Amazon Owes Us $2.5 Billion - WAN Show September 26, 2025

Summary

The WAN Show: “Amazon Owes Us $2.5 Billion”

Episode Date: September 27, 2025
Hosts: Linus Sebastian & Luke Lafreniere (Linus Tech Tips)

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Episode Overview

This week’s WAN Show dives into several major tech topics, including Amazon’s historic FTC settlement over deceptive Prime practices, the partial merging of Android and Chrome OS into a future “Android PC,” advances in AI-powered hardware cooling, Microsoft Teams frustrations, AI in spam and marketing scams, and more. Linus and Luke blend hot industry takes with their signature banter, offering both detailed tech analysis and comedic sidebars. The episode rounds out with Q&A, merch announcements, and hands-on tech anecdotes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Amazon’s $2.5 Billion Prime Settlement

[00:00–06:30]

• Context: Amazon agreed to pay $2.5B ($1B penalty, $1.5B in refunds) to settle an FTC lawsuit over misleading Prime enrollment and cancellation tactics.
• Significance: Largest ever FTC penalty for a rule violation; second-highest restitution award in FTC history.
• Consumer Impact: 35 million US customers to receive refunds—sadly excludes Canada, but US market effects often trickle worldwide.
  • Linus: “It’s nice to see for freaking once these agencies actually hold companies account with nice big fines that might actually incentivize them to do things properly going forward.” [04:25]
• Regulatory Spillover: US + EU actions (like EU forcing Apple to USB-C) tend to influence global tech behaviors.
• UI Cancellations: FTC now requires Amazon to implement a clear “Decline Prime” button and to remove manipulative cancellation prompts (e.g., "No, I don't want free shipping").
  • Luke: “They need to go after a lot of other places then too.” [06:20]

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2. Frustrating User Interfaces & Notification Hell

[06:30–10:45]

• Both hosts rant about intentionally confusing/dismissive UI:
  • Linus scorns persistent “high power usage” popups on his OnePlus watch.
  • Microsoft Teams forces repeated "Stay signed in?" prompts, which don't seem to work.
    • Linus: “Someday I dream. I dream of a day when that button will work. It'll be great...But it is not this day.” [09:36]
  • Linus despairs at apps with no “never show again” for nag messages.

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3. Microsoft Teams: Unbundling & Critique

[10:45–14:35]

• EU forced Microsoft to start unbundling Teams from Office 365; global rollout for new enterprise customers.
  • Luke: “Teams is, in my opinion, just objectively not a very good communications platform...for, like, a bunch of reasons.” [10:33]
• Teams' integration is its main selling point, not its UX/features.
• Annoyances: Annoying unread indicators, taskbar bugs, first seconds of calls are always lost ("millennial pause"), and persistent audio device issues.
  • Linus: “Remarkable how often the first like six seconds of a team's call are cut off... WhatsApp works.” [14:07]

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4. AI-Powered Cooling & Supercomputers

[15:05–28:12]

• Microsoft & Cointis: New microfluidic cooling for AI accelerators, laser-etched coolant channels right up to the silicon, offering 3x better cooling. Highlighted as cutting-edge server tech.
  • Linus: “You just plumb the coolant directly up to the pro? Are you kidding me right now?” [16:41]
• Simon Fraser University (SFU) 'Fur' Cluster (BC, Canada):
  • Linus recounts an in-depth tour of the new supercomputer, “Fur,” which greatly surpasses their old “Cedar” system.
  • Specs: 1U nodes with up to 192 cores, full liquid cooling (CPUs, memory, NICs, SSDs), no fans.
  • Massive 600,000-watt heat exchangers; sophisticated loop monitoring; $82 million CAD budget.
  • Luke: “Have you already seen it?”
    Linus: “I was there this week.” [19:39]
• Old supercomputers (“Cedar,” Cheyenne, etc.) are inefficient relics relative to new hardware; not worth maintaining for most, even if cheap.

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5. Merch Messages & LTT Store Update

[30:13–39:16]

• New fall shirts (regular & tall), “defrag” clearance sale, behind-the-scenes newsletter for product design.
• Live demo of how merch messages work (replacing tips/super chats).
• Memorable moment: Luke models the new tall-fit shirts and jokes about buying yet more. [30:45]

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6. Building Custom Houses: Experience & Regret

[34:38–39:16]

• Linus on why he’d hesitate to build a custom house—custom homes rarely have broad resale appeal; even thoughtful planning can’t account for late surprises or future needs.
  • Linus: “The more experience I get, the more I realize that I don’t know and the fewer things I can assume.” [34:51]
• “Perfect” layouts are fleeting; needs/wants change over time.

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7. YouTube View/Algorithm and Content Evolution

[48:13–56:50]

• Linus and Luke discuss shifting YouTube audience behavior, algorithmic quirks, and feedback responding to “LTT has fallen off” claims.
• Content: Balance between wild custom PC builds, affordable builds, and “expensive” product coverage is hard to strike. Audience opinions are deeply split.
  • Linus: “It’s always been both—cheap and expensive, and this is going to blow your mind… you can watch the videos that appeal to you.” [54:57]
• Short vs. long content: Modern LTT videos are 20–30+ minutes, a big change from past 8–10 minute guides.
• Nuanced update: Many features, e.g., build guide content, are heavily saturated genres; tough to keep “fresh.”

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8. Android PC Coming 2026: Google Platform Strategy

[59:59–64:57]

• Google will combine Chrome OS and Android into a desktop platform (launching 2026); Android as the base, ChromeOS layered for PC experience.
  • Actual plans are murky; some statements appear contradictory.
  • Goal: Universal Android ecosystem across categories, especially with new AI features and Linux app improvements.
  • Linus: “Hopefully you don’t abandon it.” [64:57]

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9. Meta’s “Vibes AI” and AI Doomscrolling

[65:11–68:58]

• Meta launches “Vibes” — an AI-generated, short-form video feed no one asked for.
  • Luke: “The direction of almost every corporation [in AI] is just so uninteresting.” [66:41]
• Linus recaps reviewing friend.com’s “AI companion” on Short Circuit, describing the experience as “utterly pointless and wasteful.”
  • Luke: “Bell’s actually been wearing it since the Short Circuit...It’s just as bad as you thought. Maybe worse.” [67:49]

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10. ChatGPT Pulse & Dark Side of Personal AI

[69:16–73:12]

• OpenAI’s “Pulse” feature: collects personal info/goals to deliver “updates”—which are likely targeted ads under the hood.
  • Linus: “Basically they just want you to feed more personal data into it.” [70:30]
  • Luke: “This is almost certainly going to be an ad engine.” [70:36]
• Reflection: Spreading out AI interactions makes services more addictive—a new “mind trick.”

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11. Plug-In Hybrids: People Just Don’t Get It

[83:39–87:04]

• Many plug-in hybrid owners don’t charge the battery at home, running them purely on gas.
  • Linus: “You get the benefits of a gas car and an EV...I was shocked when I talked to a guy who worked at the Chevy dealer who was like, yeah, I had a guy trade one in who literally like didn’t even realize that you had to plug it in.” [84:47]
• Toyota’s “Charge Minder” app aims to gamify and boost plug-in rates.

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12. Spam GPT & The Rise of Automated Scams

[87:42–91:36]

• “Spam GPT” – $5,000 toolkit for AI-generated spam/phishing, complete with GUI and analytics.
  • Luke: “It might be a pretty attractive option for like legitimate ad campaign management because the multi [user model]... is really expensive.” [89:19]
• Another “Spam GPT” uses ChatGPT to waste scammers’ time, but found most spam was already written by AI — bots talking to bots.
  • Linus: “So we were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money, I stopped using it.” [91:36]

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13. Communication Platform Headaches (SMS, WhatsApp, Apple)

[93:53–104:32]

• Linus discusses the ongoing lack of true message syncing in Google Messages and the pains of transitioning between devices/platforms (Android↔iOS).
  • Transfers often fail (“out of 15,000 text messages or something, it managed to transfer two.” [99:50])
  • Both iMessage and Google Messages have user-hostile quirks, like lack of retry buttons and poor backup/restore options.
• WhatsApp’s update finally allows multi-device/phone use, but Linus details previous pains recovering messages.

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14. AI in Music, Gaming & Security

[124:32–127:16]

• AI music “performers” are now getting multi-million dollar record deals; all vocals/music are AI-generated.
• Steam under fire for malware-laden indie games stealing user funds, including from charity campaigns.
• Game “Ascent Rivals” (pod racer lookalike) is built with deep NFT/crypto connections—hosts clarify lack of endorsement: “We have zero interest in NFTs in the game.” [128:29]

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15. Synology NAS Locks Features—Open Source to the Rescue

[128:58–132:56]

• Synology blocks hardware transcoding on some NAS models via kernel driver removal; workaround guide floated, but Linus champions alternatives.
  • Linus is an investor in Hexos, a “for-dummies” TrueNAS interface with a lifetime license option: “For something that the whole point of it is that you own it, you should have an option to own it.” [132:28]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Linus (re: Amazon ruling):
  “For freaking once these agencies actually hold companies [to account] with nice big fines that might actually incentivize them.” [04:25]
• Luke (re: manipulative UIs):
  “If you book a flight, it’s always like, ‘no, I want to be unsafe or whatever’—like, I don’t want my trip to be whatever.” [06:20]
• Linus (Teams login frustration):
  “Someday I dream...I dream of a day when that button [stay signed in] will work.” [09:36]
• Linus (on SFU's server):
  “...liquid cooled, no fans. The CPUs are liquid cooled. The memory is liquid cooled. The NIC is liquid cooled. The SSD bay is freaking liquid cool. Everything is liquid cooled...” [21:16]
• Luke (on AI video doomscrolling):
  “The direction of almost every corporation [in AI] is just so uninteresting.” [66:41]
• Linus (Spam GPT, AI spam):
  “So we were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money.” [91:36]

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Additional Highlights

• Merch drop: New fall LTT shirt colors in both regular and tall sizes—demoed on air.
• YouTube “fallen off” narrative: Linus and Luke push back, citing content evolution and platform changes. Audience has wide, conflicting tastes.
• AI “Pulse” and privacy: Pulse is a “Trojan horse” for advertising based on deeply personalized data and behavioral addiction.
• Communication platform migration pain: Not just a Google vs. Apple thing—all modern chat apps create data loss nightmares during device switches.
• Steam’s lax security: Even charities and streamers are victimized by malware updates on Steam, raising ongoing alarm.

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Useful Timestamps

• [00:00–06:30] Amazon’s FTC penalty and anticonsumer subscription traps
• [10:00–14:00] Microsoft Teams, forced prompts, and the “millennial pause”
• [15:05–28:12] Data center cooling, SFU’s new supercomputer “Fur,” liquid vs air cooling
• [59:59–64:57] Android PC 2026, Google+Qualcomm collaboration
• [87:42–91:36] Spam GPT and bots talking to other bots, death of human interaction

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Conclusion

This WAN Show blends hard tech news—Amazon’s regulatory defeat, AI-powered infrastructure, security warnings, OS shakeups—with the hosts’ unique brand of in-depth, lived tech commentary and comic relief. The episode is especially rich on behind-the-scenes industry insights, the effects of regulatory actions, AI’s growing pains, issues with mainstream platforms (Teams, Google, Apple), and the relentless effort it takes to make tech work for real people.

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(Summary by WAN Show Superfan, Sept 2025)

Transcript

[Linus Sebastian]

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four litre jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping. Oh, come on. They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever. You were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel. What is up? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to WAN Show Theater. I'll be your host. Linus, Sebastian and Luke will be there and I will probably talk over him a lot, but not right now because he isn't talking. We've got a great show lined up for you guys today. One of the big headline topics this week is of course that Amazon will pay $2.5 billion in a settlement for their prime subscription Traps. Freaking got em. Probably not enough, but hey, at least it's some semblance of justice. In other news, this is cool. Google reveals that its Android PC is coming in 2026. That's right. The often rumored merging of Android and Chrome OS into one dark, unholy and driven platform. Well, doesn't sound like that's quite what's happening, so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was so mesmerized by your speech, I don't have anything repaired at all.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was fascinating. Spam GPT is a thing and it's gonna suck. And I think it might already be happening.

[Linus Sebastian]

Actually. It looks really good. Which is bad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah, yeah, big time. The other one is. Oh, this made me question things. We'll read more about it. Ascent rivals the game I showed out last week has like really strong crypto connections. Maybe.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really? That's a headline top? No, it doesn't matter. The point is, the show is brought to you today by Corsair Factor and Rove Lab, along with our rap partner, dBrand, our laptop partner, Dylan, our chair partner, Secret Lab. Why don't we jump right into our headline topic? This is a really great, uncharacteristically good question from YouTube chat. And the scrolling broke. Nope. Chowee Komba says Amazon owes everyone two and a half billion. Or Amazon owes you two and a half billion. Us. The collective us. That's the title. Amazon owes us two and a half billion. And us, actually, in this case, doesn't even include us because this appears to be a us thing. To settle an FTC lawsuit that accused Amazon of deceptive prime enrollment and cancellation strategies, the company will end the practice of this is a Nice little W we call it will end the practice and pay a $1 billion civil penalty and send out 1 1/2 billion dollars in refunds to 35 million customers. It is the largest FTC penalty ever in a case involving an FTC rule violation. And the refunds are the second highest restitution award ever obtained by FTC Action. So bravo ftc. I mean Luke and I and everyone knows how Amazon prime and Barley grows. Like it has been such an obvious blatantly anti consumer approach that Amazon has taken with their prime subscriptions pretty much since ever and the kinds of mazes that they created. Wasn't it your grandfather that couldn't figure out how to cancel his prime and he had like multiple subscriptions or something like that? Yeah, like, like the whole thing was just nasty and it's nice to see for freaking once. For freaking once these agencies actually hold companies account with nice big fines that might actually incentivize them to do things properly going forward. Now I obviously would have preferred if that one click to cancel thing had gone through because yeah, big time, like we're in Canada. Right. So we don't necessarily benefit from things that the FTC does in the US except that a lot of the time we do because whatever flies in a company's biggest market tends to kind of trickle over into various other markets. It's one of the reasons that I.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's often not worth building all the differentiation.

[Linus Sebastian]

Am holding this iPhone right now that has a USB C port on the bottom because you can bet your bottom dollar that if the EU wasn't a large enough market for Apple they would have either just sort of flipped them off and not bothered to ship iPhones there or they would have actually. No, I guess this has nothing to do with them being a large enough market. But the point is they could have also segmented them out and just had lightning everywhere else and USB C there. But clearly the EU was big enough for them to not just walk away from it and not. Yeah, that's it. Not just walk away from it and refuse to make a. I suspect they.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Were worried about Capi Capy Cot who I think they're worried about copycat action and wanted to get out ahead of it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Copycat, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If like the US did the same thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh sure, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then. And that. Because if they do, if they, if they don't have that happen then I think they're at lower risk of other things being thrown at them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Anyways, the FTC specifically requires Amazon to use a clear and Conspicuous button for customers to decline prime and stop using buttons as cancellation deterrents with text such as, no, I don't want free shipping.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They need to go after a lot of other places then too. Yeah, because there's like, if you book a flight, it's always like, no, I want to be like unsafe or whatever. Like, I don't want my trip to be whatever. Blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, insurance. Like, oh, I had, I had.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was trying to close Lenovo Vantage today and it was like, do you want it to show up in your system tray? And what it was yes or later? Which seemed so crazy to me. I was like, what does later mean? I clicked later to figure it out and later was just no, dude.

[Linus Sebastian]

Any message on any one of my devices that doesn't have a do not show this again makes me want to just freaking, dude. I get this notification from my watch like every other day. That's like high power usage when you use always on screen and do all this stuff that makes your watch work as a watch and all I can do is dismiss it. I can't say I don't care. Never. Oh, here it is. High power usage. My only option. Check this out. My only option is. Got it. That's it. I have clicked got it 100,000,000,000 times since I started using the OnePlus 2R now. Okay, I don't want to go off the rails here. I don't want to go off the rails and see if there and say something that's not right. So I'll happily. I don't know apps. App notifications show all.

