The WAN Show - I Want To Be A Console Gamer - WAN Show February 24, 2023

Starting point is 00:00:00 What is up everyone and welcome to the WED Show! It's the show where anything can happen. Controversy, hot takes, controversy, and even hotter takes. And even hotter takes! You'll find it all here. We've got some great topics for you guys today. The PlayStation VR 2 launches next week, so we're going to be running you guys through. Oh no, you're going to have to do this topic. Because full disclosure, I have already tried it and I don't know what is or isn't under embargo so

Starting point is 00:00:30 we'll figure that out all right cool uh also sorry i mean i uh i had looked into this a little bit but i didn't know the price you can pay 144 a year for for facebook sorry okay i'm sorry okay what else we got uh linus rage quit a video game wait do you even know that linus rage quit video games did you know that even played video played video games? Did you? You picked that as a headline topic? Everything else sucked. Nothing happened this week. I don't know if you paid attention to the news all week, but nothing happened this week. That was an if you're desperate topic.

Starting point is 00:01:14 And I'm desperate. All right. Fair enough. So I picked it. It's a great topic. Okay, what else we got? For if I'm desperate, which I am. The other one is going to be, oh, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:01:22 Amazon expands into telehealth. Really? Not YouTube ads, dubbing podcasts, and 1080p premium? Is that more interesting? We've already talked about 1080p premium. No, we talked about 4K paid. I'm pretty sure we included 1080p premium. Probably.

Starting point is 00:01:37 Or was that just something that we knew at the time? I don't know. Because I definitely knew that at the time. Let's roll the intro. Dan? Oh. um yeah they can't hear you if you're way over there so that's a challenge i don't think he cares i can do the i can try to do the psvr i think the phone should be bigger and and the like it i can't tell that that's real water tubes if there's anything we can do about that that trying to do the PSVR? I think the phone should be bigger. And, and the,

Starting point is 00:02:25 like it, I can't tell that that's real water tubes. If there's anything we can do about that, that would be great. As for the, as for the GPU challenge. Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Starting point is 00:02:37 That looks good. I'm checking that one. Oh, you want me to watch Appy's? No, no, I wanted an audio pickup. You want,

Starting point is 00:02:43 wait, you want me to do an audio pickup? Real quick. that oh good gravy okay uh luke's gonna get the show started oh so i'm just gonna do it here okay perfect then we'll just yeah that's great then we'll just get the show started all right our first topic today so sometimes when the show is late that's what's happening yeah this sort of thing what was our headline thing today uh yeah you switch console gamer yes playstation vr2 uh hey um are our reviews up yet or like what's the deal what are we about to say it's out it's out people can buy it people have it then i can talk about it right yeah i tried it have you tried it. Have you tried it? No. Oh, there it is. Yes. PSVR 2.

Starting point is 00:03:25 Ah. Luke. It's enough to make me want a PlayStation. Really? I want a PlayStation for the first time since the PS2. Wow. Yeah. Like I wanted a PS2 because I wanted to play like Final Fantasy.

Starting point is 00:03:39 Have you tried the new Facebook one? The thinner one? Yes. The like thinner one? Yes. The professional one? Yes. And this is better? Oh, dude. Oh.

Starting point is 00:03:49 It's OLED. Oh. It's OLED. Oh, I forgot about that. It's OLED. That's actually pretty sick. I remember seeing that in the specs and being like, damn. That's cool.

Starting point is 00:03:58 It's exactly as damn as you think it is. Here, have a look. Am I trying this? No, I mean, you can try it on. You can, here, have a look. Am I trying this? No, I mean, you can try it on. Okay, I'll show you the adjustments. So there's two adjustments. This button at the back pulls it like that, okay? And twist to tighten.

Starting point is 00:04:14 That do be how our headsets work. And then there's one here that goes like that. Okay, so a little something like that. Oh, the screen, though. The screen. We've got a full review coming soon where we try a bunch of different games and um do like a short comparison against what kind of vr setup you could build um like a pc vr setup that you could build for the same price but this thing is

Starting point is 00:04:39 exciting uh it came out this week last week son Sony released a full official teardown showing off the new hardware. And based on the specs and based on my experience, the PSVR 2 is a significant jump. 4.1 megapixels per eye versus 1 megapixel per eye. HDR display. Yeah. OLED, HDR, Luke. HDR, OLED. That's cool.

Starting point is 00:05:02 And pupil tracking. Pupil tracking. That's right. Foveated rendering. Games look so good in spite of the, on paper, lower graphical performance of the PlayStation 5 compared to a top-tier PC. This puts it miles beyond anything else that's in an equivalent price range,

Starting point is 00:05:27 which is 550 US dollars in terms of visual quality. And I got to tell you this. Okay. I expected, I've never actually used eye tracking and foveated rendering before. I have used eye tracking before, and I know that it's like, can be pretty fast.

Starting point is 00:05:44 It could be pretty okay. It can be pretty okay. It can pull at rates of well in excess of 100 hertz, which is pretty good. But the eye moves faster than a lot of eye tracking technology. And my concern was that with foveated rendering, which I guess I haven't explained yet, what they're doing is they're tracking where you're looking, rendering just that spot. I think it's, what, 4% of your field of view is actually high res. Yeah, it's small. And then everything else is kind of junk tier.

Starting point is 00:06:12 Even if it was in focus, it would be junk tier, right? So what it does is it takes that spot you're looking at, renders it at higher quality, and then everything else kind of goes to crap. And I couldn't tell if it was working from inside the headset because it's so fast. And Alex and... Oh, right.

Starting point is 00:06:32 So if you think something in your peripheral is poorly rendered, so you go to look at it, it's nicely rendered by the time you get there. And I thought it just wasn't working. I thought everything was just rendering at full quality because I'd intentionally look. But then Alex was my was my spotter And he he had a TV set up capturing the experience

Starting point is 00:06:51 Okay, and we played a little game where I said I was in Horizon whatever the the horizon experience Oh, you had to try to guess where you were looking? He had to guess where I was looking based on the render quality And he's just like yeah there and there and there and so I'd be like I'd like I'd look look and I'd try to I'd try to beat it and see the lower I couldn't do it that's kind of cool it's incredible horizon call of the mountain is that it yeah yeah yeah that's the one and it is it is oh man it's just it's moving in the complete opposite direction of what met is doing with their vr headsets. It's unapologetically a non-standalone VR headset. It's the best hardware they could build into a headset.

Starting point is 00:07:33 It's still tethered. It's tethered to a box. Deal with it. Because that's what it takes to have this kind of fidelity. I mean, that doesn't mean they haven't streamlined it. The original PSVR had a large breakout box and a complex AV setup, whereas this is a single USB-C cable. Is it possible to turn off the eye tracking?

Starting point is 00:07:52 I don't know. Why would you want to? People with lazy eyes or other... Oh, that's a good point. I didn't think of that. Okay, I need to do that audio pickup. Maybe talk about, I don't know, comfort or something. And you can also...

Starting point is 00:08:03 Comfort was good. It has attached earbuds which i'm not actually as much of a fan of because what if you have more than one person at your house that uses it uh or something i would prefer the like the disc headphone things that i believe the index has um those were totally fine in my opinion i don't i'm not a huge fan of that but general comfort and stuff actually quite good um the earbuds come off yeah unless they have like built-in headphones that replace it i'm not a huge fan of wearing other headphones with it either if they have additional headphones that you can buy that come with it or designed for it then that's cool but if not i don't know personally uh but yeah comfort's good this shroud this like rubbery

Starting point is 00:08:54 shroud it's got a 3.5 millimeter jack yeah that doesn't solve it for me personally i don't want earbuds while i'm playing um but that's a preference thing yeah they said that i'm not super into that well here's the thing, right? Though, the alternate solutions are either what Meta's doing with garbage tier audio. It sounds so bad. Or what Valve's doing, which presumably is expensive. Oh, okay. The index costs twice as much as this.

Starting point is 00:09:21 Still! And it doesn't even have an OLED display. Man. And, oh, the screen door. You're going to break them. The screen door effect? much as this. Still! And it doesn't even have an OLED display. You're gonna break the mouth. The screen door effect? Negligible. You can still see it, I'm assuming? There are actually headsets out there that are slightly higher resolution, but

Starting point is 00:09:37 it's real good. It's real good. Just the persistence is so low. I got the headset on. I'm going like this, and I'm like, wow, this is amazing. There's, like, no smearing. I'm just going to go like this.

Starting point is 00:09:53 This is my new game. No external beacons. No, no. How's the tracking? It's okay. I hope that Valve stays full purist and sticks with outside-in tracking. I literally wired up my house for their base stations. My ceiling in my rec room has 12-volt power run inside it

Starting point is 00:10:18 so that I can always have four base stations. I am a one-of-a- a kind i suspect nobody else has actually done that but that's how committed i am to outside in tracking it really is superior from a performance standpoint but it's inconvenient it's the i will say for a tethered experience the single usbc cable with no breakout box is pretty sweet. Because I'm used to this thick cord of three different cables coming out that has to plug into some junction box at some point. And then go into your computer in three different plugs to the point where you might be maxing out the USB on the back of your motherboard. Whatever.

Starting point is 00:11:01 Blah, blah, blah. It's super annoying. Just having one cable is really cool. I'm totally down with that. Yeah. 120 hertz oh it weighs adjustments it weighs less than the previous one and it did feel light actual ipd adjustments very cool yeah i'm man i'm excited however how are the new controllers great they're right here oh hey what's up yeah i'm okay they're a little heavy um like rotationally i find that uh my hand's too big this is kind of bulky and there are definitely some things about the headset that are japanese designed that's one of them and i personally found that my oh i was not super compatible with the headset.

Starting point is 00:11:51 You tried sliding it out, though? Yeah, but I don't like that. I like to have the headset tight against my face because I play games that require a lot of moving around. And light leak sucks. Well, the light leak is really good on it, actually. I did notice because of the rubber thingy, but still that is usually a reason why you want it closer. But for me, a big part of why I want it closer

Starting point is 00:12:13 is just so that when I move my head, I'm not feeling that drag, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like less leverage for it to move around on my face, right? And so I... Someone said try pushing buttons. Yeah, the trigger is like hard because the bone of this part of my pinky... Luke cam.

Starting point is 00:12:35 Yeah, so the bone of that part of my... Can I show it? Yeah, I can tell. It's colliding and like bending my pinky in. So even pulling the trigger feels super awkward because if you see the natural position of where my finger goes on it isn't like up there like that's extremely uncomfortable it's like down here because it's cranking my hand down and then even to get to this thumb stick is like my thumbs on full tilt so i don't know i could do it but um

Starting point is 00:13:03 not not the biggest fan bixby asks what product doesn't have ipd adjustments quest 2 yeah they're they're digital they're fake yeah whereas the psvr2 has proper uh ipd adjustment um alpha's intel says luke bing chat gpt knows you were talking about it on wanshow it asks you not to be disappointed in its abilities. Yeah, well, I think I talked about this last show. I won't get into it too much, but I mentioned how it now has a form of memory because people are posting conversations that they have with it online and it can search the internet, right?

Starting point is 00:13:41 So it has a form of memory. It can see conversations that it has had in the future. Not all of them, just only ones that people have posted online. And it can see transcriptions of different things. So if we have closed captions for this video, for WAN Show, it might be able to have access to that. It can't watch the video, but it could watch a transcript.

Starting point is 00:13:59 And it could see people discussing what we said on the show as well, if there's text versions of that. So it would be. I would expect that it would be aware of that. I don't know if you want to call it awareness, or I expect it would be able to search that up. But, yeah. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:14:17 This is interesting. I was just poking into people are talking about using the PSVR 2 on a pc um but the creator of the ivre driver uh which is a way to use the original psvr on a pc basically says um yeah i don't think this is going to be that easy he goes you'll be wasting your money there's no guarantee you could ever use it on a pc and quite a good chance you won't be able to the original psvr is electronically equivalent to a monitor um so it is relatively simple to get a video signal up on it. Reading sensors, etc. took a lot of reverse engineering and at least a year from release before anyone figured that out. It took a couple more years before it was usable as a PC VR headset.

Starting point is 00:14:56 Yeah. Yeah, and it's still a work in progress with tracking controllers with the original hardware over five years from release. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I wouldn't expect that to years from release. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I wouldn't expect that to be a thing. Yep. Okay. That's fair enough. I mean, it's kind of a funny thing to me. Like, if people can use it on the PC and they want to use it on the PC, is there really no margin in it at $500? Like, they couldn't just sell it as a VR headset? I

Starting point is 00:15:24 guess that wouldn't be very PlayStation of them. That wouldn't be very Sony of them. Sort of. PlayStation's actually been moving a ton of games to PC and has been fairly faithful in regards to patching them and making sure that they actually run okay.

Starting point is 00:15:39 When Horizon was one of the earlier games that they brought to PC and it was quite a mess when they first brought it over, but they cleaned it up, and as far as my understanding goes, it's pretty stable now. So in the past, I would definitely agree with that, but these days, they've actually been pretty PC-friendly. Okay.

Starting point is 00:15:58 Well, I guess we'll see. Yeah, I don't know. Conrad says it's hard to keep customers in your walled garden if you open the door. I mean, yeah, that's fair enough. True. Why don't we jump into our next topic? Who wants to pay $144 a year for Facebook?

Starting point is 00:16:14 After the massive success of Twitter Blue, Mark Zuckerberg has his eyes set clearly on generating revenue from his user base through the Meta Verified program, a monthly subscription with a cost of 12 US dollars that does what? Okay, it covers Facebook and Instagram, includes a blue badge, increased search visibility, exclusive stickers for stories direct customer support and 100 free stars a currency that can be used to tip creators there does not appear there does not appear to be any reduction in ads or data mining what a deal mark sign me up. I love it. Can we, can we, can we never normalize this people? It seems to just be a brand thing. Like never. Can we never ever normalize this? Can we always make fun of people for paying for Twitter blue, please? Would you, would you normalize it if it did do what it says at the end? If it did reduce or let's say it removed ads and removed data mining.

Starting point is 00:17:31 I wouldn't believe them. Yeah, fair enough. All right. Let's imagine that you knew without a doubt. Forget the data mining because I don't believe them. But we can talk about ads. Okay. because I don't believe them.

Starting point is 00:17:44 But we can talk about ads. Okay. If I never saw an ad on Facebook or Instagram again, I wouldn't pay for this because I don't remember the last time I opened up Facebook or Instagram. No offense to our dedicated viewers on Facebook, all dozens of you. Yeah, we're streaming there right now.

Starting point is 00:17:59 We're streaming there right now. I don't think either of us have ever seen that page No, 41 people are watching on Facebook. Oh very nice sup boomers Hello fellow boomers They're leaving in shame and I took that personally don't observe us Yeah, so Facebook. No, I wouldn't pay for it.

Starting point is 00:18:27 But let's say hypothetically that it was a service I actually used and cared about. Yeah, I don't know. $12 a month doesn't seem that outlandish. Why would you pay for it, though, as a normal user? What does it even give you? As a company. Have you seen how many ads there are on Facebook? Oh, no, we're not talking about our.

Starting point is 00:18:44 I was talking about the root thing. I was no longer talking about the ad removal. Oh, okay. So we're not talking about the real product. Or we are going back to talking about the real product. We're going back to talking about the real product. Yeah, so increased search visibility, stickers, customer support, and stars to tip creators.

Starting point is 00:18:59 It's basically just stars. Yeah, I mean... If you're a normal user. What support do you need on... I mean, you use Facebook, so maybe you're a normal user and what support do you need on i mean you use facebook so maybe you're not that good with computers maybe you just need help using websites hold i i interpret that as the other way around direct customer support yeah maybe you're all right wow that's an advertised major feature i mean if you need customer support you should just contact them right i assumed that was some way that like brands could interface yeah maybe i've got this wrong

Starting point is 00:19:30 maybe it's completely the other way around i kind of hope so because if they're like hey yeah we'll give you customer support for this thing that you're paying for i would hope that's not like a thing that they advertised yeah guys i mean hit us up which which which one is it advertised. Yeah, guys, I mean, hit us up. Which one is it? Meta support also means Instagram support. We recently lost a company Instagram account because they don't have support for unverified users. Yeah, so it sounds like it's very company focused. No, it sounds like it's user focused. If you're a user and you like lose your account, you should be able to get support. Yeah, but because it wasn't verified well i mean just mean anyone who lost their account whether they're a company or an individual user

Starting point is 00:20:09 would be pretty bummed about it sure and being able to contact support but that's terrible you should just have support for users i don't disagree unbelievable this is worse than i thought and it was already laughable. Man. Shortly after, okay, so they're not the first to jump on this. Shortly after Twitter Blue was launched, Tumblr started selling what they called important blue internet check marks that officially do absolutely nothing

Starting point is 00:20:37 for a one-time cost of $4 each. They apparently made a quarter million dollars in profit, a quarter over quarter increase of in-app purchases of 125%. As of a recent update, the check marks are now rainbow colored, apparently. Tumblr user CarpySuns, that is actually unironically what I called them when I was a kid. You know those little Capri Sun pouch drinks? I called them Carpy Suns because I, I don't know, I guess I had a little bit of the dyslexia.

Starting point is 00:21:08 Anyway, Carpy Sons apparently spent $120 on check marks, which is amazing. And back to sort of the inspiration for this, Twitter blew. According to the most recent available numbers, only about 0.02% of active twitter users have a paid subscription of any kind i would have guessed it would have been somewhat similar honestly if you look at conversion rates for users to external things like say patreon floatplane nebula whatever uh i think it's actually usually a little higher than that yeah that's because there's no

Starting point is 00:21:46 real value for us but it's blue pixels but yeah considering how much you get compared like that's probably about where i would have slapped it like i mean flow plane is actually like we sell it pretty hard these days because it's a pretty darn good value these days yep like here but i'm saying like you you get a lot if you subscribe to some creators well i guess it's up to what the creator is offering but a lot of times i see you get a decent amount of value if you subscribe to someone's floatplane or patreon or whatever else considering what you're getting for the twitter blue check mark how quickly could the floatplane team um make like whale check marks because people on float plane are asking for them.

Starting point is 00:22:27 I've got offers for like 15 bucks here. You're already paying. If they want to pay more, Luke, can we get a tier that has a check mark? You can subscribe to the supporter plus tier. Then you get 4K. No, we need supporter plus plus. We have a product

Starting point is 00:22:45 the creator warehouse team is working on that has a size that is extra medium there's something in between medium and large and we didn't know what to call it we might we might fix that before we actually want this oh my goodness we'll we'll check in if you guys still want it in like a while when we have bandwidth to work on something when the memes are over yeah when the meme is dead i'll check in if you guys still want it and then we'll see you then yeah we'll call it the take my money tier yeah yeah no that's it'll have to be whale tier it'll have to be whale tier we'll come up with some other stuff that we can that we can bundle in or something like that i mean we do care about providing actual value uh like even the whale

Starting point is 00:23:30 tickets at ltx they i mean it yeah it's 10 grand but it includes like a five thousand dollar computer don't you get a hotel room yeah yeah yeah so there's value in there we we would need to yeah they would have to have value yeah we're just we're we're i'm totally down with their being i mean this is up to you guys technically but i'm totally down for there being like more expensive tiers that are offered yeah the problem is i don't like make sense i don't want waste like people are suggesting uh like free merch every month tier and my problem with that is what if it's something you don't want yeah we don't want you to throw stuff away i don't want to ship waste around the world, right?

Starting point is 00:24:06 Like it doesn't do anybody any good. I'd rather you guys just... In general, I usually would say you and I, but I think in general at the company, we are not into the idea of fast fashion. We're building things to last. You should be able to keep said thing for a while if you have it. We don't want to just create garbage.

Starting point is 00:24:24 It doesn't seem good. I don't think there's an argument for just genuinely creating garbage. Yeah, I just am not that into that. I mean, the main value is the exclusive content. We've got extras from the XQC build. We've got, oh, these are really fun. We've done a couple of mini moving vlogs

Starting point is 00:24:43 for the move over to the lab. The team is doing such an amazing job. We're doing, I think, at least two exclusives per week. So we've got Linus Reacts to Dennis and Vance switching roles. There's an update that is going to be going into beta, which is something we haven't really done before, but users will be able to opt into beta to be able to use it. It's not out yet,

Starting point is 00:25:06 but coming relatively soon. That is going to make it so that when you click on, if you go back to Flowplane really quick, if you clicked on that right there, it would expand downwards and you would be able to see a bunch of sub channels. So like Mac address and Tech Cookie

Starting point is 00:25:22 and Short Circuit. So you'd be able to effectively filter to the channel as if it was on youtube but then there can also be other things like full plane exclusive or whatever else um so that's that's coming it's a little bit easier because people have brought up that i mean you can just type in the search like full plane exclusive um but people don't like typing, I guess. So we will bring a new solution. But yeah. Oh, also, while we're talking about those types of things,

Starting point is 00:25:53 merch messages. People have commented many a time, including I, that you can't do merch messages if you use Shopify. So if you use Shopify fairly actively, it skips past where merchchMessages is, which is pretty annoying for people. And that has been- You should explain what MerchMessages are.

Starting point is 00:26:10 For those of you who are new, MerchMessages are down here instead of Twitch bits or YouTube super chats or whatever, where you just throw money into the ether and then maybe we acknowledge your message, maybe we don't. MerchMessages are a way that you can send in a message to the show like this hey how'd you decide on laszlo supernova um i think edzel was a fan and got in touch and we had a relationship with uh monster cat and basically um laszlo agreed

Starting point is 00:26:40 to do a slightly customized version of the intro song for us that exactly matched our animation. And it, I don't know, it was so good and it was so iconic that we just kind of kept it forever. I mean, I can still jam out to it and I've heard it so many times. We have stopped using the intro, as Dan noted in the response there in every video, but we do still use it sometimes. The issue is just that if you're throwing away like seven seconds of retention right at the beginning of the video, there's... Of highly valuable retention too. Yeah. It's just,

Starting point is 00:27:11 the branding is great, but the effect on viewership of not just that video, but your entire library is not positive. So it's something that we've started to shy away from anyway what was i talking about merch messages what they are right merch messages what they are is a way to send in a message to the show and if we don't get to it for whatever reason or um you know whatever at least you get your order in the mail so you get a hoodie or uh or uh oh do you have a like a right to repair pin plan that's a really good idea hey dan do you mind firing a right to repair pin plan? That's a really good idea. Hey, Dan, do you mind firing that over to Sarah? Righto.

Starting point is 00:27:48 And then maybe, yeah, maybe she could do up something like that. That'd be awesome. Basically, instead of the only thing that you get being a chance for your streamer person that you're watching to respond. And to enrich Google or Amazon. Now you definitely get something. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:28:02 And there's a free added bonus. Yeah. That genuinely costs nothing. Yeah nothing that we might respond. Yeah. So it's cool. And, oh, we launched a new product today. Man, we're getting, okay, we're getting all this out of the way here. Oh, wait, okay.

Starting point is 00:28:14 But the clarification there is where it happens has changed. It's in, I believe, the cart now. So everyone can see it all the time. Doesn't matter if you're using ShopPay. Doesn't matter if you're wanting to use Apple Pay that came up last time, whatever. You can all see it. So it works. Awesome.

Starting point is 00:28:29 Love it. And we launched a new desk pad. The WAN desk pad. It's a desk pad, but with a WAN logo and an orange accent and very LTT WAN branded and all that good stuff. Open the desk configurator. I opened the desk configurator. Yeah. Of course, I good stuff. Open the desk configurator. I opened the desk configurator. Of course, I'm going to open the desk configurator. This allows you to set your desk width, your desk depth.

Starting point is 00:28:53 You can set a style. You can see what different sizes of desk pad will look like. You can move them around and go, you know, I'd really like my desk pad to sit something like this. You can add a monitor. Wait, I thought you could add a monitor. Well, there's a keyboard anyway. So you can kind of play around with it and figure out what size makes sense for you.

