The WAN Show - I'm Happy Apple Is Getting Sued - WAN Show March 22, 2024

Starting point is 00:00:00 What is up, everyone, and welcome to the WAN Show. I'm coming to you live from the western side of the Pacific, and we've got a great show lined up for you guys today. The big story this week is obviously that Apple is being sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. In other almost equally big news i was featured in a song from smosh and it was gone sexual extremely sexual yeah uh linkedin thinks gaming at work is cool and your entire company should compete against other companies which is exciting and

Starting point is 00:00:43 also a terrible idea which we'll discuss later and i don't know if you mentioned this or not but apex legends it was hacked mid-tournament in like a big way that sort of ruined everything we'll talk about that i didn't know that hacking works like that all right let's go ahead and roll that intro i can't do it luke has to do it. Jawa, you green, and Apos. He brought you by Jawa. Okay, well, we were both doing it so that's great nice absolutely fantastic all right why don't we jump right into our first topic and if you are if you're a frequenter of r slash apple um you're gonna have to you're gonna have to grab your grab your copium supplements because this is going to be pretty hard to hear. But the reason that I am happy about this news is not that I hate Apple. In fact,

Starting point is 00:01:54 those of you who were here for the pre-show on Floatplane and Twitch will have seen that I daily drive AirPods. I actually use Apple products as part of my life and even even pay a lot of money for them do you know how you know i pay a lot of money for them because they're made by apple oh fair enough and i have oh we lost him uh while we hopefully get him back i'm just going to start reading the topic yeah he's back he's back should be cool he's back okay do you want to turn the bandwidth down a little bit actually let's have luke read the topic i'll be right back sounds good yesterday the u.s department of uh of justice wow that would be cool department the u.s department of justice and attorneys

Starting point is 00:02:43 general from more than a dozen states filed a lawsuit against Apple for monopolizing smartphone markets. In the DOJ's most significant antitrust lawsuit since its, like, amazingly massive case against Microsoft in 1998, in which Microsoft was accused of acting anti-competitively to push Internet Explorer, if any of you even remember that, on users. Epic Games' Fortnite lawsuit only claimed that Apple had a monopoly on the iOS software distribution market. This lawsuit concerns Apple's effects on the smartphone market at large. The whole thing. iPhones account for around 56% the u.s smartphone market having passed the 50 mark in 2020 the case in a nutshell the government complaint cites pretty much every

Starting point is 00:03:34 complaint about ios brought up by users in recent memory this includes apple blocking third-party app stores payment systems and side loading on iOS, intentionally obstructing cross-platform features in apps like Apple Messages, making it seem to iPhone users like Android phones are to blame. So you should, you know, just buy your mom an iPhone, that quote. A line that the DOJ quotes specifically in its document. You can look up that clip. It's pretty great. Suppressing cloud streaming services. Apple did recently change their global policies to allow services like Xbox Cloud Streaming and GeForce Now to host their game streaming library in a single iOS app.

Starting point is 00:04:14 Also, refusing to add Android support to Apple Watch. In response, Apple told 9to5Mac they investigated this possibility for three years, concluding it wasn't doable because of technical limitations. Also, forcing third-party... Look, I'm going to let you finish, but can I just call... I don't have my bleep button, so I'll have to come up with a creative

Starting point is 00:04:38 name. Oxen manure. On that, there is absolutely no way that a company the size of apple with apple's resources could not find any meaningful way to get the apple watch working i don't think that people even would have expected feature parity i mean as an android user with airpods i understand that i'm a bit of a second class citizen there are certain things that you know i i i get you know are not necessarily going to work like if apple is using

Starting point is 00:05:13 um you know a special proprietary codec or something like that to enable their spatial nonsense it's like okay yeah you know what maybe I don't get that. But there are certain things. No, this is them degrading the experience because they malicious, I shouldn't say malicious, but because they, oh man, arrogance. The word escapes me right now, but basically because they don't respect me enough for not buying enough of their products

Starting point is 00:05:44 to put in the work for me. The fact that I can't alter now, but basically because they don't respect me enough for not buying enough of their products to put in the work for me. The fact that I can't alter what the long presses of the stems do, unless I buy an iPhone and connect it to an iPhone, that's really bad. The fact that I cannot update the firmware in any way without a Bluetooth connection to an iPhone is that that's just, they just obviously hate their users. It's it's yeah, it's there you go. Thank you. Lightning man, GTS. It's spiteful. Um, there's absolutely no way that they shouldn't be able to update the firmware some other way. They just designed the product in such a way that it shouldn't be able to update the firmware some other way. They just design the product in such a way that it just won't work. And they do it on purpose. A part of me

Starting point is 00:06:33 is willing to sort of consider a little bit that everyone at Apple probably just, you know, probably just you know enemas the kool-aid all day every day and can't even imagine a world where you you just wouldn't have an iphone um so it's not a problem at all uh so you know why would we have a way for you to you know connect to the case via a wire and have it you know push that way or something and i understand that the case is just for charging or or whatever except that it's not because they can definitely communicate with the airpods via the case so i don't know um so i can understand why they just wouldn't consider it when they're designing the product but it just happens too consistently to the point where it has to be on purpose at this point.

Starting point is 00:07:25 I think that's essentially what the DOJ is getting at, is that we've got this long history of Apple designing their products for minimum interoperability, and then basically shrugging and going, buy more of our stuff. Okay, Luke, sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah, no worries. To continue the citations from the government, forcing third-party payment services to use Apple Wallet, blocking super apps like WeChat, Alipay, and other apps that also serve as platforms for mini apps and thus reduce the user's dependence on Apple's own features and more. There's tons.

Starting point is 00:08:02 on Apple's own features and more. There's tons. The DOJ even says CarPlay is anti-competitive, which was actually kind of interesting to me. But anyways. Yeah, so that doesn't make sense on the surface. But if you click through, what they're alluding to is actually a CarPlay future, not the state of CarPlay right now.

Starting point is 00:08:24 So Apple is apparently telling auto manufacturers that in the future, if they want to be able to support CarPlay, they're going to have to enable Apple to take control of all the screens in the car, not just a windowed screen. And this is really frustrating to me because one of the issues that I've had with Teslas, for example, one of my main reasons for not being interested in a Tesla for years, even though on paper, it was like, what? You're like a tech guy. You should just have a Tesla, right? One of my main issues was that I was locked into Tesla's operating system. So yeah, I could use Google Maps as long as yeah, I could use Google Maps,

Starting point is 00:09:10 as long as Tesla decided I could use Google Maps. I couldn't just plug in my phone and use whatever I wanted. And it's been shown now that you could totally, even in a Tesla, just run Android Auto or run CarPlay in a window and get all of that functionality that you want that way, instead of relying on Tesla's own entertainment operator. But I was like, no, this is absolutely perfect. I never have to be at the mercy of the car manufacturer who, and Tesla, you know what, to their credit has been a lot better than traditional car manufacturers about this, but I still just don't trust car manufacturers to keep their software up to date. Whereas I trust myself to keep buying a new phone every time I need one, which as it turns out,

Starting point is 00:09:48 it's not very often, but I can do that. And then I can just bring, yeah, I can just bring that new experience with me. And this I didn't realize would totally tank that because all I wanted was my phone to run in a little window on my dashboard. I don't want my phone to completely take over the car. I want my car to work like my car should and my

Starting point is 00:10:12 phone to work like my phone should. And then just I can listen to whatever music I want on playlists that I have stored on my phone. That's it. That's all I'm asking for. And I just don't understand why companies like Apple have to flex like this and impose their will. God, who cares? You already sold the iPhone. Sorry, go ahead. a bug that was bothering me um anyways moving on apple issued a statement saying that the lawsuit threatens who we are and would hinder our ability to create the kind of technology people expect from apple where hardware software and services intersect many parallels are being drawn i'm gonna have to interrupt you again right here because i actually agree with that. I agree extremely strongly with that. This lawsuit definitely threatens Apple because Apple are anti-competitive assholes.

Starting point is 00:11:16 And this would threaten that in a big way. As for whether it would hinder their ability to create the kind of technology that people expect from Apple, I don't think it would at all. If anything, I think this would open up the kind of technology that Apple creates, which is really great, honestly, a lot of the time. I think it would open up that technology to a wider array of users. um so cool i guess i i really just i'm afraid i just don't see a downside and the thing is that the arguments that you'll get from i don't know what to call them and i realize this is extremely disrespectful um but i just i'm so sorry i can't think of another word but just like the zombies um you know the kind of argument that you'll get from these zealots that will defend this multi-trillion dollar corporation to the death. It's this bizarre dynamic that I don't understand. Having this kind of parasocial relationship with a logo.

Starting point is 00:12:17 The kind of arguments you'll get from them is, I like the closed ecosystem. I like the walled garden I like I like everything that's great about having a MacBook and an iPhone and air pods and a vision Pro and all the synergies that exist between all these products you can have that I still not be locked cool yeah then keep buying them all I'm not asking for anything to change for you I'm just asking for a way to update the firmware on the bloody product I bought without buying another product and to not recognize the level of disrespect that that is. To basically say, yeah, you have to come to our store in order to update the firmware on this product

Starting point is 00:13:07 if you don't didn't buy enough of our products i mean imagine for a second imagine for a second if to get a windows update after you bought a windows computer okay you had to go to a microsoft store and have them install it for you imagine it it. That's the thing you've got to do. In any case, whether we're talking Democrat versus Republican, PlayStation versus Xbox, Apple versus whatever, you've got to take whatever that thing is

Starting point is 00:13:38 and then you've got to pretend that someone you hate did it and decide if it would be okay. And if it wouldn't be okay then it's not okay it really is that's a good way to see it actually yeah yeah that's a good way to frame it um continuing on many parallels are being drawn to the microsoft antitrust case which was like the last really major one of these they did it's not the last one they did it's the last super major one they did um which involved years of arguments rulings appeals of those rulings and eventually a settlement with

Starting point is 00:14:09 microsoft making a number of concessions uh riley also notes here that uh i as in riley uh have also seen analysts claim both that the lawsuit is well-founded and poorly founded. An eventual messy compromise seems likely. Which, yeah. I mean, you're going to have incredible amounts of money going into this from Apple and a bunch of money from the government. The government doesn't want to lose. So lots of money versus government not wanting to lose. It's going to take a while. It's going to be a big compromise. The way that I see this playing out is the government winning enough

Starting point is 00:14:47 that it will be such a huge distraction and such a large sunk cost for Apple by the time this whole thing plays out that they will, at least if Microsoft is anything to go by, they will for 20 years or so chill the math out on the whole anti-competitive business practices thing i mean some of this stuff has just been has been so obvious for so long i mean it look at the the epic games versus apple thing

Starting point is 00:15:21 i i don't think that epic you don't have to like tim that Epic, you don't have to like Tim Sweeney. You don't have to like Epic Games. I don't want Epic Games store on my computers. And I have, I've, I've gotten into it with Tim Sweeney in the past. I wouldn't say that

Starting point is 00:15:35 he's my favorite person ever. But I, and I think that, you know, if we were to ignore the personal motivations for this from Tim Sweeney, where he obviously wants to make more money and grow his company, that would be ridiculous. We shouldn't ignore that either. placeholders are engaging in anti-competitive behavior in order to lock in their enormous 30% take of every purchase that takes place on their platforms. To disagree with that, I feel like a demonstration that you don't really understand the behaviors that these companies are

Starting point is 00:16:19 engaging in and that you don't understand what anti-competitive means like yes it is fine to build a product that has benefits if you use it with first-parter I mean let's take our screwdriver for example it works best with our first party shorty bits but there's a huge difference in the product so that it works it fits 12 bits if you buy first party ones and so that it had uh you know an rfid chip in the bits and the ratchet stopped functioning if you didn't buy our first party bits there's a huge huge difference between designing products that work well together and designing products that punish users for not buying enough and for not playing by our rigid rules

Starting point is 00:17:12 yeah it's it's interesting because uh you often hear the 30 thing and it gets compared to to steam which is which is intriguing um because there's there's some stuff there that makes sense there's some stuff there that doesn't one is like if it's a if it's an in-game thing it doesn't necessarily have to go through steam a lot of companies will do that because for dlc and stuff it's easier but there are some in-game purchases that don't have to go through steam also there's a lot of things that steam could do to be significantly more anti-competitive that they don't do um there's interesting stats i'll come back to that in a moment there's interesting stats that make it look like oh steam is a little uh like in 2018 a group of valve staff

Starting point is 00:17:56 tried to figure out how they how just how efficient they were being and found that they were making more money per head than apple facebook etc nearly etc. Nearly every tech giant out there. They found out that they were making, in 2018, $780,400 per employee at Valve. Of any level. And you compare that to Apple. And Valve's the money-making machine. Oh, absolutely. You compare that to Apple, who historically has incredible amounts of money in the bank and just rakes in cash. You compare that to apple who historically has incredible amounts of money

Starting point is 00:18:25 in the bank and just rakes in cash you compare that to apple apple makes 476 160 per employee which is like closer to half than anything else so valve is doing well at that 30 but they allow you to sell your game on your own platform if you want they sell they allow you to sell your game on other platforms they're not determining oh you have to sell your game at at least the same price as it is on here remember humble bundle when they were popping off back in the day they're giving games out basically for free that you were activating on steam and using steam service to download and valve was just chill with that they they are not engaging in a lot of these other anti-competitive things.

Starting point is 00:19:06 The 30% is a lot. We can talk about that. But that's honestly a different conversation when there's a bunch of different libraries on Steam. Steam even allows you to use games that you have installed from Steam in a different launcher. There's multiple other multi-launcher things. I think even NVIDIA cards these days, you can launch games from their software as if anyone would want to do that.

Starting point is 00:19:27 It's interesting. I have some issues with the 30%, but they're not as anti-competitive. From people here. HockeyR says, I don't hear Linus complaining about Microsoft only letting you play Xbox games on the Xbox. Then you weren't listening

Starting point is 00:19:44 because that was a major, major point for me for a long time was Microsoft's lip service that they were paying to gaming on Windows. You know, when they launched Vista, they had this My Games menu and they kept talking about how much they cared about Windows gaming and the Windows gaming ecosystem.

Starting point is 00:20:13 Man, in the Xbox 360 and even to an extent the xbox one days i never shut up about how it made that we would get these releases these crappy ports way down the line on pc and that and that microsoft's windows users were like second-class citizens when functionally the Xbox was just a computer. Guys, I never shut my mouth about that. The reason you don't hear me complaining about it now is that it's not a problem right now. Games Pass works on Windows and Xbox like nothing. Many, many games that you buy for the Xbox, I don't think it's all of them yet i haven't looked

Starting point is 00:20:46 into it recently but i know that there was a big shift that took place about three years ago where many games would actually have a dual license so you could play them on windows or play them on xbox they added keyboard and mouse support to the xbox so you can just play your games with a keyboard and mouse which was a a huge problem for me as a PC gamer. I would look at an Xbox version of a game and be like, oh, great. I get this in two years where I can use a proper set of peripherals with this shooter game. So a lot of the problems that I've had over the years have been addressed.

Starting point is 00:21:16 That's why you don't really see me complaining about it anymore, because believe it or not, I am not just a hater. I don't complain about things for the sake of complaining about them. I complain about them when they're bad and when they're wrong. Then this is one from Jens Wust over in Twitch chat. As an app developer and publisher, I find the 30% tax, both Apple and Google, by the way, no one questions that. Epic sued both of them.

Starting point is 00:21:40 On one hand, I find it high, but I also get a lot of services for that. I get a complete store system, including invoicing, payments, management, etc. I also get a review process, which, yes, can be frustrating, but also ensures a quality threshold for the apps being published. Nobody has a problem with that. And I want to make this just crystal, crystal clear. Nobody, not me, not the DOJ, not Tim S sweeney nobody has a problem with that the problem is not the 30 fee the problem is not the complete solution with invoicing and and all these tools and review and

Starting point is 00:22:17 ensuring user safety none of those are problems the problem is the lock The problem is the lock. The problem is the lock in. The problem is that if I don't want your invoicing system, if I don't want your payment processing, I am forced out. That's the problem. The problem is that that review process so often, I mean, Luke, what is the percentage of times that we had our ios app blocked over a user safety or user security issue uh quite a few it's not happening as much anymore just to be super clear for people watching this was a major thing like probably a year and a half to two years ago it was happening all the time like every other time and when it would happen it might happen multiple times for user safety or security oh uh i think never okay how many times were we blocked for something that was not that very often yeah

Starting point is 00:23:19 my favorite one this is a little bit off topic yeah you might time we were blocked? Yeah. You might even be going there. I'll let Luke tell the story because I'm laggy. Oh, the Netflix one. No, I was going to talk about, there was one time we got blocked because they said they couldn't log in. And then they sent us a screenshot of someone else's login portal while trying to input our information.

Starting point is 00:23:41 There was another time where we got blocked because they said they couldn't log in. And i i looked at it was our login portal i looked at their login uh and they they just typed it wrong and i sent back i was like why are you typing anything like why are you copying and pasting this this is crazy um i don't know what the netflix one what was it uh netflix was doing something yeah where we we set up our yeah we it was the, the first thing you see when you launch the app, it just directed people to create an account on our site or something like that. Yeah, basically, our team assumed that what we were doing was fine. Because Netflix, for some reason, had a special arrangement with Apple where they were allowed to direct people to their own portal for subscriptions.

Starting point is 00:24:30 And they outright did not allow people to subscribe through the app because Netflix's entire business model would be unsustainable if they gave Apple 30% of their gross. And so they had their signup set up in such a way that you were just redirected. I don't know that it still is, to be clear. And so we set up... Sorry? I was just speaking to the audience. I was saying, I don't know that it still is or not. This was a while ago. Yeah, this was a while back. So we set up thinking, okay, well, that's obviously okay, because someone else is doing it. We set up our app to work exactly the same way because believe it or not,

Starting point is 00:25:06 our business model being a video streaming platform for Floatplane is equally not sustainable if we're giving 30% of our gross to Apple. We're not selling in-game cosmetics. We are not selling just button mashing games or whatever else. We have very significant costs associated with serving this video. And 30% of gross is not sustainable for us to the point where we will invest cycles into creating our own payment processing and our

Starting point is 00:25:35 own subscription plan management and all of that stuff in order to make it sustainable. And so we set it up in the same way that Netflix was doing it, and our app got rejected. And when we responded saying, this is exactly the same as Netflix, that was a long battle. Yeah. And right out the gate, they were like, yeah. I can't even remember. They did. They said that you can't compare yourself to any other app on the platform. It's not a valid argument.

