What is your value? We give all these people free Prime subscriptions and that just pours money into creators' pockets.

Starting point is 01:39:51 What is the point of this platform? It doesn't make any money. Like, why do we have this thing? Maybe they should have thought of that before they spent a billion dollars on it like a bunch of idiots. But that's how a lot of these internet companies work. They have no potential of ever making these internet companies work they just like they they have no potential

Starting point is 01:40:06 of ever making any money and companies are just like oh that looks sweet let's buy it for a billion dollars because that makes sense like just such a massive loss leader for what okay this is like oh no oh no luke is going after the Twitch chat now. I thought that was my thing. There's just, there's so many different examples of this. It's not just Twitch, but there's so many other examples of this too. And I know a huge percentage of the internet for a very long time there was pounding this drum of watch time. Like the only thing that matters at all on the internet for a huge portion there was watch time even microsoft was like oh man well mixer mixer we need to make mixer oh geez like it it was so such a frenzy there that seems to be over now but like what what was the actual value

Starting point is 01:40:58 of watch time the only actual value of watch time was getting users to either normalize on that particular website to spend more money there or to be able to sell those users more ads and just having banner ads does not pay for a live streaming service it's not enough are you sure more money but what would you know about that there's also this is the whole thing itchy itchy holes in twitch chat has another bad take amazon has plenty of money oh my god well yeah but you don't get plenty of money by operating services that lose money just burning it in a fire that's not that's not good business yeah so like i i don't know i yeah like you you look at the the business model for reddit and it's like yeah how does that make any sense like one of the ones that's just text which is wild yeah but i mean there is there is, I guess the pictures are externally hosted, aren't they? Maybe some of them aren't. I don't know.

Starting point is 01:42:08 Yeah, I think you can upload directly to Reddit, but it's like pretty light compared to something like even Twitter, where there's video, like directly embedded video. whole the whole thing is just so so many like silicon valley style companies are just wild to me um it's just this weird shifting pool of investor money and everyone's hoping to just like sell or buy at the right time that that that's that's like the whole the whole thing that's that's the entire thing it's like this store of wealth um that you're you're gambling on um and that's that's pretty much it. Oh, guys. Okay, apparently Reddit does have self-hosted pictures and video now, but 16,000 DVDs. The video player is horrible.

Starting point is 01:42:56 The Reddit video player is like the worst thing. It's so frustrating. It's so bad. It's actually so like impressively bad and it's not it's not even it's not even just their like content delivery which leaves a little bit to be desired sometimes but the like the controls are super broken it will fail the load extremely often it's just oh i love 16 000 dpis comment here twitch is making tons of money millions upon millions just not for amazon yeah yeah yeah streamers are making money yeah yeah that's fair that's that's fair

Starting point is 01:43:34 oh man and the bad thing the bad thing with the with the agreements there is it's this whole concept of like once you give someone something it's extremely hard to then take it back yeah um so some of these agreements that these platforms have established which are not sustainable um once you try to claw that back you look like uh a big i don't have a sensor button over here. You look like a big butthole. And it's very understandable because creators are sitting there. Every time you do that, if you claw anything back from creators as a platform, especially as a platform as big as Twitch, I guarantee you just completely ruined someone because there will have been someone who fairly recently um decided to quit their job or whatever and go full-time and then you just took 25 back off them and now they

Starting point is 01:44:32 can't afford to eat yep that will happen with platforms that big that will happen so like you you actually can't really claw it back speaking of aff affording to eat. So they're just left in this weird position. Can I tell you about our sponsors? Amazing segue. The show is brought to you today by, oh, Dan's getting geared up here. Oh, he's ready. He's dialed in. He's in the zone.

Starting point is 01:44:57 He's in some kind of zone. Okay. All right. Just relax, Dan. I refuse. Thanks to Circuit Specialists for sponsoring today's show. Are you looking for electronic components and equipment? Whether you're working on a personal project or a professional venture,

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Starting point is 01:47:00 Amazing. What do you want to talk about next, Luke? Let me check the doc. Apple studies thousands of heads, invents ray traced audio. Amazing. All right, let's do it. There was the six minute version. Oh wait, I lied. No, I lied. We're supposed to do three merge messages. Ah. Yeah, it's on me. Sorry. I'm a liar sometimes, like right now. You do do that. Let's see.

Starting point is 01:47:32 Hey, DLL, I am curious as to what is going on behind the scenes for a new labs website. Can you give us any spoilers on the tech behind it or how many people are working on it? Oh, I mean, do we have, can we show anybody anything, Luke? He's thinking. I have to get permission because I don't know the url oh um you should you should it's it's it's sent to you in an email almost every week um but uh don't look it up uh most of the work that's being done right now is not on the front live site. It is on tools in the back end because it's not ready for launch from the content side. So we've been somewhat waiting. There's also some

Starting point is 01:48:16 minor redesign things changing and stuff like that. But those aren't a huge priority right now. We're mostly working on some data gathering tools and stuff like that. But yeah, there's... Do you want to elaborate a little bit on that? Data gathering tools? That doesn't sound like anything cool, but what they're doing is super cool. No, no, no, no. I wasn't saying it's not cool.

Starting point is 01:48:35 I'm saying it's not visible. You can't see it right now because they're tools for us to use, you know? But I can explain what that is. I can explain what that is. Yeah, I believe it's four people that are working on it. Um, and it's, uh, it's what they have been working on is data aggregation. Uh, so basically Linus put out some marching orders a while ago that we want to be able to, uh, be a one-stop shop for like lookup information for different

Starting point is 01:49:02 products. Uh, so we've been looking into. Uh, effectively scraping, but we are interested in working directly with manufacturers to try to get information that way. But it's highly likely that most of these manufacturers will not have a way for us to just automatically gather info from them. Like I don't believe most manufacturers are going to have a product info API. So what do you don't show the doc actually don't show the doc.

Starting point is 01:49:35 Like actually close this. I'm not showing much of the doc. Dear God, I just wanted to show you. Do not share externally. I just wanted to show you do not share externally. Yeah, thanks. Sick. Super cool. Very excited about that. Also stoked that that URL is that, uh, um, you need to make sure that's not a share with anyone URL.

Starting point is 01:49:54 Um, how do I do that? Oh my God, dude. I don't think I showed the whole URL. Okay. Oh boy, I'm in trouble now. You actually are. That was actually stupid. Remember that thing we talked about earlier?

Starting point is 01:50:19 About how someone who could work for a company for 20 years could be fired over doing something really bad? No, it doesn't ring a bell. I think it be fired over doing something really bad. No, it doesn't ring a bell. I think it's time to get a new CEO. That doc is restricted, so we're fine. Nice. What was I going to say? Wow, that totally derailed me. Right. Okay. Data aggregation. So we picked some product lines and some brands. So not entire brands, because if you think of someone like Asus,

Starting point is 01:50:55 like scraping every single product in every single product line that they have would actually be... Totally untenable. An incredible task in its own right, let alone gathering from anybody else. So we decided like we would pick, I think it was like three motherboard brands, two CPU brands, I wonder who they would be, like a few GPU, a few memory, a few storage, whatever, whatever, like a little spattering from from some of the major categories. And then we're working on scraping or otherwise gathering product information from those as far back as we can from whatever public information there is. And being able to have that information in whatever form accessible on the website. So if you wanted to compare, for example, two different products, if you wanted to compare a 5090 gpu that comes out whenever the

Starting point is 01:51:46 heck to a i don't know why but uh an 8800 gtx um you would be able to look that up and maybe we don't have modern benchmarking information for an 8800 gtx but you can see the spec comparison between them or whatever else okay can i show them can i show them one thing just one thing uh no not on the dock no dock no not on the dock no dock that dock needs to be not open at all no dock open okay amazing amazing there's the there's the you like that do you like your little icon on the compare cart that's been updated and the labs logo is there now there you go yeah there's new things you can poke around the site okay all right like this is actually fine yeah this is obviously understand that it's very in development.

Starting point is 01:52:45 Yeah. But this is pretty cool, right? Pretty cool. Many of these things are changing. Many of these things have already been discussed to change, et cetera, et cetera. But real progress is being made. We are actually doing stuff, and the team is working really hard,

Starting point is 01:53:11 both the labs team and the labs website team, which are actually separate teams, but that need to interface a lot, are trying to kick butt and make this a really just awesome site right out of the gate, it's not going to be feature complete. There's a lot of things that are on the roadmap

Starting point is 01:53:32 for the next, realistically, five years. Some of them will never happen, but we've got our site set really high and we're making real investments into making this just an awesome website. We're going to bring back just good data and easy access to it. I hope that AI scraping doesn't just sort of

Starting point is 01:53:56 make us have to lock it down in ways that we didn't want to, but that's something we're going to have to evaluate as we get closer to launch. didn't want to, but that's something we're going to have to evaluate as we get closer to launch. It's going to be a problem, but there are also like actually some surprisingly fast wheels turning in that realm because some rather big companies are not stoked about the idea of their data getting scraped by AI scrapers. So they're putting lots of legal money behind it, which actually does make the system turn. So yeah, maybe, maybe other people will find solutions for us there. More messages.

Starting point is 01:54:36 Let's see. I see the LTT store.com war is on my wallet continues. Hi DLL. Are there any products that are currently in development? Hell, did you want to get out? Coldbar. I thought that was extremely not happening. I mean, as far as the

Starting point is 01:55:01 update from over a year ago says, they're back and they're moving, but who knows what happened in the from over a year ago says, they're back and they're moving, but who knows what happened in the last over a year. Site is definitely live. I can see the site. Yeah, I mean, yeah, because he literally shared it, but it's not technically like a private thing,

Starting point is 01:55:21 so poke around, I guess. What was I going to say? Yeah, the cold bar hammer, I'm certain will never happen, but they haven't publicly given up yet. As far as like physical products, I can't really think of anything. I don't personally believe that the like Apple solution to VR AR goggles, which we'll talk about very soon, is going to solve all the problems. I'm mostly... The main thing that comes to mind for me is a game. I've talked about this a bunch on Landshed, but Skull & Bones.

Starting point is 01:56:04 That's been in developer hell for like, what I feel like is actually genuinely getting close to a decade at this point. And I don't I'm not even excited for it anymore. When it was first announced, I was super excited for it. But ever since then, it's gone through a bunch of different like producers and changes to what the game actually is and what it is going to be now, which I have stopped keeping up with it. So this could be incorrect information. So if it's wrong, I apologize.

Starting point is 01:56:35 But what it is now is this like PVP arena shooter, but with boats, which is so incredibly uninteresting to me. Like if I wanted to play that, I would just play World of Warships or something. I don't know. It just keeps perpetually staying in development and not getting finished.

Starting point is 01:56:56 Whatever. Flowplane. Yay! Got him. Flowplane's in a pretty good state right now. Flowplane's in a pretty good state right now. No, Floatplane's in a pretty good state right now. Okay, hit me with one more. Sure. Hey, DLL, love the show.