[Dan]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so if there's something in here that gives me the option to not have it, warn me about that, then get notified when battery use issues are found. Okay, I did find that in Settings. Is that that either way, when you give me a notification, I don't want to have to go digging three levels into a menu to say, I don't care about this notification. Never send it to me again. I'd love to talk about Microsoft Teams.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Every single Cotton Tang time I sign into teams on my account, which is a lot because I have my home computer, I have my laptop, I have my work computer, I have my phone. Actually, you know what? It's pretty good about not signing and I actually know it does sign you out on the phone for a bit. So I sign into teams a lot. It's kind of a hobby for me, signing into Microsoft Teams. Every time I sign in, it asks, do you want to let the Organization, manage your device. And it also asks, do you want to sign in system wide or just this app?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It asks you that every time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Every single time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's actually weird. I do not have that experience.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then. And this is fun. Then it asks, hey, do you want to stay signed in so you don't have to do this all the time? And I click yes. I know it isn't gonna work, but I click it anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I click yes every time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I click yes every time because I do not want to be prompted to. To sign in constantly. Someday I dream. I dream of a day when that button will work. It'll be great.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's not this day.

[Linus Sebastian]

But it is not this day. The courage of Microsoft to keep giving me the same message will fail. But it is not this day.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I do wonder. Like, I read a headline, splitting off teams from Office.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's the thing in the EU now. Right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I thought this was gonna end up happening everywhere, man. We're talking about, like, clicking too many things. I Google that, and Google's like, do you want to try AI mode? No. Get out of my way. Yes. Microsoft is in the process of unbundling Microsoft Teams from its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 Enterprise suites globally.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow. Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apparently, it'll become a. Oh. For new customers. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But, yeah, I think this is going to happen to everyone eventually. I'm really wondering what that's going to do to Teams, because Teams is, in my opinion, just objectively not a very good communications platform. For, like, a bunch of reasons. Tons. We've gone over them many times.

[Linus Sebastian]

His take, not mine. I don't disagree, but the word objectively is kind of scary. Like, you could say something as simple as I can explain, objectively, this frequency response curve is even farther outside of what would be an ideal frequency response curve. And people would get, like, really mad about it. Like, you could say something as simple as that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why I say that, though? Because in communications, there's, you know, how there's, like, the whole body language and stuff like that. It is difficult to tell if things are working in teams. They. They. Because it's, like, seem to have.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's got all the body language.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, it's. There's. There's things like the. You know, okay, the box around your picture has, like, a border that lights up when your mic is activated for the other person. So the other person looking at you talking, your little box will have the thing. Okay, cool. Sounds good. Almost every other platform just does the same thing for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Teams does not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Unacceptable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They finally listened to it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. But I have a real problem.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They listen to the feedback and they decided to make it so that the mute icon microphone way up in the corner will slightly fill up whenever you're talking.

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Which is.

[Linus Sebastian]

No. No. I have a.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Just terrible.

[Linus Sebastian]

I have a real complaint about teams. Teams is trying to destroy my monitor. So I have an OLED at home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

And one of the things that I do to keep my oled, you know, not burned in is I auto hide my taskbar. If I have an unread message in teams, my taskbar will not hide. Drives me absolutely bat crap crazy because it could be a message that I have already addressed on my phone, but my taskbar will just be. Open it. They're trying to burn the taskbar into my monitor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I can't use auto hide taskbar Teams.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Teams feels extremely half baked to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I could genuinely talk about it for like hours. Flat out wrong. Nothing provides better integrated platform. That matters more in enterprise. Bigger companies compliance. Smaller companies.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want me to ban him? I'll ban him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I know he's a paying customer.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll ban him.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What I was talking about. So it doesn't really matter. But the thing that I was discussing was teams itself. Teams being good. Not its ability to integrate with other things. Its ability to integrate with other things is pretty good. I don't think it's actually necessarily the best. But yeah, that just. That just actually has nothing to do with.

[Linus Sebastian]

And to be clear, we obviously choose to use it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because it's cheap as dirt, which is the reason why almost everyone uses it. And a lot of companies need something else that's in Office365, which is again why they end up using it. It's like used out of convenience. It's used out of the reasons that Handyman just pointed out, which is that it's like integrated with so many other things.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost like that's why Microsoft managed to get to where they are today at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Because it's there, it's not used because it's good. And I'm wondering if that will be really changing at all with this decoupling. I seriously doubt it because even if it's decoupled, it's still there and it will still just work with a lot of the other things that most companies happen to need.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's remarkable how often the first like six seconds of a team's call are cut off.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

WhatsApp works.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm trying to think of something else that doesn't work, like FaceTime. Can you remember the last time you made a FaceTime call? And just like the first five seconds of it was both sides being like, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? It happens constantly on teams.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Constantly on literally no other modern communication platform other than teams. And it is a constant problem on teams. That's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Chat be like it has a built in millennial pause.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it really does. Teams seems to be really obsessive about screwing around with your audio devices in really weird ways as well, which is odd and doesn't make any sense to me.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, teams is boring. Let's move on. Yeah, why don't we talk instead about how Microsoft will be using AI to make AI better? Okay, that sounds really boring and sucky, but hold on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's actually incredibly interesting.

[Linus Sebastian]

With microfluidic cooling channels, Microsoft is using AI to map hotspots. Do you want to click the Microsoft announcement? I think they had some pictures in there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is using AI to map hotspots in its AI accelerators individually. So that is on each unique chip. Then laser etching hair sized channels to pump coolant through them. The channels bring coolant into direct contact with the silicon. Microsoft says inside the silicon. Forbes says passing over it. Forbes is almost certainly more correct than Microsoft here. Sorry. Microsoft inside the silicon would break it. Both the method and the AI are from specialized Swiss startup Cointis. Microsoft has claimed a 3x improvement to cooling compared to traditional cold plates. The channels need to be deep enough to circulate coolant without clogging, but not weaken the silicon enough to break. Four design iterations were produced in just the last year. And the chips needed to be designed with a leak proof package. What?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's wild.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, this is so cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I was worried about playing the video because.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, whatever. It's from Microsoft. It should be fine. Realistically, if micro for Microsoft.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is that nuts?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like go. Go back. Go back to that. That was. Dude, that's crazy. Look at this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

So you just. You just plumb the coolant directly up to the pro? Are you kidding me right now? Actual. Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think we could do it ourselves?

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, not. Obviously we wouldn't have the micro fluid channels. Yeah, but do you think we could seal something against a board well enough to just like pump coolant into it right to the die?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

You think so?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so. Not anywhere near. I mean, that was a render but not anywhere near as. As clean as I think they're proposing that they're going to be doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I don't. I don't think we'd be able do it on a desktop socket just because then you have the socket to contend with. But if we would. Were to do it on like a framework motherboard or something like that and just, just basically, like, we could use the. Just put all the. Around the cpu.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll need a lot of.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot, A lot. And then just, just, just plumb it in there. Just lay on the. Yep, just lay on it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then like, what. But what kind of shape would we need? It would have to be like. It couldn't go all the way around because you'd have to have an opening. Yeah, you'd have to have an opening, maybe a flat side. So it kind of be. It'd be like, like the D somewhere.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the point is, the reason that I wanted to talk about this, the reason this is like a main topic rather than, you know, like whatever they're called, rapid fire topic, is because I saw something really cool today. And I know it's not going to make you jealous because you're going somewhere cooler than me next week, but. Wait, what?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I'm excited to hear it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. But it was very cool. So our bros over at Simon Fraser University here in beautiful British Columbia, last.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Time you worked with them, it was sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

How long ago do you think that video was?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Six years.

[Linus Sebastian]

It was eight years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whoa. I was shooting relatively high.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's the face I made.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I looked it up. Because I wanted to grab a B roll clip from the last time as I was writing the script, and I was like, you gotta be kidding me right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's nuts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. The last time we worked with them was eight years ago, and at that time they were rolling out, I believe it's codename cedar, Canada's fastest supercomputer. Well, guess what, baby? This time things are getting furry, if you know what I'm saying. Beaver codename Fur. Oh, yeah. Nice. They're named after trees.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So this time around, they just rolled out their fur supercomputing cluster, and it makes cedar look like it's made of wood. Like it's. Dude, cedar is like hobo garbage compared to fur. It's amazing there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you already seen it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I was there this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Yeah. So. So the reason that I felt it was related to this is that we haven't actually gotten opportunities to look at liquid cooling in the data center. So we did that thing with Equinix a little while back, but. And they had some liquid cooled racks, but they were inside a cage that belonged to a customer. Because that's Equinix's business. Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I got to see it at ovh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I didn't go there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We couldn't look at certain things too closely and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

I got to look at everything. So because SFU are the actual owners of the systems, they were like, yeah, f k it, we're gonna pull a couple out of prod. And so both a CPU node and a GPU node, we got a chance to go right. Hands on with direct to die cooling systems. We saw the. We saw the liquid distribution units that go down at the end of the. At the end of the aisle. We like, got to. Oh, my God, they're beautiful. So. So, Man. There. Okay, so they had CPU nodes and GPU nodes as part of the cluster. And the CPU nodes are 1U. Okay. 192 cores. Yeah. Wait, hold on. Did I say 192 cores? No, no, that's wrong. Sorry. 1U. Two nodes per U. 192 cores per node.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Jeez.

[Linus Sebastian]

So these are almost 4. 400 cores per 1U. And there isn't a single fan in them. Not one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just all water cooled.

[Linus Sebastian]

The CPUs are liquid cooled. The memory is liquid cooled. The NIC is liquid cooled. The SSD bay is freaking liquid cool. Everything is liquid cooled. And then the GPU, the GPU one obviously adds the GPUs to that. So they're using chilled liquid from the outside of the building. They've got evaporative cooling towers. So they pull those in. Those go to their water doors. So they have the same rear doors that they had last time. Did you watch the video last time? I mean, it was eight years ago.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't remember, but yes, but basically.

[Linus Sebastian]

You pull ambient air in the front of the rack. It gets superheated, essentially. Well, not superheated in like a scientific sense, but it gets heated up. Okay. And then it comes out the back. And then they force the hot air through a door that is a big radiator that has chilled liquid running through it about 16 degrees Celsius. And then by the time it gets crapped out into the aisle, it's just room temperature. So they don't have a traditional hot aisle, cold aisle setup. They just have hot inside of the rack and then two cold aisles, essentially.

[Luke Lafreniere]

A decent amount of this sounds pretty similar to OVH's setup.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they still have water doors on the back. And that just handles any waste heat from the power supply, any networking that's inside the cabinet, anything like that, that. So they pump the primary loop right into those water doors. So that's the glycol loop that goes out to the cooling towers. Then they go from the water doors to the cooling distribution units that are liquid distribution LDU's or whatever they're called. It's in the video. So those are at the end of the aisle. And then they've got a huge heat exchanger in those. And when I say huge, I mean being massive. 600 kilowatts, 600,000 watts heat exchangers in these things. It's enough to. It's enough to make a man all hot and bothered. And then. So those have redundant pumps. What's that, Mr. Daniel Besser? Sorry, I need a minute.

[Dan]

600,000 watts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I know, right?

[Dan]

How big are they?

[Linus Sebastian]

They're not that big. No, no, they're not that big.

[Dan]

The size of a building or like a room?

[Linus Sebastian]

No, no, they're just at the end of the rack. They look like a regular.

[Dan]

How is that possible?

[Linus Sebastian]

A regular cabinet? It's just a big heat exchanger, man. I mean that one in my. In my basement. Yeah, it's only like this big. I forget. I forget how many frickin watts that thing does, but it's a lot. Like, the exchange is pretty nuts. Yeah, crazy. Fluid to fluid heat exchange, man. It's efficient. Right. Anyway, so 600,000 watt heat exchanger. And then they've got redundant pumps in there. And those pump the secondary loop which goes directly to the system. So you don't need glycol because it's all indoors. You don't actually go outside to the cooling towers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, so that is different then.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. Is that different?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I believe so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, if I'm remembering everything correctly, most setups would have a primary and a secondary loop and they would use heat exchangers. But maybe.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I mean, I think ovhs all go outside.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do they?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think so.

[Linus Sebastian]

So just primary loop?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I believe so.

[Linus Sebastian]

No secondary loop. Okay. Don't quote us on that. That might not be true of every data center.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I also just might not remember correctly.

[Linus Sebastian]

That they've done necessarily. Okay, so what was I talking about next? Oh, yes. Oh, dude. Like it's crazy. So you can actually. I was actually able to like, because they're SFU systems, there's no concerns about customer security or privacy or whatever. So we were freaking we're freaking opening up like the heat exchanger cabinet. I'm like, oh, I wonder which side's the hot side. Put my freaking hands on them. Like, dude, it's crazy. So the hot side's like almost 40 degrees or something like that. And so that goes into the heat exchanger and then that goes to. I think the coolant coming out of the water doors is like, it's starts at 16 and a half. It goes up to like 18 or 20 or something like that. Dude. And the side of these, these liquid distribution units, they have like a touchscreen LCD on them that just shows like both loops and all the temperatures and pump RPMs and everything. They've got all the telemetry. Ah. Ah. If only I had 82 million Canadian dollars, then I too could have that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I wonder.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'd have to have somewhere to put it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know a lot of schools actually do have quite a bit of money, but I wonder like, that's a lot of money for like student project stuff, so I wonder what they're doing.

[Linus Sebastian]

This isn't like student project research stuff. This is research. I would imagine they might even lease out some of this. Compute. I don't actually know that for sure, but I do know that the funding came from a combination of the federal government, the provincial government, and then also in kind discounts from, from the providers. Yeah, so they mentioned Lenovo. Shoot, I'm gonna forget who they are. They. They also mentioned the, the brand that did the cooling and one other brand, but they all get there. They're all shouted out at the end of the video. It was an absolutely incredible tour though. It was my first time getting to go full nuts and bolts, hand on, hands on with. And like, I gotta say, man, the loop layouts in these things are like wild. Like completely defy every law of efficient water cooling. Loop layout logic.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What do you mean? How so?

[Linus Sebastian]

Like they are full of 90 degree bends. Oh, they're everywhere. And like they've got, they're using these like teeny tiny like 1-8-inch tubes inside. There's like manifolds everywhere. The whole thing doesn't look particularly balanced for flow restriction.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like do they just have like insane pressure and don't care? Like.

[Linus Sebastian]

So they're taking a 18 inch. Looks like a 18 inch tube. Maybe it's quarter inch. I don't know how thick the walls are. Because it's all copper. Huh? It's copper everywhere. It's beautiful. And they take that one like 18 inch, maybe 1/4 inch tube and it Goes to a manifold that goes to those four GPUs, each of which is 700 watts. Oh, did I even mention the GPU nodes are 1U have 48 CPU cores. They can actually do dual CPUs. They could. You could put 192 cores in there and then they have four H1 hundreds in each 1U. Not a single fan. Not one.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How much is an H100?

[Linus Sebastian]

Don't worry about it. About 30 grand.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought it was H200.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think they're priced that differently. Oh, and these are H180 gigs, which are like the better H100. And then the H200 has even more memory, if I recall correctly, but uses the same hopper architecture.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, some of these are real expensive. Yeah, see 40k for one of them. But it's from a reseller, so I have no, I have no idea what people are actually buying them for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And you know, that completely ignores any in kind discounts that you get as an educational institution or whatever. SFU wasn't able to tell me what they paid for them, so we just kind of used.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, work stuff. Pricing for them. Yep. Whoa. They did say the total budget though was 82 million Canadian dollars. So that's basically all the money in Canada.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So did, did they, did they decommission cedar?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, they hit. They actually, I couldn't quite tell if they were joking or not, so I said, no thanks, I'm good. But they offered to just like hand me a node. And like, you know, they were like, need any SSDs her. I'm pretty sure they were kidding, but I didn't want to get anybody in trouble so I just, I just said no and laughed along. And we didn't take anything out and they nothing left their facility. Everything's good, everything's chill. But I'm pretty sure they were joking. But no, it was just pieces of cedar were just sitting on racks. Just. I mean it was eight years ago. What are they gonna do? No, who's gonna want an 8 year old supercomputer? I mean, we talked about this on WAN show. Remember when that like used to be a top 10 supercomputer or whatever it was, was for sale on ebay. You remember that, right?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we basically had so many people linked it to me and were like, linus, you should buy a supercomputer. And it's like, not necessarily because while the processors and maybe the memory might have some value, those platforms are basically garbage because they cost more to run than they're worth to run, which is why they're being decommissioned. Because the new stuff is so much more efficient that by the time you spend all that money on power, you're way better off just buying new stuff and powering that instead of running the older stuff. Yeah. Was it. Was it Cheyenne? Was that it? Was that the one that was for sale? I forget. It was. It was. One of. It was. Well, it was a major supercomputer. Super computer. That might be the one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Cheyenne supercomputer sold at auction for half a million dollars. So, I mean, when this thing would have been purchased, it would have been a flipping fortune. This is. This loading too slow. And I'm actually not that invested in anymore. What are we supposed to be doing next? Dan, you're a little early, so you.