Starting point is 00:26:03 And I was like, this is one of the biggest apps on the platform. How is it's not a valid argument um and i was like this is one of the biggest apps on the platform how is this possibly not a valid argument you think people aren't going to build things based off what they see on your thing and they were just like you can't compare to any other app this is what we're telling you you have to listen to what we say it's like okay because that was also really frustrating because i would complain back when we were having a lot of problems i would complain about us getting blocked for x or y or b reason and people would message me and tweet at me and all this kind of stuff oh well my app got through with whatever i'm like yeah that doesn't mean anything in my experience there's no like it's all completely individual i'm having this problem i'm now dealing with this person on apple's side and it just is what it is there's I can't make any arguments based on precedent, which is super frustrating.

Starting point is 00:26:48 Yeah. Which is how arguments work, by the way. Yeah. Precedent matters a lot. Yeah. And again, you've got to come back to, would you be okay with it if someone that you hate did it? So if Microsoft were to say, oh yeah, you know, Valve, oh, okay, here, here's a stupid thing. You know, oh yeah, you know, Valve is allowed to have Steam

Starting point is 00:27:16 integrated enough into Windows networking so that when you switch to a wired connection, it'll automatically go faster and use that wired connection. But, you know, Uplay can't have that. So it'll just stay on Wi-Fi unless you manually disconnect your Wi-Fi and relaunch the app. And, yeah, too bad. It's different rules for different applications. You'd be furious.

Starting point is 00:27:42 You'd be sitting there going, well, this is ridiculous. It's ridiculous that they're gatekeeping this. And that's exactly the argument here. You can't gatekeep functionality like that. And for anyone who's going to sort of argue back at me, yes, you can, Apple did it. The answer is no, you can't. And the doj finally woke up from its 25 year slumber and figured it out um at the time back back in 1998 you know i was 12 so i didn't really understand i i used i used internet explorer and i thought internet explorer was fine because i didn't really understand. I used Internet Explorer, and I thought Internet Explorer was fine because I didn't know any better. All I had ever touched was Netscape Navigator,

Starting point is 00:28:34 which from my perception was a piece of garbage. Did I perceive it as a piece of garbage, though, because of Microsoft's anti-competitive practices that effectively forced, removed all of their funding? Maybe, but as a consumer, I didn't understand the impact that Microsoft's behavior was having on competing products and on their own product.

Starting point is 00:29:00 All I saw was the convenience, just so convenient. Windows comes with Internet Explorer. It's so natural. Of course they're integrated because I was a kid. I didn't get it. Now I am three times the age, which has some downsides, but definitely has some benefits. I have the wisdom to look at what Microsoft did back then, to look at what Apple is doing now and see the knock-on effects of this, see the way that this kind of platform gatekeeping harms me, even if I don't understand it.

Starting point is 00:29:47 And if you're a user who loves the Apple ecosystem, let me try to attract you with honey instead of vinegar this time. Forcing Apple to compete harder is going to be good for you. You want a hungry Apple. You want a competitive apple with bite. You don't want an apple that is just going to sit and get fat and lazy and put billions of dollars into vanity projects that they ultimately cancel. You want an apple that is trying to make the iPhone better. An Apple that recognizes like, oh, you know, there's a serious, there's a serious, you know, quality problem with, you know, I'm just going to go after a

Starting point is 00:30:34 lower hanging fruit. You know, oh, there's a, there's a small percentage of users who are still mad that you still can't move around your app icons on the home screen to your heart's content, that you have to create garbage folders and make them invisible wherever you want to have an empty spot. We should deal with that. Let's get hungry. Let's fix problems. The fact that they took, what was it, three or four years to address those butterfly keyboards in their MacBooks, to address those butterfly keyboards in their MacBooks, you don't want that Apple. You want the Apple that is scared of losing market share. You want that drive.

Starting point is 00:31:15 And you should know that. Yeah. Yeah. You want the Apple that is going to lower the price of iCloud because they don't just get to stuff it down your throat because they're forced to allow other cloud providers. Like, man, how awesome would it be if someone like a Backblaze had the same level of API access and could have the same level of integration with iOS? All of a sudden, you wouldn't have to pay for freaking iCloud. iOS, all of a sudden, you wouldn't have to pay for freaking iCloud.

Starting point is 00:31:48 Backblaze is a perfectly good service. And if Apple was forced to allow it onto their platform, you would benefit because they would have to compete with iCloud instead of just... I mean, has the pricing of iCloud... When's the last time the pricing of iCloud changed? Never mind the pricing. When's the minimum amount that they've provided? When's the last time the pricing of iCloud changed? Never mind the pricing. When's the minimum amount that they've provided? When's the last time that changed? Because it's like nothing. Yeah, I don't know. I know there's two interesting arguments to go along with this as well. I got both these from Theo. But one of them is that this is this is a shout out to us because

Starting point is 00:32:27 it's bad for us but i think he was talking about places like twitch and stuff mostly at the time but platforms that have a split with the creators on the platform so flow plane would be one of these twitch would be one of these youtube maybe i don't think youtube is largely operating this way but it's going to impact them to a certain degree even twitch it's only part of their audience that this is going to impact but it is to a certain degree any platform where you're splitting the income already this is an additional split and that's going to hurt those platforms disproportionately compared to other ones because uh like flow plane for instance that's a much bigger chunk that comes out of the pie before we have to try to split it with our creators that

Starting point is 00:33:09 are on the platform so it splits and then it splits again which is really really rough for for us and then you have platforms that have probably i don't know the other argument floating around is that there's there's platforms that are like carrying the monetization of the app store and there's platforms that are mostly just benefiting from it because there's platforms that are really big and very important i think uh i think the example that theo used was like banking apps banking apps are going to pay their apple developer fee and then nothing despite being a like huge requirement in the modern era for people to do banking with your bank at all is to have a banking app so you would this would be something that they would pay a ton for but they're paying nothing so

Starting point is 00:33:57 they're effectively getting subsidized by the the the twitches the float planes the the mobile apps with microtransactions in them, all the things that are actually flowing a lot of money through this 30% cut is effectively subsidizing these other, in a lot of cases, enormous companies that just have to pay their developer fee or nothing if they're on the Google Play Store. But it's both of those situations are like, this doesn't feel like right.

Starting point is 00:34:24 This doesn't feel good no no oh and there's no incentive for apple to change it no no i'm here and there's no incentive for apple to change any of that as long as they're making money yeah hand over fist i might add yeah and if they're if they're not if they are not um required to compete with anybody if they're not required to compete with anybody, if they're able to just sit and maintain the status quo as long as it's comfortable. And that's exactly what these kinds of antitrust cases are designed to combat, is complacency and comfort, to force them to compete hard. and everyone, absolutely everyone, unless you own a whole bunch of Apple stock, should be rooting for that. And you know what?

Starting point is 00:35:09 Even if you own a whole bunch of Apple stock, you should still be rooting for it. Did Microsoft get crippled by the 1998 antitrust? Was decoupling Windows and Internet Explorer? Actually, I'm talking now, long-term. Long-term, they're doing great right now. They're crushing right now, to be honest. I'm not an accountant, okay? This is not financial advice.

Starting point is 00:35:32 But pretty much anyone smart that you talk to who treats stocks like anything other than gambling is going to tell you, you are buying these for the long term. You're buying it because it's a company that you believe in, because it's a vision you believe in. It's something that you understand. That's how you're actually supposed to buy stocks, because you're supposed to be, instead of trying to time the market, you're supposed to be going for a time in market, knowing that historically it has grown at X rate and whatever the case may be. historically it has grown at X rate and whatever the case may be. So with that in mind,

Starting point is 00:36:07 if you bought Microsoft long, are you a sad camper today because of that lawsuit? Especially if you actually bought it right when that lawsuit came in, you're probably doing super well. Because they had to fight. They had to actually try and you know what have they learned anything in the long term i think no their shenanigans with edge these days

Starting point is 00:36:35 honestly are probably worse than what they were doing with internet explorer back in the 90s however with that said what i hope is that the doj wins an enormous settlement here and we see a bit of a return to good behavior because man has edge ever gotten annoying i would love to see them go after microsoft again honestly i would just love to see the doj get 10x the staff and see them go after a whole bunch of the just clown show behavior that we've seen around right to repair, around anti-competitive practices, around walled garden ecosystems. I'm just so tired of it. And I'm tired of us accepting it. It's really frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. HP printers, let's go man i'm kind of wondering i've been i've been this bit on my

Starting point is 00:37:29 radar for a little bit i don't think they're in a spot right now for it to be a thing but some of the actions that microsoft has been taking towards ai stuff has me going like you guys releasing the beast again like what's going on here are you guys trying to completely control the entire ai space or no because sometimes it's like it get a little close but they haven't they haven't actually done it yet but uh i wonder if this is going to feel like a shot across the bow i don't know we'll see i hope so i hope they're trying to make an example of them the fact that it's so so broad to me yeah they're going after everything. I can see where people are coming from, going like, oh, it's messy.

Starting point is 00:38:10 But the fact that it's so broad, in my mind, is more of an indication that they are going for damage here. So I think they know they're not going to win everything. Yeah. Yeah, they're just trying to inflict some hurt. If they're coming in going, okay, full broadside, this is going to win everything yeah but if they just reflect some hurt if they're coming in going okay full broadside this is gonna hurt and even if it doesn't hurt that much in terms of the final settlement this is going to be such a distraction this is going to be so costly it's in just in terms of the opportunity cost in terms of the time. I think the message to Apple is play nice

Starting point is 00:38:46 or this is going to be an ongoing problem. You are going to be defending yourself on all fronts. And I hope they stick to it. Yeah. With that said, it's an election year, so who knows, right? Yeah, that's true. Priorities change so fast in American politics these days well yeah you can't even just specify america there but yeah i agreed

Starting point is 00:39:12 um yeah it's uh it's interesting because most people that i know because yeah like you were you were 12 or whatever i was like nine i don't know um when the microsoft thing happened most people talking to them about what happened, if you've talked to them about how that felt back then and what they think about the ramifications of it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Most sentiment that I have seen is that they wish that this type of thing happened more often.

Starting point is 00:39:36 What happened to more companies? They'll point at some company now that's doing something and be like, why aren't they going after them? So yeah, I think we should be happy that the people that, if're american i guess are you're you're paying them to do their job you should be happy i guess that they're doing their job um and hopefully they they keep doing that because anti-competitiveness is bad we can all wish they should do more of their job a hundred percent i'm with you they should do more of their job their job. But let's take what we can get. Yeah, this is good. This is good.

Starting point is 00:40:08 Like, yeah, I'm not American. And a lot of you are probably not American. But Apple, being an American company, is most vulnerable on American soil. And Apple's, is it their largest market? Or is it it china now but at least one of their biggest markets it's either one or two i can't remember but this being apple's biggest or second biggest market um anything that apple has to do for their american customers is very likely to trickle down to everyone else so it's a very very good thing for everyone else um yeah jade aura over on twitch says the lawsuit reads like it was written by someone that was really tech illiterate they blame apple for the death of windows phone and others instead of those companies making bad moves and that's a really good point

Starting point is 00:40:55 uh i i haven't read it it's like 95 pages or however many pages it is i i haven't read it but i've skimmed a little bit of it, and I've looked at some highlights of it that people have been talking about on Reddit that really do emphasize what you're talking about. You're not wrong. There are definitely some areas where it could have been improved by bringing in someone who really understands tech and the history behind some of these things. But again, I get that government competence is not going to be as high as private sector competence. And I understand that the DOJ is going to lose a lot of this. All I can hope for is that they win enough that we see a sizable enough settlement that Apple is sufficiently wrist slapped to change their behavior in at least a attempt for at least some temporary amount of time and that it causes every the rest of the industry to kind of wake up and go whoa hold on a second like okay a great example of this was when the FCC went after that

Starting point is 00:41:59 that Xbox promotion where Twitch streamers weren't disclosing that they were paid to play games on Xbox. This was back around the launch of the Xbox One. It never got followed up as far as I can tell. I don't think we saw, let alone a high profile case, I don't think we saw a single additional case going after this kind of undisclosed product sponsorship and paid sponsorship. But what I will say is it brought about a significant shift. It didn't clean the industry up completely. There's still companies out there and there's still many, many, many influencers out there

Starting point is 00:42:38 that are doing dirty deals, undisclosed deals. But compared to what it was before then, when it was complete yeehaw like just wild west um i would say that it is markedly improved even now even eight years later or whatever we're up to eight or nine years later so i i i am uncharacteristically optimistic is it naive maybe but we saw a big change in microsoft's behavior for a long time in 1998 we saw a big change in advertiser and influence behavior at least temporarily um back when the fcc hit microsoft for that xbox promotion and i would

Starting point is 00:43:21 i'm hoping i'm hoping that we uh avon fox and floatplane says it's now fashionable to say you disclose yeah it is and some people don't some people say they disclose and they disclose sometimes some of that is an extremely major shift in viewer sentiment about creators monetizing their stuff extremely major when we first started any form of monetization no matter what you would get very significant hate and like a lot of it from a lot of people people are really mad these days if you don't monetize your stuff people are like what are you doing you need to make money so you can do this as a career you need to monetize your stuff play those ads on twitch yeah that's that's like super common these days it is completely flipped so back in the day

Starting point is 00:44:10 disclosing that you had this this is why doing stuff like that is bad disclosing that you had some type of agreement back in the day would have got you significant hate and potentially lost you viewers and these days disclosing that you have it people are going to cheer for you and hope that you do better it has changed so much it's actually wild yeah so unless they don't like the company that you have the agreement with but like in general it's seen positively anyways moving on topic two speaking about phones windows phones apple phones whatever minimal it's like a kindle but it's a phone startup minimal launched a crowdfunding campaign for what they're calling the Minimal Phone earlier this month. While they haven't yet hit production, they have a working prototype for a smartphone with a 3.5-inch monochrome e-ink screen and a physical keyboard. It has 4 gigs of RAM, 128 gigs of storage.

Starting point is 00:45:02 The phone's OS is a custom version of android 13 and the phone has app bluetooth and 5g support despite that it's 15 hertz e-ink screen makes it unsuitable for watching videos or playing games the phone includes an 8 megapixel front camera and a 16 megapixel main camera minimal is currently aiming for a $350 price tag. Actually quite interesting. Hey Luke, do you want to maybe show the people the phone? Real quick? Can I? Oh, you mean on my screen, I understand.

Starting point is 00:45:35 I was like, wait, do I have one here? Yeah, I can't screen share this week. Loading up, yeah, I got it. So you're going to be on screen share duty. We're working on it. Here we go. Here's their Kickstarter, or Indiegogo page i guess not kickstarter but yeah big keyboard very very blackberry vibes um this looks like some form of text

Starting point is 00:45:53 messaging application i'm not sure what one um and it looks like it would work fine for that ink display qwer keyboard, 300 ppi. I gotta say, Luke, I think it's super cool, but I am not into the physical keyboard. I get why they're doing it. What I've found is that even on a device that has the horsepower to be responsive, typing on a non-responsive screen technology is a big problem because it takes so long to give you that visual confirmation.

Starting point is 00:46:32 I'm one of those weirdos who doesn't keep haptics on, so I don't get haptic feedback when I type. I rely on the little... What I find is on most devices, too laggy. It the little, well, what I find is they're on most devices too laggy. So it's a habit that I fell out of when phones every month. So on some of them, the

Starting point is 00:46:53 haptic laggy and so sloppy that it was just yucky. So I would, so I would turn off my haptic and I'm just used to it. So I kind of rely on the little popping up under my fingers and i rely on my complete really responsive to to type quickly we're we're like losing a physical i don't think dan's here though i your audio is getting really bad and i think dan left so i don't think there's any fixes coming for it we can hear you but it's cutting out like half of every word basically oh cool dan return okay well um with haste physical key not not too crazy not too into the physical keyboard their their indiegogo page by the way is is saying 4g so i'm not sure if the notes are wrong or if something's going on here but yeah the essential features here says

Starting point is 00:47:47 4G LTE yeah I don't know I haven't used a physical keyboard attached to a phone in so long that I don't know if I can really say I feel like I would like it or at least be okay with it but I wouldn't really know until I actually tried it

Starting point is 00:48:04 yeah I don't really know until I actually tried it. I do miss my BlackBerry. Yeah, I don't know. I do very much... Oh, I don't necessarily miss it. You remember how good it was? No, no, I'm talking to Dan. Oh. Actually, no, I changed my statement. I miss the BlackBerry's

Starting point is 00:48:20 swipe navigation system. That is what I miss. I don't, you know, the keyboard, I don't care about. Sure. That's fair. Because what? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:48:31 I was saying you, you miss the keyboard because it was so much better than not having a keyboard back then. It was so much better than T9 typing. Yeah. But I went back to it for a little bit for a short circuit video. And it's, it's, But I went back to it for a little bit for a Short Circuit video. And it's awesome. I'm sitting there going, it's fine as long as absolutely everything you want to type is alpha.

Starting point is 00:48:54 And, you know, as a bit of an alpha myself, you know, I'm in the Manaverse. You know, I can't even. Man, can you think of a toxic manaverse thing uh i can't think of anything you have red pills in your vitamins every day i don't know yeah yeah yeah well that's that's good that's good uh how many how many manaverse creators do you follow influencers such i doncers? I don't think so. Trucks. Trucks and guns. It shows up in my feed a lot because I like

Starting point is 00:49:32 working out and chess. So YouTube is like, you like working out and you like chess? You must be into this stuff. And I'm like, get out of here! I don't want it. You're our demo. Stop! Do you have any idea as a as a married late 30 something how much promotion i get for like secret meets and like ashley madison and

Starting point is 00:49:56 stuff and i'm just like oh no how many times do i have to tell you how many times i can tell you i'm not interested in this like not everyone who's married is is abstinent yeah that's that's unfortunate i'm doing fine i uh i you know it's a good thing it's not unfortunate wow i'm telling yvonne you said that that's not what i meant um uh the the minimal phone i don't know i don't know if i'm necessarily into the keyboard or not sorry we're fighting with latency i don't know if i'm necessarily into the keyboard or not but i am definitely interested in the concept i think the 350 price tag might actually be pretty good especially once you start being able to pick up the uh pick these up used um but i i think that there is a a fairly considerable war going on for like time and mind space and i think people are

Starting point is 00:50:54 starting to recognize and understand that um and i think tools like this could be very good because something that i've heard from did we lose linus or is he very still i can't tell he's very still okay um something that i've heard because i've been encouraging people to turn on screen time limits on their phone um because like i have like uh instagram for instance my brother my buddy daris and my and my girlfriend will send me instagram things every once in a while so i check their their uh their shared things on there But I have it limited to like five minutes so that if I accidentally get stuck onto the homepage and start doom scrolling,

Starting point is 00:51:30 it'll just shut it down for me. But something that's ridiculous about that is when it shuts it down for me, it'll go, you're out of time. Do you want to go to settings and give yourself more time? Like, are you kidding me? Yeah, I know. For me, that works.

