The WAN Show - Microsoft/Activision Deal: We Can't Agree! - WAN Show January 21, 2022

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

Use code LTT at MechanicalKeyboards at https://geni.us/RecNBTI Try FreshBooks free, for 30 days, no credit card required at https://www.freshbooks.com/wan Buy a Seasonic Ultra Titanium PSU On Amazon: https://geni.us/q4lnefC  On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KV3S Check out the WAN Show & Podcast Gear: https://lmg.gg/podcastgear Check out the They're Just Movies Podcast: https://lmg.gg/tjmpodcast Timestamps: (Courtesy of NoKi1119) 0:00 Chapters 1:03 Intro 1:31 Topic #1 - Microsoft's acquisition of Activision 4:44 Luke's take of the positive side 8:50 Linus's rebuttal of the negative side 10:36 Fears of Microsoft monopoly, effects on multiplayer 18:00 Sony VS Xbox duopoly, Xbox Game Pass advantages 23:17 Sony's "Spartacus" Game Pass, Nintendo's Back Up service 25:35 Sony's memory stick, Xbox series S/X VS PS4/PS5 26:53 LTTStore's non-zipper processor hoodie 29:05 Topic #2: Lenovo vendor locks AMD processors via PSB 30:03 CPUs brick once fuse blows, enabled by default 31:56 Anti-consumerism or badly implemented? Discussing e-waste 35:02 [TRIGGER WARNING] Blizzard's "Cosby Suite" 36:20 Sponsor - MechanicalKeyboards 37:26 Sponsor - Freshbooks 38:11 Sponsor - Seasonic 38:44 Clearing opinions on AMD's PSB, remastered games 43:34 Merch Messages #1 43:52 Stopping GPU sag 44:50 Linus interpreting American Sign Language 48:29 Government reform thoughts for tech industry 49:18 AMD's CPU vs GPU innovative roadmap 50:35 Not all LMG employees are techies, Linus idea of trolling 52:33 Cables signal degradation shielded VS unshielded video idea 53:41 Tel Aviv LTT videos, Bill Gates buying lands 55:14 Game development & SSD expectations 56:56 Topic #3 - AMD's Anti-4GB VRAM post deleted after 6500XT 58:32 Better than nothing, functional & in stock 1:00:16 Specifications, APU usage explains the lack of decoding 1:03:29 Removal of anti-4GB post, graphics card & hardware demand 1:07:26 Topic #4 - NFT overtakes cryptocurrency after crashing 1:10:08 Twitter NFT profile pictures on iOS 1:12:06 NFTs are cosmetics that people value 1:18:40 ThinkGeek bought by Gamestop 1:20:30 Topic #5 - Samsung's Exynos 2200 SoC RDNA2 1:21:32 Topic #6 - Valve verifies games that work on Steam Deck 1:23:21 Merch Messages #2 1:23:28 LTTStore's free items, GPU wasteland postcard for labs 1:24:55 Linus's take on data science content 1:25:55 Linus & Luke regret mining prior to BTC explosion 1:27:17 Right to repair laws on Canada follows America's 1:28:28 LTTStore CPU pillow dirt smell from alpaca fur 1:29:16 Game development for LMG labs, Floatplane notifications 1:32:04 4K TV vs monitor for gamers, LTTStore screwdrivers 1:33:22 Shirt stretching, Twitch staff leaving & unprofitability 1:36:03 LTTStore's RGB diode T-Shirt, labs audio space & roadmap 1:39:40 LTTStore's new desk configurator for mousepads 1:42:38 Crypto crashing & GPU upgradability, DIY channel idea 1:44:16 LTTStore screwdriver price, LTT in Cuba, labs ideas 1:49:22 LTTStore screwdriver design 1:52:46 US shipping & taxes, variable refresh rate on Sony TVs 1:59:56 Front-end early development for Floatplane 2:01:34 LTTStore's upcoming waffle shirt, delayed shipments 2:04:15 Outro 2:04:49 YouTube Superchats still not fixed Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are you like a space probe? Boop. And we're live! Welcome to the WAN Show, ladies and gentlemen. We've got a lot of great topics for you today, including Microsoft's $68.7 billion bid So close! for Activision Blizzard. Almost there.

So close. In other news, Lenovo is vendor-locking the chips in their ThinkCentre PCs, which sounds really bad, but it's way worse. Yay! What else we got this week, Luke? Twitter allows, you know, NFT. I can't even find the topic. NFT profile pictures, and it makes them a different shape and stuff,

and everyone's making fun of people for it, and it's hilarious. Also, planes are trying to stop 5g yeah like near airports and stuff yeah because they got bill gates stuck in their wiring yeah they got the micro bots yeah they got all the micro bots they're raining down from the sky they're getting the micro bots that they drop in the chemtrails they're having a lot of issues micro 5g micro bots 5, chemtrails, roll the intro. People would be like, what podcast is this? Oh, man. Oh, man. The show is brought to you today by mechanicalkeyboards.com freshbooks and see sonic

all right why don't we jump right into the big topic luke and i were gaming last night and we were both some of us made a more earnest effort than others we were both trying to not talk about this because we wanted to save it for the show so we are fresh we are fresh coming out of learning about the news of microsoft 68.7 billion dollar acquisition of activision blizzard luke pro or actually i think i already know the answer because i saw the thumbnail and james came and independently talked to both of us about how we feel about it how could you possibly support this move i'm excited i was excited i was so hoping that you were going to be against it so that we could fight about it because i was like this will this will be such a boring show if we're both on the same side let's go let's go let's go indeed let's go

let's go take luke out back let's pokemon go to the pool put him down because clearly he's gone senile he's speaking about putting down i have to get the joke out now someone in full plane chat i don't remember exactly how they worded it which is why i have to say it now but they say 68.7 billion i don't know about you but i 68.7 with my girlfriend okay i mean that's the one i wanted to say before the show it rounds up nice it's almost there it's almost nice okay okay so uh yeah they they bought activision blizzard at 95 dollars per share after the announcement the shares went up to 84 so it's still a premium on that uh okay this would bring microsoft's total number of studios to 32 yeah wow that's quite a few that's kind of crazy here's a little here's a little screen cap of uh there it is that's that's microsoft's xbox first party studios

wow mojang obsidian bethesda xenomax 343 sledgehammer i don't think this really even has no this doesn't this isn't even everything it's like just says blizzard here like yeah okay how many teams are there at blizzard like this this quantity does not fully represent um microsoft's well it's still a studio right yeah it is one studio sure they made the font a little bigger but still a lot a lot of other companies would have it under multiple studios. So yeah, it's not very representative of everything. There's also some studios in here like Toys for Bob that as far as my understanding goes,

over the last little while have been mostly relegated to just like a Call of Duty support studio that theoretically under Microsoft will go back to making games. Yeah, okay. Which is cool. Well well carry on you still haven't really given me a super compelling reason to core fundamentals of my side i guess because the whole idea is pretty simple right microsoft buys activision blizzard that includes king obviously a lot of people are calling it abk these days because king makes so much freaking

money that they should probably be included in the name crush um someone had to buy them is kind of my stance almost everything that they have has been declining there's sexual harassment stuff like crazy i'm really pissed that bobby kodak is a part of the deal and he's actually coming i wish they were just getting rid of him. It sounds like he is maybe either planning an out within, this is entirely rumor, to be very clear. There are informed people, whatever the heck that means, saying that he could be planning it out within two years unless he's pivoting to their consultancy advisory person

for Microsoft's push into the meta metaverse whatever the heck that even means okay so one of those uh ceremonial symbolic types of yes who knows though what what's going to happen there i just hope that they get rid of them um because that would be awesome there's there's a big clash that is i think inevitably going to happen um microsoft has consumed a lot of studios recently. We saw the Bethesda, ZeniMax, ID. Mojang before that. Mojang before that.

Traditionally, they don't fire people when they do that. They bring people on and they bring studios on and they let them just sit there and keep doing their thing and everything's okay. They've been very nice and clean that way. I almost hope that they are not this time. activision blizzard has been going through this thing lately where they are kind of cutting out some rot there's been all this like sexual harassment and just bad play general toxicity bad toxicity all this bad things and i don't think they're

done and i don't necessarily know that they will be done by the time this deal is closed. And Microsoft has a very open, inclusive, just better work environment and culture. And I hope that those clash and Activision Blizzard gets cleaned up by this acquisition. I do not hope that the good people working there get axed, obviously. But I hope the bad people that are working there get axed um but yeah i think it was somewhat inevitable that there was going to be either a falling out of the studios or someone was going to buy them or something and when you look at the list of alternatives i think that microsoft was good okay who is the list of alternatives hit me uh potentially uh what are they even called the chinese tencent okay who already i believe owned a decently significant part of the company i mean with the way that

china's cracking down on gaming i i don't know if that would have been in the cards, but yeah, I mean, yeah, they might be looking long, long, long term. And Tencent owns studios that very, very much focus, like I don't think Activision Blizzard counts as this necessarily, but Tencent owns at least part of certain studios that very much focus on just the Western market, not China.

So they're an investment thing they're not necessarily um hey i mean there really isn't many because there isn't that many places they're going to have 70 billion dollars um of just like free money that they can pay in cash for some company so it i mean it's like 10 cent i i don't know if they have the money um It's like Tencent. I don't know if they have the money. But EA, I don't think they'd have the money. No, that'd be more of a merger.

Yeah. And then there's other potential companies talking about like Google, Netflix, actually, Amazon. Because all those companies are trying to get into like subscription gaming models. Sure. But Google in particular has demonstrated that they don't seem to have the the commit level to spend that kind of money on an acquisition amazon seems to want to kind of go it's funny it's almost like a grassroots approach where they're trying to start they're trying to start their own new ips and stuff yeah their own yeah um no other company netflix is sort of on the struggle bus right now I don't think they're looking to spend they're not gonna have 70 the only real option was Microsoft um okay so basically

you're saying I think the property it's a poo sandwich yes but we had to eat it yeah and this was the right member of the team to take that bite. No, I don't mean that. I don't mean Activision Blizzard is the poo sandwich. I mean, in my personal opinion, more consolidation in the gaming industry is a poo sandwich. I think this is terrible for gamers. So on the one hand, yeah, Game Pass is great. Microsoft's generally more open approach to gaming this generation, things like intergenerational controller compatibility, I think has sent a pretty good message. Microsoft

has started to engage with the right to repair movement, for example. Yeah, sure. It's only on that cheap Surface laptop for students so far. But hopefully that will become a cultural shift at Microsoftrosoft so yeah yeah there's a lot of things that microsoft is doing really well but if there's anything that history has ever taught us it's that once a monopoly exists it always always always screws you oh yeah so think about it you guys microsoft is running out spending literally tens of billions of dollars on Game Studio and IP acquisitions right now in order to build out their Games as a Service product, right? Yeah, they said specifically that they're going to bring as many of these games as possible

to Game Pass as soon as possible. Right. That is clearly the goal. And then the other side of the goal, like, yes, they said, oh, we want to keep call of duty on playstation blah blah blah we want inter opera sort of yeah they didn't really say it that way right they said they will honor current contracts so that's a big problem because all of a sudden now we're taking what was becoming kind of a positive thing we have a lot of cross play these days the gaming community is as big as it has ever been and it feels like we are opening up a door to go backwards here where it's pretty much xbox and windows or gtfo and you got to give credit to valve you got to give credit to gabe newell and his team for seeing the writing on the wall here like how long ago did they start working on steam os yeah five six seven

we don't even know when valve started working on what would be eventually become the steam deck because steam machines was what like five years ago and obviously that didn't just start up overnight yeah um very likely around that time frame like seeing that that that looming specter of microsoft monopoly coming that long ago kind of incredible someone brought up uh where did it go no someone said there after this acquisition i don't remember exactly where it is but they said after this acquisition microsoft will still be third uh will be third still behind sony it's like yes and the reason why you know that is because microsoft has told

you that multiple times um because they don't want to get slapped with antitrust so they're trying to be like guys guys guys we're still not the biggest we're still not the biggest it's not a monopoly but they're microsoft has always been very happy to consume things around them i'm not saying like oh mic Microsoft is amazing. I'm so happy that they're buying this. I think this is, out of a list of bad endings, probably one of the least bad. In the midterm.