[Dan]

Can keep doing more topics if you want.

[Linus Sebastian]

We don't have, like, a ton of topics this week, so why don't we just.

[Dan]

Let's go into merch messages then.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, those of you who are new to the WAN show, we don't do super chats. We don't do twitch bits. We do merch messages because the way we see it, when you throw your money at the screen, you should get something thrown right back in your face. In this case, high quality merchandise from lttstore.com. where are my call outs? I don't see them. CW announcements. There they are. Oh.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have some very exciting things for you folks. Luke, would you like to model it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, yes. We have more tall shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoo.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know I can stand, but I'm gonna go right out of frame.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now you can look.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It fits.

[Linus Sebastian]

Now you can have a tall shirt in any color you want as long as it's black or one of our new colors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

My hands above my head, My shirt. My belly's not showing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's amazing. They're not just black shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's kind of a curse for me because now I need to buy a bunch more shirts.

[Linus Sebastian]

Do you want to load up LTD soar while I talk through the new stuff?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is up. I'm done.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a new fall colors drop in both long sleeve and short sleeve, and they are available in both regular and tall fit. The lineup now includes stone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's all of.

[Linus Sebastian]

You'll find it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There it is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stone, shadow, and cranberry, which is what Luke's wearing. So we can help you keep your wardrobe fresh this fall. Our blank shirts are extremely well reviewed. We've got 303 reviews on the site now. By the way, if you ever buy something on LTD store, please do leave a review. We always want your feedback, no matter whether it's super positive or super negative, as long as you're keeping it, you know, factual and. And. And your criticisms are constructive. We always want to build better products. So please tell us your experience, because that also helps people who are shopping for the products. And there's more. The defrag sale is wrapping up, and stock is almost gone. We've got crazy pricing. You want to pull it up on the hot dog V neck, the maze screensaver. Party shirt. He's looking for it. He's gonna find it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I misclicked. I meant to click the arrow.

[Linus Sebastian]

He's got this. There we go. The blank. Or, excuse me, the blank. The black task jacket and dropout hoodies. Once they're gone, they're gone. Friendly reminder. Wish I had mentioned this last week. Try to bundle these with something else, because as you can probably tell, no, we are not making money on these at these kinds of discounts. So that would be super cool. Neat.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's also, like, some of these don't have any stock left. Like, I think the CPU pillow is gone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. Yep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, but that does not mean that they're all out of stock. Some of them might have just one size. Like you mentioned, the task jacket. That one just has a medium. Yeah, but the discounts are pretty nuts, so it's decently worth checking through here, seeing what ones are still around.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else we got? And finally, behind the scenes feature. We put out a behind the scenes newsletter where we break down the design process that went into making our blank tees the way we wanted. Fit. Fabric, durability, all of it. Where will I find that? If you're into that kind of behind the scenes, look at how our products come together. Sign up for the newsletter to catch future deep dives. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, Sign up for the newsletter. Where is that? There it is. Nice. Cool. All right, you want to pick a topic? Oh, we got to read a couple merch Merch messages. Sorry, sorry. Oh, right. We never explained how to send a merch message. All you got to do is go to lttstore.com. oh, there we go. Add something to your cart. Say, for example, a tall fit T shirt in cranberry. Hey, look at that. Then you can look just like Luke and Jake Bell. Jake Bell's not tall. Why did he model these? Okay, you know what? It doesn't Matter. The point is we are live, so you just click. I would like my purchase to appear as a merch message on the LTT stream. You just send your merch message and it'll go to producer Dan. Okay.

[Dan]

I'm wearing a shirt.

[Linus Sebastian]

Get out of here. Get out of here. There we go. It'll go to producer Dan, who will put it down there or who will reply to it or. Oh, yeah, sorry. Right. He hit the thing. Or he will curate it. And we're going to show you guys what that looks like. Dan, do you want to read us a curated message?

[Dan]

Yeah, sure. I've got a bunch here. Hey, wan boys at Linus, you and Yvonne have loads of experience building stuff and managing complex projects. Now, would you ever consider building a house? Maybe a holiday home or something?

[Linus Sebastian]

One of the things that I've learned from all the experience that I have with big projects is that every big project will contain so many stumbling blocks and so many fun things to learn. That just because you have a lot of experience managing projects doesn't necessarily mean that all of a sudden you're an expert in everything and you should just manage any kind of project. If anything, I would say the more experience I get, the more I realize that I don't know and the fewer things I can assume. I mean, let's look at whale land, for instance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

When we acquired that building for the badminton club, and then also we wanted to do quarterly gaming events, I kind of went well, it's got lots of space, it's got lots of power. We work out a deal with the neighbors. We get some parking in here. Everything should be fine. How long ago was that? Two years?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Three.

[Linus Sebastian]

Two years, I think. I think it was two years. It was two years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And we bought the building two years ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, easy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought it was more than that.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, we might have, like, commercial real estate moves slow. We might have, like, signed papers way before. I don't remember when we signed papers. Got it. Because remember, too, it was only going to be half the size. And then by the time we actually made a video about it, it was two sides.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And a whole. We had had to go tear up most of the blueprints and redo them. And it was a whole. It was the whole thing. Anyway, the point is that we are now a couple of years in and the first whale in is tomorrow, so. Oh, yeah. Okay. And homes, you know, look how long the home reno took. Yeah. And that's a reno. And to be clear, there are a lot of things that would have gone faster with a ground up build.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there's also a lot of things.

[Linus Sebastian]

That might not have and that we might have overlooked. Dude. When we were shopping for our current place. Oh, wow. We probably saw 40, 50 properties. Like during the course of the multiple years that we were shopping, our poor realtor, we tried to go to a lot of open houses and stuff so that we didn't have to like, you know, drag him out. But the point is we saw a lot of places and I think Luke has actually been to the neighborhood where Yvonne and I saw a lot of places and there's a lot of custom homes there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lot of well intentioned and creative.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Weird stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

Creative. First time home designers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know, if it works perfectly for you and you live there forever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, who cares? Like, I remember seeing this one place that was like. I was like, why isn't this selling? It's huge. And it's priced so well. Like it's probably like 7,000 square feet or something. And we get to it and we realize, oh, this only has three bedrooms in it. Because they had two kids and they were like, well, why would we need another bedroom?

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's all we need.

[Linus Sebastian]

And that's great. But unless you have another small family that wants to live in like a mega sized house that just has all these like, spaces that don't seem to have any purpose, then good luck selling.

[Dan]

That's also second billiards room.

[Linus Sebastian]

Exactly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's. We saw. We saw it.

[Linus Sebastian]

The.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One of the places that we saw had a ballroom in it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Which, like. Sure.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not kidding.

[Dan]

You're doing a lot of galas.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably not. No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, if you're into it, not so much. That's wonderful and I'm, I'm happy for you, but I do not. I do not. I do not. Ballroom or I. Well, that depends. Are we talking like plastic orbs?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cargo? Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because then I'm super into it anyway. Yeah. So it was like this comically big house with just like, like three bedrooms in it. And I was like, okay, yeah, that doesn't really make a ton of sense. So people don't tend to build what's balanced. They tend to build what works perfectly for them. And I think we've seen enough of what's perfectly designed for me to know that that probably wouldn't appeal to anyone else. So building that house would legitimately be a terrible idea unless I were to sort of temper my, my specific needs and build something that is better suited for the general populace.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In which case almost what's the point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why do I bother? Yeah, I should just buy a house. That's a professional design.

[Dan]

Honey, why is the server room bigger than the living room?

[Linus Sebastian]

To fit all the computers, obviously.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, what if you. What if you worked with an architect who I thought you were supposed to took just. Just vague ideas and made you something cool?

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, at that point, though, I mean, I. I guess the main reason that I wouldn't bother is that we already found a house that was damn close in terms of the bones and then extensively modified it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Your place's layout is super cool and very unique.

[Linus Sebastian]

My layout is, like, perfect at this point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I've never seen a place like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's not. Well, it's not perfect, but it's. It's perfect for me. It's. We. We did change a lot, but your.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Needs and wants are going to change, so perfect is never really going to fit anyways.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dude, my eldest is gonna be, like, moved out in, like, five years. Right.

[Dan]

Sure. Crazy in this economy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I kind of doubt it. Depends on how they go to school. Where?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. On campus. I don't know. Renting with friends, roommates.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's really expensive these days. It depends on how much you're helping out. That might be a commute.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's a long commute.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It depends what school.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's fair enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sky trains coming out here.

[Dan]

That's right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that's true. That's true. Either way, my point is we will legally be an adult in that time. Yeah, like, that's mind blowing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

My SFU tour was eight years ago, you know, when he was like this high time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was talking about manufacturers say yeah. The other day. Because I was talking about, like, you know, I think it's been three, four years since we've made one of those.

[Linus Sebastian]

Three, four years.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Dude, I thought that was the last one that came up when I looked at it.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you can check. Hold on, we'll go. Luke. Laptop. Here. Laptop.

[Dan]

Thanks.

[Linus Sebastian]

Laptop. Rainier. Laptop. In the air, anyway.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Four years ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. All right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Has there been one since then?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't think so.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

So for you, and it was probably years before that one since we had looked at that series.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Something I did find, though, is that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hey, look, I'm always the victim. I'm never to blame. That's good to know. No, no, you gotta go higher. Is that new? Oh, no, that's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That one eight months ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that's a. Holy. But the actual, like, Manufacturers say once they, like, always banged. They did really well basically every time. So I was talking about that series in general and like, how it started with like the gigabyte black backplate thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All that chaos. And I realized that the gigabyte backplate video is like, ancient.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, yeah. It's like that was 10 years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gigabyte painted their back plates black or something to like, help.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They were copper back plates, were they?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, right. It was right over the GPU die. And they said it would, like, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They said it would lower it by 3 degrees, I'm pretty sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And the real thing was that their old back plates were really bad. So it. You could either have this copper backplate or just no back plate.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it would have been fine.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it would have been fine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But having their old back plates, like, increase the temperature. So it was a benefit versus having their old bad one, if I think that's how it was. But you'd have to watch that old video and I think you'd have to watch the like, Instagram video, I think that we posted because they, they, they like called me. Their board called me at like three in the morning or something. I still have no idea how they got my phone number.

[Linus Sebastian]

They have their vase.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And then they, they, they like push for me to take the video down. And we were just like, no, but, but they were like, okay, we can have our engineers, like, correct your information for you. And I was like, okay. Their engineers told us the like, yeah, it's versus our old bad backplate versus nothing. It's. It's zero change. This was like a technical marketing issue. So I brought that to their board and was like, this is what your people told me. And they're like, okay, please post like an update. And I was like, you don't want me to do this. And they're like, no, please do it. And I was like, okay. And then it was just bad. Yeah, nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whole thing was weird. Probably reach out to manufacturers before we post the videos. I think we learned that bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, we weren't even wrong on that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not that we're not gonna post it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But I think we don't need to like, jump scare people.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They can at least know it's coming.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's true. We do have a process now where the, the partnerships team gets the schedule of what videos are coming. So they can at least be like, hey, be ready.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. Which is like, you know, we were Gonna post it anyways. Yeah, but like, you know, at least.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I think the, I think the, the, the, the, the, the sheet for it is like brand, brand unsafe videos upcoming and they don't, they don't interfere with the editorial team but you know, it's just nice for them to be, to be ready to prepare their inbox. Yeah, yeah. To receive an email.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They knew exactly what they're doing. All publicity is good publicity. No, as much as I slammed them, I actually don't agree. There was, there was people on that call that called me that had genuinely no idea at all what was happening and they thought the claim was real. They.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Read it just the way that I did and assumed that it was a real thing that they were claiming and they assumed that they were not lying. Someone saw this data, either misinterpret it or, or construed it in some way and then that got through and got published. Big companies stuff happens.

[Linus Sebastian]

It turns out that when you have a thousand or ten thousand or a hundred thousand people, they are not all marching in lockstep.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And like it just doesn't work like that. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, it doesn't make it good.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

But what it does make, it is not malicious. It's understandable most of the time.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sometimes it totally is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sometimes it seems to be totally malicious.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know that this one was. I, in my opinion, I suspect someone on the technical marketing team just didn't understand and just was like, oh yeah, I see. Number went up by three. So it goes up by three. Very good.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean you would be amazed how much of the marketing and sales teams of even like very broadly speaking, very technical companies don't know that much about tech.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is also, I have also heard from many different people that work in the industry that work on the products themselves. I've heard from them about being very frustrated with the technical marketing teams and how they've taken certain claims and exaggerated them.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, that's the thing is they're good at sales, they're good at marketing, they are not necessarily good at tech and don't necessarily care about that because it has nothing to do with their KPIs. And the reality of it is that you might say, well then it's these companies fault for not hiring more technical people to do sales and marketing. But you gotta understand sales and marketing have to talk to people. I'll leave the rest of it unsaid.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. And again, it doesn't make it okay. It doesn't make it good. I just understand that's, that's all.

[Linus Sebastian]

And we, and if we want to diagnose the video and if we want to find a way to move forward, we have to understand these things because it's our job to work in this industry, you know, forever. So it is what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep.

[Dan]

Another one?

[Linus Sebastian]

Sure. Oh, was that still a merchmat good?

[Dan]

Yeah, that was one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, sure.

[Dan]

You made a computer including a case for the YouTuber Wintergaten.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's not really a question.

[Dan]

He now needs a storage server for his external hard drive collection of all his work. You want to help him? Maybe. And yes. Want your stickers.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was a super cool build. I don't know if you ever saw that one. The wood PC.

[Dan]

It had the like working wooden gears, like motorized.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. Yeah, hold on. It was, it was pretty cool. Yeah. The amazing wooden PC.

[Dan]

Yeah, I remember that one. Three years ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

That was awesome. It was sponsored by SolidWorks. That's his. That's not ours. This is ours. So we basically laser etched a thing and then we, we made these gears turn, which was, which was super cool. We haven't really done as much. Hey, we built a wild PC that was sort of like themed in this way lately.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like those a lot.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think that's something that we could do more of. What I will say is it was something that started to not perform as well. I mean, remember it kind of, it kind of felt like it had a bit of, a. Bit of a rise in popularity. Kind of like, you know, game themed modded PCs back in the day, like you'd go to trade shows and a booth like G Skill for instance would be nothing but these like wild like modded PCs and stuff like that. And then people got kind of numb to it. And videos showcasing that kind of thing, they, they stopped really, they stopped really enticing people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And where do you think that stopped? Because this is, this is three years ago.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it's more the momentum.

[Luke Lafreniere]

YouTube is funky, man. YouTube says three years ago. I expand the description.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's almost 4.

[Luke Lafreniere]

2021.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Oh, 23-12-2021. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it'll be four years ago in December of this year. Yeah. So anyway, the point is that there's probably a lot of people, like hundreds of thousands of people out there that are like, but I want to watch those videos. I would have watched the crap out of those videos. But that's the thing that people I think sometimes lose track of or don't realize is that when we're looking at the numbers we're looking at aggregate numbers and not just individual numbers. And so it was really interesting over the last couple of weeks as we dived into some of the inside baseball behind YouTube's algorithmic recommendations and how they do or don't register views, you know, when ad blocker is. Is being used. And, and we kind of, we kind of talked about these things. And the big headline that a lot of people who didn't look that deep into it or listen to what we were saying globbed onto was that LTT has fallen off. Right. Like, that was kind of the takeaway for anyone who wanted that to be the takeaway. And I'll be the first to tell you, Gu, viewership is not as high as it was three years ago, but we also haven't fallen off completely either. And that's not necessarily the conclusion, but that doesn't change that. Opinions are like a holes. And many people had opinions about, you know, what specific content it was of ours that was the reason that we had fallen off. Whether it was because we were doing content that was bad or because we had stopped doing content that was really good. And one of the funniest ones for me was people on both sides saying they built too many computers and I'm bored of it, or on the other side going, they don't build enough computers anymore. That's what I want to watch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you think it might have been oversaturated and now it's cooled down, we could hit it again?