Starting point is 01:57:11 I'm curious if when you were creating the backpack, did y'all do any crazy things to test it out? And if not, have y'all done anything crazy to test your products? We've gotten kind of boring about it, to be perfectly honest with you. Ever since we hired, I'd say it started right around the time we hired Bridget and Kyle. We kind of do things properly now. So there's a third-party fabric testing company, for example, that we use called Chima. And so when we want to evaluate, say, for example, the water resistance of a fabric we send it to them and

Starting point is 01:57:45 then they send us back like a two-page report on how it performed on all of their testing equipment and it's all very by the book and pretty boring um i'd say the closest thing to uh like like rugged you know real world wild test of anything lately has probably been uh this apple leather version the lux edition of the ltt backpack where i've just kind of been using it as my daily driver and going out of my way to beat the absolute stuffing out of it because i just can't believe that it's holding up this well it just doesn't compute for me yeah actually like tosses it around oh yeah oh that's that's far from the worst like i i stuffed it under the seat when i was when i went to taiwan and then like whenever i thought of it i like kicked it and like mushed

Starting point is 01:58:38 it with my feet just like just trying to beat the crap out of it, and it just won't have a problem. So I guess we're going to have to go to production soon. Yeah, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that's really kind of gone through hell in terms of benchmarking it in a creative way. Not really. I mean, the shapesorter toy was a fun one. Like, Tynan really tried, tried like pressed as hard as he could to try to get them in the wrong in the wrong hole so i'm yeah i'm just i'm looking at

Starting point is 01:59:12 the site right now i'm trying to think um we we do a lot of kind of real world testing like with the tech sack we took the early versions and we gave them to people and basically said okay load this up with what you would keep in it and tried to make sure that the pockets would make sense to them um remember the lanyards didn't you like tow a car with the lanyard no we might have talked about it at some point i mean you probably could with that thing i don't recommend it don't do that uh but it's it's very strong. Yeah. Next up? You want another one?

Starting point is 01:59:49 Sure. There is a plethora of optical cables on the market. USB 1.2.3, DisplayPort, and certified HDMI 2.1. Any insights into why USB 20 gigabits per second or DisplayPort 2 are missing? Well, DisplayPort 2 is just super new. It takes time. I mean, we didn't see optical HDMI 2.1 until quite some time after, first, the standard was ratified,

Starting point is 02:00:14 and then second, once products actually started making their way into the market where you could test these things in the real world, I would expect it to take anywhere from six to 12 months, and in some cases more like 24 to 36, because it all depends on what the user adoption of these is. It's not just a matter of, does the standard exist so that I can develop my product? But it also matters, like I said before, if there are real world products that I can test my compatibility

Starting point is 02:00:42 with. And furthermore, it matters if anybody's actually using these products. And if there's an install base using these products, that's large enough to justify the development costs that it's going to, that I'm that I'm going to need to invest in order to bring this product to market and produce it. I can tell you right now DisplayPort 2.0, what cards even support it? NVIDIA doesn't even support it on their latest generation GPUs. So in terms of relevant cards, and I'm not counting ARC here, in terms of relevant cards that support it, you've basically got the 7900 XT and the 7900 XTX. Those aren't going to move the needle how many how many display optical display port right and of course there's the other end of the chain what display requires it literally nothing

Starting point is 02:01:32 actually requires uhbr whatever it is display port 2.0 so why are you producing this cable that no display requires and almost no gpus are capable of supporting the maximum speed of and then i would say it's probably a pretty similar situation when it comes to usb 20 gigabit per second show me a peripheral that actually needs 20 gigabit per second and i'll show you a dock that should probably be a thunderbolt dock so why do you need this optical cable? We already have optical Thunderbolt cables. Mind you, I've been told that they don't work perfectly with every dock.

Starting point is 02:02:12 My experience with them has been pretty good, but I believe it was CalDigit that messaged me on Twitter saying that theirs has been a little bit spotty. Yeah, I think I've got time for one more sure let's see here hey oh dll any more news to share on virtual ltx for floatplane subscribers i'm stoked that we can still participate p.s thanks for cotton elastane only clothing options like the polos poly Polly equals sweaty. Yeah, it's a good question. We haven't finalized our... Oh, you know what? I think that we have a topic in the doc here

Starting point is 02:02:52 that's related to that. Yes! Okay, we want to start getting our panels locked in, but we haven't done that yet, and we wanted to get some feedback from you guys. So the LTX team is going to be watching this segment of the show. They're going to be looking at your comments. Floatplane.

Starting point is 02:03:12 I don't know if they have a way to watch back floatplane chat, Luke. Nope. Okay. So cool. So what you might want to do is hold your thoughts and throw them in the comments section under the VOD. If there's any topics that jump out to you as being particularly bad, if there's topics that jump out to you as being particularly good. YouTube chat, I mean, it moves at a million miles a minute, so I don't know how useful posting in there is going to be.

Starting point is 02:03:41 But maybe same thing in the comments under the VOD would be the best place to post something. But here are some of our ideas. One of them is price talks. So talking about price to performance, the best way to figure out bang for the buck, talking about the affordability of parts and inflation, talking about, you know, where do you start buying if you're just starting now? You know, how do you familiarize yourself with this stuff? Talking about predictions of future trends. So just to be clear, these are panel ideas where we would get creators to come up on stage and just discuss these topics. Another good one that I kind of like is handheld gaming. Where's this trend going? Is there room to grow? What do we think a flagship handheld from 2025 might look like? Handheld versus home console? The line's already blurry thanks to the Nintendo Switch.

Starting point is 02:04:31 Are we going to see this blur more? Another concept, oh, I don't know about this one, making products for real people. LTTstore.com learning experiences. What do we want to do in the future? Product release cycle, products that will never see the light of day. I feel like I talk about this so much on WAN Show, there won't be much to say. But hey, let us know if you disagree. This is one that I suggested. Sponsored reviews. Where are these coming from? You know, where are brands getting the idea that they can sponsor reviews? Where are viewers getting the idea that a sponsored video can be a review? Why is it that this line is blurry and what has happened to the word review? What does sponsored content look like given the rise of vertical video and other formats

Starting point is 02:05:17 and platforms? Why would a brand sponsor a review anyway, given that the value of a review is that it's an independent opinion, or at least it's supposed to be. Some other ideas. Are phones peak boring now? This just says GPU specs. I don't know what that means. Discussions on benchmarking best practices.

Starting point is 02:05:38 That could be kind of a fun one. Console versus PC gaming 2023 edition. If you guys have any other ideas, that sounds super cool. Luke is going to talk about Logitech killing the blue brand while I run to the washroom. Okay.

Starting point is 02:05:54 I'm jumping to where that is. I get to use the Luke cam that I made. Oh my. I won't see it because I got to look at the doc, but I trust it's amazing considering the bad quality of my webcam. Let me fix this a bit. The blown-out lighting in the room.

Starting point is 02:06:13 But anyways, Logitech kills Blue Brand and Astro, I believe, and maybe some other stuff. But Logitech will be ending the Blue Brand, which it acquired in 2018. Its popular Sona, Yeti, and Snowball microphones will instead be sold under Logitech's gaming brand, Logitech G. However, the vast majority of Blues music and audio recording mics are absent from Logitech's site. Only the Baby Bottle SL, wow, I didn't know that was the name of it. And Bluebird SL Remain. And when clicked on, they redirect to the main page

Starting point is 02:06:50 of Logitech's gaming mics, which does not include entries for either microphone. There's a discussion question here that says, why would any company choose to disband a well known brand with great deal of customer cachet in favor of a more generic brand without the

Starting point is 02:07:07 same prestige. Yeah, I don't know. It's weird to me. It's also not just blue. This writing makes it sound like it's just blue. I'm pretty sure it's blue, Astro, and potentially one other brand that all got kind of merged in. I want to try to find this. Logitech.

Starting point is 02:07:31 I know they had some like Twitter post about it talking about all this type of stuff. But yeah, it's pretty interesting. Some really major brands getting kind of somewhat deleted overnight. Yeah, so brand merge FAQ. It looks like Logitech for Creators, Astro, and Blue seem to be all merging into Logitech G.

Starting point is 02:07:59 So I didn't actually know that Logitech for Creators was like a thing that existed. So I guess that is. But I knew Astro and Blue were were and those are getting kind of deleted. Astro I honestly don't hear a lot about these days I know back like roughly 10 years ago at PAX they were a pretty big deal and I know back then especially they were a pretty big deal with the console people um so maybe the only reason why i'm not super aware of them in the modern age is because i'm not uh not so into the consoles

Starting point is 02:08:31 these days um but blue has had a really major name in the creator space for a long time i know like uh when i first got into streaming you were either either using this one particular, I don't remember what brand it was from, but this one particular mixer and an XLR mic, or you were using like a Snowball or a Yeti. There was almost no other options. So, yeah, to throw that brand away seems a little bit surprising. And I don't know. I don't really have a ton else to say bit surprising. And I don't know. I don't really have a ton else to say other than that. I don't really care. It doesn't make a difference to me personally.

Starting point is 02:09:12 But Astro had a big name a really long time ago. I don't know anymore. And Blue has had a big name this entire time. So to get rid of that branding is pretty surprising. I also think there's a lot of like super iconic, like the blue logo being on your mic is like quite iconic and to replace that

Starting point is 02:09:33 with a Logitech G is kind of interesting. I think a lot of people that were in the market for blue products as well weren't necessarily looking for like gaming branding on their products um like blue's whole design aesthetic was very um i don't know what it was yeah i guess so i don't know how to define it. Yeah, creator-focused, I guess I would say. It really does raise the question. Why do you acquire these companies? And if you just want the IP, why not acquire them,

Starting point is 02:10:23 take the IP, and then just not keep releasing products under that brand at all. Like, I don't know. Maybe I just am dumb. Well, that's the strategy now. So maybe they're adopting that now. Like, maybe they'll do that moving forward. I can... The Astro Gaming one is confusing to me,

Starting point is 02:10:40 because, like, I actually don't... Their products are so garbage. To be honest but yeah exactly like what would you want like coming from what logitech already had what would you want um other than just the market share which would you would have to keep the name for uh for blue i'm sure there was some amount of market share stuff as well. But I do suspect that that was definitely mostly like the tech behind the microphones. Because Blue did have a very good name for like quality, especially on the USB side microphones.

Starting point is 02:11:22 Do you know the background of Astro? No, I know they were like console gaming headphones that's it no they're they were just an industrial design and like branding firm and they were like oh why do we just do this for other people let's just do industrial design and branding for like gaming headphones and then they killed it and got acquired i was like okay they looked cool i they always looked really cool the astro headphones looked sick i remember one of my the first shirt that i got from pax that was actually kind of cool it wasn't just like plain t-shirt brand name and block font that's it the first one ever was an astro shirt and it like actually looked really sick i never owned astro headphones but i had a really cool astro shirt yeah my relationship with astro was um fraught at best we reviewed one of

Starting point is 02:12:20 their products once i was shocked at how bad it was and basically said i can't understand why anybody is buying any of these ever and then they never talked to me again something along those lines yeah like this is what i mean i i can't possibly imagine logitech bought them for their tech uh no i really don't think so yeah so i don't know yeah this doesn't really matter to me personally but it's just it's interesting the it's a seems like a big move to just like nuke a ton of the uh brand ip that you have um and put it all under logitech g but yeah especially just with how much of blue is not really g not gaming yeah the g part is weird to me astro sure whatever i that part doesn't really matter to me so much and also uh as i was talking before you got here logitech creators um that's another brand that they're they're kind

Starting point is 02:13:19 of merging under logitech g i just don't really get the point, I guess. But it doesn't matter. Like, I'm also not upset about it. I just actually don't care. I don't know. I don't think it matters. I don't think it's going to hurt them. I don't necessarily particularly see the benefit either. Oh, but I just noticed this. We're apparently on blue sky. Oh, I just noticed this. We're apparently on Blue Sky. Yeah. I can't find it, and searching for the handle and Blue Sky doesn't bring it up,

Starting point is 02:14:01 which sort of makes me question Blue Sky's SEO a little bit. I got to confess, i don't know a ton about blue sky other than that jack dorsey sold twitter to elon and then it turns out he had been working on a competitor to twitter like for a long time or something i mean it's lol got him okay just sand uh we got an invitation from Josh K, who is a fan, apparently. So Blue Sky, I mean, is it mobile only? What is Blue Sky? It's Twitter, as far as I know. But like a different color of blue. I mean, that makes perfect sense.