But in the long term, I think this is terrible for gamers. In the long term, Microsoft is absolutely a cloud first company going forward and we've had experiences with that i mean just last night we couldn't get into a halo infinite multiplayer game why because we couldn't connect to the microsoft server oh yeah i'm highly concerned about multiplayer gaming gaming had a solution to that 20 years ago it was called community servers and they didn't all go down at the same time this is not worse blizzard's current goal with diablo on xbox what one is it uh i don't remember which diablo it is but if it if it didn't call home for a certain amount of time, you wouldn't be able to play it anymore. Yeah. So, like, it's not... Blizzard was already just as evil or more evil

in all of these ways. So, like, I don't think it's becoming a lesser of those evils by becoming part of Microsoft. Okay, that's fair. Blizzard was already horrible. Blizzard, yes. And that's why I'm more okay with this. I think they actually become less horrible because of this.

I would rather they were under someone else. No one else that would be better has $70 billion in cash to spend on something like this. And probably because they're not as horrible, which is why they don't have that much money in the bank. All right. I feel like you've come around to me a little bit. Okay. Dark Jackie says, Blizzard servers go down regularly.

So what's the difference? The point is not an outage. The point is the single point of failure. The point is that the whole thing is going to be running on Azure or whatever it is that Microsoft's running it on in the back end. It's going to be really bad. And that when it's down, it's down for everyone. With community servers, with the old way that we used to do multiplayer,

it was almost like I kind of feel like in another five or ten years, someone's going to come around and they're going to reinvent the concept of multiplayer server hosting. And it's going to be basically huge. It's going to be huge. No way, dude. This is crazy. It'll never go down and it's like peer-to-peer and it's distributed

and it's super resilient. It's DeFi networking. Yeah, I don't know. I've talked on this show about how rough multiplayer is with Microsoft right now. How multiplayer in Forza is basically not even a thing because it's so brutal yeah um it's a it's a problem someone tweeted out i meant to bring it onto the show but i forgot i don't know if i screenshot did i screenshot i might screenshot it um but they they said like the editing software that they were using wouldn't work because the windows store was down it couldn't

call home through the windows store um like there's there's definitely negative things i'm i'm very concerned about uh what is going to become the state of multiplayer for a lot of these games if they try to run it through microsoft um microsoft on pc i should say um it's because it's just it's it's really bad it's really really bad i like christopher m's topic here this is actually something I was thinking and then totally forgot about because you put me under your spell with your blonde hair and blue eyes.

Hate that Activision gets bought out when they're in the decline. Why can't we just let them sink or swim? Like just fine, fine. If they suck and this wasn't sustainable anymore. They're not going to sink. Yeah, you're probably right. They're not going to sink.

It's not going to happen. They have King. They have Cod. Yeah, you're probably right. They're not going to sink. It's not going to happen. They have King. They have COD. And yeah, Blizzard's dying. But they have like... King and COD by themselves are just massive. They're not going to sink. Yes, they were doing worse.

Yes, their share prices went down. But their share price was no longer going down. And like all their games are in decline. But they're too big. They're not going to sink. They have so much money. But yeah, was it was moore's law is dead a youtube channel and he tweeted i'm sorry to report that today's video will be delayed due to microsoft store going down and my editing apps license being tied to the store like what that's so brutal um things i am excited about there are very negative things, right? Like I'm

very concerned about the state of multiplayer moving forward. I'm very concerned about the PC side of things with being tied into the Microsoft Store, being tied into Xbox multiplayer features, being tied into anything like that. That is all a massive concern because they are they are worst in class in all of those things i think ubisoft i think origin uh or ea whatever i think steam all of those platforms epic games all of those platforms do multiplayer friends lists invites lobbies they do all of that stuff massively massively better than microsoft does yeah and it's actually like it's kind of embarrassing pathetic it's very embarrassing very pathetic the state that microsoft's uh multiplayer stuff is at i mean we had me you and your brother and between the three of us it took like a solid two minutes to figure out how to get rich into the multiplayer lobby yep that's him yeah it's embarrassing it's

it's embarrassing and like, so lots of negatives. Massive consolidation in the game industry, that's really bad. Multiplayer stuff, really bad. Lots of very glaring negatives. One potential positive side of things is Microsoft's multifaceted expertise, operating systems, manufacturing, et cetera, operating systems manufacturing sure etc um could bring back old old ips that are under this gaming studio that have just been rotting like guitar hero and a bunch of other games that could be interesting that could be cool

exclusive to xbox probably or at least exclusive to Game Pass. I'm sure Microsoft would be wetting themselves. Is Game Pass on PlayStation? No, not now, but I'm sure that's... I'm pretty sure they've even talked about that being an ultimate goal at some point in the future. And once you do

that, the PlayStation is essentially an Xbox. Essentially. Well, they've been trending towards computers we've been talking about that for years yep consoles are becoming just more and more like just computers you put on your tv i i i still hate it for all the reasons that i already said i think that a duopoly is or i guess we at least have a triopoly although nintendo it's like they're kind of their own ship yeah you've got microsoft and sony kind of duking it out in the ring right you know like if we use a boxing

match analogy and then nintendo's just like kind of they're outside of the arena they're like in a park and they're playing with little like trucks and they're like you know when you go to a hockey game and they're like a like a kid's hockey game sure and there's always like the kids on the ice that are playing and being serious and all that kind of stuff and then there's like the brothers of a few kids on the ice that are just like messing around behind the behind the seats playing hockey in the back that's nintendo yeah they're just they they're playing with themselves. In all the right ways. So a duopoly then is better than a monopoly. And right now, I mean, I didn't believe it even a year ago.

But Sony is on the ropes. I don't see how they come back from this. They literally cannot afford to build a competitor to game pass in a reasonable amount of time especially if microsoft is running out buying every game studio that matters now the real nail that microsoft could put in the coffin of any potential competition is if they start to give game developers some kind of reasonable work-life balance. If Microsoft could actually change the culture of the gaming industry through the subscription model,

through that constant recurring revenue model, if they could actually shift that, it would be impossible to recruit talent away from Microsoft at that point. Yeah. How many people are subscribed to game xbox game pass i don't know if they've listed numbers 25 million have they okay there you go well they announced at this acquisition point so this this post is from three days ago because i

remember phil spencer said and i didn't remember the exact number but i thought it was 24 25 he said we have 25 million subscribers which gives you some idea of what a long game they're playing because that like 10 to 15 a month or whatever that's sure it's a lot of money it's you know 30 something million dollars a month but think about trying to pay off 70 but yeah think about paying off a 70 billion dollar debt at that point you're not making a sensible business transaction from an investment standpoint. You'd be better off putting that $70 billion in a GIC, you know, like in terms of when you're going to get a return on it. What you're buying is no competition, essentially. So that's terrifying. You know, when you look at a deal like this and

you go, yeah, there's no obvious ROI on this. Now, obviously, Blizzard is going to... Game Pass is not the be-all and end-all of the revenue that they'll get through the Activision Blizzard deal. They make their own money through the Play Store, through the App store through the app store uh with king and obviously on blizzard's own ips and all that good stuff but this is a long long return no matter how you slice it uh invisible ray says oh go ahead i do think if they if they move titles like um like call of duty and stuff if they start allowing that those types of things on game pass i think that's massive subscriber numbers that will come in because of that yeah that's fair if they move already subscription model games which i think

the only one activision blizzard has is wow but if they move things like that to game pass that's an auto like if you just moved like four million people or how many people still pay for wow yep which i don't think we know i don't think they've published numbers in a long time um subscribers but you'd have to think that if they're the latest wow subscriber count for 2021 shows 4.74 billion uh sorry wait what i have no idea for yeah 4.74 million um so that would be automatically tacked on so that just wow would bring them to 30 million game pass subscribers if they added it to game pass which you don't necessarily know that they but that also assumes that all of those people do not

already have game pass true which they might fair so then you might be just giving away revenue there's definitely gonna be a lot of that especially i think with the console focused games like cod i think you're gonna have a lot of people that already have game pass yep so i think we've kind of exhausted what we have to say about that um invisible ray did say they are linus sony's releasing this year apparently it's called product spartacus uh yeah so sony will have a game pass competitor the problem is that with what games on it yeah compared to all the studios that microsoft is snapping up i mean as crazy as it sounds nintendo may be the only one who's positioned to compete and their cloud gaming services are is even worse than microsoft are

awful worse than everyone is there anyone who does it worse than nintendo no i i mean i just i don't know if i can think of a company that is more hostile towards its users than nintendo i don't even i don't even think i always forget that they have an online service to be honest yeah like the whole thing where you can't uh you can't back up your save files unless you pay them a monthly fee there's an sd card sitting in the unit and they will not allow you to put your save files on it so that you will pay for nintendo online are you kidding me so if you're to through no fault of your own if your switch dies and you didn't happen to have nintendo's backup service that's it just gone isn't that unbelievable just gone it's because they hate you that's the only explanation that i can come up with for it because there's no other reason just brutal

yeah jayden said microsoft made uh original xbox out of fear of sony dominating the living room their monopolistic tendencies are present in everything they do sure yeah fair enough but one monopoly is not better than another more different monopoly come on because microsoft has such a as a warm and cuddly history right right? Oh, no, I think he was saying... Oh, the other way? Yeah. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. What was this?

I think Jaden was just saying Microsoft shows their monopolistic hand in everything that they do. Oh, I thought you said Microsoft was responding to Sony having... Sorry, I must have just tuned out for a second. That's why they made the original Xbox, is essentially what he's saying. Yeah, okay, sure. sorry i must have just that's why they made the original xbox oh i see what he's saying yeah yeah okay sure yeah microsoft riding in on a white horse to save us i'm saving the living room now the whole living room is mine isn't everyone happy big scary monopoly i mean to be clear sony's awful remember memory stick like hey there's these there's these flash memory standards that

work in everything compact flash secure digital, secure digital, what's that? Memory stick. It costs way more for no reason. Enjoy. Yeah. Yeah, go to hell, Sony. I mean, to be clear, it's not like- Sony is winning.

Oh, it's hard to say when literally everything is sold out, but Sony's winning this console generation, aren't they? They are winning in terms of actual console sales if i recall correctly i think the xbox series s has been sort of tepid and the series x doing great but supply constrained yeah uh they're still selling ps4s faster than they can make enough consoles like it's that's kind of crazy but i think if the supply was there though because before the supply problems sony was already winning so i think if the supply was there sony would be winning this current console generation yeah that's fair enough and at least

they actually do have you know some exclusives i mean that's one way that they won't go completely irrelevant you know but i just i i in the long term i just don't see how it's gonna i don't see how it's gonna be even a duopoly anymore yeah pretty real why don't we jump into our next big topic of the day we have a non-zipper hoodie ltt logo oh here i should go on your screen if you want to if you want to go to the thing the best part about it though is of course the graphic on the back oh yeah it's a blown up cpu cool right i got it excuse me uh lloyd did this one up, and I think that he did a great job of it. The hoodie is the same French terrier.

Sorry? What is that? I don't know. I think it's playing through, though. What speakers are those? Oh, it's my screen. I'm watching it. Oh, that's hilarious.

Okay, there we go. Got it. The best part is the design on the back. I think Lloyd did an absolutely bang-up job of that. Now something to note about this hoodie is if you order it, it's gonna take anywhere between one to two weeks for us to take all the orders. We're doing it kind of as a drop, so we need to take all the orders and print them to order, which means that I don't know if it's gonna be a continuing SKU,

because these blanks are based on the same French terry material as our WAN hoodie. They're super comfortable as long as you don't mind the French terry texture. By the way, if you bought one of these before and you don't like the texture, definitely wash it a few times because it softens up a lot. And what I like about it is that it's really breathable compared to fuzzy interiors and it doesn't pill.. So two years down the line, it'll still be exactly the same feel on the inside, and you won't get that pilling. So it's our blank hoodie, which means it has our own orange LTT label on the inside. But other than that, it has no pre-done branding on it whatsoever.