[Linus Sebastian]

And being equally certain, no, I don't build a PC as a genre is a highly competitive because it's super easy to do. And it's, it's one where I feel like you. We especially are inherently going to struggle with it because there's almost nothing for us to say that we've never said before. That was why we did build. How to build a PC the last guide you'll ever need, because what's the.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Last one that you. What's the last.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, we did a POV one more recently because it had been quite a while and I felt that we were due for an update because the first POV build guide, and it really is the easiest one to follow along.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The amazing wooden PC is not a build guide, is it? It's like a.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that's. No, no, no. That one's like. It's like a build log. Yeah, it's like, yeah, four year, four years ago. So more recently we did the. The acoustic baffle one was pretty cool. The most like silent PC I'd Say we've taken the idea and we've adapted a little bit. So we did buyer DIY with the arcade cabinet. In fact, that's the thing that's behind me right here. That was a cool build log. Like building a PC in a novel form factor. We've tried to add another layer to it other than just we built a computer because they started to be pretty sluggish for us anyway. Another one that people are sort of quick to diagnose as the reason that we're, you know, we're falling off because we need to do more of it or because we need to do less of it is. Oh man. Actually, no, I forgot I had it in my brain, but now I've forgotten and honestly it's probably boring anyway, so why don't, why don't we move on? We can do it, do a new topic. I forget what the question was. Did I ever actually answer it? Oh, could we do a NAS man? That's one where you can only build NAS's so many times. If he reaches out and kind of, you know, lays out what he needs and if we can come up with a unique idea, you know, make it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So like if a hard drive fails, it drops a marble in his machine.

[Linus Sebastian]

That'D be kind of cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You could totally do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have a lot of projects right now, so I'm not in a position where I could say like, oh yeah, we could, like, we could execute that on, we could execute on that in like a super reasonable amount of time. So I don't want to commit anything, but anything's possible. In the case of that PC, we had a really good sponsor that was super adjacent to what we were doing. So sometimes it can rely on that because these can be really big projects and sometimes, you know, we can't get all the hardware. So we can't just go building like multi thousand dollar like NAS's for people just out of our own pocket for no reason other than because they asked us for one necessarily. That's one of the reasons that we'll, you know, we'll go and we'll bring in a sponsor or something like that and try to make it, you know, wins for everyone, win for the sponsor, win for our channel, win for the audience, they really enjoy the content, win for the other creator who gets, you know, hooked up with this stuff. We try to, we try to stack W's as much as we can. Oh yeah, right. I remember what the other genre was. Really expensive stuff is hilarious. Watching the, the community broadly not agree on Whether we should cover like outlandishly expensive stuff they ever have. They never have and never will.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Every single video we upload that's like here I am unboxing the world's biggest TV or here's a, a thirty thousand dollar gpu. It's gonna have, it's gonna have some comment thread under it. That's people, there's people discussing how. I remember when LTT used to be reasonably priced stuff for reasonable folks. It never was. Ever. It never ever, ever, ever was. And I don't. But it always was and it always will be. Like how about this one? Four tech YouTubers were challenged to build the best thousand dollar gaming PC. That was a month ago. Here's a review of a mid range gpu. You know, oh, here's Scrapyard wars where we literally are trying to get the best deals. That's the entire premise of it. So it's always been here's make your GPU faster for $7. It's always been both. And this is going to blow your mind. You can watch the videos that appeal to you. Whoa. I know, I know. It's wild. It's wild. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If I don't watch every single one, I get the shakes.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do think you kind of miss out. I think that, I think that the team does an incredible job of making sure that there's fun and educational bits in pretty much everything we upload. I'm only hedging because there has got to have been something at some point.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The content so to dense these days. There's so much stuff going on. Every video is like 20 minutes and it's like 20 edited down minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. I don't know how we used to do a 10 minute video anymore. Like maybe, maybe that's something that we should explore. Like do a 10 minute video once in a while.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But like okay, can you imagine? Okay. Did you watch the one on the giant display volume?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What could we have cut do that in 10 minutes.

[Linus Sebastian]

How could we have cut 11 minutes out of that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I almost wanted to see more. And I'm not even like we did.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cut out a bunch.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I'm sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like we, we had to be, we had to aggressively cut that down. It's such a cool video.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like I, I remember this, this video nine years ago. Oh my God. This video.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I thought was incredibly long.

[Linus Sebastian]

At 16 I gave you shit because I was like this script is too long. But no, ain't nobody got attention span for that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Regularly release like 20 to 30 minute long.

[Linus Sebastian]

When's the last time we had a 16 minute video? Not yesterday's. Not this Rog rig reboot. That's 23 minutes. Weirdest parts on AliExpress. 19 minutes. 19 minutes, 29 minutes, 21 minutes, 16 minutes there. We have to go back to the Bose sound Canon Acoustic wave Canon.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Technically that one's still longer because mine is 1619. That was 1624.

[Linus Sebastian]

So summarizing an Apple event, we managed to make that shorter one iPhone announcement. But there's, I don't know, there's just people. I don't know how to address that. Because if we say more people get bored and if we say less people feel like it's incomplete. And maybe, maybe, maybe that's, maybe that's partly on us. Like maybe we just need to be like, okay, yeah, we're just not going to include everything. Maybe we should go back to shorter videos. It's something we've talked about.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cuz it's very burdensome on the editors. It's burdensome on the writing department.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The only other one I did in that series, 8 minutes 31 seconds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I remember when I, when I had my like float plane weeks. We do these things on float plane where we'll pick like a person and you make three pieces of content and it's, it's a week dedicated to like your pieces of content. I made a video in there that was like about the state of the video game industry and it was like four and a half minutes or something. But I mean there's no ads. I kick right into it. There's no need for like an intro and outro or anything. There's no appetizer. So I just go straight into the topic and talk about it. I got everything I needed to say in it ended up being like very true with how things have been going on and people were pissed because it wasn't longer. I was just thinking, I remember reading the comments and I remember just thinking like that wasn't even that short of a script for like back when I used to make videos. Like if you, if you add in like ad spot, beginning, end, an intro. An intro, a longer outro, like all that stuff that you'd normally have. That's probably about the length of this.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is going on with that?

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe like 50 to 70 seconds of bloat just from kind of adding all that stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. But no, now it's, it's 20 plus long minute videos.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wild.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Dan, what are we supposed to be doing.

[Dan]

It's got a couple more topics in there.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck yeah. Google reveals its Android PC coming in 2026. Back in July of 2025. Okay, so this. So two months ago, Google's Android president Samir Samat confirmed in a Tech Radar interview that they will be combining Chrome OS and Android into a single platform. The interview was very broad and not Chrome OS focused, but Samat did mention he was very interested in laptop productivity and they are combining Android and Chrome OS. Alright, fast forward to Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit September 24, 2025. So two days ago. So Matt says they're committed to the Chrome OS platform. Does that mean older Chrome OS systems will still receive support? Hasn't been confirmed. So Matt also stated that Android tablets have shown to be a productivity machine and a success for them. So basically we can't believe anything he says.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, that's really interesting because I read these notes before the show. I read that one line and I had that, that exact word for word reaction of just like, none of this matters anymore. That's obviously a lie.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hmm, interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Does he. Is he thinking of iPads?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, pretty much. I mean Android tablets exist, but like they seem to be like sign up giveaways. You know what I mean? Like they're not really.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, they're expensive, dude. No. I only know this because I was trying to remember when we used to use a big Android tablet for our teleprompter.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I was trying to buy new ones and I was like, oh my God, I'm not spending 5, $600 on an Android tablet. This is ridiculous. And I had to go find some ancient honeycomb thing that was like someone was selling used. And there it was. It was a really weird deal for some reason. Like I think it turned out like they knew me when I got it. Doesn't matter. The point is that like I got another one of these old like Tegra 2 tablets and. And we had. I had to figure out how to like install a new OS on it. I had to do some like adb. Like. Yeah, it was a whole thing because I didn't want to spend more than like a couple hundred bucks on an Android tablet because they're not worth that to me. So. But to be clear, there are very cheap Android tablets.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But they're really crappy. Oh yeah. So I wanted something that was in that middle ground of like being decent because I was gonna use it for a teleprompter. I needed the screen to be good and I needed the right, you know, performance to be okay and stuff. I needed to be reliable, but also. And I needed to be big.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Of course it doesn't need to be that great, but it needs to be reliable.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wanted a 10 inch tablet and there was like nothing in that class. This is years ago though. There was nothing in that size class that was like reasonably priced. And so I was just, I was blown away by how expensive Android tablets are. And they still are. Like, if you want to buy a Samsung or something, they're not cheap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. I mean, I didn't even like, this is 800 bucks.

[Linus Sebastian]

I do wonder if in other markets they're doing okay. Like, how many reviews are there for that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

126.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, so they're clearly selling some.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm fairly certain Best Buy reviews are unified. I think it's both sites.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh. So. And maybe in other markets they're doing really great. Oh, okay. So they've aggregated reviews from Lord only knows where.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Interesting.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are like all that way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Cute. Okay. They also, and this is where your eyes might really roll completely out of their sockets. They specifically want to bring the advancements with AI on Android to Chrome os. Neat. The solution then, Google is combining Android and Chrome OS to make a new OS for PCs. The baseline of Android for PCs will be Android as a base with the Chrome OS experience on top of it. This appears to be a collaborative effort between Google, Qualcomm and other partners that weren't mentioned. A senior VP of Google announced they specifically want to bring their AI stack in development into the PC domain. So Android can serve everyone in every computing category. Since they've already been available for smart home and auto devices devices, personal computing has been a gap for them. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Not much more has been revealed about their plans at the moment, and the latest announcement was more of a tease. But it does seem that Google has been working to improve Android with Linux apps. Ooh. The future for Chrome OS devices hasn't been explicitly covered, but Google's policy is 10 years of updates, so I'm going to hold them to that because I just bought a Chromebook and Android Authority mentioned that GPU acceleration has been slyly added to Android's Linux terminal app. It doesn't work yet, but it does show that they're looking to improve performance. Google stated the end goal is to create an Android ecosystem that works seamlessly across devices. Well, good luck, Google. Hopefully you don't abandon it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Before you minimize that. I threw some stuff at the bottom I don't necessarily think I saw these in the dock, but I think they're super new, so I don't. I'm not blaming the doc writers, to be clear. Do you know about the new Facebook thing?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Facebook. Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

Chat will tell us.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're making a new feed that is just a feed of people's like, AI generated, like mood videos. It sounds like the dumbest thing in the world.

[Linus Sebastian]

The saddest part is like, super smart people work at Meta. They could be doing anything. They could be. They could be building the future.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, it's called. So it's called Facebook meta. Vibes AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Are you ready to screen share AI?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Hold on one sec. TechCrunch. Sure, we'll go with that. Sure, go for it. There we go. Meta launches Vibes, a short form video feed of AI Slope. In a move no one asked for, Meta is introducing Vibes, a new feed in the Meta AI app and on Meta AI for sharing and creating short form AI generated videos. That's it. Who wants this?

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? So that you can just aimlessly doom scroll even more?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's just like trash. I mean, like, someone at Full Plane Chat was like, remember that two week period when Luke was all excited about AI stuff? I am still quite interested in AI.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stuff, but you don't want to watch this.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But like, the direction of almost every corporation and how they're handling with it is just so uninteresting. Like, I think it's called, like, friend.com or something.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, boy, oh, boy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Have you heard of that?

[Linus Sebastian]

I unboxed it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you enjoy. Linus gets mad about how utterly pointless and wasteful something is, tune in to Short Circuit where I unbox. Oh, no.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I literally. I had it open. I just closed it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. Did I man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I looked at his screen, the timing was crazy.

[Linus Sebastian]

And clicked it and it was gone. I unboxed my friend. I named it Riley. I prefer the real Riley.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is this old?

[Linus Sebastian]

It's all the. The trailer there is old.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

This went viral way back, but we. They actually shipped us one now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, Got it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So I was gonna say they did like an ad takeover. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't ad take over the New York subway bell.

[Linus Sebastian]

Has actually been wearing it since the short circuit. Because he was like, maybe Linus was too mean. I should use it a bit more and make sure that it's actually as worthless and pointless as he made it out to be. And he came. He came back to me a few days later and he's like, hey, so it's just as bad as you thought? Maybe worse.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah. So bad it's terrifying. It's the amount of like, man, there's always the like utopian view of like, this will help us do less menial garbage work and we'll, we'll free the common person and allow us to do artistic pursuits.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or there's the late stage capitalism view where it's like, it will create meaningless garbage work.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How about, how about you scroll infinitely with the hand motion that is addicted through just the sloppiest, crappiest AI junk ever forever and see what happens? Like, that's not what I want. That's not interesting. And I feel like I knew this was coming and there is interesting stuff happening in the space.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, absolutely.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's just not this. And it's also not. What is it called? OpenAI pulse.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh boy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think both of these were announced today. So I'm not, I'm not blaming the, the doc writing team. They are, they are new. No, this is not new.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Either way.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, I'm on your screen. Chat. GPT Pulse. What is this now?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Essentially, let's see if they say it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Out loud here to reach your goals.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What does that mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

So you tell it like goals or like things that you want and it will work on it in quotes even when you're not like using it.

[Linus Sebastian]

What does that even mean?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think the thing that they would like you to think is that something like your badminton thing when it was like, I'll go work on that and then get back to you, is that it's gonna do that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, it'll like churn away on large tasks in the background or something.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think that might be what they would like you to think. I haven't read this whole thing. I'm just being honest. So I might miss parts of it. Let's see if they show when you're traveling, what is your preference? This helps us shape somewhere one of kind experiences, blah, blah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It'll research something for you what it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What is even So I think there was like a Sam Altman tweet.

[Linus Sebastian]

So basically they just want you to feed more personal data into it. Like, am I missing something here?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The thing that I suspect other people are picking up on as well is this is almost certainly going to be an ad engine.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So they can find like a bunch of people that have certain desires and then sell ads against those desires.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is like for sure what's going on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right. So basically they just want some Time to go sell it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Here we go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Between when you tell them that I'm interested in traveling and when it gives you a response.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This. This part right here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It performs super well. If you tell ChatGPT more about what's important to you in regular chat, you could mention I'd like to visit Bora Bora someday or my kid is 6 months old and I'm interested in developmental milestones. And in the future you might get useful updates, also known as to me, ads. Ads. You might get useful ads in the future. And, you know, I'm sure they'll use it for other things first so that people feel really disarmed about it and then later on they'll just start trickling it in a little bit over time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, Elon said that out loud when. Yeah, when Croc got some update.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Handyman linked this. What fantastic timing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. So like I. I am like, rather. The second I read this, I was just like. If it said, you know, I'd like to visit Bora Bora someday, you could say that to it. And it could definitely be helpful immediately. There is no reason for it to be helpful in the future. My kid is 6 months old. I'm interested in developmental milestones. It could definitely tell you some of those now.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There is no reason that it should wait and tell you them later. Unless there's some product that it could advertise to you potentially at a more. At a time that it thinks you might be more likely to buy it. Like if it realizes you're online at 2 in the morning or something. When people's ability to resist buying things is a little bit lower.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or it knows your kid's six months old today. Then it knows that Your kid is 2 years old in 18 months. That's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you need this other product.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe you need shoes or maybe. Yeah, whatever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Because giving it a desire does not mean that it is only going to attempt to fulfill that one desire.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cyborg citation says it's like people watched Wall E and thought it was something to aspire to rather than a warning.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, man. Anie Hikage says, and this is a really good point, spreading out interactions with an app over time also makes it more addictive. So it's a Jedi mind trick as well. I added the Jedi part.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That absolutely makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

It all you will tell me your desires. Brilliant.