Starting point is 00:51:43 I won't go to settings. I'll leave it and I'll just close the app. A lot of people have communicated to me, the second that comes up, they're going to settings, they're increasing their time. It does nothing. So like it would be actually nice

Starting point is 00:51:54 to be able to have something that you like can't necessarily do that with. Like maybe Instagram does work on here, but it said it's not good enough for games. You want to put NetNanny on your phone. Like self-inflicted. Yeah, I want to put net nanny on your phone like self inflicted yeah i want to be able to yeah yeah i i want to like i want i want it to be harder to turn it off like you want five more minutes yeah like that you know oh man something like that

Starting point is 00:52:17 alarm clock remember that alarm clock that you had for a little bit that would jump up and run around the room and you had to go chase it in order to to disable it yeah until i booted something like that where you have to well you have to do some kind of cumbersome thing and i think that i can definitely see where that could be where that could be a problem like that could be a problem if for some reason you were to set your phone app to be time limited and you needed to place an emergency call or something like that like i can see from that from a safety standpoint where there could be a situation where where this is a problem but i also think that for certain classes of apps i agree with you a hundred percent that there should be hardcore mode there should be like yeah you said i get your get your heart get your heart rate above 120 for 15 minutes and you can have your

Starting point is 00:53:10 instagram back for i would love that i i would actually i would prefer that over my five minute thing because then if i if i want it if i'm like yeah i i oh man it would be cool too if it only bought you a little bit more time. Okay, Luke, tell me this. I love this. Tell me this. Wait, wait, tell me this. Would you buy a product? Oh man, we are going way off. We are going way off topic here.

Starting point is 00:53:38 Would you buy a product that was essentially a lockbox? Okay, a lockbox, okay? A lockbox for your peripheral plugs. So you can't just like unplug them and plug something else in, okay? And then what it is, is an inter, not like an interposer, like a pass-through. Essentially, it's like a pass-through dongle for your mouse board and game controller

Starting point is 00:54:06 okay and it has some kind of api integration with games so that you could actually do you are forced to do that thing you tell yourself you're gonna do which is every time you hit a load screen, do 10 pushups or whatever. So it has like a webcam thing. And it's like, I am not, I am actually not going to give you back your keyboard mouse, drop down and give me 10 soldier. You know, like every time you're in a loading screen or whatever, like, would you pay for that product? A hundred percent. That's so sick. Actually. I wasn't sure where you were going with that for like a while, but I'm, I'm super into that because my thing is I will do it.

Starting point is 00:54:50 I'll have like the willpower to do it, but I'll forget. It won't be that. I'm like, Oh, I just really don't want to. So I'm not going to, I'll just,

Starting point is 00:54:58 you know, I'm playing a game. I'm, I'm more focused on like that. I'm really annoyed that that guy just killed me or whatever. And I, I forget this plan that I had. So I'll do it like a few times and then I'll,

Starting point is 00:55:08 I'll forget. So if this thing is, uh, is, is going to jump in and be like, no, like you just died or you just, uh,

Starting point is 00:55:16 hit a loading screen, like you said, or whatever else, like whatever event that you planned out happened. Now you have to go do that thing. Um, sit ups or pushups or, or whatever it is.

Starting point is 00:55:25 That would be awesome. That would be so sweet. I think everyone knows what's good for them. And everyone has willpower sometimes. So the really critical, I don't know what to call it. Is it a peripheral? Is it a system?

Starting point is 00:55:44 Whatever it is, the really integral element is locking down your system so that you can't just plug in another set of peripherals so that your peripherals are stuck, connected through the translation dongle so that the removal of it is extremely inconvenient. So kind of like the app time limit where you can, where you have to like do something in order to overcome it. There needs to be like an accountability, you know, someone else to enter a password for you. And it's one of those things where you could set it up. You could set it up one time while you've got the willpower right but it's all about not you know not giving you an easy out like obviously if you need to just use your computer and your arms are tired at some point you've got a book report due right like obviously that's a different situation and your accountability buddy i'm sure would be happy to unlock your system for you accountability but in every other situation if you're just gaming oh i ripped it off south park that's not my word

Starting point is 00:56:49 but if i but but if if i'm just gaming or whatever there should be no convenient way to keep going and honestly if the outcome is that you just kind of go screw it i don't need to game that badly anymore i'm gonna go touch grass you know what that's pretty good too i don't see i don't see a problem with that linus just came up with the next hot accessory for streamers honestly a lot of the big streamers would be into it and i think a lot of them super wouldn't oh yeah like based on the physique i could definitely see like man some of those guys are shredded i'm sitting here going do you do anything but sit at your computer or sit in the gym that sounds like a pretty i'm into that that that is That is my goal most of the time

Starting point is 00:57:46 to be completely honest. Lifting and clicking on heads. That's the life you want, buddy. I'm trying to find mine. Creatine and G-fuel. I don't need no protein shake. I subsist

Starting point is 00:58:02 on salt. Oh yeah, you gotta get that Soylent yeah okay yeah here we go i found it so like my limits right now is i have five minutes on instagram i have uh five minutes on x and i have 10 minutes on youtube and my thing is like it might not sound super long for each one of those if you if you combine that that's a significant amount of time to just be staring at my screen like doing nothing of value to be completely honest because if i'm watching youtube on my phone for example i'm not going to be watching something of significant value i'm going to be like on the toilet watching a short or something and then if that ends i don't want to start

Starting point is 00:58:46 doom scrolling so like it yeah it should lock it and then it's over and then that's fine and my average since i started doing this my average screen time per day total has been steadily going down which is good i'd be interested to see see them implement a per domain limit in Chrome because I don't necessarily want to not be able to. For example, I don't use the Reddit app. But if I'm just like, yeah, I don't want to be on Reddit more than 10 minutes a day, I'd love to be able to set it so that that domain just won't refresh anymore.

Starting point is 00:59:26 That's really cool i like that i don't think that's a feature but that's really cool i do use the reddit app and i think i have mine locked down it's just not showing because i haven't opened reddit in a while but i have a timer on that one too i just try to stay away from reddit a little bit these days um but yeah i've i yeah, anything that I'm opening, if I notice, by an incredible amount, my most used app is YouTube Music, which is fine.

Starting point is 00:59:54 And then it's like Teams and Slack and stuff. That has been a pretty big improvement. Let's see. Yeah, screen time YouTube Music for two and a half hours that doesn't actually seem believable i bet you my screen was locked but whatever maybe it got bumped and it was open or something but um yeah screen time is going down which is good i think it's like it's actually wild um how negative is for you.

Starting point is 01:00:26 So buying something like minimal phone or if some other product comes out similar to what Linus is talking about and using it to honestly better your life, I think is like super valuable. Just doom scrolling. Like there's a, there's a reason why using the web back in the day used to be called surfing the web and why using the web these days is often referred to as doom scrolling like it used to be a bit different than it is now and the the thing that it is now is honestly very uh competitive for your brain space and i think you should do active things in order to like wrangle control of your brain back because there's billions and billions and billions of dollars right now right not necessarily but i think you should be conscious about what you're doing on youtube well you could do it on your computer a lot of it's like being on the phone

Starting point is 01:01:16 yeah that too done easy um a lot of it in my opinion is just literally specifically being on the phone because like i mean the posture of it what my opinion is just literally specifically being on the phone because like i mean the posture of it what you end up physically doing not very good etc but oh i am dude i am so unhappy with like my typical like neck posture oh yeah it's one of those things where like i i try to be aware of it but it's like it's hard using your phone like this yeah no one does this no nobody's doing this like you watch people walk out no one's walking around like this like everyone's walking around down like this it's bad yeah all good okay there's this whole thing about the rest of this show also i'm i'll try loving how well this lines up right now

Starting point is 01:02:01 I'm going to have to posture for the rest of this show. Also, I'm loving how well this lines up right now. In spite of my head being super tiny. It is pretty good. There's this whole thing about like, it's not necessarily so much posture itself, although posture might be more aesthetic. But if you think about the simple idea of weight being supported by bone,

Starting point is 01:02:19 I think is exactly how it's said. Weight being supported by bone instead of weight being supported by muscle. If you're curled like this, your muscle's trying to hold yourself together. And if you're straight up, your bone is just sitting on itself. It's way better for you. A lot better for you.

Starting point is 01:02:35 There we go. Do you want to explain merch messages? Oh, right. Yes. Merch messages are the way to interact with the show uh don't buy a twitch bit don't buy a super chat merch messages are the way to go all you got to do is head to lttstore.com where we've got a few updates for you guys and in when you're in the cart there

Starting point is 01:03:00 will be a little box anytime we're live and you can leave a merch message it'll go to producer dan who i would normally uh hey luke's gonna do it no he's not what am i doing for what i thought was it actually controls you as there's linus wave for something yeah okay whatever okay fine well it'll go to producer dan who will curate your message for me and luke to talk about or reply to it himself or just pop it up on the bottom of the screen so that you guys can see a little shout out for your mom, or a proposal for your loved ones, or whatever the case may be. We have actually had people propose on WAN Show before, which I think is pretty funny. Anyway, the point is, we will try our best to respond to your merch message in some way. Last week was an example of a week where we did not get to all of them because there was like a thousand or something.

Starting point is 01:03:52 But the worst case scenario is you'll get some quality merchandise in the mail instead of just throwing money at a screen, which has always offended me a little bit. No, you know, nothing against the streamers who rely on that and the people who enjoy that kind of thing yeah it's just not my jam and i i like that if you're going to spend money you should you should definitely get some quality merchandise in return uh so before we do a few merch messages to show you guys how it works i have a couple of little uh merch updates for the store. Retro Screwdriver is still running with free shipping for your entire order. We had a couple people ask us, yes, this temporary deal,

Starting point is 01:04:34 which ends March 29th, is applicable to international orders. So if you haven't picked up a screwdriver yet, the time to do it is now. Pick up the Retro Screwdriver. Luke, do you want to do it is now. Pick up the retro screwdriver. Luke, do you want to pull that up on the screen? Yeah, sure. Pick up the retro colorway of the screwdriver.

Starting point is 01:04:50 You will get free shipping on your entire order. That is internationally. So, hey, do me a favor. Grab a few other things while you're at it. That would be great because international shipping is pretty expensive. And this is a good time to just grab anything else that you want from the store because, hey, free shipping. Might I recommend our new cable management arches? We've also got, what else is really cool and people are super into?

Starting point is 01:05:19 TechSack is in stock right now and has really good reviews. Yeah, magnetic. Man, dude, I wasn't sure, Luke reviews yeah magnetic man dude i wasn't sure luke i love it i wasn't sure this was one of those products that um i was like do people want a management solution this badly i don't know turns out the answer is yes it just looks so good. These things are crushing it. They're absolutely crushing it. It's just like every frustration that I've ever had is like, oh, I used zip ties this time. Now I need to go get zip ties. Forget it.

Starting point is 01:05:55 I'm just not going to bother. Or like the Velcro ties. Long live Velcro ties. They're great, but they're not perfect. If you use them properly and really cinch them tight, there's such a pain in the butt to add something to. Magnetism, man. Magnets.

Starting point is 01:06:08 They fix it. How do they work? Freaking love them. Well, is the answer. One of the top uploaded things on the Reddit right now is someone using one of the arches to open their fridge. It's a fridge door. It has a broken handle.

Starting point is 01:06:19 Yeah. I wonder if I can find that. The magnets are super strong. I was trying to think what else is, what else is great to pick up on the store. Man, we launched so many products that I feel like some things end up kind of buried. The dropout hoodie that I'm wearing, that's a really good one. It's super comfy. Man, gear.

Starting point is 01:06:45 Yeah. Oh, the Steve. The Steve is doing really well. That mock neck. Speaking of the show being largely about Apple this week. Anyway, yeah. So, lttstore.com. Anyway, Dan, do you want to show what a curated merch message looks like?

Starting point is 01:07:04 Sure. Hold on. We're looking at the fridge door. He just used the normal magnets, now he's using ours? Nice. Nice. We'll watch it again, it's only 11 seconds. So he's got a stack of magnets, which, them being in a stack can help Two stacks, actually. Oh, I didn't even notice.

Starting point is 01:07:20 Yeah, he's got two stacks. And then just, yeah, one handle. They also sell a bigger size if you want to be able to get more fingers in there all right anyways curated merch message that was unintentional i'm very sorry i'm not a very good shill i'm not sorry i am sorry i'm blushing i have you have always recommended DRAM SSDs, but unfortunately most SSDs only have SLC cache. Has your opinion on DRAM-less SSDs changed much?

Starting point is 01:07:53 Sometimes you guys use them in your builds, like Sabrent Rockets. So, I... It's one of those things where I feel like, and you know what? I't have unfortunately i don't have i don't have a rational uh basis for this and sometimes things are sometimes things do be like that though um i feel like d ramless is still the way that i would go if i could if i could afford the extra in a particular budget for my build. And the reason for that is that it does put a little bit less stress on the NAND in the long term.

Starting point is 01:08:32 Is this going to be a problem within the reasonable life expectancy of an SSD? Probably not. Using the NAND flash as an slc cache to accelerate the the drive or using system memory so so many ssds these days support using a little bit of system memory to to make up for the function of a dedicated dram cache on your SSD. And that, aside from the small performance hit, is not problematic at all. Relying on the NAND itself to accelerate the SSD can cause a little bit of extra wear.

Starting point is 01:09:14 Even then, is that going to be a problem in the long term? Probably not. I think that in the early days of SSDs, especially when we were still using SLC or two bit per cell MLC, there was a lot of hand wringing and stress about how our SSDs had a finite number of write cycles, and they were only going to last for a little while. And they basically had a had a countdown timer, they had a ticking clock on them. And, and we stressed a lot about it. And some of that was valid especially for like

Starting point is 01:09:45 an enterprise application where these things are going to be overwritten you know multiple times per day but for the average user i mean think about it how how often are you actually overwriting that ssd and if it can support hundreds or in some cases thousands of cycles of being overwritten is that really ever going to be a problem um yeah so it's not rational but i would still i would still take a DRAM cache SSD over uh over a DRAMless SSD assuming that you know they're at the same price. I don't know that I would. But with that said, if I were to buy a system, so let's say I picked up an ROG Ally or a Steam Deck or a laptop, and it had a DRAMless SSD in it, am I going to notice? Am I going to bother to replace it? No. And especially if I was picking

Starting point is 01:10:44 up a game drive, like a secondary game drive i don't know direct storage might matter at some point the first couple of games implemented it hasn't really mattered but for direct storage it might matter at some point um so for like a secondary game drive just my game dump um would i bother to get a DRAM cache SSD? Absolutely not. For that, where I'm not going to have any data that matters and everything could just be replaced by downloading the games again from Steam, just get whatever the cheapest possible storage from a reasonably respected brand would be.

Starting point is 01:11:22 Inimgor in Floatplane Chat says, them KingSpec SSDs die quickly though. I mean, that may be true. That may not be true. That may be anecdotal. I don't have any trustworthy data on whether Kingspec SSDs die quickly or not. But if they do, I would say it's probably less to do with the lack of DRAM cache and probably more to do with the lack of DRAM cache, and probably more to do with the quality of the NAND. There's been some recent scandals, particularly in USB thumb drives and SD cards, around low quality NAND flash from rando suppliers, or in some cases, used NAND being used in these devices that has an extremely, extremely short life cycle. cycle man i would love to see that product

Starting point is 01:12:07 the the the ssd nand usb thumb drive you know like the the a grade nand chip thumb drive i'm not aware of anybody who sells that anymore premium thumb drives used to be a thing from the likes of you know brands like patriot or whatever else but i'm i'm not convinced that they exist anymore apparently they exist okay okay does anyone have an example who who makes who makes that these days uh build it yourself with an m.2. I mean, yes, that is what I do. Apparently, Corsair has one. SanDisk and Samsung have them. But which one specifically, guys?

Starting point is 01:12:54 Because don't tell me that every Samsung one is good quality NAND. There's no way. Give me a specific model. Let's see. Samsung Bar Plus, someone says. I've never heard of a Samsung Bar Plus. Me neither.

Starting point is 01:13:15 Apparently neither have you. You have no idea what you're talking about. Apparently the SanDisk 1TB Extreme Pro. Oh my god okay i have to go back to this thing unfortunately i can't share with you guys right now uh oh i couldn't find it i i brought up a bunch of samsungbars. No, I found bar pluses for sure. How did you not find it? I believe you. Maybe you're on that Japan Google. I'm trying to find the right one, and then I'm going to screen share it. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:13:53 You can force yourself onto the Canadian Google. Hold on, can I screen share with you guys? No, I don't think so. I got this, though. No, sir. Samsung bar plus 3.1 flash drive, 256 gigs. Speed in style. Move files in a flash.

Starting point is 01:14:05 Rugged refinement. I'm not seeing, like, stats. It says I can screen share. Look at that. I totally didn't even know that was a thing. How do I make this? Do you make it big? You need a different scene.

Starting point is 01:14:18 How do I make this big? No, no, it's fine. It's fine. Hold on. I'll just show you. I'll just show you. Okay? So everything you're looking at right here is a sponsored Amazon result.

Starting point is 01:14:30 It's really small. Everything you're looking at right here is a sponsored Amazon result. Oh, you're highlighting it. I see. I see. I see. Everything you're looking at right here is a sponsored Amazon result. Everything you're looking at here is the same Amazon result, but not sponsored.

Starting point is 01:14:50 Wow. looking at here is the same amazon result but not sponsored wow and then this is people also ask that is a gold at 100 scaling and i believe this is a 1440p display unbelievable. I have to go here to find, oh wait, is that this result? No, this is a different WD page. This may be the actual result, right under the fold. So you can tell they totally knew. They 100% knew what I actually wanted. They just put it below the fold, below all their sponsored

Starting point is 01:15:27 crap. Anyway, okay. I'm going to stop screen sharing now if I can figure out how to do that. Oh, I'm screen sharing. Someone suggested that I use Kagi. I'd never heard of it. Apparently it's a premium pay to access I think. I'm not sure.