Starting point is 00:29:15 Oh, you got to set a monitor count. Oh, look at that. Two. Boop. You can kind of move them around. Look at that. How fun is that? Everything's to scale.

Starting point is 00:29:23 You can check enable rotation and like turn them if you have them oh my goodness that is you can really see how your desk is going to look i mean that's rotating the yeah yeah well there's your problem there's your problem right there yeah yeah that was uh that was a lot of work but it's really cool so that's good uh all right. So, Luke. Yes. Are you signing up for Facebook Plus or Facebook Premium? What are they even calling it? Meta Verified.

Starting point is 00:29:51 Are you signing up for Meta Verified? Is it the new meta? No, definitely not. And I can't believe it's $12 a month. That's actually insane. Well, I guess, again again it really feels like they're very specifically targeting dan or should i call you moire yeah that that sweater though my goodness um okay not camera friendly see you later um

Starting point is 00:30:19 i have to take off your sweater. It's cold in here. Are you signing up for MetaVerified? No. All right. Thanks, Dan. It really, especially with the price, it feels like it's targeted towards customers or people who want to use Facebook in a professional manner. Yeah, that's fair. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:30:41 All right. Let's talk about a little topic that I call, I hate building PCs for people. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about a little topic that I call, I hate building PCs for people. Yeah. Luke. I do too. It really does feel like a no good deed goes unpunished kind of situation, doesn't it?

Starting point is 00:30:58 It does. I like building PCs for specific people. And at this point, I pretty much only build PCs for people that I have built PCs for in the past. So I know how they will deal with it. Okay. So here's the situation. I built a PC

Starting point is 00:31:13 for someone back in... Wait, this can't be right. I think I know who this is. Okay. Well, whatever. It was a while ago. It was a couple months ago or something like that. Okay. I don't think you know who it is. Okay okay i don't think you know who it is okay i don't think you know who it is i'm gonna be anonymizing it fairly well i see the name uh i mean sort of i i really don't think it's who you think it is no clue yeah yeah it's not who i thought that's fine it needs to be completely

Starting point is 00:31:39 anonymized um in february early fe February, I get a message. I'm just wondering how to get my monitor to 144 hertz, because apparently it's 60 right now. I kind of go, all right. It was definitely at 144 when I gave it to you, which is all I care about. This is one of those situations where the PC wasn't free, but it was, like, very not retail, if you know what I mean.

Starting point is 00:32:09 Like there was some wheeling and dealing that happened to make sure that this person who was, you know, a family friend definitely got like something a lot better than they would have walked out of Best Buy with. Sure. So as far as I'm concerned, I have done my good deed already. Business over. Yeah. Our transaction is now complete. So I kind of go, are you using HDMI or DisplayPort? HDMI may be stuck at a lower refresh rate.

Starting point is 00:32:38 Just basic troubleshooting. Yep. I don't know what that means. Sorry. How can I check? And I kind of go, you're going to have to look up how to check. Use Google. Okay.

Starting point is 00:32:48 Okay. All right. Two weeks later, I've been having problems connecting my headset mic. When I checked, it's not registering. It doesn't say the model of headset. Here, I'll show it to you. Screenshot. I'm like, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:33:01 If I was in front of it, I might be able to figure it out, but you might just have to find some troubleshooting guides. I get no fewer than 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 messages over the next three days that go as far as I'm pretty, okay, I really think this is urgent. Please reply to this quickly. I can't do anything on my PC. And I'm just, I'm sitting here going, what's my incentive to do a favor for anyone at that point?

Starting point is 00:33:42 You know, like I don't. I want to try. for anyone at that point. You know, like I don't. I want to try. I found a website called, let me GPT that for you. Let me GPT. Okay, we're going to Luke's screen. We're going to Luke's screen. Here we go, here we go.

Starting point is 00:33:54 Let's see if it works. Okay. I mean, this is one of those troubleshooting things that is so broad that. I'm just wondering what it's going to say. Sure. so broad that i'm just wondering what it's going to say sure yeah all right i mean this is good troubleshooting so far is this bing or is this chat gpt i'm assuming this is chat gpt okay i don't actually know i've never actually used this

Starting point is 00:34:25 website before i was just thinking like there's gotta it has to exist and then yeah it did performing google it must be wait what okay it's scrolling down what is this what is this bot doing it clicks the first hit for you this is maximum tier snark wait it just moves it there i have to click on it you have to click it amazing okay that makes sense that would probably violate google's t's and c's if it actually clicked a link for you yeah hilarious all right um anyway i feel like this is one of those am i the whole things right for basically just saying so my response my response to this wall of text is sorry i really can't dig into issues like this if there's a problem you'll have to shut it down for

Starting point is 00:35:22 now and take it to a computer shop or you can try and fix it yourself i didn't have anyone to help me troubleshoot and things usually worked out okay tongue smiley face a little bit of sass on the end a little bit of unnecessary sass on the end but here's the thing i mean okay have you have you read these articles and i've heard anecdotally from some a couple of people I've talked to this about recently, one who's a teacher and one who worked in an office. And I've read articles about this too, that apparently the younger generation, in spite of growing up with computers, is entering the workplace with fewer functional computing skills. They grew up with less computer problems because things worked more often.

Starting point is 00:36:05 So that's the thing, right? Is this just tough love? That's what I thought I was doing. Like, look, no, if you want to solve this, if you want to play video games. I didn't want to pry, but is this a younger person? This is a younger person, yes. So I got that vibe.

Starting point is 00:36:21 And in that case, I mean, it seems more fair? I don't know cuz I mean realistically what do young people even do honestly you're done you're done your obligations for the day by like three o'clock is that when school ends I don't even remember yeah so figure it out like I I'm not trying to be a jerk about it or anything but that was how I learned the only reason that I'm not trying to be a jerk about it or anything, but that was how I learned. The only reason that I'm doing this today, that I know any of this stuff, is because I was highly motivated to fix my computer

Starting point is 00:36:51 because I wanted to play video games. Me too. And it's amazing, right? Kids can figure out just about anything. Just about anything. I'm surprised that first one, they didn't just Google it. Because my monitor's not running at the right refresh rate, whatever. It's like super Google.

Starting point is 00:37:12 What is HDMI? Super Google. And I have to confess that the second problem with the headset is probably a more challenging problem. Less Google, yeah. But I was already kind of in the wrong frame of mind from being asked what HDMI is so maybe there was a little bit of snark

Starting point is 00:37:29 but it's also true right like the reality is that I am highly disincentivized to build computers for people if they're going to bother me about how they work when it's not an actual problem with the computer I mean maybe we need to just pull the audience here i don't know how to set up polls i forget i've got some some people

Starting point is 00:37:49 that i've been like building computers for since like high school that i still build computers for them whenever they need new ones they never bother me about pretty much anything yeah just like they've never actually built one on their own and every once in a while it'll be it'll be like you know like three or four years or maybe a little bit more but they'll be like hey like uh you still down i'm like yeah sure whatever they haven't bugged me since then about that at least so it's like yeah why not it doesn't really matter to me like if if we're still gonna have the understanding that like you gotta maintain it over the next while but yeah i'll put it together for you.

Starting point is 00:38:25 I don't mind that. Yeah, Chad is pretty universally aligned on this. I do think. Don't build computers for family. Don't build computers for friends. Because every time you do it, you turn into tech support for it forever. I do think. And there used to be a thread on the forum.

Starting point is 00:38:41 And this would annoy the heck out of me. I don't remember exactly what it's called but it was some something about like um who's it called tales from tech support i've heard that before yeah i think that's what it was yeah i don't remember um i know there was a subreddit for it there was a thread on the forum all this kind of stuff that kind of stuff used to bother me because a lot of the stories that would end up in there just mocking people were actually just people being like just gatekeeper and losers yeah like if if like yeah okay don't build computers for family except it kind of depends yeah like maybe you should yeah i i did one for my parents back in the day and they haven't needed an upgrade since then you know what's really fun there's an ncix tech tips episode where i build um where i fix a pin

Starting point is 00:39:33 on like a a phantom x3 or something like the athlon x3 uh triple core and that cpu is oh no no phantom 720 i don't know whatever that That CPU is in my parents' computer to this day because it was broken. And I was like, can I just have this? And they were like, it's a broken CPU. Get out of here. I'm like, okay, cool. So that still works.

Starting point is 00:39:58 They don't bother me about it though. I built one for my sister. She also hasn't bothered me about it. Thankfully, her hubby is pretty technical though though, so she wouldn't really need to. I will say I have some privilege here because my family is quite technical. My dad and my brother are both very technical. But if my mom has computer problems, I'm going to help my mom with her computer problems. Yeah, same with my aunt.

Starting point is 00:40:20 And I'll write down all the steps on the piece of paper. I'll record a little video for her of like how to do it and stuff. Like if this is a family member that you only ever have contact with when they have computer problems. That's the worst. That's one thing. That's its own kind of realm. I have one of those extended family member who I literally hear from once every year

Starting point is 00:40:39 or two when they want to ask me something about a computer. Yeah. See, like that's annoying. Yeah. But if this is a family member that you're in, like, pretty consistent contact with or, like, raised you or whatever else. Or tries to help themselves. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:40:51 That's a huge part of it, is if I don't have to explain the same thing over and over and over again, I have a ton more patience for it. Or maybe they're super not technical, but they, like, gave it a shot. Just couldn't figure it out. You know, and didn't make it worse. Hopefully yeah sometimes a problem

Starting point is 00:41:09 Like there's there's things like that where it's like man like just get over it There's also other ones that I used to find in those threads which were people literally just complaining about the fact that they had to Do a job Like they were that used to drive me nuts, too They would like be in technical support right at a company and then they'd be like these idiots have computer problems like yeah it's why you're here you're welcome yeah like what do you want like stop stop complaining they have they have like things that they would rather not do at their job as well i don't know those types of things used to

Starting point is 00:41:40 bother me like don't complain about helping people that help you yeah like it should be a cyclical thing if these people like raised you and in a not completely terrible way maybe i'll i mean yeah based on how you turned out i don't know if you owe them any tech support wow rude um i think i owe them lots um but yeah like if there's if there's i don't know just don't be super salty all the time about doing good things for people but if people are just trying to extract value from you and they don't care about you at all etc etc etc don't deal with that either yeah i think both of them are valid stances i'm holding the line I'm basically just going yep if I could figure it out then you can figure it out and if you can't figure it out then I already saved you

Starting point is 00:42:31 hundreds of dollars you can take it to a shop you already did a lot so I'm over it yep all right that's it next up do you really care that much that i rage quit a video game that's a headline topic to you uh i don't know sure i none of these other things interest me i would have like tried to submit topics but i was genuinely like getting concerned part way through the week because i was like nothing's happening nothing's happening at all what are we gonna talk about there was like okay a minor continuation on the like Microsoft Sony and Activision Blizzard uh thing but like that's been going on for a million years and I think people barely care until it gets finalized like do they actually get to buy ABK or not um and it hasn't been finalized yet so how about canada may force google and meta to pay

Starting point is 00:43:26 for canadian news is that interesting because we've already talked about this at least two times well there was when australia started doing it we've already talked about canada and yeah okay i mean i think it's worth talking about we can go into it yeah look it's still a maybe though and it was a maybe land writer is right there writer is right there. It's not her fault. Are you going to look right at her and not read this? She can't make things exist. You can't knock on NVIDIA's door and be like, hey, really surprised. Do something controversial. Winnie, thanks for the WAN show.

Starting point is 00:43:55 Unlaunch a GPU. I don't think the writing's bad. It's just nothing happened. For a period of five weeks, Google will be testing blocking links to news articles from appearing in searches for around a million Canadian users. The test is a response to Canada's proposed Online News Act, which would obligate them to pay for links to media content that appears in Google searches. Google has described the bill as overly broad, and Meta has stated that they might restrict access to news on their own platforms should the bill pass into law which is i think what they're trying to do is get people to

Starting point is 00:44:30 go to the original sauce for the news so mission accomplished i guess australia passed a similar law back in 2021 back then google conducted similar tests and meta restricted links to news articles on its platforms eventually however both however, both Meta and Google agreed to licensing deals estimated to be worth at least $200 million Australian dollars annually. We have a note here. Australia is home to Rupert Murdoch, possibly the world's largest news magnate.

Starting point is 00:44:55 The Meta and Googles of the world might not feel the same pressure to give in to Canada's demands. We want more money! How about some of that internet money? Stephen Abutman. Anyway, a spokesperson for the Canadian heritage minister described, man, imagine that like being your job.

Starting point is 00:45:15 Like I'm in charge of Canadian heritage. Like, okay. So what, like HBC and like Canada Goose like coats? Like I, I don't know. Yeah, sure, beavers. Described Google's actions as a threat and said, Canadians won't be intimidated. At the end of the day, all we're asking the tech giants to do

Starting point is 00:45:34 is compensate journalists when they use their work. Complicating matters. It's debatable to what degree meta in particular can be described as using the work of journalists. Links to articles and other news content are typically posted to Facebook and Instagram by users, and often by the journalists themselves. Google could be accused in certain instances of replacing the need to click through to articles by extracting snippets that directly answer users' questions,

Starting point is 00:46:01 but it's hard to say how exactly that's going to shake out. The government states that regulators will determine which organizations will be required to negotiate licensing agreements for news content according to principles such as power imbalance and quasi-monopoly status in a given market. So the discussion question here is, is it reasonable for large platforms to simply not link to content that they would otherwise have to pay for? for large platforms to simply not link to content that they would otherwise have to pay for. I mean, it's completely up to them. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:46:35 And then it's completely up to users whether that platform still has any value to them, right? Yeah, I'm trying to think, like, based on how I interact with my Google News feed, I'm not sure how to feel about this. Because on the one hand, I simply just do not read any article that's paywalled. But on the other hand, I still like seeing the headlines just because it's nice to just kind of know what's going on.

Starting point is 00:46:58 Sort of, yeah. And then if it is particularly pressing, then what I can do is I can just sort of see what people are saying about it and read the comments, figure out what at least people... General sentiment. Yeah, what general sentiment towards it is. of it at all unless I start actually going to like news media websites which I don't remember the last time I ever did like organically just navigated directly to a news site this isn't a super western thing but there is a decent amount of countries that have their own kind of news access stuff I wouldn't be surprised if there was like an inside of Canada aggregate for

Starting point is 00:47:46 these types of Canada inside news. Yeah. Um, the CBC. No, it's not. Um, just be one of them,

Starting point is 00:47:53 but yeah, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like what, what are you going to do? Where will you get your news?

Starting point is 00:48:03 Reddit. I'm usually happier when I disconnect more from the news yeah that's true um but yeah i don't know i've also find that i'm usually happier when i use things like reddit and other various uh attempts to get you to infinite scroll type applications less so i've just been more and more disconnected moving forward. I don't know. Reddit usually makes me pretty happy. That's a really well-timed phone buzz. I'm not taking it. No bait. I'm not biting.

Starting point is 00:48:41 Let's talk about the first time that I have rage quit a game. Yeah. Like ever. I actually rage quit a game. Yeah. Like ever. I actually think this should be somewhat interesting. I recently purchased an Apple TV and an Apple Arcade subscription for one game. Talked about it many times on WAN Show. Yes. There was a lot of excitement for this.

Starting point is 00:49:00 Yes. And it was the follow-up to what? It was, well, it's not a follow-up to anything but it's a very like traditional style rpg uh like jrpg and the the team behind it uh which includes hirinobu sakaguchi uh of final fantasy 6 fame sort of like one of my favorite games of all time uh also nobu matsa i can't remember how to pronounce his last name. I'm sorry. But the composer for basically every Final Fantasy game ever. So they're on it. A bunch of other folks from

Starting point is 00:49:31 that era were like, okay, for both of the two headliners, they were kind of going, this could be our last game. Let's do it traditional style. It's called Fantasian. And it's Apple Arcade exclusive. I eventually gave up on it ever coming to anything else

Starting point is 00:49:48 because I realized, holy crap, Apple funded the whole thing. This wasn't a licensing agreement. They actually just funded the game. It's also, just for user context, on the Apple App Store, it is rated 4.7 out of 5. Yep.

Starting point is 00:50:04 On RPG site, I don't know what that is, it is rated 4.7 out of 5 yeah on rpg site i don't know what that is it's rated 9 out of 10 and then google users have given the game a rating of 94 percent or 94 percent of users liked the game i guess it's a rotten tomato style and it's absolutely beautiful so the environments are actually done in dioramas. So these are all miniatures. Oh, wow. And then the characters and elements of the game that you can interact with, like chests, like even the fight environments

Starting point is 00:50:37 are all done in diorama form. It is gorgeous. It's utterly unique. Like, is this an actual diorama? Yes. But then you have digital characters that move around it? But then they scan. They scan it, and then digital characters move around with it in it. It's utterly unique. Like, is this an actual diorama? Yes. But then you have digital characters that move around it? But then they scan. They scan it, and then digital characters move around with it in it.

Starting point is 00:50:49 That's pretty cool. Yeah, it's beautiful. That's a cool idea. It definitely has some problems. I wouldn't say that it takes a particularly enlightened approach to its female characters. So for better or for worse, it's a very traditional jrpg but that's frankly speaking not what put me off of it what put me off of it was the fact that it was mobile first now you might be wondering if that was the issue why did i put over 30 hours into it and that's a fair question

Starting point is 00:51:26 well you were pretty dedicated right you you bought you were excited for it for a long time and you bought the whatever i bought hardware in order to play it yeah um but the problem is not anything to do with controls it had full support for controller everything was perfect and i actually spent the vast majority of my time playing it or actually all of my time because that was where the apple TV is in the theater so I was playing like on a big screen no problems yeah but I reached about the midpoint I think it's the midpoint of the game it's I think it's late in part one I mean I don't know because I am never going to finish the game I reached

Starting point is 00:52:02 the point where the boss fights started to become hideously unfair. And the vibe that I'm getting is whether this is because it was designed for mobile to keep you playing endlessly so that you'll keep your Apple Arcade subscription, because it was designed for an all-you-can-eat platform instead of to be sold for $59.99 or $69.99 on a platform like Nintendo Switch where they'll actually get an enormous amount of revenue that's really easily attributable to this game, or whether it's because Apple just doesn't really understand gaming and didn't invest money

Starting point is 00:52:44 in certain critically important aspects of the development process whatever the reason is the game basically falls apart in terms of difficulty curve and it's not just difficulty i don't mind playing a difficult game i don't mind sitting in a boss fight for 45 minutes but what finally made me just put down the controller turn off the system and walk out of the room was this fight with um some spirit wolf thing or something like that that basically i kid you not you can be half an hour 40 minutes into the fight and just with a couple of bad rngs and just with a couple of bad RNGs be at a non-progression bug, essentially. Because one of its abilities...

Starting point is 00:53:32 Okay, so it's got a few abilities. First of all, a problem with the game in general is that your party is three, which means that if anyone gets knocked, it is now two turns to be back to health, which is a full cycle of your buffs wearing out and their debuffs wearing out where you cannot do anything after like reset right plus whenever anyone gets knocked not only do they lose any

Starting point is 00:53:56 buffs but they also get knocked in terms of their turn position so they lose a turn you can't just pick them right back up and then go, okay, but they get a turn, now they can heal and you're back in the fight. So this particular boss has a one-two where it can knock one of your characters, then take another action. That other action can be to summon minions. Those minions then get turns right away

Starting point is 00:54:24 before you can pick up that knocked character where they can also summon minions. Those minions then get turns right away before you can pick up that knocked character where they can also summon minions. I believe it can summon up to nine total minions. And then randomly that boss, not randomly, but every once in a while, and it does seem to be a little bit RNG, it can cast a barrier

Starting point is 00:54:39 spell on itself that takes 20 hits to wear down. Now what's really interesting about this barrier spell is that when it casts it, it casts it on itself that takes 20 hits to wear down now what's really interesting about this barrier spell is that when it casts it it casts it on itself and all minions at the same time now you have a lot of your attacks like cleave everything you have multi-hit attacks the most you can do is eight but in that fight one of the characters is locked so normally you can actually cycle your characters during a fight there's so many cool game mechanics like the ability to use your entire rpg party in one fight is super cool and there isn't like a turn weight penalty to it or anything like that you can just

Starting point is 00:55:15 use your entire party in any combination you want in any battle which is kind of awesome if one of them gets knocked no you can't swap you have to get brought up. You have to rez them and then swap them. And so I can see why they make you wait after someone's rez, because otherwise that would be a super cheap move or whatever else. But honestly, the boss fights are so long that I don't know. I'm pretty sure they could have balanced it if they really wanted to. Anyway, the point is that you have one character that can hit for eight, and that character is not the one that you are locked to in that fight so you must have at least these two and then you can essentially swap

Starting point is 00:55:53 out the other one and then the most you can do with anyone else is maybe three or four in one go and that would be to sometimes multiple targets sometimes to a single target but that eight one is a single target now you can only do that, obviously, if you haven't had someone one-hitted and then have to spend a cycle picking them up. How often does this one-shot happen, and is it avoidable? Pretty often, no, it's not avoidable. And you were asking about cleaving the barrier. The answer is no.

Starting point is 00:56:17 You cannot eliminate the barrier. You can cast barrier that'll absorb up to five hits, but most enemy attacks, other than just like a basic strike, will eliminate your barrier. It'll absorb some damage, but it'll be gone. So it's an imbalanced barrier mechanic. It can cast it, as far as I can tell, whenever it wants on its entire supporting party.

Starting point is 00:56:40 And so what happened was I knew about the barrier thing. I knew that it could hit itself and the other wolves around it, but I'd had pretty good luck clearing out the crowd and making sure that it couldn't hit a large enough crowd with this barrier thing. And then finally, I lost it a couple of times, even though I am at the recommended level. And finally, I had one where it actually cast barrier.

Starting point is 00:57:01 I should have taken a picture of it because it would have been kind of funny to show you, but it's this entire army of completely invulnerable opponents until I can hit them each 20 times. And I'm just sitting here going, if they play tested this at all, that's not fun.

Starting point is 00:57:19 That's not fair. There are strategies you can use. Like I looked it up old school style, right? Okay, how do I beat this boss? And it up old school style right okay how do i beat this boss and it's like oh okay this one character has an ability that if you happen to invest in that branch in the tech tree and you've played around with it you'll know can be useful for this and it's like uh like a vacuum it's like a suction ability that takes all the enemies and puts them in one place so that your multi-targets so that it essentially you can hit them all in one

Starting point is 00:57:43 go except even that didn't solve it because I cheesed it. I looked it up and I was like, okay, I'm going to use vacuum. But now I must have a fixed party. I have to have the guy that's locked, the guy that can actually hit for multiple hits and then I have to have vacuum buddy who's essentially a chemist which is like

Starting point is 00:57:59 fine but not great DPS and oh yeah, did I mention the boss has a ton of health? So it's going to be a long fight no matter what you do. So you can cheese it with this, but guess what? Vacuum doesn't have 100% hit rate. So even when I cheesed it, I missed three of them on a vacuum,

Starting point is 00:58:20 and then it cast barrier. And at that point, it's unbeatable. And I'm sitting here going well okay then um there's another cheese you can do apparently one of the guys has like a payback type ability so if he takes a bunch of damage he can pay it back but that just counts on you managing to crowd control and stay alive long enough now the obvious solution to this grind a few levels once Once again... Which is why you think it feels like it was incentivizing

Starting point is 00:58:48 staying on the subscription. Oh, it gets worse than that. Once again, the mobile subscription nature of the game rears its ugly head, but this time because it was intended as a multi-part release, right? Like, I waited. I'm like, I'm not playing part one, then part whatever. I want to know how many parts there are,

Starting point is 00:59:04 and I want to sit down and I want to play it in one go. But because I'm apparently getting close i'm not playing part one then part whatever i want to know how many parts there are and i want to sit down i want to play it in one go but because i'm apparently getting close to the end of part one what happens is the leveling curve changes and the experience that you gain for fighting sort of this tier in this version of the world this part enemies goes dramatically down so if i was to try to grind it i could be playing for hours and hours and hours just to do a little bit more damage against this thing when the problem isn't even that i'm not doing enough damage like that might help with crowd control a little bit and okay it could make it beatable but the real problem is that this is an utterly imbalanced fight and that's it's not

Starting point is 00:59:45 fair guys he didn't mean cheesing because he was using characters abilities he meant cheesing because he looked up how to do it on yeah yeah that's cheesy i i like figuring things out like there's one okay there's one boss that also is pretty um pretty gross uh it gets to cast poison on you every single turn. Not its turn. Every turn it gets to cast poison on you. So unless you happened to get a bunch of poison resist stones that you can equip or whatever else, you are

Starting point is 01:00:15 poisoned literally the entire time. And there are other things you might want to equip that aren't poison and at that stage in the game you can only have one of these gems for each of your characters um but you know i i figured it out i figured out uh that you can block poison with that barrier uh spell it'll block poison so at least my entire party wouldn't be poisoned all the time just whoever got their barrier knocked down like okay fine you know i can work around that but when there's a one that is, and it's like a way overkill one hit.