Starting point is 02:14:42 I could be wrong, but I think that's it. I mean, there's no.... I could be wrong, but I think that's it. I mean, there's no... It shouldn't be surprising to people that when people started getting spicy about Twitter a while back, there was like a billion clones that all showed up all at the exact same time. Yeah, it's not...

Starting point is 02:14:58 It is what it is. Are you just being kind of a hater, though? No, it's actually just not a complicated site we just had this conversation where you're like yeah you know you can't just spin up a twitch competitor blah blah blah blah blah i mean yeah but that's twitch that's twitch that's a totally different thing at scale anything's complicated market share at scale yes i also complicated i also think that twitter has tried to be...

Starting point is 02:15:27 Okay, maybe I'm being a hater here. I feel like they've tried to be cooler than they are. So they've tried to go out of their way to do more complicated things than just text tweets. And it has always just kind of sucked. And re-spinning up a just text tweets Twitter clone is like actually not difficult. At the scale that Twitter is at, sure, that's like a little harder, I guess. But Twitter itself is not a complicated site. And scale is getting a lot easier to deal with these days.

Starting point is 02:16:10 Are you ready to talk about the Apple Vision Pro? Should we talk about some of our announcements first? Are we done all the announcements? We have announcements? We do. I think we're done all of them though. The blue sky thing was the last one. We're good. Yeah, let's talk about the vision pro. Is this the thousands of heads topic?

Starting point is 02:16:28 Yeah. Okay. Sure. Um, Apple studies, thousands of heads invents audio ray tracing EAX question mark. There's a six minute version of, I added the,

Starting point is 02:16:41 okay. Um, there's also like a bunch of videos on it already including some people that have used it but as far as my understanding goes no one was able to capture footage of themselves using it so you just have like them talking about it reactions they have finally announced said headset, the Vision Pro. It costs $3,500 US dollars. Oh boy. Its interior screen

Starting point is 02:17:11 is a pair of micro OLED screens with 90 hertz refresh rates. They're 4K, right? Okay, yeah, that comes way later. They have 90 hertz refresh rates and over 23 million pixels combined. That's pretty wild. For each eye.

Starting point is 02:17:27 Oh, yeah. That's actually like super wild. Something we've, I believe, all been asking for for a long time. So it makes sense. It also kind of makes sense that it comes at a high price point. But, yeah. The headset has 12 cameras and five sensors which monitor the user's hand movements and map the environment using TrueDepth camera and LiDAR. The cameras can be used to take 3D pictures and video.

Starting point is 02:17:53 The user can overlay AR images and apps over their environment or close themselves off completely in a virtual space. The audio system also uses that 3D map to create spatial audio, what Apple calls audio ray tracing. I will be very interested to see how completely you can actually isolate yourself it doesn't look to be sealed particularly well it kind of reminds me more of like the meta quest pro where it's vr there's like brain gaps but there's yeah but there's there's a ton of of gaps where light can get in. Yeah, definitely.

Starting point is 02:18:30 The Vision Pro can be controlled with iMotion, which from what I've heard, it's actually surprisingly good. Voice commands and gestures. When interacting with people in the immediate environment, there is an external panel that shows the user's eyes. That part's pretty interesting to me. The device has an onboard M.2 chip running VisionOS and handling computation tasks, while a dedicated R1 chip deals with input from the various sensors and cameras. Community response has been conflicted,

Starting point is 02:18:59 viewing the device as impressive, but really only for enthusiasts with a lot of disposable income given the price, snow goggle aesthetic and two hour battery life. Others felt that the Vision Pro needed a clearer business use case and the ability to replace a traditional laptop in order to justify its price. Mark Zuckerberg addressed Apple's new headset during a company wide meeting yesterday where he said that Apple didn't demonstrate any major technical breakthroughs that Meta hasn't already explored. In quotes, there's a real philosophical difference

Starting point is 02:19:31 in terms of how we're approaching this. In quotes again, our vision for the Metaverse is fundamentally social. It's about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things by contrast every demo they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themselves which i don't think is actually true um no they did have the one demo where someone walks up to someone who's

Starting point is 02:19:58 in a vision pro and uh they start talking so we see that we see the eyes feature. Yeah, the sentiment is fair. It didn't show a huge range of scenarios. No, it didn't. It mostly showed sitting and enjoying personal entertainment. I have a lot of questions about Vision Pro. Are we ready to start the discussion portion of this? First of all, I gotta say,

Starting point is 02:20:27 I love the tech. They've gone 90 hertz, which is fine. Probably good enough. But my god, the resolution of these displays. I'm so excited to put one of these on.

Starting point is 02:20:43 There's no way to slice it other than that 23 million pixels is a lot of friggin' pixels. And at that kind of density, I actually, I do wonder, could I use a virtual desktop? However, there are a lot of things about this that feel very developer kit. You know, two hours of battery life.

Starting point is 02:21:09 I can't even necessarily watch a movie on the plane without being plugged in. Yeah, two hours of battery life is pretty rough. It has that external battery pack, though. I wonder if there's any amount of uh on board battery like i wonder if you could hot swap those battery packs that's a good question it's one i had that i haven't seen answered yet um so if there's if there's like a super capacitor on board or something honestly i doubt it like i really doubt it um what i would have to like shut down the swap is there even is that battery pack i know it's i

Starting point is 02:21:46 know it's tethered but is it tethered just for weight and that cable is like hard plugged in or can do you know if that you can unplug from the battery pack to swap them out uh that's a good question what i suspect is that it's a uh you can plug the battery in while the headset okay external battery pack from what i've seen you can plug the battery in while the headset okay external battery pack from what i've seen you can plug the battery in while the headset is plugged in there's usbc usbc on the battery pack so yeah it looks like swapping the battery pack is going to be pretty much a non-issue yeah so that's good yeah it's good it's also good It's also good that you can just plug straight in. Yeah, but in your scenario that you just described, watching a movie on a plane,

Starting point is 02:22:32 that does mean you can do it now. For your entire flight, you could have this thing running. It's magnetic to the headset. Why did they have to go proprietary for the connection? I mean, I love magnetic connections. I really do. But this is just another opportunity for Apple

Starting point is 02:22:57 to collect licensing fees on third-party accessories. And I feel like for a product that's $3,500 already, that's pretty rough. What are your thoughts on the price point? I don't know. I expected them to kind of loss lead on it. I expected it to be affordable, like a consumer-priced dev kit. And instead, I just don't really understand

Starting point is 02:23:26 what I was looking at during the presentation. It's priced like a professional VR or AR product. Like, a lot of people don't realize this, but HoloLens, for example, is in use. It's a real product that is really deployed in real workplaces um like i saw yeah like i saw it when i was at intel's fab you can i could perform maintenance on on fabric on chip fab machinery with a hololens with someone just coaching me and with guides that will just

Starting point is 02:24:01 show up in augmented reality and like i can do it it'll be like yeah go get this pick up this screwdriver it looks exactly like this okay to pull out this tray do this like it's kind of it's kind of cool and serious investments are being made into deploying this technology um but the difference is that while hololens is also expensive just like the vision pro holo lens is um marketed for professional applications whereas apple came out with this professionally priced product this enterprise priced product and then wouldn't shut up about consumer applications for it is it enterprise price though thirty five hundred dollars yeah okay hold on hold on wait wait wait for the vr industry right now yes but if you compare

Starting point is 02:24:51 to apple products i don't know if you look at the displays that it has um if you look at the chips that are in it i don't know i mean the HoloLens 2 is literally launched at $3,500. So it doesn't matter what hardware is in it. I see your point. The hardware, sure. The hardware, it's got a computer in it. And at the price of an Apple computer, yeah, fine. If you look at...

Starting point is 02:25:19 Exactly. But that doesn't change the fact that that's not a consumer electronics price point. Like, it doesn't matter what's in it. The HoloLens could have really great hardware in it that justifies the price, but that doesn't change the fact that it is not a consumer price. Like, the average Joe buys an Xbox. Are MacBooks not consumer products? Yes and no.

Starting point is 02:25:43 I mean, the MacBook Air is, but the MacBook Air starts at $1,200 or whatever. It doesn't start at $3,500. I think Apple's whole thing is like selling to people who think they're pros. Right?

Starting point is 02:26:02 I don't know. I don't necessarily disagree. Sure, but I also don't necessarily think that it's a misstep like this feels very apple to me but what use case did they show that hasn't had an and okay i i know what your counterpoint is going to be apple doesn't invent anything they refine blah blah blah blah blah but but what use case did they show that we haven't had an opportunity for people to say, oh yeah, I'm interested in that. Like I was reminded watching it of this company Vuzix. We used to carry their personal cinema glasses

Starting point is 02:26:37 back when I was at NCIX. And I don't know if they're smart glasses or whatever. Like I don't even know what their product stack is now. But they're basically just little... No, they're not that. Oh, look, it's Google Glass. Okay, do they just have... Okay, I don't even know if they have these ones anymore.

Starting point is 02:27:00 But they're basically just like a little personal theater that you just... Yeah, they don't seem to have them anymore. But you just sit and flip it down and it used lenses and built-in displays. And you could watch movies on a, you know, 150-inch display from the comfort of your airline seat. Vuzix apparently doesn't even make that anymore because nobody cared. apparently doesn't even make that anymore because nobody cared so what is it that apple is going to be adding with motion control and man i i gotta i gotta really wonder about voice control just with how bad voice control is for everything and with how far behind the curve siri is am i going to want to voice control anything i i do have some faith that Apple could do gesture control well,

Starting point is 02:27:46 but I have serious doubts, pun intended, about what their capabilities are in terms of voice control. And so I'm sitting here going, what are these use cases that will be unlocked for me? Okay, I could have my battle station be my headset instead of a bunch of monitors. Like part of their justification for it was, well, you're not going to need a TV or monitors

Starting point is 02:28:11 or a sound system anymore. Barrel replacements. Yeah. Screen replacements. I mean, as long as nobody else needs to look at my TV or my monitors, which kind of comes back to what the Zuck was saying, where this thing is what designed for people

Starting point is 02:28:21 to use it forever alone. I don't know. It's just, it use it forever alone. I don't know. It's just, it's a weird product. I don't understand what the sales pitch is. And I still don't. You can have your eyes on it so you can interact with people. Again, that's a workplace feature. Why is it that I, if I'm at home and my kids are badgering me,

Starting point is 02:28:39 well, I guess I better just get out of my mixed reality thing and do something with my kids. Like I don't, what is the use case where I need to quickly talk to someone, but I'm not going to get out of my mixed reality thing and do something with my kids like i don't what is the use case where i need to quickly talk to someone but i'm not going to get out of my virtual environment work the like yeah the like main one that i can think of is the airplane discussion actually um and this is like not going to sell to a ton of people with just this argument. But it's like, oh, you're sitting on an airplane and the stewardess comes by to give you a snack and they address you. You have that weird graphic on the screen because you don't have pass-through. And then you look up at them and your eyes show up on the screen.