Starting point is 01:15:44 Okay. This is a portable SSD. This is not what I was... This is not really a thumb drive. I wanted something in that thumb drive form factor that is just using higher quality NAND, like an SSD. The Bar Plus? Is that what the Bar Plus is?

Starting point is 01:16:03 It doesn't look very big. Okay, I'm going to try searching for it again. Oh my God, karaoke. I have 100% had normal flash drives that are physically bigger than this. 100%. Multiple of them. Oh yeah, this one looks fine. Okay, so the Bar Plus is a trustworthy drive to store your valuable data.

Starting point is 01:16:24 Okay, so it looks like this is the one. This is the thing I want. Yeah. Comes with a nice little lanyard thing on it. Boom, that's a lot of time. Do they actually say how many total rights it's rated at or are they just saying samsung makes a lot of nan flash and our experts in nan flash therefore you should trust it because i don't actually see anything that indicates exactly what nan chips are in this

Starting point is 01:16:57 thing i'm not sure i can't find that either they just say it's fast uh and and the reviews for this thing are terrible are they they're most on samsung's own site the reviews are awful start start scrolling down yeah one and done stopped working after two months far from announced speeds poor write speeds protected registration fast read speeds poor write speeds only lasted seven months those are the first eight reviews when i scroll down oh you are on a different page than me mine is like i'm on the u.s page overall 4.5 i'm on the canada page i guess my my top ones are 2 and has a lot of negative ones my top ones are uh impressive and stylish

Starting point is 01:17:54 amazing high quality flash drive solid secure never fails future repeat customer here durability yeah i don't know i don't know man uh napalm uh in twitch chat in typical twitch manner has apparently put their life savings into intel thanks for the info guys i made it very clear that's not financial advice i don't want you to do that please don't do that yeah i don't do thank you bye apparently the bar plus had some issues for a while with sizes below 128 gigs so those might be okay which makes sense or it might be that they're not using super super great quality NAND and in lower capacities those low overall rights are revealing themselves a lot faster I want to okay i'll give a screen share for a sec i don't know how well you can see this linus but they show like you know the bar plus deployed in a few different scenarios it's on this guy's like wrist uh bead thingy like okay that

Starting point is 01:18:58 looks pretty cool it's probably really annoying having it whack into your hand all the time and then okay it's just plugged into a laptop that's fine and then the weirdest spot to permanently have a flash drive really ever really just attached to the pull tab of the side pocket of your backpack have you seen the one that's in the back of a shovel you're telling me you want to see even dumber over-engineered pull tab on the ltt backpack they're now pull tab is the flash drive yes yeah you see this yes flash drive in it carabiner and flash drive there we go are you listening tynan tynan time to redesign tynan is screaming back to square one i can hear him and to be clear guys when i was talking about intel i was talking like very long term. I was talking like multi-year outlook.

Starting point is 01:19:46 So please, none of it is financial advice. I was just saying I like their trajectory competing with TSMC and geopolitical tensions around TSMC and Intel being a place to fab things. That's all I was saying. I was saying I like Gelsinger's vision. Okay? That's all I'm saying. Yeah. You like gelsinger's vision okay that's all i'm saying yeah you like this stock damn it you guys he just likes the stock there you go i just i just

Starting point is 01:20:11 like the stock not financial advice for the cnn time yeah let's let's go maybe we should move on to uh more topics. How about that, guys? Yeah. We still need to do a merch message. Sure. Okay, we can do another one. Hi, DLL and future me. My question is, what do you guys think about non-major brand GPUs?

Starting point is 01:20:42 I've had an Inno 3D 3090 for a year now with no issues, but I heard it's not the case with Chinese brands. Inno3D is huge. I forget who... Yeah, Inno3D is PC partner.

Starting point is 01:21:00 Inno3D is a flippin' enormous AIB. They own Zotac, InnoVision, or Inno3D. They own, hold on, Consumer Electronics. They're like a huge OEM, uh, gaming. Here we go,

Starting point is 01:21:26 man. They do digital signage, logistics, casino industry stuff. Yeah. You, you own a major brand GPU. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:21:42 Good job. Yeah. Oh no. new topic now sure we get to game at work everyone everyone on the planet gets to game at work now linkedin has confirmed that they will be introducing gaming features and that they are currently working on three games called queens inference Inference, and Cross Climb. It's unclear if LinkedIn's parent company, Microsoft, will be involved in any way other than owning the whole company. But it appears that these games will be puzzle games like Wordle or Sudoku. Researcher Nima Auge says that the code for the new features contains a leaderboard that ranks companies by their

Starting point is 01:22:26 employees in game scores according to a linkedin spokesperson the games are intended to unlock a bit of fun deepen relationships and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations which means everyone gets to game at work now just kidding this sounds really dumb but that's okay why are you being such a hater i mean i can what do they do do they run out of things to make hold on did linkedin run out of things to make that that's my real question you understand that this whole thing was your idea right was it how the problem that can make sense what did i say oh no oh no you took one online okay so he cut out there but what he what he was saying was when you took one online 2014 yeah yeah 2014. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, you're cutting out. So I got to inform the people. Got you back now.

Starting point is 01:23:27 So he's back now? Just send it again. One online course in gamification in 2014, I think it was, or 2016. And you came back to work the next day, all fired up about your ideas for turning basically everything on the LTT forum into some kind of gamified thing. Everything from interacting with posts to responding to them to updating freaking profile pictures was going to be gamified. And if I recall correctly, we actually put together what was going to be like kind of a compelling plan

Starting point is 01:24:05 to make it like a tech hub um like buy sell trade was going to be gamified in some way and there were going to be incentives for like participation and uh we were basically like yeah we could like turn it into like a social media platform, essentially, by making everything like gamified. And it was it was actually a really cool idea. And now you're just mad because LinkedIn got there first. Yeah, well, we realized that forums were horrendously dying and never coming back. So kind of pause that plan a little bit. But yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:24:44 I guess they're taking game vacation extremely literally here just going like all right let's just add an actual video game um which is kind of sick i i just i don't know it it it reeks of like they either ran out of things to do or they wanted to do some type of like uh fun hackathon thingy and and people ended up making games and they're like should we do something with this sure let's give it to the people um i don't know it seems so odd i can't imagine any company there's gonna be like one company out there that for some reason like cares about this a lot and like actually has like dedicated time for their people to like compete on these games there's going to be one but that

Starting point is 01:25:30 company's going to be very silly i don't think so and there's going to be no more i think there's just going to be people who just want to play games and companies being kind of annoyed about this i love the idea that if you do play this at work, your boss will probably be able to see that you did that. And be like, hey, wait, what? Speaking of, should we get into a big topic here? Sure, why not? Glassdoor is not 100% anonymous.

Starting point is 01:26:09 Glassdoor has been snitching according to ars technica software professional who emailed glassdoor customer support to request the removal of information from her decade-old account instead found that glassdoor took the name that she provided in that email and added it to her Glassdoor profile without her permission. They then repeatedly denied requests to remove her name from her profile, insisting that no one else would see the information. She then attempted to delete the account, but found that this only deactivated the account and didn't remove the problematic information. She finally requested a complete data erasure, which deleted the Glassdoor account,

Starting point is 01:26:50 but didn't delete the associated Fishbowl account that Glassdoor had created for her without her permission. Glassdoor acquired professional networking site Fishbowl, this is the first I'm hearing of it, in 2021 and began integrating the two sites last july including automatically signing up glassdoor users for fishbowl accounts i don't think that's okay as fishbowl requires user verification glassdoor has begun requiring more information and has changed its terms of service to include language that says that they may update your profile with information

Starting point is 01:27:25 we obtained from third parties. Some users have reported details like the name of their employer or home city being changed without permission or without a notification. That new information was sometimes seriously inaccurate, like a worker in California being listed as living in England. Glassdoor claims that they vigorously defend their users' right to anonymous free speech in court. So our discussion question is, does insisting on collecting this information undermine Glassdoor's mission? And what is the risk of keeping it?

Starting point is 01:28:03 And I think these are fairly self-explanatory. Yes, collecting this information does undermine Glassdoor's mission and the risk of keeping it is potentially outing, whether it's accidental or whether it's on purpose, potentially outing anonymous whistleblowers that rely on platforms like Glassdoor in order to speak out against their employers. By the way, you're coming through. We were able to understand all that, but you are like very low quality roboting. Oh, is it fixed now?

Starting point is 01:28:36 I will shut up for a bit. No, yeah, you're roboting really heavy. Yeah, that's a really, that's a rough one. I will warn people as well that if you're not at a really big company it can be pretty obvious who you are when you leave a glass door so just keep that in mind um but yeah the whole idea of this is that it's supposed to be super anonymous so this is pretty obviously pretty sketchy what's the risk of keeping it uh the risk of keeping it is really high

Starting point is 01:29:05 because you risk retaliation from the employer. And potentially, depending on what you write, you risk your higher ability. Because if a prospective company is able to find the Glassdoor review that you're leaving and it's like really, really emotionally charged or something like that,

Starting point is 01:29:23 it could potentially hurt your higher ability, which probably don't work. Well well as is so often the case the risk is not the glass door though nothing will happen to them yep the risk is just to their users that had no say in any of this which is extremely frustrating yeah definitely absolutely uh something that isn't super frustrating is steam families launching in beta valve has launched steam families on the steam beta client uh which is in quote we should do sponsors the card is not there we listen to the cards we should do sponsors okay all right do you want me to do it because you sound like robot man yeah that would be good okay got it uh let me know when

Starting point is 01:30:06 you're ready dan wow so so respectful normally i never get asked i'm always ready man come on let's go all right jawa oh he is wow okay that was fast uh have you had a terrible experience buying or selling a used gpu on facebook marketplace save yourself from all those no-shows and lowball offers with java our sponsor they're a marketplace for gamers by gamers and they make selling your old graphics card pretty simple if you want to get rid of your gpus immediately java can buy them from you in a couple of clicks you just follow the steps on their site and get an instant quote and a free shipping label. Most sellers will get paid within one business day after Jawa receives the part. You can also easily list and sell your old computer or other components.

Starting point is 01:30:52 Plus, they have a ton of experienced and verified builders offering rigs at prices far lower than buying pre-built straight from larger manufacturers. Jawa has a community of over 8 000 members on discord offering advice on buying selling and troubleshooting go check them out at the link below sell your old graphics card and help offset the cost of your new upgrades you green stop leaking your personal photos and videos from your decrypted cloud storage oops i broke it uh oh wow it's fine just ignore it move on okay uh no one wants to see them people want to see linus they just don't want to see your uh you know your photos and videos from your decrypted cloud storage including hackers uh you green is

Starting point is 01:31:39 introducing their nas sync series it has a ton of features including professional data security features real-time protection and scheduled scans keeping your data safe from threats check out their dxp 4800 plus powered by a 12th gen 5 core intel processor it delivers fast processing for smooth operation with its 10 gig network port enjoy fast download speeds of up to 1,250 megabits per second. That's one way to say that. When equipped with an SSD. No more awkward moments when you're trying to show your grandma photos and it's just too slow even for her.

Starting point is 01:32:16 It's equipped with an 8 gigabyte DDR5 memory, expandable up to 64 gigs. With the NAS app, you can stream movies, access photos, transfer and manage files easily. Plus, the integrated AI smart assistant lets you search pictures by text. That'd save you a lot of time, genuinely, if you store a lot of photos. The NAS Sync DXP4800 Plus has four bays supporting up to 96 terabytes of storage capacity.

Starting point is 01:32:41 Check out the Ugreen NAS Sync DXP 4800 plus and its smaller brother the nasync 480t with four nvme slots uh below yeah and last the apos white fox eclipse we worked with apos to release the set of ltd keycaps announced earlier where you can hit the banana key whenever you desire or the boxer's key or the screwdriver key uh yeah it's uh it's pretty great um don't worry if bananas are not your thing they also want you guys to to meet their white fox eclipse keyboard very clean very good looking show keyboard okay hold on that i forgot to show off. The camera wasn't even on me.

Starting point is 01:33:27 Here's the white Fox one. One feature that I think is pretty cool is you can just take that off. Wow. Easy serviceability. Now you can get at those key caps, clean them all nicely and easily without screws, all that type of stuff. I'll show the other one off real quick. Here's the LTT one. So you can see it's color themed,

Starting point is 01:33:49 including part of the back plate, which is pretty sweet. You've got your screwdriver button, your banana button. There's like a widget thing here. There's boxers, including a little bit of a bulge. It looks great.

Starting point is 01:34:00 Feels great. Good switches. It's a normal sized bulge. Okay. This 68 key mechanical keyboard has the standard hot swappable switches and universal keycap compatibility which is nice but what makes it special is its carefully crafted parts such as a flexible pcb with pour-on switch foam and vibration-isolating edge gaskets. It can be used wired or wirelessly via Bluetooth and is designed to sound and look great. It sounds amazing. It sounds very good.

Starting point is 01:34:32 I don't know if this will come through. Should I put it out to Mike? Yep. Oh, that space bar is nice. Very nice. Yeah, I had to include the space bar. They have a few configurations like a high body cnc which we have here so that's the ones that you've seen as well as a low body cnc and a standard plastic body version so check it out using the link below

Starting point is 01:34:57 and use code lmgeclipse for 10 off your purchase and if you bundle the keyboard. If you bundle the keyboard up. With the LTT keycaps. You can save even more. And that link will be down there as well. Cool. Sorry. That was a lot all at the same time. Working on that for you Linus.

Starting point is 01:35:25 Working on what? Oh, I can't do that for you because I don't have access to that at all. I don't think I can hear him, by the way. You should be able to hear him. Oh, there we go. Everything's fine. I love it. You might have to ask your jive. Good job, Luke.

Starting point is 01:35:44 Nice. Thanks. Oh, no. You might have to ask your wife. Good job, Luke. Nice. Thanks. Oh, no. That is not easy right now. Luke will have to do it for you then. I don't have access to any of those. I couldn't hear him. What's happening? Oh, he was texting me. Oh. I can't access the

Starting point is 01:35:58 Merch Messages dashboard because my work account doesn't have access for some reason that is because of Luke. I think that's Yvonne's fault. Now the workaround is I have to log into some

Starting point is 01:36:14 account that I don't have the 2FA for to get access to a code for another account in order to get its 2FA. You can see where this is going. I can't access the dashboard. Do you need it?

Starting point is 01:36:30 I mean, it'd be nice to be able to access the dashboard. You don't need it. Also, you could have prepared this. Oh my God. I don't think this is my fault. Just because we have security features. I don't think so. Yeah, well, okay.

Starting point is 01:36:50 Actually, your work account is supposed to have access. I think it does. I think you're wrong. I think you're wrong, he says. Use Microsoft, not Google. Use Microsoft. Oh. You're using Google? why can't i use like yeah because if you paid attention to monday morning meetings we migrated single sign-on he's never in monday morning for everybody he's come to about as many emails he

Starting point is 01:37:18 should know he's come to about as many as you have luke um i have i have my own monday morning meetings okay yeah well where's our email blast for your monday morning meetings you don't need to know i want to know what you're doing with your full stack systems how is kubernetes going i don't know well i'm i'm doing a state of the union next monday so you'll you'll find out some stuff then um apparently it's the anniversary of the hack right now yeah that. That's kind of cool. Is it really? I wish we were back there again. Has it been a year?

Starting point is 01:37:49 I wish we were doing it again, dude. I'm working tomorrow. I could just stay here all night. I'm down. I could work out and click on heads. I want, I want this life.

Starting point is 01:38:00 That's all I need to be a happy boy. That's all I need. If it's like, Oh, I'm sad. It's all i need if it's like oh i'm sad it's like hmm what have i not done in a while is it either working out or is it clicking on heads there's probably one of them and if i do that thing i'll probably no longer be sad anymore it's usually how it works yep i've lost linus yeah he's gone I can do another topic he's not gone he's trying to get 2FA for his Microsoft account now I bet you that's what he's doing

Starting point is 01:38:31 yup request denied I hate 2FA so much the microsoft one is so annoying it does that so often i'll just be like no no you're not allowed you have to type in a number and then you have to also biometrically authenticate with your phone it's like how many times do you have and then you have to like to be able to many times do you have and then you have to like to be able to access the Microsoft authenticator app you have to biometrically authenticate

Starting point is 01:39:10 and then to be able to approve the login request you have to biometrically authenticate again it's like bro come on I just keep everything on post-it notes it says it doesn't have access okay my bad we can fix that

Starting point is 01:39:28 i hate you all i don't like being a real company can we just go back to having one shared microsoft account we would probably save money as well just have all the usernames and passwords in a sheet in a google sheet again no we would need we would need save money as well just have all the usernames and passwords in a sheet in a google sheet again no we would need we would need to log into google to to like get access to that i gotta i gotta send a message so i remember to do this next week oh my god okay dan what are we supposed to be doing right now aren't we supposed to be doing right now? Aren't we supposed to be doing merch messages? I guess. I guess. I don't even know anymore.

Starting point is 01:40:09 Sure. No, we're supposed to do topics. We finished merch messages, and then I was going to do another topic, and we went into sponsors. Yeah, and then after sponsors, we do three more merch messages. We're back. I was doing three things at once during that sponsor segment, so sorry I didn't put the card up. Hi, DL.

Starting point is 01:40:26 During the GPU pandemic, did you hear anything about how sales of peripherals were affected? Probably they went up a lot. That would be my guess. I mean, almost anything related to computers and technology went up a lot during the pandemic and then went down yeah i bearded tech guy one bearded tech guy two and oh has the preliminary data from the lab influenced any personal purchases from any of y'all yet either steering

Starting point is 01:40:59 towards or away from a product. I was reading full-blown chat. I didn't hear that. See, this is why I need access to the dashboard. So there's a Galaxy S7 somewhere that I need a code from. Oh, I can do that for you. Oh my gosh. Has the labs made you buy a product yet because you saw good things from uh the that no not for me personally but i guarantee you that it will eventually do i have to tap it'll happen it resulted in me getting a product kind of the processor in my most recent build oh

Starting point is 01:41:47 oh boy oh yeah yeah 7800x3d the you got the worst of the best yeah and then and then got a better one it was dead nice yeah that worked for me aj says i should have access now oh hey nice brought to you by me on a random train in Japan wait you guys are in the same country? I didn't really put this together until now AJ Linus is in Japan no way that's hilarious

Starting point is 01:42:20 that is hilarious I hope you're enjoying your trip AJ and Linus I mean we're both working apparently so yeah victory for me dude oh so good

Starting point is 01:42:34 oh man that's really funny that's actually kind of interesting like everyone I know is going to Japan right now dude yeah i was i was talking to someone about this i showed the dashboard for a second and now it's prompting me for a password yeah well it loads without the like the hooks or whatever so no data is actually going to flow through the one that you see for a second it's just the just the front end um i don't like technology uh i had something to say oh yeah japan was one of those countries that stayed closed for a really long time um so people that

Starting point is 01:43:16 had wanted to go visit there are kind of all you know they had to wait for a pretty significant amount of time so people are kind of rushing in right now. I think that's what's going on. They also, yeah, there's also a super budget airline, Zip Air, that just opened up service, direct service from Vancouver to Japan. We have a friend that paid like $700 each for direct flights. And like, yeah, sure, it's economy or whatever.