Starting point is 01:00:46 Like there's no amount of leveling up that would make it not a one hit anymore. It's just not fun. I don't want to just sit and res and just use Phoenix Downs. I find completely random one hit mechanics to be very lazy game design, in my opinion. Unless there's, you know, things that you can do. Yes. Then it's fine. And there isn't.

Starting point is 01:01:08 Yeah. Like there's another one where I had to look this one up too, where you can blind it. And there's like some gaze move that it uses, but at least there were hints. Like I looked it up and I was like, okay, that kind of makes sense or something. So if you blind it, it can't use its gaze ability.

Starting point is 01:01:27 But this one, as far as I can tell, it's just immune to everything. And one hits you and casts barrier on everything. Kuzamchik says, honestly, it feels like Linus doesn't play many Japanese games. The problem is not the difficulty. The problem is the unfun-ness of the way that the fight is balanced and what's really frustrating is i feel like they were almost a victim of their own

Starting point is 01:01:51 ambition here because a lot of the game is really creative they've done an incredible job of making boss fights not just feel like a grind in a lot of cases um and even the random battles they've got this awesome mechanic where random battles do hit you randomly but you can enable this uh device that you carry called a dimension that will absorb anywhere from 10 to 5 random encounters and then you fight them all at once piles them all up you told me about that that actually sounds super cool yeah so you get way more time to just experience the environments. And then the fight is probably really epic. And the fight is actually way more fun,

Starting point is 01:02:32 especially because so many of the abilities can be chained or can pierce or can be curved and arced and stuff. It's actually really fun when it's really fun. It's just that it's obvious that it didn't get proper qa because when you when you reach a a non-progress i consider a non-progression point if you're if your whole party is up and all that happened was you you know had an ability that rng didn't grab enough of those guys and it just can RNG

Starting point is 01:03:06 cast this ability that completely ends it and you're like half an hour into a stupid fight. That's bad game design. Lots of Japanese and Korean games expect you to farm. Sure, but if I can't even farm... Is the problem because the curve is so low at that point? That's the

Starting point is 01:03:22 core problem? Yeah, so I can't just grind. Yeah, because the curve is so low. that point? Yeah. That's the core problem? Yeah, so I can't just grind. Yeah, because the curve's so low. Okay. Like, I don't even mind grinding once in a while. Okay, so that's another issue, is there was another one I ran into, which is in this place.

Starting point is 01:03:35 For those of you who have played it, as far as I can tell, not many people have. There's not a lot of discussion about it, but there's a section called the Triangle of Calamity that I accidentally wandered into at some point. Sounds cool. I didn't think there was a way to get out of it. So I had to look that up as well because I ran into a boss fight there where

Starting point is 01:03:49 even after spending like an hour or two, just, just grinding, just leveling up because the issue there was that, um, my, one of my characters who I really needed, uh,

Starting point is 01:04:02 because their abilities are the weakness of the boss or whatever was way lower because I rescued her way later in the time when the party splits up. Anyway, the point is I did a bunch of grinding there and that was when I figured out that the higher level ones were like basically not moving anymore. These lower ones were leveling up. Yeah. But I went into this fight and I also couldn't win that one, even with grinding, because it also had a cheap mechanic where it splits into three of itself. And it's randomized which ones do what. And so if you happen to hit it with an ability that marks it,

Starting point is 01:04:35 so you can taunt them. If you happen to hit it before it splits, then you can tell which one is real. But if you don't and you hit them, they hit you super hard to the point where it's like one or two turns wasted in order to like pick up a guy again it's like this is ridiculous so i went straight from that one over to the other one and then this barrier thing i was looking at nine wolves with 20 hit barriers on it i'm just like i don't even want to play anymore yeah i

Starting point is 01:05:02 don't even want to play you might be able to get through this but it's just like oh man yeah why why am i bothering this isn't this isn't fun and one of the reasons why i actually like ftl so much is the the final boss fight it's very satisfying because like there's there's three stages to it and in between every stage it's a spaceship game in between every stage the the boss will like warp away so you kind of have a second to like lick your wounds and get everything kind of back in order uh but you you can't like travel because it's going to come right back and you're trying to defend this base right so you have enough time to like if there's literally like fires and holes on or in your ship you can like patch it up yeah they uh fantasia

Starting point is 01:05:46 has a boss that's like that it's running away from you and you can kind of take if you wait too long to start attacking it and like catching up to it then it like gets away yeah but if you don't wait too long you you do have a little bit of time to take care of yourself for a second then re-engage yeah i think that's really cool and and like the ways that the the fight evolves over time as you fight it is is interesting um i i have always wanted like an ftl2 to come out instead they worked on another game called into the breach which was cool i'm not particularly super into it but it's cool um i i do hope that they make another another iteration of it at some point. I've always wanted it to... If I remember correctly, there's eight zones in the game.

Starting point is 01:06:30 The eighth zone being where the boss is. And I kind of wish at the end of every zone, there was like a mini boss of some sort. Right. I think that would be cool. But yeah, I don't know. CW says, LTT is the only channel I've ever seen that claims they can't read super

Starting point is 01:06:45 chat sounds like a loadable to me uh we've shown screenshots of it lots of times how the dashboard didn't work it actually does work now but we're i'm just over it yep at this point um yeah there you go if you super chat it'll show up at the top thing for people that are watching on youtube yeah so that'll be cool um ftl is really well balanced yeah there's i mean like with pretty much any game there's things that are stronger and there's things that are weaker but i i personally find the balance in ftl to be fantastic and i i really like how with all the different ships and stuff you can have these really interesting different feels to to the run that you take okay here we go citizen bean. Citizen Bean posts on Floatplane,

Starting point is 01:07:26 straight from Reddit. Like, excuse me? 20 barriers? Question mark, question mark. A basically guaranteed instant death attack? 10 plus allies on the battlefield at once that can all receive 20 barriers? This fight is a total clusterf**k.

Starting point is 01:07:39 And even with Arrow Rain plus Samadare to try to handle the barriers, it is still ridiculous. Yeah, those mechanics don't sound fun to me. Like, I tried every possible combination of things to try to break the barrier. If you could break the barrier, no problem. Let's go. But an unbreakable 20-hit barrier is just stupid.

Starting point is 01:08:01 I always hate if you're playing some type of mmo or even just like uh there's a bunch of these like like four player rpgs and there's a boss fight and the boss has an ability where it just like targets one of your party members at random and it's like you're dead in 10 seconds it's like okay i guess i'll do what i can for 10 seconds and then just not be able to play the game like this isn't a fun mechanic like it please like try to find some other way to add difficulty to this fight i don't know what it is you can split the party like there's interesting things that you can do to reduce the amount of party members but when you take two one or two party members don't just kill them put them in like a different scenario make it so that there's like some hallway they have to they get like

Starting point is 01:08:43 teleported back or something i have to solo fight through this hallway and to regain with the party whatever it is i don't know there's other things that you can do but like twitch chat's having a pretty good moment over here asking if i tried uh suplexing the boss or casting vanish and doom um you know what yeah sure there might be like a bugged way to beat it but i'd rather not play a game than do that quite honestly yeah yeah so yeah it just i don't know it made me really sad because it was a game i really wanted to play and i feel like it was it was doomed to not be as good as it could be because of what it is and because of how it was funded if okay so i was gonna say if you had to pick one or the other do you think think it's more the funding, lack of time, lack of QA? Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:09:30 So you don't think it's more the mobile design? No. The creativity was so high. The mobile issue is, well, they're part and parcel, right? It's built for the subscription model where revenue cannot be easily attributed to that title. So yes, you can see playtime, but that doesn't necessarily tell you... And I don't know how many people are subscribed to Apple Arcade.

Starting point is 01:09:56 I suspect that it's a lot less than this would have sold if it had come out as a dedicated release for Switch in terms of revenue. I mean, these are industry legends. I would have bought it if it had come out as a dedicated release for switch oh yeah in terms of revenue i mean these are these are industry legends i would have bought it if i was on switch and the demand for you know traditional style jrpgs warts and all is pretty high like you look at the number of kind of smaller indie games that are that are sort of chasing that uh that older sort of snes era style right like there's a couple that are on my to play list that i am super excited about but it was it was an utter it was

Starting point is 01:10:35 an utter disappointment this one that is sad game development's hard um and it was just, it had so many good ideas. Yeah. Like really, I was really enjoying it. Music's so good. Like just everything about it was awesome. I know you sort of already answered this, but if you had some way to just delete that boss, would you do it and then keep pushing forward?

Starting point is 01:10:59 Yeah, I'd like to keep playing it, but I'm just worried that it's just not going to get any better because it's just such an obvious QA problem if they had had enough people play through this they would have found this error it's it's an error like it is with how their development path went they might have had to crunch really super hard to get that first act out and had bad qa because of it yeah that's what i suspect and then but they they might not have had to crunch as hard for the further acts yeah maybe uh thunderclash says some of the bosses are ridiculously hard to the point that hirinobu sakaguchi had to release

Starting point is 01:11:35 videos in his channel showing how to beat some bosses oh wow i mean as long as there are hints you know in the gameplay that tell you then fine you know okay i had to look it up i don't mind i i would rather like if i can't figure out how to beat something in a game which happens yeah and i have to look it up i would rather i look it up and go like oh yeah i'm stupid yeah instead of i look it up and i go there's no possible way i would ever forget that you were supposed to look at the symbol in the bottom left-hand corner on the bottom of the physical box when you took it home. Like, no. I don't.

Starting point is 01:12:12 Screw off. I looked up two things in Breath of the Wild. In the cult headquarters, I looked up how to get through this wall. I was stuck in this room. There's this, like, stealth section. Did you play Breath of the Wild? I played never part of it you didn't finish it i i adopted it as my i'm gonna play this on planes game and then travel stopped i get it yes cool uh okay so anyway um you there's this like stealth section and i would get to the end room i'm like this has to be this has to be where i couldn't figure out where to go.

Starting point is 01:12:45 And then, so I finally, I felt like an idiot because you just have to switch to like your Sheikah something, something. Anyway, one of the walls is magnetic and you can like move it or something. Or you can throw a thing through. I can't remember.

Starting point is 01:12:58 You can blow it up. I don't remember. But if I had just turned on, like it's like, it would be like playing Batman Arkham Asylum, not being able to figure out what to do and not using detective vision or whatever. It just felt like an idiot. I don't mind stuff like that.

Starting point is 01:13:11 It's way easier to absorb because I can deal with just me being dumb. But the second thing I looked up in Breath of the Wild is like some, it was some quest or something where you have to find the thing between the thing that looks like a thing and i found somewhere in the game that matched the description perfectly and you know how big that game world is and so i spent all this time like wandering around there uh just like fighting things and looking for i i forget if it was a chest or an entrance to a thing i never actually played this game either but i do know all the things you're talking about so far because I had to benchmark it. Right, okay.

Starting point is 01:13:50 And I had to find like a benchmarking section. And eventually there was this like room that you could fight in that would spawn exactly consistent enemies in exactly consistent positions. And you could do the exact set of moves against them every time and it worked fine. So I remember that. Wait, from Breath of the Wild no uh arkham asylum oh oh arkham asylum okay yeah no no i'm not talking about breath of the wild again oh okay yeah so there's this like quest you have to you have to be like on a mountain and it has to be night and it has to be this and it has to be that or something and i found a spot that actually matches the description so i had to look that one up and i was like i wasn't even mad about that one i was mad at myself about the stupid hideout though

Starting point is 01:14:27 yeah super mad yeah yeah giga clan hideout or whatever it is try the demo see what you think i've put if you're talking about breath of the wild i've played a decent amount of it and i enjoyed it i just i don't know my brain never shifted to like hey i guess we should play this not on planes because my whole thing was like i'm enjoying this but i don't want to like sprint through the game i'm just gonna play it when i'm on planes and then we're good because i would notice like oh i have an eight hour flight start playing breath of the wild feel like i've still just barely started playing and i land and i'm like oh this is great i want to keep this superpower i don't want to finish it m kirsch asks i think i know what you're talking about is it the one from a crossover with another

Starting point is 01:15:04 game i think so. I think it is. Oh, that's kind of annoying. Yeah, this is a really good comment from Kornosian over on Floatplane. If you could delete the boss, if the game gets to the point where the only way to advance is to actually cheat, the game instantly stops being fun for me because I

Starting point is 01:15:19 know if it gets inconvenient again, I'll just cheat again. I don't want to cheat. I want to play the game. I want to play the game, right? I don't want to cheat. I want to play the game. I want to play the game, right? I don't want to just put in cheat codes. That's not fun for me, right? It's kind of like, oh man. I mean, it's like anything. It's like in sports, right?

Starting point is 01:15:35 Like if the only way to continue to play is to just cheat, are you playing? Are you competing? What's the point even anymore then? This whole cheating thing is, has been a fairly major conversation in my circles for a bit now. And we, we talked about this.

Starting point is 01:15:55 Yeah. You were going to talk about, so like he quit Tarkov. Yeah. What the f*** you quit Tarkov? Yeah, it's weird. I've been playing this game for six years. Yeah, I know.

Starting point is 01:16:06 Yeah. And so he just like messaged me on Discord just like out of nowhere, yeah, I quit Tarkov. I'm like, yeah. A, I don't believe you. And B, what? Really? Well, I quit for now. No, I believe you now that you explained why, but let's talk about that. So Tarkov was made by a developer called

Starting point is 01:16:22 BSG and it's a really fantastic game because like, okay, so I know some people aren't going to like firearms. My grandpa was a Marine and then he got into the police force afterwards. He used to train me doing drills down in Arizona, all that type of stuff. So Tarkov's customization level with firearms is completely... A feature for him, a bug for me. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:48 It's completely unquestionably unmatched. Like it's absolutely wild, the degree that they went to. All these different systems that they have in the game, the medical systems are really just amazing. There's all these different components of the game. You can get hit in a particular spot and have to use a particular kind of first aid like yeah like you can have there's different types of bleeds and you need different types you need a certain type of bandage for like a light

Starting point is 01:17:15 bleed you need things like a a cat for a heavy bleed something like that like there's all these it's it's a the game has an insane amount of depth. I've, I've played EVE Online and the depth in Tarkov feels like it like competes with it really heavily. And yet it still has that action, that shooter action. Yeah. There's really, really intense moments. Like there's, it's really, it feels extremely unique. There's a few games that have tried to come out and be Escape from Tarkov, but like more

Starting point is 01:17:42 for normies. But then it's not Escape from Tarkov anymore. It never really works out. Honestly, even as someone who is a relative normie, I enjoy Tarkov more than I'm sure I would enjoy something that's trying to be Tarkov, because it's, I don't know, you're just kind of along for the ride.

Starting point is 01:18:00 I mean, part of it is I'm playing with these guys, right? So I'm just like, I'm going to have a big backpack on, and I'm going to put a backpack in it. And then I'm going to put a backpack in that. It's fun running around with Linus. Russian nesting backpacks. But like this most recent wipe, and it's always fun near the beginning of a wipe because no one has cool gear. wipe and it's it's always fun near the beginning of a wipe because no one has cool gear like as a so okay the game wipes every once in a while your character loses all of their uh custom stats and

Starting point is 01:18:31 you have a stash where you can store all these like different firearms body armors medical supplies money whatever um every once in a while there's a wipe you lose all that stuff your character fully resets wipes are actually really fun i know a lot of people are going to think like oh you lost all your progress yeah Yeah, but now everyone is on the same playing field. And you're playing with these like janky guns, so the recoil and stuff is horrible. You're going to like run up to someone and they're going to have like

Starting point is 01:18:54 an AK-74 that like doesn't even have a buttstock. So they try to fire it. It's just going to like fly all over the place. And it's just very interesting. But this wipe comes around. The beginning of it is really fun, having a ton of fun with it. And then they patch some things that made the game better. But those patches introduced randomly invisible players. Kind of an issue.

Starting point is 01:19:18 Not only are they invisible, but nothing that they do registers on your side. So if they like throw an item on the ground, it's invisible to you. If they make any amount of noise, you can't hear it. If you know 100% where they are and you shoot them, nothing will happen. They take no damage. And they can see you. They can interact with you. They can kill you.

Starting point is 01:19:38 They can take all your stuff. Really, really frustrating. At the same time as that's going on... Google it. It's ak-74 um as the same time as that kind of stuff's going on um sound is like super messed up completely messed up there's no real functioning vertical audio sounds are just coming in completely random directions like i'll watch someone walk like left to right in front of my screen and hear them like back there. And it sounds like they're upstairs. Like it just,

Starting point is 01:20:11 nothing makes any sense with audio, uh, crazy lag all over the place. Everything is just super wacky. So you have invisible players, which people eventually figure out how to intentionally do so they can make themselves invisible uh and it happens to people at random and you have audio coming from all over the place and cheating is a genuine major problem in every single multiplayer game that exists yeah so you were saying there's like a big tarkov creator that what like cheated to find cheaters or something like that like cheated for science that is not public yet because that video is not out um cool and i mean no offense but they're not they're not that big but they're cool they make cool stuff they're growing. They'll get there. I believe in you. I mean should we just promote them at this point or sure?

Starting point is 01:21:09 Yeah, it's it's goat moth. He's gonna be making a video which we kind of just ruined. I'm sorry. I apologize Well we didn't ruin it, we hyped it! It's genuinely fascinating It's wild because he does this whole thing. Wow. I'm just gonna completely ruin it. I'm sorry, bro I'm gonna going to completely ruin it. I'm sorry, bro. I'm going to go into it. Okay, guys, just go subscribe to help make it up to him. The O in goat is a zero. Go find him.

Starting point is 01:21:35 So he, oh, man. Wow. I hope he's okay with this. I'm just going to send it. The worst that can happen is he can never talk to you again and tell everyone he knows about what an utter piece of untrustworthy you are so no for sure yeah it's not that bad i've had worse um it's it's deeply fascinating he showed me um a bunch of clips

Starting point is 01:22:00 where and you have to go watch it because the feeling that you get from it is actually really interesting and it might only happen to people that have played tarkov but i think you should watch it anyways because like i said cheating in every single game if it has multiplayer is rampant to be completely honest it's genuinely rampant yep um cheats are so sophisticated now. Joe just linked. Is it public? Oh, this is from two months ago. Yeah, he made that video two months ago. But yeah, cheating in games is rampant. You see people get caught that are streamers for cheating.

Starting point is 01:22:40 Like consistently. It's happening all the time. We had people uh get pulled out of live events professional players on professional teams getting caught live because they loaded stuff onto their mouse that when their mouse was plugged in the computer it would inject and then give them whatever advantage like there's cheaters at every level and there's tons of them the problem with tarkov is there's very little being done to stop them. Right. Very little.

Starting point is 01:23:07 There's no way to watch a replay of the match after the match is over. And whenever I mention that, people are like, oh, it's, I don't want kill cams in Tarkov. I'm not asking for a kill cam. I do not want there to be additional information that I could give to other people that are currently playing the game. But once that match is fully complete, it would be good if I could watch it back because Tarkov has horrible servers. It has horrible desync. It has horrible tick rate, all this type of stuff. So it's really hard to tell if someone is aimbotting you or if there's crazy desync and you just haven't seen them come around the corner yet or whatever else.

Starting point is 01:23:44 So people have known that there's tons of cheaters in Tark't seen them come around the corner yet or whatever else. So people have known that there's tons of cheaters in Tarkov forever. There's a bunch of ways to be able to know that, but people have known for a long time. But the degree of which

Starting point is 01:23:53 has been hard to tell. There's a type of cheating that people have known about, which people call ESP, which is essentially wall hacks. Right. You can see through walls, right? Is it going up? Oh yeah, it just went up 300 there we go good uh there's a type of cheating in in in tarkov called esp not only can you see

Starting point is 01:24:14 through walls but next to people's names you can see their name you can see their kd you can see their their full inventory you can see the things that they have picked up in the raid so far. You can see where they're facing. Everything. And that is effectively, for BSG right now, not detectable. How is that even possible? And because there's no replay system, there's no way to see people's perspectives after the match. There's no kill cam. There's no Counter-Strike style Overwatch system. There is nothing. if that's the only way that they're cheating they're not actually aim botting they're not fly hacking they're not clipping through walls whatever they just know where you are all the time which in tarkov is everything absolutely obscene level of advantage yeah you're like never gonna

Starting point is 01:25:01 know so what he did was he wanted to look into how bad this this thing is sure i don't want to spoil the whole video well they're all gonna watch it but yeah you do you do need to watch it what he did was he went out and did the bad he got an esp because the only way to figure it out is to go do it and what he would do and i'm not going to tell you how because you got to go watch the video but goat is publishing the video now that's probably good what he would okay I'll uh yeah I don't want to spoil it too much man I don't want to screw him over a little it's fine it's fine he would test people so he he he brought on like a code of rules because he doesn't want to spoil the game right he doesn't want to make the game worse for legitimate players.

Starting point is 01:25:47 So he would just follow people around that he thought was cheating. He refused to kill any actual players under any circumstance. So sometimes he'd be following some around and an actual legit player would come up and kill him. And it is what it is. He just has to go into another match and figure it out. But he'd follow these people around and watching how they would react was so interesting took him a little while to figure it out but there's been this thing in tarkov for a long time yeah which people call the wiggle it was where you're you look at someone and you just lean lean peak left lean peak right and do

Starting point is 01:26:18 it over and over again so your character just goes like yeah what does it mean like friendly or like back in the day if it was two non-cheating players that saw each other it was a way to indicate yo like i'm cool we're friendly they've added voip to the game now so you can talk to each other that's not really necessary anymore so the gypsies don't really wiggle anymore but if you can see the other person at 600 meters through three buildings in a mountain because you're wall hacking and they wiggle at you and they're staring right at you. Well, you can wiggle back. So cheaters are using it. He figured out that people were doing this as a sign of like, yo, I'm also a cheater and friendly because there's no possible way they

Starting point is 01:27:06 could see you right so he would just go harass people and he would so like and if you're a normal player you'd have no idea that he was there right so he's not actually bothering any normal players right but because there's a lot of stuff that you just just to be clear, like it's not like, for those of you who don't play Tarkov, which by the way, I totally understand. It's pretty intense. It's fair. There's lots of things that you can do in a lobby that are not just PvP. Yeah. So there's like kind of like missions that you can complete and all that kind of stuff so just because there are there's a wasted slot in the lobby doesn't mean all of a

Starting point is 01:27:46 sudden that this this instance is now completely broken and totally imbalanced not a problem he actually probably was not hurting the gameplay experience for the legit players in the lobby at all i i seriously doubt that he was and like there's legit players that killed him it's also when he was showing me some of these clips, it was, it was soul wrenching because he would follow these guys around for like a long time. And you're convinced inside. You're like, nope, these guys are legit. Like they haven't looked at them.