Starting point is 02:29:24 And you can talk to them okay uh mark has tried it said web surfing is good here's my problem with that it's the same reason that i don't own a tablet web surfing on a tablet is objectively better than on a phone it's a it's just a bigger screen you can see more you can read more uh consumption of content on a tablet. It's just a bigger screen. You can see more, you can read more. Consumption of content on a tablet, it helps a lot, right? But I have to go get it. I don't have it on me. And maybe this is just a me thing, but the times that I surf the web, because web surfing has a really specific meaning to me it's like yeah i wonder what leopards eat right like it's it's this kind of just idle uh you know doom

Starting point is 02:30:15 scrolling on doom scrolling you know r slash you know watch people fail at things i don't even know if that's a thing it doesn't matter the point is it's like that sort of idle surfing yeah that's totally something that you could probably do from within a headset but i man for me to to set aside time to do that but i'm not at my computer i'm not at my computer which would probably be better and i'm not on the can where realistically i don't have my ar headset i'm probably just on my phone it's this tweener it's this in-between device maybe i take my air headset to the can okay people will 100 do that i i will say that the web browsing comment is actually very interesting to me because web browsing uh anything with text really has been bad for a long time because the screens have honestly not been good enough. At the price point that headsets have been being sold at, the screens have not been good enough and there wasn't really a great trajectory for them to become good enough um because yeah the price points have been kind

Starting point is 02:31:25 of too low we haven't seen an index two um if if we had seen an index two i feel like this would be a bit of a harder sell uh but because we've been in like low-end headsets for a long time um i mean okay there's use cases I could imagine for it. Like, I remember, man, who is it? Someone I know knows someone. Oh, yeah, the SO of a friend of Yvonne's has a friend who does, like, just deranged high-end AV installations for, like, very very very wealthy people um and so he i remember him

Starting point is 02:32:08 telling me about this one that his buddy was telling him about where the tv like pulls into a thing and then a thing slides down and when it's out it can like be controlled so it can point this way or it can like come up this way so you can watch TV when you're in the kitchen or, you know, whatever. Right. Like it. So, OK, I could see wearing your headset, assuming the pass through. They claim 12 milliseconds, which is really impressive. Assuming the pass through is good enough that you could conceivably cook with your headset on. with your headset on. You know, if your TV show dynamically positioned itself somewhere where it was in the corner of your eye

Starting point is 02:32:48 but not interfering with what you're doing, and with eye tracking, with machine learning, they could conceivably do something like that. And if someone, you know, comes into the room, it automatically, you know, makes sure that you can hear them so you don't trip over your kids or whatever else. I could see something like that being a valid use case for this thing. Entertainment while I'm cooking. Battery life sucks.

Starting point is 02:33:16 Every other sort of category-defining product that I can think of from Apple takes off when it boasts all-day battery life. MacBook, all-day battery life. iPhone, all-day battery life. AirPods, as long as you put them in the case a couple of times, all-day battery life. Apple Watch, all-day battery life. If it doesn't last all f***ing day, it doesn't exist. And that's another big problem for me, right? Is not only is it this tweener product that I have to go get when I want to use, problem for me right is not only is it this tweener product that i have to go get when i want to use but i have to manage charging it oh i hate managing charging things anything that runs out of battery before i'm done with it for the day this kind of automatically sucks am i off base here though uh i i think partially um but the reason why I think partially, so yeah, if it doesn't last all

Starting point is 02:34:11 day, it's kind of dead. I agree. But a lot of the use cases that they're trying to sell this one on are like normie stuff. Productivity, creativity, those types of things, right? A lot of situations where you could just be plugged in. Yeah, someone in the chat is saying, just plug it into your desk. I can't imagine using it to walk around. I absolutely can.

Starting point is 02:34:37 But what I think, well, a lot of what they're saying is you can get rid of your monitors, right? So I think their use case is literally that. I can't get rid of my monitor. As long as it has a two hour battery, I'm still going to need my monitor. It might just, I might not need five of them.

Starting point is 02:34:53 Yeah. But then I'm tethered to my desk again. What year is it? You're tethered to your desk. Uh, for a while. It doesn't mean permanently. Like you could literally,

Starting point is 02:35:05 especially using pass through, you could literally, especially using pass-through, you could literally get up and like go get a water and go to the washroom and come back and not take it off because you just unplug, have your battery bank with you, go do your things,

Starting point is 02:35:15 come back, plug back in. I mean, by that logic, why do I need Bluetooth headphones then? I'll just unplug my wired headphones, go get something, and then come back and plug it in. What I'm saying is that this is being, no, it is completely different. What this is being marketed as is a screen replacement a monitor replacement

Starting point is 02:35:30 you're not carrying your monitors around outside it's your the replacement is not the same thing you like we we did take i'm wearing wired uh airpod things right now right you just destroyed everyone's ears touching the microphone, by the way. Oh, I apologize. Sorry. I actually thought I was on my laptop mic, but I guess not. But these are things that we carried around all over the place. Yeah, we did.

Starting point is 02:35:58 So having it without the wire makes a ton of sense. The use case that they're trying to replace, or the main one that they seem to be targeting is is not walking around outside so i i don't think comparing it to airpods is fair no but it's it's being tethered again i don't want to be always tethered either i agree because you have the tugging cord and you have all this other super annoying stuff um and i just i i don't yeah to be clear i'm not saying it's doomed or anything like that i'm not i'm not hating on this thing i haven't tried it personally yet you know and i i even i told you guys like i can think of use cases for this that are consumer use cases i just

Starting point is 02:36:36 i feel like it's one of those products where the price is enterprise the marketing is average consumer the real use case is pro slash enthusiast somewhere in yes somewhere in between and everybody's gonna have to kind of get aligned on this at some point and it doesn't feel like we're there and no this is not the same as an electric car someone said this coming from the guy with the electric car. I don't take it on road trips. It's horses for courses, right? And I'm just trying to figure out what course this horse is for. And I don't think Apple seems to know.

Starting point is 02:37:17 That's my main issue. And I think if they knew, they would have waited to just announce it and launch it and do it. They didn't have to announce this. And usually they don't. Usually they announce and launch. I think they're trying to figure out what the f*** this thing is. Honestly.

Starting point is 02:37:41 Yeah, I feel like the... What is it someone was talking about? i don't know if this is official or not but someone was saying it's like a 100 billion dollar investment or something 100 billion that sounds there's no way that's like a lot someone someone in flowplane chat said that yeah i don't know 100 billion i mean if they never used micro oled technology for anything else ever again and if they you know etc etc, but they'll reuse a lot of this, I suspect. Yeah, whatever they invested, I have genuinely no idea. I think, yeah, I think they're trying to figure out how to get their money back.

Starting point is 02:38:16 I do think... Linus, that's not true. Apple also announced the first gen iPhone. That was like 15 years ago. 16, whatever it was sorry go ahead um i i yeah i think they're just trying to poop it out it was referenced uh you mentioned and i believe it was last wan show the like the the apple watch is zero maybe 10 billion yeah i don't remember what it was i I don't really care. Whatever their investment was, it was super high. The Apple Watch Zero or whatever it was called, the first version,

Starting point is 02:38:53 they retconned. It feels very much like that. They got to a point where... Yeah. They got to a point where you can use it, technically. It does stuff. It probably looks quite good.

Starting point is 02:39:08 The screens probably look great. The eye pass-through is something that Palmer Lucky was talking about years ago, I think. Like two or three years ago. Talking about how that was probably going to be the future. I think like two or three years ago talking about how that was probably going to be the future. So like that's not super surprising that like someone on that team probably listened to him, I guess. I don't know. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:36 And they just need to like get it out now. And they're Apple. So they're going to charge $3,500 for this thing that they just need to get out. And it's time to move on from there, I guess. I don't know. Like, I'm not surprised that they don't have an amazing use case for it. It is what it is. Speaking of things that I talked about last week on WAN Show, you know, I would never encourage our community to engage in any kind of brigading. Uh, I did publicly talk about my experience with our, with our landscaping and pool company, but guys, if you don't have a personal experience, you know, don't leave a, don't leave a Google

Starting point is 02:40:14 review. Um, I will say though, that after talking about the experience that we've had, they have, uh, really changed their tune. we've had they have uh really changed their tune um so we have pool equipment as of this morning um installed on our property so if they continue making progress maybe we'll actually swim this year which would be pretty cool that would put us at two years and two months or something like that to finish the project which is not great but i'll be happy if we actually have anything at the end of it uh in other news linus is dead according to wikipedia um that's unfortunate i'm sorry to hear that yeah someone flight back in taiwan didn't go very well

Starting point is 02:40:59 yeah it front paged the um ltt subreddit today that apparently someone updated Wikipedia to say that I was dead as of today. But I am, in fact, still alive. In fact, I can prove to you that this was not prerecorded. Oh, how am I going to do that? Dan, Dan, say something unexpected. Wait, this could be prerecorded. Yeah, I don't know. I'm sitting here alone, so I don't know what's really going on.

Starting point is 02:41:34 Oh my God, Dan. I don't know. Forget it. Luke, help. Let's switch over to WAN Show After Dark. Yeah, sure. Yeah, sure. How should I do that? Yeah, we. Yeah, sure. Uh, how should I do that?

Starting point is 02:41:47 Uh, yeah, we're going to have to figure this out. Uh, I have Dan to do lights for me. Nice. Yeah. Give me,

Starting point is 02:41:54 give me a sec. Thanks Dan. Super professional. Just walk in front of the camera. Don't worry about it. I can't do this anymore. Let's see what Luke comes up with. I'm legitimately very curious. I very curious i can make him look uh

Starting point is 02:42:07 ridiculous as well no no no no i want i want to see what he comes up with uh yeah let's let luke we'll let him do that first he's a big boy oh i think he's closing some blinds oh oh oh we can see him that change anything i mean there'ss? Yeah, there's fewer blinds open. Is it darker? I mean, I don't know. It's weird. You're darker but the room is brighter. I think I'm gonna get involved here. Uh, no, no, no, Dan, you're not allowed to fix it for him. Let Luke do it. Okay, I'm gonna turn off my correction then he's a big boy there we go oh well no i think you can leave your existing correction oh my god it's green this is awful everything about this is awful the people deserve better hold on what are these what is he even doing i mean okay yeah that might help oh uh whoops that kind of works actually

Starting point is 02:43:08 uh i mean i guess what dark is that not too dark unfortunately i mean he can't even hear me so that's cool oh yeah of course um yeah sure i mean it's darkish uh your your webcam is i literally can't make it darker is every light is boosting the iso yeah yeah yeah is it too dark ah it seems fine i say go for it all right dan hit me there you go now you're a little bit darker let's see here hey dll love your content you mentioned that you mainly produce things you personally are interested or invested in. Will this change with the new CEO? Kudos to all the screen, all off the screen making this work. Cheers. I mean, no, that's kind of the idea, right? Behind the whole chief vision officer thing is that I'm still supposed to be heavily involved in the content, but just only the content like oh i don't know like let me just let me just look at

Starting point is 02:44:08 my email today and just find stupid stuff that i shouldn't have to deal with uh i didn't realize how bad it was until i came back and started doing more linus media group things but the amount of things that linus does uh and avvonne for that matter, to be honest, that they just like definitely should not be spending their time on is, is wild. Okay, we're apparently changing our standardized editing rigs, because one of our editors was having some kind of instability. And someone came to the conclusion that that's because AMD is not stable in Premiere. So I inserted myself going, actually, that makes no f***ing sense whatsoever. Can we please, can you please investigate properly and get back to me? Why am I dealing with that?