[Luke Lafreniere]

To see a fabric. What are you gonna do about it?

[Linus Sebastian]

I'm already going, oh, are we talking about that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know.

[Linus Sebastian]

I wasn't sure, if it was a secret.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe not anymore. I didn't say which one.

[Dan]

For crying out loudly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't say which one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, he's going somewhere fabulous. We leave it there next week. Freaking guy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I didn't say which one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. I just don't know if it's a secret or not. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

K. I just like half assumed that everything is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why don't we talk about our sponsors? That's not a secret. The show is brought to you today by. Oh, are you. Are you good, Dan? Oh, he's awake. He. Yeah, he's awake. Float plane. First, you're above the float plane. With Sammy away on vacation, Jake Bell of Short Circuit Fame has commandeered the floatplane exclusive helm and released two off the cuff videos walking around the office to get team reactions to the cursed Casio, Mofflin, AI PET and the iPhone Air. All you got to do to enjoy them is head over to LMG GG Floatplane to enjoy Bell's sultry vocals. Okay, that's a weird way of saying that Dulcet tones and also our incredible team LMG Years react to iPhone Air. I hate this thing so much. Editors apparently argue about it. Okay, yeah, no, these seem pretty well received, so that's cool. Also, there's a new episode of we have Fridays off and Linus is still late. Why is when late?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't think.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, I don't think I was late that time. What the heck?

[Dan]

There was quite a few on times.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, there have been a lot of on time.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, because I was the only one who was actually. No, I'm not. I was the only one. There were other people working Friday afternoon sometimes. Yeah, we had scrapyard wars going, so I know that Hoffman was definitely here working on stuff. And then David got kind of dunked on because we had the Chromebook video that we had to shoot together. And then he was also scrapyard warsing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There's labs people in there, some IT people in.

[Linus Sebastian]

A lot of people had Fridays off for the latter part of the summer. Just as kind of like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if Fridays were off? So it's amazing how easy it is for me to be on time for WAN show when nobody's bothering me because I was just sitting in my office working. I'm like, oh, it's time for WAN show. And then I just go to WAN show. Yeah, it's seriously, I'm not going to claim to be a punctual person.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You were on time, like every one of those days.

[Linus Sebastian]

But a big part of my challenge in being punctual is external factors.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Both Luke and I know this and.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'Re fine with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, well, I do my best. I do my best. The show is brought to you by Corsair. You know what all these setups here are missing? More displays. But not just any display, a smaller display. Oh, cool. Like the Corsair Xenon Edge.

[Luke Lafreniere]

These are cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's a 14 and a half inch touchscreen panel with a resolution of 2560 by 720 and a 60Hz refresh rate. You could game on it, but it's not really meant for that. It's meant to be for showcasing system info like or like systemetrics. Or you could use it for chat channels or more. It's kind of up to you. Oh my God. It's kind of up to you.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sick.

[Linus Sebastian]

And with a bunch of magnetics. Magnetics. And with a bunch of magnets and two integrated mounts, you can have it sitting on your desk or attached to a monitor arm or even live right inside your PC case. Learn more or pick one up for yourself today using our link in the video description.

[Dan]

I actually might buy one. Those are cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It is cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

The show is also brought to you by Factor. Imagine you just got done unboxing your brand new tv, but instead of getting to enjoy it, you've got to go make dinner with Factor. You can get ready to eat dietitian approved meals delivered right to your doorstep. Pick from eight meal preferences that support your wellness goals, which now include even more GLP1 friendly meals and Mediterranean diet options that are packed with protein or good for you fats. Or you can make your way east and try their brand new offerings of Asian inspired meals With a vast catalog of weekly rotating meals, some that include premium seafood choices like shrimp and salmon at no extra cost, you're bound to find something that fits your needs. Factor even says that 97% of their customers have reported living a healthier life thanks to their nutritious meals. So eat smart@Factor Meals.com when 50 off and use code WAN50OFFOFF to get 50% off your first box plus free breakfast for one year. That's cool. That's code WAN50OFF@Factor Meals.com for 50% off your first box plus FREE breakfast for one year. Finally, the show is brought to you by Rove Lab. If you just got the keys to your brand new apartment, what's the first thing you're going to buy? Chances are it's going to be a couch. But getting one in can be, hopefully.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not that one, bit of a pain.

[Linus Sebastian]

And the couch itself can be a pain. Ours was awful too. Enter Rove Lab with their modular furniture. They come packed in boxes that are small and light enough to lug up multiple floors on your own. And all you gotta do is unpack for everything, wait for it to take shape, and your living room will be couched up in no time. Plus, it's made with their patent pending Smart foam, which is designed to feel even more comfortable over time while remaining mess resistant and easy to clean. They even come with a 100 day risk free trial period and a limited lifetime warranty for peace of mind. So head over to rovelab.com wan to get an LMG exclusive $100 discount that stacks on top of any other sales. But act fast because the software is only active for the next 72 hours. We've actually got a bunch of Rovelab stuff over at Willn, So I've got a 5v5, 120 inch tape to tape setup because of course I do. And we've got a bunch of. Because the couches are modular. So you can, you can buy as many middle sections like tofu of a couch as you want. And then they're just zippers. You just zip them together.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

And then they're together.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

So that they're not apart anymore. It's pretty cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, what else we got? Dj the creator asks, are they too close to the ground? They are close to the ground. Whether you're into that or not, that's up to you. I will say at Whale Land, it's very convenient because it means that I don't have to have the projector up really high because I don't have a way to do that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do you want to do next? Low WAN views solved. What is this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, let's talk about that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, this. Redditor Yevilnad shared a surefire solution for low WAN viewership. We just need to do. Come on. We just need to look more like this. Which we can do like this. Why were you looking here? Look here.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I. I think this is not real time. I'm pretty sure it's not real time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, it wouldn't need to be completely real time.

[Dan]

I mean, we're already like 300 milliseconds late.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is. This is WAN 2.2. Funny enough, it's called WAN. This is WAN 2. 2 animate, I think. And I don't think that's real time. Am I wrong? I don't know what to look at this.

[Dan]

I mean it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Is it might be.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought.

[Dan]

I thought when only did 5 seconds.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Not like wan show is live. We could. We could do five seconds would be fine.

[Dan]

Yeah but I mean like we could easily delay and that's it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like streamers and then you have to.

[Dan]

Render that like it's trained on five seconds.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, got it. Okay.

[Dan]

Don't believe it's live.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Isn't that video more than five seconds?

[Dan]

Because like. Like character replacement has been a thing for like long.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Anyway, the brilliant plan is to turn everyone on when into photorealistic AI thirsty traps.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Turn everyone on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Personally I think it's a great idea. Great. Yuzuki posted a handy comparison of face swapping tools. Here we go. Got it. So pricing model subscription 19amonth web based private generation. Oh boy. You know what? Let's navigate away from that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We should. I don't. I didn't see it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, don't worry about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We should. We should do. We should take pictures of us from like or videos or whatever. We have both, I don't know, 10 years ago and just do that so it's still us.

[Linus Sebastian]

Also apparently this is possibly fake because there appears to be real motion blur. So they might have just you know, staged that. Either way I have pretty mimicable. I have seen some very, very. There's crazy ones, wild ones ones like where they're. Where the. The software like drops for a second and then like goes back up and they're actual streamers.

[Dan]

Luke, didn't you send me a video ages ago about like the webcam one? It was like a real time thing. The guy was sitting at his desk and wasn't actually sitting there, but it was him. Insomniac says that it's a fork of face rig. Apparently real time manipulation. So it's just like vtuber at that point.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. Pretty wild, man. Anyway, I just thought it was. I basically thought it was funny. So that was it. Oh man. Why is everything AI news? Let's find something else. Oh, this is fun. Okay, man, we're gonna talk about the Chevy Volt again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because the Chevy Volt is a practical car for cool practical people. And I was always frustrated back when I got mine and back when I did my video and back when I talked about that car, how people just didn't seem to get it. They didn't seem to get plug in hybrid vehicles and how they were just like this incredible like perfect marriage of the best things about an EV and the best things about a gas car with admittedly some of the downsides of both as well, but really the best of both because you get, I want one. You get the economics of building them because you don't have to fill them with all the fuel they will ever need forever. You just put a small battery in them that realistically covers most of your daily commuting. And you get the benefits of a gas car in that if you are going somewhere far, you just put gas in it and go. You don't have to think about range anxiety. So I did most of my driving on full electric with that car. I'd fill up the gas tank freaking like, I don't know, once every four to eight weeks or something like that. Like I hardly used gas and it was awesome. And I was, I was shocked when I talked to a guy who worked at the Chevy dealer who was like, yeah, I had a guy trade one in who literally like didn't even realize that you had to plug it in. And that just, it just blew me away. And it was a super efficient gas powered vehicle.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's one of the most unfortunate thing things with automotives that I've been paying attention to automotives for because hybrids came out first and then plug in hybrids came out after and people had no idea what it was. They didn't understand it was a we to Wii U thing. Yeah, it basically happened, but with cars.

[Linus Sebastian]

So buddy just drove his Volt for years and never plugged it in once. Yeah, which is not the end of the world because. Because it doesn't have a super heavy battery in it. It's still a super efficient gas vehicle but like oh my God, if you just plugged it in to your garage every night, you'd save a flipping fortune living here in B.C. where electricity is, oh, cheap, very cheap here. Anyway, Toyota came across this same unsettling piece of information that people are not charging their plug in hybrid electric vehicles and they came up with the Charge Minder app they're going to gamify delivers push notifications at key moments like when you arrive at home or other user defined charging places. These notifications apparently increased charging by 10% compared to a control group. They also increased driver satisfaction by 16 percentage points because duh, who wouldn't be satisfied by driving for cheaper a lot of the time?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

The gamification aspect includes positive reinforcement like attaining charging streaks and charging habit summaries.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know what they should.

[Linus Sebastian]

Our discussion question here is plug in hybrid Electric vehicles cost thousands of dollars more than regular hybrid cars. If people aren't buying them or if people aren't plugging them in, why are they spending the extra money? And then this is from Nick Plouffe. He goes, I paid extra for prime for a Prime, so. Not Amazon prime for a Toyota Prime. Because I can plug it in.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yes. That's because you are a smart person who owns a display.

[Dan]

Allegedly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Allegedly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Allegedly.

[Linus Sebastian]

Allegedly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not gonna watch this anyways. I'll just say it. I think there's ways that they could probably end up making money off this as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's wrong with you? Yeah, shut up, Luke.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They're not gonna listen to this. It's fine. But they could see the places that you're plugging in that aren't at home.

[Linus Sebastian]

Stop talking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sounds good. Next topic, Spam GPT. I don't think we can get away. They're all AI topics.

[Linus Sebastian]

Let's do Spam GPT.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay, they're not all AI topics, but yeah, we'll do this one. First, hit me. Spam GPT is a new AI powered email attack automation kit being found on People Are Mad. Being found on underground forums and the Dark Web. In a P.O. a blog posted earlier this month, cybersecurity firm Veronis calls Spam GPT an enterprise marketing platform weaponized for spam and says what used to require a team of skilled developers can now be accomplished by a single bad actor with a $5,000 toolkit. And it's Spam as a service, which I would kind of hope for considering its name. The platform enables attackers to design, schedule and monitor large scale spam and phishing operations with minimal technical expertise. Spam GPT offers a straightforward, straightforward GUI and detailed documentation and incorporates generative AI to create convincing spam campaigns. Tutorials teach users SMTP cracking mastery and techniques for spoofing trusted brands and domains. Spam GPT engineers bulk email to slip through spam filters and land in your.

[Linus Sebastian]

Inbox, which honestly kind of makes me want to buy it because we have trouble with that sometimes and we're sending legitimate email. It's like if the. If the bad actors can figure it out, why am I getting gated? Anyway, carry on by.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By combining these features with campaign analytics. Oh my God.

[Linus Sebastian]

Spamchi is this scary or it's mailchimp Ne' er do wells.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The funny thing is because it's a. I'm assuming it seems like it's a one time payment of $5,000. This might be just a cheaper way for people to get like ad campaign management because the multi just terrible ideas.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The multi user subscription model that a lot of these platforms run on is really expensive and really annoying. So if it is just a one time buy, it might be a pretty attractive option for like legitimate.

[Dan]

This is the worst timeline ever.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways. Okay. Someone's gonna. Someone's gonna buy it and repackage it as like a legit.

[Dan]

I'm messaging Conrad right now. It's gonna pay the bills, baby.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Let's go. Keep the lights on with spam with. With legitimate marketing activities. Yes.

[Dan]

Based on your chappy Chat GPT history.

[Luke Lafreniere]

By combining these features with campaign analytics, Spam GPT offers everything you defined in a legitimate marketing CRM. This is my.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know that's what I was talking.

[Luke Lafreniere]

About before but explicitly designed for malicious use. Domain owners are advertised to strengthen email authentication with dmarc. Cool. Spf. There are big groups that don't have things like this running and dkim to prevent spoofed domains and to deploy AI powered tools to detect phishing emails generated by large language models. Oof. Another more different spam GPT is a set of Python scripts created by GitHub uber GitHub user Stavros. Stavros Korokithakis hopefully that was pretty. All right. This spam GPT uses. Sorry. This Spam GPT uses Chat GPT to send realistic replies to spam emails, wasting as much of the scammers time as possible by playing along and pretending to do whatever the scammer is asking for while insisting that any problems are on the scammer side. Oh my God. Stavros commented on Hacker News saying it was a bit of fun until I realized that most of the replied most of the replies for the spammers were AI as well.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, so we were just automatically spamming each other while OpenAI made money, I stopped using it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes so much sense and is like for sure true and real.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is it? Dead Internet theory? Yeah, like it's just bots talking to bots.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean it is actually just a Dead Internet theory is just like real to a certain degree. Like there is an incredible amount of just bot traffic these days. Obviously there's also like a never seen before percentage of the world that is online and like actually on the Internet. Yes, but there is also such a rate of increasing levels of bot traffic that it's like the chance that what you're running into is bot traffic is actually incredibly high.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is great. Gilmore D in Floatplane Chat says it's like two furbies just babbling at each other.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Discussion Question Is direct human interaction with the Internet dying?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, I think we can just move on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

In a lot of ways, it really is.

[Linus Sebastian]

What should Linus ask Linus? Elijah posted a thread on the LTT subreddit where you can submit questions for our upcoming collab with Linus Torvalds. Don't miss it. Now's a great opportunity for you to go post on there or upvote anything that you would like to see us discuss with him. There's no guarantees that we will get to everything, but it could be some nice jumping off points for conversations with the OG tech Linus when he comes up here for our. Hopefully, if nothing else goes wrong, there will be no hard feelings if anything, you know, does come up. But we seem to be, as far as I can tell, confirmed. I'm so excited. Yeah, so I forget where I was going with that. The point is, I think it's happening. I hope it's happening. I'm pretty sure it's happening. And if it does, what do you want us to talk to him about? That was it. Just want to make sure people are aware and then do a little sort of kind of chat with you guys about Google Messages. Google's messaging app, the default use a pixel, right? So your SMS app. Can you think of another modern text communication platform other than Google Messages?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I know where you're going. I know where you're going.