Starting point is 01:28:14 They haven't wiggled back. They haven't done anything like good, good. Yeah. And then he's still following them. He's still following. He just doesn't give up, doesn't give up, doesn't give up. And then one of them will look over and through multiple walls just and the second you see them start leaning back and forth it's just it kills you man and the amount of times that it

Starting point is 01:28:35 happens is deeply disturbing it's like almost every match It's also whole teams of players who run up against a four stack of players that are cheating. And confirmed because it's easy to confirm. Right. Because you can't see each other. And oh, right, his cheat thing. Yeah. If there is no line of sight,

Starting point is 01:28:58 it shows a green box around them. If there is line of sight, it shows a red box around them. So you know 100 100 if they can see you or not and he'll even do things like he'll pull his knife out yeah and then they'll pull their knife out you can't see each other you're too far away to hear it he'll even have people that like they can't see him and they'll be like oh why do you have your knife out they can't see him bro like it's so brutal it's so terrible so i i like i can't knowing that there's like going to be a cheater in every lobby yeah why would i play this game

Starting point is 01:29:41 how's that even fun yeah and sure, they're not rage hacking. Like people talk about, oh, I get killed by like fly hackers in Tarkov like every match. No, I don't believe you. Like at all. And after watching GOAT doing this deep dive, I don't believe you even more. Because now I know what they're all doing. Almost all of them are just running these ESP systems. Basically, for someone like you that is actually respecting the integrity of the game

Starting point is 01:30:06 which is a very, it's a very sim like game. You know there's no you know there's no Halo style radar where if people are around you and moving you just have a dot that shows you where they are or whatever else. Like you actually rely on visual confirmation. There's no outlines

Starting point is 01:30:21 showing whether people are friendly or an enemy. Well and there's camouflage too and whether people are friendly or an enemy and there's camouflage too and that's a huge part of the game yeah like camouflage actually serves a purpose like it's very sim like and so what you're essentially realizing is that nobody is actually playing tarkov yeah people are just playing run around and dunk on people who are trying to actually play tarkov and like that's that was one of the weird things about him showing me a bunch of this footage as well is like he he'd run and hide in some bush and a player would just cruise right on by

Starting point is 01:30:56 and instead of being like yeah you're playing Tarkov you hit effectively and he ran by I'm now like oh like what a cool dude he's playing the game legit I'm like proud of this guy who's not killing goat right now because not because he's not killing him but because he's not cheating so he didn't know that he was there apparently the video is the video is live now so you can go check it out I think he was planning on releasing it tomorrow and all this stuff and I just ruined everything but whatever it's probably for the better uh my bad you can hate me later um but yeah i that that i don't know it soul crushed me because i i always had this like assumption because every once in a while someone would get you and it's just like man like really how did

Starting point is 01:31:44 they possibly know I was there? It didn't feel like an aim bot. It didn't feel like anything else, but I was just like, come on. Like, I was very stealthy. We have multiple people on this team. Like, maybe Joe and I will be flanking from different angles, and they, like, perfectly transfer, and it's a really big angle. All this, like, weird stuff.

Starting point is 01:32:03 It's just like, man, like, I just don't really believe that. And now it's like, well... Like it doesn't even have a kill feed, for example. Which is good, technically. Yeah, which is true to its sim nature. You actually have to see the opponent drop. And you have to not just see them drop, you have to see them not be picked up uh

Starting point is 01:32:26 and unless you're cheating and it tells you they're dead yeah and it can be hard to keep an eye on them because you gotta maybe maybe they've got friends you don't know if they have friends because you can't it's not like everyone's in a party of three or a party of four you can't take that for granted um it's a super cool concept for a game but i'm looking at it now going man you know was every match that i was ever in compromised probably and he asked me a really interesting question i thought which was how much cheating is acceptable right because you have to understand at some level there's cheaters in every game there's cheaters in war zone yeah there was cheaters i don't know about league of legends but i know back in the day dota the the warcraft 3 mod

Starting point is 01:33:11 dota there was cheaters in that because you could remove the fog of war if there's a multiplayer game there's going to be at least someone who's finding an unfair advantage and there is no way that companies are going to be able to defeat this completely on their own because uh like how are you supposed to detect someone taking an external video camera that isn't plugged into the computer that just looks at the screen yeah and performs actions onto a motorized mouse yeah you cannot detect that nope nothing's even connected to the computer yeah so like no extra software running it's not it's not reading memory that it wasn't supposed to so like battle eye or whatever the heck whatever company has that's supposed to detect cheaters is never ever going to detect that and people do do that type of stuff so the solution is to bring back the physical land party

Starting point is 01:34:10 but okay so that actually helps a ton that helps a ton but like i mentioned there's still people that cheat on land and then when you catch them you shame them and they never get to come again they're banned from every game yeah now they can't play anymore yeah i think the stakes are a lot higher they definitely are in person i seriously doubt there's like there's there's no possible way there's as many people cheating on land but like it's an interesting question right and it kind of comes down to the reason why tarkov is currently ruined for me yeah is because i am now deeply questioning every single engagement I ever have. Win or lose, doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:34:51 Yeah, and that's not fun. It's kind of like, oh, okay, you know what I find really not enjoyable? You know that I play badminton, I get pretty competitive. Well, I get pretty competitive about anything. And I'm really passionate about badminton. I get pretty competitive. Well, I get pretty competitive about anything. And I'm really passionate about badminton. I love it. Really enjoy it. As someone who's always trying to improve, I love playing with higher level players because

Starting point is 01:35:13 they push me to my limit, right? But one of the things that I don't enjoy is playing outside of a competitive setting. I love playing ladder nights. I love playing anything where the match matters, and the more it matters, the better. So my favorite format to play

Starting point is 01:35:30 is like a point differential format where every point matters because it's like a team format and the winning team is determined by the total point difference in your matches. That's cool. I like that. So the more everyone's fighting for every point, the more I enjoy the experience.

Starting point is 01:35:52 Because I would rather lose narrowly than win by a big margin. Totally. It's kind of my general philosophy. And I don't enjoy playing when the other person's not trying. You know, the, like the integrity of competition matters a lot to me. And I think you're, you're the same way. Um, and so while I enjoy playing with players who are much better, I, if, if I feel like it's a total waste of their time and they're giving it like a 60% effort, I'd rather we both just conserved our energy.

Starting point is 01:36:23 Yeah. I, I would, would i want it i don't mind losing as long as i can reflect on that situation and figure out how i can do better moving forward and maybe that's not an immediate thing maybe in a in in like a shooting game it's like okay i need to sit on some aim trainers because honestly this guy kept his aimer on me significantly better than i kept mine on his and i lost because he's just better at the game yeah it's like okay well i i want to practice that someone just mentioned the chat valve just banned 40 000 players from dota we do need to talk about that yeah so like it's not it's not just shooters either it's super cool they put a honeypot into the game so there's like a particular memory um like a like a chunk of

Starting point is 01:37:01 memory that had some kind of useful data but that they made it so the game would never actually look in it. So only third-party applications were checking it. That's interesting. And so they basically just went, yep, with a very high degree of certainty, we can tell that every single one of you who checked the values in this, I think it was, was it RAM or was it storage? I can't remember. But anyone who looked at this is a cheater.

Starting point is 01:37:27 Bye-bye. See you later. I mean, for a free-to-play game, like realistically, they'll be back with a new account and whatever. But still they lose whatever they had. Whatever they had. Which is good. At least inconveniencing them is good.

Starting point is 01:37:40 Tools of Ownage says, and we've actually talked about this, you know, I think I've gotten less certain seeing the catastrophe that was Stadia and the complete lack of newsworthiness of anything that's of Ownage talks about, well, the solution could be game streaming so that everything is server-side. Everything. That wouldn't help with something like a camera pointed at the screen and the mouse playing the thing. But other than farming gold or something,

Starting point is 01:38:18 there's an old reference, wow, wow, wow style, right? I think that if the cheat gets to the point where they're not even sitting in front of the computer anymore i think a lot fewer users will be incentivized yeah to do it i think the the problem that i'm having with this type of stuff is is how intense it is you know like? Like it's very overwhelming. Yeah, things need to be done about it. Yeah, game streaming though.

Starting point is 01:38:51 We've talked about how that could be the reason. Like I talked about like gaming experiences that are impossible with everyone, with everything done client side, like massive environments or, you know, massive, massively multiplayer games and things like that. with everything done client side like like massive environments or you know massive massively multiplayer games and things like that but i think getting rid of i'm not getting rid of but dramatically reducing cheating could be a major incentive there's there's some interesting stuff

Starting point is 01:39:15 too like certain cheats uh that people use for tarkov you can't actually run if you have valorant installed valorant's super invasive like ring zero ridiculous anti-cheat will find the tarkov one and freak out wow so there's another thing where like part of this argument wants me to wants me to like i almost want my gaming computer to be like a specific device for gaming like i almost want my gaming computer to go more into like the console direction where it's like okay well yeah i sat here on a wayan show and got mad about valorant's ring zero anti-cheat but at the same time i don't want cheaters in my game. Pretty okay with like installing a separate SSD or partition or whatever. And just having that for only games. And I use it for nothing other than games.

Starting point is 01:40:12 And I just let invasive stuff come in and people are going to bring up, or I can look at other, I don't know what the exact perfect answer is, but like, this ain't it is is what i have to say yeah you know what might be it uh maybe we should do a couple merch messages dan do you want to hit us with some merch messages while we uh before we do some some more topics or sponsors or whatever the heck it is uh if you guys are not familiar with merch messages, you check out the cool stuff on lttstore.com.

Starting point is 01:40:48 We showed off the new WAN desk pad. We've also launched a lot of great stuff recently. The track suit is actually doing really, really well. You guys seem to be super into that. Or you can just, if you just want to send a merch message, you can just pick up a gift card or something like that. You can pick something up later if nothing

Starting point is 01:41:03 catches your fancy. But Dan might reply to you. If you have like a shout out, it can go up here. But he usually selects a few for me and Luke to address on the show. And we're going to do a couple of those now and then we'll do some more later. Sure. I've got one here from Matthew. Hi, Linus and Luke.

Starting point is 01:41:17 Long time fan. Hi, Matthew. First time merch messenger. Mystery shirt for that real life loot box. When it comes to hiring, do you find all applicants are fans? Does that make it difficult to hire? Not even close. Honestly, the bigger we've grown, the lower percentage that claim to be viewers,

Starting point is 01:41:44 especially as we've grown outside of hiring just video editors and tech writers. I've also had experiences where I think what's happening is there's fans of the channel that know people that do things that we're hiring for that like link them the job posting. Because I've asked people like, how did you find this? And they're just like, it's a job posting. What do you mean? I don't want to give away what interview I'm talking about too much, but let's say this is not the question I asked. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:09 I'd say like, what's your favorite video? It'd be a shame if someone complained about your interview process on Reddit or something. Like what's your favorite video or something? And they basically just go like, I don't know. I don't watch at all. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:42:20 And it's like, oh wow. Like I didn't actually expect that, but cool. Yeah. Like the WAN show, WAN show writer, new wanshow writer who hopefully we can introduce um she makes it through her probation um was basically i was like have you watched the wanshow and she's like well i did as preparation for this job fair enough yep yep it's like my so super into it all right fair enough i've i've ranted against i think it's like

Starting point is 01:42:48 star wars and halo where they specifically hired people that did not like the franchise because they like wanted to make it different i think that's stupid but you don't have to hire people that are pre-existing fans either like it i think i just heard him emotional damage yeah yeah i think you threaded that needle well making the reference recognizable without crossing into like questionable uh anywho got him you want another one sure this one's from mason hey linus and luke i know bringing on guests isn't a common theme for the wan show but is there a person that if you had the opportunity to bring on to the show you would bill watterson my hero that would be

Starting point is 01:43:39 no hesitation that'd be sweet yeah well you know? The reason I was thinking about it was because he's like one of the few creators ever that I would just buy anything that he licensed. I have never not enjoyed. I would have Calvin and Hobbes anything. Yeah. And he stubbornly refuses to give it to me because he's like, eh, you shouldn't merchandise things for money. And I'm like, okay, that's fair and I respect it, but I really want to throw money at you. So we're at an impasse here.

Starting point is 01:44:14 Just create more stuff then. But I mean, the last thing I would want to do is bother him though. So anyway, the reason I was thinking about it was because I was sort of reflecting on my fandom. I'm not a fan of much. I am a fan of bill watterson um and what made me think about it was the conversation we were having a little while back on wanshow about fan interactions and you know what the right way or wrong way to approach them and what i realized

Starting point is 01:44:39 is that while you and i talked about what works for us, I feel like you would have to tailor it. If I ran into someone that wants to be talked to and wants to be approached, I would take a different approach. Whereas if I ran into Bill Watterson, I would say absolutely nothing. I would just go, and then I would like leave, right?

Starting point is 01:44:58 Because- Do you think it's appropriate to do like the head nod at least? I don't know. Because I've done that before. Everything I've ever read about him, and he doesn't do a lot of interviews. He just doesn't want anything. He just like seems to value his privacy.

Starting point is 01:45:15 And, uh. Fair enough. I just, I'm like, okay. But if I had it, if I could pick anyone to have on the WAN show, then I'm like, all right, let's go. Cool. Let's go.

Starting point is 01:45:26 As long as it wouldn't bother him, I would respectfully ask for him to be on the WAN show. So assuming, assuming like, uh, um, um, it's a consensual,

Starting point is 01:45:38 I can have anyone on the WAN show, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Cause that'd be uncomfortable. Like I can force anyone at gunpoint to be on the wedge. I was like, no,

Starting point is 01:45:46 no, not, that's not cool. I think, huh? I think Todd Howard. Because I would genuinely be very interested in the conversation more than I would actually be interested in.

Starting point is 01:46:09 Like, I'm going to fanboy over Todd Howard, you know? Okay. Sure. I don't know. I can tell him that the WAN show just works. Wow.

Starting point is 01:46:24 Give us one more and then we'll move on all right that sounds good to me to roast him no and i understand why people would say that but just to talk yeah i would i would ask him things that i think people that would want to roast him would ask but i would also ask him things that i think are automatic wins it just because horse armor exists and some other things have happened doesn't mean that he hasn't made absolutely legendary products at the same time. Sure. That's fair.

Starting point is 01:46:53 Okay, this one's from Marcus. Any tips for devices slash tech to have in a studio student apartment? A computer. Studio student apartment. Battery banks bank student studio apartment yeah a laptop light bulbs ti83 plus graphing calculator nice i mean or whatever the whatever the probably much newer one is no it's still that one. Is it really? Shut up. No, it's not.

Starting point is 01:47:28 Ask Floatplane Chat. I'm pretty sure it is. Can't be. What is it, sorry? TI-80 something has been... TI-83 plus was what I said. There's got to be a newer one. There's no way.

Starting point is 01:47:37 And they're still $200. That's stupid. That's stupid. We should make a clone on LTT Store. TI-84 apparently. No, they've moved on. They've moved on. TI-84 silver. Wow, except I'm pretty sure that has been there for at least a decade. Okay, yeah.

Starting point is 01:47:55 TI-84 plus? Yeah, all right. TI-89 titanium. Let's go. Wow, this thing looks ancient. Jeez. All right. All right, why don't we move on to our next topic?

Starting point is 01:48:16 Oh, they have like TI Inspire, and it has like a color screen and stuff. We got to do sponsors. Thanks to NordPass for sponsoring today's show. If you use our Google or Facebook account to log into other sites and apps, as like a color screen and stuff. We've got to do sponsors. Thanks to NordPass for sponsoring today's show. If you use your Google or Facebook account to log into other sites and apps, you may be putting your personal info at risk. Whether it's just losing access to your accounts or becoming a victim of identity theft,

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Starting point is 01:48:56 save your team hours throughout the work week while keeping your information safe. Get an exclusive deal plus an additional month free with code Linus at nordpass.com slash Linus. And as always, there's a link in the show notes. Thanks to Magic Spoon for sponsoring today's show. Magic Spoon's healthy yet delicious cereals have zero grams of sugar, 13 to 14 grams of protein, and only four to five net grams of carbs per serving. You can now build your own variety box with the best-selling flavors like cocoa, fruity, frosted, and peanut butter. And you can even add their cereal bars to your box too. With one gram of sugar, four net grams of carbs, and only 130 calories per bar,

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Starting point is 01:49:45 spoon and use code WAN for $5 off. Thanks to XSplit for sponsoring today's show. XSplit is a cutting edge software company that provides advanced broadcasting video production tools for creators, gamers, and businesses. XSplit offers a range of products like Broadcaster and VCam. Broadcaster allows users to capture, produce produce and stream high quality video content to popular platforms such as twitch and youtube vcam allows users to remove replace or blur the webcam background during a video call live stream or recording creating a more professional looking and distraction free video so check out exploit today at lmg.gg slash x split and use code linus for 69 off your first purchase or subscription. Nice. What do you want to do for our next topic?

Starting point is 01:50:30 I am just kind of staring at merch messages, hoping to get to those. Really, like, very little happened in the world of tech this week. It was all, like, legal stuff. Okay, I want to talk about Amazon's telehealth expansion. Amazon bought American healthcare provider One Medical, which offers subscribers 24 seven on demand telehealth services and same and next day in-person medical appointments at one of its 125 offices. The deal was announced last year, but was delayed by an FTC antitrust investigation.

Starting point is 01:50:59 Amazon is looking to expand One Medical to compete in US primary care against other outpatient clinic chains owned by CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart. This has raised concerns about vertical consolidation as large corporations increasingly buy up smaller players in the market. Amazon already offers medication through its online pharmacy, and the acquisition will give

Starting point is 01:51:18 Amazon access to even more medical data, which it uses for analytics and machine learning, both on patient health outcomes and staff well-being. There's definitely no issue with the people that sell you food and everything else that you buy in your life also having all of your medical data. Cool. Sweet.

Starting point is 01:51:41 I think if people watch the show for a while, they know that I'm probably not so into this. I, for one, think it's great i don't believe that at all um yeah i don't know i don't like that yeah um i wonder what's interesting is if you are currently a customer of one medical and you don't want your medical data being taken by amazon i wonder what rights you have because it's like i don't think you can gdpr it because it's an american american yeah yeah get so like basically is it just all going amazon no matter what there might be a way to deal with it maybe i don't know i don't know so i'm going to consider if you are a one medical customer i'm willing to bet there was something in their t's and c's that's like yeah we'll keep everything super private and we won't share it with anybody by the way we might get acquired at some point haha yeah um i mean

Starting point is 01:52:33 that's it's usually in there yeah i don't know it's kind of depressing the like what industry are they going to not be in in 20 years? I mean, Wall-E is looking more and more prophetic by the time. By the time? By the day. I don't remember what the super company was in that one. By and large.

Starting point is 01:52:57 By and large, yeah. Or by and large, or something like that, yeah. So I think they were basing it off of like It was Amazon plus Costco or something as far as I could tell. It was like basically they were just involved in everything from merchandise sales to space travel okay it's amazon yeah fair enough yeah i mean at a certain point you have so much money that you can just buy your way into literally any industry we are now a market leader yesterday we did not exist we just bought we we just bought

Starting point is 01:53:37 the the human the the actual physical assets and the the like the human like knowledge capital the entire like essence of this entire industry now belongs to us lol by the way the prices are double now hope you like that because we i mean we spent a lot on this and we are think of the shareholders yeah we've talked about this before it's it like when when best buy came up into canada it wasn't like best buy and future shop fought for a while future shop was basically exactly the same as best buy in canada but like worse because the sales people were commissioned and really pushy yeah yep so that and their color was red instead of blue other than that it was like it was yellow best buy no Buy? No, Future Shop. Yeah, I just, no, Best Buy, yellow.

Starting point is 01:54:26 Best Buy is blue. Shut up. Yeah. Hold on, poll, poll. Best Buy is blue. No, that's it. Don't go on the website. All right.

Starting point is 01:54:35 Poll. No, no, I don't know how to create a poll. I don't remember. You always show it to me and then I always forget. It's so straightforward. Best Buy is what, primary color um yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah okay in the meantime uh what were we what were we talking about yellow can't remember we're talking about the buy-in large yeah i man so amazon's've got Ring, so they've got cameras all over your house.

Starting point is 01:55:07 They're going to have your medical data, so they're going to know, like... Don't they have that little robot with a camera on it too? Body, yeah, the little drone thing and stuff. They know all the products you buy. They're the primary employer in more than one significant municipality. Not only can they deliver your food,

Starting point is 01:55:29 but they also have, what's that? Big food chain. Oh, Whole Foods. They also own Whole Foods. Terrifying. It's blue, bro. It's yellow. It's yellow.

Starting point is 01:55:43 52 for yellow. What? No. Yeah. It's yellow. 87% of the votes are for blue. It's yellow. 52% for yellow. What? No. Yeah, 55% for yellow. Not percent. Yellow's going up. I think you guys are just trolling me. No, it's blue. Yes, yellow is the accent color, but it's blue.

Starting point is 01:55:58 When you walk in there, what are they wearing? When you go up to the store, what color is the Best Buy logo on? Boom. Got them. Roasted. The background's blue. Shut up. It's yellow, isn't it?

Starting point is 01:56:11 The tag? The tag is yellow, right? I'm pretty sure the tag is blue. Oh, that tag is yellow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait, no. Luke's screen. Luke's screen.

Starting point is 01:56:21 What color? What color is the? Hold on. No. There. There. That's what I'm talking about. Look, it's- the background is blue. I think- I think the- I think this is old.

Starting point is 01:56:30 What color was the favicon? What color does Best Buy think their color is? Go back, go back. No, you go back. You have to go back. Favicon, yellow. Bestbuy.com. No, no, no.

Starting point is 01:56:44 Best Buy employee. And you're wrong. Hold on no. Best Buy employee. Hold on. And you're wrong. And you're wrong. Hold on, hold on. And you're wrong. Look, they're wearing blue shirts. They're all wearing blue shirts. That doesn't mean their color is blue. Their color is still yellow. And look, the banner, oh that's a Windows banner. No, we're not looking at your screen anymore. We've had enough of your screen.

Starting point is 01:57:01 The uniform is blue. And yeah, the yellow logo is old. The entire building is blue i don't know guys i don't know um you know it's a good wan show when we're debating what color best buy is we do have an update for you guys um uh this came up on reddit and it's an update to the Apple unlock story that we talked about recently. So apparently a large number of recent gen Macs have wound up unusable on the secondhand market due to an activation lock. Apple does, it turns out, have the ability to distinguish between locked devices that have been reported missing or stolen and locked devices with a clean record. And in some circumstances, Apple can and does unlock those devices upon request.

Starting point is 01:57:54 So this is interesting because when we were talking about this, we were basically saying, well, hey, in the interest of reducing the incentive to steal a device, hey, in the interest of reducing the incentive to steal a device, we actually kind of support non-bypassable device locks, right? Except that it is bypassable, so this complicates things. Users of r slash setup app have submitted dozens of devices through Apple's activation lock removal service, and a few patterns have emerged. One, only devices with a clean status were unlocked. What does that mean? Which makes sense.

Starting point is 01:58:30 That it was not reported stolen or missing. Ah, makes sense. Two, the vast majority of devices unlocked were an iPhone 8 or earlier. The iPhone 8 was discontinued in April of 2020. The iPhone 8 was discontinued in April of 2020. 3. All unlocked devices had been unused for at least a year. 4. When devices were unlocked, it appeared to happen through an automated system. When devices were rejected, it took significantly longer and went through a human review.