Starting point is 02:44:59 But if I don't, apparently we will just throw away all our AMD Threadripper editing stations and replace them with intel ones will that actually fix the problem i doubt it because that's probably not the problem so that's that's today is that the memory leak thing i don't know i've been dealing with that the last few days actually um premiere i swear to god i don't know i mean it's not like it's a premiere issue if all the other editors aren't having the same problem and this sounds like it's uh os or hardware specific yeah i don't know anyways i mean actually i had a lot of stuff on uh on on teams today um i mean you know what i don't want to do pricing for stuff on lttstore.com so you know here's our

Starting point is 02:45:47 cost for the button-up shirt here's my proposed cost I don't I don't know just like you guys figure it out I don't care oh man oh god here's one that I had to get involved in I was sitting trying to use wi-fi at the office yesterday, and it wouldn't stay connected for more than about two minutes at a time. So I messaged our new infra guy, and I was like, okay, I assume someone's brought this up already, but there are Wi-Fi connectivity issues in the studio

Starting point is 02:46:18 that have been ongoing for some time now. Do we have a roadmap to having this resolved? And they're like, yeah, it's been an ongoing issue. And I'm like, okay, but it's's not usable and it's interfering with production like at this it's been like two weeks and i'm sitting here going is there a reason we haven't just taken some random ap that is not ubiquity because apparently it's like a particular model and some early access firmware we installed whatever it doesn't matter the point is go get another ap and plug it in matter the point is go get another ap and plug it in to the server room and set the ssid the same or something and then just so we have something we can't have we can't have nothing we can't have

Starting point is 02:46:52 wi-fi dropping out every two minutes for people this is interfering with our work and so i basically went like um there needs to be we have like an army of APs sitting in an inventory. We need a solution by the end of the day. And they're like, oh, okay. The issue was that we turned back on some of the ones that were running the weird beta firmware and we left them on and they were like, they were interfering with the ones that do work. And I'm sitting here going, okay, well then the bigger problem is that we need a process for people to report issues. Because if I'm the first person bringing this up and these have been broken for seven hours today then that means that either

Starting point is 02:47:30 people don't know how to report these things or they don't know that they're supposed to or they didn't notice there was a problem which i find difficult to believe or nobody is acting on these reports because maybe they're going to the wrong place why am i dealing with this i shouldn't be dealing with this this is ridiculous and someone else should deal with with this so anyway in the next monday morning meeting um there is already to the credit of the new the new team member uh there is already um a process in place where we're going to inform people of how to report issues with the infrastructure or wi-fi and they'll be ticketed and actioned on and a temporary process yeah sure that's fine but we need something we can't just have broken wi-fi for two weeks

Starting point is 02:48:12 yeah that's not acceptable so yeah fine something temporary something temporary that works is better than something permanent that doesn't work. Sometimes and sort of. Like this is, this is, so one interesting thing that I've been dealing with, with some of my new roles that I have to jump into it at LMG, is that tons of things are bad and everything is expected to be not bad immediately. I know. And one of the problems with that is a lot of the solutions that come up are also bad, like the solution that we're putting in place.

Starting point is 02:48:45 We have to have some way for people to report an infrastructure issue. We had a plan that we were literally currently rolling out, but now we don't have enough time to do it. So now we have to divert off of doing the actually good thing and do a bad thing so that we can temporarily have a solution for angry angry CVO guy. Which is fine. And sometimes that's going to be worth it. Sometimes you have to do that. I'm not wrong, sir. You can't wait for the perfect solutions all the time.

Starting point is 02:49:14 If you knew how much time. If I thought you were wrong. If I thought you were wrong, I would have vetoed it and said, no, we're waiting. Okay. Well, then all right then. I don't entirely disagree. I'm just saying your tone here, it's been quite interesting because we've had far too much to do, not even remotely.

Starting point is 02:49:39 For months, we had no resources. We actually had less resources than we had in the past. And now we have some resources, but there's way too much on the plate. And it's like trying to juggle, like figuring out what's important. For a while there, it was like, okay, the absolute peak of importance is security stuff because of the like last pass problems and then the breach happening and all that kind of stuff. Now the iron on that seems to be relatively cold

Starting point is 02:50:06 despite there still being a ton of work to do. So now the priority has shifted to other things despite the security stuff not being done. And it's like, all right, we got to figure out where the priorities are going to be. Luckily, in this case, spinning up a solution was more of a matter of minutes or hour instead of hours or days and in fairness to

Starting point is 02:50:27 me in fairness to me i made it clear that that was all i expected but the issue we had before was as far as i could tell based on how long we had had a wi-fi outage and how much it was interfering with people's work people didn't know how to report an issue they actually just had no idea and so part of that is like my unfamiliarity with the team because there is a tech support channel so like i didn't i just assumed people would use that all right well then i mean that could have been the solution oh i'm sure I'm in it, but that doesn't mean that I know. I'm in every channel. That's part of the problem for me is like, okay, sure.

Starting point is 02:51:10 I'm not in very many. I guess I don't know how many channels there are. I think, to be fair to everybody, it's in the logistics and warehouse tag, not LMG. Right. So anyway, the point was not to attack anyone. The point was that I identified a process issue. And if my job is to focus on creative, I can't be chasing down process issues.

Starting point is 02:51:34 That has to be someone else. That's my entire point. I'm not blaming any individual person because I actually understand every breakdown that occurred. I don't want to. I don't want my brain space filled up with every breakdown that occurred and evaluating the solution to it that's supposed to be the job of the rest of the executive team so I can focus on content that's my entire point here

Starting point is 02:52:05 um chief process officer no no that's not what i want i can't make the last thing i can do it i don't want to do it especially when i have so many processes to fix on the content side we've we've had a lot of content challenges over the last couple of years as the team has grown and we've uh introduced all these new channels and stuff right like introduced the lab I mean remember the first couple of lab affiliated or lab collaborative videos they sucked and I don't blame anyone individually because it was a team suck effort right like uh but but we ran into something today where i was meeting with james and gary because i'm like hey what the heck happened with

Starting point is 02:52:53 this amd um uh what's it called quad effects uh so we have a video coming on quad effects which was amd's craptastic dual, dual core response to Intel absolutely kicking their butt back in 2006. We got our hands on a board, we got our hands on chips that I thought were AMD FX series, but they were actually quad core Opterons, so for a total of eight cores that came out later but then the script was written around the fx70 series which came out before with the platform and at no point in this process did anyone ask hey um what's going on here why did we write a video about FX70 that actually contains Opterons that came out later that have twice the core count and have nothing to do with the entire QuadFX platform and branding in the first place? And so it was like, okay, what happened with the writing team in between me

Starting point is 02:53:57 saying, hey, we should do a video on this platform. Can we source this motherboard? And what happened with the labs team where they got their hands on the motherboard and tested it with these opteron chips and didn't realize that we were supposed to be talking about a completely different thing and i realize i'm not making a ton of sense now and when the video comes out it's going to seem like the whole thing was ideated correctly in the first place um and and we executed perfectly because that's what we do. We turn it into lemonade. But what happened was we bought the wrong chips

Starting point is 02:54:33 or rather borrowed the wrong chips. And then labs didn't think to be like, hey, these are the wrong chips. And the writing team didn't think to be like, hey, it needs to be these chips. And so we just went whoosh and missed each other and i ended up with a script today that was supposed to be for how bad is this five thousand dollar computer from ten years ago part two the sequel right because it's kind of a sequel to that

Starting point is 02:54:59 skull trail video that got like almost 10 million views we're like okay can we make that lightning strike twice okay let's try uh quad effects let's go and nobody actually added up the prices of the components to make sure they actually cost five thousand dollars and we have no way of adding up the prices if they're not even the right chips right so so and i don't i don't blame anybody blame anybody because I totally understand how from my content idea to this finished script, all of these breakdowns occurred, but we have to fix it. And so that involves getting people together in a room. And basically what I'm saying is I still have to be a process officer or whatever. I just really want to focus on the content side because that's our core business. And that's what I'm good at. And what I suck at is communicating all these little things. Because I'm looking at this going, okay, it should have taken no more

Starting point is 02:55:56 than the three minutes that I took to realize that this is not a coherent piece of content. Why is that not obvious to other people oh right because they don't have the information that's in my brain about what i expected this content piece to be so i need to actually have more meetings but they need to be about content they need to not be about wi-fi infrastructure and meetings are scary because meetings are a extremely efficient way to waste as much time as possible. So you have to, you have to be careful because we didn't, some meetings can be quite necessary.

Starting point is 02:56:32 But you end up putting yourself in like meeting hell where all you end up doing is discussing things instead of doing things, which is like not great. One of the things that came out of the meeting today is that we're going to completely re-kajigger the writers meeting. So instead of having 20 people sit in there while we come up with ideas for videos, we're going to completely re-kajigger the writers meeting. So instead of having 20 people sit in there while we come up with ideas for videos, we're going to have people submit their video ideas ahead of time.

Starting point is 02:56:49 Jake, James, and I are going to go through and say no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. We'll probably bring Gary in as well so that he has the context for why we're saying yes, no, no, yes, no, yes, no. And then when we do the writers meeting, we're actually going to treat it more like the skeleton scrum, which is what we call

Starting point is 02:57:05 the um the the the quick sort of exchange of ideas where we come up with what all the major beats for the video will be so that way we're all present for that process both writing team and labs and instead of just kind of having people pitch video ideas we're actually going through and talking about what this video is supposed to be what the finished product is supposed to be so that we can get aligned on that and i think it's going to be a lot more productive but um maybe it'll suck and maybe we'll have to reconjure it from there but at least we at least we're trying things because i'd rather try things break them unbreak them re-break them then then do nothing. I mean, that's how you die. Stop swimming and die. Yeah. Big agree.