[Linus Sebastian]

That doesn't support cloud sync.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yep, that's where he's going. No, what? It's honestly going on. It's honestly one of the only default apps that I feel like you, like, need to get something else for.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, it's wild to me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And it's, it's interesting, like, how much further ahead it feels like imessage is.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, dude, look. When Apple people tell me, yeah, I use an iPhone because, like, imessage is so great, I roll my eyes because iMessage is nothing special. But if the only other thing they'd ever tried was Google Messages, then, dang, I get it. I can see why they would think that iMessage is God's gift to people who send messages on their phone because, wow, is Google Messages. Like, I just, I hadn't tried to migrate text messages in a while because I was using my Note 9 for a Super long time. And then I only recently started like, like switching phones a lot again. And so on my Note and on my folds, I was using Samsung's Messages app, which also I think actually has Synchronization. Don't quote me on that. I don't know how good the synchronization is on Samsung's, but the point is that I used like an import wizard and so it wasn't really a problem until I started swapping between Google phones, like the Pixel and graphene os. And there was, there was something else that I was. I think it was a OnePlus I was using for a little while and I kind of went, oh crap, I'm like losing track of a lot of my SMS messages and it's not always convenient for me to completely migrate because I might have two factor authentication or like the Unifi identity app so that I have door access at Smash Jams or whatever else. I might still have that on my secondary phone or I might be using a phone for a little while knowing that I'm going to go back to my other one and the only way to migrate back is to wipe the original one and then do the full migration. And it just kind of struck me. I was like, yeah, how the heck does this not have classic, literally Google that? You're, you're, that's like the whole thing you're trying to sell me. It's like Google one and Google Drive and like all this stuff and it's been especially inconvenient. So I still am not switched over to the, the iPhone air, even though I'm trying to, because Apple's migration also is broken. Oh, seriously, Check this out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I usually hear very good things, okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Because I've got an entire page of notes on my next I switch to Apple about what an absolute cluster f the migration process.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I have an idea for, for an Alinus. I switched, by the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know if you're gonna like it, but I'll pitch it when we're done here.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. Collections on this device.

[Dan]

Screenshot.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where the hell is this? Where did I sync this to? You know what? These are pictures I took on my old iPhone 12 Pro because I couldn't. Because both my Pixel and my iPhone were linked with a cable and displaying various states of the transfer. So in order to document this, I, yeah, I had to, I had to put it somewhere else. So where, where did I put it? I don't, I don't think I put it on Google Drive. Bloody hell. Where did I put it? Oh, you know what? I think I can find it. Basically out of like 15,000 text messages or something, it managed to transfer two. And this is one of the things that I often go off about with Apple's software design and the reason for it is that as someone who uses a lot of devices and switches devices a lot and uses a lot of different kinds of apps and needs interoperability and, and has high expectations for a trillion. Yes. With a T$ company I run up against it a lot is Apple's design philosophy is it just works. The problem is that when it doesn't it just works. It just works is baked in as an expectation. So when it doesn't they often do not have the safeguards and backup plans that are baked into other platforms. So it's like probably one of the best examples I have of this is when Apple removed the restart function. Yeah, they used to have two sliders, one to shut down, one to restart. But it's an iPhone. It should never need to be turned off and turned back on. And I really, I don't know this for sure but there is literally no other reason that I can think of why they would have removed it because it was and continues to be a very useful tool. In fact, I contacted Apple support and it's one of the first things they asked me to do was restart my iPhone. So just give me the f cking button to restart it. Why do I have to touch it twice? I don't understand. Another one was this was back with my oldness is like 10 years ago. So I don't even know if this is still true. But when I did my I switched on Mac and Finder didn't have a refresh. Well it should just refresh, right? But when it doesn't, what do I do? Well, you go fuck yourself is what you do. That's your only real option. So in this case with the transfer tool. So I'm, I'm using the. What, what's it, what's it called? It's an Android app. Move to iOS I'm using the Move to iOS app from, from Apple and hold on a second. Yeah, here we go. I'm just gonna make sure that I'm not just an idiot and I'm using like a third party tool or something because I'm pretty darn sure that it's first party Apple. But I'd hate to accidentally upset Apple people again by if if I'm actually wrong. I don't mind upsetting them if. If what I'm saying is accurate. Yes, it's developed by Apple so I'm using the move to iOS app and once again, in classic Apple fashion, when only two of your 15,000 text messages transfer there's no retry button. There's no, there's no do it again button.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh, that's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

So the instructions from Apple support, who were spectacularly unhelpful, start from the beginning again, I'm assuming was to rewipe the iPhone and try again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I said, well, okay, what are we changing this time that would result in a different outcome?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nothing, just.

[Linus Sebastian]

And they go, oh, well, your Internet might have caused an issue. And I said, I told you already earlier in this chat that I was connected with a cable. What makes you think that my Internet played a role in the failure of this? What are we changing? What are we doing differently? Because what happened was my WhatsApp messages did transfer, so I'm no longer signed into WhatsApp. And I could do a whole separate rant about WhatsApp and how that too is a modern communications platform that for whatever reason does allow multiple sign in across devices. But not two phones. No, never two phones. So I have to transfer and you have to transfer WhatsApp when you are doing like the new phone setup too. It drives me absolutely bananas. So my WhatsApp did transfer over to the iPhone, but my text messages are here. And I've had some bad experiences with WhatsApp's backup and restore. Even when I explicitly click backup, verify that it's backed up in the last one minute and then I restore it, I'll be missing like a week of messages sometimes and it's really frustrating. I don't like that. I don't like not having my communication history and like it's, it's legitimately caused problems for me sometimes. Remember that stupid scandal where someone accused me of something and I didn't have my WeChat history because I had like switched phones and didn't realize that it was like not cloud synced in any way. It ended up being fine because they were caught in like multiple other lies that basically were like, yeah, it ended.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Up just dismissing everything basically.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. So that was really useful of them to just like completely themselves like that. But I didn't, I didn't have the DMs, which was super inconvenient for me. I don't like losing dms. So I am in a situation right now where my iPhone contains my WhatsApp messages and my Android phone contains my SMS messages. There's no cloud sync for sms. They're asking me to wipe the iPhone, which I don't know. Maybe I will get all my WhatsApp history back. Maybe all of the messages will transfer this time the whole experience just sucks. So Google. So in order to Google cloud sync for messages. What the is wrong with you? It's another opportunity for you to sell more cloud storage.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, it should be pretty easy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like now. Like, just do it tomorrow.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

What are you waiting for?

[Luke Lafreniere]

It should be pretty easy.

[Linus Sebastian]

Number two, WhatsApp. Hey, just let me sign in across multiple devices. Like you know, basically everything. Like, what are you doing? Number three, Apple retry buttons. You don't need to be allergic to them. It's okay. It's a lot better than starting the whole process all over again. I understand. I understand that you don't want it cluttering up your beautiful software. Whatever the fuck philosophy leads to you not having them. No, I don't understand. I think it's stupid, but it doesn't matter. The point is you can keep doing that. How about only show me the retry button if I need it. That way it doesn't have to be there like by default. But you don't mind showing me a little.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Some part of it failed.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, you don't mind showing me a triangle with an exclamation mark? I backed up two of your messages. Thanks for nothing. If I click that, it should let me retry. Thank you. That's all I'm asking for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One WhatsApp account now across multiple phones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Where? Where?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linked from Handyman.

[Linus Sebastian]

Is that a thing? How did. Why did it sign me out then?

[Luke Lafreniere]

2023. Last year we introduced the ability for users global message seamlessly across all their devices while maintaining the symbol. Today we're improving our multi device offering by introducing the ability to use the same WhatsApp account on multiple phones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hold on. I didn't even try to sign back in here. So recently I ran into a really stupid thing with WhatsApp where I was like trying to use a QR code to do the thing and I couldn't scan the QR code and then it just didn't transfer properly and then I was really annoyed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Linking phones as companion devices makes messaging easier. Now you can switch between phones without signing out and pick up your chats where you left off, so.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, okay, I know. I think this might be. I think this might be solved if.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just signed back in. I suspect you're signed out on your other one because you have to. You have to link it as a companion device.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, well, either way, I'm way happier with this than things were before. Like I was. Man, I was super annoyed when I ran into that issue where it made me do the QR code thing to. To transfer them. And then it, like, I couldn't scan it because the camera on the phone that I was switching to or from, I can't remember, was, like, too crappy to scan the QR code and couldn't handle the. Because it. It turns it up to maximum brightness. So there was a second before it would turn to maximum brightness where it would, like, be trying to scan it, and it. The. And it would, like, start to focus properly, and then it would crank to maximum brightness, and then it wouldn't be able to do it. And then it ended up not working, and then I ended up losing a bunch of my messages. It was so freaking frustrating.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you're getting progressively less and less excited for the idea that I might have for you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, what is it? Signal or like, what. What are we talking about?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you do these. I switched things. But the feedback every time is that you're not, like, really an Apple user. So by not being, you know, marinated in the. The Apple sauce, you. You don't.

[Linus Sebastian]

He means the feedback from outside parties.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yes.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Not my feedback.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, you. You. You don't have.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am an Apple user. I just don't use enough Apple for Apple's liking. I use these every day. These are twos, by the way.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I use. Yeah, I have my own rant about the AirPod fours, but.

[Linus Sebastian]

So I'm not in the sauce enough.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What if, what if? Okay, you did a year.

[Linus Sebastian]

A year.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And what if, what if, what if, what if? Maybe it wasn't even just an iPhone.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, you want me to go full Mac for a year?

[Luke Lafreniere]

I think you could do everything except a desktop. And I think that would be fair because I think a lot of Mac people probably aren't into the whole dedicated desktop thing anyways, and if they had one, it might be for games. And I think you could say, like, I'm. I'm a streamer boy. Therefore, I need a Windows desktop and you can have Mac everything else. And that is like a thing. That is a Mac user archetype. That is common. I think that's fine. So what if you did iPhone, watch AirPods, iPad, MacBook for a year?

[Linus Sebastian]

The hell would I do with an iPad? I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Giving you options.

[Linus Sebastian]

I can't figure out what anybody does with an iPad. I don't fully watch Netflix, I think.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

I mean, you know what? That's valid. I just. For me, it's like, it's this no man's land device. Like, it's big and cumbersome enough that if I'm gonna use it, I might as well just get a laptop. And it's, it's not even that limited anymore. Like it used to be really limited. But just like most of what I would need to do is already on my phone.

[Luke Lafreniere]

People were saying iPad mini at that point. Why not just, just use your phone? I don't know. Part of the reason why I included it in there was because then you're like fully in the ecosystem, right? The laptop can count as any form of computer and then you have all the other Apple things basically. I don't think I missed anything. So. Yeah, you are deep in the, in the walled garden.

[Linus Sebastian]

I will think about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

All right.

[Linus Sebastian]

I'll think about it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just could do, update videos along the way.

[Linus Sebastian]

I like, I like just be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You know what, it's like at least four videos out there.

[Linus Sebastian]

I haven't even, I don't even think I'll be able to because the updates. I did a switch to Mac not that long ago and after the first like week there's just. There was stuff that was annoying, but mostly it wasn't impeding my ability to get work done. It was just, I don't want it annoying.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I want it to not impede your ability to get work done.

[Linus Sebastian]

But that's the thing is I don't think I'm gonna be able to do updates for a year because within a week of using any of those devices I'll be able to use them. There will just be things that I don't like and some of it is just philosophical differences that I have with Apple. Like stuff like the not having a retry. I don't, I don't like that. I don't agree with that. And no amount of, no amount of me using it is going to change that fundamentally. I disagree with the assumption that something is going to work and not having a fail back. I disagree with that because I have lived in the real world for long enough that I know that it doesn't work like that even for your product, specifically Apple. It just doesn't. It doesn't work like that. And I do have my, I do have my picture up. So I'm just going to try to find the right one here. Okay. So yeah, there's the. Okay, so my first picture I took was at the top of the stairs of the code on the iPhone and my move to iOS app not picking it up even though they are both on the same WI fi. Okay, so that didn't work. So I went and Got a cable. Oh, that's a video. Just of the same thing. Okay, that's the same thing. Hold on a second. Then I got a picture, because, you know, I never know if I'll need these pictures for the video. So then I got a picture of it transferring. So it started transferring cable. Yeah. Lttstore.com. soon, soon the cables are coming. Dude, I'm so excited. They're awesome. Okay. Then I got a video of that, apparently. Just trying to be thorough. I'm trying to be thorough, you know, so our editors have stuff to cut away to. Then the next one I got, I think I. It had an eta. Oh, no, here we go. Transfer complete. Transfer complete, my ass. So here, why don't I send this to Dan? I think I'm signed into teams here. Who knows? Am I signed into teams? Oh, my God, this is so laggy.

[Dan]

Make sure that you click remember me, and then it won't happen again.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, sure. Oh, this is so. This is so laggy. I'm dying. Oh, my God.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We can't both antagonize him, Dan.

[Dan]

Well, you don't want to tag team them. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, that's a weird way to put that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Oh.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wait.

[Dan]

It's not. After Darkhead.

[Linus Sebastian]

Never mind.

[Dan]

Keep your pants on.

[Linus Sebastian]

Geez, you guys okay? I'll send this to Dan. So this is hilarious. If I didn't pay close attention, I could easily think, Dan, do you want to throw that up there?

[Dan]

Sure. It's heic, so I might have to do something fun with it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Ah.

[Dan]

Yeah, I'm gonna have to, like, pre convert that. Sorry.

[Linus Sebastian]

Serenity now. So I could easily, easily miss this because on the Android side, again, this is in Apple software. Apple Inc. Made this move to iOS app. On the. On the Android side, it says, everything's great, successfully transferred. And then you notice. Oh, hold on a second. There's little yellow exclamation marks. Everything is not okay on the iOS side. And it's not just a little bit not okay. It's brutally not okay. Dan, how close are you? Because that was all the stalling I had.

[Dan]

Yeah, there you go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Nice. There it is. So I had to click into this. So I had to click into this. So if I have to click into it, just give me a retry button. They're still connected. Oh, this is another funny thing. So both of them had a message on them warning me to keep them connected to power while the transfer was running. How the f am I supposed to do that? The phones are plugged into each other. You numpties it knows I'm using a cable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Magsafe. Okay, got em, got em, got em.

[Linus Sebastian]

I could have two wireless chargers. Caught him. One for each phone. But like, come on, you know, come on, man. In fairness to me, Luke, that is in my notes, I did think of it, but that is a spectacularly stupid solution.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Dan]

Dang, that's great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Solved it by connecting a cable. Yes. Technically, having two wireless charging pads next to each other while they're plugged in would be an option, but who realistically has a setup like that?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

I am aware that it could be done, but that is so obtuse. So it's so frustrating. And I'm clearly not the only one upset about it. I found this on discussions.apple.com this has. Hold on a second, let me check. Move to iOS app transfer error Solutions. This was started, let me see, in 2021. This has been a problem for four years at least. The me toos on this are 1664 of people being like, yep, me too. And there doesn't seem to be any, any real solution. Apple's tech support was so useless. Like, so useless. I talked to one, I asked to be escalated. They it just unceremoniously on the hour transferred me to someone new who hadn't read my case. I guess their shift was just over and they were like, see ya.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

Then I asked them to be transferred to a level two tech. They said, hey, level two is closed right now because it was late at night. Can I schedule a call back? They called me back the next morning. I was talking to level one again.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. That's good. I like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like, I just, I get it. Apple's your favorite company.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If your customers are so upset from dealing with your customer support that they hang up and stop trying on your cheapest level, then you save money on your more expensive level of support.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep. So I get that you love the taste of their dick or whatever, but. But we should ask more from trillion dollar companies. The number of people that are mad at me for being mad.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Why just get tips.

[Linus Sebastian]

That they removed the cable from the AirPods Pro 3s, that they no longer ship it with a cable that they have slowly. You should really have a cable that they should slowly. That they've slowly whittled down the number of included accessories in their products is mind blowing to me. It's like, why would you ask them that to include a cable? I don't know. Why would I ask anyone to include a cable with their product? I'm the. I'm the. Like, I just. I can't really. I can't really wrap my brain around that. I saw this great picture. It's like what was lost iPhone accessories comparison. Hold on, let me see if I can. Let me see if I can find it. Someone posted this great picture and it was like, it was only like four or five years ago that they included like a lightning to three and a half millimeter adapter. They had like headphones, they had stickers, they had a wall wart, they had a cable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Apple stickers were on like everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know what I think it was on? I think it was on Reddit. I'm gonna append Reddit to my search and no, I can't find it if anyone from chat has the link. I think it was on our slash all the other day. But it was, it was. It's quite crazy how we've just accepted them and look if they lowered the price. Totally different situation. If.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But it's just a cable.