Starting point is 01:59:04 So unless there was a fundamental change in the system after april 2020 this would seem to indicate that apple might have the ability to unlock newer devices or could contact the original owner of the device and inform them of the unlock request giving them the option to confirm or deny we have raised issues with that though yeah there's there's potential like privacy issues um i i think there's just potential customer experience issues like i just i wouldn't want like okay so what i haven't used my htc vive in four years and for whatever reason it was locked somehow um and htc just what like phones me and it's like hey can you deal with this like i mean yeah i guess so but also sorry why it would just sound like a scam yeah

Starting point is 01:59:46 why yeah why are you contacting me this is weird email or phone or whatever i would just assume it was a scam yep yeah i get that it's chat still seriously talking about best by color oh no they're not um anyway i i i don't know i just continue to be disappointed by apple's attitude you know where they they'll they'll talk about how great they are and environmentally friendly they are and whatever whatever whatever and then when push comes to shove and they have an opportunity to keep devices out of a landfill they invariably do not take that path because at the end of the day the only thing their shareholders care about is how many iPhones they sold this quarter it's just all there is to it and if they were just if

Starting point is 02:00:32 they just owned that and they weren't so like hippie touchy-feely about everything I'd be like okay yeah fair enough so you're soulless and evil and you just wear it on your face like okay fine fine but just the the duplicitous the duplicity duplicitousness two-facedness there we go nice i just i find it so hard to deal with there's one that we might actually disagree on which might be interesting hit me uh china suppresses i disagree china suppresses public no they didn't regulators in china are apparently telling chinese tech companies to restrict access to ai-powered chatbots made outside of china and to report to the government before launching their own in-house chatbots no i disagree ai image generators are already censored in China, and Baidu's chatbot Ernie will refuse to generate images of Tiananmen Square. That makes sense.

Starting point is 02:01:30 Synthetic content like deepfakes are far more restricted than in the West, not only to protect citizens from impersonation, but likewise to restrict the potential for parody and mockery of Chinese authorities. It is possible that the same factors that make large language models sometimes respond unpredictably or fabricate information may also make them difficult to effectively censor unless their data set is also fully censored. Yeah, this could be, I've just unrelated to these notes here. I was reading about this and apparently there's some criticism in china of the government's efforts to restrict this the the data sets of these large language models and basically going like look uh because of you know what you know you're being thin-skinned about you know winnie the pooh generated images or whatever we're gonna fall behind america in this tech war are you serious right now?

Starting point is 02:02:25 Here's the thing, though. What is your stance on them? So I didn't actually know the whole thing, which is why I thought we were going to disagree. So I'm going to narrow it down slightly. So just them blocking, let's say, outside of China made. Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all. What is your stance on that?

Starting point is 02:02:44 What do you think they should do? I just think it's stupid. of china made yeah that doesn't surprise me at all what is your stance on that well i mean what do you think they should do i just think it's stupid so what is your i i think i knew you said that at some point i don't know if we were like talking about it offline or what so that's why i thought we would disagree because i don't actually necessarily think it's that stupid because and my reason for this is look at how we're all reacting to tiktok existing at all in the west and oh china's using a different algorithm here to get the kids to watch dumb things so that they don't have good aspirations when they're getting older and all this type of stuff that we have talked about on the wan show before i don't know that i would assign like

Starting point is 02:03:20 causality necessarily to those things i think there are there are much i think i don't think tiktok's helping as far as my understanding goes there is a difference in the algorithm for in china and out of china where in china it directs them more to like science and education type topics and like wellness stuff and outside of china it directs them to just who's making them watch the app more yeah okay which is to be completely honest not different to how basically anything that's made in the west is made anyways so the criticism there is interesting but uh but you know but I don't know if I was if I was the Chinese government I would be concerned about like chat GPT I think I would be losing this

Starting point is 02:04:05 tech war. Not only just that, but we've had the conversation here, right? To be able to make these things work better. Say you're a software developer to make it be able to work better. You might have to give it some information. So if they allow everyone to use it, uh, imagine you are a developer for X government. Let's remove China from the conversation because there's a lot of situations there. France. Let's say you're a developer for the...

Starting point is 02:04:33 Paris is not on fire for a change and you have other concerns. There's other stuff to work on. It doesn't smell like pee right now. Love you, France. Beautiful city. smell like pee right now love you love you france beautiful city um but like it's interesting because it incentivizes you giving it a lot of information because it will work better if you do right yeah like it is actually a massive security problem we talked about that on one of the first episodes we talked about chat gpt at all which

Starting point is 02:05:05 was like oh yeah it can't read your internal api docs unless you give it to it yeah then it can and like people have a hundred percent done that i guarantee it i i know that people have done that i don't know it's interesting this and the deep fake stuff. Like, yeah, we can. I've taken this stance a bunch of times on the show, which is where like, if you start banning this stuff, other countries are just going to surpass you. Like, it's not like other people aren't going to make it. So at a certain point, like, what's the point? But then we have also brought up the argument of like, yeah, they were bad, which was nice. But when people deepfaked us having a conversation on the WAN show, that kind of sucked.

Starting point is 02:05:51 When people deepfaked other people in significantly worse ways, that sucked a lot more. Like, I don't know. It's not like there isn't problems with these technologies. And if they make it so that you're only allowed to use ones that are made in country, they might be able to have more control over it. There's also the downside that that might restrict their level of innovation or whatever else, which is concerning. But I don't know. It's deepfakes, AI technology. It's a really interesting landscape.

Starting point is 02:06:23 AI technology, it's a really interesting landscape and I can understand why different governments might react to it in a variety of different ways is I guess all I can say. I can run at 3200 megahertz, respectfully asks us to delineate between Parisians and the rest of the French. Parisians are specifically known to be the worst in italics. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:06:45 This is one of those things where everyone's perception and everyone's experiences are different. You know, I hear a lot of the reputation that the French tend to have, whether we're talking Quebecois or Parisian or France-French, the rest of France. My experience has been very overwhelmingly universally positive in all of those places. So I just don't really, I shouldn't say I don't really get it. I should say I can respect it

Starting point is 02:07:16 because every time I've talked to anyone about it or witnessed anything, the issue they have is if you don't even make an effort to engage with them on their turf in their way. So if you just walk up to someone in Montreal and speak English, where realistically like a solid like 75% of people speak fluent English anyway, they're just going to pretend they don't understand you and you can basically just f*** off. Whereas if you walk up and you're just like, je toilet, uh, still, there's going to be like, don't worry about it.

Starting point is 02:07:58 Toilet's over there. And, you know, let me know if I can help you with anything when you come out. Like they're chill, right? Make even the slightest effort. And it's know, let me know if I can help you with anything when you come out. Like, they're chill, right? Make even the slightest effort. And it's like, fine. And honestly, I can't. Are we going to get spicy today?

Starting point is 02:08:14 I can't say I don't feel the same way. Like, I don't get running into people like in my neighborhood where I live who don't speak a single word of english even though they've lived here for 25 years i have a okay yeah that's a different thing i was gonna say i have a different take on that because i find it fun i've encountered it and i'm just like i don't like if someone if someone speaks to you in a language that you don't understand and i've seen this on both sides yeah when when i don't understand the yeah whatever i've just seen it on both sides but if someone speaks to you in a language that you don't understand and then gets mad at you for not understanding it when. In that language.

Starting point is 02:08:52 Yeah. Which is really funny. And they just like start yelling at you still in that language, assuming you're going to understand it now. It's like, bro, no, I don't, I have no idea. But yeah, like I was in, I'm just going to divert because I think we're going down a not great path. So I'm going elsewhere. I was in Paris slash France because it wasn't just Paris.

Starting point is 02:09:14 Visiting Shadow fairly recently. And we weren't like in Shadow's offices the whole time. We cruised around. We're checking out different tourist destinations. We're going to different cafes, doing whatever, all that kind of stuff. It was great. Everyone was really nice. I i don't know i didn't really get it i did walk past part of the street that legitimately made me almost hurl oh yeah it was just like i mean new york's the same any like big city that had a sewer designed like 300 years ago or whatever is gonna be like that yeah it was like brutal but based on what

Starting point is 02:09:48 people had told me earlier in that same day i had remarked about how i was confused because it didn't smell bad at all and i was confused it was just very this like one specific spot whenever we'd walk by it was really bad but yeah people were nice in paris people were nice in other parts of france that we went to I had no problem with it. That might be because of like how I interacted with those people. So they were respectful back. I don't know. But yeah, I had no problem there.

Starting point is 02:10:16 I thought everybody was great. Bordaga asks, is Linus a you're an American speak English fellow? Absolutely not. A, I'm not an American. And B, it's not like the area that I live in is like, you know, a little Italy type area or anything like that. It's like literally everything's in English. You would have to have completely inoculated yourself from anything and everything in order to not be exposed to it and to not have to use it at all like it's kind of it's it's shocking it's like almost admirable if i moved to japan i would want

Starting point is 02:10:51 to learn japanese whether you wanted to or not you just probably should um is sort of obvious to me but fair enough yeah the should just doesn't apply because for me, I would want to anyways. So like it is. Yeah. It'd be almost irrelevant. All right. Why don't we move on to YouTube? Adding dubbing podcasts and 1080 premium.

Starting point is 02:11:20 So before we get into this, I just want to shoot in because I like recommend using it. I complained on the show fairly recently, I think three or four shows ago, about how despite being a premium member and despite literally every single video that I would click on, manually switching it to the highest possible resolution. Yes. For a long time, being really diligent about it doing every single time it was still automatically putting me at the bottom resolution forever i complained about that while i was on the show i had the idea of like i should just make an extension that automatically picks the highest possible resolution and then while i was sitting there thinking about that being like i shouldn't announce this i should just do it someone mentioned in chat like hey there's this extension that does this and i was like oh sick so i went home checked it out got it

Starting point is 02:12:09 installed it and i've been running it for a long time and it's great so mine just automatically picks his uh picks absolute maximum now because i was like for a long time i'd just be like oh whatever like 1080p is fine i don't need need to, like, crank everything so crazy. Yeah. But no. They wanted a war. Now it's max every time no matter what. They're going to get one. Yeah, screw it. Anyways, the actual topic. Following last week's leadership change, YouTube has announced a series of new features, including

Starting point is 02:12:38 experimenting with a new 1080 premium. Sorry, I was going to say 1080p premium, but it's 1080 premium video quality with a higher 1080 premium. Sorry, no, I was going to say 1080p premium, but it's 1080 premium video quality with a higher bitrate. Despite concerns, YouTube does not currently appear to intend to decrease the quality of the current 1080p setting to encourage paying for the premium version,

Starting point is 02:12:58 but the new 1080 premium will run at 13 megabits per second instead of 8 megabits per second with unpaid 1080p i'm sure it's still variable i think that's just like a general target yeah i don't think this is just an average for the last year a small group of creators has been testing a new dubbing system soon to roll out more broadly which adds the option to create multiple dubbing tracks on a single video similar to the current system for subtitles rather than having to create a different video for each language i believe we were part of that beta. So that includes us. We have tested it. I'm really excited about it. I think I pinged Ed about it earlier this week,

Starting point is 02:13:35 and I think I was told that the first integrated into the workflow video is going to be very, very soon. Let me just have a quick, you know what, I might have talked to him in person. I think it just popped in on him. So nope, I don't know. I don't have it on my I don't have it on my phone. But I think we're going to be ready to roll out. I think we're doing Spanish first. Don't quote me on that. But I'm pretty sure because that's what most of our initial testing was done on. It will also be possible to designate tracks and videos as podcasts in YouTube Studio, as well as adding them to YouTube Music.

Starting point is 02:14:10 Oh, okay. Dan's not there. So I guess I don't really know. Chair. Chair, Secret Lab's chair. Nope, I guess he didn't make it in time. We're done having this conversation. Sorry.

Starting point is 02:14:26 You can't have his sweater on screen. Do you have any idea how our podcast platform uploads work? Because I don't even know. I have recently found out because we didn't know. So podcast uploads are handled by Sven. That's random. Very random. Yeah, isn't Sven on the business team?

Starting point is 02:14:43 This is probably going to change. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah. I only just learned this. Oh, okay. We're looking into it. There might be some reasons, stuff like that, but it's also not automated.

Starting point is 02:14:56 Reasons like that we rolled a 106-sided die and it landed on Sven? I think you have been chosen. I think maybe things like Spotify... You are the 1%. I think maybe things like Spotify might get different ads

Starting point is 02:15:13 than other platforms. That's correct. Yeah, there are specific ad reads for Spotify. And then because our ad reads are a variable length and at variable points in the video, it can't be automated it's just whenever i feel like doing it and also for a different amount of time right because you don't you wouldn't do it for like okay for the exact next 90 seconds no matter what we are doing an ad

Starting point is 02:15:34 like a section of ads like it's not structured like that right so you can't really automate it so that means if there's a long weekend it's not going to be up on podcasting platforms until tuesday by which point you might as well just start watching clips because you know who has time to watch like a four hour podcast so we're like hyper hamstringing our own podcast yeah it's kind of hilarious how wanshow is as far as I can tell, actually an enormous podcast. Yeah. And yet... We do everything we can to try to make it not...

Starting point is 02:16:10 To impede its success. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. I put these wrinkles here on purpose. You guys know that, right? Oh, yeah. It's brutal.

Starting point is 02:16:24 But yeah, I... I think the irreverence is why they like it i i want it to be automated in some way it's a feature i just don't know if it can be because of how we structure the ad spots unless we started doing like we have the timer right so unless we started doing okay there's the but there's some amount of variance in the recording start in the recording end so it's always going to be a little odd i don't know if there's some way where we could automatically splice out if we started being really rigid about the duration of ad spots and when we did them and stuff like that yeah but we don't want to do that

Starting point is 02:17:00 so like it keeps coming back to if we want to use this the word we to mean linus yeah uh if we you used it after a while um if if you hey i stopped signing things for you is that have you though uh yeah because now i i can just sign things as myself on behalf of the company we just we just changed that um uh what was i gonna say i'm not hearing any of this uh but yeah if we want to have custom ads on those platforms it's gonna have to be manual this to some degree yeah dark 24 says no Linus it is not why we like it some of us tolerate it because nothing will change no matter what we say you being a troll is not funny why am I laughing then oh man casual forgery on the

Starting point is 02:18:07 wanshow it's been it's been enough time statute of limitations whatever i don't think a week counts hey come on oh jeez

Starting point is 02:18:18 sign my screwdriver yeah at ltx i'll sign everyone's stuff as linus there we go oh i'm sorry. Okay, yeah, I'm doing great. Okay, LTX 2023 BYOC update. Hey, speaking of LTX, what a great segue.

Starting point is 02:18:43 We know not everyone was able to get a Whaleland BYOC ticket, but we were able to shuffle the layout a bit, and we're selling more... 38 more tickets? That's it. We sold all of them in, like, the first day. That's going to do nothing. I mean, okay, look,

Starting point is 02:19:02 the thing is we can't take up the whole floor plan with BYOC. Otherwise it wouldn't be LTX. It would just be Whale Land. Yeah, there needs to be like fun things to do at the convention. Yeah, and so it's a balancing act, right? So I get it. But anyway. I think at some point we're going to get to a point where the BYOC gets like its own floor.

Starting point is 02:19:21 Yeah, Vancouver Convention Center has multiple buildings. Yeah. So the BYOC could just have its own floor. Yeah. Vancouver Convention Center has multiple buildings. Yeah. So the BYOC could just have its own thing. Totally. And you could be in BYOC land, which would actually be great for security anyway. Yeah. So you're in BYOC land and then you just walk across like this little courtyard or like external plaza thing.

Starting point is 02:19:35 And then you're in the other building. You're in LTX. I mean, I could see us getting there. Yeah. LTX is like kind of awesome. Super legit. Well, at least the last one was. Presumably this next one will be good.

Starting point is 02:19:48 Yeah. Assuming it continues to grow at the pace that it has been over the last two. And then what looks like it's going to happen for this next one. It could be like a 10, 15, 20,000 person convention by like 2025, 2026. Like it's pretty exciting. It's really cool. Anyway, BYOC tickets, those 38 will go on sale March 3rd at 5 p.m. Pacific time. So if you didn't get a BYOC ticket and you're into it, go for it.

Starting point is 02:20:20 There's some notes in here. For LTX 2019, we apparently made the mistake of opening up too many more BYOC seats at once. So we'll be offering, oh, there will be several waves of small batch tickets provided that we sell at each wave. So if you already have a ticket and want to purchase BYOC instead, please just do so. And then reach out to support at info at LTXExpo.com so we can refund your original ticket. All right. Cool. So that way, if you had any extras on your original ticket or whatever, can get you sorted out should we do a few merch messages yeah oh google was accused of destroying evidence we could talk about that um blah blah blah they were accused of destroying

Starting point is 02:20:55 evidence by the american government government Something antitrust at the games. This is a real podcast I mean the headline kind of says it all that's okay. That's what I was saying about the topics for this week though They're just like legal stuff which nothing else happened. I know origin can make solar panels out of moon dust all they have to do is They hope to market this innovation to NASA cool market this innovation to NASA. Cool. Maybe they'll win something from NASA that SpaceX doesn't get. Alright, let's do some merch messages. Okay, sure.

Starting point is 02:21:52 We got one here from Kira. Happy Friday! Yay, happy Friday! Luke, would you say in the programming world it's more important to be an expert in one language or proficient in many? Do you have a favorite slash least favorite language oh uh i think it all depends on what you're doing um like there's

Starting point is 02:22:11 there's people that get paid a lot to be extremely knowledgeable in like a very old antiquated language that no one learns anymore but like airports or yeah or nuclear silos or heavy industry or whatever still uses it and they need you to come make some change to it like once a year and they'll pay you like literally i have heard of contracts where someone flies in works for like one to five days flies out and gets paid 200 grand you just have to hope that comes along you need to be the best one you have to hope it comes along because this isn't going to be like a perpetual thing it's just me a one-time thing i'm not actually saying this is like necessarily a good career path yeah right to be clear but i know that there are people that do it so it's like you

Starting point is 02:23:06 can just say cobalt that's yeah that's one of them there are others as well so like that's a situation where being an expert in one language would be good uh being proficient in many though has some other aspects of it that might be good like i'm assuming if you're proficient in many that means that you're actively learning and if you're trying to stay with the trend of technology the current like language that's going to be the best at doing whatever is basically constantly changing so if you're only an expert in one you're like no this is the only one i learned well you're just going to fall behind and you either luckily become that like one cobalt guy that gets paid 200 grand to do the thing or you don't and then you just don't have a job so like i don't know um you

Starting point is 02:23:51 have favorite least favorite language not really um i really like he hates french i do actually really hate french such a hater literal literal hater not france but french i i even like hearing people speak french and stuff is fine but i just when i was learning in school i did not like it um but yeah i like c i like to see a lot which might come as a surprise but yeah okay uh this one's from anonymous hello. Hello, Linus and Luke. Was just wondering if either of you have watched Jeff Geerling's six-month review of The Screwdriver and what your thoughts are on it.

Starting point is 02:24:33 No, but I read the comments. I'm serious. I'm not going to dance around it. That's what I do. I am glad that he has had an overall positive experience with the screwdriver. As a YouTuber who sort of understands how retention curves work and how consumption of media through headlines works as a king tier consumer of media through headlines,

Starting point is 02:25:04 as a king tier consumer of media through headlines. I can't say that I'm stoked that the thumbnail and title focused on it breaking when actually if you make it quite deep into the video, it turns out he like broke it on purpose. So it's kind of like a lot of people are only going to see that. And I understand what your point was. It was, you know, like a multi-layered sort of critique of the average YouTube viewer's tendency to not watch the whole video. But, like, since we all know that, and since we're not going to change that um now a lot of people are just like ltt screwdriver broke and it's like okay cool um so that is not the best but um yeah i'm glad he likes it yeah fair enough okay this one's from austin what is your favorite ltx

Starting point is 02:26:03 19 moment mine was when i got to chat with linus for a second and he told me the name of a banger pizza plates d plus pizza d hot i think actually but yes close enough d plus pizza is a completely different thing i think that guy got arrested i uh we don't know what i'm talking about no i don't the guy who uh you know on the pizza i didn't know what that's oh yeah that's the thing oh yeah that's that's you don't want that pizza no you don't uh when you and i i don't know if we like ran the line or just walked the line but when people are lining up to get inside you came and grabbed me and you're like let's like go to the end.

Starting point is 02:26:45 Yeah. And then it was like, holy. Yeah, that was fun. When does this end? That was really cool. You know the line is going to be twice as long this time, right? I've heard. Let's go for a run.

Starting point is 02:26:53 Yeah. Yeah. Okay, this one's from Jackson. Hi, Linus, Luke, and Dan. I'm an avid car enthusiast and wanted your opinion slash thoughts on why auto manufacturers give zero Fs on upgrading the electronics in cars, infotainment centers in particular. Because f*** you. That's why. It's a lot cheaper to not.

Starting point is 02:27:15 Because you'll buy it anyway, you piece of s***. Being on super old processes is like genuinely way cheaper. And actually can have reliability advantages that too um but the main reason the main primary reason um is because just they don't want to change their technology they just have stuff that works for them and they just keep doing it i also honestly think most people don't really care that much. Yeah, well, the thing is that it bothers them, but they'll buy it anyway. And as long as that continues to happen, then...

Starting point is 02:27:52 I mean, that's one of the things that I was most supportive of Tesla about. Their better infotainment systems. They pushed it pretty hard. That I think have put a significant amount of pressure on the legacy automakers to build better infotainment systems. At the same time, Google and Apple pushed CarPlay and Android Auto forward, which has been just enormous for me. The last thing that I ever had any care for was updating the stupid integrated map, stupid integrated navigation garbage in my stupid car take it to a dealer to get a new map are you fucking kidding me like no um i like on principle i don't even want your new map i don't even care if it's free i don't want it it's stupid i have a

Starting point is 02:28:39 data i have a computer in my pocket that has a permanent data connection that already takes all my information anyway. So it might as well just go to them instead of you and them. So anyway, I'm a huge, huge fan of being able to just set my infotainment system to not use the OEM software and just use my phone. And it's great, which, by the way, I figured out that issue with the navigation. So it just changed the defaults. There is a setting in Android Auto that I didn't notice the first time that restores that bottom navigation bar

Starting point is 02:29:17 that shows you your previously opened app and has controls or it has your turn-by-turn. Super Glitch in Twitch says, this is super wrong. The life cycle of a car is five to seven years Super Glitch and Twitch says this is super wrong. The life cycle of a car is five to seven years started before they're released. You are super wrong. That's actually not the reason.

Starting point is 02:29:31 And you can kind of look into why the silicon shortage, the great silicon shortage of the coronavirus pandemic affected the auto industry more than just about any other industry and affected the legacy automakers more than Tesla, who actually uses modern technology in their cars. The reason is that they are supply constrained. Semiconductor manufacturers want to move on

Starting point is 02:29:55 from these ancient processes and they just don't want to redesign things. I've heard horror stories from small design teams that are like, yeah, literally the problem is that the one person who designed that board doesn't work here anymore. And nobody else knows how to like make one.

Starting point is 02:30:15 So we keep using the same board. Oh man. That, that happens. Kills me. You lose a lot of knowledge when you lose certain members of teams. Check this out. This is how you update the maps for my car that is the stupidest thing i've ever seen ever a 180

Starting point is 02:30:31 dollar dvd don't forget about the 32 shipping for a dvd which makes a ton of sense in the age of broadband internet so annoying actually like i've known about this i have obviously never updated the maps but i've known about this the whole time i should check you should pirate it i should check if other people are privateering this software just out of curiosity i mean i already said you should pirate it i don't think you really need to beat around the bush at this point there's gotta be there's gotta be like an entire like private tracker or something for that or you know people can be shockingly dedicated to shockingly specific causes i should look into this because apparently that was the last year that they were going to do it for that vehicle as well so it'd be 2021 that's another fantastically stupid thing yeah i really want something that will just stop getting updated

Starting point is 02:31:29 at some point when you arbitrarily decide there's not enough this particular vehicle left on the road that that makes that makes such sense it's good it's great yeah they might as well ship on a floppy disk. Yeah. Would have been cooler. Okay, this one's from Thomas. Hey, Linus and Luke. I've been buying some products, both physical and digital, to help my productivity.

Starting point is 02:31:59 What consumer-grade products in the last five to ten years have aided your productivity the most? Consumer products? Man, I like having a big monitor. I was going to say monitors. I like my quadrants. I have four 1080p screens, each of which is 21 inches, which is like perfect for me at 0% scaling.