So it's all just the printing, which is done at the same local Canadian shop that does our t-shirts. We're really excited about them. So you guys can, can go check those out anytime you want. LTTstore.com. I would do it quickly though, because like I said, I don't know if this is going to be an ongoing design, uh, or if this is just going to be a one and done. We haven't decided yet. I guess it kind of depends how it goes. All right, why don't we jump into our actual next big topic? Lenovo vendor locking Ryzen chips in ThinkCenter PCs. Lenovo is taking fire after news broke that their ThinkCenter M75Q TinyGen2 is locking the CPUs installed in the machine. This is being done through AMD's platform Secure Boot, an optional enterprise-level feature that seeks to improve security. So basically what happens is that the CPU gets locked to that PC's firmware key

by fuses that are set at the factory. If that key changes, like firmware modification, PSB will trip, disabling the PC. This prevents remote firmware attacks or tampering between the factory and the customer. Firmware keys are common across given model PCs and motherboards, so CPUs tend to be interchangeable as long as that firmware doesn't change. So this is to make sure that a mobile swap doesn't also require a new cpu which could be very costly in the data center the problem that the process is destructive as psb works today the cpu will never work again once the fuse is blown that is insane especially during a chip shortage the bigger problem it's enabled by default on lenovo's

entire amd pro line including desktops effectively making them lenovo only cpus so if a pc recycler or a tinkerer down the road tries to reuse or resell or salvage in some way that cpu put it in some other system it will never work again that's right it is bound to that craptastic lenovo motherboard for life what do they mean enabled by default can you disable it that i don't know that this sounded like a hardware thing i didn't think it was something that would be enabled or disabled uh replacing the cpu on one will pop up a scary warning on boot asking if you want to lock the cpu to the machine wow that's crazy so intel does have a similar functionality in the management engine but it's in the chipset not the cpu amd cpus are able to run a standalone soc so there's

instead so processors with PSP include Ryzen Pro, Threadripper Pro, and Epic. So consumer Ryzen is incompatible with this feature and therefore unaffected. But I guess the question becomes, is AMD's, because honestly, you can't just blame Lenovo for this. It's horrible that they're enabling it by default and that needs to not be a thing so that it is not bound there. But I mean, why is AMD building a feature that just bricks CPUs like this in the first place? That's horrible. That is pretty trash.

Is this anti-consumer or is it just half-baked? Did they just screw up? I mean, it wouldn't be the first time AMD just like kind of had an idea and then just completely execute proper. Yeah. Like flummoxed the, I mean, that's not the right use of that word,

but just completely screwed up the implementation. I think it's that, um, I think they saw like a security intention and then just didn't think about it properly. And we're like, yo, just blow it didn't think about it properly and we're like yeah just blow it up just make it go boom during a chip shortage let's just destroy things for fun they can't reuse it don't let them do that don't let them tinker it's like the opposite of right to

repair yeah it's really awful little tone deaf amd wrong time yeah really bad timing okay uh how much e-waste is this going to generate is another one of our discussion questions for this one honestly hopefully not that much the issue is just that a lot of the ways to get a deal right like picking up an old optiplex on ebay uh swapping out the power supply, swapping out the GPU, turning it into a budget gaming rig, or particularly Xeons, like getting old Xeons, overclocking them, turning them into capable little gaming systems. As more and more of these kinds of tools and functionalities get built into these products those those kinds of accessible ways for people without a lot of money to get their hands on some kind of gaming experience are going to

disappear and that really sucks because i'm at a stage in my life where i can afford to buy a brand new gaming computer if i really feel like it but i wasn't always and you gotta and a lot of people aren't and so taking away the ways that people who don't have a lot of money have to get their hands on something like it already wasn't the fastest thing you can sell the new fast thing by it just being newer and faster why do do you have to, why do you have to cripple the old stuff? Can we all just stop? I guess is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,

that'd be great. News market has been rough. It's been, it's been the worst time in, in either of our lives to buy computer components at all. And making it so that some of them go boom if you try to mess with it is not good. Don't do that.

Gremlin Injector says, do you really think the product managers fly by the seat of their pants? There are too many controls in the product management process to, I think, to allow gaffes like this. I'm a PM at a Fortune 500. Can't imagine something like this happening.

I mean, not every company is smoothly smoothly run even if it's really big and does a lot of revenue is all i really have to say about that i think yeah your fortune 500 isn't necessarily the same as all the other ones yep i mean we we hear about some of the just utterly bananas stuff that was happening at activision blizzard like they were an enormous company yeah yeah that's a fantastic example there's some crazy stuff if you want to go back to that wan show people oh man yeah you want to talk about ill-managed things and like intense levels of of oversight like trigger alert didn't they have a room called like the um i don't remember what the room was called what's his name was awful comedian uh oh cosby yeah cosby sweet yeah sorry yeah like what there

was a continuing the trigger alert i guess there was a lady who was almost driven to suicide because she was getting harassed about a picture of her private parts um on a trip with a co-worker and that co-worker brought like if i remember correctly like condoms and lube and all this kind of stuff i wasn't the co-worker also she knew about it yeah yeah and there was like power issues there with that and like it was just all apparently she did commit suicide oh great oh that doesn't make it better yeah so uh hey yeah not everything's squeaky clean even if there's a lot of money going especially activision blizzard yeah in fact especially sometimes if there's a lot of money going through it yep uh speaking of money uh the show is brought to you by mechanicalkeyboards.com. Their goal is to be the largest dedicated source

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at the link down below it doesn't say what you get maybe that's the free shipping code i have no idea but make sure you enter that code because you'll get something watch watch this be the most successful like shout out like call to action that we've ever done because we don't say what the code does and people just want to know what it does. It's kind of like a loot box. Yeah. FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use accounting software that helps you run your business. It's made for freelancers and small business owners who don't have time to waste on invoicing, accounting, and payment processing. You can impress your clients with professional looking invoices that detail the work you've done and save many hours a week thanks to its ability to help you streamline

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required at freshbooks.com slash WAN. Finally, the show is brought to you by Seasonic. Thank you Seasonic for sponsoring today's WAN show. Seasonic's PrimeTX 1000 power supply is a great choice for high performance system featuring an 80 plus titanium efficiency rating that means less power gets wasted during power conversion and a fully modular cable interface along with hybrid fan control meaning that it'll be super quiet when the fan is spinning and even silent when it's under low loads it comes with a 12-year warranty and you can learn more on t-sonic.com or at the link down below so someone in chat um just to derail was talking about the blow-up processor thing and they're like i don't understand how they missed this but in high security environments like i would want something

like that i don't think we're necessarily upset that it can potentially exist at all no they're running it on the entire line of of pro products we're talking you know jeff in accounting or nancy in you know receiving or whatever just having a workstation right like we're talking ryzen pro not not necessarily thread ripper i mean even even in a even you know josie in the in the animation department right like there is no reason that those stations should have the cpu and motherboard effectively fused to each other right we we don't like soldered cpus so we shouldn't like cpus that are digitally soldered it's this it's effectively the same thing. Yes, Jordan, I will check out the remastered version of Final Fantasy VI when it releases on PC. I'm excited, but I also love the, what's the

name of the guy that did the original translation? I think it has a lot of character, and I don't know. It's hard for me to revisit games from my childhood and see things just sort of change that feel arbitrary it might be more true to the original intent but that was my childhood don't mess with my childhood yeah I honestly haven't been that interested in remasters the only remasters that I'm interested are for games that I have never played before yeah I've already played it like I know it's not going to look the greatest and I know the controls are going to be kind of weird and that's what I'm used to because that's what i remember so it's fine it's a it's a great way to introduce like my kids to things that i loved yeah um because they just

they just can't handle the crappy graphics on on some things but for me to go back and re-enjoy them like i'm replaying final fantasy tactics because i fired it up as part of my uh io neo uh 2021 pro review because i was like you know firing up emulators on it i want to see what kind of battery life you might get out of um like a relatively low powered game anyway i wanted to play like to a battle where i could actually have control of all the characters so if we wanted to get b-roll showing I am now 11 hours in that game is so good if you haven't played Final Fantasy

Tactics I actually haven't you've never played Tactics you should stream it yeah you'll need help from the stream you said it's on PC Final Fantasy Tactics I mean everything's on pc oh okay okay yeah anyway so uh right anyway that's a game that has just like atrocious translation because it was at a time that the rpg rpg genre in general had not taken off in

north america to nearly the same degree that it has now and in particular tactics games had not taken off basically at all in north america so i feel like it didn't really get the same degree of polish that even a title from that time would normally so there's this character agrius who has a has uh like this this move that she does with her sword or whatever it's called stasis sword so it does damage in a cross uh pattern and it has a chance to cast stop on any of the targets yeah effectively and so she goes life is short bury like b. Like, B-U-R-Y. It's, like, clear. I don't know how this happens.

Obviously supposed to be life is short. Bury. As she, like, kills you. Some of the old school translators for games used to take so many liberties, too. Like, I don't remember what game it is, but he just snuck in, like, names of band members of different bands that he liked and like different lyrics from their songs into this game it was so epic there's a whole video on like how this guy like really didn't follow the original trans like what the translation should have been like at all and was just co-opping the whole thing to basically be about this band that he liked

and it got published and no one really noticed because like i don't know why would you wow what game is this i don't remember it was uh there was a series on youtube that i watched a long time ago i wouldn't know how to find it again but it was about just like funny old video game translations and that one came up uh oh this is great trickman01 son of a submariner yeah that's a that's a great line, son of a submariner. Yeah, that's a great line from... Son of a submariner? From a Bill something. I forget his name, but he was the translator for Final Fantasy VI,

the original release on Super Nintendo. Okay. So good. What are we supposed to even be talking about right now? Should we do a merch messages break? And then go back to topics after? Just do like 10 of them and then go back to topics? Yeah, let's do a handful that are not just about

do you guys have more stock of things coming to the store or whatever, like discussion topics. We'll do that at the end. There's a question about GPU sag. Justin H. says, I have an MSI Gaming X Trio 3070 Ti and I would like to know

the best way to stop GPU sag. The bracket that comes with it is awful and doesn't work. A new bracket or arm? Man, man yeah the only thing you can really do to stop gpu sag outright is some cases have adapters so you can vertically mount them they won't sag if you do that um you can also 3d print i think you can buy them but 3d printing it might make more sense if you know anyone with a 3d printer but you could just 3d print a thing to hold it up i'm sure you'd find something on Thingiverse for like an adjustable little, you know, retention arm thing.

You could just screw a thing in there and hold it in place. It won't be the prettiest thing ever, but it's a lot better than having strain on the card, which frankly is not going to break it. It's just ugly. So if you're fixing it for aesthetics with a solution that is not aesthetically pleasing, it could be that the cure is worse than the disease. So it's kind of up to you. Another one that just came in from Tony D is, I bought this just to ask, does Linus

know sign language? Looked like he was signing on the old stream about getting the Volt and destroying the Lambo. So I have a family member who is hard of hearing and was a teacher of the deaf growing up. And so a lot of the time we actually had a foster kid as well who was deaf. So I am functional in American Sign Language, which is to say that if I was dropped into a deaf convention, for example, I would be able to order food and I'd be able to find a bathroom and I'd be able to carry on basic conversations with people. But I'm far from fluent. I'm really out of practice.