Starting point is 02:57:54 Next up, Dan. Sure thing. Hey Linus, you've mentioned you're still using a Galaxy Fold 3, which I also have. What would get you to upgrade your phone s pen integrated even bigger unfoldable screen or the return of the sd slot etc yeah i mean s pen would be pretty cool uh better much better camera like if they like really made the camera on this thing totally kick butt way better battery life i'd be super into that. I mean, yeah, really, iterative is fine. I just didn't see enough iteration on the Fold 4

Starting point is 02:58:29 to be worth bothering to migrate all my stuff. Speaking of which, how is it even possible that in the year 2023, it's not one single account validation to actually migrate everything? Why am I entering, entering like 50 login credentials? It's ridiculous. And I know the answer.

Starting point is 02:58:48 I understand the answer. But I hate it. Continuing. What piece of merch from other people made you want to start LTT Store? Seems like the drive for quality merch had to come from some bad guy. T-shirts. Crappy T-shirts. We kept saying, look, I want American Apparel T-shirts with proper screen printing,

Starting point is 02:59:14 and they would send us samples, and they were good. And then I would run into people at PAX or whatever, and they'd be wearing LTT shirts that looked like crap. And I hated it. It sucked. and they'd be wearing LTT shirts that looked like crap. And I hated it. It sucked.

Starting point is 02:59:29 Just pre-ordered the ROG Ally. Should the LTT stick locks be able to fit the joysticks? Yeah, should be fine. Hey DLL, I love seeing the progress of labs and the updates on all the serious science y'all will be able to do. Any upcoming lab test apparati that you are psyched to get running oh i mean i'm personally super psyched for the theater room um just because it's going to be kind of awesome to just hang in there and check out amazing displays and you know surround sound setups i mean obviously i have the one at home but the one here is going to be way better. Like mine's very home enthusiast grade. And this one is going

Starting point is 03:00:11 to have all kinds of wild stuff going in and out of it. So I'm really looking forward to experiencing like micro led displays and stuff like that. It's going to be super cool. By this time next week i'll be a dad to twins nice luke is ai twins oh luke is ai far enough along to help me with raising them how long until i can get my own rosie like the jetsons i think i'm going to need one uh i uh something that i'm going to say is please uh don't set your kids up to interact with it in any way. Can it help with raising them? I'm sure it can. You can ask questions.

Starting point is 03:00:50 I'm sure there's questions you can ask it. Yeah, exactly. I would just verify things. If it tells you something, especially if, if you're asking about something that might be important. Like if you're,

Starting point is 03:01:02 if you're wondering how to do a certain particular thing it might be useful for that if you're wondering what to feed a baby or or something in in that realm it might be a little bit more dangerous and i might check the citations yeah yeah yeah um but yeah i'm sure it could be useful has there been another time in graphics cards when a completely new entrant to the market had great tech and a great deal, but the drivers left a lot to be desired? For example, the Intel A750 and A770. I'm going to cheat and totally give you an answer that you weren't looking for.

Starting point is 03:01:41 And I'm going to bring up that Chinese GPU company. What are they called? Moore Threads. There. They've got hardware that shows some potential, but the drivers are atrocious. Moore Threads. I'm actually surprised our video on them didn't get a little bit more traction.

Starting point is 03:01:59 I thought people were going to be all over, you know, oh, what? This, like, weird, weird like homegrown Chinese GPU? What is this thing? I mean it does run games, which is more than I expected. Hi LLND, my day job is, hey we don't know what blank is and we want you to find out and replace it. I am constantly a newbie in complex systems and programs is info gatekeeping a problem at your scale too i actually don't think so oh oh my gosh yes it is for us um we work on different things so like that's not too surprising um okay but like there's a lot of, uh, things not being open source, right. Oh, video delivery and whatnot.

Starting point is 03:02:48 Okay. I was responding internally, but I, your answer, I think is definitely, um, more in line with the spirit of the question. I, I, I, yeah, I absolutely there's info gatekeeping. I mean, even something as simple as figuring out what a fair rate to charge for sponsorships is a closely guarded secret by most creators. Yeah, there's a ton of info gatekeeping, of course. Even if you work with a brand partner, they might hide how much click-through you drive and stuff like that. Yeah, they don't want you to know. They don't want you to be able to sell your abilities

Starting point is 03:03:32 as well to other platforms. Yeah, and they don't want you to come back to them and say, hey, we know we're performing great for you. We're raising our rates. Yeah, that's super frustrating. Hi, Luke. Also, Linus,us dan and future me i'm 22 and finding myself struggling with growing up time keeps moving forward but i still feel like i'm 16 i'd love some advice i still feel like i'm probably about 23 as well i'm definitely me too i feel it in my

Starting point is 03:04:03 bones i'm definitely not um i don't think it changes i think when i was a kid adults were just adults and they just knew everything or something um and i still walk around a bus station and there's like children and there's me and people like me and then there's adults. And that's kind of still the way I see it. I don't, I don't know. I, I, I'm going to be like 85 years old. I'm going to be like, man, that 95 year old, he really, yeah, he really has a lot to teach me.

Starting point is 03:04:38 I, I don't know, man. Yeah. What was your first experience hacking? configs pulling pranks or etc yeah do tell luke i'm trying to think what the first one was oh you left it as easy as editing configs. So, like, I don't know because that actually used to just be, like, a fairly normal way to interact with computers. You've got to remember, Linus and I are actually decently old at this point in time.

Starting point is 03:05:17 So, like, editing config files was extremely normal. Yeah, literally. Like, this is just something that everyone did. So I don't know if that would necessarily count for me. The biggest thing that I think would actually count properly for what you're talking about would have been messing around in high school. I used to be friends with this guy, I don't know if he would want his name to be public, so I won't name him. But I was friends with him from elementary school

Starting point is 03:05:49 all the way through high school. And we used to mess around. He figured out how to send messages, like pop-up screen messages, from one computer to another computer in the school. I used to distribute this Screen Melter program, which you can see if you check out Channel Superfund. If you look up Channel Superfund Screen Melter, you can find it.

Starting point is 03:06:15 That was something I did around that era. There was a lot of prank shenanigans that happened around that time. I would consider probably that to be the main intro. Anything for you linus um running quake 3 in widescreen going in and configuring the like dot ini file so that you could run it any way you wanted regardless of what was configured in the like graphics menu i think that was when i got my first widescreen

Starting point is 03:06:51 monitor i i felt like uh like an uber hacker at the LAN parties with everyone with their with their 4x3 quake 3 and me with my like 16x10 giant like quake 3 monitor obviously that's really basic but you asked for the first one so i guess that would be it love it hello lld michael one of the ltx whales here super excited for the event anything you guys can share that you are excited about that hasn't been talked about yet he wants leaks hmm i mean i could talk a little bit about the uh the diy screwdriver booth i guess that's something people are going to be pretty stoked on um yeah diy screwdriver booth is going to be sick you'll be able to go in make it yourself we're going to have three different stations where you

Starting point is 03:07:41 uh you're going to use an arbor press which ended ended up costing us a lot of money to get all the arbor presses, whatever, I guess. Who needs to make money? So you'll press fit together your screwdriver. We're going to have, I think, a total of six or seven different colors. I think we're completely on track for that. So that's pretty cool. What else is shaking?

Starting point is 03:08:04 Oh, we're're gonna be playing a game from one of my former friends back at ncix uh he developed an indie game we're gonna be playing that at the land i'm not gonna say the name because i don't want people practicing i want it to be like very organic and everyone having no idea what's going on because it's a lot more fun that way i don't even know what it is and that's like awesome yeah it's gonna be great um i think we're gonna have three lanes for case toss this time so we are dramatically scaling up the case toss competition oh man uh oh the the creator list on ltx expo.com is way more complete now i think there's like 40 creators on it so you're gonna want to check that I mean, even if you're not into me,

Starting point is 03:08:46 you're going to want to be there, because everyone and their dog is going to be there. It's freaking exciting. Alright, yeah, I think that's enough for now. That's all I can think of off the top of my head. I'm sorry. It's been a very long week. Oh, we'll get through it.

Starting point is 03:09:02 Would you lose money if everyone got the largest size desk pad? No. See, that's what we'll get through it. Would you lose money if everyone got the largest size desk pad? No. See, that's what drives me crazy about it. That's what drives me absolutely nuts about other companies pricing on this stuff. So much of the cost, whether it's a water bottle or a desk pad or a cable, is fixed costs. Like the machine time to create this is the same, regardless of whether it's 20 ounce, 40 ounce, 64 ounce, doesn't matter. The lid is the same, regardless of the capacity of the water bottle. The finishing of these threads is the same,

Starting point is 03:09:40 regardless of the capacity of the water bottle. The, damn it. The glass bead that goes in the bottom to create the vacuum seal is the same. The QC is the same. The box... I mean, it's the same printing time. It's the same folding time. It's the same packing time.

Starting point is 03:09:58 It's the same handling time. Putting it on the skid. Handling it. Shipping it out. Most of the costs of this are the same regardless of the size. So why is it that when I buy something like this from somewhere other than LTT store, the one that's twice the internal capacity costs like twice as much? That's not actually how that works. It is marginally more material, but material is a small part of the cost of the

Starting point is 03:10:24 actual finished good. And so whether it's desk pads or water bottles or whatever else, this has always driven me crazy because the pricing is just completely divorced from the reality of the costs. Yes, we do pay more for the largest desk pads compared to the smallest ones. And we have to kind of set our pricing based on what we anticipate the most popular SKUs will be and to ensure that we're you know making a reasonable margin and yeah if all of them were the biggest one that wouldn't hit our margin targets and it might not be sustainable but we wouldn't be losing money either um so i just yeah just is it irritating i guess that that's the short version. No.

Starting point is 03:11:07 And when other companies price things like that, they are just charging you a lot more because they can. Which is not a crime. It's not wrong. It just doesn't make sense to me. Hey, Luke and Linus. I was very excited to see the anechoic chamber in use. Which upcoming labs test are you guys most excited to see?

Starting point is 03:11:32 I think we kind of answered this one already. Okay. Good evening, DLL. Luke, as a fellow bearded individual, I would like to know what, if any, beard facial care you do. Conditioner. None, and I'm going to be cutting it off when I get home so you should see you awful yeah it looks like it's too far it looks like ball hair on your chin I think that I mean technically it's it's it's cubes right? I think that's literally somewhat accurate.

Starting point is 03:12:07 I'm going home to shave immediately. We knew you were going to say that. And you had to say it. Smaller creators like Fran Blanche have said their communities have ceased growing, and YouTube is pushing them to buy ads in order to grow. How does this reconcile with your prediction that niche channels are unable to grow? I don't know the question. Cut. Off. Sorry. What? Apparently, YouTube is pushing smaller creators to buy advertisements in order to grow

Starting point is 03:12:45 i have never heard of that before fake um well i'm not gonna say fake i mean i'm just saying i have youtube has never encouraged me to um to to buy that's a Facebook play. Yeah. And I could definitely see YouTube doing it if it thinks that you're a business that is trying to advertise things. I'm surprised that they would market it towards creators wanting to grow.