Starting point is 02:32:17 So I just have a ton of information on my screen. I love it. Yeah, monitors as well. This one's from Chris. I just started a new career as an AV tech for a community school system. We've been busy installing new interactive TVs. What kind of tech, if you've seen, would be helpful for teaching our youth? VR is super cool.

Starting point is 02:32:40 I mean, it's super expensive and kludgy, so it's a long way from, I think, being legitimately useful for like at scale for educational purposes. But man, 3D printers would have been super cool. I would have loved to learn about modeling. A bunch of schools jumped on 3D printers right away, which I just thought was brilliant. Because I didn't think they would necessarily do it. But that is an absolutely wicked skill to have when you're growing up. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:33:06 Like if your reaction to something breaking in a physical way in your house is, oh, I can fix that by like printing a new part or whatever. And like epoxying it on or whatever. That is sick. Yeah, that's super cool. That is so cool. Okay, this one's from Charlie. Hi, Linus and Luke.

Starting point is 02:33:24 It's probably been answered before, but what is the average age of your viewership? Love from New Zealand. These are coming up. This data is always going to be skewed. Like I've seen reports from our audience many, many times. Like, hey, I couldn't help noticing that you guys say you're only like 1% female, but I'm definitely a chick or whatever.

Starting point is 02:33:46 And Google thinks I'm a dude or something because I'm into dude stuff, but just letting you know, you know, like I, I hear that a ton. I don't know what that voice was. Don't worry about it. But like,

Starting point is 02:33:57 I've, I've definitely gotten people reaching out to me who are like, you know, just as an FYI, you were talking about how you guys skew heavily male, and I'm not going to dispute that. But what I will say is that we do exist, and Google often misidentifies people,

Starting point is 02:34:21 especially ones who are not logged in, which is a significant number of users. Oh, based on, like, interests and stuff. Exactly. Misidentifies people especially ones who are not logged in which is a significant number of users less today Interests and stuff exactly so they'll profile you and just kind of assume that because you looked at a razor Once that you're a guy because it had a blue handle instead of a pink one or whatever arbitrary bulls**t, right? Yeah, so there's that and then we also get a lot of people telling us say hey, yeah, I'm into it But I always watch with the hubby, you know, stuff like that, right? Oh, so it would be his account.

Starting point is 02:34:50 Yeah. So I can tell you, oh, I know. I can tell you what Google reports to us. I'm just saying that I used the gender as an example of a way of as a as a way to illustrate that this data is because like when i was a kid if i was signing up for a website i would go put in my birthday and then when i hit the year i would just whip the scroll wheel and click on something random like i still do that if steam pops up an age restriction thing on my logged in account with a credit card. What are you doing,

Starting point is 02:35:27 bud? Right. I've had my, I, my account is old enough to vote. Right. So what, what,

Starting point is 02:35:36 what is the point of this? Um, I, and I understand what the point is, but that doesn't mean I have to have patience for it. And so, yeah, it's, oh,

Starting point is 02:35:43 really? I don't know. Maybe it's a setting or something. Like I set it once. I know the screen you're talking about. Yeah. It's your birthday. I set it once and now it takes that same thing

Starting point is 02:35:52 I put in last time and has it by default. I haven't seen that. Weird. You know what? Maybe it's depending. I use new computers all the time because I'm always benchmarking and stuff. It's probably because I've done that on that computer before.

Starting point is 02:36:01 It's probably cached somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So I run into it all the time. I'm like, stop wasting my time. And so, yeah, I just whatever and just select something random. Get out of here. Yeah, get out of my way.

Starting point is 02:36:12 Anyway, so the average, okay, so hold on. Median mode, average. The bulk of our viewers, 70% of them are 18 to 34, which is exactly what i would expect that honestly sounds probably accurate yeah am i aging out of our audience it's okay there's these new filters

Starting point is 02:36:37 now that make you look younger oh it'll never matter oh we got this we talked about this quite a while ago tox filter was it what are we talking this. We talked about this quite a while ago. Botox filter? What are we talking about here? We talked about this quite a while ago. About how you were worried about different features making you look older and then people not wanting to listen to tech person because they look older. Yeah, yeah, tech boomer. Yeah, I do think there's a best before date on tech personalities. There is 100% filters that already exist that happen live.

Starting point is 02:37:05 That's crazy. That make people genuinely look significantly younger and it looks actually like quite good. That's wild. It will totally be a thing and it will be like indistinguishable later on. I mean, if we keep putting wrinkles in the backdrop, then they'll distract from Linus.

Starting point is 02:37:19 Yeah, then they won't even be looking at me. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The next big group, group 17 is 35 to 44 and then it trails off significantly from there 45 to 54 is 6.4 and then it's peanuts um below 18 and above 55 um but then again i think there's a lot of younger people that are just clicking 18 i'm certain the below 18 number

Starting point is 02:37:45 is smaller than it is in reality but i bet you that what is it 18 to 35 one is actually probably pretty accurate yeah i think the 25 to 34 one is probably the most accurate because that'll be the ones that are like have credit cards entered in the site and stuff like that, where you can really make a solid guess as to how old these people are. Okay, this one's from Matthew. Hi, Linus and Luke. What are some red flags you look out for when interviewing staff?

Starting point is 02:38:16 Red flags. On a side note, as a developer, seeing a floatplane developer's blog slash newsletter would be awesome. We just don't have the bandwidth for it. Yeah. Maybe eventually. I know Conrad has mentioned being interested in writing a newsletter for the LTT store before.

Starting point is 02:38:38 So it's not like there will be no development stuff ever. But like, yeah, we definitely do not have the bandwidth. I mean, Luke had the idea of doing one like right at the start and he was like yeah even just even if no one reads it it would be so cool to look back over it you know five years down the line and it would be but we've just been i've documented a lot of stuff anyways i have like really old school screenshots and and videos remember i had the idea of linking every comment and every tweet where people told us we'd fail and printing them out so that we could wallpaper

Starting point is 02:39:13 our office with it? Yeah. We would actually have enough... Would we have enough devs in person here to have a space where we could have put that? Probably. I think we could have done it at the lab. Once we're local, there will be at least three of us.

Starting point is 02:39:25 Yeah. We need to do more float plane merch. That's a good point, Rod. Sorry about that. We'll do it. I promise. Oh, I think our printer is finally back up and running and we're going to be doing some printed t-shirts again.

Starting point is 02:39:38 So maybe we could do a blue, just like float plane logo one. Speaking of working here and stuff. Yeah. There's two, there's lots of roles on the site actually especially if you want to work for labs oh my goodness uh but there's two new ones uh that are kind of in my realm one of them is a floatplane project manager it is a relatively

Starting point is 02:39:55 small team you will also have to do development um but but as a floatplane project manager so we're looking for someone to try to like work on tasking and help guide the ship um so apply so like what like mini luke kind of but they will also do development and be much more in on things if that makes sense okay uh and then the other one is for linus media group so what i need to do is delete this stuff and just go to just jobs nice and it's that's totally elegant infrastructure administrator oh yeah wow we're finally doing it we are finally doing it it's about time how much you want to bet that that particular posting gets a lot of applicants i think it's going to get a bunch and i i will throw out a warning here uh this is a relatively senior

Starting point is 02:40:53 position and one of the reasons why it's a relatively senior position is because your decisions and actions are going to have to stand up to criticism against not only me and AJ and Linus and Jake. Yeah. Don't forget about Jake. Jake likes to criticize. And other Jake. Yeah. Oh yeah. Other Jake. And lots of other people. Don't forget about the 14 million out there. And the entire audience.

Starting point is 02:41:20 Yeah. So no pressure though. And they love picking on infrastructure things that we do at the office. So you're going to be criticized for what you do. Now. Even if you get it completely right and it's actually the best solution for our needs, there will be people out there who are experts in their domain

Starting point is 02:41:35 but have no f***ing idea what it is exactly that we do here and will suggest all kinds of... The number of times over the years that I've been torn apart for not setting up a SAN, and I'm just like... No. No.

Starting point is 02:41:55 That's just actually f***ing stupid. And has nothing to do with what we do here. Chill. It's amazing. It's actually, it's not that I don't know what it is. It's not that I couldn't afford one. It's that it would be stupid. And so, yeah, you'll be dealing with that.

Starting point is 02:42:20 And you're not a team of one. Oh, San, Storage Area Network. You're not a team of one. You'll be working with Dan, actually. You'll be working with another person that I can't name because they're Probo. You'll be working with me. You'll be working with AJ. You'll have resources and stuff.

Starting point is 02:42:34 But I want this person to come in to be fairly high-level infrastructure, security, all that jazz. So, yeah, apply. It's going to be pretty epic. Uh, the stuff that you do is going to show up on video. It should be actually a very fun job if you're into this type of stuff, but just, yeah, understand that it is a relatively senior position. We're not looking for someone like just out of school, something like that. Um, because not only will you be maintaining what is here, but you're going to have gonna have to uh would they work with me they work with jayden i kind of doubt it i don't think so yeah i don't think so i mean maybe

Starting point is 02:43:12 but yeah i don't think so um not only you're gonna have to maintain what's already here but you're gonna have to keep it moving forward and you're gonna have to facilitate um it moving forward and you're going to have to facilitate um someone like linus or jake or whoever else yeah going like oh i want to try this thing for a video and then them coming in like a wrecking ball and doing whatever they want to do and then you either need to uh pick it up where they left off and and bring it to full implementation or uh deconstruct and keep going with what we had, yada, yada, yada. So it's going to be an interesting role. But yeah, apply. Cool.

Starting point is 02:43:52 And what kind of red flags would you look out for when interviewing that person? Well, there's a first time chat over here on Twitch, typical Twitch. One big red flag would be this question from Dimshin. Is there a link to the job posting? That's the first test. If you can't find it, you're not hired. I mean, and you know what? Maybe that makes me like kind of a merciless a**hole, but I just don't really care at a certain point. Like if you don't have problem solving skills, like if you don't want it, then yeah, that's a huge red flag. If you can can't find that link you'll never make it here if you're like if you we don't want to micromanage we don't have the people to micromanage yeah if you tell me

Starting point is 02:44:33 in an interview that you don't really want the job and i'll be like then i don't really want you here i have genuinely had that before yeah like why why are you applying i don't understand like if you're why don't you go you go find something you want to do? I don't want to stand in the way of your happiness. Like, you spent, like, it's 40 hours a week of your life, right? Like, if you're not going to enjoy it, then get the fuck out of here. Like, why, what are you doing? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:44:58 What are you doing? Take care of yourself, right? And sure, you're not going to like it every single day. I don't. Yeah, nobody does. Who does? But, you know, at least a little bit. Well, there has to be things that make up for it, right? yourself right and sure you're not going to like it every single day i don't yeah nobody does who does but you know at least a little bit well there have to be things there has to be things that make up for it right joe it's it's i made it hard required on this one we i know developers are

Starting point is 02:45:16 not exactly necessarily known for their social skills and wanting to communicate a ton yeah but we had a position fairly recently where the the file drop for resume and cover letter was a required field but you could just upload one thing so like the vast majority of people just uploaded a resume with no cover letter even though it says that you have to upload a resume and cover letter and we were just like fine but now haha got them two separate fields both required get owned submit the darn cover letter we actually do read them come on face 32 says applicant gatekeeping weird it's not weird it's literally an entire job yeah that's the whole point. That's like, oh man, that's such a terrible take. So what would your process be?

Starting point is 02:46:10 If someone doesn't care at all and doesn't want to... Okay, imagine it's like... I mean, it depends on how many applicants you have. If you have to fill a position and one person applies and they're like, well, you have to fill a position. Sure, I guess. That sounds like an awful place to work. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:46:31 I don't think I'd want to be on either side of that interview table. It's like, well, I might hate you, but I guess we're going to work together. Well, I might hate working for you, but I guess I'm stuck with it. Thanks for the money. money yeah that's not great that sounds like the worst thing ever and like I've had people that uh in interviews have told me that I think we talked about this earlier in the show even uh that they have like no idea who we are what we do really but they like really love this thing that they do and they're excited to be able to do it in this environment and i tell them different projects that we want to work on they're like yeah that sounds sweet

Starting point is 02:47:07 like okay great like i don't yeah care if you're excited about working here because of what like the the the fandom of it that has no benefit or i don't care either way but if you're excited about doing the things that we do then that's great yeah twitch is like still being twitch robotic sausage over there. My probably terrible take is that asking for the link is problem solving through communication. No. Asking the CEO where the link to apply is

Starting point is 02:47:36 is not problem solving. Taking something that could take actually less time by typing a very similar thing to that, but not the same thing into Google and immediately getting results. Instead of doing that, taking two people's time. Throwing it out into the ether in like a fast moving live chat. Not better. That is problem solving, but that's a really bad solution. And you're the problem. problem it's like i don't know what else to tell

Starting point is 02:48:07 you oh i love you twitch chat i do think that this has got to be like twitch chat just be in twitch be in twitch chat which is the only reason i'm going to give them attention for it what if some what is your opinion on people typoing their own email and what is your opinion on people typoing their own email? And what is your opinion on it if it's very obvious how it happened? Like it's.ocm. It depends, though. If they're applying for an accounting position, then they're out. Got it. Put a zero in the wrong spot, you better double check your shit.

Starting point is 02:48:42 Whereas if they're applying for a creative position where really what I need is dragon energy, and if they've got a little bit of the dyslexia or they fat finger a key on their keyboard once in a while, that's not a game breaker. Everything is context dependent, right? So yeah, I mean, if you were just going to create a flow chart of how to weed out applicants, then you might as well just be an AI, right? You've got to be actually thinking. Otherwise, why don't I just replace you with a robot, right? One interesting one that I've ran into,

Starting point is 02:49:20 and I will warn people of this again because I suspect we're going to get a lot of applicants for this. It's super neat. And honestly,'re if you're applying for the infrastructure position especially if you're running your own mail server or whatever like that's pretty cool make sure it works yeah had that problem a lot oh just people like submitting cool like projects they've worked on and you look at it and you you're like, this is very broken, and it doesn't... People submit... Yeah, here's my portfolio website.

Starting point is 02:49:49 It's been under construction for six years. There's nothing literally interesting on it at all, and it barely loads. It's like, you probably would have been better off just not showing me that. Right. Or mail servers, which have major issues, so I literally can't even email them back from Gmail.

Starting point is 02:50:06 That's also a problem. Like, there's... Be a little careful with things. Check your stuff. Check your stuff. I had somebody who... They linked a portfolio website that I think they didn't pay their hosting or something. So I went to go check it and it was like very clearly offline.

Starting point is 02:50:27 So I messaged them about it and they're like, oh yeah, like I haven't actually checked that in quite a while. It's like, maybe do that before you apply, bro. Right. Those types of things. So you're basically looking for basic due diligence. Yeah. Because a lot of the roles that I'm hiring for,

Starting point is 02:50:41 that's actually really important. Right. Yeah. And there's, I don't know, it's one of those tough things, right? Like there's personality traits that you can't really expect to train. Like you can train a skill, but you can't train an attitude in a lot of cases. And so if someone just has an attitude of perfectionism, then that's a very, that's a very desirable trait again for, you know, something like an accounting position. Depends, yeah. You might not actually want that all the time because perfectionism will often also mean

Starting point is 02:51:09 that they take more time to do things. Yeah. So, like, it depends. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I think that's, I think we've talked about a lot of red flags. We've given a lot of hints to the WAN Show audience for how to avoid our traps here. Okay, so I won't email the CEO asking for the application form.

Starting point is 02:51:34 Got it. Yes. Success. All right, next up is from Alex. Hey, Linus and Luke, what's something tech-related that you vastly disagree on and have just agreed to disagree razor laptops i don't think i disagree now well we did for a long time we had a strong disagreeance about those for a long time

Starting point is 02:52:00 all the way back to pre-linus media group actually really yeah i mean i don't i thought i thought their switchblade thing was stupid i thought it was cool but like cool in a like i'd like to see where this goes in the future kind of way not like this is a good laptop kind of way eventually you want i think we were still not linus media group yet maybe we were just still working ncx once a week i don't know you know what i didn't have i had never really like owned a razor anything and i didn't have firsthand experience with their QA. Yeah, I did at that point. Sure.

Starting point is 02:52:29 So that's fair. Yeah, we disagreed. But that's, I don't know if that's really like a technology, is it like technology disagreement? It just says tech related. Tech related. What's something tech related?

Starting point is 02:52:41 I mean, I've made fun of you for like standing Firefox for the longest time, especially when it was going through its very long period of being a complete and absolute piece of shit. Yeah. Um, I actually think Firefox is in a good state right now, but the problem with it is site compatibility.

Starting point is 02:53:00 Like when I, I told you that I tried to switch to it. I think we've talked about this on the show, so I'll try to keep it short, but I did try to switch to it and it think we've talked about this on the show, so I'll try to keep it short, but I did try to switch to it and it was actually very good. I really enjoyed using it. And then I had to use the Paddy website,

Starting point is 02:53:12 the scuba diving website. That's a terrible website. I don't doubt it. It doesn't work on Firefox at all. So it's just like, okay, I guess I have to go back to Chrome. Other than that, I actually really enjoyed the Firefox experience experience i thought it was really good i have to pee it hit me like a ton of bricks i'll

Starting point is 02:53:31 be right back okay see i drank this whole thing i don't think most tech stuff we disagree on though um let me see if i can find some luke specific one yeah yeah fact oriented yeah yeah i don't know if that came through he was saying we're both pretty fact oriented um which is true like we both had um athlon 64 amd processors in our systems forever ago and then ran intel for a long time when intel was running winning and it wasn't because we like liked amd and then liked intel it was because amd stuff was awesome and then intel stuff was awesome and now we're both back on amd stuff because now because AMD stuff was awesome. And then Intel stuff was awesome. And now we're both back on AMD stuff

Starting point is 02:54:07 because now AMD stuff's awesome. Like it's more about just like what's good at the time. You know? I've got a specific one here for you, Luke. Sure. This is from Matthew. Hey Luke, what do you think about the recent layoffs at the big tech companies?

Starting point is 02:54:19 Do you think they will continue or will they start to rehire? And what about Floatplane? Well, Floatplane's hiring right now. I announced the position, I think, 10 minutes ago. So that's a thing. Floatplane will also probably, but it's going to somewhat depend on

Starting point is 02:54:35 how things go in a variety of ways. But we will probably be hiring again before the year is over. But I don't know when. It's very likely that's going to be like Q3 or even maybe Q4. It might be near the end of the year, but it's very likely we'll be hiring again. And we're finishing up a hiring wave for the Labs web development team right now. I know the Labs local team is hiring, I believe, a junior software developer. I know the lab's local team is hiring, I believe, a junior software developer.

Starting point is 02:55:08 Like, yeah, we're hiring. And we didn't have like giant layoffs. So we are not in that category. Will it continue? I don't know. I'm not really in the like Silicon Valley world. So I have no idea idea i suspect companies that haven't done it yet i would be concerned um but if your company has done one of those massive layoffs

Starting point is 02:55:31 uh i think they're probably done now unless they're twitter lol um uh and yeah i've already seen some of those companies start hiring again. I think a lot of them, once a couple other companies started doing it, tried to use like, oh, it's just the industry as a scapegoat to get rid of sections of the company to like slim down in cost effective ways. Not because they had to, but just purely because of like, they thought the stock would go up. All right. Smell my hand fresh can you identify that smell we have new soap and i was i was can i identify like be amused what like theme but yeah like what what's that smell lavender watermelon and mint yeah watermelon and mint soap what what is watermelon and mint what it doesn't smell like

Starting point is 02:56:25 watermelon and mint very unlikely combination maybe like watermelon flavored gum yeah i was gonna say like chemical watermelon maybe yeah yeah maybe chemical watermelon yeah anyway uh totally normal real podcast we have fun here. This one's from Jacob. Does the LTD backpack have enough space to soar a full-face motorcycle helmet? I ride a 01 Honda Shadow, 69K miles, baby. And most backpacks are uncomfortable and small or too expensive with bad quality. That's a good question. You might be able to pack it in there, but I wouldn't say the back would be particularly comfortable yeah i don't know that i would

Starting point is 02:57:07 yeah i don't know that i would recommend it check the dimensions they're on the site this is an anonymous one hi linus luke and dan youtube has been recommending the old videos of yours with brian the electrician great theme song where's he been uh brian moved oh yeah he's not local anymore i was kind of wondering. Yeah, I messaged him recently. I just sent him a screwdriver. Just like, hey, how's it going? Do you have a screwdriver?

Starting point is 02:57:29 He's like, no, I'm going to buy one. I'm like, no, you're not. So he has a screwdriver now. Says he likes it. But that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. This one's from Garen.

Starting point is 02:57:40 Hey, guys. I've been a fan for about eight years now. Did a project for school, graphic design, recently involving advertising for companies. Do y'all have a brand standard manual or something similar? If we do, I've never seen it, but I wouldn't be surprised if... Is it like a pitch deck? No. I have no idea.

Starting point is 02:57:59 No, it's like a whole guideline thing for how many pixels far away you need to be from the border of something. And like if it's on a dark background, what does it look like? And if it's on a light background, what does it look like? I'm pretty sure Sarah has something like that, but I don't think I've ever seen it. Canadian rail branding is like the best one ever. It's really detailed about all sorts of things. CN Rail. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:58:23 This one's from Tugs. Question. really detailed about all sorts of... See Unreal, yeah. Yeah. This one's from Tugs. Question, as a small business owner with success, what do you feel your biggest we are effed moment was and how did you overcome it? Oh, that's a pretty easy one. In the very early days when we had no money, we YOLO went outside and filmed a video in the rain and I kind of figured, well well there aren't that many gaps

Starting point is 02:58:47 in the chassis of the Sony FS700 camera. Oh I thought it was a different story. Oh did you think it was going to be the windy day? No the drive to the ferry. Oh well that was just we could have died but other than that it would have been fine. No let's not talk about that. Let's talk let's talk about instead going out and filming in the rain because they didn't really seem like there were that many gaps in the chassis. We finished the shoot, got back to the house. I went to turn on the camera and black screen. So I disassembled it to the greatest degree that I could that night

Starting point is 02:59:22 after everyone else had gone home or to their room upstairs. It was very early days. And I didn't have a space heater other than a radiant style one. And I didn't really want to point a radiant style heater at my black camera, not knowing, you know, what was sensitive or not sensitive to heat. So the only blower style air cooler I could conceive of was a test bench with a GeForce 480 on it. And so I think I put a couple of them on there, fired up Furmark or like some other stress test in SLI, and basically just put the camera in the exhaust so that whatever was in there might hopefully evaporate. If I remember correctly, at this point in time, I had a 480 in my system,

Starting point is 03:00:10 and we ripped it out of my system to help this heating project, which was just very funny. Yeah, so that was terrifying, because at that point, if we had not had a camera, I didn't really have a way to get another like camera easily we were it was it was tight yeah it was tight even the method of getting that one was fun and exciting yeah yeah like yeah we like import it from the states or something like that and then like in a specific way yeah we shipped it to ncix who uh i forget why but it was like

Starting point is 03:00:48 hard to get it in canada for some reason it was stupid yeah okay let's get you another one here no we're not talking about the fairy thing this one's from... Yeah, no. No. It's not happening. This one's from Connor. Tell us about the fairy thing. No, okay. Hi, guys.

Starting point is 03:01:12 I like the screwdriver. Now getting in the water bottle. My question is, what is the most notable thing, in everyone's opinion, to spring out of the LMG Media universe? Mine is the Lambo. Oh, it's got to be the sad Linus or Linus selfie like memes

Starting point is 03:01:26 i did not see that what about the wait i don't know if this is fair i was going to say your original screwdriver was orange and that literally set the color for the company forever that's pretty notable yeah i don't know that it sprung out of us, though. Yeah, that's why I kind of... Yeah, the LTT cinematic universe, I think. Yeah, I think it would be... There's the Christmas album. Sorry, I couldn't even finish that. It's a real thing, by the way.