At my peak, I translated this conference for my mom. It was like some kind of teaching conference. And my brain, I don't think I've ever been that mentally exhausted before or since. I don't think I've ever experienced that kind of mental exhaustion. I have a ton of respect for interpreters, by the way. And that's, I imagine listening and talking would actually be more difficult in a sense, because as long as you're speaking manually, you can kind of focus on what they're saying, maybe more than if you're talking. I don't know. Anyway, tons of respect for interpreters. Yes, Canadians use ASL. Signed English is stupid. There, I said it. ASL is the way to to go it's like an actual

language so there's that signed english is dumb because you just it has exactly the same grammatical structure as english oh no um so you just sign a lot of unnecessary words so in signed english you might say i and i don't know the signs for these things because they're stupid, but you might say, I am, so you would sign again for that, going to the store. In ASL, you should just say, you would just say, you know, I'm going to the store, going to the store. That's it. Like, it's very directional. So they have, like, they have slang, right, too. So this is an old one. I don't know if anyone says this anymore but normally the sign for understand would

be understand that's kind of like a light bulb going off in your head but you got stuff like understand because it's a super it's a super directional language like it's really different when you're talking about a car you don't just say the car turned left you just say the car went left okay yeah and then it crashed and that was bad you know like it just it has its own grammatical structure so it's sure uh it's way more legit it's way more efficient that makes sense okay i just curated that one because i didn't catch it in time so yeah i'm i'm functional but i i don't i wouldn't say that i speak it and and yes you would say speak sign language by the way fun fact that's interesting yeah i don't know i feel like that's an english problem but I don't know. What else we got?

There's probably some more questions. Hey, Linus and Jake. I have a living room set up and need a wireless keyboard, but tend to like the wired ones. Is it possible to mod a wired keyboard into a wireless one? Yes. Yeah. Anything is possible if you believe in yourself enough.

It's a bit of a project, but definitely. Oh, my goodness. These are believe in yourself enough. It's a bit of a project, but definitely. Oh my goodness. These are coming in too fast. Alexander L., you guys have inspired me to pursue my hobby. As a political scientist, I have to ask, what reforms do you believe governments should implement in the tech space? Thank you for the amazing content that you guys provide. So net neutrality is an obvious one.

Right to repair is an obvious one the fact that those things are so obvious and yet there is so much opposition to them tells you about the power of lobbying so this isn't a tech thing but absolutely lobbying needs reform yeah yeah um i mean i'd start there that's a lot of work yeah that's like your whole career there you go yeah you if you achieve that in your lifetime you will actually have a wikipedia page we'll know your name yeah good luck go for it i wish you nothing but the best me too what else we got uh do you think zen 4 chips will be worth upgrading to later this year oh man how could they how could they not be i mean amd has been absolutely firing in all cylinders i've been i've been so excited to see what they're doing over the last four years uh on the gpu side okay maybe they've had some

misfires like the 6500 xt very recently but on the cpu side i think they've shown time and time again they have a really good roadmap and i'm i'med. Someone said, this is not really a question, but it says, dear Luke, this is more troubleshooting for merch messages. You can leave merch messages if you're signed in, but you cannot leave them if you use the quick pay option by typing in the shop pay verification code. That is a limitation of shop pay, unfortunately.

Okay. We have some, I have an idea of how to potentially get around that in the future but this has been a problem with with shop pay the entire time um conclusion is that merch messages aren't isn't available at quick checkout yeah yeah um we want to eventually have a notification that shows not just on the effectively checkout pages that says like, hey, they're live. You can leave merchant messages. Right. And part of the idea is that maybe we can have it so that people add a merch message elsewhere on the site,

other than checkout or something. I don't know. But yeah, right now that is a limitation with ShopPay. Nathan, does LTT have its own help desk? Uh-oh, where'd it go? Help desk. Its own proper IT help desk, or is uh outsourced to a third party or is it just done by someone there who's knowledgeable but does other duties uh it's just done by someone here who's knowledgeable and has a different job we are getting to the scale though where we're not that need one we're not that far off of needing someone whose entire job is to make sure everyone's workstation has their antivirus and upgrade people's RAM when they need it and all that kind of stuff. Because not everyone here is like a tech nerd anymore. So people might have other expertise that matters a lot more than their tech nerdiness.

Yeah. Yeah. I just never thought we'd get there, but I guess we are. It's kind of interesting. That'll be a weird day. There will be a lot of expectations on that IT person. Yeah, I think so. I think so.

That might be a pretty nerve-wracking job to apply for. Yeah, imagine having to come to my office and upgrade my computer while i'm watching oh my goodness you know you could use that keyboard shortcut i might have saved you some time i mean i am paying for this right i would totally i would totally behave like that just to mess with them on their first day if they take too long doing something or seem like they don't know something, suggesting a video that you have on that topic. Right.

Did you even watch any of our videos before you applied here? That's actually one of my favorites. I have pulled that line on people. And man, the deer in headlights look that I got. I'm just messing with you. Welcome to home to you. That's funny all right sorry sorry yeah i know i know i'm a bad bad person lucas can you do a video about signal degradation when running pc slash monitor power cables alongside other data cables just did some wire management and I swear one of my monitors is behaving weirdly.

Also tell Luke he has good taste in names. I don't know if Luke has good taste in names. His mom, I guess you might agree with. The person's name is Lucas. That's an interesting... I think that was my dad. That's actually an interesting video concept. How much power would we have to run

alongside, say, an unshielded HDMI cable until we drop the signal? I wonder if there's different quality in shielding as well. If there's some cheap, poorly shielded cables that you could get through. That really sounds like something that I would like the lab folks to figure out. Oh, this is the lttlabs.com doc. A lot of that stuff I'm not ready to talk about yet you could just slap it on the bottom so you can grab it later yeah if you don't have time if i can find it quickly i would rather put it in here yeah for sure do you want to do one more yeah let me go find one lab uh this is a question for you technically but i'm sure you

can answer it uh hey hi linus any word on the tel aviv videos coming soon or shelved or what i know one of them i just approved a thumbnail for usually by the time i get sent a thumbnail for approval it's pretty close to release but i haven't seen it on the calendar yet uh this got curated uh thoughts on bill gates buying up so much land yeah have you seen that have we talked about that i'm wearing i don't think so i've definitely seen it i think i've talked to you about it before even yeah um uh honestly from an investment standpoint it's a smart play from a uh pr standpoint it seems to run uh contrary to a lot of the image that he's trying to craft for himself. I think his word on the subject is, well, that's like the investment fund that's managed by those guys.

I don't know. Okay. Yeah, sure. It's mostly, as far as my understanding goes, specifically farmland as well. And a lot of it is being bought expecting a food shortage and he wants to be able to own everything that can produce in the case of a food shortage uh yeah basically the thing about land is they're not making more of it is sort of the the expression very cool yeah i mean there's a company working on extracting minerals from the moon so okay so

they could maybe make a little bit... Trying to get to more land. A little bit more land. Fair enough. Measuring resistance to interference for shielded cables versus unshielded with, like, high... My son took my LTT water bottle,

so I need a new one. Question. With the GPU shortage, do you think new game design will be less hardware demanding in short term? do you think new game design will be less hardware demanding in short term i don't think game design has been very hardware demanding i think the honestly the main hardware demand that games have had for quite a while now is hard drives um the the whole idea of people having s pure ssd systems uh went i think slightly up in flames when

cod started getting to 200 gigs um gigs and other games started following suit. But a lot of games have been really easy to run for a long time. I saw a post from somebody not long ago saying like, oh, I'm still running, I think it was like a 1060. And they're like, I can play basically every modern game. Probably can't play Halo, but you can probably play a ton of other stuff.

And honestly, Halo's biggest problem is that it's just really poorly optimized. But it is pretty though it is it is a pretty game but it's also it could it could run a lot better and i just want every game to run like doom eternal if every game forever looks like doom eternal and ran like doom eternal pretty solid i think that's good enough it's an amazingly well-running game yeah and like and there's there's i i don't know like i'm sure like valorant isn't exactly that hard to run a lot of modern launch games are not hard to run gaming companies have been aiming for attainable levels of performance for a very long time because they

want to be able to sell to the most people most amount of people possible um so as fun as it is to to to see things like star citizen that is not the norm and i don't think that's going to change all right should we jump into one of our other main topics amd buries the lack of VRAM performance issues under the rug during the RX 6500 XT launch. So funny. So funny. Okay, we talk all the time, and we've been talking about this mostly, I think, since AMD did their, like, what was that advertising campaign? Like, rebel against the big man? I don't remember.

Do you remember what that was? All the branding was like a riot they had like people like at pax they had uh paid actors essentially they weren't hiding it like it was it was known but they were walking around with protest signs like protesting against the big tech companies and stuff they've been trying to position themselves as like on your side underdog underdog this whole time and then they post they make a post essentially marketing that four gigs of vram was not enough for gaming however long ago i don't remember when and then they release a card with four gigs of vram and they delete the post they're not on your side they're just not okay come on radeon 5500 xt 1080p gaming performance

uh what does it say yeah four gigs is great the gray bar eight gigs is the red bar available with eight gigs right yeah it's a way to go nudist there's insufficient video memory for the selected settings that's bad oh man ah amd new card four gigs around don't worry about that it's it's totally fine it's totally fine i mean realistically yeah it is totally fine they probably shouldn't have talked about it like that before and by totally fine i mean functional yeah i mean it's not going to explode is it ideal like their processor no no it's not ideal it's not even cheap like how am i supposed to defend this i don't know the the issue is is the value of anything right is determined by what your other choices are so if your other choices are nothing then it's valuable then i guess it's a good deal yeah so that's where we're

at on this it's in stock at yeah it's over msrp so the one that is at the 199 msrp is out of stock but there are three variants at 269 it is a graphics card that you can buy for a little over 250 dollars that is capable of 1080p gaming is it a great value no will you get texture pop-in issues yes will you experience stutter almost definitely it's got a narrow 64-bit memory interface i mean going back to like the radeon 9000 series i am talking almost 20 years ago right even then like the the oh man what was that what how far down did you have to go to find a 64-bit memory bus it's like so bad oh yeah so the specs are four gigs gdr6 16 rdna2 cus at 2.8 to 2.9 gigahertz at least least it's like clocked high. It's the first GPU on TSMC's N6 node. So this is fresh production capacity,

which might explain why it's actually still in stock. 16 megs of infinity cache. One of the bigger issues is the Gen 4x4 PCI Express interface. Do you know about this? So if you plug this thing into a PCIe Gen 3 or heaven forbid PCIe Gen 2 system system because you've got an older system and you just want freaking basic cards you can play some freaking games right it could be running at literally one quarter the pcie bandwidth that it is that that system is expecting because it's

expecting a 16x interface and three quarters of the fingers are just not wired up, essentially. Now, one of the articles that I read recently suggested that this GPU was not intended for the desktop. It was intended for notebooks, like mid-spec notebooks, where the issues around its video encoding and decoding capabilities weren't going to be a problem because they'd be paired with apus that could take over that functionality um it was also going to be beneficial to have a narrow uh bifor interface to the cpu because it's more power efficient so i heard i heard actually what i thought was a pretty strong argument for that the reason this thing is stupid on the desktop it was never meant to be a desktop GPU, which was, I thought, a pretty good take on it,

but it doesn't change the fact that AMD did release it. And hide their own old post. And hid their own blog post. So funny. So the performance tanks by as much as half in our testing, while others reported that it performed substantially worse than its predecessor the rx 5500 xt um when it was stuck with those four lanes running at gen 3 speeds in some games uh even in gen 4 mode it was worse than its predecessor and same with the six-year-old rx 570 and the rx 570 was like a 200 and change gpu max the everything seven on

flowplane said i think the biggest reason for four gigabytes of vram was to prevent ethereum mining since that currently requires 4.6 gigabytes um i don't think that's the case i don't know i don't know if i buy it if that was the case i think they would have said something they did they did say they did say that yes but i just don't know if i buy it i think that i think that it's just as happy to sell the minors as anyone else yeah i'm not convinced that amd cares at all i'm not convinced give us this is not entirely fair i guess because i'm the one saying it but did did uh did amd give us any cards for the verified actual gamer program uh amd did did they yep amd did work with us yes they did okay yeah nvidia did not yeah i knew that part i didn't think any vendor did i thought

it was all through third parties asus and msi did amd worked with us directly through a board partner so i believe they were asus cards but amd secured the allocation for us okay cool that's cool um so here's a discussion question did amd take down the vram article on purpose absolutely there's no way that wasn't on purpose it was like the night before the launch or something stupid like that definitely they should have taken it down like six months ago probably someone realized they were like going through the collateral taking it down and just owned it from the last launch right going through it in preparation for the new one hey what can we copy paste oh crap probably something like that removing it is just so obvious though and i'm sure they've gotten more bad press

about removing it than they would have gotten if they just left it up but here's the thing is there a place for the rx 6500 xt does it suck yes is it cut down in ways that would have been inexcusable two years ago a year ago even uh yeah is there a place for it though this is my this is my hot take yes it's a card that you can actually buy. And the more people buy this card, the less demand there is going to be for everything else. Because once you've got a card, once you're actually playing games, for most people,

I realize I'm talking to my fellow enthusiasts right now. You guys go, what are you talking about? As soon as there's something new, I'm like, I'm looking at it. I can smell the hardware. I can smell the hardware in the air, right? but most people are not like that they get a new computer and that's it that's their computer so the more people pick up 6500 xts the more cards we get in the hands of gamers and i was talking about something similar when we were discussing

arc alchemist yeah i don't care if it's the most power efficient i don't care if it has the best performance i don't care i want cards in the systems of gamers so that the demand, this pent-up demand that is driving scalper prices higher and higher can be alleviated. That's what we need. Does it have a place? Yes, it's places in gamer systems.