Starting point is 03:13:16 But I mean, them not showing it to you, Linus, but them actually showing it to a small creator, there being a difference there does kind of make sense so I don't know I could see it, I'm just surprised I'm just looking at some of Fran's

Starting point is 03:13:32 more recent content it looks like ah, Social Blade it looks like she's succumbed to the curve as I call it at least to an extent there was a big peak in may of 2021 and since then it's been kind of an inconsistent ride here um it's tough i mean it's fickle we talked about

Starting point is 03:13:58 this a couple weeks ago i think when our maybe it was last week when you were saying you know that other creators expressed to you that they don't really understand why I worry about this stuff. And I had to actually tell someone internally who works on one of our other channels. I was, or no, I didn't say it yet, but I came up with a really cool way of explaining this. And I meant to say it. I think I still have their message marked on red, but basically you should always be marked unread but basically you should always be sort of you should you should always be terrified um that this month's decline is just the first month of your descent into a crater in the ground right like every every time you're not growing or at least holding steady you are on your way

Starting point is 03:14:41 into oblivion and it doesn't matter how big your channel is. If you drop by 20% month over month, you will end up in a crater in the ground. That's just how it works. And the bigger you, the higher you fly, the harder you fall, right? Like it's, it's a really unforgiving game. It's really challenging. And small creators, you know, it's easier for them to break out these days between shorts, between the algorithm being stronger when it comes to serving attractive content to people. But I think that there's also less security in subscriber numbers. Having a quarter million subscribers doesn't mean that a quarter million people get a notification when you upload anymore. So it's, it's scary. You can also, so you can rise faster,

Starting point is 03:15:28 but you can also fall faster than you ever used to be able to. There used to be a really long tail on channels that, you know, weren't really hitting on all, firing on all cylinders anymore, but now it doesn't really seem that way, no matter how big you are. Could there be a table at LTX to swap the backpack zipper pulls? Might be nice to save on shipping and making those tools. That's very unlikely.

Starting point is 03:15:53 I don't know if we're going to have all the manufacturing done for the new carabiner pulls by then. Part of the reason it's taking so long is just the volume that we have to produce. We have to make like 170,000 zipper pulls or something like that. reason it's taking so long is just the volume that we have to produce we have to make like a hundred and seventy thousand zipper pulls or something like that like i remember having this conversation

Starting point is 03:16:10 with kyle when i was like hey what the heck we don't have we don't have enough um extra screwdriver bits for the screwdriver and he's like well you just increased your order of screwdrivers by you know twenty thousand or whatever it was at the time each of those contains eight bits that's um what does that work out to 160 000 bits did you ever think of that i'm like oh that's a lot and he's like and you also ordered all these replacement bit sets that's like and it was like another 500 000 bits he's like do you have idea? Like what kind of volume that if you have any idea how many bits? 500,000 screwdriver bits is I'm like, okay So it's the same thing like these carabiners you can't just at the scale we're operating at if we'd only sold 500 bags

Starting point is 03:16:55 It would be easy. We would just order 2,000 carabiner things and we would send them out but We can't really start until we're ready to go and that means producing at scale so it's the ship is just slower to maneuver um i don't make the rules but we will get everyone taken care of hey lld long time viewer first merch message how do you all keep yourself grounded i know that if i made it like you i would have to find a way to keep myself in check especially ethics wise i mean i count on the team for that right like on the one hand i i feel like i still remember a lot of what it was like when i was

Starting point is 03:17:37 not where i am today um but on the other hand i I mean, yeah, I, I, I value creating an environment where people can challenge me, where people can tell me I'm being a f***ing idiot. Right. Um, or, you know, and a**hole. Right. Like it's, it's really important to me. And so there's, I would like to think, um, I know Luke will say literally anything to me. truly anything to me so luke have i ever retaliated on have i ever retaliated towards anyone for um for a legitimate criticism i don't always agree uh no no yeah no retaliation definitely would not be the right term yeah i was gonna say like you'll you'll defend your position or you'll debate or of course i will but i don't

Starting point is 03:18:25 but i don't i don't think retaliation um would be fair to say i i think there's probably been situations where someone does that repeatedly um in an aggressive manner and are also wrong and stuff where it's like very negative and it's not constructive, et cetera. But I think you framed this with it being constructive. So maybe that's not valid. I mean, obviously I'm not going to suffer fools,

Starting point is 03:18:56 but like I'll tell someone like, I'm sorry, the conversation's over and we aren't doing that. I don't want to hear about it anymore. But that's only after I've tried quite a few times to explain it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:19:11 Hey, LDL, with the clear prioritization of profits over everything, like AI safety, should job seekers start to question the morality of working for big tech or just build the basilisk for money stop talking about the basilisk i mean should we question the morality of working for anyone like what about the morality of working for me dan i mean are we putting small content creators out of business are you wasting people's lives? Yeah, yeah. I mean, the number of hours that are spent consuming LTT content is that, should they be out, you know, digging things instead, harvesting, you know, should they be doing something more productive for society? I don't know, I kind of think you can attack the

Starting point is 03:20:05 morality of just about anything. And I know this is kind of a straw man argument that I'm creating here. But I think it's also not completely invalid. I think you absolutely should, like unquestionably, for sure. You can decide where that line is for yourself. So like you might align with the approach that Linus Media Group seems to be able to take as far as you can observe from the outside. You might better align with something else. You might not necessarily align with a company, but you might be okay with what they do, that's also fine. You can accept it, but not be enthusiastic about it. That's okay. But I think you should have, in my opinion,

Starting point is 03:20:54 you can do whatever the hell you want. In my opinion, you should have a line that you don't cross. I personally have a line. There have been offers for my employee that have come in that are highly lucrative but I'll be working for companies that I have publicly condemned. Aren't you glad you didn't go to Twitch? there's an example. But it's just like,

Starting point is 03:21:31 no, I'm not going to go do that. Because I don't need certain things that certain amounts of money would get me. I genuinely know that's not something that I'm going to care about at all. And if you watch The Wham Show a lot, you probably also know that's not something that I'm going to care about at all. And if you watch the land show a lot, you probably also know that. And like, I just, I would find it not okay to work for a bunch of these companies. I've had people apply to float plane from Fang style companies that are making monstrous amounts of money that complain about the morality of certain things that their companies have done and talked about how they're excited to work here. Not necessarily that we're this shining beacon of perfect actions all the time, but I guess in their minds they align better with our approaches to

Starting point is 03:22:17 things. And then they figured out that they wouldn't necessarily make as much. And they were like, well, that's a deal breaker. And I'm like, yeah, well, why do you think some of these companies make a bunch of money? Like, I don't know, man. Like, yeah, but that's up to the individual, right? Like, I can't tell you what to do. You have to pick what's important to you and what isn't and act accordingly. tell you what to do. You have to pick what's important to you and what isn't and act accordingly. I think a lot of people's morality and stances on things completely stops the second any amount of convenience or any amount of financial benefit comes into play. But it is what it is.

Starting point is 03:23:02 Hey, LLD, Linus, have you thought about having a conversation with framework to put the frore systems airjet in the laptop i made that connection um at this point it's in their hands to figure out if there's any way for them to work together i do think that there will be challenges i think that framework is already a really small company that's not manufacturing at huge volumes. And so integrating a very premium, expensive product like a Ferraro cooling system may not be in the cards for the time being. But in the longer term, yeah,

Starting point is 03:23:34 I'd love to see them work together. This is one from Joseph. It doesn't seem to be a question. Dan, if you curate this, I will buy more stuff. I curated that. Go ahead and buy more stuff please that's what i thought uh hey lld is floatplane profitable enough for us to get an exclusive series not behind the scenes with ldt or mac address style of editing of content that usually wouldn't work on YouTube? No, because anything that we're going to put that kind of work into would work on YouTube. I think that it's a really odd one to me. I think there are certain verticals where, yeah, you create content that wouldn't work on youtube and you could upload

Starting point is 03:24:27 it to an alternate platform and you could kind of make it make sense i think something like firearms content would be an example of that but in most cases if you're producing something that's really good you should only fans upload it to youtube like um where even more people will see it and then they will discover your content and then they will subscribe and then snowball effect like that's a that's a very uh yeah it's a it's a really good thing and if you're worried about what the impact will be on your primary channel then you upload it to a secondary channel and then you still let the algorithm do its thing and hopefully you get some discoverability and you get some additional revenue out of it um i don't know it's not a strategy that i think personally makes a ton of sense okay we're just about the end here luke if you want to look

Starting point is 03:25:14 through some of the potential and this is coming from someone who executed a similar strategy when we created nerd sports it was exclusive to vessel the only reason we did it exclusive to vessel was because they paid us a giant bag of money to do it. It's not because the economics actually made any sense, which is why they shut down the project. And we ultimately got the rights back and posted it to YouTube. Hey, Dan and the talent. Love you guys and the content. For someone who's hoping to get a job with LMG or labs in a year or two, what's your advice for building a portfolio and skill set? Thanks a ton!

Starting point is 03:25:57 I would focus more on doing something that you're gonna be very driven to do than doing something that you think is to be very driven to do than doing something that you think is going to particularly look great in a portfolio specifically for us. Yeah, there's lots of other companies. Theo mentioned recently about how you should, when you're doing something for your portfolio, you should solve your own problem. So like find something in your life that you think you could do better and make a tool for that in order to do it better. That's a really good way to do it. Because if you're going to actually like deploy this thing, and then continue to use it, you will probably maintain it, which will result in it being pretty good for your portfolio,

Starting point is 03:26:41 you would be very surprised the amount of people who apply and then have like a personal website linked as like, they'll be like, here's my portfolio. And it's their personal website. And they're like, I have other projects on that website that link out to and you click on their personal website. And it doesn't even load at all. It's like, you should you should use the thing so that you know that it's going to work. That would be very helpful. Someone at Flowplane Chat said, I have no portfolio but 10 plus years experience. Yeah, but this is not the scenario of the person that's asking the question. So for the person who's asking the question,

Starting point is 03:27:17 I would look to yourself for inspiration and try to find things that you can improve in your own world, just like Theo OZ. I think it's good. Dear DLL, are there any news on a yearly payment option for the Grandfather tier on Flowplane? Without discount, of course. I really would like to pay yearly. Thanks for all you do.

Starting point is 03:27:40 Not this second, but there have been a lot of improvements to the payment system recently, so maybe that will come at some point. Because not getting dinged on transaction fees every time would be great. Sorry, Dan. No, that's okay. Delay. In aerospace, we use V slash AR for human design studies to check install and repair methods of equipment. Once the head of the lab flexed on me by pulling out a 4090. What's the best tech flex you've ever had? Biggest tech flex? Okay, you know what?

Starting point is 03:28:21 No, I do know the answer to this. Way back in the day, once upon a time when I was working with Ivan, who you guys might remember from the fastest gaming PC ever video from secret shopper. Um, he worked here for a while, but we worked together back when we were at NCIX and when Nvidia launched the, uh, GTX 590. Okay, so dual GPU, whatever architecture that was. I can't, Fermi, I guess. Yeah, Fermi card.

Starting point is 03:28:51 They shipped it in this NVIDIA stenciled ammo box that had like, it was a green ammo box and it had an NVIDIA logo stenciled on the side in yellow. And inside they had like packing peanuts and stuff, but they also had the card and then they had these dog tags with like the name of your media outlet on them super cool so when i unboxed it i i sent him a note i said hey you got to come down to the studio right now and when he came down i told him, this is my favorite Cannot Has.