Starting point is 01:43:42 But like, honestly, I would rather sit in economy on a newly retrofitted plane than sit in business class on an old plane. Like, they have these little trays that fit your phone. And it's just like, oh, this is great. They have no built-in entertainment system, but they have somewhere for me to put the one I brought with me. Which is perfect and exactly what I wanted anyway. I set up my kids with a Switch sitting in there, and all three

Starting point is 01:44:11 of them side by side, and they just were able to play Switch games. Yeah, they had a pretty good flight, honestly. I would love it if the screens on planes just had an HDMI in and you could just use. Um,

Starting point is 01:44:32 did I just guess correctly? Okay. Okay. Check. Um, okay. A more, I want to talk about you being in Japan,

Starting point is 01:44:42 but we should do more merch messages. Sure. We should keep that rolling. A long while back, there was a frequent string of shows where either one of you both couldn't make it. Since then, you've been on a zero-miss streak. Was it an attempt to test the waters on many hosts? No. no it was um basically us kind of accepting that we couldn't make it to the show sometimes and being totally fine with someone else hosting it and then we were totally both able to make it to the show for a very very very long time because of various lockdown related reasons we weren't

Starting point is 01:45:22 going anywhere we weren't doing anything so we were always on wanshow and then it's just become a meaningless dick measuring competition to see who can keep the street going the longest and if there's one thing that neither luke nor i will accept it's that um one of us definitely has a bigger dick it isn't me and um i'll never admit it oh because that means i'm here to keep both of you honest because there's now no excuse for the wang show to not happen yeah so through through various sicknesses and various vacations and various time zones and et cetera. We've just always somehow made it work.

Starting point is 01:46:09 Yep. Yep. And I, and now that we've both made it work, um, there's just like, neither of us is going to back down no matter, no matter how much we both know the answer.

Starting point is 01:46:19 I've had, I've had the like theory craft of like, if I end up in the hospital, can I convince them to like give me a laptop with a webcam so i can do which i i have actually thought about that like okay so linus is in the hospital is it gauche to make him do the wan show still uh like who would who would have power who would have power of attorney all right you want okay oh you know what she'll enable this behavior could yvonne appear in my stead does it does that work no does it work like that no no i think yvonne is me legally no

Starting point is 01:46:56 no no no if she had power of attorney to let me point a camera at you if you were unconscious then that's okay. I think that's fair. That's what I'm asking, basically. That's what I'm asking. If she talks and I just am... And you're unconscious body... Yeah, that's fair.

Starting point is 01:47:19 I have planned for these contingencies. I think that counts. I think that counts. Excellent. And honestly, if all three of us for these contingencies. I think that counts. Yep. Okay. I think that counts. Good. I think that counts. Excellent. Yeah. And honestly, if all three of us agree, then it just does. I think Linus would be more upset if he missed Wanshow while he was unconscious. Yeah. Honestly,

Starting point is 01:47:36 me too. Honestly, I'd wake up extremely angry. Yeah. Yes. What do you mean? You can find a way. I'd be like, get back down. My life is over. I lost to luke it's over it's done take me out coach coma show oh man oh man if the show starts too late it ends up like that honestly i think we're pretty good at keeping energy up not always i guess uh let's see do you want any more if we had more i think sure as a physician we take patient privacy seriously we can lose our jobs or be fined if patient

Starting point is 01:48:13 identifiers leak what would you say is an appropriate fine for companies having customer data stolen oh yeah this one's really rough because like oh man what constitutes customer data and like now you're kind of weaponizing like if if you have a competitor now you have a weapon of either putting a bounty on them or trying to do it yourself, like breaking into their stuff and then leaking their data so that you can get them crushed. Um,

Starting point is 01:48:52 that's an interesting angle. I didn't really think of like, it's, it's actually an issue because companies that do a very significant amount to protect their customers data do sometimes get broken into you know like yeah oh and it's it's one of those things where it's like who's liable if something gets really like stolen like not not leaked not carelessly like if if if if you put a lock on your door and you have an alarm system and you

Starting point is 01:49:27 have a dog and someone breaks into your house and takes your stuff and the insurance company is basically just like i don't know yeah you should have had an automated turret um no coverage you're gonna be mad right like why is it is it on you're the victim actually yikes yeah like we really just want to line a bunch of insurance companies pockets because every company is now going to need mad insurance for this i don't know it's it's a tough one for me i think i think in general for most sites and services people just need to be more aware that they're sharing their data and potentially just not sometimes if they're uncomfortable with it.

Starting point is 01:50:05 Um, cough, cough, things like 23andMe and stuff like that. Um, and with other things, like when it starts to touch things like medical and, and, and whatnot,

Starting point is 01:50:15 um, maybe, maybe certain levels of personal data should have something like that on it, uh, to try to push companies to try to make sure that they have good security practices and maybe yeah maybe have insurance in place so that if if people's identities are stolen or whatnot because of this that that insurance can step in and give them a certain amount of payout so they can have money uh in the bank to deal with the financial ramifications of that scenario.

Starting point is 01:50:47 Security is barely thought about. That's just not true, dude. Like actually not true. It depends. Security is barely thought about at some very tiny companies that can't do it because having a full-time security specialist on your staff is going to be very expensive uh developers are very expensive as is and then having one specialized on something that you find one that's actually good and not just bsing you and you just don't understand it well enough to know if they're actually doing a good job a hundred percent big thing and is that one person enough to hold back the horde? And even if you have a super, super, super good security team, you're still going to have vulnerabilities here or there.

Starting point is 01:51:33 So like, it might still happen. I don't know. It's tough. I would love to. I'm usually on the like, know find them harder crush the companies kind of side of things um and i know this might be this might seem hypocritical because i run a web company that technically has so many user data but i just i don't think all things are equal here um negligence is the big one but i don't know exactly how to define it

Starting point is 01:52:04 yeah how do you how do you really get someone on that um like like if we if we think about the forum leak like you you brought up earlier if you think of someone if you think this thing that this company you like is doing is good if you had a company that you didn't like doing the same thing would you still think it's good well it's like okay let's flip it around if you if you had a company that you didn't like doing the same thing would you still think it's good well it's like okay let's flip it around if you if you think finding these companies for this thing is good are you just as okay with that fine applying to you if that happens to you that's what that's how i'm trying to kind of place it right now so like when the forum leak happened it's like yeah it sucked do i think we should have been fined for that?

Starting point is 01:52:45 I don't really think so. I don't think we did anything particularly wrong. And I don't think that the data that was on the forum was like really too crushing for anybody. I think the main bad part was like, you know, you probably shouldn't have two passwords used in the same spot. It wasn't really that yeah yeah yeah sorry um but if you're a a bank or uh i don't know someone who deals with like passport details or um sure medical things or things of super high value or social insurance numbers yeah maybe there should be more precedents on there i don't know necessarily what those requirements would

Starting point is 01:53:31 have to be but like yeah i don't know i think it should maybe be a sliding scale is what i'm trying to say and to be clear neither of us are condoning in any way the sale of this private data and then you know the subsequent leakage of it from somewhere else i mean that that is 100 Neither of us are condoning in any way the sale of this private data. And then, you know, the subsequent leakage of it from somewhere else. I mean, that is 100% on you. You should be fined into oblivion. But in terms of just absolutely destroying any company that has one employee potentially make a mistake and they were doing their best. make a mistake and they were doing their best and like i don't necessarily think that that's going to be sustainable either can we talk about steam families now though yeah let's jump let's jump back to that speaking of things that were unsustainable playing games with my kids is a huge problem because up until now...

Starting point is 01:54:26 Every kid needs their own copy of everything. Every kid needs their own copy of everything. And that will still be true to an extent for anything that's online-based multiplayer where we all want to play at the same time. where we all want to play at the same time. But one of the bigger problems for me has been that unlike 10, 20 years ago, where I could buy a library of games and anyone could play any one of those games at a time without interfering with the others, the way that it's worked on Steam up until now, you can share your library with your family,

Starting point is 01:55:03 but only one of you can use that library at a time. And it didn't used to be such a big problem because offline mode was a pretty good workaround. You could just launch the game on one machine, go offline, then launch a different game on another machine and leave that one online if they're playing something that requires multiplayer. Or in many cases, you could just get away with it you could just launch the games one after another and it would just kind of work even though strictly speaking it wasn't supposed to work but then valve locked down offline mode a lot more they do a lot more online checks and it got to the point where it wasn't doable and they started enforcing their one game from a library um per in use at a time policy much more strictly to the point where i would log in to do a quick

Starting point is 01:55:56 benchmark at work and it would kick my son off of rocket league at home or whatever the case may be and it kind of sucks because it used to be you bought your whole library of games and anyone could play them as long as you weren't both playing the same game at the same time, then no harm, no foul, right? Well, guess what? Valve is taking it back to that. So they've launched Steam Families on the Steam Beta client, which is a collection of new and existing family-related features to replace both Steam Family Sharing and Steam Family View. A Steam family can consist of up to six members, and everyone in the Steam family gets access to any family-sharing compatible games in their other family members' libraries now. So instead of only being able to play one game from a library at a time across the entire family users can now play

Starting point is 01:56:45 different games at the same time that's freaking awesome yeah adults consent parental controls controlling playtime limits allowing access to appropriate games and more and a child account now has the ability to request for an adult to pay for their shopping cart making it way easier for parents to purchase games for their kids and as a parent way more importantly making it way easier for parents to purchase games for their kids and, as a parent, way more importantly, making it way easier for kids to not purchase games on their own. Because in the past, you basically had to choose between the inconvenience of having to go down and enter your credit card information every time or the risk of your kids going and buying stuff with a saved credit card in their account. Now, I do see a downside to this.

Starting point is 01:57:35 As a developer, how do I feel about my games being eligible for family sharing now that family sharing is so much more convenient and so much more powerful? Like family sharing was basically so kneecapped that i essentially didn't use it i ended up buying multiple copies of games just so that i wouldn't have to worry about interrupting my kids while they're playing when i want to play or when i want to benchmark something or whatever the case may be as it is now it seems like like a lot fewer people will have to do that. And as their own independent living, breathing organisms, should my kids be entitled or my roommates or my friends or whoever my family is, should they be entitled to play these games they didn't buy?

Starting point is 01:58:22 Will I be less likely to make my game eligible for family sharing under this system what would you how would you feel yeah i don't know i'm reading through the faq right now because i'm trying to get a vibe for like how a family unit could be formed because one thing that i'm worried about if i'm a developer um is the you know uh a close-knit group of six friends at school form a family um and share one steam account amongst all of them and and and polycules are totally okay i'm not judging sure yep there's like 32 000 in the seattle one and it's growing every day it's not sustainable. So, yeah, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:59:08 It doesn't sound like there's any limitations to like under one roof or anything like that. I'm actually not really finding pretty much any limitations at all. They do say that the terms of how they define a family is subject to change. So maybe they'll figure that out over time. There's also some interesting stuff if you leave a steam family um you will need to wait one year from when you from when you joined the previous one oh that's not that big of a deal oh interesting so you can't just like float around from family to family but one year from your join date of the previous one not your exit date so if you if you okay well that kind of makes sense that could be a zero day difference if you're at above a year uh yeah as long as you as long as you don't um

Starting point is 02:00:00 well basically it says that you don't have to mourn your old family for a year. Yeah. As long as you were with them for at least a year. Yeah, which might be good for some people. You know, things happen in family units. It's just, I don't know. I would want to enable this, but it is definitely a scenario where I guarantee you people are going to misuse it. Now,

Starting point is 02:00:27 honestly, in most situations... Man, our benchmark accounts? We're only going to have to have a couple of copies of every game spread out across all of our benchmark accounts, which is going to make them way more effective for us to use. Those benchmark accounts are in a family, dude. They're all...

Starting point is 02:00:43 Yeah, it's clearly not a family though so like yeah there's definitely uses for this that are not going to be family now i yeah honestly i think that there's nothing wrong with that um us basically not necessarily buy like five copies of every stupid game just so that we can run them for 20 minutes every week to benchmark them or whatever but if it is that friend group from school i used to share games with my friends you'd trade games all the time temporarily like oh i have this snes game you have this n64 game we both have both consoles for some reason i don't know why i made this analogy this weird but you can borrow this one i'll borrow that one and we'll trade back in a week or two whatever that was total very normal

Starting point is 02:01:23 um i understand that making it all digital and making giving it the ease of use of something like steam is going to massively increase the amount of that trading that happens but you are sort of locked into this family unit for a year at a time so it's not like you're jumping all over the place based on what game you want to play um so i don't know i hope it okay, because this seems like a really cool thing. And honestly, the main way that I would potentially use it is to encourage people to pick up a game themselves. Like here, look, you can borrow this for a bit.

Starting point is 02:01:56 I've definitely never lent anyone my Origin account so that they could try out Titanfall 2 and then convince them to just buy it for themselves afterwards that's definitely never a thing that i've done by the way neither of us is recommending ever doing do not lend out your game accounts yeah um but it's just like yeah i don't know i think i would be okay with it i think i I would turn it on. Yeah, I think it's pretty cool. I think it's good. I'm a little bit worried about how this might go,

Starting point is 02:02:30 but I really hope it goes well because I think it's overall a very good thing. Yeah. And I think, honestly, it might encourage the sales of certain games. I can't say that of everything. Okay. There are definitely things that are not going to be universally regarded as good things and i think it's time for us to shift our conversation to the

Starting point is 02:02:54 smosh song that they released uh i think it was earlier this week or last week called submissive and breedable a collaboration with bb no money um that has baby no money it's baby no money don't say bb no money come on oh do i do i have any idea who this is oh he's good i like his music genuinely come on okay so the point is, the official music video, Luke, do you want to pull it up? Yeah, sure. If you guys want to all go to the same timestamp, so maybe head to about 1.30. 1.30. About 1.30.

Starting point is 02:03:38 Yep, and then you guys can, if everyone heads over there, here, I'll drop this in the chat. I'll drop the in the chat i'll drop the link to the uh you guys we can all watch together that's how we're going to do this so that they get their views okay so i'm dropping this in all the chats oh my god it brings up twitch chat rules for my own account okay so guys just just head on over there so luke's not going to screen share luke you haven't started watching yet right No Am I going to be playing audio off my computer? So you guys are all going to you're going to have to listen otherwise

Starting point is 02:04:11 you're not going to be able to hear it but you're just going to go back to the main WAN view so everyone's just going to watch it together so I'm basically going to go okay Mark and then everyone's going to play it okay? Okay so you can go back to the main view. Okay.

Starting point is 02:04:26 Yeah. All right. Okay. Will Luke be able to hear? Dan, am I going to be able to hear mine? Yeah. Without it going to stream? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:04:33 Luke, you can just pretend. Okay. Where on earth does this come from? Why do you do this to me? Do I just play it off my phone so I can hear it or something? It goes to B. B doesn't go to stream. We're giving Dan a second.

Starting point is 02:04:49 Hold your hamburgers. B. B, laptop. I don't know. Play something. I mean, Luke, your laptop's been playing the whole time. I'm going to eat a random baby box every flavor bean while we wait. I mean, Luke, here's a laptop. Yeah, it's going to stream. No, don't go to stream.

Starting point is 02:05:04 Oh my god, it tastes like ash. Do you want me to just listen on my phone? Should we simplify this? Let's do the easy thing. Change our audio output on the laptop. Yeah, but then I won't be able to hear it. If I played over the speakers, you'll be able to hear it through the mic. Oh my god.

Starting point is 02:05:24 Oh, no, I figured it out. Nice. Man, those Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans are not... Some of them are not good. Aha! Success! In case you were wondering. They truly are every flavor, I presume? Okay.

Starting point is 02:05:43 They truly, truly are. Are we ready? That truly, truly are. Are we ready? That was gross. Okay, hit it. Oh, no. so so how do you how do you feel about your name being attached to a song of that type and name keynote quality out of 10 5 out of 7 perfect score can i just Can I just say

Starting point is 02:06:46 it isn't usually a problem It isn't usually a problem that Linus is slang for penis. There's so many names that are slang for penis. Peter, Johnson, Dick.

Starting point is 02:07:04 It's not really uh sounds a little on point yeah okay you know yeah i i i i just mean it doesn't really come up that much technically it's a slang but nobody really uses it um as for the whole like tip thing and tech tips and Linus, this is actually the second time this has happened. I don't know if you remember that. The previous song? Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:07:36 So the previous song to kind of make this a thing is from the Moam Boys. There we go. Yeah. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I've kind of enjoyed that while Linus is technically slaying for penis, nobody really uses it. And now that it's happened twice,

Starting point is 02:08:00 it feels dangerously close to becoming a thing. Yeah. Yeah, yeah yeah yeah i can't i can't really say that it's my preference i don't think people are really using it that way i think they're just riffing off of tip i just to be honest yeah i think you're reading artistic expression you know tip and and linus is is a good cultural reference i would i would uh i would agree with that i don't think it's minus meaning penis i don't think anyone's doing that to be honest i want okay i want bb merch now that just says like just the tips i'm gonna wear it around work if if baby no money releases merch that that's it what is this submissive and readable i'm not saying i am not wearing anything else oh my gosh i mean you should see my computer backgrounds to start with like

Starting point is 02:08:57 geez yeah yeah yeah i don't know how do you how do you feel about that? Did they reach out to you or did they just do it? You don't have to reach out. They just did it. Yeah, they don't need to reach out. They're on base as far as that goes. Sick. I'm not saying this is not well within their rights to do. I'm just saying it's, you know.

Starting point is 02:09:22 No, no, I was just wondering. What? Yeah. Are you not flattered? I would be flattered. I think it's you know no no i was just wondering i'm not like yeah are you are you not flattered i would be flattered i think it's very flattering i am you're you're culturally relevant enough to uh yeah to be a clever simile in a in a in a piece of artistic work that people will understand too yes like that's that's big. That's huge. Yeah. You know, like, you can make references to Napoleon for, you know, other things or other ideas, right? Smosh is my pet, yeah.