And if the performance sucks and it won't sell for $350 or whatever scalpers are trying to get for it, because you can still buy it new for $270, if it makes its way back down close to MSRP, that will put pressure on the next card above it, which will put pressure on the card above that, which will put pressure on the card above that. That's competition, baby. We want it. So having anything, anything that people can actually buy is good.

I wonder if there's been a measurable change in monitor buying habits since the chip shortage. Monitor buying habits? I mean, I've seen them be just like out of stock. Are monitors out of stock too? I mean, LG had a whole thing where with that one millisecond IPS panel, they just couldn't get enough of them or something. I don't know if they're still, they were out of stock everywhere.

I don't know if that's still the case, but I know Samsung seems to be pretty stoked with the pre-orders on that weird monitor that they have. Walking around Best Buy just before Christmas, you couldn't even move because the whole floor was just filled with TVs and the whole warehouse in the back was filled with tvs so they had like overflow storage on the floor and you

could literally like it was actually hard to navigate around the store because they had so many darn tvs um i haven't seen the the shortage hit display as much as i have hit other things but i'm not surprised it's hit it somewhat but i just wonder like if you're looking forward knowing like there's a giant question mark next to when you're going to be able to get your next gpu upgrade reasonably like are you really trying to push like super high refresh rate displays super high resolution displays well that's the thing is they're making lots of gpus it's just that you're just not getting them yeah the demand is not the demand is has been high yeah i i mean i do think that as many people as ever

are putting GPUs in their gaming systems. Like they have ramped production in order to accommodate miners. And miners have been buying cards since before this big run up here. So I think it's both. I think it's a combination of more demand from the crypto scene

and a combination of more demand from gamers. More people have picked up the hobby. and a combination of more demand from gamers more people have picked up the hobby yeah um speaking of crypto have you been following the uh the crash that's been taken place over the last little bit here not thoroughly i know it exists i know it's happening but i don't know like very notable details about it uh well it's going down and this is this is something really interesting so enter a search term um oh dang gosh darn it hold on a second no problem no problem okay and then i want to compare uh to check this out somebody showed this to me and i was like holy crap is this it oh no nfts have overtaken crypto i think nfts are overtaking crypto because memes in google trends

i think i think people are memeing on it yeah but here's the thing is everybody in on the joke no okay yeah fair enough have you seen crypto land or cryptolandia or whatever it's called what's cryptolandia yeah cryptoland yeah this is it it's not cryptolandia i feel like that would have been a better name screen um, there's that email. That's fine. What am I looking at here? Does this have audio right now? It's a video promoting Cryptoland. Cryptoland is a place where you can buy... Oh, there is audio.

Let's stop that. You can buy property. There's like clubhouses and stuff. They have different names for the different areas. I don't remember. Something Something Hills is where you can actually buy your property. And it's all exclusive and all that kind of stuff. But it's all digital.

It's obviously not real property. My brain hurts. It's an amazing video. They're having some PR problems you know because like someone tweeted at them asking what the um what the age of consent was and they tweeted back a reply saying mental matured mental matured mental maturity should be more than enough uh so that was awesome that was really uh wow classy that was very classy to be fair i don't necessarily know there might have been a language barrier they might not have known what that person meant etc um but yeah very fantastic

so people like memeing on things like that and nfts are like as far as i can tell twitter's favorite pastime right now is just making fun of nfts um well okay except that in other news this week twitter has announced nft profile pictures on ios which uh as far as i can tell uh is is like what do you call it bully baiting like it's if, if you actually set your thing to one of these NFT profile pictures, which has a different shape around it, because no one would know if it's just a bad drawing or an NFT, right?

So it's really, really hard to tell the difference. So they have to make it a different shape. So it's kind of a giveaway. Something that people have been doing is making it so the the background for twitter that they they color match as part of their profile picture so they can make the shape yeah if they don't have an nft which is pretty funny and couldn't you just mint your own nft anyway oh no that like costs money

i'm not i'm not spending money you could do it though oh yeah some some guy tweeted out um frustrated that people could just screenshot and then mint copies of the nft and then somebody retweeted it with their own profile picture changed to his nft yeah so funny i thought that was genuinely hilarious but yeah on thursday twitter launched a new feature for owners of non-fungible tokens nfts to use them as profile pictures. How is that different from using it as your profile picture already? Well, it's a hexagon. Neato.

It was a matter of time until Twitter capitalized on the enthusiasm of its users with stoned ape avatars. There's also other NFTs. The social media platform added crypto wallet support back in September, but there's a gotcha. You need to be paying $3 a month for Twitter Blue. Nice. That's smart. If they're going to buy NFTs, they'll probably buy Twitter Blue.

The new feature also announced NFT alerts to show off their stats. If you click on a hexagon NFT profile picture, it brings up the details of what makes the NFT unique. Wow. So cool. You know what luke what's up this is just in-game cosmetics we were sitting there sticks in the mud going this is stupid no one will do this it's horse armor who needs it and now horse armor is like i mean we've been we've been playing halo infinite right yeah and one one of the things that Luke and I like to do

when we play Halo Infinite is talk about the people that we see. You know that cringy cinematic that it runs every time you enter a match that exists only to show off people's armor the skins that they've purchased yeah so one of our one of our pastimes is just uh talking smack about everyone who spent actual real freaking money on digital uh digital armor but it's a lot of people it It's a lot. It's like almost every pug that we get. It's really extensive. Yeah. And so as much as we're sitting here going,

this is stupid, NFTs are stupid, it's not any different. It's the same thing. People already paid money for just pictures. It's not... This might make it worse, but in-game cosmetics are not exclusive. People already paid money for just pictures. It's not... This might make it worse,

but in-game cosmetics are not exclusive. Usually. Unless they're also NFTs. There's pushes by companies to make in-game cosmetics NFTs. So, that's a thing. I think the concept of what NFT is... Is fine. Is interesting. Yeah what NFT is is interesting. It's very interesting.

But it is just ripe for abuse. I think the application that is being used of this concept almost exclusively is trash. I think it could be used for very interesting things. Just like with a lot of crypto stuff and a lot of blockchain stuff, it's, it's an incredibly powerful, very interesting system. And I think it's most often used for just like trash. Yeah. I mean, it's not true of a lot of things to be fair. It's just that it's not any dumber than what we already had. It's not any dumber than your stupid gem certificate for your stupid rock.

That is not rare. Uh, buying a, buying a star or whatever yeah it's it's no dumber than your than your stupid acre of land that you own on the moon or or whatever right like i i just don't see the i don't see the difference and so if people have demonstrated time and time and time and time again that they will accept this, then we can meme all we want. But in the mainstream, you can clearly see it in Google Trends. NFT officially has more interest in it than crypto as a search term. I think it being different is fine.

I should just mint NFTs. No. Why don't I just mint NFTs of my face and sell them? Because you make fun of people with in-game cosmetics and you make fun of NFTs. So why not just be hypocritical? Why not just do both? Why not just sell them and then make fun of the people who buy them?

I did tell you you should make a computer NFT. Can I just do that? Can I make it and then just trash on you for buying it? There's people that do that for sure. Yeah, that's definitely. Like, look at this crap. Look at this crap. Apparently some YouTubers made like $23 million

selling NFTs in 10 minutes. I don't know who these people are, but apparently they're awful. So I'm not going to shout them out, but I'm just sitting here going, well, if it's free money fine fine shower me with it i don't know man oh make fun of the nfts with the nft but that's the thing that's the thing as soon as you get that meta are you really joking anymore right like as soon as i buy a car with my nft profits

is it a joke anymore or am i seriously an nft peddler we know it's a link not an image it's fine yeah i um i i think it's totally fine and valid make gpu nfts it's the only thing people will be able to afford and then make fun of the people that buy it as long as you are super open about it the whole time i mean i was pretty open about the expensive edition cpu pillow yeah i was like look this is this pillow costs too much yeah it's a it's a dumb product that we didn't make in the first place because it didn't make any sense but you guys asked us to make it so we did yeah we've sold like almost half of them yeah it's crazy in a week yeah i don't know it's fine to me we're not bringing back more by the way guys that's it that's all

it's gone when it's gone sell nfts and donate the money this is the mentality of everyone looking at crypto and nfts right now oh well if it's easy money then why not i i don't know guys i tell me tell me why not to mint have have sarah whip up a cool little gpu icon that you can use as your twitter profile picture convince me not to i mean you know what the funny thing is is that when we talked about doing like a linus coin or or whatever like doing like a cryptocurrency back in the day we We were trying to remember, we like actually talked, we seriously talked about doing it. We were like, we're going to do it because we were trying to come up with ways that it would actually be useful. And that's the problem.

You don't do that. We shouldn't have done that. Yeah, you just do it. We should have just not bothered. We should have just released it, not cared at all. Unbelievable. All right. unbelievable all right one thing that i found kind of interesting is a lot of the i looked into a bunch of crypto projects because i was like are there i was basically trying to think like like boink and folding sure like why don't they pay out a

coin and then i was like oh maybe they do And then I found projects that effectively pay you out for work done on Boink or Folding. And I was like, oh, that's cool. And then I figured out that the coins are worth basically nothing because no one actually cares. They just want money. It's like, oh, okay. you're you might not even break even but if we can make it so that there's some benefit towards using that computing power for something that's actually helpful for anything in the world that would probably be kind of cool instead of just burning stuff for like no reason but yeah no one cares so that sucks

oh i had no you know what i was was talking about ThinkGeek today, Oliver, because I ran into that human body organ, like lunchbox thing we had that was part of our, I just wanted some stuff to like put on set that was kind of nerd culture, but not just computer hardware. And so I tasked everyone with like spending $150 on ThinkGeek so that we'd have like kind of some cool stuff kicking around.