Starting point is 03:02:02 You can DM the CEO and ask where to buy it or you could just google it that might be faster yeah it's awful i still and i i could filter them out but i don't want to because i every single time it happens i just laugh so hard i still get emailed every single time one of them sells. Every time I get like a ping on my phone, I'm like, oh, what's going on? And I see what email it went to. And I'm like, oh, interesting. Like, I wonder what this is. And I drag it down.

Starting point is 03:02:34 It's like you have sold one copy of the LFG Christmas album. And just every time it chews me up. It's great. Because you know that someone just purchased raw trash. It's so bad. It's digital garbage. It's an actual waste of zeros and ones. It's so bad.

Starting point is 03:02:56 It is so, so terrible. Pugboy1321 says, oh God, I forgot about that album. It needs whatever the opposite of a Grammy is. I had it on my phone for a while because i don't even remember why it literally wasn't to listen to but it was on a local file on my phone so google play music back in the day would just randomly start playing it if i had it on like play random songs because it would be like it's in your local files you must like this music so i'd be like driving along and i'd be listening to whatever and then out of nowhere i just hear

Starting point is 03:03:28 linus singing silent night make the album a floatplane exclusive he told me to upload it for christmas um and then i don't remember why i didn't but there was some reason but i'm planning on doing it next christmas look if you if you guys are watching us laughing about this and thinking, oh man, this must be hilarious, it's worth buying, I'm told. Just understand that it's bad and don't do it. Yeah, it's not worth it. It's like $5 and it's not worth it.

Starting point is 03:04:01 It's a level of cringe which is not actually very entertaining. Yeah. Yeah, it's really not. I mean, look, I'll take your money, but don't give it to me. It's $3. Buy something on the store. You'll enjoy it more. It's $3 and it is not worth it.

Starting point is 03:04:24 It's even missing songs And there's nothing we can do about it It's missing songs Like songs that were in the teaser That we advertised We like lost tracks I remember trying to hunt it down I don't remember all the details

Starting point is 03:04:38 But apparently yeah There's just songs that are just gone So people You don't even get the full album Because I figured once we figured out that it was missing songs because it's just like a zip if I remember correctly Yeah, I don't like get it in a reasonable way So what I someone told me it was missing songs I asked about it internally and they were like, oh yeah, we just don't have those. So then I had to update it being like, uh, yeah, these don't exist, whatever.

Starting point is 03:05:11 1,100, oh yeah, my phone's going. Oh no, why? You guys are stupid, stop. I want to remaster it. It's not worth it. Can I please spend time on this? Absolutely not. You have much more important things to do forbidden damn forbidden five people have bought it please oh the other fun part is the email comes

Starting point is 03:05:34 in and how our envision power board the software that we use for the forum how it works is you could get commissions off of things that you sell it has has to be uploaded by an account. So it's uploaded by my account, but the commission is just set to 0%. So every single time it emails me, it's all excited. It says, you have earned $0.00! Seven people bought it. Genuinely, it is not worth it.

Starting point is 03:06:02 You're going to download it because you're like, this is a fantastic meme. You're going to play one song and just be like oh you're not gonna make it through a full song i promise it's really bad i wonder if i can find the lyrics i think i did it in a google doc only five are you nuts that's the amount of emails that i have right now but like it might they might stroll in slowly over time oh no that's the wrong this is the wrong account or rather this is the right account i have 12 emails this is the account i'm emails now supposed to be signed oh boy every time i refresh it goes up we should have increased the price yeah no we shouldn't we will not increase the price um okay so hold on uh christmas might not

Starting point is 03:06:41 work here because it's going to bring up like christmas parties and stuff like that um blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah i wonder man how maybe if i try lyrics or something like that what year was it what are you trying to do uh that would have been 2015 man these are in no particular order there was the announcements on YouTube lyrics.doc what's this who dis Linus Tech Tips

Starting point is 03:07:16 Christmas Album yeah the Linus Media Group Christmas Album promotional video from 7 years ago is still up. It has 301,000 views. Copy of Linus Tech Tips Christmas. Here we go. Here we go.

Starting point is 03:07:31 Original Christmas song track list. Jingle Bell's not done yet. Deck the Hall, Silent Night, The First Noel, 12 Days of Christmas, Joy to the World, O Come All Ye Faithful, A Christmas Tree, Hark the Herald Angels Sing, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. Now, of course, we rewrote the lyrics with tech. Okay, so Jingle Bells never got done by anyone. It just says, Jingle Bells claimed not done yet. So people signed up for which song they would do. Oh, yeah, we had to write songs. Everyone had to write a song.

Starting point is 03:07:58 And then I think I went through and did a pass of kind of fixing them a bit. Yeah. So here we go uh deck your rigs by Colton deck your rig with silent cooling tis the season to be greedy yeah that gives you some idea uh silent case, Nick. Silent case filled with fans. Running low RPMs. Blowing air.

Starting point is 03:08:33 Dan's like cringing in actual pain behind the camera. I have worked with worst artists. This is pretty good, actually. I could stomach this for 70 hours. The first iPhone Lord Jobs did say that the patents he filed were perfect that day. I just refreshed and we're over 50 now. Oh, no. I'm remastering this. So you just made $150.

Starting point is 03:09:02 Yeah, not really, because a $3 transaction is like 20% fees. Okay. Anywho. Why was it uploaded to Spotify two months ago? Well, because two months ago is probably Christmas. So somebody just... Yeah, that kind of makes sense. Why does this have 28 monthly listeners on Spotify?

Starting point is 03:09:26 I don't know, but that's awful. It's genuinely really bad. Yeah, it's as bad as what I just did, except I'm probably one of the better singers here. I was handpicked out of school when I was a young'un to join out-of-school primo choir. While I was there, the choir teacher said that i asked too many questions and i don't know exactly what i said but i said something along the lines of

Starting point is 03:09:51 that stupid stood up walked out to where my mom was like still sitting in the car in the parking lot and was like we're done let's get out of here and never went back and then i hit puberty and my voice cracked. And now I can't sing at all. It's so bad. Nice. It's horrible. I'll be singing along to a song in the car. And then some map thing will happen. So the song volume goes down.

Starting point is 03:10:16 I hear myself. And I'm like, whoa. So you've still got the ear, but you don't have the voice. Yeah. And then it's best to just do this. Yep. Okay. Next up is from Nick.

Starting point is 03:10:31 Hey, Linus and Luke, loving my LTT backpack and screwdriver. Can't wait to see what's next. Linus, do you find that your kids' hobbies and interests are influenced by your work and love of technology? I mean, we definitely have a lot of tech in the house. And I think that, you know, when you're bored, it's not much of a stretch to be like, video games are fun. In terms of tech though, you know, if anything,

Starting point is 03:10:57 I think it can be an impediment sometimes because I'm so quick to kind of jump in and try and fix something because I just want it fixed that, you know, I think that there's room for me to make my kids do more problem solving on their own too. Yeah. Okay, this one's from Richard.

Starting point is 03:11:16 Hi, what do you make of Google's recent breakthrough in quantum computing error correction? Will we be seeing it in the wild anytime soon? I'm going to be honest with you. I am not a physicist. Soon, I seriously doubt it. quantum computing error correction uh will we be seeing it in the wild anytime soon i'm gonna be honest with you i am not a physicist soon i seriously doubt it and i mean quantum computing is going to be a hell of a thing when it hits yep also i will i'm going to say it because he wanted us to show it but i don't actually think showing the dashboard is a good idea the the facelift that happened to merge messages looks great conrad you did a good job. There you go.

Starting point is 03:11:47 Recognition served. Thanks, Conrad. Okay, this one's from David. Thank you for years of great content. Question for you two. If given an option and having an access to one company and their top secret project, what company would that be? Valve. There. I win.

Starting point is 03:12:07 That's the best answer. Their top secret project. Could it be projects or just project? Whatever the best one is. You just get to see their one coolest top secretest project. Does DARPA count? DARPA? No.

Starting point is 03:12:29 That's a company. I don't think it's a company. No, pick a company. I don't actually know like how they work. Why don't you just pick like Palmer Lucky's stupid defense company or something then? Anderil? Yeah, they're probably working on something cool. Because I'm pretty sure it's...

Starting point is 03:12:47 The reason why I know that off the top of my head is I'm pretty sure it's the sword from Lord of the Rings. I think it's named after the same thing. Oh my goodness. Yeah, it totally is Andoril. Got him. Nah, I'll be boring to say Google. Just because I want to see what... nah I'll be boring to say Google just because I want to see what

Starting point is 03:13:05 I am right now extremely interested in large language models right I want to see what they're capable of with like nothing holding them back alright everything want to see it all okay this one's

Starting point is 03:13:23 also from Nick hi from, from Melbourne, Australia. My gym had just installed adverts on the mirrors. What are your thoughts on paying for a gym membership and having to look at ads while working out? I would switch gyms. I'll go to the gym, so I guess I have... I can't imagine that I would like it i would switch gyms because you're supposed to be paying attention to your you probably wouldn't care

Starting point is 03:13:49 because you wouldn't see it anyways um just be honest but but like people are supposed to that yes people use the mirrors for vanity no problem don't care about that if you do it or not but the mirrors are supposed to be there in a functional way so you can watch your form if you're being distracted by an ad that is intentionally trying to grab your attention away that's actually like not a good thing and i don't want the idea of like i'm pretty deep into a workout my brain is wandering a little bit and i start staring at some ad and then i hurt myself like no i want to be able to focus screw off i would switch gyms i was just out of principle i'm gone by the way um the the did you uh watch the the worst tech ads video by any chance yes actually i'd seen a lot of those before some things never change yep yeah when you when avon was like why did you know it was msi and you were trying to explain

Starting point is 03:14:50 like i just i just do i felt that i was like yeah it's just it's just msi it's just what they do i don't know man oh man all right next up uh this one's from elijah i want to buy a qd oled but the s95b doesn't support dolby vision like my 4k blu-ray player i can't afford bravia in your opinion what's the line between sunk cost fallacy and investing in an ecosystem uh investing in an ecosystem is bad yeah but once you are invested in an ecosystem i mean basically you just have to kind of go how much money do you have because like if you're yeah wait why are you buying an s95b if you can't afford a bravia you should just wait a generation when qd oleds will get way cheaper like that's that's the actual solution the answer is always wait and buy it second hand or wait for the new one that is better because that will cover

Starting point is 03:15:58 literally every outcome so maybe if it's like uh stereo 3D or something like that, and there doesn't continue to be new development, there will definitely be a period before it becomes a collector's item, like a CRT, like a CRT period, you could call it, where getting it will be extremely cheap. So you can either wait for a new one that's better and cheaper. It's technology, right? Like it's predictable. Or you can wait and get it secondhand from someone who doesn't manage their money as well as you do because you're going to be smart like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:16:36 Yeah. I was reacting to something in chat. Don't worry about it. All right, cool. Moving on. Next one. Okay, this one's from Hector. Linus, what is the story behind the katana

Starting point is 03:16:44 you have on your fireplace i've seen it in multiple videos and wanted to know if there's a story behind it also any update on the ltd screwdriver holster the story behind the katana is i was at the richmond night market with yvonne and i had always wanted a sword because i am a man child. Weeb. And no, not that. I know. I have a sword too. Yeah. Like I was the kind of kid who would be like 13, like hanging out in House of Knives being like, swords. I mean, they weren't even like real. I'm pretty sure they were decorative, but I didn't care. I just like swords, you know, like they're big and long and manly. They're swords, right? Like what's to not like about it?

Starting point is 03:17:25 So I just liked swords and I was finally sort of an adult and I was like, I don't have to ask my mom for the sword this time because she's not here. So I'm going to ask my girlfriend for a sword.

Starting point is 03:17:35 She didn't actually buy it for me. I just wanted approval and she was desperately in love for some reason. So she said, yeah, you can have a sword and now I have it and now it's on our mantle um as a reminder that she um has more love for me than since

Starting point is 03:17:51 i uh swords are just cool and stuff and when my brother got married he chose me as his best man and i don't know how true this is but I believe there's some history behind best man actually being originally best swordsman or best fighter. So I brought a sword to his wedding. Nice. With his, like, I asked him, obviously. That's good. I'm not that guy. The photos that they have of mostly actually his wife standing there in her, like, full bridal gown thing holding this gigantic sword it actually looks so sick nice like

Starting point is 03:18:29 they're super cool i don't know yeah but i still have it it's dope and it is andreal which is why i always remember the name of his company round round pile and float plane my love of swords versus my fear of knives love it okay sorry no no no uh next up from artem i am currently studying for mechanical engineering and i have noticed that you have been hiring more people with an engineering background what have they studied and done to make you hire them they They studied engineering and then we needed engineers. I mean, we've never really had a need for engineering in the past because we're a media production company.

Starting point is 03:19:10 A lot of people don't understand what kind of company we are. Like, remember I talked about how we got that, that offer to purchase a little while back, right on my show last week. We've gotten more than one. That was like a serious one where they actually had some idea what the heck it was they were buying but we've had so

Starting point is 03:19:28 many people reach out thinking that we're a tech company and like you know trying to offer you know possibilities for a partnership or like uh like i had man i had this i had this one uh one guy approached me because his company um is like a trucking company. And soon there's going to be these mandates around like trackers in the trucks or something like that. And they were like, yeah, maybe you could co-develop one. I'm like, we are a media company. We're not a tech company. But that's changing, right?

Starting point is 03:20:02 With float plane and labs and creator warehouse. So we have a lot more need for engineers than we used to because before it was like, no, we need video editors and writers and creatives. Now we need more of the hard sciences. Right? So that's why. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:20:20 Wait a second. Linus Media Group is a media company? What? Is it a Linus company, too? Is it a group? Next up is from Michael. Hey, Linus and Luke. I'm a systems administrator for a school district. How do you feel about one-on-one technology in education?

Starting point is 03:20:44 Do you feel the benefits outweigh the cost and e-waste? I think it's one to one. One to one. I'm not actually sure. It's one device to one student. I guess one to one is different. I mean, given that

Starting point is 03:20:59 these people are going to have one device dedicated to them for their entire life, as far as I can tell. I don't think this paradigm is going away anytime soon. It seems sensible enough. I think the issue is cost. I mean, well, what we need is we need a way to make sure that these devices can be used over an extremely long period of time.

Starting point is 03:21:21 I think Framework has the right idea, but their Chromebooks are so expensive that they'd be uneconomical for a deployment like this. I think that as costs continue to come down for something serviceable, we're not going to get around the e-waste problem other than, you know, the first R reducing, or sorry, reusing, whatever it is. No, we're not reducing anything. Whatever, using it for. No, we're not reducing anything. Whatever,

Starting point is 03:21:51 using it for as long as possible where we can do that, but it's still going to be an increase in consumption. So it is not the first R is what I was trying to say. Yeah, I just want to see longer lifespans, I guess. But I don't inherently think that sharing a computer, you know, with my, with my classmates was particularly beneficial in typing class. Like we just kind of should have both had one. I don't know. Yeah. My only concern is school districts that would definitely in no way be able to afford it, which is a thing. Um, so we need more money in education. see i i i don't think we have the same um issues around district to district funding as i as i know are very common down south i know my like in the boonies high school was like broke as all heck have i told you the story of one of the reasons why one of the best things like ever i i'll just say his name because he's awesome and i believe he's a principal now uh but my computer teacher mr trattle did a lot of things

Starting point is 03:22:55 for me that were like very foundational in my opinion right but one of the things that he did maybe he doesn't want to tell me the story but i'm gonna go for it here we go um he convinced a bunch of trucks that were going around to other school districts picking up old computers old computers old monitors old computer parts whatever and taking them to a recycling facility to come by our school um but just like leave it there for a little bit and then they could take our stuff and take off and what actually happened was when the guy wasn't with the truck all the computer students ran out and like basically grabbed everything they could off the truck and ran it into one specific classroom and then left it there so we had like all this e-way stuff none of the computers worked right and then it was a project in the class to go through all these computers verify what components worked and build computers and we built an entire classroom

Starting point is 03:23:54 that's cool it was such an incredibly cool and fun project for a bunch of kids that like yeah a decent amount of kids in my school had computers at home but not all of them no for sure yeah so and you're not going to be allowed to just rip apart random computers in class because we only have so many now we had a bunch of spare parts to keep the rest of the labs up and going we got a new lab and you had all these kids that had some form of ownership over these pcs because they made that yeah which we would have never had the ability to do that. Oh, a bunch of people are saying, dude, that's awesome. Mr. Trout was an absolutely insanely fantastic computers teacher. He also went to BCIT for a summer course.

Starting point is 03:24:36 He did a course over the summer at BCIT and then took what he learned there and taught a brand new course that didn't exist in our school system before called 3d game programming which was just an amazing course and it was like diluted from what was taught at bcit whatever it wasn't the same thing but like he just passionate teachers are a game changer for it was it was fantastic i mean i i write for a living now and it's only because of my AP English teacher. Yeah. I, I had a very unsurprisingly due to dyslexia and all these other issues. I had a very poor score in English for a really long time. And then I had one teacher that was just super inspiring and like believed in me and understood

Starting point is 03:25:18 the problems that I was having, but was like, you're still creative. You can drive this forward. And just my average English just shot up. then i took ap english with another teacher and it wasn't as good because he didn't share the same things but i was confident at that point so i was able to carry it through and still passed and did okay there i i don't know that was that was amazing i don't even know how i got on that subject but um that was one of the like coolest things i've ever taken a part of watching everyone else in the class just be so excited every time a part would pass yeah like and we had to we we didn't know if a single component worked right so at the very beginning everyone's trying to find like the first functional motherboard right and then we use that to like pass all the ram and like trying to figure all these different

Starting point is 03:26:02 things out and like that's a cool puzzle and then when you would go into that lab to do whatever class, it might not even be a computer class, but you might need to work on computers for whatever reason. You'd know like what the good computers were. Nice. So you'd like try to snipe the good one and stuff. Like it was just, I don't know.

Starting point is 03:26:17 It was so cool. So, so, so cool. I might have some parts of that story wrong. My, whatever age I was when that happened, brain might have remembered it in certain slightly more fantastical ways.

Starting point is 03:26:29 Like maybe it was totally above board how he got those computers. I don't know. But it was just incredibly fun. And I know that the project of like trying to pass good all these components and building all these custom computers is a thing that a lot of other schools didn't have that opportunity. And I know we did it because not only did we need another lab at the school and we couldn't afford it but it was one of the coolest ways that he could introduce like hardware to a computer's class possible it was absolutely fantastic huge amounts of respect for

Starting point is 03:27:01 him okay next up is from russell oh man i never know what to say uh i wonder if linus would write an audio uh sorry autobiography one day or has it all been left out there on the interwebs um i went as far as i think i have a title for it. Something, the story so far. Here, I'll read my four, or like, not a four word because someone else writes that, but like whatever the like part of the beginning is. If I was a total sellout, I'd have structured this as an inspirational story about how anyone can do it

Starting point is 03:27:41 if they try hard enough and a collection of tips to help you achieve what I have. But then if I wasn't interested in making money, I wouldn't bother writing a book at all. It's a pretty transparent cash grab from my perspective. That's been the fine line I've walked throughout my career. I'm not one. That's a pretty good way to start. I'm not the kind of person who either genuinely or otherwise hides behind the I do this out of passion line from day zero when I was asked by my boss to start making YouTube videos, I've been paid. Now to be clear, I was asked by my boss to start making YouTube videos. I've been paid now to be clear.

Starting point is 03:28:06 I was chosen for the assignment because of my genuine passion for technology. And I was only good at it because of that passion. But I never would have started making YouTube videos without a bonus on my paycheck. So back to the book for a minute. Why did I write this for the money? But if I didn't care about creating it, it wouldn't be any good. So did I sell out? I guess you'll have to read it to find out.

Starting point is 03:28:27 Seems good. Yeah, I don't know. I guess it't be any good. So did I sell out? I guess you'll have to read it to find out. Seems good. Yeah, I don't know. I guess it'd be pretty good. But that's about as far as I've gotten. Well, no, I've written more than that, but I just... That's all you get for now. That's all you get for now. You gotta buy the DLCs to get more.

Starting point is 03:28:38 Come see the free Christmas album. Okay, next up, this is an anonymous one hello fellow vancouverites how does linus survive without coffee also is there any other plans for an ltd store not com i'll answer the not com one yes we're gonna do it the goal is this year okay this one's well oh you guys were asked a question i was just 70 albums i've sold now by the way oh my goodness um surviving without coffee is easier if you never drink coffee yeah don't drink it in the first place you're less dependent on it it's literally a drug you get literally addicted to it if you don't drink it after a while you

Starting point is 03:29:20 have withdrawals like it's totally a thing i don't know i don't drink it either there are definitely days where it's been a little hard, and I've been like, I could. But then I'm always like, okay, that just makes future days harder, so I'll just tough it out. I'm not saying that's a good idea for everyone, but it works for me. It seems to work for Linus. Okay, this one's from Aaron.

Starting point is 03:29:41 Spending B-Day cash on some stuff I've been eyeballing can hardly wait. With labs ramping up, has there been any tech or tech-related categories that you have decided not to test? Security. Yeah. We thought about it. We had an applicant that would have been really good for it, but decided not to go down that path. And I honestly think that's probably the right way to go. You mean like software, like antivirus software or something like that? Because that's one that I definitely said, no, forget it. It was mostly software, but it was a variety of things. Anything else?

Starting point is 03:30:21 Man, I'm trying to think. Like there's stuff that I probably can't imagine we'd get that into like i don't see us you know getting really into the weeds on you know like generic android set top boxes or something like that you know like like little like like content piracy boxes yeah and it's just not really our jam i don't think we'd be focused mostly on things that can be measured objectively yes yeah our goal isn't really to inject opinion. So if it can't be measured objectively, it's going to be a little tough.

Starting point is 03:30:52 Okay. Next up is from Aiden. Hey, Linus, love the content. I was wondering if there was going to be an LTT pocket knife multi-tool sometime in the near future. We are not working on that. I'm not saying we're not working on that. I'm sure maybe we're not working on that.

Starting point is 03:31:07 Like I'm sure maybe at some point, but at this time we're not working on that. Yes, I'm wearing the swacket. It's the sweater jacket. It's not half sweater, half jacket. Half cool. Half cool? Yeah, that's it.

Starting point is 03:31:26 Is it half uncool? I mean, it's LTT merch, so it's going to impress a certain kind of person. Yeah. Some people might not think it's as cool. Buy LTT underwear now. Yeah, exactly. I promise you, my personal Linus Tech Tips guarantee, it will get you laid. Please note, Linus Tech Tips guarantees are for entertainment purposes only can we get that on a shirt no oh my uh next up term aj during your ram tour you weren't allowed

Starting point is 03:31:52 to show some conversations about the 24 gigabyte sticks you got crucial has since announced 24 slash 48 gigabytes of ram is that what you weren't allowed to show? Yes. Ah, nah. Yeah, it's strange. Boring. This next one's from Jacqueline. I think buying the LMG Christmas album should be available as one of our low cost merch messages. Nobody needs it. I don't think

Starting point is 03:32:19 that the LMG Christmas album matches the quality of other things that are on the LTT store. I think it will remain... It is a waste of power consumption to transfer those bits and bytes. Spending 90 hours on it. It's not worth the contribution to the

Starting point is 03:32:36 strawberry. Anyone that gets that reference, high five. You may not work on it. I forbid it. Alright, so we just got some potentials left in the incoming okay out of 10 how ignored was i just now pretty aggressive yeah okay you cannot work on it on company time no at all it is my copyrighted material and you may not work on it i don't i'm gonna cover it it's gonna be good yeah i was gonna say i don't think you

Starting point is 03:33:06 can actually say that linus can i please have a sync license what's a sync license i don't know what that is um so you dan actually like comes from like the recording industry so he's gonna he's gonna like dodge around me here no no this guy Because you own the copyrighted material. Yeah. So under copyright law, I can release audio covers, but I can't release videos of me playing your song. What? Seriously? Because that's called a synchronization license, and your song covers can't be put to video. It's very weird. It's very, very strange. Wow. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:33:43 That's wild. That's really odd. Yep. Why does that exist? Music videos? I don't know. I'm guessing. It's strange.