Starting point is 02:09:57 And you're there. You're there. I'm not likening you to Napoleon. That was an accident, but... You're like, techoleon there you go what he's short and in another country so he's napoleon yeah there you go where does it where does napoleon put his armies up his sleeve he's ltd store.com yeah oh my goodness wow so um honestly my first reaction to this was that i just have no idea what to make of it um that seems i've uh i've i've met um you know i've met the Smosh guys I think they're super cool I

Starting point is 02:10:47 have a lot of respect for them they're pioneers you know and that's sort of separate right like you can think someone's super cool or like cool or whatever but you know know things about them and you're like oh yeah I don't respect them these guys I think they're super cool and I respect them a lot

Starting point is 02:11:04 absolute builders of this space which is really cool i'm so happy to see that they're you know back together got their channel back that this is you know one of the outcomes of that was not something that i had on my bingo yeah that's pretty funny uh um seeing that uh other great creators are making music uh christmas album too when

Starting point is 02:11:34 oh my god um smash the halls with something something yeah sexy christmas album Smosh the halls with Something something Sexy Christmas album Searching for the clearest I guess Like I don't know these lyrics though dude Like all the Novo Thinkpad

Starting point is 02:11:55 Oh man Okay so anywho I don't know I don't know what else to say about this i i really i don't i don't know if i've fully got an answer to like how do you feel about uh it it being this title and subject matter of a song that your name was in not not like oh people are using my name for for penis i mean more that it's it's submissive and breedable specifically that you're referenced in does that bother you at all or just it doesn't matter that really matters yeah i know okay no i don't think that really matters i mean art is uh art is art i yeah i'm not really i'm not really going to go in and sort of question someone else's voice and someone else's

Starting point is 02:12:40 someone else's art i mean they're obviously not um they're they're they're not um it's it's not slanderous or defamatory in any way it didn't seem like it at all yeah yeah it's it's nothing to do with anything other than just like whatever tekken on my tip first thing like Linus means and maybe this is just one of those things where I just don't understand it because it's some kind of slang that I am too millennial for

Starting point is 02:13:13 I think it's more they were if I have to assume it's because they were searching for something to rhyme with feral boy Friday she the Linus yeah yeah that line is really good. You think so? Maybe. I don't know.

Starting point is 02:13:31 Maybe. Either way, I think that's a good take on it because it doesn't at all seem like anything was nefarious here. It's just supposed to be a funny song. I think some people would be like, I'm not that. I don't want to be included in this um and that's just yeah whatever i don't know that's a fair enough take but it's kind of boring and i prefer just

Starting point is 02:13:52 not caring and zero point says i don't like the rhyme of linus with lioness um the reason you don't like that is not uh subjective uh it's objective those things do not rhyme but some artistic license was taken and i was gonna say it's it's not does not rhyme that is super common in music people will pronounce they'll change even how they say words to make them sound like they flow together so yeah i wouldn't that's a i drive a chevrolet movie theater interior crocodile alligator mr mr biggie smalls yeah yeah yeah it's it's classic it's lovely yeah yeah speaking of uh things that are lovely you know that's hilarious by the way luke thought what the word was yeah yeah until not that long ago i think yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Starting point is 02:14:51 i think a lot of people think that that would be i think a ton of people think that to be honest i think biggie was an extremely influential person okay it's unlimited all right unlimited he defines language yeah okay you guys you guys have never done art have you okay uh speaking of things that are cool first human to receive neural link this is actually uh pretty cool hopefully it doesn't go poorly from here uh 29 year old nolan arbaugh a quadriplegic says that the brain implant has allowed him to play chess and civilization on his pc using his freaking mind he's quoted saying i'm so freaking lucky to be a part of this the implant works by reading brain signals from the user and translating them into bluetooth

Starting point is 02:15:40 based remote commands to control an electronic device, like a mouse cursor. For Arbaugh, this part was like, okay, that's pretty cool. For Arbaugh, this initially involved trying to move his hands. Obviously, he can't because he's quadriplegic, but trying to, and even though he's lost the ability to move them, that would translate into mouse cursor movement, which is like wild to honestly even really think about from there it just became intuitive for him to start imagining the cursor moving and basically it was

Starting point is 02:16:13 like he was using the force on a cursor and he could get it to move wherever he wanted this resulted in an eight hour straight gaming session on civ 6 outside of the standard Neuralink trials. And he just had to quit because the device needed to wirelessly charge. Also, he stated that we've ran into some issues. I don't want people to think this is the end of the journey. There's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life. So, so far, that's really cool for people who might be struggling with something like being a quadriplegic being able to be enabled to have more things to do be able to play chess be able to play civ that's fantastic super cool i think that's great really really cool hopefully like i said earlier it doesn't go bad um uh but yeah wanted to share some good news what else do we

Starting point is 02:17:07 got glassware expensable menu um oh this is old this is great after lax last week's tax write-off sale community members on the ltt forum pointed out that there was a restaurant in Toronto called Good Fortune that had a campaign where they renamed their menu items after office supplies so that office workers could expense them. Luke, do you want to screen share that for the kind folks out there? Yeah. We've got the Diamond Chicken Burger, a.k.a. the Mini Dry Erase Whiteboard. We've got the Double Your Fortune Burger, renamed the Ergonomic Aluminum Laptop Stand.

Starting point is 02:17:55 The Emerald Veggie Burger, renamed the Wired Earphones with Mic. And their French fries, palm fries, or palm fries, renamed USB-wired mouse. I like the... Our discussion question... My favorite one is the Haritos... Oh, boy.

Starting point is 02:18:16 Isn't $12.50 a little cheap for... Damn, this delay, though. Our discussion question is, isn't $12.50 a little cheap for an aluminum laptop stand? Depends. If it's for apple yes yeah that's fair yeah i thought it was pretty funny it is it is i think it's been reposted because this this was happened a long time ago i think um yeah it was a long time ago yeah okay okay sounds good it was uh It was a short-term promo.

Starting point is 02:18:46 I mean, should we do it on the store? Anyone want to write off some LTT merch? The funny part is... It's fraud. Some amount of LTT merch would be... You have screwdrivers, cable management tools, thermal paste. A lot of it would be fine. It just is already okay. Yeah, you could probably write that off okay backpacks had a business that needed that

Starting point is 02:19:07 could potentially okay i don't know a lot of it might be fine uh what else we got i don't think we have much i think we're mostly through it um oh but we haven't talked about the apex legends hack oh and we have some announcements and there's some other things going on we got stuff i just have to scroll up to find it uh i'll do this one during an official apex legends tournament last weekend at least two professional players were allegedly hacked mid-game leading to the final of the apex legends global series being postponed in two separate matches imperial hall or sorry yeah imperial hall was given an aim bot and gen burton was suddenly able to see the location and health of everyone else in

Starting point is 02:19:52 the round the cheat menu was opened on gen burton's screen contained a joke option of vote putin and a message was sent via his in-game chat which read apex hacking global series by destroyer 2009 and random the anti-cheat police department a volunteer run group that gathers intelligence on cheats and cheat vendors wow i didn't know this was a thing issued a statement saying that there was a remote code execution exploit present in either the game itself or an easy anti-cheat easy anti-cheat however denied that there was any remote code execution vulnerability within their system in their first tweet in five years destroyer 2009 uh the hacker taking responsibility for the incident has since spoken to tech crunch and said that the hack was mostly just for fun but also to force

Starting point is 02:20:45 respawn to fix the vulnerability he used to hack them ea doesn't have a bug bounty program uh he didn't say exactly how he you uh how he hacked the matches beyond that it had nothing to do with the server and it never went outside the game and didn't involve infecting either player's rig or malware destroyer 2009 apparently with malware with malware sorry destroyer 2009 apparently has a reputation for hacking high profile players for the lulz as for why he specifically targeted again burton and imperial how destroyer 2009 said that they're just nice guys who deserve free attention and views discussion question is this a problem specific to apex legends Legends? Why aren't

Starting point is 02:21:25 games like this more secure? I mean, the reason I wanted to talk about this this week was because you've been kind of going off on the state of online gaming and how utterly broken it is. We talked last week about a hypothetical peripheral that basically was watching everything you did in real time to ensure that absolutely nothing that happened on screen had any disconnect from what your hands were doing in person something like this the ability of a hacker to force another player to cheat i think shows a how sophisticated the software is getting how sophisticated these um these players are getting and b how utterly unsalvageable online gaming is um i just don't really know what else to say at

Starting point is 02:22:15 this point i i think like i've talked at length about why i you know i had to find a way i had to find a way and i got it i got my. But I've talked at length about how games like Ballers Gate 3 and Helldivers and other like more recent kind of co-op or even single player focused games. There's a fantastic, very well working co-op mod for Elden Ring, but Elden Ring is more a single player game.

Starting point is 02:22:41 Elden Ring popped off. A lot of these non-online competitive games have been doing very well lately and i think in no small part it's because hacking in competitive games has gotten to a ridiculous point um and i don't i don't know if it's because companies aren't investing enough or if it's just a losing battle no matter what they do or what it is but the percentages of cheaters in games is crazy the amount of streamers that get caught all the time cheating is wild because if the cheaters are if streamers are getting caught cheating you know there's a lot more because it's a lot easier when you're not on stream um so it's just it's it's frustrating and it ruins things because

Starting point is 02:23:27 the the biggest problem which we've also talked about is it brings to to doubt every other loss or death or whatever it is that you have in a game even if that person isn't cheating it's like well were they did i actually lose because of a skill gap did I actually lose because of a skill gap? Did I actually lose because of a lack of preparation, whatever else? Or did I lose just because this person's cheating? Which really sours the whole experience. I think a lot of people out there are okay with, you know, not being good enough to win all the time, but don't really feel super okay with losing because, you know, the other person might have actually been worse but they installed something and now they win anyways um so it's it's it's rough i know a lot of people personally that have kind of stopped really playing that many online competitive games

Starting point is 02:24:18 especially online competitive shooters i even know people that have traditionally not really been interested in anything other than online competitive shooters that have started shifting to things like legal legends of all games because yes you can cheat in legal legends really yeah but it's a lot less impactful than cheating in something like say war zone, yeah, it is what it is. But this sucks. This sucks a lot. There's a merch message here that I want to jump to real quick because it's kind of on topic.

Starting point is 02:24:57 From Brandon G. Luke, Larian announced today that Baldur's Gate will not be getting any major DLC. As someone who hasn't played yet, this gets rid of a barrier to entry for me, Yeah, I'll speak to that. I've actually reached out to them about this already. I am sad. Strong disagree. Very angry. No, actually.

Starting point is 02:25:27 I'm sad because I really like the characters i really like the story and there's honestly a lot of ways that i could see it going that i think would be fantastic that team is amazing from from bottom to the top as far as i can tell so i think they would make a very good dlc but if you read the article more the reason that they give for doing so is because they didn't think their hearts were in it. Apparently, there was communication before BG3 was released about other projects that they could work on that were not BG3. And the team was excited to work on those. And when BG3 was this like incredible smash hit success, the natural stepping for a gaming company is to make DLC or additional content of some kind through expansions or whatever else so they can continue to monetize that game.

Starting point is 02:26:08 That is what you naturally do. So Larian stepped into that normal thing that you do, but their hearts weren't really in it. They were excited to work on this other thing. And the CEO of Larian, Sven Vicky, i hope i pronounce his name correctly um just decided like you know what no we're gonna do the thing that we really want to do which is this next project that they're not announcing um and you know what i have some sadness for not receiving dlc for this game that's fantastic but i have more excitement for the next thing that they end up doing so as far as i'm concerned it's the right move i think that's good if they if they're if they're well funded

Starting point is 02:26:51 a well-funded next thing yeah exactly right like whatever um so yeah i don't know i think that's uh i think that's good i also think the next thing that they're doing is not specifically D&D. There's been some talks about that as well, which might be a good move. Their previous game, Original Sin 2, as far as my understanding goes, is not based on any of that. And it's fantastic. I don't think they need to be attached to D&D at all,

Starting point is 02:27:21 personally. I don't think that's required in the slightest. I think they have no issue creating worlds creating interesting storylines creating interesting character bases all that type of stuff i think they'll be completely fine doing that um so yeah i'm excited for whatever they do next and the motivations behind this move make me excited for the fact that they did this move despite the fact that I'm still sad that I don't get DLC. So yeah, I think it's good.

Starting point is 02:27:47 I'm also happy. I'll say this, that they're not farming the DLC out to some other company. Who's going to screw it up. Uh, because we, we see stuff like that happen as well. Um, so they didn't,

Starting point is 02:27:58 they didn't talk about this game. Yes. They, they didn't talk about doing this because I don't think it ever even came to mind necessarily. But there are absolutely companies that have done that and would do that and they're not doing that as far as I can tell. So that's great

Starting point is 02:28:13 because I would rather it doesn't get touched than it gets ruined. So yeah, I'm cool with that. All right. Are there any other topics we want to get through real quick here i feel like um the canadia ban on flipper zero update could probably use a little bit of discussion the makers of the flipper zero have published an official response to the canadian government's

Starting point is 02:28:40 proposed ban on both the zero and similar devices as a way of reducing audio theft. But here's the thing. A primary argument against banning the Flipper Zero is the fact... Oh, okay. Yeah, here's the thing. The Flipper Zero lacks the hardware necessary to replicate a keyless fob in order to gain entry into a car. Car thieves can use a keyless repeater system to pick up the signal of a keyless fob near the entrance of a home and transmit it to a nearby car, but the equipment needed to pull this off is quite a bit larger, taking up the space of a backpack and far more expensive, about $6,000 online. The Flipper Zero can capture and replicate the code from a remote control, but can't replicate the kind of rolling code used by car fobs. The Flipper Zero creators further argue that many security systems are currently relying on security through obscurity, i.e. relying on most people simply not

Starting point is 02:29:30 knowing enough about the system to exploit its flaws, which is one of the reasons that the Flipper Zero exists. Needless to say, I agree with Flipper and the Canadian government is being big dumb. Also, EVGA, who traditionally has been in the news for being super cool is in the news for something not super cool a reddit user u slash sigurds kiss whatever was recently cross-posted to the ltt subreddit the user bought a new evga gq 1000 watt gold power supply however it, it was defective, which isn't necessarily a problem. Stuff happens.

Starting point is 02:30:08 But he sent it back to EVGA, who told the user, hey, hold on to the cables and accessories that came with the unit and just send back the power supply. When they received their new unit, they connected their old cables and the PC failed to start

Starting point is 02:30:24 and there was a click, possibly indicating that an overload protection circuit had been triggered. They immediately rechecked the cables, which were the correct EVGA cables, but after some troubleshooting, they checked the voltages, their state of power with a multimeter, and found that it was way off, 12 volt instead of 3 volt, and 0 volts instead of 5 volts, etc. instead of 3 volts and 0 volts instead of 5 volts, etc. Upon the issue being reported to EVGA, customer service was able to determine the problem within a matter of minutes. At some point, the pin layout of that power supply was changed. This incident destroyed 22 terabytes of SATA drives. And this is where things get really bad because all of this is drives. And this is where things get really bad. Because all of this is bad, but this is where things get really bad. EVGA support has suggested to the user that they seek

Starting point is 02:31:12 a warranty replacement from the manufacturer of the hard drives, rather than EVGA compensating them for the drives in order to replace them. Excuse me? compensating them for the drives in order to replace them excuse me so EVGA is basically suggesting to the user that they do a little they do a little fraud on their hard drive manufacturer instead of EVGA ponying up for their mistake.

Starting point is 02:31:48 This sucks. That's really bad. It's interesting because what... I think they should do it. I don't know why it says SATA drives because like... Are you expecting them to be IDE drives? Well, because it was the SATA connector that the voltages were screwed up on

Starting point is 02:32:05 yeah but what i'm saying is i can't tell if this is hard disk or ssds there's a drastic difference in cost doesn't matter just yeah well i'm at 22 terabytes i'm assuming they're hard drives yeah um oh that that shouldn't even be if If it's hard drives... I mean, if it's either of them, you just kind of have to stomach it. It gets weird because if you're not the manufacturer of the drives, how are you verifying that this is at all what happened? But at that point, you screwed up so bad. You just got to deal with it, I think.

Starting point is 02:32:42 This sucks a lot because one of the big reasons why i used to like evga so much was because their customer service was so good to me but that was also over a decade ago so i don't know it is what it is stuff like this makes me feel like evga is uh not the company that they used to be yeah i i had never heard of them doing anything like this in the past. Not at all. Ever. I've given stories of how good of customer service they've had a million times. I've never heard anyone counter it.

Starting point is 02:33:13 This is rough. Let's talk announcements. Floatplane Spring Break. Want to talk us through what that is? Yeah, we've got something special coming for our Floatplane members. From next Monday, March 25th through March 29th, we've got something special coming for our float plane members from next monday march 25th through march 29th we're releasing extra special float plane exclusives as part of what we're calling float plane spring break it's also because we just made too many exclusives for the month which is a fun problem to have uh we'll also be doing some

Starting point is 02:33:39 giveaways including a set of custom apos ltd keycaps. You just saw those on the show, actually. Green Man Gaming Codes. You look amazing. Yeah, they're really cool. This keyboard's heavy because it's awesome. Oh, no, no. I would bring them up digitally, maybe. Bring them up to what?

Starting point is 02:33:59 Digitally? Bring them up digitally. I don't think I have that. Where do i get where do i get the digital no the link there's a link i see it now i'm bringing it uh-huh hold on hold on what guys there we go oh technology i didn't see the link in the document leave me zoom in there you go no i refuse oh my god oh anyway the key is a screwdriver uh there's a banana for the uh control i guess that is i can enter key will screw your driver the right where was the

Starting point is 02:34:36 bulge you said there was a bulge it's here right there you see it on the boxer on the box key yeah yeah super cute it's pretty sizable. What did I say earlier? It was normal size? Something like that. Anyways. Yeah. Okay.

Starting point is 02:34:59 Okay. How did I even get here? Okay, there we go. The link was in a different part of the whatever what are you doing you guys are being just mean how long how many years have you been doing this uh and uh you can actually you can buy the keycap set for yourself if you want it's $39.99 with free u.s shipping that's not bad for elsewhere in the announcements and they feel good yep yeah i kind of want one of those.

Starting point is 02:35:25 Are they a partner? Are we going to get some of those? Anyway, so we're also... Yes, they're a partner. Apparently, LTT retro screwdrivers are being given away. Wow. And one magnetic cable management home bundle. That's actually super legit.