Anyway, that's one of the ones that has made it all the way from seven, eight years ago or whenever we bought that stuff to now. And I was like, oh yeah, ThinkGeek. ThinkGeek's still a thing? Apparently they're not. They got bought by GameStop and they suck. And Oliver asked,

have you considered carrying a curated selection of third-party products in LTT store? I don't know. I guess we could. It hasn't really occurred to us before though to be perfectly blunt with you i uh a while ago like during covid it was asked if if people could just like deconstruct my desk basically because i hadn't been there for like a year or something and i said yeah sure and they were like you have a bunch of like stuff what do

you want us to do with this and i was like okay well i mean if there's anything neat you guys can just like have it right like whatever it's fine and there's a bunch of stuff from back in the think geek days and then there was another one that you did later i think when we first moved in here i think you did like 100 bucks to like decorate your work area yeah there was a bunch of stuff from the think geek days and that that i still had around my desk nice like a map of mordor nice like a uh nuka cola sign and all this kind of stuff and i noticed if you walk through the logistics section they're all like around so they're still existing i thought that was kind of cool i went into the bathroom upstairs and one of them's on the wall in there and i'm like hey

they actually like they did it they didn't just throw it away they like just redeployed it i thought that was actually pretty cool that's awesome yeah uh what else we got here is oh man this i know it's still covered right now uh samsung their new soc features rdna2 graphics and ray tracing the ray tracing probably won't amount to anything but but the RDNA2 graphics sound amazing. The Exynos 2200 was built on four nanometer EUV, eight cores in a tri-cluster configuration. So a high powered Cortex-X2 flagship core, three Cortex-A710s and four efficient A510s. Oh, this thing sounds amazing. Some more support for camera sensors up to 200 megapixels.

Oh, okay. And RDNA2 features like variable rate shading and ray tracing for what Samsung claims will be console-like graphics. Pretty impressive. GPU performance has been a weak point in the past for Exynos chips, so this could be a huge step forward, but Samsung's announcement was surprisingly light on details, which some are taking as a bad sign. They could also be holding their cards close to their chest, so we might have to wait for the S22 lineup of phones to find out what is shaken here. In our final news, Valve has been validating titles for the Steam Deck.

That's right! You can find titles that are verified as working perfectly, working playably, and unsupportedupported so so much for that whole every game on steam will work but i don't think anyone sensible was ever going to believe that anyway yeah um i'm really happy this is happening um i was not entirely sure how in they were going to go with, uh, like making this rating system, an official valve thing.

Yeah. Um, because they had those verified titles. We talked about this when we were trying to write the script, they had that initial list of verified titles, but then they never really expanded on it in like two months. And I was like, is this actually going to be a thing or are they just going to leave it up

to, to proton DB? Um, I'm happy that it's actually becoming a thing. Um, I, I think it's actually becoming a thing. I think that's actually going to mean a lot for the community and for Linux developers and everything else in general. It's also going to be a way to incentivize developers

to bother to work with Valve to get it to work properly because if you can be promoted under that tab, you know Valve's going to be pushing it hard. Oh, yeah. It's going to be a way to sell your game. Yeah. Let's go. That is a direct incentive for Linux development and support,

and that is big. And people on Steam Decks, and there are going to be a lot of them, are going to be hungry for games to play that run great on Steam Deck. Yeah. It's going to be coming soon. This is really cool.

This is really good for Linux. This is really good for gamers. This is good. This is good, good, good. Hopefully, there's going gonna be more than 38 of them oh it'll happen they'll come they'll come give it give them time yes give gabe time he doesn't run so fast anymore oh oh oh all right now it's time to dig into the merch messages. Just got my new water bottle lanyard. Absolutely love them. Have you considered doing different sticker designs on the included stickers?

I have about five packs of the same stickers. Okay. We are working on other free items. Yeah. Should I talk about that? Yeah, sure. So we're working on a thing where on checkout, essentially, there will be like a shelf. We have very non-final names for it right now,

but there will essentially be like a free shelf of things and you get to pick one. And there will be like the current things that we have that are free that can go along with your order and you can pick from them. One of the things we're working on is a coloring card of the GPU Wasteland desk pad design. So that was a suggestion that we got and we loved it.

And then we took it one step further and Creator Warehouse is moving into a new space. So what we're going to do is we are actually going to make the backside of it a postcard. So what people can do is they can color it, send it to us. So it'll be a pre-addressed postcard. So they'll color it, send it to us. And then we're going to make a wall in the new creator warehouse space that is going to be covered

in these colored GPU Wasteland postcards. So we thought that was kind of a cool idea just to make it more real, right? For the team over there. Like, hey, everything that we make is actually going into the hands of a real actual person who, some of them anyway, cared enough to fill out this thing and send it back to us so that we could

see a representation of them on the wall. I don't know. I just thought it was kind of a cool idea. Dominic asks, might be a bit out of scope for the channel, but any interest in some data science content? It's something that is hard to make a visually interesting video about like that's the challenge is we have to deal with the limitations of the media it's video it has to be visual i think i think there is potential we are hiring a data scientist obviously so maybe they can help us with some direction there i think it would mostly be uh like sidebar things within another greater video um like better benchmarks for data science stuff, because we happen to have a data science person on staff that can help advise us on those things.

That would be great. And also, I mean, you saw that video, but this was more AI. But the video of those little, the seekers and the hiders. Oh, that AI video is crazy. That was fascinating. If we could drive stuff like that, like that could be interesting content. But I think that's few and far between. Yeah. And that's like a team of scientists working on a project like that.

That's not the kind of thing that we could recreate. I kind of doubt it, but maybe sidebar things within other videos. This is from James. Throughout your career, have you regretted making or not making a decision? Perhaps a decision that you didn't make fast enough and missed an opportunity.

Yeah. We both almost went really hard into bitcoin mining in 2010 we were we were really close to doing it and then we were like uh we had all these cards and all these benches just sitting around and i don't even fully remember the reason why we didn't do it i think we were just lazy we were really busy at the time to be fair yeah but yeah well no because i had it all set up on some benches and i just like turned it off i was like i don't know they're kind of loud like it was it was something that i could literally just power up when i left the studio and then like turn off when i needed to film and i just couldn't be bothered yeah i mean someone sent me uh a moment from the wan show from

like 2013 that aged like fine milk someone bought a house with crypto or something like that or so i saw this on twitter yeah and i watched i watched it and i was just like oh boy i was like yeah bitcoin's not going anywhere blah blah blah i'll eat my hat like oh okay i didn't end up watching it was i was i with you on that one i didn't watch i couldn't watch any more than my initial hot take yeah i was like quote me on this oh no way to go it's like oh no i got quoted darn way to go why i mean there's stuff i mean there's regrets and stuff but you just got to move on yep um no the pink and green beanie is never coming back to the store sorry it was a limited edition thing linus what's the right to repair laws like in canada

uh truthfully i don't know we get more American news up here than we get Canadian news honestly a lot of a lot of Canadian stuff like that they just we just follow the Americans yeah because it's in some ways um kind of detrimental to us to have different policies because all of a sudden manufacturers are disincentivized to support the Canadian market because we're creating a bunch of extra work for them. So, you know. We usually just follow them. Please, just put bilingual, you know, French on the package,

and then we're good. Je ne sais pas. Soda mousse. Costa. What do you think about the 42-inch LG OLED for desk use? I think that as long as you don't fear burning, so you're willing to turn the brightness down, you might do all right.

I'm looking to build a computer that will be good for computational fluid dynamics. What components should I spend more on to get the best bang for my buck? Well, you should try to figure out if computational fluid dynamics are CPU bound or GPU bound, and then go hard in that direction. Frosty Kygor asks, got my expensive edition CPU pillow today.

It has a smell to it, kind of a mix of dirt and acetone. Anything like this come up with the samples? It goes away, but it's stuffed with alpaca fur. It's not like a synthetic thing. So it actually, yeah, it does have a bit of a scent to it. I mean, that makes sense. There's a freaking lot of it in there. It's like half an alpaca worth of fibers.

Chrono Trigger had a bunch of Rock Band references, including characters named Flea, Slash, and Ozzy. And related to hiring a tech. Oh oh at least you wouldn't have to create training materials just a curated playlist on your youtube channel yeah there's more to it i'd want them to do better than yeah what they just learn watching our videos because a lot of time we leave a lot out yeah have you ever ever considered picking up game devs for labs slash videos being a game artist myself i always find myself watching ltd and having my own wisdom i wish were included or explored in other vids at a surface-ish level um it would we'd be interested in it but it couldn't be someone's primary skill set yeah they'd have to be a testing person yeah

yeah so that'd be pretty tough hey mr skywalker i guess this one's for you okay is there any way to watch live streams on ios right now like in float plan i guess if they miss the notification apparently it's just gone and they have to wait for the vod weird that shouldn't be the case i jayden's in the chat we'll figure that out mark a has been we've been essentially blocked for ios development for a long time we are not currently blocked so there has been a few recent updates and things are being fixed and brought up to where it should be as fast as we can. Yeah, Jaden in the flowplane chat just said that doesn't sound right. I feel like there might be a flow problem here but we'll look into it. Maybe message flowplane support so we can actually respond to you. Can you hit a CPU or GPU with a controlled

load so that it stays at a specific temperature? I want to use a PC to heat an insulated water bath and cook a steak sous vide style. Could be awesome. Okay. That sounds like the pizza heater computer. You'd be far better off just hitting it with a sous vide. Like a maximum, a full load. like a maximum a full load and then when the temperature gets to the right point backing off the load and just controlling it pwm style rather than dc style if you kind of catch my drift yeah also use a sous vide would you be interested in hiring someone just for the

workshop i did machining apprenticeship in germany at mercedes i've been working there for two years now i'm a canadian citizen yeah it'd be tough because everything we do in the shop has a purpose other than just like doing things in the shop i i don't think we're at that scale yet basically what do you think it would take for right to repair to really take off and make a big impact i mean it takes consumers demanding it eric uh there's a lot of people in flow playing chat right now saying that it works just fine on ios okay there's someone who's watching on desktop and they opened their app without the notification and opened the stream on ios by clicking the live button so i think it works i think there's just maybe a flow problem matthew asks looking for a good dual monitor stand with one monitor on top of the other not side by side any suggestions i've

been happy with my vivo stuff it's cheap and cheerful not the best not the worst i haven't tried their top oh wait i have i did a video where i upgraded to two of lg's super mega ultra wides a while back and i believe i used a stand from vivo it's fine any thoughts on a boot cut sock i'd love something to wear during work yeah we're gonna do socks eventually give us time do you think it makes what when do you think it will make more sense for a PC gamer to buy a 4K TV instead of a monitor? I mean, I'm already running a 4K TV instead of a monitor. So I would say the time the time is now. The screwdriver will have a black cap and there will also be an orange cap version. There are going to be two different versions. And for influencers, we're going to do special versions in their own colors which i'm super excited about we found a

place that'll do super low volume injection molding and we managed to get colors for like i justine uh like a blue for gamers nexus we've got uh oh what's uh jerry rig everything's color i can't remember but yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be super cool william asks how much performance am i losing vr 9900k d390 pcie gen 3 evga ftw 3090 should i upgrade to 12th gen i mean most vr games are really designed for lowest common denominator anyway yeah so i would say you're probably getting as much meaningful performance as you can it's also gonna super depend on your application there's a huge range in vr um i would i would check how your game is performing and if you need more performance go for it question for luke usually with rolling up long sleeve shirts

ends up with the sleeves, sleeve collars getting stretched out for me. So wearing the sleeves all the way out feels weird. Have you experienced any permanent stretching with the short circuit shirt? It might look big, but no, there's no stretching here. And I like exclusively wear it rolled up. Okay. I have had the same problem with other shirts.

I've had shirts become like kind of weird. I've actually had shirts make it so that I have to roll it in a different way because it gets so loose but so far i mean i'm not guaranteeing anything but so far i've had no issues here zach excited for the hoodie do you have any thoughts on the state of twitch og staff leaving coo left dmca not profitable most importantly we still don't know why Dr. Disrespect got banned. Keep up the great work. Not profitable, it's almost certainly going to stay that way. Streaming is extremely expensive.

Online video is just extremely expensive as is, and then you add streaming to it, and it becomes more expensive. Like by a lot. Yeah, and then you put Twitch Prime in there, so they're just throwing free money all over the place, and it's just crazy. In terms of everyone leaving, yeah, I'm not surprised. I mean, there's a video from, like, forever ago where I say something about bleeding purple because I thought Twitch was just so cool.