[Linus Sebastian]

If I even remotely believed that these choices had anything to do with environmental impact. Different situation. I don't buy it. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it. Apple does so much that with intent creates additional waste in the world. They do a lot well as well. Like I think the new the iPhone Air's titanium chassis is like a significant percentage of. Of remanufactured titanium, which is super cool, and that is really good. But they also do so much to create additional waste that I just, I can't take it seriously. I don't buy it. If someone like fairphone said, hey, we're not including a charger in the box because we felt that it was unnecessary. You can add on a charger to your order for this very reasonable cost. Totally different conversation. How much does Apple charge for a USB C cable?

[Luke Lafreniere]

$30 is my guess. Okay, let's find it for the shortest one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Charging essentials. You can't call something essential and then not include it in the package. Hold on. Is this CAD though? That's Canadian. So 25 Canadian dollars for this?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Like, I was pretty close.

[Linus Sebastian]

Basic. Basic cable. Is this even USB 3? USB 2.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice.

[Linus Sebastian]

25 Canadian dollars.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Nice. Let's go.

[Linus Sebastian]

USB 2 on this one too. But it's 2 meter, so that's something for 35 Canadian beats.

[Luke Lafreniere]

One is cheaper and longer.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even know why they bothered to acquire Beats, dude.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And braided.

[Linus Sebastian]

They were acquiring a brand and then they stole the sound signature. It's like you took the least valuable thing about Beats. Although I have heard DMS is literally sitting there going like this right now. I will acknowledge. I will acknowledge that some of the later Beats headphones actually were somewhat decent. But did you ever listen to the first generation Beats by Dream? I have two things sure hit me. You'll probably enjoy and hate both of them. One, I went through and looked at all of the Beats measurements I have. Most of them are less V shaped than the AirPods Pro 3. The other thing is, apparently, according to Reddit, so many people are returning AirPods Pro 3s that they're offering some people partial refunds just to keep them. Really? So there's that.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I don't know. I think you're too mad about it.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh yeah. I mean, look, Clout Chaser is going to Cloud chase is all I really have to say about that at this point. Like, it seemed.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Honestly, I watched it. You didn't even seem that upset. I'm like, I've seen him way more mad at stuff. I don't know what people are freaking out about.

[Linus Sebastian]

I think it just seemed like a really good formula for raising your own profile and virtue, signaling your own integrity or whatever. To attack me for a while. Like, that was kind of trendy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

And I think that some people haven't got the memo that, like, it's not as much anymore. Not as much anymore. I think there's. I think there's a group that, you know, is still really mad about the completely worthless water cooling concept that some company had that I said wouldn't work and it didn't work. And I. There were things about it that I didn't handle well. Admittedly, there were things about it that were not handled well that were completely out of my control and didn't go well. But, you know, whatever. There's a certain number of people that are still extremely mad about that. And then there's like everyone else who either never cared or has just, oh my God. Moved on at this point. And so the whole. Just attack Linus for saying a thing that is, in this case, objectively true. I don't know. Sure. Good luck with that. Good plan. All. All you do is harm your own credibility at that point, I think. Which is kind of sad because I would like to see. I'd like to see the tech media space and the tech youtuber space be more unified. I'd like to see us working together for the benefit of the consumer. I would like to see us working towards holding companies accountable. Maybe that's just because I don't personally like the taste of apples. D ck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Prefer oranges.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe it's an acquired taste.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Might be.

[Linus Sebastian]

Maybe I just need to suck it more.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Maybe you just brush your teeth.

[Linus Sebastian]

You know, I have a toothbrush right here. Maybe. Maybe I just need to. Maybe I need to cleanse my palate before. Maybe I should use no computers for a month before I switch to a mat. Papa Mint.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sorry, did someone say that? Yeah. Oh man.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh man. So what you're saying is Apple should make a toothbrush anyway. What are we supposed to be talking about? Qualcomm announces the Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Elite Extreme. I remember telling Qualcomm that their naming scheme was a dumpster fire. Somehow they made it worse. Good job, Qualcomm, intel and AMD are not your role models that you think they are. One year after announcing the original Snapdragon X, Qualcomm is showing off its new Snapdragon X2 Elite and X2 Extreme. Oh no. Isn't it Elite Extreme? Yeah, I think so. But you see, even our own writers managed to copy it wrong because it made no sense. X2 Elite will come in two flavors with one having 18 cores good lord. And 53 megs of cache, and the other having 12 cores and 34 megs of cache. With the 18 core edition having a slight performance advantage in dual core frequency with them otherwise being very similar. These both have a 128 bit bus. The X2 Elite Extreme has 4.4 GHz max on 18 cores and reaches 5 GHz on single or dual core loads, 53 megs of cache and a 192 bit bus. This thing should be an absolute monster. The Adreno Dedicated DPU DPU Display Processing Unit. I guess they don't want to call it graphics. Yikes. The Adreno DPU on all the chips can run three displays at up to 4K, 144Hz and Qualcomm is claiming these are the fastest and most efficient processors for a Windows PC. Two of the reference designs include the very cool Frore airjet instead of system fans, which you can check out our Computex video on. We covered that a little while ago. I have actually been back on my Snapdragon laptop recently because there's a video coming on this soon. The liquid metal leaked out of my rog flow x13 and I was super upset about that because I freaking love that laptop and I want a next gen one and I'll buy it again. Even with the liquid metal I'll just take the liquid metal out. I'll put some PTM7950 in there. I freaking love that laptop.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What comes with liquid metal? Yeah, was that the stock application of liquid metal?

[Linus Sebastian]

You better believe it, bub. So I have to own at least part of the blame for it. I was a little rough with it and it was warm. I think it might have been that time I tossed my backpack and it tried to like, throw it away. The laptop was probably warm and it probably, like made it come out, but either way, I was not happy. And my laptop is now dead. We tried to recover it and it's a. It's a long video. It's an adventure. It's an adventuresome video. Anyway, good luck, Qualcomm. I. I hope the adoption of these next generation processors is a little higher. AI performer gets a record deal. Oh, man. No. But millions of listens on Spotify regularly.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Gets 100,000 views on Instagram. And it's all AI stuff and likeness.

[Linus Sebastian]

Vocals and music, all AI generated.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And they purportedly got 3 million dollar.

[Linus Sebastian]

Offer with Hallwood Media. Okay, I hate it. Cool. I'm gonna. I'm just gonna close that. I've had enough of AI being horrible for one day. Nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I like it. Should we talk about other things?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Valves under fire After Block Blasters, a free to play game, was updated about a month after release to install malware that allegedly steals the funds of their users. The game had allegedly stolen at least US$150,000 from its users before being removed from Steam on September 21, including $32,000 from Latvian streamer Ryvo Plavniek's cancer treatment fund. Oh, come on. Apparently there was a spear phishing campaign targeting creators for sponsorship opportunities. This isn't even the first time this year that Steam has been used to distribute malware. In February 2025. Sorry, that was this year. In February, Pirate Fi installed a Trojan horse. In March, Sniper Phantom's resolution demo would open a browser and steal user credentials. And in July, Kemya game installer would also install multiple payloads of malware.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is pirating safer?

[Linus Sebastian]

I doubt it. You come across some. Some. Some sketchy stuff. Anyway, we just wanted you guys to be aware.

[Luke Lafreniere]

What was that? Command prompt.

[Linus Sebastian]

And another. What was that doing another quick game. Related.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You're good. You can go.

[Linus Sebastian]

Another quick game. Is this what it's like? Yeah. Yep. Another quick game. Related all the time. FYI is Ascent Rivals has some pretty deep crypto connections. We highlighted this game last week. It was that, like, podcast podcaser podcaster no Pod Racer. That pod racing looking lookalike.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That is how it feels.

[Linus Sebastian]

Luke was pretty excited about Ascent Rivals, though, is built on the Cardano blockchain. Genun Games, the indie studio behind Ascent Rival, stated that NFT holders can join teams based on their NFTs and they're apparently using Web3 for sponsorships during tournaments like purchasing in game build boards. So far it doesn't look super horrible.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But none of that really bothers me too much. I just. I didn't. There was a line that was like where is it?

[Linus Sebastian]

We just definitely wanted you guys to be aware that we're not endorsing the game. We don't have any kinds of partnerships here. We have no idea. Yeah, we have no idea what kind of massive win for web web3 gaming or whatever. Yeah, this is going to be.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm not interested in that.

[Linus Sebastian]

We have zero interest in NFTs in the game.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I literally just went oh I'm racing a pod.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And then wanted to tell people because I thought it was neat. Yeah, I We're not.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, we this Speaking of other folks that we're not partnered with Disclosure I invested in a NAS software specifically because of bullshit like this and that decision gets validated on a super regular basis.

[Luke Lafreniere]

This is rough.

[Linus Sebastian]

I invested in Eshtech, who's making Hexos, which is essentially a Four Dummies interface for TrueNAS. So it's Truenas under the hood and it's a shiny easy to car drive on the outside and I'm super excited about it. They are doing some really cool stuff. You can check them [e-mail] why am I so excited and feeling so validated right now? Because some Synology NAS models that were previously capable of hardware transcoding had the relevant drivers removed and not only that, but deliberately blocked at the kernel level according to User Shared Support tickets. Cool. Synology. You guys weren't like enough of a ripoff already for crappy hardware? Now you got to do this. Synology announced it would offload media processing to client devices in July 2024, citing licensing costs for HEVC YouTuber NAS Compares covered the change in detail and pointed out AVC is license free and other Synology systems with the same CPU but advertised for Plex hosting B station maintain transcoding capabilities. NAS Compare has also published a guide to get hardware transcoding back which you shouldn't have to do. So yeah, very excited for what the team over at Hexos or excuse me, Ashtech is Cooking up with Hexos. They are still.

[Luke Lafreniere]

How are they doing?

[Linus Sebastian]

They're still in alpha, actually. Oh, that reminds me.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Changed since the last time we significantly talked about them.

[Linus Sebastian]

I owe John a response. He messaged me the other day. What did he say? Oh, yeah, he messaged me on Discord. I don't know if this is for public consumption, but sure it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Now, I think you leaked their stuff anyways, so. Well, the precedence is set.

[Linus Sebastian]

He says, sorry for the washed out screen. This is from today. Snipping tool plus HDR is a nasty combination, but you get the idea. By the way, that complaint you mentioned about the welcome screen addressed in the Q3 update. We're publishing whatever Monday, so I don't know what I'm looking at here, but he. He recorded a video. Okay, cool. He just met. So they made it so that the welcome wizard is harder to accidentally navigate away from and then not be sure how to get back to.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Sure.

[Linus Sebastian]

So super cool. It just kind of walks you through creating users and creating shares. And it used to be that if you like created a share and then just went like back in your browser, you were just lost. Whereas now that's not the case anymore. So. Hexos man. And one of the things that that was a red line for me to invest was that there would be a lifetime license. There will be a lifetime license. It will not include services that have an ongoing cost. So like if you want to buy cloud storage from them or something like that, you want to. You want to back up to the cloud or you want to use, you know, some kind of like data forwarding that they have ongoing costs for. It won't include that. But what it will include is the basic functionality of the software for life. And that was. That was a major thing for me is like, guys, I understand that software companies these days got a software company, you got to have subscriptions and they're going to have subscription services and stuff.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But there might not be as many jobs for developers out there, but they're still expensive.

[Linus Sebastian]

But you should have the option for a NAS for something that the whole point of it is that you own it. You should have an option to own it. That's the point. So I'm very excited for them to get this thing out of beta and get the show on the road. I just want to roll it for everything and that's it for topics. So should we move into After Dark?

[Dan]

Sure, if you insist. We certainly can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Dan, this guy's checked out, huh? Checked out.

[Dan]

Sorry, sorry. I'm on TikTok. What did you say? Banner to after dark. Let's not end the show.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Well, at least you're not on Tylenol. I'd hate for you to get the tism.

[Dan]

That's true, that's true.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I need to start macro dosing that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Really? You want mortism?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, a ton more. I think I got a little bit going. I've always wanted to be interested just a little bit. Just a little bit more.

[Dan]

I just want to appreciate our rail system. It's about it. Collect things.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Dan]

Merch messages. How is it possible that blatant UI errors make the final product from a major company? For example, the YouTube Music widget in Google Maps blocks its own button and half of the road hazards buttons.

[Linus Sebastian]

My theory is that the people who are in charge of these projects don't actually daily drive them. Like there's. There's so many little things that are just kind of obvious. Like my car, for instance, it has. It has an individual configurable like drive mode so that you can be like, well, I want like really stiff suspension. But I. I don't want. It's like a custom one. I don't want it lower to load.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Out for your car.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. And I don't want the like super aggressive throttle response. Like I. I want it like this. You cannot, if I recall correctly, configure the regenerative braking because Porsche just has their own philosophy of one pedal driving. They don't believe in it or whatever, which is like. Yeah, that's not really your decision. That's my decision. I'm the one who paid the money for it, but whatever. And the irritating thing for me is that I have to switch to it every single time I get in the car because I never want to use one of their profiles that I cannot edit. So I have to tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, switch over to it every time I get in the car. And it's just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That's annoying.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why? It doesn't matter. It's the champagnest of champagne problems.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Can you switch while driving? Just random side question.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yep, you can totally switch while driving. It's just unnecessary. Yeah, I just shouldn't have to. Same thing for stuff like how I can't type on my touchscreen. My passenger is not allowed to type on my touchscreen when the car is in motion. It's like, you do understand that voice commands just like, don't work. I mean, you're German, so I'm sure your voice commands are even worse than ours because like they probably speak precisely. You think so? You think they just have better. Better enunciation. I mean, that is entirely possible, but it's just. There's just so many little things that I look at and I just go like, yeah, you just obviously don't daily use this. Yeah, I think the. It's. I think it's the Ford CEO that was daily ing a BYD car. That's super cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I heard he still was.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's super cool. Like, yeah, you're the CEO of Ford. You could probably just have a driver drive you around in a Bentley or whatever and never touch a steering wheel. But how can you possibly hope to run a car company unless you are driving your company's cars, driving competitors cars. Like really caring. I think that's really cool. And I just see so many examples, like you said, of software that clearly has never been used, like really used by the people who are allegedly in charge of overseeing it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

With that said, fairly unimportant clarification, but someone's gonna call us on it. It was a Xiaomi SU7.

[Linus Sebastian]

Sorry, my bad, my bad. Not by.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Somebody's gonna.

[Linus Sebastian]

But the flip side of that is we talked about this earlier. You can't have a hundred thousand people perfectly aligned on a mission. And there's all kinds of stuff that makes it into our finished products that yeah, I totally wouldn't have approved of, but I never saw it. Or.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you can't.

[Linus Sebastian]

And you can't see everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

If you want to do any significant volume of things at scale, you're not going to see everything.

[Linus Sebastian]

If you want to create rather than critique, you will discover that it's really hard.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And you get.

[Linus Sebastian]

So there's both sides of the story.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Exact same people complaining about not giving enough people agency to do their own thing and being too hard on people for failures and wanting to give people rope to try and experiment and do stuff like that. And then any single mistake that ever comes out is your fault and you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Should have done for not overseeing it better.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

It's like, what do you want?

[Luke Lafreniere]

The exact same argument will come from the exact same person.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, that one's fun.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Things happen. I don't know.

[Dan]

Up next.

[Linus Sebastian]

Hi.

[Dan]

L1, L2 and DRAM. Been. Yeah, nice. Typical. Been 15 years since the Olympics came to town. Do you have any fond memories from those events?

[Linus Sebastian]

I actually didn't go downtown at all.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I was in Victoria.

[Linus Sebastian]

I thought it was really funny when. When Canada won because of the gold medal hockey game. Because they had those. They had those. This is our game. Or Whatever. Like Scotiabank ads throughout the entire hockey tournament. And they were, like, super polished and they were professional ads. Do you remember after Canada won, there was, like, an extra bit that looked like absolute dog shit because they just, like, threw it together when Canada actually made it deep into the tournament. And just in case they won, it was like a clip that they were ready for.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I don't remember that.

[Linus Sebastian]

And it just. It looked like absolute trash.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They probably should have just done nothing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I forget if the resolution. I forget if the resolution was super low or just, like, it was missing some of the other assets or something like that. Just as a tech person who, you know, appreciates the difficulty of putting on a production, I just found it extremely amusing that someone's job out there was to have this asset ready on the off chance that Canada won the whole thing so that they could, like, put it up, but probably no one would ever see it. And they were probably so busy doing other things that they just, like, didn't care. Oh, dude. So good, man.