Starting point is 03:33:52 I'm literally guessing. All right. What else we got? We're into potentials. This one's from an on the mush. What watch does Linus wear? The gold one with the blue strap. Can we expect float plane exclusives on LTX?

Starting point is 03:34:05 It's some Withings watch that I forgot to put on today, but I wear just because it's a watch. I don't use any of the smart features at all. I kind of give up. And yes, you can expect that. Yeah, I would suspect so. Okay, next up is from Aiden. Hi, long-time fan.

Starting point is 03:34:21 You used to... Sorry, there is a comment here. Hi, long- longtime fan. You used to... Sorry, there is a comment here. Hi, longtime fan. You used to talk about wanting LTT Store to take off as its own thing. Have you ever wanted to compare a week month of not shouting it out every video versus when you do? Nope, can't say I have. Nah. That's not.

Starting point is 03:34:43 That's not. This is from shane hey linus i remember your story of maintaining your sv 650 instead of buying a zero have you been able to get much enjoyment out of your bike since deciding to keep it bike nerd and fan of the show i don't find much time to ride um but i am being extremely stupid right now my bike is currently in a shop getting all of the paintable parts ripped off of it so that I can paint it like pink with iridescent green accent, kind of depending on how the light. The Lambo is now a motorbike.

Starting point is 03:35:17 Yeah, the Lambo is now a motorcycle is sort of what I'm going for. I'm very, very excited. It's going to be, it's going to make absolutely, I could buy my bike probably a couple of times over for what I'm going to be spending making my bike look cool, which is probably the most frivolous thing I have ever spent money on. Okay, this one's from Steve. I know Linus was playing The Witcher 3 at one point on WAN. Did he finish the game? Thoughts on it? Played The Witcher 1 or 2?

Starting point is 03:35:48 Thoughts remaking Witcher 1? Open world with Unreal Engine 5 instead of the Red Engine? A lot of questions. I never made it past the tutorial because I got distracted. And all my gaming time has been Fantasian for a while. But I'm looking for something new. I kind of want to play Stray. That's like the one that caught my eye that I'm like, I want to do that

Starting point is 03:36:07 because apparently it's a pretty short experience and I want something contained. Yeah. You're not going to get lost in the Stray meta. Next up is from Anonymous. Linus and Luke, what are your favorite flowers? Zelman CNPS 7000-CU. That's beautiful.

Starting point is 03:36:28 Is that like a CPU cooler that's called a flower or something? Yeah, this is some old school stuff. Oh, my God. I remember wanting one of those so badly. Yeah. Without hesitation. I don't... You had that memorized, don't you?

Starting point is 03:36:50 Okay. I don't know. I memorized don't you okay i don't know i'm not super i like plants i'm not so into flowers though i like having some greenery around your home though makes it feel less dead next up from eric hey linus have you had any more time with the gpd win four after the short circuit? Okay. I'm still rocking my Ioneo Next. I just have all my stuff on it. It's like not because it's necessarily the best one anymore. Dan, you're just sending them into curated. I know, because we've already done curated.

Starting point is 03:37:19 It's easier than rejecting them and then archiving them. Okay, I understand. So the rest are like incoming. Do you guys just want to breeze through these? They're kind of like the third level of curation at this point. Okay. We had a lot of really good questions this stream. I don't know.

Starting point is 03:37:35 Sure. You know what? I don't know what you did with that one. I blooped that one. Really? What's blooping it? I just sent it to screen. Oh, okay.

Starting point is 03:37:44 I don't know. Verifiedbyverified.com. That's funny. What should that it to screen oh okay i don't know verified by verified.com that's funny what should that site do nothing i don't know and thanks yeah um this was this was a big uh career okay i got an idea on kbhd you see like the first 30 seconds of that video was just us on the wan show what what video yeah marques did a video on ChatGPT. Oh. And he doesn't even show his face for like the first half a minute. It's just you and me on WAN show. Oh, I don't know.

Starting point is 03:38:11 Must have confused a good number of people. No, I haven't. Sorry, is this an ad? Like skip? I should check that out. Where's MKBHD? I constantly get frustrated, like deeply frustrated,

Starting point is 03:38:23 that people have these like revelations about chat gpt or bing chat or whatever that are things that we talked about on like the first episode that we talked about it at all and i'm just like and i'll see it like blow up like it'll it'll be like oh the top thing on twitter is people figured out that you can like circumvent security things by convincing it that it's something else yeah the first show i did filter bypass mode it's just a different version of that get over it like come on i feel like people that watch the land show honestly probably feel the same way yeah because they're in yeah they're here yeah exactly um they're on the inner circle i had something to say but i don't remember what it was.

Starting point is 03:39:05 Oh, right. What to do with that domain. I actually thought of something. I shouldn't have skipped it. Verified by verified. Yeah. You should figure out, you should be able to type in, say, a company or a person or whatever, a handle. That would be the same handle across a bunch of different platforms and figure out how much money they spend every month on verifications. All right.

Starting point is 03:39:26 Thank you for that. It's pretty good. You make tech for a living, right, Luke? It wouldn't be that hard to do. That's one of the reasons why I like it. Okay. I guess we'll just start burning through these. Anthony says, podcast listener here, we are real.

Starting point is 03:39:45 Yeah. Do you think the way we build PCs will ever change? I mean, Anthony, other Anthony, our Anthony, not you, did a really good video talking about how it's probably a matter of time before things get more integrated. And I think he's probably right in the longer term. Okay, and then I'll just archive.

Starting point is 03:40:05 write in the longer term uh okay and then i'll just archive um if you weren't in your position as tech gurus with access to limitless hardware what do you think your hardware upgrade habits would look like frequency performance tier i was always a a step down from top kind of person so i i'd be likely to end up with like your non-ultra version of a phone with your like you know 3070 3070 ti sort of tier of of gpu um core i7 maybe probably core i5 you know whatever can be kind of overclocked or unlocked or hacksawed in some way to get pretty much the performance of the top one, but at half the price. And in terms of frequency, for like PC gaming, I was an every gen kind of character for a long time, sometimes multiple times a gen just to try different stuff because I was constantly buying used and flipping, so it wasn't really like costing me anything.

Starting point is 03:41:03 In terms of phones, I think I'd be a pretty infrequent upgrader. I went straight from the Note 9 to the Z Fold 3, whatever the stupid branding they have for this is. And other than that, my screen is cracking down the middle. I haven't really had any reason or temptation to upgrade this because, honestly, upgrading your phone is a hassle. Yeah, it's really annoying. It sucks.

Starting point is 03:41:23 I know it's not as bad as it used to be where you had to go into the store to get them to transfer your contacts or whatever, but it's still... Logging into 10 million things still sucks. It's a pain in the butt. I haven't paid for the components of a mainline computer for myself since I was a teenager.

Starting point is 03:41:39 Right. I'm in my 30s. I don't know. Whenever I'm like, this sucks. I'm lagging in this game. I just like my 30s. I don't know. Whenever I'm like, this sucks. I'm lagging in this game. I just like Bug Linus. It's pretty sick. To be fair, you get views out of it.

Starting point is 03:41:55 Symbiosis. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And phones, I'm an infrequent upgrader. Honestly, mostly. Not because I don't want better battery life or whatever. I don't want to go through upgrading to a new phone. It's an annoying process. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:42:10 And I don't use my phone that much. Your phone has to annoy you enough. Yeah. To overcome the annoyance. And over 90% of what I use my phone for is like work notifications or work messages, which is going to be like Discord, Teams, Slack. Those are going to run just fine. Overrule says, try saying, hey, you know, assistant,

Starting point is 03:42:31 set up my new phone and it automates quite a bit. Yeah, but it doesn't automate all the stupid entering of passwords and 2FA and going in and adjusting my stupid SwiftKey long press delay and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like clearing out all the nonsense, unnecessary notifications that my apps send me so that I only get the ones that actually matter.

Starting point is 03:42:54 Yeah, Whiskr app, I only care if the litter tray is full. That's literally the only thing you can tell me that matters, stuff like that, right? Oh, right, I'm supposed to just keep uh doing this yeah breeze them right okay um it's really hard to read my mic is like right here and it doesn't matter um i'm sad too do either of you have a game that's coming out this year that you're looking forward to yes oh looking forward to anticipating yes i thought i wasn't gonna play breath of the wild too because i thought i was just kind of done i never played the dlc but then i fired it up for some reason oh yeah i was playing around with switch emulation and i like fired it up and i was like i'm gonna

Starting point is 03:43:35 play it um what is it even called it's been so long. Anonymous. Currently looking for a job in the US. Sorry? Starfield. Suffering through their atrocious visa policy. Have you guys hired immigrants before? Should they apply?

Starting point is 03:43:57 How did it go? It's so brutal. It sucks. It's so brutal. It's the worst. People talk about how Canada brings in like a massive amount of immigration all the time. And it's like, but also no yeah it's also very challenging there are a lot of roadblocks in place there's tons you can't just be like hey sup neighbor come on come on over you live in you know britain and he's a commonwealth country or whatever i guess that's chill no

Starting point is 03:44:23 there are contractors that's chill no there are contractors that we work with that are outside of country right now that would like to be inside of country right now and that's not changing for them unfortunately i found out on wednesday evening that we have not paid gary yet gary's the head of the lab it has been for like six months at least that's brutal so the reason like at all there's got to be something. You could do a contract thing. No, you can't. So there's a whole thing. Go to lunch with him or something and ask him about it. Don't worry.

Starting point is 03:45:12 I checked with him. I was like, hey, has Yvonne offered to lend you money in case you need it or whatever? Just under the table, like whatever. And he's like, oh, no, no, everything's fine. Okay, Gary. Anyway table, like whatever. And he's like, oh, no, no, everything's fine. Okay, Gary. Anyway, yeah, anyway, he's almost got it sorted out. I think he said he told me then that he should have his personal number, like the social security number equivalent,

Starting point is 03:45:40 in like three business days or something like that. So it should be sorted out. But the problem was A, getting him here, B, getting to be able to stay here, C, getting him the documentation that he needs to work. And it's just, yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. So yeah, we have not actually issued him a paycheck yet. And I was like, Gary, that's ridiculous.

Starting point is 03:46:05 We do need to solve this. And he's like, Gary, that's f***ing ridiculous. We need to solve this. And he's like, yeah, I'm working on it. I'm like, okay, well, you don't seem to have the appropriate amount of fire under your butt. So like, I must insist, you must be paid for this. I know it's complicated. No, I was just bugging him. And no, he's not just waiting.

Starting point is 03:46:22 It's been many different hurdles to jump over. It's, it's been. No, I mean like waiting on. No. Yeah. Yeah. He is now. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:46:29 But it's been shockingly stupid. Yeah. Yeah. And you'd think like, you know, America and Canada, lots of treaties, lots of general international cooperation. But a lot less than you'd think. Yeah. It's, it's not as easy as you'd think.

Starting point is 03:46:44 Yeah. Will Gary be making a fat paycheck? Well, I suspect that first one's. Yeah. I's, it's not as easy as you'd think. Yeah. Well, Gary be making a fat paycheck. Well, I suspect that first one's. Yeah. I bet that first one's going to be pretty hefty. A thick, thick boy.

Starting point is 03:46:53 Yeah. Um, what's a piece of tech you imagined as a small child that you still wish was a thing today that I imagined as a small child. I mean, I imagine I wanted a lightsaber more than anything. And the hacksmiths come about as close as anyone can i think yeah uh i wanted a really really fantastic version of a nia a neural impulse actuator um i've always been fascinated by different input

Starting point is 03:47:19 devices i think that's one of the reasons why I find VR so interesting, honestly, is the input ramifications more than almost anything else. I find things like Tobii eye trackers and everything else just very, very interesting. And I have always wanted the ability without just like completely screwing myself over, which is questionable, to be able to have just like brain to device inputs. I've always thought that'd be really cool. And I watched, there was a video that I watched recently of this lady using a much more modern version to do something. I don't remember what. And it was like, okay, this technology has clearly moved forward because her demonstration was fantastic. But it's still

Starting point is 03:48:06 not like it's not quite there you know dylan asks luke do you think you'd be a mid or senior in the market if you were looking for a job i'm in an interesting position where i'm a senior at my job but if i were to apply in the market i'd probably be more like a mid depends what company you're applying at depends on the size of the company that you're applying at um i don't know how specific to go but it depends on that yeah joey asks there's a in seattle uh store called repc that recycles old pcs to fight e-waste for how much of it there is why do those kinds of seem to be disappearing rather than thriving i think it's just because it's cheaper to ship it overseas than it is to process it here with north american labor which is a whole

Starting point is 03:48:54 complicated can of worms that i don't think we're going to open up right now yeah do you have a current do you have a current recommendation for vpns and or password managers i believe um what are we migrating to for password manager keeper yeah and i'm still using pia even though i i don't know if it's like a good one and i don't think there's any you shouldn't trust any vpn because they have access to everything same with keeper yeah we're not telling you to trust keeper yeah it's the it's the ship we're getting on but we'll see how it goes yeah i mean we got on last pass and look how that went yep so like it might suck we are the the thing moving forward is we're going to try to be more ready if something like that happens again for us to be able to pivot to something else but

Starting point is 03:49:41 not using a password manager is not an option for us yeah or for you yeah like use them yeah just be ready to move off quickly do some research into the company make sure that if they get super mega hacked um that hopefully your vault is going to be decently okay even though your vault might leak and then if your vault leaks you know move off change all your passwords move on it should be okay wow bit warden there's a bunch of reasons i don't want to like dive into this i'm not surprised a bunch of you just said bit warden and i'm not surprised that a bunch of you said bit warden because open source one of our main reasons is in our in our testing at least and this isn't something that we like

Starting point is 03:50:24 prepared for a video or anything so relax but in our testing at least, and this isn't something that we like prepared for a video or anything, so relax, but in our testing at least, we found that autofill worked better for a lot of the things that we use it for. Didn't think it was a good idea to tell people it would be used, neither did Jake. It's going to be obvious at some point. Yeah, that's honorable enough, but I guarantee you within two weeks, Lin It's going to be obvious at some point. Yeah, that's honorable enough. But I guarantee you within two weeks, Linus is going to leak it anyways.

Starting point is 03:50:48 So it just doesn't matter. Security through obscurity is not super effective. Daniel says, if internet access seems to be the thing that always trips up AI systems and leads to them being unstable, what do you think could be done to mitigate the problem? I mean, not much.

Starting point is 03:51:08 I think that's just, if you train something on human data, it's going to end up kind of human warts and all. I'm glad your daughter loves the plushie. Greetings from Iraq, Elie says. Most unusual place to find out you have fans watching from and also most unusual country for you to visit or read about. Iraq. Really? Not Antarctica?

Starting point is 03:51:33 Is that even a country though? Or no, the place. The question was place. Yeah, we ended up having to retool some of the float plane infrastructure because we had one viewer stationed in Antarctica. Oh, I forgot about that. That was a long minute ago. Yeah, at like a research outpost or something stupid like that.

Starting point is 03:51:48 So we had to figure out how to make sure their stupid video wouldn't stupid buffer in stupid Antarctica, which wasn't my problem, fortunately. But Luke and AJ had a wonderful time with it. Yeah, I don't even remember exactly what we did or whatever, but I remember addressing that a long time ago. Yeah. Caleb asks, I was really hoping to get the Orca VIP package for LTX,

Starting point is 03:52:11 but I missed it. Do you feel it's worth the two-day pass as that's all that's available by now? Of course. Yeah. You should be there. Yeah. Be there, be square.

Starting point is 03:52:19 Let's go. Or be there and be square. That's fine too. I mean, it's a big geek nerd convention. What can I say? Just wear deodorant. That's all I ask. Alan asks for non-competitive gaming,

Starting point is 03:52:30 watching videos, web browsing. Would you rather have an ultra wide QHD monitor? So what would that be? 3440 by 1440 or a 4K monitor at 60 Hertz. So the ultra wide is at a hundred Hertz. Oh, a hundred Hertz. A hundred Hertz at 60 Hertz. Refresh rate still matters even hertz oh 100 hertz 100 hertz 60 hertz refresh rate still matters even when you're just like on your desktop it's just responsive yeah like it's like going

Starting point is 03:52:50 back in time for me it feels bad it like it it feels like the old ssd upgrades when you like double your uh refresh rate it just like feels significantly better okay replying to this one um thanks for making baby shopping, baby shower shopping easy. What are some things you had as a kid that kids today don't have and you wish they did? Not much.

Starting point is 03:53:14 I mean, I think super soakers were higher quality when I was a kid. Oh, screaming blue saucers were this cool like Western Canadianadian uh candy that was like super super sour and then it got like discontinued and it popped up on reddit a little while ago people were talking about it and like i think the rumor is that it caused cancer or something

Starting point is 03:53:36 like there was some kind of health concern i ate a ton of them um that's unfortunate yeah that's one of my favorite candies i would love if my kids could try that candy and not get cancer um yeah i don't know um i remember my dad complaining a lot about how like candy quality had gone down since he was a kid and i always just thought now your tastes just changed dad but like wagon wheels when i was really young were awesome and now they taste like actual dog food i believe that's actually been like documented right i don't know maybe because whatever company made wagon wheels like got bought out by some other company that makes the quality and a lot of these different candy brands have just found that they can save costs in a variety of ways or whatever that's been happening to a lot of different things like honey nut cheerios man as much as mkbhd might have like

Starting point is 03:54:22 built his brand on his love for honey nut cheerios the honey nut cheerios that he eats tastes like dog compared to what i had when i was a kid but before they they changed the formula and they went like all whole grain everything honey nut cheerios were so good i would literally sit on the couch like watch the hockey game and like eat an entire box of them i used to have them like every morning when i was growing up yeah like that that young that young boy did not get to experience honey nut cheerios this is totally off topic not part of the question but something that i always find fascinating is the differences between canadian and american versions of like the same thing like canadian american corn pops yeah is the weirdest

Starting point is 03:54:57 american corn pops are like terrible like i've actually grown to like them oh yeah i know it's an acquired taste for sure the canadian ones were the canadian ones peaked in probably about 2002 yeah back when they used to like cut your mouth and i know that's gonna sound cut your mouth came later okay okay yeah so they were perfect and then they cut your mouth yeah and then they went sogtastic or it might have been the other way and then they just like never improved i haven't actually had them in a long time maybe they're better now but or maybe they went back to cutting your mouth i don't know but they were like cut your mouth even during cut your mouth but pre-cut your mouth especially those oh my goodness so good peak and then so good

Starting point is 03:55:38 man when they were like like hard as glass it was an experience it still tasted good though yeah it's all the flavor just the texture was good. But then the flavor went away because I guess they just weren't putting enough glaze on them after and they just got soggy instantly. Absolute garbage. That got bad. And then there's Smarties, which up here look basically like M&M's. And then down in the States are what we call Rockets.

Starting point is 03:56:03 Powder candies. Yeah. Just weird. Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. yeah and then down in the states are what we call powder candies yeah just weird yeah yeah good stuff yeah tynan just brought up the exact same thing oh yeah joe scallon over in floatplane chat toys and cereal boxes video games and cereal boxes that was sick oh demo discs yeah that'll that'll be my thing demo discso discs. Demo discs are sweet. You know, they get like a magazine that had the demo disc in it. This might be a weird one, but I liked the flow of information more

Starting point is 03:56:36 back then. The internet was around, but it wasn't as vastly used. More excitement. You weren't just like completely bombarded with all this terrible stuff all the time you know i don't know but you could access the internet and it had a lot of information on it whatever i'm just replying to some in text here blowing through a few more of these uh good morning wan i have recently gone

Starting point is 03:57:05 from 20 000 us dollars to 40 000 take home in under a year wow how have you dealt with your meteoric rise and going from scraping by in the early days to being a real company i gotta tell you that i took a long long long time to really change my habits at all. And I know actually, yeah, the same is true for this guy. And the reason for me was that even though my income went way up, the amount of reinvestment and debt that I was carrying went way upper for a very, very long time. And so, I mean, like, I finally, like like bought the dumb car learned to love the bomb or whatever yeah uh realistically i probably could have i probably could have had a not chevy volt like a while ago um but for me there were there were sort of

Starting point is 03:58:01 internal goals that i wanted to hit um and just like feeling like i can actually relax about it a little bit i think is um what happened yeah and he just doesn't spend money yep i do have some costs like i my body is like broken in a few ways so i go to physio pretty often um and stuff like that but i don't get a lot of personal satisfaction from just buying things um i actually feel it very negatively pretty often i don't mind buying like a quality thing that i know i'm going to use a lot yep but then there's a lot of research that goes into that. Um, and a lot of the time you'll find that like most of it's just junk and then I'm not very interested. Like, yeah, I'm not going to go into specifics actually, but, uh, and then I'm not very

Starting point is 03:58:59 inspired to buy it anyways. But then when I do find something that I like research a bunch and then I feel really confident buying it and like research a bunch and then i feel really confident buying it and then i buy it and it shows up and it is really good like yeah i'm pretty into that i like doing that and it's nice that i can do that um but like just going to the store and just like buying some random junk that i think is neat doesn't uh doesn't fulfill me it doesn't make me happy any thoughts on whether or not mmos that are shutting down should be forced to give up the server code yes yep uh has linus seen his ai counterparts on athene ai heroes twitch channel it's eerily accurate so i have heard about this i didn't know that they made them for for you um but i've seen some made for other people and they are significantly higher quality

Starting point is 03:59:45 than the ones that we reviewed on the WAN show sure yeah one sec keep doing what I'm best at One sec. Keep doing what I'm best at. Actually I'm planning a 10... Hold on. So let's go back to...

Starting point is 04:00:12 Hey MKBHD, you're now an AI who is live on the Athene AI show. Taking questions from the chat, anything you want to say to introduce yourself? Hey everyone, this is Marks Brownlee, AKA MKBBHD It's a little overwhelming to be asked questions while I now know I'm technically a machine but I'm just going to keep doing what I'm best at This one doesn't sound good Actually, I'm planning a 10-bit HDR for the stealth-like boner hiding operation

Starting point is 04:00:35 Stealth-like boner Perfect Like our sponsor, Ridge Wallet This one doesn't sound like you at all either Titanium hammered wallet to hide your boner and keep your money safe and secure um order now at well okay i guess that's the thing that just happened on our show texas once is great i've seen ones from him from other people where the voices are way more tuned in sure um marquez's and yours didn't seem very tuned in. Sure. Um, Marquez's and yours didn't seem very tuned in there in my opinion.

Starting point is 04:01:05 Okay. Well, um, now that we've had that happen, that we can do our last message. Evening lads. Do you have a brand recommendation for battery banks, cables,

Starting point is 04:01:14 et cetera. I've been buying anchor for nearly a decade and I'm genuinely disappointed that I'll never buy their products again. Um, I have not, we are going to be able to review cables and battery banks once the lab is like really going here. We are not there yet. So I can't give you a database recommendation. What I can say is that we've been working with Ugreen a fair bit lately, and we have not received any

Starting point is 04:01:37 complaints yet. So that's always a solid indicator. We might find out they've got some dirty secrets down the road haven't seen any indication of that yet though hoping for the best but that's where we're at right now so full disclosure they're a sponsor but that's the reason i'm bringing them up is that we've been pushing them for a while and we haven't seen any issues oh sorry one more dustin d love the pins a few of my friends all bought the ltd backpack so i've been looking for something to distinguish mine from theirs anything like ltd iron-on patches in the future i do think we would like to do something like that but i wouldn't recommend ironing anything onto the backpack

Starting point is 04:02:11 it's made of recycled water bottles which means it'll melt it'll melt so um please don't do that and that's it we will see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye you know early in the show i thought this was going to end up being like a really short show because we were like blowing three topics and there was nothing to talk about and then and then we got like we got like a zillion merch messages so much for that

The WAN Show - I Want To Be A Console Gamer - WAN Show February 24, 2023

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