Because Twitch was just awesome back in the day, and it's just not anymore, and that's just a fact. I also just wonder how much of it was not awesome but rather just hadn't come to light yet that's probably true uh i think the main thing that i thought was awesome back then was just streaming video was so new and i thought the technology was just super cool right that's fair i'm talking this is a long time ago like a very long we're talking when justin.tv still existed yeah like it's yeah i think this was this video would have been like 2011 2012 right twitch was interviewing people at pax talking about like twitch it was very long time ago um it was they were recording vods about twitch at pax because irl streaming was not a thing right this is a long time um i i think the platform has also become

very different than it was back then um it's now a streaming for everything platform yep um i think what is it a talk show or irl or whatever i don't watch that much twitch um being the top category on twitch all the time is a big example of that sure um where back in the day a lot of the top creators were just like these really good gamers that would barely even say anything and people were just there to watch their gameplay yeah and now it's very much like uh culture streams and stuff like that so yeah i don't know that's so weird taking the headphones off and actually hearing you oh not to lose my hat here i never shouted out this new design.

Yeah. It went up on the store, I think, a couple of weeks ago. Oh. Man, what's it called again? Like RGB or... RGB diode t-shirt? RGB diode, that's right. So it's inspired by subpixels.

Oh, okay. That's the idea, by like subpixel patterns. And then I, you know, it's one of those ones that's like stealth nerdy like unless you know unless you recognize that you'd have no idea you'd just think oh like that's a cool that's a cool design i thought it was supposed to be like a interesting take on like an rgb tech linked logo yeah so i told nick i'd talk about this one because i forgot to talk about it the week that we launched it and it's always nice to give the designers a shout out on the show yeah rather than just like having it it. And it's always nice to give the designers a shout out on the show rather than just like having it go live.

And it's been selling really well. People are super into it. But I never did shout it out properly. No, we don't have any plans for formal pants, Brandon, unfortunately. I love the server content you guys do, says Logan in the future. Any more plans to do server related content? Absolutely. We experienced some data loss recently.

So you're going to see some vlogs about that yeah I'd say it's normal for joy cons to feel like they're kind of low quality and here this brings on the triggers John yep I may have asked this before but what are the estimated launch times for screwdriver and backpack

I don't know we get that question literally every week yeah yeah I don't know what to tell you. Always enjoy the show. Serious props to both of you for everything. Quick question about labs, ideas, plans,

and thoughts about testing anything in the audio space. Uh, we are, uh, we are definitely currently working on, uh, the interview process for someone who was formerly at a very well-known audio publication and we would we would like very much to um to add someone with that kind of expertise to our team

so stay tuned nothing is set in stone yet i actually have a call that's labs related when i'm driving home from wanshow today uh that will maybe be a team lead for the lab oh nice yeah so we're chatting that's cool we're chatting that's really cool is this the first chat this is my first chat so i've texted like we've been in touch this is someone i know and then james and kyle have interviewed and they they agree with me because they had well they hadn't met me because they hadn't met this person. They hadn't met him though. But they're like, okay,

we see why you want this person. And I went, yep, that makes sense. So I'm excited. We're going to chat about it. We're going to talk about some of the more nitty gritty details. Yeah. Labs is going to be a big investment dude yeah but that's okay because luke has seen the roadmap for some of the site features we have oh it's actually really cool

it's really cool i'm pretty excited i'm gonna have to hire more people for that this is like scope is increasing okay i may just be an idea man as they're called he's got some good ideas but i got some good ideas okay um i i shared it with the team by the way what they think it's cool okay i did tell them like if this group of people that i'm currently talking to is working on it it's only this little section at the top so don't freak out because like when i first showed it mvp you just hear yeah you just hear silence for a little bit and i'm like it's okay it's okay everyone's like oh no um oh no speaking of uh good things though you want to share my screen i'd love to uh we

launched the desk pad configurator jayden or sorry conrad just reminded me about it in the floatplane yeah i should have brought this up earlier this is super cool um now when you are my resolution here is a little low so the the menu is large but uh now if you're if you're shopping for a desk pad they're all the same price very cool but there's tons of different sizes and if you don't have a measuring there's so many it could be confusing yeah so you you could put in the theoretical aspect size of a desk or you could even plan a size of a desktop that you're cutting and making yourself or whatever or that you're based on uh how this ends up looking like so you can see different sizes of desk pads and you can see what they would look like on your desk you can show your peripherals

you can add different amounts of monitors so if you want to have like three monitors you can do that you can move them all independently you can enable rotation so you can like actually set up your desk how your desk is set up at home which is like actually pretty sweet i'm just going to do some stuff here you can you can get different peripherals so if you're like hey the desk pad has has a huge variety of colors on it I want my peripherals to be RGB so that they match you can do that apparently that moves the monitors don't worry about it there's also a variety of desk styles so different woods and then there's also an

RGB option so you can change it to whatever the heck color you want and then whenever you're happy with whatever desk pad size you want you can add it to cart very cool um someone pointed out that capital m capital m it would be mega somethings not millimeters oh wow mega miles i don't know what it would be yeah let's fix that that's pretty minor that's pretty minor yes it means millimeters you guys it might be a font thing so it's easier than ever to get an awesome desk pad for your desk it's also kind of fun to just kind of play with it to give you some idea of how popular the northern lights desk pad has been we have 35 082 reviews 35 or 3500 sorry 3582 reviews and we didn't even turn on reviews because we didn't have them yet until well into the life cycle of that product it's been crazy and now we've made it even

easier to kind of figure out which one's right because that's been the big thing for people is like hey it actually fits the when you add more options um which option you should choose becomes less clear yeah so making it really easy like yes obviously people can figure it out they have tape measures they have spatial reasoning stuff like that but being able to be very sure is cool and also being able to conceptualize that way oh i forgot this size a desk, what size of desk pad could I have? How could I set up my peripherals, et cetera? It's just, it's an interesting tool. Jacob W., if I had a 1050 Ti today, I would game on that

and I would watch this crypto crash real close. It could maybe be happening because we need crypto to crash. As long as it keeps going up gpu prices will just go up because it's a completely different calculus for someone who's deciding to buy a gpu based on a profitability calculation yeah as long as there's gpu mineable crypto that people care about yes yeah what about a diy channel the problem with diy channels is that they tend to be more niche

and better than diy perks we have to be well it's not even just that like no one's better than diy perks that was my yeah so like the roi from a business standpoint is not great the vision for labs is a lot bigger than a YouTube channel and that's how we can justify something that is so much work and so much cost. We could spend money like that starting a DIY channel and realistically as far as I can see we'd only ever really be able to monetize it in the same way that we could something like Short Circuit which frankly costs us next to nothing. And so why are we reaching for this extremely high fruit when we can take a low hanging one? Or we could do something that's much, much bigger than either of those things.

I only have so much capital. I only have so much time. I only have so much space and staff. So we have to pick our battles. And i've chosen labs as the battle that we're going to fight this year so you know what never say never but it's not in the cards for the time being also i don't think there's any plans for different colors of the crew neck sweater and watch diy bricks because he's awesome um finally able to catch live from malaysia what's the price of the screwdriver hopefully in the neighborhood of 69 69 is uh is the goal i've been watching since internet in cuba wasn't available had to pay for usb drives with videos on them i've actually wanted to i think i pitched years ago talking about sneaker net in cuba yep

and i basically said look i i can't fly to Cuba to make this video, but that's super cool. Yeah. Yeah. Which is fair. But it's kind of cool knowing that there was LTT videos on flash drives being handed around in Cuba. That's interesting. That's amazing. Getting into 3D modeling. Ryzen 7 2700X or Threadripper 1920X. What was the 1920X?

Was that the 16? No. no. Was that an 8-core? I would say there's not going to be much difference between those two. Was the 2700X an 8-core? If I recall correctly, it was. I would get whatever you can get a cheaper motherboard for at this point, which is probably going to be the 2700X. Any chance of LTT jeans? for at this point which is probably going to be the 2700x any chance of ltt jeans no uh no we are not redesigning the backpack to accommodate the new larger water bottle size because it would have to have a holder like this big enormous yeah it's ridiculous it's not yeah it's not happening uh thoughts on bioimplant rfid chips and humans i the only reason i don't have one yet is because we were planning to a bunch of us go down

to seattle where there's a place that does it on a field trip i'll get them and then come back and make a video about it but then kovat happened i'd go with you yeah i know yeah yep heck yeah heck yeah yeah i mean if i could like yeah if i could open a door by just like touching a thing so cool so Bring it on. What, I could get a little gangrene from the thing? No problem. In all seriousness, LTT stealth gloves when? Gloves?

We have the same response to that. Sorry, is anyone asking for this? What is a stealth glove? I don't really... I saw someone ask for fingerless gloves. Like for what though? I don't know. I don't know what we have to contribute to the glove market. Yeah, yeah.

There's some pretty good gloves out there. The wife likes the beard. That's why it's staying. Love the desk configurator. I love the desk configurator. I've been wondering which one to get. Paul H there. Nice.

First confirmed desk configurator user. Perfect. wondering which one to get. Paul H there. Nice. First confirmed desk configurator user. Perfect. Hey, I want to build my first computer. My MacBook Pro is slowing down. I want to get off a console for gaming. What CPU should I start with? Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7? Get a Ryzen 5.

We should have added tracking so we could tell how many people clicked add to cart through the configurator versus through the page. That seems like the kind of thing that developers would want to spend extra cycles doing so they can justify their existence but don't worry you guys are great don't bother i believe in it okay i mean it would potentially drive development for future tools in the later on because if no one used it then we shouldn't make anything like that in the future true people love it then we should if people don't use it

though then it's an accessibility issue because it's great i don't i don't need data to tell me it's great it's great so we're gonna make more things like that sounds good yeah you know i don't i don't need that tool someone's gonna build it anyway i don't control that team i don't even know who's in well i know who's in charge of it but like yeah sometimes he's not even in charge we won't make it now okay sure yeah uh ever thought of doing gym gear yes unless unless someone does it on creative day but i think he has more interesting things to do on creative day i think it's fine um we are working on swim shorts we're working on long exercise pants we're working on an exercise t-shirt other than that i can't promise

anything would the banana be okay as a dog toy no not recommended don't mind me just hoping when hoodies get back in stock soon yeah heck yeah jeremy me too your show has helped my wife feel more confident approaching tech she recently built her first computer uh recently received the underwear and my my and my scrotum has never known such comfort. My wife would like to know how close the women's underwear is. Not that close. We have designs. We're at the design stage.

Probably we will work with the same or similar manufacturer to our men's underwear. But we just don't. I don't like giving etas for things because as soon as i give an eta then i'm a liar because it ends up being wrong so why be a liar if you don't have to soon to him oakley says for a naz would you recommend 5900 or 7200 rpm drives if you need performance 7200 rpm if you care more about power efficiency then 5900 is fine just fine for long-term storage uh will there be new base colors for t-shirts yes they're all on that wall over there but i have no easy way of getting i do fine i'm gonna get it no it's fine i'll get them rakeem making me get up

do you think the screwdriver will be a defendable tool purchase to submit for reimbursement from my company to say it in another way will it be more likely a best in class tool or a nice tool but still merge i think best in class tool is kind of the goal we worked with like a super legit company i don't really name them off the top of my head um what company did we work with with screwdriver again uh we worked with megapro yeah so megapro very well known like automotive grade screwdrivers um we're using their patented design for the bit loader we're using their patented design for the ratchet we've worked very closely with them on the development of it really our contribution is the um i mean the tooling costs to make it

because it's got a way slimmer handle and our custom length bits so that it can fit 12 bits in a really low profile um like driver handle and the ergonomics. It's just no offense to Megapro. We love you guys. We want to work with you for a long time, but we don't like the ergonomics of your drivers. Yeah, so I definitely wouldn't say it's just like a merch thing. It's a very serious tool. Yep.