[Luke Lafreniere]

There was I. My mom tried to convince me to volunteer, and I'm, like, annoyed that I didn't because the volunteers got these, like, sick jackets.

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, wow. That's super nice.

[Luke Lafreniere]

They looked so cool. They have the writing on the arm. They have the little logo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wow.

[Dan]

Hudson's Bay made a product somebody wanted.

[Linus Sebastian]

Good for them. I mean, it was 20. It was 15 years ago, but I thought, these.

[Dan]

They're doing well now.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Awesome. They were so sick.

[Dan]

It's nice when people, like, try.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, they were dope. And you got them from volunteering and I should have just done it. My mom was right.

[Linus Sebastian]

Got them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Up next.

[Dan]

Hi, dlo. I'm pursuing a degree in tech management and recently realized I'm 1 out of 2 out of 20 in a class that actually reads the material and doesn't have chat. GPT. Do my homework. Teacher doesn't care. Should I stop trying?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No.

[Linus Sebastian]

Kind of stupid question is that you'll.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Probably just do better.

[Linus Sebastian]

You should. You should not ask questions like that because that's not good management. You should take pride in your work and you should do a good job because that should be something that you. That is, is part of your identity as a person. You're welcome.

[Dan]

Luke, thanks for actually being here today. Why are you so cheap?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, what's happening.

[Dan]

David Throwing hands. That's the whole thing. He bought a blank T shirt just to ask you that. Do better. I think he could have just said.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wait, did they buy our cheapest possible.

[Dan]

No, they bought. They bought some they picked up a couple extra talls.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Okay. So they bought a couple of our cheapest.

[Linus Sebastian]

We don't have extra talls, Dan. They bought two extra large shadows in tall. Ah, sorry, Short sleeves.

[Luke Lafreniere]

When I was young, young, we were doing great. And then when I was medium young, there was a big accident in my dad's work and he was out of work for a long time and he had to like, it got really bad for a while there. We were close to losing the house and then he had to go to our doctor and be like, yo, you need to let me work again. Because, like, things are gonna get a lot worse for me. To the point where it would be worse for me to not work than it would for me to do work. So let me go back. And then he got, if I remember correctly, and I'm pretty sure this is accurate, two full time jobs and a part time job within like a week. And just went like sicko mode for way too long. And I don't fully know how he is alive, but he like saved the family and everything was crazy. And I learned some appreciation for like having cash in the bank.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

And I, I, it's not that I don't spend money. I spend money on experiences. I prefer to buy small amount of nice thing that will last, that I can repair, that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Spend money on health.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I spend money on health. I spend money on keeping myself going gym, gym equipment, things like that.

[Linus Sebastian]

On other people. He won't say it, but I'll say it. Luke spends money on other people.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, that is true.

[Linus Sebastian]

I ran into your dad this week.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Curling.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. We had a quarterly event for the writing department, which I'm informally part of because no other department that does quarterly events includes. So we went curling, which was organized by David Pankratz, who's super awesome. He's a relatively new member of the team, but he's dived right in. He's been doing awesome. And he organized a curling night and it was the first time I had curled since nerd sports, which was the first time I had curled ever. And I still suck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah, it's really hard. It was fun though. It was fun as heck.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did he, Was he just like busy the whole time or did he like.

[Linus Sebastian]

He came over to chat with us, but he had stuff to do.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah.

[Linus Sebastian]

But he actually helped with a little bit of coaching for the other group. It wasn't my group.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Did you have like two sheets?

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Okay, Makes sense.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's two lanes for the bowlers out there.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, there you go. But. But yeah, I don't know. I also just. And you know, maybe it's something that's wrong with me or whatever. I don't really consider it that way. I feel much more comfortable. I don't feel a need to buy a bunch of this stuff like I personally attacked. I don't get that much fulfillment from just buying things. I do get fulfillment from buying something that I like spent a lot of time like. I haven't been able to use it because my house is in shambles right now. But I'm very excited about the big screen beyond. That wasn't cheap. That was a bunch.

[Linus Sebastian]

No, that was not cheap.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I took it out of the box, I put the little cover on and put it. Just placed it against my face and just everything went black immediately because it's perfectly formal. Perfect. Oh, I'm excited about that thing. It feels great. I'm stoked. So like I do spend money. I just make sure that I have an ample amount saved ready for the rainiest day you could have. And that makes me very comfortable and I like being in that state, so I do that.

[Dan]

Hey LLD, what happened to the 3D printed water cooling tube you had made? Did it hold up? Was there an update on it that I just missed? Happy to see tall shirts are back in stock.

[Linus Sebastian]

I believe we did update. Yeah, we did updates for six months on the 3D printed hardline water cooled computer challenge over on Floatplane. So here's what it looked like after three months. Jk subscribe to Floatplane LMG GG Floatplane.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Got him.

[Dan]

Hi, Landinus and Drake.

[Linus Sebastian]

Uh oh.

[Dan]

What are the coolest modifications that you've seen made to the LTT backpack? I replaced the LTT logo with my own patch. Added paracord handles and extra inner pockets and loops.

[Linus Sebastian]

I was just kidding before, by the way. The 3D printed tubes did hold up. Super cool. You don't actually have to subscribe to Floatplane just to get that answer.

[Dan]

This is why we don't go to parties.

[Linus Sebastian]

Just trolling them. I think that's probably the most modified backpack that I've heard of. Have you guys seen a more modified backpack than that?

[Dan]

Oh, there's one here.

[Linus Sebastian]

What? Oh, are you. Is this right? Oh wait, are you the one who left the merch message or what?

[Dan]

Oh no, that was just.

[Linus Sebastian]

This is like the same. This is like the same list of stuff. Okay, well here, can we see it? Show them your Sack. This is DMS's backpack.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Massively overfills it to the point where it's gonna like explode all the time. Okay, I have pointed out that he could not have that.

[Linus Sebastian]

Wait, so he ruined the zipper, it went through surgery and then just zip tied one side of the backpack shut?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Yeah. It's like literally always exploding every time I see it. You know, this is like for. For a lot of airlines, like personal item sized. And then you can have a bigger carry on as well. Okay.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay. Okay. Thanks dms. I'm just. You know what? If you're happy, I'm happy. Okay.

[Dan]

Dan, hit me. Didn't say it had to be modified. Well, hey, Linus, Luke and sound guy with the video this week on that $30,000 GPU, if you guys had one yourself, is there something you could actually use it for or would it just be like a novelty item you have?

[Linus Sebastian]

Absolutely. Lab says was like salivating at the idea of having something like that more permanently. Whether it's for like AI coding assistance or machine vision for like recognizing UI elements and like verifying in game settings. What are some of the other things they wanted to do with it?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Those are two main things. But there's also other like machine vision powered tasks that were planning that it could be applied to. But I mean there's other ways and.

[Linus Sebastian]

There'S also waiting a little bit. I mean the AI industry is marching ever onward. And so there will come a time not long from now when literally millions of these GPUs will be liquidated on places like server parts deals and that'll be nuts. We'll be ready.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That'll be actually crazy. There's also the Chinese GPU coming. Companies that are trying.

[Linus Sebastian]

We'll see how they go.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We'll see what happens.

[Dan]

Next. Luke, does floatplane participate in standards bodies like svta?

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, that was a short answer.

[Linus Sebastian]

What is it? I don't even. I never heard of that. I've heard. I don't remember hearing of it.

[Dan]

Streaming Video Technology Alliance.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah, I've heard.

[Linus Sebastian]

Like they would pick up our phone call. Okay, let's move on.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah.

[Dan]

How is the preparation going for whale land? Is this the first time?

[Linus Sebastian]

This is the first time.

[Dan]

Sorry, this. Oh, you better. This is the first time I've been in a country that I wasn't born in. I am very excited. And the border agent didn't believe me when I told him why I was crossing.

[Linus Sebastian]

That's hilarious. I'm going to a gaming party. Love it. Prep is going okay. I still have some more things to do tonight after WAN show and I will probably still have some More things to do in the morning, but I very much look forward to seeing y' all there. I'm gonna be setting up a 5v5 tape to tape. I think I said that on pre show. I'm not sure if I talked about that on. On when, but it's weird not having.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It after when I don't know that it's bad. It's just weird.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, you're more than welcome to, you know, come help set up the 5V5.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I'm going to be zipping over.

[Linus Sebastian]

Or are you going over there? Nice. Just to see it.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. Help a little bit if I can.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Whatever.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Well, I'll be over there.

[Dan]

Hello, Dll. Grabbing some new blanks. Love the feel and fit of my current ones.

[Linus Sebastian]

Heck, yeah.

[Dan]

What is the process you go through to pick up the right material? It's rare to find anything near the.

[Linus Sebastian]

Quality you have, so quality is subjective. There was another YouTuber who took issue with the materials that we use in our blanks. They basically believe that anything that doesn't have 100% cotton is garbage. I don't agree. I actually really like the feel of a cotton poly blend. So there's. There's some subjectivity there. And that's kind of the answer is because I really like them. So we went through countless blank suppliers to find one that I really liked, and then we went with that.

[Dan]

Greetings, Wan Dll. My question is for Linus. I've been watching a lot of older, early WAN shows. Do you ever miss having your cats on set? Love to hear your Bengals mewing in the background.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lol. I have wanted to have an office pet basically for as long as we've had an office. And every single time like. Like rodent incursions come up in a meeting, I'm like, hear me out.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The cats kill flies.

[Linus Sebastian]

Office cat, they can. Not all, but particularly good hunters will just kill anything. They'll just kill everything.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Is there a breed of cat that are particularly good hunters?

[Linus Sebastian]

There can be. So here's the problem is that cats are likely to. Cats calm down. Cats are likely to be an allergen for people. That is the reason that we didn't have an office cat from the moment we moved in here was that there was someone on staff who was allergic to cats. That person is actually no longer here, but I'm sure someone else is allergic. And I've always.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Someone at some time.

[Linus Sebastian]

I've always been of the mind that my love of cats cannot possibly trump someone else's.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Wow.

[Linus Sebastian]

Being comfortable at Work. What? Just.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was just amazing.

[Linus Sebastian]

Thank you. Yeah, I hope that gets clipped people.

[Dan]

Allergic to bats because we could get bats for the fly problems.

[Luke Lafreniere]

The fly problems are deeply not solved.

[Linus Sebastian]

Lizards. I don't need a new. I don't need a hundreds of Cloverdale flu. Okay. That leaked from an LTT lab. Okay, what's next?

[Dan]

Oh, geez. Luke, I know you're using Cloudflare for float plane delivery, but do you use any of the devplat ZT features or just CDN and waf?

[Luke Lafreniere]

We use like, yeah, a bunch of stuff we have. Well, I'm just going to talk more generally, but we use the heck out of workers. We use R2. We use a lot of cloud flare things.

[Linus Sebastian]

We use the heck out of workers.

[Luke Lafreniere]

It's a. It's a thing.

[Linus Sebastian]

I know, I know.

[Dan]

When one fails, we just redeploy another one. We have hundreds that are disposable.

[Luke Lafreniere]

We have. Yeah, over a thousand if I remember correctly. And you just.

[Dan]

We don't even pay them.

[Luke Lafreniere]

You just toss it out when you don't want it anymore.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

I gotta stop Googling how to kill children at work. Mother won't kill child.

[Linus Sebastian]

What do I do? The ones at work or. You're at work when you're Googling how to kill children in general.

[Dan]

That's the one.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah.

[Dan]

You can't ice cheat GPT because you just get blocked.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But do I. Does it just block you or does it ask you what you mean?

[Dan]

I don't know. I don't normally just go around.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I feel like I have to do that now.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't know. I just don't understand killing a child. Having trouble with it. It's not that hard. I don't know how to do it.

[Dan]

From the command line.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, like they're weak.

[Dan]

My experience is all in car, not cloud infrastructure.

[Linus Sebastian]

All right, next.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Anyways, yeah, we. We use genuinely a lot of their things. R2 is SEM. It's not semi new to us. We've been using it for like since the beginning of R2, but we have started using it significantly more now. And yeah, I wouldn't be too surprised if we keep using more stuff. I've said it forever. I really love the product of Cloudflare. There are some issues with it. I really wish it played a little bit nicer with Australia, but it's a fantastic product. Other parts of Cloudflare maybe not as big of a fan, but their products are great.

[Dan]

Hi, DLL for Linus. Have you thought about Whole Room VR for the lan? Side of the badminton cent Zero latency VR is an amazing experience with cool games like Space Marine. I have a good franchise.

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't want to set it up and also like, oh my God, I have to take all my nets down. We have to move all the benches. I have to set up like tracking. And I guess we'd probably have to have like an entire fleet of like backpack PCs and, you know, peripherals to deploy. It would be a whole completely different business model. We do have some cool room scale multiplayer VR stuff at Whale Land, but it's rolled by a separate company. They're just coming in to do a trial one, so they're doing it for free this time and then they'd want us to pay. In the future. We're going to see how much people like it and if people are super into it, then maybe we'll do it again in the future. But we're not going to just turn the entire badminton center into a VR space because. And this may be a surprise to a lot of folks out there who don't know that badminton's like kind of a big sport, but we're actually getting really busy.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Every time I show up, it's full.

[Linus Sebastian]

Cooking, baby. We're cooking. Yeah, it was, it's, it's been, it was really interesting reading the comments when we first announced it on YouTube. Just like, hey, we've got a Land center slash badminton club. This will never work. Is he joking? Is it money laundering? It's like, guys, there's a whole wide world out there. All you got to do to discover it is just open your mind a little bit. You'll like it. Come on in, the water's warm.

[Dan]

And last one I've got for you today. Hello, lld. Long time watcher, first time buyer question is for Luke. Luke who?

[Linus Sebastian]

No.

[Dan]

Wow. Player housing is coming back before Christmas. It's time to come home.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, I don't even care a little bit.

[Linus Sebastian]

Whoa, really?

[Luke Lafreniere]

Player housing?

[Linus Sebastian]

Oh, okay. I don't know.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Do you like, you want player housing?

[Linus Sebastian]

I don't even know what it is.

[Luke Lafreniere]

So, I mean, I don't know what their implementation is. Maybe they make it kind of neat. But digital Mom's basement, that would be really funny. But player housing in games, there's a bunch of different implementations for it, but it's like mmo, obviously. Wow. But you have a unique house that is yours that you can theoretically customize to a certain degree. So it's the Sims in an mmo.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I mean, you can invite your friends over to your house and stuff.

[Linus Sebastian]

So it's the sims.

[Luke Lafreniere]

But you have like armor on.

[Linus Sebastian]

You say that, but like, you played a lot of wow, the arm. Don't pretend you don't think the armor is cool.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, the armor is really cool.

[Linus Sebastian]

Why are you trying to be cooler?

[Luke Lafreniere]

But that's the problem is the armor is way cooler than the house.

[Linus Sebastian]

I see.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Yeah. The armor's sick while just being like. Yeah, your shoulder pads are just like four times as big as you.

[Linus Sebastian]

Right.

[Luke Lafreniere]

That was great.

[Linus Sebastian]

Okay, brilliant. So you would be into player housing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I can't wear the house as long.

[Linus Sebastian]

As the door would be wide enough to accommodate your armor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

No, because it's kind of a flex when you can't fit through the doors and.

[Linus Sebastian]

Well, because you want to built you. You want a small door.

[Dan]

So we've had horse armor, now we have house armor.

[Luke Lafreniere]

House armor.

[Linus Sebastian]

Yeah. Okay, so here you are saying you don't care about the house, but then you're like, actually, I really like it when doors are small. Yeah. So you can't really have it both ways here.

[Dan]

Look here. Your worldview is confusing.

[Luke Lafreniere]

I just. You're not going to get me to come back to wow by adding player housing, which like, MMOs had literally 20 years ago.

[Dan]

Like, I'm surprised that they didn't. It's a good way to extract money.

[Linus Sebastian]

What's up, James C. Au. Just an AU Back to James C. Nice. That was a. That was the last merch message of the show. And we'll see you guys again next week. Same bad time, same bad channel.

[Luke Lafreniere]

Bye.

[Linus Sebastian]

There it is. James C. It.