Starting point is 02:35:38 There's a teaser for the content for next week, which I'm opening because I can do that. Mean people. I got to play this. uh i gotta play this i gotta play this dan uh yes i fixed it it's probably gonna be loud there we go yeah send it i mean you have to play it with audio i am nope laptop's muted, nice it's not my fault this time apparently we did a departmental paper airplane battle we did?

Starting point is 02:36:11 unmute! I mean, that's the use of the time my name is Luke Lafreniere we got one person from each department to do a paper airplane battle to see who can do the best design, who can make it the fastest and who can throw it the farthest hi, my name is luke lafrenier that's not how you pronounce it i'm the ceo of floatplane and the cto for linus media group that's not even accurate throw it they didn't

Starting point is 02:36:34 listen to me hold on this is wrong i'm not the floatplane ceo do we not have ecc so like by default i'm'm going to do bad. So as a side objective, I'm going to bring you random facts about Canada that progressively get more deranged over time. And I'm going to start with that Winnie Pooh is based off of a bear from Canada. Wait, really? Yeah. Which bear?

Starting point is 02:37:00 Just a bear that was in a zoo, I think. I don't know. A bear named Winnie. What's also crazy is that Canada was in a zoo i think i don't know a bear named what's also crazy winnie yeah is that canada was in a war i don't know someone asked which bear it's like well we were with denmark until 2022 it's called the whiskey war the reason why it was called the whiskey war going there planting their respective flag canada would leave whiskey and denmark would leave schnapps and they did that for like 50 years. And then sadly it ended in 2022.

Starting point is 02:37:27 Sadly. Well, that was the coolest thing ever. And then they were like, nah, as long as I don't step over the crack. Yeah. So I can take a running start. You can take a running start, yeah. No, I just want to see what it's going to do.

Starting point is 02:37:37 Oh my God. Okay. That's not good. That's terrible. Wait, no, I think that's over here. Hold on. Dude, you suck. Would you say that's not over the crack just for you i'll let it pass okay okay and then oh my god dude that's the worst

Starting point is 02:37:53 airplane design what are you even doing it's gonna hit you in the foot wow i'm going to the z drive right now anyways anyway anyways i didn't spend any time even googling how to fold a paper airplane and i haven't made one in like 15 16 years uh so i just googled canada facts and then tried to bring entertainment to the video that way linus i tried to make the video more entertaining linus do you not mentor Luke not anymore

Starting point is 02:38:30 no we don't actually work together other than WAN show that's it yeah yeah pretty much other things merch updates yeah retro screwdriver free shipping is still going deal ends March 29th.

Starting point is 02:38:45 So you've got till the pretty much the end of next week. And I think we just announced that, yeah, you can buy those keycaps. So that's all the announcements we have to get through, I believe. Yeah. Are we good then? Is that it? After dark? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:39:03 Linus, do you want to get the lights? No. yeah linus do you want to get the lights um no i'll just be i'll just be a weird bright spot okay yeah fine i'll get it no no no no no my webcam no that was that meant my lights here not yours i can just i can dim you artificially my webcam uh compensates so much for darkness i probably do that too different uh yeah see like that did nothing no that's okay all it did was make me grainier please please come back i'm gonna bring the light back then and then you condemn me all right whatever that works should i eat another birdie bots every flavor bean yes okay wait wait wait yes do that but i really hope i don't get ashtray this time before before we go into merch messages you gotta tell us about your trip how's japan

Starting point is 02:39:59 you've been there for a bit now oh boy well the birdie bots every flavored beans have uh not gone so far have any good is there is supposed to be good ones right isn't there oh god um oh oh i feel like i feel nauseous need some water um that is truly an unpleasant experience. I can guarantee you that if you just drink soy sauce, the flavor of the bean will go away. Umami bean. Thank you for that. Oh, that was awful.

Starting point is 02:40:38 Yeah, so not recommended. Yeah, okay. No, but seriously, how's how's japan been um this is getting good i got to tick i got to tick off my bucket list uh last night uh getting to experience being shoved into a packed japanese train ah nice so that's um good that's a thing that happened i felt really bad for the guy um across the train from where i was standing because i had our stroller in front of me with two children in it and whoever was jamming from the door could not see that there was a stroller that was like digging into this guy's knee and they were just they were packing he had nowhere to go and i was just i looked at him i'm

Starting point is 02:41:32 just like i have no way to prevent this like the the brakes are applied on the stroller but that means nothing nothing yeah yeah like i yeah it was only for a couple of stops but yeah they they actually did the thing where the like platform person came and shoved people into the train like it's real that's wild i don't think i've ever actually because of this roller like rolling it must have felt like there was a bit of giving it or something because they kept giving her it was pretty rough dude i felt really bad for the guy. It's not over 9000 is saying, oh, he's talking about

Starting point is 02:42:10 the other stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So how is Japan? And so far you said you got shoved onto a train. What else have you done? What have you enjoyed? What are good things? Tell me about it. And you often don't like traveling. So I'm trying to dig for like has anything good happened?

Starting point is 02:42:25 Have you enjoyed your trip? Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios is one of the most elaborate, beautiful, outstanding construction projects I think I've ever seen. Wow, cool. i've ever seen um cool it was it was crafted with a level of of of care and love that i just uh think i've rarely encountered the entire place is a complete work of art there's like two rides one of which is for very very small children um and a bunch of just like places to buy merch. In fact, I'd say Universal Studios in Japan in general has some sort of incongruity, I guess is how I would describe it. Like, you know, it's a bit of a cultural,

Starting point is 02:43:21 it's not even apparently rude. It just like isn't done to to drink a beverage while you're walking around so why do you need vending machines with beverages everywhere you know like that um everything comes so over packaged but there's no garbage cans um they every people people live in i'm in an apartment right now people live in apartments where as far as i can tell there's absolutely no space to store things but so many of the experiences that you have are to just buy random shit like i'm just having a really hard time i'm having a really hard time meshing these things together.

Starting point is 02:44:09 Like Universal Studios Japan, even compared to a Disney park. So I've been to Disneyland. I've been to Disney World. So much of what's there is not rides. It's like just stuff to buy. And that's a really bad thing about the Disney parks, but it just feels even more like that here. And yeah, so I'm just, I cannot rely on just kind of any random hole in the wall just being awesome. Taiwan food is killer.

Starting point is 02:44:53 More like home, there's a huge disparity between good food and really bad food. There's stuff here that's just really gross like really awful just objectively terrible um i i i find it very i find it very and i find there are there are experiences that are quite hyped here that are sort of disconnected from that sort of cultural value of food like the pokemon cafe is rated i think four and a half stars pokemon cafe uh tokyo we managed to get a reservation after uh four nights in a row of either me or yvonne or both of us staying up till 2 in the morning to be there the second that they open up

Starting point is 02:45:47 reservations each day. We could have made something for you to make that easier. Well, look, even if I was willing to bot, I would never admit to it. Doesn't matter. The point is, it was very difficult to get a reservation. We did get a reservation here. Pokemon Cafe. Oh, for crying out loud. How do I just find this on? No, I have to go to Google Maps. And then I have to search for it. Because sure, that makes sense. I think it's four and a half stars, though. I think it's rated four and a half stars so we we got we got our reservation and i gotta say um it was terrible 4.3 stars

Starting point is 02:46:32 the food was largely inedible um the drink that i got was uh like a milk i just i got a milk tea i was like they can't possibly screw this up except probably about the top third of it was that fake fake whipped cream like the petroleum byproduct that's yeah that's not worth even whipped cream yeah it was it was disgusting i couldn't drink it um so i thought i thought i had been to pokemon cafe so i think vaughn might have asked me something about it but now in googling i had gone to pikachu sweets by pokemon cafe not pokemon cafe okay i thought they were the same thing as the pokemon cafe is basically terrible the pokemon cafe is basically terrible terrible The Pokemon Cafe is basically terrible, terrible food.

Starting point is 02:47:28 You get kind of rushed in and rushed out. There's an opportunity to buy merch. It's definitely cute. Like the Pikachu-shaped rice is cute. But little things were just awful. Like the nacho chip that is Pikachu's tail, the kind of toasted nacho chip that is Pikachu's tail in the rice dish, it was stale.

Starting point is 02:48:02 All of them were stale. We had a couple of them at our table. They were stale. All of them were stale. We had, we had a couple of them at our table. They were stale. We went to the pom pom purin cafe, not even really knowing what that is. It's like some hello kitty character, but it was, you know,

Starting point is 02:48:15 seemed cute. That was the first one we went to. So we didn't know yet that these themed cafes are just terrible, terrible food. Yeah. And a core that is themed after some character so it's just it's really weird to see how much you can pay for really really awful food somewhere where supposedly like food culture is a huge thing so i guess food culture is a huge

Starting point is 02:48:44 thing unless you put kind of a cute skin on it and then it doesn't matter it could be actual garbage just shoveled onto a plate as long as it's an acute shape um so that's so so back to my question confusing to me what's been good getting getting to enjoy traveling vacations hard people are like these are classic tourist traps guys they were mostly full of people speaking japanese there was there was almost the pokemon cafe i'd say was the most touristy one but like the pom-pom pyrrhon cafe was full of japanese people um and maybe they were they

Starting point is 02:49:28 maybe were there from another part of japan like you can there's such a thing as domestic tourism that's totally a thing but um yeah objectively bad um we did this like ninja experience cafe that was really fun for the kids i'd say they've overall had a good time. I have serious reservations about some of the animal cafes we've done. We did an owl cafe where you get to hold an owl perched on your arm. There were a lot of owls in there. Was it a fun experience for the kids? A great photo op?

Starting point is 02:50:04 Absolutely. you know, was it a fun experience for the kids? A great photo op? Absolutely. Do I feel good having supported that particular business practice? Honestly, not really. Thinking. Trying to think. Yeah, we went to a cat cafe where the cats honestly didn't seem like mistreated in any way but they were bored as heck like they were they were they were checked out they were not down to play or interact or anything so i just left them alone which seems to be what they wanted i mean that's probably if i was a little cat in a cat cafe that's probably what i would want okay what's been good there's here's here's another major disconnect in japan is this is a super sort of high-tech high-tech society right um you can get almost anything through automation like we we did one

Starting point is 02:50:58 of those conveyor belt sushi places um so you just order everything by ipad and it just whips along a conveyor belt to your to your table and you just kind of dump your dirty plates down the thing uh totally amazing and then we went to ride the bullet train and we bought our ticket at the terminal and uh we got some food and we ate and then we went to go on to the platform and to scan our ticket and they're like oh no no you you need the basic fare and your ticket and i'm like that one's so weird i have so weird i have my pass though it says i need it says i need a pass mo here's my pass mo so i tried to scan my pass mo and here's my ticket they're like, no, you need a basic fare. And I'm like, okay. So like at the machine?

Starting point is 02:51:47 No. No, you cannot buy the basic fare at the same machine where you buy your bullet train ticket for the place. You have to go and line up. So we missed our train that we had scheduled for. And they took care of it. But as I was standing in the line to talk to an agent in order to

Starting point is 02:52:13 get the half of the ticket that I needed, all of these agents working at the speed of light trying to get these people processed, I'm sitting here going, why was any of this necessary? How about I just tell you where I am and where I'm trying to go to and you just tell me how much that costs and you print the ticket. Why are there two tickets? So the way it works is you get two tickets and you slide both tickets into the machine at the same time.

Starting point is 02:52:50 And you can load your Passmo, but instead of just being money, you have to specifically load the basic fare at the counter onto your Passmo card. And it's like, why? Really, though, why? I bought my seat reservation and i have money what difference does it make and why can this not be done at the same automatic terminal that i bought my seat reservation at it makes absolutely no sense and so just the the the the lengths that some Japanese organizations and businesses and individuals will go to automate and make things high-tech, and then you'll turn around and something will be done in a manual way for no possible explainable reason it's just such a it's such a bizarre disconnect to me like the amount of micromanagement of lines at the theme park we went to um oh my god oh oh universal studios okay this is amazing so we bought the express ticket and as you go into the express line they will have you um they will have you bring up your express ticket,

Starting point is 02:54:07 but they don't have a scanner for it. They don't have a scanner for the QR code. So what they want you to do is bring up the ticket on your phone and zoom in on it, zoom in on it so they can read and make sure you have an express ticket for that ride. Then, so that takes a while because they check that for every individual in your party so we had seven people so you have someone standing at the entry to the express lineup manually reading your ticket like with with their eyes reading it there's qr codes all over it there's four qr codes one on every corner never mind that a single larger qr code might have worked a little bit better. Whatever.

Starting point is 02:54:47 Okay? Then you make your way into the line, and before you get on the ride, at some point in the line, someone comes along with a scanner and scans your QR code. Why? Why did both of those checkpoints exist? There's nowhere for you to get out of that line. It could have easily been at the very beginning of that line that they could have done that. Or they could just not bother and they could let you stand in the line and then they could check it there. Or they could have a system where their back end sees that you've scanned it once at that

Starting point is 02:55:24 one and then scanned it again at the other thing or whatever. There's absolutely no reason for someone with their human eyes to be reading text on a thing on my phone when I could have scanned a QR code, when there was no way for me to activate any of this without my phone and without the QR code. It's the exact same ticket that has the QR code on it that has the text they're reading you guys ever wonder how he why to product reviewing um okay so okay so so far we're oh for three uh what's a what's a good what's a good thing what's something you've enjoyed Have you gone to the thing I recommended yet? The kids are having a blast. So you've enjoyed that the kids are having a good time. The kids are having a lot of fun.

Starting point is 02:56:08 We went to the art installation. It was pretty cool. Ah, I got a pretty cool. That's honestly, I thought you would either come out and try to flame me for it because you hated it and I was going to have to fight you or you were going to do do that i knew you weren't gonna be like it was awesome but i i'll count that as a win he thought it was pretty cool

Starting point is 02:56:32 you've heard everything so far from mario i i was positive on super nintendo world they had you said it's uh it's just a mercantile experience. It's just to sell you stuff. It's incredible. Bowser's Castle, honestly, I would have still gone in just to walk through the castle that has the Mario Kart ride. That's cool. That's cool. It is beautifully crafted. Every square inch of it has had more care put into it than most you know grade 10 students

Starting point is 02:57:07 would put into a homework assignment they have to hand in like it's it's absolutely unbelievable um i also couldn't i was blown away by the i'm i'm just saying this is the level of care and attention grade 10 school homework though really might not get a lot of care i'm saying per square inch though per square inch luke okay okay all right for square inch yeah um i i've been i've been kind of blown away by the sort of the enthusiasm of just you know the average yeah that part is very cool actually what motivating factors are there it has a bit of a stepford wives like if i don't keep this job i'm going to die kind of vibe to it but okay i didn't get that i definitely appreciate being voted upon i it to me it just felt like

Starting point is 02:57:59 people were proud of their work regardless of what their work was that's the vibe that i got i bet there's some of that yeah which is good uh okay so kids are having a good time super nintendo land was a the trains impressive experience other than some like small stupid things like trying to catch the o loop line from um uh i don't know whatever whatever major station we were at there inexplicably there's just no signs for it um and then there's another line that uses the same color code that is not the o line okay so the reason why i laughed so hard at that is because i i guarantee you i know exactly where you were standing when you got really frustrated about the o-line because i stood there for a couple minutes ranting to my brother about how the signage is so good the whole time

Starting point is 02:58:56 and then you get to this one spot with all these pillars is is that where you were maybe i don't know we might have been at a different station There's all these pillars and the signs just get screwed up and there's no way to really tell. And then you have to walk a little bit with no guidance and then you can find your way to the O line properly again. And then, yeah, there's two lines with the same color. I ended up figuring out the same color thing is because there's two companies that run the trains.

Starting point is 02:59:22 Sure. So it's not really that there's... Which gets kind of weird. weird but yeah that's funny that you had those two complaints because i ran into exactly those two things but yeah the more local trains are pretty easy once you start getting it um but yeah the the two tickets for the the high speed bullet trains is where i get yeah aj same oh yeah yeah that's the one uh yeah yeah is that shin osaka and it was just like this is i just got to a complete dead end of signage and i'm like okay yeah it's weird it's weird i just

Starting point is 02:59:53 had to wander around and find it if you add like one to two signs it would solve the whole problem which is so odd apparently aj ran into the same problems too and there were signs that just should have obviously indicated where to go you know where they could have just had another line right there that's like yeah if you're trying to get to the to the loop line here's all the other ones but not that one right direction catching the loop line in the right direction threw us for a loop last night because you can't just say hold on they you can't just say it goes to this station because there's no terminus station so figuring out the direction is kind of tough because both ways technically go everywhere and instead of them just saying

Starting point is 03:00:36 what the next one it goes to is they pick a couple of major ones along the line uh so we almost got on the wrong uh train going the wrong way it was a whole thing we we made it though we got stuffed onto it so okay well how much longer are you there for uh a couple more days but like look i mean travel's not really my thing i I also don't like seafood, which is sort of a drag in Japan. That's fair. You know, my kids are into it, so I can't just go for Kobe

Starting point is 03:01:13 every night. You know, get that Wagyu. Would you even want to? Do you like Wagyu? I'm not into it personally. I like meatier meats. I don't know I'm happy that you at least had some experiences

Starting point is 03:01:31 that you liked because I know you don't really like traveling and you enjoying something that isn't like putting a box somewhere and plugging cables into it is good look we're here for the kids and they are having a really good time and that's that's good that's got value what's uh what's like what's we have lost your voice yeah when your voice comes back what's little man's favorite thing been so far okay well if this is potentially going to take a bit to get his voice back maybe if we can find a merch message for me while he works on that and keep the show flowing

Starting point is 03:02:15 i can do that let me just move my monitor over here um um it's just technical difficulties can Luke reply to this yeah uh what's up hey how's it going uh I have found that in in Anno uh in Bisa is really complicated because of the irrigation

Starting point is 03:02:39 systems and I'm working on uh you know increasing the efficiencies of my water runs there you go issue i have i have yes i welcome back line up and yeah linus is really hard there's my i bought it when it was on sale when uh when linus said and i'm i was like okay i can't play this game i know 1800 i'm never gonna stop yeah linus and i played and i had forgotten we played recently and i had forgotten kind of a lot of the basics of the game, but also realized, like,

Starting point is 03:03:07 all the things that I did when we played were really simple, and Linus was doing all the hard stuff. So I want to skill up. So I started playing single player, and I was like, holy crap. But I've gotten a lot better, which is good.