Thoughts on a pick your poison mentality for mobile manufacturers. It feels like a game of chance since every manufacturer and model seems to have their own problems. Yeah, I don't know what to tell you other than i think you kind of nailed it uh there's no motherboard manufacturer that goes scandal free for longer than you're also so rough right now like my my brother's building a new computer and he was shopping for a motherboard and i was trying to help him shop for a motherboard and the price that you have to pay for motherboards with like four usb ports is nuts i know right it's so crazy and like it's not like oh they filled it with other like uh io options nope it's just

giant gaps in the shield like oh my goodness these are like 350 dollar motherboards i hear you what the heck put some usbs on it it's like the one of the main thing people are shopping for right now come on your motherboard it's boring it's okay embrace it i've been watching since cat tips i have been wondering if you have any plans for engineering uh work slash shopwear specifically pants we do have a shop jacket coming uh no pants for the time being and i don't think we have any electronics engineering technologist positions open but you can always check the linusmediagroup.com website where we advertise all positions for floatplane linus media group as well as creator warehouse any chance on getting a video on setting up a home network like what equipment you need basic

security etc it's not a bad idea but realistically realistically, unless you know you need it, you're probably fine with your ISP provided modem. Like, really. If your Wi-Fi doesn't suck, then it's fine. And if your Wi-Fi sucks, then get something new and that has better range and performance. Like, I don't know. It's one of those things that's become so commoditized at this point that... Commoditized? Commodicized? Which one is it? I don't know. Commoditized at this point that commoditized commoditized which one is it i don't know commoditized i think that i i just i don't think that most people really need anything

special for it i i'm sure there's going to be people that are really upset about me saying that yeah they're horrible sure fine but my parents don't need anything other than their isp modem so i left it there yeah yeah i was wondering why you didn't review the odyssey mobius i thought we did do something on it on short circuit easily the best jacket that one went away no question cool have you thought about opening a u.s based distribution facility to make the u.s shipping and customs process easier so it might make your life easier but it makes mine a lot harder in terms of taxes as soon as you have a physical presence in a state you um have to file with that state and it's like way more complicated so we're gonna stay canadian for a bit um no there are no more bananas coming

um anytime soon or fruit or other objects, William Ben B. Do you know about anything about getting variable refresh rate on a Sony TV working on Windows 11? The 6900 XT says variable refresh rate, but the Radeon settings only has FreeSync and says it's not supported. As far as I know, Sony doesn't have FreeSync support. I, I, guys, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think Sony is kind of dragging butt on that. No idea. i'm wrong here but i think sony is kind of dragging butt on that no idea longtime fan of the show says james have you ever considered working with a streaming service to produce an animated comedy show based on the staff of linus media group and the captains around the office no i can't say i've done that i don't think it'd be that funny no probably not uh i'm not planning a galaxy watch

for review nobody watches smartwatch reviews so yeah i don't know i i honestly pretty much just use it to tell the time i i don't even really know how it works i've gone full boomer on my watch mike r says howdy possible to get an apple flavored channel in whoa it's flying all over the place uh apple flavored channel in discord windows people make fun of us. Linux people make fun of us. We need a safe space. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds like if you tweet that at Jake, maybe he could do it for you. Yeah. Hey, I got RFID tags in my hands for text syndicates video.

Okay. One of mine stopped working after seven months. Word of warning. Have a plan to get it out and swapped ahead of time. Oh, wow. Fair enough have a plan to get it out and swapped ahead of time. Oh, wow. Fair enough. Yeah, seems like it. Yes, I did order seven shirts. Okay, Blake.

They're not all for me. Is this a good idea? GamerBed V2 with this monitor arm, the DW63DW, and you're set up for a computer in another room with the corning thunderbolt cable was nice to see the team at ltx just walking by and saying hi yeah i wish ltx could ever be a thing again yeah we did the official we did the official cancellation notification recently oh really yeah 2022 is officially not happening that is pretty cool though having it come from above you so you got your screen there it's 545 dollars for that monitor armo yikes uh kyle looking into mid-range soundbars wondering if there would really be much of a difference between e-arc and arc at the 400 to 500 price range so e-arc versus arc is going to be a lesser concern than getting a good quality soundbar that makes good quality noises out of

the front of it. Obviously, eARC allows for higher bandwidth communication between the soundbar and the TV, but that's going to be wasted if it doesn't have good speakers in it. So I wouldn't let that be the decision maker for me. I would aim for just better sound quality at that kind of a price point. Thanks for the amazing content. Work only allows me to wear all black hats and shirts. Do you guys have any plans to do more gray or black stuff in the future? Yes. Yes, more. One of the things that we'd like to do is actually make our blanks available as just completely unlogoed unprinted garments so it's going to be part of creator warehouses expansion into providing merch for other creators as well as just a way to offer a slightly lower

cost way to get just like comfortable clothes. Quality shirt. Yeah. So we're pretty excited about that. Please give us an update on storage containers. Storage containers. No idea. Yeah. I'm sorry. I have no idea what you're talking about.

Okay. I bought my first parts for my first PC waiting to buy a GPU like everyone else. I'm wondering if I should be hopeful for Intel Alchemist or wait for 40 series and hope I can get one. I don't have a crystal ball. All I can say is be rooting for the crypto crash if you want a GPU to be affordable anytime soon. All right. Are there new desk pad designs coming? Yes.

A while ago, right before COVID, I believe you mentioned a big LTT store project you were excited for. Said you were planning on even sponsoring other YouTube channels. Uh, yeah, that was intended to be the screwdriver. I think that based on how much money I just lost on having to, I mean, we're going to chase them for it, the deposit, but we could be out as much as 140 grand on our deposit to the, um, the Taiwan based manufacturer that got acquired. Oh, they were acquired by a major tool manufacturer so they just like deprioritized our order and just i'm getting flashbacks to front end design for float plane dragged their butts dragged their butts know that story but yeah so we've been really frustrated and we found a uh a factory in china that quite frankly the quality of the work is better anyway.

So I think we're just going to take the order there because the, the Taiwan factory clearly doesn't want our business. So, uh, and it's like an obvious conflict of interest that they're owned by a competitor at this point. Oh yeah, definitely. I have a 32 inch 1440 P one 44 Hertz VA panel. I want to upgrade. Where would you go i have a 1080 ti that sounds like a pretty good place to be quite honestly yeah chill there yeah relax hang back yeah don't uh don't overdo it yeah oh boy i get to install linux for my it class wish me luck also any plans for ltt gloves or fingerless gloves okay Okay, here's another one. Maybe it's the same person? I can't imagine. We've never heard that request ever before.

Yeah, what would be the value of LTT gloves? Is there some meme? Is there a meme going on? I don't know. Okay, yeah. I don't think so, though. I don't think so. Also, Opera apparently overrides the checkout with a Shopify checkout,

so people can't see merch messages on there. Oh, that's okay. No one uses Opera anyways. Cool feature, Opera apparently overrides the checkout with a Shopify checkout, so people can't see merch messages on there. Oh, that's okay. No one uses Opera anyways. Cool feature, Opera. Just got my indoor hoodie this week. Liked it so much, I ordered another. Any plans to do more basic style clothing? Not a huge fan of the patterns,

but if you did more stuff like the indoor hoodie, I would absolutely buy it. Yes, we absolutely will. That's totally a plan. I should go get the waffle shirt. I can hang out. Yeah, do merch message. They're gone. They're gone. I'll chat. Talk to they're gone so chat talk to float talk to me dudes or uh or merch messages if they come in i'm gonna bring

the waffle shirt ltd gloves for airsoft you know i've been trying to get linus to do airsoft but he always wants to do paintball yeah he always wants to do paintball. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's no way we're going to end up making paintball merch. But Linus and I go snowboarding as well. I don't think we'd end up doing any snowboarding stuff. Hi, Jaden. People are asking about the – I alluded to a story of front-end development on Floatplane. So when Floatplane, I hope he's not watching because it's not his fault, but when Floatplane was very young, we worked with a fan who had a design

studio in a different country. He did very good work. I wanted to work with him. He was fantastic, super nice dude. I have met very few people in my life that are nicer than this guy. I'm actually, he's very cool. I hope we're still very cool. He was really, really good. He had done some somewhat pro bono work for us in the past. I wanted to work with him in a professional capacity. In order to do that, I had to work with his company. His company was also pretty neat. I negotiated a price with them, which was still decently expensive, but I guess they did a lot of work with companies that paid a lot more. A lot of the design work that they did were for more like single image advertisements. So they were much smaller jobs than like an entire website.

So they were much smaller jobs than like an entire website. But they agreed to this price and then they were acquired. And the company that acquired them had a lot of other really highly valuable work. So because the price was low, they incredibly devalued it to the point of essentially not working on it at all for many, many months. And we were stuck with no design. And it was really, really, really frustrating to the point where I eventually just flew to Swedeneden sat in their office and was like do it now and then we got it done um and then we didn't work with them after that so that's how it worked hi hi so this is cool what is it hold on i gotta not show my nips so is that still rule? I don't know I don't know either I don't know

I genuinely have no idea I don't know what Twitch's rules are Hold on Urban Fervor said I miss your streams You pretty much over that For the time being No I streamed this week actually

The waffle shirt That actually looks really sharp Yeah Yeah It's just like uh it's got the like tag and stuff yeah yeah yeah but come on yeah it's just like a kind of a little bit warm not too warm like long sleeve just kind of presentable thing um people apparently saw it oh whatever i'm over it so yeah this is this is gonna be like i guess it's merch but the only thing that makes it

merch is this tiny little ltd tag at the bottom here and other than that it's just a shirt is there like a thing on the back even no i don't think so i shouldn't have leaned away i was asking if there's a thing on the back and no, there's nothing on the back. Nope, nothing on the back. Cool, right? Yeah, it looks good. Looks sharp. No plans to do a follow-up on the Van Life PC, Chrissy. Please give an update on the storage containers you mentioned a couple weeks back. Oh, oh,

that our merch keeps getting stuck in. No, it just takes as long as it takes. Yeah, they're not exactly updating us on those. Yeah, it just happens. They're not exactly updating us on those. Yeah, it's ridiculous. So frustrating. That looks really comfy.

Yeah, yeah, it is comfy. It's like, it's a waffle shirt. I don't know. Maybe that's not what it's supposed to be called, but it has like kind of a waffle texture to the fabric. This was one of those projects where we found the fabric first and then tried to create a garment with it because we were like oh that's really cool that's really nice fabric it's got it's not like the softest thing it's kind of it's kind of like the french terry feeling in terms of

yeah yeah for sure yeah yeah yeah but it's like uh i like that type of it's light it's breathable yeah which i really like because i get so warm like i always get too warm so i need stuff that that breathes a little bit. You know how the other shirts called the party shirt. Yeah. Like the lounger shirt or something. Yeah. I don't know. I think we're just going to call it waffle shirt.

You're actually going to call it that. Probably. Yeah. Cool. The waffle shirt. Yeah. Why not? Yeah.

We're done though. I think that's it. Yeah. Thank you guys so much for tuning into the wan show we will see you again next week same bad terrible time same bad terrible channel it's bad channel bad channel shouldn't watch it bye cool i'm gonna call it a walk brought to you by mechanical keyboards fresh books, FreshBooks, and Seasonic. By the way, fun fact, it's good that we haven't waited around for YouTube to fix Super Chats because look at this.

They are still not fixed. Here is my viewer activity tab. Here is clear evidence of a Super Chat that I have no record of because I didn't previously click the viewer activity tab. Thank you so much, YouTube. This is worthless yeah so that's why you should instead of sending a super chat which you should never ever send anymore you should buy something on lttstore.com and even if you didn't need it you can give it

as a gift the water bottles are a great gift and then you can send your chat that way yeah and instead of the money going to Google, it will go to our warehouse manager, Patrick, and his team and the creator warehouse team and Linus Media Group and the factories that we work with, and that'll be good. Yeah. And if Google wants your money,

then they can build a feature that works. And then we'll probably still use merch messages because it's getting constantly better so get wrecked yeah pretty much and scene