Starting point is 03:29:27 And I would basically tease him because he's such a collector. Whereas for me, I've never really been as sentimental as him. So I would always just kind of bug him about anything that I got that was highly collectible. It meant far more to me how much he coveted it than the actual item itself even though usually i would just end up forgetting about things and he would just take them uh but i was like this is my favorite cannot has i just wanted you to see it but you cannot has and i showed him the ammo box it wasn't even the card itself like that's because that's not what's valuable to him like he he would he would He would obviously love to have a fast GPU.

Starting point is 03:30:07 Who wouldn't? But it was the ammo box and the dog tags that were like cannot hases, unique items. And guys, if it sounds like I'm a complete prick, I mean, sure, maybe a little bit. But also, you got to understand, just look at any of our interactions on camera. He dished it too. He had it coming. So yes.

Starting point is 03:30:36 Did I take every opportunity to rub a cannot has in his face? 100%. Did he deserve it? 100%. So, uh, that, I think that was my favorite tech flex was that gtx 590 ammo box and dog tags at the ammo box i actually do still have and the only reason i cared about it was because of how much ivan wanted it uh love that guy i actually haven't heard from him in like a couple months i should probably ping him but uh there you go. That's my favorite cannot has. Oh, the gold swift tech water block. Okay, I do like my gold swift tech water block. I held on to that. But that wasn't really a cannot has. That was there's like 200 of them. The ammo box though.

Starting point is 03:31:15 Ooh. Is there anyone on the staff that completely changed your attitude or mindset about your job after interacting with them what was the change not currently on staff anymore uh for me i don't know who i think this is just directed at all of us um but brandon had me like approach video creation in a very different way. I didn't care like at all when we started. It's like stand behind desk talk. That's probably fine, right?

Starting point is 03:31:56 And he inspired me to like try different things and just not settle for the exact same approach every time, I guess. I think that's a good answer. He had a lot of influence here. He actually uploaded a new video yesterday or is either today or yesterday. Um, it's doing pretty well. So maybe go check it out. Cool.

Starting point is 03:32:19 I haven't actually watched it yet. ADLL greetings from Germany. We're having a seven-day LAN party in august how can we get everyone to play together and stop subgroups from forming love the show it's hard honestly it's really hard like i i've struggled with it at pretty much every LAN you have to kind of like go around and corral people and be like, okay, let's go. I don't have the game.

Starting point is 03:32:48 I don't have the patch. Oh, it doesn't matter. Come on, come on. Install it. Install it. Let's go. Come on, come on, come on, come on. And it's really tough because, you know,

Starting point is 03:32:55 obviously I don't want to encourage you to just be like a pushy jackass, right? But the flip side is like if you've got seven players in a Left 4 Dead lobby and someone's being like, I'm just going to like browse Facebook right now. No! Get in the lobby! I don't care if you're not the best at the game. We'll balance the teams. Don't worry about it. Participate. Drives me crazy. That's all I got for curated. So we're going to dive into potentials if you guys are okay with that.

Starting point is 03:33:25 I see you're doing the top. I'll start at the bottom if you want, or just curate them. MKBHD just had his second appearance on Hot Ones by First We Feast. Has Linus ever been invited, and should we be trying to make it happen? Would he go if he was invited? I don't know if I've ever been invited. Hot Ones. I'm going to check my inbox. If you have been invited and missed it,

Starting point is 03:33:53 I will be very upset. Hold on. Okay, we have the internal Hot Ones challenge we did on workcation. That was fun. I don't think so. I'm going to be, it's going to be pretty embarrassing if they did invite me at some point and I didn't do it. It really depends. Like if the location is really far and it's a time-consuming production, the opportunity cost of having me out of office is really, really, really high. So I can't promise that if they invited me

Starting point is 03:34:33 that I would be able to because it depends on scheduling, right? But I'm not opposed to it. Seems fine. I like Spice. Hi, DLL. With the price of Apple's new VRAR headset, who do you think Apple is targeting,

Starting point is 03:34:49 or is the price just for the first-gen headset? I think we've talked about this a fair bit on the show today. Hi, LLD. Yeah, I was trying to text answer that before you created it. Hi, LLD. Are there any plans on releasing short-length versions of the premium joggers, paj Pants, or other future releases? Short-length Pajama Pants? Pajama Shorts? Madness! But we do have a onesie coming.

Starting point is 03:35:18 Yes, a one-piece. Oh boy. With a hood. We didn't do the butt flap, though. Bridget forbade me. Really? She forbade me. Really? She forbade it. Oh, Joseph has purchased more stuff. Hey, thanks, Joseph.

Starting point is 03:35:33 Thank you very much, Joseph. Shout out, Joseph. Hi, DLL. Always curious. If someone at LMG had a side channel, streams, or TikTok blow up, go viral, would you support them as a partner under LMG? Rather, they split off like Tarzan and others in the past. Tarzan?

Starting point is 03:35:50 Taron. I think he means Taron. Okay, well, the reason Taron left is not because you had a video that blew up or anything like that. We just, you know, we grew apart. It was time. And that happens, right? Like, you can't...

Starting point is 03:36:04 I'm not married to anyone who works here and they're not married to the company right like life changes well you yeah but anyone else like and quite literally avon yeah figuratively luke figuratively got him got him oh my gosh you're worse than twitch really okay anywho um the point is that um you know i i would like to think that we try to part on good terms with people i mean i um yeah i'm still you know occasionally in touch with taryn occasionally in touch with brandon you know i i i'd love to be on friendly terms with people. I ran into a former employee, Jesse, when I witnessed an accident. And so I had to like wait around and they were just like walking down the street.

Starting point is 03:37:00 I was like, yo, and they're like, yo, like, you know, you know, obviously we don't want to part on bad terms, but it's not always possible, right? Like sometimes in any, in any breakup, you know, sometimes one or both parties are, are unhappy about some aspect of it. And so, yeah, it's just, yeah, it can be, it can be, it can be challenging. I forget what the question was. What was it again? I think if if uh somebody had a channel split off would you support them yeah so we'd like to i mean you know obviously i i don't care i just talked about brandon's video like minutes ago uh there was a little bit of a clarificate support them as a partner under lmg what does that even mean i guess they're still employed to say yeah like like we had an opportunity there with with they're just movies yeah um and and when people are driven like there

Starting point is 03:37:53 was a lot of internal pressure as far as my understanding goes but i don't have a lot of visibility on what happened here but i believe there's a lot of internal pressure to get um game linked going so like that's why that's happening and it sounds like a car linked or auto quickie or whatever it ends up being called i don't know what kind of channel it would be but some type of car channel is like almost an inevitability at this point um so yeah i don't know hey Linus and Luke, I recently watched the video explaining the problem with your Sony HT-A9 surround speakers. Have Sony responded to your video? Has any company reacted negatively towards a video?

Starting point is 03:38:39 I don't think Sony has responded in any way, but definitely we've had companies react negatively to videos don't uh don't imagine anything but i mean you think intel was happy about the walk in the rain oh i probably i'd say probably the biggest like baby response to a video was cooler master over that mechanical keyboard that they released remember the one Luke, where they said it felt like a mechanical keyboard and you and I tried it and we were like, ah no. And basically called them like giant stupid liars. They were- Didn't we do that live?

Starting point is 03:39:17 They were so butt hurt. I don't remember. I don't think they dealt with us for a long time after that. I'm just like, okay, I'll see you when you're back back i was good friends with a lot of people at logitech and then i show that their headphones will just fall off your head if you tilt your head back and they like we were not good friends anymore really i was ready to keep being good friends but yeah yeah that like stopped oh interesting you know it's one of those things where it's not the company, right? It's the people. Companies are made of people.

Starting point is 03:39:49 And so, you know, you could ask like, you know, have you ever had a negative interaction with a sword? And it's like, well, no, but these steel molecules at the front of this blade definitely passed through my body, right? So I don't know. It's hard to say that's a phenomenal analogy i just want to commend you for that that's excellent oh my gosh i enjoy that that's very good the nvidia thing with the hardware unbox thing obviously there are some

Starting point is 03:40:15 people at nvidia that are not fans but i think nvidia overall you know probably wants to work with us in a constructive way. I don't know. What is your favorite movie or TV show to watch after a new media center set up? I love How to Train Your Dragon, The Hidden World. I actually think it's a much crappier movie than the other two, especially the first, but it's beautiful. Encanto, too, I think is a mediocre movie that um looks amazing i shouldn't say mediocre movie because the vast majority of it is pretty good but i'm just kind of tired of disney's sort of ambiguous villains like give me like a give me a baddie for a change you know like, the grandma is overbearing or something. It's like, okay. So they like, everyone just recently,

Starting point is 03:41:08 like I don't want, you don't have to teach me things all the time. Like it's fine. Life and the world itself is as complicated and crazy and wild and weird as it needs to be. What if it wasn't just a misunderstanding? What if someone was like actually, you know, Paul Bernardo and just an evil, awful person? I don't know who that is, but sure.

Starting point is 03:41:32 Serial killer, awful, awful. Okay, yeah, sounds bad. But yeah, like I kind of miss it being easy to consume content. Like having stuff that's like deep it makes you think all that kind of stuff is fine but not everything needs to be that way sometimes i just want to go watch a movie or play a game that is about uh the good people just like kicking the stuffing out of the bad guys which is what like i should have been i don't want it to be weird i don't want it to be like oh i feel bad for the bad people i just want them to be bad people and i want it to be weird. I don't want it to be like, oh, I feel bad for the bad people.

Starting point is 03:42:05 I just want them to be bad people and I want them to lose. Like, that's it. Yeah. People are like, Encanto's perfect. No, it's not perfect. They chickened out at the end.

Starting point is 03:42:15 They chickened out. They should, spoiler alert, they should not have gotten their special powers back. That was the whole f***ing point. And you can always smell it you can smell it from a mile away when the movie makes its way completely through the arc it ends with such a perfect beautiful message that it doesn't matter if you're magical what matters

Starting point is 03:42:41 is that you build community and then it's like oh but we learned that so now we get to be magical again no that wasn't the fucking point and you can tell a writer somewhere their soul died when the committee that came in and wrote this movie and fixed it for them changed that sucks really sucks yuck okay last couple here long time fans since lg34 um95 days linus do you plan on doing a short circuit on the rog ally showing ssd upgrade paths m.2 extender for full-size ssd and a pre-release with updated firmware um i'd love to do an ultimate ally i don't know exactly what that'll look like but i'd love for it to include like extended battery and you know 80 millimeter um

Starting point is 03:43:49 yeah yeah 80 millimeter yeah 80 millimeter m.2 and cool stuff like that good morning L&L from Germany I pre-ordered the ally but could not find a cool travel case are you still working on the steam deck case or will it be too chunky for the ally it's on the back burner right now I'm afraid but someday yes we do want to do a carrying case as for the gigabyte It's on the back burner right now, I'm afraid. But someday, yes, we do want to do a carrying case. As for the Gigabyte 30 series cards, Kevin, the only thing I've heard about this is that I happened

Starting point is 03:44:14 to cross a Lewis Rossman video where he talked about that it is apparently a thing. That sounds bad. I don't know anything about it other than that though. I saw that today. And I think that's it. I will see you again today. No, not today.

Starting point is 03:44:32 Next week. Same bad time, same bad channel. Bye! Oh.

The WAN Show - Ban me, Twitch! - WAN Show June 9, 2023

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