Starting point is 03:03:18 Oh, really? Yeah. That's pretty funny. I know, like, trade routes now. I've done, like, multi-point trade routes and, like, all this other stuff. So, like, yeah, I will be better now. I've done like multi-point trade routes and like all this other stuff so like yeah oh I will be better now I've actually gotten way more into it by doing that is every time you um every time you build a world you will reach a new level of citizens and you're gonna be like oh everything I did before was wrong. And everything is destroyed now. You have to plan so many stages in advance.

Starting point is 03:03:49 The reason that I was like, okay, well, I'm never going to be able to stop playing this is because the friction for undoing everything that you had already done is like nothing. It's pretty low. If you play on the easy difficulty, it's pretty low. Yeah. It's high on the higher one.

Starting point is 03:04:03 It's way less than pretty much anything else i've touched yeah yeah i i i had that feeling linus because i was playing i thought i was like doing pretty well and then i unlocked uh oil and i was just like oh yeah what what do you mean i can't have the train track run on the road i that means i can't get to the harbor cause all the houses are in the way. I, yeah, that, that sucked.

Starting point is 03:04:29 Um, but anyways, start over. Um, okay. So you're, you're back. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:04:34 What was, uh, what's a little man's favorite thing been so far? Uh, I don't know. He's kind of, uh, he's kind of enjoyed a lot of stuff i'd have to i'd have to ask him uh i haven't really done the the post trip what was your favorite thing yet not not actually post trip yet so that makes sense all right fair enough maybe we should just flow into

Starting point is 03:04:56 merch messages yeah we should go through them pretty quick though because i think i got to run pretty quick okay sounds good okay i think I got to run pretty quick. Okay, sounds good. Okay. I'll work on potentials. Recently started playing through the Halo CE campaign with my eldest. Any proud dad gaming milestones? Yeah, I curated this one. It was when my son beat me at Towerfall. Not because I'm some kind of expert Towerfall player or because he is

Starting point is 03:05:26 either, but because it's a pretty pure skill-based game. And he beat me. He won. He beat Luke too. Fair and square. And multiple times, actually. Yep. Yeah, it wasn't a fluke. It does have a strong rubber band

Starting point is 03:05:42 built in. But you still have to win. It's not like Luke and I didn't benefit built in. But you still have to win. It's not like Luke and I didn't benefit from it, too. You still have to win. 100%. Because of the DOJ lawsuit, do you see Apple ever making an app for AirPods for Android like they do with Beats products?

Starting point is 03:06:01 No. But the fact that they exist for beats products which use the same chip shows you how easily apple could have it exist they just choose not to hey dll i'm too young to remember doj versus microsoft but how is microsoft still getting away with aggressively bundling edge after the ruling that they couldn't bundle internet explorer edge is pretty easy to get around these days. For 20 years. Also that.

Starting point is 03:06:29 Wake up. Hello,.dll. Privacy is dead. As someone who wants to keep what... Privacy is dead. As someone who wants to keep what little is left of my privacy, how did you learn to let go becoming a public figure i didn't really have a choice i um i just i realized that it came

Starting point is 03:06:57 with the territory and uh once the tea was or the milk was spilled um it was there's no way to unspill it i so it is what it is there's some stuff like it's a lot easier for me but i definitely have a lot of things that are not public um but it takes significantly more to secure them that way yeah unfortunately i did the um i did the go-karting in uh in tokyo thing oh yeah that didn't interest me i didn't do that did you like that um you were right yeah it was oh it's like you're in a car but you're not yeah and you you don't even even remotely um sort of test the limits of the pretty slow kind of boring carts yep you just kind of drive in very, very carefully. Sounds about right. Yeah, it was something.

Starting point is 03:08:13 I mean, again, massive credit to the people working there. They were very enthusiastic and fun. And I'd say, you know what? I realize I sound like kind of a hater so far. My highlight is that one crepe I had the first night at a mall it was so good crepes are apparently a thing here the second one i had made me feel yeah they are because i had fake whipped cream in it the first one had fake cream and it was it was outstanding or fake cream fresh cream the first one had fresh cream and it was outstanding uh and the people the people are the people are the highlight for me fantastic yeah everyone's super nice yep it's interesting because they're super nice but also open and like it's relatively clear that they want you here um but for a little bit and then you

Starting point is 03:09:06 should go home it's like all right fair enough i like that they never like say that but the vibe is like fairly clearly communicated they're very happy you're there they're very polite they're very friendly very good but also it's like there's some amount of like... Now it's time to leave. Yeah. That was fun. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. Which is fine.

Starting point is 03:09:28 Totally fine. It's just, there's no sugar put on it, you know? There's a saying in England, would you like another cup of tea before you leave? Which is great. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's really effective. anyway big l i have no idea who this is for have you found a good wireless solution for the valve index i was hoping the nofio wireless

Starting point is 03:09:56 adapter would be good but it seems to be having post-launch issues I will be trying that one very soon. I've had mine for a few weeks and I have no excuses other than just I have a lot going on for why I haven't tried it yet. I'm really looking forward to trying it, but to my knowledge, that's the only one.

Starting point is 03:10:15 So it's either good or it's bad. My DLL, particularly Big L. Everybody's Big L. I'm almost finished with my teaching degree and always struggling helping students with dyslexia. Is there anything you do or your teachers did that really helped you? Love the show. I don't know how much people are going to like this.

Starting point is 03:10:38 One of my teachers in particular, a physics teacher that I had, I won't name him just in case he doesn't want, who knows, changed um but he gave a short talk very short talk at one point in time um not to me but i was able to overhear it from another student who had some uh learning disabilities and he was basically the person was basically asking for uh i think it was like easier marking or something i don't remember exactly what it was and he effectively said no and was like i'm happy to try to give you more attention i'm happy to try to help you but this is how it's gonna be once you're out of here so you got to figure it out and whether you have to, unfortunately, you know, study longer or do

Starting point is 03:11:25 whatever, put in more effort than other people. That's just how it's going to be. So you should start practicing that now effectively. Um, and I heard the same thing cause I always struggled with reading and was like, well, okay. Um, so I generally did. I've somewhat like brute forced the, the reading stuff where I've tried to get a lot better at kind of guessing what the word is when my brain starts messing it up. And you'll see me stumble sometimes. It happens on WAN show, literally every show. So you might notice it.

Starting point is 03:11:57 It happened during the sponsor reads. It happened during multiple topics today. It happens all the time. I have a significantly harder time reading text than just speaking. And honestly, I'm not even that great at just speaking. So yeah, I don't know. It'll be hard, but it's not impossible. You can figure it out and keep pushing. There are tricks out there. You can find fonts. In my experience, the fonts are not universal. One font that works for one person doesn't work perfectly

Starting point is 03:12:25 for another person and vice versa, but there's a lot of them. So you might be able to find one that works better for you. That's really the only tool I can suggest to you that won't help you read textbooks that aren't digitized, that won't help you read signs, I don't know, things like that. But it might help you if you can digitize a textbook, or if you can get something into a digital form, you might be able to convert the font and read it easier that way. There's other like speed reading tools that I've found that helped me, like one of them only shows one word at a time, and it just rapidly flashes through them. And for some reason, that works for me. But you won't always be in an environment or a scenario where you can read that way. So I think it's better to find whatever works best for you.

Starting point is 03:13:10 For me personally, learning how to read without those things has been more beneficial. Um, even though I, I do struggle more than if I didn't, it's just, it's like the same reason why I never went Dvorak on my keyboard. I never went Dvorak on my keyboard, despite thinking that it might be better because I'm like, well, I'm going to have to use other keyboards and that's going to be super annoying. So I'd rather just stay with QWERTY and be used to QWERTY so that when I use other things, I'm still in flow and it's still good. So I don't know. Someone said, so basically get good. Yeah, kind of. It sucks, but like, this is what it is.

Starting point is 03:13:46 And instead of just like feeling bad all the time, just fight through it. You'll be fine. You're going to make it. You're going to be okay. Yeah. Excellent. Hey, Dela, love the podcast.

Starting point is 03:14:01 I would love to hear your opinion on the overabundance of scam ads that play in front of almost every video on YouTube now. Should Google be held liable for any money stolen? I do think that platforms should have some responsibility for anything that is an officially sanctioned piece of content that somebody sees i don't know how to enforce that uh but it is pretty clear to me that something needs to be done because it's an enormous problem and it can't be on anyone other than Google to address it. Let's see what else.

Starting point is 03:14:49 Hi, Della. Linus, do you still use Plex? Are you considering changing to a competitor? And what do you recommend to stream movies in your home? I do still use Plex. I am strongly considering switching to a competitor. It's been, I think, a year and a half since I last communicated with them and told them, hey, we're not going to do any more promotional activities for you guys until you fix basic functionality that is advertised as part of your product.

Starting point is 03:15:18 And the basic functionality in question for me was loading transcoded versions of my media library onto my device to take with me on the plane. In the lead up to this trip, I tried across three different Android, four, four different Android devices to load media. And it was an absolute crap show. Just errored out transcodes, failed downloads across a variety of different versions of Android from new to old to Samsung to not Samsung. and just do not respect their users enough to follow through on becoming a streaming service for licensed content and is treating the users that got them to where they are as second class citizens. No, this is not a server side configure. This is a widespread issue. This is not a server-side configure. This is a widespread issue.

Starting point is 03:16:51 Widespread and has been for years, years and years and years and years. Hello from PAX. Sad you guys aren't here. Linus, how would you react if you caught your son cheating in an online game? Would you differentiate between an in-game exploit versus third-party software oh i'd be i'd be mad um i do differentiate between the two uh in-game exploit versus cheating though yeah cheating very very very bad in-game exploit i'd probably tell them it's rude kind of like how you know in badminton i'll see him flick serve a novice and i'll be like hey that's rude you know don't do

Starting point is 03:17:32 that it's not about winning the point it's about playing the game um sometimes don't forget if you're playing against someone who's on the same level as you or someone who's better than you by all means employ every possible strategy to win but if you're playing against someone who is already at a significant disadvantage that's fair you don't take shortcuts yeah yeah that's fair my flowplane sub just renewed so happy one year since the hackening for luke i'm a new tech manager how do you keep oh boy now it's everywhere how do you keep a fully remote team engaged and motivated what helps you help them to be successful

Starting point is 03:18:15 uh it's actually genuinely tough i think what helps it is honestly not necessarily me or maybe it's me in the hiring process. But a lot of the people on the team are just motivated people. And honestly, this might suck for the remote work crowd because I've been a public pro on that side. But not everyone can do it. The people that I have in general, I think can. There's been blips here and there, but there's blips here and there with every form of employment. So I don't think it's been any worse than any local working. I've seen intrinsic motivation drop with people who work in office as well. But a bunch of people would not be able to stay on task, stay focused, stay productive, etc, etc, etc, with remote work. Some people can, my teams

Starting point is 03:19:11 can and have proven that they can multiple times. So I'm happy with that. But some people might just not be built for it. And that isn't necessarily on you as a leader, you might just need to move that person on so that they can go work somewhere else if if working locally is not an option at your company or whatever else um but like yeah aj's in the chat right now speaking of remote workers i i had to yell at him in his first week off because someone posted a task that needed to be done in the infrastructure chat. And then he just did it before I could get to it. And I had to be like, Hey,

Starting point is 03:19:46 stop. It was so fast too. It was too fast. Stop being so competent. He's too competent. So I don't think motivation is like that. I mean, it's again, it's,

Starting point is 03:20:01 it becomes, everyone has like burnout motivation problems every now and then, especially when you work with people for a really long period of time, they're going to do this, it's okay. But I don't think in general, that's an issue with my team.

Starting point is 03:20:12 I think it has been, and I have dealt with, oh, Pocky, nice. I think it has been, and I've dealt with that usually by trying to work with that person to find ways to motivate them, or in some situations, by moving them on to some other form of work by exiting them from the company or their contract or whatever

Starting point is 03:20:30 else um he has notifications off too wow so he manually checked it geez um so i don't know i try to do things like our our our meetings for the week we we have them longer than they need to be so people can have like water cooler style talk which which I encourage, but also try to cut off at a certain point. And I try to have some much more relaxed channels in Slack where people can talk about like, oh, what games they're playing or music or whatever else so that you try to build a culture. Because one of the biggest problems with remote teams is you never build a culture um and that's actually a problem so there's a bit of a fine line where you want to encourage it but you also don't want people uh to partake way too much because especially with a remote team you're probably in different time zones so someone's going to be off playing games wanting to talk about games while someone else is in the middle of their work day

Starting point is 03:21:23 and that's a notification that's coming in work chat so it's it's funky but you gotta play the line i don't know i'm gonna stop talking before i talk for hours uh what are your thoughts on the trend of putting titanium in everything put more titanium in my body i I don't know. Titanium is pretty cool. Titanium seems pretty cool to me, too. Please don't break things. Please. I got a potential here. There we go.

Starting point is 03:21:57 Linus and Luke, with everything you've accomplished with LMG, are you satisfied? Have you satisfied a specific childhood dream or are planning to? No, I wanted to be a cop when I was a kid. That tracks. I was just like, and then later I wanted to be a teacher. When I say I wanted to be a cop when I was a kid, I mean when I was in like grade two.

Starting point is 03:22:19 Yeah, I wanted to be an astronaut. Those are the only jobs you know. Yeah, astronaut, firefighter, cop. Exactly. Doctor. Yeah, doctor's right. Firefighter, cop. Exactly. Doctor. Yeah, doctor. Doctor's good. And so I basically just became a teacher, but without a degree and with way more students.

Starting point is 03:22:36 And with a lot more dick jokes. You found the loophole. Oh, no. You won't get in trouble for dick jokes. Yeah. He will still get in trouble for dick jokes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you won't get in trouble for dick jokes he will still get in trouble for dick jokes yeah i mean i can still get in trouble uh i wanted to work at a game dev studio but with how everything's been going i feel like i dodged a bullet on that one oh yeah you did but yeah oh my god for a while for a while yeah um at its core i wanted to kind of

Starting point is 03:23:09 be the communication line between uh like business people and developers so that is legitimately a conversation that i had with my dad um that he remembers in like late high school where i was like i feel like this would be a good thing for me and then i literally ended up doing that so that part has worked out ltt making games lt has technically made multiple games actually um lt made linus jump not wrong an actually very fun game that we should probably just release at some point um because it doesn't seem like we're going to use it anymore, but it was used for the Verified Actual Gamer program. Luke, we should go back to the old way. We'll make it a mobile game for like a dollar.

Starting point is 03:23:52 A dollar. It definitely wasn't built for mobile, but we could probably figure it out. I don't know how hard it would be to adapt. And honestly, if I told this to the person who made it, they would probably just do it. I don't know how hard it would be to adapt. And honestly, if I told this to the person who made it, they would probably just do it. I would just make it 9x16. Do not take that as instructions to do that, please.

Starting point is 03:24:13 $1, $2, whatever. Jaden's sweating in his sleep. Yeah, I would not make Jaden do it. He's also not the one that made the game, so it's okay. We've also made other games you know what we should do are you allowed to make a game are you allowed to make a game one cent

Starting point is 03:24:31 so that google the transaction fees every time someone buys it i honestly don't know the apps that we've released are free the full play app is free because you pay for the subscription so i don't know apparently yes i don't know if i believe that but we'll see we'll see

Starting point is 03:24:49 you are yes what that's wild you used to be able to okay well we'll see that would literally just cost the money because of the even if you're like oh but google handles the credit card transactions yeah but they go through the credit card transactions yeah but they go through the credit card themselves yeah so they will lose money they probably have more favorable deals but um i guarantee you it's not that favorable yeah it also only has one level uh it has a leaderboard did it i thought so really it's been so long i don't remember i don't think it did i think we had every flavor bean i think we had a what yes i think we had a way to look in to see how fast people had done it.

Starting point is 03:25:48 Make more levels? Yeah, but that takes dev time. That means it costs money. Just make chat GPT do it. More level, please. And then it just outputs the frameworks and the C JavaScript. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:26:03 Yeah. One node JavaScript, please. the C Javas. Yeah. One node JavaScript, please. Thank you. Oh, yeah. I have one more thing

Starting point is 03:26:11 about Japan that I want to talk about. Oh, boy. I cannot find any connection between the cost of things and the quality.

Starting point is 03:26:20 I have grossly overpaid for mediocrity at best and I have paidly overpaid for mediocrity at best, and I have paid almost nothing for amazing quality. Have you been in cities the whole time? Yes.

Starting point is 03:26:34 Because I found when I got out of the big cities, that completely stopped. And I think it's maybe a touristy thing or like a expensive area versus cheaper area thing or something. But yeah, that, that's definitely completely stopped stuff affordably.

Starting point is 03:26:50 Like, I don't remember the last time my entire family had a sit down meal for about 10 bucks a head, but we had the entire bill service fee included was like $56 at this place that was like in a mall, you know, like it wasn't nowhere that like it wasn't like even a random home law or not a mall it was like you know they have these department stores

Starting point is 03:27:09 here that are kind of like what we would think of as a mall but it's more just like a bunch of stores i don't know how to describe it it's slightly different um but it was like a restaurant essentially is what i'm trying to say. And it was great and cheap. And then we'll go places where it's like, oh, that was $30, $40 a head, and I'm just not really sure where it went. There doesn't seem to be a connection there. Yeah. Yeah, I was running into... I didn't forget anything.

Starting point is 03:27:43 Some of them include a $10 or a 10% service fee. I was running into very up and down quality, very up and down pricing, all of that type of stuff. When I was like in Tokyo, I didn't go to other major cities. And then when I got out of that major city and got into smaller towns, smaller cities,

Starting point is 03:28:01 that type of stuff, completely no longer a problem. Quality on average was much higher. I found personally, people are telling me that just means I was unlucky in Tokyo, which is fine. But I just, that's what I experienced. Quality was really, like everything was amazing and cheap. Out of the city. Yeti Wrangler says that would be true almost anywhere though, no?

Starting point is 03:28:24 No. In Vancouver, everything's's expensive whether it's garbage or good so that's the difference every meal is $30 no matter if you're having like a three course Greek meal or going to McDonald's yeah

Starting point is 03:28:38 everywhere yeah and then in Taiwan everything's pretty cheap which isn't actually true some of it's really expensive but it's in hyper tourist trash areas this outro to the show thanks for watching guys

Starting point is 03:28:53 see you again next week same bad time same bad channel bye what did you do I pressed the intro button no I broke it hold on I can do that

Starting point is 03:29:10 there we go you know what I'm doing sometimes this better be the correct one oh no oh my god terrible oh no oh my god terrible great uh wait oh hold on i gotta stop the show

The WAN Show - I'm Happy Apple Is Getting Sued - WAN Show March 22, 2024

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